YouTube Overtakes Hollywood, Sanders on AI, Anthropic IPO, SaaSpocalypse Over?

I see a large IPO on the horizon. You're surrounded by journals. What's your position? >> Right. There's misinformation. >> Clearing order inbound. >> Let's just roll. We are surrounded by journals. Hold your position. Come. Get up. Trust the expert. We are founder of five code. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Stand by. >> UAV online. >> Blaze. >> Double blaze. Triple blaze. Double kill. Finally, it's time please. Team Deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blade. That's just wrong. Right. >> Marky clearing order inbound. Get up. >> We are surrounded by journalists. Hold your position. >> Strike one. >> Strike two. Cortisol spike. >> Activate gold to retriever mode. >> Marky clearing order inbound. >> Five. Good. Founder. >> You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, June 1st. We are live from the TBN Ultradome, the temple of technology, >> the fortress of finance, >> the capital of capital. And we have some really exciting news. We heard you loud and clear. >> You might have noticed on the Chiron, which is area.com. >> Back. >> We are back and we're going to tell you about ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill, accounting, and a whole lot more. >> All in one place. That's right. You wanted ads. We are bringing you ads. Uh, and we're very excited that we have more. >> We are >> more supporters of the show. >> Incredibly back. >> Uh, yes, we're very excited. So, expect to hear ads throughout the show. >> It's funny. We we heard over and over and over. I'm not joking. I know I get sarcastic a lot. >> Uh, but we heard over and over and over that they're a nice >> pallet cleanser. It's like turning the page right in between different topics. Yep. >> Um, and uh, we are excited >> and we love these companies. We want to help them grow. We've always been huge fans of the companies that we work with, so we're very excited to have them back. Um, let's turn over to YouTube and Hollywood. Uh, breakout news, uh, in Hollywood. Uh, YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood. Feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but uh YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood and there's a bunch of crazy statistics, but uh 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube finally, it feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win-win here. Um >> not total disruption. >> Yeah. >> Right. Collaboration, >> not that actual collaboration. And so, I mean, we all know Hollywood's been faced with a ton of challenges. I was just listing them off the top of my head. What's this? >> Trey says, "A TVPN without ads is like a human without a heart." >> Couldn't say it better myself. Um, I was >> Ryan says, "Calling in to the waiting room and not the reream waiting room was a crime." >> Yes, that's true. Um, so I I was just listing off like all of the challenges that Hollywood has faced over the past couple decades. And it's so bad. It's piracy. like you used to just be able for a lot for all through like the mid 2000s people would just download movies. Uh then better TV shows like TV just got so so much better that that really took a lot of gas out of Hollywood because it used to be if you wanted something cinematic you had to go to the theater and then Game of Thrones came out and all of a sudden TV uh we went through like the era of great TV. Uh streaming obviously that moved a lot of people out of theaters. Uh COVID that shut down the the movie industry entirely. There were strikes, the double strike, writers and uh directors strike and a whole bunch of other strikes that went on. Uh there was competition from other production markets, lower cost, and that you know that can sometimes help certain elements of Hollywood, but it also hurts Hollywood the physical place. >> Yeah. Mean meanwhile streaming just created the such a massive boom in spending on like a bunch of random projects. Not necessarily like, you know, block like blockbusters, but just like every platform needed more content and there was a lot of competition. >> Yeah. Uh and so throughout all of that, there was sort of a silver lining. I mean, the the streaming thing is a big one of that that there were jobs and projects that were getting green lit on streaming platforms, but also just the creator economy. Like even though the number I was looking at the number of uh like shoot traditional Hollywood shoot days in Hollywood it's fallen off a cliff postcoid never fully recovered but the number of people working in front of the camera behind the camera around the camera in broadly has obviously gone up throughout the creator economy. Boom. Uh, and so, um, this was always unsatisfying to cophiles, though, because no matter how viral a Tik Tok goes or no matter how much money Mr. Beast or some other creator like makes, uh, it never feels as uh, as culturally important as The Godfather or some other or the Titanic or some some movie that everyone comes together, everyone has this shared cultural experience around. we were all in these like little bit of these like isolated niches and oh yeah, I I'm really into this creator. Uh but anytime I try and bring it up to anyone, they don't know what I'm talking about. >> Our our our shared our our moment is I see a meme starting to grow. >> Yeah. >> And I tell I I make the call to you. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> And and then we just kind of bet on it basically. But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your your little nephew or your sure, you know, you know, uncle, and they both have an understanding like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during the Godfather era, like they did during Star Wars, which is uh at the center of this story because The Mandalorian and Grou is the latest Star Wars project, and it's actually been declining in the box office. it's been eclipsed and there's been three movies that have been uh really really breakout performances. So uh also the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029 this this whole this whole trend is going to be in full force. So um look at the stats. So uh Kane Parson's back rooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide on a $10 million budget reportedly. Uh Curry Barker's Obsession climbed uh is climbing in his third weekend and hit 104 million 104.7 million domestic becoming focus features uh highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around 1 million. That seems >> and right now on X every single day there's a post >> that goes viral about Obsessions return on their budget. Yeah. They're like this milliondoll film. Yeah. >> You know, it's just happening over and over and over. Yeah. Um, >> and so like the business story >> to me is like way more >> I mean is everything. >> Definitely. Definitely. Uh, and then we also talked about this earlier and it's sort of looped in with this, but Markiplier, another YouTuber, uh, released Iron Lung, which he financed himself, $3 million production budget reportedly, uh, and opened to 18.2 million domestically before grossing 41.1 million domestic, 51.2 million worldwide. Huge return on investment. And so, uh, it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is, uh, YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. Uh, but that's not exactly it's not really that clean. And there's a bunch of counter examples. So, are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel. >> Oh, is it like a toy unboxing? >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ryan would unbox toys and it became a huge huge uh channel. Uh, and they actually made Ryan's World, the movie, Titan Universe Adventure, but it grossed only $624,000 on something like a $10 million budget. And so he wasn't able to convert that audience directly over. Uh, and I think with someone like Ryan Young, uh, >> was he encouraging children to take their parents' keys and wallet and just go down to the movie theater? Because that's part of the issue with with uh with these channels and and monetizing them is there's somewhat of a there's a disconnect between the audience and who the actual like buyer is, the person that controls purchasing yeah power in the household. So you might have like an 8-year-old kid who loves these videos, but anytime they actually want to act on >> the content, they have to >> there's a translation step. Sometimes that can work though. You know, you see the advertisements of the the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy. >> Daniel says, "Ads back. The world is healing." >> Let's hear an ad. Okay. Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Thank you everybody. Okay. So, uh what is different about Back Rooms, Obsession, and Iron Lung is that the filmmakers had they'd shown they didn't just have huge audiences. Like some of these Markiplier is a truly large creator, but uh the the the the folks behind Back Rooms and Obsession are in like the single-digit millions. that alone if if they didn't have the creativity, if they didn't have the the risktaking abilities to actually produce something that could sort of, you know, draw attention in theaters, I don't think they could have just converted their subscribers over like the conversion rates just don't match up because if you're on 1 million subscribers and you did a 100 million in box office, that the math just doesn't match up. Did some did everyone go did all of your subscribers go see it five times and pay $20 each time? No way. Like that's not what happened. Yeah. Um, so, um, this like the the idea of like this creativity, risktaking, uh, new IP. This is like at the core of, uh, of Hollywood successes. I, uh, I was reading the Hollywood Reporter. They were saying like this hearkens back to like the 1970s, George Lucas's first film. Ben Thompson has a great analysis that we can read through. But, uh, these creators aren't just big influencers with millions of fans. Uh, they do have big audiences, but they also stand above their peers in terms of artistic vision. So Curry Barker had a YouTube sketch channel called That's a Bad Idea where he learned how to quickly and effectively write, act, and edit for a tight audience feedback loop. Um, Back Rooms has a similar story. Kane, uh, Kane Parsons, who goes by Cain Pixels, uh, produced his original series, The Back Rooms, in Blender and After Effects. Uh, and the internet myth had laid a bit of the groundwork, and we can go into some of the lore of backrooms. It's a very fascinating story. It all started with like a single image of a furniture store that was being renovated at the time. And that picture just went viral and went and just like kept building lore and became one of these like creepy pastas and then eventually, you know, turned into his YouTube series which turned into this film. And uh it's one of these like very interesting uh like origin story behind a piece of intellectual property. Typically, you don't see just a random image go viral and become a movie, but let alone a successful movie, but here we are. Um, and so, uh, Markiplier, he did have an objectively huge audience, as I said, but, uh, he still went full stack, uh, when he was producing Iron Lung. He even talked about building a server rack in his bathroom so that he could render VFX shots on a faster turnaround. He had a VFX studio, uh, but but it was taking too long to go back and forth. And so he uh he racked a whole bunch of servers and had a big electricity bill and put 220 volt outlets like it's an electric car charger in his bathroom all so that he could render uh like the blood splashing in his film uh on on a faster turnaround. And so uh this is sort of like this like the YouTube feels like uh creating on YouTube feels like a way to attract an audience but it also feels like a way to demonstrate your do sort of like an talent audition as like a full stack creator. like I understand the color grade, the vibe, the sound design, and I can have opinions on all of that when I go into production. So, it's an easier project to underwrite if you need that. Markiplier was able to fund it himself, but uh the other folks did have partners on their projects. Um, being able to create something engaging for social media virality is probably somewhat important to creating a film that works in theaters. I think there is some stuff that translates. We're seeing this with the the sort of like youtubification or retention editing on Netflix, but I think the bigger value is being like a full stack filmmaker. So, um gone are the days of showing up to Hollywood with a manuscript and just expecting the studio to do the rest for you. I think that um the traditionally segmented teams on productions are simply too expensive to do to be deployed on anything but existing IP. So the the the dedicated writer, the dedicated cinematographer, the dedicated sound designer, that'll show up for the Mandalorian and Grou because they know that there's a certain amount of people that will just see every single Star Wars movie. But to take a risk on new IP from a new creator, you have to understand that that creator is going to be able to leave their fingerprints and actually drive every piece of the production. >> Yeah. How do how do you think the big uh studio execs are processing, you know, these two these two films? Cuz you would think, okay, movies are a hitsdriven business. If you have a $100 million budget, like thinking about it like an if you're an early stage investor, >> like super early stage seed series A, and you have $100 million to invest, >> like sometimes the best move would be putting $100 million into one team. Yeah. >> But there's a reason that people say like, "Hey, we're going to make 20 to 30 investments across this fund. Maybe maybe more depending on the strategy." >> They're doing a lot more $10 million films. >> Yeah. And so and so it it feels like it makes so much sense because one film can generate the entire >> fund >> uh can be a fund returner but at the same time >> is it is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal right is it is is there some >> as opposed to >> not like not basically like direct financial incentive where like there's just some like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster. >> I don't know. I think uh I I I do think we will see more$10 million films, more more lower budget films. Um but I don't know. It it it feels like there's definitely a certain breed of Hollywood executive that their their uh their whole skill set is aligned to how can we put a 100red million 200 million to work and actually guarantee a return on that. So, they're going to be working on the Avatars and the Marvel movies and the DC movies and the and the Harry Potter movies. Um, but for the next generation, uh, that that track feels like very much bought in. Um, so there are already more of these sort of like YouTube adaptations in the works. Uh, one is from Wesley Wang who went viral for interestingly uh, Obsession and Back Rooms are both horror films which are notorious for being cheap to produce and potentially very high return. Um, he went viral for a nonh horror YouTube short called Nothing Except Everything. Tristar picked it up with Darren Arvnowski's Prozoa producing and Wang set to adapt it as writer director. Uh, and then there's also the much sillier but extremely viral Skibbidity Toilet, which was created by Alexa Gerasimov in 2023. And that project has been going back and forth, but reportedly Michael Bay was attached at one point. They were thinking maybe TV show, maybe uh movie. But that as silly as that sounds and as ridiculous as that series is, it does it did build like a little bit of a lore world. It captured a lot of people's fascinations and the numbers are really staggering. Um there is a little bit more nuance there because uh uh on the IP side because it was created in source filmmaker which is basically like Halflife or Counter-Strike. Uh, so you design the level and then you can move the camera around through that. He didn't use Blender and he didn't shoot it with a camera. He actually made the whole series in a video game. Um, and a lot of the assets pull from HalfLife 2 or Counter-Strike Source. And so, uh, if you want to maintain that, you have to go do a deal with Valve, which, you know, is a private company owned by Gabe Newell. Doesn't necessarily need to just allow someone to do this. And there's already been back and forths on like takeown notices. So, that's a whole different negotiation if that winds up making it to the silver screen. Um, but I do think there will be uh more unpredictable breakouts in the coming years. Uh, and I wouldn't be surprised if we see Hollywood executives combing through obscure YouTube playlists for new gems. Uh, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowd Strike secures AI and stops breaches. And, uh, some members of our production team saw both back rooms and Obsession. And I want to get some reviews. What do you What did you guys think? Which one was better? Take us through it. >> My votes Obsession. >> Obsession. >> Scott, what did you think? >> Obsession. >> Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one? >> So, Obsession was great. It felt like I feel like the >> filmmakers have gotten too good at making horror movies sometimes recently, like this like Ari type wave. Remember leaving Midsummer and just feeling like >> like like gross for like days and I felt like Obsession like walked it back a little bit and it was a bit of a comedy too, so it was fun. That's good. >> Uh, I felt like the the memes are all over it, which is great. >> Um, back rooms. We all kind of walked out. I love back rooms. Production design should win an award, but something was missing from the movie, I think. >> Apparently, they built 30,000 square ft of actual set for back rooms. They really designed it. As you said, the production design was fantastic. And that feels like I mean, the source material is literally in Blender. It would be so tempting just to be like, "Yeah, just send us the Blender files. like we'll just continue using like you're already working in CGI like it's not like oh this isn't true to the source material like it's actually less true to go build the set but they did and clearly uh you enjoyed that look and feel and sort of worked out. >> I thought it was really fun. Scott's got something. >> I want to shout out Haley Johnson who produced Obsession too. She went to our film school. >> Uh fantastic. Um let's go over to bed. guys's your guys's class at your film school, which I think no longer exists. Truly truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. >> Well done. >> So, uh, Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was, uh, taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. and he said in in 2017 when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote Goodbye Gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood where the supply of people who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood created the conditions for his predation. So he had a lot of power. uh as he noted in the article, a similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the spectre of something similar happening to movies. Don't forget YouTube. Video is a zero- sum activity. Time spent watching one source of video is time spent not watching another. And YouTube showed over a billion hours of video every 2016 >> with two phones >> watching two things >> wheels on both phones and subway surfers screen just going like this. Well, if you have VR you can have way more screens open because you can just >> you can't when is Subway Surfers getting an adaptation that feels like that's due for a trilogy. Subway Surfers the movie. I think we got something. Are they Have they has We cannot be the first people to think of Subway Surfers. >> Angry Birds is like a you know. Oh yeah, they're making a third one or >> No, but I want it to be a movie where you're just like, you know, on you're basically just going one direction. >> No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in in the subway servers universe. Um, so Ben Thompson continues. He says, "It's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize after that article. I've long noted the sequence through which the internet and digital media has affected media. text first, then music, then short form video, etc. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course, movies ask the most of customers in return. They actually have to leave the house. It's also notable I' I've been seeing more creators basically produce movies like Johnny Harris uh video essaist talks about geopolitics and breaks down history of the Middle East, history of Europe and history of China, Taiwan. Uh and his last few videos have been two hours long which is just a movie. He's just making an actual documentary. It used to be there was a 20 minute cut off. Uh well it used to be like 8 10 minutes because of the ad breaks. You'd want two ads in there. Then people sort of went to 20 30 minutes because of watch time. Um but >> yeah, the only the only other difference is I feel like if somebody's making a documentary or a film, they'll do more maybe walk and talks, things like that. Whereas I feel like the classic like YouTube >> video is just like like thinking about your YouTube videos, right? You're just set up like in an in an office like talking to the camera. >> Yeah. >> But just that slight difference makes what makes it feel like way more like a film. >> Yeah, totally. There is an interesting way where you can you can pretty pretty easily rotate from video essay scripted long form get just write the script longer and longer. I' I've put out video essays that have been over an hour um to go do a bunch of interviews, get them to say some things, weave those in and then do some sort of like walk-in talk at the beginning and you can have like a lowbudget documentary very very easily uh with just a few shoot days. Um, and I think a lot of people are are moving towards this, but it's just been interesting that YouTube has sort of found its footing in delivering a two-hour video. And I think a lot of that has to do with how the algorithm surfaces content at certain moments in time and then also resurfaces moments. So for a two-hour video, they know that they're going to need to give you like a couple shots on goal to show it as a thumbnail. And then also if you click on it and you watch 10 minutes and then you close your phone and you go do something else, they know that that's not necessarily means that that doesn't necessarily mean that you were unsatisfied with the video and they will say, "Hey, do you want to keep watching that?" Uh, and so all of that has been algorithmic changes that make a 2-hour video work a little bit better on YouTube, which is more of a casual uh casual world. So Ben Thompson continues. He says that leads to two true but ultimately unsatisfying answers as to why YouTube stars might succeed in movies. First is that they is that uh this is simply a new place to discover talent and that's certainly true. The analogy I would draw is to the impact of AWS had on venture capital. Uh cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founders's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers and that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms meanwhile didn't evaluate companies based on a power point to f to fund Sun servers but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations not that not just their ideas. That's what I was talking about the the audition the YouTube growth and the YouTube product and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the in the example of back rooms like that is the audition tape that gets you the production workforce behind Hollywood to to actually marshall behind you. Um and that's the same thing with you know the startup that shows up on Sand Hill Road raising a series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. Um, and all of that is possible because you don't need $10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. Um, more true than ever in the age of AI. >> The second true but unsatisfying answer is that YouTube creators can bring their own audience. That's uh almost certainly true. Kane Parsons who uh made back rooms has 3.2 million subscribers which feels low based on how big Back Rooms is. Uh but that's the nature of these videos that go viral. They don't always all convert to uh to uh actual subscribers. Curry Barker, who made Obsession, has 1.2 million subscribers again on that comedy channel. And then uh Mark Fishbach, who made Iron Lungs, Mark Plier, has 38.7 million subscribers. Huge account from years of streaming. Um and he purposely leveraged that to get distribution. Bloomberg sort of broke it down. Uh he uh he he was set to release his $3 million film uh Iron Lung in 60 independent cinemas. Fishbach led a grassroots campaign encouraging his followers to phone up local theaters and request iron lung screenings. This is something that a lot of people say in like CPG like, "Oh, fill out this form, request me in Arowan or Whole Foods." But it's usually really really hard to get someone to actually do that uh because the conversion rate might be like 0.001%. But if you have 40 million people that are, you know, loosely entertained by you and you get, you know, fraction of a percent to people who really really care. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you talk about a thousand true fans, he probably has a million true fans out of that 40 million that are 1% of those actually. >> That's still 10,000 phone calls. It's a lot. And so, the film was ultimately picked up by major chains, including AMC, which has been on a tear. AMC said that it uh this weekend was the highest ticket sales they've had in years. And I think >> 20% today. >> The stock is up 20%. >> Yeah. Hundred billion dollar company. 100. What? What? No. No. >> It's a $1 billion company. >> Yeah, they're they put some data centers in the theaters, I guess. Uh Regal Entertainment Group and Cinema Holdings. >> They set it up so if you rock you rock in your chair, you capture the energy film. You get a free film. They capture the energy. >> You're powering small >> Nvidia servers. >> GPUs. >> Yeah. Potentially powered by Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So, uh, the unsatisfying act aspect that Ben Thompson's referring to is best understood through the lens of the movie Backrooms and Obsession finished ahead of from Variety. So, they talk he talks about the Mandalorian and Grou, which we mentioned, and he calls back to George Lucas's original film. Uh, so his initial claim to fame was American Graffiti, which made over $200 million on a 7 $177,000 budget. That's a crazy ROI. Over 200x return on investment for American Graffiti. The success gave him the support to make Star Wars. >> How do uh Ben Scott, how do films actually get funded? >> I've been I've been uh I've been pitched like invest in my movie before, but given that I don't watch movies, didn't feel like it was really my strike zone. But how does it typically get structured? Like if a film needs a million-doll budget, like are is are the investors getting like an independent film needs a million dollar budget? >> Yeah. >> How does the equity work? Any any rough ideas? >> Typically there's there's a series of buyers and investors. >> Distracting you guys from running >> very similar to live. So, so, so, so, so Scott's job is often times a screenwriter will sell an option to to make a movie to a producer, uh, some sort of production team. They are the the the production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions, other script writers. uh they they might attach a uh they might go pitch a do the deal to to bring on a star and then from there they go to another producer and then the last the last time the last moment is uh is the actual like marketing phase and so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor they're putting in a ton of money because they're going to buy the billboards and like the Super Bowl ads and that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point. But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood uh fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3 million, that means he spent $3 million paying the >> even with Obsession. >> Yeah. >> I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around LA. >> Yeah. >> Like a at least a million dollar campaign. Yep. >> Right. When the videos were coming out saying like Obsession just turned 750K into $100 million. And so I was like, well, >> so a lot of times that might happen after the fact. >> Yeah, that's an after there's more money being spent to like, you know, it's like, hey, we have a hit now. Let's like >> and then and then basically at every phase there can be sort of an inkind investment where you get they call it like points on the back end basically, but it it's basically uh like the the the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. in Iron Man. He he took a very low salary up front, cash upfront, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series. >> Saying he's goated. >> He's goated. He's actually goated. I think he made hundreds of millions of dollars off of the Marvel franchise that came from that. And there is a world where he would have said, "No, I want only cash up front. You're going to have to pay me a ton." And then a production team has to come in, they put the money in, they get the equity, and then they get that on the back end. So now that Curry has this insane hit >> Yep. >> he can Star Wars. >> Are people going to come to him and say like I want I want to basically buy your next five films kind of thing. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Multi multifilm deal. Or if it depends on what he's pitching like he could like somebody could just come to come to him with something very open-ended. They could come with him to something narrow. Maybe he's already working on something has a script has an idea and then wants to get that you know made or locked up. Or maybe he wants to be, it's also possible he gets brought on as someone to adapt something else. So they say, "Hey, we already have this IP. Maybe we want to re bring back Scream and and we would love for you to do it." >> He's actually he actually is doing the next Texas Chainsaw. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. With A24. >> Wait, Curry is >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So generational run off the back of Obsession. He got his next feature which is called Anything But Ghosts. >> Okay. >> And then from that he hopped on with A24 to do the next Chainsaw Master. which has already been remade a few times, but it's but but but it's established intellectual property and bringing him on sort of, you know, derisks in some ways, but it also just brings some fresh energy to that that IP where whoever did the first Texas Chainsaw or the reboot, maybe they're doing something else or maybe the studio wants to take a different direction and so they license that IP because Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not like an I it's not an A24 property from day one, but at this point they went and bought the rights and then they got the director and then they put them together and so it's all a package deal. Anyway, um Ben Thompson's blackpilling on Star Wars, he says, "It turns out, however, that actually making good movies still matters. A late Gen Xer like me who saw uh who as a teenager saw The Phantom Menace twice in its opening weekend, so excited was I by the Return of Star Wars and did not uh and did the same for The Force Awakens, has basically no interest in The Mandalorian and Grou. Has anyone in the studio seen The Mandalorian and Grou? No one. No one's into it. Uh, it's not what I'm looking for. I I I'm looking for Andor. That was more my my speed. Uh, and he and he agrees. He says, "I'm I'm clearly not alone. It's been clear for a while now that all the things that Disney worries about when making a Star Wars film or TV series, actually making it good has not been one of them. Brutal." Uh, the thing uh that's the thing with IP based business model. However, Disney seems to have assumed that because they controlled distribution thanks to the massive consolidation of movie studios over the past years that they could shove whatever supply they wanted through the tubes and audiences would slurp it up because they had no other choice. Uh, this is the exact opposite of YouTube specifically and the internet generally. On the internet, distribution is free. Anyone can set up a website or start a YouTube account and they can post whatever they want. Content that breaks through has to do so on its own merits. It is good and and is it good and compelling or is it not? If it is, it gets more and more views. That's what the algorithm does. It it is respond to and amplify interest. And if it's not, like 99.99% of YouTube content, it's barely seen by anyone. In short, the reason these movies are successful is not just because their makers were spotted by powerful producers or because they brought their own fans. I agree with this. It's not enough just to bring their own fans. It's because the necessary precondition for those two things happening is actually becoming popular on pure merit. It's a more merit-based system. These movies are successful because their makers are good. And we know they're good because they're successful on YouTube. No, that doesn't mean everyone on YouTube is good. Indeed, that's the entire point. There's no quality bar to get onto YouTube, which means the quality bar to get noticed on YouTube is much higher than any gate. Indeed, as much as Hollywood types might might look down on YouTubers, it's the latter who are far more impressive, at least if the goal is actually trying to make something that resonates. Very good. Very, very fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create modify your Figma files with design system context. Go check it out at figma.com. Famously not dead. Still cooking. SAS Apocalypse is over. We'll get to that later in the show. >> Not a car either. >> Not a car. No one's a car. >> Did you see the new George Lucas Museum cinema? I I thought this was interesting that this was going viral at the same time or it launched at the same time. Uh you know, it's it's sort of uh a turning over. >> Throw on a tax. >> Yes, it it looks very cool. Apparently uh a billion dollars to make this a billion dollar investment in this whole facility, the George Lucas Museum Cinema opening in September. Uh this looks absolutely amazing. quote, uh, all through the course of a normal day, one will screen documentaries about artists and filmmakers while the other one shows short films, some only a few mill minutes long. It's in Los Angeles. If you're coming by the TVP and Ultradome, make a stop at the George Lucas Museum cinema. Um, very, very cool. There's also a a cool uh video here of the history of liinal spaces. We should pull up because backrooms, of course, is pulling from a lot of interesting videos. Let's play this. Can we zoom in this at all? There we go. Truman show. Haven't seen it. I've seen it. It's great. I can't believe you've never seen Truman Show. It's so good. >> Should we get some liinal spaces here in the Ultradoo? >> The The Ultradome is a little bit of a liinal space. We should make it more of a liinal space. Uh there are some there are some podcasters that have liinal space type setups. Uh Unbox Therapy is a famous one. >> You guys haven't seen it, but do you know like the tape on the wall? Do you know what that is? >> No. What's that? >> Okay. I mean, I guess no spoilers, but >> Oh, okay. >> Yeah, we can put tape on the wall. People have seen it will know what that means. >> That's a very cool shot. The Shining. The Shining. I never I never put The Shining in the same bucket as this. It follows. That's a good horror film. That's a great one. Very cool. Anyway, we can just vibe out spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. Uh, this will happen too with AI in about a decade. Studio executives and producers are racing to find movie material in corners of the internet they once dismissed as some of the greatest threats to their business. From YouTube to anime to video games. We talked about subway servers. Uh, we're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators. Maybe there will be data center simulators the movie. Can you imagine? We got data center simulator or uh what was the other one? Coconut simulator. We got to get coconut simulator in the movie. Realistic mode. >> Capibara simulator the movie. >> That's just a nature documentary. Get get David Atenboroough in there. You're done. You're good. Um very interesting. Well, uh Churn Entertainment financed this. >> David Atenburgh narrating gameplay from >> Cappy Bar Simulator. Ooh, I think that I think we got a hit on our hands. Call A24. They're ready. >> Uh, well, Bernie Sanders is uh talking about taking a stake in the AI labs. He says AI is built on humanity's collective knowledge. The wealth it generates must benefit humanity, not just Elon Mus, Sam Alman, or other AI oligarchs. That's why I'll be introducing the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act to give the public a direct ownership stake. and he penned a full op-ed in the New York Times, uh, a guest essay. Um, I need to confirm my account if I want to log into this, but we can we can see the I I I I think I subscribed to my phone and so it doesn't sync with my Chrome installation. I don't know. Uh, let's see. Andrew Curran is highlighting it. >> This is This is rough. Uh, Senator Bernie Sanders proposing a one-time 50% tax directly in stock from the AI labs, which will be used to fund the American AI sovereign wealth fund. This would give the government voting rights and board seats and then directly pay a dividend to the American citizens. That's interesting because so you take 50% and like when would these companies actually produce a dividend? I mean, it takes many tech companies like decades to actually uh return cash to shareholders. They're known for >> just be fire selling. >> Yeah. >> After the IPOs, >> he's just he's just like, "This is the >> I didn't tell you how there was going to be a dividend >> dividend in in sales." >> Um, no, it's I mean, the the positioning I'm I'm trying to get into the New York into my New York Times account, too. the positioning. Um, blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. >> What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge? >> Yeah, I was looking at a lot of >> TBPN is built on TBPN is built on humanity's collective knowledge. >> True. >> If if humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines. >> Hey, be careful what you say that the United States American citizens might own 50% of TVPN soon. You never know with this. >> You never know. It might you just never know >> you're attempting faith here >> but uh >> bad example >> but yeah the the the other thing is um you know we we have >> yeah AI 2027 talks about this I think that's a it it is it is right in line he's clearly in the millu of that crew and uh we'll see we'll see where all this goes you know I don't know we'll see um it's uh a lot of people are sort of framing it >> would rather have universal basic tokens >> maybe that would be the dividend I I don't know. Um he says uh >> but it's interesting. So he's trying to ban data centers with the data center moratorum. >> Yes. >> Act. But then he also >> Yeah. >> wants half >> Yeah. >> Uh those two things feel like like it feels like he's just kind of throwing stuff at the wall. >> Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of like uh you know misalignment here. He says uh I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be banned or a public good that should be redistributed? He wants to have it both ways, which is the tell that his flirtation with AI safety is mostly for show. This is about capital. Interesting. At the same time, I I I think that there is a world where if you if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that uh does enable, especially if you have a board seat over every AI lab, you could actually do the thing where you say, "We're all going to slow down simultaneously." That's a lot easier to implement if you have 50% control over everything. Uh Tyler, what do you >> Yeah, but you can just do like the AI FDA, right? you don't need equity. But okay, this is my kind of contrarian take, but this seems like extremely bullish, right? Because Bernie, you don't think of him as being this kind of classically capitalist person, >> but these are going to be the biggest. >> He's saying that the stock's underrated. >> Yeah. >> These are going to be the biggest because if all the stocks were going to zero, >> be so big that this is going to be like disruptive to the economy. >> Sure. >> Like this seems like he's extremely AGI pilled. >> It seems like it. Yeah. >> Yeah. It's like this seems like he's he's basically saying like, "Okay, the data center stuff is like probably not going to work out. I'm not going to be able to ban these things." >> Yeah. >> But >> uh Mark in the chat says, "Mr. Sanders is your crazy uncle that your mom and dad use as a baby center babysitter when there are no other options." >> H interesting. Uh let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. >> Another Mark in the chat says, "My wife wants me to tell you guys that I'm so loyal that even laying on the beach with her, I can't leave the boys." Mark is uh on vacation tuning in to TV. >> Say hello