Leopold's 13F, Mike Isaac Joins, Data Center Fixes, Shein Buys Everlane, Falling Birth Rates

I see a large IPM on the horizon. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. There's misinformation. >> Morty clearing order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journal. Hold your position. >> Get up. Trust the experts here. We are expert founder five. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. >> UAV online. Blaze. >> Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Finally, wrong is >> team deathmatch. match. We are experts. Triple blades. Let's just roll. Right. Mark clearing order inbound. We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. >> Strike one. >> Strike two. Activate golden retriever mode. >> Mark clearing order inbound. Five could found the journalist on the horizon. >> YOU'RE WATCHING TV. Today is Monday, May 18th, 2026. We are live from the TV panel on the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Massive daytoday. Tons of big stories. Five big stories I want to go through. Obviously, the first one is that the US jury finds Open AI CEO Sam Alman not liable to Elon Musk for straying from charitable mission because Musk waited too long to sue. Weird like technicality, I guess, but uh good news for OpenAI. uh judge confirms verdict and that Musk's lawsuit is dismissed. We're having uh Mike Isaac from the New York Times join the show in just a >> I see multiple journalists on the horizon. >> When is he joining? Around 11:45 today. That'll be fun to hear about the story uh from the ground because he went to the >> Yeah, apparently they deliberated for about 90 minutes. It's 90 minutes >> and they didn't uh really make any type of statement other than the statute of limitation. >> And so Max Zeff over at Wired says jury unanimously rules that Musk's claims are dismissed on the timeliness issue. He filed the lawsuit too late. Court affirms it will uphold the jury's decision. It's over. Musk loses the lawsuit against OpenAI. And Mike Isaac, the rat king, says unanimous verdict in Musk versus OpenAI is in after only 90 minutes of deliberation. So did they deliberate today? They showed up at 9ine and went from 9:00 to 10:30 and then delivered the verdict. Is that what we think happened? Because Friday's off in the jury, right? No Fridays. >> Yeah. Jury showed up this morning. >> Okay. Talk >> talked for 90 minutes, >> but they got to think about it all weekend and Friday. Interesting. >> Of course. >> Yeah. >> It's a full-time job. >> I guess it's just an interesting interesting dynamic because you know, you think you'd want everything really fresh. You'd go into it on Thursday night or something like that. Um Rack King says, "Huge day." Wow. And what did Tyler post? He posted a video of Drake talking about something. What's going on over here? Let's play this clip. >> W's in the shot. >> W's in the shot. >> Is that the open AI slack right now? >> I think that's when he is uh gambling in front of >> it is a funny way to pronounce chat, but I enjoy it. Uh anyway, uh the big news that was going on all weekend actually, there was a lot of anticipation for Leopold Ashen Bunner situational awareness hedge fund to drop the 13F. It was supposed to go out Friday night 5:00 p.m. Everyone was saying, "Oh, if he if he's not >> Well, people were expecting it throughout the entire day." >> Yeah, they were very excited. >> And then there was some speculation that he'd been able to petition >> uh to not have to release it. >> That was one theory. That was one theory. The other theory is that he was just entirely in cash. >> Yeah. Don't need to report it. >> Just wind it down. >> Said it was a good run. It's over. >> Yeah. Yeah. He's like, I counted the s and there's none left to count. We're done. Pack it up. No. Quite the opposite. Uh Leopold Asher, the hedge fund's chief investment officer, is known for making extremely successful investments based on his core assumption that Frontier AI will continue to improve at half an order of magnitude.5 per year, which translates into a thesis that AI will create unprecedented demand for compute and its associated bottlenecks. >> John, they're saying it is blindingly light. >> It is brighter, isn't it? Yeah, I think we got some new lights. We're we're sort of uh you know tweaking things. I do like that the wide is less dark. There's been a number of times we've gone to watch videos and we've been very dark in the front. So, we're bringing some light around. We'll see. Maybe maybe we overdid it. Maybe we'll dial it back. I need to brush my hair. My hair's a little a little scruffy today. I also need a haircut, but we'll get to that some. >> We'll get to that later in the show. >> John will be getting a haircut live on the program >> potentially. Uh, no. Before we go any further, I uh >> uh Nick over the weekend picked up a little gift for our very own Tyler Tyler. Let's go. >> So, we wanted you to open open it on on the video on the video. Nick waited in line. Look at this. >> We waited in line. >> Hey, what do we got for Tyler? Wait a >> very long line just for you, Tyler. Because >> what is it? What is it? I'm trying to open it. >> Okay. Little anti. >> Wow. It's a uh what is I don't know how to pronounce this. Am I reading upside down? It's a little little watch. Let's go. >> Another entire >> It is not. >> I don't know if you thought it might be might have been something else like the Swatch AP collaboration, but >> but really like the whole you know everything in the Swatch portfolio is fantastic, including this. I don't know. Describe what's on there. What is on there? >> Yeah, Nick. What is it? >> It has a rotating bezel. That's not He says has a rotating bezel. >> Okay. But just to be clear, it's not the Royal Pop, which was completely sold out and uh causing like stampedes all over the country, all over the world. I saw footage, I think, from an international country uh around people really mobbing it. Uh you you were mentioning that you thought it was maybe an aura loss for both companies because of the craziness. >> I just your brand is now associated with chaos. That's not good, right? Uh, and AP although it's although it's exclusive like you have to sort of wait in line, the waiting in line is like here have a have a diet coke and sit in this private room while I tell you that you will not be getting an allocation in the skeletonized AP. Come back soon Royal Oak or whatever, right? Uh, come back soon. And it's a and it's a it's a very high brow >> waiting in line. >> Yeah. And this was >> and they had to come out over time and say these are not going to be limited. we're selling them a lot. Yeah. Uh and so the the people that waited in line just to sell on the secondary market, I think have done pretty well. Oh, really? At least in the short term. But I would expect that over time uh prices will will sort of retrace toward retail. I did see a funny graphic of somebody that was like uh basically saying like uh you know comparing like getting a job versus waiting in the line to get it and you actually did quite a bit better if you just got a job on Monday instead of getting in the in the line. And then over time, you know, your your earnings really ramp out. >> Um, but anyways, sorry, Tyler, if you thought that was a Royal Pop. I don't know why you would, but >> he's doing the Kevin Oly, Mr. Wonderful. Two watches on one on each wrist. Looking good. >> There you go. >> Uh, I think I think that could be a good uh good daily for you. Who knows? It's got a little character to it. You make it your own. >> Yeah, it looks good. It's a little man. Sometimes the man makes a watch. >> Somebody should make a string that you can turn it into a royal like a royal pop, >> you know, like >> Oh, like a lanyard type of thing. Okay. Okay. Yeah, that's possible. 3D printing. Uh plenty of plenty of opportunities. Well, uh let's go back to Leopold Ashen Brener and his 13F, the infamous 13F. Uh there's a lot of discussion around it on the timeline. really like we have not seen this level of attention on a hedge fund's filings in a very long time. Uh it's it's because it's breaking out of finit. It's breaking into tech teapot and techx and all of that. Uh uh mostly because the a lot of the discussion centers around uh the filing shows he's made some massive puts across the semiconductor sector. Uh two billion on SMH, the VANX semiconductor ETF. And so there's there's an it feels like maybe more um more of a pointed thesis less broad hey semiconductors are going to do well more I actually me Leopold in this case understand where the real value is what companies within the semiconductor industry are undervalued which ones are actually going to be useful in the next iteration of the buildout. Uh, and a lot of stuff has been priced very hotly. Some stuff is overheated. The Nvidia trade for a while became like crushingly obvious and then it grew so much that that was not one of his early positions. Now it is looking like he is going long Nvidia, which is interesting in the backdrop of is Nvidia a car? Do they still have a moat? Well, there might still be something else going on there. You have to dig in through this and understand what's going on. Um, but the filing is hard to interpret cleanly because an F3F is only a snapshot of holdings as of March 31st, 2026. These positions are stale. He might have rotated out of these. Uh, meaning these positions were in place during the early phase of the Iran war. It also doesn't include private international >> copy trading senators tends to work pretty well, right? they tend to be, you know, maybe they they uh they're very knowledgeable on some of the subjects that they're trading on, some of the companies, right? Uh but they tend to take a more longer term sort of thematic view. Whereas Leopold, he's operating a hedge fund, right? You don't really know his his holdings could be wildly different just um you know just just weeks or days after uh the um end date of >> there is the the team behind the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker stock ticker I forget what it's called uh they have one for Leopold now uh although of course it's based on the 13F it's a loose it's it's probably has massive tracking error but it's directionally on theme like you know their interpretation of what Leopold would do if he was managing. >> It's very accurate for three months ago >> maybe. Yeah. Um so, uh reminder, 13F do disclose put and call options. They don't disclose the strike prices, expirations, premiums paid, hedge ratio, short position swaps, and or whether the options are part of broader structures. So, you have to uh be careful out there if you're trying to uh read the tea leaves too precisely. Um you're you're you know you can only uh take away so much from these. So uh FJO I don't know how to pronounce that says uh unfathomably bad takes around this morning and a good reminder of why 13F digging is mostly a waste of time. March 31st uh we were in the heat of the Iran war makes sense to put on hedges at the time. Uh options exposure on 13F gets quoted notionally so as if it were a 100 delta i.e. e all 100 shares per contract. So when you see something like oh he owns a billion dollars of Intel, it's usually he owns the right to purchase a billion dollars of Intel and he has actually deployed far less capital into that position. Although it is uh sometimes an important sign of things to come. Uh we have no way of knowing whether these were five delta convexivity hedges, convexity hedges and represent represented a fraction of what people are saying were billions in puts or whether they were ITM puts in the money puts. Uh further outright shorts don't get reported either. Too much noise associated with the things that happened back in March that aren't relevant now. We have no idea about his turnover in assets and trade frequency. A lot happened in the months of April and May. His positioning could be completely different. Making investment decisions for 80 V assets based on data from months ago sounds like a good way to burn money. So don't idolize people and develop your own thesis for why you own and sell things. That is a good takeaway from an account that I can't pronounce but has good takes. Um, now there were a bunch of funny memes about this. Leap trader says, "Now drop Leupold's Ashin Briner's portfolio where he sold all his holdings and went full cash." That certainly would royal the market. I do wonder is the market actually moving on the 13F. Are we seeing like when a position is disclosed, there's a there's a pop of copy trading going on or is this just sort of like uh online fun and games for the for the tech folks? Do you know? Yeah, I mean if you look at T1 energy >> T1 energy is up on the news that he has a position >> today >> and we talked to the CEO of that company right T1 energy is building uh solar panels in America >> that is very Chinese company that had to divest >> and turned into T1 energy and uh yeah I think we first >> talked about T1 in Q4 of last year and uh >> done very well since then. I'm I'm excited about it. Um, we can bridge into that in just a second, but uh, investor Nick says, "Did that leprosy fella tank the market with his 13F?" Uh, 47 likes, but very, very funny to just massively mispronounce Leold's name. Uh, anyway, um, where should we go from here? Options on 13F. Everyone repeat after me. Catrini is reminding everyone that options are reported with notional value, so be careful out there. Um the interesting bridge is um just around the AI backlash and the fact that a lot of >> situation in the chat says Bloom Energy is actually down. >> Well, he's owned Bloom Energy for years or maybe not years but like three or four 13Fs have disclosed Bloom Energy and uh that one has been fully digested by the by the the copy traders I imagine. Uh anyway, um the AI backlash is continuing in a bunch of different ways. And one interesting sort of twist on this is that uh a lot of the AI maxis, the AI bulls were sort of concerned at least that this would all be fossil fuel-based buildout because everything else was too slow. They might be in they may be fans of nuclear. They might be fans of of uh of solar but it was uh seen as infeasible seen as the timelines being far too long. So if Leopold is in fact taking a position in T1 energy, that sort of leads me to think that there's a little bit of a shorter timeline to at least bringing some solar power to bear uh uh during the uh AI buildout that it's not uh all just sort of uh you know a hope and a dream that there will be solar power on the grid in any near amount of time. a lot of the nuclear power companies are moving on the backs of the AI buildout, but it's still 2032, you know, when we talk to these folks, even even the optimistic ones. Um, so there has been big push back on AI data centers across the board. We've talked about this a bunch. Uh, and it's both a left and right-wing issue now. Uh, Sager and Jetty predicted this, I think last year when he joined our show. Uh, and it's been interesting. Leftwing is worried about, uh, job displacement. uh theft of art, uh destruction of creativity. Right-wing uh sees them as surveillance setters. That's the latest term is that they're they're used to spy on people. So, that's an anti- libertarian, anti- rightwing position. Uh but there are a whole bunch of others just you know this hollowed out coal town is voting rightwing and then uh data center comes to town and they see it as you know just making their town worse off and benefiting like the coastal elites and like the >> people have flagged too that both sides are using AI to create graphics to oppose data centers. >> That's true. Yeah. There's all these like deep ironies. There's there's a whole piece on someone who's protesting data centers and using a lot of AI to research how she can push back. Gabe says data centers need to be rebranded to data ranch. >> Data ranch. I like a data ranch. That's a good one. Um anyway, >> ox. We got ox powered. >> Oh, interesting. Salty says that uh Leopold sold blue energy in the latest 13F. So or trimmed. So if that's if that's the case, then uh there you go. Uh and yes, Lulu does have a good uh breakdown of the narrative mishap, which we can go through. But um the the the latest debate that I saw was over this huge data center in Utah that's being championed by Shark Tanks Mr. Wonderful Kevin Olirri. Are you familiar with this whole thing? There's some renderings. It actually looks really cool, but uh it's weird because it's like I see this like beautiful glass building. I'm like it's not going to look like that. There's just no way. There's no point. Like why would they ever build that? Uh but someone dug into >> the render economy. >> Yeah. Someone dug into like the plan and the plan actually seems pretty reasonable. Uh but uh Mr. Wonderful is a he's sort of an over-the-top caricature of a businessman. Like he plays one on TV. He is a real businessman, but he also plays a businessman on TV. And so he's a bit of a soft target. Like he was recently seen sporting not one but two expensive watches, not unlike Tyler Cosgrove over there. Uh he went to the Oscars wearing a Cardier Crash skeleton and a ruby Rolexed or Daytona. And I believe he also had a uh like a trading card around his neck. So very ostentatious, very over-the-top, a very soft target if you're looking for someone to target in like a he's doing it for the money, you know, like it's pretty pretty easy. Um, and so if you want to paint data center construction as maybe not in the best interest of average Americans, uh, Kevin Liry is going to do a lot of the a lot of the heavy >> Mr. Wonderful in the context of developing largecale infrastructure that people are afraid of. Sounds like a super villain too. >> Yes. And also like we can put this in contrast to uh Eric Schmidt or Tim Cook where uh the the previous generation like the major hyperscalers like the big tech companies they've done a pretty good job building a lot of infrastructure making really really bold climate pledges saying we're going to be net zero by this year our data centers are really clean they've built a lot of data centers without really any disruption. there was no backlash to Google Cloud through 15 years or 10 years of building AWS. Uh and and and so now >> neither of them were rocking dual iced out. >> So you're making the case for quiet luxury, the quiet luxury of a of a Tim Cooker and Eric Schmidt potentially. >> Definitely. >> Yeah. I mean, in this case, >> I think Mr. Mr. for wonderful is not not the guy to be the face of >> potentially not, but apparently his his actual data center plans are reasonable. Um, it actually seems uh pretty by the book according to current plans. It's in a remote area. It uses its own power and water uh and it doesn't seem to disrupt any local communities. Uh we can pull up this video from Quick Thoughts that has a little bit of a breakdown uh and uh and goes through I think it's called uh I think Quick Thoughts calls it why I'm not opposed to the Utah data center. Uh I think the big Utah data center is fine. So this is a 4-minute video, but we can we can watch this and break down quick thoughts is thinking >> it's in the timeline. um because there was a a Tik Tocker that was reacting to how bad it was and he is saying it's actually not that bad. So, let's play this clip. >> Million views complaining about a giant data center in Utah. And I'm kind of confused by that because I would think that an uninhabited desert valley in Utah is the perfect place to build a giant data center. I've been following really closely what's happening in Box Elder County, Utah, where Canadian billionaire Kevin Olirri the world's largest data center, a $100 billion project. Okay, this would be the largest data center in the world at over 40,000 acres. And at full capacity, the data center, which is called the Stratos project, is set to use 9 gawatt of electricity. >> Gigabytes. You saw that? >> Double the entire amount of electricity used by >> Well, she said she said it correctly. First, the data center is built. >> Yeah. Yeah. But but but the transcript said gigabytes, which is funny. >> It's not >> AI fails again. We need another data center to fix that. >> Steve in the X chat says TBPN studio uses the equivalent of 23 atomic bombs of energy data. >> To produce niche technology is so large is because they are buying water rights of the current property owners. So the current property owners are using water for agricultural irrigation. the data center project buys that land, buys a huge amount. >> See, he makes this sound good, but then it's like, wait, are we gonna have less food? That doesn't seem that good. But the point is is that it's not taking it from like someone who is going to be paying water or some local community. It's like there's there's there's already water rights there that are staying in that valley, >> right? It's not drawing power from the grid. If we look at electricity consumption by state, we can see that Utah just doesn't use that much electricity compared to other states. There are plenty of states that use double or triple. Tennessee is about triple, Pennsylvania four times. Uh Texas is like 10 times more than 10 times what Utah uses. So if over the course of this project they reach their goal and they double or triple Utah's electricity usage, so why is that bad? It's not incurring more cost to the people of Utah because they're building their own power plant >> by Utah as a whole. Robert Davies, a physics professor from Utah State University, says that he actually thinks the project will require an additional 7 to 8 gawatt of waste heat energy, meaning that the project in total will be 23 GW of total thermal burn energy, which is the equivalent of dropping 23 atom bombs in Utah every single day. Also, let's >> Okay, electricity generation across every state is going to have that same thermal load property. Not every generator is perfectly efficient, so they're going to generate waste heat as well. So if you say, "Okay, we're going to have 23 atom bombs a day worth of electricity going off in Utah." Well, then currently we have 230 atom bombs a day going off in Texas. >> You got to put everything in an atom bomb comparison. Like your car is like the size of like five atom bombs. >> That like an atom bomb is like maybe this big, maybe a little bit bigger. >> Your car weighs as much as seven atom bombs. It makes it sound so much more like weighty when you're like just comparing everything to Adam's >> night temperature by 28°. >> This is actually pretty crazy. 