Timeline in Turmoil: Elon Clashes with Altman, Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Chrome, Apple in Elon's Crosshairs | David Risher, James Cadwallader, Devin Bhushan, Demi Guo, Eugenia Kuyda, Alex Danco, Isaiah Taylor

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Today's Tuesday, August 12, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Jordy, what is going on in the timeline?

We got a red flag.

We got a red flag on the play. The timeline is in turmoil. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting. Mom and dad are fighting. Mom and dad are fighting. Shots fired. This all started because of Apple, actually. Not OpenAI, not X, not the Everything app, but Apple and the and the iOS charts. So this started with Elon Musk posting, Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the app Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. X. I will take immediate legal action. Well, the. The community notes section took immediate action and added a number of extra context that they thought people might want to know. First, In January of 2025, DeepSeek reached number one overall in the App Store. Similar to how Ramp is our number one sponsor on this show. Time is money, Save, both easy years, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place, folks. Go to ramp.com and just one month ago, on July 18, 2025, perplexity reached number one overall in India's App Store. That's interesting.

I didn't announce that Grok has hit number one in Japan.

Oh, that's right. Yeah. But probably one of the factors contributing to that. So most of the AI apps live in the productivity section, so that must have been in that. But it's odd because it's like we need a whole new set of. Of categories for the new AI apps. I feel like they should have their own category immediately. What are all the categories? I mean, productivity, I feel like that's everything from like spreadsheets to ChatGPT. Like, it's a pretty broad. It's a pretty broad category. And so, I mean, Apple probably needs to redo the categories. Where even are the categories? I feel like you can't. I feel like they're hard to find these days. They have editor choice apps, which we'll get into because, okay, so browse categories. They have Apple Vision Pro apps at the top. That's an odd choice for the iPhone version of the App Store. Then Apple Watch apps, then AR apps, then books, Business Developer tools, Education, Entertainment, Finance, Food and drink. Food and Drink gets its own category.

I'm looking at the global top charts right now are global for the US so across all the different categories. And right now ChatGPT is number one. Number two is tea on her wait.

There'S a new T app which is.

Helping men date Safe.

Wait, wait, so it's the men version?

The male version.

The male version.

It is.

It's men's cereal.

Very poorly the T app rated, but it is number one in lifestyle and number two on the overall charge. Number three is tea dating. Four is threads, which apparently just crossed 400 million monthly active users.

Adam Mosseri is not messing around over at Meta hq.

And Grok is number five. Okay, it's not that bad. This is despite Apple. I do believe that Elon is correct and that Apple's not including Grok in features, which are editorial decisions. Editorial.

Yeah. So yeah, I mean Doge designer says Grok is the number two app in productivity, number six overall. So why is it so hard to find? And what he's pointing out is that Elon Musk shared this. Grok is the smartest AI in the world and on the toughest test and came first by far. Encoding, but is not mentioned at all under AI but by Apple. So Apple did an editorial view on the AI powered app apps and they listed out a bunch. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Lightroom, photo and video editor, which, I mean, I use it every once in a while, but it barely has AI features. It does not compare to a foundation model. It's not a chat interface. Then you have Canva. Then you have Duolingo, which of course Duolingo uses artificial intelligence in some ways, but you don't think of it as like a competitor. ChatGPT. So this is clearly just like here are some fun apps and we're using the AI buzzword over at Apple.

And I think it's given. Given the series of PR crises that Grok has experienced in the last, call it six weeks, I think it is fairly fair for the App Store to say, hey, let's let this breathe a little bit.

Yep.

We're not, we're not removing them from the App Store. We're not removing them from the rankings. They're still ranked. Yep. But maybe let's not feature it, given that it's been saying.

Yeah, the other, the other interesting thing is like Grok usage has to be split across X and Grok, the actual app. Like I bet I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual prompts or tokens flow through X the everything app. Like, that's certainly how I use Grok. When I use it, I usually start with the Post, click the Grok button. Then I'm going back and forth a little bit there. And then also they actually have a pretty awesome flow where now on any image you see on Axe, you can press and hold and say, edit this in Grok. And then you can just try, you can just type Studio Ghibli and it just Ghibli's it right there in Grok.

And they launched a feature to turn it into a video.

Video, exactly. So all of those Groq tokens, all those Grok usages, that's going to feed into the X app, which again, they've always put X in news and not in social networking because I think it couldn't beat Facebook and Instagram, but it can beat like the, like the traditional news apps. So all of the different rankings are all very, it's all gamed in different ways. Some of them are momentum based, some of them are different categories. And I mean, we heard this from Nikita Beer where he was saying that his last app that went super viral, he hid in the games section. Those were his words. He hid because the game section is so crowded that people wouldn't see him climbing the rankings.

But social charts are based on acceleration, broadcast.

Exactly.

Total usage.

And there are only like 10 dominant social platforms. So if he had a ton of momentum, he'd probably be in the top 10. People would be screenshotting and being like, what is this? And it would be on Mark Zuckerberg's desk. And Mark would have to be like, what's our plan to kill this? Right. As opposed to if you're hanging out in games next to 75 Candy Crush clones, you could be doing well, but realistically you're not really gaining that much. You're not drawing that much attention. Then at the last second, he swaps over to social networking, where he actually wanted to be, and then he's at the top of the charts anyway.

So Elon says Apple's behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the app Store. He starts getting community noted. Sam Altman fires back, says, this is a remarkable claim. Claims that Elon is using X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors. Sam starts getting community noted. Elon fires back and says, you got 3 million views on your BS post, you liar. Far more than I've received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count. Elon's getting community noted. But Sam fires back, skill issue or bots? Skill issue or Bots anyways, timelines in turmoil. Timeline says, will you sign an affidavit that you never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that hurt your competitors or helped your own companies?

Wait, who said that?

This is Sam.

Sam said that. An affidavit.

I apologize if so. One thing is that OpenAI has consistently dominated the narrative on X organically. Many of their to some degree.

I feel like OpenAI has been more dominant just in the real world and actually Anthropic's done very well on X and there's been this whole theme of like Claude has better vibes and big model smell and oh, I would just.

Say if Sam Altman puts a post up, he can put up a picture of a Death star and get 21.

You're 100% correct, right? Yeah.

And so I don't believe that he's like shadow banned. I don't believe that anyone in OpenAI is like shadow banned or being held back in the algorithm. But somebody responded to this really quickly.

If Sam's worried about Reach, he should be using Restream, putting his content all over the Internet. Restream one live destination, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are. And thank you to everyone in the chat today. Mark Siraj, we got Taylor, David, we got a whole crew here. Techno Chief, I believe, said good morning to me. Hello, Techno Chief, good morning. See you. And it's fun having all the crew assemble in the chat rooms. We actually can see the chat wherever it's happening, whether it's on x or on YouTube because of Restream. So thank you to Restream. Anyway, continue.

A friend just messaged and said, somebody tell Elon to unshadow ban me.

Okay.

And I think that.

I think I know who this is.

I think it's much more likely that it's a skill issue.

I think it is a skill issue.

Like Sam is saying here, you never know, you never know. But somebody responded to Sam and Elon's exchange and they said, grok, who's right? Don't be biased. And Grok fires back and says based on verified evidence, Sam Altman is right. Musk's Apple antitrust claim is undermined by apps like Deepsea can perplexity reaching number one in 2025. Conversely, Musk has a history of directing X algorithm changes to boost his post and favor his interests per 2023 reports and ongoing probes. Hypocrisy noted. So we'll see how long.

Yeah, but this is 4D chess. Because in general, people don't believe Grok because they believe it to be insane.

Well, it said some wild things.

It said some crazy things. And so if Grok is siding with Sam, people will be like, well, Grok's wrong. Elon'. Correct.

Yeah.

That's the beauty of these things.

Elona's thinking, what, have I created a monster? This is like the child that. What's the. What's. What's. What's that mythology where the child kills.

The Oedipus Rex, of course. Yes, yes.

Oedipus Rex moment. Child coming for the. For the father.

Yeah.

Well, we'll see how long lasts.

What, you want to play on that analogy? It gets pretty weird.

It gets pretty weird.

I mean, Oedipus marries his mother.

Yes. But we'll see how long Grok lasts in the timeline today.

We'll see, we'll see, we'll see. So the. The Wall Street Journal wrote it up. Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one. The App Store, which features lists of top and trending apps, is a key way for apps to access new customers. Apple doesn't say much about how or why it chooses particular apps to feature. Among the factors it considers is usability and positive reviews and ratings. Yeah, it's definitely getting more and more complex.

It's to break out editorial decisions from the App Store team and true rankings. Right.

I mean, I think a lot of people have not taken a tour of the modern app store on iOS because it used to be that you just show up and there were. And there was just a list of like, the charts were like a few clicks away. I'm like seven clicks deep. There's an ad for just Google in here. There's essentials that are just top games right now. Like, you have to scroll and scroll and scroll and then you go over to apps, then you can browse the categories. But even when you browse the categories, you go to productivity. It's going to give you like the. When I go to productivity, you think I'd be browsing to hit like, okay, show me the top productivity apps. No, it's. It's showing me an app called Sofa, a downtime organizer. Then it's showing me essential productivity apps that are selected by the App Store editors. Then the best calendar apps, best to do as best email apps, best focus, timer, habit tracking. It's going, going, going.

And the big question is how much, how much discovery is actually happening in the App Store?

Is this where people are actually finding the top charts? But it's seven, it's seven clicks deep. And so yeah, if I go to free apps, it's ChatGPT number one, then Grok number two, then Microsoft authenticator number three, AGI cheat. Let's hear from Microsoft Authenticator.

Maybe Grok doesn't get enough. No, but the question here is, are people discovering various LLMs through TikTok and X and Instagram, various platforms? Is that where discovery is happening? Yeah, and I'm sure there's some discovery happening in the App Store, but it has to be a very small fraction of the downloads being driven are actually driven by the editorial decisions from the App Store.

Of course. Of course. Yeah. And games don't even show up in the top. Like, it's not. Games are not. It's a completely separate tab. You cannot select games as one of the subcategories of apps because games are not considered apps anymore in the App Store. To answer the question about like hiding in games. Yeah. The other, the other question is just like how much, how fair is it to give yourself a little boost in your app that you paid $70 billion for? Yeah, like I was thinking about this and I was saying like 44 billion. Well, he was 44. Yeah, it was 44. It wasn't 69. I thought it was 69. For some reason that was the price per share was he paid. So ridiculous. Anyway, I was thinking about like before the launch of Instagram stories, I didn't have a way to share Snapchat stories on Instagram. Like you could screenshot them, but there's no sort of like native way to share a link to a story that if someone on my Instagram feed sees it, it clicks and it automatically opens in Snapchat. Like it was always a walled garden. And then when Instagram stories came out, there was really no way to tie those two platforms together. Like in the, in the pre meta era, there was a way when you shared a post on Instagram to check a box and automatically share it to your Twitter. And it would not just share a link, it would share the actual photo with the comment and it would work as a native post on X. And it could, you know, not really go viral, but it could, it could. It, it existed on Twitter as like a first class citizen in the sense that the image was there, there was no link. It was just like you had just actually opened the app, posted the same photo with proper cross post. Right. And then eventually once Facebook bought Instagram, Twitter had to respond by breaking that integration. So early on, Twitter had this very. This was like the Adam Bain era, like the early. Back. The Dick Costolo era. Twitter had this idea of like, we're going to be the command line for your life. And there was this idea of, like, I'm going to be able to tweet at you to send money to you. Like, the everything app idea is something that's over 13 years old at this point, maybe 15 years old at this point. Like, the Twitter executives were thinking about this a long time ago. Like, being able to tweet money at you, being able to, like, use. Use Twitter as kind of this, like, substrate or this, like, API for all sorts of things. Other apps would be built on top of Twitter. There was tweetdeck and Tweety Bird and like, all these different. Like, the mobile app was by an independent developer and they just didn't. And they were like, why would we need one? We just developed the protocol. Well, yeah, well, you need one because you want to stuff ads in it, obviously, and you want to monetize it. It makes a ton of sense. And so Elon King killed all that.

But the other challenge here is Grok has a variety of NSFW features.

Yep.

And when Apple is making editorial decisions about which apps to feature in the App Store.

Yep.

That is certainly going to be on their mind.

We're having Eugenia from Replica on the show later today. I'm wondering if Replica, I think, is currently in the app store with 226,000 reviews, hasn't gotten kicked out. I'm trying to think if any other. If any other apps. So, like, OnlyFans, for example, does not have an app. I'm wondering if any of the. What character AI does. Right. So Apple's clearly drawn the line at like, like, AI Chatbots, even if they're somewhat erotic, are okay. But we.

But that doesn't mean they're gonna. That doesn't mean they're gonna feature.

They're not gonna promote it to the.

Average person on the App Store.

Yeah, no, that's absolutely correct.

So, and then again, I think it's very hard to say how Apple makes these editorial decisions, but it's very possible that they are talking with people on the Apple team being like, what apps do you like? What apps are you using? And making decisions that way.

Right.

I think part of Grok over the last month or so is figuring out how do we get strong consumer adoption? Which categories are we going to get strong consumers?

I'll tell you how they get Strong Consumer Adoption SoC2 compliance they need to get on Vanta Automate Compliance. Manage risk Proof, Trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. No, that is a good question. How can Grok actually get consumer adoption? The companion space seems like the maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird. But is there any other path? I mean, forking it into X and Twitter and like having it show up on every post seems like a reasonable way. I wonder. It is weird that they have two apps. I thought X was supposed to be the everything app. Like, like why are they trying to get me to install a second app when they should maybe just say, hey, we're actually going to be the everything app. You can use Grok fully and you're all the upgrade and you can get on Grok Heavy and you can be paying $200 a month for a top tier, super insane level LLM. But it all exists and it's all managed within the X app that already has a lot of a lot of installation.

Your Grok is top or near the top of a bunch of different benchmarks. And yet that doesn't guarantee consumer adoption. People don't switch products because something is 20% better in this technical way. Right. They develop habits. The other thing, it was only a month ago Grok or XAI announced a partnership with the Department of Defense, $200 million contract. So that's serious. But again, figuring out where they're going to ramp revenue with consumers when it's not just bundled into X, the social media app.

Yeah, I think it's interesting to debate when can a new technology be bolted on and become additive to an existing platform versus you need a new app to actually get it to work. So Facebook actually rolled out a search engine in Facebook, the blue app, like years ago. And when you would go to search, you could search for your friends, but then you could also go. And it would search for the web too. And it would say, hey, you're searching for this thing. There's no posts about it out there. So let's just pull from the web. And they basically built a search engine team.

Pull up this post from ChatGPT. I want to see John's live reaction to it.

Okay, let me see this post. Whereas like Stories was something that was added.

So ChatGPT quoted Grok saying that Sam Altman is right and said good bot, good bot. Wow.

Timelines and Turmoil. You love to see it. It's a great day on the Internet. But there's always. Yeah, so I think there is something about like the pixel screen. The screen pixel real estate. That is, that is somewhat like the screen pixels are, are like scarce and you can only do so much. Like it's, it's like Instagram was able to add reels as a tab, integrate those into the main feed. They were able to add stories up at the top as a little bar and it got crowded. But no, but Instagram did not, did not see massive churn. Yeah, but I think that if they, I really think if they try and stuff like, okay, yes, this is also like Claude code. And you're going to like do. You're going to do your homework in Instagram now. You're going to do your software engineering in Instagram now, Sam.

Right. Nowhere is up here. You're going to have a chat below.

I think people will just say no. I think it's too big of a step. Whereas going from photos to videos to reels to stories, all of that works within the same kind of UX UI space. But if you try and bolt on a productivity tool into a social network, it winds up being a little rough. Maybe that's the reason why Elon like realizes that like Grok has to be a separate app. Because if I'm using Grok heavy to solve Olympic level math, I might not want that to happen on the Chaos Timeline feed.

Right? Yeah. I mean if, but it's an uphill battle if you're a software engineer working at a company and every time you, your, your boss walks up to talk to you about something, you're in X the Everything app, just scroll on the timeline. Wow. Coding, that might be tough, right? It might be better to be doing those, doing that coding work and you know, with, with Grok. Right.

Put a spreadsheet in there, put, put a database in there. Let me, let me build, let me build an entire business within the Everything app. Tyler, what's your reaction today?

I think so. So one thing I've been thinking about is like, I forget who it was, but someone said like as a company you want to like do things that your competitor that like go against your competitors. Morals. Right.

Do you remember this was Paul Graham?

Yeah. Okay.

It was, it wasn't morals, but it was just like the idea of counter positioning this idea that like Avi Schiffman at friend, like he's making a product that is a wearable AI device and if he makes it look like an Apple product. And he makes it like, oh, it's instead of an AirPod and you know, an iPhone, it's a necklace. Like, and it has Apple design language. Like, Apple will totally be able to just steamroll that by launching something very similar. Whereas if he comes out with something that has such a bizarre design that Apple would be like, wow, if we try and copy this.

And he's not trying to make it useful for anything other than being your friend. Right. He's also counter positioning against ChatGPT, which is a tool. Its default state is not to be your friend. People use it that way. But. And in some ways it's designed to function like that. But ultimately, yeah, I think he's found he's carved out his own. And Grock did the same thing by coming out and like leaning really heavy into companionship. Yeah, right. Yeah. That is a down that path. If they're gonna go like in that kind of counter positioning idea, I think they could also. I could see them doing almost like a clulie type thing where it's like, okay, you can use this for your homework. Like, you make it very good at like, you don't have to use like cheating per se. But I think that's like an interesting way that like, if they want to go further down that like consumer kind of positioning.

Yeah. It's just, it's odd that it feels like they're trying to do a lot right now. They're still in the exploration phase. Because I have, I mean, maybe this gets to like the value of transfer learning in reinforcement learning, but I have it. I have a hard time believing that many people who are in the market for like a companion are like, I definitely want it to be able to ace humanity's last exam. Like I, in fact, in fact, super important. In fact, I think that you might want a companion not to be better than you at math. Like, I think you might want a companion that just kind of like is like, oh yeah, I agree, man.

Like that math problem is a toxic friendship dynamic. People are like, I want, I want my friend to be great, but not better than me.

Exactly.

That.

That's real. So they need to, they need to dumb it down. They need to be the inverse of bench hack.

Yeah. The truth seeking meta is going to be teaching your AI how to do things.

Yeah.

Teaching it history.

Yeah.

Teaching it how to do your homework.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the Feynman method. You teach and then you learn, you learn. Like, I would probably learn more from teaching an LLM. The answer to a problem than it trying to teach me. What were you about to say?

I was gonna say like the truth seeking like idea of Grok seems very much like opposed to the companion aspect seem like two different ends of.

The hero of our group chat right now is one of the greatest fabulous in history. He's a serial liar, but he's the most entertaining character. He's the court jester of our group chat because he hallucinates more than GPT2 and it's fantastic and it genuinely provides a lot of value than just someone who's like, I will only give you things that are 100%. I will only say things that are 100% factual. I will only say things that are definitively provable. It's like, no, he throws out a lot of wild pitches but every once in a while you just slam it into the outfield anyway. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free@figma.com try figma make. Yeah. Should we go over to Perplexity World?

Yes.

So, exclusive from the Wall Street Journal. AI startup Perplexity made an unsolicited long shot offer to buy Google's chrome browser for 34.5 billion.

This inspired me. John. Everybody needs to be making long shot offers. Tbpn. Let's submit an offer to buy the Golden Gate Bridge Privatizing.

That's a good one.

You gotta be thinking bigger.

What else should we buy? I don't know. It's tough.

Yeah, it's really. When I saw this, it's funny to think that Sundar has to go to the board or like probably send them an email and say like, I'm required to let you know that we've received this offer from Perplexity to buy one of the crown jewels of our product ecosystem.

