Jordy (3:22)

I wasn't even reading the chat. I didn't even see that you said that.

Miles (3:25)

Of course.

Jordy (3:26)

I was just looking at this absurd picture.

Will (3:27)

Oh, yeah, it is an absurd. So all of those are trapped tracking markers. And then the question is, like, you have a much higher resolution CGI model. If you just transfer with 50 points or 20 points, you're not getting all the detail of what a human face actually looks like and the way it moves. And so Digital Domain, which was one of the many VFX studios that worked on the Marvel series, they built a straight up machine learning pipeline. Like, they used AI. It wasn't a diffusion model, it wasn't an LLM, but they used a machine learning model to basically translate from the low resolution, just a few dots, to a much higher resolution mesh that then became the performance of Thanos on the screen. And I don't know if you remember 2018, the movies, obviously you didn't see any of these movies, but I don't remember, like AI backwards.

Jordy (4:16)

My prefrontal cortex wasn't fully developed.

Will (4:21)

But truly, I mean, people did make the, oh, it's too cgi, the explosions are too crazy, it's too over the top. But in general, people weren't up in arms about like a use of AI or use of to. Everyone was just like, this is a CGI epic. This is a crazy, you know, Marvel movie. Like, we're fine with all this. And there wasn't backlash to that. And I don't think that there would be backlash to this type of, like, AI tool. Now, obviously Marvel's Avengers, that's Disney property, but the same VFX pipeline is being used all over the industry, and it will continue to be used. Interestingly, I talked to Jason Carmen about the Carminator, the Carmine the Carminator about using AI tools in filmmaking, because he's obviously making movies and doing VFX and stuff. And I was like, certainly if you need to rotoscope out a background. So rotoscoping is where you are basically using, like, you're cutting out a subject from the background and then just doing, like a background replacement. That's an example of rotoscoping, but it's over motion, so it's moving.

Gabe (5:22)

So.

Will (5:23)

So you need to track the hand here, move it over here, track it again, track it again. And it can be very, very time consuming. Typically, this is offshore to like a bpo and then they have a whole team of people that are all aiming it, and they have some software that's used. But I was like, this feels like something AI could. Just one shot. He said that AI was not there at the level that he wanted to deliver. He wanted to deliver in 4K. And so he went to a team. I think he paid a fortune. They did it. And when they rotoscope ahead, they actually draw new hairs on to kind of create this. It's very, like, artisanal still. But obviously AI can rotoscope. You see it in the cap cut edits.

Jordy (6:02)

Where's the rotoscoping? Neolab.

Will (6:05)

It's actually Runway. We've had Cristobal on the show, and Pre ChatGPT Runway had a fantastic AI rotoscoping tool where you could basically load up a video, put a couple dots on what you wanted to keep, and then flip over to the red dots and put those in the background and be like, cancel all this out. And it would sort of use that as like an intuition for the model to drop out the background. And you could do a really, really clear, like, cut this person out of this video just in Runway. And now that's available in capcut and edits. And that's where you're seeing all those crazy hype reels where you'll see the F1 driver standing up, and then it'll drop out the background and cut in a different background. And then the F1 driver drops out. And it's like this very, like, schizo at a really cool technique. Yeah, you can see is this Runway's edit editing tool. So it basically draws a mask around it. You just highlight like, what do you want to actually roll a scope? This is an example of, like, motion adding motion. To video. But like you're putting in a little bit of your own aesthetic taste quickly. Let me tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com so goat. So like, I don't think Netflix should take a hard line stance on AI broadly because they want to use AI tools obviously. They've been using AI for recommendations forever. The original collaborative filtering algorithms were machine learning models and that's how you open up Netflix and says, we think this would be good for you based on what you watched. And it is much more nuanced than just if you like, you know, K Pop Demon Hunters, we're going to recommend Squid game next. Like it is machine learning. And so many of these rote tasks will be AI enabled and they already are. And there's not going to be. I don't think there'll be a crazy pushback here, although it's possible that there's some sort of, you know, comms mishap if, especially if a director comes out and is like, we didn't use any AI in this film because they don't think they used any AI. But there's a VFX house that when the motion capture stage did use AI to up res motion capture data. Like you could see AI being used in matte painting for the background and the director doesn't even know because they just said like, yeah, the background just make the forest a little bit bushier. And they think that they're hand painting it. After that they were using CGI and 3D modeling it. Now they're using AI and that sneaks in and then all of a sudden they face some backlash and. But I don't think that's. I think that's manageable. I don't think that's that big of a deal. The bigger question is like, how does Netflix position itself against YouTube and the UGC platforms is what we're talking about. So Neil Mohan, the CEO of YouTube has taken a very open stance on AI and I liked his stance. He was like, we're not going to throw an AI tag on everything. We're going to let you use AI tools. Right in the shorts creator, we have VO3. We're great at this. Like, we're going to lean into this and the algorithm will sort out if you like it and if you think it's slop and you don't want to see slop, the algorithm will learn that and not show you that stuff. But for the people that like that they will be served it. But it is sort of a balancing act. And there's definitely this stated preference for like, I don't want any AI on my platform. How real is that? We'll see.

