Microsoft’s Energy Tab, OpenAI Goes Super Bowl, Ellison Makes His Move | Marc Benioff, Brian Chesky, Baiju Bhatt, Gabriel Carafa, Alfred Wahlforss

Summary

TBPN Podcast Summary – "Microsoft’s Energy Tab, OpenAI Goes Super Bowl, Ellison Makes His Move"

Episode Date: January 14, 2026
Hosts: John Coogan & Jordi Hays
Notable Guests: Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Brian Chesky (Airbnb), Baiju Bhatt (Aetherflox), Gabriel Carafa (Noise), Alfred Wahlforss (Listen Labs)

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Overview

This TBPN episode dives deep into the rapid shifts shaping technology, energy, and consumer experience at the start of 2026. The hosts discuss Microsoft's proactive response to AI data center political backlash, OpenAI’s bold marketing moves (including a forthcoming Super Bowl ad), and David Ellison’s aggressive play for control in Hollywood, all while interviewing leading founders and visionaries.

The tone is high-energy, playful, and insightful—typical of TBPN—mixing headline analysis, exclusive interviews, and lively banter.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Microsoft’s “Energy Tab”: AI Power and Political Backlash

[02:44–19:19]

• Microsoft responds to U.S. political pressure (especially from Trump) concerning skyrocketing consumer power bills blamed on AI data centers.
• The central issue: massive energy demand from hyperscaler data centers is driving up prices, with consumers near centers sometimes seeing 267% wholesale electricity increases (09:11).
• Narrative Shift: Early AI skepticism (quality, cost) is giving way to enthusiasm as AI-generated content improves—"those four cats on the boat…" (04:22)—but people still resent higher bills.
• Water-use narrative debunked: Data centers recycle most water; energy use is the real sticking point (05:13).
• Microsoft’s move: a five-point plan and commitment to pay above-market electricity rates to insulate consumers. This first-mover messaging (with Brad Smith as the face) garners both political and PR advantage (13:53).
• Other hyperscalers (Google, Amazon) already pay surpluses, but Microsoft’s announcement is notable for its timing and scale.
• Free-market vs. intervention: Hosts debate if tech should pay more or if supply/demand should just play out naturally. "There are political realities and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye." (15:45)
• Quote, Tyler: "The power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in 26.” (05:13)
• Supply not increasing fast enough—new nuclear and solar are years away (08:11–08:27).

2. Data Center NIMBY-ism & Community Pushback

[09:42–13:53]

• $64 billion in data center projects are delayed due to community opposition.
• Arguments against: higher prices, environmental issues, noise/aesthetics, scant local benefit.
• Bipartisan resistance: 55% Republican, 45% Democrat in affected areas.
• Data centers are unlike stadiums or Walmarts—locals don’t feel any direct gain.

3. OpenAI’s Super Bowl Play & The Arms Race in AI Advertising

[30:48–39:08]

• OpenAI will air a new Super Bowl ad amid escalating AI ad spending. Last year’s “techno-optimist” spot is critiqued:

  “I didn’t need a Super bowl ad for me. I needed a Super bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd—people on the fence about AI.” —Tyler [33:00]

• The upcoming ad is expected to be more pragmatic and approachable.
• The AI ad race: $333M on linear TV, $426M on digital in 2025 alone—44% and 3x growth, respectively.
• Gemini (Google), Anthropic, Microsoft, and others all jumping into mainstream consumer marketing.
• OpenAI’s 800M weekly user number is outdated; true reach likely far greater, but the company is saving the milestone for a strategic PR moment.
• Product / growth hack: pre-loaded prompts and viral image sharing are driving ChatGPT’s next billion users, not just raw AI magic.

4. AI Data Center Land Rush & Local Economics

[21:54–24:11]

• Anecdotes about data center companies offering huge premiums for farmland.
• Not all see it negatively: $70k/acre up from $6k average. Some landowners see windfalls.
• The “organ rejection” dynamic—locals banding together to push back.

5. IPO Boom & Financial Trends

[54:25–56:10]

• 2026 expected to bring mega-IPOs: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic.
• Banks and investors eye “unprecedented” deal sizes for transformative tech companies.
• Big question around AI company margins, true profitability—hosts eager for upcoming S-1 filings.

6. Hollywood Power Plays: David Ellison’s “Sun King” Era

[59:56–89:32]

• Deep dive into David Ellison, Skydance, and the Ellison family’s quest to build the next media empire (with Larry Ellison’s billions).
• “He was so upset about losing [Flyboys] that he was hospitalized.” [68:48, John]
• Skydance’s savvy: from failed actor to bankrolling massive franchises (Top Gun, Mission Impossible).
• Paramount & Warner Bros bids: Ellisons aiming to out-Murdoch the Murdochs and reshape media via tech capital.
• Industry and familial psychoanalysis: Larry's orphan background fuels his ambition; David’s "pilot" journey is both literal (dogfights) and metaphoric.
• The power of vision and dreams: “Salesforce started because I was swimming with a pod of dolphins…” —Marc Benioff [211:47]

7. Startup Lightning Round: Founder Interviews

Brian Chesky, Airbnb [89:59–112:55]

• New CTO hire: Ahmed Aldal (ex-Meta, Apple). Led Llama at Meta, multi-touch at Apple; Chesky lauds frontier + craft blend (90:15).
• AI & app design: "We’re in the MS-DOS phase of AI. The current chatbot is not the end state." —Chesky [91:56]
• Most YC founders now do enterprise not consumer. Why? AI infra costs, daunting consumer distribution, perceived risk (94:00).
• Chesky's advice: Don’t fear failure, focus on consumer pain points, pick a non-niche market, keep burn low, and recognize the potential for a new app/agent paradigm (96:22).
• AI imagery risks for Airbnb: authenticity is everything; pro photography for listings helps with trust (102:06).
• Not a “first at all costs” company, wants best LLM integration, not first (103:29).

Baiju Bhatt, Aetherflox [124:20–156:28]

• Building the power grid in space: "The core idea… is collecting electrical power in orbit as a unique, underappreciated energy source." [125:13]
• First applications: defense field energy (beaming power down), then in-orbit compute/data centers.
• Economics: big spreadsheet, physics background, LLMs helped accelerate research and planning (131:46).
• Drawing lessons from Robinhood: start small, launch early, iterate in real space (135:23).
• Space junk & regulation: sustainable constellations are a must, and the space industry’s commercial breakthrough may be AI compute centers (147:35).
• Culture: "Cars are really important—they represent freedom… making that illegal would be dystopian." [155:13]

Founders, Noise & Listen Labs (Gabe, Alfred) [158:47–177:02]

• Noise: Betting markets for cultural relevance. Users long/short brands or trends, connected to real-time social chatter—Google Trends for the post-Google world.
• Listen Labs: AI interviews at mass scale for product feedback (e.g., Chubby’s, Sweetgreen). AI helps find emotional outliers and turbocharges traditional qualitative research and hiring.

8. Enterprise AI: Marc Benioff’s “Slackbot” & Salesforce Strategy

[181:05–211:47]

• TBPN hosts praise Salesforce’s Slackbot (powered by Anthropic), calling it a massive time-saver for cutting through Slack overload.
• Benioff: "It’s not just AI and apps—it’s context engineering. It knows you now." [187:07]
• Salesforce layering together custom and third-party models so users "don't have to think about it" (190:32).
• Cautions on social/AI safety: details links between unregulated AI, suicides, and the urgent need for reforming Section 230 to hold platforms accountable (191:30–196:30).
• AI in the workplace: "I've held my engineering headcount mostly flat—my engineers are more productive than ever." [199:11]
• Product sprawl/overlap: Benioff encourages intra-company competition—daring teams to innovate and even cannibalize.
• M&A playbook: Innovation is both organic and inorganic; value unleashes when great products fuse (207:24). “I’ve bought about 100 companies.”
• Favorite Interview Moment: Benioff attributes founding Salesforce to a vision while swimming with a pod of dolphins in Hawaii. [211:47]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Tyler on AI power backlash: “The power bill narrative is the one that stuck. It became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in 26.” (05:13)
• Tyler on AI’s value: “Most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that they're getting this content for free... There’s no free lunch, of course.” (05:02–05:13)
• Marc Benioff: “It’s not just AI and apps—it’s context engineering. It knows you now. It really does.” (187:07)
• Brian Chesky: “We are in the MS-DOS phase of AI... The current chat bot is not the end state.” (91:56)
• Baiju Bhatt: “If you’re going to be serious in the space industry you have to get up into space quickly. Get up there, get experience, do something, iterate.” (135:23)
• Marc Benioff (on kids & AI safety): “I think the rate of suicide I saw with kids this year because of AI… was one of the worst things I’ve seen in my life.” (191:30–191:42)
• Benioff’s founding vision: "Salesforce started because I was swimming with a pod of dolphins outside the coast of Hawaii... I saw this vision of what Salesforce could look like." (211:47)
• David Ellison profile: “He was so upset about losing [Flyboys] that he was hospitalized.” (68:48)
• Benioff on risk: “Acquisitions are very risky... It's worth it to take the risk because innovation is risky.” (207:42)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

| Segment | Timestamps (MM:SS) | |-------------|----------------------| | Microsoft/AI Data Center Backlash | 02:44–19:19 | | Community Pushback & NIMBY-ism | 09:42–13:53 | | OpenAI Super Bowl & AI ad race | 30:48–39:08 | | Land Rush & Data Center Land Economics | 21:54–24:11 | | IPOs, Tech Financial Trends | 54:25–56:10 | | David & Larry Ellison profile | 59:56–89:32 | | Brian Chesky Interview | 89:59–112:55 | | Baiju Bhatt Interview | 124:20–156:28 | | Founder Lightning Rounds | 158:46–177:02 | | Marc Benioff Interview | 181:05–211:47 |

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Vibe & Takeaways

• The episode captures the cutting-edge anxiety and opportunity of 2026 tech: consumption (energy, AI media, IPOs), cultural influence (Hollywood, Super Bowl, memes), and product revolutions (enterprise AI, space as a platform).
• There’s an undercurrent of winners and losers—who adapts, who pays, who shapes the new rules.
• Regulation, risk, and narrative control are perennial flashpoints.
• The hosts’ playful but sharp approach (and the guests’ candor) offer both illumination and entertainment.

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For Listeners Who Haven’t Tuned in

This episode is a must-listen if you want:

• Sharp, real-time analysis of emerging tech flashpoints (AI energy, advertising, IPOs)
• Insider perspectives on how executives think about scale, risk, and innovation in AI and space
• Engaging founder interviews blending business substance with conversational warmth
• Thoughtful (and sometimes provocative) discussion of tech’s impact—good and bad—on society and culture

You'll come away with a sense of the stakes, the players, and the evolving playbook for surviving—and thriving—in 2026’s breakneck tech landscape.

Transcript

[John]

You're watching TVPN.

[Tyler]

Today is Wednesday, January 14, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a smoke grenade. And it's not a sponsored smoke grenade. We should have put a brand on there. You should throw that smoke grenade. Jordy. Let's check out the new graphics.

[John]

Oh, you want to see it again?

[Tyler]

I want to see a grenade throwing smoke. Ramp.com, time is money. Save both. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in place.

[John]

That doesn't work very well.

[Tyler]

You know about Ramp. You also know about Microsoft, who's making some waves because they jumped. They were on Truth Social scrolling as they do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on now? Of course they were talking to the Trump administration.

[John]

Have you ever scrolled through Social, by the way? It's like five ads for every one post.

[Tyler]

The ads are crazy and they're crazy.

[John]

They're crazy.

[Tyler]

The ads are like, are you a real Patreon? Yes or no? And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next phase of the funnel. And then I'll just be like, glad to hear it, patriot. How about $200 donated? You're like actually 100. And they're like 200 it is. I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons.

[John]

While they have Truth Social, they have a Truth Social ETF now.

[Tyler]

Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social etf?

[John]

Invest in the Patriot economy.

[Tyler]

Oh, okay. Truth Social is really the building everything Everything Multi product. They build nuclear power plants too. Now what?

[John]

I'm sure they are.

[Tyler]

What a time to be alive. Well, we have a lot of great folks joining the show today. Let's chess day. The Linear line up. It's the system for modern software development. Linear's building is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. And we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb. It's Chesk day.

[John]

That's right.

[Tyler]

We have Baiju Robin Hood. Now Aetherflox. He's the founder and CEO of that company Spaceman Space Data Centers.

[John]

Gabriel from Noise, Alfred from Listen Labs. And of course capping it off with.

[Tyler]

Mark Benioff is the lightning round somehow sound theme. We got Noise Labs and then Listen Labs. We need Signal. We need the founder of Signal on.

[John]

The show Moxie Marlinspike. Wait, actually Moxie's gonna come on the show today. He's got A note, we got noise on the show.

[Tyler]

We need signal.

[John]

But he has a new Moxie Focus LLM fantastic called Confer. No way I'm gonna get him on the show today.

[Tyler]

Yeah, no, I'm a huge fan of Moxie Marlinspike and I'm excited to hear that he's coming on the show. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stock options, cryptos, bonds, treasuries and more with all amazing customer service. So Microsoft, what did you write about? I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. And the key line in here is really just that. He says he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't quit, quote, pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills. There's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025. The new technology came out. There's a lot of excitement in 23, 24 and 25. Things got serious. The numbers got really big, the impacts got big and the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up.

[John]

And one of the challenges is the early AI generated videos were pretty bad. And so people were like, these are bad. My power bill is going up. I don't like this.

[Tyler]

What's the point?

[John]

Now this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting.

[Tyler]

They're really good.

[John]

So I think people might start saying.

[Tyler]

Hey, it's totally worth it.

[John]

It's actually totally worth it. Yeah. You saw those, those four cats on the boat that was.

[Tyler]

I haven't seen that one.

[John]

Pull it up, Tyler.

[Tyler]

We gotta see the.

[John]

Find the four cats. Find the four cats.

[Tyler]

Okay. Okay. We will get to continue at some point. I did see an AI video of people racing full 18 wheelers with the boxes in the back. You know how sometimes there will be real races with.

[John]

Yeah, this video rigs. See, I think most people would see this and say, can we get some sound?

[Tyler]

Yeah, there's no amount of power belts. That's pretty fun.

[John]

Okay, turn it off. Turn off the sound. But anyways, yeah, it's worth it.

[Tyler]

Worth it. It's worth every bet, clearly. Yeah, you see that and you're like.

[John]

Yeah, I think most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that they're getting this content for free. They got to pay for it somehow. There's no free lunch, of course.

[Tyler]

Yeah. The power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in 26. The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly. There were a number of just, it seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys and they're like, yeah, we actually, we do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it and we just circle it, circle it around, and we actually don't dump it out and waste it. And so you're just like, yeah, why.

[John]

Would we waste over.

[Tyler]

And then we're like, but what about the power? Like, no, as soon as we use the power, the power's gone forever. Like, we trans. We. We use the power to generate and then we need more power. So the power thing stuck around. There were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up. The one shotting stories were very harrowing, and a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails, went GPT psychosis. Like, that one felt real, but it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails. The whole time it seemed like, look, these labs are, as soon as they're made aware of this, they're going to put a reality checker in the flow. And so if you're 20 prompts deep, it'll just run an extra query and say, does this seem crazy? Does this seem like two crazy people talking to each other? Okay, let's shut it down. It was pretty simple. And you could solve it just in software. And when it's a product issue, you can solve it with a weekend hackathon. You can just lock in. It can be one cloud code prompt for all I know, you can make the change to the app. And I actually noticed this. The Claude app has a pretty short context window, like chat length. Like if you're. If you're chatting with Claude and having it do. I wanted it to pull the market caps for every single one of our sponsors. And I was a couple prompts deep. And it was just like, you've maxed out the context window. You got to start a new chat, which is sort of annoying.

[John]

But what was the market cap?

[Tyler]

Over 5 trillion. Let's go. We have some breaking news today, but TVPN sponsors have been having a good year. Obviously, Google Gemini is a big piece of that, but we do have some very large companies supporting the show, and we thank them for their support. We also thank the smaller companies that haven't raised a lot of money, like TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Hey, one day, maybe it's a $10 trillion company, maybe it's the entire market cap. I see it.

[John]

I could see it.

[Tyler]

So the power one was tricky because with power, you know, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers and then you just see demand is increasing, supply staying flat, as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When, when demand increases and supply stays flat, we know what happens to prices. They increase. This is basic supply and demand. Yes, we can build nuclear power plants, but we had Scott Nolan from General Matter on the show yesterday. He's working extremely hard on this. He says, hey, we're going to be online in end of the decade.

[John]

Of the decade.

[Tyler]

There's a lot of amazing folks. We've had Doug Bernauer from Radiant on the show. We've had Isaiah Taylor on the show. As aggressive as these founders are, they're.

[John]

Trying to show critical this year.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that just means.

[John]

Think of it as testing.

[Tyler]

Exactly. It's still years away. And so. And then solar panels. Solar panels, we can deploy those, but that's still slow. And that doesn't solve the baseload power. What if you want to use a deep research report in the middle of the night or generate a cat video at 2am when the sun isn't shining? Of course you can do it somewhere else, but it doesn't solve. It's not a panacea. And so you got to build more power infrastructure. That takes time. And I don't think very many Americans care about what the supply dynamic of power in America will be in 2035. If just last month they saw their power bill go up by 20%, they're like, this is hitting my pocketbook today, and I'm upset. So Bloomberg reported a 267% wholesale electricity price increase if you're near a data center. So basically, if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way, although there's a huge amount of variation. And it's now, even if you're like, even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center buildouts. So there's $64 billion.

[John]

Yeah. One thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers have very real reasons to push back. Right. It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products. Right. Like, it doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's jobs that come.

[Marc Benioff]

I'm kind of.

[Tyler]

I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. There's empty buildings.

[John]

We did. We did joke about moving the show to Abilene. That would be good. But. But, yeah, it's a real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built and suddenly you're going to be able to.

[Tyler]

Go, yeah, like, you could be a football fan.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

But even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard.

[Marc Benioff]

Yeah.

[John]

You're just like, I.

[Tyler]

That's so true. Yeah.

[John]

That's the big thing. It's like power bill goes up, you know? What do you get in return? Nothing.

[Tyler]

Aura.

[John]

Aura. A nice view. A nice view.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Yeah.

[John]

If you're a data center appreciator.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So $64 billion in data center projects are currently held up and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because prices are going up. Now, there's a couple other reasons some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard. I just don't want a big, white square building. Maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should have some cathedral aesthetics, put some windows on token Cathedral. I don't know. I don't know how big that feels like a less important one. But there's a lot of communities that care about the beauty of the community, the natural beauty of whatever they have, and the fact that it feels like homes and it feels like, yes, there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there and I know the cashier and I go there and I walk in the data center. You'll never go in. They don't do tours. There's no reason for you to go out.

[John]

Walmart is. It employs job people and it's a product for the community.

[Tyler]

Exactly, exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly at Least as a brand. And you know, okay, well, I can get something there. It does something for me. Whereas this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know, my slop might be coming from somewhere else. So interestingly, the anti AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So pretty much just across the board, a bipartisan issue. And you know, tech has obviously been. Worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans more in the more recent history, but now they're facing.

[John]

Yeah, and I think, I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, you're just, you're, these are Luddites, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive? Why do I want this?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because, like it's gonna get built somewhere. It might as well not be in my neighborhood. Yeah, it's very. It's the easiest nimby, nimby Argum to make.

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. We're going to talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first, and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong, actually. I think it's a very good move. Now, to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the Clean Transition Tariff where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers. And Amazon pays a surplus above electricity costs already. But Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement. Like it's a whole story in the Wall Street Journal. And they've actually put a face to the program with Brad Smith, who's the president and the vice chair of Microsoft, giving quotes laying out a five point plan. He talks about a number of environmental issues as well. He talks about water too, that they want to be net zero on the water that they use. In fact, I think Microsoft again, that's.

[John]

Such a, that's such a.

[Tyler]

It's a layup. It's a layup. Yeah, it should be a layup, but it's still good. To just say, hey, you know, if that was the talking point that you were going to hit me with, we already got it sorted. Yeah. Also, Microsoft is planning to be, I think completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050 they want to be so carbon negative that they will as a company since the dawn of Microsoft in the 70s, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire life cycle of the company. Which is interesting, but so Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers. Now, a true free marketer is probably against this. Why is 1 watt of electricity more expensive for one person or another? If I'm watching TikTok and you're building the next and you're curing cancer on your laptop, why do you have to pay less than me? Why are we putting a value judgment on a particular use of a public good? Most the roads cost what they cost, whether you're driving an ambulance or whether you're driving.

[John]

Zach Meyer says would be cool to see a Microsoft liquid death collab for water that was used in a data center.

[Tyler]

Used water somehow I have no idea if the water that comes out of a data center is drinkable.

[John]

Well, of course you can just filter it, filter it again and it'll be good to go in the liquid death.

[Tyler]

So the die hard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply demand issues. Let prices rise and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally. But there are political realities and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things. Even if you're just going with natural gas, it takes time. There are backlogs. At a certain point you buy all of the natural gas turbines and then you need to build more turbine factories. That's why boom Supersonic is getting in the game. And at a certain point you have to build more factories that build more factories and it does get slow. And then there's also a capex consideration because if you're an electric, if you're a power company and you say, oh great, the rates are going up, there's a data center in my area, they're going to buy a ton of electricity, I got to bring a new power plant online. That's great. And then you go to your team and you're like, okay, we need to put up how much money and where's that money coming from and we got to pay for, yeah, we're going to finance it, but we still have to pay for a bunch in the front and it's going to hurt the interest payments that we're not going to be making money from this new power plant for a while. So we have to pay the interest so we have to raise prices. So then prices do go up even if they are responding as fast as they can. So there's a few different dynamics there that basically Microsoft and the big tech companies I think will be saying, hey, look, we want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up capacity. And so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully you can pass those that revenue on into bringing up capacity. So I think overall Brad Smith is playing the game on the field. And the good news is that it feels like Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers. Electricity represents 40% of data center opex, about $7.5 million annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers. And so energy is a significant line item. I think like 3 billion a year in electricity, something like that. That's very rough. Probably got to go to semi analysis for the real number. But this is back to the envelope stuff. But again, 3 billion in energy costs for 245 billion in revenue. Microsoft's going to be okay if they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio. We're talking about a billion dollars of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a major rethink on the company, but it is a big step towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of higher energy prices.