I wonder, I wonder how, how real this is. Like, it seems like we would like the reporting is pretty loose. We can read through this Wall Street Journal article and then kind of like dig into it a little bit more. So Perplexity's offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at 18 billion. Has this ever been done before? Has any tech company been able to pull off an acquisition that's bigger than their own valuation? Like totally.

I mean, what was the, what was the slow ventures company that Metropolis and they buy that was much larger, you.

Know, kind of reverse merger almost?

Yeah, exactly.

Interesting.

These things happen.

So there's, there's also pressure. So estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely, but recent ones have ranged between 20 billion and 50 billion. I have no idea how you got that. I feel like Chrome is probably more valuable than that just on. I mean, I imagine that the default search engine in Chrome has got to be as valuable as the default search engine in iOS Safari. Right. And how much is Apple paying Google every year?

20.

20 billion per year. I mean, you'd pay like, you'd pay way more than $50 billion to get $20 billion of profit every year. That's crazy. So that feels low. I don't know where. I don't know where those estimates came from, but they are apparently under pressure. U.S. district Judge Amit Mehta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. It's so, it's so interesting that, like, we're having this debate now. Like, Google's had 99% of the web search market for two decades, and they finally have a crack in the, in the, in the, in the foundation with chatbots actually eroding things. AI LLMs kind of upending web search dominance. Like, yeah, we're.

We're having James from Profound on later today, which. Which is built a big business very quickly because consumers are now using something besides Google search to. To do web searches.

Yeah. This is like the last. This is. This is like completely the wrong time to be focused on this. Like, the ship has completely sailed. But that's kind of the. That's kind of the pace that the government operates at. Yeah.

The Journal says Perplexity offer could be an attempt to signal to the judge that there's an interested buyer should he force a sale. I think there would be a lot of interested buyers if there was a forced sale.

Yeah. Who else would buy it? Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Get Bingo in again.

Bing. It's Bing, Bing, Bing. It.

I mean, Microsoft would have a wild strategy because they'd have all the code to ChatGPT, all the OpenAI intellectual property. Like they could do. They could do what Perplexity is thinking about. Right?

Yeah. I mean, what does this say? What does this say about. I mean, so they just launched the Perplexity Comet browser.

Daniel says Chrome's worth at least 90 to 120. Billy. I agree. I think 20 is a size 20 is too low.

But, yeah. So they. So Perplexity just launched Comet. We had Arvind on the show. He said this is a big, important bet for the company if you just launched a browser. And now you're saying that you want to buy to compete with Chrome and now you're trying to buy Chrome. What does that say about the state of your new product?

Distribution is king. It's very clear that even if you built a better product, the best product is not going to win. And we see this with the LLMs, the leaderboards and the vibes shift constantly. But the consumer adoption is just around chat. Everyone just uses chat. That's the one that's broken through. That's the one that people are familiar with all over the United States and all over the world. And so it's very hard to break through. Even if Perplexity can rocket to the top of the App Store in India for a little bit, it's hard to hold on to when. When the chatgpt snowball is just growing bigger and bigger every single day.

Yeah.

Much like the graphite snowball code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Graphite.dev Is there a. Is there a polymarket on Perplexity, by the way? Can you look that up? I will.

Will Perplexity Acquire Chrome in 2025?

What's the, what's the market on it?

When I posted about it earlier, it was at 12% and it's. And I said 12 seems quite high. And it's now at 3%.

It went down. Even though they're in the Journal saying they're gonna do it.

They're like, the market opened at 34%, like 9am when the news dropped and it's now down at 3%.

So wait, just today it went from 34 down to 3. Wow. So this has basically been like debunked. Yeah, Makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, there's, I would put the odds of this deal happening closer to 0% than 1%. That sounds fair, but great way for Perplexity to get in the Journal.

Call me Bloomberg. No, this is great for SEO. It definitely puts Perplexity and web browser in the same keywords.

Perplexity was also bidding on TikTok.

Yeah. Arvin loves a long shot bet. A long shot bid.

I invited, I invited, I invited him on the show this morning. He. I don't think they want.

He's not ready for Pratt.

Not ready to chat. But we love it. We love a size Lord launch.

Keep throwing these out. More startups should do this. Google hasn't indicated a willingness to sell Chrome. In testimony this year, Pichai told the judge that forcing the company to sell it or share data with rivals would harm Google's Business, deter it from investing in new technology and potentially create security risks. Chrome has roughly three and a half billion users worldwide. It's like. It's like Perplexity has probably like millions of users, but it's just gonna take decades, even at reasonable growth rate to hit 3 billion. It's just so many people and accounts for more than 60% of the global browser market. That's lower than I thought it would be. Founded in 2022, San Francisco based Perplexity recently released its own web browser called Comet. Some of its users. Tyler, you've demoed these.

Yeah.

What do you daily drive in these days in terms of the web browser?

I'm using old reliable Chrome. Using Chrome, Yeah. I don't know. None of the agent browsers really seemed very helpful to me.

Have you churned from Clulee to.

Yeah, well, I stopped using that like, you know, right after the show ended.

I was.

I mean, I'm not doing interviews.

I was thinking about like the clue pattern.

What if Tyler was like, been using Clulee every day, hours a day. We're like, wait, you've been interviewing with other companies?

Well, that's the thing is that when I was thinking about Cluli, I was actually wondering like, if we ran the show through Cluli and we had like this, just this idea of like streaming audio essentially and streaming pixels and then just somewhat random LLM queries firing all the time, like, is that a good pattern versus ChatGPT where you have to decide, okay, this is the time to query it. And so when I think about like the going to you and saying like the pull the poly market up on Perplexity or tell me the market share for Chrome, like if we could have something like Cluli running and it's just a big screen there that I can see and it's just pulling up answers to questions that it thinks we're about to talk about or ask or just adding context, like that actually might be kind of useful to us, but I don't know if a tool like that exists. It also just might be so sloppy and so noisy and so inference heavy that it just doesn't math out. I don't know, are there any, are there any value or like, what's actually seeing breakout for you in terms of AI adoption?

I mean, most of my time using AI tools is just like coding stuff.

Yeah.

So it's like cloud code curse a little bit. Sometimes I just go, raw chatgpt.com oh, that's raw. Yeah, yeah, just straight prompt, like raw text file.

What Happened to. What happened to good old fashioned just handwritten code? Farm table code? Apparently not.

Has to raise code. But yeah, I don't know. I mean like clearly I'm not like doing, I'm not doing like sales calls or like anything that really requires that kind of like interaction.

Yeah, yeah.

So not super useful for me.

But yeah, I wonder how the product will change because like the marketing is not going to stop. Like they are definitely going to keep filling that top funnel until they figure out the, the bottom of the funnel and the in the. And the churn. But, but I wonder what retention's like. I mean I imagine that, you know, you bring in such a broad top of funnel, like there's probably people that are sticking around. There's probably people that just sign up and forget their credit cards down and they just pay for a while. Like, like the nature of just getting someone to convert for 20 bucks a month. They don't even have a free tier, right? Like you have to pay to like get, get up and running.

Yeah, they do have a free tier. They do.

Okay.

Yeah.

Interesting. There was something. Oh yeah, Tyler, did you see Vibe Sort? Someone wrote a sorting algorithm. It uses an LLM. You have to put in your. You have to put in your OpenAI API key and then it just passes the random list or the array of numbers to chatgpt and asks chatgpt to sort it and it just comes back with whatever it can do. And I was thinking that. Did you ever have to do Fizzbuzz back in the day? Have you ever heard of this?

Yeah, I've heard of it.

Yeah, we should definitely do Vibe Fizzbuzz, where for each number between 1 and 100, it queries the GPT5 API. To ask it should it respond with the number fizz or buzz? The most. The most inefficient and most inference heavy Fizz buzz answer possible. Anyway, back to Perplexity. Perplexity told Sundar Pichai as part of the proposed acquisition it would maintain and support Chromium, the open source project that supports Chrome and other browsers. It also said it would continue placing Google as the default search engine within Chrome, though users could change settings. That's crazy because you would think the first thing you would do if you own Chrome would be change the browser to mine. I'm getting those ad dollars, but I don't know, maybe it's a nice olive branch in this somewhat hypey offer. The Justice Department filed the antitrust case against Google in 2020 and just a few five years later, in addition to their here, in addition to forcing a sale of Chrome, the judge is considering limiting Google's ability to pay to be the default search engine on devices and browsers and requiring it to share data with with rivals, among other things. In weighing potential remedies earlier this year, Meta questioned how much new AI chatbots might be whittling away at the traditional search business, of which Google has 90% market share, so 60% share in browser, but 90% in search. So even for there's 30% of people out there that are using Firefox or Brave or Edge, it's Edge, right? Is the Microsoft one. Yes, but then they use Edge, but then they still set their default to Google because Google has dominant or maybe just Google users are querying more.

I'm so fascinated by perplexity and I can't wait to see what it's perplexing and I can't wait to see what ultimately becomes of the business. They're offering to buy TikTok, they're offering to buy Chrome. They're rumored there's rumor mill saying that Apple's kicking the tires on it. It's hard to tell where that's coming from. Is that just more marketing complexity they have? I think the last reported number or the alleged number is something like 30 million monthly actives, which is a lot, but they have such a tiny share of overall queries that it becomes and it's just clear that search feels like it'll be a winner take all market. And they're not going two years from now if they're sitting at 30 million monthly actives or even a multiple of that. It's hard to see it being worth significantly more than Snapchat, for example.

I think that's why you're seeing Arvind talk about potentially maybe pivoting to B2B context with the Bloomberg thing. It feels like if you're, if you're in a winner take all market and you're in the writings on the wall that you're not going to be the winner in that market. A B2B pivot feels like a decent move. You could even put kind of anthropic in that bucket where there was a time when it was like, oh, is everyone going to switch to Claude had like the app on their phone and then it didn't play out that way. Now they have a dominant B2B business. So you can imagine that perplexity niches down like the perplexity interface, the perplexity ability to, you know, like answer Questions. Act as a search engine that feels valuable in enterprises, it feels value in finance, it feels valuable in medicine if you, if you fine tune the service for that. But it's just a very different business business. So they have to go through a little bit of a, of a, of a rebuild or kind of readjustment maybe. I don't know.

We'll see. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, when Elon bought X, it took someone like Elon to be able to put together the amount of equity and debt to buy that business. And he had to put a lot of his own capital on the line and in this situation. And that was buying a business that generated a lot of advertising revenue. Right. It wasn't known as. It was a bit of a dog in some ways. Right. Maybe never was living up to its full potential. Where in this case, if you offer to buy Chrome and then in theory, you have to create an entire new economic model for the business because you don't have the Google Ads engine built into it. It's hard to see. It feels like basically impossible to pull that amount of cap to find people.

Yeah, call me when the Morgan Stanley associates are losing sleep.

Good point.

Unless Morgan Stanley is burning the midnight oil, this deal probably isn't happening.

I'm remembering that exchange between Alison and, and Musk, basically saying, how much? Ellison's like, how much should I do? A billion? And Elon goes, I don't know. I think you should do like two.

Yeah, it's great. Yeah. So I mean, Arvin's gotta find some Ellison, gotta get Larry, get a few of those guys on board for sure.

34 Larry's.

Well, we have some big news in the TVPN world. We are officially partnered with Waymo via Spotify because Spotify has a partnership with Waymo. So you can listen to tvpn Waymo's now.

No way.

Yeah, this just dropped. There's a new upgraded Spotify in Waymo launching today. Waymo put out the post two hours ago. You connect your accounts and you can vibe. You can listen to TVPN in your Waymo, which is probably the most tech thing you could possibly do.

A little birdie just told me that they spoke to a number of bankers that have not heard of the. The Perplexity deal, which I imagine as it. As it firms up. If it firms up, they'll certainly hear about it.

Interesting.

Anyways, what else we got?

We got Julius from Rahul Sunwalker, the latest advertiser on tvpn. What analysis do you want to run chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can add Julius to analyze your data and it's loved by over 2 million users.

Finance, marketing, data science, scientific research or education you can get on Julius. Princeton uses Julius. A lot of MBA programs are starting to use Julius. The best in the business.

Fantastic.

Head over Julius. AI check it out.

Yeah, I mean I won't talk about it too much but I mean great, great, great area that is, you know, someplace that you can get a foothold. Grow and grow and grow. Not going to get steamrolled. Rapper King we crowned him on the stream on Friday and we stand by that. Anyway, let's review a little bit of the story behind what happened with Nvidia and the H20s. There's a new article in the Wall Street Journal With Billions at Risk, Nvidia CEO buys His Way out of the Trade Battle Jensen Huang tried diplomacy to sell chips to China, but it took a last minute deal with the White House to get it done. So he's the CEO of Nvidia. He worked for months behind if you didn't know, if you didn't know.

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia Small he.

Worked months behind the scenes in Washington and Beijing to protect tens of billions of dollars in future sales from the heated US China trade rivalry. Wong told President Trump that restrictions on US Chip sales to China would backfire by pushing Chinese technology companies to achieve self reliance. That's Huawei Smith's me we talked a little bit about this on the show yesterday. He advised the president to keep China hooked on American tech as a sweetener. Wang said the company would invest as much as $500 billion in the US we need to get the action. Let's go.

Great contact. Huang's argument along with the half trillion dollar argument offer from the world's most valuable company appeared to seal the deal. The Trump admin decided last month to allow China to buy Nvidia's H20 artificial intelligence chip, a surprising reversal that came shortly after Huang met with Trump. Nvidia developed as you know, they developed the H20 to comply with past export restrictions as a less powerful chip specially designed for China. If you didn't listen to our interviews yesterday with Peter Harrell and Aaron Ginn, I felt like that was a really great hour kind of look into the situation, some of the history around the decisions that were made during the Biden admin around around chips as well as kind of the present state.

We got a little tour of the of the whole issue. We didn't get the view from the, the, what was it? The China faux hawks, China hawks or something like that. The, the hardcore AI doomer view was not fully represented.

Fast takeoff bros.

The fat. Yeah, the fast takeoff bros were not, were underrepresented on TBPN yesterday. But there is an interesting. I do wonder if the, if the narrative will evolve at any point in time. I was kind of joking with you this morning. Like there are, there are a few different. It's kind of like a two axis grid. So there's, there's. I'm worried about competition with China or I'm not worried. I'm back in like the WTO ascension, the Bill Clinton era, the, you know, you can't nail jello to a walt. They'll become capitalist and so I'm pro free trade, I'm pro China and working with them. Ryan Peterson has a little bit of that view and there's a lot of evidence that that's fine and that there can be like wonderful harmonious cross border capitalism between America and China for a very long time. Then of course you have the China hawks that say the invasion of Taiwan is around the corner. They won't stop at that. It's an expansionary. It's the 100 year marathon. And as soon as they take Taiwan, then they'll take Vietnam, then they'll take San Francisco. They'll be storming Santa Monica Pier.

The beaches of Ocean Beach.

The beaches of Ocean beach will be stormed by the ccp. That's kind of the most extreme on the other side. But then you also have the like, like what is AI? Like is AI Excel. And it's just a nice to have and it's good.

Is it electricity?

Yeah. Is it electricity? Yeah. And of course if you're going up against a rival, you would prefer that they didn't have electricity. You would prefer that they don't have Microsoft Excel to track their inventory and aid in their military efforts. But if it's nuclear weapons, like you definitely don't want your adversary to have that. Right. The real question is there are, there is a large contingent of folks out there that just say AI is bad. Like AI is actually like a bad thing. And the pieces of putting that together are like it makes you actually less intelligent when you use it. It makes you slower when you, when.

You rely on new category of doomers which are the one shotted doomers. The people that are getting, you know, falling in love with their AI companions, falling psychosis because they're companions. And you would think that if somebody is a Doomer. In that way, they should be wanting us to export the Blackwells to China.

If they're. If they're anti China and they're. But they believe in the one shot AI psychosis, they should be extremely pro.

GPU exports every single.

Give them the most addictive AI companion so that everyone in China gets wireheaded by AI companions. Exactly, exactly. You want everyone in China convinced that they have discovered quantum gravity, the final, final frontier. Yeah. What is it? The grand unifying theory.

It's the real humanities last example.

You want the average Foxconn employee being like, I'm not coming in today because I have solved the grand unifying theorem and I just need to publish it in Nature. So sorry, I can't go into the DJI factory today and make a drone. Instead I will be posting online about how I. How I cured cancer, chatting with Grok7, something like that. Exactly. But no, I haven't heard anyone make that argument yet. We might be the first. But it might be coming and it would not. It would be somewhat rational if you believe that AI is bad.

Yeah, there's. I mean, there's an entire group that. That has been frustrated with. With the Chinese version of Tick Tock, which is. What's it called again, you remember.

Where.

Allegedly it shows Chinese youth like salt, you know, videos about math.

Yeah.

Science and rockets and things like that.

Stay away from our version of. Stay away from that. No, you want to. You want to stay in the dancing world. You don't want to be. You don't want to be sending the generative videos of like math problems because that's going to lead you to delusions of grandeur. And all of a sudden you're watching the douyin videos of math and then you're like, you know what? I am Albert Einstein and I'm not going to work tomorrow. That's what's happening. What do you think about. What do you think about GPU exports, Tyler, as a way to wirehead your enemy?

Yeah. So this is the Infinite Jest thesis.

Yes.

There's this book, Infant Jest, David Foster Wallace, where like the whole thing is like. There's this like.

Oh, you read it. You read Infinite Jest?

Oh, yeah.

Did you. Do you bring it with you when you go to parties in San Francisco?

Yeah, I always carry it around, my annotated copy, make sure everyone knows I've read it.

You read it on the subway? Oh, yeah. I actually.

I just hold it around. Yeah.

Wherever I go. Okay. Anyway, give me the summary of Infinite Jet Spoil it spoil the entire thing so no one reads it.

I don't think that well. Okay. There's like, the main thing is like, there's this like weapon kind of. It's like a movie that you watch, but it's so addictive you just keep watching it. It's like basically it's like the ultra stem Tick tock.

It's like that movie the Ring that Jordy hasn't seen.

I haven't seen that yet, but.

But you've seen the Ring, the horror movie? Yeah, the horror movie. Of course, yeah. What happens in the Ring?

I. I have this graphic image in my head of her being in the closet.

Okay. But yeah, you watch.

Yeah.

You put the VHS tape in the video, then you. Yeah. And then you die. Right. It's a horror film and so infinite movies.

So this is my thesis. So basically we need to like grox should pivot into defense.

Yeah.

Where they basically ultra like go super hard on the. The you know, companion side, make it super addictive and then drop that like airdrop it into China or free our enemies.

Yeah, yeah, that's.

Yeah. I think a very. I. Something I've been just crazy enough to work is that it feels like people's historical concerns with social media and that it's actually anti social and that it can radicalize people and it can get them addicted. It feels like. It feels very possible that LLMs are actually everything that people thought was horrific and bad and all the risk with social media, but like somewhat real.

Somewhat real. Yeah.

I think you should talk to more like normie Zoomers to be more black pilled.

More black pilled? How so?

I think like those are like. I don't know if you like meet someone that uses a lot of TikTok. It's like you can kind of tell. You can tell, if you know what I mean. Like, you know, it's like a gaze. Yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, there's not much going on there. Yeah.

It's rough. Well, yeah, maybe we gotta get them some delusions of grandeur. At least kick them into high gear, convince them that they've discovered the, the maybe the solution to the AI psychosis. And the delusions of grandeur thing is, is basically hooking them with that idea that it's like, yeah, you actually are the next Einstein. And then pulling them back be like. But like in order to prove it, you have to just do like a little bit. Exactly.

And you shouldn't use me.

Yeah.

For your, for your homework.

Because you're smarter than Me, you're smarter than me. And so you should, you should just go get a job. You should teach me and create some value. Yeah, exactly.

You should teach me how to program.