Jordy (9:39)

Yeah. And what we were getting into earlier, before the show started, is Netflix's decision. The bigger, like, the decision that's bigger than just like, are we going to sort of lean into AI or not? Will just really be. Do we have. Does Netflix ever lean into ugc? Right. They've been signing some bigger podcasts and they obviously work with independent media companies. But there's a very big difference between just allowing people to like, will they ever have an upload button? It feels like no. And I feel like that could end up being their advantage. Where, where there is. Part of what has made YouTube magical since the very beginning was that anybody could go and put YouTube, you know, upload a video. Anybody could be a creator. And I think, like, as the amount of content that gets created, 10, 100 x's, thousand x's because of AI, it's going to be, yeah, Netflix could be this, like, refuge where you're like, okay, at least if I go here, I know that there was some filtering process. I know that this isn't just a total free for all.

Will (10:40)

Yeah, yeah. The upload button is probably a bigger deal than like AI on Netflix.

Aiden (10:45)

Exactly.

Will (10:45)

I think that's a very good thesis. Quickly, let me tell you about consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. And someone was asking in the chat about the LINEAR lineup. Of course, LINEAR is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on LINEAR are using agents. And we have a great show. Mark Gurman's coming in person, Miles the Germanator. And then we have an amazing lightning round coming up.

Jordy (11:16)

And I think we got out to fund over at Voyager.

Will (11:22)

And then Mitchell and Gabriel, Gabe from.

Jordy (11:25)

Rogo, super excited for that one.

Will (11:26)

That's fun. So back to Netflix and YouTube. So YouTube has been on an absolute terror in terms of watch time on TVs. According to Nielsen, YouTube has been number one in streaming watch time in the US for nearly three years. And so this has been the backbone of the case for, like, let Netflix buy Warner Brothers, even though they'll get HBO Max. Like you're merging two seemingly big streaming platforms, but the combined watch time will still be lower than YouTube, so should be fine from a regulatory perspective. But the bigger question is, like, there's this Gap between Netflix and YouTube. And at the start, back in. I mean, Netflix is almost 30 years old. YouTube's over. Over 20 at this point. Back in 2005, these were seen as wildly different platforms. One was DVDs in the mail, and the other one was a video of a guy going to the zoo on his VHS camera. They felt extremely separate, and they felt extremely separate for years and years and years. Now they are starting to converge, especially around video podcasts. I feel like. I feel like YouTube really drove a big boom in video podcasting because the podcast was, I think, invented by Apple.

Aiden (12:42)

Yeah.

Jordy (12:42)

When I started doing any work with YouTube channels and podcasts back in the day, there wasn't a lot of overlap. It was very clearly like these were just different types of creators.

Will (12:53)

Totally.

Jordy (12:54)

And then there was a big shift. It was like, wait, I'm leaving a ton of attention on the table. I'm not uploading to YouTube. And that forced a lot of creators to actually get into video.

Will (13:04)

Totally. Totally. Yeah. There was the pivot to video. And then Spotify went really big into video podcasting. They went on. I didn't realize how big of a push Daniel Ek really did around podcasting. So seven years ago, in 2019, they acquired three companies. Gimlet Media, Anchor and Parcast.

Jordy (13:22)

Anchor's Mike.

Miles (13:24)

Yeah.

Jordy (13:24)

From Lightspeed's company.

Will (13:25)

Yeah. I mean, all three very interesting. Anchor's more of like a product. Parcast had a bunch of.

Aiden (13:31)

Yeah.

Jordy (13:31)

Anchor was like, we'll make it easy for you to create a podcast, because it's still like, a lot of people were there. It was. It wasn't like it was impossible to figure out, but there was quite a bit of friction.

Will (13:41)

Yeah. And they knew that everyone who wanted to distribute a podcast wanted to distribute it everywhere, but they could sort of default you to getting into Spotify as well. So that did very well. And then they signed exclusive deals with Joe Rogan and a bunch of other people. Even, like, some of the royals also signed a deal. I forget who they are, but they really spent a ton of money trying to get into podcasting. I think they were successful. I mean, we see a ton of audience on Spotify.

Jordy (14:09)

Interesting. The timing. Apparently there was. Somebody sent me a chart. There was over a million podcasts launched in 2020.

