Amazon Ban Hammer, Seedance Strategy, Amazon Blocks Muse | Vinod Khosla, Augustus Doricko, Ben Hylak, Aaron Levie, Lucas Shaw

You're watching TVPN.

Today is Monday, September 21st, 2026. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

The capital of capital.

How many days till Christmas? TVPN's Road to Christmas started weeks ago. We got 94 days until Christmas.

Double digits.

We're so close.

Every day, so close.

One day closer to Christmas. So get excited, start shopping for presents, start picking out that Christmas tree. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. They got musicals. I guess they doing musicals now. And I guess we doing AI safety now. And we'll get into that later.

Doing a bit of a show today.

Yeah.

We got Augustus DeRico coming in with a $100 million charity.

Tipping the hat for $100 million.

We have Vinod Khosla.

We know Kosla's coming on, coming back.

Aaron Levy breaking his silence on the SaaS rebound, new model drops, the latest on open source and more. We have Ron from iConnections. They are putting on an incredible show in November that we're going to be at called Tomorrow X. Excited to talk with him about that. And then we'll round it out with none other than Ben Heilich coming in With a new round of funding as well.

For Raindrop.

Raindrop.

How was your weekend?

Droptop.

Yes. Oh yeah, good name for a company. How was your weekend?

It was— couldn't have been better.

Yeah, it was good. We were off on Friday. We went to Boston and back basically the same day. Sort of a brutal flight back and forth, a little tired.

That's horrific.

But I got completely one-shotted by the new AI video model, SeaDance 2.5. Gone are the days of face swaps. I remember when it was called DreamBooth, this paper came out from Google, and it allowed you to very realistically swap your face into a photo. Now, this is something you can just do with a single prompt today, but back then, you had to go and take 10 or 20 different photos of yourself at different angles, different lighting, usually just dug through your camera roll, got them, Then you had to feed that into like a Python script that was either hosted on— what's their notebook, their hosted IPython notebook? Google Colab.

Colab.

And then the Colab thing was weird because it was a luck of the draw what GPU you got. So you would like sign up and create an instance. And then sometimes it would just be like, you got a 1080 Ti. And you'd be like, bah, like I can't do what I need to do because I need a lot of memory to do a particular thing. And then sometimes it would be like, you got an A100, brother, like lock in. Like it was just random permissions. And people would be like so excited when they got one or the other. But there was this musician who was like a guitarist who implemented the paper and then basically distilled it down and figured out how to run— this is a crazy thing, but this guy was just like a hobbyist machine learning engineer, figured out how to get DreamBooth running on like basically commodity gaming hardware. So then you could go and you could take your face, fine-tune it. and then be able to generate new photos in the style of whatever. It was all built on that open source one, not Midjourney, the other image generator, Amodna Stock was the—

Stable Diffusion.

Stable Diffusion. It was like Stable Diffusion as the base and then this DreamBooth thing on top. And it was super cool 'cause if you actually went through, if you jumped through all those hoops, you basically had access to the Magic Avatar thing like 3 months before everyone else. And you could like send one to a friend and be like, oh, this is cool. And then it was just completely commodified It became an app, and then it just became available in every chat app very shortly after. But the AI video's been moving a lot slower. It's very compute intensive, obviously, since OpenAI had to shut down Sora. And it just feels like none of the major American labs are as focused on this. So I got completely addicted to this, had a lot of fun doing it. I'll walk through everything that we did. But—

Yeah, there was one point where you sent me like 10 videos back to back of me in various AI scenes. And then I was just sending you some, like pretty mundane commentary back. And then I was like, whoa, okay.

Yeah.

On something totally different.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was like, oh, sorry. I need to respect your culture and actually respond. Yeah.

Well, it's because like you no longer need to go get a different app or sign up for anything. Like I was just texting with Codex remotely. I had a PC that was running this. And then I would just be like— I didn't even say, take this video. I would just say, like, go find some videos and put Jordi in them. And it would just do that. And I didn't even have to, like, upload photos of you. I would just say, like, go find some reference photography for Jordi across the internet. And it would—

And so far, it seems to have made a lot of sense not to focus on video, given that Codex and Claude can connect into all these other tools and models and just give you what you want as a user without incurring any of the costs of focusing to make great models or the actual Costs of serving them and having to allocate GPUs.

Yeah. So I think people will be having fun. Oh, speaking of Codex, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, creating some of the videos I will show you shortly, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. So the latest turn of AI video models, they're really, really good, not just for the high-fidelity stuff, which we'll show you some of, but even going back to '90s VHS footage, it can edit anything and it doesn't look weird 90% of the time. SeaDance 2.5, the big update here is that it replaces the whole person, the whole object, as opposed to just a face swap, which just— it just hits way harder. You'll see. And it matches all the subtle details of the footage. So things integrate really nicely. Dylan Patel posted a video of him as Drake in this cheetah print video over the weekend. And I think a lot of people fell for this.

It tricked everyone.

I think it tricked a lot of people because it's super high fidelity. Let's play Semi Analysis's latest post on X. Dylan Patel as Drake. And what's interesting about this is the video model is really good. But also this Drake video came out a day ago. And so it's not— it hasn't saturated the internet like a lot of people.

A lot of people hadn't seen it.

This is the first that I saw this video before I saw the actual Drake music video. And of course, the choreography is fantastic in the underlying video and that drives the motion.

Yeah, maybe mute the audio.

Really? Yeah, we're probably gonna get—

Fun as it is.

But it's so funny to see Dylan walk around, and that first shot really sells it. It really looks like him. Later on, he goes into the mirror. He walks up the stairs. This is what the model's really good at, is even though he's very small and he's behind, like, the chandelier cuts in front of him, there's no aberrations. This part, his face starts to look a little not like him. There's a little bit of Drake, like, sort of sneaking back in on the— facial structure. But, uh, overall very, very, uh, like incredible performance. And it does a good job whether he's looking away from the camera, whether he's big in the frame or small in the frame.

And it's really cool. I, I can't stress enough how funny it is that so many people, like so many people were dunking on this, saying, wow, this is the top. We're definitely closer to the top than the bottom.

Never become the main character. He's not serious. He's not serious.

It's like, one, Dylan has never had the most like serious brand. He likes to have fun.

But 2, the fact that it was tricking everyone shows that—

shows where we are. Shows where we are.

No, seriously, like, this is exactly what you want from the semi-analysis. Like, you want them to analyze the models.

Yeah, hey, we just updated you on the state of video models.

Yeah, yeah.

And the idea that Dylan, which they use so much AI, they use so much AI on anything, everything. I even texted Dylan recently. I was like, you should get an actual creative director, maybe use less slop.

Oh, yeah.

Um, it— but the idea that he would just like take 48 hours and a $100,000 budget to go and film this—

The day after Drake drops the video is crazy. But if he did, like, he is like— obviously he's in like an analysis business, but he's also an entertainer. He also has to fill the top of funnel newsletter subscribers. Like, he has to be front and center. And so it's actually not that crazy. Like, even if he did this by himself, I would just be like, Respect. Like, that's a fun project. But of course, he's using AI. He's using CDANCE 2.5. Higgsfield wrapped CDANCE 2.5 in a model that's sort of a harness that sort of makes this a little bit easier. You can use that via the API. It's also available on Fall. And there's a couple other ways to interface with it. But it's interesting because it's highly compute-intensive. China is obviously way behind on compute. So, What's going on with the strategy. But before we get to that, it's really fun, so we gotta play some of the more videos that we made. So I had Codex finding famous or funny videos to use as base clips. I would just say I started with the rap videos, did a couple of those. I think there's one maybe in the timeline we can play.

Yeah, Noah in the X chat says, no headphones, obviously fake.

Oh, true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you gotta have the headphones to make it believable, Dylan Patel. But yeah, let's see if we can play The, the video is— did that one make it into the production chat? The— yeah, this one, because I saw this originally with Elon Musk and Sam Altman rapping, and I think we might mute it just because of swearing. But what's interesting here is that it does a pretty good job of getting us. But there's moments when I sort of blend into Elon Musk, which is funny because it's not like it's originally an Elon video, but clearly the underlying video that was driving the AI model was the Elon and Sam version. And then our heights kind of change. Like, I look a little bit more like Elon there. It's very silly. But very, very funny. Going to fool a lot of people. But also then I was able to just say, like, okay, go make a bunch of tech videos. Like, just find iconic videos from tech. And it did it. And it found, like, Sweet Baby Ray's. I didn't tell it to go get that video, but it just did it.

That's awesome.

Which was very cool. Some of them came out really well. Some of them didn't do too well. The one that I liked, I think the most—

And it's a funny dynamic that we noticed where when you're looking at an AI video of yourself, you're thinking, that doesn't look like me. And then when other people look, watch it, they're like, wow, that looks exactly like Jordi.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So let's watch Jordi introduce the MacBook Air as Steve Jobs. I don't think actually Apple kind of bans everything. So we'll see. We'll see if this one gets flagged. But We might be, we might be cooked on this, on this particular one.

But let's play.

I said video is solved.

Roll the dice.

The post. Yeah, let's roll the dice on this one. Video is solved. Jordi Hayes introducing the MacBook Air. It's already got 350 likes on X. Let's play it. Boom. So it didn't change the voice. So you still hear Steve Jobs's voice, which is also funny about the Dylan Patel thing because it's Drake's voice. So it's like, what did they think happened? He's like lip-syncing to it or something. That didn't make any sense. But what's really cool about this is that it changes Jordi, the small Jordi and the big Jordi. It changes both of them in the same frame. And then even there, you only see a little bit of Steve Jobs' mouth and it was able to change that to Jordi. So it can represent what's going on outside of the frame. And historically, that's been very difficult for AI models. They want the face in the center of the frame. They want to be able to crop it and think reasonably, reasonably about it. But it did a good job there. Jordi as Jensen taking the GPUs out of the oven.

Added some mass for this one.

Yeah, it's very funny when you, when you use a different person with a different stature, different musculature, like they— it just comes across differently. But very funny clip. Iconic when Jensen announced— was this the H100 announcement? The A100 announcement?

The audio.

It was pretty early, but This is still such a funny gag that Jensen actually did this.

I love it.

He's really grunting. I mean, that's a heavy rack. It's the world's largest graphics card. Such a funny bit that he just did this in the kitchen. It's so good. I got something I gotta show you. Jensen's such a, such a master performer. Uh, we saw that on stage at at Salesforce Agent Force last week. The last one that I did, and before we pull up the Jordi as Steve Ballmer, which is particularly hilarious, let me tell you about Console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. This one, I specifically told it, like, keep the sweaty the sweaty shirt. And so I think he did more of a face replacement. So the face is sort of jumping around, but still very funny. The key to .NET, the key to industry transformation, the key to success is developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. It really got like the level of sweat on your face pretty cracked, but the face is jumping around. Uh, not, not quite, not quite dialed. I think you'll have to perform that one IRL.

And I should, I should run that build at some point.

You should, you should bulk to get, to get to that level for sure, for sure. Um, so, uh, yeah, I mean, downstream of this, obviously there's going to be the, uh, the it's over for traditional filmmakers, blah blah blah. Then obviously a whole bunch of blended work that uses the right tool for the job. Some productions will use this where it helps in urgent scenarios. I think some of this stuff is already actually being used in Hollywood, specifically for reshoots. About 10 years ago, Henry Cavill was in Superman. And he left Superman. They wrapped production. He went to film Mission: Impossible. In Mission: Impossible, he has a mustache. So he grew out a real mustache, was filming Mission: Impossible. And they were like, we didn't get the shot.

Oh, no.

For Superman, you gotta come back and film another scene as Superman. And he was like, I can't shave my mustache. And they were like, okay, we'll fix it in post. And in the newsletter, there's a photo here that we can pull up of how it came away, because they had to remove and reconstruct his lip and his mouth using 2017 technology. And it was not good. It was very, very rough. Probably very tedious, very expensive.

Isn't a mustache like the easiest thing to apply?

Oh, like fake?

Yeah.

Like, he should have just shaved it and then put on a fake mustache?

Yeah.

I don't know.

I think Mission: Impossible, they wanted the real thing. So, yeah. The Superman on the right is Henry Cavill with a mustache that has been removed in post and it was, yeah, widely critiqued by the VFX community. So, you can imagine for stuff like that, these tools will creep in very quickly. For most things, it's going to be, okay, well, if you needed someone to drive the video, why don't you just have the actor do that? Maybe for stunts and stuff you'd do it, but for most performances, I think you'll still be doing it the old way, at least for the time being.

What about some of the other more action-oriented?

Yes, so this was a fun one. I had to go and pull Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O clips throughout the— throughout their Filmmaking and TV generational run. Their yeah, their entire run. Make about twenty of them, and then put it together into a trailer that we can watch now. And I really enjoyed this. We got to do that in the office. I think Tyler was thinking about getting that. This one, this one didn't seem that bad to me, but Nick said this was terrifying, getting in a cactus.

I don't know.

I've never really been poked by a cactus. The hands on the bikes. I don't know how the guy on the left wins. Of course, a lot of Steve-O in that one. A lot of Steve-O here too. But I think these work so well because a lot of the underlying footage looks like AI. It looked like this.

The prompts.

This looks like an AI prompt, like, like drive a jet ski in a pool in a luxury house. You know, this looks like—

This is real though. This is real. We actually shot this.

Yeah, this is real. No, the only thing that's different about this is the suits. We replaced the characters, but the underlying footage is all real from Johnny Knoxville and crew. The fire hose rodeo. This one, that looks fun. Just gets— just dying laughing.

The old alligator in the house.

Like that, the old alligator in the house trick. I think they chilled that guy down so he was real slow. And then the bull run slammed. I didn't know rams were so aggressive. The ram just slammed that guy.

It's in the name, John.

I know, but I think of them—

this looks like an AI prompt too. Boxing match on stilts, but replaces the suits. The gag chair that falls apart. That's a classic.

All-time.

All-time classic. And I come up and, hey, don't steal that. The old air horn while you're golfing.

Classic.

No, this is a good one. Going through the window.

Soup.

Just asking someone, hey, can you go grab the 6 bowls of soup on a tray and bring it in? Okay, that's just pure Johnny Knoxville. So yeah, sometimes you get like a blended half the main character, half who you tried to replace. Sometimes it's pretty good. There's a little bit of us in there. But very fun to be able to just do this via text. Like, you don't even— I mean, I'm technically interacting with an API, but I didn't write a line of code.

All on your phone?

Yeah, all on my phone. So very, very fun. I think these things will sort of burn through pretty quickly. Like, everyone will be like, oh, yeah, like, that's the capability. Everyone did their version of the meme, and then And then it becomes more of a tool, melts into the background. Yeah, you already saw this with all the Young Lean music videos. Yeah, yeah.

Everybody's kind of made the same thing.

Yeah, and now it's like played out. But a very impressive demo.

Tip of the hat?

Tip of the hat to Young Lean. But a very impressive demo because it's able to replace multiple people and do it very consistently, even through like some really aggressive motion. So I thought that was pretty cool. So the whole pipeline here was I was running Codex on my PC interacting with that from my phone, the ChatGPT app. And then I had Codex go and generate reference images with just ChatGPT images because it's pretty good at that. And then use those to swap through Sea Dance, which was actually rendered via Higgsfield. Higgsfield, amazing in terms of just delivering the assets like as an API. extremely confusing as a product because they basically have 2 ways to give them money. You can load up API credits and then you can, like, buy a plan. And so, at one point, I ran out of API credits and it was like, time to upgrade to the plan. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm having a good time. I'll do more of this. Click the button. I'm like, okay, yeah, you loaded up a couple hundred bucks in here with, like, the ultimate plan or whatever. And then it's like, those credits are not available in the API. And I was like, Great, thanks. And then it was like, OK, time to add some credits to your plan. I was like, OK, this is what I need to do. I add credits to the plan. It's like, those credits are on your plan. Those aren't API credits. Those are plan credits. And so I have so much random money stuck in various pieces of Haysfield plans.

Well, and I think that's been a massive complaint. Haysfield has faced a bunch of, I think, various allegations over the last year around just like—

I mean, the website looks like a gambling company. It'll be like countdown, 10 minutes to claim 75% discount on your next credit. It's like it's totally optimized for like brain rot as you go through the flow being like, oh, buy it.

You got to buy it.

Yeah, I had seen stuff of like you can't, you know, not, not being able to actually cancel your plan. So now that you have a plan that you can't use for anything, it's over.

