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

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Today is Monday, June 1st. We are live from the TVPN 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 khiron web are back. We are back and we're going to tell you about ramp time is money save both easy use, corporate cards, bill

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

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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. Let's Turn over to YouTube and Hollywood. Breakout news in Hollywood. YouTubers winning at the box office. YouTubers finally breaking through to Hollywood feels super long overdue. Ben Thompson had a good victory lap post because he predicted this all the way back in 2017. It took a decade to get here, but YouTubers are fully in control of Hollywood. And there's a bunch of crazy statistics, but 2026 really is the year that Hollywood and YouTube final. It feels like they found a way to work together in perfect harmony. It honestly seems win win here.

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Yeah, but not total disruption. Yeah, right.

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

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Trey says a TVPN without ads is like a human without a heart.

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Couldn't say it better myself. I was.

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

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

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Yeah. Meanwhile, streaming just created 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.

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

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

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But even those, it's very hard for them to break out to such a degree that you can bring it up to anyone, your little nephew or your uncle, and they both have an understanding, like they did during the Titanic era, like they did during the Godfather era, like they did during Star wars, which is at the center of this story, because the Mandalorian and Grogu is the latest Star wars project, and it's actually been declining in the box office. It's been eclipsed. And there's been three movies that have been really, really breakout performances. So also the Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029. It feels like by 2029 this whole trend is going to be in full force. So look at the stats. So Kane Parsons backrooms opened to roughly 81.5 million in North America and 115 million worldwide on a 10 million DOL. Reportedly Curry Barker's obsession climbed is climbing in his third weekend and hit 104,104,004.7 million domestic becoming focus features highest grossing domestic release from a movie widely reported to have cost around 1 million. That seems.

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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 million dollar film.

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Yeah.

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You know it's just happening over and over and over.

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Yeah.

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

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Definitely, definitely. And then we also talked about this earlier and it's sort of looped in with this. But Markiplier, another YouTuber released Iron Lung which he financed himself $3 million production budget reportedly and opened to 18.2 million domestically before grossing 41.1 million domestic, 51.2 million worldwide. Huge return on investment. And so it's easy to point to these as sort of the story is YouTuber with a big audience just converts that audience into ticket sales. But that's not exactly. It's not really that clean. And there's a bunch of counter examples. So are you familiar with Ryan's World? Ryan's World is this massive kids YouTube channel.

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Oh, is it like a toy unboxing?

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

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Young, 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 these channels 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 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.

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There's a translation step sometimes that can work though. You know, you see the advertisements of the toy on the cereal box and the kids demand the toy Daniel says ads back.

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The world is healing.

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

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Yeah. How do you think the big studio execs are processing these two films? Because you would think, okay, movies are a hits driven business if you have $100 million budget. Thinking about it, if you're an early stage investor, like super early stage seed Series A and you have $100 million to invest, sometimes the best move would be putting $100 million into one team. 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.

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They're doing a lot more films.

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Yeah. And so. And so it feels like it's already happening. So much sense because one film can generate the entire fun return, can be a fun returner. But at the same time, is it studio execs that just love the rush of just like doing a big deal? Right. Is there some, as opposed to not like, not basically like direct financial incentive where like there's just something like the status associated with putting together like a blockbuster.

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

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My vote's Obsession.

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Obsession.

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Scott, what'd you think?

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Obsession.

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Okay. And what did you like about each one? What did you dislike about each one?

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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 Aster type wave. I remember leaving mid summer and just feeling like gross for 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.

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That's good.

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I felt like the memes are all over it, which is great.

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Back rooms.

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We all kind of walked out. I love backrooms. Production design should win an award. But something was missing from the movie, I think.

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

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Yeah, it was really fun.

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Scott's got something I want to shout out. Haley Johnson, who produced Obsession too.

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She went to her film school. Fantastic. Let's go over to Ben Thompson, your

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guys class at your film school, which I think no longer exists. Truly, truly insane caliber of talent to come out of that school. Well done.

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So Ben Thompson reflected on this as well. He was taking this victory lap on calling this in 2017. He said in 2017, when the first public allegations were made against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, I wrote Goodbye Gatekeepers about how the traditional structure of Hollywood, where the supply of People who wanted to make and be in movies far exceeded the demand for movies to be made by Hollywood created the conditions for his predation. So he had a lot of power. As he noted in the article, a similar structure used to be the case in newspapers, which not only gated what news was reported, but also leveraged that gate to monetize via advertising. However, the Internet had long since broken down the gate in both regards. Meanwhile, I raised the specter of something similar happening to movies. Don't forget YouTube video is 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

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of video every day with two phones watching two things, wheels on both phones. Yeah, Subway Surfers just going like this.

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

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

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Angry Birds is like a, you know,

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oh yeah, they're making a third one

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

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No, it has to be a gritty horror film that takes place in the Subway Surfers universe. So Ben Thompson continues. He says it's not a surprise that the breakthrough moment for YouTube stars in film took nearly a decade to materialize. After that article, I've long noted the sequence through which the Internet and digital media has affected media. Text first, then music, then short form video, et cetera. Movies, the pinnacle of traditional media, are the hardest to both make and distribute, particularly if the goal is to make it into theaters. And of course movies ask the most of customers in return, they actually have to leave the house. It's also notable I've been seeing more creators basically produce movies. Like Johnny Harris, video essayist, talks about geopolitics and breaks down history of the Middle east of Europe and history of China, Taiwan. 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 cutoff. Well, it used to be like eight, 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.

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

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Yeah, totally. There is an interesting way where you can pretty easily rotate from video essay, scripted long form, just write the script longer and longer. I've put out video essays that have been over an hour to go do a bunch of interviews, get them to say some things, weave those in and then do some sort of like walk and talk at the beginning. And you can have like a low budget documentary very, very easily with just a few shoot days. And I think a lot of people are moving towards this. But it's just been interesting that YouTube has sort of found its footing in delivering a 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 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 doesn't necessarily mean that you were unsatisfied with the video. And they will say, hey, do you want to keep watching that? And so all of that has been algorithmic changes that make a two hour video work a little bit better on YouTube, which is more of a 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 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. Cloud computing reduced the cost of starting a company to nothing more than the opportunity cost for the founder's time and perhaps a bit of seed funding for a few engineers. And that created an entirely new asset class of angel investors. Venture firms, meanwhile, didn't evaluate companies based on a PowerPoint to fund sun servers, but rather on actual products and market signals. So it is with this new wave of talent, the cost of production has plummeted such that a creator can be evaluated on their creations, not just their ideas. That's what I was talking about. The audition, the YouTube growth and the YouTube product, and the YouTube series that gets 82 million views in the example of backrooms. Like, that is the audition tape that gets you the of production workforce behind Hollywood to actually marshal behind you. And that's the same thing with the startup that shows up on Sandhill Road, raising a Series A that already has a product and some distribution and some customers and ARR. And all of that is possible because you don't need $10 million to do a single prototype. You can just build it. More true than ever in the age of AI. The second true but unsatisfying answer is that YouTube creators can bring their own audience. That's almost certainly true. Kane Parsons, who made backrooms, has 3.2 million subscribers, which feels low based on how big backrooms is. But that's the nature of these videos that go viral. They don't always all convert to actual subscribers. Curry Barker, who made obsession, has 1.2 million subscribers again on that Comedy Channel. And then Mark Fishback, who made Iron Lung. Mark plyer has 38.7 million subscribers. Huge account from years of streaming. And he purposely leveraged that to get distribution. Bloomberg sort of broke it down. He was set to release his $3 million film, Iron Lung in 60 independent cinemas. Fischbach led a grassroots campaign encouraging his followers to phone up local theaters and request Iron Lung screenings. This is something that a lot of people say in like cpg, like, oh, fill out this form, Request me in Erewhon or Whole Foods. But it's usually really, really hard to get someone to actually do that because the conversion rate might be like 0.001%. But if you have 40 million people that are, you know, loosely entertained by you and you get, you know, fraction of a percent.

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

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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.

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Yeah, but subscribing. But then 1% of those actually are.

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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 this weekend was the highest ticket sales they've had in years. And I think 20% today the stock is up 20%.

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Yeah. $100 billion company hundred.

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Wait, what? No, no, no, no.

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It's a $1 billion company.

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

24:53

They set it up so if you rock, you rock in your chair.

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They capture the energy.

25:01

You get a free film, they capture the energy.

25:03

You're powering small Nvidia servers.

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GPUs.

25:08

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

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How do you, Ben Scott, how do films actually get funded? I've been, I've been, 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 dollar budget, like are the investors getting like an independent film is a million dollar budget. How does equity work? Any rough ideas?

25:55

Typically there's, there's a series of buyers

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and investors directing you guys.

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Very similar, very similar.

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We'll do it live.

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So Scott's job is oftentimes a screenwriter will sell an option to make a movie to a producer, some sort of production team. They are, the production company is oftentimes the investor. They buy it and then they might invest more money to bring on revisions. Other script writers, they might attach a, they might go pitch, do the deal to bring on a star and then from there they go to another producer. And then the last time, the last moment is the actual marketing phase. And so those dollars are the biggest. So when you go and you get Universal or Disney to be the distributor, they're putting in a ton of money because they're gonna buy the billboards and like the super bowl ads and that's really expensive. The movie has to be made at that point. But there's a series of sort of gates in the typical Hollywood fashion. And so when Markiplier says he spent $3 million, that means he spent $3 million paying the.

26:36

Yeah, because even with Obsession. Yeah, I was seeing Obsession billboards everywhere around la. Yeah, like at least a million dollar campaign right when the videos were coming out saying obsession just turned 750k into $100 million. And so I was like, well so

27:32

a lot of times that might happen after the fact.

27:51

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.

27:52

And then basically at every phase there can be sort of an in kind investment where you get, they call it like points on the back end basically. But it's basically like the most famous example of this is probably Robert Downey Jr. In Ironman. He took a very low salary up front, cash up front, but he got a huge stake in the downstream cash flows from that series.

27:58

You're saying he's goaded.

