YouTubers Win the Box Office, Salesforce on a Tear, Bernie Sanders: A.I. is a Public Resource | Adam Iscoe, Danial Jameel, Mike Schroepfer, Nico Ferreyra, Sue Khim, Bernie Su

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It's funny, we, we heard over and over and over— I'm not joking. Yeah, I know I get sarcastic a lot, uh, but we heard over and over and over that they're a nice palate cleanser. It's like turning the page, right, in between different topics. And, uh, we are excited, and we love these companies.

We want to help them grow. We've always been huge fans of the companies that we work with, so we're very excited to help have them back. Um, let's turn over to YouTube and Hollywood. Uh, breakout news, uh, in Hollywood. Uh, YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood. Feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood. And there's a bunch of crazy statistics, but, uh, 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally I mean, it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win-win here.

Yeah, not total disruption. Yeah, right.

No, no, no, collaboration, actual collaboration. And so, I mean, we all know Hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges. I was just listing them off, off the top of my head.

What's this?

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Couldn't say it better myself.

I was—

Ryan says calling in to the waiting room and not the Restream waiting room was a crime.

Yes, that's true. So I was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades. And it's so bad. It's piracy. Like you used to just be able to— for all through like the mid-2000s, people would just download movies. Then better TV shows. Like TV just got so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood, because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic, you had to go to the theater. And then Game of Thrones came out, and all of a sudden TV— we went through like the era of great TV. Streaming, obviously that moved a lot of people out of theaters. COVID, that shut down the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the double strike, writers' and directors' strike, and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. There was competition from other production markets, lower cost. And that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood physical place.

Yeah, meanwhile streaming just created such a massive boom in spending on like a bunch of random projects, not necessarily like, you know, blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content and there was a lot of competition.

Yeah, and so throughout all of that, there was sort of a silver lining. I mean, the streaming thing is a big one of that, that there were jobs and projects that were getting greenlit on streaming platforms, but also just the creator economy. Like, even though the number— I was looking at the number of, like, shoot traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood. It's fallen off a cliff post-COVID, never fully recovered. But the number of people working in front of the camera, behind the camera, around the camera, broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy boom. And so this was always unsatisfying to cinephiles, though. Because no matter how viral a TikTok goes or no matter how much money MrBeast or some other creator like makes, it never feels as culturally important as The Godfather or some other, or the Titanic or some movie that everyone comes together, everyone has the shared cultural experience around. We were all in these like little bit of these like isolated niches and, oh yeah, I'm really into this creator. But anytime I try and bring it up to anyone, they don't know what I'm talking about.

Yeah, our shared, our moment is I see a meme starting to grow. Yeah. And I tell you, I make the call to you. Yeah, yeah. And then we just kind of bet on it, basically.

But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your little nephew or your— Sure. You know, uncle, and they both have an understanding, like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during The Godfather era, like they did during Star Wars, which is at the center of this story because The Mandalorian and Grogu is the latest Star Wars project, and it's actually been declining in the box office. It's been eclipsed, and there's been 3 movies that have been really, really breakout performances. So also, the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029, this whole trend is going to be in full force. So look at the stats. So Kane Parsons' Backrooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. Budget reportedly. Uh, Cory Barker's Obsession climbed, uh, is climbing in his third weekend and hit $104 million, $104.7 million domestic, becoming Focus Features' highest-grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around $1 million. That seems—

and right now on X, every single day, yeah, there's a post that goes viral about Obsession's return on their budget. Yeah, they're like, this million-dollar film.

Yeah.—

you know, it's just happening over and over and over.

Yeah.

And so, like, the business story to me is, like, way more— I mean, is everything.

Definitely. Definitely. And then we also talked about this earlier, and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself. $3 million production budget, reportedly, and opened to $18.2 million domestically before grossing $41.1 million domestic. 1.2 million worldwide, huge return on investment. And so, it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. But that's not exactly— it's not really that clean and there's a bunch of counterexamples. So, are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel.

Oh, is that like a toy unboxing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge, huge channel. And they They actually made Ryan's World: The Movie Titan Universe Adventure, but it grossed only $624,000 on something like a $10 million budget. And so, he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. And I think with someone like Ryan Young—

Was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet and just go down to the movie theater? 'Cause that's part of the issue with— with these channels and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a disconnect between the audience and who the actual buyer is, the person that controls purchasing power in the household. So you might have like an 8-year-old kid who loves these videos, but anytime they actually want to act on the content, they have to—

There's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though. You see the advertisements of the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy.

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Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Thank you everybody. Okay, so what is different about Backrooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung is that the filmmakers had, they'd shown, they didn't just have huge audiences. Like some of these, Markiplier is a truly large creator, but the folks behind Backrooms and Obsession, are in like the single-digit millions. Alone, if they didn't have the creativity, if they didn't have the risk-taking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of draw attention in theaters, I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over. Like the conversion rates just don't match up. Because if you're on 1 million subscribers and you did $100 million in box office, the math just doesn't match up. Did all of your subscribers go see it 5 times and pay $20 each time? No way. Like, that's not what happened. So, this— like, the idea of like this creativity, risk-taking, new IP, this is like at the core of Hollywood successes. I was reading The Hollywood Reporter, they were saying like, "This harkens back to like the 1970s, George Lucas's first film." Ben Thompson has a great analysis that we can read through. But these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans. They do have big audiences, but they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. So, Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called "That's a Bad Idea" where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Backrooms has a similar story. Kane Parsons, who goes by Kane Pixels, produced his original series, The Backrooms, in Blender and After Effects. And the internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork, and we can go into some of the lore of Backrooms. It's a very fascinating story. It all started with like a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time. And that picture just went viral and went and just like kept building lore. And became one of these like creepypastas and then eventually, you know, turned into his YouTube series which turned into this film. And it's one of these like very interesting like origin story behind a piece of intellectual property. Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie, but— let alone a successful movie, but here we are. And so, Markiplier, he did have an objectively huge audience as I said, but he still went full stack when he was producing Iron Lung. He even talked about building a server rack in his bathroom so that he could render VFX shots on a faster turnaround. He had a VFX studio, but it was taking too long to go back and forth. And so he racked a whole bunch of servers and had a big electricity bill and put 220-volt outlets, like it's an electric car charger, in his bathroom all so that he could render the blood splashing in his film on a faster turnaround. This is sort of like this— like the YouTube feels like— creating on YouTube feels like a way to attract an audience, but it also feels like a way to demonstrate your— do sort of like a talent audition as like a full-stack creator. Like, "I understand the color grade, the vibe, the sound design, and I can have opinions on all of that when I go into production." So it's an easier project to underwrite if you need that. Markiplier was able to fund it himself, but the other folks did have partners on there. Projects. Being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates. We're seeing this with the, the sort of like YouTube-ification or retention editing on Netflix. But I think the bigger value is being like a full-stack filmmaker. So gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting the studio to do the rest for you. I think that traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to be deployed on anything but existing IP. So the dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for The Mandalorian and Grogu because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production.

Yeah, how do you think the big studio execs are processing, you know, these two films? Because you would think, okay, movies are a hits-driven business. If you have a $100 million budget, like thinking about it, like if you're an early-stage investor, like super early-stage seed, Series A, and you have $100 million to invest, like sometimes the best move would be putting $100 million into one team. But there's a reason that people say like, hey, we're gonna make 20 to 30 investments across this fund, maybe more depending on the strategy.

They're doing a lot more than $10 million films.

Yeah, and so it feels like it makes so much sense because one film can generate the entire— Fund return. —can be a fund returner. But at the same time, is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal, right? Oh. Is there some— As opposed to the bottom line? —not basically like direct financial incentive? Where there's just something like the status associated with putting together a blockbuster?

I don't know. I do think we will see more $10 million films, more lower budget films. But I don't know. It feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their whole skill set is aligned to how can we put "100 million, 200 million to work and actually guarantee a return on that." So, they're going to be working on the Avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the Harry Potter movies. But for the next generation, that track feels like very much bought in. So, there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works. One is from Wesley Wang who went viral for interestingly Obsession and Backrooms are both horror films, which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return. He went viral for a non-horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. TriStar picked it up with Darren Aronofsky's Protozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer-director. And then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibidi Toilet, which was created by Alexei Gerasimov in 2023. That project has been going back and forth, but reportedly Michael Bay was attached at one point. They were thinking maybe TV show, maybe movie. But as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is, it did build a little bit of a lore world. It captured a lot of people's fascinations. And the numbers are really staggering. There is a little bit more nuance there because— on the IP side— because it was created in Source Filmmaker, which is basically like Half-Life or Counter-Strike. So you design the level and then you can move the camera around through that. He didn't use Blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera. He actually made the whole series in a video game. And a lot of the assets pull from Half-Life 2 or Counter-Strike: Source. And so, if you want to maintain that, you have to go do a deal with Valve, which, you know, is a private company owned by Gabe Newell. Doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this. And there's already been back and forths on like takedown notices. So that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen. But I do think there will be more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And some members of our production team saw both Backrooms and Obsession, and I wanna get some reviews. What did you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it. My vote's Obsession. Obsession. Scott, what'd you think? Obsession. OK. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one?

So Obsession was great. It felt like— I feel like the filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently, like this Ari Aster type wave. I remember leaving Midsommar and just feeling gross for days. And I felt like Obsession walked it back a little bit. And it was a bit of a comedy too. So it was fun. I felt like the, the memes are all over it, which is great. Yeah. Um, Backrooms, we all kind of walked out. I love Backrooms. Production design should win an award, but something was missing from the movie, I think.

Apparently they built 30,000 square feet of actual set for Backrooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic, and that feels like— I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like Yeah, just send us the Blender files. Like, we'll just continue using— like, you're already working in CGI. Like, it's not like, oh, this isn't true to the source material. Like, it's actually less true to go build the set. But they did. And clearly you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out.

Yeah, I thought it was really fun.

Scott's got something.

I want to shout out Haley Johnson, who produced Obsession 2. She went to our film school.

Woo! Woo! Fantastic.

Let's go over to Ben Thompson. Your guys' class at your film school, which I think no longer exists. Truly, truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school.

Well done. So Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. He said in 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote Goodbye Gatekeepers about how The traditional structure of Hollywood where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood created the conditions for his predation. So, he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, "A similar structure used to be the case in newspapers which not only gated what news was reported but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the Internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies." Don't forget YouTube. Video is Video is a zero-sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another. And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every day in 2016. I've seen Tyler with two phones.

Watching two things. Reels on both phones. Yeah, Subway Surfers.

And two people on one screen.

Yeah. Just going like this.

Well, if you have VR, you can have way more screens open. You can. Because you can just react.

You can. When is Subway Surfers getting an adaptation? That feels like that's due for a trilogy. Subway Surfers, the movie? I think we got something. We cannot be the first people to think of Subway Surfers movie.

Angry Birds is like a, you know—

Oh yeah, they're making a third one or—

No, but I want it to be a movie where you're just like, you know, on, you're basically just going one direction.

No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in the Subway Surfers universe. So Ben Thompson continues, he says, it's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the internet and digital media has affected media. Text first, then music, then short-form video, et cetera. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course, movies ask the most of customers in return. They actually have to leave the house. It's also notable, I've been seeing more creators basically produce movies, like Johnny Harris, video essayist, talks about geopolitics and breaks down history of the Middle East, history of Europe and history of China, Taiwan. And his last few videos have been 2 hours long, which is just a movie. He's just making an actual documentary. It used to be— there was a 20-minute cutoff. Well, it used to be like 8, 10 minutes because of the ad breaks. You'd want 2 ads in there. Then people sort of went to 20, 30 minutes because of watch time.

But— Yeah. The only other difference is I feel like if somebody's making a documentary or a film, they'll do more maybe walk and talks. Things like that, whereas I feel like the classic, like, YouTube video is just like— like thinking about your YouTube videos, right? You're just set up, like, in an office, like, talking to the camera. But just that slight difference makes it feel, like, way more like a film.

Yeah, totally. There is an interesting way where you can pretty easily rotate from video essay scripted, long form, just write the script longer and longer. I've put out video essays that have been over an hour, to go do a bunch of interviews, get them to say some things, weave those in, and then do some sort of like walk and talk at the beginning. And you can have like a low-budget documentary very, very easily with just a few shoot days. And I think a lot of people are moving towards this, but it's just been interesting that YouTube has sort of found its footing in delivering a 2-hour video. And I think a lot of that has to do with how the algorithm surfaces content at certain moments in time and then also resurfaces moments. So for a 2-hour video, So they know that they're gonna need to give you like a couple shots on goal to show it as a thumbnail. And then also, if you click on it and you watch 10 minutes and then you close your phone and you go do something else, they know that that's not necessarily means that— that doesn't necessarily mean that you were unsatisfied with the video. And they will say, "Hey, do you wanna keep watching that?" And so all of that has been algorithmic changes that make a 2-hour video work a little bit better on YouTube, which is more of a casual, uh, casual world. Ben Thompson continues, he says, "That leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies. First is that they— is that this is simply a new place to discover talent." And that's certainly true. The analogy I would draw is to the impact AWS had on venture capital. Cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founder's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers. And that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms meanwhile didn't evaluate companies based on a PowerPoint to fund Sun servers, but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent, the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations, not just their ideas. That's what I was talking about, the audition, the YouTube growth and the YouTube product and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the example of Backrooms. Like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind Hollywood to actually marshal behind you. And that's the same thing with, you know, the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road raising a Series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. And all of that is possible because you don't need $10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. More true than ever in the age of AI. The second true but unsatisfying answer is that YouTube creators can bring their own audience. That's almost certainly true, Kane Parsons, who made Backrooms, has 3.2 million subscribers, which feels low based on how big Backrooms is, but that's the nature of these videos that go viral. They don't always all convert to actual subscribers. Cory Barker, who made Obsession, has 1.2 million subscribers, again on that comedy channel. And then Mark Fischbach, who made Iron Lung, Markiplier, has 38.7 million subscribers, huge account from years of streaming. And he purposely leveraged that to get distribution Bloomberg sort of broke it down. Uh, he, uh, he was set to release his $3 million film, uh, "Iron Lung," in 60 independent cinemas. Fishback led a grassroots campaign encouraging his followers to phone up local theaters and request "Iron Lung" screenings. This is something that a lot of people say in, like, CPG, like, "Oh, fill out this form, request me in Erewhon or Whole Foods," but it's usually really, really hard to get someone to actually do that. Because the conversion rate might be like 0.001%, but if you have 40 million people that are loosely entertained by you and you get, you know, a fraction of a percent to do it.

10,000 people who really, really, really care.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, you talk about 1,000 true fans, he probably has a million true fans out of that 40 million that are subscribing.

Yeah, but then 1% of those actually are—

That's still 10,000 phone calls. That's a lot. And so the film was ultimately picked up by major chains. Including AMC, which has been on a tear. AMC said that this weekend was the highest ticket sales they've had in years.

And I think the stock is up 20% today.

The stock is up 20%? Yeah. Wow.

$100 billion company. $100— what? What? No, no, no, no, no. It's a $1 billion company.

