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5:02
>> Today is Wednesday, August 20th, 2025.
5:04
We are live from the TBNN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.
5:07
The Fortress of Finance is not in good shape today.
5:11
Holy bearish >> backto back tech selloffs.
5:17
>> Having its worst two days since April 7th.
5:20
>> I thought April 7th was liberation day.
5:22
It wasn't Liberation Day.
5:22
It was shortly after Liberation Day.
5:24
Um but the NASDAQ did slide 1. 5% on Tuesday.
5:29
Um some sort of correction was probably overdue.
5:31
Uh and we certainly aren't in any sort of unprecedented territory.
5:36
Um but public markets seem to be starting to react to some of the big top signal memes that have been flying around the timeline >> for the past few weeks.
5:45
So we need to continue to monitor the situation.
5:46
Uh Joe Weisenthal has a great uh newsletter today that we're going to be reading through.
5:52
will be uh taking a tour of the timeline of course uh digging into what else is driving the narrative, what else is driving the news, what else is driving the markets.
6:00
Um this feels very different than the liber than the liberation day selloff.
6:05
Not just because the liberation day selloff was I remember there were multiple days we were in the gym and we checked the market and it's like down 5%.
6:12
It is huge for a single day. >> Yeah.
6:16
Um, but Liberation Day to me always felt like there weren't that many tech considerations. Yes, Apple's in China. Yes.
6:25
Uh, there were semiconductor considerations.
6:27
Taiwan and and AI supply chains generally, but >> market was scared about tariffs. Yep. >> For good reason. >> Yep.
6:36
>> Uh, and and people can debate that.
6:36
But, uh, now the market is just effectively scared that the AI hype is over, you know, overblown. >> Yes.
6:45
But there's yeah, there's some sort of difference there where tariffs affect the real economy, the price of food, the price of gas, the price of, you know, like if there's going to be a tariff on lumber, that's going to drive up housing costs.
6:57
That's all the real economy that we're talking about computer money.
6:59
The money that's in the computer, that's the AI bubble.
7:03
>> People have been trying to get >> that's what people trying to get out of their laptop.
7:07
They've been trying to hit the keys in the bank to get >> if you had $100 million in your laptop and you were trying to get it out.
7:12
Well, today it's only $98 million cuz we're down 2%.
7:17
>> I thought this post from the account Negative Alpha was funny.
7:19
This is a quote uh this is an Anon account, but he says it's from his PM.
7:24
He says, "If your stocks are green today, you literally own dog If your stocks are red today, you own AI."
7:32
Basically, you're an idiot either way. Not true though.
7:36
One stock that's green, of course, Home Depot.
7:39
You heard it here on the show.
7:41
If you were interested in going long, the Amish, our pick was Home Depot.
7:46
And Home Depot beat earnings and I believe is doing well% over the last month. >> Uh, yes.
7:52
And and and hello to everyone in the chat. Thanks for tuning in.
7:54
We're we're glad to have you here.
7:56
And uh thank you for the feedback on the new soundboard. sound.
8:01
The eagle I think is a is a perfect >> fantastic.
8:05
>> Um anyway um when the market's down, what do you got to do to save time and money, Jordy? You got to go to ramp. com.
8:12
Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place.
8:15
Get your house in one place at ramp. com.
8:17
Um let's read through Joe Weisenthal's latest newsletter, AI, orality, and the golden age of grift.
8:25
We live in an we live in an age of extreme graphic here, too. Yes. What is this graphic? Come in. Come on. Come in. It's viral.
8:33
This is the Dubai chocolate thing.
8:34
Um he breaks down some of the different viral products.
8:40
And there's another article in the New Yorker that I I put in the deck today that um talked about uh brain rot IRL brain rot, the labubuification of the world and Dubai chocolate and these ideas that are things that are designed to go viral but then instantiate themselves in the physical world.
8:57
I think that that's interesting.
8:59
Um, >> we like when the slop stays on various corners of the internet. >> Yeah.
9:03
And you and you can just hit I'm not interested in that post as opposed to when you're walking around and and you don't really have that option when you're at a store and it's stuffed to the gills with IRL brain rot.
9:13
Uh, anyway, Joe Weisenthal says, "We live in an age of extreme grift. This is obvious.
9:20
There are people out there publicly organizing pu uh pump and dump schemes right now.
9:24
someone is trying to sell you a dollar worth of cryptocurrency for $5.
9:28
The these are of course the uh bitcoin treasury companies that are trading above net asset value.
9:37
They're trading above uh the the book value of the of the cryptocurrency that they have on the balance sheet.
9:42
Uh celebrities scam their fa fans by selling them garbage. It's all over the place.
9:48
But that alone isn't particularly interesting.
9:51
Grift has been around since day one and there might even be a cyclical element to it.
9:54
The economist John Kenneth Galbrath famously talked about the bezel, not bezel, which is the bezel on a watch, which you can go to getbzzle. com.
10:05
Your bezel constiators is of course waiting for you to help you source any watch in the world. Seriously, any watch.
10:10
Um, >> but the bezel is about embezzling uh not the bezels of luxury watches.
10:16
bad faith business practices that produce an elucory wealth effect which only gets exposed after the bust >> once everybody realizes that everybody else is or at least some people are swimming naked. >> Yes. Yes. Yes.
10:33
>> Joe says, "The interesting part to me is the total lack of shame.
10:35
Nobody bothers to try to hide it and nobody really judges it either.
10:38
It's all just right out in the open.
10:40
The world is a wash in economic nihilism."
10:42
We've talked about, you know, this sort of get get your bag culture. your bad culture.
10:48
>> Uh Jim Chenos calls it the golden age of fraud.
10:50
Anyway, I know I haven't provided any hard evidence that things have become more deranged.
10:53
This is just my sense from looking around.
10:55
If you disagree with the premise, it's fine if you want to stop reading or in our case listening.
11:02
But that being said, before going further, I want to take a brief detour.
11:05
In the middle of the 20th century, when the television really emerged, it was probably seen as the polar opposite of the book.
11:10
Highly >> So the television emerged in the middle of the century, uh 20th century, that was before reream, correct? Yes.
11:17
>> So, they couldn't do one live stream with 30 plus destinations.
11:18
They couldn't multiream and reach their audience wherever they were.
11:23
>> Certainly not a chance. >> Interesting. >> Yeah. >> Anyway, go to reream. com. >> But now you can. >> Now you can.
11:28
>> So, highly literate people look down on the idiot quote unquote idiot box and so forth.
11:32
However, however, two dots on a plane that initially seem very far apart will start to appear closer as you look from a distance.
11:38
And that's how it is with books and TV which actually have a lot in common as media types.
11:42
both engage the eyes and actually with subtitles both can be consumed in silence.
11:48
>> Growing up my parents were uh into film and they would routinely say that TV rots your brain.
11:53
That was like brain rot was a term that was used for just television generally.
11:58
>> Uh and and now we are so far beyond that. >> Yeah. >> Anyway, continue. >> Yeah.
12:02
Now, now it's algo feeds rot your brain.
12:04
The TV's >> the TV is great. It's Lindy. Yeah, it's fine. Yeah. Turn it on and enjoy.
12:07
It's it's for it's for the the pooh bear wearing a tuxedo. >> Yes. Yes. the Winnie the Pooh.
12:13
>> Um, and both are passive on one directional media forms >> that uh that can be consumed alone.
12:18
Both are very costly to produce and distribute at scale which has a gating mechanism in terms of who can get involved.
12:26
Moreover, television definitely has more in common with the book than radio does.
12:28
Radio has a long history of birectionality whether we're talking about trucker CBS callin shows or amateur ham radio that can be broadcast on a shoestring budget from your basement. That's interesting.
12:38
I was thinking about this the other day when I saw that Amazon is investing in a company that will allow viewers of TV shows to use AI to create their own scripts of shows they like and somehow insert themselves into the show itself.
12:50
The company has a vision of making TV a playable medium video games.
12:53
We'll see if anyone's into it, but it's yet another assault on passive media.
12:58
There's also Netflix had that one show that really hit that was like a choose your own adventure type show, >> but you haven't heard of any of those formats since then?
13:06
feel like it's been used.
13:08
>> Vander snatch is the one that you're thinking of. Yes.
13:10
Uh it was it was sort of it was a cool idea.
13:13
It was sort of difficult to consume because my experience going through it was like I wanted to actually be told the creator's vision and I wanted to I I wanted to give me the best story.
13:27
>> I don't have time to watch this 10 times. >> Yeah.
13:29
And then if you go back and you watch it again then you're watching repeated things.
13:32
There are some movies that do this really well. run.
13:34
One is called Run Lola Run.
13:36
Uh, and it's this story of a um a woman who has to deliver I think like drugs to a drug dealer or something.
13:46
She has to run across town or something like that in a German uh city and the movie is three scenarios of how they play out differently.
13:54
And so you watch the same thing happen three times.
13:58
And there was another there was a music video that did a similar thing.
14:00
I forget what it's called, but um uh it's a cool storytelling technique when the when the when the creator of the art decides to take you on this like multi-forked path, but they do it intentionally as opposed to putting it in your in your seat.
14:14
Uh it feels like um >> you might just be better off just going full video game if you want a true choose your adventure.
14:21
Like we have the technology to just let you choose the entire thing.
14:24
Yeah, we have video games.
14:26
And so, do we really need something like in between or do we need something that's more like the barbell strategy where it's a it's a GTA online anything or >> choose your own adventure movie feels somewhat NPC coded, right?
14:38
Where there's distinct paths.
14:41
You don't it's you're not actually able to have real effect on the world that you're in.
14:47
>> Joe says this means TV may soon become another back and forth media.
14:50
Everything's back and forth media these days.
14:51
People comment, people fave, people share, people repost, people quote, tweet, and dunk.
14:55
This is what people like the author Audrey Mir and sometimes Joe mean when we say society is becoming more oral.
15:02
It's not so much about speaking and listening and sounds per se.
15:06
It's about everything becoming this rolling conversation that appears and disappears in the exact same instant.
15:10
I mean, TBPN is a good example of this.
15:13
Uh we get a lot of >> alpha from uh the chat over here and uh it makes uh makes the show told us to bring Vlad Tenev from Robin Hood on the show and boom, here he is.
15:27
>> Uh, so thank you for John actually calling that out.
15:30
>> The constraints of oral communication impose certain distinct conditions on the mind.
15:33
A premium is placed on oneupmanship, oneupmanship and combiveness.
15:39
Per Walter, thought is less analytical and more grounded in the here and now real world.
15:43
in his famous book orality and literacy.
15:48
An oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formally logical reasoning processes, definitions, and even comprehensive descriptions or articulated self analysis.
16:00
All of which derived not simply from thought itself, but but from textformed thought.
16:05
Prior to the written word, there was no reference material for people to look things up.
16:09
So in order for society to preserve important information, it had to be packaged in ways that are memorable, repeatable, and viral.
16:17
This is all totally obvious and familiar to us now in 2025.
16:19
The uh the irony here of Joe writing this long form written piece and then us evolving it into back back and forth media which he's describing is is not uh lost on me.
16:35
In his book, Preface to Plato, the British classicist, Eric Havlock, tries to unpack why it is that in his republic, Plato takes shots at poets and poetry.
16:43
Plato's attacks on poetry is something that apparently bothers >> Take shots, Jordy.
16:47
Do we have a sound effect for that? Taking shots.
16:52
>> Still working on that sound effect.
16:52
It's uh getting dialed in.
16:56
>> Um uh but perhap we call poetry.
17:02
Instead he was criticizing this world in which the homeriic epic was the primary vehicle of moral instruction education via homer was becoming un outdated in the emerging world of written word because the oral world world finds it difficult to define and discuss why abstract analytical categories like moral behavior and hard work are good in their own right.
17:21
Moral instruction has to take the form of children's stories where good behavior leads to better personal outcomes. Hm.
17:30
Here, Havlock identifies the problem.
17:32
What Greece has hitherto enjoyed, says adimeantis, in a great in a passage of great force and sincerity is a trend is a tradition of half morality, a sort of twilight zone, at best a compromise.
17:42
At worst, a cyclical conspiracy according to which the younger generation is continually indoctrinated in the view of that what is vital is not so much morality as social prestige and material reward. This sounds familiar.
17:56
Uh which may flow from a moral reputation.
17:59
Ra uh whether or not this is deserved or else and this is not inconsistent.
18:05
The young are insensibly warned that virtue is the ideal of course but it is difficult and often unrewarding for the most part.
18:13
A lack of principle proves more profitable.
18:16
Do not the gods so often reward the unrighteous and immoral conduct in any case can be ex expedated quite easily by religious rights.
18:29
The overall result is that the Greek adolescent is continually conditioned to an attitude at which uh which at bottom is cynical.
18:36
So he's calling the Greek adolescence the adolescence the get your bag culture identified it back then.
18:43
uh it is more important to keep up appearances than to practice the reality.
18:48
Decorum and decent behavior are not obviously violated but the inner principle of morality is cynical is the key word here says Joe.
18:58
If the point of good behavior is to achieve good personal outcomes, then what's wrong with bad behavior?
19:02
If that can also achieve good personal outcomes, it's all about outcomes.
19:06
These days, everywhere you look, you find evidence that success per se is seen as a standin for quality.
19:12
For example, wealthy people are always being asked for their opinions on all sorts of things regardless of their domain expertise.
19:19
The moment someone becomes a billionaire, they apparently become an expert on everything from interest rates to geopolitics to the electricity grid.
19:27
There is something to this where once you become a billionaire, you you you you can just convene like you can snap your fingers and just be like, I want to have dinner with all the geopolitical experts and then you can kind of recycle their takes or process their takes.
19:40
There is something to this.
19:40
But but but I agree with Joe's take. It's it's a good one.
19:42
uh the whole concept of selling out the this notion that an artist might sometimes have to choose between making a lot of money and producing the highest quality art feels completely over as a concept.
19:53
Incidentally, if you look at this chart of the term selling out in books, it peaked right in 2008 soon after the introduction of the iPhone and the birth of social media and the web uh and and mobile.
20:03
Annoyingly, there was a major financial crisis right around the same time.
20:07
And there are all kinds of cultural turning points that show up on charts around then, and we are doomed to be arguing for eternity about whether it was the phones or the foreclosures that changed the trajectory of history.
20:16
I think that's a great take.
20:18
Uh maybe discussions about selling out were just a luxury of a time when the economy less felt less precarious.
20:24
My favorite thing has to be how products get marketed for having gone viral.
20:29
There are viral handbags.
20:31
There are viral sandwiches.
20:34
though this place in the East Village closed down and I never got to try it, says Joe.
20:36
Uh, the chopped the viral chopped Italian sandwich.
20:39
Not familiar with that one.
20:41
There are viral chocolate bars that say it on the label.
20:44
The original gourmet Dubai chocolate and then it just has a a seal, a stamp that just says viral. >> Viral. >> Fact check. Viral.
20:55
Well, if you're designing a new package for your next chocolate bar, do it on figma. com.
21:00
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21:02
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21:05
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21:08
>> It's also funny because viral is is something that you know happens to a thing for a specific moment in time but it's not an enduring trait. >> Sure. It burns.
21:20
>> So the right stamp would be this went viral. >> Yes. Yes. >> Certified viral. >> Yes.
21:25
This was the this was the the the COVID virality take. uh COVID was viral.
21:33
It had a positive viral coefficient.
21:33
CO uh COVID infections were growing exponentially.
21:37
But by definition, COVID must be must have a sigmoid function, not an exponential function.
21:43
And what I mean by that is it's an S-curve.
21:45
Meaning that there can never be more than 7 billion 8 billion COVID victims at the same time. It's impossible.
21:54
It can never be a h 100red billion cases of COVID because we don't have 100 billion people.
22:00
So by definition it has to peter out.
22:02
And then also like once you have if you're actively sick with the virus, you can't get the virus again.
22:08
And if everyone has it, then then the viral coefficient drops.
22:12
And so we were always going to see this sigmoid function pop up.
22:16
Uh and we did um and we saw you know very very fast exponential growth and then and then declining etc.
22:21
So Joe says, "This is funny me to me because in theory viral is a neutral object adjective.
22:27
It doesn't speak to any inherent quality of the good itself.
22:31
Things can go viral for bad reasons.
22:31
Are the handbags well-designed?
22:33
Does the sandwich taste good?"
22:35
It doesn't really matter.
22:37
The benchmark of a sandwich is that people are posting about it.
22:40
Everything else is an abstraction that we don't have the energy, time, or language to discuss.
22:44
Yes, I mean this ties to clearly like at some point they will be weighted by like their G2 rating and their churn but right now it's like it is viral.
22:53
They have viral market entry and and at some I would imagine at some point people ask is the product well-designed?
23:00
Does the sandwich taste good? >> Yeah. >> Um and we'll see. >> Yeah.
23:04
And I I mean I went through this with party round, right?
23:05
We went viral over and over and over.
23:07
Eventually I realized it doesn't matter how many times we keep going viral.
23:11
Our product inherently has massive churn and >> it was valuable for a brief moment in time where companies were raising these crazy party rounds and then >> I I was kind of well aware that we were seeing a broader tech correction.
23:26
I didn't think that >> and then comp that to branded native. >> Yeah. >> Never been viral. >> Never been viral.
23:33
>> I've never seen it go viral on the timeline.
23:35
I've never seen a stunt for it and >> but it's grown every quarter in my entire adult life. >> It's crazy. Yeah. Uh underrated.
23:41
underrated and potentially a a better way to to get your bag in decades, not mere days. >> Yes. Slowly. Slowly.
23:48
>> And of course, this gets us back to the golden age of grift or the golden age of fraud and why it's all right out in the open.
23:53
What exactly is the difference between a company that finds a way to sell a dollar's worth of crypto for $5 versus a company that designs the world's most advanced semiconductor?
24:01
you or I might be able to come up with some story about how well you see one is productive and one actually and actually contribute something material in some way to society and so the entrepreneurs and investors deserve some reward and so forth and then someone else will poke holes in this.
24:17
Are we really better off for semiconductors that make the AI that is breaking the brains of Facebook addicted boomers?
24:22
Have quality graphics and video games really made society better off? >> Yes, absolutely.
24:27
I love >> Haven't you heard about all the people sitting on their couches addicted to looking at their screens?
24:31
Did that company really do something better for society than than the company that made a bunch of people rich with the magic crypto box?
24:39
>> I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted just at the thought of having to engage in these arguments.
24:42
Life is much easier if we just say that the semiconductor company made a lot of money for investors and so did the crypto pump and dump and so they're both equally valid as business ventures. >> Disagree.
24:54
I understand what he's saying, but I will I will engage in this all day long.
24:57
>> Everybody has to eat, right? Who are we to judge? >> Yeah.
25:00
Um anyway, uh new and different media forms don't just give us new means of expressing the same ideas.
25:06
They change the internal logic of the human brain.
25:09
The uh and with the return to orality, this endless back and forth of as a pervasive modern condition uh that uh that's it for the idea that certain modes of profit are more shameful or and ought to be covered up and obiscated. I don't know about that.
25:26
I I I think we are in a we are in a special time.
25:28
I think we are more in a I'm more pendulum pilled on this issue and I do think that um that Warren Buffett will return as a hero and people will be quoting Warren Buffett.
25:43
Um >> could be Chimoth >> and and and I I I think that getting back to uh getting back to understanding the fundamental value that businesses are delivering will be lauded more and this is this is inevitable.
25:56
It is a product of maybe it's more of a product of the kangaroo market of the faster cycles like my in my early life the cycle was dot and then eight years later housing bubble and then 12 years later interest rate and COVID and the craziness then but then since then we've had every two years a cycle instead of every 10 years.
26:21
It used to be really these long these long drawn out 10 mark 10 year market cycles. Yeah.
26:25
But I do think that we will be going back. >> Yeah.
26:28
So re relevant to this article, you have uh Michael Sailor's strategy down 20% in the past month.
26:33
This is at the time when there's a bunch of new uh crypto treasury companies coming to market.
26:41
And then um yeah, I think that uh there's a lot of people that will defend Sailor and his strategy, but ultimately there's a number of reasons to to think that uh that strategy might be too good to be true, at least if it's done too >> aggressively.
27:01
And then we we covered Chimas back history uh the other day.
27:07
Um, and I think that that Joe, you know, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he might look at Chimath coming back to market with a spack and say that it's shameless given the past performance, but at the same time, every new investment is an opportunity to redeem redeem oneself.
27:26
Uh so even though that uh you know SoFi has has experienced uh a real return, Open Door not so much, Clover Health not so much, Virgin Galactic down 99%, ProKidney down 75%.
27:43
>> I didn't realize >> down 96%.
27:46
>> That some of these spacks were with Hedo Sophia and some of them were with Cerveta.
27:49
I'm not exactly sure the difference the delta there.
27:51
And then he also did uh pipe investments.
27:53
Seems like MP Materials did very well 622%. That's pretty cool.
27:58
Um but a lot of this other stuff is is is down a bunch.
28:00
Um some bankruptcies, some acquisitions.
28:02
Um Berkshire Gray got acquired by SoftBank actually. I didn't realize that.
28:07
Um >> but at 86% >> decline from the initial >> initial IPO price. >> Yeah.
28:15
So, uh I mean you were saying earlier your take is that you look at this it looks rough but he probably learned his lesson and he might be set up for success this time around. Is that the idea?
28:30
>> He could have learned his lesson.
28:33
>> I wonder >> he also might not again again you know trying to analyze why he is coming back with a spa.
28:39
The Buco Capital take is the guy loves spacks. >> Yep. >> He's just having fun.
28:43
I mean, it is not easy to just set up a spa.
28:46
If it was easy, everyone would just do it.
28:48
But but marshalling $250 million in capital for uh for an acquisition or or taking a company public is is is the domain of investment bankers.
28:58
It's the domain of of the the high high finance.
29:00
It's not something that you can like whip together over a handshake deal at demo day.
29:07
Um it it requires a special set of skills, special set of connections, and Chimoth has those.
29:11
Um but yeah, I don't know.
29:14
Um there there clearly is another Sofi out there.
29:17
There's another MP materials out there.
29:19
There are good companies out there.
29:21
Uh the trick is just finding them with more than like one in 10 accuracy. Yeah.
29:27
>> Um because ideally every every spack should be at least some some growth. Some growth.
29:32
Anyway, >> Stacy Rasgone says, "I'm good with the government taking equity stakes for chipsack money as long as we get to hear Trump asking questions on the earnings calls." >> Totally agree.
29:44
Let's let's turn it into uh entertainment, you know, let's make the most of it.
29:49
>> That would be hilarious. Yeah.
29:49
I mean, I guess he would be in a in a place to do that if he's a major st shareholder.
29:52
Um it would be I don't think it would satisfy the semi- analysis folks to have more government involvement uh on the earnings calls. Certainly not.
30:03
>> Um, let's get Dylan Patel.
30:03
Let's get Doug Olaflin uh on the on the on the earnings calls.
30:08
That's who I want in there.
30:09
Anyway, uh, if you're looking to automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously, go to vanta. com.
30:15
Vantis trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replace it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. >> Thank you to Vanta.
30:26
>> Andre says, uh, uh, miss the AI train. AI turns out to be fake.
30:30
Watch your enemies and adversaries pour billions into a bottle. >> Trillions. >> Trillions.
30:36
>> This is Europe, I guess. >> Yes. >> Okay. Do nothing, win.
30:38
Um uh I think this is a reaction to this idea that uh that the EU had higher GDP than all of China, but I think they already had higher GDP or something. Did you see this?
30:55
>> I I just assume this was general AI bearishness. >> Yeah. I don't know.
30:59
It seems like you would still rather like the net present value of all of AI is still extremely positive and you would rather have an extra trillion dollars in market cap in your in your domestic markets if you could.
31:13
Um so little bit silly post >> you may you know in a in a nonfast takeoff scenario Europeans can use some version of chat GPT.
31:23
>> We'll probably literally use chat GPT.
31:23
I I I I think that the answer I think that the aggregation layer and the application layer matters a lot more than the data center layer.
31:30
It's great to build data centers all over the world.
31:33
Uh you need to have local inference and and low uh low latency.
31:36
Um but uh like if you can't get your populace to go to lechhat. com instead of chat.
31:46
com like you have lost control over the LLM and you will and you will not uh win.
31:52
I mean you might be able to regulate and put cookie pop popups and all sorts of different stuff but uh you won't have true control over the platform like platform control in the modern era and the internet era comes from aggregation of demand and consumer habits and that's why uh Google is dominant in Europe and has not been displaced by the Google of Europe. >> Yeah.
32:14
Well, speaking of data centers, yep, Oracle will spend over 1 billion per year to power a single data center with gas generators.
32:23
>> Let's give it up for for big oil.
32:25
>> OCI deeply underrated.
32:25
Larry Ellison, >> absolute goat. >> Diving in here. Oracles.
