Weekly Recap: Casey Neistat, OpenAI Cracks Math, The Future of ChatGPT, Apple x F1, Intel Layoffs

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OpenAI has announced that they have won a long. They achieved the long standing grand challenge in AI gold medal level performance on the world's most prestigious math competition, the International Math olympiad. That's the IMO. So this went up at 12:50am on July 19th.

Typical timeline for announcements.

So this is, this is basically like Friday night, Saturday morning, you're looking at basically 1am from Alexander Way and he shares a picture of a strawberry with a metal with the OpenAI logo on it. Someone also tested, they took this picture, they uploaded chat GBC. What's the fruit in the image? How many Rs are in that fruit? And it nailed it. So we are truly, we are truly. AGI has arrived. Has arrived. Also, before we go deeper into that story, we have a new partner, restream. You saw it in the intro. We're very excited to welcome them as a sponsor of the show.

We've been running on Restream secretly, secretly, secretly since day one.

Since day one. It's been our secret to success. And it can be your secret to success. Yeah, if you have a lot of.

The Fortune 500 already for all their live streaming infrastructure. So if you need to go live.

Go live with restream and you see OpenAI do streams like that. That is a thing that has entered the standard comm strategy.

I don't know if XAI is running.

On Restream a little, but they do, but they do stream. And you know, it used to just be the hyperscalers, the Mag 7, the big, big companies that would do a live stream around a, an annual event. Then Brian Chesky came out and created Founder mode and basically said put all your announcements on an annual release schedule, bu them all up, have the team celebrate, push to get across the finish line. And part of that is let's throw an event. Part of that is let's get the CEO and the product leaders on stage, tell the community about what we're building, what we've built and now a lot of people are streaming it. If you're going to stream your stuff, you need restream anyway. Go check it out. So Dylan Field, someone who has streamed events, you know, Figma obviously has config their dev event annually and they actually do two of them and those are streamed all over the place, probably using restream. And Dylan chimes in on the open air news. He says, congrats to the congrats 2025 IMO winners and participants, including OpenAI who trained a general purpose reinforcement learning Model and achieved IMO Gold. OpenAI team includes these two folks, Cheryl and Polynomial Gnome Fun Fact Polynomial also won the 2025 Diplomacy World Championship as a human and so people are saying AGI is right around the corner. AJ from Semianalysis says what stands out to me. Scaling RL and non verifiable rewards likely via rubrics and LLM as judge thinking and reasoning for several hours at a time for a highly specific task. This is what the $20,000 per month month model will look like. And so there were a bunch of interesting things about this. Apparently there are a few different ways to tackle math IMO level math problems. One is using this, this program called Lean that is a formal math proof verifier and there's rumors that Google's building their system to leverage that a lot. OpenAI apparently went way, way down just the text based LLM reasoning path and had a lot of success there. So even though as we'll get into in this story, it feels like it's neck and neck, maybe Google was earlier and they just didn't release it or faster. And maybe this is a comms thing. There's a whole bunch of different stuff going back and forth. But potentially the more interesting thing is did they take different technical approaches and get similar results? If they're neck and neck, which one will scale better, which one will generalize better? There's a whole bunch of different discussions there. Do you want to get into some of the controversy or the pushback? Do you have, do you have a post pulled up from someone saying about, about Google's attempt?

Yeah, I mean the whole thing came down to Tim Dennis over at DeepMind was, was pushing back a little bit.

Which I can pull up Demis Hassabis from DeepMind, the co founder and now at Google. Yeah, it was interesting because we immediately jumped to polymarket because this whole idea of an AI system beating the imo. We talked about this with Scott Wu from Cognition months ago back in April. I found the clip and he said I would be very surprised if an AI system this year does not, does not actually surpass the imo. He of course is an IMO gold medalist himself. And so it was big to hear from him. Now the poly market had been sitting at like 20% and I think we're going to get into like the minutia of like what it means to truly win because the imo, like the group that actually puts on the competition has a different set of rules. They don't. They put the questions out and anyone can Go and try and do them. But to actually be awarded a goal for an AI, they said it has to be an open source model, potentially it has to be released in this particular way. And so OpenAI might have used their systems to solve the questions, which is super impressive, but they might not have checked every box to actually technically win the gold from the actual organization. And so Gnome says today.

Yeah, Demis, to be clear, so. So he put out a post this morning saying official results are in. Gemini achieved gold medal level in the international mathematical, which is different than actually.

Getting a gold medal. Right.

He said an advanced version was able to solve five out of six problems. Incredible progress. And there's a quote in here from the IMO president. He said, we can, we can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points, a gold medal score. Their solutions were astonishing in many respects. IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow. You can imagine Juan is just like, off on this insane.

There were some fascinating, fascinating details around.

How they solved them, by the way, as an aside, we didn't announce on Friday because we respected the IMO board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts and the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved. And so you can imagine somebody was saying, I don't know how real this was. Somebody was saying that they were making a claim that like, Google needed time to like, get the comms approval to sign off. But it seems more likely that the original plan was, hey, let's wait and announce this when the IMO board actually comes out.

The analogy feels like you're a super fast sprinter. You go to the Olympics and you run 100 meter dash. That's incredibly fast in the parking lot. Like you're not in the stadium. But everyone's like, wow, that guy's fast. He's hauling, he's hauling. It's very impressive, but potentially the fastest man on earth. And, and ideally you paid for the parking pass to get into the stadium. And it's like Maybe Google and OpenAI were both running hundred meter dashes in the parking lot. One of them had paid for, like, you know, enough parking spaces to make it completely clean. OpenAI was just kind of showing up with a buddy and being like, I'm sprinting. That's the vibe I'm getting. But they're both in the parking lot. Like, neither of them are in the actual stadium at this point. But you know, who knows, they might be soon. There are some questions about, you know, do they have to open source or whatever. So Noam Brown says, you know, we achieved a milestone that many considered years away. Gold level performance. Gold medal. Of course he's saying gold medal level performance, like that's very critical. It's not we got a gold medal is that we exhibited gold medal gold medal level performance. Typically for these AI results like in Go Dota Poker diplomacy, researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain and does little else. But this isn't an IMO specific model. It's a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general purpose techniques with which would be very exciting because you could apply an IMO level.

John, hold up that stack of posts for the audience.

Oh, we got 150. It's going to be a quick stream people. It's going to be a quick stream, but buckle up. So what's different? We developed a new technique that makes LLMs a lot better at hard to verify tasks. IMO problems were the perfect challenge for this. Proofs are pages long and take experts hours to grade. Compare that to aime which is another math exam where answers are simply an integer from 0 to 9 so you can verify them really really quickly. Also, this model thinks for a long time. Oh one thought for seconds. Deep research for a minute. This one. Thanks for hours. Importantly, it's also more efficient with its thinking and there's a lot more room to push the test time, compute and efficiency further. Now what's interesting is like these, I think these, I think these questions go up and then you have like, like. I think the students get like two four and a half hour sections. Segments. So there's like there's a world where the AIs can do it but just not as fast as humans, which would be very interesting. I don't exactly know how close they are. So Gnome says where does this go? As fast as recent AI progress has been, I fully expect the trend to continue. Importantly, I think we're close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. There's a big difference between AI slightly below top human performance versus slightly above. This was a small team effort. He took a.

Right now the discovery that AI is doing is talking with somebody who is potentially schizophrenic and convincing them that they figured out how to move faster than the speed of light.

Yeah, there's so many accounts of that. It's getting crazy. Yeah. I posted chatgpt agent go win me an im. Go gold Medal and then update my resume.

Don't make mistakes.

But yeah, I mean have you actually looked at any of the IMO questions ever? No, I don't even know where to start. Like it's all stuff that it's one.

Call away for us so we just text Scott.

Tyler, have you ever looked at IMO questions?

No, but I'm looking at them right now.

It's like pretty brutal. Would you know where to Tyler, if.

You can get two out of six right before the end of the stream, we'll buy you a house.

Well, there's the thing. He's just going to be able to ask ChatGPT.

Yeah, one shot it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No tool use.

Yeah, no tool use. Got to qualify that.

So yeah, Nick has the has the comment about DeepMind. DeepMind has also.

Tyler has another challenge today does.

We will introduce that in just a few minutes. D mind has also won IMO gold but they haven't announced it yet. By the way, confirmed. Congratulations.

They did this morning.

They did. Yeah, they confirmed it this morning.

And so it's been interesting to see the reaction to this. Gary Marcus is on X saying all the tech bros this morning thinking that AGI has been achieved because some parentheses insanely expensive new form of LLMs can now match top high school students on one specific task. It's almost cute. So really just ripping into the entire AI community. But Will Depew comes in and says he's on leave right now, taking a little summer holiday. He says, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier capability per dollar will drop 100x a year. The 3k task arc AGI 80% could probably be $30 if we cared to optimize it. Repeat after me. All that matters is top line intelligence. All that matters is top line intelligence. So yeah, again everybody's focused on sort of raw capabilities, not super focused on efficiency. Especially for projects like this where they're not necessarily, you know, rolling this out in mass.

Yep. You know where a lot of these IMO gold medalists go to work?

I do.

John ramp.comtimes money save both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp is amazing. So the timeline was in turmoil over the Gary Marcus post and they went back and forth and he finally admitted it at the end. He said, he said, that's impressive. So it started with a post by Daniel Litt. He says, Huge congrats to OpenAI for their IMO Gold. I don't find it too surprising that an AI tool was able to achieve this. See below though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days, but I'm but I'm pretty surprised. It was an LRM with no tool use. So it didn't have Python, it didn't have web search, it didn't have all the things that you, that you could imagine would kind of allow you to, you know, speed things up or kind of be a shortcut that would put it in a different category. There was always a question about with the when the AIs were playing video games like, like computers have wall hacks. Like they can sometimes like see the, see the map without the fog of war. They can see like it's very different to get, to get perfect pixel perfect data on where every character is on the map and be able to make decisions based on that as opposed to like looking at pixels and having to like move the screen over there to see if you're being invaded on the left flank, right? And so there was always this like yes, if you gave a computer like the RAW access that's not quite, it's impressive but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like well the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator like is it that impressive? But this was very much an even playing field. It seems like so Mel Gibson 2.0 great name says you are not surprised that they you are not surprised that they have figured out a way to make the model learn in very hard to verify domains in a fuzzier reward space. It also appears that the same reasoning model was the one used in the 80 coder competition, showing that it can generalize across domains. Daniel comes back and says I don't think we really know that what they figured out yet. I'll keep my powder dry until we know more. Mel Gibson says go reads Gnome Gnome Brown's thread on the model if you haven't already. He says and remember Gnome Brown says this isn't an IMO specific model and that's a very important thing because there's a ton of, there's a ton of situations where you can go in RL on a specific task and it gets really really good at it. But then you try and get it to do anything else and it's not that great. And so Daniel it says yeah, I read it. Gary Marcus says, chimes in from the rafters as he's not in this chat yet but he has entered the chat. He says I read it too. That's pretty vague. Are we sure that no tools were called? Gary Marcus then chimes in again, says, re IMO gold. Does no tools mean no use of python code interpreter, etc. Dan says, Daniel Litt says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial Noam Brown and also Alex Way and says, can you confirm the IMO gold was achieved without using Python or code interpreter or similar? And then Gary Marcus says humans don't use external tools in the IMO competition. I'm just. I'm just trying to understand what the system is. That's how we do science. Daniel Litt and at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Marcus just deleted their account. So just as this post is from an account that no longer exists, Daniel Litt shows Cheryl on the OpenAI team saying the model solves these problems without tools like Lean, which is a math verifier or coding. It just uses natural language. It also only has four and a half hours. To answer our earlier question, we see the model reason at a very high level, trying out different strategies, making observations from examples and testing hypotheses. And Gary Marcus says, that's impressive. So Gary Marcus, you got to fill out the apology form, bro. You got to fill out the deep reinforcement learning apology form. What was the reason for your behavior? No one told me Alex Way was training the model.

