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- [00:01]
John
You are watching TVPN.
- [00:03]
Host
Today is Tuesday, April 28, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Realm, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. We got a quick show because John Gray from Blackstone's joining. In 20 minutes, we're gonna run through a bunch of stuff I wrote about this in car surveillance thing. It's going viral. It's sort of fake news. We gotta sort of truth zone it. But also it's coming and it might not matter because if you get in a robo taxi, there's definitely gonna be a camera on you. But the fear is centered around this idea that there will be a requirement for from the federal government that every new car sold in the United States will be required by law to have technology. Uh oh. That puts constant surveillance on the driver. And this is happening sooner than you think. By 2027, that's just 12 months away. AI in your car will determine if you're sober and fit to drive, automatically turning off the vehicle.
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John
It's almost May, by the way.
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Host
I know. We're what, eight months away, I guess, from 2027. This is the real AI 2027 problem. This is a big problem.
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John
We are having audio issues. It's most likely a nation state. Potentially possible. We are under attack. We are working on it.
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Host
It's like watching a dubbed foreign film. Well, maybe we can play this video of what happened the last time America tried to pull back on driving a car while intoxicated. And some of the response, some of the backlash from any attempt to restrict
- [01:38]
John Gray
drinking and driving here is viewed.
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Host
Can we pull this up? Okay, we're working on it.
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John
Anyway, the production team is being humbled this morning.
- [01:46]
Host
Humbled. Anyway, let me read through some of my take and then we'll play that funny video. So. Sounds scary. Okay. John Axley says audio sounds good to me, for what it's worth. Let's go. Let's see. How about this? Does this sound okay? Does this sound okay? Does this sound okay? Does this sound okay? Hopefully it all sounds good. Yeah.
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John
Let's play this video.
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John Gray
Drinking and driving here is viewed by
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Shira Lazar
some as downright undemocratic.
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John Gray
It's kind of getting common this when
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Host
a fella can't put in a hard day's work, put in 11, 12 hours
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John Gray
a day, and then get in your
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Host
truck and at least run one or two beers. They're making it laws where you can't
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Shira Lazar
drink when you want to.
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Bubble Boy
You have to wear a seatbelt when you're driving.
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Host
Pretty soon we're gonna Be communist country.
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Bubble Boy
Communist country.
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John
When was that? Was that the.
- [02:36]
Host
Apparently that's real. I've seen that video before. I always thought it was fake. I didn't realize that that was real. That feels like 80s, 70s, something. 80s. Okay. Well, there was backlash then and there's backlash now. Some of it's a little bit overblo. Sounds very scary. Constant surveillance. The real crazy version is a camera that's watching you at all times. The government, the police, and the automaker can just turn off your car whenever they want. That sounds bad. What's actually being proposed? What's actually on the timetable? So the rationale for this is good, and I think most people would agree that it is a reasonable thing to do to try and curb alcohol related vehicle accidents. Drunk driving. There's more than 10,000 alcohol alcohol related deaths each year on US roads. That's a ton. Anything we can do to stop that, reduce that. Totally worth working on, totally worth pursuing. As long as it doesn't violate a whole bunch of other liberties or create more problems than it solves. Right. We want net positive impact here. Technology is getting better at detecting intoxication and it's getting a lot cheaper. So why not just ship drunk driver detection, Detective Drunk driver detection system with every car from the factory. That's the proposal. There are a bunch of potential downsides that we can get into, but it's important to get set the fact straights about set the facts straight about where we actually stand today. So the core concept here is generally correct. Congress did pass a mandate directing the NHTSA to create a standard for advanced drunk driving prevention technology in new passenger vehicles. Now, the 2027 date that people are citing, that's not a hard deadline. The law was passed back in 2024, and in the actual law, it basically allowed for delays. So they said the NHTSA will only issue a binding mandate requiring automakers to actually roll out this tech when the tech is ready. And the NHTSA currently says that the technology is not ready. So in theory, the tech feels close, but the scale of the problem is so big, you can see why there's a delay here. Alcohol detection systems exist and are typically deployed for drivers with DUIs. You're familiar with blowing in the tube? Probably. Hopefully not. But the problem is that those little hoses that you blow into, those are active systems. They require you to actually sit there and do that for a minute. The government doesn't want that. That's not what the proposal is.
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John
They want passive.
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Host
They want passive, which means breath sensing. So there's just like smell o vision. Basically, if it smells alcohol, it doesn't turn on the car. The other one is fingerprint reading. So you put your finger on the start button and it scans into your finger and sees how many alcohol particles are inside. I guess that sounds sci fi, but we're close. I guess there's a couple other ways you can solve that. And then camera system, just look at the driver. If they look drunk, then don't turn on the car. So all of these seem like they could be close to being roughly accurate right now. You can imagine an AI startup or a university lab putting something together at a hackathon that's 90% of the way there, maybe 99% of the way there, maybe even 99.9% of the way there's. But the problem is that Americans drive a lot. The rough estimate is that there are almost a quarter trillion driving trips per year in America. It's basically every American, all 350 million of them, basically taking an average of two trips every single day of the year. So 224 billion trips a year is what the rough back of the envelope I did was. And what that means in practice is that if this system is 99.9% accurate, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results every year. And the fact that probably 99.9% of these trips are not inebriated, like, drunk driving is not 50% of trips. It's not 1% of trips. It's a very small amount.
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John
People would abuse this new system. It'd be like students being like, sorry, I couldn't make it to the exam.
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Host
Dog ate my lunch. My car wouldn't start because of a false positive on this. And so even if you're at 99%, you're still looking at tens of millions of incorrect results. The vast majority of those are gonna be people who are sober. Somebody wants to get in their car for their morning commute, they're a little sleepy, or they wore some cologne that triggered some sensor system flags them as intoxicated and prevents them from starting their car. And it's infuriating. The tech will probably get there with enough time and effort. So it's worth looking into who supports this and opposes it. The mandate was actually bipartisan, but there's starting to be a backlash from libertarian conservatives who are worried about Orwellian government controls. There's an idea that there will be a remote kill switch, which leads to a bun of dystopian possibilities that is not in the current Provision. That's not what's actually being proposed right now. But you know, it's possible that at the end that the end result of this process of back and forth, you do wind up with that exact capability. And so people are worried about the system going off while you're driving at speed on the roads and then the car just shuts off and you get in a crash. And that's like actually more dangerous than potentially the alternative. And so the middle ground seems to be what's called pre drive lockout.
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John
We need a tinfoil expert because the tinfoil enthusiasts have been saying that the sort of remote.
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Host
Are you using tinfoil enthusiast to mean conspiracy theorist? I've never heard that before.
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John
It's good though. That's a new one.
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Host
Yes.
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John
So tinfoil enthusiasts. Yes, will definitely, well, have been making, have been claiming that the remote shutoff button has existed forever.
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Host
Oh yeah. Since the, since the 1985.
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John
So when some sort of like, you know, witness or something like that just gets in a very inconveniently timed high speed wreck, that is shut down.
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Host
Oh, okay. I was unfair conspiracy theory. It's interesting though. But yeah, so I mean the current like consensus is around maybe pre drive lockout being the more moderate solution than actually shutting the car off once it's driving. Still incredibly, incredibly inconvenient if there's false positives. And then you also do still run into some potential negatives. Outcomes where you go to the beach, you have a couple glasses of wine, you're not planning on leaving, but then the tsunami warning goes off, you need to get back in your car and your car says no. Like I don't care that there's a tsunami. I don't care that there's a tsunami. You have had two glasses of wine, you're at 0.08, you can't drive right now. And you need to tell the car, well, in this case I'm okay with driving drunk because the tsunami's coming and I'm at the beach and I had a couple glasses of wine and the car won't be able to potentially deal with that nuance. Right. And there's a whole bunch of other. And there's a whole bunch of other scenarios that could potentially play out where the just judiciousness is difficult but potentially unlocked AI agents.
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Bubble Boy
I don't know.
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Host
You ask these models, what would they do in some certain scenario? Maybe there's a solution.
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John
Yeah, I think there's a much stronger argument for rolling this out. As soon as the average vehicle is just Full self driving has, has full self driving capability.
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Host
But then, but then you don't need it because you can be as drunk as you want.
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John
No, I still, I still think there's going to be this big window where you're not going to be able to. So maybe specifically because if you need, I don't know, as long as somebody needs to sit in the front seat
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Bubble Boy
of their car
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John
in any type of situation.
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Host
I like the idea of level four self driving. You get in the car, there's one button you push to say, hey, just put it in self driving mode. I've had a couple drinks, don't let me take the wheel.
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John
No matter how hard I try to negotiate.
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Host
It's all disabled. It's just Playmobil level. But then there's a second button and for that you have to do a full blood transfusion. They centrifuge your blood and make sure that you have the purest blood possible to take to take the wheel and be able to actually drive the vehicle.
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John
Maybe something there.
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Host
I did have a take on this though, which is that Doug Demuro, friend of the show, founder of CarsandBids.com has always talked about the eras of cars. You know, the air cooled Porsches, then you have the fully manual, no electronic systems, no stability control, no traction control, those types of cars. Then you get into the manual gearboxes, the no turbos, no hybrid systems and then the modern supercar era. It's just a bonus if it's not a full electric car. It's like, you know it's going to be a hybrid, but is it? At least there's an engine of some sort. And that's what car collectors are sort of marking these moments where it's like it's the last manual, it's the last non, you know, non hybrid supercar made by Ferrari or something like that.
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John
Yeah.
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Host
And there's going to be a world where you're like, oh, that was the last one that didn't have the camera that looked at you 247 or whatever. And I think it creates this like new class of like vintage investment. Investment grade, maybe not investment grade, but certainly something that people, I mean you can already see people reacting to this. Even though the post is like a little bit overhyped, you can already see people reacting to it being like, I got to buy a 2026 and hold on to it forever and keep it in great condition because I don't want that. But anyway, there's been a pushback on this stuff for a long time. Tyler do you have anything on. On cars? Are you old enough to drive? I was just thinking, like.
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Apoorv
Like, what do you think the premium
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John
is for a car that you can
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Host
still like drunk driving? I think your car is going to go through.
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John
This is not even worth joking about.
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Host
Yeah.
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John
Anyway, bad joke. Move on.
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Host
Moving on. What else is going on? Oh, we got to talk about the GPT 5.5 prompt for Codex, which seems to have a duplicated line trying to get it to not talk about creatures. Tyler, you dug into this. What is actually going on? Yeah, so it just seems like there
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Apoorv
was some emergent property of the new model where it always tries to talk about creatures and.
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John
Goblins, raccoons. Yeah.
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Host
Ogres are in there.
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John
Trolls, ogres, pigeons. They had to counteract this, right?
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Apoorv
You have to put it in the system prompt, tell it not to do this.
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Host
Where is this? Creatures. Do not talk about. Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user's query. This reminds me of those old image prompts where there would be a negative prompt that specifically said, do not put six fingers on the human's hand. But what a weird one, and what an odd line to throw into a coding agent. Like, do we know anything else about this? If people dug into what is actually going on here, I mean, it might
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John
not be just the coding agent.
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Apoorv
It's probably just the model in general,
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John
but it's the model itself.
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Host
It's Goblin mode.
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John
The model itself yearns to discuss creatures. Goblins, raccoons. It is an emergent property of Superintelligence
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Host
vi says they had to put this in due to my effect on the company. Goblins, creatures sort of followed me in through the front door when I joined, and we are only just now starting to understand the downstream effects of their presence. And Thibaut says, never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it's absolutely nothing.
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John
There's so many.
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Host
If you know, you know.
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John
So somebody says, my 5.5 Kodak said Goblin with a flashlight when referring to a bug fix yesterday.
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Host
What? There's a billion Goblins inside your model weights. You just have to get them out, says Tyler Cosgrove. Anyway, we can dig more into that. There's a whole bunch more OpenAI news that we can go in to throughout the show today, but we are very fortunate to be joined by John Gray. He's the president and COO of Blackstone. And he's in the waiting room. And we will bring him into the TVP Ultradome. John, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.
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John Gray
Great to be with you guys. I've never had a preamble on ogres and goblins. Very exciting.
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Host
We are in odd territory, odd times with the AI Boom. I'm sure we'll talk about all sorts of different elements of it, different machinations in the global economy, but I'd love to start with a little bit of background on you. I know you've been with Blackstone for a long time. I'm fascinated by the decision to join what the firm was like when you joined and how it's evolved over your tenure.
- [15:24]
John Gray
Well, I came here in 1992, straight out of college, straight out of Penn. My senior year in college, I met a young woman in romantic poetry class and a month later I got a job. And now, 34 and a half years later, same woman, same firm. So very simple, very boring. And when I joined this place, it was small. We had 75 people. We had a small M and a advisory business. And then we had an investment business with $750 million of capital. And it was exciting because we were doing the private equity business and investing. And you flash ahead to today and we've got a firm that manages over $1.3 trillion. And it's been a remarkable rise. Exactly. It would be hard to imagine because when we started at the firm, when you go to meetings, you'd have to tell people what Blackstone is and what we do, and that's obviously changed quite a bit. And credit to the founders, Pete Peterson, Steve Schwarzman, who continues to drive things today, they just had a vision that they could do more. And the alternatives business, private markets was a tiny industry and it started in private equity. But Steve in particular had this idea that we could do other things. So we went into real estate, where I moved after about a year at the firm. We expanded into hedge funds, ultimately into credit, and later on into infrastructure and growth equity to the point now where we have this massive scale and can give almost any sort of capital solution in the private markets. And I'd say the key thing that's really changed is what was a very much of a niche business, serving a small number of endowments and pension funds and just doing a high octane investing in private markets, private equity, real estate. Private equity has evolved today to serving insurance companies and individual investors and sovereign wealth and all different people around the world and doing things at high returning strategies and low Returning strategies all around the globe. So. But the most exciting thing I'd say is that the firm has stayed remarkably constant, that the commitment to excellence around the place to drive the entrepreneurial spirit, that's what it allowed it to grow. And it still feels like, even at this scale, like we're running a small business, which is not what maybe your viewers would expect, but we still have tons of pride of ownership doing the right thing for our customers.
