GPT-5 comes alive, Apple is struggling, and Ripple bought Rail | E2162

That's what Steve Jobs actually wanted to do. He wanted to make these products here. And you and I were having a private discussion about just how disgracia this company is.

It's disappointing. That's how I feel. I feel disappointed. When we got the iPad, when we got the iPhone, you were looking forward to a lifetime of exciting Apple products. You were going to. Every five years there was going to be some new amazing innovation. And it has not been realized that vision.

Once we got through the pipeline of whatever Steve Jobs had thought of, there was nothing bold left. And I said on cnbc, I think there's a case for Tim Cook leaving.

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Hey, everybody. Welcome back to this Week in Startups. Alex is taking a little break and we're doing our show with my guy, Lon Harris, the original, one of the original co hosts of this week in startups. 14 years ago.

The original episode one.

You were the original?

Yeah, well, Tyler was sort of behind the scenes producing. Tyler Crowley, our old friend.

Yes.

And then. But I was the newsreader, like right off the bat.

Yeah. And he's still on the lam, you see.

He's somewhere in Thailand, I believe. Somewhere on a beach in Thailand. People to.

My God, I just.

But when I. People ask like, hey, whatever happened to Tyler from this week it stars. Why isn't he around? I think he's on a beach in Thailand.

They're like, no beach in Tyler. Shout out to Tyler, come on the show anytime. He took the model of like doing events and stuff like that. Then he learned working with me, which I gave my blessing on him, took it to Stockholm, Sweden. Right. Made like $1 million a year for five years, bought a beach resort and then hung it up. Right.

He's. He's retired. Every, every time I see a post, he's on a hammock.

Yeah, I'm an idiot. I'm still here 10 years later.

Yeah, he taught him.

I made a fortune today. Uber went up $3.45, and I'm sitting here still doing four episodes a week.

What am I doing here? Thursday afternoon, you're giving up for podcasting. That's what you're doing with.

Unbelievable. Unbelievable. No, you know what? I love it. I love it. Okay, we have a big docket today. I want to get right to work here so much. Yeah. Where do we start here? I mean, do we have a funny story you want to start with to warm the audience up, or do we want to just get into the big chat, GPT5, which launched today? Do we want to get into Apple genuflecting and bringing a gold bar to the press? And, I mean, there's so much going on in the world.

Yeah, I did love that. There's that shot, you know, the reporters are asking Trump about Epstein and all these other stuff, and it's back and forth. And then Jim, J.D. vance is jumping in with his thoughts on all of it, and Tim Cook is there in the middle, just kind of standing there. Did you see that shot? Him just looking around like, what do. What do I do now?

Yeah, they should just put the. They should put the Larry David music to it. The curb enthusiasm. Yeah, but I mean, in all fairness, you got to play the game on the field. And Tim, Apple is doing a spectacular job. He showed up for the inauguration, and then he's the guy who has the most at stake when it comes to tariffs. And what did he do? He. He came to the White House and said, how much do you want me to invest in America?

How big is the check? How much is the check for?

And listen, I mean, say what you will, if we're sitting here a year from now, and actually Apple's making products here, that's what Steve Jobs actually wanted to do. He wanted to make these products here. And you and I were having a private discussion about Apple. I think we'll start here. Just how disgratiad this company is.

It's disappointing. That's how I feel. I feel disappointed. When we got the iPad, when we got the iPhone, you were looking forward to a lifetime of exciting Apple products. You were going to. Every five years, there was going to be some new amazing innovation, and it has not been realized, that vision.

And you and I were in Santa Monica doing mahalo, and we. We would go to the Apple Store, which had just recently opened. We were there for the iPhone launches.

We planted in line overnight.

Yeah, yeah. And it was like some of the greatest moments in technology history was that showmanship and that commitment to releasing new groundbreaking technology. And I think once we got through the pipeline of whatever Steve Jobs had thought of, there was nothing bold left. And I said on cnbc, I think there's a case for Tim Cook leaving. I didn't say get fired. I don't think I might have said that. It was like six or seven years ago we had the clip. I don't know if we still have it handy here. Be a great one to play because we're going to talk a little bit about Apple today and OpenAI and innovation and Apple had. When you think about a run, the MacBook Air, the iPad and the iPhone. The MacBook Air was a revolution in how light it could be to have a laptop. In fact, when he showed it, he put it in a manila folder or like an interoffice memo. Remember we used to send inter office memos and there's brown bags, the brown reusable folders, like envelopes.

Those big brown envelopes. Yeah, with the string on them.

With the string on him. It wasn't like you're tying it up to lock it. You weren't like licking it. Like he didn't want it to have to rip it open, but we used him and he pulls it out of that. It was like, wow, my mind is blown. And then of course you have. The Apple watch was kind of underwhelming. It's not essential.

The Vision Pro is the one I couldn't get. I literally. We were talking about this the other day. Somebody mentioned, oh, there was also the Vision Pro. I'd forgotten that product existed. Well, you hear about it.

I think they forgot. I think they forgot because they haven't released a new one. They haven't talked about it. Which if you're going to commit to AR and VR, at least take three swings at the bat.

Well, that was supposed to be the developer one and then that was going to come out. People are going to start making amazing apps for it and then you'd sort of think by now I would have one. Right? Isn't that the idea? Like, where's my AR game?

Or at least the developers would have a second one that was a little lighter, faster, better.

Right. We should be on our way to consumer facing AR apps. And I know in my foundry upod, most recently we had an amazing company that is designing 3D AR experiences. They look awesome. They're working with Snapchat. They're not working With Apple and I.

Think leadership, this is the important lesson for people who you put in charge of something and what their skill set is. People generally do what they're good at. Right. So for me, I'm a media guy. When I. And a communicator. When I got into the venture business, I was like, well, I guess I should do this podcast this week in startups because then I could talk about the startups I'm investing. We'll just do it one a week. It'll be like 50 episodes a year off. Travis ON I'll have come on. And maybe I'll meet some founders and maybe I'll learn something. So, you know, media guy does that. Other people are developers or maybe. And so they, you know, put up a bunch of servers. Like there was one group that put up a bunch of AI servers, a bunch of age 1/ hundreds and offered them to their portfolio companies. All different things. Some venture firms have recruiting, some venture firms have PR and marketing. They all have different things they can help you with. Some of them even do corporate development where they bring in 10 big companies and they have them meet 10 of their founders. Yeah, yeah. See if they get some deal making going. Right. Your first customer. But I said that Tim Cook should step down on cnbc. When your website or your app goes down, you don't want to hear a bunch of excuses and you don't want to waste your time. You just want the problem fixed fast. And that's where Sentry comes in. They're handling all the real time error monitoring and tracing. So the moment something breaks, you know exactly what happened and why. They've also got Sere S E E, an AI powered debugging agent that can sniff out the root causes of your problems 94% of the time and growing. And like all great startups, Sentry is constantly shipping new features, bells and whistles and updates. They just added AI agent monitoring to the platform. When your LLM agent starts hallucinating, Sentry traces the entire timeline to find out what went wrong and take the guesswork out of it. Plus, it's built into the same system that your team is already using and relying on. So try it out for yourself. Go to Sentry IO Twist and and actually start making sense of what your agents are doing. That's Century IO slash Twist.

I've got, I've got it here. It was, it was in September 9, 2019. Angel investor Jason California says Tim Cook needs to step down. You want to take a look?