32:30
Larry Ellison used to scoff at the idea of cloud computing, saying in 2008 that it was complete gibberish. >> That's crazy.
32:36
I don't remember him saying that.
32:37
Now, the success of Oracle's cloud infrastructure unit is why the company's stock price has soared and made Ellison, its chairman and co-founder, the second richest person in the world.
32:45
Oracle sitting at 654 billion uh at this uh on on this lovely >> he's catching up to Tesla today.
32:52
Yeah, we're going to need uh we're going to need >> add eighth to the Mag Seven, Mag 8. >> Mag eight. >> Put Oracle in there.
33:01
>> I mean, founder le company. >> Good luck.
33:02
He's been on an absolute run and he's I mean it's it's crazy the like where Oracle started and and how they're still still conquering in essentially the same market obviously very different technology but uh have done quite well. Yeah.
33:17
>> So Oracle uh a software company that had long struggled to find its niche in this market gained a foothold through scoring some major customers.
33:23
Today, it's helping power Elon Musk's XAI from a data center in Utah, assembling a cluster of tens of thousands of AI chips for Nvidia near Singapore, and recently inked what is likely the second >> the the largest single cloud deal ever with OpenAI.
33:40
>> Um, we talked about this a few weeks ago.
33:42
This is OpenAI effectively committing to these sort of massive >> inference bills years in advance.
33:46
We're talking tens of billions of dollars.
33:50
>> Is this inference or or training?
33:50
This is whole I thought this was training news.
33:55
>> Uh this >> models will be trained there is what is what uh Brody Ford says.
33:58
We >> I was talking about I was talking about the the OpenAI >> cloud deal specifically. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
34:05
It's a move away from Microsoft. Yeah.
34:07
Which is the the underlying the undercurrent here.
34:11
>> Oracle is on the hook for tens of billions of dollars to develop unprecedentedly large data centers amid energy and material shortage shortages.
34:18
That includes a plan to spend more than 1 billion a year just to power one new mega site in West Texas with gas generators rather than wait for utility connection.
34:27
With all of this spending, Oracle recorded a negative annual cash flow for the first time since 1990. That's absolutely wild.
34:34
And questions remain about the longevity and margins of offering infrastructure to train AI models.
34:41
>> Oracle, founded in the 1970s, had long faded from tech prominence.
34:44
certainly hadn't faded from prominence in things that matter racing. >> Racing.
34:54
>> Um, so I won't I won't I won't accept that.
34:56
>> Having a founder that looks 40 despite being closer to 80. >> Yeah.
35:01
>> Uh, on the road to its return in the AI era were internal battles to convince chief executive officer Saffra Katz to invest in the cloud, recruitment of key customers like Tik Tok, and the rise of a brash executive named Clay Magoric.
35:15
Mor >> Mor Bloomberg spoke with more than 30 current or former employees and customers to understand how Oracle can deliver on its towering promises.
35:22
They detailed spiraling costs, accelerated timelines to satisfy open AAI, regulatory roadblocks, and the hiring of hundreds of former Amazon cloud staffers, speaking anonymously to discuss the inner workings of a famously private and latigious company.
35:35
Oracle declined to comment.
35:38
So, as cloud computing picked up steam in the late 2000s, Ellison had little reason to be excited.
35:45
Oracle's namesake database, which is purchased outright and installed directly on customer servers, is one of the world's great cash businesses.
35:52
Adopting a cloud sales model where users rent access to software would almost certainly come with lower profits and a need to collaborate with rivals.
36:00
After years of writing off the cloud as marketing, Oracle's tone changed as its business came under fire.
36:06
Amazon pushed deeper, cheaper database options on its cloud customers.
36:10
Application rivals like Salesforce promise easier installation and updates.
36:15
Ellison saw the need to get Oracle's Fusion apps, commonly used for finance and resource planning, on the cloud, according to people familiar with his thinking at the time.
36:22
There were competing efforts through the 2010s within Oracle to build a cloud for internal and customer use.
36:27
An initial attempt led by Thomas >> Curry. No way.
36:31
He's the head of Google Cloud now. >> Okay. Yeah.
36:34
Uh, I didn't realize he was at Oracle before. >> Yeah.
36:37
So, a separate group made up of largely Amazon alumni led by Don Johnson pushed an approach called Bare Metal in which clients wouldn't have to share their servers with other renters, allowing Oracle to target privacy focused customers.
36:49
The group also focused on building smaller data centers which let them expand in countries that weren't yet viable for industry leaders.
36:57
The bare metal approach won the blessing of Ellison who remains a key decision maker despite handing off the CEO title more than a decade ago. Absolutely love that.
37:05
It's like, hey, somebody else can uh can handle all the stuff I won't I don't want to do.
37:09
I'll still handle the uh I'll I'll still handle the uh >> big ticket.
37:13
What was that famous uh Larry Ellison quote during co Larry Ellison Ellison?
37:20
>> I'll keep reading while you find it.
37:20
The new product came to be known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI.
37:23
Kuran departed the company in 2018 after his approach was sidelined.
37:27
He then joined Google to lead its competing cloud service and remains in that position.
37:30
Um and there's a chart here if we can pull it up.
37:37
Oracle cloud is expected to be majority of business by 2029 and uh Wall Street is projecting break neck breakneck growth. You find the quote.
37:48
I I don't remember exactly what it was, but it basically he was just hanging out in Hawaii during all of COVID.
37:54
Uh but he paid all of his workers like the full amount when they were uh in benefits through May or something.
38:00
Uh they did some shutdowns of the office.
38:02
But uh it was just very funny where he was just like, I will be in Hawaii while this chaos is unfurling.
38:08
Uh and he was hanging out in LAI. >> Why? Yeah.
38:10
Why have a compound in Hawaii if you're not going to go there during a pandemic? >> Yeah. It's like the spot.
38:14
I mean, everyone was out there during that time.
38:17
Um, when offering the new product, Oracle had to overcome a long-held reputation for aggressive sales strategies.
38:23
Major pitches for OCI include cheaper pricing thanks to a simplified set of products and good integration with other clouds.
38:28
Oracle salespeople often take jabs at AWS's sprawling set of tools, telling customers that paying for Amazon's cloud means subsidizing expensive moonshots like it satellite project >> uh it's Kier >> Kier. Interesting.
38:46
Yeah, I mean uh there are a lot of tools in AWS.
38:49
You don't necessarily need all of them.
38:51
Some of them probably higher higher margin than others.
38:54
Uh it's just funny to hear the internal strategies of the Oracle salespeople putting the screws.
39:00
>> You really want to subsidize this this satellite project with your money?
39:05
>> You really do you even care about this?
39:08
>> Have you even thought Have you thought about it once on the on the >> Did you know you were paying for >> on the battle card?
39:12
It's just like do you care about satellites? Okay.
39:14
So during during the pandemic they they landed Zoom who who needed the capacity.
39:21
Uh they they also got a a $2 billion commitment from Uber 2023.
39:24
And then during that era as well they got uh Tik Tok of course uh owned by Bite Dance >> and that was the whole narrative of like if Tik Tok sells it'll be to Oracle and Oracle will just host all the data and Tik Tok will be kind of its own company and there's no antitrust considerations because Oracle doesn't have any consumerf facing social media products.
39:45
Uh it always seemed like a weird fit, but like a decent fit.
39:47
Like not huge synergy, but certainly solves the uh >> uh solves like all the security concerns because Oracle's like the most American forever company that's like just, you know, built American data centers for.
39:59
>> So they landed they landed Tik Tok.
39:59
They that account quickly surpassed a billion dollars in in run rate and then it eclipsed the rest of the cloud business combined.
40:09
>> I mean, I remember seeing the the cloud bills from uh what was it?
40:11
Snapchat I think was paying maybe Google Cloud like a billion dollars a year and that's on like what 15 billion of market cap or something.
40:21
So like a pretty significant investment.
40:23
Uh I mean storing videos is a lot a lot heavier than storing text.
40:28
>> And so when they started working with Tik Tok they actually that's when they started getting familiar with uh building out these more AI focused >> that makes sense because they need to do the inference for the recommendation bunch of GPUs. >> Yeah it makes sense.
40:40
Well, they should also get on graphite. dev.
40:42
Code review for the age of AI.
40:44
Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.
40:48
You can get started for free at graphite. dev.
40:51
>> Um, internal accolades have flown have flowed to Morg.
40:55
We're probably just butchering this. Sorry.
40:59
>> That name >> where are you?
41:01
>> The 39year-old has rapidly climbed company ranks and reports directly to Ellison.
41:04
He was one of OCI's first employees after Amazon had recently re relocated to Nashville where Oracle has pledged to move its headquarters. I didn't know that. >> Nashville. Interesting.
41:15
>> In June, he was promoted to president and is seen by company leaders as a potential successor to his 81year-old boss.
41:22
>> Do you think he went there because John Fo's out there? >> Probably. >> Nashville.
41:24
Uh isn't uh who else is out there in Nashville?
41:28
Uh didn't Ben Who's the guy from the Daily Wire? >> I forget.
41:34
Anyway, >> yeah, Nicole Wishoff was was there.
41:35
She just moved back toashville, though.
41:40
>> But yeah, bit of an odd choice, but you know, >> yeah, >> no sailing in in McGor says, "Sometimes you look back and say, I'm not sure that I was entirely qualified at each step of the way."
41:50
>> That's the best, though.
41:51
>> Seems to have worked out so far. >> That's great. Good for him.
41:52
Uh, those who have worked with him describe him as highly effective and conflictrone.
42:00
Uh he once told an executive that his actions were effing stupid in a room full of leadership.
42:04
That talk about managing up according to allegations in 2021 lawsuit.
42:09
Blunt bosses are typical in a company run by Ellison who once described his leadership style as management by ridicule.
42:16
We've been uh uh yeah we've been going through all the different uh Larry Ellison books in the group chat uh talking about uh what's the difference between God and Larry Ellison?
42:27
like God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison or something like that, right?
42:31
Isn't that one of the quotes?
42:31
Uh a legendary legendary uh uh we're having David Center on the show soon and we'll have to get him to do a deep dive on Larry Ellison for us since uh there's there's so much more to the character Larry Ellison and the history uh there's that famous book where he gave a writer, you know the story, right?
42:48
Uh Larry Ellison gave uh like biography rights to a to an author and said, "You can write whatever you want, but I get a rebuttal in the footnotes."
42:56
So, so the book is the book is the writer like documenting like shadowing Larry and following him around and the internal workings of Oracle and then there'll just be a footnote and Larry Ellison will be like I wasn't being too aggressive in that meeting.
43:11
They were being too aggressive like this is wrong and it's like a debate. It's amazing.
43:16
>> Anyway, >> Jeremy shared it in something in in our group chat earlier.
43:20
He said with his top guys, this is about Ellison from the difference between God and Larry Ellison.
43:25
With his top guys running the day-to-day business, he was free to do the things he enjoyed.
43:29
Brainstorm with his engineers. >> Yep.
43:32
>> Reread Pose Annabelle Lee.
43:32
Visit Japan, entertain women, buy things, give interviews, and dream. >> Ah, the dream. It's amazing.
43:40
Yeah, it was Ben Shapiro.
43:42
Stefan Sisses says, uh, and, uh, and Nate says, "Move to Nashville for Volulta Cafe."
43:49
Uh that of course is uh John Fio's latest uh caffeine.
43:55
>> We'll eventually do a live show from the Volulta.
43:58
>> We need to The aesthetics are fantastic.
44:00
You should >> We should do that.
44:00
We should do that show on a,000 milligrams of caffeine. >> I'm down. The ultimate challenge. >> Pump me full of it. Straight into the veins.
44:07
OCI's importance has grown as the cloud has become a bigger part of the company's business.
44:12
Today about 23,000 employees report up through McGor.
44:14
Uh over the last two years, more than 600 workers have joined from Amazon.
44:20
According to analysis run by Workforce AI, Amazon's recent 5 days a week return to office has made poaching easier as OCI remains largely a hybrid or remote workplace. Interesting.
44:30
Um today, the company's biggest driver of OC AI is the biggest driver of the growth.
44:35
Majority of Oracle's backlog or booked deals are tied to customers training or deploying AI models with GPUbased servers.
44:40
Uh we've talked to some founders who have said OCI is deeply underrated.
44:44
Everyone talks about Azure, GCP, AWS, but OCI, there's some good deals there.
44:51
Um OpenAI is slated to become Oracle's largest customer and has marketed work as the work as Stargate, an effort announced in January at the White House.
45:00
Uh the companies have struck deals for more than 5 gawatts of computing power.
45:04
Uh that's a lot of power, an unprecedented sum and enough energy for millions of American homes.
45:10
Uh work for OpenAI is happening on an aggressive timeline.
45:13
The data centers are targeted for completion by early 2027 with many of the servers running as soon as next summer according to people familiar with the plans.
45:22
Facilities are being designed for training AI models with the assumption that they could also power the application.
45:26
So they will do training and inference.
45:28
They need to uh they need to be designed for for hybrid workloads because uh they don't think that they will be necessarily training on an ongoing basis forever and that at a certain point the models get good enough and then you just got to get them diffused into the economy.
45:39
You got to get GDP growing and and GDP is not going to grow on training alone.
45:43
Providing infrastructure for AI, training is generally thought to be a lower margin business than inference because it requires more advanced semiconductors and cooling.
45:51
Exact timing and design details for the open AI work could still change.
45:55
Um, finding data center developers and power providers to support this project at palatable prices has been a challenge.
46:02
uh costs for many goods and services have gone up uh owing to tariffs and vendors capitalizing on intense demands.
46:09
If you have some uh power transformers or uh tents for for meta price of tents is going up though.
46:18
Yeah, you're going to be gouging them.
46:19
Um and so uh Oracle cash flow has gone negative on the cloud build out but just barely.
46:25
and they and they assume that some other folks.
46:29
>> Um the the site Oracle plans to power entirely with gas generation is located in Shackleford County uh near another Oracle server farm in Abalene.
46:36
So they're expanding outside of Abene in Texas.
46:40
It's being developed by Digital Bridge groups, Vantage Data Centers, and will have a compute capacity of 1.
46:45
4 gigawatts, making it among the largest known sites.
46:48
Um we've seen a couple groups uh pop up with one gig um uh one gig clusters. This is 40% larger.
46:55
So you know significance but uh semi- analysis often uh there's like there's different ways to measure power like it's it's and people get kind of funky with it.
47:07
It's like are you pulling 1. 4 from the grid? Is it 1. 4 to the chips?
47:11
And uh there's like the concept of like compute capacity versus IT power.
47:16
all these things kind of you you lose a little bit at every single stage.
47:20
So we'll see where this this uh this cluster actually nets out and we will let uh Dylan Patel be the final arbiter of of how how insane this particular buildout is.
47:29
Um part of OCI's popularity with AI farms firms is its long-standing focus on bare metal servers.
47:36
This has become the standard arrangement for AI work and Oracle was >> missed cloud but made a key decision >> going bare metal >> early on to go bare metal >> instead of platform as a service >> it ended up working out. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> For old Larry.
47:51
>> Uh users and employees will also point to Oracle's networking quality and willingness to do high levels of customized work.
47:56
Uh semi analysis shout out semi analysis in Bloomberg today.
47:58
Uh popular industry analyst listed Oracle Cloud near the top of its rankings for AI infrastructure vendors in March.
48:05
Um uh citing its cost effectiveness, networking quality, and strong customer service.
48:12
>> Should add a category for how aggressive the sales team is. >> Sure. >> Battle card ranking.
48:17
>> How much trash they talk about the competitors.
48:19
>> Uh another of Oracle's largest customers is Nvidia, which uses OCI for internal development and to power its own cloud infrastructure service.
48:26
Uh the chipmaker code camed Pathfinder internally rents capacity from uh Oracle from an Oracle cluster of H100 chips in Japan and from a data center being built on Indonesia's Batam Island. >> Crazy.
48:43
>> Big into islands over at Oracle.
48:43
Uh Oracle is also in talks with Meta Platforms and XAI for further capacity.
48:48
Of course, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are uh famous for getting dinner with Jensen Wong and Tom Island is right off the coast of Singapore. Is it beautiful? >> I'm sure it is.
48:58
>> More like >> industrial. >> Should we go? Should we next vacation? >> It's very industrial. >> Okay.
49:03
>> But I'm sure it's still beautiful. >> Uh, book a wander.
49:08
>> Find your happy place. Find your happy place.
49:11
>> Book a wonder with inspiring views, hotel great amenities.
49:12
Dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concier service.
49:16
It's a vacation home but better.
49:16
Folks, I don't even need to read.
49:19
>> We need to get them to put together the data.
49:20
The wander data center collection. >> Yes. Yes.
49:22
I want a wander in Abalene.
49:22
I want to wander in Batam Island.
49:24
I want to wander in Japan.
49:26
Wherever that data center is.
49:28
I want to go on the world tour. Take me to Virginia. Put me next to AWS East. I want to visit US East.
49:38
>> Oracle's cloud business is still orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon, Microsoft, and the number three provider, Alphabet, Inc.
49:44
Google, but plenty of room for growth exists. Orders of magnitude.
49:49
It's a hundred times smaller. That's shocking to me.
49:52
I feel like it would be at least within like 100x. I don't know.
49:56
The market generated almost 100 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and expanding 25% year-over-year.
50:02
Uh the question is how Oracle will fund this development and what it does to the company's profitability.
50:08
Uh still the company had hasn't had to borrow money to develop its centers like smaller rivals such as Cororeweave who we've interviewed the founder of.
50:15
uh we believe margin will rebound and cash flow will be substantial once they get through this investment phase.
50:22
Uh said um uh an analyst I think uh an analyst at Bernstein um Oracle is going through a business model transformation that is even more impactful over a shorter period of time.
50:34
period of time. Yeah, it's hard to imagine that these data centers I mean we could be winding up in like the dark fiber world where a lot of these data centers don't get used if like truly there's a major popping of the AI bubble
50:46
but uh this stuff seems to be uh extremely valuable for a long period of time and it's hard to imagine a bunch of huge data centers like not being useful to America in a decade and so um he's risk he's >> risk on but not using leverage Yeah, not using leverage. It's all
51:04
It's all coming out of the free cash flow.
51:06
They have the cash to pay for it and uh and it seems like he's he's he's in a good position.
51:12
Anyway, you should get on Julius.
51:14
What analysis do you want to run?
51:16
Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.
51:18
You can ask Julius to analyze your data >> business better.
51:23
>> They're loved by two million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, Boston Consulting Group, and Zapier >> and TBPN >> and TBPN.
51:30
Uh there is a new leak of a memo from Alexander Wang. Okay.
51:35
Uh Kylie Robinson is reporting that Alexander Wang wrote that super intelligence is coming in order to quote unquote take it seriously.
51:45
The company is making major changes.
51:46
So um we can get into this a little bit. >> Yeah.
51:50
Do we want to have Tyler break down the whiteboard or show us what uh what what is the structure?
51:55
what what can you tell us about the current structure of Meta's AI effort, Styler?
52:03
>> Yeah, so I think that the main thing is that um we now know that Alexander Wang is like top dog of AI at Meta, right?
52:07
So we have I don't know if we can show it yet but basically you see Zuck at top and then Alexander Wang is >> reports directly to Zuck >> reports directly to Zuck and then everyone who works at on AI at meta not just MSL like fair every single org that does AI reports directly to well not everyone but >> they all report to Alexander Wang. >> Yep.
52:28
>> Um so then below him we see we see three more people. We see uh Yan Lun. >> Okay.
52:34
>> Um >> and is Yan Lun at fair?
52:35
I was that >> I think that is still unclear. We're not super sure.
52:41
He So he was chief scientist, >> but he was not on the llama team. >> No, I don't think so. >> Okay.
52:48
>> It's also like maybe he was on the llama team, but then for llama 4, he wasn't or something like that.
52:52
Um but then so in charge of MSL um is Shang Jiaho. He was at Open AI. I'm like 90% sure.
52:58
Um and then we see Nat Freeman is also there.
53:04
Um and then so below them is just these are like the actual researchers who've been poached from from various labs.
53:08
Um so you see like Jason Weey, Lucas Fire from uh you know OpenAI.
53:13
I think >> I think uh I think semi analysis had a funny uh funny joke post about this that they wound up taking down that was something to the effect of uh like you worked at a different AI lab focused on training.
53:28
training. they decided that they sold and they said like this this new organization won't be doing training and then so you go over to Meta and you work under Yan Lun and then they're like you're not going to be doing training either and so there it seems like
53:43
there's a real fight if you're an AI researcher to actually get onto a team that's working on training super intelligence because there's a huge amount of demand for just like let's productize this now and there's probably a divide among the researchers on where they want to play in the stack? Do they
53:58
Do they want to be focused on on uh on implementation applications leveraging the foundation models versus training the and and coming up with the really novel?
54:10
>> So internally they have TBD labs which will also be in charge of exploring new directions such as building an omni model. >> Okay.
54:18
And and and TBD Labs is is is is a subset of MSL or aside MSL?
54:21
What's the what's the take there?
54:26
>> It's a it it feeds into >> it feeds into MSL. Okay, got it.
54:29
>> And then fair will be a quote unquote innovation engine for MSL's training runs by feeding its research directly to TBD Lab. >> Okay, got it.
54:38
>> And that's a uh according to Kylie, that's a more active role for fair than before. >> Yep.
54:45
>> Fair known for publishing their research, giving it to employees. >> Yep.
54:49
>> And so uh so how do how would I comp this to open AAI?
54:52
It seems like uh Shen Shenzha Xiao is sort of the Mark Chen of MSL.
55:01
>> I think that's probably research way to do it. Yeah. Head of research.
55:05
>> And then and then uh Xiao has four at least four like really key highle researchers.
55:12
>> These are mainly just like the the like big names. >> Yeah, the big names.
55:15
>> Um obviously there's like way more.
55:17
Yeah, >> but yeah, I mean even at OpenAI it's like still it seems like there's like a lot of teams there that's like oh I'm like I led 01 research but then there was someone else who like led reasoning. Yep.
55:29
>> So it's like unclear how those overlap.
55:31
>> So we don't really know like what the exact comp would be to open AAI or or anthropic or something like that.
55:36
>> Um >> but so far the the actual like MSL core team seems fairly small at least of like public people that we've seen. Mhm.
55:43
>> I I remember that there was some uh spreadsheet that leaked maybe like a month ago that had only like maybe 25 names on it. Okay.
55:50
>> And they were all like kind of superstars.
55:51
So, >> and were they mostly on on OpenAI on the various training runs and various research projects or was this across the entire industry? >> No, it Yeah. was not just OpenAI.
55:59
Um there was a bunch of people.
56:03
>> Was this like the list that was uh that was leaked?
56:05
Uh >> no, that that was more recruiting focus.
56:09
This was just like the actual team. Got it.
56:11
There's more info in the memo about uh the GOAT.
56:13
Nat Freiedman Freiedman, >> what's he doing?
56:17
>> Uh will lead MSL's efforts to integrate AI into Meta's products.
56:19
So uh as everyone knows, Meta has been trying to make things like AI glasses and the Quest VR headset go mainstream.
56:25
These products have garnered good reviews but have yet to make up a meaningful portfoli like it really feels like he might be the best person in the world to do that because who was the first person to actually make money off of GPT3?
56:38
It was Nat Freiedman with GitHub C-Pilot, right?
56:43
Um, and so if you think about like how can you actually deliver value that people pay for at a good margin, which in the meta context it might be it's a it's it's value that's delivered for free and then monetized via advertising.
56:57
But in general, you need you need to develop products that pass the hurdle rate of like value capture and not just go around doing science projects, which is what a lot of the research labs are set up to do and that's fine.
57:09
Um, but in ter but like the real like it feels like Meta has some real horsepower on the training side.
57:16
They're going to be able to build great models and they're going to need to build those in and vend those into a variety of products.
57:20
Everything from Meta Ray-B bands to Facebook, the Blue app and and uh and Instagram and WhatsApp.
57:26
And how can you do that in a way that is product focused?
57:28
Well, you hire the person that was the first real like AI application layer builder like with GitHub Cop. >> Yeah.
57:38
I mean, I I I I I think one thing that's notable.
57:40
So, when Meta internally announced the creation of MSL in June, it said that Freriedman would be its co-lead.
57:45
Uh, however, in the email, Wang made it clear that Freriedman reports to him.
57:51
>> Quote, "Nat will continue to lead this work, reporting to me."
57:56
>> I don't think that that that that's as dramatic as you think it is.
58:02
>> Freeman's Freeman's just like, "Yeah, I don't want to I don't I'm I've been CEO."
58:06
Yeah, >> pretty good at it.
58:09
>> I'd rather just focused on on making AI.
58:12
>> It's such a huge organization.
58:12
Um there's so much to do.
58:14
I I I think that like you you could read that as like he's reporting to Alex.