Yeah, they put some data centers in the theaters, I guess. Regal Entertainment Group and Cinemark Holdings.

They set it up so if you rock in your chair, they capture the energy. You get a free film.

They capture the energy. You're powering— You're powering NVIDIA servers. GPUs. Yeah. Potentially powered by Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So the unsatisfying aspect that Ben Thompson's referring to is best understood through the lens of the movie Backrooms: An Obsession, finished ahead of from Variety. So they talk— he talks about The Mandalorian and Grogu, which we mentioned, and he calls back to George Lucas's original film. So, his initial claim to fame was American Graffiti, which made over $200 million on a $777,000 budget. That's a crazy ROI, over 200x return on investment for American Graffiti. The success gave him the support to make Star Wars.

How do you— Ben, Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been pitched, like, invest in my movie before. But given that I don't watch movies, I didn't feel like it was really my strike zone. But how does it typically get structured? Like, if a film needs a million-dollar budget, are the investors getting— like, an independent film needs a million-dollar budget. How does equity work? Any rough ideas?

Typically, there's a series of buyers and investors. Sorry, I'm distracting you guys. Very similar. Very similar to— We'll do it live. So— Scott's job is to stage that. Oftentimes, a screenwriter will sell an option to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. The production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it, and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other scriptwriters. They might attach a— they might go pitch do the deal to bring on a star. And then from there, they go to another producer. And then the last, the last time, the last moment is the actual, like, marketing phase. And so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're gonna buy the billboards and, like, the Super Bowl ads. And that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point. But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3 million, that means he spent $3 million paying the actors.

Yeah, 'cause even with Obsession, I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA, like at least a million-dollar campaign, right when the videos were coming out saying, "Obsession just turned $750K into $100 million." And so I was like, well, this is amazing.

So a lot of times that might happen after the fact.

Yeah, that's an after— there's more money being spent to like It's like, hey, we have a hit now.

Let's like— And then basically at every phase, there can be sort of an in-kind investment where you get— they call it like points on the back end, basically. But it's basically like the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. He took a very low salary up front, cash up front, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series. You're saying he's goated? He's goated. He's actually goated. I think he made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the Marvel franchise that came from that. And there is a world where he would have said, no, I want only cash up front. You're going to have to pay me a ton. And then a production team has to come in. They put the money in. They get the equity. And then they get that on the back end.

So now that Curry has this insane hit— Yep.

He can make a Star Wars.

Are people going to come to him and say, like, I want to basically— by your next 5 films kind of thing?

Totally. Yeah, yeah. Multi-film deal, or it depends on what he's pitching. Like, somebody could just come to him with something very open-ended. They could come with him to something narrow. Maybe he's already working on something, has a script, has an idea, and then wants to get that made or locked up. Or maybe he wants to be— it's also possible he gets brought on as someone to adapt something else. So they say, hey, we already have this IP. Maybe we want to bring back Scream. And, and we would love for you to do it. He's actually—

he actually is doing the next Texas Chainsaw.

There you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, with A24.

Wait, Curry is? Yeah. Yeah, so generational run. There you go.

Off the back of Obsession, he got his next feature. Yep. Which is called Anything But Ghosts.

Okay.

And then from that, he hopped on with A24 to do the next Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

So he's already got stuff going on.

Which has already been remade a few times, but it's— yeah, but, but, but it's established intellectual property and And bringing him on sort of, you know, de-risks in some ways, but it also just brings some fresh energy to that IP where whoever did the first Texas Chainsaw or the reboot, maybe they're doing something else or maybe the studio wants to take a different direction. And so they license that IP because Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not like an— it's not an A24 property from day one, but at this point they went and got the rights and then they got the director and then they to put them together, and so it's all a package deal. Anyway, Ben Thompson's blackpilling on Star Wars. He says, "It turns out, however, that actually making good movies still matters. A late Gen Xer like me, who as a teenager saw The Phantom Menace twice in its opening weekend, so excited was I by the return of Star Wars, and did the same for The Force Awakens, has basically no interest in The Mandalorian and Grogu." Has anyone in the studio seen The Mandalorian and Grogu? Dooku? No one? No one's into it. It's not what I'm looking for. I'm looking for Andor. That was more my speed. And he agrees. He says, I'm clearly not alone. It's been clear for a while now that all the things that Disney worries about when making a Star Wars film or TV series, actually making it good has not been one of them. Brutal. The thing— that's the thing with the IP-based business model. However, Disney seems to have assumed that because they control distribution, thanks to the massive consolidation of movie studios, videos over the past years that they could shove whatever supply they wanted through the tubes and audiences would slurp it up because they had no other choice. This is the exact opposite of YouTube specifically and the Internet generally. On the Internet, distribution is free. Anyone can set up a website or start a YouTube account and they can post whatever they want. Content that breaks through has to do so on its own merits. It is good and— is it good and compelling or is it not? If it is, it gets more and more views. That's what the algorithm does. It is respond to and amplify interest. And if it's not like 99.99% of YouTube content, it's barely seen by anyone. In short, the reason these movies are successful is not just because their makers were spotted by powerful producers or because they brought their own fans. I agree with this. It's not enough just to bring their own fans. It's because the necessary precondition for those two things happening is actually becoming popular on pure merit. It's a more merit-based system. These movies are successful because their makers are good and we know they're good because they're successful on YouTube. No, that doesn't mean everyone on YouTube is good. Indeed, that's the entire point. There's no quality bar to get onto YouTube, which means the quality bar to get noticed on YouTube is much higher than any gate. Indeed, as much as Hollywood types might, might look down on YouTubers, it's the latter who are far more impressive, at least if the goal is actually trying to make something that resonates. Very good. Very, very fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create, modify, your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out at figma.com. Famously not dead, still cooking. SaaSpocalypse is over. We'll get to that later in the show.

Not a car either. Not a car. No one's a car. Did you see the new George Lucas Museum Cinema?

I thought this was interesting that this was going viral at the same time, or it launched at the same time.

You know, it's sort of a tour of the rover.

Makes me want to throw on a tux. Yes, it looks very cool. Apparently, $1 billion to make this, $1 billion. $100 million investment in this whole facility, the George Lucas Museum Cinema, opening in September. This looks absolutely amazing. "All through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers while the other one shows short films, some only a few minutes long." It's in Los Angeles. If you're coming by the TVP and Ultradome, make a stop at the George Lucas Museum Cinema. Very, very cool. There's also a cool a little video here of the history of liminal spaces we should pull up because Backrooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos. Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman Show, haven't seen it? I've seen it, it's great. I can't believe you've never seen Truman Show, it's so good.

Should we get some liminal spaces here in the UltraDome?

The UltraDome is a little bit of a liminal space. We should make it more of a liminal space. There are some, there are some podcasters that have liminal space type setups. Unbox Therapy is a famous one.

You guys haven't seen it, but do you know like the tape on the wall?

Do you know what that is? No, what's that?

Okay, I mean, I guess no spoilers, but okay.

Yeah, we can put tape on the wall.

People have seen it, will know what that means.

That's a very cool shot. The Shining. The Shining. I never, I never put The Shining in the same bucket as this. It Follows. That's a good horror film. That's a great one. Very cool. Anyway, we just vibe out to liminal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. This will happen too. Shippenator. With AI in about a decade, studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business, from YouTube to anime to video games We talked about Subway Surfers. We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators. Maybe there will be Data Center Simulator: The Movie. Can you imagine? We got Data Center Simulator, or what was the other one? Coconut Simulator? We gotta get Coconut Simulator: The Movie, realistic mode.

Capybara Simulator: The Movie.

That's just a nature documentary. Get David Attenborough in there, you're done. You're good. Very interesting. Well, Chernobyl Entertainment financed this.

David Attenborough narrating gameplay from Capybara Simulator.

Ooh, I think we got a hit on our hands. Call A24. They're ready. Well, Bernie Sanders is talking about taking a stake in the AI labs. He says AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth is It generates, must benefit humanity, not just Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. And he penned a full op-ed in the New York Times, a guest essay. I need to confirm my account if I wanna log into this, but we can see the— I think I subscribed to my phone and so it doesn't sync with my— Chrome installation. I don't know. Let's see.

Andrew Curran is highlighting it. This is, this is rough.

Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a one-time 50% tax directly in stock from the AI labs, which will be used to fund the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund. This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because so you take it 50% And like, when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies like decades to actually return cash to shareholders. They're known for stock buybacks.

Maybe he wants to just be fire selling. Yeah. After the IPOs. He's just like, this is the time. I didn't tell you how there was gonna be a dividend. Dividend in sales. No, it's, I mean, the positioning, I'm trying to get into my New York Times account too, —But the positioning, blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge?

Yeah, I was looking at a lot of—

TBPn is built on humanity's collective knowledge. It's true. It's true. If humanity hadn't figured out wheels, and roads, and combustion engines—

Hey, be careful what you say. The United States American citizens might own 50% of TBPn soon. You never know with this. You never know.

You just never know. You're tempting fate here. Bad example. But yeah, the other thing is, you know, we have—

Yeah, AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's a, it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew. And we'll see where all this goes, you know? I don't know. We'll see. It's a lot of people are sort of framing it as like—

Ryan says, I'd rather have universal basic tokens.

Maybe that would be the dividend. I don't know. He says— But it's interesting.

So he's trying to ban data centers with the Data Center Moratorium Act. Yes. But then he also wants half. Yeah. Those two things feel like, like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall.

Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like, you know, misalignment here. He says, I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned? A public good that should be redistributed. He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I think that there is a world where if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable, especially if you have you have a board seat over every AI lab, you could actually do the thing where you say, we're all gonna slow down simultaneously. That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50% control over everything. Tyler, what do you think?

Yeah, but you can just do like the AI FDA, right? Yeah, yeah. You don't need like actual equity. Yeah. Okay, this is my kind of contrarian take. Okay. But this seems like extremely bullish, right? Okay. Because Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person. Yeah.

But in principle, he's saying—

You do, maybe a classically communist. He's saying that the stock's underrated. Yeah, undervalued.

These are going to be the biggest.

Yeah, because, because of all the stocks were going to zero.

So big that this is going to be like disruptive to the economy. Sure. Like this seems like he's extremely AGI-pilled. It seems like it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like this seems like he's, he's basically saying, wait, so the data center stuff is like probably not going to work out. I'm not going to be able to ban these things. Yeah.

But Mark in the chat says Mr. Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad use as a babysitter, babysitter when there are no other options.

Hmm. Interesting. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

Another Mark in the chat says, my wife wants me to tell you guys that I'm so loyal that even laying on the beach with her, I can't leave the boys. Mark is on vacation tuning into TVC. Say hello to everyone for us. We hope you're enjoying the sun, Mark, and thanks Thanks for being with us. Thanks for tuning in.

So my question is, I mean, obviously this is a New York Times op-ed. It's not a piece of—

I know what you're gonna say. Yeah. You think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppenheimer?

I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. But first off, I mean, the big news today, Anthropic has confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public. Google's public. OpenAI, there's rumors of an IPO file.

Well, yeah, and that's what gets really crazy here, right? Because is Google, Google's a leading lab for sure. Does Bernie want? Bernie want.

But then, yeah, but then is Salesforce an AI company? Is Meta? Is Meta? Yeah, Meta.

I mean, Mark would be, we were talking about this earlier, Mark would quickly be like, me? Trying to build personal super intelligence?

I'm not an AI company.

I'm not an AI lab. I'm not an AI lab. I'm just doing some experiments. I got these GPUs to recommend better videos here.

99% of value that we're creating is just recommendation. He's gonna take half of all Allbirds. Oh no, he's gonna take half of Allbirds. But seriously, like how deep does he go down the stack? I mean, Intel, like Trump already took 10%. NVIDIA. NVIDIA.

NVIDIA makes a lot of sense. NVIDIA is the American open source hero.

But what about Microsoft? Like Microsoft doesn't have like, they have a huge partnership with OpenAI, they don't have a frontier foundation model, but they're definitely like a front door to a lot of AI services with Copilot and they're vending these tools in everywhere. And so there's just, just a whole, like Amazon, I heard Amazon Rufus for AI shopping. Surprisingly effective. It's working very well. Like this is an AI assistant that's powered by other models under the hoods. Doesn't need to be the most aggressive Mythos 5.5 Pro. Like, you know, it doesn't need to be the frontier, but it's actually working and customers are using it. Same thing with Sparky at Walmart. And so is Walmart an AI company now? Like, the definition around this will be hotly debated, but of course, you don't wanna get too over your skis here because this is just an op-ed. It's not in legislation. It's to provoke thoughts.

Well, if the argument is that basically if something is built on humanity's collective knowledge, the government should get half. Yeah. You can go pretty far here. Pretty much everything in our modern world is built on humanity's collective collective knowledge. And so, yeah, I think everybody should get ready to, I mean, even your own home, right? Your own home is built on human collective knowledge.

Somebody invented the nail. Somebody invented the 2x4. Exactly, yeah.

Somebody invented cutting down trees.

Yes, so maybe it ends with some sort of tax on corporate profits for every type of business.

Yeah, tax on corporate profits would feel.

If a company makes money, they have to send some of it to the government.

Why has no one thought of this, John? I don't know. I don't know. Take that to DC right now. Okay. Let me tell you about Consul.

Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So there's a hot debate. Apollo's chief economist says there's zero evidence of AI-related job losses. And this went viral. Torsten Sloth, The partner and chief economist says zero evidence of AI-related job losses. He says weekly ADP employment data, there's zero evidence of job loss. Instead, many firms are hiring AI implementation experts and the data center buildout is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts and on prices of semiconductors, equipment and energy. The bottom line is that AI spending boom— the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and inflation. As a result, nonfarm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the 95,000 expected by consensus. This is Jevons paradox playing out in real time. Cheaper technology is creating more demand for more jobs. And he has a chart there and you can see ADP is in a really strong position. It looks great. It's really good. There is more nuance here because if you dig into this, what's actually driving the hiring boom is healthcare and the AI-affected areas. There's not a massive massive wave of layoffs that's happening broadly. We're seeing layoffs at different tech companies, but broadly, like, white-collar work is not going through a massive unemployment spike, but the employment spike that we're seeing, the upward trend in ADP weekly employment, is still driven mostly by healthcare jobs. And so I don't know how much you can actually say Jevons paradox in real time. Maybe you can in the sense that, you know, asset prices are going up. There isn't, there isn't wide, broad unemployment. So there's more justification in hiring more in the healthcare sector. But this felt like maybe a little bit too, too soon to take a victory lap on this. I'm not exactly sure. It's certainly a better place to be than seeing unemployment go up. We want to see, we want to see lots of hiring. We want to see a low unemployment rate. And that's what we're seeing, which is great. But it is, it is soon, it is early, and we're just getting to start to implement these tools. And there's still risk all over the place. Maybe not as much risk as what Jason Oppenheim thinks though, because he went on the Iced Coffee Hour and made an audacious claim about job displacement, pinning it at 80% of people out of the workforce, 80% unemployment. We can play this clip. Which would be—

be iced coffee hour.