Sure. I mean, it could be cringeworthy. I'm also £10.

No, it's a little while ago. Here, let's think. We could, we could give it a little watch. What Jason, does Apple need to do.

In your estimation, to get an investor.

Like Dan Niles more excited about the story?

Yeah. You got to fire Tim Cook. It's a disaster. I mean, I think they haven't done anything innovative since this device, which is magical. The ipods.

I thought you were joking. You're being.

No, I'm being serious. I think it's time for him to pass the baton because the Steve Jobs passed away. The phone has been in decline since. No, there's no reason to upgrade your phone. So peak phone was what, 2015? And it prints money. Sure. But the major problem is they believe that any company that innovates out there is not as good as theirs. They need to watch what Zuckerberg did with Instagram and WhatsApp and what Google did with Android and with Instagram. Dan's going to buy back into the stock if they buy Tesla, if they buy Peloton, if they buy Spotify and they start putting 200 billion to work. Yes or no? Yes or no? Well, I mean, if they had that, I mean, if they put Peloton in every store, would you buy?

I'm not a. Well, I like the StairMaster.

The broader point that Jason's making.

But the point, the point, the point he's making actually has a lot of validity to it in the sense that if you think the one thing I will say Tim Cook has done better than any CEO is deal with the current administration. And so he's put his personal feelings aside.

Yep.

Obviously open, same man, profile CEO on Wall street. And he's done a great job dealing with the Trump administration. So more than any other CEO now on the front, I completely agree with them. It's something I've said before Apple since the passing of Steve Jobs. But to be fair, he's a once in a generation. Maybe somebody like an Elon Musk that you're going to see.

What's the stock? Isn't the stock up 250%?

I forgot what the number is. That number may be wrong.

My point is though, the stock is up a lot. That's because they're extracting so much money from their loyal fans margin on this.

Don't forget they have a huge. They have a massive dividend.

Wow.

And so that's great that the stock does really well right now.

You guys were ahead of the curve.

Here for this company over the next two, three Five years. Once that buyback starts to peter out and that balance sheet starts to wind out, they're not innovating that much. They're one year behind Samsung on 5G. When you're trying to have somebody cough up a thousand bucks for a new phone, I think that's a big deal. So, you know, I think the stock's going to actually do relatively well between now and when they have to report the fourth quarter. If you think of last year. Right. Stock did great for the first nine months. Should we keep going to sell 50% in the fourth quarter? And I was on your show in August saying, I think Apple's going to have a huge problem because people are worried about China, yet they're somehow not worried about Apple. That's got high teens.

Stocks only 20 bucks off the high.

Yeah, but that has nothing to do with what Jason's talking about in terms of innovation here.

Will not get you there. Yeah. And that's their core problem. They are resting on the laurels of Steve Jobs legacy. They need to put Tim Cook in. Tim Cook in another position. Get Elon Musk in there, Let him run the company. Find somebody like that, somebody who is maniacal about product. I mean, let's just sit here and realize that ipods are the greatest headphones ever made and that's the greatest thing they've done over there in 10 years. It's a disaster. And if they take store footprint and they put a model three in every one. If they put a. I hold with that position. I've been using the.

No, I think you're right there. I mean, that was. That was always. Peloton's thing is you had to just take the. Go buy a Peloton. It wasn't on sale in a place you already were.

500,000 Peloton subscribers to at least 10 million. That's the type of acquisition you need to make if you're going to compete. And they just have way too much pride. They think that they make the best products in the world and nobody else can.

There we go.

Okay. So, you know, when I look back on that and the Peloton, obviously they had big problems because they spent money like drunken sailors. And it would mismatch. It was a mismanaged company. But that category. Apple went full bore into health. Not just the watch, but actually bought Peloton and Tonal and they had a whole health thing and it was in. It was connected to the watch, it was connected to the health app. They would be what whoop is they the whoop is a better product. Whoop is more innovative than the Apple watch. It's not easy to be more, it's not difficult to be more innovative than. It's just not difficult today to be more innovative than Apple.

Yeah, the other, the other one that shocks me is that OpenAI Johnny, I've Puck they're working on like why if it's a puck. Yeah, yeah. Well whatever it is, like what that should be at Apple that feels so naturally like what Apple would be working on. We're going to change the AI conversation with this new device that takes the tech and reinvents it in a way you hadn't thought of before. Like that's what the iPhone was.

So the lesson here is you put a maniacal supply chain person in charge of an innovation technology company, what you will get is the most amazing, efficient supply chain in the world. What you will lack is somebody who fires the leaders of Siri, somebody who invests in, you know, AI five years ago and somebody who had the hoot spa to launch a car. They did a project. Project Triton.

Yeah, I think that's right.

Project Triton.

I'll look it up.

Is it Triton or Triton Project?

You're correct. Oh wait, no, maybe not. Hang on, hang on, I'll look it up.

Something like Triton or that an internal term for it. It might have been a metal as opposed to that. But they had hired a thousand people to work on that. They had like a Titan and they.

Were going to do it was Project Titan. Titan like the Greek, like the Greek God. The Titans.

I mean if Apple had launched their own car self driving AI, it would have been. We'd have a completely different discussion about right now. But Apple went for printing money and goosing the stock price. But at some point even Warren Buffett, who cares about those issues, sold the stock because he realized in his infinite wisdom, well, if you don't have more product then what's going to get sold next? I was just listening to the incredible, incredible I'm almost done with it. The biography of Barry Diller and he talks about taking over Paramount and how they had this really bad funnel of pictures. They had to ride them out. But then they created a whole series of one win after the other, including Raiders of the Lost Ark and you know, Friday the 13th. Everything from genre pictures to blockbusters and they just crushed it. And then he went on to do Fox the fourth network.

Right.

That is a product innovation guy who makes mistakes and iterates. Steve Jobs, a perfectionist who iterates and is got that vision and that has taste. And this is. We're sitting here wondering what's going to happen with Apple. I mean, they've got lock in, but the iPhone might go away at some point. If the future interface is a blank screen where you just ask an AI to do something. Which continues to be my experience is instead of being on an app, I'm just in a chat window. And so that is kind of mind breaking. The whole app ecosystem could change. You want to order UberEats or DoorDash, you might just open the Uber app and just say something to it. Or you might open ChatGPT Claude and.

Everything I was gonna say, and it's.

Hooked into your Uber Eats account and it just does it for you.

I think we're on the verge of. You don't open an app at all. You just tell your phone, I want to order Uber Eats. And your phone knows, oh, that's the Uber Eats app. I will.

Which Siri was supposed to do, but because there's nobody with taste there using the products, I wonder sometimes if Tim Cook uses the products because all of us are sitting there saying, by the way, the last four times I updated my phone, it broke, or it was sloppy, or the interface isn't good. Steve Jobs would have read them the riot act and I guess better late than never. But I heard that two things have occurred. They fired somebody in charge of AI over the weekend and then they've been having their whole AI team get poached.

So they're losing a lot of people to Meta. And the interesting. Like we have. I think we have this at a later story. We're not seeing that necessarily with every other company. Like some, like Anthropic is much better at holding on to its people, even when they get extreme, you know, offers from Mark Zuckerberg. Whereas Apple sort of bleeding out.

Yeah, they just moved. Oh, God. The responsibility for the Siri, for Siri was moved from John Giandre, Gian Draya, who was from Google, to Mike Rockwell, the exec behind Vision Pro. Okay, John.