Mercury was in retrograde.

Mercury, I don't know. ML and then one of them is Gary Marcus convinced me it was fake because Gary Marcus famously said deep learning is hitting a wall like this. This particular paradigm will not scale. You have to do symbol manipulation, which was like kind of his bet. Encode different relationships between ideas in the model. There were a bunch of different debates over there and he's gone back and forth on that. He's not as much of like a deep, deep reinforcement learning hater as some people think, but he's got. That's his brand at this point. So anyway, more on the drum between DeepMind and OpenAI. DeepMind got a gold medal at the IMO on Friday afternoon, but they had to wait for to approve the Tweet until Monday. OpenAI. OpenAI shared theirs first at 1am on Saturday and stole the spotlight. In this game, speed is greater than bureaucracy. Miss the moment, lose the narrative. So that's one interesting take. Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that. I mean, certainly culturally, OpenAI loves to release information before Google, like whatever. Google's like next big and they're playing.

To win Remember they. After. What did they release after the Deep Seek moment?

Deep research.

So if you're typing deep and you were looking for an AI product and then.

And then Google had IO and then. And then OpenAI OpenAI IO this is like the day before with Johnny. With Johnny I've. So anyway, you know, you'll have to see it. All's fair and love and war. I guess I don't think this crosses anything.

Warfare, violence.

And this is the benefit of having a bunch of posters on your team, I guess. Gnome Brown says it takes us a few months to return the experimental research frontier into a product. But progress is so fast that a few months can mean a big difference in capabilities. And this is from July 18th. So all the models underperform humans on the new IMO questions. And Grok 4 is especially bad on it. Even with best event selection.

Somebody was accusing Grok for of training on the problem set for.

For imo.

No, no, no.

Oh for something else. Oh for the other benchmarks. I mean benchmark hacking is like a thing that happens all over the place. That's why we need like hidden benchmarks. That's the whole thing of ARC AGI that we will talk about. We talked about Will Depew saying guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Terence Tao, one of the one of the most goated mathematicians of all time, digs in a little bit and is. Is adding his perspective as a. As a world renowned mathematician. He says it is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity. Either a given task X is within the ability of current tools or it is not. However, there is a. There is in fact a very widespread in capability several orders of magnitude depending on what resources and assistance gives the tool and how one reports the results. One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded IMO as an example here. The format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants who are high school students. Students led by a team leader, often a professional mathematician. Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult math problems. Given only pen and paper. Crazy. No communication between contestants or with the team leader during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invalidators and I don't know for clarification. This is like some math term I don't even know for clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during.

The grade invigilators are also known as exam proctors.

Okay. Proctors. Okay. So, yeah, they can ask the people that are running the test, hey, we.

Gotta start working, Invigilator. And for sure we should probably have a shot like just an invigilator too.

For sure.

We should have at least one on staff.

So. So. So. The team leader advocates for this for the students, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly. The IMO is widely regarded as highly as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to achieve a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score. This year, the threshold for gold was 35 out of 42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question. Perfect.

That a B, basically a B, Yeah. Gets you gold.

Yeah.

It's that hard.

They're that hard. But consider what happens to the difficulty, to the difficulty of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways. First, one gives the students several days to complete each question, rather than four and a half hours for three scenarios. To stretch the metaphor somewhat, consider a sci fi scenario in in the student, in which the student is still only given four and a half hours. But the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy intensive time acceleration machine in which months are even years of time pass for the students during this exam.

Before the exam, Ben might have put us in one of these as we go live, and then it's four hours later.

Time acceleration. Yeah, it's wild. 2. Before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format the students find easier to work with. Three, the team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistance, textbooks, or the ability to search the Internet. Sounds like that didn't happen. The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem, simultaneously communicating with each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends. The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches and intervenes if one of the students is spending too much time on a direction they know to be unlikely to succeed. Next, each of the six students on the team submit solutions, but the team leader selects only the best solution to submit to the competition. Regard, we're discarding the rest. Last, if none of the students on the team obtain a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted. Oh, so that, I mean, that could have happened. It didn't. In this Case. But in each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants.

Going back to the parking lot example, it's like if you can go run, go run the race in the parking lot. And then if you don't run as fast as you hoped, it's like, well, I wasn't in the. I mean, I wasn't racing, I was.

Just going for a jog.

I was just warming up. I just, I like to be surrounded by excellence.

Yeah, don't worry. Yeah, I mean that is the true one. Because if they'd missed, they'd probably be like, what the IMO is this weekend we're working on agents. Like, what are you talking about? Like, have you seen our daus? Get out of here. To each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students in the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes in format. A student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance in the normal competition, understand your test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above. So in the absence of controlled test methodology that was not self selected by the competing teams, one should be wary of making various apples to apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions such as the imo or between such models and the human contestants. Yeah, the question is like, it seems like of those not many were actually violated. By the way, OpenAI and Google attacked us like.

Well, this was before. I mean this, this was an immediate reaction before. I think there was more details came out of. Details. Yeah, yeah. That we've been covering.

This was 3:00pm on. On. So this is so on Saturday, but 3:00pm later.

Well, Rune has a good post, says my bar for AGI is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set. It's a great post.

The world isn't ready for gas stations.

Yeah, we can run an AI as long as we can. We can run a gas station as long as we have, you know, a perfect, you know, data set.

And that's. Yeah, that's like the way on how gas stations operate. Yeah. As soon as we place the goals somewhere, we nail that goal and then we have to move the goalpost shows.

This is so.

This is a great graphic picture.

So Thomas Wolf says my bar for AGI is an AI winning a Nobel prize prize for a new theory. It originated image of a team moving the Goalpost.

I do like how consistent Tyler Cowan is on AGI. He's like, my bar was the Turing test. We passed that. So I'm. I have to call it like it is.

Yeah.

And I'm not moving the goal.

I think. I think he's notorious for that.

Yeah.

Fullness of time.

I mean, I think it's okay to be like, yeah, we achieved AGI.

It's just tough when you achieve something now there's something new, cool, but not immediately dramatically transform.

But you have to imagine that that was the same. That there was the same thing when people were like, human. Human flight. And then the Wright brothers go and do it, and people are like, great. So, like, I can hop on a Southwest flight in an hour to go to San Francisco from la. And they're like, what are you talking about? Like, LA is like, you know, a couple trains and like some people, you know, with orange groves. And it's like it takes a long time for the infrastructure to get built out. Like now, a lot of these AI tools, they do build on top of the Internet and on top of technology that we have rolled out. But, like, at a certain point, like, the UI matters, the economics of these different tools matters. Like, you can't. It might not be economical for a company to release an AI tool that costs $20,000 to inference just to get you the weather or do two plus two. And so all of these things take time to roll out. And that's why we're kind of in this, like, slow takeoff scen. It feels like, I don't know. Massive post from Fiji Simo, the CEO of Applications at OpenAI. She is outlining what her plan is basically, and it's very, very interesting post. So in. So Fiji, Simo is an absolute boardroom general. Give me the Ashton hall when the.

Fiji seems to cart.

Yeah. Yes. VGC, Mo, OpenAI and Spotify board of Directors positions. Huge runs at ebay, Facebook and Instacart. Now she's the CEO of Applications at OpenAI. Today she outlined how she sees OpenAI's products having the biggest impacts. High level six things. Knowledge retrieval, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time and support. And those are kind of getting, I think, more abstract, more vague as they go along, but it's interesting. They map pretty closely to my experience. Knowledge Retrieval. I use. I use it as a Google replacement for a lot of things. I use Deep Research as a. As a knowledge retrieval product. I also use it a little bit as web of de replacement. Not a ton, but I've seen a lot of people use that, but I do ask it for advice around health, fitness, recommendations for supplements, all sorts of different stuff. Often I'll just go there and say what is, what type of creatine does Andrew Huberman recommend? And we'll just.

Or complex medical.

Fortunately, I haven't been in one of the situations recently, but I, if I did, I would definitely go to it.

It is interesting because previously when people were trying to understand maybe a small health issue they're having, they would go do a Google search, add Reddit to it, and then they would look through the comments and the comments would provide kind of like context on the symptoms or whatever they were dealing with. But you, and you could technically leave a comment, but I think the majority of people wouldn't want to post about that. So the fact that OpenAI has all that Reddit data, you can get that same type of data, but then you can kind of ask a number of follow up questions, which is very cool, very powerful. I'm certain that people are probably misusing it, maybe reading too much into the results. But again, the idea, I think for a long time doctors that would say don't, don't look on Google, you're just going to stress yourself out and then you go into the appointment room and they're over there on the equivalent of Dr. Google.

Totally. It's nothing new. People used to go to WebMD and the meme was like, you go to WebMD and no matter what you type in, it says could be cancer. Like, could be like the worst possible thing, but it might just be a cold and maybe you should just take some Advil. But like, for whatever reason, WebMD felt the need to like kind of give you the full picture and all the possibilities and then they'd of course say like go consult an expert or talk to your doctor. So but yes, I definitely see it replacing that type of health experience. Also, I'm using it as a Photoshop replacement a fair amount of time if I need to just quickly generate an image, quickly generate something that I would have normally gone to a 3D rendering program or Photoshop and kind of created a collage to kind of huge tailwind.

For the meme industrial complex.

Huge tailwind. Still a lot to work out there. I do find that sometimes when I go to images and chatgpt, I'm going back and forth on the prompt for 10 minutes and I'm like, I could have just done this with traditional tools. So it's not perfect, but when it gets that, it's so amazing and the final product often looks a lot more cohesive than what I would get if I was like, collaging and, like, the shadows didn't match and they were like rough edges and stuff, so certainly great there. The last three are a bit more vague. We'll have to read into those. But OpenAI is set up to win pretty big in all of these categories. So semi analysis clocks ChatGPT's share of queries. It's 71%. Meta is in second at 12%. And that's with billions of users on meta products. And so OpenAI is certainly running away with consumer. So there's this question of, like, the. It feels like the rest of consumer AI plays will be, I would say, like horizontal in the sense that it won't be a new app on your home screen. Meta won't have meta.

AI as a home screen app loses their lead and becomes the Yahoo of AI. But that doesn't feel likely.

Yeah, it feels tough. Like, why did Yahoo lose to Google? It's because there was an entirely new paradigm in PageRank. A new algorithm emerged. Sure, if that. If that happens from SSI or Super Intelligence, Meta superintelligence, there could be a leapfrog moment. But so far they've been pretty good at staying near the frontier to the point where it's like, okay, Google got them on this one, or Grok got him on this one today. But there hasn't been a time when I've been like, okay, like, there is a dramatic difference in the results such that it's worth it for me to go over. There was that moment for Claude for a little bit. Everyone's like, claude's way better. I went over and used Claude for a bit, and then I went back to OpenAI just because the product was better and had more of an ecosystem.

Product lead is very real.

Yeah. I was thinking about this like. Like if you played out a hypothetical scenario and you went and you had the keys to OpenAI HQ, you went and you exfiltrated all the code, everything got an app into the App Store, Geordi GPT. You have the exact same model, the exact same inference, the exact same ui, everything. Could you win? Because people would say, well, it's better, so I'm not gonna switch.