28:20

He's goaded. He's actually goaded. 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 gonna 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.

28:21

So now that Curry has this insane hit.

28:39

Yep. He can make Star Wars.

28:41

Are people gonna come to him and say like, I want to basically buy your next five film kind of thing?

28:44

Totally.

28:50

Yeah, yeah. Multi film deal or it depends on what he's pitching. Like he could, 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 made or locked up. Or maybe he wants to be. It's also possible he gets brought on as someone to adapt something else. So they say, hey, we already have this ip. Maybe we want to bring back screen and, and we would love for you to do it.

28:50

He's actually, he actually is doing the next Texas Chainsaw.

29:20

There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. With a 24.

29:23

Wait, curry is.

29:25

Yeah, yeah.

29:26

So generational run.

29:26

There you go.

29:28

Obsession. He got his next feature.

29:28

Yep.

29:30

Which is called Anything but Ghosts.

29:30

Okay.

29:32

And then from that he hopped on with a 24 to do the next Texas Chainsaw Mass.

29:32

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

29:37

Not a car.

32:46

Not a car. No one's a car.

32:47

Did you see the new George Lucas Museum Cinema?

32:49

I thought this was interesting, that this was going viral at the same time, or it launched at the same time. You know, it's sort of a turnover.

32:54

Makes me want to throw on a tux.

33:02

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

33:03

Should we get some liminal spaces here in the Ultra Dome?

33:54

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

33:57

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

34:09

No, what's that?

34:12

I mean, I guess no spoilers, but.

34:13

Oh, okay. Yeah.

34:14

We can put tape on the wall.

34:16

People who have seen it will know what that means.

34:17

That's a very cool shot. The Shining. The Shining. 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 into liminal spaces for the rest of the show. Let's see what Dan Shipper has to say. 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 Surfers. We're seeing the tide shift from these more conventional Hollywood narratives to something that feels more organic. Ooh, all the simulators. Maybe there will be Data Center Simulator the movie. Can you imagine? We got Data Center Simulator or what was the other one? Coconut Simulator. We gotta get Coconut Simulator in the movie. Realistic mode.

34:19

Capybara Simulator.

35:20

A movie that's just a nature documentary. Get David Attenborough in there. You're done. You're good. Very interesting.

35:21

Well, Chernin Entertainment Finance this David Attenborough narrating gameplay from Capybara Simulator.

35:29

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

35:37

This is rough.

36:27

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

36:29

Maybe he wants to just be fire selling after the IPOs.

37:00

He's just like, this is the time.

37:06

I didn't tell you how there was

37:07

going to be a dividend dividend in sales.

37:08

No, it's. I mean the positioning. I'm trying to get into my New York Times account too, but. But the positioning. Blank is built on humanity's collective knowledge. What is not built on humanity's collective knowledge?

37:13

Yeah, I was looking at a lot

37:28

of TBPN is built on humanity's collective knowledge.

37:29

It's true.

37:33

If who, if humanity hadn't figured out wheels and roads and combustion engines.

37:34

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

37:40

You never know. You just never know.

37:47

You're tempting fate here.

37:49

But bad example. But yeah. The other thing is we have.

37:51

Yeah. AI 2027 talks about this. I think that's it is right in line. He's clearly in the milieu of that crew. And we'll see where all this goes. I don't know. We'll see. A lot of people are sort of

37:56

framing it as, I'd rather have universal basic tokens.

38:12

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

38:16

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

38:21

Yeah. So Dean Ball pointed out this sort of, like, misalignment here. He says, I am so confused by the Bernie Sanders stance on AI. Is AI an existential risk that needs to be ban 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 think that there is a world where, if you do think AI is an existential risk, having a board seat, having control, having votes over that does enable. Especially if you have 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. Tyler, what do you.

38:36

Yeah, but you can just do, like the fda.

39:25

Yeah.

39:27

Yeah.

39:27

You don't need, like, actual equity.

39:28

Yeah.

39:29

Okay.

39:29

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.

39:30

Yeah.

39:37

But to say maybe these are going to be biggest.

39:37

He's saying that the stock's underrated.

39:41

Yeah.

39:42

Undervalued.

39:43

These are gonna be the biggest.

39:43

Yeah. Because of all the stocks, we're going

39:44

to zero big that this is gonna be, like, disruptive to the economy.

39:46

Sure.

39:49

Like, this seems like he's extremely AGI pilled.

39:50

It seems like it.

39:52

Yeah.

39:53

Yeah.

39:53

It's like this seems like he's basically saying, wait, so the data center stuff is probably not gonna work out. I'm not gonna be able to ban these things.

39:53

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

40:01

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

40:11

Another Mark in the chat says my wife wants me to tell you guys that I'm so loyal that even laying on the beach with her, I can't leave the boys. Mark is on vacation. Tuning into tvc.

40:24

Say hello to everyone for us.

40:34

We hope you're enjoying the sun Mark and thanks watching for thanks for being with us.

40:36

Thanks for tuning in. So my question is, I mean obviously this is a New York Times op ed. It's not what you say.

40:40

You think that Bernie has been getting his AI takes from Jason Oppenheimer?

40:47

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

40:53

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

41:09

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

41:16

Is meta.

41:20

Is meta. Yeah, Meta.

41:21

I mean Mark. Mark would be.

41:23

They are.

41:24

We were talking about this earlier. Mark would quickly be like me trying to build personal super.

41:25

I'm not an AI company. I'm not a take half my company.

41:30

I'm not an AI lab.

41:33

I'm just doing some experimenting.

41:34

I got these GPUs to 99 recommend

41:36

better videos that were created. Is just recommendations going to take half

41:38

of all people Birds.

41:41

Oh no. He's going to take half of all birds. But seriously like how deep does he go down the stack? I mean intel like Trump already 10% video Nvidia.

41:42

Nvidia makes videos the American open source hero.

41:52

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

41:55

Well, if the argument is that basically if something is built on humanity's collective knowledge, the government should get half. You can go pretty far here. Pretty much everything in our modern world is built on humanity's collective of knowledge.

42:46

Yeah.

43:02

And so, yeah, I think everybody should get ready to. I mean, even your. Your own home. Right? Your own home.

43:03

Yeah.

43:09

Is built on.

43:10

Who invented the nail? Somebody invented the 2x4.

43:11

Exactly.

43:14

Yeah.

43:15

No, you can go all over the place cutting down trees.

43:15

Yes. So maybe it ends with some sort of tax on corporate profits.

43:17

For every type of tax on corporate profits.

43:23

Wouldn't feel if a company makes money, they have to send some of it to the government. That would be.

43:25

Why has no one thought of this, John?

43:30

I don't know. I don't know.

43:31

Take that to D.C. right now.

43:33

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

43:35

There won't be any work. I disagree with Kevin.

46:14

There won't be any work of people out of the workforce that we know of today and into the things that I talked about.

46:16

So I think what we have to

46:24

do is start creating, showing and creating value for those things.

46:24

Start ascribing value to family and to

46:28

hobbies and to sport and to relationships more.

46:32

And it has to be less about work.

46:36

So I hear a lot of.

46:37

I thinks, and you guys are real

46:38

estate people and of the viewer.

46:40

What gives you guys credibility to talk about AI? Fair question. I would say that I've spent probably 500 hours listening and reading a lot of podcasts.

46:42

Did the homework, I think it's not.

46:51

It.

46:53

It's the quintessential, like, intellectual pursuit of the last two years of my life called David. Listening to podcasts is the quintessential intellectual pursuit. Jeremy Gifford on Suicide Watch. Tyler, you had something?

46:53

Yeah, just for some context. So in the peak of the Great depression, unemployment was 24.9. 24 point, saying 80%.

47:06

Okay, so three times, four times the great Depression is what we're looking at with AI.

47:13

Yeah, it's just. It's so. It's so funny to listen to go and just like, listen to a bunch of podcasts and come back with. With the 80% number.

47:18

It's wild.

47:26

Because you also have. You would have to qualify that. Like what, what set of technologies actually enable that? Because you certainly would need like, you know, highly effective, efficient humanoid robots, you know, fully deployed throughout society. But yeah, I don't. Strongest take we've seen yet.

47:27

Yeah.

47:49

So very concerning.

47:50

But this is a stronger take potential. Yeah, but this is the other side of it.

47:51

Sam Sulek revealed that 95% of jobs are safe from AI. He said AI is a tool. It won't replace disciplined grit or hard work.

47:55

Instagram. How did this.

48:07

This really looks like Instagram. I made this. This is a fake quote. I sent this to John over the weekend.

48:11

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 still did a double take. It's absolutely wild. So funny. Anyway, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world. Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We're partner with the New York Stock Exchange. It's really going, really going today, man. Thank you to Aria Tech. They produced all of our show graphics, the Chiron Legends, the intro. They've worked with us for a long time. And they also activated my AI Siri for some reason. I don't know why that happened on my phone and my MacBook. Wow, what a day. Salesforce is on an absolute tear. We talked about the dueling narrative. So anthropic is IPOing or 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. There's a race between SpaceX, OpenAI anthropic to get out, hoover up those public market dollars. Meanwhile, it was so over for all the SAS companies. But the SaaS apocalypse might be canceled. That's what we're seeing. A lot of companies are up. Some of them are up on Anthropic holdings, but others are just up on continued traction in their.

48:16

Mark's got to be feeling good. He invested 50 million into anthropic, I think in 2023 or 2024.

49:41

Cheeky. 100x.

49:48

Very cheeky. Very cheeky.

49:50

I think he's.

49:51

He's feeling good. He's now going to deploy 2 billion euros into France.

49:52

Love it.

49:56

It our strong team of 1800 employees in France.

49:56

Wow.

50:00

More committed than ever to driving innovation and agentic growth across the country. And I love this new meta. I think this picture is. This is the new. This is the new Vibreal 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 of sort of videos throughout history of hypersonic jets and rockets and things like that. Just take a selfie, post it, you're good to go. Much more efficient.

50:01

Okay, so.

50:34

And I'm dropping after this partnership, I just gotta say we're canceling my personal beef with France.