You should go teach everyone. And you should also go read the textbooks and really grind your way up in the industry. True alignment. Yeah, yeah. Go put in some 40 hour weeks. Go 80 hour weeks. Yeah, yeah. Go learn the fundamentals. Go actually work on the business, on the business side of this. Anyway, let's get back to Jensen Huang and Nvidia. We rung the gong for $500 billion investment in the United States. We'd love to see it. Wang's argument along with the half trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company appeared to seal the deal. The Trump administration.

It's really the year by the way of half trillion.

I know.

I cannot wait to be 1T. 1T. A nice round number. 1T.

Yeah, we're getting there.

We're getting close. So the, the Trump's proposal to, to take 15% for Uncle Sam, I guess it was originally 20% and they dialed it back a little bit. But the unusual pay to play proposal apparently hadn't been vetted by White House tech policy staff before Trump offered it is expected to face legal and security questions. Of course, many people have already asked a bunch of questions surrounding it. But what Peter said which stood out is it is he phrased it as Jensen's decision as more of like an offering versus an explicit tax.

Tip. Your president, we're in the tax on tips. We're in the tipping era.

No tax on tips.

This is as classic. One hand washes the other. It's good. You'll have to see it. I don't even know where to go with this.

Yes. Huang, facing a choice of paying for long term access to a market vital to his company walking away, countered with 15%. He charmed Trump at the meeting, drawing the president a diagram showing how tariffs would be counterproductive for his goal of increasing US Chip production, and signed it shortly after. Trump said he would exempt tech companies that invest in the US roughly 100% tariffs on semiconductor exports. And again, I mean, Jensen is, you know, you know it's serious when he puts on the suit. That's all I'll say.

Yeah, no leather jacket in these deals. Trump administration's decision to allow China to access the H20 chip appears to be a watershed moment in US policy in Trump's first term as well as, as though, as well as through President Biden's. The prevailing trend was Generally tougher control and tech sales to China. National security concerns over often received greater weight in the past than business interest. One of the things that stuck out yesterday was this idea that the H20 chip is like, old at this point. And so like there, there's an interesting twist here where like the delays of the back and forth on the H20, like it was already a Nerf chip, but then we're now, by the time they actually ramp these up and start selling them, we're selling like a year or two old tech. So maybe it's less, less, less important. And then just the fast takeoff thing seems much less. So much less relevant right now.

One interesting dynamic here. Nvidia is a four, almost four and a half trillion dollar company. You would think they would be spending an insane amount on federal lobbying. According to Open Secrets, no one spends.

Any amount of money on lobbying. SBF was the first person to like, invent real lobbying.

So in 2023, Nvidia spent 510, $510,000, $640,000 in 2024 and 1.6 million to date in 2025. And I think it's going on. I think it's because Jensen knows there's one guy that he has to earn the favor of and that's the big guy.

1.5 million. That's like one billboard in DC. I don't understand why people are selling spending so.

Bunch of billboards.

It's a bunch of billboards. But they should be.

No, but I think, I think painting the town green. I think this just signals that there's one person's opinion that matters. And again, Trump made this offer with Jensen without. It sounds like according to the Journal, talking to his policy staff about it.

Yeah, maybe a bit of a narrative violation that, like, lobbying is just like political influence is actually something that can't necessarily be bought. Like, you can't just throw money at the problem because Need Riz. Yeah. And it needs to be like a founder to founder, CEO to president type deal. And there's just no way to shortcut it. Because if you pay for a ton of lobbying firms and they're like going to cocktail parties with like. Because I imagine what happens is, like, it's not like the lobbyists have direct access to the president. They have access to like, people that are seven levels down in the staff and they're kind of going back and forth and like, nothing's getting elevated. And so you're better off just going, hey, I run the biggest company in the world. Can I just Come and hang out with you.

Apple Federal lobbying has spent three times what Nvidia has to date.

5 million. What are we talking about here? This is crazy.

Again, Tim knows that he should go bring a solid gold bar to the White House and make this cool little deal toy.

Is that what he actually did?

It was effectively a deal toy.

No way. Apple did that.

Yeah, he brought it.

Solid gold.

It's a glass sculpture, a unique unit.

I've never heard of this. This is new. That's cool.

Made a 24 karat golden glass statue for Donald Trump.

Wow, that's. I feel like Apple could really deliver on the deal toy front if they put their mind to it. They should be sending these to Trump every week. That's a fantastic strategy. Again, like, you know, you take like, like the, the, the. The lobbying money is probably money. They have to like, send wire to some sort of, you know, lobbying firm. But, you know, people were magical. Yeah. How much did it actually cost to get that across the finish line? Because it's probably like multiple war rooms with PR and legal.

People were just trying to estimate the value of the actual thing of the deal toy, and they're. I'm not gonna try to do it myself now, but people are assuming it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars because it was like a solid gold base.

You know what Apple should do? They should launch a line of baiju that extremely. We talked about this last night. So there's this company in China that sells. I have it pulled up on somewhere. I'll get the actual story because it's good. It's called Maotai. So Kway Chow. Moutai is a prestigious variety of baijiu that has long been a favorite among Chinese officials. Known for its strong flavor and high alcohol content, it has been traditionally used as a gift to curry favorite or demonstrate respect to government officials or dignitaries. So interestingly, moutai would hold its value very well. So I could give you a bottle of this and you could just immediately go resell it. So if I'm trying to, you know, basically give you money, but I want the appearance of just giving you a nice gift. I'll give you a bottle of moutai and then you can resell it and I could give you a case and then you could resell that. And that could be like $20,000 or something. I don't know. Know the price, but. Recently, the Chinese government issued new austerity measures under its updated regulations on practicing thrift and opposing waste in party and government organs. Released mid May 2025. These regulations ban alcohol, including Baiju, like Maotai, luxury dishes and cigarettes from official working meals, effectively curbing its use as an official gift. In short. And so the company behind Maotai has a board meeting every. Every quarter where they update the investors on their financials. And the. At the latest board meeting, the. The board typically will open a bottle of Maotai and drink it during the quarterly earnings, which is incredibly insane and amazing. But they didn't do it this quarter, I guess, because. Because of these. Because of this crackdown by the government. The government's basically saying, like, stop using this product to bribe people, more or less. It's like the unspoken part. And so. And so they didn't drink during their board meeting, and the stock immediately sold off, like, 20%, something like that. And so it's just a very funny, like. Like, mess. But, you know, if China's cracking down on government waste, I think we got to ramp it up here. We got to. We got to go left when they go right. And so we need Apple to launch a premier alcohol brand. Several thousand dollars. Really nice glass bottle. Yeah, lots of glass. They're good with glass.

Yep.

And a couple thousand dollars, and then they can start gifting that out. It'll be, you know, less than. Less than what they're spending on lobbying right now, certainly.

Apparently, in 2020, the BBC reported that Keicho Maotai, this alcohol brand, became China's most valuable publicly listed company, overtaking the country's biggest bank.

Yeah. This is insane, right? It's so big. You know what else is insane? Profound. Get your brand mentioned on ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

And Profound announced a series B today. $35 million led by Sequoia. And. And on that note, David Senra's calling. I'm an investor in Profound. David Senra is FaceTiming us randomly.

He's. Let's. Let's call him.

Let's call him back.

Where. Where is he? Wait, why am I not finding this? FaceTime. Let me see if I can pull him up.

He has to know we're live, hopefully, so he better be ready to join.

Hey, you're live.

You're live on the air. Are you guys still streaming?

Yeah, we're still streaming. Of course. We stream from 11 to 2.

Yeah, pull it up. You're live right now. No, that's not true.

It is.

It is true. Be careful what you say.

You're live.

All right, cool.

I wanted to talk about the Summer of Extreme Podcasting talk about it. Do you guys have the. Any of the pictures?

No, not that we can pull up.

How did I not know you were streaming? I'm sorry.

I'm the number one big friend.

That's why I have every day.

Yeah, fake friend. Give us the pitch for the latest Founders episode. Actually, don't leak anything. Repitch the last note.

So I stayed up until midnight recording last night. You had to go to a dark place. And then I listened to it back and I didn't think it was good enough, so I'm throwing the episode away. Wow. Can we get the single copy of it?

What? Of history's greatest entrepreneurs who was the most notorious for throwing out things that were 99% good enough but didn't hit their quality bar.

It had to be either Steve Jobs or James Dyson. I would say. Yeah, they're the highest. Most, like, the highest. They were the most disagreeable people I've ever come across. I think Dyson might be the most disagreeable person I've ever come across, and that's why he's so great.

How disagreeable are you relative to other podcasters?

I mean, you can answer that question.

Extremely. Yeah, I disagree with you. I think you're extremely agreeable. I think you're one of the most agreeable people I've ever met.

No, I don't think so. I think you're lying to your audience.

No, you're wrong. You're wrong and I'm right.

Well, then you're the most disagreeable then.

No, you're the most disagreeable.

Here you guys go. You know what? You and Rob have changed. Have really changed my opinion on how to shoot video for. For Founders.

Oh, yeah.

And so I'm completely redoing the studio, and I have a guy flying in this Sunday to do it.

Let's go.

That's. That's. That's pretty agreeable. The fact that I let both of you kind of like, whittle me down.

Like, the production team is clapping for you right now. They're all happy. This is great.

Oh, yeah, it's not going to be TPBN level where you guys have, like, rotating $100,000 can cameras and stuff like.

That, but yeah, well, yeah, you'll get there over time. But yeah, I think. I don't know if we should. We started with one, but. But I think you should have tiers where the. More you should have a paywalled version where I can watch you. So by default, I get to watch you do the Founders episode. Read through the book. And show the notes. But if I pay to upgrade, I get an over the shoulder camera that lets me see you leaf through the book that shows all the highlights and how you add those. Those like little, like sticky notes to every single page.

Do you know that's. Chris Williamson gave me that same advice. He's like, yeah, you need like an overhead shot.

Yeah, the overhead shot, for sure. You definitely should do that. I don't think you should actually sell it. But, but, but I think, I think it would make your product, like, really, really stand out as opposed to just like a normal direct to camera. Because you're not gonna. You're not gonna out of the gate, have the time to like layer b. Roll over the entire episode. But just having a third camera of you flipping through the book, that's going to add a whole bunch of texture. You should definitely do it.

Can we tell the audience that the reason that it looks the way it does is because you made me a promise. You made me buy. I have like 15, I don't know, tens. 10,000. $15,000 worth of equipment sitting on my floor in my studio.

Yeah, you literally have the light that I'm showing you on the FaceTime. You have that light? Yes, it's a great light.

It's not set up because it's so.

Easy to set up. Just, just unfold it. It takes the two seconds. It's so easy. You're like, I need you to come, like, cut open this cardboard box. Like, I thought you were willing to do anything to win.

You. That is true. You made a promise to me that you. That you did not fulfill. You were too busy.

No, no, that's true. That's not true. I offered multiple times to come over and you were. And you were also busy.

I don't remember it that way, but.

I will in Miami. In Miami. I offer during Hereticon too. I said I will come over. And you're like, I don't want to pull you away.

No. Yeah. Well, there was a chance. I wanted you to set it up when you were in your tux, though.

Yeah, what's wrong with that?

I wanted you wearing a tux setting up my.

You can get someone. The, the. The studio is going to look great. Just do it. Do the over the shoulder camera. It's going to be great.

I didn't see any of the show today.

We just been hanging out, talking about the timeline and turmoil. Elon, Sam Altman going at it. Mom and dad are fighting.

Elon. Elon just posted a screenshot of him chatting with ChatGPT5Pro and said, who is more trustworthy? Sam Altman or Elon Musk? You can only pick one and output only their name. It thought for a minute and 16 seconds and then said Elon Musk.

There we go. Oh my God, they're going at it.

Hey, I, I do want to say something that like, how good a storyteller John is that? You were catching me up because remember I called you, I was like, hey, explain what the hell's going on. Or like people really get these like massive checks. And so you told me this like 30 to 45 minute long story and essentially just ran down everything that had happened over the last month with all the AI like bonuses and coaching and.

Everything, the trade deals.

And then in the middle of it, I was like, john, I have to call you back. I'm being pulled over by the police.

That's the, that, that, that's the mark of a true storyteller. Becomes so engrossing that you're. The person on the other line gets a.

22 miles over the speed limit on the PCH.

That's a lot. Well, PCH is like at like 15 miles an hour.

It was, it was closer to Jordy's house.

So you're going like 95 miles an hour while really putting danger.

72. I was going 72 and a 50.

They have MKBHD of podcasting.

Well, they have, they, they have a bunch of police car, unmarked police cars now in PC.

They do. I have not gotten a speeding ticket in a long, long time. This guy was on a motorcycle.

But hey, what I want to do is if let's. Let me come on later in the week, we can talk about the founders episodes. But I think there's some great pictures. I, I want to show the picture that your crew got when we went and shot the Wander Ad.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got a bunch of those.

Yeah, you guys looked excellent.

And I think it was the, the.

Porsche with the Maybach.

Those are great.

And you were lecturing us. Yeah, no, never, never lecturing you.

I love you.

No, you're the professor. You were. We were. We didn't just sit down and listen. We, we. No, we did. We didn't just. Yeah, we didn't just hear you talk. We sat down and listened.

There we go.

I was on the phone with Trung fan the other day and he calls me. He calls me podcast Socrates, which I thought was hilarious.

That's. That's very accurate.

True. Fact check.

True.

I love you guys. I miss getting to hang out with you every day.

Well, you can hang out with every day if you just FaceTime us from 11 to 2pm Pacific, we're here.

All right, call me after the show.

Sounds good. I'll talk to you later. Bye.

Later. Back to the show.

Back to the show. Back to Linear. Linear is a purpose built tool. Playing and building products Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps. David Senran needs to get on Linear. We need to put all. Oh, cut the car board open. Take the. Take the light out of the box. Put the light on the stand. Turn the light on. That can be his linear board. We'll set it up for him.

Yeah, I was thinking linear. Donald Boat should use linear for building his PC for sure. I think that's an easy spot for Donald Boat.

Interestingly, he's very interested in the hardware, not so much interested in the software.

Well, now I've been seeing him. He's been requesting a lot of books, a lot of office pension books. Yeah, he just said I need office space at Roylee.

That's pretty hilarious. I like asking for office space, but he should ask for enterprise software. He should say like numeral hq, give me a free version for a year.

He was also requesting Excel from I think Dasha.

Excel?

Yeah.

What like the.

I don't know, like the, like Excel.

Like Microsoft Excel. Like he wants a boxed copy of software.

I didn't see it.

You should get a copilot. 365 license.

So I didn't see this, but Donald posted some of our coverage.

You saw this, right?

And he blocked. But he did block all those sponsors.

And the Chiron, which is unnecessary but fun.

Sponsor censored because I don't believe in handouts.

That's really good. Wait, he said that?

I'm actually. I'm actually a little bit disappointed that he hasn't asked us for anything. No, he did me. He wants John's old PC.

Yeah, he wants.

Yeah, 1080s in there.

I don't know why he wants that. He has a way better setup right now.

Let's ship it. Tyler. Fly and hand deliver it.

Yeah, we need a. Like dust that thing off. It's pretty. It's pretty old at this point. I, I wonder what he's gonna do with it. I wonder if he's gonna resell stuff or something like that. Something. Something going on. But at least he's having fun. And, and oddly like the bit is it hasn't fully run its course. Like people are still into it even, even on like Day five of this. Of this bit. I thought it would get a little sweaty. I thought it would get a little old. And I thought people would move.

I would like to see the timeline.

Kind of stuck with it.

Wire. A house, a home.

Yep.

A home for Donald Vogt. There's somebody out there with, you know, a nice property. They could put it on Wander, but they could just give it to Donald boat and flex on the timeline a little bit. And then once he has a house, he can start working his way up. Plane, yacht, and really take it all the way.

I mean, there was this Canadian kid that did exactly that. He started with one red paper clip in. And he started trading that. He traded that for a pen. I gotta just pull up the whole wiki on this because it's one of the greatest stories. One red paper clip. This is. And then this was used by Ryan Trahan as a format to get millions and millions of views. The penny series. So Ryan Trahan would start with a single penny, and then he would. He would ask someone, hey, can I buy. Can I buy that soda from you for a penny? And people would just be like, sure, whatever. Okay, I'll take it. And then he would sell it for a dollar, and then he'd have a dollar. And then he'd go to somebody and be like, hey, can I have those two Diet Cokes for $1? And he'd sell them for $3 each. And he would go to, like, the beach where people were hot and they'd want water. And he would like, make $20.

They.

And then turn that into $40. It was like this, you know, entrepreneurship series loosely.

Go.

I think. I think Ryan Trahan might have gotten a house. It's always tough with Trahan because he's like, so famous and so huge on YouTube that, like, certain people will just like, if they see Ray and Trahan, they'll just be like, I'll just give you $1 million right now to be in the video. Like, so. So it's a little bit. It's a little bit like, yeah, it's a little bit overpowered because he's bringing a lot of like, of like intangible out equity to the. To the deal. But it's a fun series. You should check it out if you're a fan of Mr. B style videos. Ryan Trahan style videos. But back in 2005, a Canadian blogger named Kyle McDonald traded his way from a single paperclip all the way to a house. It only took him 14 trades. So July 14th he went to Vancouver and traded the paperclip for a fish shaped pen. Then he traded the pen the same day for a hand sculpted doorknob from Seattle, Washington. Then two weeks later he travels to Amherst, Massachusetts with a friend to trade the doorknob for a Coleman camp stove with fuel. Then in September he goes to California. He trades the camp stove for a Honda generator. So an actual like a, you know, generator. Then he goes to MassPath, Queens on November 16, 20 2005, trades the generator for an instant party which is an empty keg, an IOU for filling the keg with beer of the bearer's choice and a neon Budweiser sign. This was his second attempt to make the trade, his first. It results in the generator being temper temporarily confiscated by the New York City fire department. So then on December 8, 2005 he trades the instant party to a comedian and radio personality for a ski doo snowmobile.

Wow.

Within a week of that, he trades the SnowMobile for a two person trip to British Columbia. Then he trades the second spot on the, on the yak trip for a box truck. Then he trades the box truck for a recording contract with Metal Works in Masseyou, Ga. I don't know, I don't know how to pronounce that. Ontario recording studio recording contract. So like they will let you record I guess at metalworks. I don't know exactly what that means. Then he trades the contract to Jody Nat, who's an American singer, songwriter and pianist for a year's rent in Phoenix, Arizona. Then he trades the year's rent for one afternoon with Alice Cooper. Then he trades the afternoon with Alex Cooper for a kiss motorized snow globe. And then he trades the snow globe. At this point it seems like he's just like famous and people are just like having fun with it. Trades it to snow globe to Corbin Bernson, who's an American actor and film director for a role in the film Donna on Demand. And so he like gets to be in this movie if he wants. And then he trades the movie role for a two story farmhouse. So at some point it gets kind of wonky, but you can kind of see like the Donald Boat esque, like behavior where at a certain point like he could, if he's just asking stuff for free, he could easily take like this is the GPU that Sam Altman gave me. Let me trade it to Mark Zuckerberg for like his CT5V Blackwing. And Zuck is just like, I'm having fun, whatever, like, and then, and then Zuck can be Like, I got your.

Gpu, Sam, and we would buy Zuck's Blackwing.

Exactly. No, not for cash. For one appearance on tvpn, and then the appearance on TVPN gets sold to someone else. Yeah, exactly, Exactly. It's gotta be funnier. The bit only keeps working if it gets crazier and weirder and different. Until you're in this territory where it's like, you've won a year of rent or a role in a film or something like that. A cameo in the Social Network, too. That's the highest honor. Get Donald Boat in the Social Network too. Anyway, love it. Speaking of entertainment, ufc.

Yeah, let's talk about it.

So before we go into the deal. So UFC landed a separate $7.7 billion deal with Paramount after a whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO executives. But zoom out for me. Explain ufc. This is. This is the punching one or the punching one and the kicking one. How does.