[John]

Satya is simply the goat. He's my goat.

[Tyler]

He does appear to be the goat. Play that goat noise while I tell everyone about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

[John]

No, I think it's super smart. I think it was inevitable. Trump needs this for the midterms. He's putting pressure on everyone. Right. Credit card stuff, data center stuff, we'll see more of this. And yet being the first mover, ultimately only the first mover, the one that sort of says like hey yeah, we're excited about this is the one that gets any credit, right? Amazon doing this, they're not going to get credit for it.

[Tyler]

Yeah, it's a weird sort of game theory dynamic where this will probably wind up landing like a small tax on the Entire on all the hyperscalers or all data centers as a broad like unenforced. It won't be a true tax, but they will all be paying it because the political reality is necessitate it. But the first mover gets the compressed cycle which is funny. It is from truth social to corporate concession like that is the era.

[John]

We are the pipeline.

[Tyler]

Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You're in favor of data center subsidies, right? Like you want data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable to.

[John]

Have government backed data centers electrical subsidies.

[Tyler]

You gotta feed Claude.

[John]

I mean I just think like this is kind of disappointing because it just, it's telling me that like if you imagine we have like a real free market.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

There should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply.

[Tyler]

Yep.

[John]

And that's obviously not happening because energy price would be going down. They're going up.

[Tyler]

Yep.

[John]

So it's like this is just like this is telling me that in the future we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want.

[Tyler]

Yes.

[John]

Or at least on any kind of like short term scale.

[Tyler]

Yeah. It does feel, I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is at least in the short term, much more zero sum than people thought. There's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But the pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want. Which is why I was a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy and, and a lot of work being done across all different technologies, unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not be unaffordable. Because people do want to scroll Instagram reels and they want to watch AI slop and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone. After watching four hours of Instagram Reels.

[John]

Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent $200 million at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property, which will reportedly be used for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal. Seems like as part of that TSMC will, will expand their operations in Arizona, which is very exciting.

[Tyler]

And they are basing their design for this off of Costco warehouses. Nick here, the render here is very sci fi. I've seen renders of their facility in Taiwan. It looks beautiful. Seems like they're bringing some of that Aesthetic to Arizona seems pretty cool.

[John]

This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. He says, this isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her farm by a Data Center Company. 11.2 million total. This is what Big Tech is doing in Michigan. So anyway, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan. Yeah. I remember on the University of Michigan campus, there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like, stop the AI data center.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Or it was Stop the data center build out.

[John]

And that's when you knew you had to drop out. This place is not for me.

[Tyler]

Organ rejection. You got to go back, take the. Take the fight to them. Put up some posters that say yes on data centers. Put a data center, subsidize data centers, tear down the stadium.

[John]

Yeah. So just, just some context on that last exchange. Matthew Zaitlin at heatmap says, I think this is shared as an example of Big Tech doing a bad thing. But I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6,200 per acre.

[Tyler]

So they're paying over 10x the price.

[John]

Yeah, I mean, who. Who knows? I mean, it's. They could easily be paying a premium. Land, specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. I wouldn't be surprised if some landmaxers are going out and just buying up. Why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes.

[Tyler]

I wonder how real this text message is. Because I get a lot of spam text messages for business financing. We'll invest in your company. You just get like random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out random numbers just for price discovery, just to sort of like aggregate some sort of metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out. Like if this person had said yes, what's the problem?

[John]

My wife got a spam text today that just said, babe, I dropped my phone and it broke. She immediately texted me and said, this isn't you, right?

[Tyler]

Oh, interesting.

[John]

But it's pretty interesting. Interesting. Kind of like loop to get somebody and to, I imagine, send. Send me a thousand dollars so I can get a new phone.

[Tyler]

Oh, sure, sure, sure.

[John]

Do you remember the text that Ben got? He was asking him if you want to get steaks.

[Tyler]

Oh, that's the best spam. That was the best spam.

[John]

It said, let's get steak tonight.

[Tyler]

Let's get steak tonight. I mean, should have said yes. Yeah.

[John]

Did you respond and just say I'm in? No, I just posted it. I should have responded though. Missed opportunity to make a new friend.

[Tyler]

Well, now is a great time to tell you about our newest sponsor, Cisco. Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. They're building the foundation for AI Howard. We are very excited to be partnered with Cisco.

[John]

It's truly an honor.

[Tyler]

It is.

[John]

It is truly an honor.

[Tyler]

In other news, the stock market is down. The Dow falls weighed down by JP Morgan not good news. There was a rocky quarter for JP Morgan and it weighed on the Dow Jones Industrial average headline. Prices rose 2.7 from a year earlier, 2.7% according to the CPI. This was in line with expectations and November's rate Core cpi, which excludes food and energy prices, also held at the prior month rate. Now, overall, weren't things doing what did they say here? I don't have this JP Morgan Earnings Investment Fees Both Fall Off JP Morgan reported that the bank's profit fell 7% in the fourth quarter, dragged down by a change from its deal to take over the Apple card credit card program and surprising slip in investment banking fees. The investment bankers are not making enough money. Still, the nation's biggest bank saw revenue increase for both the quarter and for the full year and was optimistic about the trajectory of the U.S. economy and consumer from Jamie Dimon. He said consumers have money, there are still jobs even though it's weakened a little bit, he said on a call with analysts. I saw a great Jamie Dimon hype reel on Instagram reels the other day. It was fantastic. In other news, there's more details about that Apple card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through. We should pull this up behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs after two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time. We'll see Goldman replaced by JP Morgan on Apple's credit card. Before we read through this, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So in early December, a long delayed deal hung over a call between JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon executive if you.

[John]

Don'T know David Solomon, you probably know him because as DJ D Soul.

[Tyler]

DJ D Soul. But he also runs a big bank called Goldman Sachs. Very cool Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program and its roughly $20 billion in balances. But the talks had stalled. Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations. You're moving too slow. JP Morgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, they'd secured a discount on the balances. We talked about this where normally these balances, they trade at a premium because people expect them to be paid back with interest. But in this case, JP Morgan was going to get a discount, but they wanted more protection in case the loans grew worse, in case there were higher than expected defaults. Goldman executives, meanwhile, didn't feel the need to bend much. Now that the Apple program was finally looking profitable. Some executives on both sides had started questioning whether to walk away. Dimon and Solomon got on a call on December 8, according to people familiar with the matter. They discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon, people said. Just before the new year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week, confirming the Wall Street Journal's earlier report. A little patting on the back for the Wall Street Journal for getting the scoop. The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together. JP Morgan is adding the flashy program to its credit lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances. Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card. Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses, a chapter it is hoping to forget. Moving the Apple credit card was never going to be simple. Card programs this big aren't put up for sale often, and few buyers, few potential buyers exist. Apple is famously finicky about details and control, including with its credit card. Before launching the program in 2019, Goldman and Apple agreed to unusual terms that other banks balked at taking over. Interested executives were especially worried about higher than normal delinquencies and subprime exposure and wanted huge discounts to consider a deal. Even still, almost nothing about the process of finding a bank to replace Goldman has been normal to begin with. Goldman began looking to exit from the contract with Apple only a few months after it had extended its partnership with the tech giant to the end of the decade. Apple and Goldman had discussions with larger and smaller credit card issuers. American Express, Capital One, Synchrony, Barclays and Santander, as well as tiny fintechs. Apple even debated bringing in private credit firms to help a smaller card issuing entity take over. But it didn't go that way and they landed with JP Morgan. So very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get at the box. Get a label box. A label box. Moving on. OpenAI is going to be running another super bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl.

[John]

Why don't we.

[Tyler]

We need to watch last year's ad, react to that and see what we think will change. What will stay the same. What will they do? The artificial intelligence company behind the popular ChatGPT tool is set to broadcast a 60 second commercial during NBC's broadcast.

[John]

All right, with sound.

[Tyler]

Let's watch it with sound if we can. The ad is the latest component of OpenAI's expansive marketing expensive marketing offensive, which began last year with its first super bowl commercial.

[John]

We don't have sound. Okay, okay. The production team is telling us, unfortunately we do not have the technology to play sound on a video.

[Tyler]

Let's work on that.

[John]

But if I remember the song correctly, it's like doom. Doom. Like something.

[Tyler]

Oh, really? Is it. Is it a. Is it a licensed song? Because you were thinking that they should license creeds. Can you take me higher for this next one? Right? That was what you thought.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

Can you take me higher? And it's like to a higher plan. You're on the free plan. Please upgrade to the $200 a month plan. Oh, we got it.

[John]

Let's go. We do have the technology.

[Tyler]

AGI is here. Okay, so there's someone throwing a spear. We create fire. Then the wheel, then the wheel with spokes. Then the horse. The horse created the horse. We created the horse. And Korn. We created Korn. Maybe they should use a Korn song. Freak on a leash. That's the song they should license. A nod to corn. I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like it is very well done piece. So you go inside the skeleton, build the 747, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV news. That's us. They go to the moon. Somewhat equally important, create the Internet and then you start talking to the computer. And now the merge. You got AI.

[Marc Benioff]

What do you want to create next?

[Tyler]

And then you get the blue chatgpt dot.

[John]

Yeah. So I love, I love this. It was just not necessarily.

[Tyler]

I didn't need a Super bowl ad for Me?

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

I needed a Super bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd.

[Marc Benioff]

Right.

[Tyler]

The people who are maybe on the fence about AI. But yeah, as a technologist, it has the aesthetics of like, wow, this is the coolest tech company ever. And this is like, this has the vibe of Apple. It has a lot of throwback stuff. It feels like high technology. It feels techie elite. Very, very cool designed. It feels refined.

[John]

It's possible at the time they were like, look, we're growing so quickly. We don't really need to run a Super bowl ad.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

Let's just flex on everybody a little bit by running one.

[Tyler]

I mean, there's a certain.

[John]

But this year I expect it to be much more pragmatic about what you.

[Tyler]

Can use to do something.

[John]

Exactly how they want the average American to think about ChatGPT.

[Tyler]

Yes, yes.

[John]

Where it integrates into their life.

[Tyler]

And so do you think it'll be one specific use case? Like there's been OpenAI videos about ChatGPT helping you cook dinner. And I actually got an odd email from a friend all about how he loves cooking with friends and how food is this important thing. And then he was calling out the ChatGPT video on food being like, I don't like this because it's taking away the one thing I like as a human.

[John]

I actually had a funny thing about it.

[Tyler]

I think it's fine.

[John]

Using an LLM for a pancake recipe last week, and it completely. The pancakes really did not work because it's basically taking the average of all pancakes.

[Tyler]

You made a mid pancake and it.

[John]

Just made the most runny mid pancakes really bad.

[Tyler]

Interesting.

[John]

I don't know. It'd be interesting. I wonder if they try to do anything on the, like, anything on the. It's probably too early for the commerce side. You could see some of that. Maybe they want people to know commerce is coming. I could also see them trying to make it interactive somehow. You could imagine like when maybe this.

[Tyler]

When is gamble.

[John]

No, no, no, no. But I was going to be like, ask like talk like, like chat with chat chat. Like tell chatgpt you want it. I don't know.

[Tyler]

Well, it could like they could sort of launch like ChatGPT Sports or something where, you know, you're like the demo of what it's showing you is that if you have ChatGPT as your second screen during the super bowl, you're going to pull up more interesting stories about the players, you're going to pull up statistics, you're going to be able to understand the. Add more Context to your experience of super bowl watching. Even, like, oftentimes, if I'm watching the Super Bowl, I'll see an ad and I'll go and go to Google and say, well, what are the greatest super bowl ads of all time? And I'll wind up on some listicle. And ChatGPT, of course, can generate that type of stuff all the time. You could filter and say, show me the best super bowl ads from tech companies back in the dot com boom. I want to know about those. And you can go anywhere. And that is the magic of ChatGPT. There's a whole bunch of other ways that they could try and contextualize it. They could try and be emotional, go with ChatGPT Health.

[John]

I wonder if they'll do anything with the new Disney integration. Like if they wanted to spark another Studio Ghibli moment, that would be really good that he is coming online. Originally they said in January, so maybe the timing lines up. That would be really wild.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you get Darth Vader in there. So something or I mean, there's a.

[John]

Lot of characters to choose. No, I was, yeah, I was saying, like, try to, try to use the super bowl ad to prompt people to make.

[Tyler]

Go to ChatGPT and turn yourself, turn.

[John]

Your super bowl party into a Disney themed thing.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that would be very good. Yeah, surprise celebrity appearance or celebrity endorsement would be good. They've sort of shied away for Scarlett Johansson.

[John]

Maybe they can bring her back.

[Tyler]

Reversal. Reversal and getting her back on the team would be fantastic.

[John]

But I expect that this will be the AI Super Bowl.

[Tyler]

You think there'll be even more ads?

[John]

I'm sure there will.

[Tyler]

So for context, tech companies across anthropic, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity collectively spent 333 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the United States just last year. And that was up 43% from the prior year, according to estimates from an ad tracker, iSpot. They also shelled out 426 million on digital ads in 2025, more than triple their 2024 outlays. So interesting. Digital is growing faster than linear. I would not expect that. I would expect the digital to have been really, really popular and then them to have just jumped into linear. But I guess they've been.

[John]

Wait, are they talking about streaming ads?

[Tyler]

Maybe it's from Sensor Tower. It just says digital ads, which I assume Zoom is Facebook, Google Ads, all that sorts of stuff. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL NBA and college sports games with ads for its Claude Chatbot. It shelled out an estimated $16.5 million on linear TV ads in 2025, despite boasting a base of over 800 million weekly users. OpenAI is. And that is such a stale number. They got it.

[John]

Download this app.

[Tyler]

What do you mean?

[John]

Like, they just. They really can. They're not in the top 25 apps.

[Tyler]

Wait, which one?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Claude.

[Tyler]

Oh, oh, you're talking Claude. So Sorry, sorry. That 800 million weekly active users is for OpenAI for check.

[John]

No, I know, but. I know, I know. So they spent. They've been spending money all over.

[Tyler]

Well, you know why? Do you know why the Claude is not at the top of the app store charts? It's because if you generate a deep research report on the iOS app, it will not read it to you out loud. It doesn't have that functionality. And that's clearly a gap that everyone has experienced and recognizes. And as soon as they run into that, they uninstall it and they don't recommend it to their friends. So if you're listening anthropic, please add that functionality. I want to be able to listen to deep research reports.

[John]

Yeah. Just think, how do they figure out how to get it? How do they figure out how to become a real player in consumer? Because clearly they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be spending that money.

[Tyler]

I mean, they need hooks. You need some viral Flywheel. So the ChatGPT number, 800 million weekly active users, that feels woefully out of date. It feels like they were well over a billion and they're just waiting to actually drop that press release at a key moment. And now is not the right time to wow everyone with the real usage numbers. But I definitely think that they're beyond that. This number is very stale. Like, we got this 800 million weekly number months and months ago and it must have grown. Google obviously has a whole bunch of hooks into the Gemini ecosystem through Gmail and Google. There's so many different entry points. Claude, as an independent app, doesn't really have that. Also, I think just on a product sense, ChatGPT, I do think that the holidays were successful and it was not discussed on X. The tech elite and the tech, you know, like anyone who's like, in tech was focused on Claude code. They were doing vibe coding projects. They had time off from work and time to lock in and play around with like the hottest new coding agent. So people weren't. People were. People knew that ChatGPT could do images, but right before the holiday started, ChatGPT launch the image tab. And if you go to the Image tab in the app, the most interesting thing there is that it's not just a prompt box, they have preloaded. Have you seen these? It will show you retro anime, it will show you ideas. Turn yourself into a bobblehead, turn yourself into a sugar cookie or a fisheye lens or ink work or pop art. And so. So it's taking the work out of someone. Like most people in tech, an image model comes out, Studio Ghibli thing happens. Everyone's like, what's the prompt?

[John]

They were like, it's too much to ask people to have an idea.

[Tyler]

It is.

[John]

We need to give them the idea and we need to make the image for them.

[Tyler]

It actually is too much.

[John]

And then eventually when you have your little sweet pea, whatever they're calling their new device, it will just be generating images on the fly based on your day.

[Tyler]

Yes, yes, yes.

[John]

And then eventually you'll just be able to stay laying in bed all day long.

[Tyler]

Yeah, but I mean, just from a product perspective, the ChatGPT Images tab is, I think, an important just growth hack, which is something that they just have to do now because they're at that scale. And I saw that people were generating images and then sharing them and they weren't screenshotting them or downloading them with some watermark. They were clicking the share button in the ChatGPT app and sharing a link to the ChatGPT app that would show you the image in a preview if you shared an imessage or in a group chat. And that would onboard more people and those sorts of viral loops. They feel like, oh, the tech is so magical, it should just grow organically. But it already grew organically. Like the organic growth was a billion people. Now how do you get the next billion? Well, you probably have to do some growth hacking and a product like images in ChatGPT with Disney characters and links that beg you to install the app for yourself. And Claude isn't quite there yet. Where there's an obvious thing that a huge swath of people can go to and then hook in and we can collaborate and I send you a link.

[John]

And then you install. Yeah, the tough thing is if you're spending all this money trying to drive consumer downloads, but then you don't have image generation at all, at what point? Why don't they just, even if that's not a priority for them, it still feels like a product that consumers really want in their daily driver. And at some point they may have to capitulate that.

[Tyler]

I don't know if they care about the app race at all, the consumer app race. It feels like Anthropic's been super focused on the enterprise, super focused on coding, and that's been.

[John]

I know, I know. But they say, like. All I'm saying is you can say that you're not focused on consumer. But they run billboard ads all over la. They're spending a lot of money on television. And so you kind of need to make up your mind.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you don't really advertise in NFL and NBA. I mean, I guess enterprise buyers watch those shows. So 16 million, maybe it's worth it. But I agree with you.

[John]

Generally, their ad campaigns have been great.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah.

[John]

And maybe they just want to rub it in the face of the other labs. They're also going public, so they want developing, like real name recognition. Broadly, I think is important.

[Tyler]

I mean, in theory, if they host Claude code in a virtual machine that you can access from a phone and have it write software for you, it should be able to go and set up an API with an image generator and generate you images. And so you should be able to do that from the app, like Claude code. If I ask Claude code to generate an image for me, it will figure out how to find an image generator, sign up for the API almost, or at least I will give it the API key and then it will be able to generate images for me, correct?

[John]

Yeah. It would ask you to, like, you would have to go generate the API key and stuff.

[Tyler]

Yeah, but that's.

[John]

Actually, I'll try that right now.

[Tyler]

Yeah. What happens if you just ask CLAUDE code to generate you a picture of four cats on a boat or something? How does it actually work through solving that? At some point, it should prompt you to at least maybe make a decision about which image generator you want to use and at least ask for credit card information to pay for it. Maybe it goes to a free image generator, I don't know. But the Wall Street Journal continues, and we will continue after telling you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise money, raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Selling AI to the masses isn't easy, says the Wall Street Journal. Due to sustained public fear about the technology's potential downsides, businesses have already cut jobs using AI tax for tasks previously performed by humans. And executives have articulated plans.

[John]

Why would the masses be scared? Why would they be scared of this technology?

[Tyler]

Half of us adults are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence. According to a spring Survey by Pew Research. That's a while ago.

[John]

But only 10% say excitement outweighs their worry.

[Tyler]

Skill issue. Just be in the 10%, right, Tyler?

[John]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Well, OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between.

[John]

Wait, this would actually be a great bit. We should make an AI Tyler that we can go to and just.

[Marc Benioff]

We'll.

[Tyler]

He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

[John]

We'll compare the two of you guys and this can just be a good barometer for AI progress. How do you feel about that? It could probably do a pretty good job because it's. I mean, it can already do like a talking head. If you just put an image of me and then the voice you can clone. I know, but I don't think it would have your takes.

[Tyler]

I don't think it would have your takes.

[John]

Just say like. Or your aura. Dwarkesh.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Or.

[Tyler]

I'm sorry, that's too controversial. I can't hold that opinion. While opening eyes, first big game AD positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance and human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions such as the light bulb. More recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. They feature people using the chatbot for everyday problems, such as finding a recipe or searching for exercise tips. Which way will OpenAI go in the new super bowl ad? I imagine that they will go more proactive, more productive, more tangible. There will be a human shot with a camera using the app, probably on the phone, but we'll see. In its ads, Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Yeah. Why would you want to run an ad saying that?

[John]

This strategy anchored by the super bowl ad concept. We are not a threat to human intelligence. We are not a threat. Don't worry about us.

[Tyler]

Yeah, how about a super relieved.

[Gabe]

We hear you.

[John]

We hear that you're concerned.

[Tyler]

Yeah, just massive super rule warranted. Our PDUM is actually really low relative to the true risk. We think that the PDUM should be low. Everyone's like, what are they talking about?

[John]

5% chance of annihilation by end of year.

[Tyler]

Well, if you're running the super bowl, you gotta get on restream one livestream 30 plus destinations. I want to be able to watch the Super bowl on LinkedIn. If you want a multi stream, go to restream.com and I know the folks who have the rights to the super.

[John]

Bowl satya really should push to get LinkedIn the streaming rights for sure be a game changer for the super bowl.

[Tyler]

Okay, so Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today designed for you. Personal Intelligence they're calling it. Personal Intelligence draws insights from across your Google apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below. They say Gemini already remembers your past chats to provide relevant responses, but today we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of Personal Intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google search and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses. Here are some ways you can start using it. Planning Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel because it'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been. It'll know that I went to Austria and recommend a different city, maybe shopping. Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level, help you find items you love faster. Motivation Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards. Look at your to do list. Privacy is central to Personal Intelligence. How you connect other apps to Gemini the new beta feature is off by default. You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect, and can turn it off at any time. Personal Intelligence begins rolling out today as a beta to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. That's me. So I gotta turn this on. I'm very interested in seeing I imagine that I will not be able to link multiple Google accounts because I have a personal Gmail and then I have a work Gmail and then I sort of want to integrate my old work Gmails that I think I have access to still because that says a lot about me. Even though I'm not really using that stuff anymore and I'm not using actioning those emails, I could see that being important in terms of building out a.

[John]

Yeah, if you were sick of switching between constantly switching between calendars and Chrome and having your personal calendar calendar, get ready to be sick of switching between LLMs.