to everyone for us. >> It's uh we hope you're enjoying the sun, Mark, and thanks thanks for being with us. >> Thanks for tuning in. Um so my question is, I mean, obviously this is a a New York Times oped. It's not going to say you think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppen. >> I I I'm not going there yet. We'll get there. But uh first off uh I mean the big news today, Anthropic is uh confidentially filed for IPO. They should be out. SpaceX is going public. Google's public. Open AI. There's rumors of of of an IPO. >> Yeah. And that's what that's what gets really crazy here, right? Because is is Google Google's a leading lab >> for sure. Does Bernie Bernie want? >> But then Yeah, but then is is Salesforce an AI company? >> Is Meta >> is Meta? Yeah, Meta is >> I mean Mark Mark would be we were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like me trying to build personal super I'm not an AI company. You take half my company. >> I'm not an AI lab. >> I'm just doing some experiment. >> I got these GPUs to recommend better videos that we're creating. It's just recommendations. >> He's going to take half of all birds. >> Oh no. He's going to take half of all birds. But seriously, like how how deep does he go down the stack? I mean, Intel, like Trump already took a 10% stake. Nvidia, Nvidia makes a lot of sense. >> Is the American open-source hero, >> but what about Microsoft? Like Microsoft doesn't have like they have a huge partnership with OpenAI. They don't have a frontier foundation model, but they're definitely like a front door to a lot of AI services with Copilot, and they're vending these tools in everywhere. And so there's just a whole like Amazon I heard Amazon Rufus for AI shopping surprisingly surprisingly effective. It's working very well. Like this is an AI assistant that's powered by other models under this under the hoods. Doesn't need to be the most aggressive mythos 5.5 pro like you know it doesn't need to be the the the the frontier but it's it's actually working and customers are using it. Same thing with Sparky at Walmart. And so is Walmart an AI company now? like the definition around this will be hotly debated. But of course, you don't want to get too over your skis here because this is just an op-ed. It's not in legislation. It's a it's to provoke thoughts. >> Well, if the argument is that basically if something is built on humanity's collective knowledge, the government should get half. >> Yeah. >> Uh you can go pretty far here. Pretty much everything in our modern world Yeah. >> is built on humanity's collective knowledge. >> Yeah. And so, yeah, I think everybody should get ready to >> I mean, even your your own home, right? Your own home >> is built on the nail collective. >> Somebody invented the 2x4. Exactly. Yeah. No, you could be cutting down trees. >> Yes. So, maybe it ends with >> some sort of tax on corporate profits for every type of >> tax on corporate profits would would feel >> if a if a company makes money, they have to send some of it to the government. That would be >> Why is no one thought of this, John? >> I don't know. I don't know. >> Take this to DC right now. >> Okay. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Um, so there's a hot debate. Apollo's chief economist says there's zero evidence of AI related job losses. And this went viral. Torstston SLK, the partner and chief economist, has zero evidence of AI related job losses. He says, "Weekly ADP employment data. There's zero evidence of job loss. Instead, many firms are hiring AI implementation experts and the data center buildout is putting upward pressure on salaries for AI experts and on prices of semiconductors, equipment, and energy. The bottom line is that AI spending boom, the AI spending boom is stoking both employment and and inflation. As a result, non-farm payrolls for May could come in significantly higher than the 95,000 expected by consensus." This is Jevans paradox playing out in real time. cheaper technology is creating more demand for more jobs and he has a chart there and you can see ADP is in a really strong position. It looks great. It's really good. Uh there is more nuance here because if you dig into this uh what's actually driving the hiring boom is healthcare uh and the AI affected areas. There's not a massive wave of of layoffs that's happening broadly. We're seeing layoffs at different tech companies, but uh broadly like white collar work is not going through a massive uh you know employ unemployment spike, but the the employment spike that we're seeing the upward trend in ADP weekly employment is still driven mostly by healthcare jobs. And so I don't know how much you can actually say Jevans paradox in real time. Maybe you can in the sense that uh you know asset prices are going up. there isn't there isn't wide broad unemployment so there's more justification in hiring more in the healthcare sector but this felt like uh maybe a little bit too too soon to take a victory lap on this I'm not exactly sure uh it's certainly a better place to be than seeing unemployment go up we want to see uh we want to see lots of hiring we want to see a low unemployment rate and that's what we're seeing which is great but uh it is it is soon it is early and we're just getting to start to implement ment these tools and there's still risk all over the place. Um maybe not as much risk as what Jason Oppenheim thinks though because he went on the ice coffee hour and made an audacious claim about job displacement penning uh pinning it at 80% of people out of the workforce 80% unemployment. We can play this clip >> which would be the ice coffee hour >> far. >> There won't be any work. I disagree with Kevin. I don't think% of people >> out of the workforce that we know of today and into the things that I talked about. Um so I think what we have to do is start creating showing and creating value for those things. Uh start ascribing value to to family and to hobbies and to sport and to relationships more and it has to be less about work. >> So I hear a lot of I think and you guys are real estate people in the eyes of the viewer. What gives you guys credibility to talk about AI? >> Fair question. I would say that I've spent probably 500 hours listening and reading a lot of podcast. >> Do the homework. >> I think it's it's the quintessential like intellectual pursuit of the last two years of my life. >> Called David. Listening to podcasts is the quint quintessential intellectual pursuit. Jeremy on suicide watch. >> Tyler, you had something? >> Yeah. Just for some context. So, uh, in the peak of the Great Depression, um, unemployment was 24.9. >> 24.9. >> Saying 80%. >> Okay. So, three times four times the Great Depression is what we're looking at with AI. >> Yeah. It's just, it's so it's so funny to listen to to go and just like listen to a bunch of podcasts and come back with with the 80% number. It's wild >> because you also has you you would have to qualify that like what what set of technologies actually enable that because you certainly would need like >> you know uh highly effective efficient humanoid robots you know fully deployed throughout society. >> Um but uh yeah I don't strongest take we've seen yet. >> Yeah. >> So very concerning >> but this is a stronger take potentially. >> Yeah but this is the other side of it. Sam Sulk revealed that 95% of jobs are safe from AI. He said AI is a tool. It won't replace discipline, grit, or hard work. >> Um, >> Instagram, >> how did this really looks like Instagram? >> I made this. This is a fake quote. I sent this to John over the weekend. >> It looks very like the fact that it added the little Instagram buttons makes it look way more legit to me. I know you made this, but I I I still did a double take. It's absolutely wild. Uh, so funny. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're very happy to be partnered with the New York Stock Exchange. It's really going really today. And thank you to Area Area.te. They produced all of our show graphics, the Chiron >> Legends, >> the intro. They've worked with us for a long time. And they also activated my AI Siri for some reason. I don't know why that happened. On my phone and my MacBook. Wow. Uh what a day. Uh Salesforce is on a absolute tear. Uh we talked about the dueling narrative. So Enthropic is IPOing or or they have they have confidentially submitted a draft S1 registration statement to the Securities and Exchange Commission pending completion of SEC review. This gives us the option to pursue an initial public offering. Uh there's a race between uh SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Um meanwhile, it was so over for the all the SAS companies, but uh the SAS apocalypse might be cancelled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on Anthropic holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their >> Mark's got to be feeling good. He invested 50 million into Anthropic, I think in 2023 or 2024. >> Cheeky 100x. >> Very cheeky. Very cheeky. >> He's feeling good. He's now going to deploy 2 billion euros into France. >> Love it. Our strong team. >> 1,800 employees in France. >> Wow. >> Uh more committed than ever to driving invent innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is this is the new >> this is the new vibr meta. So anytime you do a business transaction >> snap a selfie with your business partner, post it. You don't need to make a video with a bunch of um you know sort of uh videos throughout history of of you know hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Um just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient. >> Okay. So >> and I'm dropping after this partnership. I just got to say I'm we're cancelling my personal beef with uh France. >> Oh, that's great. >> This is a fantastic progress. >> Benny off won you over. >> And uh yeah, if they have Beni off's full faith, they have my full faith. And uh already this 2 billion euros I think is significantly more than their uh their the previous investment that they announced that created the original beef. >> Yeah. Yeah. Beef squash. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, uh, Beni off gave some more context on Salesforce's progress. The fiscal year 27 Q1 results, uh, record revenue 11.13 billion, up 13% year-over-year. This is a very mature company, still growing very quickly. Very good news. Uh, operating cash flow of 6.7 billion. Agent Force crossed 1 billion uh, ARR or yeah, ARR uh, combined with Data 360 and Informatica now at 3.4 4 billion in AI data ARR. >> We're not just talking about the here. >> We're not just talking about the agentic future. We're delivering it. The number one agentic CRM powering a shift to aentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable. Fire emoji. >> 34. Really? >> What is a sasparilla? What's a sasilla? >> SAS Barilla is a beverage. It's like a Coca-Cola. It's a drink that you get at a soda bar. >> Sarsilla. >> What? Sasparilla. Sasparilla. >> Sars. I'm seeing >> nostalgic soft drink. You just call it sasparilla. I I know it says Sars Barilla, but everyone pronounces it sasparilla, I think. Anyway, nostalgic soft drink. Herbal plant. Native to the Americans. Sweet earthy flavor. This is due for a comeback. This feels like this would sell for $20 a bottle at Arowan. Don't you think? >> I bet. Absolutely. I bet bringing back Sasparella good business. Somebody do the call call area, call day job right now. Start your branding packages and uh and I think you got a winner if you bring back SAS barilla successfully. Well, Mark Manoff uh teased a little bit of the progress on our show. Uh and we can play this clip from him uh on TBPN giving us a little bit of a view into the demand that Salesforce was seeing, the growth that they were seeing in their business. I wasn't really on the show at the beginning of the year a year ago with you guys, but if I was, what I would have said was, I'm not hiring more engineers in fiscal year, you know, 26, the year I just passed >> because I was using coding agents and I was allowing the productivity from the coding agent to give me the extra capacity that I needed for the year. >> Yeah. >> And I didn't hire more service agents in the year. I held it flat and then reduced it slightly because I'm using service agents. But I did hire like almost 20% more salespeople this year. We talked about that because I need more capacity because we have more demand than ever through every market from the small, medium, large customers. You know, guys like yourself who are like these great entrepreneurs building a great business like TVPN really going all the way through it. You need a technical infrastructure around you to grow your business. I know you use Slack. I know you use other products >> and that's our job is to make you successful and to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with an >> sales guy, final boss. Yeah, >> final boss. It is it is >> I think the push back there would be well you do sell customer service agents. You don't sell coding agents >> and but you are selling sales focused agents. So why so >> basically you're getting so much efficiency in these other places. >> Yeah. >> That you don't need to hire more people. But in the kind of category in which your primary products operate, you're he's not making the efficiency argument. He's making the demand argument. >> He's saying we have so much demand, we need more reps. >> Yeah. >> But he's selling a product that should be able to sort of meet that demand, >> right? >> Uh yes and no. I mean, he's selling he's selling like a tool that sits alongside a sales rep. If there's a booming economy, more sales, you would think that there's more people that go into sales, more people that need a Shopify or sorry, a Salesforce like installation alongside them. Um, there's there's still a bullcase there. I mean, all the labs have Salesforce admins and stuff. We've seen this reported and uh and there's certainly like so much of the diffusion uh discussion is around actually uh meeting someone having a human in the loop having someone uh alongside you as you implement these tools uh so you don't go over your token budget token maxing token maxing seems like a a hairbrain scheme cooked up by an SDR just okay go into Salesforce agent force what should I do tell them to token max tell them to create a leaderboard where they produce as many tokens as possible like okay so okay agent force got it buddy >> did you know that Jensen was such a good dancer >> I had no idea do we have a video of this we do >> okay let's play this and then we'll read Brandon Gell's deep dive on Jensen's Computex 2026 keynote which is being hotly debated >> okay >> look at this >> it's pretty good >> look at this >> he's got it he's flowing I like the swimming's having fun >> he's got Got to be feeling pretty good this quarter. >> Yeah, >> you got to read into these, right? >> Yeah. >> I mean, we read into we read into him doing the arm linked, you know, chucking beers in Korea. 5.4 trillion, up 6% today. Wow. Absolutely wild. >> Where's he sitting on multiple >> pop quiz? What movie features a dance to this song? >> Is it Pulp Fiction? >> It literally says it in the caption. >> Okay. >> I don't know. Sometimes you're so out you'd be like, I don't know what those words mean. That couldn't possibly be the answer to John >> Have you seen Pulp Fiction? >> I have. >> Oh, okay. >> I have. That's one of the five. >> It's one of the five movies. We're slowly discovering that there's more than five movies. There's like 20. Uh, it's a good time. Uh anyway, let's go through uh what Brandon Gra uh summarized from Jensen Wong's uh ComputEx 2026 keynote. Uh Nvidia CEO made several announcements during his keynote speech at Computex Taiwan's annual technology expo. I guess it's their CES but more enterprise focused even. Uh he introduced the RTX Nvidia RTX Spark Super Chip, an ARMbased chip for PCs designed to process AI workloads locally. He announced that the enterprise Vera Rubin CPU is now in full production and he announced several foundation models, a world model, an openw weight flagship AI model. Do we have a model card for that yet? Uh that seems like big news openweight flagship AI model. We heard that he was investing billions of dollars in that. But um I I think everyone's very interested to see where it benchmarks against the 55s, the what what is uh 48 now? um and uh and the 35s from Google like the closed source models have been on the frontier and there's been the chart showing that the open- source models from China have been sort of decelerating or they're just uh they're they're growing more linearly than the uh than the American closed source models. So is there a gap there? Where does Nvidia fit in with their openweight model? That that's an interesting question. Um and he also released a model specifically designed for humanoid robots. A lot of the attention from the keynote came is going to the RTX Spark, which is being viewed as Microsoft's attempt to create its own Apple Silicon moment, and Microsoft coordinated its announcements of its new Surface Laptop Ultra, which will be optimized for RTX Spark and will be released this fall. Can you play Crisis on it? Can you game on this thing? Is that cool? Or is it all about running agents locally? I wonder what the demand for these local agents on the desktop will be because so many so many workloads you know you just hand it off and you wait 20 minutes and you come back. But uh there is some value to being able to do at least like the voice transcription locally just all sorts of things. >> If you can do like tool calling then that basically gets you like most of the way there because then all the hard things you just outsource well and then for like gaming I'm still very excited to see any of these like real-time video models used in gaming. This seems like it'll be the thing you you do with these like super nice >> We got to get David Zuki back on the show uh for to talk about Roblox and the and the the real-time uprising of Roblox games because I think that that's such a such an incredible technology. I think it's going to be really popular, but it's going to take time for it to actually roll out. Uh anyway, uh there is a cutdown of Jensen's keynote that you can watch. We linked it in the newsletter and uh we we will uh go into that more later, but we have our first guest from the New York Times. He's a journalist. Adam Isco uh just wrote a fantastic piece about prediction markets and he's here with us in the TV ultram. Adam, how you doing? >> With a slat wall. >> Slat wall. >> Ready to pop. >> Wait, is that a slat wall or is that a virtual background? What we got? What we got? >> It's real. It's real. You think I can do a virtual background on you, y'all? I mean, >> thank you. Thank you. With the suit. With the suit. >> You look fantastic. >> Bringing a slat wall and a suit. You are ready to podcast. >> Okay. Uh are you in New York City? >> I'm in New York City. Long time listener, first time caller. So good to be here. Fantastic to have you. Uh since this is the first time and we have some and we do have some time to kind of unpack this. I wanted to hear a little bit about uh your journey, your history, how you wound up at the New York Times, where else you've written, the type of topics, how you describe your beat, your process. Just sort of give me the the 101 on you and then we can dive into prediction market specifically. >> Yeah. You know, at a party if someone asks me what the hell do you write about? Are we allowed to curse on this show? Is it's no >> welcome to We don't. But you're welcome to. I'm surprised the New York Times would let you. Are you allowed to draw in the gray lady? >> I can tell he's a bit of a >> The gray lady bad boy. >> It's been the great It's been the great uh controversy with me working at at the times is that I spent the last five years at the New Yorker. >> Okay. >> It's a magazine that that that encourages profanity in. But the Times, you know, uh >> more things are a little different there. Um, I've spent the last five years at the New Yorker writing about all kinds of things, whether it's mental illness and homelessness in New York City or it's um, like, you know, every year I read a story about a cool boat on the New York Harbor. >> Cool. >> Uh, you know, I'm just trying to like go interesting places and see interesting things. >> What drew you to the boat? I got to know about the boat. Yeah, since you brought it up. >> Oh, well, I mean, y'all ever see a shipping container ship? >> Yeah. >> Like, you ever want to get on one? You ever been on one? >> I don't think I've ever been on a shipping container ship, but I have wanted to go on one. I've been on I've been on an aircraft carrier. That was very cool. >> You've been on an aircraft carrier. >> I've been on an aircraft carrier. I went on the USS Carl Vincent as