58:19
I think he's close with Alex.
58:21
I think he's worked with him in the past.
58:23
And I think there's a bunch of interesting ways to um to to to actually go and have a better experience within the within the behemoth that is uh meta.
58:32
uh focused on just implic implementation of frontier models as opposed to actually having to uh have the have the AI researchers roll up to you and then you're a middle manager in between uh Mark and you're kind of uh you know sharp elbows with with Alex on on you know who's doing what where the stuff is allocated.
58:55
it makes sense to just have a a rockstar training team and then take the stuff that they trained, go implement it.
59:01
And of course, there'll be some feedback there, but it won't be uh but you uh if you are an if you're an AI implement, an application layer uh developer, like you don't necessarily need to have the the researchers report to you. >> Yeah, true.
59:15
>> Maybe there's like an equivalence to um there's like Google DeepMind and there's Google AI Studio, which is like the productized version of the models, the project.
59:23
So maybe it's something like Nat is in charge of the the you know Google AI studio for where you know Shangi is is the deep mind. >> Yeah. I I I don't know.
59:32
We'll have to we'll have to dig into how it's how it's >> regardless. Where is Daniel Gross? >> Yeah. Where is Daniel Gross?
59:37
We got to figure out how he fits in. Great question. >> Um I don't know.
59:40
I mean was his was his transfer his trade deal ever fully confirmed?
59:45
I don't think he's put out a post about it yet.
59:48
>> But it was confirmed that he left SSI. >> Okay. Oh yeah. Yeah.
59:50
Ilia posted about that and said like we >> so on Dana Gross's website it just says working on AI products at meta.
59:55
Okay, so sounds like confirmed.
59:58
Yeah, he's probably still working with >> but who knows?
1:00:00
I would imagine he's working alongside Nat, right?
1:00:03
>> They merge they the merge.
1:00:03
The merge happened and it's uh it's Nat and Daniel hanging out in uh uh going around stuffing AI in every meta product.
1:00:13
>> We're putting it everywhere.
1:00:14
>> Putting it everywhere.
1:00:14
I mean, it seems like a good strategy compared to like it's got to be wrangling that problem at Google has got to be somewhat even more difficult because there's probably a Sheets team, there's a Gmail team, there's a Google search team >> harder at Google because the core search business is threatened by Genai. Sure.
1:00:36
In the and because you can just go on chatbt and have it browse Google for you >> apparently. Yeah.
1:00:41
>> Um but yeah, whereas whereas um if you're If you're meta, you're like, "This is >> this is incremental.
1:00:47
This is going to, you know, we only want to do things that drive higher arpoo or higher user minutes.
1:00:53
How do we keep people in the apps for longer?"
1:00:55
And it should be very additive on the creator side, on the consumer side.
1:01:00
Um, but you should that like a lot of the usage patterns.
1:01:02
I mean, when they rolled out stories, it was very clear that they I don't know if they actually wound up rolling out stories in WhatsApp, but they definitely rolled it out both in Instagram and in uh and in Facebook.
1:01:13
And so there's a lot of AI features that you could imagine even just like those Meta AI studio design a character that you chat with.
1:01:22
There's no reason that that that like being chatting with although it's ridiculous to say out loud like the Russian girl or who whatever the killer app is.
1:01:29
Um, I mean like like the bull case is that it's chat with like a helpful assistant or chat with somebody who's an expert in uh watches or semiconductors or cars or whatever.
1:01:37
Like you follow a lot of car content on Instagram.
1:01:41
You can now chat with a a like the meta AI car expert ask it questions maybe.
1:01:47
Um, it makes sense that that would be vended into WhatsApp and it would also be vended into uh Instagram and it would also be vended into into Facebook.
1:01:54
Uh, speaking of watches, have you seen the levels?
1:01:56
This was an certain really important post tips for men.
1:02:02
>> It was almost the current thing in Silicon Valley.
1:02:04
Everyone was talking about this.
1:02:06
>> Yeah, this was flying around group chats and the reason is you know tips for men was giving their sort of uh definition here.
1:02:13
But to me this just screams RM at the top LPC clearly the GP. Yes. AP clearly principal. >> Principal.
1:02:24
>> Rolex obviously associate. >> Associate. Okay.
1:02:26
And then Cardier, I would say investor relations. >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:02:31
>> And then I don't even know once you get into tow range. >> Um I don't know. EIR. >> Yeah. Yeah. Seriously.
1:02:42
ER that had a had a mo, you know, an aqua hire kind of looking for their next thing. >> Exactly. Exactly.
1:02:47
Uh they they define the levels of of watches.
1:02:50
Rishard Mill, who of course we've talked about on the show here as filthy rich. Pac is old money king. AP is new money. Rolex is wannabe rich. Uh depends on the Rolex. You got a Paul Newman.
1:03:03
I think you're I think you're older old money.
1:03:06
>> Picking up a land dweller from the secondary market.
1:03:09
>> Wait, are they spiking or >> they're sitting well well above retail?
1:03:16
>> Yeah, >> Bezel has one for 70k.
1:03:19
>> 70k for a land dweller. It is a beautiful watch. I like it a lot.
1:03:22
But that is a wild price for a Rolex. Well, yeah.
1:03:28
I mean, make a statement.
1:03:30
Uh, >> it's a nice bracelet.
1:03:32
>> Yeah, it's a good bracelet.
1:03:33
>> It's a good bracelet, sir.
1:03:34
>> If you're if you were running a a luxury watch brand and you wanted to get your watch brand mentioned in ChachiPT, what would you do?
1:03:41
>> I'd go to tryperrofound. com. >> Tryprofound. com.
1:03:43
So, you could get your brand mentioned in chat.
1:03:45
You could reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.
1:03:48
You could even get a demo.
1:03:50
I would not be surprised if at least one member of the holy trinity already uses profound.
1:03:56
>> I wouldn't be surprised either.
1:03:57
>> Wouldn't be surprised. >> Fantastic. >> Yeah.
1:03:58
I got an investor update from James at Profound last week and it was the single most impressive >> really >> one you know monthly update that I've received across investing in >> Yep.
1:04:11
>> 60 or 70 different startups at this point. Very very impressive. >> Shout out to them.
1:04:17
>> What is Ra Boy talking about here?
1:04:17
Uh Keith Rub boy has taken yet another victory lap on calling Miami as an underrated place to live.
1:04:25
It was of course not in the conversation at all and then it became the current thing.
1:04:30
Uh Delian famously posted uh can we just move Silicon Valley to Miami?
1:04:35
He somewhat successfully did that and a lot of companies move there.
1:04:39
Of course, it didn't actually become like a major tech hub, but uh it's certainly more of a destination for the tech elite than it's ever been in the past.
1:04:47
Uh it's a beautiful place. I love visiting it. Great for conferences. Great.
1:04:50
Uh my favorite thing about Miami is that if you host a tech conference there, no one will go home uh after the conference ends because everyone will get a hotel room because almost no one like lives there.
1:05:02
And yet it's a place where people can justify going to a flight.
1:05:04
It's not it's as convenient as Las Vegas as as like nice weather, lots of activities like Las Vegas.
1:05:12
But if you throw a big event in San Francisco, half the audience will be like, "Oh, well, I'm you know, I'm not maybe I got a babysitter, but I'm gonna go home.
1:05:19
Uh, and if you throw an event in New York, same thing.
1:05:22
But if you get everyone to my if you get them everyone to Miami, 90% of those people are going to be from out of town.
1:05:28
They're going to book hotels.
1:05:29
They're going to be there.
1:05:30
They're going to be staying up later.
1:05:31
They're going to be having more fun, more networking, more business connections, more value creation.
1:05:34
So, uh, still bullish on Miami as a as a place to visit and as Tex Vegas.
1:05:38
Um, less bullish on it as like go try and build a foundation model company and recruit a bunch of AI engineers.
1:05:46
That's going to be a tough lift.
1:05:48
But uh the the uh the office visits in July 2025 change from the first month of 2019 uh is way up. Denver is down 40%. LA is down 36%.
1:06:02
We are trying to shift that trend by uh being fully in office.
1:06:04
Um Alec McGillis uh who's Keith who Keith is quoting says really striking to what degree New York has become an outlier in recovering from the remote work shift especially given that it is a city that was first hit hardest by the pandemic.
1:06:21
>> A huge part of this is that people's apartments andor homes that are actually in New York City are so much smaller.
1:06:26
So people often want to go to the office. >> That's a good point.
1:06:31
Whereas, if you're in Denver or even LA or Chicago or Boston, you might live slightly outside the city.
1:06:38
You might live in a suburb. >> Denver's over here. They're still on a hike.
1:06:42
>> They're still on a hike. >> They're still hiking. >> Yeah.
1:06:45
So, nationwide, um, office visits are down over 20%. Since prepandemic times.
1:06:52
Um, and so July of 2019 is kind of where the benchmark starts before the pandemic hit.
1:06:57
Uh, and obviously that changed a lot of businesses.
1:07:00
It changed a lot of work from home behavior.
1:07:01
We were just talking about Oracle, you know, they're building data centers, but they're doing it remotely.
1:07:06
Um, whereas, uh, AWS has kind of gone back into the office.
1:07:11
Uh, uh, Seattle notably missing from this list entirely.
1:07:14
Um, but anyway, >> this post from TA is wild.
1:07:18
So, he's charting out annualized ad revenue by platform. Google search at two.
1:07:25
>> We need to we need to do some pop quizzes here. billion. >> How much, Tyler?
1:07:27
How much money do you think in revenue Bing brings in every year? >> Five billion. >> 14 billion.
1:07:37
>> All right, that's not too far. >> That's pretty.
1:07:41
>> If you if John had asked you about Snap, you would have been pretty close. They did five a. 5 billion.
1:07:46
>> Pinterest is at 4 billion. Uber at 1. 5 billion.
1:07:49
This is ad revenue, uh, not platform revenue.
1:07:51
Door Dash is making a billion on ad revenue.
1:07:53
Instacarts were making a billion on ad revenue, but Meta is up at 200 billion or 186 billion.
1:08:01
Google search is at 215 billion.
1:08:01
And so, yeah, I mean like the open AI, we were talking about uh uh uh uh Brad Gersonner kind of saying that, you know, the the Open AI valuation at 500 billion is like way ahead of Google's uh metrics based on where Google was when they were valued at 500 billion.
1:08:21
But when you look at that pool of high margin ad revenue, 215 billion from Google, 186 from Meta, 63 from Amazon, and you ask yourself the question of like, will Chat GPT be able to grab a piece of that? Is it already?
1:08:40
Like, it's not really already.
1:08:40
It's mostly just people paying for a great tool that they prefer over the other uh o over other options.
1:08:47
Um, but if they if they seriously get on that in that game with a aentic commerce, agentic checkout um and and taking commissions and cuts from different uh revenue streams in the ad revenue world, like there is just so much money to be made in internet ads.
1:09:05
Like you can be a company that's not known for advertising like Uber and still be making a 1. 5 billion in ad revenue.
1:09:13
That's extremely high margin.
1:09:15
And so can can OpenAI suck 50 billion out of this 500 billion pool of ad revenue and trade at a 10x on revenue? Like is it possible?
1:09:25
It's like it's not that crazy. I don't know.
1:09:29
>> While getting getting better and better at serving the models cheaper and cheaper. >> Yes. Yes.
1:09:33
Well, as they build out their uh their ad product, they will need to be using linear over at OpenAI.
1:09:38
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products.
1:09:42
meet the system for modern software development.
1:09:44
Streamline issues, projects, and product road maps.
1:09:48
>> If you make software and you're not on linear, yeah, you're crazy.
1:09:52
>> And if we flip over to the bare take on uh OpenAI, Bone GPD says GPT5 single-handedly destroyed the fast takeoff narrative and killed the stock market.
1:10:02
Um, I don't know if that's entirely fair. Killed the stock market.
1:10:06
It sells off 2% and it's like >> GPT5 took it back.
1:10:09
This is this is the beauty of like the kangaroo market, the faster information is that like >> every time it's so over, we could just be a day away from being so back.
1:10:18
>> It's it's not just that.
1:10:18
It's that is that you you you go through the the the the trough of disillusionment so so fast.
1:10:25
Like you can have like all of the think pieces, all of the memes, all of the hot takes about like it's so bad, it's so bad, and then two weeks later you can be like, "Okay, we've clearly hit the bottom.
1:10:35
We've beat this to death.
1:10:36
Everyone's talked about how how we're completely over our skis and like the bubble has popped and you be like, "Okay, now it's time to start reinvesting.
1:10:44
We got to start buying the dip."
1:10:46
And then we start building back up so quickly.
1:10:47
And that's what happened.
1:10:47
I mean, during COVID, like it was what, like a three-month draw down even even uh even the the the interest rate poster era was like pretty quickly turned around, maybe a year of hard of of like hard times.
1:11:00
Um, it was not it was not the dot bubble, which took years years.
1:11:05
And uh Tyler Cosgrove has uh the uh this is the doomsday clock for us.
1:11:08
So the doomsday clock uh typically the folks who are worried about the apocalypse are tracking the doomsday clock.
1:11:17
Uh the amount of time until doomsday.
1:11:19
Uh we have been tracking uh we say it's 90 seconds not to age it's 90 seconds to nothing.
1:11:27
Tyler, can you give us some more context on what inspired this and how you're feeling?
1:11:31
Okay, so this is apparent this is like the doomer take on GBT 5, right? >> Yeah.
1:11:36
Now nothing ever happens. >> Nothing ever happens. >> No fast takeoff. Okay, >> I disagree.
1:11:40
Okay, I think GBD5 was pretty good.
1:11:43
>> Yeah, but how many seconds until uh AGI and the singularity? >> Uh >> how many days?
1:11:50
I mean Sam Alman put it a couple thousand days.
1:11:52
3,000 days is a decade, right?
1:11:54
I would put it closer to merge.
1:11:58
His definition for that was just people become really close friends with a chatbot. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:12:03
That's Yeah, that's that's uh that's pretty clear.
1:12:04
Uh I mean I guess uh like if there's going to be a fast takeoff, there's going to be some sort of singularity, something that's like unpredictable, I would peg it more at 7,000 days, I would put it at 2045. >> Okay.
1:12:18
Maybe I'm like halfway in between you and and and Sam. >> So Sam's 2035 2040. >> Okay. >> 2040. Okay.
1:12:26
So that's a lot of seconds.
1:12:28
>> That's a fair amount of seconds.
1:12:28
Buco Buco Capital, which is basically the the the fourth technology brother.
1:12:32
He says, "This is a draw down for ants.
1:12:35
Momentum names with zero valuation support still up 100 to 700% year-to date.
1:12:39
Several with no re revenue.
1:12:42
Many still getting gunned from the lows back to roughly break even.
1:12:46
I don't know when the music stops, but the palentards and the lemon apes are still dancing." >> Lemon apes. What are lemon apes?
1:12:52
I think Lemonade Lemonade is a meme stock now.
1:12:57
>> I mean it's up it's up uh it's up couple hundred% year to date.
1:13:03
>> Well no year there there's another story that is >> over the last year >> that is uh developing but we don't have a full analysis of it. So Deepseek version 3. 1 is out.
1:13:14
The the model was released on Hugging Face. Is that correct Tyler? >> Yeah.
1:13:18
So so I think there's basically there's no model card. Okay.
1:13:20
So, so we don't know like what the benchmarks are really. >> Why would that be?
1:13:24
Why would they release the model without releasing the model card?
1:13:27
I feel like that's kind of standard issue when they release. >> I don't know.
1:13:30
I mean, it could just be like, "Oh, we forgot to add it to the like file." I don't know. Okay.
1:13:35
>> I mean, I I I assume that they're going to add it within a couple days. >> Okay.
1:13:38
Well, people can do it independently, too.
1:13:40
>> Yeah, you can run the benchmarks independently, I guess.
1:13:41
Um, >> but yeah, so far it seems it's kind of up in the air how good it looks.
1:13:46
Some people were like, "Oh, China's cooked."
1:13:51
Like, you know, the the chips like totally screwed with >> Yeah.
1:13:55
They tried to train a Huawei. They failed.
1:13:56
They couldn't get Nvidia.
1:13:58
>> Like people were saying like, "Oh, it was supposed to be Deep Sig V4."
1:14:01
>> That's what we were hearing for sure. >> Yeah.
1:14:03
And then it turned into 3. 1. It was so bad.
1:14:06
>> So, it could be sort of like a moment.
1:14:08
But yeah, it's possible that they're going down.
1:14:10
They're they're they're mimicking the error in the tech tree that was followed at at OpenAI and meta.
1:14:19
It seemed like uh because GPT 4.
1:14:19
5 kind of came out and was underwhelming and then uh Llama 4 behemoth couldn't get out and we might be seeing something similar.
1:14:29
>> I mean, so those were both examples of like >> big big.
1:14:33
>> Yeah, that was like big pre-training runs, right?
1:14:34
But uh Deep Seek already has like good RL, right? Because they have R1.
1:14:37
that was like I mean that was the first reasoning model to come out after after OpenAI.
1:14:41
Um >> so I don't know if it was necessarily that I mean it I it seems reasonable that it's just like a chip thing where they were forced to use Huawei.
1:14:50
>> Uh but I I think we'll see.
1:14:50
Hopefully over this week they'll they'll release some more details about it. But >> yep.
1:14:58
Um well we will be tracking which company has the best AI model at the end of August on Poly Market.
1:15:04
Of course, uh Google's running away with it. 93% chance.
1:15:09
I don't know if they're already in the lead and that's why or maybe maybe we're expecting something new to come out, but uh Deep Mind seems to be on a tear.
1:15:17
They've been climbing even towards the end of the year. They're up at 59%.
1:15:20
XAI has recently eclipsed OpenAI as the second best uh AI model at the end of 2025.
1:15:29
Uh the other news on DeepSeek, uh this is still in the rumor mill, but uh some dude asked the official Deepseek customer service and they confirmed that version 3.
1:15:39
1 is a merge of reasoners and non-reasoners.
1:15:43
Maybe it's some sort of like uh model switcher coming soon.
1:15:45
Uh both chat and reasoner reasoner API now route to the same model, but just change if thinking mode is on.
1:15:53
So >> anyway, if you're looking for sales tax AGI, head over to numeralhq. com.
1:16:00
spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at Numeral HQ.
1:16:05
>> Well, Howard Marx just had an interview with Bloomberg. I think it's relevant.
1:16:09
He says, "US stocks are in quote in the early days for a bubble, although the critical point for a correction is yet to come."
1:16:15
He says, "I'm certainly not ringing alarm bells.
1:16:17
The point is that things are expensive."
1:16:19
Uh, Palanteer is certainly expensive at 500x >> Yep. >> price to earnings.
1:16:26
Uh, it's been 16 years since investors last went through a quote serious market correction, he added.
1:16:33
The current >> 16 years Oh, he's going back to 2008. >> Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
1:16:38
>> The current period reminds him of the late 1990s when the market was falling in love with tech stocks, leading to former Federal uh reserve chairman Alan Greenspan to warn of irrational exuberance.
1:16:49
Still, the market rose for a few more years after that before the tech bubble burst. Yep. >> Um, >> yeah.
1:16:56
Again, like you know, the debate everybody's been having is is are we in uh January of 2021 or November of 2021? Yep.
1:17:05
>> We might just be in 2019.
1:17:05
You know, we just don't know.
1:17:09
>> This is a Ben Thompson stake.
1:17:11
>> Mark says people get out of of the habit of thinking about market corrections, noting that a reversion to the mean is very likely.
1:17:18
Some technology stocks are quote quite highly valued relative to history.
1:17:23
No uh no new insight there.
1:17:27
This is a time to put a little more defense into your portfolio and invest investing in credit as to post as opposed to equities is one way to do it.
1:17:35
>> Yeah, I saw another post that uh was it Fidelity was was recommending a a portfolio of 70% bonds which seems very very conservative.
1:17:44
Um but do with that what you will.
1:17:46
Uh let's switch gears to uh a different hedge fund billionaire, Jame Jim Simons.
1:17:53
Uh his daughter, Elizabeth Simons, has given $250,000 to a super PAC supporting New York City mayoral candidate Zoron Mdani.
1:18:00
Of course, this is uh seen as sort of antithetical to who uh Jim Simons was and what Renaissance Technologies did as an applied math hedge fund. Gary Tan has a take.
1:18:14
He says it's a special form of insanity for private foundations to supercharge the destruction of teaching math to the next generation when that money was earned literally by the merit of pure applied math like the money earned by Renaissance Technologies legalized math.
1:18:29
Gary says uh Jim Simon's mass uh mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financeier whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history after his death last year.
1:18:44
One of his consequential bequests went to his daughter Liz who oversees the uh Heising Simons Foundation and its near billion dollar endowment.
1:18:54
What Liz has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father.
1:18:58
Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and science.
1:19:04
But his daughter's foundation is moving in a very different direction.
1:19:09
The the Hasting Heising Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K12 mathematics education according to social justice principles.
1:19:17
Uh interesting that both the left and the right are somewhat attacking math right now.
1:19:23
Obviously, this is coming from the left, but uh there's also that attack on USC. >> Are numbers real?
1:19:30
>> You Yeah, UCLA uh mathematician Terrence Tao had his had his funding cut uh by the Trump administration.
1:19:36
And so, uh it's a bad time to be a shape rotator, time to pivot into word selling.
1:19:41
Um but uh we'll see how it how it shakes out.
1:19:47
Uh I'm not I haven't been following the New York City uh mayoral election too closely because I live in Los Angeles.
1:19:56
Uh anyway, uh uh let's go to this post by Nikquille Krishnan.
1:20:00
He says, "Dude, Mark Berilini, the exetna CEO, now Oscar CEO, has an insane story here.
1:20:07
He talks about how after his skiing injury, he was in so much pain for 17 years that he went to Switzerland to end his life and was then told he could fix his pain.
1:20:15
He went through neuroplasticity exercises and got it fixed.
1:20:20
Uhing so I was getting ready to go to Switzerland to end my life at Dignitas.
1:20:24
Uh it's an assisted suicide organization, but I had to prove I had intractable pain and pain that couldn't be cured.
1:20:31
And so I was sent to a doctor and the doctor evaluated me.
1:20:35
The doctor said I was going to do it on February 15, 2023 was going to be my death day.
1:20:40
Uh I wanted to do the 18th, but it was a Sunday.
1:20:42
What was the day I had the accident?
1:20:45
Uh so I went to this doctor and sat and he sat down with me and they did a few tests and they looked at me and said, "Uh so you don't have intractable pain, you have neuroplastic pain and we can fix that."
1:20:57
I go, "Here we go again."
1:21:00
I mean, I did seven days at the Henaman University Hospital ICU, 50 milligrams of ketamine, an hour IV to try and reboot my system.
1:21:07
I had a great time and it felt better for the first month afterwards.
1:21:10
But then I ca then came back in a rush and so I said, "Here we go again."
1:21:14
And I had worked with Mary to get her through how that was going to work and what the plans were and all that sort of stuff.
1:21:21
And so they go, "Uh, okay. Well, let's start."
1:21:23
So part of it was cognitive behavioral therapy and I had to go back to my childhood and my concept.
1:21:30
I was not well treated as a child and so I was consistently under threat assessment and threat assessment is the worst thing uh you can have when you have chronic pain because you're always waiting for one cell to have pain and then all of a sudden it goes everywhere and they said and also your 42 pain centers in your brain have wired together from all this chronic pain over the years.
1:21:50
So any touch feels like pain.
1:21:52
So in in essence, I was addicted to pain.
1:21:55
And they had done MRIs on baseball hitters and they said the best baseball hitters, their visual, cognitive, and motor cortices light up instantaneously. There's no latency.
1:22:04
That's why they see the ball in slow motion.
1:22:06
That's how they see it moving.
1:22:07
That's how they hit it so well.
1:22:09
You have a baseball hitter's brain on pain.
1:22:12
There's no latency in your system.
1:22:13
Something touches your arm, you're in pain.
1:22:15
So they help me understand the system.
1:22:16
Then they put me in transcranial magnetic stimulation and they zap my brain for 30 minutes to disconnect those pain centers and they put me in a virtual reality lab with a helmet and they repattern my brain and he got through it and he's doing well. So very good to hear.
1:22:30
What a crazy crazy turnaround.
1:22:32
Anyway, uh Microsoft Excel adds co-pilot AI to help fill in spreadsheet cells.
1:22:38
This is like a crazy >> the moment you've all been waiting for.
1:22:42
the moment you've all been waiting for.
1:22:44
But there's been a lot of folks who have been building uh Microsoft Excel add-ons.
1:22:48
We had some of them on the show.
1:22:49
There's one that launched on Monday.
1:22:51
Uh we didn't have a chance to have the founder on the show.
1:22:53
Um but there was this the the current co-pilot uh instantiation similar to the the uh Gemini integration.