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Host
And.
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John Gray
And we know at the end of the day, the only thing that ultimately matters is that we deliver great performance. If we don't deliver a premium to our clients, they're not going to come back. And so everything's focused around that and obviously operate with integrity as well.
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Host
Yeah, I want to talk about the entrepreneurial DNA of the firm. It feels like the partnership is extremely entrepreneurial. That's definitely a core value. As Blackstone's grown from one strategy to 80 strategies, 80 plus strategies, I think what is the process for standing up a new strategy? How organic is that? We've seen venture capital firms go from they were doing Series A's, now they're doing growth equities. They just sort of like bleed into the other strategy. And I'm wondering if there's a more deliberate process where there's someone on the team who's going out and exploring, finding a new opportunity. Or you notice that, hey, we're doing a type of. We're engaged in a strategy and we actually need to sort of split this off and it's like cell division.
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John Gray
I think it's all of the above. There is no master plan, but somebody comes along to us. In fact, yesterday we got a call about an opportunity in an area that's adjacent to something we do where we don't have a focus. It was somebody who wants to give us a serious amount of capital and said, hey, would you be willing to do a business? So in that case, it came from sort of reverse solicitation. Obviously, when we were a smaller firm, you didn't get a lot of those. But I would say it was always this sort of basic idea of adjacency where we were doing something. You know, you're doing private equity, you're doing real estate, and infrastructure sits right in between those two. Or you're doing, you know, higher risk debt capital, but maybe we can move a little more senior. And then ultimately you move to very senior capital. And the same thing in real estate, opportunistic, then more stabilized than debt. And I think the key is, can you use the intellectual Capital, that's really one of the great assets. It's the people here and all the insights. And if you think about investing as pattern recognition, which is you connect dots. If you have a broader platform and you can connect a bunch of dots, then you can be better at these adjacent things. And you end up serving the same customers who would prefer you to show up and say, oh, you can do private equity really well and you can do real estate and you can do credit. I'd love to work with you. We really trust your organization. But the key is there's got to be a market opportunity. You've got to be able to deliver that return, and then you've got to have the people to do it. Right. Because the worst thing is to say, oh, there's a great opportunity. I can raise money for SPACs. Right. And then you raise tons of money and you end up not delivering for the customers. So the standard has to be, can we deliver a premium return? Do we have the expertise and do we have the people to do it?
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Host
Yeah, I'm sure we're going to talk about artificial intelligence, but is there a second macro trend that you have locked on to? That is an overarching thesis. I mean, we've been following the peptide boom and what's going on in GLP1s. Like, there are big stories in financial markets.
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John
Broadway or manual manufacturing is another lot of interesting.
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Host
And I'm just wondering if there's anything else that's actually.
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John Gray
Yeah, I give you a bunch. Yeah, I mean, and we spend a lot of time trying to be thematic. You know, one of the things I've learned over time as investors is you're so focused on your model. What is page 52 of the model? This assumption, whatever. But when you look back over time, I often say it's the first paragraph that matters. What's the basic business, the industry you're going after? Definitely matters. Who your management team is.
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John
But the theme.
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John Gray
Right, the theme, the right neighborhood makes all the difference. I don't care if you're the greatest investor operator in the world. If you buy department store chains or legacy media companies. Right. There are just businesses where the winds that you're in your face and you'd love to do things where the wind's at your back. Now, you can still overpay. You could have the wrong business model in a good neighborhood, but your chance of success is much higher. So as an organization, we're constantly saying to ourselves, what are those things? And so to the question, I'd say there are Some basic ones. There's a global shortage of housing since the gfc. We've been investing against that. We've been selling goods obviously really now for 25 years, increasingly online. Owning last mile logistics has been an incredible business because every time you buy something from Amazon it goes through one of these last mile logistics hubs. There are geographies. India has been moving towards capitalism. You know, more physical, legal, capital markets, infrastructure and so building a great team. They're investing in the right sectors. That has been an unbelievably successful theme for us. Japan has really reemerged in the last three or four years. Is a place that's open to foreign capital, that's allowing companies to restructure, allowing people like us to take companies private and that's creating a lot of energy and excitement. You mentioned life sciences. I mean if you think about this AI and the number of products that can be created and yet it's all still going to have to go through phase three trials. And we've got a big business that does just that. We love that. That's an area where obviously human beings are going to continue to invest a bunch of capital. The physical world, the re industrialization is massive. Probably the biggest theme beyond the data centers for us today, which we can talk about, is what's happening in electricity. I mean all of the things, the data centers, the robots, the autonomous vehicles that re industrialization, it all needs power and it's everything from LNG to renewables to pipelines to electrical equipment to utility services. The way to think about it is you try to find some great thing like data centers.
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Host
Yeah.
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John Gray
And then you turn it upside down and say what are all the inputs that go into that? Or today, sadly, defense feels like it's going to be a massive tailwind business. Right. Every country around the world is going to be spending more on defense. And so I think as investors getting your heads around that and positioning your portfolio in private markets or public markets and to say these are the areas I have the highest conviction, the best is when you can find something one derivative off. Because today, as you guys know, the hottest things tend to get really high multiples. But can I find that thing that's not quite as sexy? And for us, of course, the data centers have been an unbelievable way to play it, then you get the benefit of this without necessarily having to pay a huge price.
- [24:54]
Host
How are you grounding the your thesis around artificial intelligence and the growth there? Like are you. Obviously there's a million data points about revenue and multiples and valuations. And there's a lot of good news no matter where you look. But do you ever zoom out and look at how you at Blackstone are using artificial intelligence, the value that you're getting for it, where it's working, where it's not working, and use that to sort of level set on how real, how impactful this technology will be?
- [25:29]
John Gray
Absolutely. I mean, I think the thing driving us is seeing the power of this technology as it gets deployed. Now. I think all of us are frustrated that the technology is so powerful, but getting it inside of companies is hard.
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Host
Yeah.
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John Gray
It's sort of the beaker to bedside problem in clinical trials. Right. Like we've got this great medicine. How do we get it to the patient, how do we turn it into something usable? That is the challenge. But we are definitely finding more and more use cases. The first thing I'd point out at our companies, their LLM spend and we have, by the way, we have 270 companies, 13,000 pieces of real estate. It's massive in its scale. Our company spend on was up 15 fold Q1 of this year over last year. Now it's off a small base.
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Host
Yeah.
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John Gray
But it tells you what's happening.
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Host
Yeah.
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John Gray
And all of these companies are trying to find ways to be more efficient. We own an accounting firm. They're trying to make obviously tax and audit much more automated using this technology. We own Ancestry.com and they're trying to do things with content creation, which is telling an immersive story based on your family history as opposed to just giving you a bunch of dates and geographies and so forth. And by the way, content creation a lot of ways is the easiest, you know, coding music, movies, because it's not. The rules aren't as important. Probabilistic works better than, you know, software is great because it's deterministic. There's yes or no.
- [26:58]
Host
Yeah.
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John Gray
But content is the easiest place we're seeing pickup. But I could go through. We have a company that does lab grown diamond grading and of course, we're viewing these things visually with the AI is improving the efficiency of that company.
- [27:13]
Host
Yeah.
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John Gray
At Blackstone, we're trying to make our investment process better, take in all this data from what we have in the outside world, look at our historical memos, read the diligence that's here and say to the teams, these are the areas you should focus on. It's not making the decisions, but it's a tool that's making us much more efficient. So I would say to us on the Compute side, it still feels like it's very early days in the implementation, but we can see particularly in rules based businesses, you know, transaction processing, legal, what is a billable hour going to be? This feels like the path of travel in a big way, but I think it's taking more time than most of us would hope.
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Host
Yeah. How have you been processing the idea that certain moats might be eroded, there might be more confusion, more competition in certain sectors of the economy going forward? Is the moat section of every investment memo getting longer these days? How are you investigating that?
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John Gray
I would say the uncertainty SAC section of every one of these memos is getting longer because investing is hard. And what you did historically was look at, you know, 10 or 20 year history of a business and industry and it just may not apply. Right. And we've seen this in the past, right, the Yellow pages, which I may be dating myself with you guys, but used to get a plumber opening up your yellow pages. Find them. When the Internet came along, they disappeared. Taxicab business, which still exists, but obviously when Uber and Lyft showed up, it changed the world in a really profound way. Now the issue is in 50 different verticals they're going to be impacts and how do I think about it? Autonomous vehicles, which reduce the accident rate by 95% on serious accidents, like won't that happen? And what does that mean for collision repair? What does that mean for auto insurance? So I would say the areas of greatest risk today are obviously in sort of the white collar world. It's the software, it's professional services, information services. And there you're spending a lot of time trying to understand what the world may look like. And as a result what you're beginning to see both in the public markets, in the private markets, I describe it almost like the Red Sea parting, where obviously there are companies viewed as a winners. Could be alarms, application software, could be the digital energy infrastructure. That's easy. Then there are companies in the physical world that are pretty unaffected. We took a company, Medline, public at the end of last year and it's in medical supplies. Manufacturers distribute some no impact basically from this and that's easy to underwrite. And I think what you're going to see, I think you'll see a recovery, for instance, in an area like real estate that's been very much out of favor the last four years because of higher rates and a bit of overbuilding. That's going to come back as people are going to say, oh, that warehouse that's going to exist, that hotel is going to exist, I think sports, obviously. And so I think there's definitely a tendency from investors now to look at this physical, unaffected AI world, certainly the benefiting world. And then this other area is fascinating because some of these companies could end up being very attractively priced and they may need to change their business model, but they have real incumbency. So we have a business that does revenue management for hospitals, helps them with their billing. Basically. What do you charge for certain procedures? Now they need to incorporate AI into the business. But if they do that, they should be a winner because they have the trust of their customers and that's super valuable.
- [31:00]
Host
Yeah.
- [31:00]
John Gray
So I would just say the risk levels on investing have gone up. But I also, at the same time, the opportunities have gone up as well.
- [31:08]
John
The upside, how's your recall on your thinking around the.com era? There was very similar fears around how the Internet Internet would disrupt different businesses. We had Rick Caruso sitting here yesterday and we were asking him about this, and he's like, I never thought my category of retail would go under, even though at the time everyone was projecting that, like, hey, why would somebody go to the store to get something if they could get it shipped directly to their house? And so, yeah, I'm curious if you've reflected back on that era when you started your career and kind of tried to understand where you had good intuition where you were maybe off.
- [31:48]
John Gray
I think it's a great analogy. And Rick is a very good man. It's funny, if you look at retail, I think that does resonate with what we're talking about in software. So if you go back 25 years ago, you know, just as the bubbles bursting as Amazon starting to become a marketplace for everything, you could have said retail will be an apocalypse. And by the way, Sears, Kmart, Toys R Us did not make it.
- [32:18]
Colin Zima
Yeah.
- [32:19]
John Gray
On the other hand, Wal Mart, I think it's up sevenfold. Costco's up like 25 fold. TJ Max is up 40 times and has $180 billion market cap.
- [32:31]
Host
That's crazy.
- [32:32]
John Gray
And for those companies that won, they either had something that was infrastructure like groceries or had a great value proposition, really understood their customers. They found a way to navigate it. And I think that is the kind of way to think about what's coming to so many businesses, which is if they just sit and operate the way they have, they have enormous vulnerability. If they do something and have a market position that's protected, you know, they can end up doing much better. In terms of my own accuracy, I Think I probably at times may have been too negative on some of the retail, if I look back at it. And some of it obviously ended up thriving and doing quite well. And so you try to have a little bit of mental flexibility.
- [33:26]
John
Yeah, well, it's good to have a mental model of like, am I looking at a. Am I looking at a Sears management team or a Costco management team?
- [33:33]
John Gray
Yeah, it makes all the difference in the world. I've been the chairman of Hilton now for almost 20 years. And when Airbnb came out, which is an amazing business model they built, a bunch of people are saying it's the end of Hilton. Whatever. You know, the stock has been a rocket ship. Christine said, the CEO has done an amazing job. It had a differentiated business model. It offered something fundamentally different. And so both of those companies ended up thriving and doing great. So I do think that is the hardest part today because the technology is moving so quickly and is so capable. It's making it harder. What I would say as investors is anything in this AI uncertainty world will see these multiples come down because people are. Until there's a sense that there's terra firma, that, hey, this business model is going to survive or may end up thriving. But right now, I think people are taking a step back, and I do think there'll be some baby thrown out with the bathwater. They'll end up being some software companies that you could buy at very reasonable prices. But this is the sort of stuff. The other thing I would just point out for us, because of the risks that exists, one of the easiest ways is to be in the picks and shovels. So invest in that electricity, invest in those data centers, because you don't know who's going to win of the incumbents, who's going to win of the new model companies. But you do know they're all going to need a factories are all going to need power. And that for us has been really the biggest strategic pivot we've made. And we think it's going to pay huge dividends for our investors.
- [35:08]
Host
Well, we appreciate you taking the time to hop on the show today. We've kept you already five minutes long. We would love to have you back and go way deeper. This was a fantastic conversation.