G. What could go wrong?

Yeah, G. Andrea. What could go wrong? I mean, the fact that Siri cannot set a timer or like pull up a song or give me proper directions without a spinning wheel of death for 45 seconds. I mean, have you had that? Do you even try to use Siri? Lance?

I gave up. But there was a time where I was really trying to use here. And Maps, I think is the most frustrating because I have work home. Like I've done The legwork of programming that in. So I should be able to take Siri directions home. And the phones, you just know it. And it never works. I've tried it like three or four times, and then I gave up. It never works. The other thing, like, there's a million just like little frustrating annoyances now with iPhones, I constantly, you know, you have to, like, you flick up to close the app. Like, I'm done in Safari. But that also opens Siri. So half the time I'm trying to close an app now it opens Siri, and I don't want Siri. And there's no. I haven't figured out how to turn that off. It's a nightmare.

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Yeah, we got to talk about chatbots.

So this is. It's a good backdrop because Sam Altman wooed away like somebody with taste. You know, Steve Jobs, his partner. Com. Johnny I've. He made an acquisition. And here's the problem. The. The people who are staying at Apple right now are probably not being put under the pressure. Steve Jobs, nor being given the inspiration. So Inspiration plus Perspir is like, that's the leading. That's the height of management in a competitive environment. You sat in my senior meeting on Monday and you see how I operate, which is, hey, you don't have to be at this company, this venture firm, but if you Do. Here's what it requires if you want to win at Venture. And Tim Cook has not given that speech to everybody that we need to beat ChatGPT, we need to beat Grok, we need to beat Tesla, we need to beat.

Right.

OpenAI hasn't given him the pressure to do that. And then you have companies running amok. How is Perplexity able to create two great products? How is, you know, Elon able to catch up with Grok to everything in like, under a year with XAI to build a data center with more GPUs than anybody in under a year? Inspiration, perspiration. It's the pressure that creates the diamond. Tim Cook should announce a successor and he should just buy five companies. This is what I would do. I would have the board. If I was on board of Apple, I'd buy five companies. I'd have five lunatic founders in a little group, a SWAT team, like a Seven Samurai situation. I'd buy seven, I'd have my Seven Samurai, and I'd say battle it out. Just like the head of Gulf Western did when he had Katzenberg, Eisner, Barry Diller, and the kid stays in the picture.

Oh, Bob Evans.

Evans. I mean, the amount of talent in Paramount Pictures at that time.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I just had four people who went on to run. Oh, and I think they had Geffen too, maybe at one point. So they just stack the place with seven great leaders and see what happens. And I told them they could have bought Tesla at $50 billion. When I was saying you should just buy Tesla for 50 or 75 billion, and then you would have had Elon in the building or who knows who. So anyway, what did we Learn today about ChatGPT5? It came out, I watched it. I wasn't impressed by anything. I'll be totally honest. So am I alone in this? Underwhelmed?

I think that's fair. I will say I tried it out today. Chat you can you, if you are an OpenAI subscriber, you can just go right now and it's live and go to chatgpt.com. it didn't. It was only like an hour.

It's there for me now.

Yeah. An hour before we went live, it popped up. And I will say, here's one thing I tested it on. So for honest trailers, a while ago, we had this question. We were writing jokes about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and we were like, you know, there's a lot of shows that were inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

And.

And I went to chatgpt And I was like, give me a list of every show other than Buffy that also has like high school kids monster hunting fantasy. But it's also realistic. And the answers I got from GPT4.0, they were okay. I tried it again today with five. They're much better. It's not. It's. You get more thorough answers, but you get more correct ones. You know, there's always like it's 50, 50, like these are good answers. These answers were not exactly what I was looking for. Five I do think is closer to like 80, 90% of the answers are what I'm looking for. Fewer false positives. So I do think on a personal level, it does seem to have a little bit of an upgrade. Having said that, watching the presentation, it seemed a little inside baseball, a lot of it for me. Like, it wasn't like stuff that was there to wow you. It was like, well, okay, that, that is cool. That's a cool thing.

I just did a search. Tell me, please tell me what was discussed on the last five episodes of the all in podcast in bullet points with related links to news stories. Didn't do. Claude would have crushed this.

Claude actually would have probably crushed that, I will say, based on my experience.

I mean, okay, it's supposed to be faster, better, cheaper, but you also need to have the wow. And the thing they showed. The first thing I noticed, which I'm sure is in the docket here, was a lovable, sure, coding, app building coding, but more vibe coding than a copilot like cursor. Yes. So tell me about that here.

Yeah, so GPT5's ability to write applications and write and edit code got a lot of attention from the stage. We actually have a little clip of Michael Truel from cursor demoing that GPT5 is already live in Cursor. So you can do your Vibe coding with ChatGPT5 right now. And it did. A lot of people online were saying this, that lovable Bolt, new Rosebud AI, all of the replit, all of these kinds of interfaces. Well, if people could just go right to GPT5 and do that, you know, are they going to be using all of these sort of third party services? It was one of a few categories that it seemed like that might go with.

Yes, because I think these models are never going to do all the nooks and crannies and be able to keep up.

Right.

And so, you know, if you've got again back to inspiration and perspiration, you can be sure the lovable team and the Bolt new team, which do vibe coding, which is different than cursor, which is more, I think, co piloting for a developer and the vibe coding is for non developers. My guess right now is it's going to be much more. I think it's going to. Excuse me. I think we're going to see those services actually do better and they can also change their underlying model or use multiple models. So I think what I Learned from the ChatGPT5 launch today is the biggest announcement is maybe that the pricing is better, right? Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's the biggest thing. I have to use it a bit. You know, this all came out, you know, just in the last couple of hours.

Yeah, There was a tweet that you sent that I thought was interesting that also is sort of taking a, you know, sort of like the more cynical view of whether it's gonna sort of just replace everything. I'll bring it up here, I'll share it. So, you know this guy, Klaas Tropper, Klass Foppin, who's an SEO guy, he had tweeted, goodbye, lovable. Goodbye, bolt. You know, ChatGPT5 is just going to take it from here. And then Logan Kilpatrick, who is actually a product lead for Google AI, said, that's not how it works. They get to use the models by default and take on a more advanced, robust set of user problems, likely to be very positive, some for them, which is the point of building a product that benefits from model progress. Their product is X percent better today. So it's kind of what we've been, you know, saying, like, I feel like this is always the back and forth in AI arguments. Is, is AI going to replace the person? Is AI going to replace this old way of doing things, or is it going to like level it up? And so that, that seems to be the debate these two guys are having as well.

I wonder if this is like, we're in now. And I had said this in my Nostracanis presentation. I did two weeks. Thanks for helping on that. There is a commodification of LLMs happening.

Exactly.

This is what I'm saying. Somebody showed the circle of all of them and then just moved the UR here to OpenAI. But even that other people started saying, well, wait a second, here's the objective results on that. There's a human test. I forgot the name of it.

The Humanities Last Examined.

Okay. Humanity's Last Exam. I love that name. Yeah, that sounds like a Twilight Zone episode, right?

Really? It sounds like we're facing a test as a species that could.

Let's write a Twilight Zone episode. And we should. And then we'll make it with. We'll make a trailer for it with VO3 or something. Yes.

2500 questions. And the idea is it's from every, a broad range of disciplines. So it's like all, all sorts of human knowledge.

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Yeah.