1:23:02
It just kind of sits in the sidebar does a little bit, but now they're going to have copilot AI in every single spreadsheet cell similar to that demo that we saw on Monday. >> Yes.
1:23:11
They warn against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in high stakes scenarios with legal, regulatory and compliance implications as copilot can give incorrect responses. >> Interesting.
1:23:24
Do you think this is a disruptors innovation or uh innovator's dilemma problem where there's a there's a low-end solution? >> Yeah.
1:23:34
that uh is counterpositioned against the the status quo because uh Microsoft can't uh can't add like an unreliable product to something that is thought of as reliable.
1:23:44
This was uh the the take that the legal industry could face disruption from AI because right now AI is is maybe 50% as good as a real lawyer.
1:23:55
I don't even know 80% 10%. It doesn't matter.
1:23:58
The point is that it's a thousand times cheaper potentially.
1:24:01
People have gotten used to getting a result from Excel and feeling like they can trust it. >> Sure.
1:24:08
>> Trust their own >> calculation. >> Yeah.
1:24:11
>> You know, they don't feel like I need to get a whiteboard out and whiteboard it out and use a calculator and sort of fact check it.
1:24:16
Y >> but I think you're going to have to do that with co-pilot and various AI tools for some amount of time.
1:24:21
Uh but at the end of the day, you have tools that humans use to do things, but then humans are held responsible for whatever whatever process they use in order to get a certain result. Yeah.
1:24:34
So I don't think this is that big of a of a change. >> Yeah.
1:24:39
I mean fundamentally Excel is a functional programming language essentially like uh it's a it's a bunch of functions.
1:24:45
You can't write it's not u it's not the type of language where you can create like a class um but uh or object it's not object-oriented programming but it is functional programming.
1:24:55
And what that means is that it's entirely deterministic.
1:24:57
it's entirely deterministic. like everyone opens up the Excel the same Excel sheet they should see the same numbers there is no uh stochcastic uh non-deterministic uh and that is kind of antithetical to the way LLM work uh now to be fair
1:25:14
businesses all over the world have implemented LLMs at various pieces of their tech stacks and been fine with the fact that okay for this particular function call we get a sort of fuzzy result we're trying to tag something for fraud and we're giving it, you know, a risk score at the end of the day. And we
1:25:29
And we know that there might be some hallucinations that might get something wrong.
1:25:34
And the tech industry has completely come to terms with that.
1:25:35
And they know that these systems are sometimes reliable, sometimes they're not, but they they add value.
1:25:41
And so the fact that Microsoft's actually rolling this out quickly is pretty bullish for Excel sticking around in my opinion.
1:25:49
and the fact that they are warning.
1:25:51
As long as the warning doesn't pop up every single time you call the co-pilot AI and you and you use an LLM in a cell, uh I I don't think it would be a major headwind, but I don't know. We'll see. >> Yeah.
1:26:04
>> Um I'm not using a lot of >> Is it Lindy >> XL these days?
1:26:07
Um >> but you should be using Finn.
1:26:09
ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitor bakeoffs, number one ranking on on G2.
1:26:19
Uh we need we need world champion. >> Yeah.
1:26:22
And I mean customer service is a good example of like where most of the customer service answers are nondeterministic anyway because they come from a human.
1:26:30
So if you have an AI agent in the loop, you will still need to escalate and fact check and reality check what's going on.
1:26:35
But in general, it's the perfect uh bit for generative AI.
1:26:41
>> Kyle Chica has a po essay in the New Yorker.
1:26:45
He says, "What do all these things have in common?
1:26:47
I grapple with the burgeoning Gen Z and younger aesthetic of tacky, uzzy, ugly, chemically augmented, brain rotted consumer slop.
1:26:56
The Lubu Dubai Chocolate Matcha Industrial Complex.
1:26:59
And I'm looking forward to a time when we don't have to use the word slop anymore.
1:27:05
Yeah, I think I think it'd be fair to uh at least soon call the top on that on the >> I was really hoping that I just would never need to learn about Laboo at all and just like it would just come and go and I would just be forever ignorant of it much like you're ignorant of every movie ever created.
1:27:24
Uh it >> beautiful experience.
1:27:27
>> It leaves you with a sense of purity that I long for.
1:27:29
Uh and yet today I find myself learning about Libu.
1:27:33
Tyler, do you have a take on Labu?
1:27:36
>> Uh no, but I have a fun fact.
1:27:36
Uh, I I'm pretty sure this is true.
1:27:38
The first >> This better be legitimately fun. Okay.
1:27:43
Because you really hyped it up.
1:27:45
>> Uh, so I think the first use of the term brain rot is um Henry David Throw in Walden. >> No way. >> So like 1850s. >> Wow. Wow.
1:27:55
>> Isn't Walden Isn't Walden like literally about touching grass?
1:27:57
The whole point is like you go to the pond. >> Yeah.
1:27:59
He he lives at the pond for two years.
1:28:00
Never talk to anyone and he just like >> And he says the word brain rot or rotted brain or something. Yeah, I think brain rot. >> Wow. Okay. Yeah.
1:28:07
Well, >> is that a fun fact?
1:28:10
>> That's a very fun fact.
1:28:11
>> I thought that was fun.
1:28:12
>> I would give that 10 funs up.
1:28:15
>> On a recent quiet weekday morning in Manhattan, I attempted to obtain a Lebu, the cutesy monster doll that has become the biggest international toy fad since Beanie Babies in the late '9s.
1:28:25
This is in the New Yorker.
1:28:27
Collected by children as well as by adults, the dolls were created in 2015.
1:28:31
I didn't realize it was 10 years old.
1:28:33
uh by the Hong Kong born designer Kasing Long uh when they were brought to the mass market by the Chinese toy company PopMart in 2019.
1:28:39
The K-pop star Lisa started sharing her collection on social media in 2024, sparking the recent explosion.
1:28:46
I didn't realize that that's where this all came from.
1:28:49
This K-pop star um Laboos have pointed teeth, rabbitike ears, and wide gang glaring eyes.
1:28:56
Their faces are and extremities are >> they're demonic.
1:29:01
>> Lots of people have been saying that.
1:29:02
Uh, >> Tie Dye in the chat says, "Tim Dylan said, "Laboos are just Chinese voodoo dolls."
1:29:07
And yes, I think it tracks.
1:29:09
>> Yes, I I like that post.
1:29:09
Someone was saying, "I want to pronounce it like it's a Greek hero." Labubus.
1:29:15
>> Bill Bishop in the Substack chat says, "My dog Tshi wants a Laboo chew toy."
1:29:20
>> That could be a good We should We should for >> Laboo.
1:29:24
Let's let's buy Tshi all of them that are available on the market and have and have little little Tshi destroy all of them.
1:29:32
>> I loved I love Tshi because Tashi is like a full-on character.
1:29:35
He's sort of like the Tyler of Sharp China and Tshi is a recurring character on the Sharp China podcast that you should obviously go listen to.
1:29:44
Uh and uh >> Bill, we're going to we're going to we're buying a a Laboo for Tashi.
1:29:48
Nick, can you figure it out? >> Yeah. Get Tashi's address. We'll send a luboo. >> Yeah.
1:29:56
Don't just get an entry level one. Tashi deserves.
1:29:58
>> Get the rarest one possible.
1:29:58
The one of one, the most hyped.
1:30:00
Take it out of the clutches of the most K-pop addicted, brain rotted teen who's ready to spend uh $10,000 of their parents' money on it and give it to the dog.
1:30:10
Um, >> so their faces and extremities are bare.
1:30:13
The rest of their bulbous bodies are covered in New Yorker.
1:30:17
>> This is This is exactly who I want to be covering this story is the New Yorker.
1:30:21
Creatures are usually found hanging from phones or handbags.
1:30:23
Tiny demons haunting our accessories or and haunting our lives. >> See demonic.
1:30:29
You said it, but the New Yorker said it as well. >> Yeah.
1:30:31
They come in a menagerie of more than 300 collectible forms.
1:30:35
>> They can be matched to a personal style or mood.
1:30:37
Pink fur for when you're feeling flirty.
1:30:39
Glowing eye red eyes for a bit of an edge.
1:30:43
>> Dress be latte scarved for a cozy vibe.
1:30:47
The high-end art fair Art Basle released a limited edition art handler labu a batch of which sold out in 20 minutes.
1:30:55
>> I think that Tshi needs the uh the art >> for sure.
1:30:59
As a result of their popularity, labubus is are labus are difficult to get a hold of, often out of stock both online and and in physical stores.
1:31:09
Their scarcity made me want one even more.
1:31:11
Perhaps those who own them know something I didn't.
1:31:14
So I turned to Partia, a Union Square Boba Tea Cafe with neon lit claw machines that are perennially well stocked with labu boxes.
1:31:25
I plan to win my own tiny monster by skill.
1:31:28
A friend and I picked up refreshments at the counter, sparkling grape yogurt and and an iced green tea with vanilla mousse and traded $20 for 20 party tokens, which would allow us to scant four attempts at grabbing one of the Laboos stacked and grinning inside their glass cages. This is the Skinner box. This is fun. Um, I love I love games.
1:31:52
I would probably fall for this.
1:31:54
Um though the cafe had just opened, you know, the last time I I uh >> We should make So here's what we need to do.
1:32:02
We need to make a a a a uh golden retriever that can ward off the demonic labu. >> Yes.
1:32:10
You know the you know the antithesis of the of the antiristlike labu.
1:32:14
It is the uh Santa Monica Pier Mickey Mouse or uh or like a you know I forget exactly what I won but uh I was with my son uh on the Santa Monica Pier and there is a challenge where you have to you have to hold onto a bar like a pull-up bar and then it pulls you up and you have to dangle and you and the longer you dangle the bigger the prize you get.
1:32:37
And I held on for my life because I was fighting for the love of a four-year-old. Uh and I did quite well.
1:32:44
There are a number of tricks.
1:32:44
So, for the first minute, it doesn't rotate and then it releases and then it can rotate freely and so that makes it a lot harder.
1:32:52
I of course was not carrying my weightlifting chalk like I should have been.
1:32:56
Uh and so my my hands were a bit sweaty and I underperformed.
1:32:58
Uh but I drew a large crowd. People were cheering.
1:33:03
It was a heroic moment, something I'll remember forever.
1:33:05
And so, uh, if you're trying to if you're trying to, uh, win a toy, uh, stay away from the demonic, uh, claw grabber and instead do a feat of strength for your child.
1:33:17
That's what I would recommend.
1:33:19
>> So, the author tries to tries to win one of these. He does not.
1:33:20
And he says, "Why did I feel the need to own one of these?" >> He didn't win. >> He didn't win.
1:33:24
He just decided to cut his losses and go buy one.
1:33:26
Why did I feel the need to own one in the first place?
1:33:29
It seemed to be an accessory of lifestyle that I was missing out on and already late to adopt one constructed of physical goods >> that have attained.
1:33:36
Yeah, it feels very you're going to be late to the Laboo game if you're, you know, buying it now that we are uh finally >> talking.
1:33:45
We are definitely late to this one.
1:33:47
>> Um, one constructed of physical goods that have attained intense online fandom status symbols that are both Instagrammable and consumable.
1:33:53
Uh why are they you know I don't I don't know that anybody's eating their laboo except for tshi but uh and yet this lifestyle seemed demarcated by objects that were ugly, strange, and uncanny.
1:34:05
There's Dubai chocolate, a candy bar stuffed with pet pistachio cream. >> Yes.
1:34:13
>> And dough that oozes peacolored mush.
1:34:16
And I don't even have the uh we're not going to go into look into it if you're interested.
1:34:20
the Dubai chocolate story. Very interesting.
1:34:23
>> There's a conspiracy theory there that uh I do think track >> We don't have a tin foil hat big enough. >> Yeah. For that one.
1:34:30
>> But you can do your own research.
1:34:32
>> There's matcha lattes, bright green caffeinated beverages that sometimes come out through with a red strawberry syrup resembling blood splashed on a lawn.
1:34:40
What is >> I don't like any of this. Oh.
1:34:44
Anyway, uh I think the antidote to labu >> I mean the main thing is we are far from the Everlane era of consumer goods, right?
1:34:54
These sort of um >> Sure. It needs to be garish.
1:34:56
It needs to be controversial. It needs to be viral. It needs to be unique.
1:35:02
>> Built for the timeline. >> Yes. Yes. Yes.
1:35:03
Um if you're looking for a physical good, get an eightle. Get a pod five.
1:35:09
You don't need to go to a claw machine to pick up an eightle. You go to asleep.
1:35:13
com, they got a 5-year warranty, 30-9 risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.
1:35:17
Does Laboo has a have a 5-year warranty? No.
1:35:19
Does Labu have a 30- night risk-free trial? No.
1:35:21
Does Labu have free returns, free shipping? No. Get an eight.
1:35:26
>> One thing we didn't ask Matteo yesterday when he came on CEO was uh when are they coming out with eight sleeps for dogs because also and also a third zone for the small child who demands sleeping in the middle and wants his own temperature control. tonight.
1:35:42
That was a request that came in during the during our segment yesterday uh from the family.
1:35:46
Uh also uh timeline was in turmoil yesterday around eight deli and taking shots at benchmark. I thought about it.
1:35:54
I am incredibly bullish on eight selling in China.
1:35:57
I'll give you my my rationale.
1:35:59
So >> a lot of Americans are saying oh China America conflict it's the worst possible thing.
1:36:06
The invasion of Taiwan would be disastrous.
1:36:08
Um we need to be you know we we need to be extremely judicious with the uh you know our our frontier technology that we send to China.
1:36:17
We need to restrict exports of of cutting edge frontier semiconductors.
1:36:22
The H20 maybe definitely not the GB200.
1:36:25
Uh definitely not the H100. We'll see.
1:36:27
Um they're not getting Blackwell but they will be getting the Pod 5.
1:36:32
And I think it's incredibly bullish for world peace.
1:36:35
And I'll lay out my rationale.
1:36:35
So there are studies that show that aggression is deeply tied to lack of sleep and the pod 5 as you know >> makes it impossible to wake up on the wrong side of the bed. >> Yep.
1:36:48
>> So if you get a good night's sleep, you are less likely to want to engage in geopolitical conflict.
1:36:53
And so I think we need to be sending pod fives to the forbidden city, to Jeangai, to Beijing, to every CCP official, to every PLA official and making sure they have a good night's sleep so they wake up refreshed.
1:37:08
They wake up feeling good and they wake up like I don't want to go to conflict with America.
1:37:13
>> Trump should we can work together.
1:37:14
>> Trump should have America take a position. Yes. >> In eight.
1:37:18
>> In eight and maybe get on the board. >> Yes.
1:37:20
I think it's I think it's a uh it's a strategically important business for the United >> something that we could take away at some point if we did get into a conflict. Yes.
1:37:28
And we didn't want them to be sleeping well.
1:37:30
>> If all of China is sleeping on >> cut off the supply and >> we can remotely turn it off and say, "Hey, you're not getting a good night."
1:37:38
>> Or turn it really hot. >> Really hot. Oh, you like it cold. Now it's hot.
1:37:41
This is a major geopolitical >> Yeah.
1:37:43
So, right when they're going to take Taiwan, we just crank them up and everybody's sleeping and they're like, "No, no." Uh, cancel the invasion. Cancel the invasion.
1:37:52
>> The New Yorker says, "These products feel hallucinatory.
1:37:54
They take the social media mandate of self modification to its logical extreme, embracing easy breezy chemical additives and image augmentation, enhancing the self until it spills from its pores.
1:38:05
The aesthetic is as much a defense mechanism against the internet era as it is a selfaware and joke.
1:38:12
We can see what late hyperdigital artificially intelligent capitalism is doing to us. Isn't Isn't it a laugh?
1:38:19
It's very unnatural looking, the cultural critic Dean Kessik told me, describing the dominant visual style of extremely online consumerism.
1:38:25
It kind of relishes its own artificiality.
1:38:32
>> Do you know that song? [Music] >> I do not. >> I do not. What's that song?
1:38:40
>> Blake the Man 1000 wrote a song about Dean Kiss. It's a banger.
1:38:42
You should go check it out.
1:38:45
>> Anyway, cultural critic. I love Dean Kiss.
1:38:46
Any pretense of the pure organic is undercut by the kind of willful alchemy.
1:38:50
Everything is an ad mixture.
1:38:53
The skin care brand put peptides in lip gloss.
1:38:56
The Los Angelesbased grocery store chain Air1 and IGF-1 in lip gloss. The Wolverine peptides. I'd be down for that. What else? >> BBC 157.
1:39:06
BBC huge muscular >> BBC57 >> face.
1:39:13
>> Yeah, >> the >> like that.
1:39:14
Awan enhances multicolored smoothies with collagen and seaoss.
1:39:18
Touchlin makes powder mist scented hand sanitizers.
1:39:21
Um >> and uh the drug and beauty brand hers produces an ompic knockoff that comes in a bottle the color of matcha. I did not know that.
1:39:34
>> As if you're injecting yourself with Japanese tea.
1:39:35
I can hear the barista now.
1:39:38
Would you like a shot of semiglutide with that?
1:39:39
These days, the memes are to be ingested into the body, not just viewed on screen. >> That's a good line.
1:39:47
>> Yeah, we should move on from this. It's a long article.
1:39:48
You can go read it in the New Yorker, uh, and, uh, have a have a deep dive into IRL brain rot and the trend.
1:39:57
Um, I want to read this article by Nadia Asperuh, Delian's wife, who's been on the show.
1:40:03
Uh, and she is responding to Katherine Bole's article, uh, The Great Tech Family Alliance talking about pronatalism.
1:40:10
I thought it was interesting.
1:40:12
We didn't get to it when this dropped.
1:40:13
Um, but it's in the New Atlantis, and I guess the New Atlantis is doing an essay series of replies to other essays.
1:40:19
I thought it was kind of an interesting format.
1:40:22
Um anyway, uh Nadius kicks it off by saying, "Katherine Bole's speech is a sign of a new song making its way through the tech world, one that trills the importance of investing into our social infrastructure, strengthening our nation, and yes, building families.
1:40:35
I agree with all of that.
1:40:37
Uh it's a hopeful message, but like tech's early foray into politics, which began as a vague mood board of civic aspirations before coalesing into real policy efforts and wins, the pro-f family cultural shift still has a long way to go."
1:40:52
And so Nadia is is laying out a new pathway towards uh pro-f family cultural shift in tech.
1:40:58
Uh this is not to say there isn't a real movement happening and as a parent I'm grateful for it says Nadia Aspiruhov.
1:41:04
Uh but I feel the gap between rhetoric and reality as I navigate the tech world as a writer and researcher particularly when visiting the San Francisco Bay area.
1:41:14
>> Never never ask a pronatalist founder VC how many children they have.
1:41:19
I mean that you you you can't do that one in this case because I believe Katherryn Bole does have kids.
1:41:23
But of course but but I I I have long I have long joked uh that yes bro I I will definitely read your 5,000word essay on pronatalism.
1:41:32
But I got to take my son to soccer right now. So I'll get to it later.
1:41:37
There were too many instances of that for sure.
1:41:39
Um dinner conversations still tend to circle around whether children are worth having at all or they treat global fertility rates at arms length.
1:41:47
Many in tech embrace a borderless lifestyle that implies constant mobility.
1:41:51
Uh hosting events in cities like New York and Austin, which doesn't blend well with family obligations.
1:41:56
Children are rarely present at social gatherings.
1:41:58
I've had the strange experience of bringing my child to events where I'm praised for this act as some sort of pro-f family ideological flex, which while flattering misses the much less glamorous truth.
1:42:08
And with no evening child care available, I didn't have a choice.
1:42:13
Uh that that's a really really good point.
1:42:15
Uh there's something telling about this disparity.
1:42:17
Tech is clearly eager to recast itself as pro-f family, but it hasn't yet internalized what is required to for support families day-to-day.
1:42:25
I mean, I literally just experienced this where uh I was invited to an event and I was like, "Yeah, I'd love to stop by. I wrapped the show at 2.
1:42:33
I might be able to get there, but I got to be home for uh family dinner. That's at 6."
1:42:37
like and the event wound up being really far away and I was like there is just no way I can get there an hour and then get back and do anything meaningful there.
1:42:44
Um, and that's just the nature of these things like the the >> the same thing this morning.
1:42:47
We we saw a friend that he invited us to an event and I said if I go to that I won't see my family my kids for eight hours because it's tough.
1:42:59
>> I say good night 8:30 I see them the next day around 5.
1:43:02
If I go to something in the evening I won't see them again till the next day.
1:43:08
>> There Yeah, there is a real trade-off between uh like we we have said in America in TAC, we work really hard.
1:43:12
We also are saying we take our family life really seriously. Something has to give.
1:43:19
It's probably the uh the the the the dinner parties and the happy hours for the most part >> unless they're particular.
1:43:25
>> unless they're particular. The other the other thing I mean I think I think a lot of people in in tech uh >> you sort of grew up uh hearing that you know global warming was going to make the world uninhabitable at some point in in the near future or that was the the sentiment if you turned on the television that's what you saw
1:43:46
>> and I just remember >> hearing you know even as a teenager you know >> people talking oh I don't I don't know that it'll make sense to have kids right if if the world is so >> bad and dark and and growing up in coastal California >> my take was always like no we need way more kids because they're the the ones
1:44:04
that invent the technology that solves the problem um the solution is always like more ingenuity more people in my opinion uh I'm not Tom Thomas Mouthys pled it's crazy to see Mouthys coming back uh the Malthusian trap are you familiar Tyler with the Thomas Mouthys the Malthusian trap >> wait I don't know the trap >> so so the Malthusian trap was that uh
1:44:26
Thomas Mouthys was an economist uh 10020 years ago or something and he looked at the growth rate of uh of farming and the growth rate of the population and was projecting exponential growth in population while linear gains in farming and and uh his conclusion was that we were all going to starve to death because we would never make enough food. We would never create exponential growth
1:44:47
We would never create exponential growth in food production to match the exponential growth rate in the populace.
1:44:54
Of course, we did just that.
1:44:54
And the number of farmers went from like 90% of the population to like 2% of the population.
1:44:59
And although obviously food prices are important and starvation is still an issue, in general, we humanity has survived the uh the lack of food.
1:45:10
And so, uh it's called the Malthusian trap.
1:45:12
It's Malthusian ideology to uh to be afraid of a linear trend not being able to ever go exponential.
1:45:19
And so if you think about like uh carbon recapture or anything that is that is emitigant to uh waste heat and pollution and um and carbon emissions.
1:45:31
Uh you you you you track this out and you say well carbon emissions are growing exponentially.
1:45:35
The the temperature is growing exponentially and our progress on solving that is growing linearly.
1:45:40
But all it takes is actually finding the correct exponential solution which might just be like exponentially growing nuclear or exponentially growing solar.
1:45:48
and then all of a sudden we're we're having a very different conversation.
1:45:51
Anyway, Kathern Bole as a parent herself, says Nadia Aspir, uh is right to highlight pragmatic changes as the scaffolding that's required to build a pro-f family culture, flexible work, improving and reducing the cost of education, raising the status of parents. Agree with all that.
1:46:10
And like Bole, I believe that tech has the ability and resources to bring this future to fruition fruition if it wants to.
1:46:17
Oddly, however, it is tech's unmatched capabilities that might be what's holding it back.
1:46:22
Tech is arguably the best place in the world for unchecked personal ambition to flourish, particularly for young childish people.
1:46:32
You uh grind and get the $und00 million out of your laptop.
1:46:34
Not a lot of time to raise kids while you're in that process.
1:46:38
Uh but this type of environment can delay or disincentivize family formation.
1:46:42
My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build.
1:46:51
That I think is the primary tension not between the family and the state as Bole argues but between the individual and collective ambitions.
1:47:00
Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves.
1:47:04
And this perhaps is why why they have historically fought each other for mind share.
1:47:10
What tech offers is the opposite, a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own.
1:47:14
Tech worships individual talent.
1:47:17
Look at the talent war and the AI researchers that are getting the absolute bag right now.
1:47:24
Um, and it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. I agree.
1:47:30
Uh, but it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions.
1:47:38
That case can't be made through vibes alone, as any parent can attest, who has spent a sleepless night with a sick child before a big meeting, zooming with one hand while playing peekab-boo with the other, and or who has missed a deadline because child care fell through.
1:47:55
The answer to this, more secondary sales, more tender offers.
1:47:59
If you're a venture capitalist, you're talking a big game about being pronatalist.
1:48:03
You need to put a couple million dollars into the common in a tender and make sure that child care is paid for. What do you think? >> I like it. I like it.
1:48:11
My my uh my my lead VC in my last company uh the second that I told him uh was having a baby, he said, "Time for a raise. >> Time for a raise."
1:48:24
>> And it was like it was very meaningful important at that at that time. >> Yeah.