It's over for me.

It's over.

You're a customer for life. But the product's great entertainment.

Great entertainment. And I do think Yeah, I think I might try fall again as more of like a cleaner API that's a little more intelligible. But yeah, I think once you set up the bindings and get them all dialed in in Codex, I think—

Ellie says, looking mighty sus and mysterious today, chaps.

Well.

Well, this is the era that we're in.

This is the era that we're in.

You got to take it seriously. Safety era.

You got to take a hat seriously.

Safety era.

Anyway, uh—

Jon, once a week, Jon's like, I think fedoras are gonna come back. I think fedoras are gonna come— there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the hat.

I do think the hat could work if it's styled properly. I think it goes better with a suit. I think it goes better with some sunglasses and a pocket jacket.

Jon says, my safety.

My safety. No, I mean, like, obviously the fedora is often maligned as as not particularly stylish, not particularly modern. But if you go back to old James Bond, there was a way to make us— to make a fedora look very stylish. Now, we are wearing relatively cheap fedoras. I think you drop a couple thousand dollars on a Bottega Roman weave fedora, it's a different conversation.

Different story.

Different story. No, I think it can be done. I think it can be done properly, but it requires a discerning eye, some taste. Taste is the new moat in AI. The Fedora will be a piece of that story. Anyway, let me tell you about Public investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So my questions, my questions, my questions about CDance 2.5. I was like, how is China winning? How is China winning in this? Like they have one fifth the compute, one no rules. Is it that simple? And then also. why aren't they open sourcing it? They love open sourcing everything. They're like, we love open sourcing except when we're on the frontier.

Yeah, good point.

And there's a weird dynamic there. So first off, did some digging, got some answers. Let's dig into it. At a high level, intellectual property rules are somewhat flexible over there. That's true. But the models are insanely compute intensive. Like it is, even if you're like, I don't care about, Hollywood IP, come sue me in China. Good luck. You're still like— there's still a finite amount of compute. And so why aren't you on the RSI trajectory? Why aren't you working on coding models? Like, why don't you just take that compute and put it on the next GLM run or the next KIMI run? Right. Well, there are reasons for that. First is that ByteDance has a more natural flywheel here than the leaders in America. So Anthropic and OpenAI do not have good surfaces to deliver video, AI or not video. Like OpenAI tried with Sora, got a decent amount of people to use it, but it's— but it was not the obvious flywheel that ByteDance has. And so over in China, ByteDance is a— is a big company leading, and they have TikTok, Douyin, CapCut, ads, e-commerce recommendation systems, tons of immediate benefits to the core business without needing to pull together a new demand surface for video.

Yeah.

This sort of exists in America with Meta and Google/YouTube, right? But AI slop is deeply unpopular in America, although I debate whether or not this is slop. This is sloppier than some of the videos we showed you. But both companies, DeepMind and MSL, they are on the RSI trajectory. They're focusing on agentic workflows. Personal agents, knowledge retrieval, coding, recursive self-improvement, AGI. They are— it feels like they are more AGI pill than ByteDance, which is like, look, we got a good thing going with Douyin and TikTok. We got a lot of video space. Let's dominate there because we have an opportunity. And also like the IP infringement thing is not actually dead to rights. They haven't necessarily been caught in any major way. It's just that when the model comes out, people are like, Tom Cruise, and it's like perfectly Tom Cruise. And so it's like, what's going on here? So some of that could be the outputs and the harness that actually like reviews outputs, like because there is an argument on fair use for training to include everything, especially when you think about TikTok. So people go to TikTok and they upload clips from movies. Some of those are fair use, some of those are transformational. Like you can actually make a Vibe Reel from from Top Gun that is transformational and passes the fair use test, which is that it's not a replacement. So you're not like, why would I watch Top Gun when I could watch 30 seconds of Top Gun edited like a crazy hyperlapse edit? So it's not competitive in that way. It is transformative, and it provides some commentary layer on top. So that is actually okay. You can use clips from movies if you're commenting on the lighting and you're trying to explain the lighting. All that means is that Some of that data goes onto TikTok and lives there forever. And Hollywood can't say anything about that. Same thing with YouTube. Same thing with Instagram. There are plenty of film criticism channels that post fairly long clips from movies completely acceptably. And they don't even need to share revenue because it is transformational. It is open. It is fair use. And so they have Hollywood IP in the training data. They can train on it. Now, there's a question about, what the output should be. You still own your likeness, and so even if you can perfectly recreate something, you might still get sued. Google has a— we tested this out. Google has a music generation service, and if you go and say, like, I want a Madonna song, clearly YouTube has all the Madonna songs in the catalog. They can train on them, but it will say, I can't exactly make a Madonna song. I can make a pop song that's generic. Here you go. And that doesn't pull enough from Madonna to get sued, at least in theory. We'll see how it plays out. And so— and then also, like, a lot of people just upload full movies to TikTok and stuff. And they'll just be like, I uploaded all of Lord of the Rings. And even though that probably gets taken down, it goes through ByteDance servers. It might get saved somewhere. It might get, like, soft deleted. Like, it doesn't exist on— you can't watch it on TikTok, but it still exists on the servers.

Yeah.

So they have a lot of data. To train all this, but they're not open sourcing. They're not doing open weights. They're certainly not open sourcing the training dataset. And it's a little bit of a narrative violation from the default Chinese AI strategy. There are a few reasons for this. First, no one wants to open source when they're in the lead. We've just seen this time and time again. And second, with coding models, open weights are a play to build a Chinese tech stack. And so you open source the coding model, build the developer ecosystem, and then maybe that helps Huawei stay competitive. Maybe that reduces the amount of dominance of the American technology stack. And so there's a little bit of like public incentive to build up the indigenous supply chain that comes from that, less so in video where they are vertically integrated and have everything down to the distribution service. So, in general, if you are a challenger that needs an ecosystem, you want to open up. We saw this with the early Meta stuff. And then if you're an incumbent and you have distribution, you want to close down. So, there's some interesting knock-on effects mainly around a speculative future value of video models and training humanoid robots. Like, China also seems to be doing really well in humanoids. If AI video becomes really important in Sim to real translation and training these AI training humanoid robots with simulated video, then this could be like part of the bigger picture. But I think that's farther out. I think for the next month we're just going to be talking about memes and funny videos.

Anyway, that's right.

Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.

Just do it.

Do it.

Meta. On a tear. Meta is up 27% this month, according to Sheel Monat, almost entirely thanks to Muse. This makes sense, right?

Is that almost entirely Muse? I mean, the semi-analysis—

basically, when you have a company that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars on something without much to show for it, and then you have something to show for it, yeah, then the market's going to react positively. Yeah, they're going to— they're saying— so you're saying There's a fighting chance here.

Totally.

And the feedback on the product is incredible. There's a lot of investors who have tried it and they're like, hey, this is a good product.

Yeah. And, and interestingly, like, they are in the lead in a subcategory where they have never been the lead before. Like Google had Nano Banana, which like there was a moment where it was like, oh, Nano Banana is the best. Obviously Anthropic had best coding models for a while. Like, like crowns have changed, but Meta has never really held the best model in knowledge retrieval, or when they did Vibes, that was not the best version of that. But this is, at this moment in time, the best version of what they have. And it's building off of a model that's not on the frontier, but able to deliver an experience that puts them in first place for this subcategory, which is exciting.

And can immediately be incredibly integrated across everything else that they do.

Exactly.

Shopping, messaging, all these different things. Shopify and Muse announced a partnership this morning, counterpositioning a little bit against Amazon. Amazon came down with the banhammer. Buco Capital says Amazon cuts off Muse. While I am bullish Meta and Muse, I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that's about to occur. Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here. Let the games begin. Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on Amazon.com on behalf of customers. After attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience, the problem Amazon says is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store. The agent itself doesn't identify itself when it browses, and it appears to capture and store customer credentials, which the company says create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the pop-up continued access by an unauthorized AI agent. Violates Amazon's conditions of use to which our customers have agreed.

Interesting. I wonder how Walmart will respond.

Because Walmart was always—

The territory overlap is higher than I think most people think.

So I think Walmart had always been more friendly with chat apps, specifically ChatGPT. And that's the kind of thing that you do when you're not the leader in the space. You're more willing to Yeah. Experimenting.

I think they wound up rolling their own. I think they have Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. And so there's 2 dog-named AI agents that do the shopping. And then most recently—

Tyler's been dailying Rufus, by the way.

Yeah, just for everything?

For everything.

Just psychology.

Yeah, getting close to solving another millennium.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rufus, underrated.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know Amazon wound up finding sort of an equilibrium with OpenAI by plugging in their ad network into ChatGPT instead of letting ChatGPT like check out. This is the whole Eric Sufer, agent of commerce is a mirage. Instead, Amazon is vending in their ads. So ChatGPT brings the data and says, okay, this person's looking for this thing, do you wanna buy an ad on it? And so there's the transaction value, but—

I saw a couple play out. Yeah, I saw a couple seemingly smart investors say that, that are using Muse and excited about it, say, why is, why is Amazon banning Muse? This is so shortsighted. And then I actually saw 2 in 2 instances they deleted because of course they immediately were getting comments about Amazon's ad business, which is obviously what they're looking to protect. You can't serve ads to Muse agents or Instinct or Chat or any of these other things.

Yeah.

And Amazon's ad business is actually dramatically bigger than both Anthropic and OpenAI.

Oh, just last 12 months?

Yeah. So they've done $76 billion in the last 12 months through Q2 of 2026. So obviously they're going to protect this. Obviously they're going to protect this. I think consumers would love to be able to check out with With other services.

Yeah.

It is pretty gnarly to navigate Amazon.com, as amazing as the service is overall.

Gnarly?

Describing a UX experience as gnarly?

No, it's—

Just being a UX researcher at Amazon, they're calling it gnarly.

It is fairly gnarly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can see that there's And again, Peter, who effectively is the founder of Muse, because he obviously— Muse is based entirely on OpenClaw, and they've built an amazing sort of effectively almost like—

And I think Instinct too has some OpenClaw lineage. Is that correct? Yeah.

Peter says the beauty of running a claw yourself, they cannot block you.

Oh, they're going to block me when I say, Claw, open 10,000 Amazon windows on my desktop. Open up 5,000 Chrome tabs of Amazon.

So the Souffinator—

You can get banned even if you're running it locally. This has happened to me. Like, this is not a full solution, but he is right that there will be more sovereignty and the users might win. Like, that's what we were talking to John Quinn about was that Amazon versus Perplexity Computer, the ruling was that Amazon can't block it if it's running on the person's computer. Because it's like, yeah, yes, yes, I told the agent to open the Chrome tab, but it's my Chrome tab on my computer. And so you shouldn't be able to block that because it's not a third-party company. It's not corporate warfare. You're coming to me, the consumer. The customer's always right.

I can— I can see that being the ultimate outcome. I do think that's a bit— I think Amazon's ad business, at least their search ad business, is something that eventually you might need to underwrite like cable television, where it's like you're basically saying that there's a terminal value here. People aren't going to use their assistants to shop. But some amount of people are just going to keep going to amazon.com. Right now, it is Amazon has made it quite easy to buy things on Amazon.com. It's not like it's that much easier with an assistant, but something I found is it's it's actually really nice having a single interface for all the things that you do. Right? So I like going to one place.

Agent push the order burrito button. That's really future word.

The Souffinator has had some of the best commentary on this, which actually dates back to he says. The knife fight already took place. It ended a year ago when I wrote the first entry in my Agentic Commerce Is a Mirage series. Amazon began blocking agents last July. It's currently suing Perplexity over autonomous shopping with Comet. Amazon won't capitulate. It doesn't have to. Alexa for Shopping—

Rufus!

Rufus generated $12 billion in incremental revenue. Every time I hear Rufus or Sparky, Walmart Sparky has generated similarly significant commercial traction for the company. Agentic commerce is already a reality, but it takes place on site, not through independent agents. ChatGPT launched ads in February 2026 and shortly thereafter shuttered instant checkout. The affiliate model is economically suboptimal relative to advertising. Yeah, ChatGPT has already demonstrated that.

Yep.

Advertising is the dominant business model. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, When the OpenCloth stuff came out, I was like, it feels like Napster. It feels like the Napster moment. Like, yeah, you can go check out on an e-commerce website, but like nobody wants you to do that that way. And like you're going to have to write some API binding and then like scrape the front end and then rewrite it every time you go and check out because they're constantly going to be fighting you. And you are sort of like playing this like game of cat and mouse, which you can play. And for certain e-commerce sites, they're going to be Very open to that. Other ones are going to be a huge hassle to deal with.

Yeah, the question is, can agents monetize with advertising? I saw someone, a pretty viral post, somebody frustrated with Instinct. Instinct coming, and they did basically a blast that says, hey, you have a bunch more invites. You can invite a bunch of people. And the user was pretty frustrated with that because they're like, hey, you work for me. Why are you advertising? Even though they're not paying for the product, And they're incurring a lot of costs. Product's free to them. They're still mad that they feel like the agent is doing something that's purely in the agent's benefit, not in their benefit.

Sure, sure, sure.

Yeah, I wonder if we'll live in a world where, you know how ChatGPT has like those recommended agentic actions, if like one of those could be like sponsored. Like, hey, like, want me to go shopping for you right now?

Well, yeah, no, and that's important because Because companies will happily pay for incremental demand.

Yeah.

But the issue with with with agents is if you're saying go to Amazon and buy this thing, the user already wanted to go to Amazon.

Totally.

It's not.

But if I'm if I'm if I'm an industry coalition of surfboard wax makers, I might choose to send you a notification when you open up ChatGPT that says like hey. Want to go surfing? Want to take it to the next level? Isn't that what happened?

Basically.

You got one recommendation.

ChatGPT recommends various agentic workflows for me.

Yes.

I sent it earlier. It just says—

And one of them was—

It recommended setting up an agent to give me one realistic next step for my surfing each week.

Yep. That's great.

It's like everything else is like—

The problem is I know exactly what I need to do.

This isn't actually—

Raj Veer called out something interesting, which is that Threads started freefalling in the charts right as Muse started growing.

Yeah. Today on Instagram, there's a hero story that's a full-bleed ad for Muse. So they're pushing it. They're pushing it. And yeah, they're probably saying like, let's funnel it over to Muse. And it makes sense. The monetization on Muse, I would expect to be way higher than Threads. Threads, you get some display ads, it's text, it's never— that surface has never monetized as well as Instagram. So the best case was like you get something half as valuable as Instagram, a quarter, tenth as valuable. Whereas Muse is like a new surface area where there's a whole bunch of different monetization opportunities and they already have the whole small business community. So I think it makes a ton of sense to funnel the attention over there. 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. Now going over to the less good news in the agentic future that we're all living in. It feels like hallucinations are coming back. There was a moment where it was like, if you hit GPT-6 Pro with a query on some history or you basically want a Wikipedia page that's generated or a history report, pull some data, you could rely on it, that it was not totally making things up, directionally correct, bunch of really high-quality links, pretty valuable. And so hallucinations this year have kind of gone away. You still get slop if you're doing something on the frontier, like trying to design some system in code or using Blender or even AI video. You'll see little things here and there. But for knowledge retrieval, the hallucination problem kind of went away. But it's coming back in full force. David here said Instinct made up his middle name, and he can't board his flight because he tried to use his agent to book a flight, and it just made up David Bom Chang Choi, which I guess is not his middle name. And I've had that before where—

I find it a little hard. Well, one, we know why hallucinations would be happening, which is like if you're serving a product for free at scale, you have to figure out a way to do it really cheaply. And so they're certainly using older models and trying— and again, trying to find—

I thought someone figured out the model. Was it—

KIMI?

I think it's KIMI running OpenCLAW, right? But it's hosted in the cloud. And so you get an OpenCLAW instance cloud hosted.

Yeah.

Pretty cool.

Yeah.

That said, I've been in situations where my name was misspelled on flight details. And this is pretty easy. To resolve. So hopefully.

Oh, oh, you think it's not that big a deal because like you can just get on the plane.

You can just talk to them. They'll be like, "Here's my ID. I made a mistake." Totally, totally. Fix it and they'll give you a new boarding pass.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They might kick you out of security line. So if you're running really late, as I like to do, you you might you might you might struggle to get on the plane. You might miss your flight, but that's okay. You got to miss a couple.