- [35:16]
John
Let's do it again soon.
- [35:17]
Host
Have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon.
- [35:19]
John Gray
Hey, it was an honor to be with you guys. You have a great show. Take care.
- [35:22]
Host
Thank you. You're the man. Up next, we have Colleen Aubrey from Amazon Web Services. You know, it as aws. She's the SVP of Applied AI Solutions here with us in the waiting room. We'll bring Colleen into the TVPN ultradome in just a minute. Last question I wanted to ask. We didn't get a chance. Was the barbell strategy. I wanted to hear his take on this idea that you have Josh Kushner buying the giants the most legacy thing possible, the AI labs, and then you have Ellison owning Bugs Bunny and a bunch of data centers. And it's this weird new normal of you buy the oldest possible thing that is resistant to any sort of disruption and then the exact opposite. But we are joined by Colleen Aubrey from AWS in the waiting room. Let's bring her in to the TVPN ultradome if we can, and let's give it a try. Hello. Welcome to the show.
- [36:24]
Colleen Aubrey
Good morning. Thank you.
- [36:25]
Host
Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what's going on Today with AWS.
- [36:32]
Colleen Aubrey
Sure. So, Colleen Aubrey, been at Amazon for over 20 years now and joined AWS two years ago. And I've been on this journey of looking at how can we bring to life some of the operational expertise that we've developed at Amazon into agentic products and put them in the hands of AWS customers. And today was really sort of great to announce two new products. Connect Decisions, Amazon Connect Decisions, Amazon Connect Talent. We announced Amazon Connect Health a couple of weeks ago and this really expands the family of connect products that we have adding to Amazon Connect Customer, which is a nine year old product that we've been developing.
- [37:13]
Host
So can you help me understand? I think most people will be familiar with AI chatbots and many people will be familiar with AI agents and coding agents that they fire off a prompt and maybe it goes for five, six, eight hours sometimes and then comes back with a fantastic response. But when you're deploying an advanced model, a frontier model, an agent, into an enterprise system that's deployed on aws, what are your clients looking for? How are they thinking about integrating an agent into a platform? Is it that they're vending the agentic workflow to their customers in turn? Can you walk me through some of the examples of how enterprises are actually deploying agents in practice, when most people are probably familiar with the more point solution, they type the prompt themselves.
- [38:07]
Anthony
Yeah.
- [38:07]
Colleen Aubrey
Well, let me first start by saying that I think we're early in that journey.
- [38:12]
Host
Yeah.
- [38:12]
Colleen Aubrey
And certainly in my conversations with customers, a lot of what I hear is people looking to automate processes sure. And so, and for me, what that triggers is that the mental model is looking at how work gets done today and then putting AI to work to do that same process. And personally, my point of view is that that misses the bigger opportunity. I think the bigger opportunity is much more transformative. And we can't assume that how we work today is the sort of gold standard for how we might work when we have this new capability in our, in our hands, which is to be able to develop fairly complex agentic teammates that can work alongside people in the business. So we're really going after this mission of how do you develop an agentic teammate which is in the business with people and is actually transforming how work gets done and, and do that in a way which is intuitive and natural so that transformation doesn't come with heavyweight change management. And so we really have gone back to the drawing board and trying to think about how will work happen in a number of different areas in decision making, within supply and demand planning, in health care, in recruiting and in customer journeys.
- [39:29]
Host
Sure, sure. I feel like AWS's strong suit has always been understanding complex systems, being able to deploy a ton of resources, but then also being able to monitor, understand everything from cost to performance. How is that changing in the age of AI agents? I imagine if I have a bunch of digital workers doing stuff, I want a water cooler where I can tap someone on the shoulder and say, hey, how's it going? I want analytics on how to different work processes, even if they are fully automated, are continuing and progressing. What does the analytics stack look like in the future?
- [40:10]
Colleen Aubrey
Yeah, I think that's a good question. And certainly in the agentic teammates that we're building, there's a good amount of thought that we put into the observability, the trustworthiness, an AI's energetic teammate's ability to explain why they've taken some action, why they've come to some conclusion, the reasoning that they've gone through. And an example of that is in Amazon Connect Health. In this case, we're working on behalf of providers preparing sort of summarization of a patient's history before they meet with the patient. In that case, every reference, every conclusion is traceable into labs, into previous visits, into medications, so that the physician in this case versus Builder and SD has the opportunity to be able to observe the work, to be able to reason over the work, to be able to also course correct as necessary. And so for me, I'm really much more thinking about how I make an agentic teammate trustworthy and part of the team and that that observability comes to life in different ways. Of course, under the covers, we have to solve for price performance, we have to solve for latency, we have to solve for, for managing the efficiency of deploying many agents under the COVID to be actually be able to deliver the experience. And that's something, some of the hard work that we're doing on behalf of customers.
- [41:33]
Host
Yeah, I feel like it's potentially underappreciated and maybe this is a side, an outgrowth of the fact that the first AI models that most people interacted with were sort of low powered chatbots that did hallucinate. But the hallucination problem has, at least to my experience, basically gone away. And it feels like the next challenge is actually educating people on the reliability, the traceability that you mentioned. And of course, I'd be interested to hear a few different. There's a whole bunch of different projects that you can embark on to build confidence around the traceability and reliability. I did have one last question though. I want to. Since you've been with Amazon for 20 years, I'd love to know how has the company changed? How has it stayed the same?
- [42:25]
Colleen Aubrey
You know, I think certainly for me, this sort of passion for inventing on behalf of customers has remained pretty consistent through like the time that I've been at the company. And so really going deep to understand a customer problem, but then also pulling back and asking ourselves, is there a better way? Is there is. Can we invent a way of solving this problem which is meaningfully better than what exists today? And do we have a new unique point of view about how we would do that? And that's really what we're trying to do with this Connect family of products, is really ask ourselves honestly, what is the unique capability, the unique operational experience that we have that we can bring to life? And I think that has remain consistent otherwise, you know, Amazon's always evolving, always changing. And you know, our businesses go through inception, they go through scale, they go through reinvention. And now is a great time for all Amazon teams to be thinking about reinvention and how do they deliver their products and services to customers. Now we have this new AI capability on hands and it's exciting to see the energy around that. And I feel sort of like sort of just freshness in the organization as we go through this next phase.
- [43:39]
Host
That's great. Well, thank you for coming on the show and congrats on the progress. We'll kick it over to Anthony next, have a great rest of Your day. We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Anthony, who is a VP and distinguished engineer at AWS as well, to continue our segment on AWS and detail a little bit of the OpenAI integration and new stateful runtime for Agentix systems. And so we have Anthony in the TVPN Ultra room. Anthony, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- [44:08]
John
What's going on?
- [44:09]
Anthony
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.
- [44:11]
Host
Thank you so much for taking the time to join. There's been a lot of discussion back and forth and I think it'd be helpful to start with just like a 1 on 101 of what is a stateful runtime. How are you thinking about agentic systems? I think everyone knows LLMs are next token predictors. Maybe they're stochastic parrots, but how are you thinking about the capabilities that come from this?
- [44:33]
John
Yeah. And then how does that tie into the announcements today around some of the new models being available?
- [44:40]
Host
That's great.
- [44:41]
Alex Epstein
Yeah.
- [44:42]
Anthony
The best way I would describe it is that we've seen an evolution of how folks interact with these AI models over the last few years. It started out exactly as you mentioned, with just token prediction, early completions. API from OpenAI was exactly this. You give it a string, it gives you some more strings. These APIs have advanced over the years to where that string starts to get parsed and you get tool calls or you get reasoning or you get other kind of capabilities. What we're seeing now with agentic development is that folks are taking those tool calls, executing tools, performing things like compaction or extracting memory. This is a super powerful mechanism and this is really the thing that has caused at least my career to dramatically change in terms of productivity and what can be accomplished now. And I think the next phase for AI, I truly believe is taking a lot of what we've learned in the coding space, where most of what's happening is happening locally on a person's laptop or maybe their development machine, and making that be deeply integrated within the cloud where real enterprise applications live and getting all those same benefits. And so what we announced with Amazon Managed Bedrock, or sorry, Amazon Bedrock Managed agents, powered by OpenAI is a new API that really has three parts. The first part allows you to create what we call a runtime. You can think of the runtime as the definition of the agent. This contains skills which tell the model how to do new tasks. This includes tools like MCP servers that you want to configure or other built in tools and a memory policy you can tell it how to maintain short term memory or long term memory or whatever new memory mechanisms might come over the time. Then the next part, and this part is really the special bit is the environment today when most people are using tools like codecs, they're running them on their laptop and the agent effectively lives on your laptop. That's good and bad. It means you can do all the things that that person can do. But it also means that agent doesn't have its own identity. You can't create agent specific policies. And a lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to strike the balance of enabling these agents to work, but also making sure that you can set the right guardrails on them. Environments in Bedrock Managed Agents really solves this. It allows you to give a dedicated compute environment for that agent, it allows you to create specific policies around governance, and most critically, it gives that agent a unique identity within aws. So as a security team or an administrator, you can create policies around what that agent can can do. We think these things are absolutely critical to enable agents to be used in real world enterprise applications. Then finally there's the Inference API. The thing that you actually talk to the agent through. That API is very familiar to existing APIs, like the Responses API from OpenAI. A lot of existing applications can just work. Once you've created this agent,
- [47:43]
Host
can you reflect a little bit as a, as a distinguished engineer on.
- [47:47]
John
Wait, wait. Before we move on, if I'm an AWS customer today, what should I do to experience what you just described? Because it was a lot of corporate lingo, which I love. I'm an enthusiast, but I want to like. What would be your recommendation of the Given this new set of capabilities? Capabilities, what should I try doing to start? What kind of value might be unlocked in the organization in maybe a more straightforward way?
- [48:23]
Anthony
Today, Bedrock Manage Agents is in limited preview and that will expand over the next coming weeks. You probably have to wait a couple of weeks. But in order to actually use this, it's really as simple as making two API calls. So you can go into your AWS account and make an API call to create a runtime. Then once you have that runtime, you decide what type of compute you want to associate with the agent. Then you make another API to create that environment. Once you've done those two API calls, that's it. You now have an endpoint that you can take an existing tool. It can be codex, it can be a web chat based system, or you can just use the OpenAI SDK and integrate it deeply within your application, but it's really that simple. It's just a couple of additional API calls and then you're off to the races.
- [49:08]
Host
Interesting. How are you thinking about the different roles of engineers right now? There's been this trend of managers and CTOs becoming individual contributors at labs, and then simultaneously there's been individual contributors who are effectively becoming the manager of many agents. And so we're sort of going both ways. But where is the highest leverage point for someone who is on the distinguished engineer path? Like the ultimate individual contributor? But the world is changing.
- [49:41]
Anthony
Yeah. I can tell you that in my role, I am coding almost every day.
- [49:46]
Host
Okay.
- [49:47]
Anthony
I took the day off today to come and do this event, but I'm spending almost all of my time coding. I'm having probably the best time of my career. What my experience has been with all of these coding tools is that once you make coding fast, once you make the actual art of generating the code quickly, what really matters is your understanding of algorithms and data structures, architecture patterns and things like that. So I think what you're finding is that a lot of very senior ICs folks that have a deep understanding of software architecture are now able to do really amazing things because they understand how to prompt these models in a way to be able to generate new things.
- [50:27]
Host
Is it less frustrating? Are you having the most fun you've ever had?
- [50:32]
Anthony
I've always felt in my career that I was limited by typing. I don't mind typing. I love writing code. But you can think about a problem and you can think about solutions and then you're like, okay, this is going to take me weeks to actually implement. That's just something I had always become resigned to, is that it's going to take me weeks to solve that problem. Now I think about the solution to that problem. I do some prompting in codecs and I have the solution by the end of the day. And that is so incredibly rewarding. As an engineer.
- [51:05]
Host
Yeah. That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.
- [51:08]
John
Thanks for breaking it down.
- [51:09]
Host
Absolutely.
- [51:10]
John
Great to meet you.
- [51:10]
Host
We'll talk to you soon.
- [51:11]
Anthony
Thanks for having me.
- [51:12]
Host
Have a good one.
- [51:12]
John
Cheers.
- [51:13]
Host
Goodbye. Up next, we have Colin Zima from Omni. He is the co founder, the of and CEO Building a Semantic Layer Powering AI Driven Analytics.
- [51:24]
John
Do I blink?
- [51:26]
Shira Lazar
Do you.
- [51:26]
Host
Do you not blink?
- [51:27]
John
Apparently not, but I was blinking at them once I saw that.
- [51:30]
Host
Oh, yeah. They've been asking me to.
- [51:32]
John
You weren't imagining it with two hands? I was communicating.
- [51:35]
Host
Have you been picking up on the chat Coke with two hands thing? They demand that you pick.
- [51:40]
John
I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to do that.
- [51:43]
Host
You stared them down, said no, I saw. But I oblige every once in a while with the two handed Diet Coke. If I see somebody who's like, oh, they're not reading the chat, drink the Diet Coke with two hands. If you're reading, I'm going to sip a diet Coke with two hands. Anyway, our next guest is in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP and ultra dome. Colin, how you doing?
- [52:03]
John
I'm great.
- [52:04]
Host
Welcome to the show.
- [52:05]
Colin Zima
I can do a two and a drink for you.
- [52:06]
Host
There we go. There we go. He's reading chat. This is great. Introduce yourself, introduce the company. Tell us the the news.
- [52:13]
Anshul Gupta
Yeah.