[Tyler]

Yeah, some of them have been surprisingly good at bootstrapping knowledge. I feel like a few of the LLMs have been have surprised me by I'll ask a question and it'll just be like and here's the context for tvpn, here's the TVPN angle and I'm like oh, I forgot that I mentioned that to you. Or like you figured that out somehow or like you did something. I don't know. The personalization is getting better. Maybe this is the year when it really hits I know ChatGPT introduced it as a concept a while ago, maybe almost a full year ago, and it hasn't felt magical yet. Pulse was cool, but it's. I never became a daily active user of Pulse. The interesting question is it a data source problem, Is it an architectural problem, or is it an actual model level problem? Are the models just not smart enough? Do they not have enough data or are they not designed in the right way where they can actually go over all of your information? I was using the new Salesforce Slack bot that we're going to talk to Marc Benioff about at 2pm and it was remarkably useful in Slack because I'm not on Slack a lot and so I had a ton of notifications that had built up over months and I was able to go in and write a prompt or just talk to Chat Slack bot and say, hey, catch me up. What's been happening in Slack in this Slack workspace? And it did a good job summarizing all the different key things where I was mentioned, what was relevant to me. I did prod it on what anthropic model it's using exactly. And it's not using the Latest and greatest 4.5. It was using, I think 3.5. It didn't seem aware of the latest models. And also it didn't have the ability to search the web. It didn't have the ability to act as like a full fledged LLM. You couldn't just ask IT things. It was very confined to Slack, but within that domain it was pretty useful. And it did help me sort of get to like Inbox zero in just like a couple minutes because I was able to just scan a digest of everything that's happening across all the channels instead of clicking through them, scanning, reading the threads, the going down, the. It was just able to be like, here's the deep research report on it.

[John]

Yeah, I am waiting. I'm waiting for the moment where people are like, I'm not really interested in trying a new LLM that's hot because like having memory in the LLM and personalization is so important. Like waiting for that lock in moment. Don't think it's really. You have some force lock in where a company is saying like we use.

[Tyler]

This LLM or I mean vice versa where you know, they're just. It's just like, yeah, in the course of my day I use 5 different LLMs. Like on my phone I use Apple Intelligence and that's routing to Gemini and then I log into Slack and that's using the anthropic APIs, but it doesn't really matter because I don't care that they don't talk to each other. It's all fine and they work. They're good enough for the particular thing that I'm trying to do at a particular time. That's another possible outcome here. Andrew Curran is summarizing some of the news here, saying that it includes Google Workspace. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into Nano Banana. You can have more suggested images hey, do you want to touch this photo up? Do you want to create some sort of holiday card like what ChatGPT ultimately wound up doing with images?

[John]

Go through Google Photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every single I've ever taken?

[Tyler]

Set the GPUs on fire for sure before we move on Phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card New York.

[John]

Times has some coverage today talking about IPOs of this year. 2026 may be the year of the mega IPO. Not really new news for those of you listening. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic are going public. They talk about Eddie Malloy from Morgan Stanley says we're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented IPO deal sizes. We are confident they're executable given the scale of these companies and the investor interest. In two decades I haven't seen private companies that are this meaningful and are this impactful, said Jeremy Abelson, an investor at Irving Investors. Not only are they bigger and more relevant, but they're incredible companies with numbers that we've never seen before, ever. I think everybody's excited to just get into these S1s. I expect them to be extremely impressive. There was a ton of reasons, but.

[Tyler]

There'S been a number of reports about how bad the gross margins are, how much money they're losing. We're about to find out the real details. It's going to be exciting times. Exciting times.

[John]

So yeah, we'll see all the geopolitical chaos. You know, even this ruling around tariffs, which we didn't get today. All this stuff is going to play into whether or not. Whether or not the window stays open.

[Tyler]

Yeah, console. Console builds AI agents that automates 70% of it. HR and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and Password resets.

[John]

Saks 5th Ave, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman filed for bankruptcy crumbling.

[Tyler]

You shop at Saks Fifth Avenue? Have you shopped at Saks Fifth Avenue?

[John]

I've never been a department store guy. Department store guy ever go Straight to.

[Tyler]

The Chrome Heart store. You're the guy in line outside Supreme.

[John]

Go to. Right.

[Tyler]

And they don't sell supreme at Saks.

[John]

Right.

[Tyler]

Maybe that's why they're going bankrupt. The hypebeast move.

[John]

Zero Chrome.

[Tyler]

Zero Chrome.

[John]

Anyways, they filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday, crumbling under billions of dollars in debt, a fraying relationship with vendors, and lagging sales. The filing is the latest sign that America's luxury department stores, once landmarks that served as immersive fantasy worlds for the wealthy and aspirational, are becoming an endangered species. Jeffrey Van Raymondon, the former Neiman Marcus chief executive, will return as Sachs Global CEO. He succeeds Richard Baker, the chief executive and executive chairman, who in 2024 orchestrated a $2.7 billion acquisition by Sachs of the Neiman Marcus Group, which owns Bergdorf Goodman. Sachs said it had secured roughly 1.75 billion to help finance the company through bankruptcy, much of it coming from its bondholders. Sachs said it intended to emerge from bankruptcy later this year, and it expected to honor all customer programs, make payments to vendors, and continue to pay employees. Saks has brought in additional executives to help sewer the company, including Darcy Pennock, former president of Bergdorf Goodman, as president and chief commercial officer. This is a defining moment for Saks Global, and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future. This is good messaging. Trump was messaging around the Supreme Court ruling. He said, if they rule against this, we're screwed. He just was like, if they rule against the tariffs, we're screwed.

[Tyler]

We're cooked. We're chopped and we're cooked. Ridiculous things.

[John]

Yeah. I mean, I feel like these stores are, if anything, just nostalgic. Right. It really feels like an end of an era. ESSENCE obviously went bankrupt earlier this year. In that case, too. Founders are going to actually maintain control, so we'll see how they navigate through. But again, I just wonder, as these stores shut down, like, who. Who can even fill these spaces? Like, there's just not. There's not companies that want to come in and occupy a bunch of this. A bunch of this real estate.

[Tyler]

You gotta get Rick Caruso in there. He's like the master of this. Like, yeah, have you seen him? A little bit more durable. About the mall that you go to for, there's restaurants, there's a movie theater, there's a coffee shop, bookstore, escape room, probably laser tag VR, maybe a sphere. But there's a few key stores that are anchor tenants. The Apple Store and there's electronics, and then there are A few. There's a Louis Vuitton store, a coach store, Bottega store. And those brands want to own the entire retail experience, I think more now, I don't. I'm not sure, but it seems like, you know, as much as we joke about, like the supreme store having lines out front, like there isn't. There is a deliberate strategy to that. Like you control the full experience, not just a corner or a display table in a larger store. So these, like, aggregator retail stores seem to be having a lot of trouble.

[John]

Yeah, it's not good.

[Tyler]

Well, MongoDB choose a database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next. Larry Ellison is being profiled in Vulture for New York magazine. It's a very long profile that we should read through first. We should debate this story that we almost got to from Reddit yesterday. Are there any real candy innovations right.

[John]

Now.

[Tyler]

R candy, which I didn't know existed? Hey, everyone, I'm curious to hear your perspective as candy alone. Do you feel like there's any real innovation happening in candy right now? Are there any sweets brands or flavors that are new? Someone's been reading Zero to one, the stagnation theory has come to the candy industry. We're seeing progress in the world of bits, less so in the world of sugars, of candy. Some people did make the good point that, yes, there has been a phenomenal breakout success in the candy industry. Do you know what I'm talking about, Jordy?

[John]

No.

[Tyler]

There's one really big winner recently, and it is Nerds. Gummy clusters. These nerds. Gummy clusters. I don't know where this got buried in this. This went very viral, I guess. But Nerds was a brand of candy that had been around for a long time and was doing, I think, fine, sort of like, you know, stagnant revenue. And then they came up with this way to create like. Have you ever had Nerds? Are you familiar with this?

[John]

Of course.

[Tyler]

Yeah. It's like this, like, grainy, like, sand texture or something.

[John]

I don't know.

[Tyler]

It's like a bunch of little pellets and it's sort of like.

[John]

Are you mansplaining nerds?

[Tyler]

Yeah, it's sort of like hard to wrap.

[Brian Chesky]

I don't know.

[Tyler]

It's not that accessible. It's like you either dump it all in your mouth and then you just give a tunnel. It's not a great user experience.

[John]

It's a little outdated, really. I think So I thought it was fantastic growing up.

[Tyler]

You did?

[John]

Yeah. Interesting nerd ropes too. Yeah.

[Tyler]

Yeah. So basically what they did with the nerd rope, they cut it up into these little clusters. And this product has been selling fantastically well and has done very, very well. And there were also some. Yeah, there's a bunch of people chiming in the comments. Peelers, gummy mangoes. There's a whole bunch of stuff. There were even some companies that did like sugar free candies that I think have done well. There's been a number of sort of new startups. There really isn't like a David's protein bar type of breakout success in candy that I'm familiar with. Are you.

[John]

I love candy. I just assume that it all wants to kill me.

[Tyler]

Yeah. And so bring me the poison.

[John]

Bring me the poison. What was your favorite candy growing up?

[Tyler]

Hmm. I don't know. That's a tough one. Maybe Starburst, Skittles, the classics.

[John]

Oh, wow.

[Tyler]

Is there anything else?

[John]

Hot tamales.

[Tyler]

Hot tamales. Okay. Interesting. Tyler, what candy do you get? More of a chocolate guy. Chocolate guy.

[John]

I don't really like any. Find interesting.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I don't know. I pick up candy from time to time at the airport, something.

[John]

Oh yeah, you do?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah. If we're getting on a plane, I like to have some candy hanging around. But you know, the nerds. Gummy clusters. I've had those on plane flights a few times. But good to see that the candy community is coming out in full force in support of candy innovation.

[John]

Well, I went and found this original post on R Candy.

[Tyler]

What do they say?

[John]

The post seems written by ChatGPT. EM dashes all of it. And yeah, basically everybody's just nostalgia maxing.

[Tyler]

What are they most nostalgic for? What do they like?

[John]

They're just saying they like the old school stuff. Willy Wonka candy.

[Tyler]

Does a Reese's peanut butter cup count as a candy or is that a chocolate? I think of chocolate as a subcategory.

[John]

Oh, interesting. Halloween candy. I gotta buy Halloween candy for Halloween.

[Tyler]

Snickers came in there.

[John]

Okay.

[Tyler]

Yeah, Snickers. Snickers counts. That's good. It's also an ingredient that you could use. You wouldn't say like a chocolate cake is candy. There's something about the size.

[John]

Producer Ben wants a protein Twix.

[Tyler]

I would be surprised.

[John]

That could be pretty good if that.

[Tyler]

Revitalizes the candy industry. Anyway, let's move on to this story about David Ellison, the sun king of Hollywood. Before we read through this, we'll tell you about Century Sentry shows developers what's broken, helps them fix it fast. That's why a hundred, 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So with help from his billionaire father, Larry David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in history. One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars had abruptly checked into the hospital. What? On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison. Devlin said. Devlin made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s. Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla. Wow, what a run. But he'd struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, had a college age son named David, who was not only trying to break into Hollywood, but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film production company with an aerial name, Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role alongside James Franco as a pilot named Eddie. Who can't shoot straight? Come on. Ready? Can we try to find the climactic fight scene?

[John]

Can we try to find something? Right. Do something in Flyboys.

[Tyler]

Yeah, let's find a David Ellison hype reel. Or maybe just the trailer. And do you see the photo that Vulture chose for? This is sort of a collage, a rendition of David Ellison, but, you know, they put him in the royal oak right there in the photo. You love to see it. So, Devlin, let's. Yeah, let's watch the Flyboys trailer. I'd love to see this. I. I haven't. I actually haven't seen this movie back.

[Brian Chesky]

We had no idea what to expect.

[Tyler]

Franco, maybe this is the movie to watch this weekend.

[John]

Nothing in common except wanted to learn to fly.

[Tyler]

No, that's a cool shot.

[John]

Gentlemen, you have bravely volunteered to preserve freedom.

[Tyler]

Can't until you. We gotta turn this.

[John]

I think that's David, right? Oh, really?

[Tyler]

Six weeks.

[John]

Guy sure knows how to make friends. All these friends out there, huh?

[Tyler]

This is your quarters, Frenchie.

[Marc Benioff]

Sure put on a nice walk.

[Tyler]

That's him.

[John]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Marc Benioff]

Wow.

[Tyler]

Good luck to rub your head. I wouldn't do that if I. Are you.

[Brian Chesky]

Sorry, fellas this room's reserved for killers.

[John]

Oh, dear.

[Brian Chesky]

Killer going to war in two days.

[John]

You worried about me? The Germans are moving toward. I definitely saw this, this movie as a kid.

[Marc Benioff]

Cuz I just love.

[John]

I love playing.

[Tyler]

Yeah, there he is. We'll be back by lunch. This is pretty Sweet movie for 2001.

[John]

Worth the 60 million.

[Tyler]

They underpaid.

[John]

They underpaid. Are they missing a zero? Seems like a 600 million dollar movie.

[Tyler]

I'm gonna turn this into a cult classic for. For fans of. Of enterprise databases. If you're. If you're a fan of hyperscale and data center build out and data center construction like the rest, you gotta be watching. You gotta be a Flyboys guy. You gotta get the original Flyboys merch. You gotta get the DVD copies. You gotta start collecting this stuff.

[John]

Okay? So Devlin, he thought. Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn't all that stressed about the money. He had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race.

[Tyler]

Sick.

[John]

He was, however, concerned about his son, the actor in the hospital. Wait. Whoa, whoa.

[Tyler]

Big.

[John]

The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an. An episode of atrial fibrillation. Doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm.

[Tyler]

Wow.

[John]

Damn.

[Tyler]

That's crazy.

[John]

This is bullish. Yeah, this is bullish. He was so upset about losing that he was hospitalized.

[Tyler]

That's crazy.

[John]

You think he's gonna lose Warner Brothers?

[Tyler]

Maybe not. Maybe he's coming back and getting it.

[John]

I don't think. I think this is a guy you want.

[Tyler]

Yeah, this is good. Okay.

[John]

He was thinking that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money. He was upset about letting his father down. Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him. Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellison's family's adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun, Maverick, Crazy and Mission Impossible series, along with a number of largely forgettable movies.

[Tyler]

Have you seen Top Gun?

[John]

Yes. Sick.

[Tyler]

Have you seen Top Gun, Maverick?

[John]

No.

[Tyler]

It's good. It's not as iconic as the first one, but it is a great ride. What about Mission Impossible? There's like seven movies in the series. Have you seen any of them?

[John]

No, the first one's great. No, he was, in other words, a producer, much like many others in town. Then last year, David's father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood's legendary movie studios and a company more than 10 times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellisons set their sights on an even bigger prize. Warner Brothers. At 43, David is now the first millennial. Let's give it up for the Millennials to control a major Hollywood studio. While running Skydance, he'd built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action packed blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them. But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Brothers had revealed an empire building streak in line with his father, who's currently the fifth wealthiest person in the world. It's possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years and the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth 18 billion and couldn't afford Paramount, which was valued at 22 billion. By last year, the 6 billion Larry spent to help David buy the company barely made a dent.

[Brian Chesky]

Wow.

[John]

Which briefly peaked in his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to 400 billion. Oracle, Larry's company, is the world's most boring tech giant. Disagree. Disagree. It's one of the most exciting to me.

[Tyler]

Tell that to Chase, Locke, Miller, Crusoe. Okay, we'll see who's boring then. We'll see how boring Oracle is when we talk about Abilene, Texas. Go to Abilene, Texas and tell me that Oracle's boring.

[Brian Chesky]

Come on.

[Tyler]

Who's writing this? Who's writing this?

[John]

But Larry had long harbored more globe spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed of a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal. Titanic, Octopus.

[Marc Benioff]

What?

[Tyler]

That's so sick.

[John]

Today, he keeps some of his wealth, which includes 98% of a Hawaiian island, in an entity called Octopus holdings lp. In the past year, Oracle has become Central to the AI boom, providing backend computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build LLMs. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI infused revenue, its stock shot up so much that Larry's net worth increased by 89 billion in a single day. That still was such a wild moment.

[Tyler]

15. 15 Paramounts. Basically, you get 15 Paramounts in one day and you're like, okay, yeah, I'll take 10% of the gain from this day and buy a movie studio.

[John]

Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that, combined with David's ownership of one and and perhaps two major studios, as well as one and perhaps two major news network networks. Paramount owns CBS and Warner owns cnn. Has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdochs.

[Tyler]

Murdochs, wow.

[John]

What the Ellisons want with their conglomerate individually and together will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens. And the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis. Larry divorced David's mother when he was young and the two became close only as David grew older and especially once he got into business. David has always struck many people as his father's opposite. Shy and competent, not a bombastic, world conquering visionary. David's ambition was initially as humble as making movies he likes. But the current climate has thrown him together with his father and shown him a path to something greater. If he can pull it off here, I'll continue.

[Tyler]

But first I'll tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI. So last month the Warner board spurned the Ellison's and Paramount's offer and agreed to sell its movie and TV studio to the HBO Max and the HBO Max service to Netflix, creating a potential streaming colossus. The true streaming octopus is forming under Netflix's reign. The Ellisons have continued to argue that their offer for all of Warner Brothers, including its cable network networks, is superior. They are currently attempting a hostile takeover and trying to persuade Warner Brothers shareholders to accept Paramount's offer instead. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Glad to be in the media business covering this because it's certainly entertaining. Of course, thanks to Dylan Byers over at Puck for putting this on my radar by posting it on X. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Some observers believe that acquiring Warner Brothers is in fact critical to Paramount's surroundings. Either way, now that he has made his move to become one of the industry's leading moguls, David Ellison is faced with proving to a skeptical Hollywood that he's up to the task. David's mentors are Steve Jobs and David Geffen and obviously his dad. Those guys are ruthless killers, single minded people with a different DNA. A former Skydance employee who worked closely with David said. On the Record. A former Skydance employee said, David is a smart dude who is reasonably shrewd, but he's not that. He's not the ruthless killer. He's not the Steve Jobs, the David Geffen he's something else entirely. During the Warner Brothers auction, the company gave code names to each of its suitors. These are the code names. Netflix was Noble. Comcast was Charm. Paramount was given the name Prince. Interesting. One of the reasons David Ellison loves blockbuster movies is the way in which a spectacle can contain a more intimate story of how a battle for an intergalactic peace or control of an empire can really be a story about a family. He has often described the formative experience of seeing Terminator 2 Judgment Day. As a child. The fate of humanity was at stake. But what David remembers is Arnold Schwarzenegger rampaging across the screen to protect a young boy who never knew his father. It's emotional. It's a Great movie. Terminator 2, have you seen it?

[John]

No.

[Tyler]

Brutal. It's like one of the greatest movies.

[John]

Did I watch it?

[Tyler]

It's so good.

[John]

Is that what I should add?

[Tyler]

You should. You should. And truthfully, you can watch Terminator 2 without watching Terminator 1. They have very different vibes, very different pacings. You should watch both. But Terminator 2 is just a fantastic movie. It's so, so good. And there's iconic memes and gifs that I feel like you should. No, I'll be back, you know.

[John]

Okay. So Czar and some of the chat actually put together. What'd they put a film list for me? Sent it to my DMs.

[Tyler]

Thank you.

[John]

Interstellar Heat, Inception, Shawshank, Steve Jobs, American Hustle, Silver Lining, Playbook, Almost famous, the talented Mr. Ripley, this thing. The issue is these are so, so many movies. You could easily be messing with me and just sprinkle in like 10 that are just like really the worst movie ever. I'm like, well, the boys said I had to watch it.

[Tyler]

I think that's notoriously one of the worst movies.

[John]

There's a lot, there's a lot here. Three, three pages of movies. So I promise I will do my best to watch all these. It may take me multiple decades at my current pace, but I'll work down. I'll work down the list.

[Tyler]

Well, so at the end of Terminator 2, David Ellison sitting in the theater. Later, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not to spoil the story, but Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in a vat of molten steel in front of the boy. And the eight year old David Ellison starts to cry. Wow. Larry wasn't around much when David was a kid. One of the only similarities in their very different childhoods. Larry was born in New York City in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who gave him up for adoption at 9 months old. His adopted father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who took his last name at Ellis Island. And a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Lewis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything. Wow, what a crazy thing. Why did you adopt this nine month old kid? Just to dunk on him. This is so, so bad. But clearly it lit a fire in Larry, and he went on to build one of the greatest tech companies in history.

[John]

Maybe Larry should write a book called Hardcore Parenting. You know, people talk about soft parenting, right? You want to, you know, actually, but hardcore parenting, it's like wake up every morning, tell your children, never amount to anything crazy.

[Tyler]

As a result, Larry likes to say that he had all the disadvantages necessary for success. And colleagues at Oracle got the sense that Larry's seemingly endless ambition came partly from a desire to prove himself to his adopted father. I'm not sure I would recommend that everyone raise their children like this, Larry later said, but it certainly worked. Wow, that's crazy. David's mother, Barbara Booth, was Oracle's 10th employee. He hired his mom when he needed a 10th employee. And Larry's third wife. Oh, David's mother. Sorry. Larry hired David's mother, Barbara Booth. They divorced shortly after David's third birthday and right after his sister Megan was born. When Larry and his first wife tried couples counseling to save their marriage, Larry told the therapist that the very idea of love eluded him. I don't understand love. I don't understand people bonding to one another. What is it? Larry said that he spent military weekends with the kids and seemed to only realize later that a family was something he wanted. One night.

[John]

Guy doesn't understand love, but has been is on his fifth marriage something he's like, I just, I just need to get my reps in marriage.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Larry called Booth to say he was lonely. You're never alone because you have the kids. You always have a body. Larry said, I'm here all by myself. David credits his love of movies to his mother. The family had a collection of 3,000 VHS tapes. And David's ideal day as a child was to watch the Star wars trilogy or all the Rocky movies back to back. I did the exact same thing when I was a kid. It was fantastic. The Star wars trilogy on VHS was one of my prized possessions. Quickly, let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. It wasn't until David became a Teenager that he and Larry started taking flying lessons together, that they grew close, eventually staging mock dog fights over the Pacific. These guys are dog fighting each other. This is insane.

[John]

Yes, I bond with your son.