50:35

Oh, that's great.

50:43

This is fantastic progress.

50:44

Benioff won you over.

50:46

And yeah, if they have Benioff's full faith, they have my full faith. And already this 2 billion euros, I think, is significantly more than the previous investment that they announced that created the original beef.

50:47

Yeah, beef squash. It's good to see. Good to see. Well, Benioff gave some more context on Salesforce's progress. The fiscal year 27 Q1 results, record revenue 11.13 billion, up 13% year over year. This is a very mature company. Still growing very quickly. Very good news. Operating cash flow of 6.7 billion. Agent Force crossed 1 billion. ARR. Or yeah, ARR. Combined with Data360 and Informatica now at

51:03

3.4 billion in AI data. ARR.

51:34

We're not just talking about the here. We're not just talking about the agentic future.

51:38

We're delivering it. The number one agentic CRM powering the

51:43

shift to agentic enterprises at scale. The momentum is real. The future is unstoppable. Fire emoji 34%.

51:47

What is a non dappled version? Really good. What is a sarsaparilla? What's a sarsaparilla?

51:57

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

52:02

Sarsaparilla.

52:07

What? Sarsaparilla. Sarsaparilla.

52:09

Sars.

52:12

I'm seeing nostalgic softer drink. You just call it sarsaparilla. I know it says sar sparilla, but everyone pronounces it sarsapilla. I think. Anyway, nostalgic soft drink, herbal plant, native to the Americans. Sweet, earthy flavor. This is due for a comeback. This feels like this would sell for $20 a bottle at Erewhon, don't you think?

52:13

Absolutely.

52:32

I bet.

52:33

Bringing back sarsaparilla, good business. Somebody do the call call area, call day job right now. Start your branding packages. And I think you got a winner if you bring back sarsaparilla successfully. Well, Marc Benioff teased a little bit of the progress on our show and we can play this clip from him on tbpn giving us a little bit of a view into the demand that Salesforce was seeing, the growth that they were seeing in their business.

52:33

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. Years in fiscal year, you know, 26. The year it just passed.

53:00

Yeah.

53:10

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. 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 about that because I need one more capacity because we have more demand than ever. 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. That's our job. Make you successful and to really bring in the apps and the agents. You can't do it just with a name.

53:11

Sales guy. Final boss.

53:58

Yeah.

53:59

He's so good.

53:59

Final boss. It is, it is. I think the pushback there would be. Well, you do sell customer service agents.

54:00

Yeah.

54:07

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.

54:08

Yeah.

54:18

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?

54:18

Yes and no. I mean he's selling. He's selling like a tool that sits alongside a sales rep. If there's a booming economy, more sales, you would think that, that there's more people that go into sales. More people that need a Shopify or, sorry, a Salesforce like installation alongside them. There's still a bull case there. I mean all the labs have Salesforce admins and stuff. We've seen this reported and there's certainly like so much of the diffusion discussion is around actually meeting someone, having a human in the loop, having someone alongside you as you implement these tools. So you don't go over your token budget. Token maxing. Token maxing seems like a harebrained scheme cooked up by an sdr. Just. Okay, go into Salesforce. 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, okay, Agent Force. Got it, buddy.

54:41

Did you know that Jensen was such

55:39

a good Dan, I had no idea. Do we have a video of this?

55:41

We do.

55:44

Okay, let's play this and then we'll read Brandon Gorell's deep dive on Jensen's Computex 2026 keynote, which is being hotly debated.

55:44

Okay, look at this.

55:52

It's pretty good.

55:53

Look at this.

55:54

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

55:55

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

56:02

5.4 trillion, up 6% today.

56:14

Wow.

56:18

Absolutely wild. Where's he sitting on multiple. Pop quiz. What movie features a dance to this song?

56:20

Pulp Fiction.

56:38

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

56:39

I don't know. Sometimes you're so out of. You'd be like, I don't know what those words mean. That couldn't possibly be the answer to John Jordy. Have you seen Pulp Fiction?

56:43

I have.

56:51

Oh, okay.

56:52

I have. That's one of the five.

56:53

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

56:54

If you can do like tool calling then that basically gets you like most of the way there because then all the hard things outsource.

58:59

Well, sure.

59:04

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 do with these like. Super nice.

59:05

We gotta get David Suzuki back on the show to talk about Roblox and the real time uprising of Roblox games. Because I think that that's such an incredible technology. I think it's going to be really popular but it's going to take time for it to actually roll out. Anyway, there is a cut down of Jensen's keynote that you can watch. We linked it in the newsletter and we will go into that more later. But we have our first guest from the New York Times. He's a journalist. Adam Isco just wrote a fantastic piece about prediction mark markets and he's here with us in the TVP and Ultra.

59:14

Madam, how you doing with a slat wall? Slat wall ready to pop.

59:44

Wait, is that a slot wall or is that a virtual background? What we got? What we got? It's real. It's real. You think I'd do a virtual background on you, y'? All.

59:47

I mean, thank you, thank you. With the suit. With the suit.

59:54

You look fantastic.

59:56

Bringing a slat wall and a suit. You are ready to podcast.

59:57

Okay.

1:00:00

Are you in New York City? I'm in New York City, longtime listener, first time caller. Thank you.

1:00:01

Fantastic to have you.

1:00:06

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 your journey, your history, how you wound up at the New York Times, where else you've written, the type of topics, how you describe your beat, your process. Just sort of give me the 101 on you, and then we can dive into prediction markets specifically. Yeah.

1:00:07

You know, at a party, if someone asks me, what the hell do you write about? Are we allowed to curse on the show? Is it snow?

1:00:27

You're welcome to.

1:00:33

We don't.

1:00:34

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

1:00:34

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

1:00:36

I can tell he's a bit of

1:00:42

a in the gray lady bad boy.

1:00:43

It's been the great controversy with me working at the Times is that I spent the last five years at the New Yorker.

1:00:45

Okay.

1:00:51

It's a magazine that encourages profanity in the pages, but the Times, you know, a little more. But things are a little different there.

1:00:51

I've spent the last five years at

1:01:01

the New Yorker writing about all kinds of things, whether it's mental illness and homelessness in New York City or birds. Like, you know, every year I wrote a story about a cool boat on the New York harbor.

1:01:02

Cool.

1:01:11

You know, I'm just trying to, like, go interesting places and see interesting things.

1:01:12

What drew you to the boat? I gotta know about the boat?

1:01:15

Yeah.

1:01:17

Since you brought it up.

1:01:17

Well, I mean, y' all ever see a shipping container ship?

1:01:19

Yeah.

1:01:23

Like, you ever want to get on one?

1:01:23

You ever been on one? I don't think I've ever been on

1:01:25

a shipping container ship.

1:01:27

But I have wanted to go on one, though. I mean, I've been on an aircraft carrier. That was very cool.

1:01:28

You've been on an aircraft carrier?

1:01:33

I've been on an aircraft carrier. I went on the USS Carl Vinson as part of the Distinguished Visitor program. There's a program where you can sign up for. You have to wait years and years and years unless you're actually famous. And I had a friend who waited years and years and years, and then he slotted me in at the last second. So I got to go with, like, a lot of, like, big Hollywood producers and stuff, and they sort of give you the dog and pony show, let you sleep on the boat for two days. Meet everyone. Yeah, two days. You're, like, at sea with them, and they. You have no Cell service, they don't tell you where you are and you can kind of speculate. Okay, well, we left from San Diego. We're probably around Mexico, but yeah, you get to watch the planes take off and land and they take you and they fly you off and stuff. It's a wild experience.

1:01:34

We definitely knew where we were. We were in the New York harbor. We came under the Verrazano Bridge and it was great. The cargo was a miniature of the Statue of Liberty. It was a gift from the French government to us.

1:02:12

They gave us another one.

1:02:27

One.

1:02:28

They gave us another one.

1:02:28

They're just running it back.

1:02:30

Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to get on the

1:02:32

ship, so I just sort of made some calls and I asked around and they were, they were super psyched to have me on the. On board. That's awesome.

1:02:34

Yeah.

1:02:41

How do you think about sizing stories in that context? Like when you're at the New Yorker over a couple of years, I imagine that there's, there's shorter pieces, there's longer pieces. Like how much is it just a conversation with your editors and the team and 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. What is the process? Because we have the same show every day, it's always the same length. We don't really ever get in the world where we're like, we're gonna do an eight hour show next week, but we're gonna take a couple shows off. How do you think about sizing projects?

1:02:41

It's such a great question. It's like if you're gonna Write about a YouTube 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. 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 yeah, if I want to write about mental illness and homelessness in New York City and have New York City be a sort of, 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.

1:03:18

Yeah.

1:03:55

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 your investigating something that's really sort of topical and important.

1:03:56

How did you first come into contact with prediction markets?

1:04:05

Oh my gosh. I mean, I don't know about y', all, but.

1:04:10

But

1:04:13

aren't your friends just like, you know, degenerate gambling on sports or on

1:04:15

all of these things for some reason? I actually don't know that many people that gamble on sports.

1:04:20

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

1:04:26

sports bet, but they were very viral during the presidential election. I remember maybe, what was it, three cycles ago, 2008, the Nate Silver 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 those, those dashboards, the needles, all of that stuff sort of captures every attent, 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 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.

1:04:30

But yeah, I've always been, personally, I've been interested in the tension between, I

1:05:35

mean,

1:05:39

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

1:05:42

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

1:06:09

Yeah, I mean they could be doing like sophisticated research, things like that.

1:06:11

Exactly. Sorry.

1:06:14

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, yeah, somebody Would that did have inside knowledge on the operation, was putting the whole operation. Yeah, it's going to be better because, because, because they wanted to make, you know, 200 grand or whatever.