Will (14:17)

Oh, yeah, you saw that chart.

Jordy (14:18)

Jeremy shared this with us. It actually fully retraced to now. There's like, sub. Sub 50,000 a year. That feels like you would really have to. Maybe they're being extremely explicit about defining what a podcast is, but either way, There was, if you look at the chart, it looks like there was an insane bull market in podcasts and then a huge correction.

Will (14:41)

Yeah, it does feel like there was a 2020 boom during COVID I mean we talked to the folks that acquired about that and they said that during COVID they saw a huge spike in people like just going for walks, throwing on AirPods. All of that sort of hit around the same time AirPods were getting to like mass adoption. So we were just throwing on podcasts constantly and it really, really grew. Anyway, graphite code review for the age of AI graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So there is this chance that with YouTube with the trough, YouTube getting sloppier by the day, that Netflix carves out more of a unique value prop and you wind up seeing more space between the two. So I think of Netflix and YouTube as starting out extremely separate, then sort of like coalescing with like Joe Rogan experience. And I mean Portnoy and Bill SIMMONS Both are YouTube dominant and now have Netflix deals, right?

Alex (15:39)

Yeah.

Jordy (15:40)

Isn't there deal set up so that the video can only be on Netflix?

Will (15:43)

Exactly.

Jordy (15:43)

Audio is still elsewhere, which is why.

Will (15:45)

Do you remember that? Because Portnoy drilled it into your head. He said if you want video, Netflix, Netflix, Netflix, video, Netflix, video, Netflix, barstool video, Netflix. And it's true. And so I would think of Barstool, like if I'm trying to watch a barstool YouTube video or podcast, I would just go to YouTube. Right now Netflix is getting into that. So the gap between Netflix and YouTube is getting pretty narrow. They're becoming competitors. But there's this question on the AI issue. Do they diverge more and is that valuable? The pure AI feeds like Sora and Meta, they haven't really been able to hang on to the top spots in the charts. I think Soar is around 60, 70 point ranking. But like it's still too early to call that because the quality will get better and better. The audio is still very like clockable when you, when you hear it and there's a lot to be done there. But the struggle will be to create unifying conversations around particular pieces of content that are AI generated. I still feel like the K Pop Demon Hunters moment, the Squid Game moment, the Alex Honnold Taipei 101 Moment. These live events, these key things that everyone talks about are really, really valuable. And that's a lot of what's driving the Warner Brothers acquisition is people still dress up as Batman around Halloween. And if you can be the place there. That's way easier than. Well, I did. I've been getting AI generated content about a superhero, but my superhero is different than your superhero. And so if I wear a T shirt with that superhero on it, you're like, what is that AI slot, man. I'm not a fan of that. I like Batman. So there are some things that will remain true. So yeah, I mean about the upload button, it's almost better to think about Netflix less as being AI free and more about being UGC free. They're paying for curation and a quality bar that's backed up by a brand that's going on 30 years in the business. The AI tools will come, some fully AI generated content will come, but true slop will be filtered out by the Netflix team. And I think that that's important for a lot of viewers. Anyway, let me tell you about TurboPuffer serverless vector in full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

Jordy (18:07)

Should we talk about Saudi Arabia?

Will (18:10)

Yes, let's talk about Saudi Arabia. What's going on in the Middle East?

Jordy (18:15)

According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is widening its search for capital, turning to some of the kingdom's wealthiest families as the government looks to ease pressure on public finances and fund the next phase of the Crown Prince's economic overhaul. I saw this headline and was deeply concerned. I was like, why aren't you guys supposed to be funding the whole build out? We were kind of counting on you guys to be quite liquid while the rest of us over here in America are levering up so seemingly somewhat of a liquidity squeeze. This had been reported since back in October, and we can get into it a little bit. They're also raising from. They've been raising, tried to raise money from the Qataris. They apparently asked for something like 10 billion and the Qataris in the UAE. Qataris threw in 10B. Allegedly the UAE did not. And there was frustration around that that.

Will (19:20)

You were going to say the Qataris threw in 10B and Saudi Arabia was like, and we deployed it.

Jordy (19:26)

Time to re up. So as part of these efforts, the PIF gathered about a dozen prominent families on the Red Sea last month to assess their appetite for participating in future opportunities. At the summit, which also included others from the private sector, the $1 trillion wealth fund called for more collaboration on deals, people said, asking not to be identified. Government entities, including the Ministry of Investment, have also stepped up outreach to family offices, wealth managers, domestic businesses. According to some of the people, local families are Being sought after to play a bigger role in partnering with global investors to draw more money to the kingdom.

