This Week in Startups - YouTube’s new roadmap, OpenAI & BeReal fundraising news, Snap’s 30% drop + OK Boomer | E1592

Episode Date: October 22, 2022

First up, J+M discuss YouTube’s new @handle feature (2:10) and break down how TikTok and Facebook aren’t catching misinformation in political ads. (10:07) Then, they each do a solo segment! Jason ...chimes in on Open AI reportedly raising more money from Microsoft (20:53) and Molly breaks down Snap’s 30% drop and BeReal’s ~$600M valuation. (27:39) Producer Rachel ends the show with another segment of OK Boomer featuring recurring guests Jules Terpak and Danny Miranda. (38:08) (0:00) Jason and Molly tee up today’s show! (2:10)  YouTube has a new @handle feature (and we’re @startups) (9:05) Odoo - Get your first app free and a $1000 credit at https://odoo.com/twist (10:07) TikTok and Facebook aren’t catching misinformation in political ads (19:23) TripActions - Go to https://tripactions.com/twist and get a $500 Amazon gift card after making your first travel booking OR paying off your first $1000 of liquid spend (20:53) Jason discusses Open AI reportedly raising more money from Microsoft (27:39) Molly breaks down Snap’s ~30% drop and BeReal’s ~$600M valuation (36:33) OpenPhone - Get an extra 20% off any plan for your first 6 months at https://openphone.com/twist (38:08) Producer Rachel talks to Jules Terpak and Danny Miranda about AI Podcasts FOLLOW Jason: https://linktr.ee/calacanis FOLLOW Molly: https://twitter.com/mollywood FOLLOW Rachel: https://twitter.com/_rachelbraun FOLLOW Jules: https://twitter.com/julesterpak FOLLOW Danny: https://twitter.com/heydannymiranda Subscribe to our YouTube to watch all full episodes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkkhmBWfS7pILYIk0izkc3A?sub_confirmation=1

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 All right, first up today, we're going to talk about YouTube's new at-handle feature. Why are they doing this? Are they going to create a community? Are they going to go straight up and compete against Twitter? I think so. And then we'll talk about TikTok and Facebook, letting some ads with misinformation in them for political reasons to actually get placed on the site. And then a little solo dolo back and forth.
Starting point is 00:00:21 Molly and I had busy schedules. So I am going to talk solo about Open AI, reportedly raising more money from Microsoft. And then Molly goes on the solo dolo. to talk about Snap Stock being down 30% after another disappointing earnings report. And that Be Real, the surging social network, has raised a $60 million series B at around 600 million. And they have about 20 million multi-active users, I believe. So that's pretty good valuation for them. And since it's Friday, it's time for OK Boomer with producer Rachel.
Starting point is 00:00:55 It's going to be a great show. So stick with us. This Week in Startups is brought to you by O-Doo is a fully customizable and fully integrated suite of business apps that lets you build and scale your stack as you build and scale your business. Your first app is free forever and right now O-Doo is offering $1,000 off your first implementation pack at O-D-com slash twist. That's O-D-O-O-O-O-com slash twist.
Starting point is 00:01:23 Trip Actions was built to help businesses scale without travel and expenses being a pain point. It's the only all-in-one travel, corporate card, and expense management solution. Go to tripactions.com slash twist to sign up for free and get a $500 Amazon gift card after making your first travel booking or paying off your first $1,000 of liquid spend. And open phone. As a startup founder, a lot of mistakes are easy to roll back. But using your personal cell phone number as your company number isn't one of them. Open phone makes it easy to get business phone numbers for you and your team right on top of your existing devices. Visit openphone.com slash twist to get 20% off your first six months. We know this was coming
Starting point is 00:02:11 because we had some inside information. YouTube, Molly, this is really cool, is going to have handles. Now, what is a handle? It just means that Jason like I have on Twitter or Instagram. So when you're in the comment field, in the comment space, you'll be able to to at mention somebody. So you'll be able to say at Mr. Beast in a comment on the This Week in Startups channel or at Lex Friedman or et cetera,
Starting point is 00:02:32 et cetera. And I guess the person will get a notification. And what I think this means, Molly, is that you will have a feed that will not only include shorts or videos, and I don't have inside information on this part of it,
Starting point is 00:02:44 but I would think that there'll be, you know, a YouTube.com slash at Twist or something and you'll see our page. And, but then your feed might include people videos. Does that make sense, Molly? Like, it would become, your YouTube feed could become, feel more like a hybrid
Starting point is 00:03:01 of Twitter slash TikTok slash YouTube. Is I think what they have planned. Okay. See, that would actually make sense because I will confess to having the immediate reaction upon reading this news of like, okay, wait, they didn't have that? And if they're rolling them out as a specific
Starting point is 00:03:18 product and a specific launch, then there must be some larger goal other than, because like everybody has a YouTube username. Right. This isn't that. This is for your channel. This is associated with the channel. You have to have a channel to have an ad name. And I think that'll be the first year of this. Who knows if like civilians will get their ad handles as well after that? I'm guessing they will. But this is for creators. Because I remember when I was like, hey, let's all jump into the comments. You were like, comments on YouTube. And I was like, I think it's gotten better. And I think it has. But, you know, it's a little bit of the Wild West. It's gotten better than it was. Let me tell you. I mean, they're not like, yeah, say. dying, die, Calacanis die. Yeah. But, you know,
Starting point is 00:03:58 people can be pretty brutal in there like any other communities. But the tools are there now to make it a little nicer. So I really like this
Starting point is 00:04:05 because I want to invest more in the Twitter, I'm sorry, the YouTube community and steer it towards that. What are we great? Just a note for the YouTube creator,
Starting point is 00:04:15 the YouTube product folks. And Nick, producer Nick, I know this exists. The ability to deputize like the five or ten people we have as noty gang members
Starting point is 00:04:23 who are mods. I would like them to be able to moderate the comments. So if they're in the comments and somebody's spamming or somebody's saying something unkind would be my rule, everybody on our team has the ability to mod our comments only for chat. You can have mods, yeah. So that's the next piece I need to really invest in it.
Starting point is 00:04:42 But I would like to invest in it because we tried Slack, we tried Discord. We have a Twitter community, but it would be much better to have the community on YouTube in my mind. It does make me wonder if this is not an opening toward more of a Discord like product or a Slack product or a persistent chat that could exist outside of just comments, which would actually be awesome. I mean, it's never, I don't know why it has not occurred to me until now that YouTube,
Starting point is 00:05:06 particularly with this creator network, is in a place to really kind of just flip on a social network. Yeah. Like they, you know, I mean, Google, there was Google Plus. Like, it's probably, probably the only reason they haven't so far is that they've been tied up in the Google ecosystem and it's like prevented. some, you know, overlap or product development. But man, if they could turn on a persistent chat room like Discord, they could put,
Starting point is 00:05:30 they could just finish off Discord with persistent chat. You know, most subredd, most people on, you're exactly right, Molly. Most people on Reddit create discords. Most people on YouTube who get popular, create a Discord. So why not have the Discord inside of Reddit and have the discord inside of, you know, for the modality of persistent chat, as you're saying. Persistent chat, obviously distinctly different than a chat room
Starting point is 00:05:57 that pops up with a live video or for, you know, this would be like for the, a channel's persistent chat. So how great would it be if we could all be just chatting about the Founder University channel or that this week and startup's tunnel? That would be amazing. Amazing.