This was interesting from former Meta. Employee Nikita Beer says, how important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell. One of the launch features of the Muse app was auto-negotiating for stuff on Facebook Marketplace. The poor product manager who owns Marketplace knows that millions of bots lowballing sellers will eventually kill the product. But this was escalated to Zuck by the Muse team and he said, okay, we'll poison Marketplace just a little.

Wait, why will that kill the product?

I mean, think about the experience if you tell your bot like, hey, I'm interested in these types of items, go anytime one of them appears, auto-negotiate Yeah, but wouldn't someone have a bot on the other side dealing with the negotiation? You can do the outbound too.

You can go outbound?

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Message everyone on Facebook.

Yes, I got a Dodge Hellcat. If you know, you know. I got one pair of keys and I saw you were posting, you liked a post from the Dodge Hellcat community. Would you be interested in purchasing this? I'll need cash.

Don't ask questions.

Don't ask questions. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got Augustus DeRico back in the UltraDome, back in the waiting room. He's coming in hot off of a Series B. How you doing?

Gentlemen, I'm blessed. It's a pleasure to be chatting again.

Congratulations. Did you align all this news?

Yeah.

Was that strategic? Was this like a—

You're like, I need to pump the Series B so I'll get engaged to Get an extra press cycle going.

Oh yeah, they were close together.

I guess not that was coincidence.

Both embargoed same weekend, maybe.

Yeah, that didn't work.

Obviously, congratulations. We're very happy for you on on on the engagement, but also the Series B. How are things going? What's new in your world? How much rain are you making these days?

Yeah, well, first of all, the the hundred million dollars that we raised, I'm super grateful to have done that with with great partners.

Okay.

We keep—

we keep—

we're gonna need a bigger gong the next round. We've been with— I feel like we've been riding with you for every round to date.

Day 1.

And, uh, yeah, time to upgrade for us.

No, you were there, you were there early. I, uh, I was wondering whether a $100 million bag was big enough for the size gong, but, uh, sure.

Oh, for sure.

The reality is, um, it's, it's, it's a drop in the bucket relative to what The Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending.

Yeah.

What are they spending?

They understand—

say again?

Yeah. What are they spending? Order of magnitude.

So they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather modification program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource. We talk about critical minerals, we talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agricultural and food. And if we don't produce more, and cloud seeding is the foremost option to produce more, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake, the bodies of water across the United States are going to be impaired to the point of mass evacuation. So we need to make more for the sake of the strategic health of the country and then also for our allies overseas that need more water, like Jordan in the Middle East, like Morocco and so on.

Did you get saved by data center backlash? Because there was some backlash brewing to your crazy scheme to make it rain. And then I feel like it's been real quiet since the data centers started sucking all the air out of the discourse.

Well, the data centers have been sucking water out of our reservoirs.

How real is that from your perspective? You're the water expert. Talk to data center people, they'll be like, it's closed loop. It's like a car wash. Yeah, we use water, but we recycle it. But at the same time, you know, water usage, it's low, but everyone's saying we're gonna build 1,000 times more data centers. So at a certain point, might be significant. What's your take on it?

Well, the reality is, yes, American agriculture is using far more water, orders of magnitude more than data centers. So does municipal use, the showers that we take, the dishes that we wash, orders of magnitude more water than data centers. But data centers do consume water. And when you have as great a shortage of supply as we do in the American West, Do you want to give water to computer or to your shower and your faucet?

Probably computer.

Probably computer.

You're asking a guy that spent all weekend generating AI videos.

If it's generating AI videos and playing video games, I'll skip the shower. I'll lock in.

But John, Jordi, you can have AI slop videos in the shower if you just make it via cloud seeding.

I can have my cake and eat it too with cloud seeding.

Precisely.

Is there actually any Any near-term flywheel there where cloud seeding can alleviate water usage from data centers, or is that like further out?

Rainmaker already has one deal closed with a hyperscaler, and we're in negotiation and engineering feasibility with multiple others offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of hyperscalers to produce more water for the American interior. That's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide. And so I look forward to that. Maybe not as much as I do the ski resorts that we're negotiating with, but keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter.

That's cool.

Yeah, talk. Yeah, talk. Talk more about that. As personally, as a skier, I'm quite fascinated. But, but like, what are those deployments going to What does that look like? Like, are you— is that basically you have a team that's set up at an individual mountain and then you're basically— I mean, these are businesses that have basically dealt with making artificial snow for such a long period of time. I'm sure they took like very naturally to the concept, but what are these deployments gonna actually look like?

So they haven't taken super naturally to it initially because cloud seeding and weather modification has mostly been full of fugazi and snake oil for the last 100 years. Right? There are many, many people in the last couple decades that have claimed to be able to modify the weather, but they can't physically measure it and prove it in real time.

Hmm.

If you can't do that, then why would somebody bother paying you? It's only because of the recent results that we had in Alaska and Oregon, Idaho, Utah, where we're making hundreds of millions of gallons of new water, that they've taken an interest. And we wouldn't be able to do that if not for our efforts to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. The weather is something that's historically underinvested in. invested in by basically everyone besides commodities desks. We need to put way more sensors into the field. We need to build far more sophisticated models in order to understand our interventions and then actually harvest the resources available to us in the sustainable and renewable reservoir that is the atmosphere, be it for ski resorts or farms or data centers.

Are you going to stay with drone delivery for the foreseeable future, or is there a howitzer In the pipeline? Because I've seen those— some ski resorts actually have howitzer cannons that will just launch conventional munitions to cause avalanches, to clear avalanches for safety. But they already have some of the equipment. And I imagine with the right round, you fire the right chemical and disperse it at the right— it doesn't seem that crazy to me. Might be cheaper, but I'm sure you've looked at it. What's the decision tree for you?

At the end of the day, what I care about is delivering on the effect that our customer wants, right? Do you want more snow? What's the best way to get it to you? If it's a rocket or a howitzer or me skydiving and HALO jumping through a cloud with, with silver iodide in my hands, like whichever way is best works. We're taking a really big and deliberate bet on autonomy drones. They— the ones that Rainmaker's built are unparalleled in their capability to fly in these severe atmospheric conditions, much more wide a flight envelope than most manned aircraft. But in the limit, what we get out of autonomy is more flights, more cost-effective observations, and significantly lower cost per volume of water or snow delivered to our customers. So we're going to keep using our drones and make them increasingly autonomous, although we'll probably do some research with planes in the not-too-distant future.

How does El Niño affect your sales cycle?

Like, is that going to put you out of business? It's going to be rough.

But I just, but I just imagine there's some players that are like, I think we're going to be good this year. Yeah, check back.

No, no, it's kind of a cyclical business, right?

Shift your focus to other parts of the US.

It's a, you know, I think Tim Morse commented recently that building Rainmaker is like playing Diablo on insanity mode for startups. Not only is it seasonal business because we're making snow in the winter, but also it is annually cyclical because of El Niño, La Niña. Some regions are going to get a lot more natural snow, but other regions will get a lot less and Rainmaker will be working harder there. That said, even in the regions around this Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies that are getting more snow, they're so critically depleted that they need excess snowmelt relative to the baseline year in order to refill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, the Great Salt Lake, et cetera. So We're geographically hedged in order to accommodate this, not just within the United States, but across the world. That is going to scale up the extent to which, you know, we're hedged across multiple different climates simultaneously.

What does the team look like?

Where are you?

Are you— have you expanded beyond the Gundo? I know you have like 4 deployed operating bases, but what's the footprint of the company right now?

Well, you asked first, what does the team look like? I first would say drippy.

Oh, look at that.

I would show you a series, a series of Hermès ties that we decided to do with.

I love it.

This is a nice collection of different ties that have clouds on them.

Very cool.

And here you go.

Are you, are you donning ties more or less often than you were last year when I, uh, saw you on local TV every week?

More, more often. And, you know, the Gundo thing, it's great. I love it. I am a Gundo supremacist, absolutely. And we couldn't have built Rainmaker if not for that. But we want to serve water for everybody.

Sure.

We want to serve water to the federal government, to nations around the world. And in order to do so, we need to collaborate with the best national labs and universities across the country. Being the mulleted guy in Yeezy is not necessarily the outfit and persona that you want to don when you're talking about those research scopes of work. So I'm wearing a lot more Hermès. I am wearing a little bit less Yeezy, and that'll probably persist for a while.

Last question. Last question for me. As some of these open problems, Millennium Prize problems have been solved, A lot of people outside of San Francisco are like, cool, the nerds solved another math problem. Like, you know, they don't— they're not like as captivated by it. But something that I've been thinking about is like, for every one of those sort of high-profile open problems, there's tons of businesses that have access to the same models or models with close to the same capabilities. that are just applying them to their industries. And I feel like for you and your category, it just feels like having intelligence on demand that you can apply to these problems that like hasn't had 10,000 PhDs working on it. You talked about how hedge funds have paid a lot of attention to the weather because of commodities trading, but are you feeling like an acceleration in— in your team's abilities because of new models, or are you not feeling it yet?

To give credit where credit is due, the nerds in San Francisco have done a spectacular thing.

And tip of the fedora, perhaps.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tip of the old fedora.

Worth taking a point too, right? Like Richard Feynman was a spectacular scientist. Oppenheimer, spectacular scientist. We can do great in frontier science without being total nerds.

Just a reminder to the San Franciscan audience listening.

But again, you can see the rate of hypothesis generation and experimentation accelerating at RainMaker because of the models available. Astra has been a spectacular lever for RainMaker, and we're gonna continue using it. And then also developing better and better models with the informed participation of the LLMs critiquing the output. That is something that is actually genuinely accretive to our understanding of the atmosphere, and it's going to become all the more so in time.

It's amazing.

Awesome.

Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the engagement, and safe trips.

Safe travels.

We'll talk to you soon.

Great progress, dude. Great to see you.

Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have a Node co-sla coming the TBN UltraDome in just a minute. First, I wanted to— we're going to talk to him about personal agents, and I wanted to share this hot take from Alex Kerr, who says, I think Silicon Valley is making a fundamental mistake with personal agents, optimizing entirely for the outcome and forgetting that for a lot of things, the process is a very core part of the experience. Travel is the obvious answer. People almost always never want book me a trip. They want to browse, compare, daydream, change their mind, send options to friends, and eventually book. I think you can actually do all that with agents. But he says the average person probably has far fewer recurring tasks worth delegating than the AI industry seems to think. That's why personal agents feel more like a feature that gets absorbed into existing products than a standalone category. Well, Vinod Khosla has seen both, you know, develop over his career. He's the perfect person to talk to about this. And so we're very pleased to be joined by Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. Vinod, how are you doing?

I'm doing great.

Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I would love to hear about how you're thinking about this moment in personal agents. It feels like a new category, a new feature, a new product, a new winner-take-all potentially. How are you viewing the market? How are you investing against it?

Well, it's a new category. It'll be a broad category. I do think it'll be very diverse, and I don't think there will be a winner-take-all.

Okay.

Every one of the big labs or big companies, Meta included and Google included, will want to have their agents. They will have different trade-offs, and I think we'll see a lot of diversity in requirements. As to Alex's comment, I think he hasn't used agents enough to understand much of that diversity that he's thinking about, like we want to browse. The best way to browse is have the agent do the work for you and give you the options and ask you questions and be interactive with it. It's amazingly good when you can do it that way. And I think some companies will optimize for it. I think the fundamental difference will be, do you want to be an advertising product or be something else? Do you want to trust Meta with your data or you want to— and some people will and they do today. And I think Meta will be successful. I'm not trying to say they won't be, but there's others who will have different tradeoffs. And I do think agents from startups will move faster than agents from the big companies.

Interesting. Okay.

Yeah, that makes— that makes a lot of sense. There's— I wanted to ask you about the quote unquote knife fight that's unfolding between agents, which are right now deeply, deeply aligned with users, right? Even fundamentally, last year we went through the cycle of Labs and different players launching new browsers.

Oh yeah.

Which I thought was fascinating at the time because it felt like for me, ChatGPT was a browser.

Yeah.

It would replace my need to go to 20 different websites to understand like a topic or a certain product or anything like that.

Yeah, instead of 20 Chrome tabs, you just ask one question. It already was a browser.

It just does everything. And I think that consumers like the ability to do a lot of things from one single interface without bump— you know, jumping around, and they can ask a question about a product and then navigate to another and all these different things. But it seems like there's this, you know, something that's been basically ongoing, this fight between new agents that want to just do what the user what the user wants in a way that's aligned to them and these platforms like Amazon that have big businesses that are under attack by these sort of new products?

I think you're right on there. There's a massive difference between a company wanting its agenda. In the browser battle you referred to wasn't for the consumer. It wasn't the consumer wanted to move from Chrome to something else. It was the company saying Google controls what happens on the Chrome browser. I don't want that, so I'll have my own browser. Yeah, that's a very different need than what the consumer wants. Yeah, I think from the consumer's point of view, with all the assault on the consumer, the marketing assault, I should say, from AI, And all the AIs ganging up on changing shades of blue, which Meta does to make you click more, or other things TikTok plays. Do you want to be subject to the consumer or fight all the AIs with your own AI, your personal AI that does— only has your interests at heart? And I think that's a very, very large and important category. I think I talked about this first about 4 years ago, the largest opportunity being protecting the consumer against all the AI assaults and getting all their work done without it being biased. Today, you can't even look at the reviews without understanding whether it was paid for by whoever is marketing it.

Yeah.

So representing the consumer and having an AI that loyal to the consumer, not to a particular company, a particular product, a particular point of view. is going to be very, very important.

Dude, so Silicon Valley has long said consumers won't pay for things at scale. There's a lot of people—

Ben Todd has said consumers want to be entertained. They don't want to be productive. If you're building a tool that is a productivity tool, you ultimately need to sell that to businesses and enterprise.

Yeah. And yet, it feels like that is going to be the most aligned —model for agents, because your agents can go fight different things. It can save you money, all these different things. It feels possible that this time could be different. I don't want to— maybe it's too early to say. But an agent that can get $20 a month, and it saves you a couple hours a month, and it—

That was Mark Zuckerberg's pitch. He said Muse will save you money. And we're already seeing examples of people using it to cancel subscriptions that they're not using. Get refunds. And so there might be some economic calculus where it looks more like paying for TurboTax than, you know, browsing Instagram Reels potentially. But how do you think about monetization?

ChatGPT with its subscription service proved that consumers will pay if there's enough value. Yep. Yeah. Massive business got built. Google always assumed consumers won't pay. Yeah. And that was the conventional wisdom. And ChatGPT ChatGPT, in my view, destroyed that. Sure. For enough value, consumers will pay. Now, saving you money is really, really valuable for most consumers, and they will pay if something does that, knowing that it represents them, knowing every time they're about to spend some money, they can find a more efficient way to get the same thing. That's a big deal for consumers because whether you're looking in travel, whether you're looking in shopping, there's always ways to save money. Subscriptions is a great example. I have way more subscriptions than I know about. And so representing the consumer's interests and acting on their behalf as if it was an omnipotent personal assistant.

Yeah.

is what matters. And personal is the key. It's for them, the consumer, not for some company.

How do you think about moats in this era of personal agents? There's a thesis that's percolating right now that says once you install a personal agent, once you've given one personal— maybe people won't trust Meta. Certain people obviously will. But the people that do and they go in that bucket and they start daily driving that particular personal agent, They give it access to their calendar, their email, their text messages. They are not going to move to another agent, even if it's a little bit better. At the same time, I feel like there's a risk of, if you're on Instinct, you can go to Muse and say, hey, just offboard me from Instinct and set up Muse, or vice versa. And so it might be a little bit less of a hassle to offboard, not quite as strong of a moat as traditional social networking, but how do you see the moat How do you see the offloads question playing out in the era of personal agents?

I think offboarding will be possible, a little bit clumsy, but then if you have a good agent, you tell it to do the offboarding.

Yeah.

And the onboarding onto the new one.

Yeah. And we saw that with OpenAI and Anthropic saying, hey, go dump this prompt in the other chat app to get all your memories, come and paste it over here. And they were fighting over that because is, you know, it was possible to move from one LLM to the others. This is—

I would say is the complexity of tasks, especially as companies make it hard to offboard, will no longer be a barrier. You know, if I had to look at all my information on Google or Meta and figure it out, it's complex. If I want to know— I don't want Google to know where I was on September 3rd at 5 p.m.? They probably know, and I can probably disable that, but it's hard. AI is just going to be good at doing all these complex things. And so I think that moat disappears. So what's the moat? I believe the moat will be trust in a company that develops trust with consumers. And that's where Meta has a huge disadvantage. So, the trust will be the mode. That'll be important. I also think completion is going to be really important. Consumers will be loyal to products that get their shit done. Excuse the language.