Will (20:00)

They added years of excess expenditure and subdued oil revenues alongside a tighter lending environment have challenged the Gulf nation's ability to bankroll expansive projects planned under the $2 trillion Vision 2030 agenda. Officials this week said they would postpone the 2029 Asian Winter Games. And the government had previously pared back spending on other of Saudi Arabia's economic rejig. It seems hard to host a winter game that seems extremely expensive to host a winter games in Saudi Arabia, if that's what's going on.

Jordy (20:35)

They have. Don't they have some mountains?

Will (20:38)

They have mountains there.

Jordy (20:39)

I don't know.

Will (20:40)

Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stacking efforts to. Yeah, I know that they have some stuff indoors, and I guess you can just do everything indoors, but again, that feels expensive.

Jordy (20:48)

Yeah.

Will (20:48)

So as opposed to like, just go to Russia and walk anywhere and you can ski.

Jordy (20:52)

Yeah. So they had been developing something with neom. Oh, yeah, the pivoting, which is also, I guess, in the process of pivoting.

Will (21:02)

Before we move on, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Against that backdrop, Riyadh has been stepping up efforts to look for alternative sources of financing, including a rare loan deal. Now a range of local entities have begun to sharpen their focus on Saudi Arabia's family offices and businesses, which collectively control assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. So the number of family offices in the Middle east in 2019, 250, 2024, 290, now we're up to 310. And the projection for 2030 is 350 family offices. There are big portfolios. The wealth is sizable. So the chief executive officer of the national center for Family Business in Riyadh. These entities have long dominated the Saudi economy, and close to 95% of private businesses in the kingdom are family owned. Interesting. They're not doing a lot of IPOs over there. Of these, many groups are only just starting to form family offices as they grow in size and look to formalize strategies to help spread the wealth across multiple generations. That makes both established and new family offices a prime target for more investment. They're naturally looking to diversify and want to contribute in areas where we've just scratched the surface. In addition, more complex areas of finance are also beginning to emerge, drawing the attention of family offices. That includes private credit and industry in its infancy in the kingdom. As overstretched banks struggle to meet more explosive needs for financing. I like that the financing needs are getting explosive at this moment. Not expansive, not expanding. Exploding lenders for years have been the primary financiers for individuals, businesses and government entities looking to drive investment into Saudi diversification agenda. But they are starting to pull back as liquidity tightens, leaving many local firms scrambling to find new sources of financing.

Jordy (22:53)

Well, we got to bring somebody on.

Will (22:55)

To learn more about this and I will tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, cryptos, treasuries and more with damn great customer service.

Jordy (23:06)

Shacob says yes, you're bearish on the US Dollar. The token used to buy AI products. Bold.

Will (23:13)

That's really good. Yes, the US dollar is all over the place Tether is shaking up the Gold Market with massive metal Hoard I did not see this as interesting. There are roughly 3,370,000 nuclear bunkers in Switzerland. That's so many. I've seen a video about one of them, but I didn't realize there were so many. The legacy of the Cold War that are now rarely used. One of them though is a hive of activity. Every week more than a ton of gold is hauled into the high security vault owned by crypto giant Tether holdings sa, which is now the world's largest known hoard of bullion outside of banks and nation states. Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market. The embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds who shared distrust in government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never before seen highs above 5200 now. It was 5000 yesterday on the COVID of the Journal. Gold is on an absolute tear and yet relatively little is known about its inner workings or its gold strategy. When two of the most senior gold traders quit leading bullion bank HSBC holdings last year, the industry was abuzz about go where they would head next. Few guests, few guessed that the answer was Tether. In an interview with Bloomberg, Chief Executive Paolo Adorno described the company's role in the gold markets as similar to that of a central bank and predicted that Washington's geopolitical rivals would launch a gold backed alternative to the dollar. Interesting. He revealed that it plans to keep plowing its enormous profits into gold while also beginning to compete with banks in trading the metal. We are soon becoming basically one of the biggest, let's say gold central banks in the world. Interesting. This is like the original crypto narrative, right? E Gold even before bitcoin.

Jordy (25:14)

Well, was e gold actually gold backed?

Will (25:18)

I think that was the whole pitch was. Yeah, it was trying to be digital gold and I don't think it ever really got adoption. It was very early, late 90s.

Jordy (25:24)

Yeah. Tether has a scale now. They also launched their US focused stablecoin this week to compete with usdc. The new token is known by its ticker. USAT is being issued by Anchorage. I think we had the CEO of Anchorage on at one point. Maybe it was really quick. Cantor Fitzgerald, which already manages the reserves of Tether's mainstay 186 billion USDT stablecoin will do the same for the new coin as it's designated reserve custodian and preferred primary dealer. So USAT is already available for trading as of yesterday. So we'll see. We'll see. It'd be interesting if, like, at what point does USDT depeg upward if gold keeps ripping, Right?