[Tyler]

Yes. As a matter of fact, I do have that dog in me. I literally dog fight with my dad in planes that we fly over the Pacific. David went on to compete as an aerobatic pilot, whipping barrel rolls, flying at 300 miles an hour, just 15ft above the ground, and pulling off his signature move, the Devilator. He has a signature move. This is incredible. After graduating from high school in 2001, David went to Pepperdine University as a prospective business major. He hated it, and he transferred to film school at usc. He commuted from the beach in Malibu, where he lived in one of the many homes Larry had purchased there on a $65 million buying spree. His neighbors included Jennifer Aniston, who is renting one of Larry's other houses for a senior thesis. David wrote, directed, and starred in a thriller called When All Else Fails, in which he plays a billionaire's son who has to rescue his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers before her insulin runs out. That's an interesting frame for a plot. His girlfriend at the time, who was a diabetic, played the part, according to people who worked on the production. David was respected and eager to learn, if a bit oblivious to the ways in which he wasn't making an ordinary student film. The budget was close to $100,000, and he shot part of it in one of his father's giant homes in the Bay Area. When they ran out of film, David offered to fly his plane to Los Angeles to pick some up. Instead of graduating, David left USC to film Flyboys. He worked with an acting coach to prepare, but his performance didn't do any favors to a mediocre script. David spent the next several years going to auditions and landed a few more roles from Devlin, the Flyboys producer. He played a bumbling assistant to a corrupt mayor on a TNT show and a shirtless drug addict who punches an FBI agent before leaping from the second floor of a motel in a TV movie. His most significant screen time came in a raunchy 2009 comedy called Hole in One, in which he plays John.

[John]

Have you seen this?

[Tyler]

No, I have it. Should I have? Do you expect me to see every movie? I haven't seen every movie. He plays the owner of a golf apparel company, and there's a picture of him here in a sort of golf polo, whose partner loses a bet that leads two nefarious plastic surgeons to give him breast implants, sending David's character on a quest to drum up enough money to help him get them removed. Or what a wacky plot. Only in 2009 are you making movies like that. That is wild. He delivers one of his first lines in the movie after a woman takes off her shirt. That was pimp. He says, wow, that is a phrase straight out of 2009. No one uses those words anymore. That slang has fully died. His acting career more or less came to an end a few years later after he wrote a script called Northern Lights about a pilot friend of his who had died. Taylor Lautner signed on to play the lead, but dropped out after finding David had written a role for himself. Rough.

[John]

What did Taylor have against David?

[Tyler]

I guess he was like, I don't want to act with him or something, or I don't want to be in. I mean, you know, it's like in F1 there's always like the, oh, is this person, do they deserve the seat? Or, you know, are they there for the. Because they just have the money. And so, you know, you sign up for this, you're in this role. The movie bombs and it's seen as, you know, a black mark on your IMDb resume, I suppose. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. While David inherited a love for movies from his mother, it became clear that if he wanted to stay in the business, he needed to think more like his father. David wanted to be an actor and when that didn't work, he was like, if I'm not going to be on screen, I'm going to be the biggest guy in the room. A person who knew him at the time told me the writer of this Vulture piece, Larry's friend David Geffen, introduced David to Skip Brittenham, a legendary Hollywood lawyer who had represented Pixar, which was co founded by Steve Jobs, who was Larry's best friend. Brittenham helped David make a business plan for building a production company and learn to navigate the web of agencies, producers and studios in Hollywood. David wanted Skydance to make the type of movies he loved, movies with explosions. Let's go. Finally, like the last. The last Hollywood producer who understands how to get me in the theater.

[John]

You know how Truth has their ETFs, their Patriot ETFs. I think they gotta get Paramount, Paramount, Skydance in there. Because this movie studio committed to explosions. Explosions. Very American. Yes, something there.

[Tyler]

So Andy Kessler was an investor who Worked with David to raise money for Skydance early on and they had a rule, they said, he swore to me, no rom coms, no touchy feely emotional Oscar bait, just explosions. But funding the Hollywood dreams of the 25 year old failed actor son of one of the world's richest men was a tough sell to investors. Will people show up to these movies? And Larry ultimately made the point moot. In 2010, he stepped in to provide almost all of the initial $150 million David was trying to raise, according to multiple people with knowledge of the company's finances. Their timing was good. The late aughts Hollywood was roiled by the financial crisis and Paramount, the studio behind the Godfather and Titanic, was struggling movie was the struggling moviemaking arm of the Redstone family's Viacom cable TV empire. Deutsche bank had bailed on an agreement to fund Paramount's movies and the studio needed cash. When Larry's fund for Skydance came through, David signed a deal to co finance Paramount's movies, which meant he would help fund production in exchange for a share of the profits. David had initially considered partnering with Relativity Media, which would later collapse in a fiery bankruptcy. While co financers often get stuck funding risky projects, Paramount's desperate state opened the door for David to negotiate his involvement in some of the studio's biggest franchises like Star Trek and Mission Impossible. The first feature film David Bax a Coen Brothers remake of the western True Grit. I've seen that. It's a great movie. Have you seen it?

[John]

No. No.

[Tyler]

Went on to make $250 million, but they couldn't get a dime out of Geordie Hayes, apparently. And it earned 10 Oscar nominations. But couldn't get Geordi to throw it on streaming on one random Sunday night. His sister Megan followed him into the industry, co financing True Grit and launching her own company, Annapurna Pictures. Oh, I didn't know that. That interesting. Annapurna has been on a run. I think they also have an interactive division, although that might not be related, I'm not sure. Scott Anthony's thesis, according to a person that worked closely with David, was that Hollywood wasn't prepared for the overwhelming economic force of a Silicon Valley billionaire throwing around his wealth and ambition. Plenty of dumb money came into town, but producers and talent mostly viewed it as something to take advantage of. Money in Hollywood is not appropriate appreciated. The person said. This was an opportunity to reverse that, to make Hollywood treat treat money with respect. We got to respect the dollar in Hollywood.

[John]

Nicholas Cage was one of the worst.

[Tyler]

Yeah, he famously said, I do not chuckle when I get a big check. I have respect for the dollar.

[John]

That's right.

[Tyler]

David Cage, Nicholas Cage. Shortly after signing the deal with Paramount in 2009, a person who knew David then said that he had declared, quote, we are going to buy Paramount one day. He called his shot in 2009. Well, here he is. He did it. David proved to be a savvy enough operator, negotiating better terms with Paramount when his deal came up for renewal, and working hard to pick up the quirks of a job that involved everything from managing the egos of talent to negotiating debt facilities with JP Morgan. He would sometimes tell colleagues about an instructive conversation he'd had years earlier about running a company in Hollywood. At the premiere of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, he walked up to congratulate David Geffen, who had produced the movie through his company, DreamWorks. As David told it, Geffen shook his hand. Steve is getting paid. Tom is getting paid. How much do you think DreamWorks is getting paid? Geffen said. He held his hand up in the shape of a zero. DreamWorks was making a relative pittance on the movie, an early lesson in the confusing economics of the business, where a poorly structured deal could mean even a hit might generate little for the company that produced it. It was always in the back of David's mind on Minority Report, everybody got paid except for DreamWorks. A former Skydance executive said, have you seen Minority Report? That is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is a fascinating, fascinating movie. It is amazing.

[John]

It's not on the list. It's not on the list that the.

[Tyler]

Chat made the list. Add it to the list. Binary Report is fantastic. Really great vision of what the future of VR and augmented reality could look like. Has a whole bunch of other interesting sci fi elements. Tom Cruise obviously puts on a masterful performance, but the interactive how they interact with computer technology is remarkable in that. Anyway, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customers customer support, go to Fin AI.

[John]

Okay, I think we're running out of time. Chesky's gonna join in a second. Is some funny dialogue happening? I'll fill you in. The Kalshi market Will Elon win? His case against OpenAI was at a 36% chance this morning.

[Tyler]

What's it doing now?

[John]

He asked. What are the odds looking like? They responded. Now Elon is posting. I've lost I few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war.

[Tyler]

Elon Said that, just posted this. Oh my God.

[John]

Absolutely.

[Tyler]

Scorched earth. Well, we have Brian Chesky, the co founder and CEO of Airbnb in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him in the TVP at Ultram. Brian, great to see you again. How are you doing?

[Brian Chesky]

Hey guys, good to see you. Thank you for having me back on.

[Tyler]

Of course, you're welcome anytime. It's great to be here with you. First, kick us off with the news. You've been acquiring talent, building the roster. You have a new cto. How did it come about? Tell me about this person.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, so like, you know, obviously a couple of years ago, I started asking around, like, who are some of the best leaders in AI? And I started meeting people and one of the names that came up over and over was this guy named Ahmed Aldal, and he was head of generative AI at Meta. We met and I, I just was completely blown away by him. You know, not only was he at Meta and he essentially created, led the team that created the Llama. Models have been downloaded a billion times. There's been over 60,000 derivative models. But he was also at Apple. He actually joined Apple at a college, worked on the original iPhone in 2005, led a lot of the multi touch technology. He led the autonomous technology group that was the self driving car project at Apple. So he was somebody at the frontier. He really understood both frontier technology, but he also understood that kind of Apple design craft, which I think Airbnb also is really passionate about. And we just really hit it off, became friends. And as my current cto, we were talking about handing the baton to somebody. We thought it would be really great.

[Tyler]

Yeah. How are you thinking about design in the era of generative AI? These apps are amazing. And the models, you see the benchmarks, you use the models and it's magical. It's like we created fire and then one rough edge, one button that doesn't quite work the way you expected it. I was lamenting the fact that I was using Claude and I couldn't get a deep research report to read it out loud. To me, that feature is in one app and there's different features there. How do you.

[John]

Yeah, it feels very notable that even in all the leading LLMs, there's still so many rough edges in the product.

[Tyler]

Little low hanging.

[John]

And part of that is like a new product paradigm. We're kind of figuring out what the edges are.

[Brian Chesky]

But yeah, maybe there's all sorts of metaphors. You know, I remember when I was a kid, I think I got Like a compact computer and I was running Ms. Dos and we're kind of more in the Ms. DOS phase of AI. You know, I don't, I think not to belittle the interfaces, but the Chatbot is not the end state interface. The current Chatbot is not the end state interface for AI. I mean think about your phone and your app. Do you want a chat to get the weather? Do you want to chat to do most of the functions? The answer is no. And so I think the future AI interface will have a reference to chat, but it's probably going to be much more visual. Most people aren't completely text based and I do think there's been a. It's kind of like we've been entering the engine of the car, but we haven't really redesigned the car. And so the Chatbot is really a pre AI interface that we've plugged onto this incredibly powerful engine. And so I think what we're trying to do is think through like where can we take this interface? What is the like multi touch reference for an age of AI? And we're not going to do this overnight. We're not going to be the only company doing this. But I really think like the models are even more powerful than people realize because we have hardly harnessed them. And if you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So I totally agree with you. And I think the other thing I'd say is like I'm on the board of Y Combinator and I think the Last I checked, 87% of their companies are enterprise companies per batch. People aren't.

[John]

I know we're all, we, we go and we meet with every batch and to have them on the show and we're always trying, hey, every, we want every consumer company to come on because oftentimes. Yeah, oftentimes they give you.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

And the interesting thing is all of them, all these founders started doing consumer businesses. You asked them, they're doing Minecraft servers, flipping sneakers and stuff. So they actually have some consumer DNA. But they end up.

[Brian Chesky]

You're bringing up a really good point. I joined y Combinator in 2009 and that was not like two years after the iPhone was introduced. And almost every startup was a consumer company. And enterprise is awesome. And I think it makes complete sense why AI is starting with enterprise. Because the models are not cheap to run. You can basically vertically integrate any business and completely automate the workflow. It's going to revolutionize how we do work. But the point is that the biggest prize is consumer because that is what's going to reach daily life for billions of people. And I think a lot of people are a little bit, a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to go into consumer. That's the biggest thing we've heard. They're afraid, partly, they're worried that OpenAI or Google are going to essentially eat their lunch and vertically integrate. The other concern is consumers is hard. You know, it's a little bit more of a hipsterism business. Distribution's a little more mature because of the App Store. There's not really new distribution channels in the same way. At the same time we are in the midst of a revolution and more than just a couple chatbots have to be the way that you interface with the world. And I also, this might be self serving to say, but I also believe this independently. I don't think we're going to use just one agent. I don't think we don't have just one person in our life. I don't think we're gonna have just one agent in our life. I don't think we'll use thousands. But I think there's gonna be some level specialization that's gonna help. And there's gonna be too much specialization where I wouldn't download that agent or use that agent. But I think even if you want a meta orchestrator, whether it's Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, specialization is gonna help even within consumers. So we wanna do some really cool stuff within traveling and living.

[Tyler]

Yeah. What advice do you Give to the 13% of y Combinator founders that are going after consumer, at least for now or at least at this moment, is it, hey, keep your burn really low, run a ton of experiments, stick it out. Because it feels like part of the reason why 87% wind up in enterprise is because businesses are just throwing money at them. They're saying, yeah, you're doing consumer, but if you come solve this one really small, small problem for me and build this API for me, I'll give you a contract, I'll be your first customer. It's very easy to get the money flowing on the business side potentially. But how can you actually make it as a consumer founder when there is a big prize? But it might be a harder road.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, so many thoughts here. I mean one of the things that Paul Graham taught us and Gary Tan teaches, which I think is very effective, is use otherwise Commodore companies as your early adopters. Hence why a Lot of companies go into enterprise. If you have an artist company, don't go to like, Boeing to try to use your service. Go to a young startup and work your way up to the large companies. And so they've developed this incredible ecosystem where thousands of companies are adopting each other's tools and they bootstrap each other. And that's actually been part of the explanation for why Y Combinator has so successfully created so many enterprise companies. But when I was in Y Combinator, we got everyone to use Airbnb. And so in other words, like, we have a huge alumni network. I would tell you people that are going into consumer number one, don't be afraid to do AI consumer. It might fail. But, like, investors aren't going to hold it against you that a startup failed. They're going to, like, a founder who's failed is more fundable the next time than someone who's never started unless they really blew it. Yeah, because you have experience. And I think that's what's so great about this. Number two, you got a lot of early adopters within Y Commander who are normal people too. They have daily life. I would agree to keep your burn rate low. I would pick a niche. I wouldn't pick a niche that's too narrow. So, like, maybe like AI to do something incredibly narrow is gonna get really, really difficult for somebody to want to change their workflow and behavior. But just think about all the parts of daily life that are kind of annoying and maybe pay attention to, like your sister, your significant other, your children, like whoever's in your life, and just look at their life and ask, like, how could their daily life be a little bit easier? And I would just go for it. I mean, and by the way, like, the App Store is mature. That's a little bit of an issue. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are AI apps. So if something is truly great and truly breakthrough, people will seek it out. And I do think my prediction is that AI is going to revolutionize consumer applications in the coming years. And they might not be apps. They might become agents. Agents might be the new apps. We have to figure out what that means. What's new platform paradigm is probably agents, not apps, but we'll see. But I ultimately, I think that's the big takeaway here. And so what we're going to do is we want to really innovate on the consumer experience. We want to integrate, we want to interface on like, what is consumer interfaces look like in the age of AI. And I think they should evolve past the current design paradigm and we'll see where it goes.

[Tyler]

Yeah, it would be. I'm not expecting to open the Airbnb app and see a blank text box. Purely. There's so much more that you can do. Have you thought more about Airbnb app is unique, I think because it's not this reactive. People are opening it 10 times a day. There is an intention and there's probably a lot of value in understanding, okay, this person, they like to travel around the holidays. They're opening the app in October. Let's think that through. Agents and LLMs can probably work through a customer's history, their preferences, just do better recommendations, what you're servicing them. How much have you thought about being proactive about reaching the customer with something that's more tailored? What's been working? Where do you see it going?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, I mean, so many things. One of the other problems with consumer that's to keep coming back to it is there's a business model challenge. Right. Like these models are not cheap. And so there's probably one of three ways you can make money in consumer. You can put ads in your chatbot, you can pay a subscription, or you can do essentially transactions. Well, Airbnb luckily has the business model. We have transactions and our transactions are pretty high dollar transactions. So we actually have the really the business model going for us. We also have a lot of data. We do about 50 billion searches a year on Airbnb. That's nothing compared to Google, but 50 billion. So that's that number times somebody's typing in something into an Airbnb search box. So we actually do have quite a bit of data about people, their preferences, and we can bring it in. And so in part of what we want to do is if the interface is a little more chat like, again, won't be per se, a chatbot. Exactly. OpenAI. But if it's a little more of a turn by turn chat like connection, you're going to get a lot more information from people. And I think, you know, the one benefit of the current chatbots are they have memory. And so you're putting a lot of context in the window. And I think memory, by the way, is something I think we're going to want to technically innovate on because the chatbots still are stateless. And so you're essentially the prompt is putting in this kind of, you know, obviously a lot of your memory. So I do think there's going to be an area around how can Airbnb understand people's Preferences, learn more about you, understand what you care about, and just be really thoughtful. Like, what's your bucket list? Who are you traveling with? One of the other things Airbnb can be really good at is the majority of trips have multiple people. Most chatbots are single player mode. They have collaborative tools. But most people are not chatting with multiple people. Most people on Airbnb are searching for an Airbnb with multiple other people. So I think another thing we really want to do is really be great at, like, understanding two people. They have totally different preferences. How do we help them figure out the right choices for them? So a lot of collaboration tools, are they going to be really important? But I think at our heart, what we want to do is really build out these robust profiles, deeply understand people and give them what they want in the real world.

[Tyler]

How are you thinking about the challenges of generative AI imagery in Airbnb listings? I can imagine there's sort of a risk of, what is it called? Catfishing, where someone takes a photo. It is their house, but they said, hey, like, patch up the walls and, you know, let's change the lighting and make it look a little bit warmer, a little bit nicer, and there's probably a little bit of that. That's fine. You know, if you took it on a phone, you want it to look nice, but you want it to represent the actual experience. How are you thinking about the challenges with that?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, I mean, like, it's really interesting, right? Like, I don't know, I saw on Twitter yesterday, like, the Stranger Things where, like, you can turn your face into someone else's face. And so what this really means is the, like, know your customer authentication. A lot of it is like, you know, you do a selfie and an ID or you do a video. A lot of this stuff now AI can get around. And so, I mean, we should remember AI stands for artificial. And so we're now starting to live in a world where if you see in the screen, it might be artificial. And so I think authentication is going to be critical. And one of the best authentications is in the real world. I mean, we're going to be pretty soon living in a world where you don't know if something's real unless you've seen it in the real world, unless we have authentication. One example of the way air and we can solve this, for example, is we do have a network of professional photographers, over 5,000 around the world. In fact, we built an on demand professional photography network before Uber even launched, where you hit a button and if a photographer shows up and takes photos of your home, an advantage of that is those photos are by Airbnb. And so if we took them, a customer would know those are authenticated photos from us. That's just an example of something that is possible. But I do think, like solving this. Is this real, is this authenticated? Is really important. So we're going to have to have something. We're going to have to have technology solutions for it.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

What's your latest thinking on integrating Airbnb with various LLMs? Like, how are these conversations going?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, I'm interested. I think last time I was on, I said they weren't ready. And my view, we chose not to launch with ChatGPT. They launched Expedia Booking. And the reason why wasn't like, I was a huge fan of that project and gave Sam some advice on it and stuff. And I think it's awesome. I would love to show up on ChatGPT. I would love to show up on Gemini. I'd love to show up on Claude. Here's the thing. I don't want to be the first. I want to be the best. We want to have the best integration, not the first integration. There are some limitations. 90% of people booking Airbnb send a message to a host ahead of time. You have to have a verified id. There's just some things we need in integration for Airbnb to have a really good integration. We'd love that. By the way, the traffic coming from chat to GPT converts higher on Airbnb to a booking than the traffic coming from Google Search.

[John]

Yeah. So actually there's a way various, like e commerce brands have been reporting this too. Like the traffic is super high intent because people are informed.

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah. So I get, I get this question's asked to me often as an existential thing, as in, are you going to partner with them or not? And are they going to kill you? And there's going to be no app in the future. And my answer is there probably are no apps at some point in the future. They're probably agents. There's probably some platform like Paradigm. We're probably designing agents. I don't know for sure, but I think that we're going to exist on those platforms. But I also think specialization is going to matter. I don't think there's just going to be a few chatbots and they do everything and you are separated from every application. That's going to be true of some apps and that's going to be true if you need like Maybe a commodity, but there are going to still be reasons to work with different agents or different applications. I think some specialization will make a difference.

[Tyler]

What are the big. What is your super.

[John]

One sec. One thing I appreciate about your framing of, like, we don't want to be first, we want to be the best is because I think other CEOs in travel that are not tapped into Silicon Valley, that, that aren't on the board of Y Combinator feel this pressure to be like, I have to prove that I'm like, at least trying to be AI native, whereas I feel like you don't have any, like, there's no ego around, like, can we build great products with AI? It's simply like, yeah, we're going to. But, like, I don't need to, I don't need to prove it by, like, rushing into something.

[Brian Chesky]

I remember, I appreciate you saying that. I remember when the metaverse launched, I had somebody who didn't on my team.

[John]

That was Metaverse. You mean the idea of the metaverse?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, yeah, sorry, yes. When it was announced. Mark Zuckerberg, what's our metaverse strategy? And I remember other companies, like, we have to have a metaverse strategy. And it's like, that is definitely like what someone usually would say if they're not really steeped into it. So I think it's important that you do something really, really well. But I don't think you want to be first to signal we care about AI. That's kind of vanity. You don't need to do that. And so when it's ready, we'll do something great. And we want to add value to customers and that's, that's kind of all that really matters.

[John]

If you were running Apple, what would your AI strategy be?

[Tyler]

It's a big question.

[Brian Chesky]

Oh, wow. I would, I, I, I would say that, like, the devices should be completely built from the ground up. AI native. AI first. Probably not even AI first. AGI first we should ask ourselves, what is it going to look like in a few years? It's probably going to be fully agentic. These devices are going to be able to work while you sleep, and you should work backwards from that. These devices and the paradigms haven't changed since the advent of AI. These are pre AI devices running AI. So my question is, what would it look like if you designed it from the ground up? Knowing what we know today, it would probably look pretty different.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

So less Genmoji, more actual hardware. More hardware.