1:48:29
Um, and yeah, I mean that that's the if you're an entrepreneur and you're building a company and you're having a child and you aren't going to be able to have access to child care, that is a >> Yeah, >> that is a >> a serious uh leg weights while you're running.
1:48:46
>> Putting an extra 45 on the bench press. >> Exactly. Maybe not unnecessary.
1:48:48
Maybe a couple plates on each side unnecessarily.
1:48:53
>> Um, you need one of those shirts that makes it easier to bench press.
1:48:55
Are you familiar with those? We got to get those. Have you seen these?
1:48:57
Yeah, they that's our new merch drop.
1:49:01
>> Oh, that is a great merch drop.
1:49:01
So, it's a compression shirt that basically it keeps your arms like this like tight and so when you stretch like 20 pounds and so people do it to get comfortable and like yeah I can't really do 315 but if I wear the shirt I can.
1:49:17
And then they get comfortable with 315.
1:49:19
They do it a bunch and then they can take the shirt off and then they hit 315 and then they can push up.
1:49:22
So yeah, I think that's our next merch shop for sure. >> For sure.
1:49:27
There's some big news coming.
1:49:29
This will be for the for the people in the chat first.
1:49:31
Um, let's continue with Nadia.
1:49:33
Uh, if tech wants to embody more pro- family values, it needs more skin in the game.
1:49:39
It's not enough to tweet about population decline or pass around graphs on it in the group chat.
1:49:42
Uh, tech will learn much faster what's required by having kids raising them and supporting each other through the ups and downs.
1:49:49
Pro- family culture means figuring out how to meet the family's needs for parental leave, affordable childare, quality education, and social environments that are welcoming to children and family lifestyles.
1:49:57
Until then, the rhetoric will feel less like a movement and more like a mood.
1:50:01
Uh tech has a track record of moving quickly once it figures out what it truly wants.
1:50:07
If the pro- family turn is real, and I hope it is, then what we need next is the is to move the discourse from talk to action.
1:50:13
Only then will we be able to say it with a straight face that tech is building not just companies but families too.
1:50:22
>> Fantastic article Nadia.
1:50:22
Thank you for posting that.
1:50:25
>> And if you want if you want to if you want to invest in the public markets completely unrelatedly go to public.
1:50:28
com investing for those that take it seriously.
1:50:32
Tried to find the translation.
1:50:34
>> Sometimes the anti-transition keeps you guessing. It's public.
1:50:36
com is investing for those who take it seriously.
1:50:39
They got multiasset investing industry leading yields.
1:50:41
They're trusted by millions.
1:50:42
Oh, you want to transition?
1:50:44
Why don't you set up an investment account on public. com for your child?
1:50:45
Do your own Gersonner account. Tyler, what you got?
1:50:49
>> It was an anti-transition just like antiex. >> Oh, there we go. There we go. Yeah.
1:50:52
All these other all these other uh all these other uh live stream hosts, they think they need to have the perfect transition.
1:51:02
>> I keep you guessing with the anti-transition.
1:51:04
>> Well, we have some big big big breaking news. >> Stop.
1:51:08
Elon has hit the timeline and Anie from XAI has new outfits. >> New outfits. >> I know.
1:51:18
>> So, for all the Groheavy subscribers, get ready to >> This is big.
1:51:23
>> Little virtual try on >> Fortnite skins for your companion.
1:51:27
>> Didn't we just say this?
1:51:27
That that's the way that they'll monetize is that there will be a number of outfits and that the outfits will be there will be more expensive outfits. >> I want a Birkin. >> Yes. >> I want a Leubu.
1:51:35
I I think we just unlocked like the real value of the virtual AI companion economy and all of a sudden I was previously thinking this is a singledigit billion dollar opportunity.
1:51:48
Now the moral stuff is aside like I think me and you are both like we don't love this and that's the point that Jira Tickets makes here.
1:51:54
He says sir we need to get to Mars and I agree with that.
1:51:58
I think the efforts would be better spent uh getting us to Mars and getting us to AGI and and solving physics.
1:52:04
And I hope that none of that takes a backseat to this stuff.
1:52:06
But um >> you got the new fits.
1:52:10
>> Do you have the new outfits already?
1:52:12
>> Are they free or do you have to pay?
1:52:13
>> Are there any upgraded picks? >> They're free.
1:52:15
>> There's no inapp purchases yet. >> They're all free.
1:52:17
>> No, no inapp purchases yet. >> Okay. >> Unfortunately.
1:52:21
Um well uh let's hope that uh one of the upgrade picks is just a donation to uh the next uh Mars mission. Yeah.
1:52:27
Uh maybe put on uh instead of being so scantly clouded, you could put on a full space suit and then uh all that money would go to the next Mars mission, which I am in favor of.
1:52:38
Uh but but but I do think that I do think that you know uh the Ali aliyah octaest I botched that super bad. The die has been cast.
1:52:48
Um they're the the AI companions are on a trajectory to monetize uh very well specifically in price discrimination.
1:52:56
And so um this is the this is the brilliance of Only Fans and why Only Fans is so is so profitable is that there are both power law creators who generate the vast majority of the revenues and there are power law customers that spend the most money on the individual creators.
1:53:14
Um this is the this is the value of this is the the economic insight in Fortnite.
1:53:19
There are power mo many the the median Fortnite player probably spends zero but the biggest whale on Fortnite is probably spending thousands of dollars and so uh that that price discrimination there's going to be someone who is on Grock and and talking to Annie and spending thousands of dollars on virtual goods. I would predict.
1:53:43
I think that's where this goes.
1:53:45
>> Same thing as the dynamic in mobile gaming.
1:53:48
>> Mobile gaming whales that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars >> bringing price discrimination into a category that previously did not have it where it was oneizefits-all uh all you can eat like you know Netflix does not have this.
1:54:01
Everyone pays the same price for Netflix.
1:54:02
Um but but if there's a version of the product that can ramp up so you're making more money and this is the beauty of of just online advertising.
1:54:12
um Meta makes probably makes more money from advertising um uh aquinauts to you uh than than someone who has lower has has lower uh penchant for uh luxury watch. >> Yes.
1:54:30
Anyway, uh Dan Nolan says, "A guy on Reddit built something I've wanted for ages, scraping public data and putting it together a leaderboard of real estate agents who appear to serially get prices wrong."
1:54:41
And so, uh I guess you could go and find the real estate agent who is underpricing assets and then and then go and buy a house from them.
1:54:52
Maybe this is the solution to the housing crisis.
1:54:54
Maybe this is alpha for open door in a bullc case for Openoor.
1:54:58
Uh open door of course buys and sells uh real estate and houses and uh if there is uh if there's a a market dislocation and an in an in uh inefficiency in the market you would expect uh financial institutions to take advantage.
1:55:15
>> So this uh real estates real >> yeah what you got >> real estats. org real estats. That's a good point.
1:55:22
>> Having a leaderboard of just the people that mispric assets, >> but and and they do it to both directions.
1:55:27
They overpric and they underpric.
1:55:30
>> I feel like how how how responsible is a real estate agent for mispricing a house?
1:55:35
I feel like a lot of that's driven by the home buyer.
1:55:36
Like the home buyer might say, "I know what I'm I know what I got.
1:55:40
I want three million for my house."
1:55:42
And the real estate agent is like, "But you made some really weird decisions in the remodel.
1:55:45
You have four movie theaters."
1:55:48
Well, people also will strategically underpric it at listing. Yeah.
1:55:54
In order to create >> demand and then over Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:55:58
Uh uh there aren't that many people in this neighborhood that need car lifts in their garage.
1:56:03
You're like, but everyone wants car lifts.
1:56:05
Everyone has four GT3 RS's that they need to store in the in in the plastic.
1:56:10
Everyone has supercars in this neighborhood. They're like at at at 1. 5 million. Yeah.
1:56:18
People usually spend 50% of their net worth on cars, right? >> Yes.
1:56:22
They all should >> get a get get a 1500 foot $1.
1:56:23
5 million house in LA and spend uh and get four supercars for the next 1. 5 million. >> Exactly.
1:56:33
>> And secure it all with an unsecured.
1:56:36
>> We have another massive announcement. >> What's that?
1:56:38
>> Again, I think everybody listening has been, you know, waiting for this really.
1:56:44
I'm feeling the AGI right now. I'm feeling the AGI.
1:56:46
We got to update our timeline.
1:56:48
>> Update our timelines, Jordy.
1:56:49
>> Notion has launched offline. >> Let's go. >> Let's go. >> Let's go.
1:56:53
>> Let's give it up for the notion team.
1:56:57
>> Uh I actually think this I mean this is cool.
1:56:59
I mean I I I used to use notion a lot >> and uh you know even if you have a small feature update, make it make it feel big.
1:57:07
Clearly their users are excited about it.
1:57:10
Termally online engineer says notion is so funny.
1:57:12
Announcing an offline mode for a to-do app in 2025. the right thing to do. Don't get distracted. We saw this with Figma.
1:57:19
Figma launched uh Figma make vibe coding platform.
1:57:22
Super on trend AI stuff and then simultaneously like yeah we improved responsive design. >> No Figma sites.
1:57:28
>> Oh yeah sites for sure but also just like minor iterations on you know the the the opacity layer and and how how how you can implement parallax in your design.
1:57:38
Like you you you can't get lost in the sauce.
1:57:41
have to stay on the trend and be using the latest tools and and and be on the cusp, but also you can't let the culture of of uh you know uh regular iteration uh fall by the wayside.
1:57:54
Uh you can't you can't get distracted by the by the shiny green tennis ball.
1:57:59
Sometimes you have to focus on just uh you know scratching your ear.
1:58:08
I don't know this golden >> we got a post we got a very low tan post here from Mopar >> two two post >> two likes 61 views >> highlighting the MIT report that we covered yesterday 95% of genai pilots at companies are failing >> Mopar says no babe your zero ROI is perfect big one scare me um yeah I think this is a this is a real real problem there's a lot of uh genai companies that have sold in pilots to things like healthcare Yeah.
1:58:37
>> Uh systems that um are not these are not going to turn into multi-year contracts. Yep.
1:58:44
Hopefully a lot of them do. Some of them do.
1:58:46
Y there's still a business there, but >> um your ARR uh is not necessarily real. >> Yeah. Um we'll see.
1:58:56
I I I wonder the methodology of this report.
1:59:00
I wonder what a generative AI pilot means. what failing means.
1:59:06
Um I I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of companies are using tools that have implemented generative AI features under the hood and they don't even really realize that their software is just getting better.
1:59:22
Um but it's probably deeper in the stack.
1:59:25
It's probably uh a little more I don't know obfiscated.
1:59:28
don't know obfiscated. uh and they're just seeing like oh the fraud detection algorithm that my you know ERP uses is a little more reliable but I didn't like pilot that it's just like the software I you the tools got better the the
1:59:44
graphics in video games got better like there there's not a a binary moment people are hoping for the chat GPT moment of generative AI pilots and it might not be coming we might be on a smoother adoption curve there anyway >> uh what else should we have post here from Julie Chang. Very important. Who Very important.
1:59:59
Who wants to own Bill Walton's longtime San Diego estate in the Marston Hills neighborhood, which has two homes sitting on 1. 3 acres combined.
2:00:08
Both homes sit uh abuing a trail head, seven beds, eight baths, listed at 5 million.
2:00:18
Absolutely giving it away.
2:00:18
This thing looks beautiful. What else we got here?
2:00:25
We have is it Vlad or Mark joining?
2:00:28
Vlad is joining in just 3 minutes.
2:00:31
So, we'll keep >> I'm just posting for my personal account.
2:00:35
Just letting everyone know.
2:00:37
>> Alyssa says uh she's looking for the most performative man in San Francisco. >> Yeah. What is this?
2:00:42
What What >> Can you explain this, Tyler? >> Yeah.
2:00:44
Tyler, do you understand this >> uh a little bit?
2:00:47
So, there's this concept like you're like performative guy, right?
2:00:50
So, you can imagine you're going to >> like a matcha.
2:00:54
Where do they sell magic? >> Matcha. >> Matcha.
2:00:58
You go to like a a coffee shop. >> He's drinking matcha.
2:01:00
He says >> you have a book with you. >> Oh, yeah.
2:01:03
Like you with Infinite Chest on the subway. >> What?
2:01:06
>> Like like how you were reading Infinite Chest on the subway.
2:01:08
That was like a performative thing that you did. >> Well, okay.
2:01:11
>> And how you and how you were telling everyone about how you're you know you're a bit of an intellectual and you read Infinite Jest. >> Okay. Okay.
2:01:17
You know, let's move on from this.
2:01:19
But yeah, there's like um like intern Michael, he loves matcha.
2:01:21
He's kind of a very likes guy. >> Yeah. >> Oh, he's performing. You're taking shots. He can't defend himself. He doesn't have a mic. That's not fair.
2:01:32
>> Uh but then I don't know. Yeah.
2:01:32
You have like a um a tote bag. It's like a >> Yeah. Signaling. Signaling. Yeah. Yeah.
2:01:40
I I'm just unclear on on exactly what people are signaling. Yeah.
2:01:42
Is it Is it more the aesthetics or is it more like the startup swag?
2:01:46
Uh either way, uh the SF's performative mail contest will be happening at Alamo Square Park on August 22nd at 7 PM.
2:01:54
They're putting up posters in San Francisco advertising it.
2:01:57
They should get a billboard.
2:01:58
They should go to adquick. com.
2:02:00
Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.
2:02:03
Say goodbye to the headaches of out ofome advertising.
2:02:06
Only adqu combines technology, out ofome expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.
2:02:11
And we have our first guest of the show, Vlad Tenev. How you doing, Vlad? Good to meet you. >> What's up, guys? Good to meet you. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for joining.
2:02:21
Um, give us uh can you give us a little bit of a state of the union on Robin Hood?
2:02:25
You've launched so many different products.
2:02:27
Like, how do you see the shape? How do you define?
2:02:30
Are you a financial institution?
2:02:30
Uh, I remember when I first used the product, probably almost a decade ago now, I guess.
2:02:37
Uh, uh, it was it was an app and now it's a company, now it's a business, now it's an institution.
2:02:43
uh what is the shape of the company today and how has it evolved?
2:02:47
>> Well, first off, our mission hasn't changed.
2:02:49
Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all.
2:02:53
>> And what that means to us is we really see Robin Hood as the defender of free markets.
2:03:00
>> And we're building a financial super app, a platform where all of our customers can custody and hold any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction.
2:03:10
And obviously it started with stocks but it's expanded across multiple domains.
2:03:15
We have a credit card which in my unbiased opinion is the best credit card on the market.
2:03:21
Banking which is a high-end uh private banking inspired offering is coming out very soon.
2:03:29
We offer I think the best retirement account on the market for u the self-employed entrepreneur folks that might not have access to a traditional 401k.
2:03:38
So really we've been on this journey and uh we we've increasingly been expanding the scope and capabilities of what we offer.
2:03:47
>> Does that mean something like I when I think about uh like legacy financial institutions I think about like an auto loan, a mortgage like is that coming down the pipe?
2:03:55
I mean I'm I'm sure you can't comment on specifics but just like that shape of experience for consumer finance like what are all the touch points as you kind of plan the next uh the next phase of growth?
2:04:05
Yeah, I mean the the scope is broad, right?
2:04:08
Any financial asset, any transaction.
2:04:10
We actually a couple of months ago started piloting a mortgage offering in partnership with Sage Home Loans and >> surprisingly, you know, I announced that on X and it was probably one of my best performing tweets of the year.
2:04:25
I mean, people are people are really interested in these types of offers >> from Robin Hood.
2:04:31
uh the focus is really on daily habits, the financial products and services that you use on a daily basis.
2:04:38
But I think serving our customers well with those gives us the opportunity to do these one-time offers.
2:04:44
And you know, you could imagine if we serve you well with your banking needs, we would be sort of like your first call if if you want a mortgage.
2:04:54
And I think the rapper behind all this is our Robin Hood Gold program.
2:04:58
Gold program. So at at first when I launched when we launched this there was skepticism because subscription products never really worked in financial services but we've seen this interesting thing where someone joins Robin Hood usually to buy a stock or or a crypto y
2:05:15
>> they sign up for Robin Hood gold very quickly our attach rate for you know day one has gone up quite high and then once they become a gold member >> they look at what else is offered in in the gold bundle and even if they're not ready for that service like a mortgage right away. We usually are top of mind
2:05:30
We usually are top of mind if they ever you know become interested in something like that in the future.
2:05:38
>> How do you think about services broadly over the long term?
2:05:41
I think uh our generation oftent times saw you know having somebody at your bank for example that you could call and talk to as kind of a bug right and and then at some point you realize hey this is actually a feature.
2:05:55
It's actually great to have somebody on the other end that you can call if there's an issue or things like that.
2:06:01
>> Yeah, it's a different different margin profile, but but how are you thinking about that side and especially in the context of of um AI and and giving people that ability to kind of have these like new ways of of interacting with platforms.
2:06:15
I could I could imagine a world in the future where somebody can call their you know call Robin Hood call effectively call Robin Hood and have a conversation with the platform and that person not necessarily even being human. >> Yeah.
2:06:28
I mean we're already basically there uh you can have a chat interaction with a Robin Hood agent and the majority of our cases are handled by our in-house AI.
2:06:41
And I think people don't realize this about Robin Hood, but you know, we've looked at where we are relative to others in our industry, and I think we're best in class.
2:06:50
Like, we're doing very sophisticated things with AI, both internally and uh in the product through Robin Hood Cortex.
2:06:58
the service model has evolved and and I think what it's going to look like in the future is if you're a customer that's high net worth or a little bit older and and we serve an increasing number of these customers as time goes on.
2:07:13
I mean, I'm I'm uh talking to customers on a semi-regular basis who are thinking about moving hundreds of millions uh into their Robin Hood account and I I wasn't having those types of conversations a year ago, but we have Robin Hood concierge that gives you a hightouch experience for those types of customers.
2:07:30
And uh the aspiration of the AI team is let's just make sure the baseline level of support that everyone gets is world class with like an increasing amount of sophistication and and I think we've been making a ton of progress and like I mentioned already I think best-in-class in terms of how we use AI.
2:07:53
>> How do you uh let's talk about IPOs.
2:07:55
That's like the number number one thing I wanted to get your kind of updated thinking on.
2:07:58
Um, I'm curious how you expect the IPO process will evolve.
2:08:04
Obviously, we we covered the Figma IPO live at NY.
2:08:06
It was an incredible uh day.
2:08:10
It was unique to our industry because it's a product that many I'm sure everybody that's listening to this has used at at some point or another.
2:08:16
Um, but there was uh certainly a frustration from the retail community and I'm sure even a frustration from your side, right?
2:08:25
people were able to get into uh get in at the IPO price uh but not necessarily as much allocation as as uh some would have liked.
2:08:33
Uh I'm sure you were doing everything you and the team were doing everything you possibly could to get as much allocation for uh your users as possible.
2:08:40
But how do you think that process is evolving now that you know we have millions and millions of investors in the United States that are smart enough to know when they want to get in you know um and uh at the IPO at the IPO >> which is just a completely different shift from a decade ago.
2:08:56
I mean we have we have multiple ways of going public with direct listings, traditional IPOs, spaxs like the landscape's changed a lot and the appetite for these products has changed too. >> Yeah.
2:09:06
So, I'm curious like what what kind of change you're personally pushing for and what role Robin Hood will play in that. >> Yeah.
2:09:13
And by by the way, a lot of my friends were with you guys there.
2:09:14
Uh, you know, Andrew Reed from uh Danny I believe uh was there as well.
2:09:24
So, >> yeah, shout out to those guys.
2:09:25
Uh early Robin Hood investors as well. >> Great.
2:09:29
Um our our approach to this we you guys probably know four years ago we rolled out this product IPO access.
2:09:36
>> Uh we started with uh some companies that were going public in 2021 and then our own IPO had at the time the the biggest or if not one of the biggest retail allocations of over 20%.
2:09:51
>> And at first it was it it was kind of a challenge to get companies excited about this.
2:09:56
there was skepticism about the value of retail.
2:09:57
Uh the companies were concerned that you know retail would would sell and they wouldn't hold.
2:10:03
And over time that's shifted to the point where you know nowadays uh the majority of companies that are interested in going public are coming to us and talking to us about retail.
2:10:18
>> And I think that's an awesome shift.
2:10:18
And uh where I'd like to take that is even earlier in the life cycle.
2:10:24
Now we're helping companies and retail get access to IPOs, but can we go to latestage privates?
2:10:32
Can we go early stage privates?
2:10:35
Can we go uh seed rounds where actually Robin Hood can offer capital as a service to entrepreneurs and we can deliver a button where you know you you press the button maybe you issue some information and you get capital for your business deposited directly into a a Robin Hood account for for you to operate.
2:10:56
And I think >> let's kind of go >> could we go through could we could we kind of talk through those specific stages and and kind of what the product would look like.
2:11:04
So, so on the one hand, latestage privates, uh you uh o over the summer uh you had talked about uh uh tokenized products that that could uh involve late stage privates. That's super exciting.
2:11:17
Uh how how are those conversations going?
2:11:19
This is such a like hot hot button issue.
2:11:21
obviously companies and and CFOs that are that are worried about, you know, being marked to market, but it's ultimately something that everyday retail investors want so badly, right? People are smart.
2:11:33
They know they know that they know they can identify generational companies and and and CEOs and teams and they want they want it.
2:11:43
So, it's going to happen eventually, right?
2:11:44
But at the same time, there's this incredible kind of friction at this moment in time in order to get to that point. >> Yeah.
2:11:51
Uh so I I started making a public stance on this whole thing with an op-ed in the Washington Post in January and I think that uh OpEd was basically universally acclaimed.
2:12:04
People got very excited about it.
2:12:06
Everyone's on board, but of course I'm not one to just write opeds.
2:12:10
I I think a lot of people are doing that.
2:12:12
I want to go and do the thing and actually execute uh on on these things.
2:12:17
And uh as it turns out, execution and and whenever you're the first to do something, it's uh it can be a little bit messy.
2:12:25
It can be a little bit unclear.
2:12:26
But uh going back to our mission, you know, we believe in free markets.
2:12:31
We want people to own the means of production to to the greatest extent possible.
2:12:36
AI can be this massive transformative force.
2:12:39
And I think it's very very important to have everyday people aligned with that. Right?
2:12:44
If if you're worried about AI having disruption on the labor market, um you could either fight it, which you're more likely to do if you have no ownership stake, or if if you have an owner, you're you're kind of rooting for for that innovation.
2:12:58
So, I'd like to live in that latter world. And we see a path.
2:13:00
We have the technology to do it.
2:13:04
We've had a lot of companies actually come to us and they they want to be a part of providing access to to private markets.
2:13:15
And I think at first there will be a little bit of like hesitation just like for IPO access, but I think 5 years from now we'll be looking around, retail will have access and we'll we'll all wonder why we were so foolish and uh and and having such resistance to to being in this world.
2:13:35
So, I'd like to accelerate that and and I'm very motivated to to make this happen in a way that addresses everyone's concerns, even the companies with the real time pricing that that you mentioned. >> Totally. Yeah.
2:13:47
It it's it somebody needed to come in and just rock rock the boat basically, right?
2:13:51
Like it w it wasn't, you know, it seemed obvious that it wasn't going to happen totally organically or it has been happening, but in ways that aren't necessarily good for investors, right?
2:14:02
for investors, right? like the the meme from the last week is everybody's being offered these like incredibly layered SPVS and uh that that just shows that like capitalism is going to find a way to allow this demand to find supply >> but if you have all this friction it's not going to happen in a way that
2:14:22
actually is is good for for the demand side >> and I think this is an incidental I don't think anyone sat around the table and said you know we don't want retail investors 80% of the unacredit of of the market that's unacredited to not have access to you know the leading innovation companies of our era. I think
2:14:39
I think it was incidental in the past couple of decades it's gotten harder and harder for companies to go public.
2:14:46
for companies to go public. there's more, you know, process uh it's a greater burden and some companies are just avoiding it alto together and at the same time the private markets funding environment for startups has gotten much easier to the point where you know now companies can raise tens of
2:15:04
billions if not more in the private markets and and I think the outcome of that the collateral damage is that retail is not getting access to the leading company in the space the emerging space industry and many of the leading companies in the AI industry which I think is uh >> yeah that should be allowed to continue. >> How do you how do you think about
2:15:27
>> How do you how do you think about offerings?
2:15:28
Uh you mentioned potentially at at one point having retail be able to access even earlier stage opportunities like you know maybe seed or series A.
2:15:38
How would how do you kind of uh what's your vision for for that kind of product given that a lot of Robin Hood users are going to be you know used to to making investment and maybe changing their mind about it and getting out of it and uh as
2:15:53
we all know if you you back a company at seed you're riding with them for a very long time and maybe you can make you know maybe there's features that would allow you to to to let people get out over time but I'm curious kind of what what your vision for for that would look like. >> Yeah. Um I think the interesting point >> Yeah.