Will (26:21)

I mean, does USDT have a claim on the overall assets of Tether? I think that's not what the product is. I think, I think like the Tether stock would own the Treasury.

Mark Gurman (26:30)

Sure.

Jordy (26:32)

But historically, when you, when you saw a Stablecoin like dpeg, it was because people were turned around the reserves.

Will (26:39)

Yeah, But I think that the contract is that they will, they'll never give you more than a dollar, so.

Jordy (26:44)

No, I know, I know.

Gabe (26:45)

Yeah.

Jordy (26:45)

But I'm just saying, like, stranger things have happened in crypto where.

Will (26:48)

No, it's always been a very profitable company. So certainly, certainly bullish for them. Banta Automate Compliance and Security. Banta is the leading AI trust management platform. There's one funny quote in here. So Tether makes his money from its dollar. Stablecoin, that is the giant of the sector with 186 billion in circulation. The company takes in real dollars in exchange for that USDT token and invests them in treasuries or other assets such as gold, raking in billions in interest and trading profits. Processing the physical metal is crucial, Adorno said. So much so that the company has taken the unusual step of storing the bullion itself in the former nuclear bunker in Switzerland guarded by multiple layers of thick steel doors. And he says it's a James Bond kind of place. It's crazy. That's a great quote to give Bloomberg. Just like James Bond, the secretive nature of another CEO. This is a positive. This is a positive reference. It's okay. If you're building a secret bunker to hold all of your gold. I think you can safely use the James Bond analogy. The secretive nature of the gold market means that while it's easy to describe broad drivers of investment, it can be hard to pinpoint who exactly is behind the buying. China, for example, officially disclosed just 27 tons of purchases last year, but many traders believe it bought much more. Such is the scale of Tether's disclosed purchases that some market watchers have pointed to their role in shifting global prices. The purchases likely Contributed to Gold's 65% rally last year, Jefferies said, describing Tether as a significant new buyer, which could drive sustained gold demand. Still, Tether is only a small part of a much larger rush from investors into gold, with central banks and ETF investors collectively buying more than 151,500 tons of metal. I wonder if this is moving the gold watch market, do you think? You know, the Texas Timex is booming on the back of gold spiking.

Jordy (28:50)

We'll see. I think a lot of prices are still down pretty dramatically 20, 20, 2021 era. But I definitely, I mean, you got to be a little bit scared right now if you're in the business of manufacturing gold watches and other precious metals. Just given that your input costs are going, you know, I'm sure they have like one or you could imagine one or two years worth of supply. So they're not. They can be somewhat insulated, but price prices will go up, or at least costs will go up.

Will (29:24)

Yeah, well, Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. I heard a very funny, very funny interview with an actor who was talking about why he always wears a gold Rolex and he was calling it a helicopter watch. Did I send this to you?

Jordy (29:43)

Yeah.

Will (29:43)

And he's saying that like, this was army. I think it's Army Hammer. And he's saying it's like obscure. It's such a situation, such a funny situation. But he's like, if you're ever in a crisis, you're on the top of a building, the zombie apocalypse is upon you, someone shows up with a helicopter and they're going to save a few people. Everyone knows what a gold Rolex is and they know that that's valuable.

Jordy (30:05)

But if you're not going to have time to be like, no, it's an FP Journee.

Will (30:09)

It's a Patek. Let me explain high horology. Here's the Tourbillon.

Jordy (30:16)

Aftermarket prices.

Will (30:17)

Yeah, exactly. It's like gold Rolex is a store of value. It's always going to Trade. And now it's probably going to trade even higher Anyway. Cisco. On February 3rd, the Cisco AI Summit brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS and more to discuss the future of AI and the economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a Giga.

Jordy (30:38)

Paula says SF escape room called the permanent Underclass. And it's just a room with a laptop and Claude code installed.

Will (30:46)

How do you get. There's something here that's funny.

Jordy (30:50)

So good.

Will (30:51)

Have you ever done an escape room?

Jordy (30:53)

No, I have never once in my life thought that that would be fun. Nor thought that I would. This is how I want to kill time.

Will (31:09)

Yeah, it's like an hour. Well, if you're good, you get out faster, right?

Jordy (31:13)

Yeah. Have you. Are you.

Will (31:15)

I'm not into them, but I've done them and they're fun. Sometimes it depends on, like, if it's a well structured one. But I like puzzles. Like, it's fun. It's like fun puzzle, like figure out. But you can very quickly get caught in like just like overthinking what's going on and being like, oh, it must be some like, complex math thing. And it's like, no, you actually just needed to like press this lever instead of like analyze the situation or something.