- [52:13]
Colin Zima
Colin Zima, CEO at Omni Analytics. We are building the next great data platform. So a product that can do everything from AI to spreadsheets to dashboards. We're trying to consolidate all of BI into one tool and we're doing it on top of a semantic layer. So a layer that can explain how everything in the business works so that AI does stuff reliably.
- [52:32]
Host
How generalizable is the semantic layer? Like this has got to be some trade off because the different businesses have different ontologies. How, how are you thinking about creating something that's flexible but simultaneously uniform?
- [52:46]
Colin Zima
So I mean, on the one hand a semantic layer is actually pretty straightforward. It's just a bunch of text about the business. So if I'm going to go write a semantic layer for ChatGPT or Claude right now, that is what the skills framework looks like. It's a document that has lists of stuff about the business and that is completely unique to every single company. On the flip side, we've had semantic layers in data for 50 years at this point. And it's the specifics of how all the tables in a warehouse fit together and what we're doing is just bridging those two worlds together. It's completely specific to every business. Yes, exactly. Like a snowflake or a databricks.
- [53:22]
Host
Yeah. I imagine that there's still a world for databases in the future. How are you thinking about that? Do, do migrations get easier or changing schemas get easier in the future? Does this get harder because the data is just so much more? How are you thinking about the evolution of databases and how you'll use them?
- [53:41]
Colin Zima
Yeah, I mean using sort of public trading as a proxy for this. It seems like the data warehouses have found A nice middle ground in between the SaaS apocalypse and the pure play AI companies, we need somewhere to hold all them of the data. And so I think the databases will probably be here for a long time. I think what has gotten interesting is that picking up your data infrastructure from one tool and moving it to another tool has gotten substantially easier. Like SaaS used to have a good bit more lock in than it does today and you still need a database that's holding all the stuff. But the portability of it I think is the new question.
- [54:21]
Host
Yeah, is there a piece of this pitch that cost driven? Because with some of the advanced models it feels like if I just threw a million dollars of compute at a problem, I can have it go and parse through every PDF and use an API to turn it into text and turn it into CSVs and write custom python for it. Just to answer the question of what was revenue last month? That feels inefficient. It feels like this is a good solution. But is that the goal or is it something faster? Speed, cost, everything?
- [54:55]
Colin Zima
I don't think that we started there, but I think that to your point, savvy people are sort of coming around to this because on one side these models are smart enough that you can just sort of throw it at Google Drive and Slack in your warehouse and you can actually answer every single question. So you can get 80% of the way there with literally no thought. Which on the one hand is a little bit scary building a data company because it's sort of like again, why don't you do this? I think to your point, you probably don't want to reinvent your ARR metric every single time you query. Ultimately, if it's a one second answer that you're going to ask every single day, a dashboard is probably a pretty decent place to go. Get that we don't need to rebuild the dashboard on the fly every single time. People are starting to come around to realize that this is a cost performance optimization problem. It turns out that the analytics products that have existed for the last 20 years or 50 years or whatever it is, actually do have some sort of good solutions to these things. I think at the same time trying to fight the idea that you can just bring ChatGPT to the warehouse and get an answer is a naive version of building product. Now every single person is going to compare your SaaS product to sitting the thing on the warehouse or just setting it up yourself and doing it in Claude. And so figuring out that balance is the goal of every SaaS company. Now and cost is a part of it.
- [56:19]
Host
Okay, bit of a hot take I want you to respond to. There is like a muttering around like AI psychosis in the enterprise, like people vibe coding, like things that don't actually create value yet. And there's a question about what's the useful token spend versus just the explorative sort of formative token spend. I think there's a lot of real stuff to be done, but there's also some crazy, just some crazy internal tools that are just like self perpetuating. And it reminds me of people had dashboard psychosis. Like a decade ago I worked at a company where somebody was like, oh, we need all the, every dashboard, we gotta have every metric. And I'm like, you kind of just oftentimes you have a question and you just need to go answer that question. You don't need to be checking what's the website traffic on my website every single minute. Sometimes that's not useful, sometimes there's already a dashboard for it. So how do you think about rolling out dashboards or analytic products that are actually effective and what coaching needs to happen versus just raw consumption?
- [57:25]
Colin Zima
It really comes down to pragmatism. So the example I love to give is Guitar center is a customer of ours. They have sent spreadsheets to every single store for the last 30 years that have every single SKU and like the week over week, day over day sales. That's not a process that needs reinventing. Like they're going to send the spreadsheets to the stores for the next 25 years. You need products that can do that. You're also going to have a dashboard. Like I want to know what our plan is and I want to go compare like our ARR on a weekly basis to where it is relative to plan. You're also going to just have a question that you need answered that you didn't predict in advance and need to go answer questions. And I think the challenge is that every vendor sort of has this point of view that's like, you know, dashboards are the way or tableau was. Visualizations are the way to do everything. And then I was at looker and semantic layers were the way to do everything. And I think what you see is that there's a little bit of truth in all of these things. And quite frankly right now it's AI is the way to do everything. And we're into, you know, how many billion tokens can you spend to go answer your question? We probably want a tool that does all of those things and Actually makes them fit together.
- [58:30]
John Gray
Yeah.
- [58:31]
Colin Zima
And it's sort of like the. It's not the sexiest pitch. You know, every single thing that you are doing is right and you need a little bit of all of it. But I think that there is space for pragmatism in the world where we can invent things on the fly sometimes and that is a great way of doing it. And we don't need UI and we had good UIs and they do things and, you know, websites are good and we can go back to them again. So it's both.
- [58:55]
Host
It's not the sexiest pitch, but it was sexy enough to get the Series C done. How much did you raise? Tell me about the round.
- [59:02]
Alex Epstein
120 million.
- [59:06]
Host
Five one post valuation.
- [59:09]
John
Massive.
- [59:10]
Host
Massive.
- [59:12]
John
Could you give us a quick history of the company? When did you actually start the company?
- [59:16]
Colin Zima
Yeah, February 22nd. So four years and a little bit old. We raised about $27 million as we got the company started. Did our B about 12 months ago at a $650 million valuation. So we're building for about a year and a half and we've been selling for two and a half, so business has been pretty good.
- [59:38]
Host
Fantastic.
- [59:38]
John
And what were you doing before this?
- [59:41]
Colin Zima
I was at a company called Looker that got acquired by Google.
- [59:43]
John
So you feel like a very direct
- [59:45]
Colin Zima
competitor to my previous company.
- [59:48]
Host
You know what you're doing. Well, congratulations on the progress.
- [59:51]
John
I love the chat. Loves the pink, by the way. I love the pink, it's great. Are you guys like fully just. Are you going to own pink?
- [59:58]
Colin Zima
We embraced the pink. We sort of fell into it.
- [60:01]
John
I think it's so smart.
- [60:02]
Colin Zima
We were going to a conference that was all blue and gray and one of our marketing leaders was like, hey, wear some pink, people will notice.
- [60:09]
Host
You stand out.
- [60:10]
Colin Zima
And then we just turned into a pink company, so we embraced it.
- [60:12]
Host
Fantastic.
- [60:12]
John
I love it. Very smart.
- [60:14]
Host
Well, congratulations. Thanks so much for taking the time
- [60:16]
John
to come chat with us to meet you, Colin.
- [60:17]
Host
We'll talk to you soon.
- [60:18]
Colin Zima
Thanks for having me, guys.
- [60:18]
Host
Have a good one. Goodbye.
- [60:20]
John
Up next, interesting username. I didn't get to ask him about it. It's at drinkzema. It sounds like some type of like cool caffeinated beverage.
- [60:30]
Host
Yeah, that does. It's a Zo coconut water.
- [60:33]
John
Get a very cool caffeinated energy.
- [60:35]
Host
Maybe that's the next job, the next thing he can buy. Sobey, bring it back. Up next, we have Alex Epstein, the author of Fossil Future, Live in the TBPN Ultra Dome, taking us through what's going on in the world, what's going on in energy markets, what's going on, going on with opac. Great to see you again, Alex. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down to the TV pin Ultra Dome. Please get us up to speed. What should we be paying?
- [60:59]
John
Look at this. Black on black.
- [61:00]
Host
You look fantastic. Oh, thank you.
- [61:02]
John
Good with the hair too.
- [61:04]
Alex Epstein
Oh my God. Do you guys remember what we talked about last time?
- [61:08]
John
The straight.
- [61:08]
Alex Epstein
The straight.
- [61:09]
Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [61:11]
Alex Epstein
So by the way, interesting fun fact about AI. So I think most of what I said last time was vindicated in terms of the main thing was this strait needs to open and there's no substitute for it. And there's all these other little things you can do, but nothing compares. And that's still true. I would add you need to enduringly open the strait. So if you cut a deal with Iran and they have control over it, even if they give you control for a year or whatever, then you've actually made the situation way worse than it was before the war where everyone figured we really have control over the strait. But fun fact, since you're talking about AI tokens. So in preparation for that, in addition to consulting experts and thinking about the issue, I have my own internal AI called Alex AI Pro, which I've invested over a million dollars in and oh yeah, it's nuts. So to talk about. And one of the things I've invested in Istack. I don't get enough compute. Yeah, yeah. I don't get enough computer compute from off the shelf AI. So you need. If you can run your own agents, then you can do it. So that query, which I think led to very valuable content was 48 kilowatt hours. So that's half a Tesla.
- [62:21]
Host
Yeah.
- [62:22]
Alex Epstein
Wow, think about that. That's three powerwalls.
- [62:24]
Host
Yeah, yeah. For one query that's a ton.
- [62:27]
Alex Epstein
So yes, I now use.
- [62:29]
John
How long was that running for?
- [62:31]
Alex Epstein
10 or 20 minutes.
- [62:33]
Host
What? That's crazy. And what is it doing? Pulling data from the Internet, pulling it together.
- [62:40]
Alex Epstein
It's really God mode. I'll show it to you sometime. Well, actually, so here's an announcement. For the first time, a version of that AI is now free to everyone who works in government. So it's Gov Alexepstein AI.
- [62:53]
Host
No way.
- [62:53]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, yeah. So at some point it's free. If you use too many tokens, we'll have to just charge you costs beyond that. But yeah, I mean, I have a lobbying firm which is the only pro freedom lobbying firm, the Energy Freedom Fund, which is a 501C4 that I'm the unpaid president of. And I figure like one of the best ways to spend those dollars is to give people a pro freedom AI. So I'm not going to make any money off those queries, but I'll at least cover our compute costs. So this is a real world example of. I believe that if you know how to intelligently integrate AI, you can make use of a lot of energy.
- [63:27]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [63:28]
Alex Epstein
And very profitably.
- [63:29]
Host
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, of course. Because like the results that come from good research or good policies and good consulting fees and all sorts of things.
- [63:37]
Alex Epstein
But you need to train it. So a lot of the work is just literally breaking down everything I do and my researchers do. I just built one today, which is the policy validator, which is anyone is free to send us policies and we'll lobby for them in proportion to merit, not in proportion to payment. We don't take payment for this kind of thing.
- [63:56]
Host
Interesting.
- [63:57]
Alex Epstein
But I needed to replicate, hey, I have these two really brilliant researchers and then I'm pretty good. And we have some other pretty good people. How do you break that down? And it turns out there's about 25 questions you need to ask to get the credibility of the people. Is this a pro freedom policy? Is this going to increase energy abundance? Are there better ideas if you know how to really do it, you can get. And you have human validators at the end of it. It's wild in terms of what you can do.
- [64:25]
Host
Okay, let's start with. There was on the strait, there was this interesting piece in the Economist that was arguing that the market was simply not processing or digesting the fact that even if the strait were fully open today, there's still a massive shortage of entities energy that is effectively delayed and that that would have ripple effects on the economy, inflation, all sorts of things. How have you processed the impacts, the downstream impacts? I think a lot of people see it at the pump when they go and fill up their cars. If they drive gas cars, it's starting to show up in other places. But how are you thinking about just what's at stake? Why the strait being open is important from first print.
- [65:09]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, I'm very sympathetic to that argument. It would be just miraculous if it didn't get a lot worse in terms of prices. I mean, you're dealing with a situation we talked about last time. You have a certain amount of spare capacity. So international agencies released a lot, a reasonable reserve in terms of their oil reserves. But these are all very temporary measures.
- [65:34]
Host
It's like 30 days here, 90 days, there's 180.
- [65:37]
Alex Epstein
Yeah. And there was already a bunch of supply.
- [65:39]
Host
Yeah. No one's sitting on 5,000 days of oil.
- [65:42]
Alex Epstein
And the thing you have to realize is in America, we are very America centric. So we don't even think about Canada, let alone Asia. And a lot of what's happening with the Strait is oil that is intended for Asia and Asian consumption. Now the Chinese are in an interesting situation because they did build up a bunch of spare oil. Now there's questions of other things they need like sulfur and helium that go through, through the Strait. And I've heard interesting claims about that, but we're already seeing in Asia various shortages. And one analyst that I like likened it to, okay, you're starting like one part of the Titanic is starting to fill. And not everyone on the Titanic realizes this is happening. But you're cutting off a huge, whether it's 14% or 20% or whatever, you're cutting off a huge percent of global oil supply. And that cannot last. And even if you solved everything today, it takes a while to bring it back, of course. And right now we're in ceasefire mode, which is not creating enduring. That doesn't enduringly open it up.
- [66:45]
Host
Yeah, I heard, I think it was Rahm Emanuel was saying that the Gulf states do not want Iran to have a veto over the Strait even if the Strait is over opened. Now the conversation has shifted to what does it take that America is potentially responsible or is being held responsible for removing that veto?