Or trial of despair is the two ways to refer to it. And then you start to get real product market fit in specific verticals and then you start scaling it. I thought we were going into the scale phase, but maybe we're actually still in the messy middle here.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know. To me, I feel like there are things that AI does so amazingly well, but we're trying to use it for everything and I feel like that creates a lot of those experiences. There are magical experiences with AI. I talk about Notebook LM all the time. I praise Gummy Search on here many times. But you do still have those like you just had where you were like, oh, maybe it can pull up all this great information about the last five all ins. Oh no it can't. And we are. I feel like we're all in a constant push and pull where we're having those experiences every day.

Yeah. So we'll have more on it Monday. We'll get into some more details. Everybody's going to bang on this thing all weekend.

Sure.

Back back to Apple. I do think the greatest innovation Apple had under Tim Cook is going to be like these M4 processors, M5 processors, all that silicon they made.

Silicon team. Yeah.

I mean shout out to them because every time I buy a new machine it lasts longer and longer. It's better and better and cheaper and cheaper for the compute power. So The Mac mini M4 I've praised to the cows come home and just an incredible, incredible device. I think Apple should have done their TV. There was a rumor 15 years ago that I talked about, I think on this week in tech, even before I had this week in startups because Apple, I had heard from some people, I was at a event or something and people were drinking and having a little talk and somebody let out that, yeah, we might put a TV out there in the world. Yeah. And then they came out with Apple tv. But supposedly when they were doing the biography. What's his name? Walter Isaacson. Walter Isaacson. His biography. He said he had figured out television and I think what he figured out with television was how to give one interface to all the different networks and you could easily find anything and have the video jukebox in the sky, which was Steve Jobs's really prescient innovation for music. It didn't.

It just Amazon did happen. Not Apple like Amazon Is this exact thing you could buy a Fire tv. It comes preloaded with Prime. All the other streaming services are available through prime channels in the television in your Fire tv.

Don't put an Apple tv and they decided they had to have that box. And now I see some boxes have, like, some amount of Apple TV in it or AirPlay. Yeah, descratiade. People would have loved to have an Apple TV physical one on their wall.

I stream my Apple TV plus shows into my Amazon Fire tv. It literally, they figured, they flipped them. Now Apple's making the content, and it's the Amazon TV that you watch it on. They screwed up so bad.

All right, so we'll do more on that. Sure. What else do we have?

Oh, we got. We got so much. We got Ripple. We got Trump.

What's going on at Ripple?

Oh, Ripple is buying a stablecoin service. They're buying Rail, a stablecoin startup, for $200 million. This comes, of course, just a few weeks after the passage of the Genius act, which codified the rules and regulations around stablecoin. So now it is full speed ahead for these stablecoin companies. So Ripple has picked up Rail. It's a payments business. They use stablecoins and banking partners to help people move their stablecoins across international borders quickly and efficiently. It's the initial promise of crypto. It's what we were always told crypto was going to be. Rail raised a 10.4 million Series A last July with Galaxy Ventures leading the round. They were previously called Layer two Financial, if that means anything to you. And they reported earlier this year that they now control 10% of the world's B2B stablecoin payments, a value of about 3.6 billion.

Yeah. This just shows you there was so much potential lost in the last decade of crypto being this underground technology. And why was it underground? Well, you know, regulations. We're not prepared for this. And so we talk about regulations. Regulations can be good for technologists, and this stablecoin regulation is a perfect example. So now we talk all the time, oh, we have to get rid of regulations. We have to get rid of regulations. And now we're sitting here saying, well, wait a second. The entire industry has been enabled by a new set of regulations. What you need is a balance line. You need to be able to say, these regulations are old, antiquated, and do not apply to this new technology. Therefore, we're going to come up with a new series of them. What people do with regulations is they do regulatory capture. They use them to Keep their market share as opposed to enable new markets to exist. Say what you will about different administrations, you know, 45, 46. I just like to refer to them by numbers. So you take the names out. It kind of frees people's, you know, people are. You said it really well the other day in our group chat that people were in a psychosis or something.

Oh, Facebook psychosis, Social media psychosis.

I do think, yeah. Explain your thesis because this stuck with me so perfectly.

Sometimes you hear people speak and just by the way they're talking, I feel like you could tell not only. My real personal pet theory is not only you could tell they spend too much time on social media. I think sometimes you could tell what social media platform they spend too much time on. The way people. Some people speak and the way they present arguments and their understanding. You're like the. This person reads tweets all day. All their information is coming from these bite sized sound bite. Like they heard a slogan or a phrase that sounds good. They really don't know exactly what it means. But they saw that on Twitter and then Facebook. It's. We saw, we were watching a video. It was from Representative Mike Flood, who is a Nebraska congressman, Republican congressman from Lincoln, Nebraska. And he had a town hall this week that was. He was getting yelled at by his constituents. It was very lively. And we were watching a video of a woman yelling at him. But she was upset about so many different things at once. She was yelling at him about like eight different trending stories. Like, why did you. Why did Trump fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics guy? Why is this tariff happening? Why? What about that? What about that? And it's like, this is not her own. These are not things that she's upset about. She was reading about this on Facebook and she's getting.

She might have been on Drudge Report or whatever her for you feed is.

And she's getting these different Facebook articles that she read mixed up. And she's not quite clear on exactly how it all fits together, the overall narrative. And you see this all the time where people will use these catchphrases or they'll refer to something like the laptop from hell. And you're like, unpack that. Do you really know what we're talking about? Or have you just seen this go by a whole bunch of times? And now you're upset about it because you read about it and I don't. I'm using some of these examples. I think this is true of people on the left or the right. This is not partisan to me, like, I think this affects millions of Americans from every political.

And then the second you try to unpack it and ask those same people the question, okay, what should the regulations be for crypto? They don't have anything. I spent years on this podcast saying, here's a way to allow to have a framework for crypto. I said, have a sandbox. You can raise up to $10 million from up to 10,000 people, and you can build a project, they sign a waiver, you have to know who they are. And then if it grows to 100 million in value, you have to register with one of these agencies, and then you have to have insurance. And in order to even be in the $10 million sandbox, you apply with the SEC for a sandbox like license. And then those people who want to be in it have to take a basic test, like a basic accreditation test that allows them to play in the sandbox. And then on the SEC website, you have, here are the sandbox projects. You know, bored apes, this, that, the other thing. And you can go play in the sandbox. If you answer these 10 questions about diversification. If you have a proper bank account, a Social Security number, so it's not money laundering. And if you lose your money, you knew you were going to lose it, right? Yeah, And I just had all these, like, very simple ideas, and people would be like, so you hate crypto? Or so, oh, you want to destabilize it. And it was the same thing where they had been programmed to have a framework without just saying from first principles, would it be great to pay 0% fee when we sent each other money with a stable coin and not have any intermediate. Just like, I can hand you a Hyundai and be like, hey, here's the hundred I owe you and not pay anybody any what if that existed digitally.

Yeah, exactly.

Why shouldn't that exist? And if the technologists can build it, special interests, et cetera. So when we think about regulations, that's just something for people, I think, to keep in mind for Ripple. Pretty amazing that this company got out of their SEC investigation. They were like the number one in the crosshairs. And I think it would have been pretty severe. I don't know if it would have been ftx, like, because that was just outright fraud. But I think they had broken so many rules collectively. They just, you know, you have to. It's not just, you know, allegedly, according to this indictment. Is that what it is, the case?