1:06:15

Yeah, yeah. But when you look at the election

1:06:33

or you look at, you know, you look at, you look at financial anything, you know, sort of unemployment or the Fed rate or what have you, you don't need insiders to have sort of non public information. You can just, you can sort of do what Wall street has always done, which is go out and find an edge. Go out and find the best information possible. Yeah, go and talk to a bunch of people. Go and look at really complicated weather data to predict oil prices. I mean you can, you can do 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, you know, compromised national security by illegally trading Venezuela. You can be someone who just knows a lot more than the average sort of user or better and kind of create tremendous informational advantage for people. I mean the stat that I came across, sort of crazy is that a third of adult voters in America insulted a prediction market. Right. That's like a, that's like a lot of, that's like a lot of people,

1:06:35

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

1:07:39

And I mean in low liquidity I

1:07:43

only vote for winners. Who should I vote for?

1:07:45

Yeah, no, no, I think people do, I think people do actually see, okay, there's momentum. To me, it's worth me donating to this candidate. And then you get this weird flywheel where potentially you could have someone who wants a particular candidate to win. Then they artificially shift the odds of that candidate, they spike and then that candidate runs a whole bunch of talking points or ads saying, I'm at 60% on the prediction markets, you should definitely donate because I'm gonna run away with it. And then it becomes like a self fulfilling thing, prophecy. There's like a weird cycle there that could be bad.

1:07:46

I don't know.

1:08:21

I think six months ago, maybe eight

1:08:22

months ago, that may have been at least pre, pre 2024 election this may have been possible. But the way the markets are sort of becoming more efficient just like any other market on Wall Street.

1:08:23

Yeah.

1:08:34

I think now if you went in and you were trying to sort of artificially hype up a candidate that didn't have genuine support, smarter money than you would just buy your money and just.

1:08:34

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

1:08:44

Participants, yeah. So I would say that the average trader. And like, that's me. We're just getting crushed. Absolutely decimated.

1:09:09

I actually want to. I want to.

1:09:18

I want to read y' all something that, that, 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.

1:09:19

Wow.

1:09:30

And so. And so, and. And you know, it's a grad student. I'm going to keep them zor of protect their enmity. They're quite worried about being crypto kidnapped.

1:09:31

Sure.

1:09:38

They go by the screen name Frozen. And they said, I really am just taking money from people. Every dollar I gain is someone else losing. And there's a lot of people joining and betting and losing and leaving. And then there's a group of a couple hundred guys winning. And that's the whole story. And you know, that's not the whole story, but, but, but that's a lot of it is that you have really smart people just crushing the average trader.

1:09:39

Okay. So what I find weird about this is that I don't have that many friends who fall into the.

1:10:06

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

1:10:13

Yes, clearly.

1:10:18

Wonder. I wonder.

1:10:19

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

1:10:22

You know, I was so delighted. I had a wonderful conversation with Geff.

1:11:18

Yeah.

1:11:21

Pass

1:11:22

one of the sort of most respected trading training firms in the country, if not the world. And I asked him this question and he said, we are just getting taken for a ride. We're just getting crushed by these sharks. And I was sort of trying to figure out why. And I talked to someone who actually, you know, SIG is trying to go out just like a number of other places and they're to going to try to hire these sharps, right. I talked to someone who had an offer from SIG and I said, you know, why didn't you take it? Well, you know, wouldn't you get, you know, better health insurance? You know. And he said, not only am I just making a killing, but I can do things that a big institutional fund can't do. For instance, I can, you know, he's a Rotten Tomatoes trader. He trades, trades. How is a film going to do on Rotten Tomatoes? And he, 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. 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 film going to perform and, and such. And he's doing things, he's scraping websites and he's doing things that maybe SIG, through their corporate policies wouldn't allow. And he asked in the interviews, like could I do this technique in a know. And they said, yeah, probably not. And so in these markets, you know, and there's just so many market.

1:11:25

Well, is that because it's illegal?

1:12:46

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

1:12:49

Not like a law, but like a terms of use just.

1:12:52

Yep, yep, exactly.

1:12:56

And, and this guy, you know, it's really interesting, right, because he's someone who, you know, he, he, you know, pardon me, I'm going to swear. But, but he, he, he, he self described as sort of like a dipshit from the Midwest. You know, the first like, you know, hey, I'm this guy, I didn't go to an Ivy League school.

1:12:59

Yeah.

1:13:18

And I'm able to out compete Wall street with a $600 Lenovo laptop.

1:13:19

That's crazy.

1:13:22

I didn't go to a fancy school. I could never have gotten a job on Wall Street. This is not, this is not my world. But I'm able to do this because I'm quite sharp on prediction markets.

1:13:23

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

1:13:31

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

1:14:31

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

1:15:44

the next few years. What do you think sensible regulation looks like? Because in the case of, of there had to have been some guidelines that would have somebody in the special forces, if they check the rule book, say, like, should not send a signal to the Internet that we are going to attack a foreign country, which is effectively what this individual was doing when they were betting on strike on Venice.

1:16:35

It's terrible.

1:17:02

But that doesn't feel like, like, like that just feels like it's not even necessarily like, that must have been violating like a number of policies, I would

1:17:04

imagine, policies and, and federal law. And, you know, the Justice Department and the CFTC are prosecuting the case. You know, you also want to see better enforcement, right? You want to see, you want to, you want to sort of flag these things before they, they, they even start. You know, I talked to Kalshi about this. I talked to polymarket about this, and they say, you know, they say, say, hey, we're really working quite hard to 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. We need to sort of make sure that they're actually doing that. And, you know, this is where, you know, there's lots and lots of other great reporters at the Journal. At the time at npr, there was

1:17:14

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

1:17:58

Yeah. What percentage of the Sharps do you think just have inside info and are kind of taking you on a, you know, basically telling, telling you a little

1:18:13

story about I built a cool web scraper.

1:18:24

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

1:18:27

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

1:19:25

That's a question from Emily or from

1:19:32

me or you want me to. It's from Emily for you.

1:19:34

Clearly from Emily for me.

1:19:36

You know,

1:19:38

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 five years. I have a sense that things are changing. And I really, rather than sort of be on the outside as a reporter and, and, and watch as things sort of sort of change and be become a tech reporter, I think this would be. The thing that I would do is I'd go be a tech reporter. I'd write wonderful stories about, you know, what's happening, happening. And I got the sense that I couldn't do it from the outside. Like, I've become increasingly convinced that sort of like, AI is like the thing that I need to think about over the next 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, some level of being in AI world. And then I went around and I. And I had to sort of find a place that shared my values. And I was lucky enough to sort of, by happenstance, meet, you know, this guy Ivan, who runs this company, Notion, and. And I really loved his vision of the world, and I love this company's vision of the world. And I thought, okay, you know, I'll

1:19:41

give it a shot.

1:21:01

We'll see. And it seems like it's the kind of place here that. That you can tell wonderful stories about what's actually happening in the world. And that sort of has a sort of a genuine curiosity and a sort of a genuine Ambition to tell true stories, to tell real stories about what's happening in the world. And yeah, I'm quite excited to do it.

1:21:01

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

1:21:25

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

1:21:49

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

1:21:55

Yeah, I mean, I don't think product or marketing really resonates with the thing that I, I really do here. Yeah, I'd be a terrible marketer. I don't think I know how to sell Notion as a product. But what I think I can do is come into this place, ask a ton of questions about what's happening here, go elsewhere, ask a ton of questions about what's happening elsewhere and then yeah, maybe tell interesting stories or maybe the first thing I can do here is sort of ask questions and start to tell interesting stories about what does AI look like in the economy, what is. And maybe, yeah, maybe there, maybe there is an economic benefit for the business. Sure hope so. 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, you know, part of that is, is this.

1:22:27

Very cool. Is there anything else?

1:23:19

No. It's great to meet you.

1:23:22

Great to meet you. Thank you so much.

1:23:23

Breaking it down. Congrats on the new roll.

1:23:25

A cargo ship. You know, just call me up, let me know.

1:23:27

Let's run it.

1:23:29

Next one.

1:23:30

Let's do it.

1:23:30

I'll talk to you soon.

1:23:30

Great to hang, Adam.

1:23:32

Have a good one.

1:23:33

Cheers.

1:23:33

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

1:23:34

Virgin Galactic has the ticker SPCE.

1:24:18

Sounds a lot like SpaceX to me.

1:24:20

Yeah, fortunately this guy, I mean hopefully he held comments came in because he'd be up 126%.

1:24:23

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

1:24:32

Tyler says yo, we just got an ad read. Just made my day. We love you guys.

1:25:14

Kyle Kuzma, friend of the show guest as of last Friday, said, look at IBM Quantum, he's had 24% followed the market. He was a great interview. We had a lot of fun talking to him. Micron is also way, way up. They extended gains to rise above $1,000 a share for the first time in history. Look at that candle. Of course, this is very zoomed out. This goes all the way back to 2000.

1:25:21

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

1:25:48

Not dependent on the Strait of Hormuz, apparently. Well, the stock is now. The company is now worth over 1.2 trillion. The stock was worth just 60 billion 13 months ago. Absolutely remarkable. There are some rule changes from the SpaceX IPO.

1:26:13

Micron is a lambo candle.

1:26:28

Lambo candle. That's a lambo candle. Up 22% today. Absolutely insane. Rule changes for the SpaceX IPO index providers waived the profitability requirement and cut the seasoning window from 90 days to just 5. This forces over 30 trillion in passive 401 and retirement money to buy Space X at IPO valuations. Bloomberg Intelligence estimates S&P 500 funds must absorb 19% of SpaceX's float within six months. The Russell 1000 and Nasdaq 100 funds will absorb 24%. The rules built to protect to protect passive investors, 1 S&P 500 required 12 months of trading and 4/4 of GAAP profitability since 2002. Both are waived now. NASDAQ cut its inclusion window from 90 days to 15 and the FTSE Russell cut its to 5. All three benchmarks are now structured to buy SpaceX at IPO pricing before the lockup ends. So lots of buying activity for SpaceX, Nick Carter says so this is what kills index funds. Cult of passive finally coming to an end There's a bunch of different ways to deal with this. If you for some reason don't want SpaceX in your S&P 500, I'm sure you can go and develop a synthetics S&P 499.

1:26:30

Definitely do it on public.