There won't be any work. I disagree with Kevin. There won't be any work. I think 90% of people out of the workforce that we know of today and into the things that I talked about. I think what we have to do is start creating, showing and creating value for those things, start ascribing value to family and to hobbies and to sport and to relationships more, and it has to be less about work.

I hear a lot of I thinks, and you guys are real estate people and the I in the eyes of the viewer, what gives you guys credibility to talk about AI?

Fair question.

I would say that I've spent probably 500 hours listening and reading a lot of podcasts. Did the homework. I think it's the quintessential, like, intellectual pursuit of the last 2 years of my life. Call David Sanger. Listening to podcasts is the quintessential intellectual pursuit. Jeremy Gaffaut on suicide watch.

Tyler, you had something? Yeah, just for some context, so in the peak of the Great Depression, The Great Depression, unemployment was 24.9%. 24.9%.

And you're saying 80%. Okay, so 3 times, 4 times the Great Depression is what we're looking at with AI?

Yeah, it's just, it's so funny to listen, to go and just like listen to a bunch of podcasts and come back with the 80% number. It's wild. Because you also have to, you would have to qualify that. Like what set of technologies actually enable that? Because you certainly would need like highly effective, efficient humanoid robots, fully deployed throughout society. But yeah, I don't know, strongest take we've seen yet. So very concerning.

But this is a stronger take potentially.

Yeah, but— This is the other side of it. Sam Sulek revealed that 95% of jobs are safe from AI. He said AI is a tool. It won't replace discipline, grit, or hard work. Instagram.

How did this— this really looks like Instagram.

I made this. This is a fake quote. I sent this to John over the weekend.

It looks very— the fact that it added the little Instagram buttons makes it look way more legit to me. I know you made this, but I still did a double take. It's absolutely wild. So funny. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very happy to partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. It's really going, really going today. And thank you to Area, area.tech. They produced all of our show graphics, the Chiron. Legends. The intro. They've worked with us for a long time and they also activated my AI Siri for some reason. I don't know why that happened on my phone and my MacBook. Wow. What a day. Salesforce is on an absolute tear. We talked about the dueling narratives. So Anthropic is IPOing, or they have, they have confidentially submitted a draft S-1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission pending completion of SEC review. This gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. There's a race between SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Meanwhile, Well, it was so over for all the SaaS companies, but the SaaS-pocalypse might be canceled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on Anthropic Holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their—

Marc's gotta be feeling good. He invested $50 million into Anthropic, I think in 2023 or 2024. Cheeky 100x. Very cheeky, very cheeky. I think he's feeling good. He's now gonna deploy €2 billion into France. Got it. Our strong team of— He has 1,800 employees in France. Wow. More committed than ever to driving innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is, this is the new, this is the new Vibe Reel meta. Okay. So anytime you do a business transaction, on a farm, snap a selfie with your business partner, post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of, you know, sort of videos throughout history of, you know, hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient. Okay, so. And I'm dropping, after this partnership, I just gotta say, we're canceling my personal beef with France. Oh, that's great. This is fantastic progress. Benioff won you over. And yeah. You did. If they have Benioff's full faith, they have my full faith. Faith. And already this €2 billion, I think, is significantly more than their, uh, their, their previous investment that they announced that created the original beef.

Yeah, yeah, beef squash. It's good to see, good to see. Well, uh, Benioff gave some more context on Salesforce's progress. The fiscal year '27 Q1 results, uh, record revenue, €11.13 billion, up 13% year over year. This is a very mature company, still growing very quickly. Very good news. Operating cash flow of $6.7 billion. AgentForce crossed $1 billion ARR, or yeah, ARR, combined with Data360 and Informatica, now at $3.4 billion in AI data ARR. We're not just talking about the, here.

We're not just talking about the agentic future. We're delivering it.

The number one agentic CRM powering the shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable. Fire emoji. 34%.

What is a, yeah, so Relay says, what is a sarsaparilla? What's a sarsaparilla?

Sarsaparilla is a beverage. It's like a Coca-Cola. It's a drink that you get at a soda bar.

Sarsaparilla.

What? Sarsaparilla.

Sarsaparilla. Sars.

I'm seeing nostalgic software. Soft drink. You just call it sarsaparilla. I know it says sarsaparilla, but everyone pronounces it sarsaparilla, I think. Anyway, nostalgic soft drink, herbal plant native to the Americans, sweet earthy flavor. This is due for a comeback. This feels like this would sell for $20 a bottle at Erewhon, don't you think? Absolutely. I bet bringing back sarsaparilla, good business. Somebody do the call area, call day job right now, start your branding packages. And I think you got a winner if you bring back Sarsaparilla successfully. Well, Marc Benioff teased a little bit of the progress on our show, and we can play this clip from him on TBPN, giving us a little bit of a view into the demand that Salesforce was seeing, the growth that they were seeing in their business.

I wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year, a year ago with you guys, but if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers. Engineers in fiscal year, you know, '26, the year it just passed. Yeah, because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year. Yeah. And I didn't hire more service agents in the year. I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents. But I did hire like almost 20% more salespeople. Salespeople. Because I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever. Every market, from small, medium, large customers, you know, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs building a great business like TVPN, really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you Slack, I know you use other products. Yes, that's our job, to make you successful and to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do Sales guy, final boss.

He's so good.

Final boss. It is— I think the pushback there would be, well, you do sell customer service agents, don't sell coding agents, but you are selling sales-focused agents. So basically, you're getting so much efficiency in these other places that you don't need to hire more people, but in the kind of category in which your primary products operate, you're— he's not making the efficiency argument, he's making the demand argument. He's saying we have so much demand, we need more reps. Yeah. But he's selling a product that should be able to sort of meet that demand, right?

Yes and no. I mean, he's selling, he's selling like a tool that sits alongside a sales rep. If there's a booming economy, more sales, you would think that that there's more people that go into sales, more people that need a Shopify— or sorry, a Salesforce installation alongside them. There's still a bull case there. I mean, all the labs have Salesforce admins and stuff. We've seen this reported. And there's certainly so much of the diffusion discussion is around actually meeting someone, having a human in the loop, having someone alongside you as you implement these tools so you don't go over your token budget, token maxing. Token maxing seems like a harebrained scheme cooked up by an SDR. Just, okay, go into Salesforce, Agentforce, what should I do? Tell them to token max. Tell them to create a leaderboard where they produce as many tokens as possible.

Like, okay, Agentforce, got it, buddy. Did you know that Jensen was such a good dancer? Answer.

I had no idea. Do we have a video of this? We do. Okay, let's play this and then we'll read Brandon Garel's deep dive on Jensen's Computex 2026 keynote, which is being hotly debated.

Okay, look at this. It's pretty good.

Look at this. He's got it. He's flowing. Oh, I like the swimming. He's having fun.

He's got to be feeling pretty good this quarter. Yeah, you got to read into these, right? Yeah, I mean, we read into, we read into him doing the arm length You know, chugging beers in Korea.

5.4 trillion, up 6% today. Wow. Absolutely wild. Where's he sitting on multiple? Pop quiz: what movie features a dance to this song?

Is it Pulp Fiction? It literally says it in the caption.

I don't know. Sometimes you're so out of it, you'd be like, I don't know what those words mean. That couldn't possibly be the answer to John Coogan.

Wait, Jordy, have you seen Pulp Fiction? I have. Oh, okay. I have.

That's one of the 5. That's one of the 5 movies. We're slowly discovering that there's more than 5 movies. There's like 20. It's a good time. Anyway, let's go through what Brandon Grossman URL summarized from Jensen Huang's Computex 2026 keynote. NVIDIA CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex, Taiwan's annual technology expo. I guess it's their CES, but more enterprise-focused even. He introduced the RTX, the NVIDIA RTX Spark Superchip, an ARM-based chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the Enterprise Vera Rubin CPU is now in full production. And he announced several foundation models, a world model, open weight flagship AI model. Do we have a model card for that yet? That seems like big news. Open weight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that, but I think everyone's very interested to see where it benchmarks against the 5.5s, the, what is Anthropic on, 4.8 now? And the 3.5s from Google, like the closed source models have been on the frontier. And there's been the chart showing that the open source models from China have been sort of decelerating or they're just, they're growing more linearly than the American closed source models. So is there a gap there? Where does NVIDIA fit in with their open weight model? That's an interesting question. And he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots. A lot of the attention from the keynote came— is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple Silicon moment. And Microsoft coordinated its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Can you play Crysis on it? Can you game on this thing? Is that cool, or is it all about running agents locally? I wonder what the demand for these local agents on the desktop will be, because because so many workloads, you just hand it off and you wait 20 minutes and you come back. But there is some value to being able to do at least the voice transcription locally, just all sorts of things.

Yeah, if you can do tool calling, then that basically gets you most of the way there because then all the hard things you can just outsource well. And then for gaming, I'm still very excited to see any of these real-time video models used in gaming. This seems like it'll be a thing you do with these super nice—

We got to get David Suzuki back on the show. For to talk about Roblox and the real-time upressing of Roblox games, because I think that that's such an incredible technology. I think it's going to be really popular, but it's going to take time for it to actually roll out. Anyway, there is a cutdown of Jensen's keynote that you can watch. We linked it in the newsletter, and we will go into that more later. But we have our first guest from the New York Times. He's a journalist, Adam Isco. Just wrote a fantastic piece about prediction Markets, and he's here with us in the TVPN Ultra. Adam, how you doing?

With a slat wall. Slat wall.

Ready to podcast. Wait, is that a slat wall or is that a virtual background? What we got? What we got? It's real. It's real. You think I'd do a virtual background on you, y'all? I mean, no.

Thank you. Thank you. With the suit. With the suit. You look fantastic. Bringing a slat wall and a suit.

You are ready to podcast. Okay. Are you in New York City? I'm in New York City. Longtime listener, first-time caller. Thank you. Fantastic to have you. Since this is the first time and we and we do have some time to kind of unpack this. I wanted to hear a little bit about your journey, your history, how you wound up at the New York Times, where else you've written, the type of topics, how you describe your beat, your process, just sort of give me the 101 on you and then we can dive into prediction markets specifically.

Yeah, you know, at a party, if someone asks me, what the hell do you write about? Are we allowed to curse on this show? Is it— We are welcome to. We don't, we don't.

We don't, but you're welcome to.

I'm surprised the New York Times would let you. Are you allowed to drop the F-bomb?

The Gray Lady.

I can tell he's a bit of a bad boy.

It's been the great, uh, controversy with me working at the Times is that I spent the last 5 years at the New Yorker. Okay. It's a magazine that encourages profanity in the pages, um, but the Times, you know, uh, things are a little different there. Um, I've spent the last 5 years at the New Yorker writing about all kinds of things, whether it's mental illness and homelessness in New York City or birds. Um, like, you know, every year I write a story about a cool boat on the New York Harbor. Cool. Uh, you know, I'm just trying to like go interesting places and see interesting things.

What drew you to the boat? I gotta know about the boat. Yeah, since you brought it up.

Oh well, I mean, y'all ever see a shipping container ship? Yeah. Like, you ever want to get on one?

You ever been on one? I don't think I've ever been on a shipping container ship, but I have wanted to go on one. I mean, I've been on an aircraft carrier. That was very You've been on an aircraft carrier? I've been on an aircraft carrier. I went on the USS Carl Vinson as part of the Distinguished Visitor Program. There's a program where you can sign up for. You have to wait years and years and years unless you're actually famous. And I had a friend who waited years and years and years and then he slotted me in at the last second. So I got to go with like a lot of like big Hollywood producers and stuff. And they sort of give you the dog and pony show, let you sleep on the boat for 2 days, meet everyone. 2 days? Yeah, 2 days. You're like at sea with them and they And they, they, you have no cell service. They don't tell you where you are and you can kind of speculate, okay, well we left from San Diego, we're probably around Mexico, but yeah, you get to watch the planes take off and land and they take you and they fly you off and stuff.

It's a wild experience. We definitely knew where we were. We were in the New York Harbor. Okay. Like we came under the Verrazano Bridge and it was great. The cargo was a miniature of the Statue of Liberty. Oh, interesting. It was a gift from the French government to us.

They gave us another one? They gave us another one.

Wow. Round 2. They're just running it back. Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to get on the ship, so I just sort of made some calls and I asked around and they were super psyched to have me on board. That's awesome. Yeah.

How do you think about sizing stories in that context? Like when you're at The New Yorker over a couple of years, I imagine that there's shorter pieces, there's longer pieces. Like how much, is it just a conversation with your editors and the team on,— "Okay, I actually have something here. I need to go heads down on this for months and pull on this thread, and there's a 70% chance it's great, 30% chance it goes nowhere." Like, what is the process? 'Cause we have, like, the same show every day. It's always, like, the same length. We don't really ever get in the world where we're like, "We're gonna do an 8-hour show, you know, next week, and— but we're gonna take a couple shows off." Like, how do you think about sizing projects?

It's such a great question. You know, it's like, if you're gonna write about a UFO, used car auction in Brooklyn, you know that that piece is going to be 850 words. You know, it's going to be a little, just like a little tasty morsel for the reader to enjoy. Um, but if you want to do something where you're really trying to contribute to, you know, to society, to our culture, to, you know, then, then you need more words to tell a deeper story, you know. And so yeah, if I want to write about mental illness and homelessness in New York City and have New York City be a sort of proxy for the nation, then it's, yeah, we need 6,000 words, we need 10,000 words, which means I need 6 months or a year to work on that project. Yeah. Uh, and then of course, you know, because The New Yorker is a business, you know, you also need to be writing shorter stories along the way while you're spending— you're investigating something that's really sort of topical and important. How did you first come into contact with prediction markets? Oh my gosh, I mean, I don't know about y'all, But aren't all your friends just degenerate gambling on sports or on all of these things?

For some reason, I actually don't know that many people that gamble on sports.

They are most active group chat. No one has ever talked about a sports bet.

But they were very viral during the presidential election. I remember maybe, what was it, 3 cycles ago, 2008, the Nate Silver before the Silver Bulletin, the FiveThirtyEight dashboard, everyone was refreshing that constantly. He famously called all 50 states correctly. It was a bit of luck, but those dashboards, the needles, all of that stuff sort of captures everyone's attention. And during the last presidential election cycle, it felt like the prediction markets were really having a moment. But I didn't actually know that many people that were actively betting on them one way or another. It was more just a curiosity. To say, oh, well, that source might be biased, or that source might be biased, but at least if there's just money on both sides, maybe it's more neutral. Maybe it will give me a stronger vision of the future. And I think that's where a lot of people, a lot of the goodwill around prediction markets came from, because it sort of told the story of the election somewhat more independently or more accurately. And so I think they carried a lot of that goodwill into the sports betting that you're talking about.

But yeah, I've always been— personally, I've been interested in the tension between I mean, if you're just using prediction markets as a data source, and you're just logging on to a website, not even logged in, you kind of want people to be insider trading, because that's going to make all the data more accurate. Yeah. But the platforms— I'm not saying generally that's good for society, but I'm just saying, if you just want to get an idea of what's going to happen in the future, If there's no insider trading happening, it just means that people are just purely just—

That's not true. That's not true. Because in the—

Yeah, I mean, they could be doing sophisticated research, things like that. Exactly. But on some of these markets, like, for example, like the war markets around Venezuela, where you were seeing spikes in activity, and then, OK, it turns out somebody that did have inside knowledge on the operation was putting the whole operation at risk.