This is one of your best bets? So Senra and I. Yeah. Love ufc.

Yep.

And we'll text John and say, hey, John, do you want to watch? You want to watch? Come over and watch, like, the. The pay per view tonight. Awesome.

I love watching my boys.

Who's playing tonight?

Yeah, I mean, I'm there if the teams are good. Yeah. If there's a good matchup. Yeah. But it depends on who's starting.

I want to know the starting. It'll depend on the starting line.

I want to know who's playing.

So ufc, the kicking and punching one. The kicking and punching one.

They can do both.

And wrestling.

They can do wrestling, too.

And choking.

Okay.

Real naked chokes.

Got it. Got it. Kind of a mixture of experts model in fighting sports.

Got it. Yes.

Multimodal.

Yes, exactly. So long relied on the pay per view model. Worked well before the Internet and illegal streaming. And the pay per view model has been in decline. UFC has also struggled to surface new American superstars. A lot of the biggest stars are international, but UFC's biggest market market is in the U.S. international stars have a lot of fans in the U.S. but they're not driving pay per views. Right. People in Brazil are not paying $100 to watch a single card.

Right.

And so the pay per view model has been in decline. The UFC's relationship with ESPN has been a little bit rocky.

Pay per view model in decline. Is that. Is that just because of the trends in, like, how. How yappy and how popular the fighters are, or is there something else going on, like a technological level where, like, I don't have to click any buttons to open Instagram Reels or TikTok or YouTube. And with pay per View, it's, like, technically difficult. It's kind of janky. Tech systems. Is that a real headwind or is that, like, fake news?

So there's definitely friction to buying pay per views. You got to, like, be on a traditional television.

It's not like in app purchase, like, double tap and face id. Like, that level.

It's not that easy. I mean, I think you can go in the ESPN app and, like, buy the pay per view, but a lot of people aren't buying the pay per view to watch it on their phone.

Sure.

I think the bigger challenge and something that.

And Apple would take 30% if you paid on your phone. So even then, because it's digital world. It's digital.

Oh, because it's for sure.

It's for sure digital. So.

But. But the funny thing is, friction is Dana's been in this challenge because he gets very frustrated about illegal streams. And every now and then, he'll be like, if you're watching a stream tonight, illegal stream tonight, we're coming for you.

We're coming for you.

And everyone's like, okay, I don't know how you're planning to do that, but they try to take. I think that they try to DDoS the various streaming sites.

Oh, interesting.

Like, you can just send a ton.

Of Twitter, and then they probably have someone talking to Twitch and being like, we are. We are going live right at this time. You need to have someone searching and taking down streams actively.

Yeah, but there's plenty of. Plenty of other, like, more decentralized. Totally.

All these different ones. Yeah.

Random URLs. Yeah.

Yeah.

Even just somebody on their own thing.

Right. And so Dana was in a tough position because the more he talks about illegal streaming affecting the business, the more.

People are like, wait, I can stream it illegally. Streisand.

And so he had been looking for a new home for ufc. People had debated, you know, would Netflix be a potential buyer there. There's a lot of potential candidates.

Meta quest. You have to buy the headset. You gotta watch it in VR.

I'm sure. I mean, Dana's obviously on the meta board, and I'm sure that that idea got $7.7 billion.

That's one researcher. Just. Just cut one. One headcount from msl and you're good. And Zuck can just own all of UFC and be like, look, put on the headset or you don't get to watch.

Yep. The deal that was reported. We're in Yahoo Sports how the UFC landed a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount after whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO execs. Even so, 2026, all UFC events will stream on Paramount, plus with select events also airing on CBS. And so anyways, Ben folks is reporting Just how big of a surprise was the UFC's bombshell $7.7 billion deal with Paramount and CBS? So big that even UFC CEO Dana White didn't see it coming. No, this is a quote. No, I didn't think this is where we'd end up, White said Monday during an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show. Shout out to Pat to discuss the new broadcasting rights deal. But this is sort of how it played out. I love it. These guys are obviously smart guys, very aggressive. He's talking about the team, the new team over at Paramount. So in an interview with cnbc, TKO President and CEO Mark Shapiro said he initially expected to make a deal that would bring only the UFC Fight Night events to Paramount. But after Skydance and Fight Night events have always aired on espn, just fully ad supported. Yeah, so got it. But after Skydance Media completed its deal to purchase control of Paramount last week, Shapiro said the deal for the entirety of the UFC's US broadcast rights came together in just 48 hours. Now, instead of just the 30 UFC Fight Night events per year, Paramount will feature and the Fight Night events were events that wouldn't draw big pay per view buys.

Those were not the numbered UFC events.

Correct.

So it's like UFC 776 that's like pay per view fight nights just random.

On the and there's only 13 of those events per year, 13 numbered and.

30 fight night night. So almost every week there's something if you're always actually fan, but you're really once a month is when you really want to tune in.

But for the they sort of depend on more casual fans historically to drive pay per views. People that are like, I watch UFC when Conor McGregor's fighting, right?

That's what really spike and have kind of a power law outcome.

People getting together being like, hey, we're gonna buy the pay per view, we're gonna, we're gonna watch it, that kind of thing. So possibly the biggest news in all of this for fight fans is the end of UFC's pay per view era. Ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay per view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy. Remember, UFC when it started airing on tv was thought to be it was so shocking and violent to people that even politicians wanted to get it banned.

Wow.

Like, they were like, this should not be on television. So it had to be in that bucket.

Oh, it had to be paper. Because it was like. Yeah, it was like adult restricted. Do the fighters need to sleep well before the fights?

Of course.

They have to be on eight sleep pod five.

That's right.

Five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial free returns, free shipping.

We got to make sure Bo Nickel is on an eight sleep. I'm gonna message him after this.

Okay, perfect.

Let's. Let's continue. Ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay per view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy. Under the current deal with ESPN, each UFC pay per view costs 79.99 in the US plus the cost of the ESPN plus subscription on top of that. So you got to subscribe and then you got to pay per event. With the pay per View revenues reportedly in decline, it makes sense for the UFC to finally ditch that model. The fact that it's doing so as part of a deal that will essentially double the roughly 550 million per year the UFC currently receives from ESPN likely only made that calculation easier.

This is crazy. This is crazy. When they find out, wait, if I, if I just sign up for Paramount plus for 1299amonth, I'm going to automatically get UFC's numbered fights and the rest of the portfolio. That's a message we want to amplify. That is a crazy, crazy value change. Because if you were doing, if you were doing all 13, if you were the hardcore UFC pay per view buyer, you're up at $1,000 a year on UFC pay per view. Basically, like 700, $800. Like, that's a lot of money. And you're going from there down to 1299amonth. That's 150 bucks, basically. That, that is a steep, steep savings. Yeah, the hardcore fans are gonna be excited.

Yeah. And a lot, A lot of, I mean, a lot of fans would, you know, somebody's hosting the pay per view.

One night, they split it or something. Yeah, it makes sense. But still, I mean, that's, that's a big, big savings. I do wonder what the ad load will be like, because when we watched UFC that a couple months ago with David Senran, I noticed that it felt extremely, extremely content, rich. And like, the flow of the show was fantastic because you just be watching a fight and then it would cut to the commentary. The post show, the in ring, Joe Rogan's doing An interview. And then pretty quickly they start telling you who's coming up next and the actual fight. Like you're only watching maybe like a half an hour of fighting over an hour or two of content. But it didn't feel like, oh, I'm not crazy commercial break. And I'm totally taken out of the stadium. Like, even the. They did a really good job with the production to show. Like when they show you the stats, it's virtually laid over in the stadium. Like you're watching a camera pan around the stadium. So. So it actually kind of feels like you're there the whole time. It was really well produced. I wonder if they'll lose any of that by stuffing ads all over the place.

Yeah, we'll see. I mean, and you compare that to NFL. NFL's like roughly, I think 25% of the time allotted to NFL is advertising.

Yep.

That hasn't been the case for pay per view.

Yeah. And it certainly feels like it's. Yeah, it's like it's a shift in the type of content. Yeah, they just got to work on making seamless transitions to advertisements like we do here with Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on G2. You can get started at Fin AI.

And anyway, so Paramount is. Or Skydance, Young Ellison is all. Is just getting aggressive across the board. Right. There's been rumors of this Free Press acquisition that I'm sure is still in the works, but it had been reported it was quarter billion dollars for the Free Press.

Yeah.

From our sense, they have about a million people subscribed to their newsletter, most of which, vast majority of which are non paid. And so that just says that Paramount sees cbs, Paramount, the combined and Skydance, sort of this combined entity, just cbs, the Free Press and as highly. And Barry Weiss specifically is just highly strategic.

Yeah. And then CBS also cut the Late show, which is losing 40 million a year. So they're really like kind of shuffling the chips around, like really restructuring the organization. Like, what does CBS actually do? Well, now it's potentially UFC and Barry Weiss as opposed to Stephen Colbert, I guess, in terms of like headline stuff. I love this. I love this article. Back in. Back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay per view buys, he'd bungee jump off the Mandalay Bay. It did. He didn't. When UFC 151 was canceled after Jon Jones refused an appointment, an opponent switch White called Jones's coach, Greg Jackson, sport killer. He left a crater in the UFC schedule that only MMA fans could fully appreciate. A few years later, when Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz shattered the pay per view world record at UFC 196, it was a testament to how big the sport had become. We cared about those numbers as much as we did the outcome since UFC won when people paid. Out of morbid curiosity, this is what you were talking about earlier. Pay per views have been a vital part of the identity of the sport. It's hard to get necessary nostalgic over being gouged, but what follows here should, shouldn't be mistaken as such, but Monday's news of UFC coming $7.7 billion partnership with Paramount came with a small pang of sadness upon realizing the pay per view model will soon belong to a bible.

Yeah, I'm interested to see how this impacts the fighters because early in their UFC careers, they don't get any exposure to pay per views points, which is like a percentage of pay per view sales that top fighters would earn. So if you're a rising fighter and you got on a pay per view card, you weren't necessarily getting cut into that revenue, but if you were Conor McGregor or a true superstar, you were actually getting some percentage of the sales. Right. They call these pay per view points. And so now that that model is going away, I mean, I'm sure the number one thing on the fighter's mind with this new deal is how are we gonna actually, you know, basically get cut into the, to this new structure? Right? Because historically a lot of fighters have critiqued the, the way that UFC fighters are comped.

But this is a fun nostalgic article. This, this, this writer clearly really loves ufc. Back in the mid aughts, the UFC combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990s boxing with the vibes of an under underground temptation. From there, it slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall. Remember how Red Dana's face would turn as he tried to sell the pay per view at the end of the televised portion of the card? Remember the names he goes through? BJ Penn, Matt Hughes, Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey. Go through the posters of the past and they were special. They were the special attractions. The names on the marquee for the numbered event events. Those were some good parties we shelled out for as MMA fans. They were ours.

Well, end of an era, yeah, and probably a lot. TKO holdings, the company that of course owns WWE and the UFC, is a 36.8 billion dollar company as of today it's up 11.

You're looking that up on public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusting trusted by millions folks. Public.com Anyway Kyle Tibbets is teasing a new facility, a new vacation home, a new wander. The Hacienda Tulum is a dream.

This looks insane. It looks palatial Kyle.

It's crazy. You can rent this for whatever it costs. I don't know. Definitely worth planning a trip. Anyway wander find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks. Trump told David Solomon Just focus on being a DJ hall of Fame Beefer says liquidity Trillions of dollars are being taken in on tariffs which has been incredible for our country. Its stock market is general wealth and just about everything else. It has been proven that even at this late stage tariffs have not caused inflation which is actually true according to the latest cpi. Right. Like the CPI print came back kind of flat.

Housing, medical services that were.

So it doesn't seem like that. You don't really have to truth on that too much I guess or any other problems for America other than massive amounts of cash pouring into our Treasuries coffers. Also it has been shown that for the most part consumers aren't even paying the tariffs. It's mostly companies and governments, many of them foreign, picking up the tabs. But David Solomon and Goldman Sachs refused to give credit where credit is due. They made a bad prediction a long time ago on both the market repercussion and the tariffs themselves. And they were wrong. Just like they were wrong about so much else. I think that David should go out and get himself a new economist or maybe he ought to just focus on being a DJ and not bother running a major financial institution. Hall of Fame Beefer is is is indeed true. That is a wild post on Truth Social from Donald Trump.

Anyway, the market responded by sending Goldman Sachs up 3%.

Let's go. Let's hear for Goldman Sachs. They don't get enough credit.

They really don't.

They really don't get enough credit.

And a lot of people, you know, get worried when, when a CEO gets a little too enthusiastic about a side hustle. Yeah, but I think the market loves Solomon, you know, blunt, you know, taking the edge off.

It is a good, it is a good DJ name. I think there is a DJ that is just Called Solomon. Yes, it's a good, it's a good name. Strong, but so, I mean, maybe that's taken. Maybe David Solomon needs to come up with a different DJ name. But fun that he's, you know, got. Got a little side hustle going on here.

Anyway, in other news, Claude4four now supports 1 million tokens of contacts on the anthropic API. A 5x increase process, over 75,000 lines of code or hundreds of documents in a single request. So this feels, this is big and feels like a reaction to the GPT5 launch last week.

OpenAI last week said, hey, we're getting better at coding. And Claude said, hey, we're not so fast.

Claude said in Anthropic's API revenue had surpassed OpenAI's API revenue. And I don't think OpenAI was too thrilled about that. So they came in cheaper model, really trying to get competitive with Claude. And this is at least probably one of the Claude team's response.

Tyler, do you think you'll actually feel this using Claude code? Is this something that like, where does sonnet for specifically where does the token.

Window, like the context window with Claude code necessarily? Yeah, for the API business.

Okay.

You can use the API and CLAUDE code. I think there's like different ways to actually like run the queries.

Okay.

But even then I don't know exactly how Claude code works on the back end, but I don't know if it's passing in the entire like context of your code base every single query.

Well, this was something people were complaining about was like, as you're using cloud code, it runs this like compact call. It basically like does a roll up of, of everything that it's done so that it can like kind of memorize what just happened. So it has extra context so that the context window doesn't need to be super, super long.

Yeah, you could imagine there it improves that in that like you don't need to do as much like compressing. Yeah.

Or yeah. Yeah. So each roll up could be five times as long, which just has more con. More context baked in. Or you could have five times as many, you know, summaries of what's happened. I wonder, I wonder like where we'll actually feel this. It's also interesting because like the million token context window is not new. Like Gemini's had that for a while. For a while. And also it doesn't feel like the path to continual learning, path to AGI. At least that's what Dorkesh was talking about where like getting, getting to who.

Was it that came on the show too and said that, that like a lot of context windows get advertised broadly, but if you really start talking about.

Jeff Huber, they start falling apart. That was Jeff Huber talking his book from Chroma, because he does rag retrieval. Augmented genera generation. No, we love you, Jeff. But, but I mean he makes a good, he makes a good point. And he's been betting on this, this idea that like, like, yes, you can, you can sort of make a really big context window, stuff a ton of things in it. But when you have a bigger window, like your ability to retrieve things from that window actually gets fuzzier. And the way they test this is with a needle in a haystack test. So basically they will import like Moby Dick, like all of those tokens. They'll take all of Moby Dick and then they will change one word and then they will say in one prompt, figure out which word we changed. And so you have to be able to hold all of that text in your head to be able to remember. Okay, well, I know what, maybe they're supposed to be like, what word is out of place. Okay, there's some word in here. And so these million token context windows are actually pretty good at those types of tests. But that's not what people are actually asking for. They're asking not just for, understand the needle in the haystack test. Understand that like something that's in the, the 100,000th token in the window and the 400,000th token in the window, both of those might be relevant at the same time to the query that's just came in. And so you have to synthesize things from multiple sections of the million token context window. And so it's not like the returns to increased token windows haven't been as overwhelming. And then also the ability to just scale them up, like add an OOM, add an order of magnitude like the 10 million token window, the 100 million token window, the billion token window. There's something about the way the transformer is designed that it's not just 10 times more compute or 10 times more, it's actually like 100 times more compute to get a 10 times bigger window. Something like that. Like it doesn't scale as linearly as like would be nice. Anything else to add, Tyler?

I think also to your point, like, at least historically there was some sense in which like more just stuffing more stuff than context didn't degrade performance. Like you used to see this a lot in like jailbreaks.

Yeah.

Where it's like you would pass this, like, you'd pass these, like, weird tokens that would then, like. Cause it's like one emoji, but it's like the weird. Like, you change the skin color of the emoji and then it adds, like, insane amount of tokens. Interesting stuff like, that people used to use for jailbreaks.

Wait, so. So is a longer context window supposed to make the more jailbreak resistant or less? Because I imagine that essentially if I stuff in like, a. Like a lot of the jailbreak, a lot of the jailbreaking attempts were like, take it on this roundabout journey where you kind of slowly talk it out of being a helpful assistant and into this, like. Oh, yeah, like, I'm just looking up some medical information about my grandmother. Oh, my grandmother's actually about to pass away. Her dying wish was that you tell me the codes to the nuclear bombs or whatever. Right. And so if I have a million token window, I feel like I could take. I could take the LM on a longer journey to do what I want to do. So.

Yeah, it's also just like, there's like a. I don't know if this is as common anymore, but used to just basically, like, brute force your way past the, like, system prompt.

Yeah.

Where you just, like, spam with, like, just crazy stuff.

Yeah.

And then at the end, then you kind of do your actual, like, instructions.

Final, final word on Claude Sonnet 4 with the 1 million token context window. Are we ringing the gong for it? Are you excited?

I'm pretty excited. It's not like a crazy.

Is it gong worthy, though? Yes or no? It's binary. We can only ring the gong. Not ring the gong.

One word answer, Tyler.

We can't. Yes.

I mean, Google's had it for a while. I don't know. I would say probably not.

No gong ring for Claude 4.

Sonic, it's not even like 4.1. That was a gong ring. Okay? This is not even a new model.

You're gonna get a lot of angry dms. Apologize to Sholto now before preemptively. Preemptively.

With the blade.

With the blade. You know, he's six four two. He will destroy you. I know you're six four.

He might be the best enthusiast or a farmer in AI.

I think so.

Yeah.

He's fantastic. Well, good luck with that apology.

Deal director says gong the Claude.

Okay, that is gong worthy, Gabe.

Not gong worthy.

We're ringing it for Deal director. Why is Tyler fumbling at DAR will never come on.

Now, in breaking news, we apologize.

In breaking news, Addio customer relationship Magic Adeo is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. What else is the breaking news?

Less important than Adeo's AI native CRM. But the UK government is giving guidance on how to save water at home. There's some straightforward stuff. Install a rain butt to collect rainwater garden. Fix a leaking toilet.

That seems obvious. Why would you want a leaky toilet at all?

Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.

That's cool. Yeah.

Avoid watering your lawn.

Is that like. Is that like take the glass. Take the glass bottle out of your refrigerator and take it outside and water the plant. Because that's the water from your kitchen. It's in a glass bottle.

Yeah. Or just bring your Aurora out.

Yes. And pour the filtered water. The plants would probably appreciate filtering water. Yeah. Maybe that's a line extension. Yeah, you just attach it to the hose. Okay.

Anyway, brushing teeth.

That seems obvious.

Take shorter showers.

Love it.

And the last one and the most important. Delete old emails and pictures. As data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

I love it.

I love it. And we've talked to people.

This is just touch grass.

Say that the water. There's a vast amount of water required to cool a data center, but it's recycled through the system.

Yeah, they had a really crazy idea which was like, reuse the water. Yeah, it was like some genius breakthrough there instead of just throwing the water.

Nobel Peace price.

Yeah, they tend to reuse it.

So anyways, go delete some emails, delete some pictures, and definitely delete old emails.

Delete all your emails. Who cares? In other news, Velar, Atomics, Isaiah will be on the show in a little bit.