1:27:50

Yeah, you can probably build something that is neutral to this move. Of course if you're bullish on SpaceX, you'll be happy that it is in your retirement account and if the Progress continues and SpaceX delivers on everything that they have planned and are optimistic about should work out for everyone. But there is a lot of risk in the system so we will continue to monitor it. Well, there has been a lot of back and forth about how much you should work, how much you should work. Corgi is going back with Kari at Linear. We can go through this big debate. It's a lot of long posts. People are going back and forth. I think this all started with Harry Stebbings had the Corgi Insurance founder on on the show and he said if you're not working seven days per week, you're going to lose. Kari takes the other side. Nico goes back and forth with him. Interesting timing with the Willmanitis grind slop grind slop essay. I think that the Corgi Insurance I was unsure if it was just random timing or if the corg was the Corgi Insurance interview trying to bait a response from the Will Menitis post or was it recorded before posting?

1:27:51

I think that Nico this is just part of their culture as a company. It's working for him and it's working for him. It's clearly working for him. 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. And in Nico's defense, he's built, I think, a $2.4 billion company in a very short period of time.

1:29:06

Remarkable.

1:29:31

And it's a remarkable feat. Kari, on the other side, has also built a very big business and done it in maybe a more calm way. This is personal. I felt like over the last 18 months, we've worked harder than ever in our careers, but weekends are very much time off. And part of that is, I mean, we're still talking, like multiple times a day and making, you know, decisions around the business. But I actually felt that was especially necessary because five days a week we're coming here and hanging out, trying to put on a show. Three hours.

1:29:32

Yeah.

1:30:09

And so the weekends are good time to be able to actually, it feels like unwinding is particularly helpful.

1:30:10

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

1:30:17

Apparently two thirds of Corgi's employees have the company tattoo.

1:30:27

Oh, okay. So Wilmanias was referencing that specifically because he mentioned that in the essay, which we should read at some point. It's a great essay if you haven't read it already. Will Menias grind slops?

1:30:31

We could read it and put ads in it.

1:30:40

We can. Finally, the final form of the content oral board after all. Essay about a podcast. Well, we have our next guest from Saris here in the TVPN ultra realm with us.

1:30:42

Welcome to chat.

1:30:56

Do you believe in working eight days a week?

1:30:56

Yeah. Where do you stand on this? Where do you stand five days a week, seven days a week? Where do you stand on relentless work above all else?

1:30:58

I don't think.

1:31:13

Are you guys able to hear me? Can you hear me?

1:31:14

Yeah, we can hear you. You can't hear us.

1:31:15

Oh, no. Oh, no.

1:31:17

Oh, no.

1:31:18

Why don't you jump out?

1:31:19

We will bring you back in.

1:31:21

We'll bring you back in.

1:31:22

Okay.

1:31:23

Well, he was about to say, every person on my team has a tattoo.

1:31:25

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

1:31:30

Something else, but I'm looking at this.

1:32:22

I'm looking at it. Okay. Okay, I want everyone to weigh in on this. You have a one way flight, somewhere unknown within the red boxed region. You drop in via parachute at midnight. You're given $2,000 in cash or precious 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 arrive within a week, 1 million if you arrive within a month. Which region do you choose? And the first option is right between Panama and Colombia in the Darien Gap. The Darien Gap, which is uninhabited. There's no roads that go through it. Did we lose the Khiron too? What happened? Or Chiron, of course, is created by adoption.

1:32:23

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

1:33:12

You crossed the Darien Gap.

1:33:19

I didn't cross the Darien Gap, but I was dropped into Panama and I was going to a place called Bocas del Toro, which is a small chain of islands in the Caribbean. And I took an all day bus and I arrived in this port, this Caribbean port, like at around midnight. And there were no more boats going to the chain of islands that I

1:33:20

was trying to get to.

1:33:43

So you were stuck legally, I guess they're not allowed to make like, you know, boat runs.

1:33:43

Yeah.

1:33:47

And we ended up having to make a. Find a guy that was willing to, willing to make the charge. So we made the trip. Lights, lights out, which was very sketchy. You're not supposed to be going, you know, traveling by boat at night in harbors without lights. But this one captain was on board and there was no hospital, like, there was no lodging in that little, like port town.

1:33:48

So it was like sleeping on the

1:34:17

boat, asleep basically at a bus stop in a Caribbean port town. Or make the trip by boat with no light. We took the boat. We were surfing that next morning.

1:34:18

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

1:34:32

I'm going Darien Gap.

1:34:45

Yeah.

1:34:46

Why can. Just so you can get a ferry around. Right. Because you hear about these sorts of people motorcycling, like, you know, South America to Alaska or something.

1:34:46

Yep. And I think the passport's less of an issue.

1:34:54

You just get to the border.

1:34:56

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, very, very harsh conditions. Would you go Darien Gap as well?

1:34:57

Yeah. The 2,000 bucks, I mean, is the big constraint, Right. Because it's not really enough for a significant incentive for someone.

1:35:15

Yeah. And you only fly business class, so you would be stuck because you'd get there and you'd be like, well, sir, a one way flight from Pyongyang to New York City business class is going to be 2,500. No ID.

1:35:23

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

1:35:37

you don't have no Daring Gap for sure because you can get to Panama, you can get to Medellin. Either one is gonna let you, with that passport, get to New York City.

1:35:43

Oh, right.

1:35:52

For sure.

1:35:52

But I'm an American.

1:35:54

Yeah, but you have this Israeli passport. So that's the one that you. They will see this.

1:35:56

But it's a valid passport.

1:36:00

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.

1:36:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:36:09

Regardless of your actual passport. Whereas in Colombia or Panama, I think they will say, right this way, sir. Like you can go to New York City. It's much easier.

1:36:10

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

1:36:19

Frank agrees with us. Daring Gap first. Anyway, I believe we have our next guest here with audio. Let's bring in Denal.

1:36:32

Are we back?

1:36:40

How are you doing?

1:36:41

Yeah, okay.

1:36:42

I'm well.

1:36:43

Fantastic. Folks, let's be quick. Introduce yourself. Give us the news what happened.

1:36:44

Sure.

1:36:50

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

1:36:50

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

1:37:09

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

1:37:28

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

1:38:09

Yeah, absolutely. So I think there are two parts of this story. The first one is the technical part. I think creating point solutions is easy, especially with foundation models and how quickly they're growing. The challenge really is that how do you connect humans, the work that humans do, with the regulatory environment, with the infrastructure, with integrations, with systems. Not everything is API accessible with semi structured unstructured data, data like you said in papers and so on, that orchestration, that's where the magic is and I think that's where the moat is for a lot of startups to come in. Because if it's a point solution and it's more or less clear foundation models will probably figure that out. So I think that's the first part. The second part of the story is more human again and it's what we call, or what I call the dignity of work.

1:38:43

Right.

1:39:30

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, their team had a backlog of 300 loan documents and they are literally spending the time from 5pm till 9.30pm five days a week completing that backlog. Because nine in the morning they have to get to another backlog. We launched SARS about like three weeks ago. Now they're going home at 6:20. They can be with their families.

1:39:30

Right.

1:40:02

That's dignity of work. That's amazing. We have another case where, you know, it's HELOC loans and mortgage.

1:40:02

What happened with other major technology cycles where the workweek effectively just shrank.

1:40:09

Yeah. Which is great. Just more efficiency, higher productivity. Which is the good news.

1:40:14

Exactly. And I think it's also like the feedback loops we're seeing so that. So. So we're not seeing so much that people are being let go. It's more that they're not hiring additional staff members. So one other example quickly I'll share with you is, you know, we've had a case where the president over credit union sent me a text that, hey, we were planning a hiring, hiring five people this quarter, but because the output with Cyrus is so much higher, they didn't hire those five people. However, they gave a raise to the existing team. Everyone's happier about that. Right. So those are kind of like interesting things we're seeing.

1:40:19

Good. Give us the fundraising news because we're running late. What'd you raise? Who funded you?

1:40:52

Yeah. So it was, I guess, love at first sight with a partner. We raised $28.8 million in the same Z.

1:40:57

Congratulations.

1:41:08

What partner led the deal?

1:41:11

It was Alex, man. It was first sight. And then. And then we got to meet with Joe as well, who's. Who's just an awesome guy too. So it was great.

1:41:14

That's great news. Well, sorry for cutting this short, a little bit of technical difficulty. But thank you so much.

1:41:22

I'm sure you'll back be back soon together.

1:41:27

And good luck with the journey corner. We'll talk to you soon.

1:41:30

Cool. Awesome. Cheers guys.

1:41:33

Great to meet you.

1:41:34

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?

1:41:35

Doing awesome. How you guys doing?

1:41:52

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

1:41:54

Yeah. So I've been in Silicon Valley 25 years, been an operator, joined Facebook Meta 2008, scaled everything from data centers to Oculus to Instagram to building the Facebook AI research lab. Yeah, I stepped away from that job.

1:42:03

Just everything. Just every important project there. Yeah, a lot of stuff.

1:42:15

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

1:42:19

How much did you raise?

1:43:05

250.

1:43:07

250. Quarter bill. Quarterbill. What were some of the. What were some of the standout companies in that first company of, like, angel fund that you mentioned that. That made you think you were onto something?

1:43:08

Well, there's a. There's a bunch of them. So Pantalaza is building ocean data centers for inference. I think you have Garth on here a little while ago and is one example 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-year-old technology. Literally.

1:43:21

Really.

1:43:43

We've got a new idea. We're taking the power electronics that are in your Model 3, Model Y, and we're putting them on the grid and we can deliver you power faster, better, cheaper than anyone else out there. They're shipping products next year. You know we've got radiant nuclear is building a container size micro reactor gives you a megawatt half of power for five years with no refueling and they've got form energy that said hey, you know these data centers you have power swings, you might have renewables which are on and off, 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 three days, no problem. I got four day battery and that battery is super cheap because it's made out of it literally like rusts and unrest. Iron is like the basic chemistry of it. It's the cheapest possible material you could use to build a battery. 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 works for everyone.