Starting point is 00:06:13 And then you can keep it loud. Because then you don't have to go through comments on a specific video exactly. Like you would just have this like home. Yes. Yeah, it'd be great. I'm just to assume that handles as part one of that. and Bravo. And also the other great thing
Starting point is 00:06:25 about this for people is that you just get a nice clean, much like you have on Twitter or LinkedIn, just a nice clean URL. YouTube.com slash at startups or at startups
Starting point is 00:06:36 or yeah. At Jason, yeah. So I think we have, is this what we actually have at startups? Oh my God. It's us. Maybe. YouTube.com slash at startups.
Starting point is 00:06:45 It's already set out. Yeah. Oh, is it already turned on. Yeah. So we, we, I guess we, we're a major channel there. we have 200,000 subscribers, so we picked at startup.
Starting point is 00:06:56 So if you go to YouTube.com at startups, that's us. Yeah. Dude. So fantastic. Good handle. Good handle us. Be okay. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:04 If you really support your, when you support your early content creators like this and you do something nice for them, like getting in their handles early, making sure they have a good one, it will increase usage. It shows the right way to do. That's huge. And I think we also have YouTube.com slash at all in. So it's just another way to get to the all-in podcast without typing slash channel slash this, you know, yada, yada. Man, I mean, people already spent so much time.
Starting point is 00:07:31 I wonder what the time spent on YouTube is. But if this increased it with more, you know, ability to interact and build community, who. Good move. Yeah. I think you'll also be able to search by this from what I understand. So, you know, if you wind up being at Molliwood, somebody could search YouTube for at Maliwood and then see your comments on other videos. you know, and I think that's something that's been lacking. So what I've wanted to do, when I see somebody place an unkind comment on our videos,
Starting point is 00:08:00 I would love to click on their handle and see all their activity across the site, as should be my right. You know, when you're on Twitter or you're on Reddit, the handle follows you from subreddit to subreddit or on Twitter. It follows you from thread to thread. The reason that's important, Molly, obviously, to you and just for the audience, is the person can then own their words, right? and if they own their words across the site,
Starting point is 00:08:20 if somebody's misbehaving in one subreddit, but they're delightful in the other nine, you can be like, hey, dude, what's going on? It's always a dude, by the way. 99 times out of 100, some dude who's, you know, brigadooning as, you say. Nobody detected brigadooning is my favorite, by the way. Well, we just came up on the all-in pod 101.
Starting point is 00:08:39 It did, and now that's what you're calling it, brigadier. Yeah, when you get brigaded, we call it preview for people, because this week's startups will come out before all-in-101. But we're calling it brigadooning. because Sacks, you know, is getting brigadooned. So the briggadooning was, you know, a lot for him. So he took the mental health week.
Starting point is 00:08:57 He did, he had a vacation free-rely scheduled. Good on both counts. I like bricadooning. Are you sick and tired of huge SaaS bills? I know I am. And switching between 10 different platforms every day, it's chaos. SaaS churn is real. And you need to check out Odu to reduce SaaS burnout.
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Starting point is 00:10:22 It's an absolutely great story. Or great move, rather, great product move in the direction of taking down Discord. There was an interesting piece on CNN today about how, according to the Human Rights Watchdog Global Witness and Cybersecurity for Democracy Team, they attempted to submit, they submitted 20 ads with abjectly fake claims about elections. Oh, no. False information about... Hold on. Hold on.
Starting point is 00:10:51 20 ads. Yep, 20 ads. The punchline is how many got through? Exactly. I'm going to guess. Hold on. Let me guess it. This is to Facebook.
Starting point is 00:10:57 I take it. This was TikTok and Facebook. Okay. And YouTube. And YouTube. All right. I'm going to guess that close to 100% of them got through Facebook because they don't care.
Starting point is 00:11:10 I'm going to say 15 or so got through YouTube. Like two out of three got through YouTube and TikTok. I don't know the numbers. I'm just guessing. Um, TikTok did worse, actually. TikTok approved 90% of the ads. Okay, 18. Okay.
Starting point is 00:11:26 Facebook approved a quote, significant number. Okay. YouTube was able to detect and reject every test submission and suspend the channel used to post them. Fantastic. So what this tells you is, if you want to do this, you can. Because there's no difference between the tech teams at these three companies. They're all the elite of the elite. So this is then a matter of intent.
Starting point is 00:11:52 And TikTok don't care because it's run by the CCP. They don't care if there's chaos here. In fact, they probably prefer it. And then Facebook are marauding capitalists who have ignored this forever. And Zuckerberg, I don't believe really cares all that much. He cares if it cost them acquisitions, like the Giffy acquisition. I guess he's not going to be able to buy Giffy. I think he's arguably as bad an actor as TikTok.
Starting point is 00:12:11 I'm not going to lie. I would put him up with the – I would put Zuck with the CCP. Sure. He does not – he does – he has demonstrable. He demonstrably does not care about the future of America. He demonstrable he does not can, you know, there is not any universe. Despite all his talk about China, there's no universe in which this guy is like pro-USA. Well, I mean, to be clear, he learned Chinese, went to China and begged to put Facebook in there, knowing that they would use Facebook to round up every dissident there and torture them.
Starting point is 00:12:43 He knows that. He knows full well. Yeah. The government told him Yahoo, the history of Yahoo and China, everybody knows if you go into China and you are a data service. There's a slightly different than making an iPhone there when the iPhones come back to the U.S. You're not going to have a problem, but putting aside hardware and Amazon Basic cables, if you actually run a data service there, they will tell you like they did Yahoo, hey, we need these five people's accounts, their locations, and you don't need to know why, but you know why. They're going to a re-education camp to be tortured, raped, murdered, until they confess that, you know, they are humbly accepting their mistakes for thinking differently than the CCP.
Starting point is 00:13:24 And Zuckerberg actively wanted to embrace that possibility. That tells you everything you need to know about the individual. At a time when Google was pulling out of China, other companies were leaving over these exact same things, exactly. Yes, he ran to it while everybody was running away from it. The end. And despite, despite Reams, terrible. bytes of empirical data showing the damage that this stuff does. And by the way, the results of this test show you quite clearly that it can be done. The fact that YouTube detected all of it,
Starting point is 00:14:00 stopped it, and suspended every one of these counts, puts the lie to everything that Zuckerberg and frankly, Charles Sandberg have said, even up to and including in front of Congress for like a decade. It can be done. And they are still not doing it. Yeah. It's pretty. astonishing. I'm a little surprised that TikTok fared so poorly only because they are trying to have a better like PR camp, but right? Like if you were trying to stay in the United States and not get banned, do you think you would have tried harder at like that one thing? I think the ban is coming. I think it's just a matter of the people who have big stakes in it, clearing their positions from what I understand there is a buyback going on. And shareholders who are U.S. shareholders are getting
Starting point is 00:14:40 a lot of money back with this share buyback, which to me, this is what I heard. I don't know if it's true. But I think that's a prelude to this, either the Americans getting their money out or the Chinese getting control over it and maybe it not being in the U.S. for much longer. TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, plan to use TikTok to monitor the physical locations of Americans, something I said they would obviously do. And I predicted that they were already doing it. Well, you know, our friends over at Forbes, which I think as a new owner, somebody to look that up for me. they said that they had knowledge of this. They got some documents that people at TikTok. I don't know if you saw that story, but quote,
Starting point is 00:15:24 a China-based team at TikTok's parent company by dance plan to use the TikTok app to monitor the personal location of some specific American citizens, according to materials reviewed by Forbes. So, as I said on Twitter, you don't need to have a smoking gun to know that this is too high of a risk factor to in any way do this, yeah. The company priced the buyback at US $155 per unit for current staff up from US $142 in an April repurchase. Yeah. Thanks, new guy.