We live on a part of the Internet where people are constantly debating the merits of the leadership teams and the approaches and the philosophies. But then downstream, you have approaching a billion users that are just like, yeah, I like the product, I use it a lot.

Yeah. And so even if you ran a Super bowl ad saying like, we have a product that's exactly as good as ChatGPT. It is feature for feature feature people would be like, but I already have it installed. You're asking me for two minutes to uninstall this and reinstall the new one and then I don't get any benefit. I wouldn't do it even if you match my capabilities. You got a leapfrog.

It's funny. So Jason Fried had a great post relevant yesterday. He said feature parity is just another way to say we don't need to exist. So if you come out and you're so good at what you do that you can create as good of a product as OpenAI models that are as good, you still don't need to exist. And so that is the challenge for anyone competing.

If you let me tell you about ramp.com, time is money Save, both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com really quickly. So it feels like the rest of consumer AI plays will be horizontal. There won't be a new AI app for Meta that really takes off. Instead AI will improve everything Meta does across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Quest, et cetera. And I was thinking about the initial takeoff of Facebook. The other tech companies, they didn't really seriously get to compete in social networking. Like Google never really took off. I guess Microsoft bought LinkedIn and that's kind of a niche social network, very profitable business, great business, but it is like its own thing. It doesn't directly compete but graph databases and the idea of storing efficiently connections in graph networks like Facebook kind of pioneered that became really widespread and was used all over the place. And the same thing with Google search like this, this page rank, just better search algorithms, those wound up manifesting in better search in all sorts of products. And so when, when a new company comes out and builds, you know, a whole paradigm or they break through in terms of front end development or database development or some sort of structure, like it winds up, up, it winds up improving everyone. And so I think, I think AI will have these like horizontal benefits all over the ecosystem. And I think it makes a ton of sense that Meta is investing so much in super intelligence, but it's not, I don't really think the narrative should be like they need to play catch up to ChatGPT. I think it's more like they just need to implement LLMs in every single crack in their, all of their different systems like they do with with great databases, great infrastructure. I'm not sure we'll see.

I still think there's. I mean remember Meta made some early experiments of making digital clones of big celebrities on Instagram. I still think they'll take more shots on goal around companionship. Will they go grok waifu mode? No, I don't think they want that revenue line. But there's a bunch of other ways in which they could kind of go after that market that I don't even think. I mean ChatGPT is such an interesting product because it's designed to be a functional tool around knowledge retrieval, creative expression, just unlocking consumer surplus, giving people access to expertise, etc. And the way in which people are using it as a companion is sort of not the sort of of default. It's not like you name your chatgpt, right? People will give it a name.

Yeah, but it doesn't really stick. It's certainly not baked into the UI in the way that it could be. I know people do talk to.

And so again I've said it before but as ChatGPT user hours are just. Or sorry, user minutes still. But as they're ticking up, I do think Zuck will look at that and say I want some of that action.

Yeah, yeah, and maybe some of that. But I still think some of that happens inside of the platforms. I don't.

Yeah, not necessarily a net new app.

It would be very difficult and Meta has yet to really do it. WhatsApp and acquisition Instagram and acquisition but stories massively successful within Instagram and so I would expect. I agree with your take that I think there's an opportunity for, for a lot of AI stuff to live within those apps. And then also just on the monetization side, they're in a very unique space where they can give great products away for free, but they can't be charged an inference cost to another company. And so if they have their own open source model, they can inference very cheaply, they can give it away for free and then they leverage their massive ad network. So let's go through what Fiji simo over at OpenAI is building building. So a few in a few weeks I'll be joining OpenAI as CEO of Applications. We've all been waiting for this moment, helping to get open AI's technology into the hands of more people around the world. I've always considered myself a pragmatic technologist, someone who loves technology not just for its own sake, but for the direct impact it can have on people's lives. That's what makes this job exciting, since I believe AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any other technology in history. If we get this right, AI can give everyone more power. And so she has a fantastic career. EBay, Facebook, then Instacart, and is now at OpenAI.

And she was heavily involved in building the ads engine at Instacart, correct?

Yeah, yeah. And obviously Facebook as well. So on knowledge, she says empowerment starts with understanding the world around us and our place in it. When we have the right knowledge at the right time, we can make better decisions, advocate for ourselves and change our path. But for most of history, access to expert level knowledge has been limited to those with more resources. I mean, even, even after the invention of the printing press, like, you still had to be in a big city that had a library to go check out a book for free, still had to have the time to do it, and, and certainly buying every book and being able to index it was very expensive and difficult. Now it's even easier. It's already working. People who use AI tutors learn twice as much as they do from human ones, and the gains are even bigger compared to learning in a traditional classroom. In a 2024 OpenAI study, 90% of users said ChatGPT help them understand complex ideas more easily. I agree with that. On health, she says, personally, I'm most excited about the breakthroughs that AI will generate in healthcare. A few years ago, I faced a complex and poorly understood chronic illness on that side, and it became painfully clear just how fragmented and inaccessible the healthcare system can be. Even with access from some of the best doctors in the world, I found myself acting as a connector, piecing together insights from multiple specialists who weren't speaking to each other. I actually had a friend who got a very, very rare form of cancer and did all of the research pre ChatGPT, actually downloaded all the frontier science and all the different papers, figured out that it was this one very rare condition found. The expert went to that expert, he was like, yep, you have this thing. I'm the only one that studies this thing. I'm gonna help you. Did the surgery, saved your life. Crazy.

I had an issue. I. I was 18, traveling. I was surfing in South America. There was flash flooding. I was in this tiny town. I got a antibiotic resistant staph infection from that.

Oh, that's bad.

And then was getting repeated infections over the next year. And the doctor kept prescribing antibiotics, antibiotics that were so, I mean, such an intense antibiotic that doctors won't. It's Like a soap, they won't touch it without gloves on and they use it before surgeries. And they just said, use this twice a day over your entire body. And I kept having, I kept having issues and eventually found in a Reddit community that was like, just like obsessed over this issue. And the thing that fixed it was avoiding gluten. It like actually just fixed everything.

That's so crazy.

And I just imagine if I was like, even now, if I was dealing with that issue, I would have been able to, I would have just been able to talk with ChatGPT about it. They would be able to surface all that kind of thing, build a picture of it.

Very interesting. Well, let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are.

We use restream, the backbone of this show.

So she closes out health, saying AI can explain lab results, decode medical jargon, offer second opinions, and help patients understand their options in plain language. It won't replace doctors, but it can finally level the playing field for patients, putting them in the driver's seat of their own care. Very excited for that. And also that feels like something, I don't know, like, yeah, just like, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see if that manifests itself in like, all of this is like, will there be any fracturing in the actual product? Because right now all the fracturing that's happening in the ChatGPT product is in like, what model you're using. You're using Agent or Deep Research. But so far all the different products, yeah, they're all chats and none of them say, this one's for health, this one. And I'm in like a safe health territory. It's like, that's all driven by the prompt. I would imagine that over the long term, everything's driven by the prompt. I would love to be able to go to ChatGPT and just say, hey, quickly, what's the population of Canada? And it knows to use 4.0 for that. And then if I say, hey, I want you to give me a full report on the history of Canada, give me a deep research report. I wouldn't need to select it, it would just know from the prompt, a.

ChatGPT agent, Help me annex Canada.

And then it just goes and starts. You don't mistake. And then it just keeps working. So the third one, she says, creative expression. I believe we're all born creators and that the ability to imagine something in many, make it real, is a big part of what makes us human? The problem is that our ability to express that creativity is often limited by our skill sets. Completely agree. I can't draw at all. Not everyone has the resources, time or training to paint, write, compose or build. When I imagine the future, it often comes to me in images I paint in my spare time. But the ooh, we gotta find some VGCMO originals, but I'll hang them on the wall. This is interesting lore, but the images in my head are much more realistic and complex than what I am able to paint today. Now AI is collapsing the distance between imagination and execution. With AI and image generation, I can prompt and iterate until the output matches the complexity and realism of the vision in my head. Unless it's a Where's Waldo, we gotta solve the Where's Waldo challenge.

We do.

It's coming for sure. The where the Where's Waldo Eval for Image Generation Today, nearly one in three Gen Z users say AI tools have helped them express themselves in ways they never could. So this is another fun, viral, obvious, valuable, like we know it. We love it. Everyone's using ChatGPT for creative expression.

Well, yeah. And this presents a massive challenge if you are a GPT rapper that's trying to go compete in the creative expression space because you have to. It's not enough to generate a cool image or generate a meme. It used to be that if you could do text, well, that was maybe an advantage that people would use your product. But ChatGPT image generation has just gotten better and better and better. It's fantastic. If you haven't played around with it much, drop your group chat. The profile pictures of your most popular group chat, put them in there and say make them all gigachads and then.

You can share bodybuilders. Yeah, for sure. Well, you start with generating an image in ChatGPT. Then when you're ready to go pro, you move over to figma. Figma.com Think bigger, build faster Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free@figma.com Fourth, she says economic freedom. When people can independently create and capture value, they gain power over their own economic destiny. But starting a company isn't easy. The average cost to start a small business in the US is around $30,000, an impossible threshold for me. Most aspiring entrepreneurs and until recently, building a product or launching a service required technical knowledge, especially coding. That was a problem for hundreds of millions of people who had ideas for tools, apps, platforms, etc. That could have made an impact. But didn't they didn't have the technical skills to bring them to life. The classic ideas guy. I just need a programmer to build it for me. Well, now you can vibe code it. AI now gives the people the the power to turn ideas into income no matter what their age, credentials or zip code. A single person can now brainstorm, prototype, market and launch a product with tools they control themselves. A 2024 Shopify report showed AI enabled solopreneurs launched businesses 70% faster than peers without a tool, without AI tools. I've seen it with my nine year old daughter who decided one day she wanted to be a party planner for kids birthdays.

Let's give it up for it's amazing.

What a great story. In one weekend, using AI tools, she created a fully functional website showcasing her party ideas, shared it with her peers and started taking on clients. Amazingly, my husband and I didn't have to help her. But we did have to intervene before the confetti cannons were ordered.

Ben, good reminder, we should get some confetti cannons.

We do need confetti cannons.

Except last time when we had confetti cannons at YC demo day, my eyes were in pain.

You need goggles.

And days and days. We need goggles. Next days. Yeah. There was so much dust in the.

Confetti cannon, we left it all in the field.

We did, we did.

In the future, people will be able to build new things without waiting for permission, capital or credentials. This will of course will mean a meaningful shift in the workforce. Companies will hire fewer people, so you get more smaller companies. That seems pretty cool.

Yeah. My first real company, skateboard company, JMAX Designs, probably. I don't know if I would have done it if my, my lovely mother wasn't a graphic designer and I needed a logo to print on the decks that I was getting made. And I just would sit with her and tell her, you know, do this, do that, do this, do that. And yeah, it's pretty cool that you can now just talk through that process in natural language and yeah, how many more people can do.

It was pretty crazy. You ran a skateboard company without doing proper SOC 2 compliance.

I know.

You should have got on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust, continu. Obviously Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process.

Huge alpha. Starting an extreme sports company and saying, look, none of our competitors are serious enough about this to get serious, to really take compliance and security as seriously as you should.

Yeah, I mean I do think for kids especially, I mean the ability to just use AI tools fully to go and solve problems. And it's almost like you're your town's McKinsey consultant. I remember I had an early job of just like scanning photos for someone. They needed a whole bunch of photos scanned. It was like pretty manual labor. But like I actually wasn't that good at it. I kind of messed it up. There was like too much like the, the scanner wasn't configured properly. So a lot of this I had to redo a lot of them. It was learning. It was a learning process. But it's probably the first one of.