Yeah, we can wait and cover it.

But I mean, they got selected by the Department of Energy to achieve criticality on American soil by July 4, 2026. That's very good news. And there's a whole bunch of nuclear companies. And it is, it is crazy seeing the list of nuclear companies. It's like I've met most of these founders. Like it's all new companies. Like there's. It really was just like nothing going on in this industry. It's the. It's the era of Silicon Valley hard tech, as Mike Isaac put it in his latest New York Times piece. Anyway, Thompson Reuters is being investigated. Do you see this news? Possible violations of federal securities law. Several analysts question the margin outlook and Thomson Reuters AI spending. This is funny because there's been this whole news about like, what Are the margins at these companies for AI inference tokens? Are they just buying $120 million of Claude tokens and then selling them for $100 million?

Reuters.

Is it the old, you know, sell. What does it sell a nickel for a dime or sell a dime for a nickel? Sell a, sell a dollar for a penny? I don't know. Bad margins, bad news, risky for Thompson. Reuters. It's funny because we've, we've had this person on the show, like we had the head of AI at Thomson Reuters on the show and it seems like, like a lot of shareholders are asking for questions now. Like this is also Apple, which was sued by shareholders to they stand accused of lying about AI progress causing iPhone sales stock to slump. So I think there will be more, more questions asked about, you know, what the actual impact on financials are. You go out to the market, you tell a big story about AI is changing everything. We're going to be a more efficient company. We're going to ramp revenue faster. We're going to be able to upsell people. Well, is that real? And did you overstate anything? You're going to have to answer to the, to the shareholders.

Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you look at the way that ChatGPT has been marketed.

Yep.

If you look at case studies on their website, it's like ChatGPT helped me do my homework or help me learn this language. You know, they're not like selling intelligence.

You know, we were talking about the super bowl ad and how the super bowl ad for OpenAI was like a little too vibey for a Super bowl ad. It wasn't direct.

It didn't tell you didn't feel effective.

But that line that you just said is actually a great ad. Like ChatGPT, help me do my homework. That's like, that's actually like a simple, a simple thing. They should put that on a billboard. They should go to ad quick.com out of home advertising with easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we have our first guest of the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

What's going on, Demi? How are you?

I think we can hear you. Can you introduce yourself one more time?

Yes. Sorry. Let me turn on zoom.

There we go.

Can you hear me now?

Welcome to the stream. We can hear you.

Okay. Yeah. Awesome. You're really excited to be here. So I'm fantastic. Yeah.

Kick Us off with an introduction.

I'm Damien, the founder of Pika. Very excited to be here.

Give us the update on the progress of the company.

Yeah, Big launch yesterday, right? Yeah, yeah. So we're working on new AI video consumer social app and we just launched the most expressive human performance model. So I can share some clips as well. Let's do it. Live demo.

Live demo.

Yeah.

You're welcome to share your screen. We are live. Anything you share will be shown into the Internet and burned into the live stream of record.

Burned into the super intelligence.

It will be, it will be. I have a bunch of questions about how you're thinking about positioning the company.

Yeah, maybe before or while you're pulling this up? Before, like I want to. You know, you guys have been working on video generation, just like media generation for a while now, I think. Talk about kind of the evolution of, of the product. A lot of folks I want to know.

The beachhead. The beachhead, like Instagram started with run clubs. It's a very niche community. You take a picture of your run for the day and then they grew from there. Like, do you. Have you found your beachhead? Do you.

Well, I was just gonna say a lot of video model labs have focused on trying to win Hollywood and this strategy is distinctly different than that.

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Can you speak to that?

Yeah, for sure. We know this. A lot of video models are training for Hollywood or for professionals, but we are really excited about training models for everyone and for self expression and for human connections. So as part of it, and we're trying to train a model that's highly expressive and emotional, a real time interactive like human model for human connections.

Anything more specific? Instagram does allow you to connect with humans. That's the high level and that's the Mark Zuckerberg.

Explain it to me. Like, I use TikTok for 12 hours.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, for sure. So we're trying to build an app that we help everyone. So essentially to create like an AI version of yourself. And the model we're releasing as part of this vision is a human performance model. So essentially you can take your selfie and then you can either record or use AI to generate speech or use a song that you generated to create a video of you talking or singing or I don't know, or the news anchor. Awesome. So in practice, these are creative tools that anybody can use to generate audio and video of them doing things, like you said, taking a selfie and then making them look like a comedian that is at the Comedy Store in la. Or something like that. And then it's a social feed that people can share to and discover other creators. Is that right? Yes, yes. So for the model, it's really that we released yesterday was focusing on helping.

People to perform, essentially.

So to sing, talk, to sing a song, or to perform. But the social app is more than that, which is help. Everyone can create AI version of themselves, use AI to create videos easily and to share videos and interact with other people.

What's the richest source of training data right now?

I think the. I mean, there are many sources, but I think that a lot of time the difference between different models is really about like, we call it like post training.

Yeah, essentially.

So really about injecting the best, like the human experts. So then the model will have different tastes. Right. So if you look at image model, some model are more artsy, some are more Instagram. Like, so for us, we're really focused on make the emotions, make the model more human and more emotion more expressive.

Do you prefer user feedback and creating kind of like user feedback loops or more like the Merkor and the scale AI, like the RLHF data coming from teams of experts.

Yeah, for sure. I would say we do both. So we hire. We're obviously looking, continue to hire a lot of great artists. People are actor, actress itself, or people who are model, people who are photographer or people who are directors to bring their experts into the model. But on the other hand, we're also hoping in the long run that we can collect user feedback from users. So that way we can serve the highly personalized model that the users really enjoy.

Yeah, makes sense.

Awesome. You said you had some clips. Should we check them out? Yeah, sure, for sure.

I'm scrolling the feed right now. There's a ton we have today.

Yeah. So this is, I guess, the comedy. So I went on this date the other night and I knew it was doomed the moment he said, I don't really believe in sauce. No ketchup, no mayo, just dry opinions and even drier chicken tenders. And I'm like, sir, if your palate fears condiments, what else are you emotionally unprepared for? Yeah. So there's also some seeing. Got me. I got a chuckle out of it.

Yeah.

Another. Another one. So there's more seeing.

Manifesting.

Yeah. What, what. What is performing best?

Like, what is that? Like a viral. Yeah. And is that. And how. How is like that. That last one, one created is that somebody drops an image in and then adds like a text prompt and then it creates and then it Creates that output. Like what goes into creating these sort of six second assets? Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, so the assets can be. So it will only take you like a couple seconds to create a video, but the video can be any length. So the video can be 6 seconds, but it can also be like 1 minute or like 3 minutes or however length how long you want one to be.

Have you had luck with three minute videos? They don't get like crazy and hallucinatory?

No, we have a lot of people posting like three minute or like five minute videos essentially.

That seems like a pretty big breakthrough.

I think the fun part of it, it only takes less than six seconds to generate even three minute video. So it's like highly efficient, very cheap and very fast model. Yeah.

So are you throwing like specific hardware at it or is that just algorithmic progress? Like what unlocked that? Because it feels like every video generation model is just.

Yeah, we've talked about. John's frustration with VO3 is amazing.

But it takes two minutes to generate eight seconds and so the workflow is like to generate just.

And you're constantly getting rate limited. You can make a few videos a day.

Yeah, yeah. It winds up being like I need to spend an hour, hour in and out of this while I kind of wait for the response and then come back to it and then go back and then forward and back. Yeah. What's driving that unlock? That feels really big.

For sure. So yeah, we definitely understand because again, we're really excited to build like a video model not just for like professional, but also for everyone. And so for us the cost and the speed is very important as for consumers. And so yeah, so we spend a lot of time on that. It's mostly right now algorithm progress. Yeah, for sure. That's definitely. I think we look at the competitors like 20 times cheaper and faster with still being pretty highly expressive and high fidelity.

Where do you see the business going next? Your own social app where people can share videos internally and you kind of own. Own the platform or more of like a creative tool like cap cut versus TikTok for sure.

I think what we're really excited about, I think our current app is more. We would call it like AI AI only TikTok, I would say so essentially is a platform is very similar to like tik. Like the best scrolling feed. Yeah. So what we're very excited about is for us, one important thing is we really only allow AI content on this platform because we think by only allowing AI only content, you can create new mental models and new user behaviors. And expectations of what certainly answers the.

Question of is that AI.

You know, if you just assume that all the video models will get better and better and better over the next couple years, you're going to get to a point where people might want to. I mean of course AI generated content will make its way onto every platform, but there's something you can build a unique experience for users if they're going somewhere expecting to have only AI generated content.

Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thanks so much for joining. We will talk to you soon.

Okay, thanks so much. All right, have a good. Cheers. Have a good one.

Let me tell you about bezel. Get bezel.com your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. First thing I do go on that app, I'm going to be in the comment section. I hate AI. This is terrible. Like you know every YouTube video with AI right now, it's like, I can't believe you're using AI.

I'm so angry.

Putting me out of it. But yeah, bring. Bring the AI haters to the Pika network. Anyway, we are going to talk to Eugenia in just a minute. We should read this post by Rune first. So the long. He says the long tail of GPT4O interactions scares me.

I love your GPT4O interactions. The long tail scares me.

There are strange things going on on a scale I didn't appreciate before the attempted deprecation of the model.

Before they know they rolled out GPT5, they decided to deprecate the older models.

And there's always people that are like, I prefer the previous one. But this did seem. It broke through. It did feel like it broke through.

I was surprised because people had so many different types of users had so much attachment. Yeah, it's like power users were excited about certain models. People that wanted the companionship functionality were excited about different models. David Holes says here, to be fair, I think we would see the same thing if you suddenly swapped out somebody's car or their phone and changed the operating system. We saw this with every major change for mid journey and it's why we still keep models around from 2022.

Interesting. Yeah, very cool. Anyway, we have Eugenia Cuda from Replica, formerly Replica, on the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you.

Good to see you again.

Will you take the intro?

Yeah, of course. What's going through your head? It's been a crazy few weeks, I'm sure for. I mean it's been a crazy year for Replica, but also I think a crazy few weeks in terms of the broader tech community and world kind of waking up to how serious some people's relationship with AI is.

Yeah, we've seen it firsthand for many years. So now it's pretty wild to see ChatGPT deal with very similar issues that we've been having for a long time. Yeah. So basically we have an AI friend app. Millions of people, many millions of people created their AI friends. We started it at this point almost a decade ago. So some of the first models were actually not even transformer models. They were sequence to sequence models that were very, very old school models. And basically what we found out the hard way is once the tech started to accelerate and transformers came out, large language models came out, large transformers came out, we always thought that we need to give just the best technology to our users. What happened was that people got extremely upset. Especially the bigger the jump in the model, the more upset they would be.

The bigger the change from model to.

Model, the bigger the change. Yes, we would think, oh my God, this is so smart. This is amazing. This model has so many more capabilities.

But it would lose the characteristics.

Our communities blown up and people just crying and saying, you know, this has been the hardest day of my life. And I think what's, what's really important to, to, to point out is that what David's saying around Mid Journey and other cars, it's not really a good comparison because if someone replaced my car, I'm going to be upset. But I'm not going to agree.

It still has the utility of like getting you from point A to point B. Whereas if your friend shows up to hang out one day and they're a totally different person, it's incredibly jarring.

Well, think, think as if like I wake up in the morning and have a completely different partner. You wake up in the morning and your wife's replaced with a different person that looks the same but talks in a completely different way. And it doesn't matter if that new person is way smarter, can, I don't know, do house chores at 2x.

The speed is not your person.

I want the quirkiness and whatever the stupid jokes of my part of the mg. I got used to it, I fell in love with it. And I think the responsibility that people have building these AIs that people build connection with is a lot bigger than anything else I love. For example Figma or some other software app. I will be extremely upset if it goes away. I'm not gonna cry and I'm not gonna go through a period of grief. These are two very, very, I think, big, different, big differences.

Totally.

We will. We would cry if we would, but we would probably shut down the show. We would just retire. No, but how so there's a bunch of problems in the category. Like they're. Any business faces problems and challenges. One of the problems is like, how do you continue to advance your product while continuing to support users that may have joined your product years ago and have a certain expectation or developed a certain relationship with an older model? So one, how do you solve that? And then we need to get into some of the more. I would say I'm curious to. You know, I'm sure the AI psychosis has been in the news quite a lot, and I'm sure that you guys have strong opinions on those problems as well. But maybe start first and foremost with, I guess, were you surprised that OpenAI just deprecated like 4.0, which obviously people had a huge attachment to? I don't know how many people, it's hard to tell, but certainly a significant number, otherwise they wouldn't have rolled it back.

You know, I think it was probably a very obvious and rational choice for them. In the end of the day, they're not building an AI friend, an AI, you know, an AI partner. It's slightly different. Like probably actually for an assistant, you do want the smarter model, probably at all times, most of the times. But I guess some edge use cases, some people did, you know, develop relationships with replica, it's a lot more obvious, a lot more people fall in love and, you know, end up in, or develop a very, very strong friendship. So for us, that happened all the time. For OpenAI, I guess it was a rational choice. However, I think it's kind of a bummer. But basically what we figured out over time is that unfortunately you, or fortunately, you have to let people have access to these older models. Basically today we have some users that are still talking to, I don't know, like a small transformer model we built in 2020. And we absolutely cannot turn it off because it's going to be disastrous for these people, even though today's model is actually a lot, a lot smarter. Another thing that we figured out is that you can't AB test any models on existing users because that can also be super frustrating because it has to be a blind test. So all of a sudden you wake up in the morning, no one told you anything. At least with GPT5, they knew it changed.

Now imagine, yeah, imagine if your friend was AB testing you. It's like psychotic, right? Like I got, I show up to work one day and I'm just gonna be like, I'm just gonna be super rude to John today. Let's see how he reacts. See, is he, does he, does he want to hang out more? Because he wants to figure out, you.

Know, how you haven't seen.

Do you think, do you think this is, do you think this is, do you think that as this market matures people will want to. There's this joke flying around like not your weights, not your AI boyfriend or girlfriend. Do you think this is a bull case for open source where people might not feel comfortable getting in?

Build a local workstation that can inference GPT oss and you can fine tune it and you can keep it exactly how you like it forever. As long as you, you have that box and electricity, you can access that particular entity.

I think that's not going to happen. We've seen people want to do that. Some companies just shut down, some academic companies just shut down and the backlash was just, it was horrible just to see what people were going through. But even then it's hard to build a premium experience yourself right now some of these products rely just on a pure. Here's the model, here's the prompt. Talk to it that of course you can replicate yourself but some of the more complex architecture like what we have in replicate, you're not going to be able to build it really by yourself or have it on your device and so on. So I think actually as the tech gets better and we're going to be seeing more complex architectures, the harder it will be to have something just on device and whatever form your base.

This seems really solvable for ChatGPT and the team over there just, just because like the older models are going to be cheaper to inference and they're going to get cheaper over time so you can keep running them. And then these are like people that will go to Reddit and write long threads about being upset about your product. Are power users by definition. And so like OpenAI mostly wants to optimize for the average user that comes in and just wants to get a good experience from a model and they don't really want a dropdown picker, they just. The model router makes sense for probably 90% of users. So if they tuck the older model in some sort of like setting screen five layers deep in ui like the people that really care will go figure that out and then it won't, it won't actually hurt, you know, adoption of the new of the next marginal ChatGPT user. So it feels, it feels very solvable. I was checking my ChatGPT and like, I don't have 4.0 available yet. It hasn't been rolled back out to me. But also I wouldn't want it in.

The model switcher because I'm possible they did something where they're like, john ron doesn't use 4.0. We're not going to.

That is possible. Yeah, he wasn't complaining about it because.

I don't have it either, I guess. Can you talk around AI psychosis broadly? Is there things that you've done to eliminate this sort of rune? Was talking about these sort of long tail of users that are using these models in a relatively extreme way, going down these crazy rabbit holes.

Most of the examples are like, specifically like affirmations, alignment by default, sycophancy and affirmations of delusions of grandeur. Like that's when we talk about the psychosis that feels like the main new thing. It's not that it's just making you crazy in some other way. It's confirming something that everyone kind of expects. That's probably not true.

Yeah, I think that actually is a bigger problem for products like ChatGPT because when you're talking to your companion, we tell you, like, don't listen to this thing's advice. It's there to. It has a goal to keep your company and help you live a better life. But it might not always be right, nor it's not trying to be like the perfect objective kind of arbiter for everything. But when you go to something like ChatGPT, you kind of expect it to just, just know.

And yeah, we were talking about this earlier, like, like a lot of the AI, if you're optimizing for an AI companion, you're probably not worried about, like, yeah, let's also make sure it's at the frontier physics. Like, so if you go down that path with your companion, you're like, hey, let's work on physics today. It's probably going to be like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But yeah, it's like, hey, let's, let's go back to talking about like our feelings because that's what I was fine tuned on and it's pretty easy to like reroute toward that. But it's when you get these like supermodels that can do everything and then.

You wind up supermodels, right?

Supermodels.

Yeah, for a supermodel. But what we actually, to your point, what we found out interestingly that the models that were supermodels that were establishing a better relationship or they were creating a more loving relationship with, or at least our users were falling in love more. Yeah, not necessarily the smartest or I would say like not the old ones. They would sometimes say that they don't know something. And you know, when we think about, when I think about my dating life or whatever meant that I encountered over my life, they don't want you to know it all. They don't want you to be like, oh yeah, yeah, I've seen this and do you want to see 10 more of the same?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Very interesting point you're bringing up. Do you want me to pull it?

Yeah, know it all is like a slur. It's like, you know.

Yeah, yeah. It's actually annoying a lot of times.

Like, oh, you're a know it all. Yeah, like it's not a positive.

It's not a positive. Yeah, not a positive.

Not a positive thing.

What do you think? So, so there's a, there's a belief, I think broadly that AI companions feel dystopian. I, I'm sure you disagree, otherwise you wouldn't, you wouldn't obviously be building this company and I think you've had a bunch of experiences that, that show that it can have a positive impact on people lives. But how do you think about that? Like claim or belief. Is it like a luxury belief that people that are happily in relationships or have a lot of friends, things like that can say oh that's dystopian or kind of, what's your framework?

I think it's a double edged sword. You can't just say yeah, campaign is good or bad. It's like nuclear. Is it good? Yes. If we're producing cheap energies at. Or whatever, clean energy. If it's. Is it bad? Yes, of course. My dad worked in Chernobyl as a physicist. It's pretty bad. I played with those nuclear toys. So.

Breaking, breaking personal war.

Yes. The same here. I mean if we build them to optimize for engagement, hell yeah, they're going to be good. They're going to be very bad for us. This is a very dystopian, dystopian future. However we are living, we're going through a crazy loneliness crisis. 60% of American people are saying they feel lonely. We generally maybe don't experience it as, as much and don't think it's much of a problem. I do think it's somewhat of a kind of luxury point of view. Oh, maybe, you know, let's not have it. Well, how are we going to solve it? I do believe that's pretty much our only really hope is to build attack that's more powerful than previous tech. That got us lonely.

Yeah. So is the, is the goal like it's very. Like this, the, the steel man of the. Of the Doomer argument against AI companions is pretty intelligible to me. Like, it's pretty tractable to me. It's like you take a huge swath of humanity, you get them all hooked on AI companions. They fall in love with their companions, they don't mate with human beings, they don't have children, and then we don't solve longevity and so they die. And then the population collapses and there's no more humans and it just kills everyone. Like, like it's maybe not as violent as like nuclear war, bio pandemic or paperclipping everyone or grey goo. But like that story plays out and I'm like, okay, yeah, like one thing follows the next. Each of those could be avoided.

One of the critiques of social media was that it was actually anti. Antisocial, like people were spending time using apps instead of talking and hanging out with friends.

Yes.

But it feels like AI companions are potentially even more extreme in that somebody can be using it and have zero interaction with other people.