Yeah, it's going to be better.

Because they wanted to make, you know, 200 grand or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

But when you look at the election, or you look at, you know, you look at, you look at financial, any, anything, you know, sort of unemployment or the Fed rate or what have you, you don't need insiders to have sort of non-public information. You can just, you can sort of do what Wall Street has always done, which is go out and find an edge, go out and find the best information possible. Yeah, uh, go and talk to a bunch of people, go and look at really complicated weather data, uh, to predict oil prices. I mean, you can, you can do like sort of really intense research as just like an individual or a group of individuals working together. And so you don't need to be that guy that like, um, you know, compromised national security by, um, illegally trading Venezuela. You can be someone who just knows a lot more than the average sort of user, or better, um, and kind create tremendous informational advantage for people. I mean, the stat that I came across, sort of crazy, is that a third of adult voters in America consulted a prediction market, right? That's like a, that's like a lot of, that's like a lot of people.

They're basically at the ballot box being like, hmm, who should I vote for?

And I mean, in low liquidity, I only vote for winners. Who should I vote for?

Yeah, no, no, I think people do. I, I think people do actually see, okay, there's momentum to me, it's worth me donating to this candidate. And then you get this weird flywheel where potentially you could have someone who wants a particular candidate to win, then they artificially shift the odds of that candidate, they spike, and then that candidate runs a whole bunch of talking points or ads saying, "I'm at 60% on the prediction markets, you should definitely donate because I'm going to run away with it." And then they— and then it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's like a weird cycle there, uh, that could be bad. I don't know. I think 6 months ago, maybe 8 months ago, that may have been—

at least pre-2024 election, this may have been possible. But the way the markets are sort of becoming more efficient, just like any other market on Wall Street, yeah, I think now if you went in and you were trying to sort of artificially hype up a candidate that didn't have genuine support, smarter money than you would just buy your money. Okay. And Interesting.

OK, so tell me about what smarter money looks like in this context, because we've heard about big hedge funds. Citadel is doing clearing. And there's— I think Steve Cohen's fund has a desk for this type of stuff. There's traditional Wall Street. Then there are Sharps. And then there are the average traders. How do you segment the market? How would you characterize the different market participants? Participants?

Yeah, so I would say that the average trader— and like, that's me, yeah— there, we're just getting crushed, absolutely decimated.

I, I actually want to—

I want to, I want to read y'all something that, that, uh, that, that one of my sources told me. Yeah, this is someone turned $200— they're quite sharp— they turned $200 into half a million bucks just last year. Wow. And so, and so, and, and, you know, it's a grad student. I'm going to keep them of protect their anonymity. They're quite worried about being crypto kidnapped. Um, sure, they go by the screen name Frozen. Um, and they said, I really am just taking money from people. Every dollar I gain is someone else losing. And there's a lot of people joining and betting and losing and leaving. And then there's a group of a couple hundred guys, uh, winning. And that's the whole story. And, you know, that's not the whole story, but, but But that's a lot of it, is that you have really smart people just crushing the average trader.

OK, so what I find weird about this is that I don't have that many friends who fall into that.

Wait, but do the people that get crushed quit right before they're about to hit it big? Yes, clearly.

I wonder. I wonder. So I have been— I have had friends who have been in that camp of like, smart grad student, tech person able to build a real model. And I always go to them and say, you shouldn't be trading, because there's a much more sophisticated market participant sitting at a hedge fund with a data center worth of compute behind their models, and they're going to crush you. And so I'm surprised that an individual of any sort can have an edge in this market.— like, is it just that— like, did you try and talk to any of the Wall Street funds that would more professionalize that— like, this activity? Because it feels like even the— even like the smart, clever, individual, disciplined individual who's maybe feeding off of like the casuals that are just coming in and out would eventually get crushed by something that's even more robust and professionalized.

Yeah, you know, I was so delighted. I had a wonderful conversation with Jeff Yackley, Kovacs, who co-founded SIG, one of the most respected trading firms in the country, if not the world. And I asked him this question. And he said, we are just getting taken for a ride. We're just getting crushed by these sharks. And I was trying to figure out why. And I talked to someone who actually— SIG is trying to go out just like a number of other places, and they're going They're trying to hire these Sharps. I talked to someone who had an offer from SIG. And I said, why didn't you take it? Well, wouldn't you get better health insurance? And he said, not only am I just making a killing, but I can do things that a big institutional fund can't do. For instance, I can— he's a Rotten Tomatoes trader. He trades how is a film going to do on Rotten Tomatoes. And he's, he's turned, you know, uh, I, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but he's made quite a bit of money, you know, 7 figures easily. Uh, and so, you know, he's, he's guessing— not guessing, he's predicting. He's building models to figure out how is a Rotten Tomatoes, uh, film going to perform and, and such. And he's doing things, he's scraping websites, and he's doing things that, that maybe SIG, through their corporate policies, wouldn't allow. Okay. Um, and he asked in the interview, like, could I do this technique in, you know, and they said, yeah, probably not. And so in, in these markets, um, you know, and there's just so many markets.

Was that because it's illegal?

No, it's not. Yeah, it might be against terms of service.

Yeah, not like a law, but like a terms of use.

Just, you know, as violent. Yep, yep, exactly. Uh, and, and this guy, you know, it's really interesting, right? Because he's someone who, you know, he Pardon me, I'm going to swear, but he self-described as sort of like a dipshit from the Midwest. The first person he talked to was like, hey, I'm this guy. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. And I'm able to outcompete Wall Street with a $600 Lenovo laptop. That's crazy. I didn't go to a fancy school. I could never have gotten a job on Wall Street. This is not my world. But I'm able to do this because I'm quite sharp on prediction markets. The American dream.

Carl Sager and Jetty, he's going to be so happy to hear that. No, I mean, there has been a ton of pushback, but it feels like the greatest gift to the prediction market industry has been AI being more controversial. And I'm wondering if you are tracking any of the potential political moves that might change the regulatory landscape for prediction markets. They've grown so fast, feels like there's federal preemption, they're gonna be legal everywhere.— but has anyone popped out as a voice of what regulation might look like in this market, whether there's just, hey, no insider trading, or, you know, make it more of a level playing field, more disclosures, even something as simple as with a lot of the Vegas casinos, you can self-exclude. I don't know how that applies in a modern prediction market world, but that's something that the, like, the anti-gambling lobby the lobbies would certainly like to see, I imagine.

Yeah, I mean, I think the regulatory landscape is incredibly important with all of this stuff. The Trump administration has been incredibly favorable to Kashi, to Polymarket, to the CFTC, which regulates these things. They also regulate, you know, like the derivatives that you might trade lean hog or wheat or corn on. So, you know, the Trump administration CFTC has been much, much more willing to play ball with prediction markets. And so, you know, you talk to folks and they say there may be, you know, come 2028, come 2029, if there's sort of a change of power in Washington, things may shift, things may change. And in the meantime, I think, you know, who knows? It's really hard to think beyond 3 months from now. So it's really hard to think that far. Out. But in the meantime, there's a lot of people doing really, really good work. Um, you know, Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, is doing really, really good work on thinking through how do we just kind of come up with sort of sensible solutions on how to better regulate things. Yeah. Uh, you know, how can we make sure that, you know, our national security is not, you know, imperiled, um, by, you know, a lone wolf kind of going out and trading on there's going to be a strike in Venezuela.

Yeah, exactly. It seems like there's a bit of a game of whack-a-mole where there's some really, really really, really problematic markets that have negative externalities, like the Venezuela one you mentioned. And then I still don't really have a first principles problem with a broad presidential election market. That seems totally reasonable, totally useful, very valuable. I've found prediction markets useful all the time. We were checking Kalshi constantly throughout the OpenAI-Elon lawsuit because we'd try to cover it independently, and it's a good source of, okay, what does the market think? And it was accurate throughout the whole affair. But yeah, I mean, certainly people can get sucked into all sorts of different markets and there are gonna be hotly debated issues for many years. But it does feel like this is like the key focus at the federal level will be AI, at least for the next—

What do you think sensible regulation looks like? Because in the case of there had to have been some guidelines that would have somebody in the Special Forces, if they check the rule book, say like, hmm, should not send a signal to the internet that we are going to attack a foreign country, which is effectively what this individual was doing when they were betting on a strike on Venezuela. Absolutely. It's terrible. But that doesn't feel like like, like that just feels like it's not even necessarily like that must have been violating like a number of policies, I would imagine, and federal law.

And, you know, the Justice Department and the CFTC are prosecuting the case. You know, you also want to see better enforcement, right? You want to see— you want to— you want to sort of flag these things before they even start.

You know, I talked to Kalshi about this.

I talked to Polymarket about this. And they say, you know, they say say, hey, we're really working quite hard to, to stop this kind of, you know, this kind of insider trading. We're kind of— we're working quite, quite hard on— we're building AI systems to do it. We have, you know, teams of people working and working and working on this. Um, we need to sort of make sure that they're actually doing that. And, you know, this is where, um, you know, there's lots and lots of other great reporters at The Journal, at The Times, at NPR.

There was a good story in The Journal about an independent watchdog that discovered a poly market trader who was betting on Google search results, and he wound up working for Google, so he just had the exact data available, which obviously is a violation of the terms of service.

Yeah, what percentage of the Sharps do you think just have inside info and are kind of taking you on a— basically telling you a little story about—

I built a cool web scraper. I think—

I talked to dozens and dozens and dozens about the sort of really top traders. And, you know, I asked for receipts, you know, I wanted to look at their models, you know. I went down to Texas and, you know, knocked on doors. I went— I went and there was a group I went down to Texas with to sort of check out their approach to modeling Texas Democratic primary, uh, and they call themselves MAGA Kiwi Club. It's, you know, 12 or so guys, and, and, and they went and knocked on, you more than 1,000 doors, nearly 1,000 doors, to try to get a leg up in this election. And they were right. You know, they were right. I think there are some, there are some sort of really bad wolves out there that are taking advantage of the system. But the Sharps, the Sharps that we're talking about, people who are using information to make the markets more efficient, are in a totally different category. And that's sort of, that's the vast majority of the activity, that and Wall Street. Making platforms.

We have a question from Emily Sundberg. Why is a New Yorker writer taking a job at an AI tech company?

It's a great question.

That's a question from Emily or from me or you? It's from Emily for you, clearly.

From Emily for me. You know, I love my job. And I've been so lucky to have gotten to talk to all kinds of just wonderful people. Over the last 5 years. I have a sense that things are changing, and I really, rather than sort of be on the outside as a reporter and, and, and watch as things sort of, sort of change and be— become a tech reporter, I think this would be the thing that I would do is I'd go be a tech reporter. Sure. I'd write wonderful stories about, um, you know, what's happening happening. And I got the sense that I couldn't do it from the outside. Like, I've become increasingly convinced that sort of like AI is like the thing that I need to think about over the next n number of years. And I didn't have a sense that I could do this as a sort of a reporter from the outside without sort of having, you know, the street cred at some level of being in AI world. And then I went around and I had to sort of find find a place that shared my values. And I was lucky enough to sort of by happenstance meet, you know, this guy Ivan who runs this company Notion. And I really loved his vision of the world and I love this company's vision of the world. And I thought, okay, you know, I'll give it a shot. We'll see. And it seems like it's the kind of place here that you can tell wonderful stories about what's actually happening in the world. And that sort of has a, has a sort of, you know, a genuine curiosity and a sort of a genuine ambition to tell true stories, to tell real stories about what's happening in the world. And I'm, yeah, I'm quite excited to do it.

How do you think about the opportunity at Notion to tell stories about the technology that, you know, ultimately drive traffic into the Notion ecosystem? Versus like actually give insight into what would make Notion like a dominant product for the next generation of writers? Like those, those two opportunities seem both interesting, but is there one that's sticking out to you?

Well, maybe you could ask a different question or ask, ask it slightly differently. I don't, I don't quite understand.

So, so Notion is a product that, that writers use to, to actually research All sorts of people, but people also use it for organizing information of all sorts. But, uh, there is a world where you as a member of non-technical staff, uh, help advance the product. And then there's another side where you, uh, tell stories and do, uh, more, more written output to attract customers to Notion. More so, it's more like product versus marketing if we went back in time?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think product or marketing really resonates with the thing that I, I really do here. Yeah, I think I'd be a terrible marketer. I don't think I know how to sell Notion as a product. But what I think I can do is come into this place, ask a ton of questions about what's happening here, go elsewhere, ask a ton of questions about what's happening elsewhere, and then yeah, maybe tell interesting stories, or maybe the first the best thing I can do here is sort of ask questions and start to tell interesting stories about what does AI look like in the economy? What is— and maybe, yeah, maybe there, maybe there is a, uh, an economic benefit for the business. Sure. Uh, sure hope so. Um, but, but I think there's also just sort of a deeply felt duty here to, to do good work in all kinds of different ways. And so I think, um, you know, part of that is is this. Very cool.

Is there anything else?

No, it was great to meet you. Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Breaking it down.

Congrats on the new role. A cargo ship, you know, just call me up, let me know.

Let's run it. Next one. Let's talk to you soon. Great to hang out. Have a good one.

Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Public, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more. With great customer service. There's a whole bunch of IPOs going out— SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI. Uh, if you're on public, you want to make sure that you don't go and buy the wrong ticker, because apparently people are, are doing this on WallStreetBets. Somebody claimed to put $129,000 to work in SpaceX IPO. They wound up buying Virgin Galactic mistake. That's a different company. But the Virgin Galactic stock is mooning on the rumors of SpaceX's IPO. Or—

yeah, Virgin Galactic has the ticker SPCE.

Sounds a lot like SpaceX to me. And, uh, yeah, fortunately this guy—

I mean, hopefully he held— comments came in because he'd be up 126%. It's still up.

Yeah, who knows, maybe there's a comeback for Virgin Galactic. That would be very cool. I mean, I think a lot of, I don't know what will happen to the rest of the space economy. Potentially there's more capital for SpaceX, more competition, more demand for a duopoly. If you're a wireless carrier and you don't wanna be locked into Starlink exclusively, and so you want to get an ASTS working for you and you continue to back that, or if you are a company that needs to launch satellites into space case, you are helping Blue Origin and Rocket Lab continue to chop down the wood that they need to do to get to space regularly. And so that's actually bullish, or maybe they just eat it all up, who knows?

Tyler says, "Yo, we just got an ad read, just made my day." Just made my day.

We love you guys. Kyle Kuzma, friend of the show, guest as of last Friday, said, "Look at IBM, #quantum." He's had a lot of fun in the last market. He was a very— he was a great interview. We had a lot of fun talking to him. Micron is also way, way up. They extended gains to rise above $1,000 a share for the first time in history. Look at that candle. Of course, this is very zoomed out. This goes all the way back to 2001.