It's true. It's true. It's a good point. It's that simple. I mean, it's like we miss it a lot, but that is a good point.

And if you look at the Wajo agent, You don't need to know what it's doing, but it knows when it's stuck. Most agents then just tell you they're stuck or don't even tell you that, they're just stuck. The Wajo agent, for example, will pull a human in as a tool and use a human to complete your task.

Interesting.

Trust first, your information, your most private information, what you like, what you don't, what you buy, what your preferences are. That's trust.

Mm-hmm.

Then there's completion. If you can get all my stuff done, I'll be loyal to you. And for the very large companies, it's really hard to have humans in the loop.

Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, you need to scale it. I mean, it's very difficult to come over the top with a product that can service a billion users that has humans in the loop because you have to stand up that workforce.

So, there's an advantage to being small and agile.

Interesting.

Right. And frankly, for people who need stuff done, it's much, much better if you pay a little for the human in the loop And get things done, then—

Yeah.

Yeah. So the other thing that's really important, and you talked about the Chrome browser, not everything will be in the browser. The right agent won't be an app. You just— where do most people live? They live in their email, they live in text messaging, they live in Slack, they live in other channels. And so agent has to operate So we communicate primarily with all those channels. And the app, if there's one, and there may not be one, it's just in the background. So you don't have to open the app. You just text message your agent like you do with Fo from Voyager, and it takes care of it. Or sometimes you just pick up the phone and do that. And sometimes the agent just has to pick up the phone and have a conversation with the merchant.

Yeah.

So, you know, meeting the consumer where they are, the consumer experience is really, really important. Not get stuck in, we do text only, we do browser only, you have to be in our app. Users don't like those constraints. How do you think about— And I probably don't want to install one more app on my phone.

Yeah, it's reflected in the App Store. It's all just AI apps. How do you think about the way you will interface with personal agents over the next few years? If you want to send a message to me, John, will I receive that message from you? Will I think it's coming from you, or will I think it's coming from your agent? Will your agent identify itself as Vinod's agent with a different name, with a different identity, a different persona perhaps? Or will you want to tuck the AI beneath the fold of your digital life so that it's sending emails as you?

So I was actually doing some ordering from Petco yesterday. Oh yeah. And it said some things to me and I said, just pretend to be me. And it said, I can't do that. I won't do that. So this goes back to trust as a key more.

Interesting.

Right. So I do think for both parties, you have to be transparent. The agent is your agent, but it's not you. And I think that's important and that'll engender trust and we'll see much better—

I want to stay on petco. Dog, cat, bird. What type of animal are you most fond of?

Oh, dogs for sure.

There you go.

Within dogs, what kind of dogs?

I'm sorry?

What kind of dogs?

Oh, I'm a big fan of Newfoundlands. Anything I've got.

I have a Newfoundland. I love Newfoundlands.

Oh, awesome.

I had 2. One made it to 11. He passed away. Rest in peace. But we have another one that's going strong. A dog, about a 130-pound, 200-pound dog. Lovely dog.

I had 2 Newfoundlands that died last year. They were both around 200 pounds.

Wow.

And so we now have a puppy, but I was trying to get a cast done. I could have looked at 6 websites for this specialty type of dog collar after surgery. My puppy had surgery last week. It could call lots of stores and look for, do they have same-day delivery, which is the key thing I was looking for, and can it pay for me and all that stuff. One of the great things is payments is going to be a real differentiator.

Sure.

If you can be absolutely secure and give your agent your credit card, that's a big deal. And there will be lots of abuses or mistakes in that domain. I feel comfortable with the Wajo agent giving it my Amex card. Sure. Because it has certain types of protections that are going to be patented. So won't go into it, but I will be absolutely sure that card won't be reused for something I didn't authorize.

Yeah. Yeah. You can sort of set up payment rules if it's over this threshold. And that's, and that's actually in code. That's not something that can hallucinate and made a mistake and the model thought it was $100, it was actually $100,000. It makes a mistake like that. So yeah, it makes sense that we'll be in this blended regime of both deterministic software, stochastic software.

Last thing for me, do you think we'll get to the point where users will want to give something like power of attorney to their agents? Dan in our chat was asking about that. And I've thought about this before, just working with executive, normal executive assistants, it's always very frustrating where you get to the point where a certain service will be like, hey, they need, they actually need you to call now. I can't sort of like take this any further. So it feels like we'll get to that point eventually.

All these questions come back to what's the moat. Trust is the moat. And will you give your power of attorney to the agent? If you trust it. My bet is 95%— 5% of users will do anything. 95% will not trust giving your power of attorney to your agent today. Now, in 4 years, will that start to happen? I suspect 40% or 50% of people will give a power of attorney to their agent by 2030.

Right.

Because they've had enough interaction and developed enough trust. Trust becomes the key issue, and this is why startups may have an advantage. Startups with great transparency will have an advantage over people who already have a brand of lack of trust.

What's been your journey with Wajoh and Fo? Did you invest early, and then this is just the right product at the right moment? Did they pitch you on this this day one? Has this been years in the making? What's been the journey?

Well, we invested in it day one. In fact, we brainstormed with Shivani, who's just a great technologist and a real understanding of the human factors. Those were 2 things that are key. So we invested and we even brainstormed the idea. So we're really happy with Vajra. She's— and she's, of course, both deeply technical and had this other understanding of what consumers need. And I call it empathy for consumers is really what you need. And say, how do I best represent them? That's the right mindset. So we've been very excited about Vodjo.

Do you need an access code? Is it in early access? How does actual onboarding work right now? Because it feels So it sounds like if there's a human in the loop, you can't jump straight to general availability because you might get flooded, right?

You also want to grow slowly. Yeah. Because you want lots of connectivity to lots of things, and that builds over time as you get more users. Today, it is not free access. It's limited access by invite only. Okay. And hopefully you can give people an invite code from the company.

Yeah, we'll share out some invites to anyone who's interested.

By September 30th, it'll be Yeah, free release. So by the end of the month, you'll see it pretty open to everybody.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, breaking it down.

Yeah, great to see you. Great update.

Great tussling with all the different trade-offs in the modern era. Have a great rest of your day, Vinod. We'll talk to you soon.

Thank you.

And send my best to the puppy. I hope he heals up quickly. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era unlocks seamless real-time experiences a new value with Cisco. There's some breaking news before we bring in our next guest. The FAA, the Federal Aviation Authority, has restricted airspace up to 10,000 feet for the Tesla Roadster reveal. Remember, we have a bet going here. Elon has teased that the next Tesla Roadster, which will be announced October 2nd, I think October 1st, he has teased that the Tesla Roadster We'll leave the ground. He said it might fly. There's a SpaceX collab. There's 4 cold gas thrusters. We had a debate. Where did you— you had 6 inches? You had 6 inches?

No, I was at 9.

You were at 9 and I was at 6 feet?

I was at half a foot.

Half a foot?

I thought you were at 8 inches.

No, I thought I was at like 6 feet. I want it jumping. I want it flying. I'm going 10,000 miles.

I did see something. FAA shut down the airspace around the launch site.

That's this. They shut down. So the FAA has has issued a temporary flight restriction over SpaceX's McGregor, Texas rocket development and test facility ahead of Tesla's October first Roadster reveal. The restriction covers a 1.5 nautical mile radius around the site and extends from the ground up 10,000 feet in the air. That altitude is unusually high for McGregor, where restrictions tied to static engine fires and component testing have often topped out. Closer to 2,000 feet. So they're going 5 times higher. The larger block of airspace is feeding speculation that Tesla plans to demonstrate the long-promised SpaceX package for the Roadster. Elon Musk has previously described a version of the car equipped with cold gas thrusters that could dramatically improve acceleration and potentially allow the vehicle to briefly lift off the ground. Reports earlier this year suggested Tesla was preparing a remotely operated demonstration at McGregor. With the car unmanned and spectators positioned hundreds of yards away because of the expected noise, which is just a hilarious, a hilarious thing. You're demoing something that if you drive it within hundreds of yards of someone's house, they will be annoyed or maybe not safe. Like, how is this going to work? It's a lot of, it's a lot of showmanship for what could wind up just being like a pretty fast Sports car, but Tesla has not confirmed that the Roadster will actually leave the ground. So far, the company has only teased the event with language like "go for launch" and imagery showing the car on what appears to be a launch pad. But the FAA restrictions suggest Tesla and SpaceX are preparing for something beyond an ordinary static presentation. Whether that means the Roadster will actually hover on October first remains unknown, but the FAA has now reserved a substantial column of. Texas airspace for whatever happens. I wanted like an F-35. I wanted to do full VTOL. If I want to park, just bring me up, plop me down. I don't know. I'm excited. I think he's got to deliver something. It's been 9 years since he took the deposit. Are you going to put a deposit down? I think it's $5,000. I'm not going to put a deposit down. $45,000 due within like 10 days. And it feels like it's kind of high optionality. Because if it's incredible, so many people are going to flood in after the fact. But unlike waiting 9 years, you can just wait until October 1st. If it's a flop, you can just get a refund. So, for locking up $50,000 for 10 days—

Yeah, I think you should do it.

It's pretty tempting. It's pretty tempting. I need to really read the fine print or have AI read the fine print to understand if there's a chance I get hosed. But there's a chance that you get one of the first ones. Not even, oh, it pops financially and it resells. Just the fact that it could be a really special and cool car that's really fun to have. And if they bring it in with the final price of $250,000, there's a lot they can do to impress at that price range. If it comes in at $800,000, they're competing with a lot of—

No, I mean, if it's just a sports car that looks like a Cybertruck, It'll be a huge hit.

If it's $250,000. If it's $800,000, now you're competing with new Volari. And new Volari has a V10, V8, something like that. Like, it needs to be Cybertruck, Cyber Huracán, like Huracán Cybertruck, but also $250,000. Because then you're like, wow, this is crazy. This is competitive. And that's what Tesla has been for a long time. The Model S was really, really performant, delivered a lot of value for a pretty decent price. Same thing with the Model Y. It's still like a value play even though it is a relatively mid-market expensive car.

Well, yeah, I bet you Aaron has it, has his preorder down from like—

We're going to find out. That's going to be the first question. We're bringing in Aaron Levy from Box. He's the co-founder, CEO. Welcome back to the show.

Did you put down a deposit for a Roadster 9 years ago? Roadster deposit?

I, I would— I didn't do 9 years ago. I was very tempted this time around though. Um, I did, I did go down the rabbit hole. There's these great YouTube, uh, uh, you know, kind of, uh, speculative fiction. Yeah, sleuth, uh, folks that, um— did you see the thing? If you, um, no, if you white out the, the, the, uh, the video, it says where we are going.

Oh, okay.

Do you see this?

Is, is that a reference to Back to the Future?

Yes.

So it might have— it might go 88 miles an hour. That would be huge.

Either that or, or no road.

Or it flies.

So yeah, so we're, uh, but there's a whole— I went, I went and watched a 20-minute video. Um, I'm very excited. I'm glad that you agreed to film that.

What's your theory though? What's your theory?

No, I don't know.

The, the— I mean, obviously Elon would make a flying car, so it's, um, I think we're all, we're all waiting for that. Now I guess the question is like practically, what is it? What does that do? If you literally can't fly it. But like a great question.

Well, you can fly it if you're within 1.5 nautical miles of Starbase, Texas, and the FAA clears you, I guess.

But I wonder if there's some loophole where like, if you're on your own private property, can you get off the ground? And you could have, you know, those people have—

Those VTOL things, yeah.

No, no, no. I was gonna say like, you know, you drive onto it and then it's supposed Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, turntable. Could he make it, yeah, turntable, so you could make it like, you know, if your garage is kind of tight and you wanna turn around, a little indoor parking.

We may have reached the point though where Elon is building things for his personal life that exceed our normal zoning laws of mere mortals.

There's gonna be a lot of people with deposits that are like, you're telling me I need 100 acres of private land now? I was told that this would go 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. And the craziest thing is the original specs were, Sure. 0 to 60 in 2 seconds. Cars already do that. The Model S Plaid did that. Not, not crazy. $250K. Okay. That's like a reasonable price point for a supercar these days. But 600— over 600 miles of range, which is— which has actually not been done by any EV yet. And in a smaller vehicle, it's not like it's going to be huge. So very, very uncertain how they hit that.

Whatever. I mean, they seem to be doing things with batteries that I never thought would be possible with batteries. Like, I was always told like 20 years ago that, you know, we'll never get more than 30 miles in a car ride. So you just wake up one day and I guess it's 600.

So yeah, I mean, I guess if you launch with the cold gas thrusters, put it in neutral, coast for 100 miles of range—

Maybe that's exactly— yeah, they get you the first 300 miles with, uh, yeah, 600 downhill as long as you just cruise them.

Uh, anyway, how are things going at Box? Roller coaster ride SaaS-pocalypse fully canceled. We were very happy to see that. A bunch of— we were early to cancel.

We actually called.

We bought them tickets.

You guys canceled it within like 3 hours.

Yeah, no, we were like, this is not happening.

No, but we did have a newsletter that went out like during the depths, and I believe we were the first people to say it was canceled.

SaaSpocalypse is canceled. Yeah, because—

Actually, you know, you almost though had to— you almost couldn't cancel it too soon though, because you had to have the— full trough.

Yeah.

And you had to have like full capitulation on, okay, it turns out that there is actually software that is powering the world and these systems of record are incredibly robust. And, and actually the more agents that you have running on these systems, in fact, the more important the backbone becomes. You know, like everybody always sort of made this claim that once you have all these agents, then actually all they really need is a database underneath. But the problem is, is that database has to be coordinated again. against possibly thousands of end users and then possibly tens of thousands of agents. And so the access controls, the business logic, being able to actually render the experience, the security, obviously, you know, see OpenAI Hugging Face, like the—

Yeah.

These core systems are actually gonna become more important in a world of all of these agentic workloads. So it's good to see the market, I think, paying more attention to that reality. And it's obviously, you know, driven by, I think, the continued performance of these these software products doing well in the market.

Yeah, I mean, even over the weekend I was generating AI videos. I was trying to get them from my PC to my phone. And at no point was I like, build a new storage system for these videos. Even if it could do it, I'm like, I don't want to waste a prompt. I don't want to waste a second doing that. Let's use what I already use. Let's use all the tools that are already built out that are robust and I can share links and all these things. I don't need you to one-shot some shoddy clone. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of energy, a bunch of things. But in terms of resetting the narrative with the market, the Street, investors, employees, everyone, how much of it is going back to, okay, you thought this thing was existential. You thought we were going to be in so much trouble. We're not. It's business as usual versus there might be still some threat, But there's more opportunity, and that's actually outweighing the threats. And so that's why the company's performing well in the markets over the last couple months, for example.

Yeah, very much not business as usual, I think, for anybody in software. So so like like this is this is go time. I don't know of a single company still being run the way that it was run maybe you know eighteen months ago. I mean, everybody is. is, is, uh, you know, running insanely fast, uh, into the future. And then I think we're, we're, you know, there, there still will clearly be some parts of the market that don't capture as much of the value as they did previously. And then there are gonna be some parts of the market that capture actually a ton more value than they did previously because of, of what agents can do. I mean, you look at, at, you know, uh, infrastructure providers as, as an example, like the Cloudflares of the world, totally on fire.

Yeah.

Yep.

Because agents need sandboxes, they need compute, they need network, they need gateways. Like, like great business. If you look at Databricks or Snowflake, agents need to be able to triage against large sets of data that are— that you need to be able to pull together in one kind of common system. So doing fantastically well for us. We have reaccelerated growth far past our internal plans. Because it turns out that enterprises need core systems to be able to manage their unstructured data.

Sure.

And agents need to be able to work with that unstructured data to make decisions or move information through a workflow, whether it's all of your contracts or your research materials or marketing assets or financial documents. And again, like, it might be easy in a personal productivity sense to be like, okay, well, I can just have that data in some cloud system or even on my local device. Now imagine an enterprise with 10,000 employees.

Yeah.

How do you ensure that those agents continue to go after the actual canonical records?

Yeah.