[Brian Chesky]

We are in the midst of, of a revolution, obviously. I mean, I don't want to be like saying what everyone already knows. But here's what I do want to say. Like the everyday life of the average person has barely changed in the last three years. We're on ChatGPT a lot. We're on Gemini, we're on Claude. People listening are much more technical than the average person. They're doing unique things, workflows. The average person's still mostly living the life they lived three years ago using the same devices. The world hasn't finally made the shift yet. It hasn't funnel made the shift. It won't make the shift until daily life has changed and daily if life doesn't change until the devices have changed the operating system to change. Apps become agents and we're all living in a completely natively consumer AI world. And we're not using chat bots, at least not today's chat bots. We are still living in the DOS era of AI. We need to move into the multi touch era.

[Tyler]

The chat is begging us to ask you for an arm routine. Is there a dedicated arm day? Are there any particular machines that you recommend free weights? What is the secret to those arms?

[Brian Chesky]

Oh, thank you very much. Well, first of all, like genetically I have better arms than shoulders or chest, so that's just one thing. But I actually don't have an arm day. I used to do a five day split where I do back, legs, chest, shoulders, arms. I now do arms with shoulders. So I'll usually do two exercises of biceps, two exercises of triceps, typically a compound free weight movement and a machine movement. So maybe like a dumbbell curl followed by like a hammer strength cable with like a rope or a rope or a V bar. And then triceps, always doing a push down with a cable and then maybe like a French press or skull crusher, depending what we don't call it.

[Tyler]

Okay, that's a good.

[Brian Chesky]

I like to call them skull crushers. They sound a lot more hardcore.

[Tyler]

Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's heavy metal.

[John]

We don't know how to name exercises like that.

[Tyler]

We don't.

[John]

The world, world's become soft.

[Tyler]

It really has the best, the best.

[Brian Chesky]

I do think, I do think generally if you're like under 40, for sure, you should be doing almost entirely compound movements and free weights and dumbbells and barbells. You know, I'm 44, so I think transitioning to some more machines is good just because the tax it puts on your joints. But I still try to put in free weights.

[Tyler]

Are you using any AI in the Gym. Are you tracking movements or asking questions, Johnny? Or is it all nutrition? And nutrition.

[Brian Chesky]

I have a.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Brian Chesky]

I have a trainer, he was a former Mr. Universe. He competed in Mr. Olympia. So he, I let that, I let him do that. He is, he is, he is. But I. My diet and my supplements are very much like, I put everything into AI and I get like, I do, I do things. I don't know if it sounds eccentric, but, like, I'll get blood work and they'll give you a PDF and you can put the PDF in a chatbot and it'll tell you, like to analyze it and it can even tell you what supplements you need based on your blood work. It's probably something everyone should do. It's not that hard. And so like, I don't get, I don't go out enough, so I don't need more vitamin D. The blood work said that. So I take a vitamin D supplement because I'm not, I'm like inside working a lot. So stuff like that.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah.

[John]

Have you been surprised, seeing the explosion of peptides? I wouldn't have imagined a world where, you know, people are clamoring to do like actual injections. And given how popular it was, I mean, it's. In the bodybuilding world, there was always like a divide between how hardcore you were, which was like, are you like natural or are you gonna.

[Brian Chesky]

Are you natty or not?

[John]

Yeah, natty or not. And now nobody's natty anymore.

[Brian Chesky]

Seemingly no one's natty. I'm not surprised. I'm surprised actually a little bit how much the tech community's embraced fitness. I mean, like, when I came to Silicon Valley, I was like slightly self conscious about like wearing long sleeve shirts because I thought if I wear a short sleeve, people think I'm a mija and therefore an idiot. And people just didn't really lift weights in like 2007, 2008. And I really think that, like, everyone's come around probably to just the science that like, nutrition and weightlifting is good, it's good for longevity, it's good for your mind, you'll live longer, you'll feel better. And honestly, weightlifting is far superior to cardio. You should do both. The weightlifting is far superior, increases bone density. It's just if you can only do one thing, you should do lift weight, weightlifting. And so I'm really excited to see people actually embracing this. I mean, one of the things I learned about bodybuilding that I think is very much consistent with Silicon Valley is I was like, you know, I was like 120 pounds. In high school, I played hockey. I remember I broke my leg and I had to do physical therapy. And through my physical therapy, I said, I'm gonna, like, I wanna learn about, like, my body. And there wasn't a lot of information on the Internet, so I'd like go to the Barnes and Noble and read as many books as possible. And I learned something about bodybuilding, and that was, if I can change my body, I can change my life. And it was about control. And it's about this idea that you don't get in shape in one workout. It's 1% a day. And frankly, those are the lessons I learned with Silicon Valley. It's not about one idea. It's about grinding every single day, year after year, with consistency. And overnight successes take thousands of days, actually, typically. And so I think there's a lot of lessons from bodybuilding that I brought to Silicon valley.

[Tyler]

Yeah, no, 100%. It's a really. Yeah, it's a really important frame of mind. And we appreciate you sharing all of that with. We know. So we got to get up and get them out of here.

[John]

Oh, hard stop.

[Tyler]

Yeah. But thank you so much for taking the time.

[John]

We have time for one more.

[Marc Benioff]

Enjoy.

[Brian Chesky]

I hope to be back soon. Guys, thank you for having me here.

[John]

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, awesome. Great.

[Tyler]

We appreciate having you on the show. We'll talk to you soon, Brian. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

[John]

Wanted to ask them about super bowl ads.

[Tyler]

Oh, yeah.

[John]

Specifically, like, how they're thinking about. I know they've run an ad in the past that they haven't been a annual spender on that front, but.

[Tyler]

Yeah, well, they do those annual showcases, sort of like the WWDC style. You wouldn't expect it from Airbnb because they're not necessarily introducing, like, a new iPhone. But Brian's been very outspoken about putting the whole team on an annual cadence, a rhythm of releasing all of the information, packing, packaging everything up, getting everyone to rush towards one deadline. It's an interesting way to run the business.

[John]

We got cut off on the Sun King of Hollywood about David Ellison and Vulture. I encourage you to go read it.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you should go read it. It's a very long piece. It goes on and on and on.

[John]

But so many great stories.

[Tyler]

You should go check it out in Vulture.

[John]

I'm glad that we know that the father and son are dog fighting together.

[Tyler]

I mean, some great. Some great writing from Reeves over at Vulture.

[John]

Matthew, go check it out.

[Tyler]

McCONAUGHEY first, before we go into that, let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

[John]

Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized AI fakes, trademarking himself. He's trademark Dr. Plans to use trademarks of himself saying, all right, all right, all right. And staring at a camera to combat AI fakes.

[Tyler]

And the print headline is actor is not all right with AI fakes. I love it. Over the past year, over the past several months, the Interstellar and Magic Mike star has had has had eight trademark applications approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office featuring him starring, smiling and talking. His attorney said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from simulating McConaughey's voice or likeness without permission, an increasingly common concern for performers. Maybe we'll have to get a trademark on. You're watching tvpn so we will get paid when someone generates a deepfake of us. The trademarks include a seven second clip of the Oscar winner standing on a porch, a three second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree, and an audio of him saying, all right, all right, all right. His famous line from the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, which I know you haven't seen, but I don't think I've seen Dazed and Confused either. Tyler, have you seen Dazed and Confused?

[John]

No.

[Tyler]

Yeah, just a little bit. Before all of our times, maybe we gotta lock in and watch that. Is there anything else in this Matthew McConaughey piece? What else is he doing here?

[John]

He says, my team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it's because I approve and signed off on it. We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world. So lawyers, lawyers finding a way.

[Tyler]

Well, if you do pay Matthew McConaughey like Salesforce has for an advertisement and you want to run it on connected TV on streaming TV, you got to go to Vibe Co, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta.

[John]

Yeah, this is interesting. It doesn't seem like they're going to trademark this and then go to ChatGPT and say like, hey, you want to license my likeness? It feels like he realizes the value of like doing a handful of big deals with a salesforce and probably wants to keep doing that. It'd be interesting to see if every all talent needs to Go and file trademarks.

[Tyler]

At a certain level, I wonder what his total all in cost for all of those trademarks is. It's not super cheap to file a trademark. We've done it, you know, it's not nothing. It's not a billion dollars. But what did Rune say? He replied to the deciphering of the Rune l vague post. Rune said the elves have left for Valinor. And Boaz Barak says our internal models are so good they can decipher Rune's posts. Boaz, who is a computer scientist at Harvard and OpenAI and Rune says after a vague post gains a certain level of mystique, I lose the ability to correct misconceptions. I'll let them have it. And Brandon Gorell says, I was just made aware of John's theory that you were literally just watching Lord of the Rings and live tweeting. No one looked to see if he had tweeted. You know, Gandalf has reached the Shire. The fireworks have started in the Shire. They're having breakfast in the Shire. No one checked on that. So maybe that's the next one.

[John]

Speaking of OpenAI, I have some breaking news. They partnered with Cerebras.

[Tyler]

Oh Yeah.

[John]

So there's 750 megawatts worth of like capacity over it's through.

[Tyler]

That's a big. That is massive news. Well, deserving of the flashbang. Yeah. And it seems like Cerebras is on an absolute tear post Grok deal. There are a ton of rumors swirling about financings and IPOs and it seems like they're in a great, great place. Do we know anything more about the partnership between OpenAI and Cerebra?

[John]

It's in the Journal.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[John]

Multibillion dollar agreement, I think. $10 billion.

[Tyler]

10 billion?

[John]

Yeah, through 2028.

[Tyler]

Wow, that's very exciting. I'm very interested to see how they integrate it. Are they running 4.0 on it? Are they running?

[John]

Yeah, I assume. I mean it's definitely. I mean not definitely, but I would be very surprised if it's going to anything besides just like inference. Right?

[Tyler]

Yes, but what are they inferencing? Because they also do Sora video generation. That's a different model that might need different silicon at a certain point. OpenAI is working with Broadcom on custom chips. They're co developing stuff with Nvidia. They're working with amd. There might be an intel deal at some point, who knows? They obviously they use every part of the semiconductor supply chain. And how Cerebras fits in. It doesn't Feel like it's just like, oh, OpenAI now runs everything on Cerebras. It's probably a particular piece of the model architecture or a particular model. Maybe when you go to a deep research report or do some reasoning, it needs to be faster. I'm not exactly sure where they would be taking advantage of it, but it is exciting for them. I don't know. Certainly boring zebras.

[John]

Raising 1 on 22 billion is the rumor. So they're doing the meme. Remember the meme 2021. It was like the classic round was like one on 20. But they're of course doing it at.

[Tyler]

A B instead of an M. And also, I mean, good news for the OpenAI folks. You know, they have the 1.4 trillion in deals, so they do another 10 billion deal. It's just 1.41. And at that point you just round out, it still rounds down to 1.4. So you're still good.

[John]

Nobody's worried.

[Tyler]

It's a rounding error. It's a literal rounding error. You're good at this point.

[John]

Plants. Every guest on CNBC is like, yeah, we are concerned with the end of the global order and death of US institutions, but we are looking forward to double digit EPS growth this year. So we want to remain focused on that brutal real.

[Tyler]

It's a tough time to be navigating politics and business, but we're having fun in the trenches.

[John]

We already covered this one earlier. Elon said, what are the odds looking like on. Will Elon win his case against OpenAI?

[Tyler]

Yes.

[John]

Kalshee says 36% chance.

[Tyler]

Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in figma. So outputs look good, feel real, and stay connected to how teams actually build, create code back prototypes and apps.

[John]

Tyler was joking around earlier. He was saying, I'm going to move to Oakland.

[Tyler]

Oh yeah.

[John]

And become a resident for the chance of being a juror in the trial.

[Tyler]

I feel like there's a plot of a movie with that where, you know, you try, you know, if you really are a crazy corrupt lawyer, you try and get a plant on the jury. They're making an open AI movie. Maybe they should make a second movie about this. The story of Tyler sneaking his way on the jury and the whole time you're just like. You're just like, look, guys, we got to settle this in a way that maximizes the total amount of compute in the United States and ultimately delivers AGI as fast as possible. And everyone's like, what are you talking about someone's guilty here.

[John]

Skilled AI has secured through this or market's low volume. But it's now up to 57% chance that Elon wins. Yes.

[Tyler]

Interesting.

[John]

Yes.

[Tyler]

What's at stake if Elon Musk wins? What does that do? Is that just a settlement? Is that just some monetary penalties? Does Elon have the chance of getting equity in OpenAI? Because at a certain point, if you convert it to a for profit and you can just have a settlement where he gets 10 billion in stock, it doesn't really change the structure. He doesn't get a board seat. That's kind of a non issue even if he wins. But then there could be the nuclear option where he wins and he gets control and gets a board seat or gets a majority stake. I mean, if you run back the clock and you look at how much he donated, if you weight ownership by nonprofit donations, which is a crazy thing to do, that's I don't think on the table you would wind up with a very, very different control structure. But it is an exciting time and I'm sure the court reporting will be fascinating. I wonder if there will be cameras in the courtroom and if we'll get more testimonies every time.

[John]

Somebody sketching maybe.

[Tyler]

Yeah. We might just get the court. The court.

[John]

Have we figured out why they still do sketching?

[Tyler]

It is fascinating. I think.

[John]

Is it just for fun?

[Tyler]

I think it's just. It has aura, it has. It has motion. Like there's nothing.

[John]

I love how the person sketching can just have so much ability to make the person look cool or really.

[Tyler]

I mean a photographer does too.

[John]

Not as much leeway as they can.

[Tyler]

Catch you picking your nose and then you look like a fool. Or they can catch you from a really great angle with perfect lighting and you look like a hero. They can frame things.

[John]

I'm just saying if Tyler was the sketch, the sketch artist is just be mogging.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[John]

And it'd be hard to catch him whacking.

[Tyler]

Well, didn't they do that with spf?

[John]

That is an all time. That's what I'm talking about.

[Tyler]

Yeah. They just gave him the Gigachad filter.

[John]

Maybe that's because. Let's pull up this courtroom sketch.

[Tyler]

Yes. We have our next guest.

[John]

Oh, we do. That's probably more important.

[Tyler]

Let me tell you about Gusto first. It's the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern.

[John]

Small and medium size cameras are just not allowed. That makes sense.

[Tyler]

But.

[John]

But I'm saying why don't we like. Is that Not a rule that we could at one point say, like, okay, we can have one camera in the course.

[Tyler]

I don't know, maybe there's a lobbying group, maybe there's a union. Maybe it's just the way people like it. Big sketch, big pencil. Big colored pencil. Well, we have our next guest. Welcome to the stream. How are you? How are you, gentlemen?

[Baiju Bhatt]

How are you doing?

[Tyler]

Oh, you gave us a preview of the wrist check. What's on the wrist today?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Oh, yeah. I figured this was gonna happen. The liquid FP jorn on today.

[Tyler]

Whoa. That is beautiful. Fantastic.

[Baiju Bhatt]

And what's behind the T30?

[Tyler]

T30. Very nice. And what's behind you? The liquid nitrogen. You're doing serious business.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, I got a few tanks of liquid nitrogen behind me, which were actually, like, making a ton of ruckus a couple of minutes ago.

[Tyler]

Oh, really?

[Baiju Bhatt]

And I'm glad they're not anymore. Yeah, they were, like, hissing and making all kinds of noise.

[Tyler]

So you're fully funded. You have a lab, you have a team, you're building. What are you building? What's the first product? And I'm sure I'd love to go into the far future, talk about data centers in space. And then I also want to go back and talk about your career at Robinhood, since this is the first time on the show.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, Yeah. I feel like it's been a long time coming.

[Tyler]

It has.

[Marc Benioff]

So, yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

What are we doing here? So start out by telling you guys about Aetherflex.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

The mission of the company is to build a power grid in space. And the core idea behind this, when I started a little less than two years ago now, was that collecting electrical power or collecting power in orbit, was this, like, really special, an important energy source that had not really been thought of as such. And the reason is because if you place things in the right orbits, they're going to be illuminated by the sun. The solar panels are nearly continuously.

[Tyler]

This is Sunsync, Right. We learned this term yesterday. Scott Nolan, Sun Sync.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Or the more specific one is called Don Dusk orbit, which is also sometimes called the Terminator orbit.

[Tyler]

Oh, Terminator orbit. I like that. We were Talking about Terminator 2 earlier on the show.

[John]

Terminator orbit.

[Tyler]

The Terminator orbit sounds like the one I want to be in. So what is special about the Terminator orbit? And then how does that lead into the whole strategy for the business?

[Baiju Bhatt]

The thing that's cool about it is, is that it's always facing the sun or nearly always facing the sun. So if this is the Earth.

[Marc Benioff]

Right.

[Baiju Bhatt]

And the Camera is the sun, then it sort of follows this orbit, if that makes sense. So it's kind of passing over sunrise and passing over sunset balloons.

[Tyler]

Okay, okay, got it.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah. And the benefit of this is if you take a solar panel, which is the cheapest form of energy as we know it today on Earth, problem is it's not terribly useful because it's very intermittent. It produces peak power for an hour or two in the middle of the day. If you take those same or very similar panels and you put them in orbit, they're going to be producing power 24,7 at nearly peak power. So you just get so much more energy production out of effectively the same panels. And also, low Earth orbit is actually kind of an interesting place to build electronics applications. So I started the company out with the goal of making energy and space a commercial business. And a little bit more on that. The idea was that the reason space isn't a bigger part of people's lives day to day is because it's like for the large part of history, been mostly a government thing, right. Where is in one shape or form funded by the government or there's government price pricing that kind of drives what the activity there is. But if you can find new ways for people to actually make money doing it, then you'll attract more young people to want to pursue those careers and you'll just make space a more commercially relevant part of day to day life. So if the applications of space today are like Earth imaging, telecommunications, defense and Internet, what's that next thing? And my thesis was that energy would be the next thing. A little analogy to the past company that I started. The core idea when we started Robinhood was that if you thought of mobile as a platform back in 2012, 2013 era, then the applications that were built on top of it were like photo sharing, maps, email, they were mostly digital services like that. And the thesis that we had was that the next industry to sort of natively exist on this platform was going to be financial services. And that's Robinhood. And the idea here is that low Earth orbit is a platform and that energy is the next vertical of the economy that's going to natively exist there.

[Tyler]

So yeah, how much of the energy do you think will stay in space just be routed around? Obviously there's new narratives about what you can do in space with data centers and whatnot. But versus beam the energy collected on the solar panel down to Earth via a laser, something like that. I've seen there's reflect orbital, that's just doing Mirrors. There's a whole bunch of people that have said, hey, there's cheap and abundant and solar up there 24,7 in these orbits. Let's get it down to Earth. Where. How are you thinking about where the power should be used?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, well, I think our, our view on it is, is we want to have electrical power in orbit. And you can use that for two applications. Yeah, you can kind of think of the two applications that we're building as almost like appliances that you plug into this newfangled energy grid. And the first one is actually getting. They're doing sub component assembly, like right next to me right over there. So behind this container is our clean room, which kind of goes on for a long ways back there, where the first satellite that's going to space is hanging out right now. So that first thing is basically the appliance that plugs into the energy grid and then beams power down to places where there's no power grid. So the use for this is going to be places like DOD applications. Excuse me, excuse me. Department of War.

[Tyler]

Yeah, Department of War applications. Dow.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah. Where there's no energy grid, where you can basically provide resilient, useful power, where there's a contested environment, stuff like that. The other application is rather than beaming the power down to the ground and doing things like powering artificial intelligence data centers, the more natural thing to do is cut out all those energy losses and take the chips and put them directly in orbit.

[Gabe]

Yep.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Because they don't actually, in the grand scheme of things, they're not the things that are the heaviest part of this. So that's the galactic brain, and that's actually where a lot of our efforts are right now.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that's exciting. I remember when we first talked about this, like years ago, thinking, you know, the natural reaction was going to be, oh, what does this finance guy know about space? And if there's, like, the math is so important and if you get one number wrong in the spreadsheet, maybe the economics don't work and it's 10 years out instead of two years out. But of course, you have a math background, so I know you did the math, I know you crunched the numbers. But I'm interested to know how did you actually crunch the numbers to understand that now is the right time, with the amount of funding you're gonna bring in to the orbital launch costs, to the value of what you're doing up there, to the materials, how much a solar panel costs, there's all these different variables. They all have to synthesize into something that eventually makes profit within somewhat of a venture timeline, I imagine. What was the actual process? Were you talking to a team? Were you in an Excel sheet? Were you just asking an LLM to sort it out for you? How did you do the back of the envelope to know that now's the right time, that the economics can actually make sense on, on a reasonable timeline?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Well, I did what any rationally minded person would do is I made a big old spreadsheet.

[Tyler]

There we go. I love it.

[Baiju Bhatt]

In all seriousness, though, I kind of make this joke with people sometimes is when I started doing this, for all intents and purposes, I was a finance bro. You could make the argument that was arguably perhaps the archetype of the finance bro in some ways. But in all seriousness, I was approaching this as a novice, as a student of the field. And the cool thing about this is that artificial intelligence has made the learning curve dramatically, dramatically easier to cross. Because the hardest thing about physics, I remember because I studied physics and math in college, was you sometimes get a textbook and you're trying to learn a new subject, you end up sometimes just getting stuck in the first chapter of it because you don't know the formalism like you're, you have to, you. In order to learn these things, you have to learn them in the language that they're written, obviously. Yeah, but the difference is now you can just ask questions as you understand them and, you know, artiful artificial intelligence will kind of meet you there. So it's been a huge accelerant in learning sort of the ins and outs of doing it. But beyond that, look, we're a team of like 30 people. We've got optics experts, we've got folks from JPL, we've got folks from SpaceX, we've got folks from the, what's it called, Lawrence Liver National Lab. So we've done pretty deep foundational work in understanding kind of how all the components work together, what the economics of them are asking questions like, what is the raw cost of this?

[Marc Benioff]

Right.