One person on the team is clapping especially hard over there, a Micron shareholder. Believe. It was so funny because, uh, I was seeing this right as I was getting notification that, uh, the ceasefire or whatever, the negotiation had blown up. And of course, Micron overpowering—

yeah, geopolitics, two different things, not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz apparently. Uh, well, the stock is now— the company is now worth over $1.2 trillion. The stock was worth just $60 $1.2 billion 13 months ago. Absolutely remarkable. There are some rule changes from the SpaceX IPO.

Micron is a Lambo candle. Lambo candle.

That's a Lambo candle. Up 22% today. Absolutely insane. Rule changes for the SpaceX IPO. Index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to just 5. This forces over $30 trillion in passive 401 and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within 6 months. The Russell 1000 and NASDAQ 100 funds will absorb 24%. The rules built to protect, to protect passive investors— one, S&P 500 required 12 months of trading and 4 quarters of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both are waived now. NASDAQ cut its inclusion window from 90 days to 15, and the FTSE Russell cut its to 5. All 3 benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing before the lockup ends. So lots of buying activity for SpaceX. Nick Carter says, so this is what kills index funds. Cult of passive finally coming to an end. And yeah, there's a bunch of different ways to deal with this if you for some reason don't want SpaceX. In your S&P 500, I'm sure you can go and develop a synthetic S&P 499. And probably do it on public. Yeah, you can probably build something that is neutral to this move. Of course, if you're bullish on SpaceX, you'll be happy that it is in your retirement account. And if the progress continues and SpaceX delivers on everything that they have planned and are optimistic about, should work out for everyone. But there is a lot of risk in the system. So we will continue to monitor it. Well, there has been a lot of back and forth about how much you should work, how much you should work. Corgi is going back with Kari at Linear. We can go through this big debate. It's a lot of long posts. People are going back and forth. I think this all started with Harry Stebbings had the Corgi Insurance founder on. On the show, and he said if you're not working 7 days per week, you're going to lose. Kari takes the other side. Nico goes back and forth with him. Uh, interesting timing with the Wilmanitis Grind Slop essay. I think that the Corgi Insurance— I, I was unsure if it was just random timing, or if the court— like, was the Corgi Insurance interview trying to bait a response from the Wilmanitis post, or Was it recorded before post-fire?

No, I think that Nico, this is just part of their culture as a company. Yeah, it's working for him. And it's working for him. It's clearly working for him. Yeah. There's a lot of reasons not to have a culture that sort of expects people to work 7 days a week, but there's a lot of reasons to have one. And in Nico's defense, he's built, I think, a $2.4 billion company, in a very short period of time. Remarkable. And it's a remarkable feat. Kari, on the other side, has also built a very big business, and done it in maybe a more calm way. This is personal. Like, I felt like over the last 18 months, we've worked harder than ever in our careers, but weekends are very much time off. And part of that is, I mean, we're still talking like multiple times a day and making, you know, decisions around the business. But I actually felt that was especially necessary because 5 days a week we're coming here and hanging out, trying to put on a show. Yeah, 3 hours. Yeah. And so the weekends are a good time to be able to actually— it feels like unwinding is— yes, particularly—

I mean, overall, Wilman Ise makes a bunch of good points in The Grind Slop 'but I'm different and they don't apply to me.' That was basically my takeaway. Anyway, we have the founder.

Apparently 2/3 of Corgi's employees have the company tattooed.

Oh, okay, so Wilman Nyes was referencing that specifically because he mentioned that in the essay, which we should read at some point. It's a great essay if you haven't read it already. Wilman Nyes, Grindslops. We could read it and put ads in it. We can, finally, the final form of the content oral board Sarris, which was, after all, an essay about a podcast. Well, we have our next guest from Sarris here in the TVP and Altroom with us. Welcome to the show.

Do you believe in working 8 days a week?

Yeah, where do you stand on this?

Where do you stand?

5 days a week, 7 days a week, where do you stand on relentless work above all else? I don't think—

Can you guys able to hear me?

Can you hear me?

No, we can't hear you. I'm able to hear.

You can't hear us? Oh no. Oh no. Why don't you jump out?

We will bring you back in just a second. We'll bring you back in. OK. Well.

He was about to say every person on my team has a tattoo.

Somebody should make headphones that work 7 days a week. That would be an innovation. We'd like that. That would benefit us. Anyway, what did Kari say? He said, I get that certain Is their business insurance a similar Nobel-level type pursuit of groundbreaking physics and the Manhattan Project? Hopefully the blast radius will be contained. They are burning back and forth, fighting back and forth on the timeline. The timeline's in turmoil. Well, we do have a challenge that I want your take on because I actually saw this post and I did a whole deep dive and I have a very informed opinion. I want your take. So Alex Tabarrok, friend of the show, Deste as of last week says, "This one is genuinely difficult." And Sela in SF, @sela_ says, "You have a one-way flight." Do you have this pulled up? I want you to see these images. Tyler, you too. Wait, are you laughing at this or something else? Something else.

But I'm looking at this. I'm looking at this.

Okay. Okay. I want everyone to weigh in on this. You have a one-way flight somewhere unknown within the red boxed region. You drop in via parachute at midnight. You're given $2,000. $10 million in cash or precious metal equivalent, an uncharged phone, 3 days of food, 2 changes of clothes, and an Israeli passport you're not allowed to get rid of. Your mission is to get to New York City. You get $10 million if you arrive within 1 day, $5 million if you arrive within a week, $1 million if you arrive within a month. Which region do you choose? And the first option is right between Panama and Colombia in in the—

Darién Gap.

The Darién Gap, which is uninhabited. There's no roads that go through it. Did we lose the Chiron too? What happened? Our Chiron, of course, is created by Maria Dottak.

I did have a crazy, pretty wild travel story generally in that region. I was in Panama.

You crossed the Darién Gap?

I didn't cross the Darién Gap, but I was dropped into Panama, and I was going to a place called Bocas del Toro, which is a small chain of islands in the Caribbean. And I took an all-day bus and I arrived in this port, this Caribbean port, like at around midnight. And there were no more boats going to the chain of islands that I was trying to get to. You were stuck. Legally, I guess they're not allowed to make like, you know, boat runs. Yeah. And we ended up having to make a, find a guy that was willing to, willing to make the charge. So, we made the trip lights out, which was very sketchy. You're not supposed to be going, traveling by boat at night in harbors without lights, but this one captain was on board. And there was no hosp— like, there was no lodging in that little port town.

So, it was like—

Sleep on the boat or something. Either sleep basically at a bus stop in a Caribbean port town or make the trip by boat with no light. We took the boat. We were surfing that next morning.

OK, so the options are North Korea, remote Russia, the Iran-Pakistan border, Gulf of Oman box, or the Darién Gap. Which one would you go with and why? Tyler, do you have a pick?

I'm going Darién Gap. Yeah, why? —so you can get a ferry around, right? Because you hear about these sorts of people motorcycling, like, you know, South America to Alaska or something.

Yep. And I think the passport is less of an issue.

You just get to the border.

Yeah. I think if you land in Iran, you're screwed. If you land in North Korea, you're immediately a political prisoner. And Russia, probably the same thing. Also extremely cold, very, very harsh conditions. Would you go Darien Gap as well?

Yeah, the $2,000, I mean, is the big constraint, right? 'Cause it's not really enough for a significant incentive for someone.

Yeah, and you only fly business class, so like you would be stuck. 'Cause you'd get there and you'd be like, well, sir, business, a one-way flight from Pyongyang to New York City business class is gonna be $2,500.

Yeah, no, I mean, I just think if you're trying to get to New York City, New York from these places with $2,000, and you don't have—

No, Darien Gap for sure, because you can get to Panama, you can get to Medellín. Either one is gonna let you, with that passport, get to New York City. Oh, right. For sure.

But I'm an American.

Yeah, but you have this Israeli passport. So that's the one that you, they will see this. But it's a valid passport. It's a valid passport. And so they will see it, and they will say, okay, well, If you're in Iran or North Korea, they will say absolutely not. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Regardless of your actual passport. Whereas in Colombia or Panama, I think they will say, right this way, sir. Like, you can go to New York City. It's much easier. Anyway.

Gabe says, if I'm in Iran with an Israeli passport, the situation strongly suggests I'm a Mossad super agent on an undercover mission, which sounds awesome. Didn't really read the rest of the post, so not sure what happens next, but I picked that up. And Sean Frank agrees with us.

Daring gap first. Anyway, I believe we have our next guest here with audio. Let's bring in Daniel. Are we back?

How are you doing? Yeah. Oh, we're back. I'm well. Fantastic, folks.

Let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news. What happened? Sure.

I'm Daniel. I'm founder, CEO of Saraci. We build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions. Focused on the back office. It's sort of the unsung heroes of, you know, any company in the back office. So we're helping automate a lot of their tedious, complex tasks that, you know, the humans don't enjoy. So, yeah.

So how diffuse is your customer base? Because credit unions, I mean, I feel like there's, I don't know, thousands of credit unions in the United States. It's like the backbone of American banking. Is that your goal to be, I guess, like more like mid-market versus like we're going straight to JPMorgan and we're going to be at that level on day one?

Yeah, that's a great question. We are working with one of the larger G-SIB banks, but to be honest, it's sort of like sometimes founders just fall in love with this particular story or a segment of the market. Sure. And as you put it, right, banks and credit unions, it's about 8,000 of them all across the US and they're serving, you know, the heart and soul of the economy. You know, our customers are the folks who are helping a lumber mill in Mississippi, you know, get their first loan. It's the young family in Arkansas get their first mortgage. Or we have another customer in Illinois helping farmers, you know, get agriculture loans. So, you know, these folks often don't get the headlines, but they're really serving, you know, the heart of the economy.

So it's kind of cool. And how much of the business is like— I mean, we're already in unsexy territory. Let's get unsexier. How much of the business is is like not even like AI doing the full workflow and more like AI enabling digitization, AI enabling ETL, AI enabling better organized digital systems. Because I mean, I go to banks all the time and there's still paperwork and you're signing things and just scanning that, getting that into something that's interpretable from any computer system, it seems like it's still a challenge.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this story. The first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy. Yeah. You know, especially with foundation models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect humans, you know, the work that humans do with the regulatory environment, with the infrastructure, with integrations, with systems? Not everything is API accessible with semi-structured, unstructured data. Data, like you said, in papers and so on. That orchestration, that's where the magic is. And I think that's where the moat is for a lot of startups to come in, because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear, foundation models will probably figure that out. So I think that's the first part. The second part of the story is more human again, and it's what we call, or what I call, the dignity of work, right? So I'll share a story with you. Like, we often talk about AI versus humans and they're replacing jobs and so on. On. But let me share some stories on the ground. Right. So we have one, one of our customers, their team had a backlog of 300 loan documents and they are literally spending the time from 5:00 PM to 9:30 PM, 5 days a week completing that backlog because 9:00 in the morning they have to get to another backlog. Yeah. We launched ours about like 3 weeks ago. Now they're going home at 6:20. They can be with their families. Right. That's dignity of work. That's amazing. Yeah. We have another case where, you know, we— it's, it's, it's not—

it's a lot of loans and more That's what happened with other major technology cycles where the work week effectively just shrank. Yeah, right, which is great.

Just more efficiency, higher productivity, which is the good news.

Uh, exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing. So that— so, so we're not seeing so much that people are being let go, it's more that they're not hiring additional staff members. So one other example quickly I'll share with you is, uh, you know, we've had a case where the president of World Credit Union has sent me a text that, hey, we were planning they were planning on hiring 5 people this quarter. But because the output with Cyrus is so much higher, they didn't hire those 5 people. However, they gave a raise to the existing team. Everyone's happier about that, right? So those are kind of like interesting things we're seeing.

Good, give us the fundraising news 'cause we're running late. What'd you raise?

Who funded you? Yeah, so it was, I guess, love at first sight with a partner. We raised $28.8 million in a Series A. Nice.

Congratulations. What, what partner led the deal?

Uh, it was Alex, man. It was love at first sight. And then, and then we got to meet with Joe as well, who's, who's just an awesome guy too.

So, uh, it was great. That's great news. Well, sorry, uh, for cutting this short, uh, a little bit of technical difficulty, but thank you so much.

I'm sure you'll be back soon together, and good luck with the journey.

Corner. We'll talk to you soon. Cool. Awesome. Cheers, guys. Great to meet you. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in Mike from Gigascale Capital. Mike, how you doing? Doing awesome.

How you guys doing?

Former CTO of Meta, by the way. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Tell us a little bit about yourself and the fund, the strategy. I have so many questions.

Yeah. So I've been in Silicon Valley 25 years, been an operator, joined Facebook, Meta 2008, scaled everything from data centers to Oculus to Instagram to building the Facebook AI Research Lab.

Yeah, I stepped away from that job. Just everything. Just every important project. A lot of stuff.

Yeah, a lot of stuff. I mean, with a lot of great people. So I don't want to really take credit, but I saw this, this change happening in the world a couple of years ago, which was I thought we were moving from atoms or bits to atoms, which is like the physical world mattered again. Yeah, that is the marginal cost of software went to zero. The thing that really mattered is how much stuff can we build and how are we going to build it? And so I started a venture capital firm to sort of prove out this thesis. I, I want to prove it first by investing my own money to make sure sort of I knew it was working. And then, you know, our company started working. The question isn't do they want to buy it? It's how fast can they make everything? Because they're making it sort of better, faster, cheaper than the way we did it for the last, I don't know, 100, 150 years in a lot of cases. And so we brought on a set of institutional investors and raised more money and are just getting going on this journey. How much did you raise?

$250 million. $250 million. Quarter bill. Quarter bill. What were some of the standout companies in that first kind of round? Angel fund that you mentioned that, that made you think you were onto something?

Well, there's a, there's a bunch of them. So Pantalassa is building ocean data centers, um, for inference. I think you had Garth on here a little while ago, um, and, uh, is one example. Um, Heron Power, which is a more recent investment but is just on a tear, they're, they're saying like, hey, the way we brought energy to data centers is using 100-year-old technology, literally We've got a new idea. We're taking the power electronics that are in your Model 3, Model Y, and we're putting them on the grid and we can deliver you power faster, better, cheaper than anyone else out there. They're shipping products next year. You know, we've got Radiant Nuclear is building a container-sized microreactor, gives you a megawatt and a half of power for 5 years with no refueling. And they've got Form Energy that said, hey, you know, these data centers, you have power swings, you may have renewables which are on and off. We're going to build a new kind of battery that lasts 100 days. So if you're dependent on solar and it's cloudy for 3 days, no problem. I got 4-day battery. Um, and that battery is super cheap because it's made out of— it literally like rusts and unrusts iron. It's like the basic chemistry of it. It's the cheapest possible material you could use to build a battery. Um, it's big and it's heavy, but who cares because it's on the grid. So again, you're just like rethinking problems in a different way and using modern technology and you come up with a solution that, that works for everyone.