part of the Distinguished Visitor program. There's a program that you can sign up for. You have to wait years and years and years unless you're actually famous. Uh and I had a friend who waited years and years and years and they slotted me in at the last second. So, I got to go with like a lot of like big Hollywood producers and stuff and they sort of give you the dog and pony show, let you sleep on the boat for two days, meet everyone. Yeah. Two days. you're like at sea with them and they they you have no cell service. They don't tell you where you are and you can kind of speculate, okay, well, we left from San Diego. We're probably around Mexico. But um but yeah, you get to watch the planes take off and land and they take you and they fly you off and stuff. It's it's a wild experience. >> We definitely knew where we were. We were in the New York Harbor. Okay. Uh like we came under the Verzo Bridge and uh uh it was great that the cargo was a miniature of the Statue of Liberty. It was a gift a gift from the French government to um to to us. They gave us another one. >> They gave us another one. Round two. >> They're just running it back. >> Yeah. Yeah. Um and I wanted to get on the ship, so I just sort of made some calls and I I asked around and um they were they were super psyched to have me on the on board. >> Yeah. >> How do you think about sizing stories in that context? Like when you're at the New Yorker over a couple of years, I I imagine that there's there's shorter pieces, there's longer pieces. Like how much is it just a conversation with your editors and the team on, okay, I actually have something here. I need to go heads down on this for months and pull on this thread and there's a 70% chance it's great, 30% chance it goes nowhere. Like what is the process? Because we have like the same show every day. It's always like the same length. We don't really ever get in the world where we're like we're going to do an eight hour show, you know, next week and but we're going to take a couple shows off. Like how do you think about sizing projects? >> It's it's such a great question. You know, it's like if you're going to write about a used car auction in Brooklyn, you know that that piece is going to be 850 words. you know, it's going to be a little just like a little tasty morsel for the reader to enjoy. Um, but if you want to do something where you're really trying to contribute to, you know, to society, to our culture, to, you know, then then you need more words to tell a deeper story, you know, and so yeah, if I want to write about mental illness and homelessness in New York City and have New York City be a sort of proxy for the nation, >> then it's Yeah. We need 6,000 words. We need 10,000 words, which means I need six months or a year to work on that project. Yeah. >> Uh, and then of course, you know, because The New Yorker is a business, you know, you also need to be writing shorter stories along the way while you're spending investigating something that's really sort of topical and important. >> How did you first come into contact with prediction markets? >> Oh my gosh. I mean, I I don't know about y'all, but isn't isn't aren't your friends just like, you know, degenerate gambling on on sports or on on on all of these things? For some reason, I actually don't know that many people that gamble on sports. >> Our most active group chat, no one has ever talked about a sports bet, >> but they were very viral during the presidential election. I remember maybe what was it three cycles ago, 2008, the Nate Silver uh before the silver bulletin, the 538 dashboard, everyone was refreshing that constantly. He famously called all 50 states correctly. It was a bit of luck, but uh those those dashboards, the needles, all of that stuff sort of captures every everyone's attention. And during the last presidential election cycle, it felt like the prediction markets were really having a moment. But I didn't actually know that many people that were actively betting on them one way or another. It was more just a curiosity to say, "Oh, well, you know, that source might be biased or that source might be biased, but you know, at least if there's just money on both sides, maybe it's more neutral. maybe it will give me a a stronger vision of the future. And I think that's where a lot of people a lot of the goodwill around prediction markets came from because it sort of told the story of the election somewhat more independently or more accurately. And so I think they carried a lot of that goodwill into the sports betting that you're talking about. Um, but >> yeah, I've always been personally I've been interested in the tension between uh if you're just using prediction markets as a data source and like you're just logging onto a website, not even logged in. >> Yeah. >> You you kind of want people to be insider trading because that's going to make all the data more accurate. Yeah, but but the platforms I'm not saying like generally that's good for society, but I'm just saying like if you just want to get >> uh an idea of what's going to happen in the future, >> if there's no insider trading happening, it just means that people are just purely just >> That's not true. That's not true. Because in the >> Yeah, I mean they could sophisticated research, things like that. But on some but on some of these markets like for example like the >> the the war markets around Venezuela where there were you were seeing like spikes in activity and then okay it turns out somebody was that did have inside knowledge on the operation was putting the whole operation it's going to be better >> because because they wanted to make you know 100 grand or whatever. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. But when you look at the election or you look at, you know, you look at you look at financial any anything, you know, sort of unemployment or the Fed rate or what what have you, you don't need insiders to have sort of non-public information. >> You can just you can sort of do what Wall Street has always done. Yeah. >> Which is go out and find an edge. Go out and find the best information possible. Yeah. >> Uh go and talk to a bunch of people. Go and look at really complicated uh weather data uh to predict oil prices. I mean, you can you can do like sort of really intense research as just like an individual or a group of individuals working together. And so, you don't need to be that guy that like um you know, compromised national security by um illegally trading Venezuela. You can be someone who just knows a lot more than the average sort of user or better um and kind of create tremendous informationational advantage for people. I mean, the stat that I came across sort of crazy is that a third of adult voters in America have insulted a prediction market, right? That's like a that's like a lot of that's like a lot of people. >> They're basically at the ballot box being like, hm, who should I vote for? >> And I mean, in low liquidity, >> I only vote for winners. Who should I vote for? >> Yeah. No, no, I think people do. I I I think people do actually see, okay, there's momentum. It's worth me donating to this candidate. And then you get this weird flywheel where potentially you could have someone who wants a particular candidate to win. Then they artificially shift the odds of that of that candidate. They spike and then that candidate runs a whole bunch of talking points or ads saying, "I'm at 60% on the prediction markets. You should definitely donate because I'm going to run away with it." And then they and then it becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy. There's like a weird cycle there. Uh that could be bad. I don't know. I think six months ago, maybe eight months ago, there may have been at least pre pre2024 election, this may have been possible. But the way the markets are sort of becoming more efficient, just like any other market on Wall Street, I think now if you went in and you were trying to sort of artificially hype up a candidate that didn't have genuine support, smarter money than you would just would just buy your money, okay, and >> just crush you and crush. >> Interesting. Interesting. Okay. So tell me about like what smarter money looks like in this context because we've heard about you know big hedge funds Citadel is doing clearing and there's uh I think Steve Cohen's fund has a desk for this type of stuff. There's like traditional Wall Street then there are sharps and then there are the average traders. Like how do you segment the market? How would you characterize the different market participants? >> Yeah. So I would say that the average trader and like that's me to be clear. We're just getting crushed. Absolutely decimated. I I actually wanna I I wanna I want to read youall something that that uh that that that one of my sources told me. Yeah. This is someone >> turned 200 bucks. They're quite sharp. They turned 200 bucks into half a million bucks just last year. >> Wow. >> And so and so and and you know it's a grad student. I'm going to keep them sort of protect their anonymity. They're quite worried about being cryptokidnapped. Um sure >> they go by this name frozen. Um, and they said, "I I really am just taking money from people. >> Every dollar I gain is someone else losing." And there's a lot of people joining and betting and losing and leaving. And then there's a group of a couple hundred guys uh winning. And that's the whole story. And, you know, that's not the whole story, but but that's a lot of it. Uh, is that you have you have really smart people Yeah. >> just crushing the average trader. >> Okay. So, what I find weird about this is that I like I I I don't have that many friends who fall into the >> Wait, but but do the people that get crushed quit right before they're about to hit it big? >> Yes, clearly. >> Wonder. I wonder. Um so so I I have been uh I have had friends who have been in that camp of like smart grad student uh tech person able to build a real model and I always go to them and say you shouldn't be trading because there's a much more sophisticated market participant sitting at a hedge fund with you know a data center worth of compute behind their models and they're going to crush you. And so I'm surprised that an individual of any sort can have an edge uh in this market. Like is it just that like did you try and talk to any of the the Wall Street funds that would more professionalize that that like like this activity? because it feels like even the even like the smart, clever, individual, disciplined uh individual who's maybe uh feeding off of like the casuals that are just coming in and out uh would eventually get crushed by something that's even more uh more robust and professionalized. >> Yeah, you know, I was so delighted. I have I had a wonderful conversation with Jeff uh who co-ound >> you know, one of one of the sort of most respected trading training firms in the country um if not the world. And and I asked him this question and he said, "We are just getting taken for a ride. We were just getting crushed by these sharps." >> Uh and and I was sort of trying to figure out why. And I I talked to someone who actually, you know, Sig is trying to go out just like a number of other places and they're going to they're trying to hire these sharps, right? >> I talked to someone who had an offer from SIG. Um and I said, you know, why didn't you take it? Well, you know, wouldn't we get, you know, better health insurance, you know, and he said, not only am I just baking a killing, >> but I can do things that a big institutional fund can't do. For instance, I can, you know, he's a Rotten Tomatoes trader. He trades trades, how is a film going to do on Rotten Tomatoes, and he's he's turned, you know, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but he's made quite a bit of money, you know, seven figures easily. Uh, and so, you know, he's he's guessing, not guessing, he's predicting, he's building models to figure out how is a Rotten Tomatoes uh film going to perform and and such. And he's doing things, he's scraping websites, and he's doing things that that maybe SIG through their corporate policies wouldn't allow. Okay. >> And he asked in the interviews like, "Could I do this technique?" And, you know, you know, and they said, "Yeah, probably not." >> And so, at least in in these markets, um, you know, and there's just so many market. >> Well, is that because it's illegal? No, it's not. >> Yeah, it might be against terms of service, like an individual, >> but not like a law, but like a terms of use, >> just as well. >> Yep. Yep. Exactly. >> Interesting. >> Exactly. >> Uh and and this guy, you know, it's really interesting, right? Because he's someone who, you know, he, you know, pardon me, I'm going to swear, but but he he he he self-described as sort of like a [ __ ] from the M Midwest. You know, the first person talk to like, >> you know, hey, I'm this guy. I didn't go to an Ivy League school. Yeah. >> Wall Street with a $600 Lenovo laptop. >> I could never have a job on Wall Street. This is not my world, but I'm able to do this because I'm quite sharp on prediction records. >> The American dream. Call Sager and Jetty. He's going to be so happy to hear that. Uh, no. I mean, there has been a ton of push back. Uh, but it feels like, uh, the greatest gift to the prediction market industry has been AI being more controversial. And I'm wondering if you are tracking any of the potential political moves that might uh change the regulatory landscape for prediction markets. They've grown so fast. Feels like there's federal preeemption. They're going to be legal everywhere. Uh but has anyone popped out as a voice of what regulation might look like in this market? whether there's just hey no insider trading or uh you know make it more of a level playing field more disclosures even something as simple as uh with a lot of the Vegas casinos you can self-exclude I don't know how that applies in a modern prediction market world but uh that's something that the the like the anti-gambling lobbies would certainly like to see I imagine >> yeah I mean I I think the the regulatory landscape is incredibly important with all of this stuff um the Trump administration has been incredibly favorable to Koshi to Poly Market to you the CFTC which regulates these things. They also regulate you know like the derivatives that you might trade leanhog or or wheat or corn on. Um so you know the Trump administration CFTC has been much much more sort of willing to play ball um with uh with prediction markets. And so, you know, you talk to folks and they say there may be, you know, come 2028, come 2029, if there's sort of a change of of power in Washington, things may shift, things may change. >> Um, and in the meantime, I think, you know, who who knows? It's really hard to think beyond three months from now. So, it's really hard to think that far out. But in the meantime, there's a lot of people doing really really good work. um you know, Council on Foreign Relations, for instance, is doing really really good work on thinking through how how do we just kind of come up with sort of sensible solutions on how to better regulate these things. Yeah. >> Uh h you know, how can we make sure that, you know, our national security is not imperiled um by, you know, a lone wolf kind of going out and trading on there's going to be a strike in Venezuela. >> Yeah, exactly. It seems like there's a bit of a game of whack-a-ole where there's some really really uh really really problematic markets that have negative externalities like the Venezuela one you mentioned. And then I still don't really have a first principles problem with uh a a broad presidential election market that seems totally reasonable, totally useful, very valuable. I found prediction markets useful all the time. We were checking call sheet constantly throughout the OpenAI Elon lawsuit because we trying to cover it independently and it's a good source of okay what what does the market think uh and it was accurate throughout the whole the whole affair. Um but uh yeah, I mean certainly people can get sucked into all sorts of different markets and um there are going to be hot hotly debated issues for for many years, but it does feel like this is like the the key focus at the federal level will be AI at least for the next >> what what do you think what do you think sensible regulation looks like? Because in the case of uh there had to have been some guidelines that would you know have somebody in the special forces you know if they check the rule book say like hm should not send a signal to the internet that we are you know uh going to attack a foreign country uh which is effectively what this individual was doing when they were betting on uh strike on Venezuel but but that doesn't feel like like that just feels like it's not even necessarily like that must have been violating like a number of policies I would imagine >> policies and and federal law and you know the Justice Department and the CFTC are prosecuting the case. Um you know you also want to see better enforcement, right? You want to see you want to you want to sort of flag these things before they they they even start. You know I talked to KHI about this. I talked to Poly Market about this and they say, you know, they say, "Hey, we're really working quite hard to to stop this kind of, you know, this kind of insider trading. We're kind of we're working quite quite hard on we're building AI systems to do it. We have, you know, teams of people working and working and working on this. Um, we need to sort of make sure that they're actually doing that." And, you know, this is where, um, you know, there's lots of lots of other great reporters at the journal at the times at NPR. There was a good story in the journal about an independent watchdog that discovered a poly market trader who was betting on uh Google search results and he wound up working for Google so he just had the exact uh the exact data available which obviously is a violation of the terms of service but >> yeah what percentage of the sharps do you think just have insidefo and are kind of taking you on a you know basically tell telling you a little story about >> I built a cool web scraper I I I think, you know, I talked to to to dozens and dozens and dozens of sort of really top traders and, you know, I asked for receipts. You know, I wanted to look at their models. You know, I went down to Texas and, you know, knocked on doors. These I went I went and there was a group I went down to Texas with to sort of check out their approach to modeling Texas Democratic primary. Uh, and they call themselves MAGA Kiwi Club. It's it's, you know, 12 12 or so guys and and and they went and knocked on, you know, more than a thousand doors, nearly a thousand doors um to try and get a leg up in this election. Um and they were right, you know, they were right. I think there are some there are some sort of really bad wolves out there um that are taking advantage of the system. But the sharps the sharps that we're talking about, people who are using information to make the markets more efficient um are in a totally different category. And that's sort of that's the vast majority of the activity that in Wall Street um >> you know making money. >> We have a question from Emily Sunberg. Why is a New Yorker writer taking a job at an AI tech company? >> It's a great question. That's a question from Emily or from for me or you >> It's from Emily for you. Clearly >> from Emily for me. You know, I I I I love my job and, you know, I've been I've been so lucky to have gotten to talk to all kinds of just wonderful people over the last 5 years. I have a sense that things are changing and I really rather than sort of be on the outside as a reporter and and and watch as things sort of sort of change and be become a tech reporter. I think this would be the thing that I would go do is I'd go be a tech reporter. I'd write wonderful stories about um you know what's happening and and I got this sense that I couldn't do it from the outside. like I I've become increasingly convinced that that sort of like AI is is like the thing that I need to think about over the next number of years and I didn't have a sense that I could do this as a sort of a reporter from the outside without sort of having you know the street credit at some level of of of being in AI world and then I went around and I and I had to sort of find a place that that shared my values. Um, and I I was lucky enough to to sort of by happen stance um meet uh you know this guy Ivan who runs this company notion. Uh and and I really loved his vision of the world and I loved this company's vision of the world and I thought okay you know I'll give it a shot. We'll see. Uh and and it seems like it's the kind of place here uh that you can tell wonderful stories about what's actually happening