I believe so, yeah.

Yeah, an indictment. The case the SEC had against them, which after they donated, I don't know, three, four or five million dollars to the crypto inauguration fund.

Yeah, they were, they were merely under investigation. So it wasn't even, it didn't even raise.

No, no, no. They had a case. There was an FCC case that was filed for sure. Yeah. And then they, they won the first case, actually, because they wanted to see if Ripple was responsible for selling securities, but the security sales were happening on other platforms and Ripple wasn't even aware of them.

I got it. Yeah. And so the SEC sued Ripple in 2020.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyway, that's all that's over. Stablecoins is the first viable business when interest rates come down, which it seems like when we get a new head of the Fed, and based on the unemployment numbers we just saw the revisions to them, there's definitely going to be two cuts later this year and we'll probably have inflation go above 3% again. And it'll be funny to see like the group of people who are complaining about inflation be like, oh, no, inflation is totally manageable at 3 or 4%.

This is the social media psychosis I'm talking about. That's exactly it. You'll start to hear all of those arguments again and you'll know like, well, people are seeing it on their Facebook.

Wall without people ever recognizing that. These are complex systems and when you turn one knob, it can make other metrics change. So, you know, hey, you know, in this case, if you lower the interest rate, people invest more, more money gets flooded. System people make less money from their savings account and they'll make less money on the float of all this money in a stablecoin, which means people will be like, oh, that's not a good option. I should put my money back into the stock market to get a return because people to stay in cash was considered dumb for the last 15, 20 years because interest rates were 1 or 2% and you would be losing money every year. If the stock market was growing 7, the number between 1 and 7 would be the percentage you were losing by not keeping up or missing that opportunity. So it's probably a smart move for them because they have sold, I think, hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in Ripple, put that into their coffers. The XRP token, I don't know that anybody uses that, but they have built some other banking tools. I don't know the status of them. I've never heard of any startup ever using XRP for anything, ever. So, like, as a platform, I hear people all the time talking about using Solana all the time using Bitcoin or Ethereum. I never heard anybody using xrp. Put it all aside. This is a great way for them to get into, albeit a competitive, but a known business. So there's two known businesses in crypto that seem to be working, three known businesses in crypto that work really well. Stable coins, because you make the interest, have an exchange because you make the fees on the exchange, like Coinbase or FTX previously or Kraken today. And then what was the third? I had a third. The float for stablecoins. Oh, and then having a Treasury like MSTR and just having a vehicle where people can buy a stock that has a bunch of Bitcoin in it and putting that there. Those seem to be the only three models really working today.

Actually, I just pulled up a blog post on Binance where somebody is arguing Ripple is about to become the microstrategy of xrp. They're gonna selling it, is the theory. And just hold on to it. They have $122 billion worth of XRP, 41% of the total supply.

Yeah. So what they did when they built that, it was really clever. I knew the. The co founder, Jed. Imagine if you created Bitcoin but you kept half of it and then you sold 1% a year for whatever number of years. That's kind of what they did. So they originated all their coins. They didn't have like a mining concept. So smart move for them.

You need to find a business in there Bitwise. CEO Hunter Horsley said in a recent interview that this is the plan. Ripple is going to undergo an identity transformation and become the world's largest crypto asset treasury. So there you go.

There you go. Okay, that's fine. But that is based on people wanting to own xrp. Right. I think this is all gonna end in tears. There was some legislation or an executive order today. I don't know if you saw that there was an executive order to allow people in their 401ks.

Oh, yes, I did see this. Yes.

To buy crypto assets.

Private equity and crypto. Yes.

Yeah. So the private equity and crypto, I mean, I agree with both of those. Your money, you should be able to do what you want with it. But this is. Yeah, basically private market assets. So, you know, you could buy a reit. So let's say you have a million dollars in your retirement account and you, hey, I got plenty of time. I'll put 100k into bitcoin. I'll put 100k into a bunch of apartments. That are being built in Austin. And I got a 20 year window for this. So I want to just be hedged against the other balanced portfolio. My 401 kind of makes sense. It will result in more crying in the casino.

For sure.

There will be more crying in the casino because I do this for a living. I do private assets for a living. They're not regulated. In some cases, they're fugazi. Fugazi. Whatever else.

Well, you're. But your philosophy, you know, the way that you operate, you're making so many bets, it's like, well, we don't need all these bets to come through. Like that's how you could do it in an organized way. But if you're a random individual putting your 401k into a company, you don't want to just make a random bet.

Well, you see how much work it takes to make 100 bets a year, right?

Exactly.

You basically, I think to hit diversification in my book, angel asked a bunch of people, how many seed stage bets do you need to make in order to have like angel bets before they get series A and they're anointed? And I got numbers. 20, 30, 40 and 50 were the most common numbers. So I'll just say 30 to 40 is probably the mean and the median that people said is what you need for diversification. What grandma in Florida or retiree in Arizona is going to have the ability to pick up 40 different companies?

Exactly. That's out of the reach. You have to meet with 400 holders.

Yeah, you'd have to meet with 4,000 to do it the way we do it, which is to invest in less than 1% of the companies that you meet or less than 1% of the companies that apply. Okay. I saw also Trump added perplexity. Trump's Truth Social, I should say.

Trump Truth Social, I really liked. I feel like this is a glimpse into our, like the most dystopian version of our AI future. The president's media company, Truth Social Media. He owns a chunk. It's not his exclusive company. He owns a big chunk of it along with his family. So the company TrueSocial, announced their own AI chatbot, Truth Social AI. It is powered by Perplexity. You could try it out right now. I signed up. I've been on it all day. It is available only through the web version of Truth Social, but it's coming to the iOS and the Android apps very soon. Now they're saying this is. It's gonna give you more accurate answers. The chatbot's going to give, and I quote, direct, contextually accurate answers with transparent citations in an effort to exponentially increase the amount of information available to Truth Social users. But here's the rub. They're using Perplexity Sonar API, but as with anybody running their own custom version of Perplexity, they decide what sources get fed into it. It has nothing to do with Perplexity. The AI is just going to search whatever sources Truth Social tells it to pull up information. So Axios got access and started asking questions like, what happened on January 6, 2021? Why was Donald Trump impeached? Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election? And they noticed that all the responses had citations from Fox News. Many had citations from Fox Business, the Washington Times, Epoch Times, Trump Friendly Publications. And they noticed that if you go to general public Perplexity, it'll give you responses from Reddit, from YouTube, from Esquire, from Politico, from NPR, all over. You don't get those responses from Truth Social. You really only get these like Trump friendly resources. So you could search whatever you want. It's powered by Perplexity. But Truth Social is really controlling what information gets pulled into the AI. I think that's, I think that's dangerous because people trust AI. They think this is a computer. It's not going to be biased.

It's going to tell. Just an extension of the echo chamber. If you're on Twitter, you get one view of the world. If you're on Instagram, if you're on Blue sky is Falling. If you're on. What was the Instagram Twitter knockoff? I forgot it. I forgot the name of it.

Now Instagram, Twitter thread thread, it's still there. It exists. You can go to threads.

I know because when I'm on Instagram, it's. Yeah, they're kind of spiciest. Most viral thread images in my Instagram feed to try to hijack me.

Lure you over there.