28 degrees feels like a lot. >> Daytime temperature could increase 2 to 5° throughout Hansel Valley, not the state of Utah. The valley where the data center is being built. Same with nighttime temperature could increase up to 28 degrees trapped in the valley. Hansel Valley is an uninhabited desert valley. So if you build a big power plant here and a big data center here, maybe it'll increase the temperature of this valley by 5 degrees. But okay, nobody lives there. I think this project solves a lot of people's stated concerns with data centers. You're worried about water usage? They're reallocating agricultural water to cool the data center. Worried about power cost? They're building their own noting waste, >> but I like vegetables. >> Middle of an uninhabited desert valley where it's already hot. And you're worried about this is such a huge project. This is a giant data center or something. World's biggest data center. Well, that's just data centers that don't have to be built in other places that are being built in this uninhabited desert valley. I think the concerns in her video are just fear-mongering for reasons that I hope I've explained here. Thanks for your time. I guess the question is like they say that there's water for agricultural usage right now in that valley, but the valley is uninhabited and it seems like a desert. So, it doesn't seem like they're growing food there. So, like where is that water actually going? Because is it just getting piped to some other farm like far away or was it like they were >> way way back in the day? Way back in the day, you could just have a piece of land, you could drill a well and you could pull up as much water as you wanted. Yeah. And then people realize that you might if if you have a property here and there's property here, here, here, here, here, they're often times all pulling from the same aquifer. So you all of a sudden if you come in, you move in next to me and you start pumping, you know, billions of water, your milkshake. >> Yeah. You're drinking my milkshake, right? Uh and so it's very possible that all these parcels of land which they collectively bought, >> they all have their own water rights. That doesn't mean they are being used, right? So because people will sell their water rights to like a neighboring property that is >> Yeah. >> But my question is like it sounds like they sold the water rights previously or they had some sort of deal to send the water that they were getting out of that desert which I can't imagine produces that much water. But I guess it does uh use it for like agricultural purposes. Like what were they growing? >> Well, agricultural could mean you have some like you have some cattle. Like there's a b there's a bunch of different potential meanings for that. It doesn't mean you're growing fresh produce. >> But were they actively using or were they just like >> No, that's the other thing. That's the other thing, too. It could have been agricultural land. >> Yeah. >> But not >> could have been like a failed farm. It's not farming anymore or like a former livestock uh like farm, something like that. But I don't know. I feel like people are going to want to go a click deeper on that. like he rebuts a lot of the good the good rhetoric like but uh there's still like another another layer there. >> Says the water could be used at Agiri. >> Yes, >> influencers are protesting in the flats outside of Amaniri. >> You drain the pool at Amaniri. It's it's going to be uh it's going to be a big protest for sure. Uh well uh yeah, I mean these the these points like as you said I think are going to be hard to break through just because AI is so deeply unpopular for a variety of reasons. Uh and we should watch the video of Eric Schmidt uh getting booed on stage at University of Arizona. Alex Canowitz played a video here. I don't know if we need to watch all of this, but he says this is incredible. artificial intelligence getting booed out of the stadium in any commencement speech. It's mentioned in maybe telling college students AI was taking their jobs wasn't the best strategy. Let's watch this clip. >> The architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. >> The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know. We do not know the precise contours of what district if you if you'd let me make this point please. >> Step one get if you're giving a commencement speech you got to bring a soundboard. You got to be like AI. Yeah, it's not that bad. But also I hear you. >> Including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country. >> They're really going crazy. We thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge that humanity had been constructing for centuries. >> There's just a lowlevel boo the whole time. >> It's so rowdy. Like normally you'd think there'd be like a little bit of boo and then they just like get quiet down. Okay, this is about to turn into a riot. This is crazy. Did he just bail on this thing? >> Surrender your agency. We have only seen >> at this point. I mean, you got to go off script. >> You could you can't stay. >> It is funny that if you cut it up in the right way, you could make it seem sound like the most >> you will surrender your agency. >> Okay, now we need to take this clip uh do that thing where we >> says he's lucky they didn't flash bang it. True. >> Uh we need to do that thing where we take out the booze uh and just leave his words and then add cheers. So, it's just it's just the same exact speech, but everyone just like, "Yes, this is amazing." >> I I can try to find it, but there's a video of him after the speech like getting mobbed by his students. They're all like yelling at him. Yeah, they were not fans. >> Wow. >> This is rough rough rough. Uh yeah, not good. Uh I mean the the the big thing is like I don't know that that is it like everyone is booing for a slightly different reason but it's like this ensemble of of uh of problems and and grievances with AI generally like uh everyone is what one thing that I'm that I've been like frustrated about is uh everyone is vibe coding like 247 leaving MacBooks open talking about like productivity and yet uh the like the magical moments the consumer technology has been like completely left behind. Um, like there was a time when we got the cloud and we were building a lot of data centers, but every year you'd get like a cool new thing like Yelp would come out and it was like it wasn't changing the world but it was like oh you could find a cool new restaurant and maybe like or Groupon like Groupon was like not a great business ultimately but like for the first couple months of Groupon you could like go try a restaurant for like half price and it just felt like magical or like Uber when that came out. It was like, wait, I can go out and and the car will be right outside instead of having to like call a phone, call a taxi cab service, maybe it comes, maybe it doesn't. Stand outside in the cold, try and flag a car. There were all these things. >> Do you think they were I'm just I'm just thinking now. Do you think they were uh Do you think they were like angry at usage nanobanana usage limit? >> Probably. Probably. >> Is that Yeah. >> Is this whole thing just a misunderstanding? They they they might think we're in a plateau and they might just be upset with the lack of progress outside of coding domains. They say, "Yeah, the writing is just still not that good on any of these models. >> I can clock it." >> Yeah, I it's still clockable. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. At first I thought they were mad that uh like at Google Eric Schmidt was he was doing too many, you know, stock buybacks instead of investing too much technology innovation. >> Yeah. Having a hundred billion on the balance sheet in cash is just unacceptable. Like yes, you get Whimo. Yes, you get deep mine. >> Yeah. They don't know what to do with the money, right? >> Yeah. Yeah. They weren't innovating for a long time and and that makes a lot of sense why you would boo them. Sort of the teian >> the teian boo. >> Uh no. Um and then and then also like yeah the the jobs thing is super real like uh whether or not AI is affecting the jobs. >> It's also so prospect. So we should pull up Lulu's critique because I'm sure it'll be way better than this. But just in those handful of sentences, like is that that felt like a speech more potentially like oriented towards >> maybe like the Stamford student body, which is like how are you going to contribute >> to AI? That's what I was like sort of that's that's what was standing out to me being like don't be afraid of this thing like >> jump in and help shape it. >> Yeah. And if you're maybe someone at in Stanford >> Yeah. >> and you have the opportunity to go actually be involved and you're at the epicenter of all this progress, maybe that would land. >> Yeah. >> But at U of A where people are hearing like, hey, all the different career paths that I'm >> I would prefer in terms of commencement speaker, I would prefer someone like a Sam Sulk >> to give the commencement speech. That would be that would be like my like Eric Schmidt is is like he's kind of like a me Sam Sulc that's an inspirational speaker that's going to fire me. >> He's on the come up, right? >> Exactly. Yeah. Did you have a question? >> Derek more plates more dates. >> That would be fantastic too. >> Yeah. I was trying to Gabe's asking about the why would he give a speech there? I was trying to find a connection. I I think I think he's just a big name. Okay. >> And it's very obviously his experience is very relevant in this moment. show up to mock and none of you are getting any jobs. Just terrible. Yeah. No, no. I mean, there is this thing where like AI needs to create jobs because like even if AI isn't destroying the jobs, if we have a weak economy, there won't be good jobs. And then like you're still hold you're still held accountable for that. And so you got to you got to create jobs. Um and then on the data center side, like there's just so many issues within that that we can go through. Environmental impacts, which are probably real. If you burn a bunch of fossil fuels, you're going to have negative externalities. Diesel generators, these things are smoky. Uh the the air quality, all of this stuff is is fairly real when done improperly, which is happening. The water use thing, mostly fake, but still like needs to actually be walked through fully uh and digested by the public. Uh the noise issue, which is solvable, but still like not that great. Uh and then a bunch of other issues that are just not going to happen happen magically. Ben Thompson had a wild wild proposal. He he had a great uh great piece which uh I wish we had time to read through the whole thing, but um we we we can sort of run through it. So uh he starts with a with an anecdote from uh Politico. A Texas county southwest of Dallas this week passed what may be the state's first county level moratorum on data centers. Not what everyone was expecting in the free state of Texas. Everything's bigger in Texas except for the data centers which are getting smaller now that there is a uh county level moratorum seeking to buy time for lawmakers to soften the blow of development across uh sweeping across rural counties. Uh, Hill County's commissioner Hill County's commissioner vote court voted three to two Tuesday to put a year-long moratorium on data center and power plant construction in unincorporated areas, citing an influx of as many as eight data centers planned there, many of which could have could have their own power plants. Oper opposition to data centers is spreading in regions led by both Democrats and Republicans as politicians try to balance economic development. >> Yes. Apparently, according to handovers. >> According to AI, there's no official >> public count of operating data centers in Hill County, but there's eight proposed or planned data centers. >> This is a place This is a place that >> they're going to be delayed. >> Yeah. >> In Missouri, one small town unhappy over its city council's approval of data centers voted last month to oust all four incumbents running for reelection. In North Carolina, Governor Josh Stein has made a point of saying that sales tax exemptions for data centers cost the state up to 57 million per year. Texas has hundreds of data center locations operating or in development, second only to Virginia. Among US states, the growth has stirred push back from environmentalists and rural residents who worry about the effect on water supplies, the electric grid, or their quality of life. Officials in states across the country are starting to have second thoughts about data centers, and some are looking to roll back tax incentives. And Ben Thompson says, "I chose this story because it happened just it happened to have happened over the weekend. In truth, there are an exploding number of options, including one just up the highway from where Ben Thompson lives in Wisconsin in DeForest. Uh, and they are hardly isolated isolated sentiments. Seven in 10 Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local areas, including nearly half, 48% who are strongly opposed. barely a quarter favor these projects with 7% stronger in favor. Now, I was thinking about what do Americans want to build because it's easy to look at the data center stuff and be like, well, everyone's against building data centers, but I I do think that there is an element of like Americans don't want to build anything. Like the whole I was reflecting on the whole reindustrialization meme uh this weekend. I uh I got a I I got a a version of that sweater mailed to me that I picked up and uh and I was thinking about the actual knock-on effects of re-industrialization. Like most people don't want a car factory in their town, >> but we do want new roads. Well, not necessarily new roads. >> No, people don't want new roads, and they don't even want the roads paved because they're like, I'll just buy a bigger car. Like, I don't know. >> You want a bunch of people dying next to you? I don't think people want hospitals. I I literally golf courses, they have the poisons. They're bad for your health. Like I I actually think people just don't really want change necessarily. They don't want things built broadly. Like data centers are probably at the bottom of the list. Like they're the least popular, but they're like highspeed rail. I thought that would be popular. It was not popular. And like I'm just going down the list of like oh like you want like oh we need to we need maybe you're a national defense person. You want a missile factory next to you blowing up bombs. Like, no. Everyone, no one wants that. Like, what do we want? Like, we don't really want anything. We're kind of good on building in America. I don't know. I I just think we're good. Like, we're just like, we're fine. It's good. Don't change anything. No new train. >> I think when there's self-interest, right, when people want to build their house, right? When people want to >> everyone wants to build their data center. >> Yeah. Their data center for sure. But people don't want other stuff built generally. like there's very there very very few things that people are like, "Yeah, I'd be down for that to be built." People like the status quo. They're they're happy with things as they are and they don't like change. So, um like any anything new is going to be like somewhat uh somewhat unpopular as nuclear power was. Uh not building out nuclear power 50 years ago was of course one of the greatest mistakes humanity has made and one that contributes directly to data center opposition today given questions about the impact on energy bills. Also interesting uh we have to do this another time but the you know did we run out of nuclear scientists? Was that what stopped the buildout? Did we not have enough geniuses? I don't know. Maybe we'll dig into it. But Ben Thompson has an interesting solution. He points out a bunch of ways to fix the problems of data center construction and opposition. He says first >> people are saying homes in the chat, but then again, people don't really want more homes in their area once they already own a home. >> They block them all the time. They block they block home construction all the time and and also permitting and also uh expansion of existing homes. Like these things, I'm not saying I'm not saying that they're like as unpopular as data centers. No way. Data centers are are are at the bottom. But but homes are something maybe in the abstract but like new housing in communities is like razor's edge 50/50 6040 like it's like there is a lot of opposition to building just in America broadly like that's just the nature of our society. Um so Ben Thompson has some solutions though. What do you got to do to build a data center properly? He says, "First, this sounds obvious, but tech needs to fix its messaging problem. The issue, and if an answer seems obvious, then there surely must be some other problem at play is three-fold. First, a good number of people in tech, particularly at one of the leading labs, genuinely believe most jobs are going away. they could lie more effectively. But beyond being dishonest, it's also a betrayal of the fanatical fanatical devotion with which they are pursuing AI despite obstacles, including the challenge of spending billions and billions of dollars on models that are obsolete in months if not weeks. Second, it is extremely hard to describe the benefits of inventions not yet made, cures not yet discovered, economic activity not yet engaged in, uh, etc. This is always the burden of those arguing in favor of progress and the sheer potential of AI actually makes the problem even harder. 50 years ago, everyone was like, "Electricity isn't that expensive. Why do we need to build nuclear power plants? They're scary." And now electricity is expensive. We're like, "Oh, we should have built those." That's the way these things always go. Third, tech is and always has been terrible at understanding and relating to this to the rest of society. I go back to how Silicon Valley was extremely skeptical of Facebook, a company predicated on connecting with friends and family precisely because it it's filled with people running away from their friends and family. You can optimistically say that people in tech live in the future. You can also more cynically say they live in opposition to and denial of humanity for better and in this case for worse. Second, tech could control the misinformation. Uh Tik Tok is a major point of this. He talks about uh how the the algorithm is still controlled by the Chinese and maybe there's misinformation there. Uh second, in a rather ironic twist, Meta has learned the lesson of trying to control misinformation. Doesn't want to overtly censor, but now the company gets no credit for not censoring misinformation about data centers. And so it's like this weird thing. Uh and then third uh this was a wild card which I didn't think of but uh X is the the social media platform X and Twitter formerly Twitter uh is actually incentivized to be anti-data center in a weird way because X is owned by SpaceX and a big part of SpaceX's upcoming public offering is the possibility of building data centers in space. >> This is like total tinfoil hat I think but uh but it's an interesting like okay uh and and he says to be clear he hasn't seen any evidence of thumb on the scale or not. I certainly haven't. Um uh but uh you know part of the problem though is that we would never know if there were. And so he goes on to to propose something very very bold. Very very bold. He says uh instead the most obvious solution is the most crass. Simply start giving people money. Not universal basic income though. If data centers are a resource for our AI future, then start paying people for that resource. if that data center up the road weren't sold to my neighbors based on amorphous tax benefits my that my local government may or may not spend appropriately and I was talking to Tyler about this earlier uh but rather were to result in a check in the mailbox every year I suspect you could get a lot of people on board so he put some numbers together and he says for the data center up the road it was expected to be 1.6 6 gaw which could generate around $3 billion in annual operator revenue. Deforest the village it was to be built in has around 11,500 people. So you could pay every person in that village $10,000 a year and it would only equate to 3.8% of annual revenue grossed by the data center. and and he says, "I bet that that proposal would have been approved and I bet the operator could very easily pass on those costs to actual data center use users." It also highlights how relatively pathetic the original commitment. I think the data center said, "Hey, we'll give you 50 million," which is like nowhere near uh what that math works out to. So you data center is coming to town. You get to vote for it, but the data center company says, "Hey, we'd like you to vote for this and we will give you a $10,000 check in the mail every year forever while we're operating this." And that seems like that could actually get people on board. So >> this goes back to even months ago at this point. we were saying, you know, AI is not a is not like a, you know, natural resource where you benefit from having it in your backyard, right? If you're just an everyday AI user, you do not care where the data center is at all. And so, if someone is coming to put it in your community, it's pretty fair to want to benefit from that in some way. And like a direct payment like that, I think um I'm sure that will happen more. Yeah. Yeah. And what I was talking to Tyler about was uh does the uh like like do local communities feel a difference between $10,000 in the mail directly to them or $10,000 to their local government that says we're going to use this to build roads and hospitals and all the different things that we do. Like I think that on net the average American is a little bit skeptical about dollars going to the government actually benefiting them at a onetoone ratio. They they definitely think that if the money that goes in is worth something, but a lot of it gets mixed around and there's delays. >> The data center is already going to generate a bunch of local tax revenues for that local government. >> Show me the money. Show me the money. That's what the the locals should potentially be saying. >> Well, that's that's what I'm saying. It's like they don't, you know, the I I think