- [67:10]
John Gray
Right.
- [67:10]
Host
Is that your perspective?
- [67:11]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, that's my perspective is it needs to be enduring. So in advance of this, there was the idea that, hey, if America ever goes into Iran, obviously we're going to keep the strait open. Obviously we're going to prioritize. That unfortunately did not happen to the extent that it did. I mean, there are different people in the administration, but overall, I mean, we have to just be objective. I'll praise them where they deserve praise, but they were not prepared for this in terms of whatever the final decisions were. I think within a week of our last interview, not because of our last interview, but just talking to people in the administration, they all became very clear that Hormuz is non dispensable. Before that, there had been people saying, oh, we have Venezuela, we have all. And it's just all nonsense.
- [67:51]
Host
Yep.
- [67:51]
Alex Epstein
So they understand.
- [67:52]
Host
We talked about that with Venezuela, it's like 1% maybe.
- [67:55]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, one, you might get to one
- [67:56]
Host
now at some point you might get to 1%. And we're talking about 20%.
- [67:59]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, we're talking about years.
- [68:00]
Host
Are there 30 Venezuelans? No, in years there's no one to do business with.
- [68:04]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, yeah. So it's like they understand the importance, but it's still in this mode where Iran now is known to have. Look, Iran has proven that they can control the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the US cannot obviously counteract. So if we cut a deal with them where they, again, where they can use the same power to stop us anytime they want, then it's not open. Open is a little bit ambiguous. Like it can be open momentarily, but it's open on their terms. So basically you need, without giving any strategy, because I don't know the exact strategy it needs to open on our terms. That's the only way you have a victory.
- [68:46]
Host
Let's shift to opec. Can you give me a primer on opec? It's the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
- [68:53]
Alex Epstein
Yeah, yeah. And now it's OPEC and opec.
- [68:57]
Host
So yeah, take me through the history and the importance of cartels.
- [69:01]
Alex Epstein
I think the easiest way to understand this. It's important to understand cartels. And I think people have a uniformly negative view of cartels, which is plausible but a little bit exaggerated.
- [69:12]
John
So you take the people that aren't a part of cartels.
- [69:14]
Host
There's no I in cartels.
- [69:16]
John
Yeah, exactly.
- [69:17]
Alex Epstein
Well, so you think about the. If we look at the early oil industry where Rockefeller is criticized as a monopolist and we created this thing, the Sherman Antitrust act and other things to prosecute so called monopolists. And I'm totally against these laws for any number of reasons. I don't think the government should not be able to create monopolies that it enforces by force, saying hey, there's one producer nobody can compete. But nor should it be able to say, hey, you're really successful in this market. And so I've decided that you're too good. One of the things that people will
- [69:50]
Host
counter with is well, what if economic deadweight loss.
- [69:54]
Alex Epstein
What do you mean?
- [69:55]
Host
Just the idea that if you actually do control 100% of a resource, you can charge dramatically above market rates, which reduce demand at and wind up having less human flourishes because you have less energy produced in fact.
- [70:11]
Alex Epstein
Yeah. So what happens in practice is like if you look at what happened with Rockefeller, so Rockefeller, his focus was refining. You look at the early people in the oil industry, the different producers, what would happen is oil prices are decent, then you get a flood of new oil on the market and People just get wasted, they get ruined. And so what does that do? That disincentivizes people from investing over time because the volatility is so high. So what Rockefeller was basically able to do is he said, okay, I'm going to buy you up. You're exposing yourself to way too much risk. I'm going to buy you up. I can run everything much more efficiently. And so in the long term we can have something that is A, profitable and B, has much lower prices on average than the very volatile situation. And in fact he dramatically lowered prices. So the interesting thing, so you could think of Rockefeller, they call it, it's in a sense a cartel, but it's a free market cartel, which I think should be able to exist, but you can call it.
- [71:06]
Host
Yeah, and I believe that's in the Sherman Antitrust act in some ways, like you have to prove consumer harm. And this is why.
- [71:12]
Alex Epstein
Well, after versions, I mean it's very vague, it's like no comp, you can't do restraint of trade, which, what the hell does that mean? And then later they have these different things. And I have a lot of reasons for being against it, but it's notable that, but the volatility is a really, really big thing in oil markets historically. And that's why people, whether or not you think free market cartels should exist, as I do, you have to understand why these things exist, why any cartels. OPEC is not a free market cartel. But why these exist is because the volatility is just so, so high and oil is so, so valuable. So people want steady oil, but. And they want people to be comfortable being in the oil business instead of just getting wrecked all the time and getting thrown out. So we had this era of Rockefeller and then that was broken up. And then we have in the United, the United States had something called the Texas Railroad Commission, which basically cartelized America, was the dominant producer. And so they did these things that basically rationed how much everyone could produce. So the term that's often used is swing producer. The U.S. was the swing producer, which meant that they could basically control the supply in the world. And in particular, if there was a cut in demand for some reason, they could cut supply. And if there's a huge increase in demand, they could increase supply. So that happens until the Mideast starts to boom. And then the Mideast starts to become the swing producer with the rise of Saudi Arabia and others having very low cost oil. And so then you have the era of opec, but then you have fracking and so for a little while, the US Becomes the swing producer in the sense of we have unrestrained production, we add a lot of oil to the market, and what happens at a certain point, prices crash, there's over investment. US Consumers benefit hugely from fracking. But a lot of these companies just get wrecked and then they start doing what they'd call fiscal discipline, which functions as a restraint on supply. Even though they're not doing any kind of cartel activity. They're basically saying, hey, we're not going to produce if prices go below this, we're not going to keep increasing our production, et cetera, et cetera. So the reason, if you take OPEC right now and OPEC plus, they have a lot of reasons, even though there's a lot of unethical stuff. And I don't think the government should own the oil and I think they stole the oil. But if you just understand how they're thinking, they do not want a. They want to sustain a certain level of price. So you have the different swing producers, particularly Saudi Arabia and then uae, who we're talking about, they want to keep. Like what happens if there's excess supply on the market relative to demand? They will cut. This is the key. They will cut their supply as a swing producer to keep prices high, because if they don't, then prices will go low. And that will have a ruinous effect on many people, including U.S. shale, by the way, because we have higher production costs, but including these economies that are dominated by oil. So you take Saudi Arabia, they're so dependent on oil and they have all of these alleged green ambitions that are totally fueled by oil, and they have all these welfare schemes that are totally fueled by oil. UAE is a little bit less dependent. So the interesting thing about UAE saying they're going to withdraw is can they sustain this if there's a supply glut? Right now there's a supply shortage. So it's easy to say we're going to leave OPEC because there's no need from their perspective to cut supply and then everyone will take all the supply they get. And Saudi Arabia doesn't really care if UAE produces more now. But when there's a supply glut, is uae, are they going to stay out of OPEC or is Saudi Arabia gonna be able to pressure them back like they've done? Because Saudi Arabia can say we've got the most oil. We can just flood the market, too, and ruin you.
- [75:05]
John
Is there a history of major suppliers leaving and coming back?
- [75:09]
Host
I don't know.
- [75:09]
Alex Epstein
I mean, there's at least been threats like Saudi Arabia has been able to use a lot of force. Now they've been able to do that in the past. But the argument, so there's an argument that the UAE won't stay out of OPEC because Saudi Arabia can pressure them back in when there's a supply glut. There's also an argument that UAE has become more disentangled from oil now than it used to be because it's diversified its economy, it doesn't have all the welfare obligations of Saudi Arabia and therefore it can call Saudi Arabia's bluff. Now people will say both UAE and Saudi Arabia have incredibly low production costs. So it's very cheap for them to bring a barrel up from the ground. But they don't just have the production costs, they have all the governmental costs of actually how they're obligated to spend that oil. If Saudi Arabia spends $5 a barrel on oil, say that doesn't mean at $100 a barrel they get $95 profit because they have to finance all these schemes that they're involved in. So that's going to be the interesting, that's going to be interesting thing. The other interesting thing is, so if UAE stays out, here's one. If they stay out, they're going to increase production, let's say on some timetable this Hormuz thing gets resolved, then it's plausible in the next few years, at some point you'll have a supply glut because you'll have added a million and a half barrels a day on top of everything else and you won't have a corresponding increase in demand and you won't have some other decrease in supply. So it's possible that this could dramatically lower prices, which would be hardest for US shale. Now, long term, I believe the best estimates I've seen is longer term, we're actually screwed in the other direction. We've had all of these anti fossil fuel policies that have disincentivized long term investment in oil. And oil is really hard to sustain. People need to remember oil depletes over time. So you don't just take the same well and keep tapping it the exact same amount. You have to do what's called reserve replacement. And there are many credible arguments that our reserve replacement has been incredibly inadequate in the ESG era. And that takes a few years to show up. But that's actually my biggest fear. My biggest fear. I'm afraid of Hormuz keeping prices high, but I'm really afraid of insufficient reserve replacement with high Oil demand, because you're talking like $200 barrels, you're drilling new
- [77:26]
John
wells, or you have to drill so
- [77:29]
Alex Epstein
much, you have to replace so much. And the oil supply is so politically driven. There's so much oil in the world that you could harness if everyone had the policy of the United States under Trump and under a friendly Congress. But most of the world has these national oil companies. We've had ESG all over the place. It's been hard to finance things. I mean, as recently as 2021, think about this. The International Energy Agency said there should be no new oil and gas development financed. So we could be really screwed in terms of higher prices.
- [78:00]
Host
I mean, geographically, it's coming up on the map there. The UAE is directly affected by Hormuz. Every barrel that they make will have to go through the street.
- [78:11]
Alex Epstein
Well, they have a pipeline.
- [78:12]
Host
They do.
- [78:13]
Alex Epstein
They have one pipeline, but it's about a million and a half barrels.
- [78:16]
Host
Okay, so they can get some out.
- [78:19]
Apoorv
Oh, yeah.
- [78:19]
Host
So if they become the swing producer, they are, in effect, they are in fact important, even in a world where the strait is closed.
- [78:27]
Alex Epstein
No, no, it doesn't matter as much right now because they're saying, we want the right to expand our production, but they can't. None of them can produce as nearly as much as they want right now. This is why they're doing it now. They're not doing it in the time of a supply glut. They're doing it in the time of a supply shortage because nobody really cares. It doesn't really affect things for them to say, oh, yeah, we have a million and a half spare capacity that we'd like to use and we're planning on using into the future. But right now we can't bring most of that to market. No one can bring anything to market. That's different from a situation which we've had fairly recently where there's tons of supply on the market, like there's too much. And US producers are saying, hey, we've got $50 a barrel oil. This is really hard to sustain. Imagine then a million and a half new barrels coming on the market.
- [79:14]
John
Who wins? Who saw the news this morning and was fist pumping.
- [79:18]
Alex Epstein
Well, I don't think most people understand the consequences of these things because I think many people think, oh, it's going to be amazing for the U.S. like OPEC bad, U.S. good. But OPEC, the way it's set up, in a sense, favors our shale producers because they have higher. They're one of the set of higher cost producers in the world.
- [79:42]
John
You have OPEC collectively decided to just massively increase supply and flood the market. They could do real damage.
- [79:49]
Alex Epstein
And this has happened already.
- [79:50]
John
Yeah, right.
- [79:51]
Alex Epstein
This has happened in previous year.
- [79:53]
John
Yeah. Like you were saying, if you're, if you're in shale and you're trying to make money at $50 a barrel, it's like very. You're really hoping. What's the, what's the sweet spot again? It's like somewhere between 70 and like 90.
- [80:09]
Alex Epstein
Yeah. Sweet spot is interesting because they'll take whatever they can get. But yeah, if they get to 70, 80, 90, it's a lot more profitable, basically. Not much changes about their cost structure when prices go low. So it's almost pure profit a little bit. They can squeeze what are called the oil field service companies. When you're thinking of oil, and particularly oil, you're just thinking every $10 that goes up, that is almost pure profit for them. And every $10 that goes down, that is almost pure loss of profit or loss in absolute terms. Now, in terms of policy, look, I think we should forcibly reopen the strait. And I don't believe that the US government should be directly trying to favor or disfavor its shale companies. But it's just important for people to understand these dynamics. And it's not. And also you have to understand the UAE is doing this at an opportunistic time. They're not doing it at a time
- [81:00]
Host
when there's already a supply shifting gears. Where do you want to go?
- [81:04]
John
I wanted to ask you about beaming sun.
- [81:08]
Host
I had the exact same question.
- [81:09]
John
Into solar panels you can get 24 something in space.
- [81:16]
Host
Put a mirror in space that shines light onto a solar array so that they can get 24.7Power to a data center.
- [81:24]
Alex Epstein
Potentially they're going to do it on Earth.
- [81:27]
Host
The recipient of the light will be on Earth a solar panel next to a data center. But there will be a mirror in there's a specific orbit that is always in the sun. And so the sun will hit the mirror and the light will bounce down onto this particular solar panel in their solar array. And so they will be able to get power from their solar panels 24, 7.
- [81:52]
Alex Epstein
There's no weather that interferes.
- [81:55]
Host
Weather might interfere with fear a little bit. Okay. I have not closer to 24. 7 than current.