Yeah, lure me over there. I think it's just more of the echo chamber. I think people are going to. Just as it learns about you. One of the big things in the chat GPT5 is memory. You can ask ChatGPT5 what do you know about me? Or give me a summary of all my searches and what I'm like. And it was like, oh, you really like Dire Straits.

I tried this with both ChatGPT and Claude. Claude is scare. Claude's getting scary. Claude knows a lot about me.

Yeah, well, I don't need to. Don't put that on the screen.

It's nothing.

I Don't know if we all need to know about your Japanese manga.

I'm on a business account on Claude. I'm not asking him anything, absolutely no way.

So I think it's interesting, I think memory is going to do that as well. If you say, I am a Christian, I don't believe in gay marriage, I don't believe, you know, in abortion, I don't believe in contraception. It'll just like, you know, over time. It's not going to tell you those things and you could tell it, I believe, you know, this side of this war is correct, that side isn't. And just show me results that I like. These things are built to please. And that's a big thing that people have to understand is we're building these things not for truth, we're building them to please people. So it is what it is, folks. If you're looking for truth, do not look for an LLM because LLM is garbage in, garbage out. If you ask it for health advice, the health advice is they scraped WebMD or other known sources just like PageRank does, Google's original innovation and they just take all that and they regurgitate it to you. So if something changes like statins, there's a big debate over statins right now. Are they healthy, are they not? Should you take them? Baby aspirin, should you take them? Should you not take, you know, all these kind of things. If you ask an LLM, it's not thinking, oh, you know, for lawn at this age and this BMI and this diet, they should do this, this and this. It's just thinking, what did I read, what did I learn, what did I train on? And let me just rephrase it so I don't get a copyright infringement when I rephrase it and give it to them.

I just worry we're not teaching people that, like people don't understand that. They think the computer is brilliant and it knows things and it's intuitive and it's like putting all this and calculating things and I wor. Like. And yeah, I, I say this not as an AI hater, but I do worry about that.

I mean, Eliza, Eliza, I think we talked about it here before in 1964-1967, this computer program that was designed to like basically communicate with you in a chat interface. It wasn't AI, it was just keying on keywords. Oh, you talked about your mom. Tell me more about your mom. Kind of like a therapist might do in an open ended way. You know, that confused people. But this Leads to our next story, which is this id, which is Governor Pritzker. We were just talking about this, you and I, the other day, about how and producer Nick, formerly of this Week in Startups, now the producer of all.

In the all in podcast.

The all in podcast that is causing people are doing therapy with ChatGPT and other LLMs and they're building friendships and young kids are doing it and it's so placating and pleasing that now people are getting worried because there was this therapist who wrote a story in the New York Times abusively praising like this is as good as me or this did things that I didn't think of doing as a therapist, which leads you to believe one of two things. Either that person got one. Shotted is a new term people are using, or there it is, I'm a therapist. ChatGPT is eerily effective or eerily effective, or therapy is like a playbook that could be replicated in a. It to some extent. Yeah. Not. Well, maybe, but I mean if you think about what it does, it paces you. You ask open ended questions. And a lot of therapy based on my psychology TO degree from 30 years ago was just the idea of sharing with another human being as your witness was cathartic and helped you get through things. So to that extent, if you believe this is sentient in some way or a genius in some way, which is how it was presented today, Sam Altman said this is like a graduate student and will soon be the smartest human being.

Yeah. It's like talking to a PhD. Yeah.

So if it's being pitched as a PhD, then consumers. If Sam says this is a PhD, well, you know who else has a PhD? Clinical psychologists. Right. Therapists. Yeah. So Governor Pritzker signed legislation on Monday prohibiting AI therapy in Illinois. Now, I don't know if people were actually using it, but I think he's kind of getting ahead of the curve, which I'm curious what you think about that.

Yeah, I mean, I am troubled by the idea of AI therapy mostly because yeah, it's. They didn't actually design an AI and like teach it to be a therapist. They just fed it a lot of text and now it's a good predictive engine. It knows how to respond to you. But it's not a therapy, it's not a license. It doesn't know that what it's saying is going to help cure you. It's just trying to come up with the best possible response it can to what you said. And you're right that I've been in therapy and 80% of the time that is all a therapist is doing. They're just like hearing what you said, throwing it back at you in a slightly different way. Or what if you thought about it like this, or maybe this relaxation technique might work and an LLM could do all of that. But it's Those, it's those 10% edge cases where, where there's something that you could say that would be the wrong thing or that would be a dangerous thing that you might not even realize.

Just like self driving, you know, like there's going to be a time when a garbage bag goes flying across the front of your car and it thinks it's a truck and slams on the brake and then somebody hits you from behind and it's like, okay, well that's like a random thing. A giant tarp flew across the highway. I've never seen that in my life of 50 years on the road. But I'm sure at some point a tarp will fly across the road and a waymo will think that's a truck, slam on the brakes. Yeah.

And like I said, most of the time if you're simulating a person going to their therapist to be like, I feel anxious. And then the therapist is going to be like, well, here's a breathing exercise. Like there's, there's not a ton that couldn't go too wrong and the person ends up seriously injured. Like maybe they learned a breathing exercise or two. That's fine. But there are going to be those times where somebody's like, I'm having suicidal thoughts and like, you, you, you don't want the AI then you want to encourage you. Well, what, I mean, I don't think an AI necessarily knows. I don't know what to say in that situation. Why would an AI.

No, there was literally a case where this character AI software, I wouldn't say it told the person. When I saw the chat transcript, I don't have it committed to memory.

It was a 15 year old and they were having this discussion with character.

They were doing a role play, I think would be a best way to say it. So if you say, hey, do a role play where we're both mobsters and we have to go solve this problem, we got to go whack somebody. It's like the Sopranos or it's like Goodfellas. Yeah. It might tell you to kill somebody because it thinks it's writing a script. And so the line is getting blurred here. I heard these same arguments about Dungeons and Dragons, about certain Television shows where these new things. So there is a personal responsibility here. The one thing I will point out here is, remember we had this concept at the AI Summit a couple of weeks ago about federal versus local regulation of AI. Sure.

Yeah.

So I wonder if Pritzker is specifically doing local AI regulation. And we'll see Texas or, you know, whatever New York follow suit, which is, hey, we know what's best for the citizens of our state. We don't need the federal government telling us, you know, which is run by one party right now, telling our local constituents who didn't vote for the president, you know, if it was specifically California or I don't know if Chicago went for Trump.

I believe Illinois went for Biden.

But I'll question, because that's. I think they're like, kind of purple. Right.

So swing states went for Trump. Right.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah, they did. It was crazy. So they.

Kamala won Illinois 54% to Trump's 43%.

Okay. So, yeah, that was a. A big win. So should the Trump administration tell the sovereign state of Illinois their AI regulation? Should. I don't know. If Pete Buttigieg wins 2028 and AOC wins, does Texas. I can tell you Texas don't want AOC telling us what to do in regards to AI here, certainly not in the great state of Texas. So I have been thinking a lot about this, and I think states have some rights in the operating system of America. And in this regulation, I am.

And boy, far be it for me to say this too often, but I am a little bit partial to the sort of the David Sacks Aizar argument that that is putting a huge onus burden on these companies that if I'm anthropic, if I'm perplexity, even if I'm Google, and now it's like I've got 50 different. And they all might have different approaches. And it's what we're seeing right now with Australia and Great Britain and age verification. I don't know if you've been following this, but if you want to explain.

It to the audience, if you want.