Jordy (31:37)

Are some people in there using their phones to try to figure stuff out? Because I imagine you could just say, I imagine there's only.

Will (31:43)

Take a picture.

Jordy (31:44)

There's probably only solve. This is like a series of rooms.

Will (31:48)

Yeah. Well, usually you start in one room. They're all different. But oftentimes you'll start in one room and then there'll be a series of puzzles, locks and keys and whatnot. And then oftentimes you'll unlock something and then you'll progress to another room, and then you'll progress to a third room. And then you'll finally get out of like a series room. Because it's a lot of like, they're pretty easy to set up in sort of like a defunct office space or like, you know, storefront. That's just kind of like, you know, going in between. It's like the spirit Halloween of commercial real estate. Like, you just. Anyone can come in and just say, like, oh, we'll be in there for like a couple months. It's not super permanent. The build out's pretty simple. It's mostly just like some walls and decorations and like some creativity. On the, on the, on the, on.

Jordy (32:32)

The puzzle side, Trey says, can you guys put Tyler in an escape room and see if he gets out before the show ends.

Will (32:38)

I mean it'd be very hard to find a three hour long escape room. I think most of them aim for like 45 minutes.

Jordy (32:45)

Well, maybe we need to make one.

Will (32:46)

One of our guests had to leave the Ultra dome and go straight to an escape room. So there are escape room fans among the TVPN army all over the place. Have you done one, Tyler?

Tyler (32:57)

I've not.

Will (32:58)

Are you interested in it? You're a speedcuber, so you know.

Tyler (33:01)

Yeah, I mean it could be fun. I don't know, I'm kind of in the Georda camp though. I've just like never been.

Will (33:08)

It's very like, I don't know, maybe it's great with. It's probably great with like kids who are maybe like 8 to 10 who can do the puzzles. Like family event would be fun. And then it was a common thing. When they came out, there was definitely a boom in Escape Room.

Jordy (33:26)

Bobby in the chat says Escape Room would be a good benchmark for AI. Certainly a humanoid.

Will (33:34)

I mean you could go in there, take pictures and be like, help me solve this, help me solve this, help me solve this.

Jordy (33:38)

I know, but I want to see a humanoid run through it.

Will (33:41)

Let's call 1X, see what they can do.

Jordy (33:43)

Call any of them, Hit them up.

Will (33:45)

Figma. Figma make isn't your average vit coding tool. It lives in Figma so outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes and apps.

Jordy (33:53)

Fast moving on.

Will (33:56)

Lots of reaction to claudebot. Very much enjoyed our interview with the creator of claudebot now Moltbot. Yesterday, one of the.

Jordy (34:07)

Yeah, yeah. Incredibly, he had some wild lines but incredibly refreshing kind of conversation. Totally viewpoint, totally. Just totally counter to the entire philosophy that I feel like a lot of people, at least on the west coast in the way that they're approaching AI right now and the way that America is approaching AI. He's like, we asked, you know, you think somebody will like, you know, fork what you're doing or clone it? And he's like, yeah, I'm sure they will. Like, I don't care.

Will (34:37)

Yeah, I'm building this for myself.

Jordy (34:38)

Yeah. And he's like, I have enough, I have enough money.

Will (34:40)

Yeah.

Jordy (34:41)

And I'm super. It's going to be really fun to follow along. I have a feeling that he's just going to keep launching a bunch of random projects because he clearly is just in it for the love of the game. But I do hope that, I do hope that he can get a lot More resources and really scale up.

Will (34:58)

I don't know. I don't know that he needs more resources. He has more agents and whatnot. Like the interesting thing about Claude Bot as a product is you Download it from GitHub, it installs and it has all these different integrations and it does something that's very complex and it has all this safety text and different. There's a website and there's a community page and all of that feels like okay, yeah, this is like a 10 person startup. They probably worked on this for a year but it's like no, it's one person and it's like three months because the guy is, you know, using agents.

Jordy (35:32)

Yeah, you would think that he would build. His big complaint was the security inbound, security researchers asking him stuff. Yeah, it's like, okay, bought it.

Will (35:45)

I think he will, I think he should. But yeah.

Tyler (35:49)

He posted December 26th he had his Codex dashboard up, so he said he's done 250 billion tokens, which is like probably top 10 Codex users apparently from.

Will (36:02)

So I don't know that he needs way more resources. I mean he should be able to get donations if he needs them, get credits or something. I don't know. The financial strain on that business does not seem. It seems like it's more constrained by his ideas, how he's thinking about designing the system, integrating things. Rolling it out.