How are you thinking about publics versus privates? Because there's this massive boom and I'm so excited about Doug and, and Radiant and nuclear and bringing new solar on the grid. And there's so many different key technologies that it feels like we're in this crazy moment where like it's just hard to pull forward heard these foundational technology efforts in the private markets and startup world where, yeah, you're doing something completely new. It might take 5 years. And so in the meantime, it's just call up GE Vernova and 10x the amount of natural gas. And that is like a technical debt that I think we're going to have to pay at some point. And I'm wondering about, like, is there a crowding-out effect? How do you stay sane if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool, but you're watching some public company go 50x in the public markets. And I'm just wondering about like, where, like, is the time compression, is the timescale a factor one way or another? Is it a benefit or curse or both, double-edged sword? How are you thinking about that?

Yeah, I mean, I fundamentally left a big platform to bet on startups. So I think you're gonna get my belief that it has never been a better time start startups. And I'm seeing this, this firsthand. I mean, just think about the speed at which I can build tools, um, you know, using AI, using robotics in the physical world, um, you know, even just using platforms like Stripe and Ramp and like all these. It's just like the amount of time you would spend monkeying with things before is just like free. You can have these tiny 6, 10, 12-person teams have incredible, um, unbelievable impact. And you throw off all the, all the, you know, dead weight of doing it the way, you know, you've done it even for the last 10 years. You started a company 6 months ago, you would, you would form it differently than if you started it 12 months ago because like that's, that's prior to, you know, Opus 4.7. And it's just, just an incredible time. And we haven't talked about this, just like an immense well of talent coming out of SpaceX and Tesla who are just like showing up to these old problems and saying like, oh, we know how to do this like 10x better, faster, cheaper, starting with, with new technology. So, you know, there's this analogy recently about when electricity first came to factories. You know, we used to build factories with like a central, like, steam thing that would spin all these, like, shafts, and you built your entire factory around the structure. When they first electrified, they just rip out the steam thing and put electric motor, but everything else was the same. And productivity gains didn't really happen until you just rebuilt the factory saying, actually, I can put an electric motor at every workstation. I can completely reorient the way that the factory works. This is how I think it's happening with robotics Now we're dropping in a robot where a human used to be and you're like, wait a second, if I just like took a building and said, actually my goal is to feed the robots and keep them 80% utilized, how would I build this factory? And that's a very different structure than like replacing a person with a robot in terms of it. And that's where I think you get 5x, 10x wins.

Jordan, are you worried we're going to run out of problems in the real world to solve? No, I'm kidding. I do, I do. No one's ever asked me that one. No, I mean, it is, it is fun.

Return the funds. There's no more ideas.

Yeah, yeah, just return capital.

We're done. Return capital.

We're sold. No, but any intuition around like the, you know, the next big, big category in sort of Atom's, like, is it just robotics generally? Like, how do you have a, do you have a, any ideas around like timeline of robotics and the application of them across different industries? Because this is one of those, you know, categories that I think it's been, it has been happening, it's real in certain industries, but it's been promised for so long. This time around does feel a little bit different, but I'm wondering how you view it just because if you get the, obviously if you get the timeline wrong, uh, you can get the bet wrong entirely.

Yeah, predicting these things is, you know, we, we have two bets in fusion, and the fusion has been the, you know, the joke— it's 10 years away every 10 years, um, for a long time, but this time it's, it's, it's different. Um, but, uh, the— so robotics, I think, is quickly going into that zone. Um, I'm really bullish on industrial robotics, um, and we already use robots in fact in car factories all the time. Um, and so the question is is can you move into like slightly less well-structured things like taking a box? If you look at a lot of like factories and warehouses, like there's a surprising amount of like unboxing and boxing that happens. I get a box, I get a box cutter, I cut it open, I pour all the stuff out, I get rid of the plastic bags. It's all done by humans now. Um, that's a really hard thing to automate with like a KUKA robot. Like, 'cause it's just every box is a little different and like the bag gets stuck and all the rest of it. And so like those are the sorts of like things that I think are gonna be really good. 'Cause you're still in a controlled environment. I'm not in my house. I don't have a dog running by. You don't have to worry about the robot tripping over my pet. So I think the home is like, and like I'm excited about it. I want a robot to fold my laundry and empty the dishwasher. Can't wait. But like, man, you're playing on hard mode to like start in the home. I've shipped home electronics. Like people drop stuff, they spill wine on it. Like there's all sorts of things that happen in the home that I just don't have to worry about in a factory. So I think you're going to see it in factories and warehouses first, um, and then you're going to sort of see it go out from there.

Spilling wine on your Oculus or your Quest, that's a wild time. That's something you would do. I'm sure it's happened. You ship millions of them, so yeah.

Oh yeah, no, no, this is the, the thing that created all the gray hairs. It's like you do all this work making this awesome product. Yeah. And then you're like, oh, we have this thing called a drop test. Like the consumer takes it out of the box and it's supposed to go on my face. Instead of putting my face, I drop it on the floor. And like, does it break or not? Yeah. And so we spend all this time like dropping them and putting these high-speed cameras to watch which part breaks and then go reinforce it. Yeah. It's just like—

And that creates a lot of weight, and that hurts the product. Yeah.

Yeah, and the bigger issue with robotics is then you have— there's not a huge risk of if I drop the Oculus, maybe it does some minor damage to the floor and the device itself. But you add these big humanoid form factors, and suddenly it's like the dog died because the robot just fell on it. You know, this is, or it does like really material damage to an appliance or something like that.

Yeah, I mean, besides laundry and emptying my dishwasher, I want it to like make me breakfast, right? But like now we got a robot like operating with hot oil, you know, on a stove with a flame. Like what could go wrong?

That's gonna be wild. Solar. I feel like there's, you know, the Elon Musk of space is Elon. He did electric cars, he's working on robots. Products. He's been a little shy about solar. I mean, he's optimistic about solar, but he hasn't actually scaled up American manufacturing capacity of solar. We have a number of founders, you know, if you have Palmer Luckey in defense, and there's a number of nuclear founders who have sort of taken up the mantle to go on the press tour that's necessary to get folks excited about nuclear. I haven't seen that in solar as much. Am I just not paying attention? Is there some sort of fundamental constraint why solar is not going through as much of a fast takeoff? We've talked to the CEO of T1 Energy. That's sort of this, you know, acquisition, changing the management. It's very exciting, but it's not the same, you know, startup seed round, you know, visionary founder all the way through this really broad vision. And I'm wondering if that's going to happen if we're early, if it's already happening and I'm not— I'm just not aware. What are you thinking about solar generally?

Yeah, it's such an interesting thing because solar has gone through the biggest cost decline of anything I've ever seen. And, you know, it's 99% cheaper than it used to be. It's mostly manufactured in China. It's a scaled manufacturing problem. That's not a great problem to go after as a startup where it's like manufacturing scales.

How do you compete China against China?

Like, good luck. So I think that that explains a lot of it. What I do think is going to happen is if I'm just trying to make a, you know, 400mm by 300mm solar panel cheaper than China, good luck. But like for a long time, we treated these things like they were like precious minerals. And so if you look at a solar farm, you like lay down all this steel and you put up all this framing and all the rest of it to like put this panel on. Well, when that panel was the most expensive thing on the field, then like, yeah, that makes sense. Cents. That thing is now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff, the like steel frame, costs more than the panel. And so I think what we're going to see, and I'm excited about a couple of startups in this who are saying like, let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form factor, from an automation perspective, and like just go after installation cost. And assuming the cells themselves are basically free, it's basically glass. Yeah. Um, like what would you do differently? And that again, I think this notion of like constraints have changed is what creates a new opportunity. So So that's to me what I'm most excited about in the next wave of solar.

Yeah, and even from, obviously there's a lot of geopolitical considerations with the US and China, but at the end of the day, like a solar cell is not the same as buying like a full computer or something that can have spyware on it. It is just a chip there that it's, where would the spyware be exactly? And so I think you'll see more like hybrid approaches like this, like what Waymo's doing, They're buying Chinese batteries and Chinese steel frames, but then they're putting all the software and hardware on board. So it's a little bit more, you know, less politically dicey, I think. Yes. Anyway, last question on fund size, fund structuring. I feel like a lot of these projects are capital intensive for the best possible reasons. How are you thinking about actually participating over time Do you think you'll be doing SPVs to maintain ownership? Because some of these projects are probably going to be pretty capital intensive. That usually means dilution. Have you thought about that and do you have a strategy in place?

Yeah, I mean, so the first thing we have been doing is just going to work to get these companies fundraised. So we have a giant network of others. So Pantalassa is a great example, just raised a huge round from, from Peter Thiel. We were very early investors in that. So the first thing is get these companies successful, then you have We have the options in terms of how we take advantage of that access and option is something we're going to figure out over time. You know, I think this is the beginning, not the end. We are oversubscribed in this fund. So there's lots of opportunities for us to raise other, other vehicles.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And I get going, but I wanted to keep it— but, you know, I give all our entrepreneurs advice, stay focused. So let's get out the gate, stay focused, prove that there's a bunch of early stage. To your first question, are there opportunities for early stage companies in the space? I think so. I think you're going to see a lot a lot of interesting progress in the next year, and then we'll have lots of different ways to structure, um, how to participate as these companies grow.

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Yeah, excited to meet more of your companies.

Yeah, good luck out there.

We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Okay, up next, we have Nico from Default with an amazing Series A. I've known Nico for a long time, but it's his first time on the show, so we'll bring him in to the TV. How you doing, Nico? Good Phenomenal. Long time no see. Get that overnight success button ready. Overnight success. Another one. Yeah! Introduce yourself. Introduce the company. Give us the news.

Tell us what happened. These guys get it out of their system.

Hello, gentlemen. Hello, listeners. Good to see you. I'm Nico, one of the co-founders here at default.com. Most recently, default.ai. We got a nice URL redirect going. Here we go. Wait, you were at default.com?

Wait, you're going from.com to.ai domain?

We kept the.com, still main domain. Had to pick up default.ai, had to redirect those without ads.

Protect, protect. He's a.com respecter. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I am. How dare you disrespect the.com. No, very good.

Tell us about the product.

Yeah, so we spent the last few years building out a bunch of top-of-funnel orchestration tools, primarily for inbound scheduling, inbound routing, enrichment for very fast-growing B2B companies. And over the last 12, 18 months, we just kept hearing from everyone that everyone was trying to deploy agents, was running, still running into the same issues people have been running into for the last decade. And we took a really big bet and basically built a new product over a good chunk of last year. And last Wednesday, about 5 days ago, we launched it to the world. And it's been great so far. This is my 12th meeting of the day, so I'm glad to be, I'm glad to jump off the demo router.

Explain the flow. When does the agent come into the process? I imagine inbound lead, B2B SaaS company, they have a landing page, there's at some point they collect a form or an email and then the magic happens. Like what is the magic? What is happening?

Yeah, John, so we, The way we used to work before we launched a new product, we'd basically come in, we'd hook into the forms on your website, we'd add a little piece of code that told us how many visitors were coming to your site, who was showing up, et cetera. And then we'd kind of build out all this middleware and plumbing between your forms, your website, all these top funnel signals and your CRM and your sales team. Now what we do is we give you an out-of-the-box data layer. And what data layer is, it's a real-time data warehouse you plug into your CRM, whether that be Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar. We pipe in all of that really rich context that agents can use to really answer these tough to— usually really tough to answer questions about your business. And everyone says that all growth problems are data problems. And at least in, at least in go-to-market. And effectively what we do out of the box now is give you this data layer that plugs into your tools and this kind of semantic modeling layer that translates all this context from your systems as well as different activity like meetings and form submissions and website visitors into a language that agents can actually understand and use to answer these really tough questions.

Isn't this gonna grow into a CRM at some point? It feels like the opportunity to do a compound startup, do many more features, like you have, not only is your company AI-enabled on the product side, but your engineering team's enabled on the products, on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features. Like why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case or do you have ambitions to build out something that looks like a legacy workflow? Is there demand for that? Or do you see the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM?

I think a lot of the same fundamental problems our customers are running into today, even as they're navigating this really challenging, really, really challenging kind of transition, even at really, really large scale. These are the same problems they were running into 10 years ago. So there's no shortage of surface area to solve for today for us. That being said, we're already seeing a ton of our customers really, really build some really cool stuff internally and completely flip the way you know, things have been done for the last couple decades. So that being said, you know, every road in this category and, you know, more broadly leads to an incumbent like a Salesforce or similar. So yeah, we've built with that mantra since day one.

How have you thought about segmenting the market, finding niches, finding little veins domains, like if you find that you're doing really well with startups or doing really well with real estate agents or like anything that takes inbound and has a go-to-market motion or in B2B software, there are other niches within B2B software, right? More dev tool focused, more finance focused B2B software. Do you find that there are sort of mini network effects in these niches? Have you been successful finding a few, or do you want to deliberately cast a wide net so you can sort of cross-pollinate all the learnings from one category to the others, like immediately?

So I would say, you know, really early on, we were focused on working with the fastest growing, you know, really the fastest growing startups. And there was a bit of a, I don't know if network effect is how to put it, but a lot of our pipeline came from referrals really early on. People would go and they'd sign up and book a demo for their favorite new recently launched and fresh off the assembly line product, and they'd see the little Powered by Default logo down at the bottom, and that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today. But it's really interesting. I think a lot of our customers, we serve a lot of customers in software, a few in medical devices, some services businesses, fintech as well. And more or less everyone runs into some version of the same problem, which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another and really kind of create this sort of data soup or this Frankenstack is what we call it, that just makes it really, really hard to grow. It creates growth tax. Every incremental dollar of revenue past a certain certain threshold, depending on the vertical or market, requires sort of army of operations people to sort of maintain the Frankenstack and keep it at bay.

So, yeah. So how prevalent is the Frankenstack? Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like Databricks exists, Snowflakes exists, like everyone has this beautiful data lake. Of course, and not only that, Zapier exists and there's vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly every company has done that. Sounds like they haven't. Is there like a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked and does become best practice? And then is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations? Yeah, so I'll give two answers here.

First and foremost, I've never met someone who didn't hate their CRM. Around. Okay. I'll say that first and foremost. Second, you know, I think it's very rare that we run into a scaling, you know, revenue org that has, you know, very deep technical proficiency and, you know, is spending a lot of their time in a data warehouse or writing SQL. Typically they're pulling reports and trying to answer, you know, a lot of these normally tough to answer questions. That being said, one of the one of the things that I've been— you know, my team and I have been really excited about here over the course of the last year is seeing so many really, really fast-growing companies. Like Owner.com is a perfect example. Kyle Norton, the CRO there, has built just an absolutely incredible go-to-market operations team. They've built so much internal, you know, basically just building their own distribution product, their own foundation they can use to scale. And as a result, they're able to gain a massive competitive advantage and they started doing that very, very early on. You see the same thing with other hypergrowth companies like Ramp and Rippling and many others. But, you know, the best companies treat their distribution as product and, you know, as an extension of product. And, you know, I think that is, that is getting earlier and earlier in terms of when, when companies start prioritizing that.

Tell us about the— well, before that, 7-day work week. 5-day work week. Logo tattooed. 2-day work week. Do you have the Default as like kind of a back piece?

Yeah, I've got a nice stamp down here, yeah. That's nice.