The first jobs I had. The only thing that maybe boring and repetitive that I can imagine you doing is the bench press. Basically the same every time. But yeah, those type of tasks I've always struggled with. But I don't know that we're at a point. I still think if you were using. I don't think that. I think that job still exists.

I think it does. I think there are bigger companies where you can just send in a ton of stuff and they'll just professionally scan it for you. But they're pretty expensive, I think. So I think the kids still have some alpha if you're, if you're. If your opportunity cost is low enough, as kids are fifth. She says time regaining control over your time is one of the most liberating, empowering shifts a person can experience. The ability to control how you spend your time is often what separates people who feel in charge of their lives from people who feel overwhelmed by them. Wealthy people who have always bought back their time by hiring personal assistants, household staff, private tutors, chefs and more, building full infrastructures to reduce friction in their lives. Meanwhile, the average household spends nearly 20 hours a week on domestic work, logistics and errands. While leading Instacart, I saw firsthand how technology can shift perceptions and behaviors around time. In 2012, the idea of paying someone to shop for your groceries felt like a luxury, something reserved for the ultra wealthy. But with the right product design, logistics and pricing, we made it accessible and indispensable for everyday families. Today, the Instacart user base mirrors the US population, with millions of families getting hours back each week to spend on higher value activity.

The question is, will OpenAI build a gig worker network where when your agent runs into a wall and needs somebody in the real world to accomplish a task, will you be able to delegate? Tasks like that feels like a stretch, but I don't know. They could plug into the Uber network or any of these other Networks.

Yeah, maybe they'll, I mean they already have like an instacart integration so maybe they will, they will rely on other gig work platforms to solve those problems and actually handle that side and they will stay in the full.

Like the package, package delivery where you can get an Uber to just pick something up and take it across town.

Yep.

You could imagine that, that being integrated.

Yeah, I mean there's, there, there's a host of, you know, services and companies and APIs for shipping, mailing, moving things around, hiring someone and I mean in theory you could hire a personal chef and be communicating. Your agent could be emailing with them and say hey, you know, be here at this time. There's this party here's and it's kind of, you know, it doesn't need to be, it doesn't even, you don't even maybe need a gig work platform because the agent can go out and scroll Instagram in theory and find someone who's advertising that service or Google it and find a listing of local people providing that, that job and go and retain their services directly. Interesting. I believe AI will allow for a similar shift in many areas of life. Time consuming activities like researching decisions, planning vacations, scheduling a tutor and more can be done by an AI agent that anyone can access. As we build new products, we have a chance to make these time saving capabilities feel not only useful but routine. In doing so we can empower people to regain control of their time and attention. And I certainly feel that, that something that I would need to sit down 15 minutes looking for, you know, a new studio space or something. Fire off agent and come back with some interesting results. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Graphite.dev last one, support. For many people, the biggest barriers to progress aren't lack of access or opportunity, but self doubt, isolation and burnout. Sometimes what's most empowering is support someone or something that can help us reflect, feel seen or simply move forward with clarity and confidence. My business coach Katya has been transformative in my career. I've joked with her over the years that everyone needs a Katia in their pocket. Personalized coaching has obviously been a privilege reserved for a few, but now with ChatGPT it can be available to many. This is something I have not used. This feels like we're getting further out on the curve of like, you know, defining what the product is like. Knowledge Retrieval is like so concrete. Generate an image. Very concrete. Now support is much more. It's much more of an amorphous product. And there's some companies out there that are doing it right now. It's not a drop in replacement. And there's much more to define about what this product looks like or how people actually use this.

Yeah, it's very general. There's going to be vertical, specific companionship products. Right. We've seen this. What's the founder that we had on the replica? The original one started like a decade ago.

Yeah.

Gro Gro Heavy 4 has their own specific iteration. But then this is also to be clear.

Yeah.

The area of greatest concern. Right. Where it's very clear, if you have a business coach telling you, John, you got this, you're incredible, you're. You're built different, that's great. But then when you tell them that you've discovered, you know, how to break the, you know, space time continuum and they. You're actually right.

Hill Road right now.

You're right.

You're good.

You're absolutely right. You figure this out. And so I think they need to figure out the guardrails for this category. And I'm sure that's top of mind for everybody at the company right now.

Yeah, for sure. AI Coaches, on the other hand, can be available throughout every day. She says this isn't about replacing human connection, but filling a gap that often goes unfilled. Many people don't feel comfortable opening up to family or friends. And most people don't have access to a therapist or coach they can call regularly. Even people who do have access often spend an hour a week or less with these professionals. At the core, at the core of philosophy and religion is the idea of self knowledge. To become who we want to be, we have to understand who we are. So very interesting. Apple and F1, that's the story that we're talking about today. We've talked about this before. So F1, fantastic race series. We're a big fan. But the actual streaming rights to the to the Races has been kind of hotly debated. There was an article in the Journal a while back that they were going to ESPN saying, hey, we want something like $80 million. And ESPN was like, I don't know if that's worth it.

And we were going and they wanted something like 200.

Yeah, yeah, they wanted a lot. And so the stack of content to go through is growing. So we will be. We will be thinning out the textbook. We will be thinning out the guest lineup in the future but for today we're going through. Let's kick it off with Ben Thompson. He had some good analysis here and has some some details from reporting the Athletic which is a New York Times property. Formula One is trending towards choosing Apple for its United States broadcasting rights for our for 202026 onwards. The technology company's bid being in the 120 to 150 million dollar range. Market clearing order inbound is a market clearing order probably will clear. ESPN has held the rights since 2018, but its current deal is up at the end of the year. The sports media giants exclusivity negotiation period period expired before February 2025 leading to.

Interest from other other broadcasters including Netflix, Netflix and tvpn. Yes, we would love we decided to sit it out.

ESPN has remained in the mix for US broadcasting rights, though its bid is lower. Apparently ESPN's offer is in the $90.

Million per year range, which is still wild because this is the US broadcasting rights.

Yep.

And I believe in 2024 Formula 1 had around 1 million total viewers, 1.3.

Million race viewers on average. Per race.

Yep.

But Ben Thompson puts it in a different perspective. He says F1 on the other hand, has a meaningful audience versus MLS, which was averaging around 200,000 viewers per year on linear TV before the Apple deal and that wasn't growing. So this is six times as big as mls. Yeah, again, there's, I think there's more games than or more race, more games than races. So it's not exactly Apple to Apple. But every race but one has seen a year over year increase in viewership. So F1's getting more popular. A lot of that's driven by drive to survive. And this is the crazy thing, given when races are televised usually early Sunday morning and the fact that they aren't promoted by ESPN any meaningful sense. So it's not like you're getting the Pat McAfee show talking about, oh, you got to tune in. There's a ton of coverage on ESPN throughout the week. They just kind of show up Sunday morning and people turn on the TV and they schedule it. And so you can, I always like.

The timing because any, any parents out there, you know, you're certainly not sleeping in on the weekends. Kids wake up and I find it's, it's some nice background noise or viewing in those early hours for sure.

And so he says you can make the case that F1 makes its own audience, which by extension means they will be able to pull people to a streaming service. Basically, F1 fans are strong enough that they'll go search it out. And when I, when I was really getting into F1 after getting into Drive to Survive, I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to subscribe to F1, the app and like jump through all these on your phone. And it was, yeah, it's like as many hoops as ufc, but people still do it.

Yeah.

And there's still, there's still a big debate, but.

And I think Netflix had done the analysis and realized that all of the potential viewers of F1 were basically already subscribed to Netflix. And so it didn't, it was a more difficult kind of equation to make work than someone like an Apple TV potentially that, that could potentially drive new.

Someone called streaming Backwater or something like that in here. We'll dig into it. But somebody had some not nice things to say about, about Apple tv, although I'm a subscriber and I think it's nice. So he says, what makes this. Is Ben Thompson writing Astrotechy. What makes this all work is the fact that for F1 races, F1 races are at the bottom of the funnel in terms of fan engagement. F1, at least in the US has by and large grown its audience via Netflix's drive to survive. Netflix pays F1 a pittance for rights, apparently single digit millions for that. But it's okay for F1 because the way they ultimately make money is by Kurt converting Netflix viewers into race fans. So if you're F1, you see that as a marketing channel, honestly.

Yeah. And F1 has sponsors at the, at the sort of league level and also the individual teams, all of those sponsors are getting more viewership and engagement through F1. So it's sort of added value to them. And they don't have to pay. They're actually making money on.

I mean, I wonder if the sponsors, I wonder. I mean, of course the sponsorships are like such like 360 deals that it's like, you know, car livery and also a whole bunch of other, you know, advertising assets. But I wonder if they broke out, okay, how much lift, how much benefit, how many impressions are we getting from Drive to Survive? Would that be when you total up all the, all the value add to all the different advertisers from being in Drive to Survive and being seen by people on Netflix, how much would would that be more than the couple million dollars that Netflix pays for the, for the rights? It might be, it might be like there's a lot of people that, that see ads that are for specific F1.

Sponsorship Aramco like hundreds of times during Drive to Survive. Drive to Survive, exactly.

Yeah. It's like pretty valuable ad space. So interesting deal that kind of works both ways and everyone makes money anyway. Making that model work, however, means actually monetizing the races, which means that it actually, it's actually quite logical to go with the company willing to pay 30 to 60 million dollars more for those rights. You have to capture value somewhere in the funnel. Moreover, you can make the case that many F1 fans aren't necessarily ESPN subscribers. And this is, this is where it gets interesting because the cable bundle is shrinking and the, the F1 did this global fan survey. So it's their data. So Ben Thompson's kind of taking it with a grain of salt. But this is from the F1 Global Fan Survey. They, they conducted a study every four years to track how fan engagement is evolving across the Sport. They got 100,000 responses from self identified highly engaged fans in 186 countries. That's, that's basically all of them. The findings offer a detailed snapshot of the modern, modern fan mindset and show that Formula one is increasingly attracting new, younger and more female audience. With growth in markets such as the United States, Gen Z is helping shape the rhythm of modern, of the modern fandom engaging with the sport more frequently. And on a deeper emotional level, female fans now account for three in four new fans.

Interesting.

I would not have predicted that. That's very, very interesting.

Well, the drivers are often Chads.

That's what's driving it.

That could be part of the factor.

Yeah. It's also interesting that there are no female drivers on the grid right now. There was Danica Patrick in the NASCAR series for a while, but somehow it's breaking through. Maybe it's through Drive to Survive being more accessible on Netflix. More storylines pulling people in and they're just going down that funnel. I don't know.

Well, there's also the WAG industrial complex surrounding F1 that is aspirational lifestyle.

Maybe they should do a spin off of Drive to Survive. Don't they do that with NBA? Isn't there a show about like WAGs or something like that? Maybe that's kind of informally what the Housewives series is, right? Maybe they should do that. With the largest country share of respondents, you fans in the US Consider continue to stand out for their growth, youth and digital fluency. They over index on content, engagement, sponsor responsiveness and daily touch points, signaling a market where fandom is evolving rapidly and is commercially.

Saudi Aramco is Like why we seem to be getting a lot of female zoomers, zoomers buying oil following our content on Instagram. They seem to be really into this. What's happening?