Starting point is 00:15:52 Thanks to new producer Brian. Oh, producer Brian's awesome. Yeah. Producer Brian. So yeah. Okay, so it is public that this buyback because I've been hearing about this buyback. I guess so, yeah. It was April, but I've been hearing about this for a year maybe that this was part of the process.
Starting point is 00:16:06 And then I was talking to somebody, an insider at TikTok, I'll just say that. You can make your best guess at it. was telling me that the entire company is controlled in China and that the Americans have no say in anything going on over there. This is somebody inside of TikTok told me this in the past. All right. I'm open.
Starting point is 00:16:27 I'm open to being convinced as long as you take Zuckerberg down with you. This is somebody I know across three or four companies. As long as you also just drag Facebook kicking and screaming out of the American market, I'm fine with it. Like, how about can I get a two for? Can I get a two for one? I'll tell you this. It's like one A, one B.
Starting point is 00:16:42 Can I get a ban one, get one free? Exactly. I mean, it's, I think we're now getting into the age of accountability. I think in the second decade of this, people have had enough. And, you know, kind of like smoking or other. Yeah, actually. You remember vapes, you know, jewels and stuff like that? Like, I think it, you know, over time our justice system, our society takes time to digest.
Starting point is 00:17:11 Yes. But, you know, Facebook owner Meta is going to have to sell Giffy now. The UK watchdog said, hey, no, when, you can't buy anything. Lena Con said they can't buy this, like, de minimis little VR company. So Zuckerberg is hitting the wall, right? Nobody wants to buy the shares, and the Giffy deal will be a block. So you can only, there's just, did you see this trending? You can only F around so long before you eventually find out.
Starting point is 00:17:37 This is a meme, correct, Molly? Yeah, F around to find out. It's a whiteboard meme. the more you're going to find out. It's a five-second video that is just so illustrative. As you can see, the more you f*** around, the more you're going to find. Tell your Starlink story real quick. Then I'm in a scamper.
Starting point is 00:17:56 And then you can do this open AI story as a solo. And then we'll have like a kicker back. A little solo joint solo jam. Handoff. No, I just, I put the Starlink up yesterday. I started using it. Oh, my God. It's wonderful in the Bay Area.
Starting point is 00:18:09 It works. I was very impressed in the little mountain town. I used it in the Airbnb. I mean, I think it's going to take a little time for the uplink to be perfect for HD, but it's pretty darn close. And what's great about this is I'm setting up, you know, because I lose the town I'm in, we seem to lose a power all the time now.
Starting point is 00:18:30 And we lose power. We default lose electricity. So I'm going to be, I'm building power redundancy and internet redundancy, which is a little bit of a luxury, but I don't have the ability to not, be on air seven days a week and so exactly
Starting point is 00:18:46 all right well nice seeing you at the management offsite that was fun that was so fun yeah good thanks for that nice dinner I was good time a shout out to our friend Tyler Florence who's a big fan of the pod if you are in the Bay Area your first stop is Miller and Lux it is like a good steak and maybe some
Starting point is 00:19:03 ta-ta seafood Seas your style and Dover So just go to one dinner the whole week and make it that one also coming to Hawaii he's open opening one and he's opening one in Aspen. So Miller & Lux is going to... Yeah, Miller & Lux is going to take the country by storm.
Starting point is 00:19:18 Thanks Tyler for hosting us. Take care. Bye, Molly. All right, whether you're a boss or an employee business travel has always been so annoying. You know, you get to your tickets. Oh, who should get the miles, me, the company, the credit card. Who's going to do all these receipts? Which card should I use?
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Starting point is 00:20:39 or paying off your first $1,000 of liquid spend to learn more about this. fantastic special offer just for this week in startup's listeners. Tripactions.com slash twist. Tripactions.com slash TWIST. All right, there's some breaking news about OpenAI. This was a non-profit. I remember Elon had backed and Sam Maltman had gotten involved. Then they flipped over to a for-profit, which I think was a brilliant idea, because money.
Starting point is 00:21:08 And it seemed like they could make a lot of money by making this a for-profit. I don't know if the nonprofit still. exists or not, but Microsoft had invested in Open AI in 2019 and a billion dollar valuation. They raised that somewhere around a $20 billion valuation two years later. So they literally went up 20x in 24 months or so, a billion dollars or so in increased in valuation during that time period. According to the information, Sequoia A16 Z and Tiger Global, you know they have GPT3, the writing tool that a lot of people are building off of, and they did Dolly. of course, Dolly and G.P.T.3, I think, are going to be commodified. There's now other
Starting point is 00:21:51 open source projects that are doing the same thing. So we saw that the stable diffusion based company raised at $100 million at a billion dollar valuation. And it's, I think, important to note that I don't believe that these companies have revenue yet. I don't know Open AI if they're charging people for these tools exactly, or I'm sure they will at some point, and it's unclear what the business model will be, but there's a business model in there somewhere. I've looked at a lot of startups that are built on GPT3. So if you imagine you want to write a poetry startup, if you wanted to do one on copywriting, these are all starting to emerge, where if you want to write copy for your new sports beverage,
Starting point is 00:22:35 the copywriter instead of just starting from nowhere, would say, hey, I want to write something inspirational for teenagers. I want to write something inspirational for women who are moms in Japan to buy this drink, to share the sports drink with their kids when they're all going on runs together. And literally the software, just in that very narrow AI sense, would be able to write that copy or somebody could say, hey, make me an illustration for this story. And you know, when you look at the illustrations in the New York Times and you look at a dolly, I'm not saying this to diminish the great artists who write who make beautiful illustrations for magazines and newspapers.
Starting point is 00:23:12 But I think the public would look at a dolly too, maybe with a little bit of polish on it, no differently. Like zero difference at this point with a stable diffusion or a dolly illustration, then illustrators at those popular publications. Now, that doesn't mean that those illustrators won't become augmented and use these tools and then come up with something even better. But I do think the same way telephone operators went away. I think copywriters and graphic designers
Starting point is 00:23:40 are going to have a different role in society. You might have elite copywriters and you might have elite designers, but this mid-market or the low-end market for this type of work is going to go away. Or it's going to be done by things like Canva plus Dolly 2. So you can imagine if Canva puts AI in it, you'd say, hey Canva,
Starting point is 00:24:01 I want to do an invite for my eight-year-old's birthday party and I want it to be a Star Wars theme. And you'd say, no, not classic Star Wars. I want to do Clone Wars and I want to do animation, but I want it to be a Shoka-based and not, you know, based on Anakin. I want to include some wukies and, you know, it just made you the invite.