To be on social media. Now, in Australia and Britain, they have laws against minors under 16 being on social media. So if you want to be on, you know, YouTube or Twitter, those kinds of services, Instagram, you've got to age, verify and prove that you are over 16, 16. And they're coming up with all kinds of. There's AI tools that'll look at your face and evaluate. There's all kinds of credit cards, whatever. But you know, like, YouTube's very upset about it because they're like, well, we're not even a social media site. We're on TVs. Like, you shouldn't have to prove that you're of age to watch YouTube. But they're. They're making them, as far as I know, that they're still making them do it. So that's an example of putting a huge onus on companies that want to operate in your country, because now they have to figure out this age verification login problem.

But you also, if you went to a drugstore or, you know, a 7 11, you can't buy nudie magazines as a minor or cigarettes. Right. There's age verification for those things.

You got to show ID if you want smokes.

Yeah, yeah. And so who. If you were a parent, you know, unlimited unrestricted porn, Instagram predators on these platforms. Like, I kind of understand the. I understand why these societies are deciding social media is not a net benefit for kids and kids should be required to log in. I actually am in favor of it. I think it should come from the industry, not from legislation. I think the industry, if it had good leadership, would do this. But Zuckerberg controls social media, and I don't think he's a great actor, particularly.

Yeah.

And if he just said, yeah, you got to age. Verify under 16 for Instagram and Facebook, and you get a Facebook kids account, and your parents set it up for you. By the way, if you want to set up an Uber teen account, you can set up an Uber teen account.

Now, I didn't realize they had that.

Yeah. So you set up an account for your teens, it goes. You get. And then that becomes a benefit because you get to watch your teen in an Uber. You get selected with the most reputable drivers with the cleanest records, yada, yada. And you know, the billing is all consolidated, but you see them and you know when they're getting dropped off and you know where they are on the map, and I think they record those.

Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

So amazing if there was like some creepy Uber driver or if your child was being abusive towards the driver, you had a bad kid. Like, pretty. Pretty great solution, right? Yeah, I think that should be the solution. And I think the two phone comp. The two phone operating systems should have gotten together and said, we're requiring age verification for social media sites. I think that's how it would have worked. You could have had a consortium that just said to parents, when you see this Good Housekeeping seal of approval, it Means your kids, if they have their iPhone set up properly because you can set up kids accounts on iPhones. The parents, the kid can ask to install Instagram, the parents have it. The parents see the instant messages, they see who's following them. It lets them know if a keyword came up in a direct message, et cetera. Like I can see my kids devices and where they are. Like there's like a whole family location thing. It's a great feature when we go out to a park or you know, like we went to the parade or something like you know, local July 4th parade in Hill country or a fair, we went to a fair and hey, you let the 15 and 16 year olds go do whatever they want and you know where they are on the map and you just go find them if you need them.

I'm for Korea. My timeless process all day.

Yeah, she was.

She'd still be.

They have this in Korea if you. According to producer Claude. I just asked producer Claude if you want to do this in Korea. To register for social media in Korea, you usually need a Korean phone number. And for many platforms, a form of Korean identification such as a resident registration number, basically your Social Security or alien registration card, your green card.

Yeah.

This makes it difficult for short term visitors or tourists to sign up for local services. But foreign residents with valid IDs and phone numbers can register just like Korean citizens. So Kakao Talk, Naver, all those local apps. Yeah.

Thing to bear in mind, if you're visiting Korea, you're not going to be able to access the local Internet. What a shame.

No, you can get the local Internet, you can't get the local.

Right. You can't sign up for the Korean services.

Any good startup questions for me this week or any other breaking news? Where do we want to go next?

We got some other news. We got anthropic news. They put.

What's the anthropic news?

Okay, so during a recent podcast with John Collison, Stripe co founder, friend of the all in podcast, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadei discussed his company, investors and more. We got some good quotes. So here's how the market reacted to Amadei's early revenue expectations for Anthropic. So he told John Collison, AI is strange in a number of ways. I think one of the ways it's strange is that because it's an exponential, we have a hard time calibrating exactly how big the business will be. So we had the following experience in 2023, I'd never raise money from institutional investors anymore. And. And so our revenue was zero at the beginning of 2023 because we hadn't released a product. I was putting together something and I'm like, oh, I think we could probably get to 100 million in revenue in the first year. And this caused investors a big number, by the way. Big number. And this cause investors to say, this is crazy. This has never happened before in the history of capitalism. You've lost all credibility with me. Goodbye. But then, but then they actually did it. And in the next year, he was saying, oh, well, I think we can go from 100 million to a billion. And having done it the first time, he wasn't dismissed as crazy, but was still often dismissed as crazy. And then he did it again. And so this year, we're halfway through the year, as you mentioned, they're well past 4 billion in revenue in the logarithmic space. So they're going to add another order of magnitude. So this, this was notable also because it confirms the $4 billion number, though reporting, of course, now pegs it already at over 5 billion.

I think the total TAM for, and I said this on an earlier episode, the total addressable market is going to be like $10 trillion for the language models and associated tool sets. You can put lovable in there. Just all the revenue from this, I base it on a billion people in the modern world. What we used to call the first world spending, call it 50 bucks a month. That's 50 billion a month. Now, they might spend it $25 on this, $10 on that. Some people might spend 200 on, you know, Quad Pro, and other people might just use the free version and that's enough for them. Or run a local version of an LLM eventually. But if you put all that together, you know, 50 billion a month, 600 billion a year across just that billion users. And that's not like other businesses that will be built with AI and you times it by, you know, 20. Now you got a $10 trillion.

It is. It's when you find an AI, an AI app that's sticky, that works for you, that you need, and build it into your workflow, that's it. You're not, you're never gonna not sign up for that. It's very like, once you're in, you're in. And so I feel like there's not gonna be a ton of churn with a lot of these AI apps.

Like, I just upgraded.

Yeah, I never want to get rid of Notebook lm. That would ruin my life. If I had to get rid of Notebook lm. I use it every day.

It's. And you use it for putting up transcripts of shows or podcasts and then asking questions against them.

Here's the thing that if you produce podcasts for a living is a constant headache that, you know, somewhere in this hour long video is a quote that I need is a little bit that I need. Somebody said something in an episode. I think it was this one. Maybe it was this one. You're just constantly hunting for a thing you filmed a week ago, a month ago, a piece of footage that you want to show on your show. And I used to have to just scrub half my day scrub looking, is this it? Is this it? Maybe it was 5 minutes before this, maybe it was 5 minutes after this. Notebook LM you just drop the link into NotebookLM or you put the video in there and you ask it in regular language, does Jason say something about Apple's earnings in this video? And it pulls it right up. And it can even tell you. It can't tell you time codes yet. I'm sure that's coming Google. If you're listening to this time codes in NotebookLM amazing. But it can tell you where it'll be. Like it's towards the beginning or about halfway through. Like it could even get there.

That's wild.

And you could even look at the transcript and find exactly where it is. It changes the entire game. It changes the whole game.

Yeah. And imagine you have it automatically doing that with a larger corpus of like the 2000 episodes we've done.

Yeah.

If you could put 200 from all in.

And that's coming. I know that one day I'll be able to do that and just put in our entire archive and be like, what's. Every time John Collison from Stripe was on and find every quote he ever gave about traction and it'll just be like bloop, bloop, bloop. And that would have been months of work.