1:43:43

How are you thinking about publics 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 key technologies that it feels like we're in this crazy moment where 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 five years and so in the meantime it's just call up GE, Vernova and 10x the amount of natural gas and that is like a technical debt that I think we're going to have to pay at some point. And I'm wondering about like is there a crowding out effect? How do you stay sane if you're a startup founder who's doing something really cool but you're watching some public company go 50x in the public markets And I'm just wondering about is the time compression, is the time scale a factor one way or another? Is it a benefit or curse or both? Double edged sword, how are you thinking about that?

1:44:41

Yeah, I mean I fundamentally left a big platform to bet on startups so I think you're going to get my belief that it has never been a better time to start start startups. And I'm seeing this, this firsthand. I mean just think about the speed at which I can build tools, you know, using AI, using robotics in the physical world, you know, even just Using platforms like stripe and ramp and like all of these. Just like the amount of time you had said monkey with things before is just like free. You can have these tiny 6, 10, 12 person teams, have incredible, 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.

1:45:49

Years.

1:46:25

You started a company six months ago, you would, you would form it differently than if you started it 12 months ago. Because, like, that's, that's prior to, you know, Opus 4:7. And it's just, just an incredible time. And we haven't talked about this. Just like an immense well of talent coming out of SpaceX and Tesla who are just like showing up to these old problems and saying like, oh, we know how to do this, like 10x better, faster, cheaper, starting with, with new technology. So, you know, there's this analogy recently about when electricity first came to factories. You know, we used to build factories with like a central, like steam thing that would spin all these like shafts and you built your entire factory around the structure. When they first electrified, they just rip out the steam thing and put electric motor. But everything else was the same and productivity gains didn't really happen until you just rebuilt the factory saying, actually, I can put an electric motor at every workstation. I can completely reorient the way that the factory works. This is how I think it's happening 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 5x10x wins.

1:46:25

Are you worried we're going to run out of problems in the real world for startups to solve? No, I'm kidding. I do, I do.

1:47:37

No one's ever asked me that one.

1:47:47

No, I mean, it is, it is fun.

1:47:49

Return the funds. There's no more ideas.

1:47:51

Yeah, yeah, just return capital.

1:47:53

We're done.

1:47:54

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

1:47:56

Yeah. Predicting these things, you know, we have two bets in fusion. And the fusion has been there. You know the joke. It's 10 years away every 10 years for a long time. But this time it's different. But so robotics, I think, is quickly going into that zone. I'm really bullish on industrial robotics, and we already use robots, in fact, in car factors all the time. And so the question is, is can you move into, like, slightly less well structured things, like taking a box. If you look at a lot of, like, factories and warehouses, like, there's a surprising amount of, like, unboxing and boxing that happens. I get a box, I get a box cutter. I cut it open, I pour all the stuff out, I get rid of the plastic bags. It's all done by humans. Now, that's a really hard thing to automate with like a cuckoo robot. Like, because 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. Like things that I think are going to be really good because you're still in a controlled environment. I'm not in my house. I don't have a dog running by. You don't have to worry about the robot tripping over my pet. So I think the home is like. 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, and then you're going to sort of see it go out from there.

1:48:40

Spilling wine on your Oculus or your quest, that's a wild time.

1:50:02

That's something you would do.

1:50:07

I'm sure it's happened. You ship millions of them. So. Yeah.

1:50:08

Oh, yeah.

1:50:11

No, no. This is 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, 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.

1:50:12

It's just like, creates a lot of weight and that hurts the product. Yeah.

1:50:32

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. 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 robot, you know, just fell on a. You know, know this is. Or it does like really material damage to an appliance or something like that.

1:50:35

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?

1:51:00

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

1:51:10

Yeah, it's such an interesting thing because solar has gone through the biggest cost decline of anything I've ever seen. And, you know, it's 99% cheaper than it used to be. It's mostly manufactured in China. It's A scaled manufacturing problem. That's not a great problem to go after as a startup where it's like manufacturing scales, China against China, like, good luck. Luck. So, so I think that that, that explains a lot of it. What I do think is going to happen is if I'm just trying to make a, you know, 400 millimeter by 300 millimeter 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.

1:52:17

Sense.

1:53:05

That thing is now the cheapest thing in the field. All the rest of the stuff, the like steel frame costs more than the panel. And so I think what we're going to see, and I'm excited about a couple of startups in this who are saying, like, let's rethink how we actually deploy solar from a form factor, from an automation perspective. And like just go after installation cost and assuming the cells themselves are basically free, it's basically glass, 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 there's, that's to me what I'm most excited about in the next wave of solar.

1:53:05

Yeah. And even from. Obviously there's a lot of geopolitical considerations with us and China, but at the end of the day, a solar cell is not the same as buying a full computer or something that can have spyware on it. It is just a chip there that it's, where would the spyware be? Exactly. And so I think you'll see more hybrid approaches like this, like what Waymo's doing where they're buying Chinese batteries and Chinese steel frames, but then they're putting all the software and hardware on board. Correct. It's a little bit more, you know, less politically dicey, I think.

1:53:36

Yes.

1:54:11

Anyway, last question on fund size, fund structuring. I feel like a lot of these projects are capital intensive for the best possible reasons. How are you thinking about actually participating over time? Do you think you'll be doing SPVs to maintain ownership? Because some of these projects are probably going to be pretty capital intensive. That usually means dilution. Have you thought about that? And do you have a strategy in place?

1:54:11

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

1:54:36

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

1:55:05

And I 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, of interesting progress in the next year and then we'll have lots of different ways to structure how to participate as these companies grow.

1:55:07

Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

1:55:27

Excited to meet more of your companies.

1:55:29

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 tb. How you doing, Nico? Good you to see. See you. Phenomenal.

1:55:31

Long time no see.

1:55:48

Get that overnight success button ready. Overnight success. Another one?

1:55:49

Yeah.

1:55:56

Introduce yourself, introduce the company. Give us the news.

1:55:57

These guys get out of their system.

1:56:01

Hello gentlemen. Hello listeners.

1:56:03

Good to see you.

1:56:05

I'm Nico, one of the co founders here@default.com. most recently default AI. We got a nice URL redirection.

1:56:06

Here we go.

1:56:14

Wait, you are default.com. wait, you're going from.com to AI domain.

1:56:15

We kept a dot com still main domain, had to pick up default AI, have it redressed.

1:56:21

Protect.

1:56:27

Protect.comRespecter. of course.

1:56:27

Yeah, yeah, yeah. How dare big.comRespecter you just the dot com.

1:56:29

No. Very good. Tell us about the product.

1:56:34

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

1:56:37

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

1:57:22

Yeah, John. So we, the way we used to

1:57:41

work

1:57:45

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

1:57:48

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 company AI enabled on the product side, but your engineering teams enabled on the products on the AI side. So I would imagine you'd be able to ship more features like why have you stayed where you are? Do you think that will remain the case? Or do you have ambitions to build out something that looks like a legacy workflow? Is there demand for that or do you see the whole process just sort of evolving in a way that you'll never need to build what traditionally looks like a CRM?

1:59:05

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

1:59:47

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

2:00:42

So I would say really early on we were focused on working with the fastest growing, 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 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, favorite new, recently launched and fresh off the assembly line product and they'd see the little powered by default logo down at the bottom and that drove a ton of traffic for us and got us to where we are today. But you know, it's really interesting. I think a lot of our customers, you know, we serve a lot of customers in, in software, a few in like medical devices, some services businesses, Fintech as well, and more or less everyone, you know, everyone runs into some version of the same problem, which is they've got all these different systems that don't really talk to one another and really kind of create this sort of like data soup or this like Frankenstack is

2:01:28

what we call it.

2:02:31

That just makes it really, really hard to grow. It creates this like growth tax. Every incremental dollar of revenue past a

2:02:32

certain,

2:02:38

past a certain threshold depending on the vertical or market requires sort of army of operations people to maintain the Frankenstack and keep it at bay.

2:02:40

How prevalent is The Franken stack. Because I feel like there's a view of the world that's like databricks exist, snowflakes exist, everyone has this beautiful data lake and of course, course and not only that, Zapier exists and there's vibe coding and you can clearly create these ETL pipelines between everything. Certainly every company has done that. Sounds like they haven't. Is there like a revenue scale or an employee scale where that does become unblocked and does become best practice and then is that moving down into smaller and smaller organizations?

2:02:53

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

2:03:28

Tell us about the round before that please. Seven day work week, five day work week, logo tax day work week. Do you have the default as like kind of a back piece?

2:04:49

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

2:05:02

Yeah, it's nice. Yeah. I mean you got to, I mean

2:05:04

jokes aside, what is the work culture like at default these days?

2:05:11

Yeah, it's intense. You know we've been doing a really hard thing for a good chunk of the last year

2:05:14

project for GTM for BB sets.

2:05:22

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

2:05:25

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 five days a week like you're just going to get smoked. This is real.

2:05:27

Yep, we're we're definitely not on the beach five days a week. I'm too pale.

2:05:36

Too pale for that.

2:05:40

But no, yeah, we, you know, we're

2:05:41

solving a lot of.

2:05:44

A lot of really hard problems, I think. I think we have a lot of really smart people who are really, really excited at solving the growth rate problem and trying to help our customers grow better and faster. A lot of that stuff, a lot of the problems that we run into are a lot of the same kind of boring things that our customers run into on a daily basis. We have the benefit of having really good resources and a lot of great minds thinking about how to solve these problems day in and day out. And yeah, we're very excited about the future.

2:05:45

Amazing. Tell us about the round. How much did you rate?

2:06:16

So. So we did a $10 million last year again.

2:06:20

There we go. There's another one.

2:06:27

Got one more.

2:06:33

Yeah, Sounds like there are a couple.

2:06:33

There we go. There you go. That's hard.

2:06:40

That's a hard one.

2:06:42

That's a hard one. Anyway, expert mode. Great to catch up. Nico,

2:06:43

thanks for coming on the show soon. We'll talk.

2:06:49

See you soon.