2:16:07
Um I think the interesting point is that the customer and the market are slightly different between an early stage seed investment and a late stage private. >> Mh.
2:16:21
>> So early stage seed investment uh there's primary capital.
2:16:25
Your market is entrepreneurs that are in need of a capital as a service offering.
2:16:30
So whether it's onchain or offchain, what I what I think would be very attractive is pressing a button, putting in some information and getting money into your business bank account as easy as possible.
2:16:44
When I was a seedstage entrepreneur, I spent half my time fundraising, if not more.
2:16:49
And so the time at which your time is most critical and you need to build your product and make sure your business works, you're spending a ton of time trying to fundra.
2:17:01
So I I think it's very very valuable if you lower the friction to to getting capital.
2:17:05
You'll get more startups, more entrepreneurship, which is great for the long term.
2:17:09
So there's one uh if it's a late stage private your market increasingly becomes secondary transactions from early shareholders and employees and and I think that's very very different and I think uh any any private offering um has to like deal with these realities that that you have to have two slightly different customers and constituents and I think where they failed in the past is by treating them kind of as one.
2:17:38
Um, so we're thinking a lot about this.
2:17:42
Um, I I think as time goes on, I'll get much more specific, but yeah, I I think what what you'll see is various mechanisms.
2:17:49
The way the way it's going to work is Robin Hood will get exposure through various means to these assets.
2:17:58
>> We'll hold them in a box very much like how stable coins work.
2:18:00
you know you get exposure to dollars or treasuries hold them in a box and you know distribution overseas uh will have tokenization as kind of a delivery mechanism and in the US it'll be u tokenization hopefully once the regulatory environment matures around that but but there's also lots of other means to to give access to privates >> is there a risk that companies wind up like changing their docs to try and push back against this.
2:18:31
I remember forward contracts were pretty popular in the secondary market for a while and then companies started saying, "Hey, no forward contracts early employees like you got to go to us because we have a roofer and we want to offer that to our >> The beauty of a forward contract is >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:18:47
But, you know, they they they they they like capitalism finds a way as always.
2:18:51
But I'm just wondering if there's other like layers of abstraction that might be more dominant.
2:18:55
like uh they don't have nearly the brand with retail traders, but there's a world where you're you're slicing uh venture funds and offering those to retail traders and then the companies might be a little bit more uh on board because the because they like they don't wind up with a retail army that's, you know, like upset with their latest product release or, you know, monitoring them.
2:19:20
Uh they but they might still see the economic upside or exposure.
2:19:24
>> What do you think about that?
2:19:24
Yeah, I think all of those are right.
2:19:26
I mean, some some of those vehicles exist already.
2:19:29
Um, >> and like you said, I I think we'll find a way.
2:19:35
I do think over time, um, companies will see the value of this.
2:19:41
It'll be right now the companies that are coming to us for IPO access see that >> when you have a an established retail base as a public company, uh, there there's certain advantages, right?
2:19:52
Your customers are also active shareholders in in many cases.
2:19:57
Y uh they they can defend you.
2:20:00
They can give you good feedback, but they're a constituency that, you know, companies are beginning to value more and more.
2:20:07
They want to hear from them.
2:20:09
They want to encourage retail participation and and I think you'll see that at earlier stages because companies will believe and and I think it's true that cultivating retail interest early uh has a compounding effect as as you go public and and even beyond.
2:20:26
beyond. Uh I I I know this story has been like beaten to death, but uh we talked to Mickey Malca about the the the round that came together in the middle of the night uh during GameStop, but I'm interested to hear just about uh what has changed technically and then
2:20:45
financially and then from a brand perspective in terms of like the going through that cycle, making it through, but then just having a lot of folks out there who are like ah like I had a bad experience and and I'm I'm still I'm still holding the grudge. How do you win
2:20:59
How do you win them back? Uh what's the strategy?
2:21:01
Uh both on the actual like business building side and then the messaging, the changes that you made like what's the full postmortem?
2:21:12
>> Yeah, I mean it's uh there's this phrase that trust is slowly gained and can be lost in an instant.
2:21:18
And uh I I have validated that that's basically true.
2:21:26
>> When uh when January 28th the the date that will live in infamy and Robin Hood lore came down, we saw you know hit to our NPS obviously on social media and across every channel.
2:21:38
>> It was abundantly clear that customers were unhappy.
2:21:40
And >> we've had to climb out of that slowly over time.
2:21:45
And I think there have been moments where we've sort of like gained a net promoter score.
2:21:51
It's clear that, you know, we've done good things and we've sort of like accelerated earning trust from customers.
2:21:58
But there's no magic formula where I snap my fingers and say the right words and and suddenly, you know, you make up for that.
2:22:06
I think that it's it's done by delivering on our value proposition and being sort of like a consistent trusted uh member of of the ecosystem for many many years.
2:22:18
And it was probably like a year and a half ago where it became clear like okay we've like shaken off um and turned the corner and and I think we've been we've been on a great trajectory since then with some of the highest net promoter scores in the past four years and customers are very very happy and you know I think we just have to keep executing.
2:22:40
There's uh there there's the only way is through right? >> Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes sense.
2:22:45
Jordy, >> as somebody who runs uh a platform that uh actually uh facilitates stock trading at scale, what gets you excited about the potential of tokenized stocks?
2:22:57
I think there's a lot of people that are more cryptonative that that uh are very excited about the potential and they talk about how easy it will be to trade and and trans transition in and out of positions.
2:23:11
And somebody might say, well, I can open uh I can open my brokerage right now and do that today.
2:23:16
Um, and so that's that's maybe a a luxury of being in in in a great market like America, but where are you particularly excited about the intersection of of uh traditional finance and crypto?
2:23:29
And where do you think uh there might be uh unnecessary or or uh hype is overblown?
2:23:38
Well, I think that in the same way that stable coins have become a great delivery mechanism for US dollars outside the US, uh, tokenized stocks will be a great mechanism, probably the dominant mechanism for US shares being delivered to retail outside the US. >> Interesting.
2:23:56
>> Interesting. uh inside the US uh there is benefit going from 245 which we offer through Robin Hood 24-hour market today to 247 uh as well as self custody and DeFi applications I I think um we we haven't scratched the surface for what those can be yet but as the regulatory environment
2:24:20
matures I I think there's a lot of really interesting potential um and it's also the cost of operating because more and more of what's traditionally been applications and you know centralized third parties run by by humans more of that in crypto is being replaced by software. So you have you know transfer
2:24:41
So you have you know transfer agency, payment processors, clearing houses, all of this is just uh now in software and and what that allows us to do is lower the cost and eventually if you lower the cost enough the value gets fastpacked to customers.
2:24:57
So I view it as you know the next stage in the technological evolution of financial services going from you know pen and paper filing cabinet to mainframe to cloud and then blockchain infrastructure is the the the next stage in that. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:25:18
It feels like there's this like almost barbell uh emerging within Robin Hood where you are going like more individual expression.
2:25:28
The ability for a single retailer uh retail investor to buy a single share in a preIPO company that's like an incredibly high agency thing to do.
2:25:38
And then simultaneously you recently launched managed investing which feels like at the opposite end of the scale.
2:25:45
And I'm wondering if you see this more as uh is this like a funnel where people move from one group to the other?
2:25:52
Are these distinct groups?
2:25:52
And I'd love to just hear more about the managed investing product.
2:25:56
How's the business going and how that how that weaves into the rest of the landscape of the product you're building.
2:26:03
Yeah, I think the end state is um going to look less like people graduating from self-directed trading and active trading to, >> you know, retirement and and more passive products >> and more that uh >> customers are going to have multiple accounts. >> Sure.
2:26:24
>> So, you'll have your discretionary self-directed account on Robin Hood.
2:26:26
You might have a joint account with your spouse.
2:26:29
You'll have your retirement account.
2:26:31
And some of those will be passively managed and others will be uh actively managed by by uh by yourself.
2:26:41
And I think that as we've gotten deeper into understanding our customers, we see that it's less two different groups of people, even the active traders are interested in retirement products and sometimes have an even larger bucket of their capital that is managed on their behalf.
2:26:58
And so that's why, you know, we've been focusing a lot on the customer experience and the technology front on serving your broad financial needs.
2:27:11
>> How has your uh you know approach to running the company changed having having been in the game for uh over a decade now?
2:27:18
I can imagine uh in the earlier days when markets were ripping broadly, there's all this activity.
2:27:27
Yeah, I'm sure it was easy to get kind of caught up in the hype a little bit and uh I'm sure now I would imagine you've you've you've uh kind of adapted to try to stay as level as you possibly can when when uh you know we've been uh joking around on the show recently counting up how you know you you you certainly need more than 10 fingers to count all the different top signals.
2:27:50
So, how do you how do you kind of uh stay even keeled even when markets are euphoric and and wild in so many ways?
2:28:00
>> Yeah, I mean it's much it's much easier to stay about your wits when things are improving, right?
2:28:06
improving, right? uh even though it can be challenging I think when when markets are going up and everyone's looking at you know increased stock prices whether it's our employees or you know investors we we just like to tell ourselves we
2:28:22
shouldn't get complacent we've got a huge opportunity in front of us the job's not finished um and then you know at the same time in 2022 when interest rates went up and you know our stock traded below $7 a share air who's trading basically at cash value. Um you
2:28:37
Um you have to tell people that um you know you have to make sure people aren't discouraged and they they they think that there's you know a wonderful future worth fighting for both outside the company and the environment and and also here.
2:28:56
So, you go through enough of these and I think we've been through multiple waves of of ups and downs and I I'd like to think I've I've developed a little bit of a wisdom about it through experience, right?
2:29:07
I I I started the company writing all the code or a large portion of it myself and you know you sort of evolve with the company and I I I think I've been fortunate to be part of ups and downs and I think now I just uh I I enjoy all of it you know bring bring it on and it each one is a learning experience and an opportunity to kind of like develop some more tools in the toolbox. >> Totally.
2:29:35
Can you give us an update on harmonic?
2:29:37
>> I was about to ask Oh yeah.
2:29:39
Um so harmonic is building mathematical super intelligence >> and what that means is um we want to build something that can solve math problems at a level exceeding the best humans.
2:29:55
Um I I don't know if you guys were uh math people in your in your uh uh school days, but we actually recently >> I dro I dropped out of differential equations.
2:30:10
>> That's where I topped out.
2:30:12
>> Differential equations are are hard and very useful.
2:30:16
>> Um >> but uh yeah, we'll have machines doing them for us. So >> appreciate that.
2:30:21
Um yeah, essentially we uh developed a model called Aristotle that has gold medal level performance on the international mathematical olympiad which is a very difficult test.
2:30:35
Offthe-shelf AI models like >> GPT5 Gro bore all the things that you can use don't do well on this exam at all.
2:30:44
Um so this is one area where humans still do very very well relative to the AIs and the reason is when you have a a very difficult mathematics problem um it's not just like computing big numbers right it's you know logical difficult challenges that require a spark of genius and actually require you to take nine or 10 correct logical steps and and if you're an AI model that hallucinates if you get one of those wrong, the the result is is done.
2:31:16
So what you have to do is build a a very strong way to verify the output of of your AI model, which means that uh you have to control hallucinations and you have to make sure every uh line or piece of output uh follows logically from from what happens before it.
2:31:34
And we think that this is going to be a new paradigm in AI models.
2:31:39
And it's a little bit different than what everyone else is doing because uh nobody's really tackling the the verification problem.
2:31:46
And more and more of our software code is going to be written by AI.
2:31:50
And we're we're in a future already where the job of an advanced software engineer is no longer to write code, but it's to like review code that's written by AI.
2:32:00
And as that becomes more voluminous, you know, the humans reviewing it is both uh a very sad existence for our top software engineers, also impractical.
2:32:14
You're not going to review hundreds of pages of stuff.
2:32:18
So, Harmonic uh has figured out how to solve this problem.
2:32:20
I think the applications are beyond just math, but uh any domain where accuracy is critical from computer science.
2:32:30
Well, I'll give you I'll give you an example.
2:32:31
So, C-pilot, uh they've they've added uh the ability to add C-pilot to Excel, but then they had to add like a heavy disclaimer that basically said, don't rely on this.
2:32:44
Don't rely on copilot for anything important because we make mistakes and >> I think that hallucinates and all the calculations in them, right?
2:32:55
And uh yeah, I think I think it's a big problem not just for spreadsheets, but you know, think about control systems for autonomous vehicles and all of this safety critical code.
2:33:06
Uh in order for AI to be used to generate it, we need to solve this hallucination problem.
2:33:14
>> Did your team find problem six on the IMO as difficult as everyone else?
2:33:16
It was this combinatorics problem.
2:33:19
It seemed like everyone was struggling with it.
2:33:22
Um, are there any glimmers of hope for solving that or is it intractable?
2:33:28
Is it some sort of wall that we've run into? >> Yeah.
2:33:30
And what are your ambitions for next year with the IMO?
2:33:32
Are you guys going to take >> Go for the perfect score.
2:33:36
>> So, we we had uh we had proofs for five out of the six problems, formal formal proofs that didn't require humans to verify.
2:33:44
Y >> uh we did not solve number six even though I was really hoping that we would.
2:33:49
But yeah, it turns out that the solution to that problem was uh a tiling.
2:33:55
It was a tiling problem, but the solution was the exact tiling used uh at the at the floor of the Sunshine Coast airport in Queensland, Australia.
2:34:04
Which is where uh which which is where the IMO was held this year.
2:34:10
So, the human had an advantage.
2:34:13
They all walked through that airport.
2:34:16
They were given the answer. >> Interesting.
2:34:18
That's a fascinating piece of lore.
2:34:19
Thank you for sharing that. That was >> all right.
2:34:21
So, next year have a humanoid. Oh, yeah.
2:34:23
The humanoid >> all around the city of the location, scan that into the the context window.
2:34:30
The the the full IMO contestant experience uh context window is important.
2:34:35
>> Oh, ne next year for sure problem six and problems like that will will definitely uh will definitely be solved.
2:34:44
>> Yeah, >> the the pressurees the pressure will be on for you guys because it's the main it's the main thing.
2:34:47
you know, the other labs can be like, well, we we we do math, but we're really consumer. Yeah.
2:34:54
No, this is >> Well, I don't know.
2:34:55
I mean, once you have the gold medal, I guess the the perfect score is a is a is a big accomplishment, but I think our sights are a little bit higher.
2:35:05
>> I think we're interested in kind of two things.
2:35:07
One is solving a unsolved problem in science and mathematics and actually contributing to the state-of-the-art in one of these quantitative fields like the Remon hypothesis if you guys are familiar. >> Stokes same thing.
2:35:21
>> Yeah, if we could solve that.
2:35:21
Uh Navier Stokes is u I'm less excited about because I'm I'm more of a theorist.
2:35:29
>> But Remon hypothesis would be good. Yep.
2:35:31
>> Um, also just delivering this technology to individuals and corporations in a form that they could actually use.
2:35:37
So, >> I think there there's lots of things coming, but uh, another IMO gold medal maybe maybe isn't top of the list. >> Last question.
2:35:47
Have you uh have you did you give Terrence Tao a call to >> Harmon on this on the show?
2:35:54
>> We were like, who who should give him a maxed out contract?
2:35:56
Just uh, what are your thoughts?
2:36:00
So, I I don't know if you guys knew this about me, but I was a math PhD student at UCLA, and I actually went to UCLA to uh study under Professor Tao. >> I had no idea. That's amazing.
2:36:14
>> I I know I know him very very well. Yeah, >> that's great. Fantastic.
2:36:16
Well, yeah, some good outcomes there. >> Yeah, I was joking.
2:36:23
Seems like he does great stuff.
2:36:24
>> I had a non-traditional background starting harmonic. I got a math, Ph. a new parental at UCLA. That is fantastic.
2:36:32
Well, thank you so much for joining us. Great. Appreciate the updates.
2:36:33
We will talk to you soon.
2:36:35
Have a good rest of your day.
2:36:39
>> And we have Mark Cuban joining the stream.
2:36:41
Uh we invited him on after him and Jordy got in a little timeline in turmoil AI advertisements.
2:36:48
We have a lot more news on the front of AI ads.
2:36:50
We have more news on what Meta is doing with AI.
2:36:55
We have more news on what uh OpenAI is likely doing in the world of advertisements.
2:37:00
We're going to debate that.
2:37:03
>> Welcome to the stream. Mark, how are you doing? >> Good, guys. How y'all? >> We're doing great.
2:37:06
Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to meet you.
2:37:08
Uh where should we kick it off, Jordy?
2:37:10
Do you >> dive straight into the debate over artificial intelligence and advertising? Um sure.
2:37:17
>> Maybe you could set the stage for us.
2:37:19
What What set off your alarm bells?
2:37:19
What triggered your initial uh worry about this idea of ads in LLMs?
2:37:31
>> Because this isn't the internet, right?
2:37:33
It's not just a normal digital platform.
2:37:35
It's it it's a platform that depending on how it's trained, depending on what u pre-prompts you put in, it could be very manipulative.
2:37:45
>> And there's not really age limitations at all.
2:37:48
There's not really any limitations whatsoever.
2:37:50
And normally I'd be, let's just be lz fair, right?
2:37:52
The market is the market.
2:37:55
But you've already heard, you know, of stories of kids going down these rabbit holes and, you know, other people being told, you know, to kill themselves and you just you just don't know what can happen.
2:38:07
So if I if if I build a model and it becomes popular, even if it's only a niche model, right?
2:38:14
Just like there's headsp space and there's calm.
2:38:17
Let's just say I build the calm AI large language model and I have millions and millions of users and I want and I have an advertiser who sells Xanax or sells, you know, whatever, right?
2:38:31
And they're trying to get more sales and I need the money. Mhm.
2:38:38
>> I can easily easily train this thing to manipulate people into doing things we typically would not allow people to do. And that's my concern.
2:38:47
And so if we just want to put up, you know, um just little ad, traditional graphics, JPEG ads, all you know, put them into um the chat list on the left hand side. Great.
2:38:58
You can do all the display ads you want.
2:39:01
You could do video there all you want.
2:39:02
But if it's in the response that comes back from the model, boy, you're you're going to have lots of problems. >> Yeah.
2:39:10
I think I think Sam Alman said something to this effect, saying that uh artificial intelligence will be superhuman at persuasion before it is truly super intelligent.
2:39:18
It will be very good at convincing people. So it is reasonable.
2:39:22
What do you think of uh Sam Alman's uh latest commentary on how OpenAI might get into this world that the actual LLM interaction, the chat would not be uh would not be monetizable, but uh if you if it made a recommendation to buy a product and then you said, "Hey, I want you to go check out for me." It sends out, right? >> Referral fee. Is that okay?
2:39:48
>> Yeah, it's already doing it.
2:39:48
You know, it's this, you know, it's one thing to have the model itself convey and try to manipulate.
2:39:56
It's a whole another thing when there's a search query. Yeah. >> Right.
2:39:59
So, we get a lot of traffic from um um OpenAI Chat GPG for cost plusddrugs. com.
2:40:05
In fact, I've used it because sometimes if I want a price for one of our drugs and I I don't want to take the time to look at the latest price list, I'll just put in what's the price for, you know, Darren, whatever it may be. And um it's right there.
2:40:17
And so yeah, of course they can extend that, but response is a whole and models are are smart enough to know what the difference between a response to a query >> versus influencing and engaging in a chat.
2:40:36
>> I guess the question >> Yeah.
2:40:36
I mean, I think I I I think to to double down on what you're saying, an example, uh, if you're going from search, which is people coming in with a specific intent and and maybe doing some product research and you have ads and you have, you know, organic listings or or web pages, that's one thing.
2:40:52
But if if if uh various AI models are seen as trusted advisors, uh, if you compare that to a situation, if I ask John, what kind of car should I get?
2:41:04
And John starts giving me answers and saying uh like I think you should I really think you should get this car. It's really nice.
2:41:10
And then I buy it and then later I find out John was getting a 10% kickback.
2:41:14
I'm like >> I hopefully I like the car but if I didn't like what are you doing?
2:41:18
You know and this happens in a business context too.
2:41:22
You might you know people get in hot water all the time because they're taking referral.
2:41:26
Yeah, >> in this particular case it's really easy just like you know there's you know emoji for um sources or just says sources you could put a dollar sign just to show they're being compensated. >> Sure. Sure. Sure.
2:41:37
And do you think that needs to happen at like the FTC FCC level or are you do you think >> I don't know the legal aspect of it enough?
2:41:46
>> You know hopefully it's self enforced but you know there's going to be idiots and who don't self enforce and but particularly for medical stuff.
2:41:52
I mean, it's easier to talk to chat GPT about your own personal medical situation than it is to find a doctor to talk to sometimes.
2:42:01
>> But but does that call example you gave matter?
2:42:04
Because uh like I I I imagine that there'll be a power law outcome here.
2:42:08
And yes, I could set up a search engine that serves that serves ads and doesn't disclose that they're ads.
2:42:13
But how am I going to take market share from Google?
2:42:17
People are going to go to Google and Google does say when it's an ad.
2:42:18
And so like as long as the power law winner is a good actor, we kind of get >> there's also an interesting there's also an interesting thing where there's this self selfinforcing sort of positive effect which is if if people rely on chat GPT for example to help them do product research and buy the right products >> and you buy a bunch of bad products in a row because they're just pushing the the product that that they're getting paid the most.
2:42:44
Eventually I do think that consumers are smart enough to realize I'm not going to use this app anymore.
2:42:48
I I wouldn't agree with that, Jordy, because I think people are primed for misinformation these days.
2:42:53
You see it in healthcare continuously.
2:42:55
You know, you saw it with co vaccines, people on their deathbed saying, "I wish I had taken the vaccine, you know, and you see it now with, you know, um raw milk where now there's more people who have, you know, there's examples of people who have died and people just don't care." Yeah.
2:43:12
you know, they just go on and maybe they'll say, you know, chat GPT is woke, so I'm using right GPT. Yeah.
2:43:20
And that's because those are the kinds of answers I want >> because, you know, there are people who want to be influenced and want to be part of a group when it comes to the product decisions.
2:43:32
Just like we saw the anti-Bud light and that kind of builds and you see, you know, pro right-wing products.
2:43:39
I just don't know that it is an efficient market enough where people are going to take responsibility for just making a bad product choice and then going to another source.
2:43:49
There's just so much personal identity and how we use technology.
2:43:54
That's part of my concern.
2:43:57
>> How how worried would would you say you are about AI broadly?
2:44:00
I think over the last few months the industry has woken up to uh you know a year ago people were kind of laughing about AI safety right and and thinking about these fast takeoff scenarios.
2:44:13
Now I think people are kind of waking up and worried about the general well-being if you just give hundreds of millions of people you know unlimited access to these tools.
2:44:22
You know they are gonna that there there is going to be uh some effects.
2:44:26
Some people will be good some people will be bad but but what's your what's your high level read?
2:44:32
>> Well it's changed a lot.
2:44:32
We went from fear of the Terminator >> Yeah.
2:44:36
>> to fear of being influenced in ways we didn't expect because they're such good communicators. Right.
2:44:42
communicators. Right. We can't talk to other people or we feel you know shy or not open in communicating with other people experts or friends or otherwise but this is our best friend who never gives us a hard time and depending on
2:44:57
how it's programmed will compliment what a great question Jordy what a great >> that is that is a really interesting approach so there's a lot of things to be concerned with there particularly because AI is not smart >> yep >> right AI is just statistical right now. And I'm of the mindset that that's not
2:45:15
And I'm of the mindset that that's not going to change for a long time.
2:45:17
You know, one of the reasons that you don't see full self-driving cars that are just everybody using no matter what is because it's it's easy.
2:45:27
There's so many adversarial things that can happen to a car. Yeah.
2:45:32
>> You know, we have um Australian many Australian German Shepher or a million Australian Shepherd, right?
2:45:37
Tux and about six years old.
2:45:39
I trust Tux at an intersection to know when to cross before, you know, that he's never been to before >> before I trust a car.
2:45:47
And that's the whole point with AI because there just rules and laws and latencies that they that it can't account for.
2:46:00
>> It's all text, some graphics, some video, but it's always behind.
2:46:03
And then that's part one.
2:46:06
Part two, we're I think we're going to see a ground swell in how um intellectual property is dealt with.
2:46:13
A ground swell of change and how IP is dealt with because there was for a long time it's been publisher perish.
2:46:21
>> Get your stuff out there. Get it into journals.
2:46:23
Make it available so that you can present yourself as being an expert.
2:46:28
Well, the minute you do that right now, it's going to get absorbed into, you know, training data for these models and you've lost everything you've just created.
2:46:38
>> Well, what if I want to what if I'm taking the side of big raw milk and I want to and I want to get people and so I should just write as much as I can about >> that's what you're going to do, too.