[Baiju Bhatt]

What is the cost to buy a component versus what's the cost to manufacture it from raw ingredients? And if you see the delta in any one of these things being too big, you kind of know you have to ask the question why? But to kind of answer the question that you started out with, right? The goal from the beginning was how do we down cost this down? How do we make this as close to the sort of theoretical minimum cost? And if we do that, does this make sense? Does this make sense at bigger scale? And I Think that there's a path to doing that. But the cool thing about it is the path starts with actually showing that you can do this. And by the way, you guys should come out when we do this. So we're going to have a demonstration this summer, ideally because we have two satellites going up that are actually going to beam power down from space. So we're going to have something between a scientific conference and like a mini Burning man in the desert where we'll show what this looks like in real life.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that's remarkable speed. I feel like the modern space company Varda did a little bit of this where it's like, if you're going to be taken seriously as a space company, you got to get up into space quickly, get up there, get the experience, do something iterate, start the process. Instead of 10 years of oh yeah, we're going to go one day, but it's got to be the perfect system. Vardo went up and back and I think there were a whole bunch of chaos that happened in space, but they learned a lot and it obviously improved the second, third. And then already the Varda launches have become kind of old news. Oh yeah, I guess they're up and back again. That happened and it just becomes part of the business. So I love that you're moving so quickly there. Talk to me about.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Those guys were inspirational for me in that regard. Like I talked to Will Brewy in the early days. I once called him my space Sherpa. And I think for that exact reason, I think they went from concept to real thing in space. It doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to be the exact version of the thing that you're going to be doing forever and ever. But like you're much better off just demonstrating it in year one, year two, year three, rather than waiting 10 years. Because the odds that the thing doesn't work are still pretty high. You might as well get it out of the way early.

[Tyler]

Yeah, you gotta blow some stuff up. If you're working in the aerospace industry broadly.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, you gotta be comfortable. You gotta be comfortable like having stuff not work and iterating from there.

[Marc Benioff]

Right.

[John]

What kind of weird groups are coming out of the woodwork to try to get you guys to help them do data center stuff in space? Because there's a lot of different types of groups that seem like they have an incentive to just do something like space data center, just for narrative purposes. Right. I mean, this whole thing kind of like heated up because you had a handful of SpaceX investors really start to get excited about it. But I imagine you've got some kind of strange pitches because, like, you guys are working on this problem broadly, and people are like, hey, do you have power? I want to put some chips up.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, we're cooking some stuff. Stay tuned on that.

[John]

We got some.

[Baiju Bhatt]

We got some good stuff we're cooking up. I will say, though, I think the credit for this goes to Bezos, who was looking just, like, very professorial. And that talk that he gave last fall where he was like, data centers in space might happen in the 2000 and 30s, and then everybody in the world is like, no, we're actually gonna do this the next five years.

[John]

Yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I will say, though, that there is something kind of interesting to this point, which is that I think a lot of people in the space industry see this data centers in space concept as one of the first novel ways to make money in space in kind of a long time. I would say in about a decade. And I think that that's an important point and one to kind of pause on for a second, because the reason space isn't a bigger part of our lives is because we haven't really figured out how to justify people working on it in mass numbers, in my opinion.

[John]

Yeah. Starlink has been a big part of Starlink, I feel like, is the best example of, like, hey, if you just build the capability of going up and down a lot, then you can build a lot of other capabilities, Telecom being one of them. One thing I'm curious about is how has it been like, building and running this company versus Robinhood? You've sort of done the meme of make your money in finance and then work on the thing that you really want to work on. Of course, I'm sure you really wanted to work on Robinhood as well, but is it like, you know, at the same time, like, you have so much to prove, right? Like, you needed. You want to. You want to do something at Robinhood scale or bigger. Right? Which is a high bar. But then at the same time, there's maybe more. I would hope, like, some element of, like, even just, like, calmness, because you're like. It's not so existential as I feel like early companies are, where it's like, I need to. I just need to, like, I need to make something in this world.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah. A couple of thoughts on this. It kind of kind of hit the nail on the head. This is something I think about pretty often because on the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. So I do like that a lot. At the same time, it's like kind of a brutal reminder of like, when you're in the early ages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard because you have all the problems of like a small company, in my case, all over again, right? Where you've got like, you've got, you know, a function within your organization where there's like one person working, right? And that person, for whatever reason leaves, right? And then you're like, well, got to rebuild that thing from scratch. And so there's like a lot of those kinds of growing pains where you're like, up, there's nobody here that's doing that. I gotta go out and hire a recruiter. And then that person has to go out and recruit the person that's going to do the thing. So in many ways it's like, it's really hard. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm trying to say is like, it's a reminder that starting companies is actually not that easy.

[John]

Yeah, you get better, but it doesn't actually get easier because then if it's easier, it just means you need to be doing more and more and more and more more and. And pushing yourself even further.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I also did do something that I didn't have a ton of professional experience in, which was kind of the point, Right. I wanted to do something that was net new because it was intellectually very interesting for me. But at the same time, and not to throw shade at anybody out there, that's building an enterprise SaaS company, right? Like, that's. This is like new company on absolute hard mode.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there just is the reality that in enterprise software you can get a customer to pay you pretty quickly if you build something that works in hard tech. And anything that requires government approval or real science and R and D, the money is just going to be further down the road. And so that's going to require more risk. That's just a fact.

[John]

When people talk about progress in space or really any human domain, there's this general sentiment that, okay, this thing that we want to do is really hard, but robots will be able to do it in a few years. And you're looking a little concerned, which is why I wanted to ask, what about the process so far, I'm sure you've been pitched by various robotics companies that want to help speed up processes internally or help with the work that you're doing. Is there anything that's really adding a lot of value today.

[Baiju Bhatt]

There's not a lot of robotics going on here. No, this is like.

[Tyler]

Fire up the welder.

[Baiju Bhatt]

It's not to say that that's not going to happen, by the way. There is a welder, I think, either in the corner or it got moved back to my garage.

[Tyler]

Have you picked up any new skills? Can you use a blowtorch now? Are you, are you learning this stuff? I mean, I imagine you have a team, but every once in a while you want to take the crane for a spin.

[John]

Sometimes you got to do it yourself.

[Tyler]

Exactly, yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I mean, I'm really good at opening boxes.

[Tyler]

Okay, that's good.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I joke around with the team about this sometimes. I'm like, yeah, I left a software company to start a hardware company, but somehow I ended up with a job that's emails and spreadsheets.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, of course, of course.

[Baiju Bhatt]

No, but it is fun because I do get to. I mean, my background is in physics, so I get to think about the actual physics of it pretty often. But we have a team of people that's actually doing assembly and doing a lot of the hardware design. But I get to live vicariously through them. Yeah. And I can't, I can't show you this right now, but literally there is assembly happening, like on and off. You'll see people walking behind me because they're like carrying boxes, boxes and stuff in there for the first satellite that goes up.

[Tyler]

Yeah. When we watch tours of Abilene, Texas and see data centers, there are a lot of people buzzing around. It feels like even if you just get an off the shelf, like NVL 72 Nvidia Rack, there's people that are maybe doing wiring or dealing with cooling issues or a variety of things. A chip that's died and you need to replace it. That all feels really hard to do in space. I heard one pitch that was sort of making the case that wafer scale compute could be more popular in space. Because you want the entire model on one chip that's just in one satellite. You don't want to put an NVL 72 up into space or whole rack. You're just going to have more problems in space. And so it's going to live on one sort of complete system. We asked the CEO of Cerebras if this was in his forecast and he said, no, I'm not really interested in the next three to five years. And then he went and did a $10 billion deal with OpenAI. So he kind of denied that that was on the roadmap. But what do you think the shape of like the compute workload or the compute hardware that you will eventually put into space, or any company would put into space? What will be the norms? What will be the full, like, we very much coalesced around like one rack and AMD and Nvidia, they all work within rack scale architectures. What will be the equivalent on a satellite bus that is compatible with a starship or a SpaceX rocket? What will the shape of the compute stack be in space?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, the way that I think about it is in terms of the workloads and the energy draw or send workloads. And there's versions of this in the future that are more ambitious, right, where you say we'll get to much, much bigger scale integrated power levels per satellite. But I think from my perspective, the right starting point is to say, what can you do right now in terms of satellite size, power envelope per satellite? And can you solve meaningful problems with that?

[Marc Benioff]

Right.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Because if you're trying to do something brand new like this, you want to, you want to, you want to sort of like, you want to have a conscious approach to how you take on risk, technical risk, more specifically. And if your idea is predicated on making something that's like, you know, the size of 10 football fields on day one, you might want to see if there's a way to do it much smaller at like satellite sizes that are commonplace.

[Marc Benioff]

So.

[Baiju Bhatt]

The thought process is that we'll start out in the next 12 to 18 months or so with demonstration missions culminating in a first of its kind satellite from us that has, let's say, the 10 to 20 kilowatt electrical power draw that powers a set of eight to 10 interconnected GPUs that can host a model and do inference on it. So inference, I think, is the primary initial use case for this. There's the idea of like, could you do training with this or could you do stuff that requires massive interconnectivity? And it's possible. I think, I think the orbital mechanics of it might be challenging if you're trying to connect 100,000 GPUs together. But you don't want to start there because it's kind of interesting because we kind of ran into the same problem when we were working on power beaming from space, where the old versions of that concept called for one gigantic satellite that would beam power down with microwaves and a byproduct of the frequency of light and the aperture sizes that you would need. That thing called for like satellites that are like 1-5 km in diameter.

[Marc Benioff]

Right?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Like that's too much. Like if you, if your demo mission is a kilometer wide satellite in space, let me give you a little hint. You're probably not going to get funded for that. There's probably not funding out there to spend a billion dollars on something that may or may not work for the first time. That's kind of how I think about it here too.

[Tyler]

Are you feeling any pushback yet or pushback coming on the horizon around space junk blotting out the sun? It's annoying when I'm stargazing. Is that something we need to worry about? Is that something you should be worried about? Even if the worries are unfounded, you need to get out ahead of from messaging perspective. Like how a lot of the AI data centers probably should have been talking about recycling water a year ago. So that never became an issue. It did and then got debunked. But it still was something that, you know, took over the news cycle for a few days at least.

[Baiju Bhatt]

No, I think it's a good point. So on space junk in general, I think a couple of things, you have to look at space and realize that it's going to get commercialized and that might happen this year, it might happen five years from now, might happen ten years from now. But I think that there is an inevitability that as humans exhaust or really push the boundaries on the resources on planet Earth, that we're going to look to space to do more stuff there. So I think my starting point is there's going. The civilization that we want to build has a massive footprint in orbit. And so the question is, how do you design these satellites and how do you design these mega constellations that are, I hope in the next 10 years, putting gigawatts or more power up so that actually works and doesn't create massive problems with things like the Kessler syndrome. And we think about that from the beginning. We think about the sort of component choices that we have to make sure that, that as we're deorbiting them, that they're made with components that can demise on reentry. And there's a lot of work that's actually going into this already to make sure that, you know, there's this, what's it called, where you could basically disambiguate the space that your satellites are in. That being said, there is space junk out there. There's actually a lot of effort to sort of identify where it is, to track it and to do orbital Maneuvers to make sure that you can protect your spacecraft against it. But again, like, space is really big.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Sorry, Jordy.

[John]

Any plans to go to space yourself? Blue Origin. It's gotta be a little bit weird, like, working on something. It's like working on, like, a restaurant, but you never actually go there, you.

[Tyler]

Know, Like, Jared Isaacman's been. He's running. I feel very confident with him at the helm at NASA, given that he's basically into the. The thing that he's in charge of. We got to get you out there. What's the plan?

[Baiju Bhatt]

He's a good dude. He seems very fit, too. He seems like. He's like. Seems like he's. He's. He was able to survive that and had the build for it. I gotta tell you guys.

[John]

Maybe he is fit because of the space.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Oh, you think the space did the fitness for him?

[Gabe]

Yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

In that case, count me in.

[Tyler]

It's a miracle up there. That's funny. One last question. Oh, yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

In all seriousness on this. This one, can you imagine how upset your stomach would be in space? Can you imagine the pressure changes and.

[John]

Like, oh.

[Gabe]

You'Re gonna.

[Baiju Bhatt]

So that's my reaction.

[Tyler]

Okay, last question. The Chevy Corvette ZR1X just posted a 0 to 60 time of 1.68 seconds. It goes quarter mile time of 8.6, 0.675 seconds. Can we call it a supercar? Is America back in the supercar game? What's your take on the ZR1X?

[Baiju Bhatt]

I think so.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Baiju Bhatt]

But I'll. I'll say this. I don't think people give a. About that.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I think what people care about is, is the car fun to drive? And what they should do is they should make that thing with a manual.

[John]

Ooh, I think that's.

[Baiju Bhatt]

You guys know I love cars, right?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, of course. Of course.

[John]

That's a good take.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Sort of. A Chevy Corvette ST would be the move. Something like that.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

That Corvette's really cool. It's based on the. It was, like, inspired by the458 Ferrari.

[Tyler]

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to like about it. They set the speed record for American cars. I really like how they have the Chevy executives driving it on the track, setting the records, the employees themselves. They don't just hire some. I think that's really cool. I mean, that's equivalent of, like, sending an Aetherflux employee to space. You know, it's like. It's a little bit of a gimmick, but it just feels like, oh, they really? Yeah.

[John]

I don't think it's a gimmick at all. It's way cooler to be like, okay, one of their employees.

[Tyler]

Yeah. What do you say if they want.

[Baiju Bhatt]

To do a gimmick? You know what would be a really good one? Put a manual on that.

[Tyler]

There we go. Back to the manual. Yes, 100%. I completely agree.

[John]

Do you see any predictions around? Yeah, just cars, supercars with manual transmissions. It feels like there's certainly a lot of enthusiast interest, but it feels like potentially one of those things where the TAM is actually just, like, you take people that will buy a supercar and then people that will buy a manual supercar. Because you get into this, you start running this calculation of like, okay, I'm getting this car, and then I'm on a hill in San Francisco. Maybe I'm Sam Altman. I pull up on a hill, and maybe I drive stick. But I'm in a $4 million car, and it's starting to slide back. It's starting to slide back.

[Tyler]

Sam Altman stalls F1 on Gary street or something.

[John]

But the thing that I am bullish on is more analog controls in cars. Anybody that's owned a Ferrari loves how the buttons get all sticky.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I may or may not have been dealing with some sticky buttons this morning.

[Tyler]

No, it's brutal.

[John]

The sticky button thing is truly so funny. They're like, yeah, like, we made these and all. After a few years, everything is gonna feel like a kid was eating candy in the car. And if you want to replace it, it's gonna be.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah, you go to turn the volume knob and, like, the volume knob, like, comes off on your hand. You're like, this is disgusting. I gotta tell you guys like the fact that there are not too many manuals that are being made today. And I love cars. It just takes people like me out of it, Right? I'm just like, if you make a manual, I'm in. But otherwise, there's plenty of cool cars out there.

[John]

Well, one exciting thing that I've been thinking about is I feel like in 15 years from now, it is not unreasonable to imagine that it is illegal to drive a car yourself on the roads. At some point, autonomous vehicles will become so safe. And driving a car yourself is so dangerous as one of the number one causes, motor vehicle accidents being the number one causes of death, that car manufacturers will start making insane enthusiast cars that are effectively track only because you have some percentage of the population that's just like, they're not buying a 911 to use as A daily. They're like, I love cars, so I'm going to get this like, you know, something like they're making like a W1 track only edition. Right. And I could see like track only cars having like a real renaissance.

[Baiju Bhatt]

That kind of stuff is happening already. But I will tell you this. While such a thing might happen in California, Florida, man will never stand for that.

[Tyler]

I agree.

[Baiju Bhatt]

They're like, texas will never stand for that. There are parts of this country that simply will not.

[Tyler]

From their cold dead hands. For sure. Yeah, for sure.

[Baiju Bhatt]

But like Florida, man's not down to that.

[John]

I don't know. I just feel like I see it. But at the same time, eventually, you know, these, the safety, the safety data.

[Tyler]

Is going to be overwhelming for perfect self driving cars in a decade. Like they're just never gonna get.

[John]

It will literally be like moms against self driving. Talking about human driving self.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Baiju Bhatt]

But, but it's so dystopian though.

[Marc Benioff]

Yeah, right.

[John]

I'm not saying I'm excited. I'm not saying I'm excited about it.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Because, because cars also, I mean, if I'm gonna wax bullet here for a second on cars, like, cars are really important. They represent freedom in my opinion.

[Alfred]

Right.

[Baiju Bhatt]

They represent the idea of like being able to have the freedom to explore the world, the geography of the landscape of everything around us.

[Marc Benioff]

Right.

[Baiju Bhatt]

It's the feeling of the wind in your hair, the way the steering wheel feels in your hands when you go over a patch of road, the way all of these things feel. It's not just about transportation. It's not just about the feeling of power. For me, I think it is like the embodiment of freedom and the idea of like going through a sort of like technological course and a course of human history where we make that freedom illegal. Man, that's. I find that to be super dystopian.

[Alfred]

Yeah.

[Tyler]

Let's hope it doesn't happen. You can still ride a horse around if you want. On many streets.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. We might see a resurgence in horses.

[Tyler]

Take the horse, stay with the people.

[John]

Are like, I want to live within horseback, different distance of my office.

[Tyler]

Give that horse a manual.

[Baiju Bhatt]

But I don't think, I don't think this is going to happen. I don't think this is going to happen in the next 10 years.

[Tyler]

Okay. You know, okay, we'll have you back on and we'll. And we'll see what happens. Check in in a decade. We'll check in next month when there's some amazing news in California.

[John]

There's Some, there's some like mileage tax that they're working on where you'll be allocated like a certain number of miles. And past that point, past that point, it's like you're gonna pay your Adama.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Leave it to California to come up with all these brilliant ideas.

[Tyler]

Who knows? Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come hang out with us.

[John]

Come back on. Come back on as you have these launches announcements. Always welcome.

[Tyler]

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

[Baiju Bhatt]

We'll have you guys out too.

[Tyler]

Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Eleven labs build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs. See, we have some. We have a small piece of news and then we'll bring in our next guest. CBS is preparing a new segment called Whiskey Fridays.

[John]

Whiskey Fridays.

[Tyler]

Dokopu. I can't pronounce the last name. Some staff were only first made aware of it because they encountered CBS testing set designs of a faux stocked bar.

[John]

Brought to you by Jack Daniels.

[Tyler]

They saw Cheeky Pint and they were like, we gotta have a cheeky pint at cbs.

[John]

Okay. Cheeky Pint, great concept. I got the faux Boy Friday hanging out. It's casual. They got a photo drinking. So what if you did? Cheeky Pint. Oh, with whiskey.

[Tyler]

Wait, is this a. This cannot be a real photo. This is has to be fake. Update. Here's what it look like. May look like. Okay. Because that makes no sense to just put a news desk in that type of set. Anyway, we'll have to tune in. We'll have to give it our review. But until.

[John]

Wait, one more post until Friday comes. We'll review this post because we were just talking about cars. This post here from CDTV, the goose says, Remember when Quavo flexed driving 60 miles per hour. I go a mile a minute skirt.

[Tyler]

Yeah, that's actually quite slow on most freeways where the speed limit's 65 and most people are going 85. 60. Might be time to speed it up. Quavo, let's step it up. Let's step on the gas. Let's get you into a ZR1X hopefully. Anyway, let's bring in our next guest, Gabe from Noise. He's the CEO and we got fantastic news. Thank you for waiting on the show. How are you doing? Welcome to.

[John]

Good to see you, dude.

[Tyler]

Good to see you.

[Alfred]

Absolute pleasure, gentlemen. It's great to be here.

[Tyler]

First time on the show. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and Noyn and get the gong ready.

[Baiju Bhatt]

I will.

[Tyler]

I Will warm up the gong.

[John]

Yeah.

[Alfred]

So my name is Gabe. I'm one of the co founders of Noise. We started this project maybe at the start of 2025 when we started building it. But the idea is to build this trading platform for relevance. Right. So can we give users the ability to long or short trends, brands, ideas, and have these markets kind of be rooted to social data in a way. So, you know, when you combine the trading activity and you combine the kinds of things you're seeing on Twitter or TikTok or Reddit, you kind of end up with this objective measure of cultural relevance for different types of brands or trends. And for many reasons, we think that's extremely important for where the world is at today. But maybe we can jump into those that you guys.

[John]

Yeah, so maybe. Yeah, maybe an example. So like we, when we started covering Le Booboo, we were like, this must mean it's about to be over. And I think it was like, I think there's a lot of the stock at least has sold off a lot in that situation. There's a public company associated with the product.

[Tyler]

And you can track Google Trends. But yeah, walk me through more of how you pull out signal from all the noise around a brand. There's so many different data points that you can use to track.

[Gabe]

Yeah.

[John]

So like, Google Trends is a good example, but Google Trends, in an era where people are spending more time in apps. More time and all these things like social relevancy, how much something's being talked about is there's less signal there?

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's the process like?

[Alfred]

Yeah. So Google Trends is, you know, if you were to look at a market on Noise, let's say it's Claude code, it was Labubu, you would see something structurally similar to Google Trends. The problem with that is, you know, like 20% of the information that is going into Google Trends is what actually matters in today's world.

[Brian Chesky]

Right.

[Alfred]

Which what he was saying, you're seeing things on TikTok, on Instagram, on Twitter. So the labor one's interesting. We basically we partnered with Kaido first, so they were doing this already for the crypto industry specifically. So they're building social graphs on Twitter and they were able to tell you, how much relevance does polymarket have vs call sheet in that industry? How much relevance does AI compared to DeFi have? And then you can see kind of how that relevance changes over time. What we care most about is kind of the market component of it, which is, you know, it's great. Like you can get A snapshot of where attention is today. You know, can you really trust it? That's, that's something to discuss as well. But we want to use markets to have kind of this forward looking nature and help basically all these different types of industries make decisions based off of trends and resource allocation. Right. So where are trends going to go in the future? Where is relevance going to shift? We're talking about movie theaters. If you're talking about is Claude, is anthropic still going to be as important as it is today in the industry by the end of 2026? These are all extremely interesting questions.

[Gabe]

Right.

[John]

So yeah, if you're pulling, if you're using signal from social and these markets get to some amount of scale, there will become an incentive for market participants to try to game it. Right. I can think of somebody spinning up a bot farm and talking about Labubu millions and millions of times in an organic way. How have you guys thought about parsing through all the noise and trying to find real signal?

[Alfred]

Yeah, for sure. It's a good question and it's often one of the number one questions we get. But we pull from a variety of sources. And I'd also add that the relevance on noise is very much market based. So it satisfies the criteria of any other market which is, you know, if the relevance of let's say Claude or movie theaters or Peptides is going to go up, it's because people are inherently putting capital behind those positions.

[Brian Chesky]

Right.