The actual documents that, that are the real sources of truth and that are the authoritative versions of that data. That means you need platforms. And we're obviously competing for how do you become the platform for all of this unstructured data. But I think there's a lot of value being created really across these ecosystems. And I would say right now, my view would be it has unequivocally been a net positive for software, even with some of the spaces being under pressure, simply because how much more work agents are doing on these systems and the need to be able to provide the guardrails and be able to be the traffic cop for what those agents are doing and to be able to deploy these agents natively within your own agent harness in your own system of record. And all of that is creating more value for these platforms.

At a system level, what is What is the biggest lever that you want to pull? Is it speed of interaction with agents? Because in the previous paradigm, search and file retrieval, if it took a couple minutes, somebody's drinking coffee, they're checking their email, maybe it's not as crucial.

Yeah.

But if it's like, if my agent is hanging because I'm I'm, you know, churning through a bunch of records or files, that could actually be more annoying? Like, or is it just the volume of content? Because even an employee, if they're not like totally slopping it up, they're probably producing more files, more contents, more video. Everything's just multiplying. So like, where have you been like, okay, this is the lever we need to really pull to make sure that agents like love the Box experience?

Yeah, I mean, I think realistically all the above. First of all, there's an explosion in just content creation in general. Yeah. Agents are producing content obviously at an unbelievable rate. And you know, if you look at—

Thought grenades.

Yeah.

Have you gone through this? I wanna talk, I wanna talk about that, but let, let's finish what you're saying. Sure. Sorry.

Yeah, there's just data more, more than ever. And, and the, and you're gonna need to, you're gonna need to govern it. You're gonna need to store it. You need to manage it in just as if a person created it. And so all of that is obviously like the core backbone system. We're doing a lot of work at the second layer, which is, which is we effectively think about it as sort of context retrieval for your unstructured data. But obviously, if you did a regular search, you know, 2 or 3 years ago and you compared it to a search today when we actually can capture embeddings of those documents, we can— our agents do re-rankings of the search results. We search in parallel so we can run multiple versions of your query at once. your chance of finding your document not only faster, but just generally more accurately is way higher today than it was a couple years ago because we not only have all these other signals, but we can parallelize the process much better. And so an agent from the outside coming in and saying, hey, I'm looking for this record, you're able to now much more accurately achieve that result, which is fantastic. And then I think the thing that we're also, we're spending a lot more time on is how do you better secure data in this world of of, you know, kind of infinitely more agents than what we had, you know, 3 or 5 years ago. You know, the OpenAI Hugging Face incident has many interesting ramifications to how we build agents, how we ensure the safety and alignment of them, but it has very real-world implications on the security of our systems. So while this was more of like a production system from Hugging Face that was under threat, you can imagine the internal environment of an enterprise. If you have all of your critical contracts or financial documents in an environment that agents can eventually get their way into, enterprises are going to need to care deeply about how do you protect that information. So we're imagining and reimagining all the ways that you would protect data in a world where you had agent swarms that were being deployed against your data environment. And how do you go and defend and protect that type of risk?

Yeah.

So lots of, I mean, you know, many, many layers to this problem. But really just through the lens of imagine you have 100 times more agents than people. How would you work with, store, access, search, and secure your data in that kind of world? That's the platform we're building.

Do you think we need to move away from the word sandbox? Because I don't know if you have kids, but if you've ever taken like a 5-year-old and plopped them down in a sandbox, at no point should you as a parent believe that that kid will stay in that sandbox. The sand is going to go everywhere. The kid's going to be on the playground, 2 seconds later on the swing set. They're going to be running around crazy. Sandboxes have never been secure environments. They're not jails. Yeah, I think— I don't know who's using this terminology.

I think that terminology is outdated.

I think it's running its course.

I think it's running its course.

On personal agents, how are you processing the new race?

Mm-hmm.

To be the most helpful assistant ever.

Yeah.

And then specifically, I want to understand how you think all, you know, the sort of agents versus walled gardens war is gonna evolve, just because it seems incredibly obvious that Amazon will fight to the death to maintain their, like, $75 billion ad business. and the health of it, but what's your read?

Yeah, super fun how fast-moving the space is. I want to first apologize, because I honestly did not have the imagination on the consumer front. And so, I was like, I was pretty skeptical of what the breakthrough would look like on the consumer end. And it's funny, because it was obviously staring at us with open claws, But just the form factor and the packaging and getting it all kind of in the right way that both Muse and Instinct have done, and obviously there's gonna be more entries into this space, has just been phenomenal. And then the capability progress on computer use and browser use is just amazing. And I do think I have a list of like, I have a wishlist of what we need architecturally as an industry. Like you need to eventually be able to have some better password sharing dynamics. You know, if I can in one click be able to get into any of these products in a very secure way and there's a trusted handshake between the agentic system and, you know, the tools that I'm using, we're going to need that. Payments are largely solved because of obviously the work that Stripe and others have done. So I think that's pretty seamless. But really it's the authentication that we still need to work on as you're kind of ramping up the use of these agents. But I think it's going to be an incredible market. I, you know, the ability to now hand off the whole problem to an agent as opposed to just using it merely as a research assistant, I think is going to be a breakthrough for consumer use cases. I'm very excited about, about what this can mean for all new business models in the economy. I think there's a, you know, the Citrini post, you know, 5 months ago, 4 months ago or whatever, had, had some of the more you know, kind of, you know, risky to, to capitalism elements and, and the market. But you can easily look at the exact other end, which is I might now be a consumer of 5 times the amount of local service providers.

Sure.

Uh, as a result of, of these types of systems. So, you know, like, like if I, if I could lower the barrier to just like, I need flowers like right now delivered for this thing and, and it handles the whole thing, I, I would, I, I mean, at least in my personal experiences, I'm gonna I'm going to grow my usage of the local economy as a result of this. And so, very interesting to see, you might have, I think, some exciting areas.

Cutting out the middleman and installing an even more powerful middleman.

Yeah. Well, or layers and layers of middlemen. It might be middlemen all the way down. I mean, I like Yelp as an example, is like, how do you sort of triage the local economy as a graph?

Well, there's something even with Even with how good the internet has gotten in so many ways, there's still specifically local providers where I think using flowers as an example, like how many— the place that I order flowers from, it's a good reminder to everyone to order flowers for your significant other.

It's 5 months until Valentine's Day.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

It's crazy Valentine's Day starts now.

The problem is you never do it soon for flowers.

No, but it's like the services, they make amazing bouquets, but the process of actually making an order is so terrible.

Oh, it's so painful.

It's so painful.

So painful.

That, yeah, just that little bit of friction. And so, people say, okay, consumers don't want productivity. They don't care about productivity is what a lot of the bears are saying right now, but they also hate friction. And so, what's going to What's going to win out?

I think that's the thing is I'm so utilitarian and productivity-pilled that I shared the same view of consumers don't sort of value their time in the same way. But I think it's just then not on that dimension. It's like the pitch is not to save you time. It's just to do things that you've probably added to your remit. And then there are lots of ways which are like, on one hand, they're time-saving, but on the other hand, they are just literally doing more as a consumer. Like, you know, we have 3 kids. We're always signing up for more things. There's more camps, there's more, you know, I don't know what, what was that one for?

3 kids, it's just very good. Congratulations.

We have, you can even take it a step up. We have 9 kids.

We have 9 kids between us.

We might have 9 kids in the future. So, you know, you have camps and museums and this thing and you're renting that thing. So it's not even like you're saving time. You, like, if you could just have an agent do a lot of these activities for you.

Stress reliever.

Yeah, your stress relief. And then you actually just do more with your kids. And it's like, it's fantastic.

Totally.

We went to, there's these Japanese tea gardens in San Francisco and I had an agent. Oh my God, what is that one?

That's for Japanese tea gardens.

I'm just excited.

Sorry. I was excited. I'm getting in the castle.

So, and we had an agent book the whole thing. And it was like, and we just like added that to our plate that day because it was, it was that much easier to go and execute. So, so I like the idea of more of the kind of consumer abundance use cases. And so I'm very excited by this as, as just even more volume in the economy of, of just buying and selling. I mean, you're gonna, you can imagine the, You can imagine the Thumbtack, Yelp, TaskRabbit use cases of, hey, I need help right now to go install this thing. And it's just like all new forms of activity happening. So I'm a big fan of the personal agents. I think it's just full net growth in the consumer economy.

Yeah, I completely agree with you. At the same time, I would assign some sort of low probability that in a few years we're having this conversation and being like, oh, well, actually, what we saw in Q4 of 2026 was prosumers, early adopters. It didn't cross the chasm. And those agent, personal agent companies are basically getting ready for the enterprise and doing enterprise-level OAuth. And like, we've seen this, you've seen this play out before. And there's a Ben Thompson take about this and whatnot. So So I don't think it's like a foregone conclusion that we'll cross the chasm, but it feels like we're definitely the closest we've ever been. You know, 6 months ago, people were like using command line coding agents to like order food and being like, wow. And this feels like we're definitely one click forward, but we're still a little bit away.

I think with a technology like this, you have to— you have to basically do a couple of things. One, you have to extrapolate to the ultimate sort of maybe the limit on technological progress.

Sure.

And so if you sort of somewhat just imagine that the agent literally can, you know, within 98% kind of perfectly execute these tasks.

Yeah.

And everybody opens up their CLIs and their MCPs and browser use is sort of good enough for all the long tail. Let's just assume that for one second.

Yeah.

Then, you're not really left with the technological breakthrough that's required. The form factor itself is just a mobile app on your phone. So, we don't need societal-level change of behavior like all VR glasses or something.

Totally.

And so, I think this one works because it's not— if the technology works and the consumer change of behavior isn't high, then it just literally just might be a new way to interact with your with your mobile device and the apps that you already would otherwise use. So I agree, we'll have to see, but it's not like, this is not sort of like Oculus VR level, you know, kind of change of our society as we know it.

Completely agree. In fact, I had a friend who sort of framed it as more of like a return. He was like, yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm just like a business person, but I feel like a Gilded Age CEO. I'm like, take a memo and then dictate a letter To someone and go and do this. And it feels like you're in Great Gatsby or something, as opposed to— it is futuristic, but it's also like a return and a democratization of a certain style of working that has actually been the way it's happened throughout history many, many times, as opposed to being entirely new.

Yeah, the 0.0001% could do this in history, and now everybody can.

Now everybody can. Now everybody can. It's not just the fedora clap. Yeah. What is your take on x-risk? Do you have a p-doom? What's the internal house philosophy?

My p-doom still remains kind of very, very low. So I'm— but I think the progress on AI is certainly like— I'm in a weird category because I have low p-doom, but I actually appreciate all of the safety work that's happening.

Of course.

And so it's hard to not—

It kind of has to happen.

Yeah.

A lot of it's like cybersecurity and stuff. Like, these things are good to happen.

And I think that because of the amount of attention on the safety, I think that's sort of what causes me to have a low P-doom, ironically.

Sure. Yeah.

So I see the events that otherwise could be quite catastrophic or problematic.

Yeah.

But because of the attention that I think I think the ecosystem has a strong incentive to go and attack.

Totally.

That lowers my p-doom as a result.

Yeah. So a lot of the stated p-dooms are conditional on doing nothing. So it's like 10% if we don't fight back. And it's like, okay, well, if we fight back, what is it then? And then they'll be like, oh, it was 0% then.

Yeah, it's a very high p-doom if literally we decide to fund all security research.

Yeah, it's funny. There's so much criticism of I don't want to get into any safety rhetoric or talking about safety and criticism of the Hugging Face incident, but can you imagine alternative reality where all the researchers are like, I don't care about safety at all. I'm building this as fast as possible.

Totally, totally.

No, it's actually great that we have this powerful technology and the people building it—

Taking it very seriously.

—cared almost as much about safety 5 years ago, right?

Yes.

20 years ago, some of them. We've been on this forever. Yeah, every lab is founded like that.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a key point. I think the one thread that we still have to figure out though is the language will be co-opted by parties that don't have the same kind of either level of either view or goals or incentives on the situation. And so the one risk is, is how does it— like, once you get that language into the rest of the world, it will be turned against you no matter what.

Sure.

And so do you have the right sort of fortification of the industry and of progress to be able to not just basically get the whole thing halted and shut down? Because that sort of like— there's a very narrow line between the right way of elevating the risk and continue to fund all of AI safety and and alignment research. And then one click above that where basically we will just vote for the data centers to never get built again.

Yeah.

And navigating that is a really tricky kind of terrain. I'm not sure that I've seen a perfect sort of anybody perfectly finesse that.

Cool.

But that's the one kind of, you know, challenge here is do you end up in a spot where enough people say, you're telling me it's extremely scary. You're saying that the likelihood is actually like high enough that I should be very worried. need, and I could just press a button and vote this thing to not exist, I probably am just going to press that button. Because again, so far, you know, your best— the best thing you've presented to me is that you're going to go shopping for me on my mobile phone. So like, that's like, we're going to have to work on that sort of, you know, kind of, you know, trade to consumers a bit.

Yeah, there's a lot of like odd alliances between and people that just, I mean, they don't even use the frontier models. They wanna go back to a world where there's no GPT-3. And so they're like, oh cool, these people speak for us. And it's like, I don't know that they're actually gonna try and go that far. And so a lot of them are saying like, we're not even gonna pause training, you know? So there are some like, we'll see how things get papered out.

Yeah, I'm still unfortunately on the more nervous camp on can we, can any country realistically But, but can we kind of navigate through this where all parties are satisfied? I think it's— I think it's just extremely unlikely.

Yeah.

So I expect this to be quite messy for, for the coming years. I think it's going to become the dominant 2028 conversation from a, from a presidential election standpoint, like it has to be, because it's going to deal with jobs and GDP and safety and, and the next sort of major risk that people people start to think about. And we as an industry, as a tech industry, I don't think we know where we want things to land. You have this sort of roller coaster of one day everybody signs the open waiting room.

Open source thing. Yeah.

And then the next day everybody signs the pacing letter. And I think there are some people that can kind of figure out how the 2 letters are the same, could deliver the same outcome. But they basically pull you in 2 different directions. And so, I think it's going to be interesting to see how we kind of thread all of that.

Well, it's 146 days till Valentine's Day. So, fire up that personal agent. This is your notice. We're only 146 days away. So, get ready. Make sure you're onboarded to some Frontier Intelligence personal agent. That can make sure your Valentine's Day is fantastic in the next 146 days. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Nice to see you, Aaron. It's just been too long.

We'll see you soon.

All right. Good to see you.

Have a good one. Goodbye. 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. We have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Ron from iConnections here. He's the co-founder and CEO. Ron, how you doing?

There we go! Look at that! You got the memo. Tip of the hat to you, sir.

Looking fantastic. Fantastic.

How are you doing? No audio, but you have motion.

Yeah, it doesn't matter when you got a hat like that. Who needs audio? Who needs audio? How we doing? We'd love to start with background, but also, what's the ribbon on the hat? Oh, I guess we're going black on black and there's some contrast there.

He one-upped us.

I think that might be the next iteration. I've been saying we need to continue the progress.

There we go. You had this thing ready because we didn't— I know we didn't give anybody warning.

No, no. This was a test.

We were testing all of our guests. Can you pull out the fedora?

And you do at a moment's notice. Anyway, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

Hey, it's great to be here. And I have to give my 28-year-old son credit because he got into the fedora way before we did. Wow. He actually had one available. He Ubered it over to me and it arrived like 2 minutes ago.

That's amazing. There we go. Well, fantastic. It seems like you're feeling optimistic. Let's start with like some background. I'd love to I want to let the audience know about you, your journey, and TomorrowX, and what's happening. But—

Yeah, well, let's start with iConnections.

Yeah, let's start with iConnections.

Absolutely. So iConnections is the world's largest capital introduction platform. And what that means is we connect the world's largest institutional investors with all of the fund managers who appear on your show— private equity, venture, private credit, real estate, everyone who lives in those more unique strategies. They come to our events, and they use our software to meet the institutional investors who deploy capital into them, and over the course of a year, we'll run about 30,000 one-on-one meetings between all of them, and they'll move about $10 to $20 billion in a given year through that whole ecosystem, so it's really become a machine.

And what is the business model? What's the shape of the business? I know that there's events, but there's probably other things, like, can you walk us through the shape of the business.