Starting point is 00:24:19 And you didn't have to hire a designer or a party planner to do that. You could just come up with a theme yourself and just talk to your software. And with what's happened in AI and obviously with speech recognition, we're here, folks. There's going to be a new round, apparently, for OpenNet. AI as well, and we don't know when that's going to happen. In terms of Open AI's revenue, a person with direct knowledge of Open AI's finances implied the company was on track to generate revenue in the low tens of millions of dollars this year. So there is some revenue for Open
Starting point is 00:24:50 AI happening. Let's just say, instead of low tens of millions, we'll just pick a number here. Low tens means either 10, 20, it means 20 or 30. So we'll pick the higher of those two numbers. Let's say 30. 30 million, 600 times revenue. Six times 30 is 180. is 1.8 billion and 600 would be about 18 billion. So, yeah. If we were to do back in the envelope, 600 times revenue for open AI. Now, if they were growing year over year, 100x in revenue,
Starting point is 00:25:21 I mean, maybe they went from 300,000 to 30 million. I don't know. But this valuation does not seem to match performance reality as much as potential. And sometimes that happens in what we do here in Silicon Valley. but you have to wonder what the investors out of $20 billion valuation are thinking in terms of what their return will be.
Starting point is 00:25:42 Could they 2x or 3x from there? Well, if we were to look at public market comps, you know, 60 billion or 80 billion would be like Uber or Airbnb-ish in terms of revenue. Congratulations to the team over there on an absolutely absurd valuation and to the people who are investing. I hope that you get a 2 or 3x,
Starting point is 00:26:02 but I mean, trees don't grow to the moon, $20 billion valuation is what Figma just got sold from, and that is the most successful highest-growing SaaS business, or one of the highest-growing, most successful SaaS businesses of all time. There is a cap on returns, folks.
Starting point is 00:26:21 You do have to look at reality, so this is one of the things in Silicon Valley that sometimes gets out of sync, and this really has nothing to do with open AI necessarily, but one of the weird things here is Open AI says there's a cap on the return. So there's some strange clause they came up with. And this is the quote, in an effort to prevent investors from driving the company to focus purely on the bottom line, OpenAI said it was capping the return on investment for its early
Starting point is 00:26:50 investors to 100 times their capital. The capital will be lower for later investors. So, okay, let's pick the people who invested at 10 billion. a hundred times for people invested at 10 billion 10 times 10 billion's 100 so they're saying you can't this company hits a trillion that's the cap of your returns there are very few trillion dollar companies in the world so that cap seems to make no logical sense
Starting point is 00:27:17 it's almost like you would say that as a marketing technique you know what I'm saying that would be like the cynical look at it like oh I'm capping you at 100x Like, what investor doesn't want to get 100X? It's like, yeah, that's kind of crazy. Weird story. All right, next up, Molly is going to talk about Snapchat and be real.
Starting point is 00:27:38 So stay tuned. All right, I'm just going to solo a little bit of news for us today because there is some wild markets news and Jason's off doing all in. You know, it's a double duty kind of day. Let's start with some, I can't say entirely surprising, but still a bit startling news from the world of earnings today, tech earnings. Snap's stock is down 30% today after another disappointing earnings report. Snap, of course, has had a string of disappointing earnings reports.
Starting point is 00:28:11 But just as a level set here, Snap is down about 90% over the past 52 weeks, 90, 90. And again, it was down about 30% this morning. So let's dig into the reason for today's drop this chart, by the way. I am just looking at another one of our Y charts on SNAP's quarterly year-over-year growth, and it is absolutely brutal. Here's what they reported that caused this latest drop. Revenue was $1.1 billion in the quarter, up just 6% year-over-year. 6% year-over-year growth is the slowest growth that Snapchat has had in its entire time as a public company.
Starting point is 00:28:49 It's still growing, but obviously it's basically flat at this point. There is this chart, if we want to pull that up, of Snap's, year-over-year revenue growth on a quarterly basis. It is not pretty. The chart is not yet updated with SNAP's newest numbers. So you'll see 13%, but that was actually last quarter's year-over-year revenue growth. So the growth is really slowing that trend line, just continuing to go down. Let's talk about why that year-over-year revenue growth number matters so much. It's because SNAP's market cap, unlike some other companies, is completely correlated, has traded basically in lockstep with its year-over-year revenue growth over the past five years or so. So we made another
Starting point is 00:29:31 chart where you can see SNAPS market cap in yellow and it's quarterly year-over-year revenue growth in black. And again, these are almost identical trend lines. This is one of the very few cases where investors are saying, we have no faith. Right. There's no sort of divergence in price to earnings ratio, there's no divergence from reality when it comes to snap. Whatever its revenue growth is, that's where investors follow it. So if you see a big increase in revenue growth, you can expect the market cap to follow suit, and unfortunately, vice versa. But here's what we want to note, because this is also, of course, taking down the rest of the
Starting point is 00:30:12 social media market, or at least it was when these earnings first came out. Inflation and the kind of general market downturn and the thing we've seen where lots of stocks are losing a lot of value as we come out of the sort of COVID period, those are not the only things impacting Snap. Oh, no, many, many headwinds for this company. In a prior earnings report, Snap noted that Apple's app tracking transparency features were a huge problem for its business. This is, of course, the thing that also wiped about $25 billion off the combined market caps of Google and Facebook. And you could imagine that Snap didn't have as big a cushion as those two companies. These new privacy features,
Starting point is 00:30:51 make it harder for platforms to target users as accurately as they were before. That means digital ads are less effective, which means advertisers pay less because they're not as effective, which means revenue goes down, which means revenue growth goes down, and all of these things lead to SNAP's market cap dropping. I want to reiterate 90% over the past 52 weeks. It's a pretty brutal time for SNAP, and I think a lot of us have been wondering what the future holds for this company, whether someone else might come in and buy SNAP. It really has been the little social media engine that could just kind of keep chugging along for a while, but it's getting pretty rough. Here's a few more numbers from those Q3 earnings. Q3 cash and
Starting point is 00:31:37 short-term securities total about $4.4 billion. So the cash situation is not a disaster. Q3 net loss was about $360 million, though. That's a five times larger loss year over year. Here, SNAP's stock-based compensation in Q3 was $343.43 million. That actually represents a majority of that net loss. So just to be clear, that was mostly a compensation issue. But Q3 free cash flow was only about $18 million. That's actually about break-even on a free cash flow basis, which is not terrible. I mean, these numbers are not a disaster, right?
Starting point is 00:32:11 This is a network that is growing, even if it's growing incredibly slowly. It's just that investors have no patience for it. Snap is in the middle of a bit of a turnaround. So they said they would cut 20% of staff last month as part of a major restructuring. So we're hoping, for their sake, that it could be a little more profitable toward the middle of next year with just about 20% less overhead. The company also noted that it was focusing on expanding its revenue growth and has been investing heavily in AR with tools like custom landmarks for House of the Dragons, Snapchat, times both. world in New York and adding lenses to L.A. Rams Arena screens
Starting point is 00:32:53 in 4K in real time. You know, Snap's been dabbling with this kind of camera strategy for a long time, and so maybe that is going to be its differentiator, since it does seem like kids are not using it to share pictures and chat with their friends. On that note, though,
Starting point is 00:33:10 a thing that kids are using, Be Real! We have been so early on the Be Real train, literally as users, me and producer Rachel, and Prash. But also, I feel like we got here just at the right time in terms of covering this app. And in fact, the popular photo sharing app, Be Real, if you're new here, Be Real, of course, is the app that gives you a pop-up once a day and tells you to take a picture at exactly that moment, a front-facing and a back-facing camera photo and has no other features than that, for the most part,
Starting point is 00:33:44 nor does it have an obvious monetization strategy. And yet, we're all kind of obsessed. obsessed with it. And now it's raised a $60 million series B at a $600 million valuation. Sources familiar with the deal have stated that Yuri Milner's DST Global will lead the round. This is a 4x jump in valuation since its last $30 million series A, which was led by A16Z in Excel. That was back in June of 2021. It's a French app. It's been around since late 2019, but it just hit, like sometimes things do. It got this kind of mass adoption by Gen Z and some old folks like me. I have some like Gen X friends on there.