The whole back. Yeah, I mean, you gotta, you gotta, a lot of space back there.

I mean, jokes aside, what is the work culture like at Default these days? Yeah, it's intense.

You know, we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year, Um, it's very project for GTM, for B2B SaaS. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. No, but it is a competition.

You want to win, and there's other players. And like, you know, if you, if you're on the beach 5 days a week, like, you're just gonna get smoked. This is real.

Yep. We're, we're definitely not on the beach 5 days a week. Yeah, I'm too pale, too pale for that. But, um, no, yeah, we, you know, we're, we're solving a lot of, uh, a lot of really hard problems I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really, really excited at solving the growth rate problem and trying to help our customers grow better and faster. A lot of that stuff, a lot of the problems that we run into are a lot of the same kind of boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds thinking about how to solve these problems day in and day out.

And we're very excited about the future. Amazing. Tell us about the round. How much did you raise?

Yeah, so we did a $10 million A last year. Again.

Again. And then there was another one? Yeah, one more. Yeah. Sounds like there were a couple rounds.

There we go. There you go. That's hard. That's a hard one. That's a hard one. Anyway, expert mode. Great to catch up, Nico. Thanks for coming on the show.

Catch y'all soon. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Cheers. Very fun. That is the hardest one to hit. The glasses. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sue Kim from Brilliant. She's the co-founder and CEO, and she's here with us in the 2D Penultimate.

What's going on?

Sue, how are you doing?

Hey, thanks for having me. I'm doing great.

Thanks for hopping on the show. Since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company and the launch and for you to just take it through, take us through it.

Yeah. So I'm Sue. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant. We just launched Brilliant's new AI tutor. His name is Koji. He's a little green guy. He helps you learn how to think and problem solve in math and coding. If you come check out the product, everything starts out very visual and interactive. And this tutor can see how you're interacting with all the concepts and the problems you're solving and point and sketch and annotate on the screen with you. So we call it a graphical tutor because it's designed to feel like someone sitting next to you, looking over your shoulder and ready to help.

Uh, talk about how people have processed the intersection of AI and education to date? It's been such a big selling point overall. And personally, I think it's most powerful as a way to ask like the dumb question that you might be embarrassed to ask, you know, a friend or an actual teacher or even a tutor. But how have you kind of processed it it. Obviously, you can use the base models themselves to, to learn, but there's a lot of missing functionality and opportunity for you to kind of, you know, extend out that kind of raw capability.

Yeah, totally. You know, I think that lowering that barrier of embarrassment is huge. That's something that we hear a lot, that, you know, the student who would never ever raise their raise their hand in class and ask a question, or, you know, even with a tutor, it's just kind of like, I still don't get it, like, can you explain it a third way? It's hard to do. And, you know, I think that these models have helped a lot with that, like lowering that embarrassment. And one of the things that we haven't yet seen them do is design for something other than the moment of explanation. I, you know, when we designed this tutor, we designed it for that moment understanding, not for the moment of explanation. And there's actually a lot of research on tutoring that shows that when human tutors don't just sit there and explain stuff to you, the tutoring conversations become a lot more interactive, and then students just do a lot more of the work. And, you know, these, like, magical outcomes of why tutoring is so broadly effective, you know, ultimately a lot of that just comes down to the learner spending more time on the material, uh, And, you know, if the tutor talks too much and just, like, spits out tons of stuff for you to read, that is worse than the student doing stuff and just sitting in the confusion. So I think it's a combination of how much can you engage the student to actually do the work, and then, you know, lowering the embarrassment, improving their motivation and engagement, and just getting to the point where they feel sort of confident tackling these things on their own.

Do you feel like you have a duty to make learning addictive?

How would you put it? Something similar.

Because every— there's a lot of big companies out there. I won't name them. They certainly want people to spend as much time in their applications as possible. It's like every company, but yes. Not every company. There's— but let's say like the algorithmic video feed. Sure. As much of our time as possible, I feel like you have a duty to take, to try to make learning as addictive as possible. Good addiction. Because it's a positive addiction, right? I want people to be obsessed with understanding the world, furthering their skills, et cetera.

Yeah, you know, we talk about this a lot, like a big marker of success of the tutor is whether or not he can make himself unnecessary. And, you know, The goal is that you scaffold the learner and allow them to ask questions until you get to a point where they can do it for themselves. And then you want to get out of the way. So one of our goals is that if we are doing a good job, over the course of learning a concept, Koji should become totally unnecessary. Like, you should be asking the questions that he used to ask you. And one of the things that I find a funny parallel is that on our board, is someone who started the dating company OkCupid. And then he went on and, you know, became the CEO of Match, was on the board of Tinder. And he was like, you know, the funny thing about consumer dating apps is that if you're successful, churn is built into the product. Like, you want people to churn because, like, you don't want people just in the app just going on dates all the time and not, you know, meeting that long-term partner. Yeah. And so, you know, we do measure whether or not people churn.. But we measure it very differently from how most other consumer products would think about it.

But I feel like learning is much more, learning is way more continuous. Like everyone should aspire to be a lifelong learner, whether, whereas like maybe it's not so healthy to aspire to be a lifelong dater, you know, somebody that's just like, I never wanna, you know, I don't feel like there's never been a subject that I've I've like learned about where I've just run out of things to learn. Well, it's interesting, that happens to me all the time.

I feel like I'm like, yeah, but I'm talking about more done. I know everything. I know everything. I'm kidding.

No, but I mean, of course, of course you're joking, but there is specific things where you're like, okay, I've learned enough about nutrition, totally, totally, and I don't really care about it too much, you know, let's say. But like, I've learned the basics, I can move on to the next topic. But there's so many topics. For me, that's nutrition. Every Every single point, every single place that I've gotten to in terms of an overall understanding, I'm like, "Wow, this goes deeper than I thought." Yeah.

How are you thinking about multimodality? I feel like the big labs all have different ways to turn out a result that's not just a big block of text. There's an image, an infographic. We saw with Google I/O, there's the Omni model that can show a 10-second video diagram or an explanation, a whiteboard lecture. And it feels like there's maybe a gap right now in that you have to come to the model or the chat app and ask for what you want. You have to say, "I want this as an infographic," or "I want this as a video," or you might even have to go to a specific model or a specific company. Like if you want video, you go to Google. If you want an image, you go to ChatGPT. And I'm wondering if you're thinking about how that fits into your process of actually picking the right tool for the job.

Yeah, it's very, you know, working with a chatbot to learn is a very proactive process. And it's one of those things where when you use a chatbot, the chatbot gets very little data on whether or not you've actually learned the thing. Like typically the interaction with the chatbot is you ask your question, you get your answer and the exchange is over. And so for a lot of these like homework help type learning queries, people answer, people get their question answered and then they leave. And so the model gets back no data on did the learner actually learn this thing? And going back to the point about addiction, the thing that we try to get people really immersed in is like tons and tons of like dense real-time reps in learning a new skill. Learning a topic so that we can self-improve and hyper-personalize in real time. And to do that, you have to have a dense user model. You have to have a learning graph. You know, that's not going to come out of a model company anytime soon. Uh, the UI/UX matters a lot too. It has to be purpose-built for teaching with all the features that come along with that. And also, you know, just some of the stuff also has to be purely deterministic. Like, you have to be correct, uh, and you have to guarantee that correctness. And so I think there's a lot of things that ultimately just add up to a lot of friction, uh, when you are asking the user to pull and sort of scaffold and structure their own learning. Whereas, you know, our philosophy is we're gonna pull you in and give you things to do that are the right next thing for you to do.

Amazing. Uh, where can people get started?

Uh, go to brilliant.org, uh, and we have apps as well.

The App Store and Play Store. Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Great to finally meet you. And congrats.

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks. Goodbye. Bye. Before our next guest joins, we have a new, a new release, new information from Sam Sulek. He has chimed in on the debate over should you work 5 days a week or 7 days a week? He says you only need to work 5 days a week. Don't overdo it. It. You do not need to work 24/7. Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time you're not working on the Manhattan Project. Work hard, recovery, keep some balance. So wise words from Sam Sulek. No, I just took your image and put it in ChatGPT, but it actually makes a lot of sense in the bodybuilding. You know, you do need to take rest days in bodybuilding. So it's totally reasonable that that would be something that he would say. But that, of course, of course, is fake news. That's our fake news segment for the day. Fortunately, we have someone with some very real news joining us. We have Bernie Su, the Emmy-winning series creator, to talk about movies, go back to the YouTube-ification of Hollywood. We'll get his takes on my takes, my very novice takes. But why don't we start with an introduction on you and yourself? Can you tell us a little bit about you?

Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Bernie. I am been working in the entertainment industry and tech adjacent industries for over a decade. I've created many shows. Thanks. We create many shows across YouTube, Twitch, and other new media platforms, including some shows that were in traditional Hollywood, but I'm most known for my 3 Emmy-winning shows, uh, Emma Approved, Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which were the first and second primetime Emmy wins ever for a YouTube show, and the show Artificial, which was the first Emmy Emmy win for a Twitch show, which also won a Peabody. Um, and it's been— it's an honor to be here, guys.

Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Popping on. So, uh, I mean, rattle off your takes. Okay, so, uh, I don't know if my take was that, uh, contrarian or anything, but it does feel like we're at an— we're at an interesting moment where potentially Hollywood is finding a stronger way to work with new media or YouTube than ever before. The Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029, and we have back to back to back YouTube massive successes at the box office, something that has been tried loosely before. Can you just get an audience of 10 million YouTube subscribers to show up in theaters? Hasn't always worked out, but this summer it feels like we're seeing positive success stories with, uh, Obsession, Backrooms, Iron Lung. And I'm wondering how you're interpreting those three movies. Is this an actual turning point? Has this been a slow, gradual grind for years? And maybe this is less of a, of an important moment than— maybe this is something only outsiders are noticing and it's been a trend that's been going on for a long time. But how have you processed the recent viral news around Backrooms obsession, Iron Lung, etc.?

I mean, you kind of said it there. I think it's a trend that's been going on for many years. So if you Um, I speak at VidCon every year, for example, and I've asked every year in this kind of the same panel, like, when is, like, you— when are the creators of YouTube going to take over Hollywood and all that stuff? And I'm like, they are already going, getting there. Yeah, they're just not seeing it. And like, you're seeing the ramp up, and of course it's just getting bigger and getting bigger and getting bigger. It's like, like, um, I think, you know, regarding, say, like the Emmys, like, MrBeast is not a YouTuber, he's a Prime creator. Yeah, because he has a show on Prime. That's what he's going going for, right? So, so these, this is, we're now seeing in movies, as you said, like now we're seeing it, um, in the, in the last, you know, like you said, the back to back to back, uh, run of this year. Yeah. Um, but this is something that at least I've been seeing for, you know, 5 years or so as this ramp up. And you're kind of, where were you, where the earlier genesis of this was, is that you had this era where there was these YouTuber kind of led movies, influencer-led movies. The movies probably weren't regarded as great movies, but I think what missed the mark there was that they just kind of plugged and played a dude. Yep. In there. It's like, oh, you've got 10 million followers, let's just put you in here. And the problem with that is that that doesn't work because it's not on brand with the audience that it's coming from, right? So, so now with like Iron Lung and Markiplier and all that stuff, like, it's his, right? Yeah, it's, it's his. So it's very much him being him. Beast Games is him being him. Am just amplified. And you're seeing that tech and social media play coming in all at the same time.

Yeah, I've heard a lot about this in casting calls these days where actors and actresses will just get asked like, oh, well, do you have 10,000 on Instagram or 100,000 Instagram? And it feels like that is, it maybe it's some sort of signal, but it's not really gonna move the needle on, is this going to be a success at the box office? Box office if a few thousand people buy tickets from your audience of tens of thousands of people. It's more just like, are you serious? And have you figured out the Instagram algorithm to get a bunch of views?

What do you think? Living in LA for most of my adult life, I've been surprised. I've met a bunch of people who work in the movie business, directors, producers. And you'll ask them, like, oh, "Oh, do you have like a YouTube channel?" And they'll be like, "No, no, I don't do that." And it's always like surprising to me 'cause it's basically saying like, I'm going to let other people and like gatekeepers sort of like dictate my creative output.

Well, if you already have the key to the gate, why do you need to, it's no problem for you because you're going right in.

No, I know, but no, some people like that are trying to break in. Sure, sure, sure. And so personally, if I was trying to break into the movie business, I'd need a movie— Get a shovel. Movies, start digging on like as much as possible, even if they were, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, or just figuring out some of these other formats. And like, I think that's like when you look at Obsession. Yeah. That's an example of somebody who like really, really, really, really got their reps in. Yep. Even if it wasn't like the format that led to the breakout, you know, like proper, like, like, uh, box office hit.

Yeah. I mean, 1000% agree. I mean, I'll add to that, that like right now all these these young creators, like you said, breaking in, you are more armed today with just tools, like, like not just audience, but audience and tools with like the, if whether you, you're on the AI side or not with the creative and the GenAI, you have all this automation and all these like, like efficiency points that you can activate.

I mean, and you can tell some story. Blender, Blender, it's a free open source CGI package and exactly like, and, and you go to Skibidi Toilet and it's like and Valve Filmmaker, and people are making movies in Fortnite, and Halo from a long time ago, if you remember Red vs. Blue. Of course, another Bernie. Bernie Burns, yeah. And so I guess my big question is Hollywood still has an immense amount of prestige, and it's still seen as the Mount Everest of being a creator. If you can have a film on the silver screen and have a box office box office smash, that's great. But in terms of economics, the YouTube revenues have to be bigger than Hollywood right now. And I'm not anticipating like a flippening where Hollywood comes back in the traditional sense. But I'm excited by the idea of YouTubers being able to graduate in the more prestigious, you know, Hollywood filmmaking scene. But I'm just wondering like how much of this is about cultural shelling points, these moments that bring us all together versus something that's more abstract, prestige. Like, what is the long-term relationship here? Because it doesn't feel like you're going to see, "Oh, YouTubers aren't making any money anymore and everyone went back to making money in Hollywood." It feels more like Hollywood's just getting some juice back and restructuring a little bit to bring some young talent up, but YouTube YouTube will still continue to be a behemoth in terms of monetization on ads and brand partnerships and whatnot.

Um, yeah, all of that is, is accurate. I would just add clarification on like YouTube is, yes, it is bigger, but it's also more diversified, right? Because it's just so many channels, right? It's like Hollywood puts out whatever, 50 movies a year at most. And you know, YouTubers are doing that, one YouTuber's doing that a month, right? Yeah, yeah. Like, or not movies, but videos.

You get what I mean.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

And so what we're kind of where you're Hollywood's worth of content.

Like every month, basically. Per minute, right?