So the business is, we really combine the software. The software is the special sauce that makes this whole thing go. But because alternatives is very much a face-to-face business, you know, you don't cut a $10 million, $100 million check without meeting someone in person. So it is still very much a face-to-face business, and we combine our software that makes it possible for you to identify who do you really want to meet and spend time with? And then at our event series, you actually do those face-to-face meetings. So we— all the investors, of course, come for free. We roll out the red carpet for all of our institutional investors. We take great care of them, and they never have to pay because they're the money in the room. And, and the GPs are the ones who pay for that package of software plus event.

That's great. Was there a chicken and an egg problem? I'm interested in, like, how you start the business.

Yeah, it's definitely a chicken and egg kind of problem. So I was lucky enough to have been at a point when we started iConnections in 2020. We actually did it by way of a global charity event. We said— we first went to the institutional investors and we said, hey, everyone's freaking out. You know, you can't do a lunch meeting, you can't have a breakfast office, all the ways that people got together were not available.

Sure.

We said, we want to do a global event to benefit food banks all over the world. We'll give 100% of the money we make to the food banks, and we're going to charge the GPs to come to this thing. Will you just agree to take meetings? They— I literally don't think one of them said no. We had about 400 institutional LPs in that event. We ran 3,000 meetings. And I'll never forget, the first meeting was a fund in Hong Kong meeting the Kansas State University endowment. And I remember thinking, there is no way these 2 people would have ever met if it hadn't been for the software making it possible. So COVID really created this opportunity to make it more of a tech play at the core, because like Like I will say, the industry doesn't generally adopt technology quickly. You know, they're they're very old school. They want to just get in a room together. But the tech kind of made it possible during COVID They all had to buy into that, and it worked incredibly well. And then they kind of fell in love with it, and it took off from there.

And then I'd love your your overview, your positioning of Tomorrow X. It's it's it's sort of like my Super Bowl in the sense. The group that you bring together is incredible, and particularly you just get people that are huge names in the world of private markets but are sort of under the radar among retail investors, among the broader investor community. But that's what I love about it because it would be so easy to to pull other names on stage. But I think you've done a great job of like honing a really really laser focus. Polished product, but how much of that was developed deliberate? How how much of it is happenstance? How do you think about positioning Tomorrow X today?

So Tomorrow X is different really from what I just described. Tomorrow X is really the brainchild of three of us: myself, Gavin Baker, and Antonio Gracias. I had been talking with Gavin and Antonio about. They are the best. I had been talking with them about how to pull more tech CEOs into what we were doing in, in the fund world. And they advised me to not do it in Miami where our flagship typically happens. They advised me to really try and do something in Austin. And then they actually came back to me a few months later and said, we've been thinking about that discussion. And we would love to do an event in partnership with you. So that was kind of the beginning of Tomorrow X. But I would say more than anyone, it's been Gavin's brainchild. Gavin, Gavin is so active on X. Yeah, he loves that community. And, and his concept was, why don't we try and democratize access to a world-class banking conference for the FinEx community? You know, when you think about it, there are so many analysts on Substack and Reddit and X, of course, who are never going to get invited to a Wall Street event. You know, you're not going to see them at a Morgan Stanley conference or Goldman conference, but they all would benefit from being in a room with the best tech CEOs in the world. So Tomorrow X is our attempt to really bring that world-class banking experience to the masses. So if you're a retail investor, or you're an analyst that has a Substack and you're really active in the space, you can now come to this event and hear Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, John Gray, David Solomon, the CEOs of Databricks and Vercel. I mean, it is— if you go to tomorrowxsummit.com and look at that speaker list, it's absolutely stacked.

It is stacked. I think it's important because some of these people are very much moving the market. Totally. You'll have these Absolutely.

Private company CEOs. Yeah, yeah. Markets, tons.

Well, well, that, but I'm saying investors, even analysts that may not even use a real profile picture. Yeah, but they are deeper in this stuff and have bigger audiences than, than many people at the bank. I think it's important for them to get the analysis.

Yeah, these are important.

Yeah. And then the long tail as well.

Yeah, tons of them.

Yeah, absolutely. And that was exactly Gavin's point and, and why he felt— I mean, we We, you know, like normally when you do a conference, you start small, you know, you get like a ballroom in a hotel and you try and get 1,000 people. We rented a stadium. So the concept, the concept of Tomorrow X is like, let's really lean into this thing and make it available to the masses. You know, it's priced super inexpensively so that it's really accessible by anyone.

And we're gonna be there.

Yeah, we're very excited.

And you are, guys. I can't tell you, this is so exciting to have TVPN as our podcast media partner. We were like, who do we want to be the tech podcast partner? And there was really only one choice.

Yeah, we have some amazing guests lined up.

Thank you for saying yes.

I know it's going to be an amazing event. I'm so excited for it. It's, yeah, it's just so perfectly aligned with everything that we love.

Yeah, and we really hope a bunch of people in our community, which already are overlapping with Gavin's, are all there in person. We can't wait to hang out with everybody.

No, it's going to be fantastic. For sure. You guys are going to have plenty of interviews.

And hopefully your son comes too, 'cause he's clearly tapped in. Yeah, he'll be there with us to do it. We got these this morning. He already had it ready.

He was years ahead of the crowd.

Ahead of the curve. He invested early.

Ahead of the curve, man.

Alex Biscardi, ahead of the curve.

Amazing.

Well, we'll talk to you soon.

Yeah, great to see you here on the show, and we can't wait for the event in November.

Thanks so much for having us.

Absolutely. Same here, guys. We'll take it from here.

Thank you so much.

Goodbye. Up next, we have Ben Hilak in person, the co-founder of Raindrop. I'm gonna tell you about Shopify while he comes into the TVP UltraDome. 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. Go check it out. Ben, how you doing? Doing great. How are you? The TVP UltraDome. How you doing?

John's going detective mode.

You guys look great. I didn't get the memo. Yeah, that's okay. You want to wear one? I would. Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler, maybe sacrifice your— We can share. You look like you look sorry. You look like you're about to release a book on Fear and doom.

How optimistic are you about the world? How are things going in your world? Are you a doomer? Are you an optimist? Are you an accelerationist? Are you a cautious optimist?

Getting right into it. Right with the hard questions.

Yeah, it's always interesting to start from like, where are you? Because something I've noticed is that there are no doomers at the application layer. There are no doomers in the infrastructure trade. There are no doomers— doomers are only at the model layer. And there's a good reason, because that's where AGI and superintelligence is emerging from.

It's sort of a good reason. I actually— I think this is maybe a hot take here. I actually think that— so I think part of the problem right now is that the, like, whole AI safety conversation, risk, whatever, it's like 5 or 6 different things all muddled up into one.

Totally.

There's like— yeah, there's like—

Climate change from data centers is getting looped into, like, bioweapons.

Exactly.

Very different things.

There's like the whole sycophancy thing, how it affects people's mental health.

Totally, totally.

There's like a bunch of different things. And I do think that for some of them, not necessarily the bioweapon thing or the data center thing, but like for a lot of, like a lot of the things I think about are at the application layer. They are like, that's where people meet models.

Sure.

And there is a risk there that, that, that, A, people at Frontier Labs, like, don't really care about or think about, right? Um, but, like, you know, we work with Fortune 100 companies that, like, uh, their, their products are used by millions of people and then affect even more people, right? And so—

Sure. Um, well, start there. Reintroduce the product. Explain. I know you're here with fundraising news and product news, But give us the high level again.

Raindrop is an agent reliability product.

Important.

So we detect issues happening in production, and we prevent those issues from happening. So the product we just announced recently, which I'm really, really excited about, is simulations. So when people make changes to their agents, we simulate what those changes are going to do in the real world and can show people things they wouldn't have even ever expected to happen.

Sure.

So, yeah.

How reasonable is it to have an AI model that just reads every—

Trace?

Every trace?

So—

Is that prohibitively expensive? Is that the problem?

It's getting less so. Yeah. So I think, like, you know, we've sort of pioneered, like, super cheap classifiers for this thing. Jev is another example of—

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm just imagining, Like, burn a classifier onto silicon that just says, is this bad or not, and have it run over every trace?

So here's the trick.

You start detecting things now?

So there's a problem.

Please.

It turns out that binary classification, like, is this bad or not, is really, really hard.

I can imagine, yeah.

Take it a step back. It's like humanity has been trying to define what is good and what is bad for as long as we've existed.

We're going to need more than one simple tree in this case.

Yeah, exactly. So we consider ourselves in some ways like a human alignment company. Like, how do you get a company to define what is good or bad?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then how do you make that as easy as possible? How do you— a lot of it is like, especially now that agents can do more than the people that make them have ever imagined that they can do. Like, you're looking at traces like, oh, shit, I didn't expect that to be asked. I didn't know it could do that. You need to be able to surface those things and be like, Do you want to be able to do this? Do you want it to be—

Yeah, yeah. So creating alignment within a company looks different. I always think about the tobacco industry because a lot of the models will reject to work on anything tobacco-related. But Altria is going to use AI somewhere.

Yes.

But they're going to get rejected a lot. But in some ways, they're going to wind up deploying AI one way or another. And their sense of legality is going to be informed by the way they're regulated in every single market. And it might not look like the morality of the lab that trained the model, but it will fit within their business construct in a weird way. And the way we process the morality of cigarettes is through the court system.

Totally. I think there's hundreds of examples of this, thousands of— infinite, like—

Probably infinite.

And especially, like, I think the way that frontier labs consider alignment is, like, often very different.

Sure.

I was, like, using, I think, like Claude or something recently. I was like trying to negotiate on some product, and like I wanted, um, the, uh, the— it was like on Marketplace, and the guy like wanted to like hang out with me. Like he was like, oh, it'd be really cool if I could like sit down and like show you this thing. But I was just getting like weird vibes. So I was like, I told Claude, I was like, you know, just, just like say something that kind of like gets by this, but like in a way that's not too like—

Softly.

And it was like, I cannot be dishonest about this, we should not like—

and I was like, it's a Yeah, exactly. I was like, come on, like, you know, could be my safety at risk here.

Who knows, right? But anyway, so yeah, I think that human alignment is a really hard problem. And I think you see this—

So did you hang out with the guy?

No, I did not. I didn't even end up—

Yeah, actually, Claude booked us a 4-hour walk on the beach together.

No, it would have, right?

No, the deal wasn't worth it in the end.

OK.

But yeah, I think that like, I think that telling something whether that's a human or an agent, what you want is incredibly hard. I think management is incredibly hard, just in general. Like, if it were really easy to express what you want and have the other person— like, have some entity understand, like, management wouldn't— half of management wouldn't be—

OK, so an interesting thing for your business right now is that consumer agents are getting more and more popular. We saw the OpenCLAW boom, and then— This cycle will be bigger because you don't need to go buy a Mac Mini or really set up much of anything. And you can just imagine every business on Earth is going to start having— first of all, they're going to start realizing, like, wow, our phone's ringing a lot more. We're getting just more messages. And so what that's going to create is tons and tons of businesses that need to create counteragents to process and negotiate with other agents, which is kind of funny because 'Cause I'm sure some people will be like, why do we need a data center for this? Just like, why don't we just work it out the old-fashioned way? You know, but clearly people like having like an intermediary in a bunch of these different things. And so is your bet that like there's this massive long tail of businesses that are gonna need to have their own agents and sort of process and basically grade them on how they're performing and improve them?

Yeah, I think that there's gonna be more agents. —than there are now.

Let's go.

Hot take of the century. More AI in the future.

Right.

But another question is, like, you would almost bet that a business is going to have to take some version of an agent, and then fine-tune it for their business, and then test it. And I feel like that is where you're going to fit in. Yeah, totally. Yeah. Like, somebody might buy— Say, I'll take one agent, but then I also want the software to understand how it's working?

Yes. I think that companies will want both humans and agents that are aligned to how their company works. Like, if you take— pick a random Fortune 100 company, they probably have some way that they work that works for whatever industry that they're in. And there might even be parts of it that are like, you know, suboptimal.

Yeah.

Some like—

I wonder if more culture stuff will bleed in. Like there's a couple famous examples of like, if you go to Nike headquarters, like everyone wears Nike.

Yeah.

Like you don't walk off, you don't go to work and be like, I'm wearing Adidas today. Like that would be a bad look.

That would be bad.

And so, but if you get an off-the-shelf model—

You wear a Nike fedora.

Yeah. But if you get an off-the-shelf model, it's gonna be like, Yeah, like Nike and Adidas, like these are both like comparable brands. They're both like pretty good. And you're gonna be like, this AI is not a culture fit. I need to— and that's like a very subtle alignment thing that actually might be real because you don't wanna be building a deck and it's like, oh yeah, like, you know, maybe we should partner with Adidas 'cause they're similar. And it's like, no, it's not.

I worked at Apple for like 4 years. Yeah, everyone works at Apple once, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And this is like a protest not wearing out, but no, I think that the way that AI is and agents will fit into there will be different than other companies. Like, it's just like their— it's a— the way it works is just entirely different, right? Like, if you've ever worked at a big company, you sort of get that. And so, I don't know, I think there's millions of examples of this. I think that, yeah, I think a lot of the future will be— how do you you sort of conform to.

Sure, sure. On simulation, where does the simulation end? Because you can create a digital twin of—

Right here. We're in it.

But I mean, if you go to a company, you can create a digital twin of their AWS instance and their Gmail and their Slack. But at a certain point, then you also need to simulate the entire internet because that's part of the world. How big can you go? How big are you going now? How big will you go ultimately?

This is a really, really good question. I mean, ultimately, I'm joking, but also, maybe this could be a raindrop simulation.

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. For now, where we're starting is all about replaying historical things that have happened, getting really, really smart about how you choose those historical things, and then in very specific scenarios, creating completely sort of like on-the-fly adversarial scenarios goes. As far as, like, technically, we simulate everything.

Mm-hmm.

And it's kind of a hybrid of trying to be as smart upfront about what you need to— one way of thinking about it is if you think about, like, let's take a past trace, like something the agent did. Every time it called a tool, it's almost like a hole through this, like, veil that lets you sort of see what the world behind it looks like, right? The agent's sort of perceiving that world one sort of, like, call at a time. So you can sort of start there and say, well, let's try to, like, fill in around the holes as much as possible. So if it goes here, you know, so if here it goes, like, right next to it, it sort of has that data, right? And then you also have to be monitoring that simulation in real time just like they do for this one, right?

Um-hum.

To see, oh, you know, if something's slightly off, right? So it's like maybe it tried to get data somewhere but that data was not filled in. And you can sort of detect that as a quality gap if you get really smart about how you're classifying it and then fill in that data at runtime. So that's essentially the way to do it well.

How do you think about how different cultures are set up to even build agents? Because it feels like there's— it's quite funny to me that—

I'm thinking of Amish culture.

Culturally, we are missing a lot.

No, but I think it's very funny That I think it's very funny that Apple like is just getting around to cloning ChatGPT.

Yes, and they have such an advantage in the personal agent thing. I know they are the most trusted tech company with privacy killing it. They should be killing it.

All of my passwords are in Google.

Even Google people will be like they're going to sell your data. They want to advertise. Apple is the one where it's like my family photos are in there. Oh, I know they have very, very high trust.

I talk about this all the time. There's two companies that and Meta.

Meta is—

oh yeah, totally. It's Google and Apple.

And Meta is specifically well suited for it because Zuck's like, I don't care if it misspells like 5 out of 100 people's names. If 9, you know, like you saw this with, with one of the agents today, somebody had an issue like getting on a flight apparently because—

Yeah. He's always worked in like a messier, more algorithmic world than Apple where it's like, if the photo's on your phone, it must sync to your iCloud. Like, That's— there is no AI lineage, no stochastic lineage in the business.

I think it's very true. I think that Apple is— first of all, I would literally never count them out because I think they're ridiculously well positioned and they have some amazing people there. But yeah, like, I think that there was this, you know, there was a way of working there which was sort of, you know, we're going to like, you know, The reason why Apple is such like insanely, you know, they have the most insane, you know, attention to detail, etc., is that designers would sort of define like, this is how it should work.

Yep.

Right? And then engineers are like, well, no, like that won't work. And the designer's like, well, we don't care, like this is how it's going to work. And, you know, you just kind of do that loop, right? It's like RL or something. And the thing is that that does— that kind of way of working doesn't work as well for AI, right? Because You can't just say, like, oh, it's like, well, you know, it should be, you know, as natural as—

I mean, it is entirely flipped at the Frontier Labs. It's like, the researchers went and did something, and this is what it can do.

Exactly.

Go market it.