2:06:51

Goodbye.

2:06:51

Cheers.

2:06:52

Very fun. That is the hardest one to hit the glasses. Anyway, we have our next guest, Sue Kim from Brilliant. She's the co founder and CEO and she's here with us in the 2D pin ultra. Sue, how are you doing?

2:06:54

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

2:07:07

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

2:07:09

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

2:07:18

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

2:07:56

Yeah, totally. You know, I think that lowering that barrier of embarrassment is huge. That's something that we hear a lot that, you know, the student who would never, ever raise their 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, 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 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. And, you know, if the tutor talks too much and just, like, spits out tons of stuff for you to read, that is worse than the student doing stuff and just sitting in the confusion. So I think it's a combination of how much can you engage the student to actually do the work and then, you know, lowering the embarrassment, improving their motivation and engagement, and just getting to the point where they feel sort of confident tackling these things on their own.

2:08:39

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

2:10:09

How would you call it? Something similar?

2:10:14

Because every. You know, 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.

2:10:15

It's like every company, but. Yes.

2:10:25

Yeah, not every company. There's but let's say like the algorithmic video feed. Right. Like, they wanted as much of our time as possible. I feel like you have a duty to take, to try to make learning as a good, but because it's a positive addiction.

2:10:26

Right.

2:10:43

I want people to be obsessed with understanding the world, furthering their skills, etc.

2:10:43

Yeah. You know, we talk about this a lot. Like, a big marker of success of the tutor is whether or not he can make himself unnecessary. And, you know, the, 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 this 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, like, I find a funny parallel is that on our board is someone who started the dating company Cupid and then he went on and 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. 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.

2:10:50

Yeah.

2:11:51

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.

2:11:52

But I feel like learning is much more. Learning is way more continuous. Like, everyone should aspire to be a lifelong learner, 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 never been a subject that I like, learned about where I've just run out of things to learn.

2:12:00

Well, it's interesting. That happens to me all the time. I feel like I'm like, yeah, but

2:12:26

I'm talking about more done.

2:12:29

I know everything. Well, no, I know everything.

2:12:30

No, but I mean, of course, of course you're joking, but there is specific things where you're like, okay, I've learned enough about nutrition.

2:12:33

Totally, totally, totally.

2:12:38

And I don't really care about it too much, you know, let's say. But like, I've learned the basics. I can move on to the next topic. But there's so many topics for me that's nutrition. Every 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.

2:12:38

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

2:12:53

Yeah, it's very, you know, working with a chatbot to learn is a very proactive process. And it's one of those things where when you use a chatbot, the chatbot gets very little data on whether or not you've actually learned the thing. Like typically the interaction with the chatbot is you ask your question question, you get your answer and the exchange is over. And so for a lot of these like homework help type, learning queries, people answer, people get their question answered and then they leave. And so the model gets back, no data on did the learner actually learn this thing. And 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 to in learning, learning a topic so that we can self improve and hyper personalize in real time. And to do that you have to have a dense user model, you have to have a learning graph. You know, that's not going to come out of a model company anytime soon. The UI UX matters a lot too. It has to be purpose built for teaching with all the features that come along with that. And also, you know, just some of the stuff also has to be purely deterministic. Like you have to be correct 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 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.

2:13:47

Amazing. Where can people get started?

2:15:16

Go to brilliant.org and we have apps as well, the App Store and Play Store.

2:15:19

Great. Well thank you so much for coming on.

2:15:24

Great to finally meet you and congrats.

2:15:26

Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

2:15:28

Thanks.

2:15:29

Goodbye. Before our next guest joins, we have a new release, new information from Sam Sulek. He has chimed in on the debate over should you work five days a week or seven days a week. He says you only need to work five days a week. Don't overdo it. You do not need to work 24, 7 over. Training reduces performance. Most of the time you're not working on the Manhattan Project. Work hard, recovery. Keep some balance. So wise words from Sam Sulek. No, I just took your image and put it in chatgpt. But it actually makes a lot of sense in the bodybuilding. You do need to take rest days in bodybuilding. So it's totally reasonable that that would be something that he would say. But that of course is fake news. That's our fake news segment for the day. Fortunately, we have someone with some very real news joining us. We have Bernie sue, the Emmy winning series creator. 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?

2:15:30

Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Bernie. I have been working in the entertainment industry and tech adjacent industries for over a decade. I've created many shows. Thanks. We created 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, Emma Approved, Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which were the first and second primetime Emmy wins ever for a YouTube show, and the show artificial, which was the first Emmy you win for a Twitch show which also won a Peabody. And it's an honor to be here, guys.

2:16:37

Yeah. Thanks for coming on the show.

2:17:13

Thanks for popping on.

2:17:14

So I mean, rattle off your takes. Okay. So I don't know if my take was that contrarian or anything, but it does feel like we're at an interesting moment where potentially Hollywood is finding a stronger way to work with new media or YouTube than ever before. The Oscars are going to be streamed on YouTube in 2029 and we have back to back to back YouTube. Massive successes at the box office. Something that has been tried loosely before. Can you just get an audience of 10 million YouTube subscribers to show up in theaters? Hasn't always worked out, but this summer it feels like we're seeing positive success stories with obsession, backrooms 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 an important moment than maybe this is something only outsiders are noticing. And it's been a trend that's been going on for a long time. But how have you processed the recent viral news around backrooms, obsession, iron lung, et cetera?

2:17:15

I mean you kind of said it there. I think it's a trend that's been going on for many years. So if you, um, I speak at Vidcon every year for example, and I've asked every year and this kind of the same panel, like when is like you are, 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, I think, you know, regarding say like The Emmys, like Mr. Beast is not a YouTuber, he's a prime creator.

2:18:21

Yeah.

2:18:51

Because he has a show on Prime. That's what he's to going, going for.

2:18:51

Right. So.

2:18:54

So these, this is we're now seeing in movies, as you said. Like now we're seeing it in the, in the last, you know, like you said, the back to, back to back run of this year. Yeah, but this is something that I've been seeing for, you know, five years or so as this ramp up. And you're kind of where you were. The earlier genesis of this was is that you had this era where there was these YouTuber kind of led movies, influencer led movies. The movies probably weren't regarded as great movies, but I think what missed the mark there was that they just kind of plugged and played a dude 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 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.

2:18:55

Yeah, I've heard a lot about this in casting calls these days where actors and actresses will just get asked like, oh well, do you have 10,000 on Instagram or 100,000 on Instagram? And it Feels like that is, 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 bottom box office if a few thousand people buy tickets from your audience of tens of thousands of people, it's more just like, are you serious? And have you figured out the Instagram algorithm to get a bunch of views? What do you think?

2:19:52

Living in LA for most of my adult life, I've been surprised. I've met a bunch of people who work in the movie business, directors, producers. And you'll ask them, 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 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.

2:20:25

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.

2:20:53

No, I know, but no, some people like that are trying to break in. So personally, if I was trying to break into the movie business, I'd get shovel movies, start digging like as much as possible. Even if they were, you know, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, you know, or just figuring out some of these other formats. And like, I think that's like when you look at Obsession. Yeah, that's an example of somebody who like really, really, really, really got their reps in.

2:20:59

Yep.

2:21:20

Even if it wasn't like the format that led to the breakout, you know, like proper, like, like box office hit.

2:21:20

Yeah.

2:21:28

I mean 1,000 agree. I mean, I'll add to that that like right now all these young creators, like you said, breaking in, you are, you are more armed today with just tools like, like not just audience, but audience and tools with like the, if you, whether you're on the AI side or not, with the creative and the gen AI, you have all this automation and all these like, like efficiency points that you can activate.

2:21:28

I mean, and Blender, it's a free open source CGI package. And exactly like. And you go to Skibidi toilet and it's like made and Valve filmmaker and people are making movies in Fortnite and Halo from a long time ago, if you remember. Red versus Blue, of course, another Bernie Burns. And so I guess my big question is Hollywood still has an immense amount of prestige and it's still seen as the Mount Everest of being a creator. If you can have A film on the silver screen and have a box box office smash. That's great. But in terms of economics, the YouTube revenues have to be bigger than Hollywood right now. And I'm not anticipating like a flippening where Hollywood comes back in the traditional sense. But I'm excited by the idea of YouTubers being able to graduate in the more prestigious Hollywood filmmaking scene. But I'm just wondering 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.

2:21:50

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 because there's just so many channels.

2:23:22

Right.

2:23:30

It's like Hollywood puts out whatever, 50 movies a year at most. And you know, YouTubers are doing that. One YouTuber's doing that a month. Yeah, yeah, like, or not movies, but videos.

2:23:31

You get one.

2:23:39

Yeah, yeah.

2:23:39

And so what we're Hollywood's worth of

2:23:40

content like every month basically.

2:23:43

Per minute, per second, whatever. But like, so what you're going toward there as far as the business side of things is the kind of what I call the franchising. Right. So Hollywood is still the best place to like amplify your franchise. Like take something and like send it to a bunch of other places. Okay. So obviously this is a little cherry picking, but like K Pop Demon Hunters is masterful in the sense of that it became a franchise over night. And now the irony and fun of it is that Hollywood trying to catch up to it. It's like, oh my God, we need more everything. We're behind on the toys or behind on the merch, behind on the videos. We need another series right now, all that stuff. So it kind of comes hand in hand and you'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 been 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.

2:23:45

Yeah.

2:24:48

And that's successful, that counts.

2:24:49

Yeah. Probably more totally.

2:24:50

Like, maybe even more. Right. So like going kind of what they call transmedia. It's a weird term, but like, if they can jump to different formats and different avenues, that's where the. If you're coming with the money, like, that's where the real franchise ability of this thing comes from. And YouTubers, if anything, are actually way more nimble. Not saying they're better. I'm saying they're more nimble at this than Hollywood because. Just because the map that the definition of how small their teams are and how fast they can move versus these giant corporate behemoths which have tons of resources but have all this bureaucracy that could slow the system down. So that's where we're seeing this kind of not a clash, but it's like an evolution as this goes forward, where I would imagine that if you're trying to franchise out one of these guys, these movies, it's like, it's like, all right, let's show you how we do it, but let's also kind of get out of your way, let you guys do what you do too, and see where we land.