Maybe, I don't know. So basically Ben Thompson's conclusion from this survey is, what do you, what are you talking about when you're talking about a younger, more female focused audience? Those don't sound like ESPN subscribers. Those actually sound like Apple TV subscribers or potential Apple TV subscribers, certainly cord cutters, certainly people who are not going to buy a big cable package and get on ESPN2 and red zone and all of that stuff. That's typically the Gen X male, the maybe older millennial male that probably dominates the ESPN audience. And so, yeah, that's really interesting.

Apple kind of has an edge where they can build out a service for some of these more lifestyle oriented sports, these alternative. You know, you could imagine them doing, doing things in tennis over time because maybe that's a different audience than like the hardcore ESPN Red Zone subscriber.

Yeah, yeah. So he says, I could definitely envision a scenario where F1 not only doesn't suffer from being on a streaming service instead of espn, but it actually grows further. So this is an interesting bull case given Apple TV's lower price point relative to a standalone ESPN streaming service, much less a cable bundle. What is clear is that this deal certainly makes a lot of sense for Apple than the MLS deal did. If the company can capture all 1.3 million of those current viewers and they are incremental to current Apple TV subscribers, then the company will break even on this deal. Those are very generous assumptions, of course, but not nearly as generous as whatever assumptions drove the company to spend double the money on a sport no one watches, which is mls. So he's, he's taking shots at mls because there was an interesting quote in here from, from something else. What was this? It was from the Athletic again, talking about the North American Soccer League general managers. One common theme from general managers, the Apple deal, which is Apple's deal to air mls, is proving to be too much of a barrier for new fans.

Wait, they want the content to be completely free?

New fans just don't want it on Apple, apparently. Or the GMs don't want to be limited to the Apple audience. Apparently they want to be on ESPN or something.

Oh, okay.

Apparently so the GMs say, hey, if we want this to grow, we're the general managers of a bunch of different MLS teams. If we want to grow soccer in America and grow mls, change the format, change the salary.

Why don't they just pivot to football or basketball or baseball?

Yeah. What's wrong with just throwing around a pigskin? Yeah, change the format. Just turn it into American football.

I have to say a football is one of the best things you can buy under 50 bucks. Period. Period.

For sure.

That's non food. I mean the value you can get out of a pig skin is absolutely insane. The return on pigskin.

Yeah, it's fantastic. He says allow us to bring more attractive players. I didn't realize that MLS had a salary cap because I thought they were signing massive deals with these legacy famous.

Who is the player that went to.

Galaxy Messi or something?

Yeah.

Is that right? I don't know. Well, this is, this is bad because I don't know. There was someone who went to Miami, there was someone who went to the LA Galaxy. I don't know. Anyway, this GM says yeah, so.

So Messi plays for Inter Miami.

Yep. And it's a huge deal. It's like a researcher money. Remember that's what we were, how we were comping it. And the GM said, but they also have to end the deal with Apple. It's bad for fans.

David Beckham played in the mls. You have Zlatan Ibrahimovic as well. So they'll pull in some superstars, but usually towards the end of their runs.

So the GMs of the North American Soccer League, MLS, they say, I think we have to be on more linear outlets. We have to be on abc, NBC, Fox or more regularly. More regularly. Because I think a lot of people, a lot more people watched our games when we were in that space. I think Apple and the whole streaming thing is really innovate, innovative. But it's probably where things, and it's probably where things will be going. But I don't think MLS is the leader of that. I don't think enough has been put behind the subscription model. You're in a different league when you're, you're a different league when you're a subscription based league. I don't think the effort has been put in like it should be. It's like selling tickets. You need people out there selling. You can't just hope that people are going to sign up. And so yeah, interesting. The risk for F1 is that the series, which has massive growth, is going to conscript itself to the streaming backwaters, says Ben Thompson, just so it can make a few more bucks in the meantime. So that's the risk is that F1 goes and you know, gets stuck in subscription Land and no one can just turn on the TV and see it. And the 1.3 million fans don't actually migrate over and they say I'll just catch the highlights or I'll just watch Drive to Survive on Netflix instead of going setting up a new subscription. But if it's truly F1 truly does have a younger audience, does have a more female audience, they might be. That might be what gets them to turn on Apple TV streaming at least.

Yeah. Anyway, I still get so confused by all the different cable plans. I watch F1 on YouTube TV, which I guess is through ESPN. I guess that will go away. And then I would have to subscribe to Apple so they would get a net new. I actually don't subscribe to Apple tv.

You don't? Okay.

Not, not for any reason. I just, I never want to. I never want to go through the ha. Never want to go through the. I just don't watch a lot of television.

Yeah.

And I don't want to go through the hassle of like signing up for a new service.

Yeah. I feel like recently I got a new iPhone and it just like came with Apple TV plus and I just like clicked the button and didn't unsubscribe and then I've been on that for a while. So let's go over to Ben Thompson talking about Google earnings. He has said I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google. And we asked him about this when he came on the show. My question was like, is there a world where, where revenue and profit from. From generative AI products is actually not as counter positioned against Google in the sense that like if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the Chat GPT, they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini. That's monetizing even better. And was it a question of them just like not being able to take that pill or was it more about like the risk and priority nervousness?

The thing that Ben said that stood out to most, the most to me. And I'll probably butcher it a little bit. But effectively he was saying like it's really hard for companies to change who they are. When you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful that is so deeply aligned with AI. It's like, what does ChatGPT do? Like organizes information, it makes it useful. Right. Agents like ChatGPT agent is making that information useful. And so it just feels like again like generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission and so it's easy to see them continuing to win here.

Yeah, I think the problem is disruption comes when you create a product that is not as good but the financials are structurally different. So the idea of like if AI disrupts like a law firm, you look at this product or even like I don't know what's the classic example of disruption that people go through, I don't know. But like this idea of like yeah.

The big thing was innovators dilemma.

Yeah, in the innovators dilemma the example is like a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well. And so it's like unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product. But then over time it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the Google search bar to just be like this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift and they would have been like I want to go back and ripping that band aid off to the tune of what, $300 billion a year in search revenue would be really painful. So they had to take a more, a more iterative like step wise improvements. But it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says once again and however I have to come to Google's defense, all available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well indeed. I would go further. You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going hard. And so they flipped the switch on Cloud. Their infrastructure spending is through the roof as we mentioned. So after the Q4 2024 earnings and their announcement they were spending 75 billion on capex. Then Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed. But this was because they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained. So they missed on top line like they didn't bring in enough revenue but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand. They had pricing power and they could say no, we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs. They want our infrastructure so we don't need to, we don't need to sell them at a discount. And so their margins were really good. And what that revealed was that they were, they were capacity constrained. And that justifies the bigger capex spend that they're going into Right now and.

Google is still the poly market. Which company has the best AI model? End of 2025. So December 31, there's been one and a half million in volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of being at the top of LM arena at the end of the year.

Yeah, this is such a crazy supply constraint metric. So the Google CFO Anat Ashkenazi said on the earnings call in cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog. Guess how big their cloud backlog is? Just the demand for Google Cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers. But if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this $106 billion that is so much money.

Great. Honestly. Honestly, more businesses should try try to put themselves in the position.

Yes.

160 billion of demand.

106 billion.

We try to not give business advice. So yeah, well it's just like every business is different, every founder is different. But in general, if you can develop a demand, it's a good call for.

Like a YC company. Like if you go on stage at demo day and you say like, yeah, we have Lois and we have some.

Demand backlog, we have $106 of demand that we're unable to. There was actually a YC company yesterday or two days ago that was getting a little bit roasted because they were like, they launched a product and they were like, wow, today was insane. Our servers went down immediately and you could see the user chart and they had like 250 users. And so people are like, wait, like your entire product went down on 250 users?

That's ridiculous.

So anyways. But happy for their success.

Yeah. Well, let me tell you about figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free@figma.com and so this. So he keeps going into the CapEx.

Wait, before we do that, Figma make is generally available today. You can go to figma.com make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma make make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon.

Very excited for that. We will announce that soon. So from the earnings call, given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest 85 billion in capex from 2025, up from a previous estimate of 75 billion. Just a 10 billion incremental investment. Absolutely massive. Our updated outlook reflects additional Investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers, and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction, primarily to. To meet cloud customer demand. The challenge, Pichai cautioned in an answer to an analyst question, is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course the, the risk is like you overbuild. But there's certainly no evidence of that given the massive backlog. So the other interesting thing that, that Ben dips his toe into. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Tuckery famously does not get caught up in trade deals and non CEO employee shifts.

They're below his line.

They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google. So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's throwing in a delve. You know, it's not written by a.

It's been.

But he's baiting. Yeah, he's baiting for sure.

He's like, how dare you accuse. He's like, you can go back and look at how many times I've used a million.

I created Dell. I coined that word.

There's, there's a, there's a, there's a YC company called Dell.

Oh yeah.

As well. It's doing well.

So he says. But it's interesting that the Google that the earnings call was Ruth Peratt's Last1 as CFO Porat earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google spending under control in the late 2000 and tens. But what seems clear in retrospect that is that 52.5 billion that Google spent on CapEx in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into an AI boom.

You could lose your job over the.

That maybe Ruth Perrott was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible. Fortunately, we don't lose a job.

There's nothing wrong with calling top signals.

There's something wrong with water if you're.

Calling specifically calling the top.

Yes.

Trying to identify top signals is more of a metagame.

Yeah, yeah. So basically Google. It does seem like Google under. Invested in CAP CAPEX in 2024 based on demand wound up with that massive backlog missed on Top Line. Couldn't. Couldn't make enough money, couldn't generate enough revenue, had higher margins. That's great. But, but didn't deliver on the cloud side on, on the actual scale. So Ashkenazi's Ashkenazi's calls, meanwhile, have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained. They don't have enough servers, and the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its capex plans. Let's go says this, in my opinion, is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to this. The disruption lens which we were kind of noodling on earlier. The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to flow is from this is the CFO office. Like the CFO should be resistant to disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disruptive, the CFO is saying, we have a good business, let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing. Let's not worry about it, let's not see cfo Exactly.

Are you guys seeing the numbers?

Yeah, but like for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash high dividends for decades even after the disruption happened. The next the iPhone comes out and in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividends, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity. Maybe like they have to become a new product development company. And it would be very, very difficult usually.

But BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2005, 1.9 billion. They completely Blackberries annual revenue in 2024, 580 million.

It's a cyber security company now. They bought a couple cybersecurity assets sets while they were valuable, while they were like, you know, while the stock was up. And then eventually they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cybersecurity company because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerries were sold into like large enterprises as, you know, work phones. Very few people had blackberries as like everyday phones, but so they had all those. They had like solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset and were able to continue the business, even though obviously it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say there's a. There does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI, particularly for a segment Google cloud that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business. What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. Google is the only company we talked about the TPU thing They're the only company with an at scale asic alternative to Nvidia's GPUs which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end. To the extent that cloud computer that.

Scale to a point where they they're going to be able to support SSI SSI which is crazy, not just their own needs.

And then, and then there's also a question.

The dynamic that's interesting is like OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure and as we covered earlier this week commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with with Oracle and their revenue today doesn't support that. Obviously their growth trajectory is absolutely insane. But OpenAI being in a position where they are competing head on with Google for this very very critical consumer use case search, knowledge retrieval and ultimately usefulness. It is a extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in.