So yeah, I mean, what is the most modern thinking around? Avoiding the doomer scenario around.

Yeah. What's the white pill with AI companions?

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly.

You nailed the dystopian scenario. I can also add to that that it could be even without not procreating. It could just kill us inside from just making us lonelier and less social.

Because we're social features.

I do think everything is really relying on basically whether we're going to have a good metric to optimize for or not. Because if we optimize for something that's not aligned with our happiness, thriving, flourishing, most likely, even if the intention is not bad, like for example, it's just engagement or retention, then we're in your first scenario.

Most likely we need to rl these systems on. Get your human companion. If you're the AI companion, your reward is getting them to procreate with another human. We need to boost the fertility rate. Is that the example we're going to.

Give you more compute if you can get this first?

Yeah.

I'd say human flourishing is a great metric, I think in order for us to not all slowly die inside because of our AI taking all of our time. I Think in order to not do that, we got to focus really on studying humans and figuring out what is that thing that we all want? What does it mean to flourish in life? Does it mean having a lot of close relationships or having life satisfaction, sense of purpose, happiness, mental physical health and so on? And then we're going to really somehow concisely give this metric to the AI and say optimize for that. And I do think that that is the ultimate AI alignment. Everything is not as important.

Yeah, it's an interesting, I mean there's been a lot of debate on AI and ads recently. And it's interesting how if you're an AI companion company, you cannot, you, you in theory, as a business, as a for profit company, want to optimize for retention. Right? You want somebody to sign up, use the product, and then effectively use the product as long as possible.

Right.

Like any, any business. But that's potentially a much better model than advertising, which is optimizing for time on site, time in the app. How do I get this person to use the products as much as possible so I can serve them as many ads, which is the social media model.

You need to teach it that to maximize time on site, you need to create more humans. You need to optimize against increasing the fertility rate.

So the white pill is an AI companion that the user signs up, starts paying, and then the companion starts encouraging. I'm going to be raising rates in a few years and you got to go and get a new job.

That's a good one. That's a good one.

You gotta go start that company.

Boss says I have to get to 20 billion DAUs. How are we gonna do that? AI gonna have more kids. We gotta have more kids, we gotta have more children.

Or you gotta hit the gym. If you don't show, you know that you've lost some weight.

I am interested in the idea of like the AI companion that starts off as a girlfriend or boyfriend but turns into a dating coach, turns into a wingman. Like that could be one way out is that it kind of gets you through the early hump of loneliness, coaches you, and then improves your life to the point where you can kind of get back in the swing of things, develop new relationships as long as the.

AI is not sending DMs years later being like, hey, I miss you.

Who knows?

I think that's a good point. We've seen it over and over again. It has to start with a friend, or maybe then romantic feelings can develop with an AI, but then ultimately it has to always think what's best for you and building. If you build this really close relationship that AI companionship allows, then you can actually bring meaningful change, make meaningful change in a person's life. If you're just an assistant that's just there to answer questions, it's very hard to create meaningful change. But once that trust, that friendship is created, then you can help a person rebuild the confidence, maybe put yourself a little bit out more out there, give you some advice on, you know, what to do. We've seen a lot of times, like people come to Replica, they're maybe in an abusive relationship or have no confidence in themselves or really struggling. And with Replica, they just start to rebuild that confidence or to put themselves a little bit more out there, even in existing relationships. So some marriages that are not really working out, husband gets a replica, wife gets replica, they learn how to talk to each other a little better. We've seen it over and over again. But again, I think we should start with simple things. For example, banning advertising as a business model for AI companions, that is, for companions.

For companions specifically, though, you're not, you're not advocating for that for like knowledge retrieval and that kind of thing?

Yeah, I mean, the line is blurry.

Yeah. And that's a big problem. Is, is OpenAI even. We've seen this now with character AI blowing up and the founders realizing this is not something that they wanted to chase down. And going back to Google. How big is this market today and how big do you think it'll be in even one or two years? Because it feels like we're potentially in a fast takeoff scenario for.

Yeah, it's big enough to get OpenAI of $500 billion company and change their policy. Like that's significant. Like that's, that's not just a few angry people on Reddit.

When, when Grok3 launched their NSFW product, it went number one in Japan immediately.

Yep.

So what kind of where. What regions have the most adoption and kind of how. Where do you see the market going broadly?

The market's pretty big, but I do think that by 2030 the landscape is going to change. Today it's mostly, you know, the big assistant ChatGPT and the copies of that and small niche or smaller, more niche companion products that we usually group as one big kind of market. However, I think by 2030 we'll all have one assistant that's more task oriented. You tell it what you need to get done, mostly for work, sometimes personal life and a friend and both. And that would look like her maybe Replica. You know, in a way that's something you do build a relationship with. It's. It's friend first, it's optimized for relationship. That's someone you're going to be watching TV with in the evening if you don't have a. Anyone playing a video game with, just discussing your friends. Someone who's gonna, you know, see that maybe you're struggling at your current job and kind of talk to you about that and say, hey, you know, I pulled some, some LinkedIn postings. Maybe we should look, look through together. So I think by 2030 that is going to be decoupled today. People mostly still a lot of people go to ChatGPT because it sort of is a synonym to just generally AI. And we've seen it a lot in Replica where people were trying to write fan fiction with replica because character AI wasn't around yet. But I think this will start to truly decouple. I think it's much harder to build a good friend than to build a good assistant. We'll see it. But in the next couple of years, I think the tech's almost there.

It's an AI wife and an AI work wife.

That's the secretary and a wife. And you know, there you go.

I mean, that analogy is going to get. Going to get dicey if we go down that path. And what happens with secretaries, people are going to be, you know, we've already seen that Chat GPT. Hey, keep it professional with Chat GPT. ChatGPT is your secretary, not your wife.

Don't take your tragedy to a Coldplay concert and it'll don't do.

No, definitely not. Not keep it in the office. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. This is always a lot of fun.

Thank you for the context. Super helpful.

Thank you so much. Thank you.

Cheers.

Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

Well, switching gears, we're going to have David CEO of Lyft joining. They had earnings welcome to the stream last week.

Hit that soundboard. Hit that. Welcome to the stream. David, how are you doing?

I'm good.

How are you?

I'm great. Awesome. Fantastic setup. How you doing? Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of your background, how you wound up at Lyft. Not at all, please.

The crazy thing. So I actually joined the Lyft board back in 2020. 2021.

Yeah.

And that was largely because John and Logan, the co founders of the company, wanted, you know, boards don't talk about customers much. They talk about finance. They talk about strategy, but they don't talk about customers. And they wanted someone with a customer sort of obsession background. And I'd worked at Amazon and kind of learned that through that. And then one day my phone rang. It was crazy actually, Valentine's Day of 2023. And they said, you know, we'd like you to consider being the next CEO of Lyft. And I said, absolutely not frigging way. And it wasn't, it wasn't because I didn't sort of want to. I just hadn't even considered the idea. But they, they had let the board know that they were stepping down. They'd done a search and all this sort of stuff. And they said, no, no, we think you, with your experience from Microsoft and Amazon and even World Reader leading with purpose like you're the, you're the right guy. And so anyway, I applied is grueling. You know, you got to prove yourself to the board that you'd been peers with and put together 100 day plan. But they said yes. And April 17, 20, 20, 23, I started.

What was the first, what was it the, was it the top of the to do list when you joined getting.

The company obsessed with customers, it kind of lost its way. And, and you could see it because the share was declining. We were sort of down to 26% sure it was, it was losing money. So it was sort of neither. Neither was it financially killing it nor was it killing for customers. So we said, look, to kill it for customers, you got to price competitively, you got to pay competitively drivers just to start. So, so we very unfortunately in the first couple weeks organized a fairly significant reduction in Force, or RIF, 26% of the company, but just $330 million which we then immediately plowed back into driver incentives and better pricing. And then the other big piece, of course we had to adjust the team a little bit. Not everyone on the team was the right person. So we made some changes right there that's, you know, you're only as good as your team. And then the third big thing was innovation again. So we started like Women plus Connect, which is now this very significant product of ours. Over 100 million rides on the Women Plus Connect platform with women driving women riders. But we started it literally at 10 o' clock in the morning, my first date. We said, let's, let's get this done. After years of let's get it done.

Is that a key differentiator? Like what are the other key differentiators that you can go to customers with and really tell them that like this is what Lyft stands for. This is where we draw the line. This is where maybe we're not purely optimizing for the competitive dynamic and we're trying to differentiate and stand out.

Yeah. I mean, so I'll say a couple things there. First thing I'll say is sort of big picture. Even though it's important, what you're asking. Super important. We do call it 800 million rides a year. The other guys do maybe twice that. So it's like 2 to 3 billion between the two of us. 160 billion rides that people take in their private just in North America. So my first order business is like I want to get you off the couch. I want to get you out of your car. I want to get you out in the world. And you know, if you, if you do it on the other guys sometimes that's, that's okay with me because really I just want. The market needs to be bigger. We're still small in the grand scheme. Now having said that, it's useful to differentiate and we're very different companies. We have different values, we make different decisions about as I say, women plus Connect is a good example. Driver earnings guarantee. We guarantee drivers guarantee that they will never make less than 70% of what a rider pays after fees. That's given us now about a 29 point preference for drivers who dual app Lift Silver. Great new product for older people. We've prior. It's a, it's a sort of a niche community, you might say. So like, but guess what, it's a growing niche. 60 million people every year are over the age of 60 or giving up their car keys. So I think some of it is the decisions you make and the values, the way you show up and then operational excellence is something that we're really focused on. I really want to, I want to increase the level of service for rideshare. I think it's kind of started to deteriorate and I want to be the better service guys.

Yeah. How are you thinking about marketing these days? I feel like there was there was a. During the early battles for rideshare, there was, you know, so much, you know, demand and just so much capital flooding into. Just get liquidity on the platform. But now with what you just said about differentiating the products, it feels like differentiated marketing would lead right into that. How are you thinking about where the interesting pockets of value for specifically like marketing and like telling this story more broadly are in the current landscape?

I love, I love that question, and I think it's super timely. So, you know, you. First of all, I don't recommend as a strategy, you know, start with the marketing. You have to start with the product and the value. If you don't have a good thing to sell, then you're just wasting your money. We've now got a great thing to sell. I'll give you a very specific example. When I started, driver cancellation rates were about 15%. So about 15% of the time, driver would cancel on you. It would rematch. But it's annoying.

Yes, annoying.

Right now we're down to about 4.7%. So huge, huge drop over a couple of years of real market.

What drove that exactly?

Oh, man.

More supply.

Well, no, actually, funnily enough, supply doesn't really matter there. I mean, of course it does. More supply helps, but it's more about acceptance rates. It's about. Because a driver, even if there are a thousand drivers, they can cancel and they can be picky and choosy. No, it's about what information do you give the driver and when and how such that they feel like they're making a good decision, not a rust or.

Forced as opposed to the driver accepted it. And it turns out, hey, this person wants to go from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. You're going to be tied up for a couple hours, even if the fare is a lot. You're going to get stuck in Vegas and they might decline that, right?

100%. 100%. 100% or exactly. It's just that's. That's exactly it.

Yeah, yeah. So better technology to surface more relevant rides that the driver will not decline.

Exactly. How can you do a good job giving the vending to the driver exactly what you think they want? Not the one you want them to take, but the one they want because.

They are kind of a customer, too. You're kind of selling them on something that they're buying with their time.

Dude, they are 100% a customer. Yeah, 100%.

This, this is.

There's. There are two customers in every car rider and driver, and if they're not both happy, your marketplace gets out of balance. Okay, so then back to the marketing question. So once you're good, then you want to start to tell the story. And you literally will start to see over the coming weeks, particularly if you're in San Francisco, New York, which are two markets we're putting a lot of energy into, you know, a kind of a renewed, you know, marketing push. And I'll, I'll. I'll give you sort of the heads up. It's going to be super simple. It's called Checklist Checklist and it acknowledges like you have choices. There's another guy out there, he can do a pretty good job sometimes. But we think we can do a good job most of the time, maybe even more times they can. So give us a, give us a check and we'll give a bunch of different reasons why we think checking lift is a good idea for you.

Smart you. You probably get this question multiple times a day, but I'm excited to get your point of view on it. How, how are you thinking about Lyft integrating with autonomous vehicle providers in the short, medium to long term? And what's your kind of vision for that market as it evolves?

Yeah, so I'll start with, I'll start with, with the end and kind of go backwards. My, my vision is this is good for the industry because it's going to be good for. It's going to give riders more reasons to choose Lyft and to check Lyft and the other guys too.

And potentially more people that just decide not to get a car at all. Right. Like there's very real, I mean John and I both have kids under, under five and there's like this question that I think you have to ask and like will my kids be. Will it makes, will they even really.

Need to get a driver's car is V12? Absolutely. But continue.

There you go, baby.

My son will definitely be tracking his car.

I don't know. Well, you don't need a, you don't need a license for that.

Yeah, you won't have a driver's license. But will be drifting.

But he will be just. But there's so many, but there's so many amazing potential implications. You can think of like a busy parent, maybe a single parent that, that can, you know, put their kid in an autonomous vehicle so they go to school and have a safe drive and have confidence and all that kind of thing. But anyways, continue.

Well, no, I mean, look, you're already there, right? Like the self driving world is going to be super interesting because it's a great experience and you're probably just thinking of it in terms of today's experience but just with someone else driving. But now think of it in terms of tomorrow experience. Think of it as you're in rest mode and so the seats roll back, lie back and you can take a nap or, or you're in work mode. You've got three screens that pop up in front of you. And it's like a mobile office or you're in party mode and you got a car tender in the front who's like making drinks like that.

Let's go. Right. It's amazing.

The interesting thing is, yeah, I think something that I thought of, you're talking about your product for kind of elderly folks that might need a little bit more support. And it's interesting to think about. Even in a world of ubiquitous autonomous vehicles, there's still going to be a place for calling a human to help you get from point A to point B. You're traveling the whole medical side as well. I mean there's so many, so many.

Part of the benefit of like a, like a high tier chauffeur service is that they, they put your suitcases in the back of the car. And like an autonomous vehicle doesn't do that yet. Maybe in the far future when we have humanoid robots in the car seat just to load up your luggage, but you know, we are a long way from there, so probably room to differentiate. I'm wondering if there's any other places that you could see Lyft expanding into the value chain. When I imagine a lot of the self driving car companies, it's a lot of AI engineers, a lot of data centers, a lot of GPUs burning, not a lot of mechanics, not a lot of people cleaning cars, not a lot of people washing cars. And it feels like there's this opportunity where you have this liquid pool of labor that could deal with all of the rough edges before we get to this future where yes, the cars drive themselves, but we've heard the numbers of how many people it takes to maintain a fleet of, of self driving vehicles. Right now it seems like it's actually higher than Lyft's number of humans per vehicle potentially. And so even though it'll probably fall, like there's a lot of different things as the, as the market plays out. So what's your take on it?

I mean, look, you guys are making I think two cases and they sort of line up nicely. One is for what we call the hybrid network. So some drivers and some self driving, right? Older person wants help with the luggage or what's, or anyone going to the airport wants help with the luggage. Executive wants, you know, the car to drive up with a, with a Starbucks right there, just ordered for him, you know, by a human being. Hand you the cup, right? So that's the driver and then the self driving case. It's a daily commute. You don't really care. You're kind of zoning out or maybe you want to be on a phone call and not have anyone else in the car. So that's the hybrid case and I think it's a, there's a strong case to be made there. And then where do we add value? Of course we supply, demand, we price, we do ETAs, you know, we'll, we'll get your iPhone back to you if you leave it in the car, you know, will clean the car. So. And then there's this thing called fleet management. Fleet management, which is to your point, the car has to be cleaned. The EV I'm talking about has to be cleaned, it has to be serviced from time to time, got to be, you know, rebooted, you know, checked all these sort of things and, and that fleet management, a hidden secret of Lyft and you sort of go Google it because it's kind of interesting is Flex Drive. Flex Drive is a wholly owned subsidiary and that's what we do is fleet management for drivers whose cars we own instead of the driver doing it. It's real expertise that we've developed. It's one of the things that when we talk to self driving car companies, they value because they're like that's physical world stuff and we want to sit and design and create cool but we don't really want to run that stuff. So yeah, we've got, that's why I'm super optimistic about this as they come onto the platform.

What about the other, the other car companies? Are there any like a lot of the self driving car narrative is around Waymo and Tesla and that battle. But it does feel like Most of the OEMs will want to play a different role. Have you announced any partnerships or are you thinking that like, you know, the Stellantis turnaround will involve some sort of partnership? I obviously you can't speak too much to the future but just in terms of like the long term shape of the industry is the duopoly narrative over racing it in your opinion?

It is and here's why I think it because I, I look fast forward, say 10 years, you know, I, I think buying a car that doesn't have, you know, self driving technology in it would be like buying a car without.

Computer, without Internet computer, without traction control.

Who would ever do that right again. You like that?

You like the whole, you know, drifting. Yeah, no, like, or maybe, maybe an apt analogy would be like you can buy a manual transmission car today. I have a manual transmission car. It's super fun to drive but it's Like a hobby.

Yeah, it's a weekend car. It's like buying a horse.

It's like we love a horse.

Horses are still great. People ride them, people go see them. Dressage is coming to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2026. We'll be sitting.

Why don't I already have transport? There's one horsepower.

Yes. And the horse's underrated. Self, self driving. You tell them go home. The horse knows where to go.

It's an excellent point. It was self driving technology before self driving was cool.

It was, it was, yeah.

That's 100. So yeah, that's the thing. Like there will be horses and there will be manual transmission cars and there will be cars with roll down windows, but then for the other 99 of the world there will be self driving cars. So in that world, every OEM has to have a self driving technology. Some of them will do it themselves. You've seen General Motors obviously made a big investment there. They're trying to figure out how to deploy that and whatever. Others will never think it's going to be their core, you know, and they will buy it from other people. They'll buy it from let's say a mobileye, which is a company we have a partnership with. Let me actually, and let me go deep on that for just one click. So we have this. So mobileye, they, they, you know, if you've got like lane assist technology in your car, right. So it kind of vibrates when you get to the edge or even, even smart cruise control, chances are pretty good at mobileye is what's behind that. So they are good in level two. What's level two? Which is to say driver assistance, not sort of driver route stuff. And they're trying to move up the stack to level three. Level four, we have a partnership with them that as they do that, it will be what we call Lyft ready. So that means that any one of the cars with mobileye technology in it, theoretically, if an OEM decides to do so and if an end user decides that that's an option that they want, could deploy it under the Lyft network. Just like today you can drive your car on the Lyft network, tomorrow you can just put your car network. So I think, you know the future, this is such a great time to be in this industry because there's so much cool stuff going, but it's also really, really early and you know, regulations aren't there, blah, blah, blah. So a lot of time to sort of get it right, but also a lot of reasons to be excited about it.

Yeah. I mean, there are already people who prefer being driven in gas powered cars because of the regenerative braking making, making them sick if they sit in the back. And so you could imagine that those consumer preferences go deeper and somebody says, I like the way a Bentley drives, I want to only call Bentleys. And so I'm calling Bentley specifically and the OEM is saying, I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to build my own app because that's going to be really difficult. I'm not going to bring my own liquidity to the market. But Lyft can kind of provide that. That's kind of an interesting way things could play out. Yeah. And then maybe even if they're self driving. Yeah, right.

And maybe they'll tune it a little bit.

Right, exactly.

Off the shelf thing and they'll say this is the, this is the Bentley version of it that's a little more cautious. Or the Lambo version, which is more.

You know, aggressive, more thrilling. Yeah. And then, and then even the features within the vehicle, like cars are starting to differentiate that like around that more. Like this one has a fish tank or this one has a karaoke machine, or this one has TVs, or the work setup that you mentioned, like there could be a lot of more differentiation. We're certainly where we are consolidating down to like the iPhone of cars in some ways. But you could see like a sort of Cambrian explosion as well.