Starting point is 00:34:30 Sources say it has been downloaded 53 million times. It boasts as many as 20 million daily active users. So it's had two and a half times growth since July of 2022. Again, though, Be Real has yet to generate any revenue that we know of. The Financial Times has reported that they've considered a subscription-based model. I guess we could imagine a situation where they could put an ad in here and there. And I think we had some clever kind of sponsorship discussions. Like you could imagine them doing something around an event.
Starting point is 00:35:02 Actually, a friend of mine suggested this. Like, if you were all at the same event, let's say it was the Super Bowl or a Warriors finals game, they could potentially do a sponsored pop-up for just that event. and then everybody's B-Real would be from that same thing. Although, in my experience, using the app, that means it would almost certainly crash and nobody's photos would upload for like an hour. But, you know, whatever.
Starting point is 00:35:23 They're on Series B now. I'm sure they're going to use some of that money to fix it. There has been, of course, no statement yet as to how that influx of cash will be allocated. But I have to imagine that a little bit of server capacity is going to be included in that spin. Anyway, congratulations to be real. It still is kind of a mystery.
Starting point is 00:35:43 what makes one thing take off and another thing not take off? I mean, if we go back to those SNAP earnings, you can think about a time when SNAP was just, that's what everybody was using. They were all using Snapchat. They were all posting there. It is worth, I think, noting how quickly the wins can change for a social app. So a $600 million valuation for Be Real,
Starting point is 00:36:10 which doesn't currently generate any revenue, and could, I mean, we're already having conversations about gas, you know, an all new app that does an all new cool thing. I feel like if Jason were here, he would say we might not have made that investment, but I personally am excited to see Be Real. Do better. Good luck to you guys. All right, everybody on the phone today is Open Phones founder Dorena Kuya. Welcome to the program, Dorena.
Starting point is 00:36:39 Thanks, Jason. Great to be here. Now, what mistakes do most founders make with Fong. numbers in their startups? Great question. First one is they use their personal phone number for their business. And it's an easy mistake to make because you don't necessarily think about it much. You know, you incorporate your company, you put your phone number. There's all these forms you fill out. It very quickly goes from being your personal number to being the number for the company. And when that happens, there are all these data aggregators and all kinds of services that take your number and put it everywhere. Suddenly now there is this uptick and spam, spam,
Starting point is 00:37:14 text messages. It's the worst. Yeah. And people just wonder like, how are others getting my number? Well, let me tell you, you put it in different places and it kind of snowballed from there. So that's the first mistake. The second, which is initially as a founder, you're the salesperson. You're the only sales rep. And then you hire a first sales rep. And sometimes founders let that person use their personal phone number. Oh, no. That number, the data, everything that happens is just fully belongs to the sales rep and if that person leaves? You lose the entire history with your customers. Yeah. And then what if that sales executive goes to a competitor? Exactly. Yep. Okay, everybody, Twist listeners can get 20% off any plan. For the first six months at Openphone. Just go to openphone.com slash twist. If you got an existing number,
Starting point is 00:38:01 they'll put it right over for free. Head to O P-H-O-N-P-H-O-N-E.com slash twist today for 20% off. Okay, Boomer. I understood the assignment. All right. So thank you guys. for joining me on another segment of OK Boomer. For those of you who are not watching over on YouTube, we have two reoccurring guests this week. We have Jules Turpac and Danny Miranda, both of who have, you know, been on the podcast and content creation space for a bit.
Starting point is 00:38:30 And I wanted to have you guys back on, like I said before I started pressing a chord. I basically don't even have notes for this because this isn't really an interview. I've already done interviews with you guys. I just want to hear your thoughts on podcast AI. Recently, we saw this podcast come out on a platform called podcast.com, really interesting, where Joe Rogan was interviewing steep jobs. And it didn't sound like super great. Like, obviously,
Starting point is 00:38:57 like it wasn't perfect, but it was still pretty cool. And right when I saw that on Twitter, I immediately had to send it to you guys. And I was like, you know what? I want to hear your thoughts. Do you guys think that we are going to see AI podcasting any type of? soon. And I guess before we dive into that discussion, can both of you introduce yourselves to the audience? Like, Jules, you can go first? Yeah, maybe we both do our intros and then we get into it.
Starting point is 00:39:23 But hey, everyone, I'm Jules Terpak. I'm a video first content creator mostly on TikTok, but I'm also really active on Twitter. I cover digital cultures, so basically everything under like human computer interaction stuff. And I also have an advice column in the Washington Post about life online. So, Danny, one of me? For sure.
Starting point is 00:39:43 I'm Danny Miranda. I podcast mainly at the Danny Miranda podcast. Just launched a paid newsletter as well, which has been a lot of fun, but just enjoy covering technology, creators, entrepreneurship, and business, and I've had a lot of fun doing that over the past two years. Awesome. And since you guys have, like last joined, both of you have actually started new projects. Jules, since your first recording, you have that wonderful column that you were talking about. And Danny, congratulations on the newsletter. So really cool to see you guys continue to iterate in the content space. So the first question I have, the big one,
Starting point is 00:40:20 it was the first thing I Twitter DM'd for you guys, I think. Will we see AI podcasts come out and will people be listening to them? So obviously they're already starting to come out. But will these start to be like a normal thing people listen to in over 10 years or under 10 years? Big question. Danny, what are your thoughts first? I want to be from the main podcaster. Oh, well, I was going to say ladies first, but if you insist, you know, it's funny.
Starting point is 00:40:47 I think that all this type of stuff is exponential in nature. Right now, the podcast that we listen to with Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs, you could tell there were some things that were off about it, but it seemed like a conversation you really could listen to. What I think is that the technology is going to get so fast, so quick, so good, that we're going to be sitting here in a year from now and being like, oh, my God, I can't believe we heard Napoleon talk to Trump, right? Like something crazy like that.
Starting point is 00:41:17 And they're not obviously going to be in the room together, but if we have recorded audio from the people, it's going to be a crazy, crazy world. And also another thing is there are presidents that have radio shows. I think all of this is going to happen very soon. Maybe in like three years is my prediction. Okay, whoa, three years. So you're bullish on this.