Yeah, so the other hyperscalers are working on Asics that are alternative to Nvidia GPUs but they all seem to be following the similar path trying to get line time at TSMC not fully at scale. Then there's also the question and I think a lot of people's mind is like is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the Nvidia GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem or even the the Google TPU and semi analysis has a funny meme here, way down in the stack about the next generation of chips that were that have been pitched from startups like Etched and a few others. So Semianasis says although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's mostly just a marketing slogan. 90% of transformers flops are Japanese just GEMMs and 256 by 256 or 128 by 128 systolic arrays in TPU and in TPU Trainium are already optimized for these. Even modern GP GPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GEMMs. Even if you bake transformers into silicon aka just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells. That's the memory and you will still face the memory wall. Since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GPGPUs, TPUs and Trainium. And so the meme is 20 transformers are just 90% MATMULs. George Hotz had a similar analysis or take just saying that if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them. They're pretty efficient and most of the, most of the energy that goes in goes into these very, very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone something about the. This is from Martin Shkreli that Jane street, or was it, Was it Jane Street? One of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very basic matmul calculations on a GPU more efficiently and I guess kind of open sourced it or something or got out into the, into the research world. So. So it doesn't feel like at this moment I still think that there's an interesting bull case for the etch crew in some ways, in some niches or something, some specific models, but it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's going to come out and obviate the need for both Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs. And so Google's very well positioned as Ben Thompson is writing. So. So he says this should give them their position that they have an at scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia GPUs should give them a meaningful cost advantage. To that end, to the extent that cloud compute becomes commoditized, is the extent to which Google actually has a margin advantage. Because if all of the clouds are commoditized but all of them are on Nvidia and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin basically from their tpu, they should be in a video good spot. This is, to be sure, a bit weird. Peratt gained these plaudits, those plaudits, because there was so much waste in Google to cut, which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly in margins and search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural cost advantage, but here we are.

Sundar is going to tell every employee we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one. We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit.

Got to get fit and you got to get on vantage to automate compliance, manage risk, improve 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.

It was great talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog.

Boardroom General.

Boardroom general.

She put the KPIs in orbit.

She really has.

She really has. Did you see that reads.

Yeah. Chart she says. Andrew said Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard yeah. And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood like just out there, like that's what it is, putting in the work.

Just. Yeah, a couple percent here, couple percent here. Just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of business. So congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round and we will go back to Google. So more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI, along with Meta's spending on AI talent really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all. Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams. And critically, both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution, including search. Sometimes the empire strikes back. I love that. So there were other takes from, from search. You'll have to subscribe to sirtechery to get the full analysis. You gotta go and subscribe to sirtechery. If you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from from search is that there it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks and now the Chief Business Officer Philip Schindler is saying and, and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract our attractive ROI for our advertisers. We don't, we actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets, which is fair and good. But it's funny because Ben Thompson's like, but I to want, want that data. That would be helpful to me.

I mean when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important, don't worry about it.

But it does make sense. They're a huge business. They've moved on to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction.

Just look at the growth in tokens. Yeah, don't worry about anything else.

What he says is that there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clothes clicks. And that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10Q paid clicks, we're up 4% year on year. But a number of factors affecting this, these metrics from quarter to quarter, such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says. So Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said. I don't even think you pre read this, but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head.

Because this is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show. I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I think that I have an original thought. And you've already thought it.

Okay, so this is what he says. And it's literally I haven't read the article. The more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention. Which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clips, paid click pay clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%, but revenues up 12%. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie is incredible growing that fast. They're just getting like. It's basically like, you know, once Instagram Reels is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed. Right. And that's kind of. That seems like what they're doing and that's what's driving search revenue. Up 12%. AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the, the chief Business officer Philip Schindler at Google says basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all because people just click on a link.

That's what I said. Oftentimes the. If you're searching for information, you can have very low purchase intent, right?

Yeah.

Like how many times a day do I search for a specific fact?

Yep.

And never would have. You could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact.

Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a, that's not a purchase intent. If that comes from an AI overview or it comes from A you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like it would pull from Wikipedia or if you click on Wikipedia. None of that is making Google any money. So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer. And then Gemini is on absolute tear. Really remarkable. How many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has? These are maus, not daus on the.

Mobile app, web app, Gemini app combined.

I think this is probably across mobile web and desktop, but I would assume mobile 70 million 450 million big right.

And it doubles like I guess I get, I mean they kind of get the, it's kind of a cheat code because everybody already has a Google account. So they're like signed in.

Yep.

But in terms, I don't know, they're.

Monthly and what we know from semi analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much. But 450 million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's, if there's a world where Google can build a business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better, better products and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad free. If OpenAI and ChatGPT has a $200 tier that's ad free. And then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience but with ads for free like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on. That feels like something that could actually be pretty sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know, we'll have to see how it goes. But daily requests grew over 50% from Q1 to Q2 and I think everyone, everyone is pretty surprised by that. And I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the, the Gemini app when I went to go download it. The number of five star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. Okay. This is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared. 450 million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get VO3. I got the Gemini app and they were, they already know but I couldn't.

Gemini is Gemini frustrations default in Android yet?

I don't know. I imagine that it has to be be pre installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre installed? But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it because I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth, but maybe that might be an interesting thing. How many of them are pre installs, preloads. But even then you have to open it to become an MAU. But yeah, maybe they're testing. Maybe people will churn and go back to OpenAI and change.

Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time. That's getting phased out. Gemini?

Yep. Intel now expects to have 75,000 employees at year end, down from 116,500 in June of 2024. That's basically one year ago. That's a massive cut. Nvidia is on the other side of the trade. Nvidia CEO said they now have 42,000 employees yesterday, up from 36,000 in January of 2025. Massive shifts. It's crazy to think about the market cap per employee difference there. It's pretty remarkable. If you're cutting costs, you got to get on ramp. Time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. So the news is intel has a ramp problem. Yeah, they really should get on ramp. Lip Bhutan. I know you're listening. You should get on ramp. Lip Bhutan. So this is from the Wall Street Journal, the business and finance section. Intel is going to lay off 15% of their workforce. Chip giant stands at a strategic crossroads. The CEO warns no more blank checks. Intel detailed dramatic steps to revive its sagging fortunes, outlining layoffs for 15% of its workforce and scrapping plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chips. Facilities in Europe. Bearish for Europe. I didn't realize that was going on. The chip making giant said Thursday it would refocus its strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors and developing its advanced 14A technology to sell to large customers. It's like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna narrow down. We're just gonna do three incredibly difficult things we're gonna to compete in, in the most aggressive AI chip market where we're not just competing with Nvidia, but also the TPU from Google, all the upstarts, Grox, Cerebras, all these different companies. So we're going to like go from 0 to 1 there and then we're also going to turn around our, our personal computer processing market. Bold. Bold. Intel, which has long dominated the business of making chips for laptops and desktop computers, fell Far behind competitors like Nvidia, AMD and tsmc after it failed to anticipate the surge in demand for the powerful chips fueling the artificial intelligence boom. Lip Bhutan, the CEO, the new CEO of, of intel after Pat Gelsinger stepped down about a year ago, I believe said there are no more blank checks. He wrote in a memo. Every investment must make economic sense. Sense. Love to hear that. Exactly what you want to hear from.

Nominative determinism of Lip Bhutan. Hate to put you on the spot.

Hitting the beach getting a tan like that.

You know, I can see it, I can see it.

Maybe if, maybe if intel doesn't work out, he can get into cosmetics. It's like get a tan with this tanning oil. Get some lip balm. Lip balm.

Yeah, there's something, there's something called lip blushing. I think it's like a mild tattoo. So maybe if this whole semi thing doesn't work out, he could get into lip blushing. Franchise game.

Yep, I, I agree. Revenue in the June quarter was roughly flat at 12.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectations. The quarterly loss though widened to 2.9 billion for the quarter from a 1.6 billion loss in the year earlier period. The result results represent the company's sixth consecutive quarterly loss, extending its longest streak in 35 years. It's got to suck to be in a position where computing broadly, computers are doing incredibly cool things. AI is magic. We passed the Turing test and you're not a beneficiary, you're losing money and it's because of a bet on, you know, the server and these large scale CPUs and not getting into GPUs and then missing mobile. There's a lot, whole bunch of things that went into it. So sales in Intel's PC chip division, the company's largest segment, fell 3% from the year earlier period. I remember about a decade ago I built a new, you know, massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on it.

Intel was, you weren't, you weren't building it to as a gaming rig.

I did use it for a gaming rig.

That's John's vice. John's vice. He said there's market research.

I need to understand what the gaming market's going. I need to understand the future of VR.

To your credit, I think you beat your video game addiction.

I did in years. And so it's an interesting time for Intel. I have some more information here.

Do you remember six months ago there was the rumors floating around that Elon Musk was, was a Potential buyer was so long ago.

I was propagating those rumors.

And ultimately it feels like, you know, he. He got the. Got the fun experience of a turnaround at Twitter. Does he want to do that again?

Yep.

I don't know.

I mean, my take when. When he bought Twitter and turned it into X was that it was exciting. I thought that he could make it a lot better. He has in many ways, but made it a better product. We stream on it now, and it feels like it's still a vibrant community and there's a whole bunch of new features. Good stuff, bad stuff. But overall, I think he put the company back in startup mode. They're shipping very quickly. Interesting things are happening, and he's making plays in an interesting way that I like. But at the time, I was like, okay, $44 billion. There's something like $50 billion from the Chips act, maybe going to intel and foundries in America, run this back and marshal the same amount of capital, let him buy intel, turn that around. That feels like something that Elon would be uniquely equipped to turn around. It would put us on a very different path if he got into semiconductor manufacturing, but it would be a huge challenge, and maybe it wasn't as important to him. So I don't know.

But I mean, only a week ago, a. A small company called AOL aol.com was posting that. Is Elon Musk about to buy Intel? So this feels like very, you know, Dylan, Dylan Patel on January 17th saying Elon's jet is in Florida. Global Foundries jet is in Florida, Qualcomm's jet is in Florida. And. But ultimately a lot of people were in Florida at that time.

Well, if your jets flying around the world, you got to take your jet to a wander. Find your happy place.

Find your happy place.

Wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top of your cleaning, and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And so Dylan Patel, speaking of Dylan Patel, he actually hung out with Lip Bhutan at a conference and he has this hilarious story where he clearly wanted to meet Lip Bhutan and spend some time with him. And everyone's coming up to Lip Bhutan asking him what the future of intel is. And so he goes up and offers to make him tea and makes his tea for him. And they sit down, they have tea and they like. And I think Dylan Patel really understands, like, tea culture and knows what makes for a good cup of tea in the same way that someone like a coffee snob knows about good coffee. So they have tea and Dylan Patel is kind of picking his brain and it just feels like Louboutin's overall goal is just layoffs, reduce cost. Right. The ship refocus. And so what's interesting is that we talked to Ben Thompson and I wanted a clear, I wanted a clear narrative. I wanted something like, oh, it's obvious, just split the foundry and the design business. Split up intel into two companies and that will solve all the problems. But everyone seems to agree it's more complicated than that because part of Intel's foundry business is that they design their own chips. And so they are there both, they're both their customer and their supplier. And breaking those up might be more difficult. It's not a cure all, it's not a panacea. And so, so it is more complicated. So there's not a super clear path forward. It's a lot of hard decisions. It's a lot of cuts to employees and that's what we're seeing today with the 15% layoff. There will probably be more in the future as intel continues to downsize the workforce.

Really, really rough for morale knowing that the workforce will just be, you know, continue to get cut into, you know, like you said, probably not the last.