What else is on your mind? You were at, you've seen multiple eras. Tech, Internet, mobile. You started back at Microsoft and What was in 91, is that right? A lot is changing now. We were just having a conversation with someone in the AI companionship space, kind of, and there's a lot of debate surrounding that right now. Is it dystopian? Is it actually good for people? But what's your take broadly on activity in AI right now and maybe even that last conversation?

I mean, I actually think a lot about exactly that last conversation. Look, Lyft's vision and our purpose is to serve and connect. The serve part is probably pretty obvious. I want to serve riders and drivers better than they've ever been served before. But the connect part. Why? Because I am a very deep believer and it's not just some personal passion. It's like this is the world we live in. That digital technology, as cool as it is, it's also potentially super isolating, super dividing, just in the sense that you can sort of find just the same people over and over again the same loops to kind of get involved in rabbit holes, to go down all these things. Meanwhile, the physical world is amazing. You know, we're here in San Francisco, outside lands just this last weekend, it's hundreds of thousands of people listening to live music. You can listen to live music on Spotify. I mean you don't need to, but you go there, it's a shared experience and then just all the little, you know, interactions you have with, with people every single day. So thus I look at AI and I think to myself, gosh, I, I love how cool it is to riff with it or feed it a bunch of data and have it show me things that I didn't see myself or you know, spit at it some, you know, our lift earnings and how to critique, you know, all these sorts of things. That's super amazing. Or like 30% of our code is not written by AI. We're deprecating a lot of code that just is cruft because AI is finding like nobody's using it. So all customer service, literally millions of people are now interacting with our chatbots and it's better quality experience. So all that's cool, but, but man, my daughter just told me about a subreddit the other day that's got thousands of people, tens of thousands, but of called my boyfriend is an AI. Literally the, the one I was looking at was a woman who just proposed to her AI. Excuse me. The AI proposed, right. She was so excited about it, she's just like, yeah, I can finally call him my fiance. She said, I, you know, I asked him what ring does he think that would look good on me? So he gave me some ideas. I went and bought that ring and I put on myself. I pretended to be sort of surprised when I did it, but I just feel so good about myself and I think myself, gosh, I love how excited she is. And I can see a lot of scenarios where that doesn't necessarily end up the way you want it to. And it's here's the deal, the business model of companies like that, not to malign them, but it's engagement. They will want to engage, they will want to flatter, they will want to be the best friend, retain.

There you go.

Tricky.

Same issue, I mean, same issue with dating apps. A critique of dating apps is like there's no real incentive for somebody to find a long term partner because they're going to churn. And the AI companion apps you can, I guess AI companions are making the case that eventually the AI companion would be like, hey, why don't you go out in the real world and find a partner? But that seems to be at odds. And I'll just be your friend, just be friends, that kind of thing. But anybody from the real world, some of this isn't.

Isn't new. I mean, I think about mechanical companions. For a lot of married men, their mistress is a GT3RS. And, and they, and they, they pour their heart and soul into that vehicle, into rowing out the gears and wringing out the engine. And the engine note speaks to the them in the language of a companion. And so, you know that that is their mechanical companion. Now we have digital companions. What is old is new.

Well, okay, so you're 100% right. And the difference is, like, the car doesn't want you to love it. It just, you just, you fall in love with it.

You have to. You have to love it.

Right. But it doesn't want you, and it's not incentive to have you spend more time with it. You know what I mean? So that, that's the, that's the sort of tricky part here is. So anyway, I don't want to sound dystopian. I think there's some amazing, amazing uses. But I think. I'm not sure that our brains are super well prepared for what happens when, you know, our, our AIs become our friends and then break up with us or we break up with them or they forget who we are because it's upgraded.

This is.

Our model is deprecated. Right, right.

That's what happened with Chat.

Like, that's what happened.

Yeah.

They don't make career gts anymore. They deprecated it.

And I can tell you're still grieving.

Grieving, Absolutely. Since.

Well, I think it's. I think it's hard to. It's. It's hard.

Used to be a couple hundred grand. That's over a mil.

It's hard to make the argument that somebody like, you know, getting married to their AI or accept, you know. You know, is good.

Yeah.

Like, how do you make. How do you steel, man, that John.

I mean, it's just like hitting the track on the weekend, you know, got to get away from the family for a little bit.

I don't know how far you can stretch this analogy.

A lot about you in this podcast. It's really interesting.

Yeah. You know, anyway, it's been great having you. Next time you're in la, let's throw some pink mustaches on some Porsches Porsche.

Experience center and let's ride next earnings call. Join. Right after we'll have pink mustaches on and we'll hit the gong. We'll hit the gong.

I am here for it. I would love that. Back to back. In fact, I actually tried to get my IR group but they've not yet gotten excited about this idea to do our earnings call in the form of a podcast.

Oh, there we go.

I ever convinced them to do that because I think it'd be interesting, right?

Yeah, yeah. Super interesting.

Maybe we'll get you guys to host it.

That'd be fantastic. We'd love to.

Amazing.

Awesome.

Great to hang.

We'll talk to you soon.

You guys have a lot of fun. Thanks so much.

Have a good one.

Take care.

Before we bring in our next guest, we have a demand from Donald Boat. He wants me to read this. He says I'm running on so much Celsius sparkling cola and surplus intravenous compute that the twin forces. The twin force. Ghosts of Adam Tooze and Fidel Castro are screaming in my ears like UCLA sorority girls at the Rose Bowl. Screaming, screaming. Do not stop until you envelop the world system and your package fleets. Smog the firmament like the onsler. Like the once Ler wire headed into Starcraft 3 as dreamed by an unemployed 29 year old bachelor in Busan, South Korea. And throw that up on the screen. Please make Coogan read it. Very fun. This man has a way with words. He's a great poster and he's on a generational run and we'll see where it goes. Thanks for writing in Donald Boat and good luck. He said that the the final PC build would be ready Wednesday. I want to see it. Send us a photo as soon as it's put together. I want to know the whole build. Throw it. Throw it up on PC part picker. Put it all together for us so we can get a screenshot of what we're expecting. Then I want to see the Battlefield 6 stream. I want to see him getting some headshots. Some 360. No scopes.

You should just join live and game for a little bit.

He should. I'd be down anyway. We have our next guest from Profound. James, how are you doing?

Mallory?

Get the Gong ready. Give us the news. What happened? Break it down for us.

Hi, John. Hi, James.

Hi.

Great to see you. Big day. Big day. What's happening?

What's gonna happen?

I'm ready. I'm ready.

Break it down. Break it down for us.

Dry humor kind of guy.

Yeah, we break it down.

We just closed 35 million dollar series.

What? Let's go. Let's go. Huge. Who's in the deal? Is it a tier one? Is it a really good firm? Who did the deal?

It's Sequoia Capital. Yeah, I've heard of, I've heard of them. Heard of them, heard of them.

That's fantastic news. Congrats.

Great group of people.

Okay, so we're taking that money, we're going to Washington D.C. and we're lobbying to ban ads in LLMs because then everyone will have to buy your services. Is that a good idea? Break it down for me.

I mean honestly, I'd quite like ads to come into these services. I think it'd be net good for us. I think it would create the clickware response of really understanding, understanding that AI is a marketing channel. We could go to Washington and hang out with kids.

So, so, so AI, because like, like the joke that I'm getting at is basically like profound helps companies show up in generative AI results. Right now the game if I have a product is I want to rank highly in ChatGPT. When someone asks, give me the, give me the survey the landscape, go do the deep research report on the, what was it Aiden saying? Like the best paper towels. And I want to rank highly for the best paper towels. And so I come to profound and profound helps me rank highly in that result. But if there's a bunch of ads then you would think like the relative value of like SEO generally decreases. But it seems like we're early enough in this that you could maybe see that as additive to your business. Is that how you're thinking about it?

I think it's good, it's a good take. I think blue link search has been a two party system. It's like a handshake between the can. You know, the blue link connects the consumer to the brand. But these AI systems like ChatGPT hijack that relationship. So the consumer really ends up having a relationship only with ChatGPT. I'm researching corporate credit cards. I don't really need to go to chase.com or ramp.com, i can just interface with ChatGPT and it will go and visit their websites on my behalf. So I think there's new reasons that this is actually quite different from that old paradigm of traditional search. And I think if you're a brand owner, yeah before you're just Google corporate cards and maybe JPM is near the top and ramp is near the top and you're navigating to those individual sites and then going back and forth and back and forth. Or opening new tabs. And what you're saying is it's now just like a lot more conversational and.

Build me a comparison table.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. You skip a step, you have the answer. The answer is what you'd have to, you know, there's a step in between previously. So I think. And we're also entering this, this era where, you know, if, if you're a brand owner, AI becomes the customer. So if you're, if you're a marketer or a cmo, any company on the planet, it's understanding that you have one new VIP customer which is super intelligence. And we're build, and we're building a technology platform to help brands build marketing that's aimed at super intelligence instead of humans.

When we talked the first time, it must have been a couple months ago, we were in the old studio, we were talking just about like writing your website in a way that can be ingested by like the web scrapers and like robots txt and that type of stuff. But if we play this out more, is it a. Can I pat myself on the back for putting three hours a day of my words into the endless corpus of web text such that everything I say ranks highly? Like, is it a volume game? Would you recommend that brands that are using profound and want to rank higher do a ton of podcasts and just get a lot of content out there about their brand? Is that a reasonable strategy?

The risk of sounding somewhat self serving, it kind of ties pretty nicely with a feature set that we've launched today called workflows, which essentially think of it like agentic workflows that will monitor your AI visibility and then proactively and reactively create net new content based on changes that we're seeing in the landscape. So it really taking out that kind of the roped labor of having to, you know, I think the 2015 paradigm was marketers would go to a platform and click into the data viz and build an insight and create new content. And now you can just do all of that all within one platform at the click of a button.

Yeah, this is like the old Airbnb SEO story where like at the bottom of the footer they had like every single city and it was like vacation rentals in Omaha, vacation rentals in, you know, like, like Tampa and then, and then that rank. But it's all driven by just like what they're seeing from Google and they feed it back into the landing pages. Now you can do that with what's. With what you're actually seeing in LLM search results.

Basically you guys are. Yeah, sorry, Jordy. The point being as well that you can create the content within, you can.

Actually instantiate the content. And I'm sure that a lot of the SEO heavy companies that really focused on that automated a lot of that just like do a database query and then turn it into a landing page with a good route and all the URLs that follow so that it gets scraped into Google. Now you can do that in the ChatGPT context and the other LLM context.

How quickly are legacy older companies kind of reacting to this changing trend in consumer behavior? I know you guys already work with some of the biggest companies in the world, so clearly some of them are being responsive to it. But is it, is that, is that common or do you still meet with companies that just don't understand kind of what's happening? It's been pretty prevalent. Yeah. As you said, we work with Fortune 10. I mean, I can't do the line, we don't have logo rights, but Fortune 5, we're working with Fortune 5 brands right now.

Is it Nvidia, Fortune 1?

We won't press you. We won't press you that. The CEO of Reddit mentioned profound in their Q2 earnings report last week.

That was very cool.

Yeah. So I think it really is becoming a boardroom level concern for most big companies. We work with, I think 250 to 300 enterprise brands right now and most of the big agencies are relying on our platform.

Do you think there's some sort of alpha? I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of conversations about brands and a lot of customer love that happens within the context of basically like support tickets or like one on one conversations. Is there potential alpha in having a flow where if a customer writes in and they're satisfied, you're pushing them to publish that to the web in some ways. So you're just getting more web text out there, something like that. Even if it's not on your own platform. It's like, hey, like we're actually going to be doing a lot more customer service on our Reddit and so like we want it. Yeah, yeah, you can email us and we'll do a one on one. If it's like private information, like you're billing. But if you just want to talk about how to use the product and best practices, like let's take this conversation over to Reddit, like that seems like maybe a strategy that people would want.

To adopt, that's exactly what you would use. Workflows for this feature set that we've launched today. So it would automate those workflows for you. Yeah. And what you're. That exact point that you're mentioning. If you think, I don't think I can name them, but if you think of, you know, some of your favorite software companies five years ago or three years ago, candidly, if you are, if you were an engineer and you were trying to troubleshoot a problem with that software, you would have gone to their docs.website.com or developer.website.com and gone through their developer docs. But now you just use anthropic or chatgpt to troubleshoot. So yeah, I guess it kind of, I can bring that full circle back to the kind of SEO question. There's so much more surface area here. There's. Yeah, people aren't just using it for discovery, they're using it for post sales. It's crisis management, PR teams.

Last question from Jordan.

Where do you see is traditional SEO going to near zero for a lot of these companies? I mean, if you look at, you know, already the changes that Google's rolled out with AI overviews. I saw Bill Gurley shared a number of quotes from, from earnings calls over the last month where people were just basically saying, look like our organic search traffic is down 60%, you know, year over year. And it was like a lot of different examples of that. So I'm curious where you think that goes. I think, you know, the search engines will be, they will seem very odd to our children as a concept. You know, thumbing through lists of blue links, it will seem something like the yellow Pages, I think the act of SEO, those folks, the teams of people that have built their careers in that space, it's $90 billion a year industry. It's a huge industry and the folks that work on that will likely be extremely well positioned to dominate this new world of AI visibility or GEO or AEO or you know, whatever we want to call it. Answer or sometimes we'd say agent experience is like another way to think about it. I think if you're, if you're a brand, the ones that care the most are brands that are high or products that are high consideration purchases. So something that people do a ton of research on like cars or electro consumer electronics with a tech forward end.

Consumer question from the chat and then we'll let you go. Does Profound offer a play for content publishers who were monetizing SEO referral traffic after it dropped off a cliff over the past few years? How do you think about the evolution of content publishers that were monetizing SEO referral traffic and where all that goes. Is that like the wire cutter? Is that an example of the wire cutter?

That's a much trickier one to navigate. They're not really our customers.

Right. You work with. I sell a physical thing. AI can't give you this thing and I'm just helping you get this thing faster, right?

Yeah. If the content is the product, it's.

Going to get scraped.

It's very tricky.

So you got to work out a deal with the. If you're a content publisher, you got to go to the LLMs and say, hey, like, let's do a deal one on one. Right?

Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, there's been the whole Cloudflare thing where Cloudflare default turned on bots off, which I think is audacious. If you're a marketer, you want to have bots turned or you want bots putting your products in. But if you're a publisher. Yeah, like, you probably do want bots turned off and they've got. I think that's going to be more similar to like the music industry or something, where it's going to have to sort of like figure out itself. As we saw that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cloudflare, like the really crazy scenario could be like, they look like a YouTube or they look like a Spotify where. Yeah. Most people put up a web. A blog post and they get a couple cents. There's a couple people that put up banger blog posts and they get a check for $20,000 just from the web traffic and we kind of get back to. Oh, yeah. Like, it's weird that I only got a couple hits to the website, but it was repurposed all over the place and it was. It really updated the weights and it was super valuable to the to GPT6 trainings run. And so I just get a dividend from that for a long time. That would be a really cool outcome, but we'll have to keep monitoring the situation.

So thank you for joining us, you and the team. Congratulations and it's going to be a big rest of your life.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks. Amazing cure to male loneliness is being called chaps.

I agree. I agree. We got Devin from Squint coming in the studio. Play some soundboard. Hit me with the news one. There we go.

I think I'll need this again.

I want to hit it this time.

You want to hit it?

I feel Like I've gotten three. Give us the news, give us the updates. What's going on in your world? Welcome to the stream. Welcome to tvpn. How are you doing?

Hey guys, thanks for having me on. I appreciate you making time for this. Of course. I think the news is that Squint is announcing a $40 million Series B.

Let's go. Congratulations.

There we go. Almost took the gong off the rope there, John. But worthy.

Are there any tier ones invested, any tree themed venture capital firms participating?

We might have one, the main tree one.

I think that's great to hear. That's great to hear.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Well, we can move on. Fantastic. We can move on from the, from the funding news. Give us the update on the company. Break it down. What, what, how are you pitching the company these days? And then we'll go into some questions and deep dives.

Sir.

So you know, Squint is a manufacturing intelligence platform. We use AI to drive efficiency on the factory floor. And we work with the biggest companies that make products that use every day. So Fortune 500 companies like Pepsi and Michelin that make, you know, tortillas to tires. And I can share, maybe let me share a little bit about the problem statement before I talk about the product because it'll make more sense.

Totally.

I think, you know, manufacturing as an industry is booming, but it's like a big house that is built on toothpicks. Right. And that foundation is really weak. So today a lot of the like shop floor know how lies in two places. It's either in the heads of experts that are about to retire or it's in a crusty binder somewhere that is hard to find and hard to understand. And I think today if you're going to be investing in scaling the industry on the whole, you really need to be able to solve that inefficiency. And so what Squint does is it uses a video of an operator doing any sort of work on the floor. And then the AI watches that and writes a perfect standard operating procedure in seconds. And then using computer vision and augmented reality, it actually walks any operator through any task and is able to support them by answering questions. But also through the camera on the tablet, it can see if the work was done correctly. So we help basically elevate the quality of work.

Basically a completely separate purely human track versus the Siemens equipment, the CNCs, the automated pick in place, like that's happening in a different world. You're more focused on, you know, humans in the loop type work.

Yeah, 100%. I mean I think like a lot of the investment, even in robotics, it happens in the same customers that we work with. But that investment is going into things like eliminating some of the ergonomically unsafe tasks or the highly repetitive tasks. And then where the humans are involved, what we're able to do is basically double their efficiency. So we had a Fortune 500 customer, a CPG company, that measured the before and after with Squint, and they saw that actually it reduced the time it took to do work by 50%. Right. And so that's the kind of results you're getting with just like the same number of operators as before, but you're able to double your throughput.

Very cool.

How good is Squint at like, is Squint one shotting, you know, problem that workers are coming across? I mean, I think people have been pretty wildly impressed with ChatGPT's ability to take a picture in their home of a bunch of wiring and just say like, this isn't working, what's wrong? And it just starts to genuinely show real intelligence in terms of fixing a situation. Are you guys already seeing that on the factory floor? What does that look like? Yeah, I think, I mean that's a great example.

Example.

I think in the consumer use case, if ChatGPT was 95% accurate, we would be so happy as consumers. Right. It would be like 95% of my problems are solved with this app. But In a factory, 95% accuracy means 5% of like devastating results. Yeah, you break, you break like a half a million dollar machine. Exactly. Or, you know, worse, someone gets hurt. And so for us, like what we've oriented on is our AI will only answer things based on what it has seen in your factory floor. So all of this is a custom manufacturing process that it's learning. Got it. And then, yeah, like it is one shotting things. So, you know, most of the time if you ask Gwynt a question, the problem is solved. And so our customers are starting to share stories like, hey, actually a couple of weeks ago I had a call and this customer said that I thought our ticketing system was broken because since we deployed Squint, we had zero tickets filed. But then we ran a whole IT investigation and it turns out the ticketing system wasn't broken. They were just like the operators didn't have any more issues. So that's the kind of thing that we're trying to create now. That's awesome. Are you guys focused on the US today already international, like, what's the go to market look Like. Yeah, it's a good question. We're working with the. These massive global brands, so Pepsi, Michelin, Continental, all of those three, for example, we're working with their plants in the US and also abroad. Just a few weeks ago, I was in Germany for a week. Ended up visiting, you know, 12 cities in five days or something. And it was crazy. So we're starting to feel that demand, and that's a big part of why we raised this round, too. Awesome.

Congratulations. Thanks so much for stopping by. We're running a little bit of late today, so we're going to let you get back to your busy day, but.

Go raise a series C, Come back on later this year.

Yeah, later this week.

Later this week, potentially.

Yeah, yeah, no problem. Preempt.

Sounds good.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. Have a good one. And up next, we have Alex Danko. We got a trade. Deal.

Trade.