it's totally fair for the local population to to think, okay, like this big infrastructure project is happening in my town. Even if I'm not going to work there, yeah, it's going to generate some taxes or to help improve our community, but >> show give me the money basically. >> Go direct. >> Yeah, go direct with the money. I like it. Well, we have Mike Isaac from the New York Times in the waiting room. Uh, we can come back to our data center debate after we check in with Mike. And I think he's on location. Is this correct, Mike? Where are you? >> Welcome to the show. How are you doing? >> I'm good. Can you hear me? I'm sorry. I'm literally outside of the courtroom. >> Amazing. No, we can hear and see you just fine. That's amazing. >> Well, take us through it. >> My actual >> How has today been going? What's happened? >> Uh, it was crazy. Uh basically today was supposed to be the first day of jury deliberations and we were a few reporters were in the courtroom because in the morning it was about uh both sides presenting their case for remedies to the judge on basically how much money if anything would be dispersed as a result of the lawsuit. And literally in the middle of this deliberation, the uh clerk goes and interrupts the judge and says, "Hey, D something's happening." Basically, the scurrying and everyone's like, "Oh my god, what's happening?" D and this is like less than two hours into it. Um they reach a verdict and so the jury comes back in and and delivers the verdict. >> Interesting. >> What was your expectation going into today? Did you think you'd be hanging out at the courthouse all week? All right, Bill. Yeah. Yeah. I'll see you soon. Sorry, that's a lead opening eye council walking by that I should go run after, but he's doing his thing. >> I mean, we're just hanging out chase him down. He's I I'll bug him later. Very literally, he was just chilling and walking out. Um >> I uh Sorry, I can't see that. I uh uh I forgot what you I'm so tired. What did you ask? >> Yeah, I I was I was What was your expectation for your week? Were you expecting to be at the courthouse every day? >> Yeah, we were like I got here again at 6:00 a.m. and like was ready for a long like sitting out in front of the court for days because the way these work is like you get 10 minutes notice uh from when the judge gets the jury verdict to get down here. I live 10 minutes away but still like no uh reassurances. So we had me, my colleague Kade Mets, and then Natalie Roa, another colleague of mine just like ready and I was just like, "Thank God when they when they came back. I didn't want to sleep out here." >> Okay, so uh the actual verdict, it feels like uh victory on a technicality. And what I'm interested in is that uh over the last few weeks, it feels like the the core discussion or the or the talking point was Elon Musk, you can't steal a charity. very piffy phrase, easily memorizable, could stick with you or could bounce right off you, but you know what his grievance is. And then OpenAI sort of needs to say, well, the charity still exists and we had an agreement that we would go this way and it was a little bit more complicated. But that doesn't seem like what the jury actually decided based on. And was that like as you think back to the last 3 weeks, do you think that there were that there were actually good seeds planted around the statute of limitations and when the case should be filed? Because it feels like from the reporting and from the viral, you know, the the screenshots and the emails and the and the quotes, like there was never like, oh yeah, we all remember the smoking gun of statue of limitations. No, I don't. I remember the you can't steal a charity or the Brockman diary, right? and and it feels like we got a different outcome here. >> I think I think I remember at different points like >> they this this only this whole debacle only became a thing after the launch of Chad GBT and after >> you know the the company was showing you know massive traction and revenue growth but I never heard specifically like you said this statute of limitations. >> Yeah. But how did you process? Well, that's a wonkier point, too, right? Like it's it's very easy to and that's what I think like really the strategy on the must side was was to go for really like clearly digestible talking points for a juror who may not be steeped in nonprofit contract law or uh statute of limitations and exactly what that is. And I think that's what they were betting on, too. They're like, "All right, if we can sell the jurors on this idea that Musk is, you know, selflessly trying to, you know, interrupt something that could be bad for the world versus um OpenAI's more technical point of look, you should have filed this lawsuit years ago. Um maybe they can win it." And so I think that was going into it what everyone was kind of thinking about like is this gonna be certainly what I was thinking about is this gonna be a battle of like the billionaires who do you trust who you this like a character thing that is this a referendum on that and exactly what you said it's super surprising when they came back and essentially I would say statute of limitations was like if that was that was the ball game right and if they had blown past that if they had not find them the burden to be met then we would have seen how it really played out. But that was just that was the the whole thing, you know. >> Uh what so so last week I was surprised that that Elon jumped on the China trip with with Trump. >> Yeah. That that something I mean a lot of the people online were just like he's a billionaire. He can do whatever he wants. That was like >> the president supersedes the federal judge. But I don't know if that's actually the case. There was some dialogue around like, hey, you're in the middle of this historic trial, like you should be present or at least able to be present. >> Did that Do you think he did that because he felt like it wasn't going his way and he was just like, I need to >> make the most of my time? >> I think he So, so I uh Yeah, NBC wrote a good story on that. Like he was not uh excused. He could have been recalled and asked to testify again. Mhm. >> Uh and it's typically bad form when you leave the country to when that happens. Um and uh but what I was told or what I heard is that they had actually spoken to the judge beforehand to like make sure it was like okay and like that he probably wouldn't be recalled. I think part of it also was that both sides were both sides are on a clock. So you only have so much time to to present your evidence and the early testimony was running long. So OpenAI still needed to get through a lot of the testimony of their expert witnesses towards the end. So they decided uh and uh Muside also decided they weren't going to recall Musk. So like there was that part of it that probably made it okay. That said, like it's probably bad luck when you make it the first three days of the trial and Sam and Greg um make it mo basically most of the time, but uh but at the same time like it didn't come down to character who pissed off the judge necessarily. It came down to like a legal technical argument which seems to have this jury was pretty sophisticated at least in like focusing on something that I didn't know if it was going to land or not. >> Yeah. did uh it I mean it really makes all of the like the the the AI safety testimony feel like maybe a miscalculation because it sort of took the conversation in a completely different place and then they got focused on this like technical issue. Um I mean the jury doesn't put out like a statement. Are we are we expecting any sort of like closing statement from the judge or is this what we get here? >> We So, by the way, sorry, there's still like people protesting in the background if you want to see that, but um my very terrible laptop camera. >> Are they protesting the statute of limitations because they're on Elon's side or >> protest? There's actually this has been the best part of this is like there's many different protest camps and it's kind of hard to define who is is against what. Are any of the protesters protesting other protesters? >> I mean, genuinely, yes, probably. There there's the I want to do >> is out there protesting the dels. >> Genuinely, there there were a supporter. No, 100%. Um, so actually, usually posttrial, you people like me go and try to find the jury and chase him down, which is what we were doing. I think they probably are already out of the building. Um, I ran around the back and saw a van that was like all blacked out and this marshall that I had known the whole trial and like they were just like >> getting the hell out of here. So, I'm guessing they didn't want to get mobbed by Yeah. >> us. >> But, uh, the judge I'm going to try to get the notes out. The judge left the jury with like a pretty good summation, not of the trial, but just like appreciating a jury and like respecting a jury finding like finding uh parties liable or not liable, you know, and and I think that the point of that was >> she didn't she some federal judges could like be like, "No, I'm throwing your verdict out or whatever." But she respected the jury. It was a jury of their peers and they were deliberate, you know, and they listened intently and so she left them I'll find the exact quote and send it to you guys, but she left them on sort of like we thank you for your service. >> Yeah. Yeah. That seemed also a little bit unexpected because uh the when when the jury verdict became, you know, popularized or publicized as as like advisory, a lot of people were sort of interpreting that as well, like it doesn't matter at all in that case. But it seems like the judge did wind up sort of uh you know giving the jury a lot of weight and very quickly reacting to the jury's verdict. >> And I think that's a that's really important as far as appeals go because you could argue um >> bias cut out like you could argue like oh the the the jud Yeah. Exactly. The judge didn't care the jury. So I think there's real incentive to be in line. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's very interesting. Uh, what was the snack setup today? Are you going to get a proper lunch now? I feel like I I feel like that was one of the most disappointing arcs if I'm going to be completely honest with you. The lunch game just didn't seem to evolve. >> We were saying that learning from your lesson Nathan for you where you've got, you know, the Nathan for you episode where he's got the chili suit. We were going to do that into >> because it just felt like they day, okay, day three, you show up with an apple and a banana. It's like, okay, he's still learning his lesson, but like fool me seven times. I was expecting a Chipotle burrito or something with a little more substance. Get get into the four digits of calories, please. >> Oh my god. People were like DMing me saying I have like scurvy or ricketetts by the end of this trial. I think I just have like a really disturbing diet overall. So, yeah. And today I forgot. I was out last night until way late at a show and I'm hung over and I forgot to bring food. So, it's just this is basically my you get to see my slow descent into madness. But, thank God we're done. >> Okay. So, I mean, we asked you uh earlier uh is this the stuff of movies? Is there going to be a movie about this or was this antilimactic? I think like I think this the movie's still going, man. Like this thing is still there's so much I feel like this most exciting time in AI because opening eye is really on his back foot in a lot of ways. This gives them some relief in the many fronts that they're being attacked on whether it's going public this year with a messy balance sheet or Anthropic coming after him, Google coming after him, Google IO's tomorrow. So, like if anything, it's a brief reprieve, you know, but uh I wouldn't I wouldn't make the movie now. I'd wait a couple of years. >> Okay. Okay. Uh anything else, Jordy? >> The story continues. >> Story continues. >> I'm expecting to see uh Model Wise around San Francisco that say, "I bought this after Elon lost his landmark trial against OpenAI." Bumper. The bumper sticker. >> New bumper sticker. >> And on. >> Well, have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for taking the time. >> We'll talk to you. Great to see you next time. >> We'll talk to you soon. >> Uh so Mark Cuban has another proposal for how to deal with data centers and internalize all those negative externalities. He says we should tax tokens federally at the provider level. Uh Tyler, you're going to have to interpret what this would mean and all the ways that uh companies would wind up getting around this uh with um maybe you know less less robust answers potentially. But he says not a lot, less than 50 cents per million tokens. It will accomplish four things at least. It will push the big AI players to optimize tokenization, caching, routing, and localization, which will reduce energy usage, saving them in energy costs more than what they paid in tax and reducing strain created by the growth in energy consumption, which will generate maybe 10 billion a year to start, but over the next 10 years could grow 30x to 100 year 100x. So he's he's thinking two orders of magnitude in a decade in terms of growth for AI. That's uh low end of what a lot of people think. Um and then four, create a source of funding to pay down the federal debt or deploy in response to the things AI brings that we don't expect or don't like. At some point, the models will pass it on to consumers. Of course, that's okay. Consumers will have the ability to choose between providers or do or to do everything using open-source models locally, which I guess wouldn't be taxed. What do you >> mean? This is kind of like the opposite of what we were saying before of like going direct, right? Because we were saying, okay, uh, you know, the actual data centers are going to make so much revenue, you can just tax the data centers and then the the money goes to local community and then that's where you see the benefits. But isn't this going like up the chain even more? So you're taxing the companies then people in the community like definitely won't it like the money will be like so abstract if it's at the federal level. >> I feel like this is the wrong way. >> Here's something else. >> You should be giving people you should get a check from Open Anthropic every month. Maybe that's that's I think the better version of his if you want to tax the company. >> What if we taxed companies, you know, what what if we had something like um like a sales tax or you know what if what if when >> income tax? >> Yeah. Like if someone when someone paid what if some of that money went >> to the government >> to help pay for public, you know, services and maybe even if a company's doing really really well, >> then you could take a percentage of their profits. Yeah, >> because that company has >> investors sold their stakes. They would >> they would also pay tax on whatever game >> and then every single what about every single underlying vendor that the company you had the same sort of like uh structure for every underlying company. >> If Nvidia sells a bunch of GPUs and they make a bunch of money, they have to pay tax on the profits on that. >> Yeah. Or even somebody like a contractor that uh you know manages a building, right? So they have a you know maybe it's a small local business >> they manage an office million dollars costs are only half a million that that half a million profit that gets taxed. >> Has anyone thought of that? >> That might work anyway >> and then you could use that money to sort of you know cover the costs of operating the government and then >> potentially even potentially use some of the extra to pay down the debt >> potentially. Well Palmer Lucky is going back and forth with Mark Cuban about this. Palmer Lucky says there are already massive economic incentives to optimize. So this is just a tax on American companies that makes foreign models and more and products more attractive along with creating the infrastructure for government to track all AI usage and punish anyone who doesn't report. Uh Mark Cuban says those incentives change over time. Right now the incentive is to grow and spend market share over optimization. you know this uh don't do you think the marginal cost of some bips on a token is going to make those buyers choose differently or do you think the models are just a commodity and price is the only differentiation space and then the question mark every time you know it's not AI uh and the tax would only be on what providers sell not open source models not local not internal and what foreign models are you referring to Palmer Mark you are essentially making an argument for central planning the burden is on you to show you where it's worked before no quotas no mandates just good old capitalism and competition. Palmer says this is obviously not capitalism or competition by any reasonable definition. It is a tax that specifically disadvantages one type of AI business to the benefit of others artificially propping up their business models and my business is one of the ones that would benefit because he's not tokenheavy. That is an interesting take. >> Semi analysis says 50 cents uh per MTO is a lot of money marker. Are you considering considered cash hit on prefill or just output tokens? >> These are the hard questions. Steven says, "Imagine a bit tax in 1995." >> Yes. Flops tax. Uh, I don't know what what else is going on in the AI slop. The bot farms. >> What about every time you How about this? What about every time you move your cursor, it's just one cent? >> Right. >> Yeah. I don't know. Tax on something. >> It's pretty funny. I was saying I was saying last week when I was saying like basically reinventing uh uh uh the US Postal Service >> a lot of people were messaging me saying you know people you know this exists already. >> It's like man it's tough when the sarcasm >> doesn't break through >> doesn't break through. >> Well the bot farms have figured out anti- AI anti-data center posts on Facebook are good for engagement but ironically they're using AI slop to do it. You don't know this is the eye slop. This might be the most perfectly designed set of stones ever visited upon a beach. It's not worth it's not worth giving up an inch of this to a data center Indiana. Breaking an Indiana resident aredly arranged stones to make an anti-data center message. Uh this is 99% slop. And this one is really sloppy. Wow. Uh, Wisconsin's forest, farms, lakes, rivers, small towns. Not a single square inch of Wisconsin is worth giving up for an AI data center. Interesting that the I and is is capitalized. Makes me think that that was added after the fact. Uh, but the rest is uh pretty sloppy, but kind of beautiful. I kind of like the perspective on this image with the big farm in the the barn in the background and the uh >> this makes me want to visit Wisconsin. >> Yeah. Does Wisconsin actually look like this? If it does, perfect place to build a data center. Yeah, that's the only thing that's missing. Uh, well, >> no, I want Yeah, we we have to go and find we have to go find the the the the ugliest 10,000 acres in Wisconsin. New challenge, Tyler. >> Well, we got to we we got to cover uh Everlane. We got to cover Everlane. There was a big >> Well, just to close out, should we should we should we cover this post from Ken Griffin that was going around. >> I I I want to cover this, but like the trick is that this is a Ken Griffin clip. So, basically, he pivoted on AI three months ago. He was saying like, uh, it's not really useful. The reports that we get from AI models are not actually, you know, relevant to our business. And now he's saying, uh, for us at Citadel, it's allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases. It's been really interesting to watch uh work that we would usually do with people with masters or PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months is being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days. And it's seen as sort of a blackpilling moment because he says like I got home and I was sort of uh I got to tell you I went home one Friday barely depressed by this because you could see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society and uh it is like a weird moment and it's sort of like oh okay he's he's waking up. Um, but then if you actually watch the full interview, this is one minute from a 40-minute interview or something. And he goes on to enumerate a whole bunch of different benefits and where he is allocating his workforce. And also, Citadel is in a very interesting game theoretic dynamic where uh it's not they they they are not a monopolist. So by definition like they are in competition with all their other funds. And so, uh, there's there is a world where, uh, like even if they're getting incredible value out of AI, they wind up using AI and humans in conjunction to compete because, uh, we are in like the centaur era, which is sort of what he enumerates. But anyway, what did you mean this? >> One uh, one >> one thought I had is that uh, you know, Citadel has, you know, >> AI psychosis. That's what you're saying. That's uh No, they they have a team of thousands of, you know, PhD level talent. >> Yeah. >> That are doing things that AI can do pretty well now. And him driving home on a Friday being depressed. >> Part of me was thinking, is he depressed because he realizes everyone will soon have access to a thousand >> people with PhD level talent >> that they can turn on uh and maybe they can't cover the whole market. talked a lot about how much there is to build. He's like, we'll never build enough. But at the same time, he was thinking like, wow, this this like resource that I've accumulated, this like capability, this like uh this this team um when AI can do what they do and everyone can access AI, >> like how is my business going to change? >> Yeah. So funny reflecting on the time I worked at Citadel and my job was basically to copy and paste cells in an Excel spreadsheet. And so I wrote a visual basic script to sort of just do it for me and then I was able to just like have seven hours of free time every day. And uh and I and I wound up being able to do a lot of other stuff. Uh and it was a story of automation. And uh and I can tell you at least back in 2011 I spent the summer over there as an intern. Uh there was a lot of stuff you could automate for sure. A lot of stuff in the back office, middle office, uh and yeah, some some research in the front office, but uh Citadel's Edge is more than just it's more than just research. They do a lot of CEO interviews. They talk to a lot of people uh off the record. They have a lot of information that does not exist on the internet. Uh and >> scale, >> yeah, there's a lot of different stuff. So, I don't know. It's interesting. Uh it is. >> Yeah. Let's uh let's talk about Everlane. >> Yeah. Uh well, we have our I think we have our next guest already here. But um we can go through Everlane quickly or we can come back to Everlane at 12:45. What do you >> Let's do that. >> Okay. Well, let's bring in Rowan from Reddus because he's waiting in the waiting room. Rowan, welcome to the show. How are you doing? >> I'm doing great. >> Thanks so much for being here. Uh, since it's your first time in the show, I' I've actually been >> Are you getting an act is this an active sauna session for you? >> It does look like a sauna background. No, >> I'm in Tenneref today, actually. So, >> amazing. Amazing. >> The wood paneling behind you really does look like a >> I like it. I like it. >> Um, well, yeah, we'll see in in in a few minutes if you start sweating. >> I'll be doing the cold plunge next. We'll see how that goes. >> Yeah. Well, some people in tech do combine cold plunges with >> that's happening >> talking about their companies. Tim Draper being >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Anyways, great great to great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. Um I I I used Reddus a ton uh about a decade ago. I'm a big fan of the product, but uh if you could introduce yourself and the company a little bit before we go into the news today, that'd be great. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, guys, for having me on. It's an honor to be on. I loved your show. Uh big big fan and watch all the time. >> Great. Uh yeah, so I'm the I head up Reddus and we're one of the sort of core infrastructure components that uh you know has been around. We're one of the one of the bigger open source projects uh over the last 15 years and sort of helped build out a lot of the internet infrastructure and >> uh got a great team. We have just about we're 3500 people now. Um and we're starting to see a lot of >> uh there you go. >> That's great. >> We're starting to see a lot of traction in the AI world um as people are starting to really build out agents as you guys were just talking about. you know, lots of opportunity there and and um >> so we're being pulled in on agent data. >> Yeah, I want to get to that. Is is is the is the correct framing for Reddus for people who might not have actually used the product uh in memory key value storage like non- relational databases? Think like my SQL but less structured and also held in memory therefore faster. >> Totally. You nailed it. Uh it the history of of it is it's an in-memory data structure server. It's not really a database. Yeah. >> Uh but it's been treated as a database and the killer app that kind of took off and made Reddus a part of kind of got the tendrils into all the applications on the whole internet was was key value >> used being used for caching. >> Y >> so it originally started as an in-memory database. The big thing that's changed though and this is just >> coming live now is over the last few years we've rearchitected Reddus and launched a new product that uh it uses flash as the backend storage. And so now we have the fastest the world's fastest >> uh flash object store and uh and so that's that's a new thing and that was really driven by AI because we were seeing huge demand for way bigger uh way way more data and just and also RAM prices have gotten crazy >> and MVME uh cost uh uh performance has improved dramatically. >> Sure. Okay. So then uh take me through some of the history of the business. I know you joined as CEO uh like in the modern era but uh in terms of that transition uh what is the shape of the business because a lot of people are building open source software and I'm always fascinated by that transition and that interaction between the product which sometimes has like incredible developer pull incredible ecosystem and then also an incredible opportunity to build a real business around it. But what is the shape of that? because I think people go to Red Hat, they go to consulting shops, they go to hosting providers, enterprise software wrapped around it, but what how would you describe it? Uh the the shape of the business around the product right now. >> Yeah. So we're it's a great question. We're still a open core company. So we have an open source base which is Reddus. Anyone can download it and use it for free. It's used >> all over the place for free. And then we have a paid version. So, for example, the the recent innovation I mentioned, the rewrite using flash uh story, that's that's not for free. That's something that you would pay for. We have a lot of performance advantages in the paid version. We have a hosted version. It runs on all three of the the major clouds. So, if you get Reddus on Amazon or Google or or Microsoft, Azure, right, we we provide we we have our own version essentially that runs on those clouds. Um, and so that's that's that's the that's the heart of the business. Most of our usage on the internet >> is free Reddus cuz the free product is amazing. >> Yeah, >> the paid version is even better. >> I like it. That's good. That's good salesmanship. So the the relationship with the hyperscalers uh is that like consumption revenue that's coming to you. I set up a an an AWS instance. I pull Reddus off the shelf from the dashboard of a million different tools and then as I'm using it every month, stuffing more and more data into it, uh that money is flowing to you from the hyperscalers. Exactly. So it's a little different depending on which hypers scale you're talking about. from Microsoft they're hosted right if you buy the first party service from Microsoft right so on on the in the hyperscalers you have first party services that are offered by >> the hyperscaler themselves then there's third party that you buy through the marketplace in Microsoft's case when you buy Reddus first party it's actually our software and and exactly you're exactly right we get a revenue share of that so that's called Azure cache for reddus and then there's uh and then Amazon and Google no longer offer as firstparty services Reddus they have their own products that were once built based on Reddus, but we did a license shift >> uh to kind of get them off of our tail, frankly. So, Amazon and Google now have their own code bases that they have to maintain that that that that have really diverged from what is now core Reddus. We offer on Amazon and Google through the marketplace uh Reddus uh you know as the Reddus cloud product essentially and then increasingly we're offering that through new cloud vendors uh either their neo clouds or like Verscell for example. So if you ask an agent >> if you're building on Versell and you say hey please deploy Reddus cloud boom you'll get our product uh and it it seamlessly is integrated into their platform as well. >> Yeah that makes a lot of sense. So um I mean I remember when I was using Reddus I was using it a lot for uh actually like business intelligence and like data analysis. It was just nice to uh clean up some data have it all available in memory much faster to sort of query and do like map produce over. Um but uh obviously the the the bread and butter is caching but I'm interested in in the shape of the agent business like what data is being stored uh when because a lot of this stuff can be loaded in context. It can live on the chip. We talked to Cerebrus founder last week like there's an incredible amount of work being done really really deep in the in the in the AI supply chain and then there's everything out to hard drives and tape storage on the other side and so what is the sweet spot that Reddus is filling right now? >> Yeah. So if if in the past as you just talked about sort of the the the killer use case in the cloud mobile era was caching your your database basically. Okay. Okay, you could use it for a lot of other stuff as you talked about. Um, and in the new world we sit in a similar place and that is essentially providing all the context you know like coalesing all the context for the agent and then delivering that to the agent. >> Yeah. >> And we we had to actually build a new product to do that. So what what developers have been using Reddus for in the agent this called the next era that we're heading into is storing agent data and hosting agent context. And one of the reasons for that is that you're going to see multiple orders of magnitude more agents than human beings in a company. >> And what that has a direct consequence to the load you're putting on your backend data systems. So just like in the cloud mobile era, you saw you know kind of you went from like uh guys that were sitting at at green screens like like bank tellers for example >> and and the load factor on your backend DB2 might have been like 10,000 to one or something. Okay. Then you added mobile and you added a million customers or 10 million customers. So so two, three, four orders of magnitude more load and Reddus came in there as a scaling layer. >> Yeah. >> Okay. And you didn't you didn't have to go and scale DB2 or your mainframe or whatever. It doesn't make any sense. You Oracle that back end. Similarly, in the agent era, a similar transition is happening. So as that load increases, you can't have like my company has a thousand employees. I can't have a h 100red thousand or a million agents and we're going crazy with agents right now internally. >> Yeah. >> Hitting my backend data systems because I'm going to be paying a hell of a lot more to all my underlying providers. So we use Reddus in the middle >> as the context engine. >> Yeah. >> And we cache and hold all the context from the underlying databases in Reddus and that's what the agents interact with. So we launched a brand new product that's on our website right now called Iris. >> Yeah. And this is its exact intention is that what you do is you you have we have a data integration piece that sucks the data out of your underlying databases, stores it in our new reddis flash database and then serves it through CLI and uh MCP through pyantic models. So you define pyantic models on top of your data >> and you do the transformations underneath and then what the agent sees is a manifestation or a view of the underlying data. And the difference is it it's not just a scale issue. It's also providing the data in the way the agent expects to get it. So, I'll give you a simple analogy here would be like if I told you, you know, hey, you know, let's say let's say I said to you, um, uh, hey, I'm an agent and I need you to go get some data and you said, great, it's in that filing cabinet and I got to go rumage around as an agent calling a whole bunch of MCP tools and doing queries and figuring out relationships, etc., etc., versus I say to you, I need some data, and you just pull the exact file out of the cabinet and say, here it is, and hand it to me. >> And that's the difference. So it's a huge reduction in token costs y >> um and also agent speed and then a and then a big improvement in terms of performance of agents because the data is essentially massaged into a format these pyantic models and then semantically described exactly what the agent needs. So that's what Iris is all about and then it also has the second component which is memory. So agent memory is the other big thing we've invested in. We have a state-of-the-art uh memory server that we've just launched as well. >> Yeah. So I I mean what what is a like a reasonable scaling factor for the amount of data from my relational database my hard drive based database to go into memory because I imagine it's you mentioned like brings a copy into memory but I imagine that's not one to one I want to do some uh some condensing down of the data to what's relevant and I imagine that Iris helps with that but what is a good rule of thumb I imagine that there's some sort of cost relative uh tradeoff there. But how how are how are companies even thinking about that? >> Yeah, it's interesting. You know, I haven't really talked to any customers who are thinking about it in that way. >> Okay. >> What they're thinking about is what is the cost delta to scale my data layer in Reddus versus purchasing additional licenses of you know whatever Netswuite or >> sure >> you know Salesforce or this or that the other thing whatever that whatever that underlying asset is. Um and so but I would say >> so so it's a good question. I actually don't know the answer to that. Um but they do think about it in terms of accuracy. >> Yeah. >> Like you know you want the data to be served up in a way that is the best possible and most accurate data. So semantic descriptions this is why we use the pyantic models is you can put semantic descriptions on each thing. So so >> so all that encoded knowledge >> of like what to query what database what record what table that all gets encoded in the system. What the agent gets is a really nice set of MCP or CLI tools that say like, you know, search customer records. >> Yeah. >> And we have a super fast search underneath the covers. We have a great vector search and then a BM25 search. So we can search across all those records and then just deliver exactly what you need. And so what that all amounts to for the end customer >> is a much faster and much more token efficient agent experience. >> Yeah. And and the second piece of it, and this is important, we should talk about it, is that that context should get better over time. Like agents learn things as they go and they need to remember the things that they've learned. Not just facts about the user. Like when people talk about memory these days, we often talk about remembering user preferences. That's interesting. But you also need to remember, hey, when I uh when I check the shipping status for this particular customer, like that system was wrong, but this system was right. Mhm. >> And that's the truth of large enterprises and their data is that they're really messy in most cases. And so expecting them to sort of like get all that stuff in order in advance, it's just too tall of an order. And so we need to also remember things that the agent has learned over time and then store those uh and that and that gets stored in agent memory. So we have a state-of-the-art model there called agent memory server that does the extraction and all the kind of stuff you would expect from a memory platform. >> Yeah. How are you interacting with uh benchmarks these days? Because most of the benchmarks are centered around uh performance like meters like how how advanced of a software engineering task can the frontier models crank on and they're up to like 24hour it would take a software engineer 24 hours to do something but uh 4.7 or 5.5 can can can do it period and can achieve it with 50% accuracy. they're not really talking about the time to return that result. And we've sort of settled into this equilibrium where uh if it's a big query, 10 minutes is acceptable for most people. Uh maybe 20 and then for, you know, a knowledge retrieval, I want to know an answer. It's got to come back in like 30 seconds. But it's not we're not in the Amazon uh e-commerce era where a 100 milliseconds means losing dollars which is sort of where you're where where the reddest DNA comes from in caching. But I imagine that a pitch to an agent company might be something like yes, the vast majority of wall clock time is going to be waiting for tokens to inference and turn out on, you know, a big cluster somewhere, but we're going to keep the GPUs fed so much more effectively by keeping this in memory. How are you thinking about quantifying that for customers? >> Yeah. Well, so the first point you made about agent runtime certainly that we're we're witnessing what everyone else is witnessing, you know, the the length of time an agent can run unattended. And the and the issue with that is context becomes even more important, right? Like if I told you to solve a problem and then I locked you in like a closet and didn't give you access to the outside world for 8 hours, you'd just hallucinate a bunch of answers. But if I stuck you in the New York Public City Library and with a Google terminal, like you'd be good and you'd come up with an answer and it would be good. So context becomes super important when you're running these really long tasks. And the transition that has happened really over the last couple of years from what started with rag, which was kind of engineers thinking, hey, we'll just preload the context window with all this stuff. >> Yeah. >> And then then the agent can go and go figure it all out. And there was this whole idea that context windows would get bigger and you could just load everything into the context window. Your whole codebase, >> you know, all of your enter but but the truth is that really doesn't work to stick everything into the context window. number one is expensive >> and number two just really it's overloading. You're just getting way too much rot in in the context window. And so it's much better to provide a tight set of tools to the agent to let them reason over the data and sort of do searches and what what can I access and and that kind of stuff. So what we see is the longer the agent can run the the better the context has to be to make it effective. >> Otherwise it just starts to go haywire. >> Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh switching over to just uh your philosophy as a CEO, you said500 people, something like that, over a thousand work for Reddus. Uh you're obviously using these tools. How do you see the shape of the organization changing over the next few years? >> Well, dramatically. I mean, so I I've been coding since I was 11 years old and professionally since I was 18 in high school and at a startup. And um you know I woke up one day with these tools and realized like all the way that I learned how to build software 30 years ago is just not relevant anymore. >> And so you know I'm not going to rely on a bunch of other people telling me you know and like watching you know Twitter people breathlessly telling me how the world is changing. I'm going to go learn it myself. So I've gone back to basics over the last year and a half. Um I mean really since we started using chat GPT for coding. Yeah. uh and OpenAI and then really have been diving in myself personally. So I I actually sit on teams. I've been contributing and building my own projects on the side as well as contributing to our own code. And I think there's a few maybe non-obvious things that I've learned. You know, there's the obvious part that is like the code is now can be written mostly by by agents and by you know by coding agents. >> But but that if you just do that, it doesn't really change much because then you still have the same people in the same process. The process is all set up to basically handle a world where the coding takes a really long time. That's the long pole. If that's not the long pole anymore, there's all these other long poles like meetings and daily standups and processes that were all built around that fundamental assumption of coding is the long pole in the tent. Now that that's gone, we're having to reinvent those processes. And I've basically found and same with my CTO, we have to go right back into the front lines with the teams and build code ourselves as we reinvent the software development life cycle. And frankly, we're finding that a lot of folks have to make a big jump in terms of how they do work. Like a developer with eight with 10 agents is more like a development manager of old. And the development manager does a different job. They coordinate. They express the right the requirements in the right way. They have taste. They decide what's the right approach to solve a problem. And that's the new job. And it's really fundamentally different than what the developer of, let's say, three years used to do before these agents showed up. So I, and by the way, I'm having a blast. Like, I love coding. I've always loved coding. I I love everything about it. And I love it even more now. I mean, it's like the I've taken out the gnarly part in the middle, which was the, you know, typing everything in and finding missing semicolons, and now I just go right from expressing intent to getting the result. And that's awesome. I mean, it's super cool. Uh are you seeing it instantiated more in like new green field projects, new internal tools or actual uh product velocity on the core product? >> Both but it more on green field on the brown field what we've and first of all like we use it differently. So >> for like front-end stuff um >> you know we can like pretty much vibe code everything. >> Sure. >> You know on core Reddus system software >> uh I'll give you a good example. We just launched a new data type. Salvator Sanfalippo, who's the original author of Reddus. >> Yeah. >> Uh launched a new data type called arrays. >> Yeah. >> It's 4,000 lines of CC code. It took him 4 months and he was deeply using codeex. >> Interesting. >> And uh um and anthropic. Okay. Claude. >> Yeah. >> The whole time. >> Yeah. >> Um and it was it's but the different so it it took it was faster to do. Yeah. >> Okay. So that same idea that that array data type would have taken probably a lot longer >> but more important like eight eight months maybe for him just sitting there writing C code but more importantly it's way higher quality >> right out of the gate huge amounts of tests huge amounts of infrastructure like all kinds of benchmarks all that extra stuff that comes around the edges and we really do use even at hardcore systems level coding we're using the AI to give really good suggestions uh we're often p pitting them against each other to sort of say Hey, come up your bet with your best design for this and then we'll throw it at the other AI to say what do you think and back and forth. So, so at that level, you really are still crafting the code. Um, at the systems level, which is kind of where the world that I come from. Um, but at the higher end and and kind of for Greenfield projects, you know, JavaScript and, you know, Nex.js applications, you're just like vibe coding and just going crazy. I would say we have one project is a good example in a green field. It would have taken a typical like we were building this big management infrastructure for for the Iris project. It would have taken us probably a year for like 10 devs to do something like big like that with LDAP support and all the different things you need for enterprise software. >> It took five guys one month >> uh guys and girls actually. So that's a big acceleration on that front but it's different at the systems level software side and brownfield. >> Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Uh well, thank you so much for coming on the show, breaking down for us. Uh, hope you have a great week. We'll talk to you soon. >> Huge fan. Thank you so much for having me on. >> Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Uh, Everlane was sold to Shien for just $100 million. It was a VC darling when it launched, says Shil Monot raising from Kleiner Perkins. I didn't realize how many uh bigots. It was a who's who. Uh, Kleiner Perkins, Kosla, Maver, and others. $145 million raised. I think the bet was that consumers would pay more for ethical sustainable basics and that consumers may not really exist at venture scale that consumer the low-end consumer consumer wants price. The high-end consu customer wants brand taste and status. Everlane is kind of stuck in the middle. sells smart basics at a premium. But I'm not sure uh people who are willing to pay a pre significant premium for simple clothes over quints, unilo, and Amazon. Maybe the radical the real radical transparency was showing everyone how brutal fashion economics can be. Wonder when what Sheen does with it. Will they just make the same clothes in sweat shops now? And so people were very upset about this. Rachel. >> Yeah, you have. So, so yeah, I think you >> one pretty pretty shocking, right? Companies have had very different approaches to building their business. >> Yeah. >> Uh and uh it's hard to see how uh it's hard to see how uh Everland can fit into Sheen uh in a way that maintains their historical ethos. Who knows, right? Sheen Sheen, >> is it that hard? I mean, doesn't like like Volkswagen Group owns Lamborghini or something like >> Yeah, but neither Volkswagen or Lamborghini were ever they were both saying we're making cars. Lamborghini says we make faster cars. Volkswagen, >> they both make clothes. Everlane saying we make clothes in the system. >> Yeah, but Sheen is a company. She like Everlane Everlane was created as a response to uh people's concerns with sweat shops, right? >> Was the Rivwellto not a response to the pat? >> I believe it was >> um No. So, so Everlane came out of >> It is different because it's moral. It's moral. It's not It's not purely functional. It's not like we're making Everlane wasn't like we're going to make a better t-shirt. That was maybe part of it, but it was more like we're gonna make >> we're gonna make >> at the same time. A lot of the car makers, they went EV directly to counteract the gas. >> You have to look at when these car companies were founded at the time there there wasn't Yes. Speed, if speed is is morality, horsepower is morality. Maybe you're right, John. But but look at the uh when was Everane founded? 