in the world. Um, and it sort of has a has a sort of, you know, a genuine curiosity and a sort of a genuine ambition to to tell to tell true stories, to tell real stories about what's happening in the world. Um, and I'm yeah, I'm quite excited to do it. >> How do you think about the opportunity at Notion to tell stories about the technology that, you know, ultimately drive traffic into the Notion ecosystem versus like actually give insight into what would make Notion like a dominant product for the next generation of writers? like those those two opportunities seem both interesting, but is there one that's sticking out to you? >> Well, maybe you could ask a different question or ask ask it slightly differently. I don't I don't quite understand them. >> So, Notion is a product that that writers use to to actually research >> all sorts of people, but people also use it for organizing information of all sorts. that uh there is a world where you as a member of nontechnical staff uh help advance the product and then there is another side where you uh tell stories and do uh more more written output to attract customers to notion more so it's more like product versus marketing if we went back in time. >> Yeah. I mean I don't think product or or marketing really resonates with the thing that I I really do here. Yeah. Uh, I think I'd be a terrible marketer. I don't think I know how to sell Notion as a product. Um, but what I think I can do is come into this place, >> ask a ton of questions about what's happening here, go elsewhere, ask a ton of questions about what's happening elsewhere, and then yeah, maybe tell interesting stories or or maybe the first thing I can do here is sort of ask questions and start to tell interesting stories about what does AI look like in the economy? What is and and may yeah maybe there maybe there is a an economic benefit for the business. >> Sure. >> Uh sure hope so. Um but but >> I think there's also just sort of a deeply felt duty here to to do good work in all kinds of different ways. And so I think um you know part of that is is is this. >> Very cool. >> Anything else? >> No, it was great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on the show breaking it down and congrats on the new roll >> a cargo ship. You know, just call me up. Let me know. >> Let's run it. >> Next one. I'll talk to you soon. >> Great to great to hang Adam. >> Have a good one. >> Cheers. >> Goodbye. >> Uh let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. There's a whole bunch of IPOs going out. SpaceX, Antropic, Open AI. Uh, if you're on public, you want to make sure that you don't go and buy the wrong ticker because apparently people are are doing this on Wall Street Bets. Somebody claimed to put $129,000 to work in SpaceX IPO. They wound up buying Virgin Galactic by mistake. That's a different company. Uh, but the Virgin Galactic stock is mooning on the rumors of SpaceX's IPO or >> Virgin Galactic has the ticker SPCE. >> Sounds a lot like SpaceX to me. >> And uh, yeah, fortunately this guy, I mean, hopefully he helped the comments came in because he'd be up 126% last up. >> Who knows? Maybe there's a comeback for Virgin Galactic. That would be very cool. I mean, uh, I think a lot of, you know, I don't know what will happen to the rest of the space economy. Uh, potentially there's there's more capital for SpaceX, more competition, more more demand for a duopoly if you're a a wireless carrier and you don't want to be locked into Starlink exclusively and so you want to get an ASS working for you and you continue to back that. or if you are a company that needs to launch satellites into space, you you know, you are helping Blue Origin and Rocket Lab continue to uh chop down the wood that they need to do to get to space regularly. And so that's actually bullish. Or, you know, maybe they just eat it all up. Who knows? >> Tyler says, "Yo, we just got an ad read. Just made my day. >> Just made >> We love you guys." Uh Kyle Kosma, friend of the show, guest as of last Friday, said look at IBM #quantum. Uh he's having a lot of fun following the market. Uh he was a very he was a great interview. We had a lot of fun talking to him. Uh Micron is also way way up. They extended gains to rise above $1,000 a share for the first time in history. Look at that candle. Of course, this is very zoomed out. This goes all the way back to 2000. One one person on the team is clapping especially hard over there. A micronolder I believe. It was so funny because uh I was seeing this right as I was getting notification that uh the um ceasefire or whatever the negotiation >> had blown up >> and of course Micron overpowering >> geopolitics >> two different things not dependent on the straight of her moves apparently. Uh well the stock is now the company is now worth over 1.2 trillion. The stock was worth just 60 billion 13 months ago. Uh absolutely uh remarkable. Uh there are some rule changes from the space IPO. >> Micron is a Lambo candle. >> Lambo candle. L. That's a Lambo candle. Up 22% today. Absolutely insane. Uh rule changes for the SpaceX IPO. Index providers waved the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to just five. This forces over 30 trillion in passive 401k and retirement money to buy SpaceX at IPO valuations. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within 6 months. The Russell 1000 and NASDAQ 100 funds will absorb 24%. Uh the rules built to protect protect passive investors. One, S&P 500 required 12 months of trading and four quarters of gap profitability since 2002. Both are waved now. NASDAQ cut its inclusion window from 90 days to 15 and the FTSE Russell cut its to five. All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing before the lockup ends. So, lots of buying activity for SpaceX. Uh Nick Carter says, "So, this is what kills index funds. Cult of passive finally coming to an end." And uh yeah, there's a bunch of different uh ways to deal with this. If you for some reason don't want SpaceX in your S&P 500, I'm sure you can go and develop a synthetic uh S&P 499 and >> probably do it on public. >> Yeah, you can probably build something that is neutral to this move. Of course, if you're bullish on SpaceX, you'll be happy that it is in your retirement account. uh and uh if the progress continues and SpaceX delivers on everything that they have planned and are optimistic about uh should work out for everyone but uh there is a lot of risk in the system so uh we will continue to monitor it uh well there has been a lot of back and forth about uh how much you should work how much you should work corgi is going back with kari at linear um we can go through this big debate it's a lot of lot of long posts People are going back and forth. I think this all started with Harry Stebings had uh the Corgi insurance founder on the show and he said, "If you're not working seven days per week, you're going to lose." Carrie takes the other side. Nico goes back and forth with him. Uh interesting timing with the Wilmanitis grind slop essay. I think that the Corgi Insurance I I I was unsure if it was just random timing or if the Corg like was the Corgi insurance interview trying to bait a response from the Wilmanitis post or was it recorded? >> I think that I think that >> I think that Nico, this is just part of their culture as a company and it's working for him. It's clearly working for him. Uh there's a lot of reasons not to have a culture that sort of expects people to work seven days a week, but there's a lot of reasons to have one. Uh and uh in Nico's defense, he's built a I think a $2.4 billion company in in a very short period of time. >> Remarkable. >> Uh and it's a remarkable remarkable feat. uh on Ki on the other side has also built a very big business >> and uh done it in maybe a more calm way. Uh this is personal like I I felt like over the last 18 months we've worked harder than ever in our careers >> but weekends are very much time off and and part of that is I mean we're still talking like multiple times a day and making you know decisions around the business. But I actually felt that was especially necessary because 5 days a week we're coming here and hanging out trying to put on a show for three hours. And so the weekends are are good time to be able to actually it feels like unwinding is is particularly helpful. >> I mean overall Wilmani makes a bunch of good points in the grind slop essay, but I'm different and they don't apply to me. >> That was basically my takeaway. Anyway, we have we have the founder >> apparently twothirds of Corgi's employees have the company tattoo. >> Oh, okay. So Wilmanas was referencing that specifically because he mentioned that in the essay uh which we should read at some point. It's a great essay if you haven't read it already. Momentitis grind slop. >> We could read it and put ads in it. >> We can finally the the final form of the content oral boros >> was after all essay about a podcast. Well, we have our next guest from Saras here in the TVN with us. Welcome. >> Do you believe in working 8 days a week? >> Yeah. Where do you stand on this? >> Where do you stand? >> Five days a week, seven days a week. Where do you stand on on relentless work above all else? I don't think you guys able to hear me. >> Yeah, we can hear you. >> You can't hear us? >> I know. Oh, no. >> Why don't you uh why don't you jump out and >> we will bring you back in. >> We'll bring you back in. >> Okay. >> Well, >> he was about to say, "Every person on my team has a tattoo." >> Somebody should uh make uh headphones that work seven days a week. That would be an innovation. We'd like that. That would benefit us. Um anyway, what did what did Carrie say? Carrie say he said, "I get that s business insurance is similar Nobel level type pursuit of groundbreaking physics and the Manhattan project. Hopefully the blast radius will be contained. They are burning back and forth fighting back and forth on the timeline. The timeline's in turmoil." Well, uh we do have a challenge that I want your take on because I actually saw this post and I did a whole deep dive and I have a very informed opinion. I want your take. So, Alex Tabarok, friend of the show, former guest as of last week, says, "This one is genuinely difficult." And SA in SF, SA says, "You have a one-way flight. Do you have this pulled up? I want you to see these images." And I Tyler, you too. Wait, are you laughing at this or something else? >> But I'm looking at this. I'm looking at >> Okay. Okay. I want everyone to weigh in on this. Uh, you have a one-way flight somewhere unknown within the red boxed region. You drop in via parachute at midnight. You're given $2,000 in cash or precious met metal equivalent, an uncharged phone, three days of food, two changes of clothes, and an Israeli passport you're not allowed to get rid of. Your mission is to get to New York City. You get $10 million if you arrive within one day, 5 million if you if you arrive within a week, 1 million if you arrive within a month. Which region do you choose? And the first option is right between Panama and uh Colombia in the >> Darian Gap. >> The Darien Gap, which is uninhabited. There's no roads that go through it. Did we lose the Chiron, too? What happened? Or Chiron, of course, is created by >> I did have a crazy pretty wild uh travel story generally in that region. Okay. I was in Panama. >> You crossed the Darian Gap. I didn't cross a Darian Gap, but I was dropped into Panama and I ar I was going to a place called Bocas del Toro, which is a small chain of islands in the Caribbean >> and I took an all day bus and I arrived in this port, this Caribbean port, >> like at around midnight and there were no more boats going to the chain of islands that I was trying to get to. You're stuck because legally, I guess they're not allowed to make like, you know, boat runs. >> Yeah. Uh, and we ended up having to uh make a uh find a guy that was willing to uh willing to to make the charge. So, we made the made made the trip uh lights >> lights out, which was very sketchy. You're not supposed to be >> going, you know, traveling by boat uh at night >> in harbors without lights. But this >> one captain was was on board. Uh if and and there was no like there was no lodging in that little like port town. So it was like either sleep basically at a bus stop in a Caribbean port town >> or or make you know make the >> the trip by boat with no light. We took the boat and we were surfing >> that next morning. >> Okay. So the options are North Korea, uh, remote Russia, the Iran Pakistan border, Gulf of Oman box, or the Darian Gap. Which one would you go with and why? Tyler, do you have a pick? >> I'm going Darian Gap. >> Yeah. Why? You can just so you can get a ferry around, right? Because you hear about these stories of people uh motorcycleycling like uh you know, South America to Alaska or something. >> Yep. And I think the passport's less of an issue. >> You just get to the border. >> Yeah. I think I think if you land in Iran, you're screwed. If you land in North Korea, you're immediately a political prisoner. And Russia, probably the same thing. Also extremely cold. Uh very, very harsh conditions. Would you go Darian Gap as well? Yeah, the two the 2,000 bucks I mean is the big constraint, right? Because it's not really enough for a significant uh incentive for someone. >> Yeah. And you only fly business class. So like you would be stuck >> you'd get there and you'd be like well sir business a one-way flight uh from Pyongyang to New York City business class is going to be 2500. I mean, I just think if you're trying to get to the if you're trying to get to New York from these places with $2,000 and you don't have >> no daring gap for sure because you can get to Panama, you can get to Medí. Either one is going to let you with that passport get to New York City. >> Oh, right. >> For sure. >> But but this impli but I'm an American. >> Uh yeah, but you have this Israeli passport. So So that's the one that you will see this >> but it's a valid passport. >> It's a valid passport. And so they will see it and they will say, "Okay, well, if you're in Iran or North Korea, they will say absolutely not." >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> Regardless of your actual passport, whereas in Colombia or Panama, I think they will say, "Right this way, sir." Like, "You can go to New York City. It It's much easier." Anyway, >> Gabe says, "If I'm in Iran with an Israeli passport, the situation strongly suggests I'm a MSAD super agent on an undercover mission." Which sounds awesome. Didn't really read the rest of the post, so not sure what happens next, but I picked that one. And Sean Frank agrees with us. Darren Gap first. Uh anyway, I believe we have our next guest here with audio. Let's bring in Denal. Uh >> are we back? >> How you doing? >> Yeah. >> Oh, we're back. >> I'm I'm well. >> Fantastic. Folks, >> let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news. What happened? >> Uh sure. I'm Daniel. I'm uh founder CEO of SARS AI. Uh we build AI workflow agents for banks and credit unions focused on the back office. It's sort of the unsung heroes of, you know, any company in the back office. >> Um, so we're helping automate a lot of that tedious complex tasks that, you know, the humans don't enjoy. So, yeah. >> So, how how diffuse is your customer base? Because, uh, credit unions, I mean, I feel like there's there's, I don't know, thousands of credit unions in the United States. It's like the backbone of American banking. Um, is that your goal to be, I guess, like more like mid-market versus like we're going straight to JP Morgan and and we're going to be at that level on day one? Yeah, that's a great question. Uh, we are working with one of the larger GIF banks, but to be honest, it's it's sort of like sometimes founders just fall in love with a particular story or a segment of the market. >> Sure. >> And as we put it right, banks and credit unions, it's about 8,000 of them all across the US >> and they're serving, you know, uh, the heart and soul of the economy. You know, our customers are the folks who are helping a lumber mill in Mississippi, you know, get their first loan. it's the young family in Arkansas get their first mortgage or we have another customer in uh Illinois helping farmers, you know, get agriculture loans. So, you know, these folks often don't get the headlines, but they're really serving, you know, the the heart of the economy. So, which is kind of cool. >> And how much of the business is like I mean, we're already in unsexy territory. Let's get unsexy. How much of the business is like not even like AI doing the full workflow and more like AI enabling digitization, AI enabling ETL, AI enabling better organized digital systems because I mean I go to banks all the time and there's still paperwork and you're signing things and just scanning that getting that into something that's uh you know interpretable from any computer system. It it seems like it's still a challenge. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this uh story. Uh the first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy. >> Yeah. >> Um you know especially with foundational models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect >> humans you know the work that humans do. >> Yeah. with the regulatory environment with the infrastructure with integrations with systems not everything is API accessible with semistructured unstructured data like you said you know papers and so on that orchestration that's where the magic is and I think that's where the boat is for a lot of startups uh to come in because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear >> foundation models will probably figure that out so I think that's the first part the second part of the story is more human again and it's what we call or what I call the dignity of work right so I'll share a story with you like we often talk about AI versus humans and they're replacing jobs and so on but let me share some stories on the ground right so we have one one of our customers uh their team had a backlog of 300 certain documents and they are literally spending the time from 5:00 p.m. till 9:30 p.m. 5 days a week. >> Mhm. >> Completing that backlog because 9:00 in the morning they have to get to another backlog. >> Yeah. >> We launched ours about like 3 weeks ago. Now they're going home at 6:20. They can be with their families. Right. That's dignity of work. That's amazing. We have another case where um you know we it's it's it's loans and more. >> That's what happened with other major technology cycles where the work week effectively just shrank. Yeah. Right. >> Which is great. Just more efficiency higher productivity which is the good news. >> Uh exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing. So the so so we're not seeing so much that people are being let go. It's more that they're not hiring additional staff members. So one other example quickly I'll share with you is u you know we've had a case where the president of a credit union sent me a text hey we were planning hiring five people uh this quarter. >> Yeah. >> But because the output of with with SARS is so much higher they didn't hire those five people. However they gave a raise to the existing team and everyone's happier about that. Right. So, so those are kind of like interesting things we're seeing. >> Okay. Give us the fundraising news cuz we're running late. What What did you raise? Who who who funded you? >> Yeah. So, it was uh I guess love at first sight with a partner. We raised $28.8 million in the season. Nice. >> Congratulations. >> What What partner led the deal? >> Uh uh it was Alex, man. It was at first sight. And then and then we got to meet with Joe as well. who's who's just an awesome guy, too. So, uh it was great. >> That's great news. Well, sorry uh for cutting this short. Uh a little bit of technical difficulty, but thank you so much. I'm sure you'll back be back soon >> together and good luck with the journey. >> We'll talk to you soon. >> Awesome. Cheers, guys. Great to meet you. >> Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And our next guest is already in the waiting room. We'll bring in Mike from Gigascale Capital. Mike, how you doing? >> Doing awesome. How you guys doing? >> Former CTO of Meta, by the way. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Uh, tell us a little bit about yourself and the fund, the strategy. I have so many questions. >> Yeah, so I've been in Silicon Valley 25 years, been an operator, joined Facebook Meta 2008, scaled everything from data centers to Oculus to Instagram to building the Facebook ad research lab. >> I uh stepped away from that job. just everything just every important project there >> a lot of stuff >> a lot of stuff I mean with a lot of great people so I don't want to really take credit but um I I saw this this change happening in the world a couple years ago which was I thought we were moving from atoms or bits to atoms just like the physical world mattered again that is the marginal cost of software went to zero the thing that really mattered is how much stuff can we build and how are we going to build it and so I started a venture capital firm to sort of prove out the thesis I I you know want to prove it first by investing my own money to make sure sort of I knew it was working and then you know our company started working the question isn't do they want to buy it it's how fast can they make everything uh because they're making it sort of better faster cheaper than the way we did it for the last I don't know 150 years in a lot of cases and so we've brought on a set of institutional investors and raised more money and we're just getting going on this journey >> how much did you raise >> 250 >> 250 quarter bill quarter bill uh what what were some of the what were some of the standout companies uh in that first kind of like angel fund that you mentioned that that made you think you were on to something. >> Well, there's a there's a bunch of them. So, Panalasa is building ocean data centers for inference. I think you had G on here a little while ago um and uh is one example. Um Heron Power, which is a more recent investment, but it's just on a tear. They're they're saying like, "Hey, the way we brought energy to data centers is using 100-y old technology. Literally, we've got a new idea. We're taking the power electronics that are in your Model 3, Model Y, and we're putting them on the grid and we can deliver you power faster, better, cheaper than than anyone else out there. They're shipping products next year. Um, you know, we've got Radiant uh nuclear is building a, you know, container size micro reactor gives you a megawatt and a half of power for 5 years with no refueling. And they've got Form Energy that said, "Hey, you know, these data centers, you you have power swings, you might have renewables which are on and off. We're going to build a new kind of battery that lasts 100 days. So, if you're dependent on solar and it's cloudy for 3 days, no problem. I got 4 day battery. Um, and that battery is super cheap cuz it's made out of it literally like rusts and unrusts iron. It's like the basic chemistry of it. It's the cheapest possible material you could use to build a battery. Um, it's big and it's heavy, but who cares because it's on the grid. So, again, you're just like rethinking problems in a different way and using modern technology and you come up with a solution that that works for everyone. How are you thinking about publiclix versus privates? Because there's this massive boom and I'm so excited about Doug and Radiant and nuclear and bringing new solar on the grid. And there's so many different uh key technologies that it feels like we're in this crazy moment where like it's just hard to pull forward these foundational technology efforts in the private markets and startup world where yeah you're doing something completely new. it might take 5 years. And so in the meantime, it's just call up G Vernova and and 10x the amount of, you know, natural gas. And that that is like a technical debt that I think we're going to have to pay at some point. And I'm wondering about like is there a crowding out effect? H how do you stay sane if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool, but you're watching some public company go 50x in the public markets? And uh and I'm just wondering about like where like the is the time compression is the time scale uh a factor one way or another. Is it a benefit or curse or both? Double-edged sword. How are you thinking about that? >> Yeah. I mean I fundamentally left a big platform to bet on startups. Yeah. So I think you're going to you're going to get my belief that it has never been a better time to startups. And I'm seeing this this firsthand. I mean you think about the speed at which I can build tools um you know using AI using robotics in the physical world um you know even just using platforms like stripe and ramp and like all these it's just like the amount of time you said monkeying with things before is just like free you can have these tiny 6 10 12 person teams have incredible um unbelievable impact and you throw off all the all the you know dead weight of doing it the way you know you've done it even for the last 10 years. you started a company 6 months ago, you would you would form it differently than if you started it 12 months ago because like that's that's prior to you know 47. Um and it's just just an incredible time and we haven't talked about this just like a immense well of talent coming out of SpaceX and Tesla who are just like showing up to these old problems and saying like oh we know how to do this like 10x better, faster, cheaper starting with with new technology. So, you know, there's this analogy recently about when electricity first came to factories. You know, we used to build factories with like a central like steam thing that would spin all these like shafts and you built your entire factory around the structure. When they first electrified, they just rip out the steam thing and put electric motor, but everything else was the same. And productivity gains didn't really happen until you just rebuilt the factory saying, "Actually, I can put an electric motor at every workstation. I can completely reorient the way that the factory works." This is how I think it's happening in robotics now. we're dropping in a robot where a human used to be and you're like wait a second if I just like took a building and said actually my goal is to feed the robots and keep them 80% utilized how would I build this factory and that's a very different structure than like replacing a person with a robot in terms of it and that's where I think you get 5x 10x wins >> uh are you worried we're going to run out of problems in the real world for startups to solve no I'm kidding uh I do I do uh >> no one's ever asked that. >> No, I mean it is it is fun. >> Return the funds. There's no more ideas. >> Yeah. Yeah. Just return capital. Return the capital. >> No, but but uh any any intuition around like the you know the next big big category and sort of atoms like is it is it just robotics generally? Like how how do do you have a do you have a uh any ideas around like timeline of robotics and the application of them across different industries? because this is one of those, you know, categories that I think it's been it has been happening. It's real in certain industries, but it's been promised for so long. This time around does feel a little bit different. But I'm wondering I'm wondering how you view it. Um just because if you get the if you obviously if you get the timeline wrong, uh you can get the bet wrong entirely. >> Yeah. predicting these things is you know we we have two bets in fusion and the joke fusion has been the you know the joke it's 10 years away every 10 years for a long time but this time it's it's it's different um but uh the so robotics I think is quickly going into that zone um I'm really bullish on industrial robotics um and we already use robots in fact car factories all the time um and so the question is can you move into like slightly less well ststructured things like taking a box if you look at a lot of like factories and wareh houses like there's a surprising amount of like unboxing and boxing that happens. I get a box, I get a box cutter, I cut it open, I pour all the stuff out, I get rid of the plastic bags. It's all done by humans now. Um, that's a really hard thing to automate with like a cuckoo robot like cuz it's just every box is a little different and like the bag gets stuck and all the rest of it. And so like those are the sorts of like things that I think are going to be really cuz they're still in a controlled environment. I'm not in my house. I don't have a dog running by. You don't have to worry about the robot tripping over my pet. Um, so I think the home is like like I'm excited about it. I want a robot to fold my laundry and empty the dishwasher. Can't wait. But like, man, you're playing on hard mode to like start in the home. I've shipped home electronics. Like people drop stuff. They spill wine on it. Like there's all sorts of things that happen in the home that I just don't have to worry about in a factory. So I think you're going to see it in factories and warehouses first. Um, and then you're going to sort of see it go out from there. >> Spilling wine on your Oculus or your Quest. That's a wild time. That's something you didn't you ship millions of them. So, yeah. >> Oh, yeah. No, no. This is the the the thing that created all the gray hairs is like you do all this work making this awesome product and then you're like, "Oh, we have this thing called a drop test. Like the consumer takes it out of the box and it's supposed to go on my face. Instead of putting my face, I drop it on the floor and like does it break or not?" And so, we spend all this time like dropping them and putting these high-speed cameras to watch like which part breaks and then go reinforce it. It's just like >> that a lot of weight and that hurts the product. Yeah. Yeah. And the bigger issue with robotics is like then you have like you know there's not a huge risk of like if I drop the Oculus >> does uh maybe it does some minor damage to the floor and the device itself, but you add these like big humanoid form factors and suddenly it's like the dog died because like the the robot, you know, just fell on it. You know, this is uh or it does like really material damage to an appliance or something like that. >> Yeah. I mean, besides laundry and emptying my dishwasher, I wanted to like make me breakfast, right? But like now we got a robot like operating with hot oil, you know, on a stove with a flame. Like, what could go wrong? >> That's going to be wild. Uh solar. Uh I feel like there's, you know, the the Elon Musk of space is Elon. He did electric cars. He's working on robotics. Uh he's been a little shy about solar. uh I mean he's optimistic about solar but he he hasn't actually scaled up American manufacturing capacity of solar. We have a number of founders you know if you have Palmer Lucky in defense and uh there's a number of nuclear founders who have sort of taken up the mantle to go on the press tour that's necessary to get folks excited about nuclear. I haven't seen that in solar as much. Am I just not paying attention? Is there some sort of fundamental constraint why solar is not going through as much of a fast takeoff? We've talked to the CEO of T1 Energy. That's sort of this, you know, acquisition changing the management. It's very exciting, but it's not the same, you know, startup seed round, you know, visionary founder all the way through this really broad vision. And I'm wondering if that's going to happen, if we're early, if it's already happening and I'm not I'm just not aware. What are you thinking about solar generally? Yeah, I I it's such an interesting thing because solar has gone through the biggest cost decline of anything I've ever seen and you know it's 99% cheaper than it used to be. Um it's mostly manufactured in China. It's a scaled manufacturing problem. That's not a great problem to go after as a startup where it's like manufacturing scales what determines >> compete China >> against China like good luck. So so I think that that that explains a lot of it. Um, what I do think is going to happen is if I'm just trying to make a, you know, 400 mm by 300 mm solar panel cheaper than China, good luck. But like for a long time, we treated these things like they were like precious minerals. And so if you look at a solar farm, you like lay down all this steel and you put up all this framing and all the rest of it to like put this panel on. Well, when that panel was the most expensive thing on the field, then like yeah, that makes sense. That thing is now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff, the like steel frame cost more than the panel. And so I think what we're going to see and I'm excited about a couple of startups in this who are saying like let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form factor from an automation perspective and like just go after installation cost and assuming the cells themselves are basically free. It's basically glass >> um like what would you do differently and that again I think this notion of like constraints have changed is what creates a new opportunity. So that's to me what I'm most excited about in the next wave of solar. >> Yeah. And even from uh you know obviously there's a lot of geopolitical considerations with the US and China but at the end of the day like a solar cell is not the same as buying like a full computer or something that can have spyware on it. Like it is just a chip there that that it's you know where would the spyware be exactly? And so I think I think you'll see more like hybrid approaches like this like what Whimo's doing where they're buying Chinese batteries and Chinese steel frames but then they're putting all the software and hardware on board. So correct. It's a little bit uh more uh you know less politically dicey I think. Anyway, um last question on fund size, fund structuring. I feel like a lot of these projects are capital intensive for the best possible reasons. Uh how are you thinking about actually participating over time? Do you think you'll be doing SPVS to maintain ownership? Because some of these projects are probably going to be pretty capital intensive. That usually means dilution. Have you thought about that? And do you have a strategy in place? >> Yeah, I mean so the first thing we have been doing is just going to work to get these companies fundraised. So we have a giant network of of other so Pentalosa is a great example just raised a huge round from from Peter Teal. Um we were very early investors in that. So the first thing is get these companies successful then you have the options. Um in terms of how we take advantage of that access and option is is something we're going to figure out over time. Um you know I think this is the beginning not the end. uh we are overs subscribed in this fund so there's lots of opportunities for us to of other other vehicles that makes a lot of sense and uh and get going but I wanted to keep it you know I give all our entrepreneurs advice stay focused so let's get out the gate stay focused prove that there's a bunch of early stage to your first question are there opportunities for early stage companies in the space I think so I think you're going to see a lot of interesting progress in the next year and then we'll have lots of different ways to structure um how to participate as these companies grow >> fantastic well thank you so much for coming Excited to meet more of your companies. >> Yeah, good luck out there. We'll talk to you soon. >> Goodbye. >> Okay, >> up next we have Nico from Default with an amazing series A. I've known Nico for a long time, but it's his first time on the show, so we'll bring him in to the TV. How you doing, Nico? Good to see you. >> Long time no see. >> Get that overnight success button ready. >> Overnight success. >> Another one. >> Yeah. >> Introduce yourself. I've introduced the company. Give us the news. Tell us what happened. These guys get on their system. >> Hello, gentlemen. Hello, listeners. I'm Nico, >> one of the co-founders here at default.com. Most recently, default.ai. We got a nice URL redirect on. >> Here we go. >> Um, wait, you're going from to.ai domain. >> We we kept the com main main domain. Had to pick up default.AI Yeah, I have a regression just to protect protect.com respect. >> How dare us >> the com? >> No. Very good. Uh tell us about the product. >> Yeah, so we spent the last few years building out a bunch of top off ofunnel orchestration tools primarily for inbound scheduling, inbound routing, enrichment for uh very fast growing uh B2B companies. And over the ca the last like 12 18 months we just kept hearing from everyone that everyone was trying to deploy agents uh was running still running into the same issues people have been running into for the last decade >> and we took a really big bet and uh basically built a new product over a good chunk of last year and last Wednesday about 5 days ago we launched to the world and it's been it's been great so far. I've this is my 12th meeting of the day. So I'm glad to be I'm glad to jump off the demo demo router. >> Explain the the flow. When does the agent come into the pu in into the into the process? I imagine inbound lead B2B SAS company. They have a landing page. There's at some point they collect a form or an email and then the magic happens. Like what is the magic? What is happening? >> Yeah, John. So we, you know, the the way we used to work before, um, you know, before we launched a new product, we'd basically come in, we'd hook into the forms on your website. We'd add a little piece of code that told us, you know, how many visitors were coming to your site, who was showing up, etc. >> And then we'd kind of build out all this middleware and plumbing between your forms, your website, all these top funnel signals and your CRM and your sales team. Um, now what we do is we give you an out-of-the-box data layer. And what data layer is, it's a real time data warehouse you plug into your CRM, whether that be Salesforce, HubSpot, or similar. Y >> uh we pipe in all of all that really rich context that agents can use to really answer these tough to usually really tough to answer questions about your business. And you know, everyone says that, you know, all growth problems are data problems. Um and uh you know at least in at least in go to market and um effectively what we what we do out of the box now is give you this data layer that plugs into your tools and uh this kind of semantic modeling layer that translates all this context from your systems uh as well as different activity like meetings and form submissions and website visitors into a language that you know agents can actually understand and can use to answer uh you know these really tough questions. Isn't this going to grow into a CRM at some point? It feels like the opportunity to do a compound startup, do many more features like you have not only is your is your company AI enabled on the product side, but your engineering team's enabled on the products on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features. Like why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case or do you have ambitions to build out uh something that looks like a legacy uh workflow? Is there demand for that or do you see the whole uh the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM? I think a lot of the same fundamental problems our customers are running into today even as they're navigating this really challenging um really ch really challenging kind of transition uh even at at really really large scale. Um these are the same problems they were running into 10 years ago. Um so there's no shortage of surface area to solve for today for us. Uh that being said, we're already seeing a ton of our customers uh really really built some really cool stuff internally and uh completely flipped the way um you know things have been done for the last last couple decades. So um that being said, you know, every every road in in this category and and you know more broadly leads to an incumbent like a Salesforce or uh or similar. So um yeah, we've we've we've built with with uh that mantra since since day one. >> How have you thought about segmenting the market, finding niches, finding little veins? Like I if you find that you're doing really well with startups or doing really well with uh real estate agents or like anything that takes inbound uh and has a go to market motion or in B2B software, there are other niches within B2B software, right? um more dev tool focused, more finance focused, B2B software. Um do you find that there are sort of mini network effects in these niches? Have you been successful finding a few or do you want to deliberately uh cast a wide net so you can sort of cross-pollinate all the the the learnings from one category to the others like immediately? So I would say you know really early on we were focused on working with the fastest growing um you know really the fastest growing startups and there was a bit of a you know I don't know if network effect is how to put it but um there you know a lot of our pipeline came from referrals really early on you know people would would go and they'd sign up and book a demo for their favorite uh favorite new recently launched and fresh off the assembly line uh kind of product and they'd see the little powered by default um logo down at the bottom and that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today. >> But um you know it's really interesting. I think a lot of our customers you know we serve a lot of customers in in software uh a few in like medical devices uh some services businesses uh fintech as well. and more or less everyone uh you know everyone runs into some some version of the same problem which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another um and really kind of create this sort of like data soup or this like franken stack is what we call it uh that just makes it really really hard to grow. creates this like growth tax. You know, every incremental dollar of revenue past a certain uh you know, past a certain threshold depending on the vertical or market, you know, requires sort of army of uh operations people to sort of maintain the Franken stack and keep it at bay. So, yeah. >> So, uh I how how prevalent is the Franken stack? Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like data bricks exist, snowflakes exist, like everyone has this beautiful data lake and of course and and not only that, Zapier exists and and there's vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly every company has done that. Sounds like they haven't. uh is there is there like a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked and does become best practice and then is that is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations? >> Yeah. So I'll I'll give two answers here. First and foremost, I've never met someone who didn't hate their CRM. >> Okay. >> Uh I'll I'll say that first and foremost. Second, you know, I think um it's very rare that we run into a scaling, you know, revenue org that has, you know, very deep technical proficiency and, you know, is is spending a lot of their time in a data warehouse, uh or writing SQL. Uh typically, they're pulling reports and trying to answer, you know, a lot of these lot normally tough to answer questions. Um, that being said, one of the things that I've been, you know, my the team and I have been really excited about here over the course of the last year is seeing so many uh really really fast growing companies like owner.com is a perfect example. Kyle Norton, the CRO there, has built just an absolutely incredible go to market operations team. Uh, they've built so much internal uh, you know, basically just building their own distribution product. uh their own foundation they can use to scale and as a result they're able to gain a massive competitive advantage uh and they started doing that very very early on. You see the same thing with other hyperrowth companies like ramp and rippling and and many others but um you know the the best companies treat distribution as as product and uh you know as an extension of of product and um you know I think that is that is getting earlier and earlier uh in terms of when when companies start prioritizing that. Tell us about the round >> last before that, >> please. >> 7-day work week. >> Five day work week. >> Logo tattoo work week. >> Do you have the default as like kind of a back piece? >> Yeah. I've got I've got a nice stamp down here. Yeah. >> Nice. >> The whole back. >> Yeah. I mean, you got a >> But but I mean, jokes aside, what is the work culture like at default these days? >> Yeah, it's uh it's intense. you know, we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year. Um, >> basically project for GTM >> for B2B SAS. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. >> No, but it is a competition. You want to win and there's other players and like, you know, if you if you're on the beach 5 days a week, like you're just going to get smoked. This is real. >> Yep. >> We're we're definitely not on the beach five days a week. Yeah. I'm too pale too pale for that. But, um, no. Yeah. We, you know, we're we're solving a lot of uh a lot of really hard problems. I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really really excited at, you know, kind of solving solving the growth rate problem and trying to help help our customers grow better and faster. Um, a lot of that stuff, you know, a lot of the the problems that we run into are a lot of the same kind of boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds, you know, thinking about how to solve these problems day in and day out. And um, you know, we're we're very excited about the future. >> Amazing. Tell us about the round. >> How much? >> So, uh, so we did a $10 million last year again. >> There we go. >> There's another one. >> Yeah. One more. Hurry up. Stop playing there a couple rounds. >> There we go. >> That's hard. That's a hard one. >> That's a hard one. >> Anyway, >> expert mode. Uh, great to catch up, Nico. >> Awesome progress, fellas. >> Thanks for coming on the show soon. >> We'll talk to you soon. >> Goodbye. >> Cheers. >> H, very fun. That is the hardest one to hit the glasses. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sue Kim from Brilliant. She's the co-founder and CEO and she's here with us in the TV panel. What's going on, Sue? How are you doing? >> Hey, thanks for having me. I'm doing great. >> Thanks for hopping on the show. Uh, since it's the first time on the show, I'd love an introduction on yourself and the company and the launch and uh for you to just take it through take us through it. >> Yeah. Uh, so I'm Sue. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Brilliant. Uh, we just launched Brilliant's new AI tutor. Uh, his name is Cooji. He's a little green guy. He helps you learn how to think and problem solve in math and coding. Uh if you come check out the product, everything starts out uh very visual and interactive. And this tutor can see how you're interacting with all the concepts and the problems you're solving and point and sketch and annotate on the screen with you. Uh so we call it a graphical tutor because it's designed to feel like someone sitting next to you looking over your shoulder and ready to help. uh talk about how people have processed the intersection of AI and uh and education to date. It's been such a big uh such a big selling point overall. Uh and personally, I think it's most powerful as as a way to ask like the dumb question that you might be uh embarrassed to ask, you know, a friend or an actual teer teacher or even even a tutor. uh but how have you kind of processed it? Obviously, you can use the base models themselves to to learn, but there's a lot of missing functionality and opportunity for you to kind of um you know, extend out that kind of raw capability. >> Yeah, totally. You know, I think that lowering that barrier of embarrassment is huge. That's something that we hear a lot h that you know the student who would never ever raise their hand in class and ask a question or you know even with a tutor it's just kind of like I still don't get it like can you explain it a third way it's hard to do and you know I think that these models have helped a lot with that like lowering that embarrassment and one of the things that we haven't yet seen them do is design for something other than the moment of explanation >> you know when we designed this tutor, we designed it for that moment of understanding, not for the moment of explanation. And there's actually a lot of research on tutoring that shows that when h human tutors don't just sit there and explain stuff to you, the tutoring conversations become a lot more interactive. And then students just do a lot more of the work. And you know, these like magical outcomes of why tutoring is so broadly effective. You know, ultimately a lot of that just comes down to the learner spending more time on the material. uh and you know if a tutor talks too much and just like spits out tons of stuff for you to read uh that is worse than the student doing stuff and just sitting in the confusion. So I think it's a combination of how much can you engage the student to actually do the work and then you know lowering the embarrassment improving their motivation and engagement and just getting to the point where they feel sort of confident at tackling these things on their own. Do you feel like you have a duty to make learning addictive? >> How would you something similar? >> Because because every every you know uh there's a lot of big companies out there. I won't name them. They certainly want people to spend as much time in their applications as possible. >> It's like every company, but yes. >> Yeah. Not not every company. There's there's there's uh but let's say like the the algorithmic video feed, right? Like they want as much of our time as possible. I feel like you have a duty to take to try to make learning as addictive as possible but because it's a positive addiction right I want people to be obsessed with understanding the world furthering uh their skills etc. Yeah, you know, we talk about this a lot like a a big marker of success of the tutor is whether or not he can make himself unnecessary. And you know, the the the goal is that you scaffold the learner and allow them to ask questions until you get to a point where they can do it for the for themselves and then you want to >> get out of the way. So you know one of our goals is that if we are doing a good job over the course of learning a concept coach should become totally unnecessary like you should be asking the questions that he used to ask you and you know one of the things that it like I find a funny parallel is that on our board is uh someone who started the dating company okaycid and then h went on and you know became the CEO of match was on the board of Tinder and he's like you know the funny thing about consumer dating apps is that if you're successful, churn is built into the product. Like you want people to turn because like you don't want people just in the app just going on dates all the time and not, you know, meeting that long-term partner. >> Yeah. >> And so, you know, we do measure whether or not people turn and but we measure it very differently from how most other consumer products would think about it. >> But I feel like I feel like learning is much more learning is way more continuous. Like everyone should aspire to be a lifelong learner whether whereas like maybe it's not so healthy to aspire to be a lifelong dater you know somebody that's just like I never want to you know I don't feel like there's there's never been a >> subject that I've like learned about where I've just run out of things to learn. >> Well that's interesting that happens to me all the time. I feel like I'm like yeah but I'm talking about >> I've done I know everything about I know everything about science I'm kidding. No, but I mean course you're joking, but there is specific things where you're like, "Okay, I've learned enough about nutrition." Totally. Totally. And I don't really care about it too much, you know, let's say, but like I've learned the basics and I can move on to the next topic. But there's so many topics. For me, that's nutrition. Every single point, >> every single place that I've gotten to in terms of an overall understanding, I'm like, "Wow, this goes deeper than I thought." >> Yeah. Uh, how are you thinking about multimodality? I feel like uh the the big labs all have different ways to turn out a result that's not just a big block of text. There's an image, an infographic. We saw with Google IO, there's the omni model that can show a 10 second video diagram or an explanation, a whiteboard lecture. And it feels like there's maybe a gap right now in that you have to come to the model or the chat app and ask for what you want. You have to say I want this as an infographic or I want this as a video. Or you might even have to go to a specific model or a specific company. Like if you want video, you go to Google. If you want an image, you go to chatbt. Uh, and I'm wondering if you're thinking about how that fits into uh your process of actually picking the right tool for the job. >> Yeah, it's very uh, you know, working with a chatbot to learn is a very proactive process and it's one of those things where h when you use a chatbot, the chatbot gets very little data on whether or not you've actually learned the thing. Like the typically the interaction with the chatbot is you ask your question, you get your answer and the exchange is over. And so for a lot of these like homework help type learning queries, uh people answer uh people get their question answered and then they leave. And so the model gets back no data on did the learner actually learn this thing. And you know going back to the point about you know addiction the thing that we try to get people really immersed in is like tons and tons of like dense real time reps uh to uh in learning a topic so that we can self-improve and hyperpersonalize in real time and to do that you have to have a dense user model you have to have a learning graph you know that's not going to come out of a model company anytime soon uh the UIUX matters a lot too it has to be purpose-built or teaching with all the features that come along with that and also you know just some of the stuff also has to be purely deterministic like you have to be correct uh and you have to guarantee that correctness and so I think there's a lot of things that ultimately just add up to a lot of friction uh when you are asking the user to pull and sort of scaffold and structure their own learning whereas you know our philosophy is we're going to pull you in and give you things to do that are the right next thing for you to do. >> Amazing. Uh, where can people get started? >> Uh, go to brilliant.org. Uh, and we have apps as well in the App Store and the Play Store. >> Great. Well, thank you so much for coming on. >> Great to Great to finally meet you and congrats. >> Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. >> Thanks. >> Goodbye. >> Bye. >> Uh, before our next guest joins, we have a new uh a new release, new information from Sam Sulk. He has chimed in on the debate over should you work 5 days a week or seven days a week. He says, "You only need to work 5 days a week. Don't overdo it. You do not need to work 24/7. Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time, you're not working on the Manhattan project. Work hard, recovery, keep some balance." So, wise words from Sam Sulk. Uh, no, I just took your image and put Chad GBD, but it actually makes a lot of sense in the bodybuilding. Uh, you know, you do need to take rest days in bodybuilding. So, uh, it's totally reasonable that that would be something that he would say. Uh but I that of course is fake news. That's our fake news segment for the day. Uh fortunately we have uh someone with some very real news joining us. We have Bernie Sue, the Emmy winning series creator uh to talk about movies. Go back to the youtubification of Hollywood. We'll get his takes on my takes my very novice takes. But why don't we start with an introduction on you and yourself. Can you tell us a little bit about you? >> Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Bernie. Um, I am been working in the entertainment industry and tech adjacent industries for over a decade. Uh, I've created many shows. >> Thanks. We create many shows across YouTube, Twitch, and other new media platforms, including some shows that were in traditional Hollywood. But I'm most known for my three Emmy-winning shows. Uh, Emma approved Lizzy Bennett Diaries, which were the first and second prime time Emmy wins ever for a YouTube show, and the show Artificial, which was the first Emmy win for a Twitch show, which also won a Peabody. >> Um, and it's been it's an honor to be here, guys. >> Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. >> Popping on. >> So, uh, I mean, >> rattle off your takes. >> Okay. So, uh, I I don't know if my take was that, uh, contrarian or anything, but it does feel like we're at an we're at an interesting moment where potentially Hollywood is finding a stronger way to work with new media or YouTube than ever before. The Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029, and we have backto backto back YouTube massive successes at the box office. Something that has been tried loosely before. Can you just get an audience of 10 million YouTube subscribers to show up in theaters? Hasn't always worked out, but this summer it feels like we're seeing positive success stories with uh Obsession, Back Rooms, and Iron Lung. And I'm wondering how you're interpreting those three movies. Is this an actual turning point? Has this been a slow, gradual grind for years? And maybe this is less of a of a important moment than maybe this is something only outsiders are noticing and it's been a trend that's been going on for a long time. But how have you processed the recent uh viral news around backrooms obsession, iron lung, etc.? >> I mean, you you kind of said it there. I think it's a trend that's been going on for many years. So, if you um I speak at VidCon every year, for example, and I've asked every year and this kind of the same panel like when is like you when are the creators of YouTube going to take over Hollywood and all that stuff and I'm like they are already going getting there. >> Yeah. >> They're just not seeing it. And like you're seeing the ramp up and of course it's just getting bigger and getting bigger and getting bigger. It's like like um I think you know regarding say like the Emmys like Mr. Beast is not a YouTuber. He's a prime creator because he has a show on Prime. That's what he's going for, right? So, so these this is we're now seeing in movies as you said like now we're seeing it um in the in the last you know like you said the back to back to back run of this year >> but this is something that at least I've been seeing for you know 5 years or so as this ramp up and you're kind of where you where the earlier genesis of this was is that you had this era where there was these YouTuber kind of led movies influenc influ influencer movies the movies probably weren't regarded as great movies but I think what missed the mark there was that they just kind of plugged and played a dude in there. It's like, oh, you've got 10 million followers. Let's just put you in here. >> And the problem with that is that that doesn't work because it's not on brand with the audience that it's coming from, right? So, >> so now with like Iron Lung and Markiplier and all that stuff, like it's his, right? It's it's his. So, it's very much him being him. >> Beast Games is him being him just amplified. >> And you're seeing that tech and social media play coming in all at the same time. >> Yeah. I've heard a lot about this in in casting calls these days where uh actors and actresses will just get asked like, "Oh, well, do you have 10,000 on Instagram or 100,000 Instagram?" And it feels like that is it maybe it's some sort of signal, but it's not really going to move the needle on is this going to be a success at the box office if uh a few thousand people buy tickets from your audience of tens of thousands of people. It's more just like are you serious and have you figured out the Instagram algorithm to like get a bunch of views? >> What do you think? >> Living in LA for >> most of my adult life, >> I've been surprised. I've met a bunch of people who are >> like work in in the in the movie business, directors, producers. And you'll ask them like, "Oh, do you do you have like a YouTube channel?" Like, and they'll be like, >> "No, no, I don't I don't I don't do that." And uh it's always like surprising to me because it's basically saying like I'm going to let other people and like gatekeepers sort of like dictate my creative outcome. >> Well, if you already have the key to the gate, why do you need to It's no problem for you because you're going right in. >> No, I know. But no, some people like that are trying to break in. So, so personally, if I was trying to break into the movie business, I've been making movies >> start digging under >> like as much as possible even if they were, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, or just figuring out some of these other formats. Obsession really break you know like proper like like uh box office hit. >> Yeah. I mean >> thousand% agree. I mean, I'll add to that that like right now all these young creators like you said breaking in you you are more armed today with just tools like like not just audience but audience and tools with like the >> if whether you you're on the AI side or not with the creative and the genai you have all this automation and all these like like efficiency points you can activate >> I mean blender blender it's a free open-source CGI package and exactly like and and you go to Skippy Toilet and it's like made in Valve filmmaker And people are making movies in Fortnite and and Halo from a long time ago if you remember Red Versus Blue. And >> another Bernie. >> Yeah. And so, uh, I I I I guess my my big question is, uh, Hollywood still has an immense amount of prestige and it's still seen as the the the the Mount Everest of being a creator. If you can have a film