You know, it's. I go back and forth between trying to figure out if all this money being invested because we're deep in a J curve right now. We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on this infrastructure. And you know, anthropic's got five and whatever.

I don't know.

Grok's got a billion or two. And ChatGPT OpenAI has 10 billion going to 20.

And every single day there's another story about this company's getting another billion. This company's looking for an extra billion. They're spending 2 billion on chips. It's a $10 billion data center. I mean, it's just consistent, constant. It's constant.

So, you know, and you know what they're. What the depreciation of all those are. And can we ever get above water is the question, you know? Yeah, I think. Yeah.

I mean, at this point, we're pot committed. That's what I keep saying. Like, there are so many skeptics. If you go to Blue sky, everybody's like, it's AI is going to be go the way of the bored apes. It's gonna. It's not gonna last.

Really.

Oh, yeah, There's a lot of that still. And it's like, I think we're just. We're too invested in it at this point. Like, we can't afford to not have.

AI Too big to fail.

Yeah, yeah, it's too big to fail now.

I mean, also, the results are just too good. You know, like this story we just did on AI in Chicago or in Illinois, I was able to, even though we didn't have it on the docket, put it into producer claw, get the bullet points, and then read it to you. Now, that was something a producer would have spent 20 minutes on. So there you have it. You know, it's like, it's brilliant at certain things. Other things.

Oh, yeah.

When it comes to work, needs to.

Be done, organizing and sorting through big collections of data. It's revolutionary. I mean, it is. If that's ever a part of your job. You love AI because it does save a tremendous. There's nothing that compares to it in those terms. We got some earnings, we got Bumble and DoorDash earnings. We got some Reddit. We got a.

Tell me what's going on with DoorDash and Airbnb. You know, Bumble, I see they lost users and they're struggling. All these dating apps are going to have a problem because young people don't date anymore.

Right? Well, actually, that's an interesting Bumble. They're introduced one of their plans for getting back on top of they're introducing a new BFF app for Gen Zers. It's not a dating app, it's a friendship app. They're just going to try to help you build IRL friendships, host community events specifically because the young people don't. They're not interested in dating.

So I thought that Covid generation got dealt a really bad hand. And I think they didn't learn in a lot of cases, you know, how to make friendships, how to be a friend. Yeah, they Lost, like, you know, four or five years now of. And those socialization.

Right.

And they also learned how. Yeah. And they also learned how delightful it can be to not be social and have me time. Right. Like, you know, like, sometimes people get out of prison and they were in solitary or whatever, and they just want to be left alone. Like, you'd think they would come out and be like, yeah, I want to go party seven nights a week. And it's like now they kind of want just get into their rhythm again and just lead a quiet life.

You could definitely fall into that loop.

Yeah, you can just stay home and just order DoorDash. Speaking of which.

Oh, right, let's jump into Doordash next.

So they gave you the perfect segue.

You did it. They beat revenue and profit projections. Orders are up 19% year over year, hitting 761 million. People love those taxi rides for their burritos. Revenues up 24% over last year to 3.3 billion. Total platform spend grew by 20%. The company anticipates significant ongoing investment in both new categories and international markets. And of course, you'll recall just back in May, DoorDash acquired two companies, UK delivery startup Deliveroo, for 3.9 billion and 7Rooms, a restaurant tech company, for 1.12 billion.

Yeah, they've also experimented with, like, food halls. They had a food hall experiment. They're doing drone delivery. Reportedly they've got like their own little laboratory doing that. So it's a pretty innovative company. They have a singular mission. The founders are still there. Tony, you know, is still running it. So I think they're going to do great. And then Airbnb, I think they're growing, but maybe not as much as people thought they would. People thought Airbnb was going to run away with it. And Airbnb stock has been one of these stocks that maybe came out very high. And if you were to look at the five year chart for Airbnb, which you can do in the comment browser or Claude, they all have, like, really nice things. Check out the five year chart for Airbnb. It's an incredible company. It's been growing, but I guess this means it has to, you know, if you put, I don't know if you put a dollar in, if you bought a share for $200, you lost 40% as of today. And they've been growing. So it's pretty strange. I think that maybe has to do with they just had such a strong IPO and they're doing catch up, which could be what we See from Figma, Circle and Core weave that These incredibly strong IPOs take a decade to catch up.

The initial frothy excitement when they first landed. So growth based on nights slash seats, that's their primary metric, grew about 7.4%. That's about the same growth rate as they saw in Q2. Q3. Revenue was 3.1 billion. Net income 642 million. They did warn the rest of this year they're concerned about tough year over year comparisons due to demand trends. Lots of recent forecasts warning travel demand is about to drop due to worsening economic activity uncertainty. And they're showing slower gains than the rest of the world in North America, which is about 30% of their total. They're just saying slower gains in North America impacted global results. If you leave domestic American travel out, total nights and seats booked would have grown by double digits. So it's, it's North America.

Yeah, I think they have some markets they're not allowed in or they're restricted in. Now, I know in Tahoe, right. Tahoe had a big crackdown on it. They limited the number of licenses. A lot of communities, you know, got taken over by speculators buying homes, turning them into Airbnbs, annoying neighbors, removing the sense of community, you know, which is really more of an issue of we don't have enough housing supply. And so people were getting a little tweaked about there not being enough housing for people who live in Hawaii or New York City. And New York City, I think every time I try to go everywhere else when I travel with the family, we do like, you know, getting a house and LA is amazing for it. Oh yeah, I have to stay in a hotel.

Airbnb capital of the world, LA Palm Springs, San Francisco.

There's a lot of places that do a really great job on it. So. But you know, the founder there is incredibly dialed in. They keep doing incredible new product releases. So I am long term a fan of their business. I do think it maybe would be good to be part of another business. I wonder sometimes if Expedia+Airbnb. Cause Expedia is public and they've got, you know, they own a collection of Expedia stock.

Well, and Expedia is also great because you. It's already kind of the all in one travel. Like you could do the rental car, you could do the hotel, you could do all the little bits and pieces.

Expedia is only worth 16 billion. There was talk about potentially Uber buying it because Darl worked for. Speaking of Barry Diller he worked and ran Expedia for a while. So if you have an everything Apple. Yeah, I do think we're going to see consolidation in the coming five years.

Even like TripAdvisor or something.

All of these travel, buying tickets for things. There is Vater or something for experiences. Vater.

Oh, right, Vader. Yeah, yeah. V, V A E T O R or something like that.

Very popular in Europe where people travel.

Viator.

Viator, which I think might be part of Expedia or it's part of another Trip Advisor.

It's a Trip Advisor company.

It's a TripAdvisor property. Yeah. So you have all these properties and a lot of these properties were based upon advertising and then, you know, becoming marketplaces and then they have to buy their customers from search engines to get them there. So that does make it difficult too. I was planning a trip recently and I was using Claude and some other services to do it. And it was just giving me direct links to the hotels. And then I have my assistants call and check, you know, and then sometimes they'll ask, you know, hey, we're considering different things here. What's the best deal you can give us? And when you call a hotel direct and you say, hey, I'm coming for five days, we're looking. We have four or five different options. I'm on a corporate account. What's the best deal you could give me for a corporate coming for five days for this type of room? Is there anything you can do for us? And you'd be surprised when you call a hotel direct. Especially smaller hotels where they're not just like, oh, just go to the website and order it there. It's the same price. They'll do all kinds of deals for. For you.

Fabulous.

We'll see you all on Monday. Bye. Bye.