Yeah, like, try to build a product. And— but we do also see labs—

Wait, wait, wait, it can do math now?

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, go tell people it can do math.

Exactly, exactly.

And they're like, but it can't do comedy, or it can't do— there's still 6 fingers, but it's amazing at Python, and you're like, okay, that's the product.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

As opposed to the opposite, which is like—

100%.

We are building this particular thing.

100%.

Yeah, very exciting times. What does it take to sell to a Fortune 100 these days? Like, what are you seeing in the enterprise? Ara Karazian has this evolving take that there's sort of this duopoly in price competition at the frontier between Anthropic and OpenAI. He has said that there's less switching to open source and Chinese open source than he thought he would see. But there's tons of price competition on the frontier still. What are you seeing? What do— what are enterprise leaders just like excited about, worried about? Anything that you can share?

So, yes, definitely way less adoption of like— I would just say like Chinese models in general, especially at Fortune 100s. I think that there's like definitely a narrative of like a risk around it, even if it's not super well—

It's more like, let's go actually instead of token max, like efficient token spend will take us the next leg up.

Cost.

People do care about cost. And I think that it's like, uh, pretty reasonable when you're like even, you know, $5K, you know, ahead times like, you know, $50,000, $100,000, like whatever. It's like it starts starts getting crazy, right?

Yeah.

So it does matter. I think that there's a lot of— companies are definitely all building internal things right now. And I think trying to grapple with, well, when do we just use Claude code? When do we just build our own— I guess Codex now, maybe. But when do we just build our own thing? And I think that there's more of a justification for companies to build their own kind of internal ways of working than I might have expected 6 months ago, actually. Yeah, which is really interesting. Like, I think even if you look at something like Muse, it's like, it's like pretty much like some OpenClaw-style thing.

Heavily inspired.

Yeah, it's their words.

Yeah, and everyone was talking about his OpenClaw. Yeah, telling him to drink more water. Yeah, Stripe Sessions, like maybe 4 or 5 months ago.

It's, it's the, the barrier to entry there is like pretty low.

But distribution is really important.

Yes, but, but if you have, you know, especially I think again when you think about Fortune 100, Fortune 500 I think we're seeing an increasing number of just internal agents and applications that I think, like, 2 years ago might have felt a little silly. Like, it's kind of like, well, like, why are you actually building this yourself?

Yeah.

I think increasingly it's like, no, like, you know, you have all these, like, legacy, like, you know, internal docs and, like, exact— like, you know, the exact path a ticket should take. And every company sort of, like, maps to org structure, et cetera. It, like, kind of makes sense.

Yeah, it is interesting that like even if you go back to dot-com, like Amazon became the everything store, and yet there were so many brands that didn't go all in on Amazon, maintained third-party websites for decades successfully, and built brands even in retail and big box.

Yeah.

Like all of these things like lived on longer. And so, yeah, when I see like a law firm saying like, okay, we're gonna build our own model, bottles, we're going to build our own harnesses. I'm like, yeah, maybe that's not that crazy. Maybe that'll stick around.

Does brand design matter more or less today than it did 2 years ago?

Oh, it matters more. Yeah, it matters more.

Does it though?

I think so.

Because I feel like when everyone can have like a pretty decent brand, like you see some teams like looking at Instincts, right? Getting to $10 billion with the plain text website.

They don't have a brand, right?

Well, their brand— no, of course they have like a Twitter brand, right?

Like, like, like, brand is not always, uh, uh, it's like what you do. Their brand is super understated.

But here's another, here's another example. It used to be like you could get a long way as an early-stage startup designing like a really simple, cool 3D asset.

Yes, totally.

Like that, they would just instantly be like, okay, this team They may not have a lot of resources, but they like— and now you can just be like, make me a cool 3D asset.

But there's a website that flips around.

This is why it matters more though. So I think I've like, I've gone back and forth. I think right now my view is that like in some ways you could think of it as like taste is being commoditized, but also the second that things are commoditized, you need to stand out.

Yeah.

And so you do need someone at at the, like, that understands the zeitgeist, understands whatever the tip of, like, whatever it is. It's like, you know, because it is not enough to throw a nice, like, 3D asset on your website or something.

Yeah.

And so, but you still need, like, for example, if a Fortune 100 company is landing on your page or, like, just anyone, you want them to understand that this is a real team of humans behind it. It's even like writing. Like, you can imagine that, like, so I think AI writing is still bad, but also, like, if you sent, like, AI writing to people, like, 10 years ago, you know, would they think it's bad? It's not obvious to me, versus, like, there being a lot of tells, because you are getting inundated with, like, really low-quality writing that you can obviously—

Yeah, have you seen, like, the old Paul Graham post where he uses all the AI spells?

No, yeah, em dashes, whatever, yeah, exactly.

And he clearly wasn't using AI, Unless he was a time traveler, which is possible. But yeah, it wasn't annoying then and now it's annoying now because it's oversaturated.

Yeah, just the second I detect it, I stop reading and I just close whatever the page of the document.

Exactly. What's weird is that I feel like I'm detecting it less in the actual responses. Like if I ask ChatGPT to go pull some data together for me, I'm noticing they clearly RL'd the it's not this, it's that out of the model in the last run.

Of course.

Because people are like, okay, that's actually really annoying. But in general, like, I'll sit there and I probably read 20 minutes of AI text a day just from queries that I do throughout the day.

You're lucky, that's all.

I don't know. I mean, I'm live a lot, so. I think so much more. Yeah, but you're not necessarily annoyed by that. But if I tell you like, hey, I got this blog post, and then you're like, this is AI, it's like disrespectful. We actually— Quality of the writing is probably identical to what you read all day.

I get what you're saying. Yeah, yeah. I actually actually do find the the responses from like Codex et cetera to be like obnoxious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it can be annoying. But yeah, we we we had I had a funny thing recently where like we put up a blog and it was like it was like a I thought it was a pretty like it's a pretty decent blog. It was about the Hugging Face incident. Sure. Like a whole like simulated game called Hugging World. It's at huggingworld.com. Cool. And it's pretty funny. funny. It's funny to watch. Uh, uh, and so the thing is, like, I was pretty busy. I got the blog, like, 80% done, but, like, I knew that there were, like, some— like, you could read, you could read it, it was good. But it also— I was like, someone's gonna call— like, someone's gonna see, like, the, like, some AI-written phrase here. I don't want to get called on that, you know what I mean? And so I added a little, like, stamp, like, Vibe written, you know, on the top. And I think that was, like, a nice, like—

Okay, yeah, just being honest with the audience.

Exactly. But it's like, it's like, there is good information in it.

And was there pushback or no? No, that's great.

Exactly. So I think like there was good information. It was not, I think, disrespectful to someone to read. Yeah. But at the same time, it's a little bit different than if I were to write every sentence. Yeah, yeah. So there's some sort of—

I have one more question.

Please. And we have one big gong here.

Yeah, we do. Yes. Maybe we should hit the gong first. You raised $25 million CRV? $35 million. $35 million. Oh, who's captain? We get it. Wow, wow, wee-wah. Smash that gong. CRV. CRV's in. He's shipping up to Boston. Did you go to Boston or you raised it in the Valley? No, no, no. Okay, cool. Uh, Charles Rivers Ventures. The Charles. It's in Boston. We were just there. It's great. Um, completely unrelated question, but prediction in the tech world. The new Tesla Roadster is being announced October 1st, and the FAA has cleared the airspace 10,000 feet So the maximum height it could go is 10,000 feet. The minimum height it could go is 0 feet, right? What is your prediction? It has to be inclusive of 0 to 10,000 feet. How high do you think it'll go? Could be an inch, could be 1,000 feet, could be 100 feet, could be 10,000 feet. Can't be higher than 10,000 feet. Can't be less than 0. We know it's in between there. We have the bounds now.

I think it's— I think it'll be more than 0.

Okay. Pretty sure.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking we're gonna get 10 feet.

10 feet! I like it.

Here's the new— here's the new, uh, I gotta get some foil under here. As I've been thinking about it more, it really seems like he never wanted to actually— once he got into this whole thing and humanoids, he doesn't really want to make this car, right?

No.

Yeah, he really doesn't want to make this car, right? People have been sitting there for 9 years having their money locked up. They're like, I hope this year I get my my car. He doesn't want to make it, right? Okay. But he— we know he can make it. Yeah. And we know that he could make something so incredible. We know he could make a flying car, right? I don't think anyone doubts, like, oh yeah, like, like, I'm not saying it's gonna be super safe. Okay. But, but let's see.

I'm not even saying it's gonna ship.

Let's say this. He makes something that is— no, so he makes something that is just like an insane demo, but it just instantly gets like hard banhammer by—

Oh, and he's like, oh no, I can't make it.

Or it gets into another 5-year period of like legal battle. I got to keep the deposit.

Okay, okay.

You got to get through these legal battles.

The deposits are that big. But also, there's a wild card, which is that it could be more or less a normal car, but they cleared the airspace because it's doing sort of an Evel Knievel-style jump and they set up a ramp. And that will throw all of our predictions off.

Quite possible.

Because it could easily go 30 feet in the air if there's a ramp and it could just be a normal Which is the thing, like, you know, like, so, like, he has, he has, he has the resources. Yeah.

Right?

And, and, um, I'm sure at some point someone was like, well, what if it flies? You know what I mean? And so he would have been like, well, let's get a team on that.

Yeah.

And I believe that if you, you can attach engines to this thing and make it fly, like, I—

I, I was going no ramp, 6 feet up, but after seeing the 10,000-foot news, I think you might might be flying around like a plane or something. It might be getting up there. We'll see. You think so? Maybe. I don't know why. Test flights, that's the thing. Oh yeah, there would have been spies or something.

There would have been pilots and there would have been— yeah, I think—

I don't know, they might have it locked down. It's a pretty secure facility.

Self-driving?

Yeah, I don't know. Self-flying? That's real. That's the easy part. Yeah, I think the hard part is to actually make a rocket car that doesn't explode when you drive it around. Yes, exactly. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Congratulations on getting funded.

Of course, we'll hang out after the show.

Sounds like a plan.

And, uh, our next guest will be joining in just a minute. We have some other breaking news we gotta run through. Um, um, we, uh, just set up our, our next guest. I think it'd be worth talking about Paramount.

Let's get a quick tip of the hat for our friends over at Raindrop.

Yes, yes, yes, of course. Um, so Paramount is officially not leaving California. It's been a back and forth. The company Going through an acquisition with Warner Brothers Discovery has been duking it out with AG attorneys general in California. The company said Monday that's Paramount said that it has reached a settlement with the states challenging its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, clearing what had become the last major obstacle to the deal. California Attorney General Rob Bonta. And a coalition of other states sued Paramount in July, arguing that combining the two companies would give a single entertainment giant too much control over major film studios, cable networks, and other media properties. To resolve the case, Paramount agreed to several conditions. The combined company will create an independent board of journalists intended to protect the editorial autonomy of CNN and CBS News, commit to releasing at least 30 movies theatrically each year, and spend an additional $1.5 billion on film production. Over the next five years, Paramount did not agree to more structural changes. They're not selling CNN or divesting one of the movie studios. Once completed, the merger will bring Paramount and Warner Brothers under the same roof, along with Paramount Plus, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, and franchises and films including Superman, Minecraft, and Sinners. Paramount has argued that the scale is necessary to compete with increasingly powerful technology and streaming companies like Netflix. Netflix. If you subscribe to every Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery premium service now, you're probably giving them like $60 a month, maybe more. HBO Max is an independent subscription. Paramount Plus, that gets pricey if you get the— don't they have UFC now? CBS, I think, has an all-access. CNN launched something, but I think they shuttered it. Anyway, the settlement also follows months of political pressure surrounding Paramount's future in California. The company had warned that it could move significant production and thousands of jobs out of the state if the acquisition were blocked and had reportedly begun exploring studio space in Nashville. Governor Gavin Newsom publicly warned that losing Paramount would damage California's standing at— as the center of the entertainment industry. With the lawsuit now headed for resolution, one of the more serious recent threats of a major Hollywood company pulling back from Los Angeles appears to have receded. So this is extremely bad news. for everyone that was hoping that the Paramount lot would be converted into a data center in the heart of Los Angeles. A lot of the pro-data center crowd were optimistic about a large-scale data center coming into Los Angeles, using up a lot of the water, a lot of the energy here in Los Angeles. But looks like they're going to be making movies instead. So—

Well, let's check in with Professor Zhang.

Oh, what happened?

Who went on Jack Neal's podcast to talk about AI.

Oh yes, yes, we need to. This is the funniest clip because it's like half true, half false. Let's play it. Do you really think when you put something into ChatGPT, it's going to be generated by the AI?

I guarantee you it's not true.

I guarantee you it's being manipulated by humans somewhere in India. Human in the loop. ChatGPT, human in the loop at scale. Billion, billion weekly active users. Billion people answering questions. I think what happened was a human first wrote that, and then so he's sort of right. He's like describing training data, and like it's half crazy. Like no, there's no human in the loop when you ask a question; it answers with superhuman speed. How is that possible? But at the same time, like yes, Scale AI exists. Merkur exists. There is a lot of training data.

Professor Zhang is willing to actually guarantee this too. He did guarantee. He did guarantee. He's not. He's not just saying it, he's willing to guarantee it.

Yes.

It seems that the new meta for governments globally is to just have like a podcast guy that just goes around saying insane things, half of which is true, half of which are made up. And then it just sort of is exciting and confusing for people, but very stimulating. John Kiriakou is another guy, another guy like this, it seems. Although he's taken a turn into fashion, so we'll see.

Oh yeah, he walked it at Fashion Week. There's an interesting thing. David Sacks is the AI czar, and he's also the co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which abbreviates to PCAST, which sounds like podcast. He sounds like he's the podcaster in Chief. Isn't that isn't that a random title? He just happens to be the the co-chair of PCAST. Yeah, I thought that was a fun fact. Anyway, we have Lucas Shaw in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVD and Ultra Dome. Welcome to the show, Lucas.

What's going on? Great to be here. How you guys doing? Been wanting to make this happen for a while. Yes. Anytime we are we we go live from Hollywood most days of the year, but I still don't fully understand Hollywood, so stuff is happening in the news. I usually just think I'm going to wait till you write about it, then I'll get a good understanding of it. So it's an honor to have you here today to talk about everything with Paramount, and then I want to get into Netflix and YouTube as well.

Yeah, please.

I'm sorry I did not bring my hat, then we could all be matching.

We should have prepared you. We're trying these out. John has a theory that—

I think you do have a pair of sunglasses. that you could put on him potentially with a button if you, if you want to give him a pair of shades at some point.

We can figure that out. Anyway, but John, John's trying to bring back the fedora, so I'm just trying to be there for emotional support. Yeah, I'm just here to, I'm just here to support.

It looks like old Hollywood. I think we can pull it off. I think with, with the suit and the tie, it reads a little bit more like, like 1950s.

Insane overconfidence. I'm gonna bring back the fedora. I can pull it off. Anyways, how was your weekend covering everything going on with Paramount?

It was fine. I was actually at a relative's wedding in Rhode Island, so I helped where I could. We also had some really good colleagues of mine who handled it. I mean, I've been covering Ellison, Paramount, this deal for the last year and the players in it for far longer. I think we're all happy that it is Finally over. Obviously, there are some people who are not happy that the deal is going to go forward, but those of us covering it didn't need the proceedings to drag out forever and ever.

Talk about your read today on, on the sort of winners and losers and where, where the different parties kind of gave ground and where they, they kind of maybe came out on top.

Well, the settlement looks for the most part like a big win for David Ellison, right? He was looking at, you know, months of uncertainty. This trial wasn't going to start until next year. Yes, there were hearings between now and then. But if that had happened, he was going to owe hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, to this ticking fee that he had in the deal between Paramount, Skydance, and Warner Bros. Discovery. And instead, he mostly agrees to do things he's already said he was going to do, you know, release 30 movies a year in theaters. Only 20 of them have to be wide releases.

Yeah.

There's a commitment to, you know, make a certain amount of production or make a certain amount of movies and television in this country. But again, I think he was going to do that stuff anyways. Maybe this, you know, forces him to do it because there's always a chance, you know, he says he's going to do X and gets in and he instead does Y. But it doesn't seem like Rob Bonta, the attorney general of California, or any of the attorneys general who are involved in the suit or the Writers Guild got some big win where they can say, you know, they were calling for structural changes, which would have meant selling something and there is nothing being sold.