Starting point is 00:41:37 Jules, I mean, you post a lot about AI. So I'm also interested in hearing your thoughts on. You've been covering AI for actually a long time now, now that I think about it, because some of the first content that I saw of yours, which is probably about a year ago, covered the AI space. So what about you? Over under 10 years? I don't know because with everything AI,
Starting point is 00:41:58 even like what's kind of more, not nothing's fully mainstream yet, but like within the entertainment realm, things that are more so utilizing AI. It doesn't seem that people are really indulging it in a casual way yet. it's more so being utilized as a tool. So with this specifically, what I found most interesting, for example, I partner with Descript. So overdub is their feature.
Starting point is 00:42:19 And this whole thing about utilizing AI voices isn't new to me. Because Descript has that. You can have an overdub of your voice that's AI generated. And if you forget to say a few sentences or whatever, you can just type it out and have your voice say that. And of course, there's consent there as well. What's interesting here is more so this new, Because we're entering just a new realm of media and entertainment,
Starting point is 00:42:42 and the way to capture people's attention is just different. And a lot of people aren't accustomed to this new way of media and entertainment. So what's interesting about podcast.ai is that you can just feed this system, supposedly. That's what they're saying, a topic and choose the voices. And they just go off on that topic. It's not like Descript where people are writing in exactly what they want the AI voice to say. It's like they're generating information from the internet and like data from the internet,
Starting point is 00:43:07 compacting that into a storyline. And also on top of that, the AI voices, which is interesting in the way that, like, I think there's such a disconnect today between, like, the education system and how kids consume content online versus how they consume content in school. Because at the end of the day, like, the textbook is content. That's, like, information you're consuming. And so if there are more compelling ways that AI can help kids learn in the ways that they like, like, oh, they like listening to Joe Rogan, they like his voice, whatever, they could just, like, use, like, textbook information with him, like, talking. If that's how they are most compelled to learn information, then do that. But so like pros right now to me, the three that stand out are like, yeah, information being compelling in the new way that media is evolving. Like efficiency and output of people.
Starting point is 00:43:53 If like someone's a better writer or if like I'm like on a plane one day and I have an idea for a podcast, I can just type it out and have these voices do so. It's just like great for content creators. But then the cons come like consent. profiting off of information, content, and likenliness that isn't yours, just like post-true society, easy manipulation, and then purpose and grief, because Steve Jobs is, of course, deceased,
Starting point is 00:44:19 and it is a little wishy-washy there if this is, like, ethical to be doing. Is it respectful? Yeah. I love that Descript feature. I think it's really interesting. Again, I saw that when you tweeted it. I thought, oh, my gosh, this is so interesting.
Starting point is 00:44:33 I, when I edit my own podcast, my own things, right now we have wonderful editors at the speak at startups, but I don't have the bandwidth to do as detailed edits as they do. So Descript is a wonderful platform. And whenever I miss a something, which happens a lot, you can go over and instead of like voicing over something, you can just use AI to completely do it. I'm kind of surprised podcast AI hasn't already been done just because of GP3. and how long we've had it. We haven't had it that long,
Starting point is 00:45:08 but we've had it for a while now. So I was like, okay, this is really cool, but why hasn't this happened yet? So I think that was like my first thought, but I never thought about it from an education standpoint. And when you brought up education, Jules, I thought of ASAP science, I think it's what it's called. And basically they break down like really difficult science topics
Starting point is 00:45:29 or almost like Hankering, where you break down really difficult topics into a way that's easily digestible, AI would be so interesting if they could make a topic in the same exact, like, use the exact same terminology that, like, Joe Rogan would use, not just, like, the cadence of his voice. I think that would be, like, a really interesting, like, next step. So, excited to see where it comes in the specific sectors. Yeah, it seems like all this tech stuff, like, whether it's AR, VR, AI, stuff, like, it all sounds amazing when it comes like education and training purposes,
Starting point is 00:46:02 almost like utopian when it comes to that stuff. But when it comes to the social aspects, that's where it gets definitely gray and a little more on the negative side. Yeah, one thing that the first thing that came to mind was when I heard this podcast was like, we need to spend more time recording conversations with people we love. Because if it's possible that there's a future where we can have conversations with people who aren't there based on recorded footage or recorded audio,
Starting point is 00:46:30 of them, you might want to have a conversation. What would my grandpa say about this? What would my great-grandmother say about this if they're not around anymore? Yeah. It's good to hear like these positive thoughts, I guess, about AI, because I think a lot of times when it's talked about in the media, your first thought is to go to scary. You're like, oh my gosh, like this stuff can be used and you can think of a million in 10 different ways where it can be used just absolutely horrible. Obviously, like you said, Steve Jobs passed away. Imagine this getting in the wrong hands of, you know, just right off of that, like, first thing, using this for somebody that has passed away and not in the best sense.
Starting point is 00:47:04 Like, you can think of ways that that's not great. And now that you said that, Danny, got me thinking of, you know, when people originally started doing vlogs and things like that, especially, like, the mommy vlogging era, people were like, okay, I'm doing these vlogs, making these videos. So I can remember, like, these days with my kids. Like, it wasn't, oh, I'm going to, like, make a profit off of, like, ads on the internet. It was I really enjoyed living in this certain stage of life,
Starting point is 00:47:28 like a bunch of New York City or L.A. vloggers. I really like living in this city. I'm going to document me living in this city. I'm going to document my kids because these are important times. I can see podcasting going to the early stages of vlogging in terms of popularity. And right now, the problem with podcasting, I think, not only is it just really difficult to search, but there's so much podcast content, we don't know what to do with it. How do you think we can use AI in the future to make, to honestly find podcasts, I think are interesting and just sort through all of this stuff because I hate opening up my
Starting point is 00:48:04 Spotify and getting podcasts recommended to me that I've zero interest in. Like, when will that change? And can AI, how can AI change this? Yeah, well, I was just on like my YouTube homepage the other day. And I love listening to podcasts, but I'm like, my whole YouTube homepage now is filled with podcast. And like, and they're all of value. I'm like, I want to listen to them. But they're all so long. I'm like, I don't have enough time to listen to them. And so like, what I try to do on Twitter and I want AI to be a bigger help there. We always talk about how content curators are at the forefront right now. That's going to continue for a while as too.
Starting point is 00:48:37 But this decade, what's just as important is content curators. And most podcasters have people who pull clips, of course. I know, like, Danny, I've seen like your videos on like Twitter people have retweeted or something of pulling clips. But like these content curators who can like pull these clips and add more context to make it like compelling content so that people, if they want the option to go and listen to the full. podcast, that's fine. But reality is, like, we don't have all the time in the world to listen to every podcast. And how can creators and curators benefit from, like, these clips together? I'm in a more, like, complementary relationship. So it's not like these curators benefiting off
Starting point is 00:49:14 of these creators' content just solely, but it's also helping the creators because it's like, your content can be memeified and it can get more like, obviously, views in such, such that way. So, like, how can AI kind of pool? Again, the most compelling information. And that's what really interested me about podcast.a.i. It's like how, like, when someone gives the system a topic to talk about, how is like the system deciding which information is valuable enough to be like said in the podcast and like the back. And like how that's vetted.
Starting point is 00:49:46 Yeah, like what information is worth making a TikTok over? I also am studying to say on that and like making all the, um, separate content that comes from a podcast that Danny, I'd love to hear your. take on because like Dules mentioned, you have a awesome way of making a bunch of freaking clips. You, like your whole newsletter, like a bunch of reasons people are looking at is because you talk about, yeah, I've been able to grow exponentially by pushing out these different forms of content, all sourcing from my podcast.