- [82:02]
Alex Epstein
Here's the dynamic is obviously in space you have 24.7Solar and it's really hard to do things in space. So all credit to people who are willing to invest their own money to try to do this There are a number of variables that might make it succeed or not. I mean, the more you're talking about chips that are evolving very quickly on Earth because we don't have this moon colony yet, right? You're talking about, you're replacing chips every year, doing these very logistically difficult things in orbit. That tends to disfavor the energy advantage you're gonna get from having the stuff in space if you're doing something that some of these solar things work, if the energy cost is high and you don't need to change a lot about it, if it can run a long time. So my view is like my view of solar is always you need to recognize its strengths and limitations and use it accordingly. My argument continues to be on Earth with the solar that we have right now, solar is primarily a fuel saving technology, not a real on demand power source. And I wrote a long article about this and it is. Go to alexepstein.substack.com to check it out. And so by the way, that means that in some places solar is a lot more valuable than others. And in particular it's valuable in places with very high fuel costs, which the United States is not really one of those places because we have really cheap natural gas and could get cheaper natural gas. But in general, what we don't have, what the holy grail would be is if you got solar and batteries so cheap that you could have self sufficient solar by sufficiently overbuilding the panels and having multi day battery storage. Overbuilding the panels means, let's just say round numbers. You have 100 megawatts of demand in a given location. So 1/10 of a gigawatt. Well, if you overbuild it by 10, then you have a gigawatt. Well, even when the solar is fairly, the sun is fairly low, you're going to be able to meet your demand. And then you can charge the batteries you can get right? And then you can get rid of it and then you can charge the batteries so you have more to charge the batteries. But then to make that work, because sun is not around at night, people really underestimate this as a problem. Night is a big, it's not as much of a problem for wind, but it's a big problem for sun. Like night is a huge, huge, huge problem. So you need to then, and you know, think about a winter day like we had during winter storm fern. Even in Phoenix you can have storms that disrupt the sun for a week. So you need lots and lots and lots of batteries and you need lots and Lots of overbuilding. And the question is, how cheap can you get it? And China's not even nearly there yet, let alone the us but it's not a bad path to pursue. It's not bad to pursue because batteries are valuable anyway. Batteries are valuable, number one, to store reliable power and dispatch it. And Elon is in favor of that. I've said on the show before, I'm in favor of that. So it's good to get the cost of solar lower. It's good to get the cost of batteries lower. We have to recognize primarily it's a fuel saving play, not a replacement. Replacement play. But if we had 24, 7, all bets are off. Then you get the benefits of solar.
- [85:07]
Host
That's the mirror, that's the space mirror.
- [85:11]
Alex Epstein
So I hope that as long as they're doing it in a safe way, they should be free to try. And it's interesting, the schemes I've seen in the past haven't worked and I don't know if they have better energy people than they used to at Meta. So we'll see.
- [85:22]
Host
We'll see. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [85:24]
Alex Epstein
Good to see you.
- [85:25]
John
Yeah, I wish we had more time.
- [85:26]
Alex Epstein
Anytime.
- [85:28]
Host
Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Shira Lazar from what's trending. She's the co founder and host of what's trending and we'll bring her in to the TVPN ultradome in just a minute. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?
- [85:43]
Anthony
Good.
- [85:44]
Shira Lazar
We're just diving in. I love it.
- [85:45]
Host
Yes, of course. That is the nature of the show. We dive right in. Why don't we dive right in with an introduction on yourself. How are you introducing yourself these days? How. What can you tell us about the shape of what's trending the platform?
- [85:57]
Shira Lazar
Yeah. So I've been in the digital media. Yeah, sorry, I think there's a delay. But I've been in the digital media creator economy space for almost two decades, aging myself. We started what's trending actually was a live streaming show in 2011.
- [86:13]
Host
Cool.
- [86:13]
Shira Lazar
So we're playing around with this tech and these tools. Way back, one of the first to live stream interview high quality way. But you know, the space in some ways wasn't ready. It was us, the young turks. At the time, Al Jazeera was doing a live stream and we had a weekly show. We went daily actually with YouTube.
- [86:35]
Host
No way.
- [86:36]
Shira Lazar
Oh shoot. Am I like what? Oh, is it? I, I look like I'm paused right now, but I don't know if that's.
- [86:44]
Bubble Boy
We can hear you.
- [86:44]
Host
We can hear and see you just fine.
- [86:46]
Shira Lazar
Okay, I'll continue. Welcome to tech. And then I'll stop by your studio. But yeah, then we went daily with YouTube and then it seemed like live, just the platforms and the audience weren't ready yet. And then we went more into On Demand, grew more as a digital media brand and publisher and that's who we are today. And we cover news, views and culture for the social generation. And now, oddly enough, like seeing your success in what you're doing starting to rethink. Like, how do we maybe go back to that? Who knows?
- [87:14]
Host
Yeah, yeah.
- [87:16]
John
Timing is so important. I mean, there's been like Jason Calacanis had TVPN effectively back. I don't know the first year that he did it, 2007. Yeah, like very, very early. Same kind of era when you started. But yeah, people need to be ready for it.
- [87:33]
Host
Yeah. I'm interested to hear about what is changing right now, what you are tracking. I was reading a piece in the Journal about sort of a K shaped dynamic that's emerging with brands. Only want to partner with the biggest celebrities, the biggest podcast and there's sort of a winner take all market. Are you seeing that or is there a way for sort of middle class of creators to emerge these days?
- [87:59]
Shira Lazar
Yeah, that's really interesting. I actually think that there's two extremes of opportunity. I think that definitely people that have skilled audience and those big names that are the new wave of celebrity are definitely getting the deals. As long as there's, I would say, conversions. And they have that fandom audience. They're the new names that a lot of brands want to partner with. And of course these streaming services or the podcasts like to really have a successful, I would say at scale, podcast or platform, you need to have, you know, that audience, that big name. However, that doesn't mean that's the only way to succeed. Right. So we're seeing, as you might know, a lot of smaller creators that have niche audiences, the B2B creators now that are becoming big, the LinkedIn creators, the knowledge creators. And they've hunkered down on a very specific audience and they're seeing high conversions even though they don't have a skilled audience. And so that creates a lot of success too, where they could have, you know, or be making half a million to a million a year. Possibly they're relying on brands, they're maybe having courses, there may be having, you know, paid events, etc. So what I think is really Interesting right now is we are at a time that there could be opportunity for big names, but also not such household names. But again, it's really about understanding your why as a brand and what you're trying to go after.
- [89:20]
Host
Do you like the term Nimcell niche Internet micro celebrity? That's been one that's been bailed out.
- [89:27]
John
I've never.
- [89:27]
Host
You've never heard that?
- [89:28]
Alex Epstein
I don't know.
- [89:29]
Shira Lazar
That sounds like too much like an incel.
- [89:31]
Host
Yeah, it is a weird knockoff, but I think it does capture something that is real, which is that there might be someone who is incredibly influential in a particular sub vertical or industry and they might be a household name. Gets stopped for autographs at that industry's conference, but never at a random Starbucks. Right. And so this is just an interesting. Who was it? It was Colin and Samir we were talking with and they said that something like 80 to 90% of the next generation, maybe Gen Alpha, is a super fan of someone that no one in their high school has heard of. So they all have individual relationships with someone that they're a super fan of, but they don't cross over. It's not everyone likes Tom Cruise, everyone. It's everyone likes their own individual unique Tom Cruise or whatever.
- [90:20]
Shira Lazar
Yeah, I was talking about that with someone actually recently because it creates, I think again so much possibility. But then it's harder to figure out, like if you can just find one name that everyone knows that will have that popularity again. Like in the past there were how many cable channels or even before cable, you know, TV channels and cable channels and then shows that you watch. You know, we have such a fragmented audience right now. And so there could be someone that is so popular and you might have never heard about them. And that's like the beauty of social media and the Internet right now. And actually, you know, you were mentioning the middle class. I do think there's something about the middle class that is difficult right now when it comes to the creator economy. Because I see people when they're at the 1% making a ton of money. I mean not everyone is Mr. Beast. Right. And then niche creators are making a lot of money when you're kind of stuck in that gray area that's becoming, I would say, more and more of a challenge because you're getting underpriced. But then also, you know, the prices that you want, they're not necessarily being able to hit it because they're keeping that for like more of that macro creator.
- [91:27]
Host
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [91:29]
John
The other challenge is that there's going to be new creators that are growing, that are growing quickly, that are, that are, that are hungry, that maybe have figured out formats that the algorithms are rewarding more intensely. And if you're in that middle zone and you don't adapt quickly, you can quickly become irrelevant. I used to, yeah, I used to talk to YouTube creators that would try to. This was back in 2018, that would try to set pricing based on the number of their. The number of their subscribers. Because there was a period where you could basically say, like, I have this many subscribers. Like, you can assume that at least half of them will like, click through and watch the video. There was a moment like that and then it changed pretty rapidly.
- [92:10]
Host
Views.
- [92:10]
John
And I would, I would talk to them and be like, hey, like, unfortunately, like average views, you can take your last 10 videos and take the average and like that.
- [92:19]
Host
For some creators, that's higher than their subscriber base. But for a lot of creators, it's 20% of their subscribers.
- [92:23]
John
Yeah, a lot lower.
- [92:25]
Shira Lazar
But then, you know, I think pricing is really important. Important to talk about because, you know, I do think there's different types of creators that require different things. Like, you know, now there's a lot of the affiliate creators, and I liken that to, like a QVC host, right. They're really good at selling through and having that affiliate model, and that's the only way they work. And they're really good at that. I don't think that's for everyone. And just because something works in the creator economy for a group of people doesn't mean it needs to be the end. All, be all.
- [92:52]
Host
Do not tell that to Gary Vaynerchuk. If you get him going about TikTok shop, it's over for you.
- [92:56]
Shira Lazar
He will be like, not everyone is meant to be a TikTok Shop.
- [93:02]
Host
I agree. I agree with you completely.
- [93:05]
Shira Lazar
And then where's. Wait, on that note, I love Gary. Where's Gary Vee's TikTok shop?
- [93:09]
Host
I want to see him.
- [93:10]
Shira Lazar
And he's like, okay, so TikTok shop is hot. What are you selling? I want to see you selling. Which he does these moments where he'll be selling or he'll go live for a week or, okay, we're doing the skin wine library tv and like, okay, by week two or three, he's like, okay, I've other shit to do.
- [93:26]
Host
Yeah, no, 100%. I mean, he does he. I think part of his benefit is that he's. He's sampled from the smorgasbord of Content creation and can speak to. Okay, well, there. There is a gap here for some people, but not. It's not all going to be one size fits all. Just like I don't think everyone's going to be, you know, doing IRL streaming in the future, even though that's having a moment. And we could see many more creators do IRL streams outside of the kick streamers and the controversial folks and the political folks, you can see that instantiated in a whole bunch of other categories. But it'll just take time to get there. We've been seeing with tvpn, people have made a version of this show for car dealerships or what's going on in Europe or what's going on in crypto. And there's like all these different twists on this format, and that happens whenever there's a new thing, but it's not going to be perfect for every single vertical. But.
- [94:18]
Shira Lazar
Yeah, exactly. And that's what they'll jump on it because it's a trend and there's a difference between the people that jump onto something and then build it as actually, like a substantial career.
- [94:27]
Host
Yeah.
- [94:27]
Shira Lazar
So, for instance, like I like to say, like, I'm looking at a career like, I'm here in the digital space. It's something I'm very passionate about. And now on my personal brand, I cover creator economy, trends, emerging tech, I even mental health, we could get into that when it comes to the digital space. But I've been now working in this space for 20 years. I get to look at trends and how they've changed and not just report on them, but I've actually lived through them. So it gives it a different approach, at least for me, and an edge when it comes to my coverage. I also think, just sidebar, if you're a creator or someone looking to be in the space, like, I do believe as long as you get the right representation, agents or managers are important as long as they don't take advantage. There's a lot of predatory behavior out there because they have other talent they could see.
- [95:18]
John
How much should you share with a manager? Like 90% or where they want. Well, they want more. No, I'm kidding.
- [95:25]
Shira Lazar
No, no. Usually agents, and I'm going to say this. Someone said, don't talk about this. I was on a panel at the NAV show last night week, and someone's like, why are you revealing? And I'm like, these aren't secrets. These are kind of industry standards, and we need to talk about things more and not cut people off from information. Like, I am not, I do not want to be that person. So. Yeah, so agents typically take 10%, managers 20%. But again, this day and age, managers, people are just becoming salespeople and they're saying they're managers, which is crazy. Whereas in the past a manager would actually build your strategy and help you with your career and like your longevity. Now they just run your email inbox and like, that is not a manager. But anyway, that's just my hot take on, on that. But I think things are, you know, things are changing.
- [96:14]
Bubble Boy
What?
- [96:14]
Host
Yeah, no, no, no, I like it. It's a good point. And I think it is important for these to, for the. Yeah, just the benchmarks or any sort of relative information getting out there is always good. Jordy, anything else?
- [96:25]
John
What's your outlook on clipping? It feels like the legacy media. It feels like the legacy media just woke up to this.
- [96:34]
Host
Well, it just started. The first clip, I think went out like last week and so that's why everyone's talking about it.
- [96:39]
Shira Lazar
The first clip from a legacy media company.
- [96:41]
John
No, no, we're joking.
- [96:43]
Host
No, the clipping's been around for years and it's now like having this big moment and it's just sort of funny to reflect on this thing that everyone's been aware. Aware of for a long time.
- [96:50]
John Gray
Yeah.
- [96:51]
Shira Lazar
So I, it's interesting because I think when you Google even clipping and I was trying to find the platform that does it, there's like two sides of clipping. It's like the. You're clipping up all your clips, obviously, and distributing them at scale across everywhere. And then there's the clipping farms, like where they'll. You can pay people to post on their platforms and try to get views. Yeah, those are kind of two sides
- [97:12]
Host
to the clip industrial complex.