2:46:46
>> You're people are going to use bots to try to influ to post things to try to influence like the um robots.
2:46:51
ext for AI, you know, for AI.
2:46:55
You can you can structure it in ways so you can set up sites where you can tell it exactly where to go, you know, tell it all why raw milk is amazing, right?
2:47:02
But the bigger point is AI doesn't understand death.
2:47:08
AI doesn't understand pain.
2:47:08
AI doesn't understand context.
2:47:12
AI doesn't know what happened two minutes ago.
2:47:14
It doesn't know that there was a plane crash as it's about to tell you or something happened, right?
2:47:19
AI can't tell you why that ball fell off the table unless you tell it, you know, this ball fell off the table, what happened next, right? It's just not smart.
2:47:28
And as long as it's not smart, it a can be influenced and b, you're just not going to know what it's going to do next because it can't it doesn't have judgment.
2:47:41
>> So, what would you tell the folks at OpenAI and the other foundation model labs on how to structure their business?
2:47:46
It feels like a firewall between there needs to be some sort of truth seeeking organization that's focused on on delivering the highest quality results and then on the flip side you have a monetization team.
2:47:59
>> No, I mean you can't check for quality. >> That's impossible.
2:48:02
>> Yeah, of course you can.
2:48:02
You like you can you can always like benchmark these things or just like vibe test them with the with the with the audience.
2:48:10
>> You know, Jordy was giving me I was giving Jordy online.
2:48:12
podcast are going to be completely different. Right?
2:48:16
Right? But what I what I'm saying is like is like Google Google does try and try and deliver the highest quality search results for a particular query and then separately they have an ad auction uh function that that adds as an ad platform and those two teams are
2:48:31
separate and so like if your age if your age is showing up as one of those like knowledge boxes on Google you can't just pay to have them change it like that's a separate business line and it's a separate team and they are separate products in the UI. I yes they exist on
2:48:45
products in the UI. I yes they exist on the same page but they're separate >> and that's fine right I mean >> to me the bigger questions are what's the value proposition for AI as we understand it today or at least as I
2:49:00
understand it today right I don't see AI getting smart >> I look at AI and I think it's the world's best library let me explain it another way yeah >> we all have that one friend that remembers everything >> Yep >> everything right What did we do that one day back in college? Remember when you
2:49:16
Remember when you know our one buddy, oh yeah, this is D. That's AI.
2:49:21
They'll it'll remember everything.
2:49:23
It'll give you the, you know, if you give it A, B, and C, it'll figure out D, E, and F, right?
2:49:27
But it doesn't even know XYZ exists, just like you're right.
2:49:32
So, it is just like the world's biggest library.
2:49:34
It is just like a meeting of of the minds of of just regurgitation.
2:49:41
And so knowing that then you you have to there's going to be so much competition between the models that is the biggest driver right now in terms of revenue generation right because >> there's not there'll be five six whatever it is foundational models before there's consolidation but beyond that there's going to be millions of models >> millions and millions of models and every brand is going to need a model
2:50:11
particularly like in healthcare like if you are Stanford medical right if you are Mayo Clinic if you're MD Anderson you're not going to just you know put out all your IP from the doctors and researchers and scientists you're paying so that chat GPT can absorb it and have the benefit of all that knowledge so it remembers everything that that all your doctors and scientists did. You're going
2:50:33
You're going to keep that to yourself.
2:50:35
And so in terms of the business models, these guys are going to have to start making decisions.
2:50:41
Are they start going to start paying a lot of money for content?
2:50:46
>> Because as much as they're investing in the technology, they've reached a lot of limits, right?
2:50:52
You don't you're not hearing about, wow, these guys are getting to do these new topics that I had no idea that they could cover.
2:50:59
>> They're paying for a ton of content to be clear.
2:51:00
I mean, they pay Reddit, they pay the New York Times, they pay all sorts of >> Yeah.
2:51:05
We had we had a group reach out wanting to buy our back catalog.
2:51:07
I was like I assumed you already scraped it.
2:51:12
>> But but think of it if you're I mean let's talk about it from the government perspective. Sure.
2:51:16
So they just cut all these NIH grants right all this stuff that presumably went and created new drugs which they have foundational research basic science >> all this research. >> Yep.
2:51:28
If the government really understood AI, they'd be like, "Okay, we're going to keep on investing in this research and then I'm going to make it available to the biggest bid, the highest bidder, whoever it >> privatize it. I like that.
2:51:43
Make some money off of it.
2:51:45
>> Not even privatizing it, but monetizing it. >> Monetizing it. I like this. This is good.
2:51:51
Make some money off of that nonprofit research because that's that's the way things are working right now, right?
2:51:56
And I don't and I don't have honestly I don't have a problem with that at all if it gets us more solutions >> but or doing our own you know the government doing its own model and making that available for a fee. >> Yeah.
2:52:09
>> Those are the decisions from a business perspective that all these models are going to have to make otherwise how do they keep on adding more training data because there's no way to synthesize all that You're not synthesizing.
2:52:20
You're not creating syn synthetic data that all of a sudden is going to, you know, you could tell, you give it all the backstory you want that you're a doctor, that you invented this, that you did that.
2:52:29
It ain't going to invent what the doctor and the scientists are going to invent. >> Yeah.
2:52:33
>> At any point during the AI hype cycle so far, did you think that this time might be different?
2:52:39
There was I would say a year ago the common a common line was this isn't like the internet bubble because there's real revenue.
2:52:47
You know these companies are ramping revenue to hundreds or billions of dollars of revenue very quickly. This is different. This time is different.
2:52:55
Meanwhile, uh and and I wouldn't lean on this too heavily, but MIT had a report this week saying that, you know, 95% of of Gen AI pilots in the enterprise are not turning into uh not creating real value.
2:53:06
I'm curious what your read has been.
2:53:11
>> I've been through every single technology, you know, event and evolution and this blows them all away. >> Mhm.
2:53:18
>> Now, how you implement it in business is a whole different issue.
2:53:21
Like literally, when I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value and having these guys going, "Well, son, I got this receptionist right there. I got that secretary.
2:53:35
I'm never going to need that ever." Right.
2:53:40
>> And but then you know my business then was helping them figure out how to implement it to give them an advantage.
2:53:46
>> They're going to be integrators that particularly young kids like when I'm telling my kids who are 15, 18, 21 or 19, 21 and kids going into school, what should I do? What should I do?
2:53:55
I'd be like >> AI research.
2:53:58
>> Learn all you can about AI but learn more on how to implement them in companies. Right.
2:54:04
Because to your point, companies don't understand how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage.
2:54:12
You got the head of Microsoft saying software is dead because everything's going to be customized to your unique utilization, right? Or use usage.
2:54:21
Who's going to do it for them?
2:54:23
Particularly small to medium-siz businesses.
2:54:24
There are 33 million companies in this country.
2:54:26
30 million of them are soloreneurs, right?
2:54:29
Um single person enterprises.
2:54:32
There are only, you know, there are millions of companies that have one, five, 10, 50, 100, 500 people that aren't going to have AI budgets, aren't going to have AI experts.
2:54:43
This is where kids getting hired coming out of college are really going to have a unique opportunity.
2:54:48
If you're spending your senior year in college right now, your senior year in high school even, whatever it is, your excess time, and you're learning the difference between Sora and VO, and you're learning how to do all this video, you're learning how to customize a model so that then you can then walk into a company and say, "I understand your business as a shoe company selling shoes at a retail store.
2:55:11
We're selling and selling shoes online.
2:55:13
Let me show you how to benefit you."
2:55:15
That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school because every single company needs that.
2:55:22
There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI and that's what people don't understand.
2:55:32
>> We hired two we hired two interns this summer at the end of the last school year because they just built products.
2:55:39
Instead of saying, "Hey, here's what I can do."
2:55:41
They just showed us they took a day and just built something. We said it day, right?
2:55:45
They went to chat GPT or >> perplex. >> Yeah. Yeah.
2:55:48
Well, the bear the bearcase John was joking about this though.
2:55:49
I thought this was interesting.
2:55:51
Uh we we we had one of our interns built this product. It's tbp. com/guest.
2:55:58
It's this guest directory transcript tool.
2:56:00
And he built it in a day, but then he had to spend the whole summer improving it.
2:56:04
So that was that was a bullcase for software engineers still having a job.
2:56:09
>> But you don't even have to be a software engineer, right?
2:56:10
You just have people are afraid to ask the models the right questions.
2:56:16
They're afraid to ask complex questions because they just presume that it can't they can't answer.
2:56:20
Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow-ups and their ability to prompt.
2:56:29
They have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees. Right.
2:56:35
>> So, I completely agree with this. Jobs for everybody.
2:56:37
This feels like a It feels like you're making the argument for putting ads in AI and keeping it free so that kids can have access to frontier models and then go and and explore, learn, implement things at businesses.
2:56:50
If all of a sudden you can't get in the game, you can't even interact with a cutting edge.
2:56:56
>> Well, Mark saying he's cool with display ads.
2:56:58
He's cool with a Laboo showing up in the sidebar. >> Yeah. On the side, chat. That's fine.
2:57:02
But think of it, you're Okay, there's a death war going on with the Frontier models. Yes. >> War. Yeah.
2:57:08
It's zero sum game in their minds. Not all will make it.
2:57:10
Some will get consolidated.
2:57:12
Maybe one goes out of business. Yeah. Right.
2:57:14
And so for the next however many years, however long, there used to be a time when Excel costs $499 >> to buy a spreadsheet.
2:57:24
Now, >> you know, not free, but like basically >> Google >> Yeah. Google Sheets, right? Google Docs, etc.
2:57:34
The basic models are always going to be free >> because of ads.
2:57:38
Like the reason Google Sheets is free is because of Google's ads business.
2:57:42
>> When was the last time you Google? >> No, you don't.
2:57:44
But but the reason that they can subsidize it is because they have this amazing ads business over here that throws off so much cash they don't care about monetizing it. >> Yeah.
2:57:51
But in the case I mean to to to uh to to take Mark's side here, I mean a subscription product also subsidizes a free product. >> Yes.
2:58:01
That that's exactly right.
2:58:01
So, you're going to have tears, right?
2:58:03
Free your college, your your kids version free.
2:58:06
And those those those versions are going to have more constraints >> because they know high school kids, you know, >> sevenyear-old kids are going to use them.
2:58:16
So, there'll be all kinds of limits built in. Yeah.
2:58:17
But then you get your $20 version and Jeff GPT is doing what$ 122 billion annualized and growing quickly. Yep. >> That's insane. Love, you know, lovable.
2:58:28
All these guys are just crushing it.
2:58:28
And like I I in I was the first investor in a company called Cynthsia which does you know talking avatars.
2:58:36
I don't know if you know these guys. >> Cool. >> Yeah. They're killing it. Killing it.
2:58:41
It's just up and to the right. >> Yep.
2:58:43
>> You start them off with it's just a whole premium model, right?
2:58:45
That's been around forever and I think that's going to happen.
2:58:49
But as you know we talked earlier about buying IP.
2:58:54
>> You'll see things go into different directions.
2:58:56
So you'll have a chat GPT/halthcare and if you want that it's an extra five bucks a month.
2:59:01
You'll see chat GPT programming or math or foreign lang dualingual version right and it might be an extra 50 cents a month or a dollar a month whatever it may be.
2:59:12
And then there'll be, you know, entrepreneur version and it'll have all the integrations into all the the states so that you just, you know, fill in these forms and you're incorporated wherever you want to be incorporated because all the agents will do all the work.
2:59:29
>> All that stuff you can upsell. Yeah.
2:59:32
>> And so, but if they're not using your model in high school, >> they ain't going to use it in college.
2:59:37
And if they ain't using it in college, when they go for that to that company, >> they're not going to use you.
2:59:42
Y >> and I think that is a big deal.
2:59:44
But I can't say it enough.
2:59:48
All these people, we're in a trans transition period right now for kids coming out of college, whether you have a computer science um degree or not.
2:59:58
But you're not trying to go to the big companies to get a computer science degree.
3:00:02
It's probably not the right way to go.
3:00:04
going to any other company who has no idea about AI but needs it in order to compete.
3:00:11
There'll be more jobs than than people for a long long time because there's only going to there's going to be two types of companies in this country in the world.
3:00:19
Those who are great at AI and everybody else >> and this is not AI is not intuitive.
3:00:26
You're not going to take a 40-year-old who's worked at a company for 15 years and say, "Go play with chat GPT and figure out how we can improve our our productivity and improve our processes."
3:00:37
Some people will put in the time to learn it, but it's not intuitive to pull all those pieces together and extend them with agents and have the agent start doing things and then, you know, writing software on lovable or whatever and having all that's going to be intuitive for for digital natives and Gen Z who are going through school and graduating with that.
3:00:56
That is going to be jobs left and right. >> For sure. >> Totally agree.
3:01:00
uh wanted to get your we were just on with Vlad from Robin Hood and he is he's super excited about getting uh everyday investors access to great private markets uh great companies in the private markets.
3:01:14
I wanted to get your general read on that.
3:01:16
You've obviously been part of Shark Tank for a long time.
3:01:20
>> Can you imagine if you were watching you could be like I want to invest.
3:01:22
That seems extremely long. >> Yeah.
3:01:24
And a lot of people have taken crack.
3:01:26
>> I'm sure people have pitched you this exact thing.
3:01:27
But I'm curious because because you obviously you you uh I can I can see you being Yeah, it's great when company when if retail can get into the next Figma, but there's, you know, not making a lot of, >> right?
3:01:41
>> I' I've been anti- um not sweat equity um crowdfunding, right?
3:01:45
Crowd equity programs against it because there's no liquidity.
3:01:50
>> People love a company, the next Figma, and they put in their life savings because they know Figma is going to the moon, baby.
3:01:56
and they can't they can't get out. >> Yeah. >> And they got to wait. That's the problem.
3:02:02
Y >> and so that's part one to the problem.
3:02:05
Part two and more of a system systemic problem.
3:02:08
There's just not enough IPOs.
3:02:08
I mean it's like watching some of these IPOs.
3:02:13
They're like meme coins now. >> Bam.
3:02:15
They take off and then it's musical chairs to see who can get out the last but first, right? >> Yep.
3:02:22
>> And if you don't get out first or at near the beginning, you're getting crushed, you know.
3:02:25
And so is there a way whether it's tokenization or other approaches to that? Probably.
3:02:31
But it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker. Yeah.
3:02:42
>> If Vlad or whoever is a market maker so that there's always some liquidity within X percentage of the last trade, >> great.
3:02:50
then everybody can do it and everybody's protected to a certain extent as long as they're not doing deals where the people are just out and out lying, right?
3:02:57
Or misrepresenting it, at which point hopefully the CFTC or the um SEC, whoever happens to end up in charge.
3:03:05
>> It's not enough just to bring access, you also have to bring liquidity.
3:03:07
Uh last question, if Donald Trump runs for a third term, will you run for president?
3:03:14
I mean, it's easy to say yes right now, but it's that's the probably the only thing that could make me really reconsider because otherwise I'm not I don't want to do that It's not my not my dream to be president.
3:03:25
I'd rather argue with you guys about my dream when you come back on the show.
3:03:29
You'll be too busy if you're in the White House.
3:03:32
>> Last last question from me.
3:03:32
Are you excited about the the the the American taxpayer potentially taking a position in intel? >> Oh, interesting. You know what?
3:03:40
It's a great question, Jordy.
3:03:42
So, >> you're sounding you're sounding like an AI.
3:03:46
You're sounding like an AI.
3:03:47
>> Yeah, you sound like an AI. >> You know what? That's a great question.
3:03:50
What you don't know is I have Chat GPT listening. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's running clearly. He's running clearly.
3:03:57
>> It is a progressive dream.
3:03:57
This is the Bernie Sanders dream. The AOC dream.
3:04:04
because and I'm not saying I agree with it, but if you think about it, >> yeah, it's asking for equity and taking value from the billionaires before it even makes them billionaires or goes to the billionaires.
3:04:17
So, when you take 10% of Intel, and first let me add, the fact that it's a grant that they're converting, I think is awful because it was meant to be a grant and that was the deal the United States of America made and now we're going back on the paper that we signed as a country. I think that's bad.
3:04:33
But generally, if this was okay, we'll put in more money in order to take and we want 10% of Intel, obviously, they can say yes or no, just like Nvidia and AMD had the option to say yes or no on the H20 chips.
3:04:45
Just like material, whatever MP um had the option. >> Yeah.
3:04:53
>> Politician politicians have gotten so good at trading stocks.
3:04:54
Maybe we want them maybe we want them running our our federal No, you don't. time. Yeah.
3:04:59
But if you're going to generate if I if I was running right and I would say Donald Trump did the same thing, he got this one right now.
3:05:09
The only question is will he do it at the right time?
3:05:13
>> Because would you I rather take more money from taxpayers, the average person who might need to pay more or even the the billionaires, the oligarchs according to Bernie, would I jack up their tax rates to 30 from 39 37 to 39 or 41 or can I just take it this way? Right.
3:05:31
Take it before it even gets to them.
3:05:33
That's a progressive dream.
3:05:33
I don't understand why AOC and Bernie aren't shouting to the rooftops and Elizabeth Warren. Yes. Yes. Yes.
3:05:40
And make, you know, make Donald Trump's head spin around in circles along with every other supporter because those guys >> if they got excited about it, he might reverse course.
3:05:52
>> Well, of course, that's why they're being quiet because they don't want him to reverse course. This is 40.
3:05:56
>> Maybe you're ahead of chess on both sides of the aisle.
3:05:59
>> Everyone's playing chess.
3:05:59
But don't you guys agree?
3:06:01
Isn't it just like a progressive dream? >> Yeah.
3:06:05
>> Like, and you know, so tariffs, which is just like the greatest sales pitch in the history of sales pitches, when you can convince 30 plus percent of people in this country, that that tax that they're paying with increased prices isn't a tax.
3:06:19
Somebody else is paying it.
3:06:22
Amazing sales job, right?
3:06:22
So now that's $360 billion towards the deficit and everything.
3:06:27
And if you can start doing these other deals that aren't pigish, right, meaning they're they're fair to the companies that are involved and they're not across the board like tariffs and start banging down on the deficit in the way that is the ultimate progressive approach.
3:06:41
He's turned into Bernie Sanders. >> Yep.
3:06:46
>> He literally has, you know, only a better salesperson.
3:06:50
>> Uh, you're great at this.
3:06:50
This is >> I mean I I give him credit though.
3:06:52
I'm not knocking him, right?
3:06:54
I am giving Donald Trump all his flowers because he is he is doing things in a way that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out to have done themselves. >> Yep. >> This is great.
3:07:08
Thank you so much for joining.
3:07:10
We'll have to do this again soon.
3:07:12
>> Yeah, we got to do this again soon.
3:07:12
We got to find a new uh new topic to argue about, but this was fantastic. >> Healthare. Let's go. Healthcare.
3:07:15
I got Wait till you hear my with healthare. >> Okay. Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. Healthare debate soon. Well, we'll email you. I'll see you soon. Have a good night.
3:07:24
Thank you so much for joining. Appreciate it. Talk to you soon.
3:07:27
>> Uh up next, we've been keeping and waiting.
3:07:28
We got Quaser Ununas from Clyde.
3:07:30
Uh welcome to the studio. Do we have him?
3:07:34
I want to ring the gong preemptively.
3:07:35
I don't even know if we have news, but I'm just excited for what he's up to. >> Oh, there he is.
3:07:41
>> We haven't talked to you since DC.
3:07:41
We talked to you at Hillen Valley. How you been?
3:07:45
What's new in your world?
3:07:47
>> Sorry to keep you waiting.
3:07:47
We had to >> in my world.
3:07:51
Hill Valley seems Helen Valley seems like a lifetime ago. >> It really was.
3:07:54
There's been like four other iconic DC tech crossover events.
3:07:56
I have yet to make the to many of them, but uh uh it was a fun time and we appreciate >> Hill Valley is the only one that's uh that's worth uh that's worth it.
3:08:06
So, so I think that's fine.
3:08:09
>> I mean, it used to be a dinner, now it's an organization that throws like some of the biggest and most impactful events.
3:08:15
It's a fantastic crew over there. Uh shout out to them.
3:08:17
Um but anyway, this isn't about Helen Valley.
3:08:19
This is about >> This is about you.
3:08:22
>> Welcome to the stream. How you doing? >> I'm doing great. I'm doing great.
3:08:24
Uh I, you know, following up Mark Cuban, I couldn't really watch the the thing.
3:08:28
I I don't know this going to be This is the This is the you know, the slow let down to the end of the day.
3:08:34
No, no, we got Yeah, we're working on being able to feed back the show to you so you can watch it while you're in the waiting room, but uh we're we're sorry to keep you waiting, but give us the update.
3:08:43
Uh and and I mean maybe for those who are are new and maybe hopped on during the uh the Mark Cuban segment uh if you could introduce yourself and the company briefly and then go into the news that'd be great.
3:08:54
>> Yeah, for everybody uh who who's who's not in the Bay Area ecosystem uh my name is Pastor Eunice.
3:08:58
My uh uh and the company is called Applied Intuition.
3:09:01
Uh we are a late stage company.
3:09:03
Uh we earlier this year raised a a series F if I got my numbers correct.
3:09:09
uh led by Black Rockck and KP at 15 billion.
3:09:12
The company is uh broadly uh there's a couple unique things about the company.
3:09:19
One is we've been historically uh profitable uh which is super rare. Uh we've preserved 100%. Yeah.
3:09:24
That that word that pro word probably doesn't get thrown around a lot with AI companies. >> No, no.
3:09:31
We talked to a lot of folks with high revenues.
3:09:32
Uh gross margins not there yet.
3:09:35
Hoping on some very low very low gross margina you want.
3:09:38
I and you know you can never be bragging about any of this stuff because you know it creates great fodder for when you fall.
3:09:47
It's like look at but like you know >> every every bull cycle I think like maybe I should start playing around with hubris.
3:09:54
Maybe this time is different.
3:09:54
I think hubris it might be fun to experiment with but >> never it it just never it never works. It never works.
3:10:02
It never works. the the but the three things that you want in a in a late stage company is you know uh things like profitability but you also want high gross margins and you want high growth y >> and uh we we've been fortunate we got triple digit growth for basically the
3:10:16
history of the company and then uh and high gross margins but that's the finance side for all the people who are like engineers or technical people watching um we're a AI company that focuses specifically on vehicles so the broad category we talk about is vehicle intelligence uh it would be a subpart of
3:10:30
physical AI sometimes you know you might hear Jensen or somebody talk about that this is I think the most pragmatic and real part of physical AI right now humanoids I think will come for sure but uh but in terms of like monetization it's cars trucks tanks that's the business that we're in and we bring AI
3:10:48
to those systems so uh it's it's in a bunch of different we have dozens of products and all this stuff you know I won't get into it but >> yeah take me through the the the market structure because you have uh Whimo no consumer product whatsoever you have Tesla vertical ally integrated. I they I
3:11:01
I they I mean they had a mobile eye deal a while ago.
3:11:05
I don't even know if they have mobile eye anymore.
3:11:06
Uh pretty much vertically integrated. Uh I I drive a Cadillac.
3:11:11
It's a a product of Kyle vote over at Cruz. They bought Cruise.
3:11:14
They were thinking about getting into the self-driving taxi market.
3:11:17
They kind of pulled back from that, but they have Super Cruise. Pretty great system.
3:11:20
Um and then you got George Hots with Kama, the the bolt-on, but what is the shape?
3:11:26
All the OEMs, they need a play here.
3:11:26
How how is this going to play out in kind of the the the the vehicles that most people see?
3:11:33
We can go into the defense side later, but just in terms of like what the average American >> summary, they're coming for it.
3:11:37
They're coming for it all. >> Yeah.
3:11:39
I mean, you just said it like like uh GM's been a long customer of ours that that that you're using is built on our tools.
3:11:46
So, our our business our business is one where we are a supplier to the broad ecosystem. Sure.
3:11:53
So, of the of the top 20 global automotive OEMs, uh we say 18 out of the 20 use our tools, but in really honestly, everybody does.
3:12:01
Uh and so that's our play.
3:12:04
We are we're we're like the >> you know, I don't want to use the the like it's a very it's a very like risky analogy, but we're the arms dealer in this ecosystem. >> Okay. Yeah.
3:12:14
give me a little bit more context and shape of like what what what the product you're actually vending in is because there are physical cameras that need to go on cars if you're going to do an an a self-driving system.
3:12:23
Uh there's also some sort of foundation model I imagine that gets trained on a lot of data.
3:12:30
There's data aggregation.
3:12:32
all sorts of uh you know uh some part is going to be in C++ the other is going to be in ML like are you doing an end toend system like like what's the shape of the product and how much is like solutions versus uh just like the the the packaged up software >> yeah so uh historically the what we
3:12:49
announced yesterday and why why we're talking is historically we've been a tools manufacturer we've as in we give engineer we make tools that engineers use to build these systems >> the companies you know you're talking about then we got an operating system. We still do. That's a huge part of We still do.