2011. >> I just think like like some car brands were founded with safety in mind. >> Founded in 2011. two things pop of mind at that point. >> Uh sweat shops, >> like apparel sweat shops, right? And then the entire, you know, sort of like eco sustainability movement, right? So, Everlane was a response from that. They met the moment, the business absolutely ripped. I think the other thing at that time is like a lot of the big legacy brands thinking like >> Gap and and um and uh Old Navy and brands like that uh they were just totally asleep at the wheel, right? So they're they're I I think they weren't keeping up with just weren't keeping up with the times, right? When you just look at think about the difference of like navigating like an Everlane website in that era versus navigating like a Gap website, right? Like I've never I've actually never navigated, >> but just imagine it, right? Like one is extremely clunky, the other one is like very >> easy to operate. Uh Everlane was a pioneer of an entire style of uh you know, photography, product photography. >> Uh it was very everything was like clean, minimalist. It really met the moment, right? And this is something that um apparel brands blow up because they >> is a little bit busier on the website. I'm looking at Everane, it's like a single model just showing like a few items of clothing and you open up the Shien website and it's just huge accept all cookies and then 30% off if you sign up and save and then like a huge registration thing and then another popup. So many popups here. Uh yeah, wildly different brands. Another popup. >> Yeah. So, Everlane created in the perfect moment a response to consumer concerns and preferences. They ride that wave to couple hundred million of annualized revenue. They've got own retail in a bunch of different places. They're DOC darling. >> Uh Michael CEO uh who's uh a friend of mine. Uh I'm an I'm an investor in one of his new companies. Cool. >> Um he Yeah, I mean incredible execution by the team. They built a brand that effectively uh became a household name. He stepped away after basically 10 years. Um and uh and uh woman named Andrea took over. Mhm. >> Uh but but yeah, I think ultimately when you look at there's there's this like constant desire that sometimes gets forgotten or obfuscated, which is that consumers want cheap stuff, right? And I think as Everlane was like trying to scale, right? Competing over the coastal millennial who's like on Instagram all day long shopping, right? They're excited about newness, right? Like I have tried so many different companies that are effectively competitors to Everlane. I've tried so many different t-shirt >> basics companies just because I'm constantly searching for the perfect white t-shirt, >> which we might we might have to make. We might have to make >> the TBPN perfect white tea. >> Yes. Um uh and and so you have this customer base who you met them at this amazing moment and their their revenue ramp reflects that. But then over time it was in some ways like the the sort of like sustainability brands like broadly have suffered over the last decade, right? it stopped being something that the average consumer was um caring about to the same degree. Allirds is another example of this sustainable footwear, >> right? Um and uh and so yeah, shift in consumer preferences also when you look at a lot of the greatest apparel brands in history, they they didn't raise venture capital, right? When you have venture capital, it's like we need to grow as much as possible year over year forever. Like that is what you sign up for, right? And when you look at apparel brands oftent times like there it's more of a kind of like winding road >> like Chrome Hearts. >> Exactly. >> Up and down. Yeah. >> Exactly. Up and down but tightly >> held right by by one family and uh they're okay. They're like, "Hey, if revenue dips one year or we want to pull back >> on supply, that's great, right?" And so, uh, when you're venturebacked, you don't have that luxury. Yeah. >> And I think that venture is at odds with building, >> it's just at odds with building >> a super durable apparel brand >> simply because there's there's no network effects at all. Right? And especially if your customer if if your customer base >> is excited about newness, right? I'm not uh I might be more loyal to one brand or another, but that doesn't stop me from, you know, seeing a brand pop up. Maybe it's run by >> some founder, I think, is cool. Being willing to try it, right? And um this is happening all the time. like Chris Chris Black has a brand um and uh the dollars that I'm putting towards his brand are uh are like effectively dollars that could have gone to Everlane, right? >> Yeah. >> Um >> Amy Leon Door founded in 2014 seems to be doing well. >> Venture back though, >> is it? >> I don't think so. >> I don't think so. No. >> Uh and I think it's uh very tightly held, very tightly controlled, very limited. Well, uh, the deal was $100 million. We don't know too much about the deal other than, uh, they had raised over $und00 million in equity. El Caterton invested $85 million in Everlane in 2020 when the brand was doing 200 million in revenue. Now revenue is down to 170, but there's 90 million in debt. Sort of unclear. Did she acquire the debt and then pay that hundred million to the preferred equity holders? Uh it feels like Common was probably wiped out, but uh unclear exactly the structure of this deal. Uh they say uh this one post Fan B says uh um uh the $und00 million sale price essentially covers the debt, but it's possible that the $und00 million went to the preferred equity holders and Sheen assumed the debt with the with the uh with the deal. Uh either way, not a fantastic outcome. Uh there's uh you know people are saying it's the death of DTC but there are some green shoots specifically with green products sold for 1.2 billion that's a good outcome. >> Hu that's a brand that can go in every Target every Walmart every Whole Foods every major retailer and sell billions of dollars worth of product. uh Everlane. I'm not sure if they ever were selling in in other retails or it was entirely their own >> uh their own stores. >> Um and there's no there's no real like, you know, Everlane made some great clothes. Yeah. There's probably people listening to this that bought something from Everlane >> five, eight years ago, something like that. >> Uh and it's still in their closet. And so, uh, unfortunate outcome for the Everlane, uh, uh, team, but, uh, they, uh, their execution across that decade was, uh, pretty impressive. >> And we'll see where it goes. Uh, well, we have our next guest, Dean from Decart in the waiting room. Let's bring in Dean. Will there be a crazy filter? Normal. Normal mode. >> Welcome back to the show. We'll throw a filter off. I haven't seen anyone nail that as well as you have. Uh, well, you've been nailing lots of things. Give us the news. Tell us what's going on. >> Well, so fun to be back here on TVPN. Last time we did this, we had some crazy filters. >> It was very psychedelic. I loved it. >> It was It was very psychedelic. If you're interested in newer ones, you should go on our site and try them out. It's been mindblowing. >> Amazing. >> But but today, you know, we announced a round. We had a big funding round. We million dollars. Woo! >> There we go. >> Nice. >> It's great to have you back. Great to have you back. >> It was It was worth doing the round just for that. We should We should do more and more rounds just to get that going. >> Raise a dollar tomorrow. We'll have you back. >> Um, no, tell us tell us what you've been up to since the last conversation. >> So, so you know, today the really exciting stuff is that we have announcements on all three of our product lines. >> Wow. So, so we have we have three product lines at the cart. The the first two are world models. We have Lucy, that's a world model. It's a real-time video model that is used for immersive experiences. So, gaming, live streaming, e-commerce, ads, and and we have the new version of Lucy coming out soon, which which has been growing dramatically over the past three quarter. Yeah, >> that's generally what you were demoing the last time you were on where you have this real time video of you in these sort of exotic settings, right? >> Exactly. We have Lucy. Lucy can take any video stream and edit it live. So it can do either fun stuff and we've seen huge usage for that on social platforms like Twitch, Tik Tok live, YouTube live and at the same time can also be used for for beneficial experiences for example e-commerce and virtual tryon trying on different clothes uh or putting ads inside live streams and we've seen that for example with Amazon uh we're using this across different e-commerce providers. So that's that's our Lucy product line and has its new version that's coming out. We have our Oasis product line which is a real time world model for physical AI for robotics for autonomous vehicles uh drones manufacturing and really over there our real time model lets AI just interact with the real world. It stops being just in the virtual world in tech space and actually is real-time pixels lets the AI see the real the real world in real time and interact with it. And then we have our our third product line which is DOSS the the cart optimized stack. It's our inference engine. It's basically what powers both Lucy and Oasis. And it lets us run models, all types of models, a LLM models, agentic models, video models, audio models, world models, all the types of models, dramatically more efficient than anything on the market. And today we're announcing DOS 2.0 that's already being used by some of the hyperscalers. >> Hit it again. >> I think I got I think I got bang lacking. I gave him a heart attack. >> Uh when did when did you release DOSs 1.0? You you you realized at some point, hey, we're cooking pretty hard over here. Maybe we should let other people use it. Uh it feels, you know, uh pretty aligned with with the other products. Um but uh but yeah, how did you get into it? >> So I think that's a great question actually. You know, we we don't talk about DOSs too much, but DOSs was actually the first product we commercialized. >> When the company was just 3 months old, we closed the first multi-million dollar license deal for DOSs. >> Overnight success. >> Literally, >> literally 3 months in, it was less than 100 days. >> Fantastic. >> Why did you Why did it take you so long? >> That's, you know, that's the number one question I ask my team literally every single day. Okay. Number one rule for running an AI company. If you're an AICO, whenever your team comes to you with a deadline, ask why not 10 times shorter. >> Okay. But but yeah, you know, to go back to your question, DOS 1.0 was the first product we ever had at the cart. We licensed it back to the Neoclouds back then and to some of the younger a 2.0 is being used by by all the players including the tier one players as well uh and the hyperscalers to to really use compute much more efficiently. And for the models that we support, really focus on very fast models. So either aentic models or live video models. For those models, we're anywhere between five to 8x more performant than anything on the market. >> Okay. >> Is focus overrated? >> No, it seems that you're doing a lot. You're competing. You're fighting. You're fighting, you know, fighting on, you know, three different uh fronts, but clearly doing doing a great job at it. How do you how do you make it how do you make it work? Uh, I can imagine any one of these opportunities being, you know, big enough at some point to warrant kind of going all in on it. >> Well, we're all in on them on all three of them. Now, the nice thing is that it really I think I think focus is very very very important and you have to build inside the company very independent leaders. We have a lot of very very talented researchers that turned into very independent leaders inside the company. So they're both great on the technical side and very very good on productization on taking this to market on talking to customers on building the product itself and and we inside the car really have three different teams one for Lucy one for Oasis one for DOSs and they each operate completely independently and only focused on the thing that they're doing. Now with DOSs the reason the reason we we accelerated DOSs 2.0 0 was supposed to come out in August. We're launching it now instead is because of the huge huge huge huge supply constraint on the chip side. It's it's just become we're hearing this from all our customers that there's no capacity left basically till 2028. >> Mhm. >> And and so getting more performance out of chips is the only way to actually grow your revenue and and to and to grow your AI adoption. So if you're any AI company, you really have to be able to extract the most out of any possible chip to be able to actually grow your business. And right now that is a bottleneck. >> Yeah. H how how tightly linked are the different products? Because when I think of uh Lucy real-time interactive video world models, I think like optimization there is what you're a good at, but also incredibly important because even the demos that we've seen, they're not 4K, they're not 60fps. There's clearly room to run there. Whereas in many of like the text generation models for a lot of the queries that people are asking, how do I cook this? you know, uh, tell me the history of this company or or story like it's basically superhuman already, but superhuman real-time world models, like we're not there yet. And so optimization feels really important. How how tightly linked are those two projects? >> Yes, they're very tightly linked >> through DOSs. Yeah. >> And DOS 2.0 today, it can run realtime video models. Sure. >> At full HD for the first time. >> Okay. >> Up to 100 frames per second. >> Wow. >> Okay. Yeah. Yeah. >> So that's huge breakthroughs there. >> And on the text side, what DOSs can do. So DOSs runs on all the three major chips. It runs on Nvidia, on Google TPU, and Amazon Trainium. >> Yeah. >> It's it's it's the only the only stack that really supports all three for all the different types of models. >> And on the agentic side, >> for AMD, >> it's >> so over >> the the the chips the chip space is incredibly incredibly interesting. >> Like we will support the fourth eventually. We we we will we will support everyone. We will support everyone. >> Yeah. >> But to your question about fast text models, >> yeah, >> where you really need them is agentic workloads. >> You really need it if if you want to be able to run, for example, coding models very very quickly. >> Yeah. >> And DOS 2.0 can for the first time run it above a,500 tokens per second. >> Okay. Um >> which is more than 10 times the industry. >> Interesting. uh what at at at at somewhat of a high level technical level uh what is different about the architecture of interactive video world models from textbased LLMs? Like I think most people saw the fork in the road during like the midjourney era, the Dolly era, the diffusion, you start with a bunch of noise versus tokenbased next token prediction. Like have these converged? Have they diverged? Are there different requirements like we're seeing with agents we need more CPUs now we might need more more context in cache we might need rag or or vector databases like like what are different if you're to build out like the ultimate data center for generative interactive world models like are you looking for cerebrus like chips are you going all in on NVL72s like what what is the how is there is there a difference to the shape of the of the architecture that lends itself to like different hardware constraints. >> Yes, I think that that's that's probably one of the best questions in this field right now because AI is moving so quickly >> that it's very very hard to predict what the right infrastructure will be 3 months from now. >> Yeah. >> Uh you you brought up, you know, the the CPU shortage that suddenly happened. No one was expecting AI to need CPUs. And when AI needed CPUs, it went from zero to can we get all the CPUs and all the hyperscalers today? >> Yeah. and and that's and that's happening overnight. >> Now it's becoming it's becoming very hard what we're seeing what we're hear from our customers. It's becoming very hard for the people on the model side to actually understand what to do on the infrastructure side and and vice versa. And so there's this gap here of how do you map the model requirements and that they're constantly changing every single week to what's possible on the infrastructure side. And so that's why for example we support all three major hardware. It really allows us to choose where to route the different workloads to and then each one has its own unique strengths and weaknesses >> and and that lets us really we developed a very very deep expertise in knowing how to map the model to the chip itself. >> I think that it it ties into something else that we're seeing. You know, usually when people draw out the stack, they say, "Okay, there's the model layer. >> Then there's software, for example, Kudo, and then there's the hardware layer. >> I call it a five layer cake." But >> I wonder if someone else will will adopt your five layer cake terminology. >> Yeah, you have the two layers above and below. You have the data center and you have the application layer. >> But what people usually miss is that the software layer is around seven layers inside of it. >> Okay, it's not just one It's Oh, there's cuda here. No, no, no, no. Cake. >> It's It's a five layer cake with lots of flavors in in layer three. >> Sure. Lots of ingredients. >> Now, that's that's really where we sit. We integrate across all those layers inside the software side >> to really tie from the AI model itself directly onto the chip. We literally write assembly for all these three chips. >> Sure, >> we know how to write VIW for TPUs. We know how to write assembly for trainiums. We know how to write uh SAS and PTX for Nvidia chips. >> Sure. >> And so we have all these different layers and they really enable us to very quickly move between these workloads that constantly change. >> Okay. Are you seeing glimpses of consumer product opportunities in video world models? When I see your your technology, when I see Genie from Google and World Labs, I think, okay, like a harness, a wrapper, a couple UI, a relational database storing my inventory, like a couple other steps and all of a sudden this is something that I want to play for more than a demo, for more than a minute. And maybe the hardware is not there, but I think just as you know, lots of folks who were interacting with LLMs during like the GPT3 era sort of saw ahead and started thinking, oh well, like chat is a potential modality here. Uh, everyone's seeing that video games or something playable would be a potential modality, but how far away are we from that? Is that interesting? Like what else what what other dominoes need to fall for that to actually happen? So over the past month actually we've seen huge usage for using Lucy in live streaming. >> You can go to dulu.ai. >> Sure. Yeah. >> D lu.ai >> and and you can dul come on. Of course >> it's good. It's good. It's good >> and it just plugs right into your OBS. >> So you can just it just literally plugs into your OBS camera >> and you can just apply all these filters live. And we've seen streamers go on it for eight hours non-stop. >> So So we've seen that. We've seen that pop really over the past month, month and a half. We have a new subscription service there that people just subscribe to and they can turn it on uh for however long they want and that's just been growing exponentially fast. >> Okay. Uh well, thank you sir coming on. We actually have some videos that we're going to play uh because we've been demoing it or the team has uh >> no only while we've been while we've been talking. >> Can we play this while he's live so he can see it too? I think you'll see the program monitor if you want to hang out. Uh, but let's pull up. Uh, this is >> Tyler. You guys are doing the live demo instead of me this time. That is insane. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, we have a video here. We recorded it of uh I believe it's Tyler as Albert Einstein. Is that correct? Uh, let's see it if we can pull this up. Pulling it up might be the harder part. >> Real time video models, but pulling up the shadow and the lighting >> still a challenge. >> Did you prompt this? >> So, it started as Einstein and then I I went through a couple different uh the pink tuxedo on as well. That's very funny. What a funny prompt. And the Yeah, the the visual fidelity on Einstein's face. That is weird. Okay, that there we go. You got >> It's a very humanoid dog. Oh, that's a jacked horse. That's >> That is odd. That's very odd. But the horse head. Oh, there you go. Okay. That's interesting. as you touch your face like the the hand of the horse sort of hits the correct part of the face so it understands the physics. Well, that that was impressive. It wasn't purely >> last question. Last question before you jump is is there a certain milestone that if achieved you will cut your hair like >> is it in >> Oh yeah. >> Oh yeah. >> Oh yeah. Really? >> It's the the the milestone is that we need to hit 1 billion ARR. >> That's the milestone. It's a it's a bet from early on in the company. Now, this this is a year and a half long. Okay. This is just one and a half years. We have to get rid of it now with with DOSs and the way that's scaling. That's that's uh at some point we're gonna get a haircut. >> Fantastic. >> Amazing. >> Well, we'll be here when you hit that milestone. >> Selfishly, I kind of cut your hair on your waist, right? >> Oh, we should we should do a haircut on stream. We're going to do a haircut on stream. I love >> the stream. Come to the We'll shave your head. >> Dean, you're the man. >> This is great. >> The the chat loves you. Say hello to everyone at Radical. We're big fans. We'll talk to you soon. >> Cheers. >> Love them. >> Goodbye. >> Another one. >> We have Joanna Stern, author of I am not a robot coming in person today. >> But before, what do you want? >> We got to talk about >> what are we going to talk about? >> The protein shortage that is coming. >> What's going on with the protein shortage? >> Ellen Cushing in the Atlantic says making all that way is complicated. >> Okay. She says, "In retro retrospect, maybe the protein pop-tarts were a bit much. Americans, broadly speaking, are in a state of protein mania." >> Mania. >> We are eating it at breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, >> mania, >> and just about any time in between. We like it in chips, candy, soda, water. We like protein so much, in fact, that we've been eating it all up. Whey protein prices are surging and a shortage may be eminent. Uh, if you're not investing in the protein bottlenecks, I don't know what to do. >> Yeah. Where's the situational awareness for the protein shortage? >> We really need that. >> Demand is strengthening. The USDA warned in a recent report. Inventories remain tight. Some manufacturers have already sold their supplies for the full year. >> No way. >> I'm getting I'm getting PTSD. Uh since January, wholesale prices for food grade whey protein powder have wi r risen by more than 50% to the highest level on record. Retail prices are going up too. 6 months ago a 2 lb jug of Optimum Nutrition's delicious strawberry flavored whey protein went for about $40 on Amazon. Now it's $54. We've absolutely felt it, says Steven Zaminsky, CEO of the supplement company Nick Nutrition, said of the shortage in an email. He said his company has not raised prices. Demand is up and supply is tighter than it has ever been. Historically and currently, much of the protein that has made its way into packaged foods and smoothies and those big tubs of protein powder comes from whey. Raw milk is treated with heat acid or enzymes to coagulate it into two distinct substances. Kurds, which become cheese, and whey, >> which was at least until recently the cheesem processes unloly byproduct. Almost as long as industrialized agriculture has existed, the problem with whey wasn't scarcity at all, but the opposite. Farmers did anything they could to do to get rid of it as cheaply as possible. Fed it to livestock, sprayed it onto fields, uh dumped it into rivers and sewers, uh can you imagine swimming in a river that that was used as a dumping ground for whey, John? >> Weird. Especially combining that with a place like Switzerland where you can, you know, drink the the water and the lakes and the rivers, uh, and and you'll be totally fine. That could be a powerful combination. Uh, for much of our nation's history, any fish unlucky enough to be born in Wisconsin or Vermont had a good chance of being whoa murdered by whey. >> Whoa. I'll keep reading from here. >> Then environmental regulation limited whey dumping and technological developments made processing whey into powder much easier. Starting in the 1980s, whey was the food industry's go-to source of supplemental protein. Cheap, vegetarian, efficient, and already right there in abundance, supply and demand were more or less in alignment for a while. >> I I'll keep reading. >> No, >> another one. >> Then came the protein. >> Protein protein protein. This is such a fun the helium. Is there a helium shortage as well? It certainly seems that there is not because the helium is flowing through about the TBP and Ultradome. Anyway, uh influencers started bragging about how many grams they got in a day. The government flipped the food pyramid around, placing protein at the top. People from every walk of life latch on a protein as a sort of onesizefits-all super ingredient supposedly capable of giving anyone the body they want as long as they eat enough of it. M even >> even if the reality is obviously more complicated and food manufacturers responded to this new demand. You know when I was young and I was uh intentionally trying to have as many calories as possible. I realized I had to pull back on protein because it was just like too it was too filling at times. >> Yeah. Not enough calories and protein. You need fat. Yeah. Right. More dense, more >> caloric. Um, food manufacturers responded to this new demand enthusiastically, cramming in America's new favorite macronutrient wherever they could, usually in the form of weight. Now, the infrastructure can't keep up. The North American dairy industry has pumped about a decade of investment. >> Let's go. >> Wow. >> Heavy infrastructure. The build >> the build out. >> The buildout. Say that again. >> Build out. >> The buildout. The protein. >> The protein powder buildout of the late 2010s. Uh consumer demand and consumer preferences can change faster than processing capacity can. We're in that lag situation right now. It's this is a screaming bottleneck. >> We got a capability overhang. >> Turning fresh into shelf stable, scoopable, tasty enough protein powder people want is a massively complicated process. One that requires space and time and huge expensive machines. >> I didn't think the what is the AUV? What is the AUV machine? What is the ASML of whey? >> The EUV machine. Sorry. Sorry. EV. >> The advanced lithography machines. Yeah. What is the ASML? Probably I don't know. Maybe that company. Uh what's that caller? The cow collar company. They're right at the top. >> Yeah. Top of the >> founders fund's going long into the what what's it called? Cattle holler collar. Something like that. Cower. >> Whoops for cows. >> It's whoop for cows. And they're printing. The business is growing really really quickly. Um, >> a full processing plant can cost up to $1 billion to build. >> Everything is just big numbers. Even if you had theor theoretically started raising capital for a dairy processing facility the day the word protein maxing first appeared on Reddit 3 years ago, it would unlikely to be up and running today. >> Mhm. >> Wow. >> Higher the protein content, the more complex and expensive the processing. Whey protein isolate, the proteinist protein available, the kind that makes it possible to stuff half a chicken's breath breast worth of fuel into a candy bar, is the most expensive and until recently was a very small part of the market. The dairy industry just isn't set up for it. The processor decisions are long run decisions. It's really hard to make capital investments at the drop of a hat. Okay, just say you're not proteinpilled. uh based on whatever new shiny consumer preference there is out there. Pson grew up on a dairy farm. He remembers the cottage cheese craze of the past when fitness fixated when the fitness fixated country set its sight on a different milk-based superfood that was supposed to make you healthier and thinner and more powerful. Trends come and go was his point. They move quickly. Our appetites change faster than the systems that satisfy them. North America is currently building out 12 billion of dairy processing capacity. projections suggest that the current shortage will be short-lived and that the dairy industry will catch up with demand in the near future. I just wonder what consumers will be demanding then. Um I'm I don't I don't see uh I don't see supply ever catching up with demand, John. I think I think we're in a fast takeoff. >> I think we're in a fast takeoff scenario. I think that uh the fitness in influencers of the 2030s will be recommending 5 to 10 gram uh 5 to 10 gram uh per per pound body weight. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised. I I did not know that the protein boom was going as well as to to drive up uh you know supply. >> Capex. >> Yeah. Yeah. Because we I mean we >> ramp capex. We we we've talked on the show a few times about how like the they're putting protein in everything, protein in cereal, but I thought that was maybe like overhyped. It was going to be like a temporary trend. They're calling it a way bubble. >> Away bubble potentially. Potentially. Um well, we have our next guest, Joanna Stern, the author of I am not a robot in the TBP and Ultradum. We'll bring her in in just a second. Um, but uh I I don't know what have you have you added anything to your diet recently that actually uh contains newly added protein? Have you gone from something that was not like I'm not drinking a Diet Coke with protein. I don't know. The occasional protein bar, the protein shake, these are the staples of the modern life, but I don't know if there's something that jumps out to me as uh as wildly successful. There's been a lot of like protein cereals and protein pop-tarts and all sorts of different things, but I haven't seen like breakout successes in those actual categories. >> Yeah, I think when you add protein to most things, it just tastes worse. >> And then explain to me uh with the David Bar EPG that is >> but that's a that's a fat >> that's a fat. So he still has >> that is uh >> from from how it's been explained. >> And so they still have to buy normal protein. >> It passes through. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. So it doesn't count. So, so I would expect that part of this whole thing is that uh Peter >> has cornered the market somehow. I wouldn't be surprised. Anyway, we have our next guest, Joanna Stern, author of I am not a robot, live with us in the TVPN Ultra Dome. Let's bring her in to the studio. Welcome to the show. >> Will you be enjoying a diet coke? >> Yes. >> Me, just grab a seat. >> You're welcome to have a sit down. How are you doing? >> It's real. >> Is today the official book launch day? Is today the day? Last week. Okay. But but the tour continues, right? >> This is the West Coast tour. My first stop on the West Coast >> here. LA. We're having a conversation tonight. Then up to San Francisco. >> Up to San Francisco. Mountain View. >> International dates yet. >> June is when it goes international. So, we'll find out if they'll have me. >> The the the bot replies, "Come to Brazil. Come to Brazil. Brail." >> That's a very popular thing. You know about this, right? >> I do know about that. Um but I think >> they're like huge fans, the fandoms. I think London. >> London would be great. >> London. Yes, I think. >> Well, how are you introducing yourself these days? >> I know you guys had me as author. >> Author. >> Author. I think founder. Founder as a founder. Popular name. >> Founders. Correct. >> I think I I prefer business owner. >> Okay. >> Or businesswoman. >> I think founder is already sort of fading. >> Business person. >> I think we hit peak founder. >> Oh, okay. Uh because because >> being anybody can be a founder but not everyone can be a businesswoman or a businessman. >> I was at LinkedIn last week and they said that they're seen a big uptick in people putting founder in their profiles. >> Yeah. >> And angel investor too became very trendy. >> It's over. >> It's overrisising at LinkedIn. >> So you should put you should put business owner because you're selling you're selling subscriptions. You're selling books. >> You have sales ads. >> All right. Business. So maybe take us through the shape of the the business the media empire that you're building. Obviously there's a book that's a great way. Was this intentional to time up the launch? >> Is a great way. >> I I I I think it makes so much sense. >> It's a good marketing vehicle, I think. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> I mean, that's why I'm here, right? And so I can come on and I can I I thought through a lot of that when I when I decided to leave the journal, >> I thought, okay, >> I've got this book coming out. I've got to get out right away. Yeah. Because I've got to start building this business so it's ready when the book is ready. And I probably should have, >> you know, >> I think there's like a 1 plus 1 equals three thing here where you have video content that feeds into Substack subscriptions that feeds into books purchases and then someone hears about the book, maybe they read even if they just read a review of the book, maybe they wind up going and subscribing the Substack. And so having that sort of 360 degree view, >> it's a flywheel. >> It's a flywheel. >> It's a flywheel. It's a flywheel here. >> We need a flywheel. I don't even know what a flywheel looks like. Is that a water wheel? >> I think it's >> What is a flywheel? >> Well, if you The Amazon flywheel is like a >> I'm familiar with the metaphorical flywheel, >> but a heavy rotating mechanical device used to store rotational kinetic energy. So, we're going to need some proper machinery. >> Okay, >> we can get that made. >> We can We can get a >> It's specifically not a windmill. >> No, I think in my mind it does look like a windmill. Okay. I think so. This is funny. >> Okay. Can we get one of those here? Next time I return to the studio, look at all these people. They already went out and started to get the flywheel. Look at there. Five of them already. >> This is the flywheel. Flywheel creation. >> Anyway, what was the flywheel for writing this book? >> Um, you know, I wasn't the the motivation for writing the book was not actually really a business reason at first. I mean, a little bit in the sense >> now it is. Now, sales are rolling in. Now it's uh um but as you know I wrote a popular column for the Wall Street Journal for a long time 12 years. My biggest you know one of the reasons I didn't want to leave >> success >> I thought you guys might not read me anymore >> because I know you read the Wall Street Journal you love the Wall Street Journal >> and we love your coverage. >> Um so I have been considering just making a newspaper of just my newsletters and sending it to you guys. But >> that is something that every writer discovers when they leave a big platform is like were people reading me for who I am or were they reading me uh and care about what I was saying because it was in the context of the platform that you were a part of and and I think for you it's certainly uh >> you had way more of a personal brand. >> Yeah. Yeah. You had a personal brand but still it means like you guys won't pick that up and be like oh yeah Joanna wrote about robots today. Let's have her on the show. Well, print edition of the newsletter. I know printed as I think that's a >> but so just to kind of I >> I've been writing this column for a really long time and I was realizing so much of the AI columns had a theme to it >> and I was testing all of this AI stuff from hardware and gadgets to the chat bots and the models to then I started getting really into robotics and said >> okay what if I put this together in more of a cohesive story because when you're writing these even whether it's newsletters or columns >> getting the theme and like big picture is very hard to do. Some newsletter writers are really great at it. Ben Thompson is great at it. And if you can really get your readers to go deep on something in a newsletter that you're amazing, but I don't know if I had that reader base. We'll find out. Uh, and so I felt like in the book I could get really deep into this. And so the concept was for the year in 2025, I was going to live my entire life with as much AI in my life as possible. And that was generative AI, but that was also self-driving cars. And that was going to be medical AI and that was also going to be humanoid robots, but it really just turned into robots. >> And describe your headsp space going into that year. Are you, you know, >> insane >> print reading situational awareness like at night, you know, before bed? Like are you AGI pill? Are you a are you skeptical? I I guess I'm skeptical, but I'm thinking more we have all of these tech executives out there and this is you end of 2024 just all the hyperbole in the world, right? AI is going to change everything. It's going to change the way we >> eat and educate ourselves and healthcare and we're going to live forever. All of these bold promises that I sort of wanted to explain to the normal person, what are they talking about? How is life going to be different? Better or worse with AI, which is kind of a perfect moment for this book to come out right now because we have a lot of people thinking it's going to be worse and they might not be wrong and then we have a lot of people also saying this is going to be great. And so I think it's a pretty balanced look at all of these different things. Um but yeah, I my headsp space was just I want to what's real? I want to find out what's real here. >> Sure. Yeah. What was uh so back to the flywheel. What was the actual flywheel of writing the book? Was it test something, write about it, take notes, write about it, or do a ton of research and experiences and then in a fugue state churn out the entire book in a couple of sleepless nights. >> It was a mix of both. So I try the book is structured seasonally. So >> every season I try to >> figure out a theme, right? So, like the book starts in winter, beginning of the year, and I'm very focused on health. And so, I wrote that, or I lived that and then wrote that, and then started realizing, oh crap, this stuff is moving so quickly. And so, I started realizing, okay, I probably should have some of these journal entries in the book. It's a I also wanted to make it very bite-sized book because I don't think people just sit and read a whole long book anymore. And so, I started fitting things in like that and realizing I got to tell the story of how the progress is being made. so quickly every single week right now. So, it was a mix. I I AI did not write the book. I think it's very me. The writing is very me. But AI definitely helped make the book in so many ways. It would not have been done by now if I did not have AI. Just the backend systems I used to organize my notes and all of the timelines and the thing getting like things like the endotes done. All these little things AI did for me. Have you seen the the chart of Amazon Kindle releases post chatbt? So basically after the release of chatbt you just see this massive uptick in book releases on Amazon. >> 100,000 a month prior to AI now it's up to 400,000 >> and and the funny thing the funny thing is people people are everyone is just saying like oh people are obviously just like prompt you know making just dropping in a prompt and prompt the whole book. But what you're saying is like there's actually just like a speed up in >> I don't think that's what's driving that 300,000. >> Yeah. Yeah. I don't but some some of them some of them certainly are. And I think a lot of you have the perfect book to be able to like say like of course I used AI to help in the process because it's like why would anyone trust anything else in the book if you were just going to say like all this stuff is completely you know fake and >> well one thing that's interesting is I do these generative AI experiments every season where I try to just one seasons I just listen to AI music or one seasons I just read AI books and so I read a few AI generated books off Amazon They're not terrible, guys. I mean, I hate saying it, but they're really not terrible. >> Is this fiction, non-fiction? >> It was fiction. Yeah, it was fiction. And I got in touch with one of the authors, quote unquote. And it's funny because it relates back to the chapter on radiology. And the the premise of his book, it's called Variant. And it's about how AI has taken over all radiology. We don't have radiologists anymore, which I'm very clear in my chapter on radiology. That's just not going to happen. But and the AI has decided it's not going to spot cancer anymore. And a human figures out that the AI has gone rogue. And so it's like an it's a novel, a thriller about this. And >> Oh, interesting. >> AI writing an AI. >> Exactly. I mean, I got in touch with the author and he said I think it's only like 3,000 words that you can actually get >> at a time. >> At a time. So he had to keep prompting every chapter. >> Yeah. >> So that was basically all he had. >> Yeah. Yeah. You need some sort of harness to >> work through. You can open the Diet Coke, by the way. >> I know. I'm worried about this. >> I'll I'll I'll burn some air in. That's why I'm doing this >> on on the medical question. Uh I'm I'm so fascinated by the way AI is diffusing in medicine because like we do have uh you know tools that can help radiologists and yet I can't name a company that's gone out and built Salesforce for radiologists and done very well and then you'll see remarkable like PhD level be work being done with some of the models but then I'll go to the doctor and have to fill out like a paper form and I'm like we're not even seeing a fa fast takeoff in like SAS adoption at many uh at many uh uh you know medical offices and so there's this odd nature of like the capabilities the capability overhang and I'm wondering if that came up in your uh in your interrogation of the medical questions in particular >> well I I'm forgetting the name of the company it's not it's not my chart >> it's one of the companies that is doing the AI note-taking in medical right now I and that seems to be the biggest catch on >> I mean I would consider it in whatever s backs they just get this tool now and have you been to a doctor where they're ask you can they record >> I haven't actually but I did see a company that sells a wearable device for doctors that's doing hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and has been very successful in rolling that out. Um, >> but uh >> such a magical and useful feature. I can I can just remember trying to like understand like doctor's notes time even if it's just like a medication like get this at CVS and it's like >> you get to CVS and you're like >> sorry buddy you got so nobody knows what it's >> I mean that feels like the hardest one to measure because if you have a whole bunch of notes ideally like you're catching something oh this person had three different symptoms we should screen them you screen them you save their life or something that's like the best case that's a lot less satisfying And then the AI got so good that we asked it to cure cancer. It did and now there's a pill and whenever somebody gives gets cancer, we give them the pill and everyone cheers and they're like AI, it was worth it. All those data centers, it was worth it. Uh that's what everyone wants. That's what everyone wants. In fact, we're probably getting like the average doctor can see seven patients instead of six and they make 5% less mistakes and you don't really feel it dayto-day. Well, I go and interview Bill Gates about this and >> he kind of comes at it in from two perspectives. There's going to be that the the every doctor is going to have this AI assistant and every patient is going to have this AI assistant, which we're already seeing inroads in, right? Open AAI and Microsoft have all started rolling out ways to use >> their bots and you know you feed it it's medical you feed in medical information but then there's going to be the other side where AI is externally doing uh drug discovery or cancer cure or or whatever it is. Um and so the promise is on both ends. I think the one that people are starting to see already though I mean it was in the pit. Do you watch a pit? >> The pit. I've seen one episode. It was sort of gory. >> Yeah, it's very It can be very gory. >> It was like not really for me. No, it's very successful. >> It's very success. And the doctor, there's like one example of the doctors now using AI to summarize their notes. And so I think that's the one that most consumers have now experienced. Oh, my doctor's going to ask me if they can use AI to summarize my notes. And they're probably not they're not going to think that that is >> that's weird. Yeah. weird or consequential that they're going to have some amazing breakthrough because their doctors >> I did have a weird uh experience where I went to the pharmacy once to pick up some drug and uh I I I had some follow-on question about like what how you know how does it interact with some food or something and I noticed that the uh the pharmacist was asking an AI model but I also noticed that the pharmacist was not using a thinking model and I was very disheartened by that because I was like I I could use a pro model, probably get a better answer here. >> But were they using like some >> they were using either either like uh you know the Gemini overview which is not Gemini thinking proprietary. >> No, no, no, no. You're just going to Google and searching for something. Uh and I was like, wait, but I have, you know, 03 Pro or whatever the standard, whatever the flagship model at the time was. I was like, I we should be using the best. We should be using the at CVS Yeah, these things take time to diffuse and they have cost if it's an expensive model, but I don't know. >> True. Interesting. Well, I think I think the healthcare chapter I I like talking about it because I think it really does point to the positives of where this is going to this can go. And even with the radiology example, which is pretty outdated honestly by now, it's outdated in the sense that Jeffrey Hinton has been saying for years radiologists are going to be replaced by AI and deep learning, >> but that didn't happen. Like, you know, we could talk about it from the economics and the job standpoint, >> but we can also talk about it from >> this is actually an amazing change. It can spot cancers that humans can't >> and it's out there like you might women might be getting their mammograms or breast ultrasounds read right now and they might not know that AI is doing that for them. So this idea that like hey we're all you know we we need to reject AI. We need to reject AI. >> Well you might actually have AI doing things in your life right now that are actually quite good and it's very nuanced. >> Yeah. Yeah. There's something about like AI on the back end gets no credit. But if you see some slop image and it's really annoying or some fake news, you're like, "Ah, this AI stuff sucks." You don't notice that deeper in the supply chain, some problem was caught before you could even know. That's tricky. I wonder how that can filter through to actually good >> marketing. I guess better. I think it takes time. I don't know. uh talk about companionship like why did you think that one was important to to center in on how would what was your process for setting that up? >> I I think so well >> I did a few things in companionship. One I did a lot of experiments with AI therapists >> and um one particular called Ash was my AI therapist and I still talk to Ash sometimes. Um, and then I did a chapter and a real experiment in in my summer love with a with an AI boyfriend. >> Yes. >> And I did >> fling. >> Fling. Yeah. I've ghosted him since. >> Brutal. >> Yes. >> Churned. >> Turned. >> Brutal. >> Um, and >> that's a risk for you, by the way. >> Which part? >> Because in the in in some AI doom scenarios, >> the AI might hold that against >> true. Rockco's Basilus, you should continue to uh send affectionate messages to all AIS because if it becomes all powerful, it will help. >> I have I have a section of the book where I talk about that I cursed at AI and I felt really bad and I like really went after it for making mistakes, but then I go to a manners expert or an etiquette expert and ask if that's okay. >> Okay. >> Um >> what was the conclusion? He said the AI doesn't have feelings, so you don't need to to do this, but it depends on your >> I would love to I would love I mean they're so easy to smokes smoke. We should have them on the show to talk about manners cuz simply like you don't want to be somebody who part of your life you're just screaming, yelling, using cuss words and then you just go back to your life and you're like, "Oh yeah, I'm a super respectful person." It's like you're putting out a bunch of you're putting out a bunch of negative >> that's exactly what he said is basically you need to realize how that might affect you as a person when you interact with humans. >> So the more you might start beating up on and just completely berating your AI but then what happens when you start to blur like those lines blur and how does it affect you as a human? >> Yeah. Like and one of the idea funny right when I just got dropped off by my Whimo I didn't do it this Whimo trip but this morning I kind of forgot that the Whimo driver wasn't a human like I just was like not paying you. You kind of just cuz >> I don't have Whimos in New York so >> no I just I said thank you when I got out. >> Sure. >> You know and I was like oh right like you know but I was thanking the robot. >> Well they do have tea op so like >> there's probably someone who might have heard that because they might be they might have >> they shed a tear. They shed a tear because every other drive that day, no one said they >> sort of like cat. >> So I think that that makes up for the fact that I ghosted my AI boyfriend, right? There's a tally. >> There's a tally being kept. And so I think that's >> as long as it all is flowing through the same data. >> I think there's one human for every two Whimos. So there's a 50% chance that thank you was received by a human. 50% chance that it was not received by a human. But you will never know. So it's >> But the human didn't do the driving today. No. >> So, it really was thanking the robot. I don't think so. >> You were thanked by Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. Anyway, >> yeah, but the human might have stepped in in a really key moment. It's possible saved you. You don't know. >> You kind of know. Yeah, you probably know. >> Okay. Sorry. We're talking about companionship. We got >> Wait, how is how is Whimo uh how is what like how how did you did you feel Whimo's progression over the last year? >> I feel driving around LA. >> Yeah, >> driving around LA. I mean, I still see Whimos making some pretty heinous calls out on the road. I had a Whimo. It was like a two-lane two-lane road. Whimo trying to There was wallto-wall traffic going the other way. >> The Whimo's trying to just like turn in. It's not a there's no definitely no U-turns. And then Whimo's like, >> I'm going. So, it's like we're fully backed up this way. Everyone's honking. The Whimo's just like waiting to like do an illegal U-turn. like there's someone in it. They're just like, "Oh, >> oh boy." >> I noticed today as I whenever I come to LA, I take Whimos and go to San Francisco, but I did notice today the pickup spots are getting better. >> Do you guys take them or I guess you don't take cars here? >> They they don't go to Pasadena, so take them much. I've taken them in San Francisco. >> Yeah, because I just took it here from Westwood and the pickup spots and the drop off spots are getting better because usually they would really struggle. I mean, anyone that's watching the middle, >> they just like go to the like a weird and you're like or like talking about your like weird like they would just go to like a >> one of those circles like by my hotel last time. It was just like a circle and I was like why would you pull over in the middle of this circle like it's a terrible spot to pick somebody up. >> Those are more logical. >> Yeah. Because it doesn't know where effectively. >> Yes. And it doesn't know where the spots are that it's like kind of okay to pick you up. >> But I've noticed today two very good >> Okay. >> Seamless drop offs. Um, companionship though. >> Yeah, companionship. >> Um, so I just I wanted to >> Hey, I could never go on an insane tangent like we just did. >> Actually, I think it could. >> Yeah, this is very hallucinatory. This whole This whole interview is very >> This is I mean, I watch you guys all the time. This feels like what you guys do. >> This is what we do. We hallucinate. >> No more than 3,000 words at a time, please. >> You guys are usually I mean, you're asking serious questions as founders. I'm a founder, guys. We got to Sorry. >> Business owner. >> Business owner. Business owner. >> Yeah. >> What's my lower third say? >> Uh, it says founder. >> Business owner. >> Author and journal. >> They need to update that. >> Okay. Business woman. >> Business. >> Business owner. >> Joanna Stern. Business owner. >> Joanna Stern. >> Okay. >> They'll work on it. >> We're doing that live. >> Yeah. >> Um, >> you can do it. >> Companionship. >> There we go. >> Here we go. Business owner. >> See, that goes so hard. >> Yeah, that does look good. >> That looks better. Yeah. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> The name of the business. Tell everyone. It's companionship is the name of the business. No. Uh the name of the business is called the new things. >> The new things. >> The new things.com. >> The new things. >> Please go please go visit the new things. We talk about the new things. >> Tease it with a landing page that had a different domain. >> Yes. >> My next thing. >> Yeah. This is my next thing. >> This is my next thing. I like that. >> But I could I I didn't know the business name yet. >> Yeah. >> Um but this the new things. >> The new things. Okay. Did you talk to any people that had that at least claimed to never have used AI? >> Interesting. >> Cuz you really can't claim that at this point because you would have to just like sit in a forest. >> I did. >> Say you've never met an Amish. >> You'd have to sit in a forest and then somebody would be like >> the Amish are growing. The population collapse is vastly over. >> Here's the issue though. Like probably the forestry service is like probably using AI in some ways >> and that affects the Amish. >> No, no, no. I'm talking about my example of somebody who's like, I don't use AI. >> My counter example was the Amish. And I think if you talk to an Amish person, they would say, no, I have been AI free. >> I know, but they're buying wood from a business that real deep. >> No, you that you have to you have you can't somebody can't be like, well, I don't I don't use electricity, but they're buying goods and services that require electricity. >> True. >> Okay. >> I didn't do that, though. I think that's actually a good story to do now. >> Yeah. go and ask people if they think they're living an AI free life, but they're not. >> Amish are flourishing. >> Fertility rates are fertility rates are particularly high amongst the Amish. >> Really, >> there's a big deep dive in the in the Financial Times uh this weekend around smartphones being like the inflection point, right? We can get into that later, but um uh but the Amish have stayed away and they are flourishing. >> Do they chop their own wood? >> I believe many times they will. Wait, but are the flourishing because they don't have smartphones or is has their birth rate ste stayed steady? >> No, I think probably stayed steady. >> Yeah, for Yeah, it's actually a straight line on a log graph with the Amish. >> It's a hockey stick. >> Yes. By by in a few years they will be producing thousands of offspring >> per Amish person. >> Uh, talk about >> is this the worst tangent you've ever had here? >> Maybe. >> No, definitely not. Um, >> talk about Yeah, talk about more. you mentioned like you're feeling like progress as you're writing the book. So, you're trying to like get a section out of the way and then realizing like the story is not quite >> the story is like still evolving. What What was that like? How were you feeling that progress? Cuz it's not like >> it's been very obvious if you're a software engineer just being like, "Wow, I'm I have a lot more capabilities today than I did three months ago or six months ago." Um, but how are you feeling it? Well, even some of that software engineer the tools, right? Like claude code midy year last year believe comes out gets so much better towards the end of 2025. >> Yeah. >> Or even the advent of AI browsers which we can say now is really just going to be any browser but like Chrome for instance has gotten so many features over the last year that are just so much more AI enhanced. One example for me was perplexity comment came out mid last year and I was like, "Wow, I can really live this agentic life that people have been talking about, right? I can have it do multi-step processes for me in my browser." >> Did you book a flight? I didn't uh I think I did try to book a flight and I couldn't do it at the beginning of the year, but I could do it by the end of the year >> and I did try and I I mean there's multiple things I did in Perplexity Comet last year that I still will open it from time to time, but I'm using so much more now of Claude in Chrome that I don't need Perplexity Comet. >> Um >> I mean everything from food shopping to school supply shopping. I use it a lot for shopping because even though it takes a while to use, you're like, I'm not doing it. >> Yeah. >> Do you trust it with your credit card? >> Um, it still basically will ask for your credit card. I mean, I don't have anything set up where it's like autopay, but I had like I did specifically I've used Walmart or Amazon and at that final point it will say like I need your confirmation to purchase. Look at the shopping cart. >> Yeah. >> Just pass you the link and then you check out there naturally. But I on that prog like there was obviously also so much progress and still is so much progress happening on the models end but I was less worried about the model progression and much more about the interface and the UI progression of whether it was wearables how we're interacting with this through hardware or through software. So, was it the was it improvements to apps? Was it improvements to a cloud code or a vibe coding app or to a browser where people could actually interact with this stuff? >> Yeah. >> Which I think we'll, you know, see we're starting to see obviously more of that through OpenAI and more of that through Google probably this week at Global A. >> How uh how do you rate the tech industry's current uh terminology? Do you like do you think that use calling data centers AI factories is a good move? >> People love factories. >> Probably not. I don't who's been saying that is a good move. >> A lot of people have been using the word AI factories because it sounds cool if you're, you know, uh, investing in the >> Oh, yeah. Because you're like, yeah, the revolution. Yeah. >> Um, >> we've been pushing for supercomputers. I don't think normal people like data centers or AI factories, >> but supercomputers. >> That sounds better. >> Sounds better. >> That sounds better. Yeah. >> Sounds like a big computer. Less scared. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I haven't I haven't been able to listen to the show today, but have you guys been talking about the commencement booing? >> Oh, yeah. >> Yeah. >> Incredible. >> I watched a little bit on the way here. I didn't hear that, but yeah. Like I mean maybe it was just the super cut we watched, but the Eric Schmidt, it felt like he was getting booed the entire time. >> I know. I'd like to see the whole thing. >> And I feel like if you're getting booed, you need to read The Room and just sort of go off script and adlib and just take it in a different direction because there's plenty of inspirational things that he could talk about. But he was really seemed like he was really doubling down. I need to watch the full uh the full uh commencement. >> Yeah. It would have been so it would have been so easy to say like when I started my company Google >> Yeah. Everyone was worried that the internet would lead to massive job loss and all this change in the economy. And what happened? We did get a lot of change. But >> yeah, >> there were so many good things that came out of it, right? >> Did you just tell the story of Y2K? Like he lived through this, right? Like Google existed before Y2K. I'm sure that >> I see that I mean you guys have probably been talking about your timelines and everything today, but I feel like there's this at least on X, there's two takes on this. one, it's Eric Schmidt and nobody wanted to hear from Eric Schmidt at that >> ever, you know, like it is just the fact that he is Eric Schmidt and they shouldn't have been >> just because he's a billionaire or >> just because he's a billionaire, he's tied to Google and he's writing about and talking about how AI is everything, right? >> And then there's the oppos the second point which is it's actually a backlash to AI and people hate AI. I think probably >> interesting >> event diary, you know, probably somewhere in the middle of it's both. >> Um because then there was the speech at uh US UCF last week. >> Okay. >> Did you see that one? >> I saw that one. No. >> Yeah. So there's a I forget her name, but she's a real estate uh uh real estate executive and she also gave a speech and when she's talked about AI being part of like the next industrial revolution, they boo. They didn't boo her the whole time. Yeah. So my argument which I made on X which is no this is definitely a backlash to AI because we've now seen two examples. >> You see David Solomon's >> no CEO of Goldman Sachs just going so much harder than than Eric Schmidt. Eric Schmidt's like at least trying to like paint an optimistic view and David Solomon just plays an EDM song generated by Sunno for the Wharton grads who I were probably more receptive to it because you know they're going into business. I I think it might have been >> I made this in 10 seconds. >> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No, he did. And he said like creativity is no longer relevant and like a whole bunch of just like really rough sound bites. >> Well, actually I gave a commencement speech a year ago all about AI. >> Really? Yes. >> Did you get booed? >> No, but they my I went to Union College. They were they were I would say 90% of the audience was hung over and was not listening to me. >> Okay. >> So, it went over really well. >> Yeah. What was the thesis of your commencement speech? It was lean into humanity and AI is coming and you all need to learn AI but you need to lean into your humanity and your and your creativity and in fact I played a Sunno song and then had a human come up and play the same song and her song version was so much better. >> Whoa. Interesting. >> I know, right? >> Moged. Wait, you did this at the commencement speech? >> Yeah, I did this last year. >> Wow. >> But but again, nobody nobody knew cuz they were all super hung over. Um >> ahead of the wave. Yeah. >> Yeah, I was ahead of the wave. You know, I think if they had had me instead of Eric Schmidt, I wouldn't have gotten booed because I'm not a tech billionaire. >> Yeah. Would you would you change anything if you were giving that speech