Per second, whatever. But like, so what you're going toward there as far as the business side of things is the kind of what I call the franchising, right? So Hollywood is still the best place to like amplify your franchise, like take something and like send it to a bunch of other places. Okay. So, uh, obviously this is a little cherry picking, but like K-pop Demon Hunters is masterful in the sense of that it became a franchise over night. And now the irony and fun of it is that Hollywood's trying to catch up to it. It's like, oh my God, we need more everything. We're like behind on the toys, we're behind on the merch, behind on the videos. We need another series right now. All that stuff. Okay, so it's— it kind of comes hand in hand. And you finally seeing it, as you kind of mentioned at the top of this thing, which was that the YouTubers are now, okay, you know what, I'm really good here on this platform. Let's go up. Let's give it a shot. Let's see if we make it work. And we're seeing successes as we— as we were talking about. I'm sure there's been any failures, okay? But we're seeing those successes now. And now, like, the Markiplier and these guys, like, they have basically a burgeoning franchise. Now, whether it continues over years and sequels and everything— doesn't mean it has to be a sequel, by the way. Like, if it becomes a video game, yeah, and that's successful, that counts. Yeah, totally. Like, maybe even more, right? So, like, going kind of what they call transmedia— it's a weird term— but, like, if they can jump to different formats and different avenues, that's where the— if I'm talking about the money, like that's where the real franchisability of this thing comes from. And YouTubers, if anything, are actually way more nimble. I'm not saying they're better, I'm saying they're more nimble at this than Hollywood because just because the ma— the definition of how small their teams are and how fast they can move versus these giant corporate behemoths which have tons of resources but have all this bureaucracy that could slow the system down. So That's where we're seeing this kind of— not a clash, but it's like an evolution as this goes forward, where I would imagine that if you're trying to franchise out one of these guys' movies, it's like, it's like, all right, let's show you how we do it, but let's also kind of get out of your way. Yeah, right. Let you guys do what you do too. Yeah.

And see where we land. What do you think Obsession will do for low-budget film funding? Like, the, the potential return here is so extreme, I imagine a lot of people would see this and go try to fund other projects like this? Or is it so, so out there and so rare that people won't try to replicate it?

I mean, Hollywood loves trying to replicate, so we've actually seen this kind of cycle before. We've seen it with um, uh, Blair Witch Project, you know, over 20 years ago. We've seen kind of these versions of these like virally kind of things, uh, Paranormal Activity, right? Like, oh yeah, like these, these started as very, very low-budget movies that were just very, very cleverly done, became sensations in their own way, and became franchises. And you also saw this kind of wave of like found footage movies after Paranormal Activity. And like, what is it about—

what is it about What is it about horror movies that, like, is a category that seems to do well with a low budget?

I think it's because it's very just— it's very understandable. Like, universal. There's no language barriers, no, like, cultural jokes you have to hit. It's universally understandable. And so it's one of those things where, like, you know, as much as we love comedies and we're like, why aren't these comedies a hit? Like, it's still our culture. Cultural tastes are like, what's funny to us in America?

Oh, so like fear, fear is like more universal than comedy. Yeah. And you can create like an extremely scary situation with just a house in the woods, right? Yeah, exactly. Or you don't need to be—

And on the production side, yeah, just a house in the woods works, whereas even if you're doing a romantic comedy, you might wanna shut down a street in Manhattan for a scene that's outdoors or go to some physical place and like travel travel around, or let alone sci-fi where you have to do a whole bunch of CGI and be on the— be on a spaceship or something building complex sets. Whereas, you know, you can go and film something in a—

team is also saying no A-list actors. Usually it's weird to see a Marvel star in a horror movie. Yeah, why don't A-list actors?

Because it's more relatable. Because if I see Tom Cruise there, I'm like, he's not gonna die. But if I see some, some no-name actor, I'm like, oh, that, that person could go next. I don't know who's going to The Last One Standing.

So it's kind of a— it's a way for like new talent, like in front of the camera and behind the camera, to try to basically break in. So, so you're saying, well, we're going to see 1 million Obsession knockoffs in the next 12 months?

I mean, I don't know about 1 million, but we're gonna definitely see some, that's for sure. Okay, like the question is whether they're good or not and all that. But it's like going back to your, your, the, the— I think with horror, you can bring the budgets down. Like, you have to pay Tom Cruise, right? If you're gonna bring Tom Cruise in, you're gonna pay— everybody's— everybody is— it's a cost there. And if horror can just kind of generate its own audience, like, well, why are we paying for it? Like, why do we need to, to, you know, shell out all this money to bring in a star, a name star, or someone with a big following to do this? So it's like, it's a bit— it's a business plan. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, um, but it's historically the case. Like, look at any horror franchise, it's rare to even see any type of A-list, B-list, whatever, recognizable star even, you know, headlining it. Like, look at, you know, the latest Final Destination, right? That's a 7-movie franchise, I think. And it's like, even the 7th movie didn't have a really anybody, any household names, okay, that were in there. Scream's a little bit of an exception, we'll give that. But like, Scream kind of built its own. Yeah, sure, sure.

When— how long until you, uh, until you think we see a hit in theaters that had where 90% of the budget was as AI compute. Whoa. A hit.

Can you define hits?

A hit is like over $30 million. Over $30 million. At box office and over 3x return on budget or something like that.

That's a good question.

I mean, I think we're gonna see in the next—

They put $10 in, they get $30 out.

Somebody has to be working on it. The question is, do they have the talent? Are the models actually good enough? Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

And so AI in the Lot was literally last week and there was a lot of stuff that came out of it, right? The Amazon announcements and like the Higgs Field movie, um, sure, uh, Heat Check, I think, what was— I'm sorry if I misnamed it, like that's a ni— that's 100%, I think, or 90, like it qualifies as far as your compute power situation. Um, could it do, you know, $30 million at the box office? I, based on what people— I've not seen it, but based on what I'm hearing about it, I'm gonna guess no, but prove me wrong, please. Sure. Like if you're gonna go for it. Uh, but yeah, I do think it'll come. I do. I think there's two factors. Interests here, right? So one is the, does it matter that's AI? Like most of the, most of the public worldwide audience just wants to be entertained. Sure. Okay. It just want to be entertained. Like if it's, if it's real or not, like we've been watching CG movies for generations. It's like, we just want to be entertained. Good movie or bad movie. Okay. So there's that. But right now you still have this kind of public vitriol shaming of like, oh, it's AI, ban, ban, ban. And we're still seeing a bit of that coming out of AI on the a lot even. So, so when we think of like experiences that like, you know, we're building, we're just like, okay, we use a lot of AI right now. Okay. Um, and like we're just trying to build entertaining experiences. So to me, like it's, I would say it's sooner than later, except for just that, that X factor of the vitriol. Like I just don't know how to predict that one of when it'll be okay.

But, but it does feel feel like there's someone out there who hasn't broken in yet, who has nothing to lose, who's just gonna be sitting at home just prompting. And it could, that's why I think it potentially comes from somebody that nobody has heard of before.

There's also, there are also movies. Oh, for sure. It might be like an AI movie that could break through because it's either like self-referential or making fun of AI or doing something in a different way. Like, like Toy Story was about toys. It wasn't replacing actors with CGI. And so there's like less of a conflict there. So if you're doing some sort of story that could not be told without AI and it's handled the right way, like you could maybe massage it a little bit more to get there. And maybe you don't jump straight to like, you were expecting Tom Cruise, but it's just an AI version of him. On Tom Cruise, like that's probably gonna be pretty poorly received. I mean, you're speaking my language.

So like, I'm gonna just slightly explain what I'm working on so it kind of relates to this. Please. So we're, we're, we're at Pickford. We're building, we showed experience last week over at Sony, which was basically a, a, a detective series where, where the audience could interact with it in real time because the AI was writing the show as it goes. Okay. So literally impossible without the technology. Okay. Yeah. So this is one where my colleagues in the, in the filmmaking and AI spaces, we talk about, well, what's more exciting is not just, hey, let's make an AI movie. What can AI do to juice up the form of art and narrative that we couldn't have done before? Yeah. Not a cost thing, like a possibility thing. Yeah. Right. And so when you have a series like what we're trying to build, which is interactive, which can only be done because of live prompting audiences in theaters on phones. Now you've driven the experience to the theater, which we're going to— self-plug— do at Alamo Draft Houses around the country this year. Now, we're not going to— I doubt we're going to generate $30 million, like you said, to be a big hit. But, you know, we have proven, at least in our small sample sizes, that we can provide an in-theater, communal, entertaining experience, be interactive, be consequential. As a paid ticket even, and we're using AI tech and it's just like, it's entertaining. Yeah. Animation may be kind of a little wonky at times. The tech is very, very like, it's calling all this complicated data and all in real time. Yeah, yeah, sure. But at the end of the day, we are entertaining and that's what we are in the industry first and foremost, all the tech aside and all the business side, we, that's what we're here to do, right? If we're not entertaining, Classic, you know, Russell Crowe, "Are you not entertained?

What are we even doing here?" So that's where I look at it. Yeah, the personalization stuff is super interesting. I had a funny experience maybe 20 years ago or so. I grew up in Pasadena, and I was watching this movie in Pasadena, Kill Bill, Tarantino. Nice, love it. And I'm watching, and the bride pulls up in this yellow truck, and across the bottom, the bottom white text pops up and it says, "This scene takes place in Pasadena, California." And I was like, "This is so weird. Like, did I buy the localized version of this movie?" It just happens to take place in Pasadena. But you could imagine a horror film that takes place in like any town USA that like uses your, you know, geolocation to make it more customized to you. It feels more scary 'cause you're like, "Oh, this could be happening right outside my window." There's a whole bunch of bunch of different ways that you could instantiate like little personalizations that would be putting in a lot of job.

Yeah, you could generate, you know, if you needed a scene of a car like driving past like, "Welcome to Entertown, USA," generate it with the Google Map.

Yeah, like on the fly potentially, not for every place, but yeah, there will be, I imagine that like whatever breaks through will be newer and weirder and break boundaries and won't be a clone of the things that we love like Star Wars, because we have Star Wars. We don't need AI version of Star Wars. We need something entirely new and creative. Yeah, I completely agree.

I completely agree. So it's like, I have this thing where I say like, AI is not gonna out-Game of Thrones Game of Thrones. Like, we're not, it's not gonna do that. Like, AI can do things really fast and you can fill buckets really quick. Good with like, you're trying to fill content on your feed. Really great at that. Yeah. So it's not gonna do that. So on the high-end art side, the great artists will probably incorporate some little bit AI, but it's not gonna end to end that. And then on kind of your side with customization, I really do think that's— selfishly, I do think that's the play because AI is really good at speed and optimization, and it's really hard to do customization without speed and optimization. So now you're playing to the advantage of the technology versus the disadvantage, which is the sloppiness that we're getting to. Okay, so not only on your side with the Pasadena example, which I think is an amazing, amazing example of customization for possibilities, got me thinking about it, actually. I also think it's about consequentiality, which means that did you feel like you impacted it, right? Like, did you feel like while you're watching the movie, did you do something? Does it— maybe it's an eye thing, maybe it's a saying thing. Can you feel like you're part of it? And I do think that the young generations, the Gen Zers, the Aers and everything, they're already growing up with like a parasocial relationship to their content. Sure. Okay, end to end, right? And that may be also why these movies are getting successful because they're like, they feel like they have a relationship to the creator and they feel like, you know, we're gonna go. Um, but to feel like they have an impact in their content, I think that's where the blue sky is. That's where I feel it's coming from, and that's where I'm trying to get to myself in my work.

Yeah, make a horror movie that I can pause if it gets too scary. And I think you pause— no, no, pause. And if I pause, you, you sense it, you just tone it down a notch.

Oh, tone it down It just gets less, less scary.

And if you let it play, it's just like a nature documentary.

I mean, I mean, you could have a movie that you have a separate volume button for, like, I want G-rated, PG, R-rated.

I don't want to get too spooked.

I don't want to get too spooked. I somehow think that would break the experience. Anyway, lots of fun, lots of new projects coming.

Well, thank you so much. Great to meet you, Bernie. I'm excited to see your new project.

Yeah, hopefully. Yeah, come back on the show when you launch it.

We'd love to talk more. Happy to. Looking forward to it, guys.

Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Uh, we have some more updates from Sam Sulek. He says Hollywood isn't losing, it's teaming up. YouTube creators are no longer outsiders, they're the next franchise. Gatekeepers are gone. Discovery happens on YouTube now. The best stories and the biggest audiences are moving into theaters. Wise words, wise words. He also weighed in on, uh, on Star Startup tattoos, we have another one here, Sam Sulak hot take. This is a whole format now, the Sam Sulak hot take is going viral in his Young LA tank top here. You don't need to get your startup logo tattooed even if you were an early employee. You do not need to work 24/7. Overtraining reduces performance most of the time. You're not working on the Manhattan Project. He continues. Fun times. Also, Sam Sulak's His very first post on X, 5,000 likes, 260,000 views. It's just him with a fish. Check this thing out. It's beautiful. Catfish, dude.

Check this thing out. Looking good. Dream guest. People ask us. Yes, this would be a good one. What's your dream guest? Hands down.

Sam Sulek.

Sam Sulek. Yeah. On AI, hyperscalers, the build-out capability overhead.

He's been working on a build-out for years. He's going fantastic. Some of these AI CEOs could learn a little thing or two from him. That's true. That's true. Build out yourself before you build out that data center. Approval rating will be a lot higher. You're worried about the wrong build-out.

You're worried about the wrong build-out. You're worried about the energy bottleneck? You should be worried about a protein bottleneck. Exactly. Protein shortages.

Protein is the energy of your muscles. Well, we can close with Wilmanitis. He says, I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest 5-year run in techno-capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes, he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery. Well, he's bullish.

He's flipped extremely bullish recently, which I don't know if that's bullish or—

Him being bullish? Bearish. Are bearish, you should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy. Who knows? Do your own research, make your own decisions. Just do it on public. Adam Faze also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, I'm so tired of how many experiences in my life have now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the instead. I thought this is very, very cool, wildly different. And like, all of these can be printed or framed. I mean, I guess they're, they're physical pieces of art, but they could also be replicated for the partygoers. Very, very cool analog. This is why vinyl records are at an all-time high. There's demand for both the Content Barbell— this is very cool— the slop and the artisanal handcrafted sketch artist from Adam Faze.

Very, very cool. I had the pleasure of running into Adam on the street. Oh yeah, you did? Last week when I was getting coffee, I ran up to him with my camera and I said, "Hey sir, what do you do for a living?" What do you do for a living? Was he amused? Mildly.

That's what you aim for.

I was more amused by my own bit.

Anyway, oh, last thing. Arena Magic Arena Magazine is dropping issue number 008, At Sea. They're covering deep sea mining, shipbuilding, undersea cables, maritime autonomy, autonomy, island building, American sea power, and so much more. Best enjoyed near a body of water with a cold drink in hand. Shipping to subscribers now. Go check it out. Arena Mag, one of our favorites. You can subscribe to get the issue at arenamag.com. We love the folks over there. Uh, so much more more to talk about, but we will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week. And it's June. Leave us 5 stars. It's June.

You see that, John? Yeah, it's June 1st.

What was surprising about that?

We said that on the intro. I know. I mean, it's just crazy to see it. It's June.

It's June. Another month.

Time flies. Another month.

Well, and your podcast. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for the newsletter at tbpi.com, and we will see you. It's been an honor. Tomorrow. Bye. Fire!