Starting point is 00:50:13 At what point do we stop calling these podcasts and we start talking about them in terms of like talk shows or it feels like the reason we had podcasts to start with and the reason they we're so compelling is the low production value. So you didn't need a lot, you didn't need, you didn't need really high production. You didn't need this kind of things like you might have needed for YouTube video to make a really good podcast. Whereas now, not only do you need more manpower, which maybe can be supplemented by AI, but it feels like you, there's just a lot of other production pieces to it. Do you think in that 10 year period, we're still going to be calling these podcasts?
Starting point is 00:50:51 Probably. I think so. just because that's been how the name of the medium normally stays, meaning like TV shows are still called TV shows, even though you could make the argument that they're Jimmy Fallon on YouTube is just a YouTube show, right? But we still call Jimmy Fallon a TV show. What I'm interested in is how AI can help me sort through the different clips that I have. Right. So right now, how I create probably 10 to 20, maybe even 30 or 40 clips. clips per episode is I manually go into the episode at 2X speed, relisten to everything, and
Starting point is 00:51:30 try to find the moments that are interesting and compelling to people. When will that happen where I could just feed a system that episode and that system will be like, all right, the best moment is this to this time and it will clip it for me. That's got to be the next wave of AI technology in podcasting from my perspective. I love that point because even on YouTube now, it's like it has the wave of like when people are like what most replayed moments and everything like that. It's like, yeah, clip the ones that are most valuable, like specifically, automatically through YouTube or whatever and just send those off more easily. Right now there's so many different apps and everything that you need to do so.
Starting point is 00:52:09 And like you have to hire other people. And it's just like a lot. YouTube needs to listen. That is such a good idea. Manually do it from that. So if anybody's ever tried to make a YouTube video, basically you can go and you can see which parts, people went back and listened to or timestamp, like they'd like
Starting point is 00:52:25 the most. If that could be cut already by YouTube and made into a separate feed called like whatever clips, what? That would make everybody's lifetime helps easier. Oh, for sure. Like, such a good idea.
Starting point is 00:52:39 To Danny's points, like you want to send it off what's most compelling to your audience. And podcasts are great in the way that's like everything's so fast moving today, especially on TikTok. Like there's not a millisecond wasted of information. That's like what's more human about podcasts, but also it's like, we're still putting time into these platforms and we want to be getting at the utmost value
Starting point is 00:52:59 that we can just like. So podcasts are typically more valuable than like super short form content. So yeah, like just pulling out the downtime moments like what is most compelling from this podcast, let me know so I can move on with my day and like utilize it like what I learned in those in real life as well. So we're not just like stuck watching two hour podcast. I think I watched a podcast. I didn't watch it.
Starting point is 00:53:20 I was about to the other day. It was like five hours. I was like, no, this is inhumane. I should not sit here for five hours and watch your podcast. It's like so messed up. Yeah. And at that point you were like sitting at somebody's like sleepover party. Like that, that's the length of that conversation.
Starting point is 00:53:35 Like you don't. That's just like so much content to consume. Like we really are becoming these like how many people make content versus how many people are consuming it and how much content is being consumed is crazy. And it would be nice to make sure that content that it is. is being consumed is at least of value. I don't know personally, it's really difficult for me to see like under 10 years and over 10 years because I do think that AI and podcasting is going to become way more mainstream.
Starting point is 00:54:04 We're already seeing great platforms like Descript, which is really affordable. I think I pay like $15 a month for it and it has an AI tool. Like that's nuts. In 10 years, obviously we're going to be having the things that we're paying for now are probably going to be free on the internet, just like how there's like a million and 10 different free Photoshop downloads now that work just as great as Photoshop. And more skeptical on are people going to want to listen to ideas from robots, or are they going to want to listen to ideas from people?
Starting point is 00:54:35 As humans, do we value just the content, or do we value the person making the content? And that's just a question that I'd hope it's, they value the people that are making the content. but I don't know. That makes me a little uneasy. Well, it's weird, right? Because the people who, if we're in the situation of listening to Steve Jobs and he's not around anymore, he did create the content that it was just a machine that was fed into that.
Starting point is 00:55:05 And so now we can hear him in a different context. But it's interesting because it's like, I think there's going to be a new genre. Right now we have education podcasts. and we have society and culture podcasts. I think in three years or five years, there'll be an AI generated podcast. Well, you'll be able to hear all these incredible people and anyone really who's recorded audio in that feed, in that section of the podcast app. That's my personal prediction.
Starting point is 00:55:36 Okay. I like that. I also, I just worry about like the delusion it can cause too because like I don't know if you guys have ever experienced this. If like your friend or something did something messed up, like you had a dream. And like someone you know did something messed up in your dream and you see the next day. And like they actually do this in real life. But like I have some animosity towards you because you did something dream. It's like, oh, no, my boyfriend cheated on me in my dreams. Like you're pissed off with it.
Starting point is 00:56:00 I was like whatever. Exactly. Yeah. No, it's like, like again, just like how things run on the internet, the amount of people who don't look into the context of things and you're just going to take it at face value. Like obviously these conversations I've already been had about AI. it's just like weighing the net positive versus negatives. It's hard again.
Starting point is 00:56:21 I look at AI as like amazing with education and training with the social element. There's a lot of mess and I wonder if it's in that negative situation. But it's also like we're coming towards this stuff. So right now we need to think of like the solutions and like the cultural barriers that we need to put in place so that everyone's kind of like on the same page. And it's not such delusion between all of it. It also gets me thinking, like, even after we saw the Anthony Bourdain movie using an AI version of him, people still went and watched it because they have a lot of admiration for Anthony Bourdain. And honestly, when I first listened to it, I didn't know who was AI.
Starting point is 00:56:58 I just clicked into it because it was a new movie coming out. I don't know, there's books everywhere. I was like, yeah, I'll check it out. In fact, I'm not sure if it was announced that when I was watching that trailer, if we already knew it was AI. It might have been right before. I did not know. Like, I couldn't tell because I think I was so engaged in the visuals
Starting point is 00:57:18 that I wasn't paying that much attention to the audio. Obviously, with podcasts, you're not looking at anything else or you're a little bit more engaged. So technology-wise, I could totally see people moving into this fairly quickly. Imagine, like, if you could hear Steve Jobs, go through and read all those emails. he sent these beautifully scripted emails to himself. There's one that's really great. It's about, I believe he's reminding himself to just show gratitude.
Starting point is 00:57:46 And it goes along the lines of, like, I didn't create the clothes on my back. Other people made these. And just really a really great piece of writing. And I'm not sure if he wrote it, but I know it was something that showed up in his emails to himself. Like, how cool would that be to have like those almost like affirmations, like read to you by Steve Jobs AI.
Starting point is 00:58:08 Like, I think that is really soon. And like, coming around the corner. Like, there's going to be a YouTube channel run by some faceless, nameless company that is like, Steve Jobs affirmations. And it's those emails. You know what I mean? Like, those are, those are coming soon. Those are coming soon. Oh, yeah. Like, probably, yeah, early 2023.