2:24:52

What do you think? What do you think Obsession will do for low budget film funding? Like, 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 out there and so rare that people won't try to replicate it?

2:25:49

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

2:26:12

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

2:26:45

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

2:26:52

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

2:27:14

And 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.

2:27:26

A team is also saying no. A list actors. Usually it's weird to see a Marvel star in a horror movie.

2:27:47

Yeah.

2:27:52

Why don't a list actor?

2:27:53

Because it's more relatable. Because if I see Tom Cruise there, I'm like, he's not gonna die. But if I see some, some no name actor, I'm like, oh, that, that person could go next. I don't know who's gonna be the, the last one standing.

2:27:54

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

2:28:05

I mean, I don't know about 1 million, but we're going to Stephanie see some, that's for sure.

2:28:19

Okay.

2:28:23

The question is whether they're good or not or. And all that. But it's like going back to your, the. I think with horror you can bring the budgets down. Like you have to pay Tom Cruise, right? You can bring Tom Cruise and you're going to pay everybody. 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 name star or someone with a big following to do this? So it's like, it's a bit, it's a business play. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's historically the case. Like look at any horror franchise. It's rare to even see any type of list, B list, whatever recognizable star even headlining it. Like look at, you know, the latest Final Destination. Right. That's a seven movie franchise, I think. And it's like even the seventh movie didn't have a really anybody. Any household names that were in there. Screams a little bit of exception, I'll give that. But like kind of built its own. Yeah, sure.

2:28:23

Yeah, sure, sure.

2:29:16

When. How long until. Until you think we see a hit in theaters that had. Where 90% of the budget was AI compute.

2:29:17

Whoa.

2:29:25

A hit? Can you define hits?

2:29:26

A hit is like over 30 million. Over 30 million at box office and

2:29:29

over 3x return on budget or something like that.

2:29:34

That's a good question. I mean, I think we're gonna see 10 in.

2:29:37

They get 30x.

2:29:40

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

2:29:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so we AI and the lot was literally last week and there was a lot of stuff that came out of it. Right. The Amazon announcements and like the Hicksfield movie.

2:29:48

Sure.

2:29:56

Heat check. I think. I'm sorry if I misnamed it. Like That's a. That's 100%, I think, or 90. It qualifies. As far as your compute power situation. 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.

2:29:56

Sure.

2:30:14

Like if you're going to go for it. 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's AI like most of the. Most of the public, worldwide audience just wants to be entertained.

2:30:14

Sure.

2:30:28

It just want to entertain like if it's. If it's real or not. Like we've been watching CG movies for generations. It's like we saw me entertain. 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 on the left 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. And like we're just trying to Build entertaining experiences. So to me, like it's, I would say it's sooner than later, except for just that, that X factor of the vitriol. Like I just don't know how to predict that one.

2:30:29

Yeah.

2:31:09

Of when it will be.

2:31:10

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. And it could, that's why I think it potentially comes from somebody that nobody has heard of before.

2:31:11

There's also, there are also. It might be like an AI movie that could break through because it's either like self referential or making fun of AI or, or doing something in a different way. Like Toy Story was about toys. It wasn't replacing actors with cgi. And so there's 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, you could maybe massage it a little bit more to get there. And maybe you don't jump straight to like you were expecting Tom Cruise, but it's just an AI version of Tom Cruise. Like that's probably going to be pretty poorly received.

2:31:29

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 at Pickford, we're building. We showed Experience last week over at Sony, which was basically 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 my colleagues in the, in the filmmaking and AI spaces we talk about, well, what's more exciting is not just, hey, let's make an AI movie. What can I do to juice up the form of art and narrative that we couldn't have done before? Not, not a cost thing, like a possibility thing. Right. And so when you have a series like what we're trying to build, which is interactive, which can only be done because of live prompting audiences in theaters on phones now you've driven the experience to the theater which we're going to self plug do at Alamo Draft houses around the country this year now we're not going to, I doubt we're going to generate $30 million, you said as be a big hit. But you know, we've proven at least in our small sample sizes that we can provide an in theater communal entertaining experience. Be interactive, be consequential. As a paid ticket even. And we're using AI tech and it's just like it's entertaining. Yeah. Animation may be kind of a little wonky at times. The tech is very, very like it's calling all this complicated data and all in real time. Yeah, yeah, sure. But at the end of the day, we are entertaining and that's what we are in the industry first and foremost. All the tech aside and all the business side, that's what we're here to do. Right. If we're not entertaining, classic Russell Crowe. Are you not entertained? What are we even doing here? So that's where I look at it.

2:32:08

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

2:33:56

If you needed a scene of a car driving past. Welcome to usa. Generate it with a Google Map.

2:34:45

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

2:34:52

Yeah, I completely agree.

2:35:13

I completely agree.

2:35:14

So it's like I have this thing where I say like, AI is not going to game us out. Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones. Like we're not. It's not going to do that. Like AI can do things really fast and you can fill buckets really 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 artists will probably incorporate some little bit AI but it's not going to end to end that little green screen. And then on Your side with customization, I really do think that's. Selfishly, I do think that's the play. Because AI is really good at speed and optimization, and it's really hard to do customization without speed optimization. So now you're playing to the advantage of the technology versus the disadvantage, which is the sloppiness that we're getting to. Okay. So not only on your side with the Pasadena example, which I think is an amazing, amazing example of customization for possibilities, got me thinking about it, actually. I also think it's about consequentiality, which means that did you feel like you impacted it? Right? Like, did you feel like while you're watching the movie, did you do something? Does it. Maybe it's an. I think 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 heirs and everything, they're already growing up with like, a parasocial relationship to their content.

2:35:14

Sure.

2:36:23

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 we're going to go. 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.

2:36:24

Yeah.

2:36:42

Make a horror movie that I can pause if it gets too scary. I think you can pause and get. No, no pause. And if I pause, you sense it and you just tone it down a notch.

2:36:42

Oh, tone it down a note. It just gets less. Less scary.

2:36:52

And if you let it

2:36:56

like a nature document, I mean.

2:36:58

I mean, you could have a movie that you have a separate volume button for. Like, I want G rated because I

2:37:00

don't want to get.

2:37:04

I don't want to get spooked. I don't want to get too spooked.

2:37:04

I somehow think that would break the. Break the experience. Anyway, lots of fun. Lots of new projects coming. Well, thank you so much.

2:37:07

Great to meet you, Bernie. I'm excited to see your new project.

2:37:14

Yeah. Come back on the show when you launch it. We'd love to talk about more.

2:37:17

Happy to. Looking forward to, guys.

2:37:20

Fantastic. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. We have some more updates from Sam Sulek. He says Hollywood isn't losing, it's teaming up. YouTube creators are no longer outsiders. They're the next franchise. Gatekeepers are gone. Discovery happens on YouTube now the best stories and the biggest audiences are moving into theaters. Wise words, wise words. He also weighed in on star startup tattoos. We have another one here. Sam Sulek hot take. This is a whole format now. The Sam Sulek hot take is going viral in his young LA tank top here. You don't need to get your startup logo tattooed. Even if you were an early employee. You do not need to work 24 7. Overtraining reduces performance. Most of the time you're not working on the Manhattan Project. He continues. Fun times. Also, Sam Sulex very first post on x5000 likes 260,000 views. It's just him with a fish. Check this thing out. It's beautiful. Catfish.

2:37:22

Check this thing out.

2:38:20

Looking good.

2:38:21

Dream guest people ask guests. Yes, this would be a good dream guest. Hands down.

2:38:22

Thank you.

2:38:29

Sam Sulek on AI really enjoyed him on hyperscalers. The build out capability overhead.

2:38:30

He's been working on a build out for years. He's going fantastic. Some of these AI CEOs could learn a little thing or two from him.

2:38:37

That's true. That's true.

2:38:43

Build out yourself before you build out. That data center approval rating will hire

2:38:44

the wrong build out.

2:38:50

You're worried about the wrong builder.

2:38:50

You're worried about the energy bottleneck. You should be worried about a protein bottleneck.

2:38:53

Exactly.

2:38:56

Your own energy protein shortages.

2:38:57

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

2:38:58

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

2:39:20

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. Adam Faze also hired a sketch artist for a party. He said, I'm so tired of how many experiences of my life have now been taken over by phones and content. So for my birthday party this year, I told my friends to leave their phones at home and had a sketch artist capture the night instead. I thought this was very, very cool. Wildly different and like all of these can be printed or framed. I mean I guess they're physical pieces of art, but they could also be replicated for the partygoers. Very, very cool. Analog. This is why vinyl records are at an all time high. There is demand for both the content barbell, this is very cool and the artisanal handcrafted sketch artists from Adam Faze. Very, very cool.

2:39:27

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?

2:40:23

What do you do for a living? Was he amused?

2:40:35

Mildly.

2:40:38

That's what you aim for.

2:40:40

I was more amused by my own bit anyway.

2:40:41

Oh, last thing. Arena Match arena magazine is dropping issue number 008 at sea. They're covering deep sea mining, shipbuilding, undersea cables, maritime autonomy, autonomy, island building, American sea power, and so much more. Best enjoyed near a body of water with a cold drink in hand. Shipping to subscribers now. Go check it out. Arena Mag, one of our favorites. You can subscribe to get the issue@ Arenamag.com we love the folks over there. So much more to talk about. But we will see you tomorrow at 11am Pacific. Have a great rest of your day. Have a great week. And it's June. Leave us five stars. It's June.

2:40:45

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

2:41:21

What was surprising about that? We said that on the intro.

2:41:23

I know. I mean, it's just crazy to see it.

2:41:25

It's June. It's June. Another month.

2:41:27

Time flies.

2:41:29

Another month. When your podcast leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for their newsletter@TPPi.com and we will see you.

2:41:30

It's been an honor.

2:41:37

Tomorrow.

2:41:38