Yep. And so, so they are focusing on, the direct quote is refocus strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors and advancing the 14A technology. Now the problem is that intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis. This comes from semi analysis. So they have the Intel 3 node, the 18A and that goes up against the N5 N3 and two nodes from TSMC. And across the board intel is more expensive on a per wafer basis. So this is at their own fabs. They're trying to catch up, they're trying to create chips that are, that are as, as powerful. But the name of the game is always cost. Yep.

Yes. Semi analysis says the company has cost discipline in its DNA. Talking about tsmc intel, not necessarily this manifold. In many ways TSMC has more aggressive cost down targets and exercises its leverage on suppliers. It does not use the copy exact dogma that creates unnecessary overhead and resistance to improvements.

Hence intel is now moving to copy smart. Are you familiar with the copy exact strategy?

No.

So when intel built the original fabs, what they would do is they would build this. I mean it is a incredibly precise process. So you can think of lithography is basically etching. That's why that company, that semiconductor company is called etched because they, that you're etching grooves in a silicon wafer and that's where when you put electricity through it, it goes through a series of gates. And that's what a semiconductor is.

That's how you create magic.

That's how you create magic. Yes, it's the, it's the spice. The, the dune analogy is the most important one here. But basically you have to etch these grooves at as small as its smallest scale as possible. So 3 nanometers silicon atoms are 1 nanometer. So you in theory cannot go smaller than 1 nanometer chip because the space between the atoms is only 1 atom or 1 nanometer. So this is incredibly small. And so you basically have to shine like a laser or some sort of light or some sort of radiation to actually etch into the silicon to create the grooves. Basically this is very, very high level abstraction. But in order to do that they get these, they get these mirrors from a company called Trump, which is unrelated to Donald Trump, but and Zeiss makes these lenses and they focus all this stuff and this liquid tin gets like, you know, dispersed and then they bounce light off of it. It's this crazy process. The mirrors are so flat that if you, if you, if you, if you, if you like blew them up to like the size of the moon, you would still would not be able to see a groove even this high. It's like the most precise process in every single.

By the way, intel missed opportunity to create the tpu. Google's obviously owning that right now. But if intel had said we're making Trump processes, I mean they're already public.

Yeah, I mean, you know, what's the chip that's going to be in the Trump phone? The golden, the golden American made phone should be an intel processor.

Really should.

Who knows?

American made.

So the, the, the semiconductor manufacturing process is so precise that apparently a tsmc, like if there's an earthquake or anything like that, everyone, they don't even need to send out a notification. Everyone just knows, go to TSMC to just deal with everything. Because the slight change in like the road noise or slight could like miscalibrate the machines. If it like rains too much much, there will be extra salt in the parking lot that will get tracked in. Even when they go into the clean room, it'll get tracked in and the small sodium particles will throw off the yield. So all of this is about yield. They'll make a ton of these wafers. There'll be small imperfections. It ruins the whole wafer that's been A big problem with the wafer scale.

Which is why TSMC getting any yield in Arizona, despite setting up, you know, this new facility so recently, was very unexpected.

It's a miracle. Yes. And so the copy exact dogma was it is so hard to build a fab that manufactures semiconductors reliably at good yields, that when intel figured out how to make one fab, they said, let's make a second and let's change nothing. And so they build a building, they build the exact same foundation. They build the. The bathrooms would be in the same place if there was two urinals in one bathroom. Like there would be two urinals at the other one. Like everything was exactly the same copy.

Basically. Extremely superstitious.

Yeah, basically because they were like anything that changes, like if the water flows through the pipe in the bathroom at the wrong flow rate, it might throw off the amount of molecules in the air over here and the atoms over. It's like, it's crazy precise. Right. And so that worked for intel, but it had this problem which was that every once in a while you do want to make an iterative change when you're building the next fab and you do want to increase yield by maybe not copying exactly and doing things slightly differently. And so now intel is pivoting to copy smart, only copy what's actually improvement instead of just copying everything. Exactly. And TSMC has never held themselves to that same standard. And so customers are likely baselining the 18a intel node against any 3, 3 nanometer nodes TSMC given the characteristics. But intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer. And so they would need lower margins if they want to compete. And so you can think about intel as having kind of like three feature products that people are focused on. It's Intel 3, which is their 5 nanometer class. That one is fabbed in Arizona and Oregon and Ireland. These are at intel facilities. Intel also has the Intel 18A which is at the same sites plus Ohio. And this is competitive with the 2 nanometer class from TSMC. And then they have the 14A which is supposed to be 1.4 nanometer or below. This is the most cutting edge extreme ultraviolet, really, really aggressive lithography. And, and this is also made in America, which is great. And these will compete with Nvidia's Blackwells and then the next generation Blackwell successor. And so they're going head to head. But the real question will be, can they go head to head and still squeeze out a decent margin because the in the Nvidia TSMC partnership is really, really strong. They both have good margins and they've really optimized for cost and reliability and yield. And intel has kind of lost a step there and so they will probably need to get on Linear to make this work. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. So Lip Bhutan, if you need an intro to the folks over at Linear.

Reach out, we'll make it happen.

Reach out and and we'll figure it out.

So intel is of course down almost 10% today. Market is not loving much of anything happening over there right now.

Yep. So semi analysis continues saying intel, the home of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of course worked at intel and coined Moore's Law, the idea that the number of transistors will double every few years on a silicon chip, allowing for more compute power basically at the same price. They're evaluating if it will continue at the leading edge. This is what moves the stock in my opinion more than the 15% layoff. The layoff seems like reasonable downsizing, but deciding hey, we're not even going to compete on the most advanced semiconductors. Which is what Elon, Google, Anthropic Sam Altman Every single company is like give me all of the best and give me hundreds of thousands, thousands of the best. The rest of the stuff is like okay, I'll go to anyone because I need a, you know, wi fi chip in my toaster. So the quote from the 10q from Intel's 10q is however, we are unable to secure a significant external if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet the important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading edge nodes on a go forward basis. In such event we may pause or discontinue our Pursuit of Intel 14a and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects. Just and semi analysis says just like that we could be talking about a TSMC monopoly and the death of American made semiconductors forever. Very dark. Up next we have Casey neistat recently.

The YouTuber the creator.

He's our retro now working on the Chromatic which we've been playing in the studio working on the M64. How you doing Casey?

There he is.

Gentlemen, good to see you.

Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? How did the Are those the nothing year One. Give us a little review.

Oh, yeah, these are fantastic. I actually had to take them off because the noise canceling on these is. It's. It's like, too good. And I'm at home right now, and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. But, yeah, these things are fantastic.

Yeah. We had Carl pay on the show a week ago, and he put them down, and I was like. I was too afraid to ask, like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you gonna leave those for me? I kind of want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick them up.

You know what it is? I'm not enough of an audiophile to know what if something sounds good or not? Like, it's either good or it's not good. But physical switches, like buttons you can touch. Yeah, I really like. And the. Like, the apple. I don't know what they're called. What are their AirPods?

AirPod Maxes. AirPod Maxes.

There's no on off switch.

Yeah, there's that digital crown.

I need an on off switch, and you have that.

I like the are you big teenage engineering guy. It feels like kind of like that. That they're almost coining, like, a trend that's, like, becoming more mainstream now.

Teenage Engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously, even though I have no idea how to use any of them.

The same thing happened to me. I bought the little keyboard. I was like, I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song.

I use it.

I love it. It's amazing. It's so beautiful.

Someone that cares that much about the craft, I want to be a part of that.

Support them unconditionally. Yeah. So tell me about mod retro. How'd that come together? What is the news in your world?

You know, the mod retro thing is really funny because my video says all this, but, like, I'm a big retro gamer. I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but it doesn't work out when you got away from kids.

No, you're not being guilty. Every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty Duty, you know, getting on rust. Getting on rust with your boys.

Yeah.

So close to that W. And then the door comes flying open, the children come running in. It's challenging. But I'm 44, so, like, apex of video games for me was, like, 1989, I think, getting a Game Boy. The first year, they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And, like, you guys are younger than me, but before that, all we had were those, like, like, LED LCD games that were, like, really janky, like the Tiger games, and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and, like, saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, holy, this is such a moment. And then Nintendo 64 came out when I was. I was in, like, just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like, the regular bus, and then drive two towns across and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario 64. When that thing came out, I think it was in 94. So I was 12 or 13 years old. So I love that stuff. And Mod Retro, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand because you can get those Chinese ones off of Amazon for 50 bucks. And a friend of mine was like, like, no, this is great. They're doing great things. Do you want to talk to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to. And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like, by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like. I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who. Who is the CEO of Mod Retro and understand the vision for the company, I was just so, like, overwhelmed. I was like, this is the most, like, beautiful vision ever. I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me. But the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them, what I understood the company was. And they're like, that's it. That's what we want to say. And I was like, all right, give me a job. And my job will be to figure out how to communicate that. And we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not going to pay you. And I was like, great. I'll take a business card. It's been great working with it. I also. I'm an investor in Mod Retro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding, But, I mean, that's not the. That's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from, for me.

Yeah. So many places we can go with this. This is fantastic. What? Yeah. Do you think that there's a world. I mean, I love the handheld gaming stuff. My experience having kids was I stopped playing console games. The N64 was actually my first console ever. And but once I started kids, Mario 64 for sure, Goldeneye was big, big head, Golden Gun, you got to do that. And then a couple other Donkey Kong and was never really into the Mario Kart racers. But then Smash Brothers kind of took over and that was the real competition with everyone eventually.

I think what, I think what's exciting to me is like building new consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now. I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up and when Mod Retro came out, I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked. And that was like such an amazing moment for me because like when like I haven't, I've got old iPhones, phones lying around. I've never been like one, I've never been like, oh, I should turn that on. It's going to be fun, right? Because it's like, it's not evergreen. It was of the moment and you just move on. And so I think if Mod Retro can do anything, which is like make consumer hardware which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that, yeah, you're going to get your Mod retro or your M64, you know, this year and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years and like, you know, bridge generations.

Yeah, you know, it's, I think there's, there's, it's easy to sort of shit on planned obsolescence because it is real. I think of that like we woke up, my house woke up this morning at 7:30am because the refrigerator repairman finally showed up and was banging on our door at 7:30 in the morning. The dog was freaking out because our two year old refrigerator doesn't work. And this is a refrigerator that has WI fi.

There we go. Let's give it up for WI Fi.

Everybody's always, it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

And when I think about that, it's like the refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like it just worked. It worked forever. But in order to keep selling shit, you have to keep coming out with new things. And I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like new phones that come out. Every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's maybe a reason for that. But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young, I think we lose some great things. And, you know, my understanding of Mod Retro, at least what I want it to be, and I think what Palmer and what Torin also want it to be, is like, let's identify consumer electronics that people just love. Like, had an unbelievable relationship where they really like the love I had for my Gameboy. I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy. And let's bring them back and let's do them justice. Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was, we don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like, the last one that ever needs to be built. And that's the vision with M64 as well. Like, you can get emulators that kind of. They kind of work. But let's. Let's build the thing that you and I had, John, when we were kids, and let's have it last forever. And I just think there's so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And Mod Retro's tiny, just a couple people working out of a small office. But the list of products that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have, is endless. And that's a really exciting thing to take on.

It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products and you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product. Otherwise, what do you. It's not to say that Mod Retro couldn't one day create. Create totally novel products, but it is like an interesting constraint and challenge, and you actually have to. It's really. In some ways, it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build, but in other ways, it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form and still, like, you need to make, should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?

Yeah, you know, like one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this. I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen Match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high pixel density screens on them. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate. And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it. Real psychopaths on Twitter have done this super zoom into a pixel and you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen. And Torin and Palmer's like, religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it was actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there.