Jordy (36:25)

A buddy of mine, Michael, watched the interview and he said that he's had claudebot set up. He set it up right at the beginning of January and was initially like just kind of got a little frustrated using it but has now got it. He's got it set up so that it's able to make phone calls on his behalf. Specifically wants to get Hillstone reservations. So he just like basically.

Will (36:49)

Wait, what's Hillstone?

Jordy (36:50)

The restaurant.

Will (36:51)

Oh, okay.

Jordy (36:51)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he's just like going to use it to start getting reservations at different restaurants.

Will (36:55)

It's so funny. Google has a product for that that does an AI phone call but for some reason it just hasn't really rolled out that or it just hasn't gotten to like adoption. I don't know. There's some sort of, there's some sort of like memetic like I think people seeing the clip where he's like explaining how he's feeling. The AGI really, really hit people.

Jordy (37:14)

Obviously he's has it make him a daily brief.

Will (37:18)

Yeah.

Jordy (37:18)

That feeds into an RSS like on a podcast. So in the morning he can just really listen to like a five minute podcast. On like what his days. Like, things that he should be responding to. Kind of like it seems like you.

Will (37:30)

Could have this podcast ever. Your enemy texted you something and you will be. You will be deeply upset when you see what happen. Everyone's preying on your downfall. No, no. Security is important with. With Claude Bot. Now Moltbot Crowdstrike is also important. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

Jordy (37:56)

A random 10 person team in Paris just dropped what looks like. It looks like something superior to Cloudbot. According to Chubby on X, it's called Twin. The AI company builder, Hugo Mercier. Yeah, they raised a $10 million seed round. They have over 100,000 agents deployed. Okay, so Tyler, give it a spin. Check it out. Twin Lives.

Will (38:23)

There's a community note on here. This is undisclosed advertisement But Doug over at Semianalysis Fabricated Knowledge says, I think that claudebot is going to be a moment and yeah, someone's going to do this. And I'm still wondering about how quickly a business can actually scale when you're getting constantly hammered with TOS violations from every Mag 7 legal department. Constantly like, hey, yeah, we noticed that you built a CLI for the Web interface on WhatsApp and we don't want you to do that. And it's one thing if it's like an open source repo that people are running themselves and can change and can edit and fix and tweak versus like hey, you're a corporation that we could potentially sue or tie up in litigation or go on a press tour around. It's just a very different dynamic.

Jordy (39:17)

Yeah. And the prompt injection risk as well.

Will (39:20)

Yeah, totally. It's like, does that liability fall back on the company? I'm excited to talk to Mark Gurman about how he's processing this with what will happen with Siri, the timelines there, what will be integrated? Because Apple and the iOS ecosystem should have a lot of the same functional hooks into these products.

Jordy (39:40)

But yeah, we talked about this Monday. The there was a team that built a product which sold to Apple and became shortcuts. And then they built software applications incorporated in a product called sky and they were pre launch and OpenAI acquired it. It was focused on integrating AI into the operating system. And so you can imagine OpenAI behind the scenes has been cooking on a lot of stuff like this, but this isn't the kind of thing that you can just at OpenAI scale just say, hey, we're going to just ship this and see what happens. Whereas a startup or an open source project.

Will (40:11)

Yeah. Let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. There are a lot of people building stuff on Multbot around Multbot around the concept. Another there's actually someone in the chat that's working on a Claude bot for the cloud. He says he has a name. I'm very excited to learn more about his project. I think his name is Jeff. In the chat Brexton says yes, that was fast. Yup. Software is cooked because Kalyn Y says introducing Multbot for teams. One click connections to all the apps client side encrypted and builds your team's memory. Get your momo is the product I wonder. This feels like almost something where if you've been building a product that's like this, you should potentially reintroduce it on the back of all the Multbot hype. And if you're like a multi tentacled agent that can touch a lot of different systems, we'll put it in terms that people understand and say, hey, this is claudebot or Multbot for the enterprise. And it has these functions and these benefits and the security approach. But clearly a lot of people will be focused on this. Let's click over to re watching the interview with the claudebot creator, Peter Steinberger, because I want to hear about his AGI moment. The AGI achieved moment. First, I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR built to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses. And then we will play the video from claudebot creator. I want to see. So in November.

Miles (41:59)

Yeah.