Yeah. Is this real cause for optimism for the entertainment industry in LA? Is there already plenty of cause for optimism? Living here, I don't, you know, when I talk to folks, I don't get this sort of sense that like they're super excited about the state of things, but maybe it's darkest before dawn.

Well, the last few years have been pretty rough, right? There was kind of an unprecedented explosion, particularly on the television side, kind of starting around Netflix and House of Cards. And really, look, the TV business was a cash machine for the— for decades. Streaming seemed like a really great business for, for a lot of these people. And then around '22, '23, there has been this kind of correction or rightsizing, and from which the industry has never fully recovered. So, yeah, you're right that most people who work in Hollywood don't feel great about it. I don't think that they believe that this deal is going to be the solution for that. Right. They're looking at what will likely be thousands in job cuts and the combination of 2 of the original kind of 6 Hollywood studios. But other people feel great because it means they think that David Ellison will finally be the one to kind of create a scaled player to compete with Netflix and Amazon and Disney. Look, Warner Brothers has traded hands a lot over the last decade. It got bought by AT&T, then it got bought by Discovery. Now it's getting bought by David Ellison. Everyone has said that they're going to be the ones to figure out how to make HBO kind of a real competitor in streaming. They haven't done it so far, but maybe David Ellison will have the magic touch.

How is Hollywood processing the— it seems like TV's in a rough spot, but it feels like it's starting to be a good year for movies, at least financially. I mean, we had the 3 breakout sort of like crossover YouTubers: Obsession, Iron Lung, Backrooms. Then you have $2 billion outcomes with The Odyssey and Spider-Man. And then you're going into the back half of the year, it's tech-focused, and you get the Theranos Elizabeth Holmes documentary. There's an OpenAI movie. There's another Facebook movie. Like, at least from my world, I feel like there's more stories around the movie business. But how is Hollywood perceiving this year? Will this be remembered as like a good year for the moviemaking business potentially?

I think it depends on who you ask. Top line, it's the highest grossing year since before the pandemic, since 2019. You have the second most billion-dollar movies ever. You know, you had The Odyssey, you had the Spider-Man movie, you had Toy Story 5, you had a new Super Mario Brothers movie. And then a lot of the ones that you referenced, whether it was kind of the YouTube breakouts or even Devil Wears Prada 2 was a big hit.

Sure.

I think where people counter that is that if you look just in terms of ticket sales, ticket sales are still down a lot. The reason that grosses are stronger is in part because going to the movies is just more expensive. And so We've entered a phase where moviegoing as a habit is just not what it used to be. But yeah, I think this is— if you talk to people in the movie business, they feel better about it this year than they have since before the pandemic closed theaters. And the question that they all have is, is this going to continue? How do we make sure that this isn't a blip and we actually are back on kind of a growth trajectory, which the business hasn't really been on?

Yeah, I've seen some, some crazy stats. about moviegoing before the dawn of television, I think in like the '40s and '50s, like the average American bought like something like 10 or 20 movie tickets a month. Like it was like the only thing to do. And so everyone was going to movies constantly. And then once people could watch—

Gotta get your screen time somehow.

Well, and think about when you— yes, there's what happened, you know, before television where it was like, yeah, so it was pretty much Pretty much it was that or reading books or playing cards. But even when you were growing up, going to the movies on a Friday night was something that—

Every weekend.

Correct.

Every weekend.

And that's just not the case now, right? You go when there is an event. A movie is competing with TikTok, it's competing with YouTube, it's competing with live sports, it's competing with concerts, it's competing with, you know, anything and everything. And so it has to be loud and it has to feel like something needs to leave the house to go see. And that's something that the movie business struggles with because they were in the habit of people just showing up on a Friday night and saying, what do I want to see?

Mm-hmm. Switching gears, YouTube and Netflix. You had an interesting post this morning on a creator that was potentially trying to rework, rework their deal with Netflix, seemingly because they're worried about losing something to do with their— the Golden Goose, which is their YouTube channel. Oh, interesting. Break it down.

Yeah, there's been this fight for talent between YouTube and Netflix over the course of this year. Right. They're the 2 leaders in streaming video. For most of their existence, they were competitive but operating in different lanes. Right. You know, Netflix was Hollywood programming, professional film and TV. YouTube was UGC and Just shorter-form videos. Over time, they've gotten closer and closer together. And what's happened this year is Netflix, in trying to increase the amount of time people are spending and stay relevant with people under the age of 25, 30, in particular under 20, they have done deals with a lot of big YouTube talent. And that's, you know, they've done business with YouTube before. It used to be, okay, Cocomelon, package together your videos and make highlights for Netflix. Now it's like with this, with this person I mentioned, the chef Nick DiGiovanni, and they've done it with a bunch of people. It's post your new videos to Netflix and YouTube at the same time. We will pay you millions of dollars on top of what you already get from YouTube. And we're happy to talk about whether we should, you know, work on some kind of original programming. YouTube got upset about this, right? YouTube, even though they are the biggest player on the block, they seem to, you know, break records in terms of how much time people are spending with it every I think Netflix trying to get people to post at the same time on both places just irritated me.

How dare you? How dare you? How dare you? No, it's so funny to me because they've been through this like, oh, it's like everything, it's like rainbows and butterflies. Like, we put the U in YouTube, it's about you, the creator. Creators. And like, we're here to just empower creators. And it's like, we're here to empower creators that maintain our monopoly on human attention. You know, it's like, it's really, it's really kind of exposing just the realities of like business. They're gonna make a bunch of like rational decisions to try to maintain their monopoly on like streaming UGC. And, and, but, uh, but having to go kind of— it feels like they just had to go very much like mascot. If you do this, we're gonna kill your reach. Um, and—

We will punish you. And by the way, if you go back and work with us, we will reward you. It is very Machiavellian. They did not care.

Yeah.

It was interesting when I first started reporting on it and what YouTube was doing in response. Like, YouTube thought what they were doing, to your point, was very reasonable and rational and just what any business would do. And the Netflix folks were like, I can't believe what YouTube is doing. And probably some of that comes from what you're talking about, which is YouTube has cultivated this reputation as this very creator-friendly platform, which of course, they're, you know, they're ultimately about the bottom line and creators are a means to an end for them.

Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is like when, when podcasters were like, hey, I could just— I'm posting my podcast to the RSS feed, I could just post it on YouTube at the same time, maybe I get some additional views. Creators are now just trying to do that. They're like, I'm creating this video asset that I slaved away making for any number of hours, I made this thing. It's my IP. I own it. I should be able to post it anywhere. And now YouTube is saying like, we're gonna cut your reach, you know, by however much. And it just feels like it is deeply misaligned with the creator, which is the person that built YouTube.

Yeah.

And it's my hope that— it's my hope that the creators like win here because it's so much better. It'll be so much better if a creator can be like, yeah, I get views all over the place. Place. And, and, but, but I don't know. YouTube will be better for shareholders, though.

They may be misaligned, but I would actually say that this competition for creators, at least in the short term, is a net positive because there are multiple people. It's not YouTube for the longest time was kind of the only game in town, right? Yes. You had TikTok and Instagram and Twitch. Well, that's what I'm saying.

I'm saying the competition is like amazing. I want more.

I want permanent competition, not just this brief fight. That might be the state because right now if YouTube is that stick, then Netflix has to increase the amount of carrots to say, hey, yeah, you are going to get crushed, but we're going to double what we were going to pay you. So, and then all of a sudden somebody says, you know what? Yeah, I'll get rid of my YouTube channel at that price. I'm down. Right. And then that's good, potentially.

Yeah. And you see Disney and Fox and other legacy entertainment companies trying to get in too. And so if there are just more people trying to compete, compete for creators' dollar, that's good, right? We've seen it. You brought up, you were talking about podcasting earlier. When there were a bunch of companies trying to get podcast deals and trying to sign podcast talent, that's when you started to see people like Joe Rogan and Alex Cooper and all those folks getting huge paydays. So yeah, the more folks who want their videos to die.

Do you think that Netflix could think about trying to co-opt cultivate emerging talent. They're so used to being like, hey, let's put $1 million towards this single production. If you take $1 million, you divide it by 20, you could seed 20 creators that are just showing any— I'm very excited for a lot of the content that I like most on YouTube is highly produced 20, 30-minute videos from a super passionate creator that just spent— and it's like real time, right? And so, what Netflix has been missing is just like— and they've kind of done this with some documentary projects where they'll like come out with a documentary on like Trump's flight from Turkey.

Right. They're doing these quick-turn documentaries right now.

But they should be doing that across like every single category, basically.

Sure. They could. I think Netflix is really wary of They would sort of categorize that maybe as user-generated programming, and I don't think they feel like they can win at that. But it— like, Netflix's strength has been, yes, that, that really high production value type of programming, and YouTube's strength has more been the long tail, being a place that you can go for anything and everything.

Mm-hmm.

And I think if you— most people at Netflix feel like they, they can't beat YouTube at that game. game. But it would be interesting, certainly, to see them, you know, go to 20, 30 creators they like and say, here's $50,000 to make whatever you want.

Yeah. Well, I would just like to see that because those creators, if they're at— if they're just starting their journey, have nothing to lose. Like, they don't have this, like, amazing, you know, platform and business built on YouTube yet. So it would take a lot of money. But some way or another, they're gonna need to get to the point— they're gonna need to benefit from like having creative talent that's distributed all over the world that can make this more like real-time content. And I've always felt like Netflix, in the slop era that we're in, Netflix has amazing opportunity to just curate UGC better than YouTube because I actually can't stand when YouTube surfaces some video to me. And historically, I would've been like, oh, cool, there's a video. It looks like it's well-produced. It only has 4,000 views, maybe it's like someone great. And then now more than ever, it's like some like AI script from a— and there's actually no substance to the content. And I think like if Netflix can create a slop shield of sorts, curation layer, I'd be optimistic.

I like that. What's the status or the status of Apple in this ecosystem? I talked to a filmmaker before they really launched real Apple TV+ productions, and he was saying it's gonna be challenging for them because movies are— it's a hits-driven business. You're going to have flops, and that's sort of antithetical to the Apple culture of everything needs to be polished and perfect. Right. And then I think they've done well and they've developed a portfolio of really well-reviewed and Emmy-winning, Golden Globe-winning, you know, they've won a whole bunch of awards. But how do people in Hollywood see them? Are they an important buyer in the ecosystem? Are they just one of many? It feels like they're sort of sitting out this YouTube versus Netflix battle, but is there a battle coming, you know, years down the line as they try and expand, or are they sort of happy with where They're definitely sitting out the Netflix YouTube skirmish.

I mean, when they first showed up, I think they were seen as you know Captain Moneybags. They just they would outspend anyone and everyone. They're kind of seen as starfuckers because every show that they do, they want to have big name talent in. But over time, they've developed a reputation as one of the one of the best program or one of the best streaming services in terms of programming. Right? You mentioned Emmy Awards. They just won the most. Most Emmys of any streaming service, of any company.

Is that Widow's Bay? It was—

Widow's Bay was their biggest winner, but they, you know, they got a lot of nominations across that and Your Friends and Neighbors and Shrinking and a bunch of their shows. They get really good critical praise.

Yeah, it feels like they've sort of jumped straight into more of an HBO competitor than a Netflix competitor. Yes, they have.

Well, that's— but remember, that's where Netflix started, right? Netflix started as competing with HBO and then went mainstream. I don't know— Amazon started as competing with HBO and then decided to speak to the middle of the country with Reacher and other stuff like that. I don't know that I see Apple making that same transition. To your point about sort of what Apple is, it doesn't feel like in keeping with their brand to try to be CBS. Yeah, um, the, the knock that most people have on Apple is just their shows aren't very popular, or, you know, they, they do really well with a particular type of viewer. Yeah. Um, but only a couple other shows have broken through in the culture in a big way. But I know—

I saw some estimated ratings and it was like 70,000 views an episode or something, which is like a small podcast, right?

But they may not care, right? That if you're John Ternus and you're like, oh, I just went to the Emmys and we won all these awards and talent wants to work with us, that's good for our Well, that's been the the 4D chess argument in tech is that it gives them something to talk about that's not just App Store rents because they're like, oh yeah, our services business.

You want to talk about services? Let's talk about you know Widow's Bay. Not right. We made another ten billion dollars charging thirty percent.

Do you think any of the major platforms will take are taking a hard look at at short form dramas or any of These apps that are charting, I think a lot of them are basically like adult content that's sort of like—

Romantic skies.

Softcore porn, some people would say.

Yeah, fantasy. But there's also like horror and like true crime stuff in there.

They're all looking at it. I think Peacock, I think, has already added some verticals. I know that Netflix and others have said that they're looking at it. That again doesn't feel like one for Apple per se, but most of the other ones, Look, all these services, because streaming isn't growing as fast as it once was, they're all looking at ways to bring in more people. So they're all looking at YouTube creators. They're all looking at podcasts. They're all looking at vertical dramas. Anything that people are paying attention to, if they can find a sensible way to integrate it, they will.

Makes sense. Is it fair to say that the Warner Brothers story was somewhat predictable just by the actions of David Zaslav even before the first first bid came out, was this was something that you and other folks in the industry were tracking, correct?

There was a feeling that what was happening, that Warner Bros. Discovery wasn't working as a public company. Right. The stock was low. The stock was doing badly. The company was shrinking just in terms of revenue. The streaming service was doing okay. And so we We knew they had to do something. What they were doing was they were splitting it, right? They were gonna cast off the cable networks into one business, 'cause that's the part that generates a lot of profit but isn't growing. And then they were gonna put the studio and the streaming service into another. And my belief is that is what David Zaslav wanted, 'cause he liked being the mayor of Hollywood. He wasn't the mayor, but he liked being a big shot in Hollywood, right? He's in Bob Evans' house. He gets to hang out with movie stars and get dinner with those people. He didn't wanna give that up. Sure. And that's why when David Ellison first came calling, or one of the reasons that David Zaslav and his board said, you're not valuing us high enough, we don't want this, we don't want it. And Ellison just kept coming. You know, you got to give him credit in the case of both buying Paramount from, from Shari Redstone and in this Warner Brothers deal. He faced a lot of resistance and he, you know, in part because he has the resources from his family, but he just kept coming.

Mm-hmm. Do you ever negotiate? He's debating against himself.

Do you have any predictions for what the next big Hollywood story might be, either through the end of the year or next year? Something that people are feeling like, okay, we're in act 1 or act 2 there. There might be a crescendo, some big deal, some change, some structural moment. Could be sort of across any storyline, but what are you tracking?

Well, look, in the immediate, there's going to be a lot of attention paid to what does David Ellison do, Combining 2 companies is going to mean not only firing a lot of people, but who's going to run the streaming business? He's got a high-profile person in charge of streaming at Paramount and a high-profile person in charge of streaming at Warner Bros. Discovery. Setting that aside, a lot of people are wondering what is going on at Netflix. I think, you know, they've had a pretty rocky year ever since they walked away from Warner Bros. Discovery. It's led to a lot of questions about the future and, you know, whether they have a plan for their next act and how they're going to grow. There's been a lot of rumors about changes in leadership there. And so I think people are keeping an eye on that. Comcast is doing what Warner Bros. Discovery once was planning to do. You know, they're splitting their cable business from the entertainment business. And a lot of people are wondering, is that the first move? And, you know, NBCUniversal ends up getting combined with something, you know, So AI is a much bigger conversation, I'd say, in the music business than in Hollywood right now, but it's lurking, obviously, as it is in all sectors of society. Those are probably the big ones. No, that makes sense. Oh, and the federal film tax credit. A lot of people are wondering. There's a push to try to pass a tax credit for shooting in the United States, which would bring a lot of production back from Europe and Canada. And Trump came out for it. And people are trying to get that done basically between now and when the next Congress seats.

Yeah, I think Avengers is going to London or the UK. And I don't know if that's because that's where they actually want to shoot or it's a financial decision. But be exciting to get back to making movies in Hollywood.

It's a good town. Hopefully we get booted out of our studio. That would be— that'll be a bullish indicator for Hollywood.

It was way too easy to find studio space. Way too much space in Hollywood for us.

Yeah.

Way too much.

Well, thank you so much for joining, Lucas. Really, really enjoyed it. And let's do it again when you have more stories.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks, guys. Cheers.

Bye. Well—

And that's our show, folks.

Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPn. We'll see you tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. Leave us 5 stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbn.com. Goodbye.