on the silver screen and have a box office smash, that's great. Um, but in terms of economics, the YouTube revenues have to be bigger than Hollywood right now. And I I I'm not I'm not anticipating like a flipping where Hollywood comes back in the traditional sense, but I'm excited by the idea of of YouTubers being able to graduate in the more prestigious uh, you know, Hollywood film making scene. But I'm just wondering like how much of this is about cultural shelling points, these moments that bring us all together versus something that's more abstract prestige. Like what is the long-term relationship here? Because it doesn't feel like you're going to see, oh, YouTubers aren't making any money anymore and everyone went back to making money in Hollywood. It feels more like Hollywood's just getting some juice back and restructuring a little bit to bring some young talent up. But YouTube will still continue to be a behemoth in terms of monetization on ads and brand partnerships and whatnot. >> Um, yeah, all of that is is accurate. I would just add clarification on like YouTube is yes, it is bigger, but it's also more diversified, right? Because just so many channels, right? It's like Hollywood puts out whatever 50 movies a year at most and you know, YouTubers are doing that one YouTuber is doing that a month, right? Yeah. >> Like or not movies but videos. You get what? >> Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And so what kind >> one Hollywood's worth of content >> like every month basically >> per minute per second whatever but like so what you're going toward there as far as the the business side of things is is the kind of what I call the franchising right so Hollywood is still the best place to like amplify your franchise like take something and like send it to a bunch of other places. Okay. So, uh, obviously this is a little cherry-picking, but like K-pop Demon Hunters is masterful in the sense of that it became a franchise overnight and now the irony and fun of it is that Hollywood was trying to catch up to it. It's like, oh my god, we need more everything. We're behind on the toys, we're behind on the merch, we're behind on the videos, we need another series right now, all that stuff. Okay, so it's it kind of comes handinand we're finally seeing it as you kind of mentioned at the top of this thing, which was that the YouTubers are now, okay, you know what? I'm really good here on this platform. Let's go up. let's give it a shot. Let's see if we make it work. And we're seeing successes as we as we were talking about. I'm sure there's many failures, okay? But we're seeing those successes now. And now like the Markipliers and these guys like they have basically a burgeoning franchise now. Whether it continues over years and sequels and everything doesn't mean it has to be a sequel by the way. Like if it becomes a video game. >> Yeah. >> And that's successful that counts. Probably more. >> Totally. >> Like maybe even more. Right. So like going kind of what they call trans media. It's a weird term, but like if they can jump to different formats and different avenues, that's where the if you're talking about the money, like that's where the real franchiseability of this thing comes from. And YouTubers, if anything, are actually way more nimble. I'm not saying they're better. I'm saying they're more nimble at this than Hollywood because just because the ma the the the definition of how small their teams are and how fast they can move versus these giant corporate behemoths which have tons of resources but have all this bureaucracy that could slow this the system down. So that's where we're seeing this kind of not not a clash, but like an evolution as this goes forward where I would imagine that if you're trying to franchise out one of these guys' uh these movies, it's like it's like, "All right, right. Let's let's show you how we do it, but let's also kind of get out of your way." >> Yeah. >> Right. Let you guys do what you do, too. >> Um and see where we land. What do you think uh what do you think Obsession will do for lowbudget film funding? Like the the potential return here is so extreme. I imagine a lot of people would see this and go try to fund other projects like this or is it so so out there and so rare that people won't try to replicate it? >> I mean, Hollywood loves trying to replicate. So, um we've actually seen this kind of cycle before. We've seen it with um uh Blair Witch Project, you know, over 20 years ago. We've seen kind of these versions of these like virally kind of things. Uh Par Paranormal Activity, right? Like Oh, yeah. Like these these started as very very lowbudget movies that were just very very cleverly done became sensations in their own out own way and became franchises. And you also saw this kind of wave of like found footage movies after Paranormal Activity. And like >> what is it about what is it about horror movies that like is a it's a category that seems to do well with with a low budget? >> Um I think I think uh it's because it's very just we it's very understandable like universally it's not a there's not a language barrier. There's no like cultural jokes you have to hit. It's universally understandable. And so it's one of those things where um like you know as much as we love comedies and we like why aren't these comedies a hit? Like it's still our cultural taste like like what's funny to us in America. >> So like fear fear is like more universal than than comedy and and you can create like an extremely >> scary situation with just a house in the woods, right? Or you don't need >> on the production side. Yeah. Just a house in the woods works. Whereas even if you're doing a romantic comedy, you might want to shut down a street in Manhattan for a scene that's outdoors or go to some physical place and like travel around or let alone sci-fi where you have to do a whole bunch of CGI and be on the be on a spaceship or something building complex sets whereas you know you can go and film something in a >> team is also saying no A-list actors. Usually it's weird to see a Marvel star in a horror movie. Why don't A-list actors? >> Because it's more relatable. Because if I see Tom Cruz there, I'm like, he's not going to die. But if I see some some no-name actor, I'm like, oh, that that person could go next. I don't know who's going to be the last one standing. >> So, it's kind of a it's a way for like new talent on like in front of the camera and behind the camera to try to basically break in. >> So, So, you're saying we're going to see 1 million Obsession knockoffs in the next 12 months? >> I mean, I don't about 1 million, but we're going to definely see some. That's for sure. Okay. Like the question is whether they're good or not and all that, but it's like going back to your your the horror, you can bring the budgets down. Like you have to pay Tom Cruz, right? If you're going to bring Tom Cruz in, you're going to pay everybody's everybody is a cost there. And if horror can just kind of generate its own audience, like, well, why are we paying for it? Like why do we need to to, you know, shell out all this money to bring in a star, a named star or someone with a big following to do this? So, it's like it's a it's a business play. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. Um, but it's historically the case. Like look at any horror franchise. It's rare to even see any type of A-list, B-list, whatever recognizable star even, you know, headlining it. Like look at, you know, the latest final def destination, right? That's a seven movie franchise, I think. And it's like even the seventh movie didn't have any really anybody any household names, okay, that were in there. Scream is a little bit of an exception. I'll give it that. But like Scream kind of built its own. Yeah. Sure. Sure. When how long until uh until you think we see a hit in theaters that had where 90% of the budget was uh AI compute? >> Whoa. >> A hit. Can you define hit? A hit. A hit is like over 30 million over 30 million >> box office and over 3x return on budget or something like that. >> It's a good question. I mean I think we're gonna see >> they put 10 in they get 30 out. Like it's >> somebody has to be working on it. The question is, >> is it like >> do they have the talent? >> Are the models actually good enough? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. And so we the AI in the lot was literally last week and there was a lot of stuff that came out of it, right? The Amazon announcement and like the Higsfield movie. Um uh heat check I think. What was I'm sorry if I misnamed it, but like that's a that's 100% I think or 90 it qualifies as far as your compute power situation. >> Um could it do you know 30 million at the box office? I based on what people I've not seen it, but based on what I'm hearing about it, I'm going to guess no. But prove me wrong, please. Sure. Like if you're going to go for it. Uh but yeah, I do think it will come. I do I think there's two factors here, right? So one is the >> Does it matter that it's AI? Like most of the most of the public worldwide audience just wants to be entertained. >> Sure. >> Okay. It just want to be entertained. Like if it's if it's real or not, like we've been watching CG movies for generations. It's like we just want to be entertained. Good movie or bad movie. Okay. So there's that. But right now, you still have this kind of public ritual shaming of like, oh, it's AI ban, ban, ban. And we're still seeing a bit of that coming out of AI and a lot even. So, so when we think of like experiences that like, you know, we're building, we're just like, okay, >> we use a lot of AI right now. Okay. Um, and like we're just trying to build entertaining experiences. So to me, like it's I would say it's sooner than later except for just that that X factor of the viteral. Like I just don't know how to predict that one of when it'll be okay. >> But but it does feel like there's someone out there who hasn't broken in yet, who has nothing to lose, who's just going to be sitting at home just prompting. Yeah. >> And and it could that's why I think I think it potentially comes from somebody that nobody has heard of before. >> There's also there also might be some there might be like an AI movie that could break through because it's either like self-referential or making fun of AI or doing something in a different way like like Toy Story was about toys. It wasn't replacing actors with uh w with CGI and so there there's like less of a conflict there. So, if you're doing some sort of story that could not be told without AI and it's handled the right way, like you could maybe massage it a little bit more to get there and maybe you don't jump straight to like you were expecting Tom Cruz, but it's just an AI version of Tom Cruz. Like, that's probably going to be pretty poorly received. >> I mean, you're speaking my language. So, like I'm going to just slightly explain what I'm working on so it kind of relates to this. >> So, we're we we're at Pigford. We're building, we showed an experience last week over at Sony which was a basically a a detective series where where the audience could interact with it in real time because the AI was writing the show as it goes. Okay, so literally impossible without the technology. Okay, so this is one where um my colleagues in the in the film making and AI spaces, we talk about well what's more exciting is not just hey let's make an AI movie. What can AI do to juice up the the form of art and narrative that we couldn't have done before? not like a possibility, right? Now, you've driven the experience to the theater, which we're going to selfplug uh do at Alamo Draft Houses around the country this year. No, we're not gonna I doubt we're going to generate $30 million like you said to as be a big hit. But, you know, we've proven at least in our small sample sizes that we can provide an inthe communal uh entertaining experience, be interactive, be consequential um as a paid ticket even and we're using AI tech and it's just like it's entertaining. Yeah, animation may be kind of a little wonky at times. The tech is very very like it's calling all this complicated data and all in real time. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. But at the end of the day, we are entertaining and that's what we are in the industry first and foremost. All the tech aside and all the business side, we that's what we're here to do, right? If we're not entertaining classic, you know, Russell Crow, are you not entertained? What are we even doing here? >> So that's that's where I look at it. >> Yeah, very personalization stuff is is super interesting. I had a I had a funny experience maybe 20 years ago or so. I was I was I I grew up in Pasadena and I was watching this movie in Pasadena. It's Kill Bill Tarantino. And uh and and I'm watching and uh the bride pulls up in this yellow truck and across the bottom white text pops up and it says, "This scene takes place in Pasadena, California." And I was like, "This is so weird." Like, did I buy the p the localized version of this movie? It just happens to take place in Pasadena, but you could imagine a horror film that takes place in like any town, USA that like uses your, you know, geol location to make it more customized to you. It feels more scary because you're like, "Oh, this could be happening in the right outside my window." There's a whole bunch of different ways that you could instantiate like little personalizations that would put, >> you know, if you needed a scene of a car like driving past like welcome to any town, USA, generate it with a Google map. >> Yeah. potentially not for every place but uh but yeah there will be I I imagine that like whatever breaks through will be newer and weirder and break boundaries and won't be a clone of uh of the things that we love like Star Wars because we have Star Wars we don't need AI version of Star Wars we need something entirely new and creative >> yeah completely agree completely agree so it's like I I have this thing where I say like AI is not going to game out game of thrones game of thrones like we're not it's not going to do that like like AI can do things really fast and can fill buckets really good good with like you're trying to fill content on your feed really great at that so it's not going to do that so >> on the high-end art side >> the great artist will probably incorporate some little bit AI but it's not going to end to end that thing >> and then on kind of your side with customization I really do think that's I'm selfishly I do think that's the play because AI is really good at speed and optimization and it's really hard to do customization without speed and optimization so now you're playing to the advantage of the technology versus the disadvantage which is the sloppiness that we're getting to. Okay. >> So, not only on your side with the example, which I think is an amazing amazing example of customization for possibilities. Got me thinking about it actually. I also think it's about consequentiality, which means that did you feel like you impacted it, right? Like did you feel like while you're watching the movie, did you do something? Does it maybe it's an eye thing? Maybe it's a saying thing. >> Can you feel like you're part of it? And I do think that the young generations, the Gen Zers, the AIRS and everything, they're already growing up with like a parasocial relationship to their content. >> Sure. >> Okay. End to end, right? And that may be also why these movies are getting successful because they're like they feel like they have a relationship to the creator and they feel like, you know, we're going to go. Um, but to feel like they have an impact in their content, I think that's where the blue sky is. That's where I feel it's coming from and that's where I'm trying to get to myself in my work. >> Yeah. Make a horror movie that I can pause if it gets too scary. >> And you can pause and No, no. Pause. And if I pause, you you sense it and you just tone it down a notch. >> Oh, okay. It just gets less less scary. >> And if you let it separate volume, just like a nature document. >> I mean I mean you could have a movie that you have a separate volume button for like I want G-rated P. >> I don't want to get I don't want to get too spooked. I don't want to get too spooked. >> I somehow think that would break the break the experience. Anyway, lots of fun. Lots of new projects coming. Uh well, thank you so much. >> Great to meet you, Bernie. I'm excited to see your new project. >> Yeah, come back on the show when we launch. We'd love to talk more. >> Happy to. Looking forward to it, guys. >> Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Uh we have some more updates from Sam Sulc. He says, "Hollywood isn't losing. It's teaming up. YouTube creators are no longer outsiders. They're the next franchise. Gatekeepers are gone. Discovery happens on YouTube. Now the best stories and the biggest audiences are moving into theaters. Wise words. Wise words. He also weighed in on on startup tattoos. Uh we have another one here. Sam Sulak hot takeake. This is a whole format now. The Sam Sulak hottake is is is going viral in his Young LA uh tank top here. You don't need to get your startup logo tattooed. Even if you were an early employee, you do not need to work 24/7. Overtraining reduces performance most of the time. you're not working on the Manhattan Project. He continues, "Fun times." Uh, also Sam Sulick's very first post on X, 5,000 likes, 260,000 views. It's just him with a fish. Check this thing out. It's beautiful. >> Catfish, >> check this thing out. >> Looking good. He should >> dream guest. People ask us. >> Yes, this would be a good dream guest. >> Hands down. Think Sam Sulac. Yeah. on AI really enjoyed him scalers the build out capability overhead >> been working on a build out for years he's going fantastic some of these AI CEOs could learn a little thing or two from him >> that's true that's true >> build out yourself before you build out that data center approval rating >> you're worried about the wrong build out >> you're worried about the wrong >> you're worried about that you're wor you're worried about the energy bottleneck you should be worried about a protein bottleneck >> exactly your own >> protein shortages >> protein is the energy of your muscles Uh well, we can close with Will Manitis. He says, "I don't think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest 5-year run in technoc capital history. God help us all. I pray that when the judgment comes, he can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery." Well, he's bullish. >> He's extremely bullish recently, >> which I don't know if that's bullish or >> is him being bullish. Bearish. If he's bearish, you should be bullish. Be bullish when other people are bearish. Be fearful when other people are greedy. Who knows? Do your own research. Make your own decisions. Just do it on public. Uh Adam Faze also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, "I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have been now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead." I thought this was a very very cool, wildly different and like all of these can be printed or framed. I mean, I guess they're they're physical pieces of art, but they could also be uh replicated for the partygoers. Very very cool analog. Uh this is why vinyl records are at an all-time high. There is demand for both the content barbell slop and the artisal handcrafted sketch artists from Adam Fay. Very, very cool. I had the pleasure of running into Adam on the street in New York last week when I was getting coffee. >> I ran up to him with my camera and I said, "Hey, sir. What do you do for a living?" >> What do you do for a living? >> Um, >> was he amused? >> Mildly. >> That's what you aim for. >> I was more amused by my own bit. >> Anyway, uh Oh, last thing. Arena Magazine. Arena Magazine is dropping issue number 008 at C. They're covering deep sea mining, ship building, undersea cables, maritime autonomy, autonomy, island building, American sea power, and so much more. Best enjoyed near a body of water with a cold drink in hand. Shipping to subscribers now. Go check it out. Arena Mag, one of our favorites. You can subscribe to get the issue at aramag.com. We love the folks over there. Uh, so much more to talk about, but we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week. And >> it's June. >> Leave us five stars. It's June. You see that, John? >> Yeah. >> It's June 1st. >> What was surprising about that? We said that on the intro. >> I know. I mean, it's just crazy to see it. It's June. >> It's June. Another month. >> Time flies. >> Another month. Well, >> when your podcast, >> leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for their newsletter, tbp.com, and we will see you. >> It's been an honor >> tomorrow. Flashbang.