[Alfred]

They're longing it. And those are good questions. But I think the best question that we could try to answer right now is is social media data alone today a good measure of relevance, a good measure of understanding the shared interests of the world. Our bet is that, you know, markets are probably the best coordination mechanism for these kinds of questions. And we just need markets to be a little better about reading where genuine interests are, where those trends are, than social media data alone. So is it a solved problem? No, we'll continue to basically build in that direction. But it's definitely interesting.

[John]

What are some rising trends that you guys are thinking about building markets around for this year specifically?

[Alfred]

Yeah, indie rock music, I think people aren't really noticing this, but it's been on the rise for the last 18 months. My prediction is this is coinciding with this return to in person meta. Indie rock music is probably the best kind of music for that. So that's one obviously Claude code. I think one of the interesting things with noise is you kind of get to see where echo chambers are breaking Right. Because Claude code was kind of this thing in Silicon Valley that took over the entire timeline and everybody assumed Nobody's using ChatGPT at this point, that these OpenAI products are basically in the dust. But the things that we were seeing is the engagement and the kinds of interest that people have in ChatGPT is still higher than Claude, no matter what. So when you actually compare these things side by side at a very global level, it's interesting to see where these trends are actually at.

[John]

Yeah, yeah.

[Tyler]

How do you think about relevancy to particular sub communities or niches? Because we were reading this piece in Vulture about David Ellison and we were joking that they were saying that Oracle is the sleepy, no name company that makes a lot of money, but it's not known or it's not popular. And in us, it was like in the headlines all last year. We were following it very closely. We know everything about the company. But at the same time, I understand where the Vulture writer is talking about in the sense that Oracle is not a company that.

[John]

That they're like Oracle, the sailboat company.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Like if you stop someone on the street, they might not be talking about Oracle where they might know about leboo. So how do you think about someone's stock rising relative just to their niche?

[John]

Yeah.

[Alfred]

One of the most interesting things that we found when we launched our beta in summer of last year was that people were kind of, you know, we kept seeing maybe 40% of the users that we had invited onto the platform using it every single day, every single day, consistent time patterns. And we were like, you know, why the hell are you using this so much? Right. So we're trying to talk to people and part of it was they were, they wanted these niche trends to be part of their daily news cycle. Right. They wanted to see how the relevance is changing based off things that they really cared about. And mind you, we're talking about some projects in the crypto industry that people don't really know your audience probably doesn't even know exist. And it was about kind of engaging with other people who are also interested in those things or have differing opinions about those things, and basically creating communities around these niche trends. So, yes, it's interesting. More interests are becoming niche over time, but still the echo chambers and seeing where you're actually at is something crazy.

[Tyler]

We love. We love it.

[John]

We love echo chambers. We celebrate echo chambers.

[Tyler]

Give me the lead. Who led the round? How much did you raise paradigm?

[Alfred]

7.1 million.

[John]

Great hit. With authority. With authority.

[Tyler]

Congratulations. Thank you so much. For coming on the show.

[John]

Great, great to finally have you on the show, Gabe. Have a great rest of your day. Excited to.

[Alfred]

Cheers guys.

[John]

Excited to track noise on noise in the near future.

[Tyler]

We will talk to you soon. Thanks a lot guys. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. We have our next guest already in the Restream waiting room. We have Alfred back on the show for the second time from Listen Labs. He's the co founder and CEO. Welcome to the show.

[John]

Welcome in.

[Marc Benioff]

How are you doing?

[Gabe]

Thank you so much. I'm excited to be here.

[John]

I'm excited to be welcome back. I love the energy. We're fired up and we got it. We got a special, we got a, I mean real quick reintroduce yourself to people that missed the first appearance and then we'll get into these special deliveries that you got for us.

[Gabe]

Amazing. Yes. So I'm Fred. I'm the CEO of Listen Labs. What we do at Listen is an AI that speaks to thousands of people and tells you what they want and why. And this helps you develop better products or fix your marketing campaigns. And what you have in the room with you is some incredible products that have been developed using Lessa.

[Tyler]

Yes, yes. So take us.

[John]

Do you have in there?

[Tyler]

What is this? How are you involved? What happened with this crazy.

[John]

Did you want John, did you want John to wear these?

[Tyler]

Who are you talking to? You didn't talk to me about this, but somebody's.

[Gabe]

Are you going to put them on?

[Baiju Bhatt]

Yeah.

[Gabe]

Yes. No, sir.

[Tyler]

Who's happy?

[Gabe]

You know, products are all about finding the right audience. And so these are shorts from Chubby's, which has been one of our early customers. And they use Listen to test their prints, test their fitting. And actually one of them, they developed a new, entire new product line for kids, kids shorts where they used Listen to interview hundreds of kids and they figured out like the liner in the shorts that they had previously were very uncomfortable. Maybe something for you to wear.

[Tyler]

Yeah, Very, very fascinating.

[Gabe]

Maybe 10 years ago.

[John]

What are some of the challenges with consumer brands when it comes to really understanding your customers? Because I think with a SaaS company, early stage SaaS company, you can just talk to all your customers.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Because there's many. Because there's probably a power law where there's one customer who's providing 80% of your revenue in the first couple years.

[John]

Whereas with consumer brands you go talk to, to 20 customers and then you could get 20 different terrible signal because you just happened to pick incorrectly.

[Gabe]

Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean in the olden days you were stuck in this paradigm between you could use a survey, but then you would get a ton of people not really paying attention and they would answer your questions, but you wouldn't get rich deep insights. You could then have one on one interviews. But as you said, if you have thousands of customers, it's really hard to do them at scale. And so with Listen, you get the best of both worlds where you have an AI talk to all of your customers and then you can figure out the nuances like which segments work, which don't. And people are much more honest. Talking to an AI than talking to a person is something that we found out. So you get kind of their feedback is more driven to how they actually will behave in the future.

[John]

I have a company that I'm going to email and tell them to use Listen Labs. I don't know them at all. It's this company, they make sound machines for kids. And I've had multiple of them. I don't know why I've had multiple of them because both of them, when you're trying to adjust, if you just like touch the thing in the wrong way, it triggers like a motion thing and it just starts playing music. It literally I went, I was messaging quietly trying to. I felt bad. I was messaging the support after a week ago saying like please let the CEO know that your product makes bedtime worse, a disaster and I will buy another one as soon as you fix it. But you need to fix it. I'll give you the third chance. And that just seems like an incident where they ship the product and then it sells well because it's in demand, but they're not actually paying attention to how people experience it.

[Tyler]

Do you feel like you're able to pull out that emotional response from like you interview 100 people, they're all like, eh, it's okay. And then there's that one person that clearly found a fatal flaw with the product is animated about it. They're aggressive, they're emotional. Maybe they're screaming at the AI, maybe they're being rude. You censor the expletives, but you know that there's emotion there, valuable, good on you. And you're able to give that more weight. Like how do you think about balancing out all, all the different emotions that come through in responses? Because sometimes they can get collapsed in AI models.

[John]

Totally.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Gabe]

I mean the CEO of sweetgreen I think was on TVPN talking about this, how surveys miss the outliers. Yeah, that's the protein bowl that they developed using Listen.

[Tyler]

But.

[Gabe]

The other methods of collecting feedback miss the kind of the crucial piece of feedback that really matter. And it's often about one or two or a couple of of people that are part of your segment that will drive most of your revenue. And they will be much more animated and care much more. And so the AI is able to detect kind of their emotional, the way they show up emotionally, as well as kind of the nuances of how they answer the question. We have something called response quality. So the AI can rank how well this person kind of answers a question and how much they know about the product. So it's able to kind of surface those outliers to you and then give you actionable recommendations.

[John]

What is the actual workflow like in general in order to actually start talking with customers through Listen? I imagine it's also different with a kid's product line. With Chubby's. How do you actually facilitate getting a parent to allow their kid to talk to a robot? I'm very curious.

[Gabe]

Yeah, of course you need the parental consent, but it's essentially four steps. So you start by asking your question, which could be, you know, SaaS tools also use it like Replit. So they could ask how should we. What should we change in a product if you compare us to lovable? And then Listen will go and recruit that audience for you. So we'll find Replit users as well as lovable users. And we have 30 million people in our database, so we can find pretty nuanced recruits. And then Listen will go and have video calls with them where they could potentially also share their screen. So you can have thousands of those video calls. And then the AI will kind of analyze those and give you recommendations of what to do.

[John]

Makes sense.

[Tyler]

Take me back. We didn't really talk about your earlier career. The first time you were on the show Be fake image app, what was the story there? How did you build it? How did you scale it? What was the value prop? And how did you wind up selling it too?

[Gabe]

Yeah, for sure. So my co founder and I, we built this AI consumer app which was essentially kind of giblify. You could giblify yourself. You could do this kind of image prompts back in the day with stable diffusion transfer almost. Yeah. And the real use case was, was creating Tinder profile pictures, of course. And so it like blew up on Reddit. We were on the front page of Reddit and we had 20,000 downloads in one day. And that was the inspiration behind Listen, because we had these many users and we were experimenting with LLMs at the time and thought it would be interesting to let an AI talk to our users. And it turned out to be really useful. So we were like, why are we making this shitty app? Like, let's just sell this thing. And then we actually ended up in this limbo state where it did work for us, but it still took us 18 months of making the product perfect before it became useful. And that's something I've learned that being early looks the same as being wrong. And a lot of people we talked to told us they've already built the product that we were building and it didn't work. And so we had so much rejection. But now, since we launched nine months ago and when I was last on TVPN, we've grown our revenue 15x. We interviewed a million people. Let's go. Raised 100 million in total now. So let's go.

[John]

There we go.

[Tyler]

Congratulations.

[Gabe]

I'm still trying to get used to the energy of, you know, Swedish.

[John]

I'm trying to amp it up, but this is night. This is night and day from the last time. You're fired up. I love it. What's. What's next? Just. Just scaling on the. On the customer side.

[Tyler]

Hiring Fortune 500. You gotta get them all.

[Gabe]

That's right. That's right.

[Tyler]

Green, Google, Nestle, Skims, Microsoft, There's a couple.

[Gabe]

We have a list going after 500 companies one at a time. But we have, like, hiring is the number one priority. And we're trying to do these tricks to stand out. We did the billboard. I don't know if you saw that. Where we had. One thing we've learned is that there's so many companies growing really fast, raising a ton of money. And so you just got to communicate your culture and get people excited to join. And so we made this billboard that had just black text on white where that led to a puzzle, an engineering puzzle. And that made it much more attractive for folks to kind of join the team because they realized we're like competitive programmers and puzzle hunters. Overall.

[John]

Puzzle hunters love it.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Mike Isaac in the New York Times wrote a whole piece about how, like, how obscure billboards are in San Francisco. It's like a few people talking to each other very in group. But I love when people do fun stuff with billboards.

[John]

Gotta stand up.

[Tyler]

It's always great. Thank you so much for taking the time.

[John]

So great to have you back on. I'm sure you will be back on this year with the amount of momentum you guys have and looking forward to it. And yeah, enjoy this. Thanks for this. Thanks for this protein Max Bowl. We'll. We'll split it. We can each still get like 50 grams of protein. Plenty. Thank you.

[Tyler]

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

[Marc Benioff]

Bye.

[John]

Cheers.

[Tyler]

Railway Railway simplifies software deployment. Web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. TJ Parker, Apple asked a question. He said, why are there not 100 times more weird consumer AI things going on? Nikita Beer answered. He said, hold that thought until Dom Hoffman launches. And Dom, quote, tweeted and just said, sup? Of course. Dom is the creator of vine and.

[John]

His company is called Sup. Oh, I didn't know that, but it was a good response. Dom created Vine.

[Tyler]

Yeah, and in a number of other things. A fantastic creator on the Internet has created a bunch of, like, fun moments on the Internet. I've been following his career for a long time. I enjoyed Vine. Were you ever on Vine?

[John]

I was on it, but I never, like, fell in love with.

[Tyler]

I created the schizo added on Vine. No, not really. But I was actually experimenting with the vine format very seriously. And I would do these, like, hyperlapses and infinite loops. You could do this fun format where you would take a little like basically an image as you went around your house, and if you ended at the start, it would be an endless loop. And vine was very good about endlessly looping videos so you could do all these cool, fun things with it. I had a lot of fun with that format. It was great.

[John]

Did you see that? Havana Syndrome is real.

[Tyler]

Apparently. This is crazy.

[John]

Noah Smith says Havana Syndrome was real and we got the device that causes it. Conspiracy theory that turned out apparently a number of months ago, the US captured a weapon that has been associated with Havana Syndrome.

[Tyler]

Havana Syndrome Disputed medical conditions starting in 2016, in about a dozen overseas locations, U.S. and Canadian government officials and their families reported symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound. The symptoms lasted for months, including disabling cognitive problems, balance problems, dizziness, insomnia, and headaches. Havana Syndrome is not officially recognized as a disease by the medical community, but apparently there is reporting in CNN now that there's a device.

[John]

Well, there's been a bunch of real investigations in this because it's happening all over the world. People are like, I feel terrible. Why do I feel terrible? I'm hearing things. I have a headache. I can't balance. And so this was Just a great mystery. CNN now reports the device linked to it was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration, and DoD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits into just a backpack, which is scary.

[Tyler]

Will a defense tech startup build one and go through Y Combinator? Who knows? Stay tuned. We might see someone commercialize this technology any day now.

[John]

Tyler, I want to see someone. If they're building it, I want them to use it on themselves. Like Jake Adler at Pilgrim.

[Tyler]

Oh, yeah. Cuts his leg open. Yeah, that'd be great. Prove that it works.

[John]

Shoots the VC with the.

[Tyler]

I'm so dizzy. I gotta write you a term sheet. ALS says the jobs exist because important people want to have large paramount pyramids of people reporting to them. Even if the pyramids do nothing useful, AI will not change this. Interesting. Fake jobs. In other jobs news, there's an opinion here. Our brightest minds are disappearing into finance, management consulting and corporate law. And is this one of like Marinetti says? No. We are using our best minds to allocate resources optimally. How terrible. Of course, we love finance, management consulting and corporate law. These are all valuable pieces of the economy. They are important.

[John]

New research.

[Tyler]

Salesforce, who we have the CEO of joining us right now. Marc Benioff is in the Restream waiting room and we will bring him in to the ZBPN ultradome. Mark, how are you doing?

[John]

He's back.

[Tyler]

Great to see you guys back for round two. I prepared for this interview. I prepared for this interview. I prepared for this interview. I went.

[John]

No, we loved it. We loved it. I will say it was one of the most fun conversations we've had all last year.

[Tyler]

It's amazing.

[Baiju Bhatt]

Wow.

[Marc Benioff]

Really?

[Tyler]

No. Yeah.

[Marc Benioff]

Well, then you guys are just not having enough fun in your life. I'm your biggest fun.

[Tyler]

Here it comes. Here it comes.

[Brian Chesky]

The mod.

[John]

Don't sell yourself short.

[Tyler]

Bogging starts. But I prepared for this interview by going to Slackbot now. Powered by Anthropic. And I asked, what is the single best Metallica song? It said, Master of Puppets. Agree or disagree?

[Marc Benioff]

Okay, guys, I know that you are. This isn't at the tip of your tongue. So I was ready, and I was gonna flip it for your partner so he can get all the words. Cause, you know, we had some issues last time.

[John]

We did have some issues. Are you gonna. Are you about to say? Are you gonna give us Malika?

[Marc Benioff]

Name your tune.

[Tyler]

Yes.

[Marc Benioff]

It was not a great moment for your show.

[John]

It was a rough moment. It was a rough moment.

[Tyler]

It was Rough.

[John]

Are you going to sign that and send it to us so we can hang it in the rafters?

[Marc Benioff]

I'm not. It's mine. You can get your own metallica.com we run it actually on Salesforce. We run metallica.com. you can get to your Metallica album on there and all the other good stuff that you need to kind of.

[John]

Okay, so I'm going to give my recap of John using Slackbot this morning because this was an ASI moment for John. He was like, I was very pleased with it. John, we do the show all day long. There's a lot going on in Slack, and so catching up is tough. Absolutely nailed the summary. Immediately found something that was very actually interesting and important. And we were like, whoa, we missed that.

[Tyler]

I probably truthfully had about 200 notifications across 15 different channels as they build up. And it basically put together a deep research report of every little item, picked it out when am I mentioned? And it was exactly what I wanted to catch up. And then I went to it and I asked, okay, clear all the notifications. It couldn't do it, but it gave me the shortcut shift escape, and it did it in two seconds. So I was very satisfied. How has the response been from your.

[Marc Benioff]

Customers, first of all? Well, there's the response of my customer right there. I would say. I'm so excited that we could finally get this out of the shop and into people's hands. I've been using it myself for months. It's completely changed my life. I think it will change your life. I think it'll change your show. I think it's going to make everything better. Because we've talked a long time about prompt engineering in AI. When you're writing your prompt, you're coming up with your question. Now you really see the power of context engineering. That is, it's looking at all the data about your show and everything you guys have ever said. It can even read your DMs. And then it's coming in and it's saying, hey, right here. This is what you need to ask Marc Benioff this question. This is the zinger for him, and that's the prompt you could give it, which is, hey, based on everything we know about Mark, everything that's ever happened in the show, everything that's happening inside Slack now, plus everything that Anthropic knows, everything that everyone knows, what's the zinger for Mark? And then it's going to come up with it.

[Tyler]

Yeah, talk to me about the. The tone and the Speed. I noticed that it responds like an LLM. It's giving me a few paragraphs. It's not acting like a person who might respond with. On it. And then, okay, here's what I found. And then it's like six different messages. Is that intentional? Do you like the tune or do you see it evolving to your style over time? Where does all this go in terms of. In terms of the flavor of Slackbot's personality? Powered by.

[Marc Benioff]

This is really different than our last interview. We're going deep in product.

[Tyler]

We love it.

[Marc Benioff]

Number one, every company is gonna have a customer agent and an employee agent. And that's why we've been working on AgentForce to build the orchestration layer, the observability layer, so that companies can get out there with their agents. And that's what I've been so excited about. Then all the apps, like Slack is only one app we make. We have a whole bunch of apps like Tableau, our sales cloud, our service cloud marketing, commerce, and on and on and on. We have a whole family of apps that help you run your business. And then a huge set of data capabilities, including Informatica, Mulesoft, our Data360 layer that let you federate and integrate your data, which means that it's going to find all the data in your company and bring it together. Now, what you're not seeing yet in Slackbot, but what I have is that you just. You just hit a button and it connects to all your Google sources also. And it connects.

[John]

You're keeping the good stuff for yourself. This is a fast takeoff scenario. And you're like, we're keeping this for ourselves.

[Marc Benioff]

You can't let it out. I was at a conference for the last two days. Really cool conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. I live in Hawaii. So I popped over to Honolulu and it was called the Honolulu Defense Forum. And there's so many of my customers there. It was really cool, but I didn't have time to get briefed on all these customers, so I'm doing the briefing myself. I just say to Slackbot in real time, I'm meeting with this customer. Tell me everything about the customer. And it's not just getting the experience from the public web, but it's also then looking at all my proprietary databases and saying, boom, here you go, Mark. You're ready. And the prioritization. I think you're going to have a great experience. I want to hear your exact feedback after you kind of get into it for a few days, because it's changed how I work. It's awesome.

[Tyler]

Yeah, I had a great experience. I didn't feel like I needed a smarter model. It did seem like I was on Claude 3, not 4 5, which I've used and is great for some.

[Marc Benioff]

You want to know why you feel that way?

[Brian Chesky]

Yeah, why?

[Tyler]

Why?

[Marc Benioff]

Because you're getting the data from Slack. You have so much data about your business or your show, everyone. That's what you've been missing in all of your prompts. When you go on Anthropic or you go on Gemini or OpenAI or whatever you use, it doesn't know anything about you. It doesn't have your context, it doesn't have your data. That's what I mean. Context engineering. It knows you now. It really does. It knows so much about you, your company, everything you guys have done, what you built, this great show you have, and now it's able to really tell you and you should like ask it like, hey, what are the three things we should do to increase viewership? What are we going to, what should we be doing to increase our revenue, make us more profitable? What is my prioritization for the week? Try like, because it knows so much about your company now because of the, the huge investment you've made in Slack, you're going to get a great outcome. I'm really confident and you know, I don't know if you've seen some of the videos that Mr. Beast has been doing, but he is really in it to winning on this and he runs, you know, his whole company.

[John]

People talk about Mr. Beast like, like he's this consumer guy, but this guy loves enterprise software.

[Marc Benioff]

Entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. Oh, he's amazing. The first time I ever talked to him was a couple of years ago. He goes, I am going to be like Steve Jobs. I am going to be like Larry Ellison. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, I want to be one of the great entrepreneurs of all time. So he really has a mental model that's super unusual. Well, he runs his whole companies on Slack. So now he has the ability to kind of, of get to a new level by bringing AI in. Because when you take AI data and the app together, as you see, you get a tremendous outcome. AI by itself, the models, great, fantastic, but they're commodities at this point. We all know that. Yeah, the data sets, those are commodities on the consumer side, but not your data set. The only one who has your data set is you. And then three, the app, you've chosen Slack. Thank you for that. And so now you put 1, 2 and 3 together. And bam, you are ready to roll. You know, you can now sleep with one eye open.

[Tyler]

There we go. Give us a Super bowl preview. What's been exciting in the past that you've done? What do you want to do in the future with the Super Bowl?

[John]

What's your most memorable Super Bowl? Let's start there.

[Marc Benioff]

I think there is going to be some pretty cool stuff coming from us for the Super Bowl. I'm not going to give you all the secrets. I may have already given you some of the secrets, but I don't think I can give you any more of the secrets because it is going to be astonishing what we're doing and everything that we just talked about. Somehow, serendipitously, maybe you guys already know, but everything that we just talked about. Take all of that and make it into a Super bowl ad over the last 10 minutes, and I think you're going to have something astonishing.

[Tyler]

What do you think about model pickers selecting the model that I want to use? How much of that should live with the end user? I go to Slackbot and say, hey, I want to use opus or I want to use 4, 5 versus your team. Deciding what makes sense for that overall infrastructure that you've built. And then it's below the surface. And I don't really care as a user.

[Marc Benioff]

Well, you're already using a whole synthesis of models.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Marc Benioff]

Because Salesforce hat we make a lot of our own models. Sure, sure. We use all the major vendors and we bring it all together to get what you need to be successful. We don't want you to have to worry about that. We want to just deliver a great. You hit slack bot and it just says, boom, here we go. And I don't want you to have to think about those things. I want to make it just great, a great experience, and I want to help you grow your business. I want to help you grow your customers. I want to help you service them. I want to help you make your employees more productive. That's what I'm excited about.