- [97:15]
Shira Lazar
Yeah. And I find that fascinating. Like a lot of the streamers are doing that. Ishowspeed.
- [97:23]
Host
Well, for a long time Joe Rogan would be clipped, but just by people that were watching the show and were like, this was an interesting moment.
- [97:30]
Shira Lazar
Organic.
- [97:31]
Host
Organic, yeah. Authentic farm to table clipping. Now you got the industrialization of clipping and so thousands of people are being paid to clip a single streamer. And it's part of a marketing process, but it seems to be effective for people. So it is becoming a trend and
- [97:47]
Shira Lazar
people are paying attention and that how like, is it clavicular?
- [97:50]
Host
Clavicular has been a massive beneficiary of the clip industrial complex. Apparently he has 100 people working for him.
- [97:57]
John
Yeah. But it's interesting because People like analyze his whole strategy and they put like, they seemingly put like 80, 90% of the, of the, of the success and the growth of his personal brand, whether you believe it should grow or not, on the strategy. When he was a unique figure and a controversial figure.
- [98:19]
Host
And if he had been saying there just, yeah, a little bit of sleep, diet, exercise, don't worry about it too much, you're going to be fine. And he had a million clippers, no one would know his name. Instead he's out there with the craziest hot takes possible. Possible, the craziest stunt, saying that he's doing math, getting in jail and stuff, like insane stuff. And so the clips really amplify that. But there's a seed of virality there already on day one, whether or not the clippers are paid or not. I think.
- [98:46]
Shira Lazar
Yeah, no, that, that is the thing. So I think it's interesting as a new marketing strategy that it will be interesting to see if traditional media jumps on board. I don't think they will because they have a hard enough time building out their social strategy right now, let alone doing a whole, like, I would say clipping strategy like that. I think that definitely benefits the individual personal brand, the person that's willing to take the risk. Again, there's still money that you need to spend on this. But if you want to become a social media celebrity one, yeah, you need to have the basic, I would say, controversial hot take and then being able to tap into this other stuff. But it's something to look out for in terms of the phenomenon of social media right now and putting more out there. Right. And how do you do it faster? But then some of these, I would say I use Opus, for instance. I know the team there, they're great if you have long form video and you want to cut it up. But some of these tools, they do need to be better. It's like you can't just throw it in and spit it out.
- [99:47]
Host
Yep.
- [99:48]
John
Yeah. We tried a number of the tools early on and could get any of them working. We ended up building our own internal
- [99:54]
Host
software which helps with the cutting of the footage, but does not do the selection for you. The selection is still editorial. That's still human, which is interesting.
- [100:04]
Shira Lazar
Exactly. So a lot of creators are still worried about, or anyone about AI taking their job or this or that, which is real. Which is why I think that you need to lean into having a voice and an approach to things where you're not just being told what to do, but you can take a piece of content as an editor and be like I'm going to make this the best. It can be like better than AI Right now I'm personally excited for when I could throw a clip in and it could spit it out for me and be awesome. We are not there yet. It would save me so much time. So as a creator, I'm excited for these tools. I am not scared.
- [100:38]
John
Clip super intelligence.
- [100:40]
Host
It's got to happen. It's got to happen. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Have a great rest.
- [100:45]
John
Yeah, great to meet you. Come back on whenever you have. I love all. I love all the spice. Come back on whenever.
- [100:50]
Shira Lazar
Oh, I will be back. Maybe I'll be in studio. It's easier and I want this tech. I'm just seeing a freeze frame right now.
- [100:56]
Host
Thank you.
- [100:57]
Shira Lazar
I appreciate it.
- [100:57]
John
You'll talk loud and clear. Great to hang.
- [101:00]
Host
Okay.
- [101:00]
Shira Lazar
Amazing.
- [101:01]
Host
Goodbye.
- [101:01]
John
Talk soon.
- [101:02]
Host
Flashbang out. Our next guest is Anshul Gupta from Actively AI. He's the co founder found he is the co founder and president. I think I got it right. Welcome to the show. Last minute switch. Introduce yourself and the company please. Sorry for being John. How you doing? Thanks for having me guys.
- [101:21]
Anshul Gupta
Good to meet you. Big fans of the. Big fans of the show and congrats obviously on the. The.
- [101:27]
Host
Thank you. Yeah.
- [101:28]
Anshul Gupta
Or a lot of folks on our team have switched from Sports center to. To you guys. So I think that's a.
- [101:32]
John
There we go.
- [101:33]
Host
I didn't realize we were pulling people from Sports Center. I like that. Yeah. This is the new sport, the sport of enterprise revenue workflows. Tell us about it.
- [101:43]
Anshul Gupta
Amazing. So yeah, quickly I'm on show. One of the co founders of Actively as you guys mentioned. And we build agents for go to market teams and effectively are the only platform that proactively guides revenue teams on what to do next and then actually helps them do it. And. And it's based off this notion that we built called an agent for every account. So this concept called per account agent. So the idea is as a rep you're stretched really, really thin on all the possible actions that you could be doing to drive revenue. And so it actively does is we've created these agents that live with every single one agent that lives with every single account for the life cycle of that account across the funnel, from top of funnel through close through, through expansion that are maintaining all of that context as well as guiding you on what you should be doing next and then actually doing the work which stands in stark contrast to, you know, a lot of the solutions that require a human being to go point, click, to kind of decide what they, what they want to do. And our fundamental belief is that there's going to be. And you know, it's true with our customers. There's going to be a lot more agents than sellers. Right. And so how do you build and plan for that world?
- [102:55]
Host
And that reality is software sales the beachhead, or are you selling to car dealerships or Rolex ads or H Vac salesmen? Like, there's so many different people that would benefit from an agent on every account. But I imagine that you'll be accelerated in certain verticals. Have you narrowed down or are you going broad?
- [103:15]
Anshul Gupta
So it's a, it's a great question, I think, for, for us, ultimately, you know, the ICP is very clear, which is we make revenue teams way more productive. The larger revenue teams you have, the more impact that we can make sure. To your point, however, the beachhead very much is within, within software sales. We're starting to see organic demand from some of these other, other verticals. Maybe, maybe not car dealerships yet. And that's, you know, hopefully a good, maybe a good thing.
- [103:40]
John
But, you know, watch the watch brand ads, they could just be like, hey, tell this person they're not, hey, I
- [103:47]
Host
scraped your Instagram and I noticed that you had a bear wrist when you were going swimming. Do you need a dive watch? Potentially. Talk to me about what it actually takes because obviously you're scraping the emails, you're scraping the calendar invites and probably transcriptions, understanding what's going on with the interaction between the company. But are you also looking at like product analytics? I feel like so many times you sell a software product, they're like, great, we did the demo.
- [104:13]
Shira Lazar
Cool.
- [104:13]
Host
We were rolling it out. Yeah, it's going to great. And you're like, we see that no one's logged in, we need to intervene. Is that part of what the agent's working on?
- [104:22]
Anshul Gupta
Yeah. For, for us, we view the bright line as being very, you know, plain and clear, which is full and complete context. And so in order. If the way I try to analyze it is if I had unlimited dollars and I was a CRO, I would put one seller, ideally I would figure out a way to clone my best seller and put one seller each and every one of these accounts. And so as part of that, if they're doing their job, John, to your, to your question, they would be looking at every single data point, which today sellers don't do. Because to your point, it's in so Many different different systems. Right. Whether it's product analytics calls information that's not in your, in your database. And so our account agents are kind of becoming this sort of continuously updating source of truth across all of those different, different areas. And so you know, because we're very enterprise focused, we have to build integrations into a pretty large, large set of kind of technologies houses this information.
- [105:09]
Host
Tell us about the round.
- [105:09]
John
Do you track last, last question. Do you track how long it takes to generate one of your customers their first like a dollar of revenue that you can attribute back? Like what, what, what metrics matter on your side?
- [105:24]
Anshul Gupta
Yeah, it's, it's a really good question. Yeah, I think, I think ultimately we are in the business of helping increase you know, seller productivity revenue revenue per rep. And so you know we track based off our account agents sort of what are they able to, what are they able to drive and attributed kind of pipeline conversion rates, downstream revenue expansions. But then also there's, there's some interesting or change dynamics that as a result of having these really powerful agents we're starting to see, we work with many publicly traded companies that as they're starting to see efficiency gains, they, they can rethink their, the levels of maybe middle management that you have that maybe the, the levels of ratios between AES to two BDRs. Because as you gain more and more efficiencies with these, with these account agents, you don't need as much in sort of those, those different, those different supporting functions. But I think like, you know, the other point that, that I'll, that I'll make is it's not just about the metrics that you're driving. It is a fully different way of doing go to market. Right. Which is every single other solution out there only works when the human goes into it and decides I want to do this or I want to do that. But like what about when they're asleep or what if they're not thinking about asking that question? That is where. And there's a huge disparity in terms of seller performance in terms of a. Players in the, in the rest. And so it's kind of this broader transformation that we're trying to, trying to drive.
- [106:46]
Host
Very exciting. Tell us about the round.
- [106:49]
Anshul Gupta
Yep. Do I wait for the gong? Wait for the big old.
- [106:52]
John
Tell us, tell us $45 million series.
- [106:55]
Host
Series B.
- [106:56]
John
There we go.
- [106:57]
Host
Congratulation. Congratulations.
- [106:58]
Alex Epstein
Thank you, thank you.
- [106:59]
Host
Thank you so much for coming on the show. We will talk to you soon.
- [107:03]
John
Congrats to the team on the milestone and we'll see you at the sea.
- [107:07]
Host
Yeah, have a good one. Talk to you soon. Goodbye. Up next we have Apoorva from Avoca, the founder and co CEO working on AI agents for the service economy. Baby, let's go.
- [107:20]
John
A lot of capital being deployed today.
- [107:22]
Host
It is a boom time.
- [107:23]
John Gray
Being announced.
- [107:24]
Host
It's a boom time. Well, we are very fortunate to have our next guest. Here we are in the TVPN ultradome. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.
- [107:32]
Apoorv
Hey guys. I'm doing well, how are you?
- [107:34]
Host
Thanks so much for taking the time. Beautiful.
- [107:36]
John
We are doing great. But I didn't know they made an office right there.
- [107:40]
Host
Yeah. Introduce yourself and the company, please.
- [107:42]
Apoorv
Yeah, so my name is Apoorv. I'm the founder and co CEO of Evoca. Yeah, we are basically building AI agents for physical service business businesses primarily for example, home services where we've seen a lot of traction. And my co founder is Tyson and we started this business together in 2022.
- [107:59]
Host
Cool.
- [108:01]
John
2022. What did you see?
- [108:03]
Host
Yeah, what, what were you thinking? Just like SaaS. And then it just got a lot better with the AI tailwind.
- [108:09]
Apoorv
Well, it's kind of interesting. So this kind of happened during the time that the models that created ChatGPT had come out. But ChatGPT is itself wasn't yet out.
- [108:17]
Host
Yeah, GPT3 was getting a lot better. Like 3.5 was like basically out. Da Vinci like stuff was starting to work, but it was a little bit rough. But you could see glimpses.
- [108:27]
Apoorv
Exactly. Yeah. So this is the time when like DaVinci was out, but then you didn't really have the consumer adoption of ChatGPT yet. And yeah, during that period of time. Something interesting about both me and my co founder is that we both came from backgrounds where so I grew up in Michigan, Tyson grew up in Pennsylvania. We basically grew up in backgrounds where our moms own these service businesses. And we actually used to do that kind of job every day where we'd have to actually be picking up phone calls, booking customers, figuring out how to properly book them and all of that fun stuff. And so we essentially after we did that, I think when I saw I was getting really good, I was immediately like, wait, I feel like businesses like that will have so much value and no one's really looking into it. And so we were like, what does it look like to bring value here? And we thought, let's start with the phone call.
- [109:10]
Host
Okay. Oh, the phone call. Okay. Yeah. I want to know more about just the data ingest points because you can imagine like, ERPs, custom ERPs, CRMs. There's a lot of different touch points, and you could even go into photos and 3D scans of things that are going on in the physical world. But where is the beachhead? Where's the light bulb moment for your customers?
- [109:35]
Apoorv
Customers, yeah. So it's kind of like multiple phases, I would say, for our customers. If you think about it like, our customers, their customers are basically just like us. You know, anytime we need, like, a new job for plumbing, new ac, etcetera, Things like that, they're coming through a lot of sources. So phone calls is actually how many businesses get most of the revenue. But then there's also, like, lead aggregators. Some people are texting. And so Avoca, we want to first. Our first phase is like, essentially responding and closing everything lead, which is like, how do we get you any lead that's coming from, like, Angie's, for example, people often think of as a war room because now every single person's, like, fighting for that person. So we can have an AI that'll go respond to that lead immediately. We can have an AI that picks up every single phone call and sticks to the script, does what you need, and close that customer. Then there's kind of like a second phase, which is like, how do you, you know, figure out your capacity and get new customers? So basically based off of what kind of availabilities and jobs you have, can you go reach out to the existing base? Who should you target to kind of fill up your board?
- [110:33]
Host
Yeah, our voice models. At a chatgpt moment. Now, I had a really great experience booking a restaurant reservation in Fogo de Chao Bain Capital backed. No surprises there. But I have grown up my entire life. Do not talk to the robot. Do not reject the clanker demand. The human press zero a bunch. But it feels like we're starting to see glimpses of magical experiences. How close are we? Have we crossed the Turing test? Do you have data on any of this? Like, how's it going on that front?