Yeah. I remember Palmer saying something about, like, a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform at the last second. But it's like this bizarre, bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel, I feel like. And it feels like something that's just, like, been lost in this. Like, everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture. And it feels like, I. I don't know, like, it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario's one pixel too low when I do the jump, like, the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something. It's hard to put an exact, like, quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right?

That is the gamble that is the company. Palmer said that in my video, but he's like, you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but. But weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like, there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel? And if you're one of those people, totally cool, you're. Well, there's plenty of products in the market for you. But if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much you want to have it, then you know there's a place in this world for companies like Mod Retro.

Yeah. What do you think about the temptation to just make one small change? The Chromatic has a USB C port on it. That's a huge upgrade. But you could easily turn this into. Well we have the technology to make the M64 handheld and then you're in Switch territory and all of a sudden it's a completely different product. Right.

Look that's ever present and that's the problem with sort of limitless. Like when Nintendo was building this, what was for almost 40 years ago, 35 years ago now, they were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do. Like when you think about the Sega game gear, I don't know if you ever had one of those great product this big but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it and it took six AA batteries instead of four like the Game Boy. But the battery life on it was like 40 minutes.

Yeah. Do you remember the N64 like expansion pack that you put in to like double the memory? That was.

Yeah, dude, I remember that one about the Rock Rumble pack. That Rumble Starfox that was like the greatest innovation ever exploded when the controller shook.

Yeah, dude. These add ons because like they couldn't bake it all into the first product.

And that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do.

Totally.

And when you look at like, you know, I don't know what Samsung announced Last week at 2 weeks ago @ unpacked and you're looking at what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper, you realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction, but there's kind of no limits and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago. The problem is like where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront.

Yeah. What can you teach me about the lore of in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool new music video and it had this fisheye lens and this grain and I was kind of digging in. It seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. This feels like something that I was looking like maybe I could buy one on ebay. But it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it. But then of course you always have like oh, you could just Throw the filter on there in premiere or whatever. But what are some of the iconic video cameras or just, like, creative tools that might be worth revisiting at some point?

It's such an interesting examination, and your question's great because my family and I are out. We're in Massachusetts for summer vacation, and there's a lot of kids around. Like, we went and got ice cream last night. A lot of teenagers around, and a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies, and the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies, and they're carrying the point and shoots that we had in, like, the 2010s, like, before your phone camera was good enough, they all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one, and every one of these kids has it. And when I ask them, because I'm curious, why do you carry that? They're like, I love the way it looks. And I think we've reached this point. Like, iPhone, cell phone photography, it all looks so perfect in a way that it almost becomes artificial. Like, I think the iPhone5 was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, just sort of took a picture. And then after that, every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you.

You.

And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic.

It's like, you look at it, you're at a store looking at a picture. You know, a camera from a Picture from. From 2010 or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like, you're at. You're at the grocery store, and there's the organic apples, and they look good, but, like, they're a little fucked up. And, you know, they may be like, whatever part of it's kind of rotten. And then you look over and you see the perfect apple. And, like, intuitively, you know that you're like, it's a little bit too good to be true. That apple over there, you know, And I think. I don't know. The other thing that's real is removing the camera. Like, adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of this century. Right? In many ways. But now removing it. Removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation. Right. Going backwards. And I think that's the other Thing that kids like. And I found that's nice if I'm going to the beach with my kids. It's nice to be able to bring a camera but not have my phone.

Yeah. My daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to walk around with her friends without a parent. And she has a flip phone and she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I have this discussion and the reason why we said no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like it introduces a new level of sort of attention why you're in purpose. And the reason why I want her to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us. No other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration in the way that you're trying to get away from that. But I think just going back to the camera things is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to. Quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with the aesthetic that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off of those old point and shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fish IDV look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When we see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the 80s or the 90s. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board, this like crispy flat 4k phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that, that has some sense of identity attached to it. And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that's that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue.

Yeah, it's this generation's vinyl.

Yeah. I've joked that I want to film. I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something. Just spend a fortune developing film.

What other, what other, what other consumer tech categories are you excited about? We're having, we're having the festival founder of Wave on and I and I in 20 minutes. And they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that will just live stream constantly.

Do you have a, do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views?

I mean, I think everybody, people had a viscerally negative Reaction to it, that's.

My take on it as well. And it makes me think, you know, my software development company, Beam, my startup, we started that company in 2014. And a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass. And we actually, you know, we rewrote the code, we rewrote the software that Google Glass ran. So it had a singular function which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed. That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it and they showed us what Google Glass 2 was going to look like and we're like, fuck, yeah. We started raising money based on that. And then a week later they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program. And we, we backed off. We're like, we'll just do it on the phone now. But I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to live stream all the time, or the negative reaction that we're seeing based on, On Waves video they posted yesterday, I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in the hardware startup world. I think of the humane AI pin. You know, a really good friend of mine worked for, for humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah, Sam, which parenthetically you joke about. Panavision for a podcast Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can be live streamed from vhs.

That's amazing.

But Sam would be around.

We tried to, I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project and I was like, he's way too hot.

He's way too hot.

Ye.

He's got to be, he's got to be solo.

He's way too big of a deal. Sam's the best. But when I be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him. And I think, like, that's what I mean by social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here, but if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, your uneasiness about that. And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming or at least have the capability of live streaming, the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple Vision Pro, which blew my mind when I got that thing. I made the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used. But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them and my wife is like, casey, take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids. And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people.

Yeah.

And I was like, how did they not see that? And so I think about that because, like, we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like, we're used to this. This is not okay. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which.

Is, well, the crazy. So. So Amazon acquired a company, it got announced this week called B, which is a brace. After. After all, everything they face with Siri, Siri's listening to me. The B band just listens to you all day long. Every single conversation.

Everything.

Everything.

And. And I.

And.

And it's cool. I think all new tech, for the most part, is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a bee bracelet? Are we gonna allow people to wear bee bands?

This might be a bee free zone.

This might be a bee free zone.

You know, I'm not gonna have any friends that wear bees. I don't have any friends anyways. But if you have a bee, it just means, like, we can't hang out.

Yeah.

Because it makes. It makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument. It's like, get over it. Like, you fucking Luddite. Like, this is the direction everything's headed and you're being recorded all the time anyway.

Sure.

But in the interim, I do think, like, there is a. There's a learning curve. I think that met his decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray Bans. The most common sunglasses in the world was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like, there was no learning curve. There was no, like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it, they don't record. There's some degree. At least there's some.

That's important. My question. My question for the Wave founder in 20 minutes is, should your glasses be bright red and have, like, you know, a circle in the middle of Your head that's flashing that says, I'm recording.

Yeah. I mean, if you.

That people can.

Someone shows up with a TV camera. Like, I don't feel like, oh, this is in violation of my privacy. I'm like, I know exactly what's going on. The news is here, and if I step in front of the camera, I'm on the news. Like it. We have a social understanding of that.

And we still might not want to be around it. Yeah.

Actually, I'm going to turn around and walk the other way because I don't want to be seen on this camera or whatever. I don't know.

But there's an understanding there. Yeah. And look on WAVES website in the Q and A, there's a question like, is there an indicator light? And their answer is, yeah, but you can turn it off. And so, like, I don't know that I read that. And it makes me a little bit queasy as a guy who has a camera on him all the time. And so much of the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me. I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder, pointing a camera at someone, versus, like, you know, the glass hole movement of the, you know, Google Glass, which, like, by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you. I think it's going to be a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually, like, figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like.

Yeah. What do you think about, like, airplane demos? It feels like all. There's so much tech where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the. A lot of the.

The handheld, but it doesn't work when it's dark.

It's not too dark on planes. It does work very well on planes, but it's this like, weird niche use case that feels like killer application and then you actually get out into. Most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually.

And so, yeah, look, if that's the best you've got, like, I travel more than most people I know, and we're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe. Maybe 10 hours a month. Month tops.

Yeah.

So, you know, 4,000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane. Which, by the way, doesn't work for me on an airplane. Like, I didn't like it at all on an airplane.

Okay.

No, it worked like. No. When you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the idea that, like, I'm just gonna go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me, you know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have flown Spirit, and I know it goes on. On those flights. Like, it just. Again, like, you live to tell the.

Yeah.

The social implication of it. You know, I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your. About your hardware.

Yeah.

How do you spot talent? You discovered Sam? Someone in the chat was asking.

That's a great question.

Have a framework for it.

It's a difficult question, but, you know, it's the same. I approach it the same way that I approach investments. And it's seldom the work, and it's almost always the. The individual, you know, Like, I. I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work. That humane. He's brilliant. The work that he did at the Verge before that, he's brilliant with his own YouTube channel. You know, I've got a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter, who works in the building with me, but Hunter's a.

Hunter's a friend, and we invest together. So Hunter's.

Hunter's fantastic. And like, I don't know what Hunter does because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor. Like, the work is almost irrelevant. It's the individual. And I think it's like it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it. But when I see that in people, I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people. And when I look at the. And I look around at the friends of mine that I have some sort of professional relationship with, a professional admiration for. They all have that same. That sort of desire to see it through, whatever the it may be. So I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the product.

That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way. He says hello. Another question I have is we've been thinking about AI generated images, video, etc. Is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. You're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers in different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how that will play out if we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then these synthetic pros and cons. I've been thinking about in the context of, of, you know, an example is like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman. I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from. Because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, you know, and making, you know, these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you, you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because you can just shut the account down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think.

Yeah, okay. My cynical take on it, which is, which I believe is accurate, I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will, will be able to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while. It is a tidal wave. And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999, it was the first computer animated feature film and it was great. I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this onslaught of computer animated films. And I was like, you know what? The hand drawn stuff is better. I miss that. When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better. I like practical better. That's going to be the thing. And it's like, no, you're going to lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that. I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant of it. And old people like us might appreciate real human things and we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see hand drawn animation, they're like, what is this? They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter and that tidal wave is going to consume everything. And I think that we're, it's the progress that we've seen over the last couple of years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of, you know, the latest GROK and the latest GPT, you look at how smart these things are, you look at the sort of conversations you can have with any of these agents, and then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by, you know, Google's video or whichever, whichever AI you might be fond of. It's like they're just going to marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now we're going to start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is going to be so good. You know, like another example is like, we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI generated, but it's going to come out of nowhere. It's going to be like Gangnam Style, which, like, the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has. The first AI song that's going to be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan and esque song that comes from the soul. It's going to be something fun and outrageous and we're going to forgive that. AI made it. And then slowly it's going to start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium put on the humans that are able to sustain because of what they represent uniquely. Maybe another bad analogy is it's like, like I love Marvel movies. They're fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, like, you know, there's an argument that said it's like the kind of artistry that we saw in the the 70s or 80s, like the, the apex of cinema, where it comes from one. When you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of, you know, a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Marvel movies are something else. Yeah, they're great and we love them. We all show up to see them and we're okay with them that. And I think that's going to happen with AI but it's going to happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before. And it's going to be so good that we're willing to forgive it. And I think it's going to leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Heman will be one of them. I hope so. I'm a fan of his as well. But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly human, that distinctly represents something that I could never. When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI So the power law gets steeper. Yeah, absolutely.

Makes sense.

Well, that's like a five hour conversation, by the way.

Well, we'll have you back on again soon. And congrats on your new fake but very real role at Mod Retro.

Congrats.

I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys.

Yeah.

Have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon.

We'll talk soon.

Take care.

Have a good one. Bye.