[John]

You guys have insane scale as you look across the. Yeah, to put it lightly, it is crazy. But specifically, have you been surprised by any industries that are resistant to AI? Like, just blanket saying, like, yeah, we're.

[Marc Benioff]

Well, there's so much dark things to AI that it freaks everybody out. I mean. I mean, how dark do you want to go? Like, we can go. Really?

[John]

Let's go dark. I mean, we were talking. There was. The Journal had a statistic earlier. They said only 10% of adults are.

[Marc Benioff]

Excited about AI I don't think that's as dark as I would go. I would say the rate of suicide that I saw with kids this year because of AI, that was one of the worst things I've seen in my life. It was very reminiscent of kind of what we saw with social media, kind of this unregulated technology dramatically impacting families in the most horrible way possible. I watched an episode on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago on character AI, and I could not believe what I was watching. And I think that that dark part of AI, the unregulated AI, because we know AI is kind of, you know, it's inaccurate. It's, you know, it's very kind of unwieldy. We don't know how these models work. And to see how it was working with these children and then the kids ended up taking their lives, that's the worst thing I've ever seen in my life. So that's the darkest part of AI. And I think we have to be careful. You know, tech companies hate regulation. They hate it. You hear that all the time. Except for one regulation. They love section 230, which means that those companies are not held accountable for those suicides. So those social media companies, or in this case now the AI companies, that's not. They basically say, oh, we're protected by section 230. We're a platform company. They, they will quickly run to that regulation, but the reality is, is highly unregulated in every other area. So this is kind of a moment. I'm sorry, am I going too dark?

[Tyler]

No, no, I'm sorry.

[Marc Benioff]

You said go dark.

[John]

We, we have these kind of conversations. We've talked about all this stuff. And in general, I wrote about this in our newsletter last week, which is that why would the average, all the interviews that all the lab CEOs have done have just resurfaced over the last couple years? Maybe they did the interview five, six years ago talking about how the classic line from Sam is AI will lead to the end of the world, but there's going to be a lot of great companies created in the meantime. And so when people. I saw that exact video yesterday, had a hundred thousand likes on Instagram, right? So, like, that is everyday people just seeing this and being like, okay, I like. They maybe like ChatGPT, but they're like, I like my job more or I like, you know, living in this world and being a human. So I think we have a. There's a real, like, narrative problem with the industry right now, and it's going to be tough to talk.

[Marc Benioff]

If we're not about protecting our children, what are we about? So let's just start there. And because we now have evidence of what happens when it's fully unregulated, and because we have the evidence of this huge, horrible situation, we have to take action. And I think some countries, you know, have taken a lot of action, especially when it comes to things like social media. You know, if you're in Singapore, you can't use social media if you're under 16 years old. So it's like it will eventually get taken care of. But we live in our world here in the United States, we're very much like, oh, don't regulate technology. Because we got to keep the innovation going at all costs. We got to keep the growth happening at all costs.

[John]

Yeah. So what's the real solution? What's the real solution?

[Marc Benioff]

I get it.

[John]

Yeah, yeah. What's a pragmatic approach here? Because at the same time, LLMs can have some negative externalities. We've talked about the example of like, you know, if, if grocery stores were invented last year, all the headlines would be like, this guy just went insane in a grocery store. And that would be a huge story. Right. Or like, this person was murdered in a grocery store. That stuff happens, but like, we don't. It doesn't get written about every day. It's not because of the grocery stores, just because. And at the same time, AI, from an education standpoint, all the focus is on people, like, not writing essays anymore. And there's very little writing on, like, hey, this, you know, you know, a 15 year old might like, teach themselves, like physics through using an LLM. And maybe that's amazing, right? So it's like cuts both ways.

[Marc Benioff]

Well, I own a media company too. Not as exciting as yours. It's called Time. And in my little media company, we're held responsible for the content that we write and what we say. Oh, by the way, you are too. But in the case of this technology providers, they are not. So I think step one is let's just hold people accountable. Let's reshape, reform, revise section 230 and let's make it. Let's try to save as many lives as we can by doing that.

[Tyler]

Yeah. Who are you looking to in terms of leading the messaging around AI safety? Do you like Dario?

[Marc Benioff]

Oh, I'm turning it over to you right now.

[Tyler]

Is it us or is it Dario?

[Marc Benioff]

I'm passing this over to you guys.

[Tyler]

Okay? Okay. Yeah.

[Marc Benioff]

Well, you guys can make this part of your narrative and take it forward.

[Tyler]

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. What about in the workplace? Have you had to contend internally with the idea of someone confiding in, as silly as it sounds, confiding in Slack Bot about a problem that they're having in an HR context and. And how that might be a new territory, a new surface area for you to deal with?

[John]

Yeah, we need to talk about Slack Bot safety.

[Tyler]

I mean, it sounds silly, but really, if somebody goes and they're like, my boss said he's gonna fire me next week. I'm overstressed. I'm thinking of doing something crazy. You're in this bizarre scenario for the first time in perhaps your entire career.

[Marc Benioff]

We are. And I think in two areas. First of all, as I mentioned, every company's gonna have a customer agent. And you've seen, like, there's. Since we've spoken, like, 10, 20, 30,000 companies. I don't even know what the exact number is today of companies deploying agent force for their customers. And we've seen these amazing agents emerge, like Olive Williams Sonoma site, or we're going to see one emerge next week at the World Economic Forum in Davos called eva. And every company has an agent to work with their customers to make them more successful. And when we deploy those agents, we have a tremendous architecture to create the guardrails to help prevent crazy things happening. You know, we don't want, you know, we've seen this where customers try to come along and have kind of cybersex experience, you know, with these agents on these websites. Like, no, that's not going to happen. You know, on the Williams Sonoma site, where you're. That's not what you're going to use the turkey baster here for. Okay.

[Alfred]

So.

[Marc Benioff]

We have a whole different approach. And so that level of guardrails is super critical. And on the employee side, we're doing exactly the same thing. We have to kind of put those tools together and work with our partners, but also do a lot of deep engineering work to make it as great as we can. And that core platform, Agent Force, has all of those capabilities built into it.

[Tyler]

Okay. On the employment side, has AI rethought your thinking about employment planning? How many people you need to hire, the scope of the organization? Has it been a roller coaster or do you feel like you've been on one trajectory or the trajectory has changed? How have you been processing just AI, making your employees more effective potentially?

[Marc Benioff]

Yeah, what a great question. I would say that we have about 80,000 employees now, and we'll do a little over 41 billion this year in revenue. We're now the number one enterprise software. Number one enterprise software company in AI. We just passed 11.1 trillion tokens like crazy.

[John]

So are you, like, are you surprised? Are you surprised that companies are not getting valued on token generation yet? They're such big numbers, you know, we. We.

[Marc Benioff]

I am. I think. I mean, we're probably number one or number two on the. The token side. That probably has to do with our relationship with Bilbo Baggins, but otherwise, we've got this figured out.

[Tyler]

Okay.

[Marc Benioff]

I would say what we have to do when we think about employment. To get back to your core question, I've changed the employee mix. This year. We hired more than 20% more account executives. There still needs to be people like me and you who go meet with our customers to really explain all of the intricacies and nuances of the technology. There's a lot of false narratives and people playing the market and saying things about AI that are not true, especially in regards to the enterprise. And we have to go explain it and talk to it and build the relationship and show them and prototype and deploy. And so those people are more valuable than ever and more important than ever to us. On the engineering side, I've held my engineering headcount mostly flat this year because I've gotten so much productivity increase. I probably have about 15,000 engineers, and they're more productive than ever. I'm so proud of them. Look at what we just delivered for you guys. They're doing great. And we need to go even farther. But you mentioned anthropic. We own about 1% of anthropic. I would say that those coding tools you mentioned, Claude, code, other things, cursor. We use that inside. We do things to have a more efficient, more productive engineering organization. And it turns out we've reduced the number of CEOs to one because of Slackbot. We can do more because we can deploy that AI technology. The CEO also.

[Tyler]

I mean, you've spent your entire career in technology. Did the ChatGPT moment. Did the AI boom? Were you expecting it, or did it hit you like a flashback? Was it just. Was it just a. Just a massive flashbang that just hit you like a ton of bricks?

[Marc Benioff]

Hit me like a ton of bricks.

[John]

I would say.

[Tyler]

We have a flashback. In fact, I had to use it.

[Marc Benioff]

Ten years ago, I had the nastiest dream about AI, and so I started a whole AI initiative at Salesforce called Einstein. Okay? And we became the number one enterprise AI. And so we were building models, doing these things, making all that happen. I always believed that this time would happen, but it was more about predictive AI and machine learning and machine intelligence and these kinds of things. And it was, you know, we still use all that by the way, to make this work. And then when the large language model emerged and prompt engineering emerged and by the way, you may or may not know, but I'll give a little credit to my engineering team because they deserve it. But prompt engineering actually emerged out of Salesforce Research. And then all of these companies have. New companies came along to say we're just going to focus on the large language model. And it's been a huge, incredible success story. So I am just so impressed with what's happened in the last few years. But it's just another core part of our infrastructure now. And I think you see that in Slackbot. So getting back to Slackbot, it was just a seamless upgrade for you today. Sure, you have Slack. We added Slackbot. When we added Slackbot, we added all the AI and all the data capability. And now actually in the new version of Slack, you're gonna see a lot of new CRM capabilities as well. You'll be able to manage your customers information without even having to go to Salesforce. You'll be able to manage your service organization. But here's the secret. Salesforce is behind the scene doing all of it.

[Tyler]

Let's go.

[Marc Benioff]

And at some point if you wanna upgrade to the bigger, more advanced adult versions of all those things, you'll be able to do that too.

[Tyler]

Okay, I wanna talk about that because, because we've talked to a lot of companies where they have a single product. They're a point solution. But because of AI, they're able to add on other surface area. Everyone's bleeding into everyone else's territory. Everyone's expanding right now. What is it like running an organization where you might have two products that are now bleeding into each other and do you have to go and play tiebreaker a lot? Do you have a pattern for this? How do you work through all that?

[Marc Benioff]

I love it. I think everyone should innovate and create and compete with each other, especially inside the company. Some people stay in their lane, some people don't. I'm not going to interfere with that. You know, we have these tremendous leaders like running Slack or our sales product. Our sales and Service product are $10 billion products each. They are some of the largest products in the software industry. And the new versions are incredible. But the new versions are all Slack bot. First and you haven't seen them yet. But if you want to get a demo later after the show, you'll see Slack bot and Slack sitting on top of Salesforce and that boom. You can have all this incredible productivity, but it's the lineage of Salesforce coming forward into the present moment reality of these unbelievable new advancements in AI. And that is what I've been working on. So a Slack bot, first world, the ability for every company to have a customer agent, an employee agent, the agent force layer, all these incredible app families, applications. We have. We just bought a company called Informatica, by the way, for like $9 billion. And it was kind of an incredible acquisition. All right, well, there we go. I love. I always love the company, but, you know, they've done things in their new technology that for AI, if you don't have your data right, you don't have your AI. Right. Remember, the reason why Slackbot is working is we have all your data in there normalized. And so it's able to take all your data and give you really cool answers. Well, every company needs to normalize their data. So that's why we bought Informatica. Everybody needs to integrate it together. And then you have to go and connect to all the other data sources in the enterprise, like Snowflake or DataBricks or, or BigQuery or Redshift or even IBM mainframes. We call that zero copy. So our system goes out, grabs all that data in all these other places, brings it together like it is for you already in Slack, and then everything sits on top of it and you get this really powerful AI experience. So that's what's going on. That's what's exciting for me every single day.

[John]

Let's talk about M and A. You talked about Informatica. There's, you know, the SaaS apocalypse has been widely reported. I'm sure you look at some charts and get a little excited.

[Marc Benioff]

I'd rather not look at the charts. I can't figure them out. I mean, our revenue and profitability and cash flow go up and then the stock is all over the place because people think there's some weird end of sass. But I would just ask you guys, did Slack become a lot more valuable for you today or less?

[John]

Way more. Way more.

[Marc Benioff]

Yeah.

[John]

No, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about you looking for value. You've done a ton of M and A. Like, you must look around at companies that you feel like are oversold.

[Marc Benioff]

I think there's a lot of incredible Opportunities right now in the market. And you, you, if you were not looking at, look, we do about 15 or 16 billion in positive cash flow a year. We're going to use that. We're going to buy back some stuff, we're going to buy back some stock, we're going to do some dividend action too, you know, but what else are we going to do with our cash? I think we should buy some companies also, you know because I love organic innovation but I love inorganic innovation too. I bought about 100 companies.

[John]

Give us a, give us a, give us a 3 minute M and A master class. There's a lot of companies whose market caps have inflated. They've got a bunch of cash on their balance sheet, their, you know, 1% of the size of Salesforce. But maybe they're starting to think about M and A. What have you learned about how to do it? Well in a few minutes and this.

[Marc Benioff]

Is the last question, you gotta, you have to innovate. Innovation is our core, one of our core values. What are our core values? Trust, customer success, innovation, equality, sustainability. Those are our five core values. We can talk about any of those. But when you talk about innovation we talk about organic and inorganic innovation. Right? Organic is those 15,000 engineers making Slack. But it's 100% organic. But then. Well actually but it's not because we bought Slack. Remember five years ago when I bought Slack because I love Slack, I thought they did such a great job. I thought it was a one time trade. I don't think anything was going to replace it and I thought I could make it a lot better. I thought I could put it on top of all of our products. I thought it could be a user interface for the future. I thought AI would be incredibly benefited by the data inside Slack. We just proved that to you with Slack Bot. So we bought Slack. Well it was a huge purchase at the time, one of the biggest ever in the software industry. I think it was like $25 billion, our biggest. But guess what, the value that it's provided now it's you know, it's not a sub billion dollar company like when we bought it. It's a multi billion dollar company. I think it's like almost $3 billion or more I don't have in front of me. But you can just go wow, this is like incredible. The value that Salesforce and Slack together provide. And that's what I'm looking for. Or Informatica plus Salesforce together or Mulesoft. I mentioned we bought it when it was a $300 million revenue company and now it's a huge multi billion dollar software engine as well. So we have so many of those and our job is to buy them and make them work. Not all of them are going to work. Acquisitions are very risky. You got to be really careful. And then you can have it all worked out and it still doesn't work out. But it's worth it to take the risk because innovation is risky and organic and inorganic innovation. You have to do both.

[John]

What is a good rate? What is a good hit rate at scale? You said you bought something around 100 companies, but when you're talking with your M and A team, how often are you okay with them and the company just swinging and missing?

[Marc Benioff]

I have such a cool team there because not only do they do that, they also run a $5 billion investment fund. We have invested in so many amazing companies and taken so many amazing companies public. We just sold Wiz that we helped start to Google. We took, we helped grow Snowflake and took it public and made one. I think we've made a billion and a half dollars on that. I think we made a billion dollars on Wiz. I think we have about, you know, a point of anthropic, which is a few billion dollars or so.

[Tyler]

Fantastic.

[Marc Benioff]

I, you know, and it was started, you know, when it was a tiny company. So we love investing, number one. We love buying things and we think all of that is innovation.

[Tyler]

I love it.

[Marc Benioff]

And it's all in one big innovation bucket. And I'm, you know, but we're trying to do something that others have not done is we're trying to innovate in the enterprise at scale.

[Tyler]

Yeah.

[Marc Benioff]

And that is the hard thing because, look, as I said, we have 80,000 people and more than 41 billion. And we're starting, going to start our next fiscal year out on February 1st, and it's going to be a, it's going to be a massive year bigger than that. So I'm like going, whoa, these numbers are huge. But I've got a huge dream. I'm trying to go as fast as possible, you know, to 100 billion in revenue, but while maintaining this incredible profit. Oh, we're one of the most profitable enterprise software companies too. We're delivering more than 34% margins this year.

[John]

I have, I have one last question.

[Tyler]

Coming on the show.

[John]

Last question. Are dreams an underrated. Are dreams an underrated source of business? Alpha, you said you had almost a nightmare about AI and that started Einstein. Do you look for signal in your dreams?

[Marc Benioff]

I pay Attention to my dreams. I pay attention to my visions, my insights. And Salesforce started because I was swimming with a pot of dolphins outside the coast of Hawaii where I live and I was in about 100 dolphins and I was one with the pod. And when I was one with the pod, all of a sudden in my mind I saw this vision of what Salesforce could look like. And I came into Larry Ellison and I said, hey, I think I'm going to quit my job. And he gave me $2 million and we started Salesforce and that was that. That was 26 years ago.

[Tyler]

That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story with us.

[Marc Benioff]

Thank you dolphins.

[Tyler]

Thank you dolphins. Thank you to the dolphins. He's got a sound. The sound is amazing. Look at that.

[Marc Benioff]

Thank you dolphins.

[Tyler]

Thank you for coming on the show. Take care of the dolphins. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest. Goodbye. Love you.

[John]

Super fun. The chat's calling him the Steve Jobs of AI.

[Tyler]

Indeed.

[John]

He's a strong candidate.

[Tyler]

Strong candidate.

[John]

Always great to chat. What a great hanging out with Mark. What else we got?

[Tyler]

There's, there's a few posts, there's some breaking news. Andrej Karpathy has been on a following spree on X. This is why you come to this show. He followed Jacob Rintomaki, friend of the show. He followed Eric Gliman, the CEO of Ramp. Andre Karpathy is making the rounds and Jacob Rintomaki says, you know, I still think it's funny that the guy who ran Tesla's full self driving program, his name is Carpath E. It's a good.

[John]

Nominative determinism for it is always there.

[Tyler]

Although he's working on education now. So we're going to have to rework the nominative determinism to figure out how that works. In other FSD news, Tesla says. Elon says Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14th. It will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter. So February 13th you go and you buy the full self driving. It's a one time purchase. Then he's going, he's going. Subscriber mode. Probably good for the fan.

[John]

Yes, somebody here is in Google just searching. I'm a kitty cat. Where is my owner? My bowl is empty. The AI overview pops up. It sounds like you are very hungry and miss your owner. Since you can't find your owner right now, you might want to meow loudly near their usual spots to get their attention. Check the common areas of your home like the living room or their bedroom. In case they are sleeping or relaxing elsewhere. I'm really glad that the AI overview and Gemini powering it are thinking about cats.

[Tyler]

It's all animal species. It's not humanist. It's not focused on humans exclusively. It embraces the kitty cat inside of all of us. I suppose I started saying yes to all the apps that can track me prompts. The Internet is now noticeably better with more relevant and less spammy ads. Apple did us all a disservice and misplaced emphasis on privacy. He says, get into the targeted advertising flow. You want to see good stuff, hit yes on this app can track me. Let them target you with the best possible ads.

[John]

Well, speaking of targeting, Hermes is allegedly stalking their clients. A glitz investigation investigation has revealed that Hermes employees are googling clients home addresses to determine whether they have a prestigious enough address to be deemed worthy of a Birkin or a Kelly. Hermes is also allegedly scrutinizing clients social media accounts and the content they post after a quota bag is purchased. They continue to monitor for resale activity, which if detected, results in an immediate blacklist for the client. No surprises there.

[Tyler]

I think OpenAI should do this with their device and they sell those. They should say, oh, you know, there's a quota, there's an allocation. We'll try and get you in, but no problem. Really not using ChatGPT all that much. And the questions you ask aren't that interesting. So, you know, I don't think we're gonna be able to get one for you. And oh, by the way, you know, AirPods, we were debating, is the OpenAI device gonna cost a hundred bucks, 300 bucks? I think they gotta do like 30K. I think it's be gonna got to be like 30G's. Yeah, it's got to be add a zero. Why not add a couple zeros, add a couple zeros and then make it a huge hassle. Make it. Oh, well. How many ChatGPT Pro subscriptions have you bought for your friends and family? How much money have you spent with us? What's your purchase history with us? Before we get you one of these devices, you need to make it elite. This is the key. Have you ever churned to winning consumer electronics?

[John]

Have you ever churned from ChatGPT? Well, you're going to the back of the list.

[Tyler]

Yeah. What was going on in November? We see that you tested Claude. Yeah, yeah. You're not getting the device. You're not getting the. What's it called? Sweepy sweet PE's.

[John]

Ben Mullen at the New York Times says what AI generated PR pitches are doing to reporter inboxes everywhere is a catastrophe. It's brutal. You're absolutely right. It says Lulu. Yeah, this is crazy because the challenge is they can like it used to be from our side even maybe a year ago if someone was like really enjoyed this segment where you were talking about this, this, that totally seemed like they watched it and now you can just easily get that from Gemini or wherever. So it's a disaster. Fortunately Nick is there just chopping emails down, dodging PR lasers.

[Tyler]

Maybe the last piece of news. Mike Krieger, the co founder of Instagram who joined Anthropic two years ago as Chief Product officer. He's changing roles to co lead an internal incubator dubbed the Labs Team. I could see him cooking up some really cool stuff. He of course in between Instagram and Anthropic worked on a news application called Artifact that was sort of a precursor to Pulse. It was like almost at the perfect time but AI wasn't quite there and I could see him doing something really interesting. Obviously he's good at going from 0 to 1 in a consumer application. If there's some new surface area for an AI tool and app, I wouldn't bet against him. So congrats to him him on the new role.

[John]

One final post. Freya says, so fascinated by this product and it is in some type of booking. Looks like it's in the booking.com world and it's a get $500 if it rains on three days of your nine day trip for only $26. So we're bringing gambling now. This feels like a pretty straightforward. This is just Friedberg's first company, right?

[Tyler]

Climate insurance? Not really. He was selling to farmers but yeah, it is sort of weather. Weather futures and insurance. Crop insurance has existed for a long time and yeah, this makes sense but are we getting out of here? The bomb has been planted. Thank you for watching TVPN today. We had a lot of fun with you. Leave us. Five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

[John]

Actually do it. Please actually make a difference.

[Tyler]

Leave us. Drop your [e-mail] we have our daily newsletter. Thank you to our sponsors and thank you to our production team and Tyler for hanging out with us.

[John]

Dylan who's here today in the studio and we'll see you tomorrow. We really can't wait.

[Tyler]

We can't wait. 11am Pacific. We'll be here live.

[John]

More great guests.

[Tyler]

Goodbye.

[John]

See you guys soon.