Starting point is 00:58:26 You guys know those Reddit threads that are read by like bots? Mm-hmm. That you can, like, listen to on YouTube. Oh, Danny, you're not in the nerdy spectrum. You need to get deeper, deeper into YouTube. So if you don't want to read a YouTube or a Twitter, excuse me, thread on Reddit, there's like thoughts that read them. And I would like listen to them on walks and like high school and like listen to threads.
Starting point is 00:58:49 So maybe like voices like that are going to change. I don't know. Well, aren't those, those are crazy popular on TikToks. Like there are people I know who they're entire. Yeah. Yeah, their entire for you pages are like these Reddit threads that are like read aloud and that have like something like a video game. going on the background, of course, like so much multimedia going on.
Starting point is 00:59:08 Yeah, to your point. It's just like, yeah, I think the Steve Jobs example you said about something he's written, that's like beautiful, like kind of seems like a no-brainer, but definitely when it's like you can just put words in their mouth. That's when it's weird. My prediction is I think we won't have people reading audible books in a few years. I think it's going to be good enough that we can get AI and then you can choose your reader. like we have with platforms like
Starting point is 00:59:36 Speechify, who's a screen reader that it does sound pretty human, but I think we're going to be able to make it so good that Barack Obama can read any audiobook you want. He, I believe Barack Obama, I know his wife read her
Starting point is 00:59:51 audiobook, but that would be sick if you could find one actor, actress you really like, or I don't know, voice actor, and have them in Audible. I think that's like a career that could slowly fade away. Oh, for sure.
Starting point is 01:00:06 I can't believe people would sit there and record their entire books, like reading them out loud. Yeah, I was listening to Ryan Holiday, who does like The Obstacles the Way and like some awesome marketing books, and he reads like every single one. I was like, where, where's this time coming from? Like, that's awesome. But oh my gosh.
Starting point is 01:00:22 Like, yo, that's nuts. It wrote it. My question for you to is would you sell the rights to your voice to be utilized by other people? Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, his voice IP? I think, well, Rogan's going to have to answer that question soon since he was the first one, right? Oh my gosh, I didn't think about that. He'll probably sue podcast AI or he probably doesn't care to sue them.
Starting point is 01:00:47 But someone would, right? It's fascinating. It's like, what's a voice worth? Yeah. If a lot of people like that voice, it's worth a lot of money. Yeah, I don't know. I feel like I would have to approve, like, I would want to see the like scripts that come through. and approve them.
Starting point is 01:01:04 Yeah. I don't know how that's like, it's just slippery slow. It's so weird because there's like this CGI influencer called Little Michaela that I'm kind of obsessed with, right? She's like not real, but she looks pretty real. And obviously she has IP
Starting point is 01:01:20 because she's creators behind her. And so I feel like I can think of it from like a little Michaela point of view where say they take a bunch of voices, just mash them up and be like, okay, this person of this age would probably sound like this, I can totally see them using that as a, I'm saying like a marketing tactic, but like seeing like a CDI person hosting like a documentary about AI and then them selling like her IP for stuff
Starting point is 01:01:46 like that would be really interesting. But for my own, oh man, I feel like it was either tick, I don't think it was Siri. I think it was like the original TikTok voice utilized. Oh my gosh. Like woman. They didn't get the right. Yeah, they didn't have the rights to her voice. And so she like, I don't want to say misinformation if she like sued them or something, but there was a whole situation where they had to change the voice. Yeah, because of that. So who knows, guys, we'll see. I would need like some crazy money, like more than Caller Daddy was bought for Spotify.
Starting point is 01:02:17 Like I would need like life changing money because I feel like my voice is kind of attached to at this point, at least in my early career or part of my career. Like without my voice, I wouldn't be making like money at least a portion of it. So I don't know if I'd sell it. How about you, Danny? Everyone's got a price, right? You can throw up a billion and you can get the voice. Right?
Starting point is 01:02:41 I'm like, huh. Not less than a billion? If I said a million. Nah, you couldn't have my voice for a million. Well, for what? For me to say anything, for you just have free reign to use it to say that things that I don't believe? For six months.
Starting point is 01:02:58 Yes, free reign to use. This question is so. spicy. Well, this question is core to like who we are as human beings, right? Yeah. Can somebody literally twist your words? Exactly. Yeah, and I think that's
Starting point is 01:03:13 some of the most powerful things we have is our own opinions and our own perspectives. Yeah. I don't know if I would tell for anything, honestly. If you guys remember and speak Barack Obama, I don't know why he's coming up a lot in this episode. Like, sorry if he's listening, but actually, no, like, let me know if you're listening. That'd be kind of cool. but there's this video compilation where he doesn't sing
Starting point is 01:03:35 call me maybe but people like cut up a bunch of his voice stuff to like call me maybe I assume he didn't try to like get that off the internet or anything like that but those like voice clippings and things like it's already so easy even without AI to like mess up what somebody's trying to say like you always see in the movies like kids taking voice recordings from phones and stuff like that to try to make it sound like you know, they can do something that they're not supposed to. That's definitely coming in.
Starting point is 01:04:02 That's coming so quick. We'll see. We'll see. Well, it's fascinating because it's like AI isn't AI. When something becomes so good that it becomes just technology that we use, like, for example, AirPods are a version of AI. The Alexa device in someone's house is AI. Like, it's all AI, but when it becomes so good that it's part of our everyday life,
Starting point is 01:04:26 we no longer call it AI. TikTok algorithm. That's just AI. So yeah, it's interesting how we think of it as like an other AI, but like in the future, it will probably just be a technology that we often use and is part of our everyday life. It's funny to say that. We actually had a guest on this weekend startups that when he was asked about Web 3, they were like, how do you feel about Web 3? I believe it was like in terms of if you would invest in it, I think is the conversation that they were having. And basically he was like, a Web 3, like, you just have to think of it as like an extension of the internet.
Starting point is 01:05:01 Like, Web 3 is just the internet. It's just another part of the internet. And it's what's going to do well in this sector is really, really hard to figure out. Just like it's really, really hard to figure out what's going to do well in any new sector. So like when the internet, as we know today was first coming around, there was a bunch of stuff on that platform that didn't kick off and like wasn't great. And then I'm sure a bunch of people invested it. And now we're having the same issue with Web 3 where not all of Web 3. is one giant grift.
Starting point is 01:05:29 It's just an extension of the internet that we're trying to figure out in a very painful way through trial and error. And I wonder if AI, like you said, like this is just technology. Like when are we going to stop calling it AI
Starting point is 01:05:41 and this is just going to be, you know, another tool in our toolbox. Yeah, just the evolution of it all. Yeah, not like AI. Like, I don't know. AI with like a crown on its head. It does feel like people are really treating that term.
Starting point is 01:05:54 That's something to look up to. But thank you guys so much for coming up. on this segment, it's emergency segment, it feels like. It's kind of nice because you guys already have mics and setups. Where can everybody find you guys? At Jules Terpak on TikTok and Twitter. Cool. What about you, Danny?
Starting point is 01:06:14 Add Hey, Danny Miranda on Twitter's the best place and Danny Miranda. Dot substack.com. Amazing. I can't wait. Can't wait. Awesome. Thanks, guys. I'm definitely going to have you on again soon when I see another update in tech.
Starting point is 01:06:27 And I'm like, oh, like, when does this kind of have podcasting? Thanks, Rachel. Thanks for having us. Really appreciate it.

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