3:13:02
That's a huge part of business.
3:13:03
But while ago, we got into autonomy, but we got into autonomy directly, like literally making the autonomous systems.
3:13:08
That's in in your words, that's the algorithms, the models that run the vehicles.
3:13:14
>> We've been in it for defense.
3:13:14
We've been in it for commercial trucking. We do L4 trucking.
3:13:18
You know, we're we're running driverless trucks right now in in Japan as an example.
3:13:23
So, we're already doing that.
3:13:24
What we announced yesterday is an L2 plus system for automotive. Okay.
3:13:26
So it's specifically it's kind of like you know the the average person would know Tesla FSD. Yep.
3:13:35
>> It's like that except it's one that you can buy from us.
3:13:37
Y >> and so where we fit in the ecosystem is we're we're we're like so I come from the car business.
3:13:43
So I went undergrad to the General Motors Institute.
3:13:45
I used to work at Cadillac in the Cadillac building as an example.
3:13:48
So >> you're John's hero.
3:13:50
You're you're John's hero. I love it. I love it. >> Yeah.
3:13:53
The car the car business is an awesome business by the way.
3:13:54
If you ever want to just nerd out in the car business, we can.
3:13:56
It's going through lots of changes.
3:13:58
But one thing to understand the industry structure of the car business is historically the car business one was kind of like defense where you would procure all this technology as an OEM from other parties.
3:14:08
>> What's changed now is OEMs are like Tesla has shown you can actually verticalize do a lot of this stuff yourself and you kind of need to do it because these systems are way more integrated with each other.
3:14:17
It used to be you could bolt on a mobiliz system and then that would give you lane keep and adaptive cruise.
3:14:24
But when these systems are much much more sophisticated and they're they're working with the other functions within a vehicle, you need like a white box solution.
3:14:30
And so our our SDS product is a white box solution.
3:14:36
And what I mean by that is, you know, access the source code agnostic to the silicon.
3:14:42
>> So if you're if you're buying, you know, like like an Nvidia system or if you're buying a Qualcomm system, you're going to use Nvidia and Qualcomm chips.
3:14:46
So we being just a software supplier, we can ride on different silicon.
3:14:51
And then on the other end where you're talking about sensors, each company has a different sensor strategy, but the broad summary of passenger the car business is it's a cost business.
3:15:02
And so all of the all the OEMs basically want to have the cheapest sensor suite they possibly can.
3:15:06
Like even more fundamental question, why can't we get all the Whimos tech into the passenger vehicle?
3:15:12
It's because all the way to the compute that's being used, it's just very expensive.
3:15:15
And so another like feature quote unquote of our self-driving system is it's embedded which is another way of saying it runs on automotive grade silicon which is cheaper and has all these other things that you need for automotive grade uh products.
3:15:30
>> How are the OEMs reacting to the the latest version of Apple CarPlay?
3:15:33
I saw it roll out in an Aston Martin SUV.
3:15:36
From a consumer perspective, it seems awesome.
3:15:40
The new CarPlay takes over all the dash.
3:15:42
So even the volume control will be handled by CarPlay.
3:15:45
But it feels like if you're an OEM, you're kind of giving away.
3:15:49
You're letting the fox in the hen house potentially.
3:15:50
But what's the reaction been?
3:15:53
And then what does that mean for your business basically? >> Yeah, I think so.
3:15:56
So so let's kind of gear shift your that's that you know we go go from autonomy to now just let's say the inc cabin software experience for us.
3:16:05
We call that business line vehicle OS.
3:16:07
It's it's something that that we build and sell.
3:16:08
Um the the punch line there is the issue with CarPlay is if you're a Mercedes and you're in in your experience is the same as a Chevy Bolt which is the same as let's say Aston Martin.
3:16:22
>> You know OEMs are really good at two things that they're really the heart of their business is two things have to get bright and if they get it wrong they ultimately end up going bankrupt.
3:16:28
The first one is just managing the cost side of the business supply chain getting all the suppliers wrangled.
3:16:33
So they put all the parts in a factory to because a factory is this big fixed cost and it pops out at a certain rate.
3:16:39
The economy actually moves up and down at pretty significant you know consumer carb sales and consumer index are very very connected.
3:16:47
So all the global OEMs are extremely good at forecasting what they need to build where and when years in advance.
3:16:54
The other thing that they have to do very well is brand management and and what like more fundamental question what's a brand like fundamentally what what's a Mercedes brand?
3:17:02
It's the collection of experiences you've had. >> Yep.
3:17:06
>> That's what a brand is.
3:17:06
And so if the collection of experiences you've had is with Apple CarPlay that does actually degrade your brand.
3:17:12
And so the OEMs are extremely sensitive.
3:17:14
I mean I think >> maybe a controversial thing to say.
3:17:18
I think we've seen car peak CarPlay and peak Android Auto has already happened.
3:17:23
Um I mean multiple OEMs have gone out and said that they're not going to do CarPlay in the future.
3:17:27
They're not going to do Android Auto in the future.
3:17:28
And by the way, Tesla doesn't do CarPlay and Android Auto.
3:17:32
the emergent emergence, you know, the Lucids, the Rivians, they're all they're all similarly.
3:17:36
They they build their own user experience.
3:17:40
So, I think that's a tough business to be in.
3:17:42
Now, if you're Google or if you're Apple, your your consumer brand has to be in that interface.
3:17:46
If you're applied intuition, it doesn't.
3:17:48
We're we're a B2B software supplier.
3:17:50
So, we can make the same thing that CarPlay and Android Auto do, except we can do it in a again white box.
3:17:56
And I view the self-driving system much more like seat belts or >> airbags where all I care if I'm driving a Mercedes or Cadillac is that I survive and I'm and I'm safe and and I and I people talk a little bit about the driving style of a self-driving system in a Bentley might be a little bit different than in a Chevy.
3:18:15
But in general, I feel like it's something where I'm very I would I would make the selection based on the benchmarks like how what are the incidents per vehicle miles traveled?
3:18:24
Anyone is h how do you see the autonomous uh driving uh >> uh landscape evolving over the next few years?
3:18:33
A lot of people talk about this like two-horse race and Tesla, but using the arms dealer analogy, it's like Tesla and Whimo are nuclear war and you come and you're like, "Hey, I I'll give everybody nuclear weapons."
3:18:46
Is that is that >> Listen Listen, this is not the time to make jokes about my Pakistani heritage.
3:18:55
>> Yeah, we we'll skip that.
3:18:55
But but is that is that is that really your play here is basically leveling the playing field? >> Yeah, absolutely.
3:19:02
And and I I would take issue with a two two horse race.
3:19:04
I mean, you got to remember, >> well, it's more so I'm talking about that in the context of, oh, you're gonna be able to just like, you know, why would I buy a test something other than a Tesla if I could rent out my Tesla when I'm not using it?
3:19:19
There's a section of the market that's excited about that. Yeah.
3:19:22
But I can imagine >> I think that that future is to be determined, right?
3:19:26
Um, and so let me let me answer the f there's many and this is such a vast area.
3:19:32
We I'm sure we could spend hours on it, but let me tackle each of those individual points first.
3:19:36
For the first one is, is it a two- horse race? Absolutely not.
3:19:38
I mean, you talked about super cruise just earlier.
3:19:40
Every manufacturer globally is absolutely building some version of an Al2 plus system or working with a partner like us.
3:19:48
There's without exception, the smallest manufacturers that you know are doing that.
3:19:52
The a good petri dish of you seeing how this will un unravel is China.
3:19:58
China is this kind of like walledoff ecosystem separate in the automotive industry and you there is no dynamic that says a winner take all will be effective and I I'll I'll do the 10-second pitch on why I think an SDS from us would be better.
3:20:12
We're taking data from all geographies from many manufacturers and not only that from many vehicle types like off-road defense etc.
3:20:20
and our models therefore are just will be and already proving to be more performant.
3:20:24
So there you could have an an you know you could have a pretty plausible technical view that actually the two legs are are maybe the early entrance but when everything becomes autonomous it's going to be a and there's just no there's just no win or take all dynamics there.
3:20:38
There's no winner take all dynamics there.
3:20:40
Uh and then and then in terms of like uh the the the broader what happens with autonomy next 5 to 10 years like this is the this is the autonomy moment.
3:20:49
the this is the autonomy moment. It's happening now and we're you know when you're in the Bay Area you kind of live just maybe it used to you know Paul Graham used to say 6 months into the future maybe we live 3 months in the future maybe but you do live a little in the future and you hang around in any
3:21:04
street corner on San Francisco you'll see Whimos after Whimo after Whimo and then you'll start using them and you see them eating at Uber's uh you know market share in terms of right so like that's absolutely going to happen pass and what that's doing is it's getting the public used to this concept of self-driving We in the tech industry are very comfortable with it. A lot of us are
3:21:23
A lot of us are Tesla owners. A lot of us use FSD.
3:21:24
So we're comfortable with it. You go to Michigan. I'm from Detroit. You go to Detroit.
3:21:31
People don't know any of this stuff.
3:21:31
And the forget and Detroit's a car town. You go to Tulsa.
3:21:35
You go to, you know, Dallas.
3:21:38
It's just not what people are talking about.
3:21:39
So I think that in the next 5 to 10 years is the general availability of autonomy.
3:21:44
And so if you want to use a good analogy, mobile, we're in like 2008, 2009.
3:21:52
If you're in the Bay Area, you saw that the iPhone is coming.
3:21:54
People talk about people talk about Whimos, but most people.
3:21:57
So when does mobile really hit?
3:22:01
>> Well, mobile kind of hits in like, you could say it hits when WhatsApp or maybe Uber or maybe Instagram.
3:22:04
Like Instagram you can't even think of before mobile and it requires an app store and requires a front-facing camera.
3:22:12
>> So like when will that self-driving moment happen?
3:22:13
It's happening now, but I think I think the next two to five years I'm not just saying I'm not just pitching my book by the way.
3:22:19
I like believe this like I think the next two to five years without driving it's it's going to be massive.
3:22:24
It's like the a it's like the area of AI that everyone I think it's just because it's not you know the hype happened 10 years ago.
3:22:29
know the hype happened 10 years ago. So everyone wants to talk about LLMs and they want to talk about humanoids but it's like this is the thing where it's you know when we started the company reason we're called applied intuition by the way is we want to be on the applied side of this technology >> you can spend many years on the research
3:22:46
side and if >> subtle dig in the name >> yeah like SDS the reason but people ask us like especially engineers who you know are working uh interviewing with us they're like well why don't you get into like this space like four years ago number one transformer former boom, you know, and the change hadn't like the technology just wasn't very good. But
3:23:03
technology just wasn't very good. But also now if you get into it too late then the like timing is a really really important thing and I think like we always wanted to see hey when are we exiting the research phase of self-driving and when are we entering and the applied phase just to be very
3:23:17
direct for folks who are not is it when it becomes an engineering problem and now the engineering problem is just about cost cost cost >> like you guys are not asking me is self-driving real like that conversation in 2015 that's maybe the first question is like >> is this like a real thing I know it's real. I want to know when will
3:23:34
I want to know when will self-driving be available in a Koigseg?
3:23:38
When will it be in the next?
3:23:40
When will it be in the next McLaren?
3:23:42
Because this is San Francisco lives in the future.
3:23:45
Everyone there is already driving P1's Mustang GTS.
3:23:49
You got to get these into the general.
3:23:51
You're talking about >> for the people who don't know Koig Ziggs are which like by the way they make like six a year, right?
3:23:56
Like the these cars aren't even crash tested.
3:23:59
They're so they're so infrequent.
3:24:01
Ferrari more of a mass mass car.
3:24:04
>> Well, >> I think it'll be a while, but >> I'm challenging you.
3:24:06
Sell your product to coding. Get it in a coding.
3:24:10
>> I'm throwing down the gauntlet.
3:24:12
>> We we we have, you know, we have a large and public relationship with Porsche.
3:24:15
They're big shareholders of ours as well.
3:24:17
Um, never, you know, we we deal, like I said, with all the OEMs.
3:24:20
We never want to expose any particular strategy.
3:24:21
But >> if you if you think about it, if you're from a buyer perspective, if you're looking at a Tesla Model S, what's the other thing you look at? You look at takeon. >> Sure. >> And a lot of time.
3:24:32
So like I think even the more exotic companies that are focused on driving dynamics, you have to think about this technology of good UX in the cabin and safety systems that prevent, you know, you from getting injured.
3:24:47
I think will be like table stakes.
3:24:49
By the way, AE like the re another like a subtle revolution that's happened in the car business that people don't talk about is the automatic emergency braking stuff. now coming in.
3:24:59
>> It's it's it's like statistically making an improvement in like pass pedestrian deaths like that's wild like things that often can talk about.
3:25:06
So I think even in the highest end stuff right now everyone talks about EPA and emissions stuff.
3:25:10
I think in 2035 and going forward it'll all be just like hey why are we still having deaths? >> Yeah.
3:25:17
like and and then and then that's the clone exit question will come up is like hey it should be aware enough it doesn't have to drive but it should be aware enough to take over from the driver when something really bad is about to happen.
3:25:28
Well, thank you for last question. Just curious.
3:25:31
We're we're way >> we're keeping a series E company waiting.
3:25:34
Just to talk about I was gonna say uh when uh how do you think about you know financing the business in the future?
3:25:42
Uh it feels like I'm sure I'm sure many many spa uh spa uh sponsors would be begging but you I imagine we'll take the more traditional path.
3:25:51
How do you think about, you know?
3:25:54
>> Yeah, we we've uh we've preserved 100% of the capital we've ever raised in the company's >> almost taken.
3:26:00
>> So, uh so I stack is >> Hit that gong, John. Hit thatong. >> Yeah. Yeah.
3:26:07
For the for the for the finance folks at home, they know what that actually mean.
3:26:10
That that is that is no easy feat.
3:26:14
>> So, no spack is not I can there's many things that I'm speculative about.
3:26:17
Spack is definitely what I can tell you affirmatively we wouldn't do.
3:26:19
Um I think you know we fall into the very I mean there it's not random that Fidelity and Blackstone and you know Franklin Templeton are investors in the company.
3:26:28
I think in that way we're very traditional in the way we're not traditional is we're a very hard tech company.
3:26:32
I mean the stuff we build there's virtually no other companies that that do it.
3:26:35
So yeah the future I think the future is good >> you know how are we going to spend the money?
3:26:40
I mean or how do we think about capital allocation?
3:26:41
Um I'm all of our values the company's values can be reduced to radical pragmatism. Mhm.
3:26:48
>> If we had to if we had to raise a billion dollars to get into some specific technical area or fight that we think is worth fighting for, we'd do it.
3:26:55
>> Like it's like pretty pretty straightforward. >> It's fantastic. Well, congratulations.
3:26:59
>> Always great to talk about.
3:26:59
That was that was >> I know. I know.
3:27:02
Well, just hop on next week.
3:27:04
Yeah, we we could talk for hours. This is awesome. Uh thank you so much.
3:27:09
Have a great rest of your day.
3:27:10
>> We'll talk to you soon.
3:27:11
>> Uh we have been keeping Elise AI waiting, but we will let them in from the reream waiting room.
3:27:15
Some big announcements today.
3:27:18
Good thing we warmed up the gong because we got a big deal coming into the TVPN Ultradome from the reream waiting room. Um, hello. How are you doing?
3:27:32
>> So sorry to keep you waiting.
3:27:33
>> Sorry to keep you waiting >> on your big day. >> I was tuning in. I was learning stuff.
3:27:36
>> The previous guest was talking about cars and we went down a whole rabbit hole. It happens.
3:27:39
Um, but thank you so much for taking the time.
3:27:41
Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the company? Yeah, absolutely.
3:27:45
Um, I'm Mina Song and I'm the co-found one of the co-founders and the CEO of a company called Elise AI.
3:27:52
And Elise AI is built is a company in based in New York City.
3:27:56
We build AI agents that automate the entire customer journey for two verticals, the housing industry and the healthcare industry.
3:28:06
And um, we've we just raised our series E today. So that's excited. Uh, yeah. >> How much?
3:28:12
Yeah, we raised a 250 $250 million. >> There we go. >> Congratulations.
3:28:19
>> Can you give us uh can you give us a quick history of the company?
3:28:21
We heard from a friend uh what uh he gave us a general read on your revenue ramp and it was pretty mind-blowing.
3:28:30
So I I would love to kind kind of get the the quick history of the company since this is the first time >> overnight success. >> Yeah. >> Yes. Just started yesterday. Vibe coded too.
3:28:42
say um no we uh yeah we've we've we started 2017 started with my co-founder Tony um who's the CTO we met in college studied um computer science both software engineering backgrounds um I went to MIT he went to University of Cambridge but we after college shortly after college
3:29:02
we wanted to um build a company build technology for industries that serve fundamental human needs and that gave us this idea that we wanted to um we wanted to go into housing and housing is our largest expense as humans and we thought um it seemed like it had limited technology as an industry. We didn't
3:29:19
We didn't really know too much about it but felt like a good place for two technologists to start investigating.
3:29:25
So I when we got started I took a job working at a real estate firm in Manhattan and um that was just sort of a research opportunity.
3:29:34
I got to I worked at the front desk.
3:29:35
I answered all the phone calls. I greeted everyone.
3:29:40
everyone. answered all the emails and um was just really listening for what is the biggest bottleneck that exists that we can start chipping away at and it was very clear that was communication and so we were actually a conversational AI startup right from the very beginning
3:29:56
versus I think a lot of the companies that you know are adding on AI right now um it's been >> pretty obvious if you've been doing it for a long time that there's a lot of value and um a couple years ago >> how long did you last at that job by the way your research your paid research opportunity. >> It was like it was like a good three
3:30:11
>> It was like it was like a good three months.
3:30:13
So, um it was it was quite fun. I enjoyed it a lot. >> That is a wild start.
3:30:20
>> Uh how how important is it to the company to be seen as like an AI agent pure play?
3:30:26
Uh I like it feels like a lot of companies that are doing that are really really successful or really adding a lot of value are actually not just picking the hottest tools off the shelf but they also have a lot of traditional software and like SAS.
3:30:38
Um some are bolting on AI tooling but others are kind of offering elements of both whether it's traditional dashboarding or just uh traditional you know uh business logic and workflows like how has the business grown? What's the shape of it? What's demand like?
3:30:55
Um is it is it are our are customers receptive to something that is purely non-deterministic?
3:31:06
Yeah, I mean a big part of what we work on is to make sure that it's providing enterprisegrade reliability to our customers in housing and healthcare to you know highly regulated industries to just really >> consequential decisions for if we make mistakes it's a big deal for our customers right and for their customers their their consumers.
3:31:26
So um we we focus a lot on making sure it is um you know it is it is stable and it is reliable for for them. >> Yeah.
3:31:36
>> Um but yeah it's a mix of I mean you have to you know AI is a is a really powerful tool.
3:31:41
It's a new type of computer really and you can solve problems with that but also traditional software and other things that you you need are are also important in solving a problem.
3:31:52
I think what's sort of different about what we build, we're not a we're a vertical AI company, right?
3:31:58
We're not a horizontal AI.
3:31:58
Horizontal being, you know, you can >> um solve one sliver of a problem for a bunch of different industries, but our approach is we we sort of go 10 layers deep into every problem and um that way we can actually solve that problem and end. So it's very different.
3:32:15
So let's say in in housing um you are um you are saying that you have you're a broken sync right?
3:32:26
It's very different when an AI might be able you know a large language model might be able to say hey thanks for letting me know I'll submit a ticket for you and maybe it does that for us um our AI is actually doing a bunch of things.
3:32:38
It's understanding how that resolution should uh how how that issue should be resolved.
3:32:43
it's coordinating all the the workforce and all the resources, the systems, the compliance to get that ultimate issue resolved or um there's things that we do that are not just pure sort of conversational AI pieces, but we work in the physical world.
3:32:59
So, we have to actually unlock these things called doors and allow people to go and get into the building.
3:33:06
So, we have to do things like hardware integrations and um you you can't avoid doing that if you actually want to solve the whole problem. >> Yeah.
3:33:12
On the integration side, uh what's working on the marketing side?
3:33:14
Is are there channel partners or platforms that you can plug into to accelerate growth?
3:33:21
Is it just a ton of SDRs?
3:33:21
Is there a viral component to this?
3:33:23
Like what's accelerating the growth other than just the product delivering value? >> Yeah.
3:33:30
Um, yeah, we work in particularly non-technical industries.
3:33:34
So, it's not really there's not a great um market for PE people that are just naturally searching for the latest.
3:33:43
>> It's not like an app store that you can go viral on and then all of a sudden you're the number one enterprise app in in uh property management. >> Yes.
3:33:51
I I wish it is blood, sweat, and tears. We have outbound sales. Sure.
3:33:54
Um but we do have a lot of partners.
3:33:56
Um >> AI is actually a great vehicle for delivering a lot of the other products that exist in the industry.
3:34:05
So historically if you needed um if you let's say you were a marketing software for housing providers or you were um or you have some other tech uh you have insurance or something like that.
3:34:18
you needed to train a human agent, a leasing agent or a property manager to make sure that got that that marketing content got distributed.
3:34:28
And that's another manual step that people had to have.
3:34:30
And I think a lot of people in the industry have realized, hey, I can just partner with Elise AI and my now my marketing materials or my my uh insurance will be, you know, will be um >> yeah, >> communicated to everybody else. >> Sense, Jordy. >> Uh nothing for me. This is very exciting.
3:34:50
>> Congratulations on the fundraiser. Thanks so much.
3:34:52
>> Let us know when you add podcasting as a vertical.
3:34:53
We'll happily uh happily try it out.
3:34:56
>> We're definitely in the market.
3:34:56
Uh well, have a great rest of your day.
3:34:59
Congratulations on the raise.
3:34:59
We will talk to you soon. >> Thanks for joining. >> Bye. >> Bye. >> Thanks.
3:35:03
>> Uh I wanted to finish on this post from Lucas Buyer now at Meta AI.
3:35:05
He says, "Ring on the floor laughing.
3:35:12
The solution it draws is amazing."
3:35:14
Uh this is from Tor Olman.
3:35:16
Uh so the question for chat GPT for GPT5 is let's go back to this and it's a picture of what uh you can go to the next slide.
3:35:24
Uh is this the head of a rabbit or a duck?
3:35:26
And the answer that chatt gives is this image shows the duck rabbit illusion.
3:35:32
It can be seen in two ways as the head of a duck with the beak pointing to the left or the or the head of a rabbit the ears pointing to the left.
3:35:41
So the answer is it is both a duck or or a rabbit.
3:35:43
And then uh and then it says, "Would you like me to mark the outlines for each interpretation directly on the image to make the two views clearer?" And it does.
3:35:53
>> Ah, that's so clear now.
3:35:55
>> And it draws it on there, which is a fascinating ability to even trace the outline.
3:35:59
This was unthinkable in machine learning just a few years ago.
3:36:03
>> What does it see that we don't? >> Yes.
3:36:04
Maybe it's found a deeper truth.
3:36:06
>> It's possible it's found a deeper truth.
3:36:09
No, this is this is this is hilarious because clearly it's been RLHF to know that people play pranks on LLMs all the time.
3:36:17
They hit them with riddles.
3:36:17
They hit them with unsolvable questions and trick questions.
3:36:20
And that one of the things people demand of their AI chat bots is that they don't mess up when they're hit with a one of the classic examples is uh a boy is injured, goes to the hospital, the doctor says I can't I can't operate on this uh child.
3:36:35
Uh, and then the question is like why?
3:36:38
And the answer should be because the doctor is the is the is the patient's father or something.
3:36:45
But you can throw all these subtle changes where it clearly indicates who is who and it'll still think that it's being hit with the with the test with the trick question.
3:36:56
>> Well, one more post from Luke Metro since we haven't covered him today.
3:37:00
There was a a a young man, very young man, a teenager joined SpaceX at 14.
3:37:04
At 16, uh Chiran is joining Citadel Securities. >> Let's hear it.
3:37:13
>> Luke says the hard techy actually money is cooler. >> We've seen it before.
3:37:18
If he's really good, he'll get poached by a lab within the next >> Maybe. Maybe.
3:37:23
And then one final post from >> you can't pull Jordy Hayes out of the timeline.
3:37:30
>> Uh Sophie Netcap Girl says, "August is the Sunday of months and so here's to hoping that >> we just have the Sunday scaries. >> Fun hanging."
3:37:39
Oh yeah, >> September is going to come around and we'll be >> extremely back.
3:37:43
But >> thank you for tuning in today.
3:37:47
>> Hope you enjoyed the guests.
3:37:47
Hope you enjoyed the show.
3:37:48
We will see you tomorrow.
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