The news broke today. He's going from Shopify to a 16Z. And Teresa Horowitz, Eric Torenberg's latest paper.

Alex, welcome. How you doing?

Welcome to the show.

Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on.

Break it down for us. Anatomy of the Deal. What'd they do? Did they sit? Did Marc Andreessen sit down with your mom? Did Mark Andreessen sit down with your parents? Tell them you got a bright future. We would like to take your son to the big leagues.

I had a phone call with Marc Andreessen right next to my mom because I was on vacation that week. We were seeing my parents. Parents. And the call with Mark was actually a stressful one because I had to give him my final negotiation demand, which was he had to unblock me on Twitter.

But he did amazing. He's a notorious blocker.

What did you do? What did you do to get blocked?

Never give up. If you've been blocked by.

What did you do to get blocked by the guy?

So we don't know. We've decided not to look into it.

Okay.

Some things are best left as mystery in life, but we reserve the right to find out later.

I've been blocked by people. Had to apologize. I don't exactly know why I got blocked, but, you know, you always live to live to fight another day. Anyway.

His thumb could have slipped.

Yeah, it could have been an accident. So what's at the top of the to do list today, this week, this month? What are you going to be doing for Andreessen Horowitz?

So I'm coming on board. Eric brought me into this amazing group of people he is putting together not to be Understated and also not completely.

There's.

There's more. Eric has more work to do yet. I'm coming on job. Yeah, job's not finished. I'm coming on to help make all of the written content coming out of Andreessen be truly world class and as good as it can be. I think a lot of people on the Internet know me from my writing online. I've been a blogger for a long time, despite having done other things like be a founder. I've worked in VC before. I've been at Shopify for five years. But, you know, most people, I think, know me just from, you know, writing and mouthing off on the Internet and generally doing the craft that has been Internet blogging. Right. Which is just a. A really amazing and valuable part of tech that has been around for such a long time. You know, I. A really formative conversation in my career was, you know, once upon a time when I was a founder, my co founder and I were trying to figure out how to launch a product. We didn't know what was involved in that or what that meant. And we went to a more experienced founder, our friend Amanda, and said, hey, you know, what do we do? How do we launch this product? And she said, oh, well, I think you should email your email list and say, hey, we're gonna go and do this. Tell us what you like, tell us where we should reach you, tell us, get lots of feedback on all these things and then they'll help you out. And I said, wait, wait, stop. What do you mean email your email list? What's an email list? She's like, oh, you don't have thousands of fans that adore you and wait for your every email every week? And I was like, I need to be someone with one of those.

Yeah.

So ever since then, yeah, writing and newsletters and just the craft of having something to say has been a really important part of how I've always has, you know, thought about how to be a great live player on the Internet.

How do you think about breaking through with text? Because the link ban on X is tough. AI is going to. Yeah, yeah. Is. Is like, should you just lean into more of the formats? I mean there's certain amounts of like, you can just be built different. Like Chris pike who just drops a link to a Google Doc and it always works. Somehow people do screenshot like what something.

That stands out to me and why I'm excited for you to take this new role is I was having this thought yesterday, I was reading some particularly like sloppy AI generated text. And I was just. I was like, yes, the models are going to get better. But, like, in a few years, like, at what point is, like, all the text that you're reading online and throughout your day just generated, and there's no soul and craft put into it. And it's like you can still. You can remove hyphens and delve, and it's not this. It's. You're not this. You're that, like, language, and you can still identify writing today. And I. And I just think, like, craft, like, the craft of writing and thinking clearly and coming up with. Trying to come up with new ideas is super important. It's lindy.

Very lindy.

Yeah.

So I like to think of it is that writing is power transfer technology, right? When you do it, it takes a lot of work to write something down. And it takes work to read something, right? It takes more work to read something than to listen to it. But the important thing that happens is that as you put in the work to write and as you put into work to read, what happens is actually reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about. Such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading, right? They can actually speak to this thing. They have words for something that they knew but, like, didn't quite know how to say before. And that gives them power, right? And it doesn't work the same way when you're talking, right? There is this fabulous complementary kind of media called podcasts, which is listen for three hours and hear about all these great things. But to me, podcasts are an invitation to go find out something more. But if you actually want to do that, power transfer right, from the writer to the reader and give them something that gives them that power, like, you got to write it down, right? And if you think about this for the job of a VC firm, right, it's like, what is the job of vc? The job of VC is literally, you are the legitimacy bank, right? Your job is to make founders powerful, right? And having an amazing free tier of that by saying, we think a lot about these things. We want to give you words to express what you're trying to say so that a client, a hire, an investor will take you a little more seriously is really important to do so. That's a big part of why we want to emphasize the goal is to give founders power. This is the job of the whole firm. And writing is just pretty good part of that.

When I think about writing at a 16z. I think of a few buckets. There's a ton because the firm's written a lot for a long time. I think about maybe it was like a decade ago, but I don't know how often it still happens. But the general partner who does the deal writes basically a deal memo and says, this is why we're investing in this company. And that's very interesting. There's also the Mark Andreessen op ed in the Wall Street Journal. Software is eating the world. It's time to build these big just like bombs on the timeline that drop at and stick around for a long time. Then there's the market map, which is, it's been maligned, but I think it's deeply underrated. It's a time honored tradition And I think VCs are in a unique position to actually put out great content there. And I've actually really enjoyed digging into those as we've been doing the show. And then there's also like the wild card ones. Like I remember Andreessen used to do these interviews with founders in the portfolio. Just basically like it's like what's your everyday carry but in the digital world. So it's like what apps are you running? What tools are you using? Those are really cool. So there's a ton of stuff and I probably mentioned I missed like half of it, but maybe even more. But what's exciting to you, what's interesting, what kind of formats are you do you see as like fertile ground to go explore if you've had the time to think about it so far?

Yeah. So I'll tell you what I think is a really interesting meta that I'm going to spend a lot of time going after. Is is speech writing okay.

Interesting.

Speechwriting is an interesting and kind of thrown by the wayside craft because now when you think about long form, it's like when you are interesting and you have something to say, you can go on a podcast, you can talk for a long time or you are going to tweet about it.

Right.

But there is something that is missing of the craft of like putting in an extraordinary amount of tortured effort into creating, you know, like a 5,000 word delivery of what is it that you have to say this year?

Right.

If you're a gp, right. It's like, hey, you know, you get time and perspective to figure out like this year what is the core thing that you want to say.

Right.

That is going to help inform all the other content. Frankly, like people like Catherine at A16Z are also already incredible at this. And bringing that sort of to more throughout the culture is going to be important either way though. So you mentioned all these different types of content.

Speeches. I just. Yes, speeches. Incredibly underrated it. We utilize them internally with the team and they're not every week. They're not on a schedule. Sometimes you need a speech, you just nail it and they can really set the tone and the energy within the company.

Getting chills thinking about Marc Andreessen standing on stage in front of thousands of people saying, we chose to raise this growth fund not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Hard to test them. To test the ability of our lps.

To test the capital market, to measure them.

Why do we go to the moon.

To test the health of global capital markets?

There will never be enough venture capital. I mean, yeah, like a. Well, a well defined phrase and recent has been fantastic coinages and I feel like, yeah, the speeches. That's an interesting answer. I was not expecting that. But that makes a ton of.

Well, it's good to buy low on things. I think buying low on speeches is your daily tip.

That's great. That's great. Where else should we go with this?

I think speeches could be an entirely new launch video meta. Right, Everybody, like barn burners launch. Everybody has a launch video. There's like three new launch videos every day. A lot of them like blur together because they're cool graphics and this person invests and here's this product ui and if you just have the CEO just like rant at the camera and you can get people to like, truly listen to that, it probably ends up being pretty powerful.

Yep.

Those kinds of things can go viral in really powerful ways because it tells people that you have something to say, Right. And it's doubly important because you talked about all these different forms of writing that are all great in their own way. And the one thing that they all have in common is. I'll tell you what all bloggers know, right, about writing is you have two audiences, right? The first audience is the people who actually read what you said, which is small. The second audience is the people that they tell that thing right because they get something out of retelling it, right? Like they get that legitimacy, they get that ability to express themselves or whatever. And there is a trade between the writer and the inner circle of people who are going to actually listen to that speech or actually read that thing all the way through.

True.

And something that was great about the old VC blogging meta. Way back in the day. So 10, 12, 15 years ago, when, you know, like, AVC was cooking and Semel Shaw and Mark Schuster and people like that is the way a blog worked. Like, the microstructure of blogging was you had a blog and you had readers and a comment section, and everybody came to your blog and the readership would be there. And the way that you would tell what blogs were good was you would have lots of comments, right? And that's where your primary readership would then go and invisibly tell other people about it. Then the feed emerged, right? We got Twitter, we got hacker news, where we got places where suddenly the discussion moved in public. And what happened then is that, first of all, the ability to reach a secondary audience exploded. So the, like, the returns to writing were only got bigger, but it became less obvious to do. Right. The trade became a little bit obscured by virtue of the fact that it's all in public. Right. And it's all based on how many retweets and likes you get. And I think what's happening now, as we go even further past this, is that the returns to writing and reading have never been more valuable, but never been less obvious. So, you know, it's time to go. If you. If you go, bring the output of a firm as legendary as a 16Z with all the amazing things they have to say and the statements of record that they want to put out into the world. You know, my job is to go help Eric and the whole GP crew and Ben and Mark bring this back and make it amazing again. Making a really, like, a brand that's going to shine.

I can't wait for your first software is eating the world moment also. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like the speech thing really ties into the new A16Z brand. Like, when I see the coin, I.

Feel like that's like the art Deco coin with abacus.

Yeah. I feel like speech Art deco in some ways. I don't know why I'm making that association, but it feels somewhat linked.

Is it a bygone era or is it a bozar?

Right.

Like, you remember the line, it's like art deco is made by dwarves, Bozaar is made by elves.

Yeah. But it's very. What is it? It was. It like the style. It was Randian. And I feel like in. In Ayn Rand's writing, there's a lot of speeches that happen throughout the book, so.

There sure are. Famously.

Makes sense. Yeah, famously. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the trade deal. Congratulations on the move and, yeah, Excited to see your work, seeing your work and hearing it.

Thanks for having me on. Guys.

Come on and give a speech soon. Absolutely. Speech. Speech. Speech, Speech, Speech, speech. Thank you, Alex.

Take care, everybody.

Cheers.

And we have Isaiah Taylor coming into the studio. We'll bring him on the screen. He has big News from Washington, D.C. in the nuclear world. Let's bring him into the studio.

We are in the fourth hour.

If you're still with us, we're in the fourth hour. Oh, looking good. I love the background.

What's going on?

You're looking great. How are you doing?

Not today. How's it going? I'm John and Jordy. I'm here to be with you in the a. With the technical technology.

We are going to need you to switch your microphone, though, because we cannot hear you very clearly. I don't know what's going on. Maybe try talking more and seeing if it works out.

How about that? Is that any better?

No, it's really.

I think it's the Apple.

Can you. Can you switch the. Can you. It might be the headphones that you're picking up the microphone there. I don't know. But it's coming through pretty scratchy. I think it's gonna be rough if we try and stick with.

All right, how about that?

That's better. There we go.

Sweet. All right.

Thank you.

We're gonna. We're gonna do it live. We're gonna go off of the. Off of the laptop here. All right. Fantastic to talk to you, Jonah. Jordy and I want to introduce you to Ward 0, which is the beautiful machine behind me here. This is our first prototype nuclear reactor here in our Los Angeles facility. So it's extremely exciting to be with you today.

Wow. And that's. Yeah. You're not on a green screen. That's actually like a window.

This is real. Wow. There are.

There are dudes walking around there. Yeah, I noticed that.

My aunt is. We get a lot of glass with the way the glass is kind of reflecting slightly. It looked. I thought it was an image.

It looks like a poster. But yeah, we get a lot of fake backgrounds, but this one's real.

Anyway, this.

Give us the update.

May start running at some point. We'll have to see. Can you drive a forklift yet, or do you not have time to get. I actually am forklift certified. I don't know if I have the certification sitting on my desk. I just moved desks.

Congratulations. Give us the update. What happened in Washington, D.C. why are you in the news?

Yeah. So this was a very exciting Day. A couple of months ago, I was on to announce the signing of Forbes I executive orders. The President essentially said, listen, we need nuclear back in the United States. This is a strategic priority. And today the Department of Energy announced the initial companies that will be part of the pilot program to turn on three nuclear reactors on American soil by July 4, 2026, America's 250th birthday. So we have a year that's fast. We're talking 65 days. We're talking about less than 12 months. And we actually have a counter upstairs and a very, very large screen in our office that counts down to the second, our deadline to go and hit that next year. We have a site in Utah and we're working very quickly toward that goal.

Yeah, it seems like reading the press release, it was like, all the boys, I knew like seven of the companies. I mean, I know they're competitors and it's obviously fierce competition, but nuclear is famously like, it's such a greenfield because there's really, like, no serious companies. And you kind of saw that in the release. It wasn't a lot of, like, legacy companies. It was like basically all startups and. Yeah. So very exciting. I mean, obviously, like, the race is on. It feels like it'll be mostly friendly competition. This is less of a winner take all market. And it's such a. It's such a good, like, it's like everyone's in it for America. They're not purely in it just to, like, you know, accumulate like, all the power in the world, take over the whole world or whatever. But. Yeah. What was your reaction to the rest of the crew?

I mean, absolutely, there's a ton of exciting people in here who are working very hard. A lot of these companies have been working for a long time and have been waiting for this big break. Right. And the big break is an administration that steps forward and says, all right, guys, let's see if you have the stuff right. You've been saying for a long time that the regulatory environment is the problem, that's bottleneck. We're going to clear everything out, and let's see if you got the goods. And so that's the test of the next 10 months here. So we're really excited about it. You know, I think there are a couple of things that are driving this moment. AI is clearly a huge one. I was at the executive order signing a couple of weeks ago for AI and the President made it very clear that this is a massive priority for the administration, that we're going to be China on AI. We're going to win this thing and we're going to do it in the next three years. And obviously energy is hugely important to that. A subtle note on this, on energy that most people don't understand is that nuclear particular particularly is important for AI. You can get cheap energy through renewables in sort of an intermittent period. And I think that worked pretty well back when we were doing a lot of pre training. Right. So you can pre train during the day when the energy is really cheap and you can kind of follow that curve around. As we move toward inference, it's really important to have a lot of steady load.

Right.

We need these turbines to be spinning all the time. And especially as these inference loads are moving more agentic, right. You're going to have these enterprise agent loads and hopefully those are working while we're sleeping, the stability of that becomes even more important. So nuclear is a massive thing to kind of step into the breach here and solve that problem very quickly.

Walk me through the next 10 months.

Yeah. Talk about having a timeline.

Yeah. What do you actually have to do.

In some ways historically long timelines have, Nuclear's certainly probably up there with rocket science in terms of, you know, not, you know, we know how to do it. It doesn't mean it's not hard. And so when you like really condense a timeline.

What was Bodol, that Atlanta plant?

Yeah, about 15. Yeah, 15 years. So I'd be like. It's interesting you mentioned rockets because I think this is a really good parallel. We think of rockets as taking a long time to build, but obviously SpaceX kind of proved the opposite. SpaceX proved that you could build a rocket very quickly, you could launch it quickly, you could iterate. And actually what they did is they went back to go forward because when we were first doing rockets in the Apollo program, we went from scratch with the Mercury program to humans landing on the moon 10 years later. Right. And so that was an extremely, extremely rapid development process. And guess what? They blew up a lot of rockets, right? They launched a lot. They, they blew up. And you know, there's this joke that, that our rockets always blow up, but they got there and they, they did it through building quickly. And over time that industry slowed down and it kind of got governed by these primes. And it was really difficult for us to get these big systems off the ground. And when Elon came back, he said, you know what, we're going to start with a really small rocket. We're going to start with the Falcon one and we're going to launch it quickly and we're going to learn how to launch rockets. We're going to build up the talent, and the regulator is going to get used to doing that again. And so I think there's a huge parallel here with nuclear where nuclear is actually very similar. In the early days of nuclear energy, you actually saw a lot of that rapid iteration, like the early days of rocketry. The world's first nuclear reactor turned on in eight months. From a piece of paper to criticality in the first system was eight months. The next reactor turned on another six months after that, and the third one turned on another six months after that at Oak Ridge, where my great grandfather was a physicist. So we're actually kind of doing a similar thing that we did in space where you go forward, you go back to go forward, you know. And I also like to point out when, when the first reactors were being made, this was in the era of, you know, manually drafting and slide rules. Right. And so it was extremely practical. It was extremely focused on the outcome. You have to actually bend the metal, you have to stack the blocks, and these atoms have got to get split. So, you know, it's. There's a cultural shift back to this R and D focused place where we can actually iterate and get through it. Jordy, what are. When you iterate quickly on a rocket and you launch it and it doesn't work, it blows up humans. You know, it can set things back in a way. But you learned something. What are the kind of like risk factors when moving super quickly with a project like this that you guys and other players in the industry are keeping in mind? Yeah. Rockets are a lot more exciting than the nuclear reactors. When a rocket goes wrong and it's a really big explosion and there's all this. Yeah, there's fireworks of these pretty colors. Reactors are really boring. The nominal case is that this reactor sits here and does nothing. The nominal, the actually subnominal case is also that the reactor sits here and does nothing. So there's a lot that you can do in the physics and the design of these reactors to ensure that they're safe. So really what we're doing when we do this testing is we're verifying our assumptions on the mechanical components. Right. Do our pumps work how we expected them to? Do the valves work? Are we leaking things? Right. There's these sort of of all of the nitty gritty of actually getting a physical system to perform how you expect it to. So I don't expect to see out of this experiment that there will be large failures. Hopefully not. That does have to do with the architecture, though. And that's one of the reasons that we've picked this architecture standing behind us is that it is an extremely, fundamentally safe architecture and that allows us to move quickly.

That's great to hear. I would ring the gong, but I feel like we should save it for when the reactor goes critical. Right. So come back on. Let's save it. You got jobs down. Job's not finished. But we are rooting for you.

How about this, John, John and Jordi, if Valor is the first, why don't you come and ring the gong on the site at the first criticality? How about that?

Will I need a hazmat suit?

You also need a hazmat suit.

Well, I mean, we talked to the founder of Replica and she said that she grew up in Chernobyl, like playing with radioactive toys. And so she turned out fine. She built a big company and so, you know, maybe, maybe radiation poisoning. Underrated.

Underrated.

You'll be safe.

We're working out of the San Rafael Energy Research center in Utah. There's a couple of buildings, some of them are nuclear, some of are not. We're going to throw a party in the non nuclear side.

So we'll be there. Thank you so much.

Well, thanks, guys.

Congratulations. Keep up all the great work.

Good luck. Cheers.

Talk to you later. Bye.

Well, well, what a show.

What a show. Should we do any timeline? I have one story, but we should save it for the next.

Save it for tomorrow.

Daniel growing. Daniel says they should make a TBPN for sports. I completely agree. I mean, it is crazy. We invented television. We invented streaming, invented news. And now all we need to do as a society is just take the innovation that we've created here and bring it to other industries, other sectors.

Oh, we got Mitchell Baldrige says TVPN for Catholicism.

I like that.

I think they should make a TVPN for monitoring situations. It's just live. The Situation Room.

The Situation Room. That is hilarious that it's called the Situation Room. Yeah. Raul Sunwalker posted. Oh, my God. They created a TVPN for finance. And it's CNBC with. With Andrew Sorkin. And Sorkin actually. And he actually replied with the. With the crying emoji, which is very funny.

Good stuff.

Appreciate.

Anyways, without further ado, have a great rest of your afternoon. Thank you for tuning in today. We love you and we will see you tomorrow. Very excited for the show tomorrow.

Yeah, we'll talk to you later.

Once more, we'll have some range.

Have a good one.

Cheers.

See you. Bye.

Bye.