- [111:10]
Apoorv
Yeah, absolutely. So we have now crossed the point where, like, if you wanted to, for the first 30 seconds to a minute of a conversation, people would not be able to tell that they're talking to an AI because the models have just gotten so good. But still, to this day, we are not yet at, like, the point where we're at with text, where you could literally have, you know, minutes, long conversations because eventually the AI sounds robotic. It takes, like, extra 100 milliseconds to respond. Interrupts you when you're speaking all those kinds of things. So we're not yet at the moment where it's like, oh, everything is going to switch over. But we're at the moment where, in fact, you can have very good conversations. You can pick up the phone, you within a second and super efficient. Like, these average calls actually last about 30% faster than calls that humans would take. So it's even more efficient.
- [111:56]
Host
Okay, yeah, that's great. Tell us about the round.
- [111:59]
John
Any of these different. Is there, is there you have roofing, H vac, plumbing? Is there a category that is more resistant to AI like our plumbers? Like, nah, I'm good. More than electricians or H vac or is it, is it pretty unique, like. And what is general sentiment across the board?
- [112:20]
Apoorv
Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. So I think like, you know, the initial thought would be that, oh, people are probably not too excited about adopting AI or whatever is evil. But in fact, the nice part about our business is that the AI is not the main character of the job. What the main AI is doing is just making sure everything gets booked, making sure their customers are happy, making sure, you know, you're always getting new customers. But the main characters are actually the plumbers, the technicians, the, you know, H vac guys. And so they are actually, I mean, I would split up, split them into multiple buckets. But a lot of them are very hungry and eager to actually adopt AI right now because they already see the overhead of like, oh, shoot, I forgot to follow up with that customer. Or oh, wow, I can't believe we dropped that customer on their phone call. And so an AI can go in and solve that. They can do their job. They're still running the show and the AI can help facilitate that. So still seeing actually really good adoption there.
- [113:07]
Host
Cool. Tell us about the round. You raised a bunch of money. What happened?
- [113:11]
Apoorv
Yeah, so we actually, this is our first time going public, so we're very happy and honored to be here. We've now raised 125 million at latest million dollar valuation.
- [113:21]
Host
Congratulations.
- [113:22]
John
First time going public, as in coming out of stealth, right?
- [113:26]
Apoorv
Yeah. I mean, we were all over LinkedIn but we had never did a single press release. And so I'm fortunate got the exclusive.
- [113:33]
Host
Let's go.
- [113:34]
John
They're like, let's just wait. Let's just wait till we, till we hit a billion.
- [113:37]
Host
Very impressive. Very, very good, Good progress. Congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out.
- [113:43]
John
Yeah, great to meet you. Congrats.
- [113:45]
Host
Goodbye.
- [113:45]
Bubble Boy
Cheers.
- [113:47]
Host
Up next, we have the Non joining, we have Bubble Boy. I believe Bubble Boy is in the waiting room. Let's break Bubble Boy into the TVPN ultradome. We have some important questions.
- [114:02]
John Gray
Another one.
- [114:04]
John
He's coming. He has been on an absolute terror.
- [114:07]
Bubble Boy
There he is.
- [114:08]
Host
Bubble Boy. I like this golden retrieve.
- [114:11]
John
Hello, hello, hello, hello, hello.
- [114:12]
Host
Okay, so you said yo, TBPN put me on the show to talk about semis. I will make your listeners rich. Go make our listeners rich. Tell us about semis.
- [114:26]
John
Why do you still have a normal job at this point? Let's start there.
- [114:31]
Bubble Boy
Yeah, so someone actually asked me this recently and I think the answer I got was a lot of my ideas come from working on the same problems these engineers are actually trying to solve. So I really don't think I could have actually called intel or called a lot of these other companies like SanDisk if I didn't have that experience and know how and expertise. So I actually think having a job is a bit of alpha, believe it or not. And I think a lot of the engineers who are actually just making a killing this market, I mean these are just real experts in their field and we look at the market every day and we just see, you know, big divergences. I don't think the finance bros really understand what advanced packaging is or what yields really mean. They understand it maybe from a financial aspect but not from a competitive standpoint.
- [115:29]
John
Rewind to a year ago. Where did you think we were in the overall AI cycle and where do you think we are today?
- [115:39]
Bubble Boy
Yeah, probably the start. I think the beginning of the year. At the beginning of the year every hyperscaler basically said that they're going to spend 680 billion. So I mean we're just at the start. I think we have at least three years of capex growth going crazy from my estimates. And from there tokens are just looking like the new oil or electricity. I think at this point I actually can't live my life without a token. So yeah, I think we're just at the start. I think right now is really when things are going to be going crazy. If you actually look at the data center build out, nothing's actually been completed yet. We're just at the beginning.
- [116:29]
John
How do you think everyone having access to LLMs, these incredible research partners is changing the markets? Like does that. Do things get priced in faster when everyone is maybe asking the same questions?
- [116:50]
Bubble Boy
Absolutely. And that's a good question. I just need to shout out GPT 5.5, my preferred model for stock research. I think I know for sure that the number one consumer of these tokens is these hedge funds and financial institutions. They are absolutely running through a bunch of research and it allows you to get up to speed quickly. If you really think about it, like five years ago, if I wanted to make a bet on like chemical epoxy for semis, that would have taken six months of my life and been a bit ridiculous.
- [117:29]
John
And then, and then, and then. So share. Your post yesterday, which went incredibly viral, turned into news. You were just basically just showing that you could just make up stuff on the timeline and I think you moved the market. Give us the backstory, what happened.
- [117:50]
Bubble Boy
So I was actually just researching these chemical suppliers and I just realized, you know, you could really, you could really talk to an LLM and get it to say whatever you wanted to say. So I, I just picked a random company, honestly in Japan and I just said, hey, try to really pitch this as an AI bottleneck. Sadly, it's not a bottleneck. Right. But I, I think they're doing well either way. Yeah, they, I mean we're in a good place. Data centers will be built out. We don't need to wait for Sumitimo Bake Light to get their epoxy resins the scale. But yeah, so I guess that's a harm. People need to definitely do their own research. I've seen a lot of people just piling into things they don't understand. So very interesting place to be in.
- [118:47]
Host
What's your intel thesis right now?
- [118:50]
Bubble Boy
Great question. I think up to this point intel was a top. Intel's thesis was really a fab turnaround. It was about 18A and 14A, which is coming, I think really now I've completely changed my logic. It's about advanced packaging. Advanced packaging to me is the new Moore's law. You kind of already seen this with Vera Rubin where they can't actually do four dies on one package. They actually had to change that last second. If you look out to Feynman, I mean this packages, the packaging of the silicon is a huge bottleneck. It already was a bottleneck in 2025. Nvidia was 60% of TSMC's advanced packaging. So everyone else was out there to fend for themselves. So any kind of advanced packaging that comes to market that allows people to scale compute way more than I think just shrinking a node. I mean shrinking a node's great, but the way Nvidia's timeline and I think all the hyperscalers as well, they want more hbm, they want more radical size dies and they all want it in one package so that's really where things are headed towards and I think the market's not pricing that in. I think this is a real sea change to the semi industry. This really is just happening over the past year or so.
- [120:21]
Host
What's the story with the dog?
- [120:24]
Bubble Boy
Oh well this is just kind of like how I look on the day to day basis when I'm sitting at my desk dipping on a diet well Pepsi in this case but I just like to spread joy. Yeah, no I think this is kind of like how you look when intel beats on earnings and goes up 30% in a day and you've been proven right after a year of being told you were wrong.
- [120:51]
John
Any non financial advice predictions for this tech earnings cycle? What are you expecting tomorrow?
- [121:00]
Bubble Boy
Well I think we have SanDisk reporting soon. I think that's kind of been telegraphed that SanDisk can just increase the price of flash until the customers cry. So I think yeah they will be fine. I think the other story is people think there's a CPU shortage. I think that this is going to be we're going to get a yes or no definitely in this earnings season and people actually just price up CPUs 25, 30% and will people take it
- [121:33]
John
when when you when you post a picture of your a screenshot of your returns on X do you ever get worried that that it's a sign that you should at least go to cash somewhat or does does it just. Absolutely not.
- [121:48]
Bubble Boy
That's never absolutely not. I've never thought of going to cash. I actually took some money out last year for taxes and the biggest mistake of my life because that money who knows where how much it would be by now. I see this as we have a three year run at least and now it's time to really pull the trigger. If anything I'm trying to borrow money at this point to go bigger and
- [122:13]
John
that's why they call him Bubble Boy.
- [122:14]
Host
That's why they call him Bubble.
- [122:16]
John
Used to pray for a bubble like this.
- [122:19]
Bubble Boy
I definitely did. Yeah and it's come to fruition so
- [122:22]
John
we can all what can people expect from you? You say that having a job is alpha. I'm sure you're getting people are trying to pitch you on new job opportunities but what can people expect from you this year besides making a lot of calls all the time and to date often being quite accurate it I think
- [122:46]
Bubble Boy
I'll give a hint you'll see me in the flash business somewhere somehow maybe at a pretty established flash company and supply chain. So I think Flash is one of these technologies that I think scales a lot higher than the market expects. And I always have this joke, I say, like, if you want to change the world, you can cure cancer or you can come up with new kinds of memory. So I can't work on the first one, so I'm going to look at the number two for now.
- [123:18]
John
And would this be an early stage company?
- [123:20]
Host
You get exposure. Yeah,
- [123:23]
Bubble Boy
potentially. Or it could be really partnering with a very, very large company. So there's some advantages to both.
- [123:31]
Host
Well, good luck wherever the future takes you.
- [123:35]
John
And this was fun. I've deeply. I've deeply enjoyed your posting and, yeah, you're clearly having a lot of fun and it's fun to watch. Great to meet you.
- [123:48]
Bubble Boy
Thank you guys both. And big fan of the show. So thanks for having me on.
- [123:53]
Host
Thanks for having me.
- [123:54]
John
It's been an honor. We'll talk to you soon, Bubble boy. We'll talk to you.
- [123:56]
Host
Cheers. We should close with an example of why memory is so expensive. Star wars meets Pawn Stars. Have you seen this video? Have you watched this, Jordy?
- [124:12]
John Gray
I did see this.
- [124:13]
Host
Crazy. I saw the first second. I haven't watched the full thing, but I think it's.
- [124:16]
John
It's pretty incredible.
- [124:20]
Host
I have items to pawn.
- [124:22]
John
All right, let's see what you got. Okay, so these are lightsabers.
- [124:30]
Host
Correct.
- [124:31]
Bubble Boy
So where'd you get them?
- [124:35]
Host
Estate sale. Estate sale.
- [124:37]
John
It's so funny that you can clock it by the audio more than the video.
- [124:41]
Host
It's very weird. For many years, it is a great passion of mine. Each lightsaber has a story, a history. There is a certain three. This, the character is CGI to begin with. So it's easy. It's harder to clock even probably AI video, or maybe it's edited together, I don't know. But yeah, you're 100% right. It's the audio that's awful.
- [125:08]
John
That's rough, man.
- [125:09]
Bubble Boy
How much are you looking to get for him?
- [125:11]
Host
100,000 credits.
- [125:15]
Bubble Boy
Look, I'll give you 50 bucks for him, you fool.
- [125:19]
Host
It's interesting that why that's popular is because it's this mashup between two intellectual pieces of property and they're not being compensated for that. And so there's like this thing that can only exist in the piracy world. Basically, if you had recreated this without leveraging Star Wars IP or Pawn Stars ip, it doesn't go viral. Right. And so the business case for AI Video is still a little bit more narrow, and I think it will be tucked in the tool section. I was looking a lot at the Aflac project that he sold to Netflix and some of the background replacements, some of the VFX stuff. It feels like the way even though this is this. It's like one shotting entertainment, it feels like the next moment of AI in Hollywood is very much tool driven leveraging things like green screen removal and object replacement, VFX workflows and just sort of speeding up rote tasks. But people will continue to have fun with these mashups and I'm sure we'll see many more of them on the timeline.
- [126:39]
John
Anyway, the other news, Mike Isaac and his team over at the New York Times are in the courtroom live blogging.
- [126:47]
Host
Blogging. They went.
- [126:48]
John
They're blogging. Yeah, they're blogging. It is.
- [126:50]
Host
There's some crazy moments already.
- [126:52]
John
There's some crazy, crazy moments already.
- [126:56]
Host
The judge is.
- [126:56]
John
We'll try to put some of them together. The judge is doing. The judge is doing bits. Apparently Elon's lawyer's microphone turned off four times in the course of his opening statement.
- [127:07]
Host
Or maybe the screen turned off at one point. I saw some different on that apparently on the there were technical issues.
- [127:12]
John
Fifth or so time the judge says what can I tell you? We are funded by the federal government. So that's wild. She's running bits but highly recommend going over and yeah, Mike Isaac and looking at their posts are still rolling in. It's a lot to go through because it's hours and hours and hours of content. But we'll try to pull out some of the highlights and go through it on tomorrow's show.
- [127:40]
Host
The other thing you should listen to is Patrick o' Shaughnessy had Paul Tudor Jones, one of the greatest macro traders of all time on Invest like the best. It's an hour and 11 minutes and you should go listen to it. So go take a listen. It already has 5,000 likes, 1.7 million views, not nearly enough downloads. So go add it to your podcast player right now and enjoy that for the rest of the day. Enjoy the rest of your day and we'll see you tomorrow 11am Leave us five stars in Apple Podcast Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter tvpn.com can't
- [128:15]
John
wait to see you tomorrow. Have the best afternoon of your life. We love you.
- [128:18]
Host
Goodbye. Flashbang. Flashbang out. Goodbye.