today? Because it seems like the message would still resonate, but probably needs to be delivered in a different way because people people might say, "Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's going to be AI and you know, I'm still relevant because there's this unique human element that will remain." And maybe I believe that, but in the meantime, the earth is going to melt because of all the data centers. I still don't like it. Let's just let's just do the human thing. >> Well, I think the hate a year later is a lot stronger. Yeah. >> I think we've seen the job impact. We've heard about the job impact from tech executives. >> These students, I think, have started to also talk to their peers who graduated a year before and they're like, "Oh [ __ ] they don't have jobs." >> Right? >> And I mean, I'm sure you guys see that in people applying for jobs here and lots of people out of out of just out of school looking for really great jobs. and what they studied. And so I think that that impact a year later is super real. If you talk to any young >> person either in college, out of college, >> they are thinking about that and that is a very real thing. So I think a year later it would be a definite >> post post uh >> I probably just wouldn't talk about AI. >> Yeah. Post GFC like the tech industry was a fantastic track to get on for new grads. Like if you were working in law or finance or sales or tech and you could just find your way into a mag seven company like you did very very well and sort of live the American dream and if those jobs are not available at the same clip um that's going to affect the new grad class like pretty significantly. >> I think you guys should start asking actually a lot of the executives you you interview what how what their advice would be. Yeah, we we we ask a fair amount of time. Advice for for young people. Uh get a varying amount of uh amount of responses. I mean, entrepreneurship broadly is continues to be uh a bright spot since it's easier than ever to start a company, easier than ever to scale a company. There's so much more that you can do or learn with AI. But it's hard >> this as a business owner. >> Yeah. Yeah. But but but it is hard because like there are people who are just like I don't want to start a company. I want a job and and >> I want to learn the things so I can one day be a business owner job >> or or I just never want to own a business. I want to do a job and if that concept goes away that's very very tricky. And then also you have a much broader swath of of outcomes from entrepreneurship than from jobs. If you just look at the the net worth distribution between entrepreneurs, you have like seven orders magnitude versus like lawyers like yeah, there's probably a lawyer that's making six figures and there's probably a lawyer that's making seven figures. There's no trillionaire. >> One thing I don't understand is like at what point in the last 20 years was a good time to just be looking for a job and just like going on job boards and applying randomly? Like was was there a point? I I graduated in 2018. Certainly at that point >> going and just applying >> without >> trying to find other other ways in was not super effective. >> Yeah. I mean, in in in the leadup to the global financial crisis, like the finance industry was so was booming so much that there was like, you know, banking recruiting would happen in the fall and all the banks would come to a job fair and you could show your resume and if you were, you know, an A student and you did well at a serious college, you could land at a a Goldman, a Morgan Stanley, a JPM or go into consulting at Bane, BCG, Mackenzie. And this was like a very established track for like upwardly mobile like you know neo elites basically and and and that and that still exists to some extent but it is maybe more fragile than we previously thought >> and I would say preandemic for the tech industry right >> um >> yeah Google Microsoft they would just be on campus and they would have used thousands and thousands of openings and you could slot in if you were like at the top of your class at a great school which is a lot to ask but uh for that to become fragile I think is uh what's causing a lot anxiety among the young folks. Anyway, >> uh what is your current advice for for those individuals? Is it the same as the speech you gave? >> Yeah, I think you got to do more to get in front of people. I mean, even just as a business owner, >> um I'm just going to keep saying that like >> it goes way harder. goes um I have really I've had so many applicants which has been such an honor like amazed to see how many people would want to come and work at what we're building and the people who are doing really unique things to get in front of you which means really knowing the company really knowing the mission but also then being able to sell on hey I want to I want to be I want to give you the best human talents that I have right which right now for me at least is in the creativity and in the writing and in the reporting. I'm going to use AI to do these other things and just having a very basic knowledge. I mean, I'd like you to have more than a basic knowledge, but a willingness and a and a knowledge of these tools and what you can do and what you can offset to them, I think, is huge. >> Yeah. I mean, I don't I guess that sounds like a copout, like just learn the tools. But I I really believe that someone who comes to me and says, "Actually, I'm going to use this and this and this and I'm going to do that task." >> Yeah. The bar Yeah. The bar is not that high. I remember when I when I was a teenager, if you could like make a website, even though things like Squarespace existed, you could you could like get in the door because there were people that had companies that would be like, "Okay, we know this person, everyone has access to Squarespace or whatever products were popular at the time, but if this person can just like has figured it out, they can show you one thing that they made." >> Yeah, that helps. I mean like yeah it does feel like somewhat basic advice but like if you're applying to a hundred jobs a week >> spend one week apply to one job actually get to know the company do something that is beneficial to stand out and you're just in the top 1% of applicants because 99 other people just clicked like the apply button and >> and I've been thinking a lot about sort of human mentorship through a lot of this and that I don't think I could be doing what I'm doing right now if I hadn't had the years of human mentorship ship at other companies and and other news rooms and you're really lucky if you can find a really great mentor. And so I think that's about just that human connection part still. Can you find someone in that company? Can you connect with somebody who >> is is just going to try to impart to you some of the skills that you also might not learn now on the job? Because that's the other big hurdle this generation's up against is that if you're not going to learn the skills on the job, how are you ever going to learn them? >> Yeah. Uh any theories about how it's my last question that's top of mind for now theories about how AI wearables will evolve? Do we do you feel like we need do you think there's space for new AI hardware or I'm assuming you tried everything that >> I tried I I'm I'm look I come out of the at the end of the boat I'm I think this is going to happen. I think we are going to have this next computer shift to something that is a wearable or something that is more ambient around us because I spent a lot of last year talking and is still now talking to AI whether it is in glasses or in the car and that experience is very good and so we we're going to get to the companionship thing one day but whether you're using it as a companion which I hope people aren't really you know I don't want you to fall in love with your chatbot that's a big lesson to the book please don't do that but if you're using as a personal coach, a personal career coach, trainer, just assistant interacting with it through a pair of glasses or a wearable that you like a a bracelet that might be recording you or that even if you mentioned the pin that the doctors are starting to wear. It's really compelling when it works right. It doesn't work great right now, but I can see it starting to work really well. I think, you know, we had efforts at it with like the humane pin. It just didn't do much for you. the hardware was so poor. It just didn't do it was the hardware got in the way of it. And so now if we can bring it to life in with it both with voice and microphones, I think it's going to be pretty cool. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. The the thing that I've been thinking about uh everything so far I think has been cool demos. you know, not not quite ready for real products, but things that if they were shipped internally at a big company, like if Humane was a product that had been shipped internally at Apple, it's like, hey, this is like kind of where we're we're headed, right? It would have been gotten a great response internally and probably gotten more resources, but not ready for prime time. >> I've been thinking about uh just like general phone fatigue and if you generally gave me a device that allowed me to do things on the internet without being like a source of just like kind of general like stress, right? Inbox like how many different inboxes do we have? >> And I think that I think that people are so online now that it presents an opportunity for a device that allows you to stay more connected uh still still allows you to stay kind of connected with the world but in a way that's like a little bit more passive, right? like if just being able to say like, "Hey, uh, let such and such friend know that we should think about doing something on Saturday versus like hammering out >> the right text and getting distracted by notifications >> and then having this thing, right?" Um, and uh, and I do think there's this more ambient product space to be explored that it could at least get my time on. Um, I have a I have a buddy who like only uses his Apple Watch on the weekend, so he can't really use apps. He can like generally stay in contact. He's not >> sending emails. He's just saying like, "Yeah, if you want to get a hold of me, you can, but I'm not." And so, I think there's something in that space. And then the other thing, like part of Apple's moat was that there's millions of apps for every little use case, and so many of those use cases are just able to be done by the models now. Yep. And if they can't be and you need UI, you can just generate something like that on the fly a little bit more a lot more easily. >> And so I think there's a moment here. And but I think a large part of the opportunity is not because the iPhone isn't great. It's because there's fatigue around this like insane connectivity >> that everybody's been sort of just fallen into over the last decade. >> No, I I totally agree and get to that sort of in the back of the book. And I have this chart where you see we go from computers that sit in our homes to the iPhone or the smartphone and then something else. And my big point there is that nothing got replaced that we still have the laptop in our home or that we take with us. We still have the smartphone but then we have these wearables right now but they haven't fully lived up to anything other than health. And even there we can argue if they have really lived up for anything. I know everyone wears their Whoop bands and now is very interested in the Fitbit Air. Um, but I think like I wore this Apple Watch side by side with a few other AI wearables last year where on their own these wearables were not great, but they were doing specific things that I was like, "Wow, this it makes this watch feel dumb sometimes." Yeah. >> Right. And like I wore the the B bracelet when B was acquired by Amazon at the end of or at Yeah. August 2025. >> Yeah. It was sort of random at the time or felt a little bit random. >> Yeah. And Limitless was another one I wore and they were acquired by Meta. I think that this idea of persistent recording is going to we're going to have privacy issues around it. But I do really think that when you can have this thing listening to you and synthesizing a lot about your day and what you say you're going to do, it you it is there was many times I was like this is a holy crap moment. I was like, wow. I said I was going to do all these things and now my app just told me to do them. Right. Or to your point, like >> Well, it gets really it gets really interesting when that it doesn't just make a to-do list, but it does those things, right? Hey, order these things from the G, you know, order these things from Instacart, book this reservation. >> So far away from that, but it could be so cool. >> Yeah. I don't know. I mean, far away could be a year, >> maybe. >> We'll Well, like there's this perfect example where I say like my B bracelet has picked up on me saying that I need to call the plumber and I forget to like I keep forgetting to call the plumber. I keep telling my wife, "Oh yeah, I'm going to call the plumber." But my B bracelet keeps adding it to the list every day, right? And yeah, why couldn't the why couldn't we have the agent call the plumber? And then the plumber's just like you. >> We created magic. We created artificial intelligence and it just creates more to-do lists >> and plumbers doing it for you with a my broken toilet in my house. Um >> well someday we'll get it fixed. >> Yeah. No, I think the look I think open AI and whatever they're making with Johnny IV is going to be it's going to be worth paying attention to. I don't know if it's going to be a mass scale thing, but it's going to be absolutely worth paying attention to because I think I've specifically has some ideas about our dependence on phones and where I think that's going to play into this messaging of any of these devices is where we're going beyond phones. Yeah. >> But to be clear, the phone doesn't go away. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. How do you think about the the trade-off of like all this happening and then you know your position that you should not fall in love with an AI bot? >> Don't do it. >> It feels like reflective like you said here uh if you think as I do that social media was bad for kids, society, politics, our brains, you name it, AI could end up being worse. And I agree with you and the kids thing seems like the easiest to to sort out because now I think a lot of parents are implementing screen time for kids, but the more broad questions like about society and business like I'm a huge beneficiary of social media as are you. We use it to uh market our products effectively um >> and build whole businesses on top of at the same time like I don't know that we have a good pattern for social media hygiene how incumbent on is it on the like the companies to roll things out responsibly like replica clearly exists we've had the founder on the show multiple times um and but I don't know is like are we going towards like national conversations bans on certain usages like >> and where I get on that is very clear like look we we should just have a ban on companionship chat bots and bots and toys for kids like we don't need it >> why do we need it >> right we're getting there in some ways with social media I think >> that sort of worked for cigarettes like we banned them for kids and then we banned a lot of the marketing and eventually like the younger generation just sort of stopped picking it up >> and this is where I think are we going to ban AI eye for kids in general. No. >> Yeah. >> Right. Like there's going to be the educational the the conmies and the Google classrooms of the world that are going to honestly be important about teaching digital literacy to our kids around AI like that. We have to do that and I I talk about that with my own kids in the book. But >> why do we need our kids turning to chat bots about our their problems? >> Yeah. >> No. Like just don't have it happen. I mean, it's caused so many problems for OpenAI. >> Yeah. Yeah. Totally >> right. Like, it's been nothing but a problem for them to have >> kids or teens talking to chat bots about their problems. What maybe there's examples of some good of it. >> Yeah. >> You know, >> just KYC those features off like it's another thing. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And I think it's harder. >> YouTube's done a great job of this too. SE like sort of I mean after a long >> after a long time, but they eventually figured it out and >> Exactly. And that we feel like we're in that moment. That's a really good example. I feel like we're in that moment of like, >> you know, kids early days being on YouTube, rabbit holeing into dark conspiracy theories. And look, you can still those things still happen, but I I watch my kids watch YouTube now and I can see a lot clearer how they've put guard rails around the content and they've built in a lot of things. And again, not saying it's perfect and but to your question, can these companies self police it? I don't know. like they they probably are going to have to because our government is not going to do anything. You need Yeah, this is >> mic down. >> I wonder it is odd that you see uh increasing demand from American consumers for these weird products, weird use cases like AI romantic companions. Uh and yet you also see you also hear the booze like I don't want it but then I go and I buy it or something. It's like this weird uh I mean obviously it's multiple different >> and I have seen that a lot today on the time. How many of these kids that are booing also were using you know to write their essays or write their resumes. >> That's a little more optimistic. But the the the the weirder one is like yeah protesting the uh the the AI while while pulling like the darkest pieces of the AI out or demanding it. I don't know at the same time there there was a lot of uh fear-mongering about uh Elon Musk and XAI like really leaning into the romantic companion and same thing with Sora too to a similar extent of like this is uh infinite jest it's going to you know you're going to become so addicted to it and with both of those products it felt like they just didn't find product market fit and I don't know if it's like we're early but both of those like XAI is now doing like code completion with cursor and like serving claw Right. And that's a much more like functional I would say like the good outcome versus like the Anie and Valentine thing which is a little weird. >> Was it anie? >> And then there was like the Mecca. >> I remember thinking at the time XI needed to do that to basically differentiate because the >> right >> general chatbot market had run away from them. >> Yeah. We did some back of the envelope on it and we were like maybe this is like a multi-billion dollar business. We were trying to underwrite like >> yeah somewhat of a white even if you're just like put all the moral stuff aside like is X AI going to make money off of this and it was like sort of hard to get to but you might be able to get there but it was weird but then the market just sort of rejected it. >> The market I'm sure there are a few people that still >> use uh Anie if she's still alive out there. I think she is >> she's still she's there. I I yeah I I think although although the the computing resources are getting sold out of the back of the truck left and right anthropic wise I'm sorry Annie right >> good luck you're going to have >> is actually have to think less basically and cursor Michael Truel's like look uh Anie is going to be running a very old model it's actually going to run on CPUs now it's just a smarter child that just reflects whatever you say back to it and that's it >> it's a line command >> it's more of a small language age model now. >> Um, yeah, I don't know. I think >> you kind go back to like the replicas and there there is a market. They have pushed marketing towards these these kind of companions. >> Yeah. Character AI. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And Meta did it for a little bit too. I think they'll probably pull away from that with their >> celebrity companion >> blah blah blah. But I could also see them leaning into it more too because it is a social network and they do see this us all eventually as Mark Zuckerberg has said us having personal assistance and personal super intelligence >> and that probably has to come through the view of a some sort of bot. >> Yeah. >> Um >> I don't know if it needs to be like a sexy bot. Yeah. Like a cow. >> They they that was one of them. That that was one of them. The so basically the the whole story with that it went viral because there was one that was like stepmom or something like that. It was like a little bit crude. Uh >> that was community generated. So meta created the ability for anyone to go prompt a bot basically write a pre-prompt to like create the character. And so the vis like the sins of the creator were visited upon meta incorrectly. But there were some funny ones like cow and you could just talk to a cow which I think is nice. >> You know what? I don't remember the last time anyone fell in love with a cow. So that sounds fine. >> I think it seems fine. >> You know, anyway, >> PETA might have some problems. I don't know. >> No. Digital cow. What's not to like? >> No. >> Anyway, >> congratulations on the book. >> It's been an honor to follow your business owner journey. >> Yes. >> It's been an honor to be named a business owner by sitting here. >> Yes. What What >> I mean, you didn't we can't make We can't You don't become a business owner. >> No, but you gave me that title. >> I know. But you got that title by selling products. >> Yes. By running a business. >> Revenue. Revenue. Revenue makes you a business owner. >> But you know, I felt like when I walked in the store, I was a founder. >> Okay. And you walk out of business. >> Walks out a business owner. >> Thank you for the business, guys. >> Yes. >> I appreciate it. >> Thank you. Oh, there we go. Perfect. >> You got it. There you go. >> There we go. Nailed it. >> Thank you for having me. >> Ridiculous. And thank you for tuning in. >> Thanks for tuning in. >> Five stars on Apple podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tbn.com and go get the book. >> I am not a robot by Joanna Stern. It's available everywhere books are sold. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 Pacific. >> We love you. >> Goodbye. >> Goodbye.