Will (42:02)

I don't know, I wake up every day, I'm like, okay, what do I want to work on now? What would be cool? And then they was like, okay, I want to chat with my computer on WhatsApp because if my agents are not running, if they're running and then I go to the kitchen, I want to check up on them or I want to do little prompts. So I just hacked together some WhatsApp integration that literally receives a message, calls cloud code and then returns. What cloud code returns? One shot and it took like one hour and it worked. I was like, okay, that's kind of cool. But I usually use prompts like a little text and an image because images are like, they often give you so much context and you don't have to type so much. So I feel like this is like one of the hacks where you can prompt faster, just, like, make a screenshot. So the agents are really good at figuring out what you want. So I had to get images. And then I was on a trip in Marrakesh with like a weekend birthday trip, and I found myself using this, like, way more than I thought, but not for programming. It's more like, hey, there's like, restaurants. Because it had Google in it and it could figure out stuff. And it's like, especially when you're on the go, it is super useful. And I wasn't thinking, I was just sending it a voice message. But I didn't build that. There was no support for voice messages in there. So the reading indicator came and I'm like, I'm really curious what's happening now. And then after 10 seconds, my agent replied as if nothing happened. I'm like, how the F did you do that? And it replied, yeah, you sent me a message. But there was only a link to a file with no file ending. So I looked at the file header. I found out that it's opus. I used FFMPEG on your Mac to convert it to wave. And then I wanted to use Vispa but didn't have it installed and there was an install error. But then I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment. So I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I earned respondents. That was like the moment where, like, wow. Yeah.

Mark Gurman (44:12)

Yeah.

Will (44:13)

You know, it's like, that's where it clicked. These things are like damn smart, resourceful beasts if you actually give them the Power Beasts app. Loving the ad at the end. I love it.

Miles (44:29)

Yeah.

Will (44:29)

People were reacting to this. People are not. Are genuinely not ready, says Vittorio Lots.

Mark Gurman (44:34)

Well, that.

Jordy (44:35)

That's the one way. The reason that I feel like that is such a powerful moment and I'm glad that he shared it, is if you give somebody, if you're talking with a model and you give it a task and then it just hits a dead end. It's just incredibly like, that's sort of like people are very used to that right now. And it's not that it needs to be that way, but it's just kind of like the steady state.

Will (45:04)

Yeah. People are used to, okay, I know.

Jordy (45:07)

What the models can do effectively. The agent having real agency that makes it an agent. It's saying like, well, I didn't know how to do this, or I was confused and I tried a number of things until I did what you wanted. And that's like, what you want out of that's what you want out of a team member.

Mark Gurman (45:23)

Right.

Jordy (45:23)

If you're working with somebody on a project and they have a task, they don't just try one thing and come back or just say like, I actually can't handle this because the file type's wrong. Convert it, figure it out.

Will (45:35)

What was your reaction entirely?

Tyler (45:36)

Yeah, I mean, it's like pretty insane. Definitely raised my chance of permanent underclass.

Will (45:43)

Oh, no.

Tyler (45:45)

It's making me a little worried.

Will (45:46)

Yeah. Will says it's over. It's over. We need to move. And there are a lot of people quoting this. G Fodor has the Eliezer Yudakowsky meme. And lots of people here. Lots of people were, you know, interesting that he uses Codex here. Rune said, Codex 5.2 is really amazing, but using it from my personal and not work account over the weekend taught me some user empathy.

Jordy (46:15)

Lol.

Will (46:16)

It's a bit slow. And Yoochun Jin says, every time I ask my OpenAI friend, when will you beat Claude at coding? They say, we already beat them. I think Sam is realizing speed, not intelligence. Is Codex's blocker to a clogged code moment. Cerebrus chips. Cerebrous chips might unlock a Codex moment. Yeah, that would be very interesting. And that's one of the. The models are so powerful now that there's so many moments where you know it's going to deliver. It can deliver because it can work around all these problems. But if you're like, I need this done in five minutes, I'll just do it myself. Yeah.

Tyler (46:54)

Like, 5.2 Pro is like an incredible model, but it just takes like 5, 6, 10 minutes every time you prompt it.

Will (47:01)

Totally.

Tyler (47:01)

It's kind of like thinking or, you know, deep research. Type model.

Will (47:04)

Yeah.

Tyler (47:05)

Yeah.

Will (47:06)

Well, let me tell you about Label Box. Reinforcement learning environments, Voice robotics, evals and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. I like the fireworks.

Jordy (47:17)

Do some fireworks for that.

Will (47:18)

I like the fireworks. What else is in here? So you already mentioned this, Tyler, but Peter's probably in the top 10 users of Codex at the moment. Over 250 billion tokens in a few months is a lot. So how much does that actually cost? That feels like you're up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Jordy (47:39)

No, it says it here.

Will (47:40)

Yeah. How much does it say?

Jordy (47:41)

$51,000.

Will (47:43)

That's not much. Wow. Yeah. Usage cost. And he has a streak going of 74 days. No days off. Yeah. So $51,000 for this type of result. Pretty remarkable. So where do we move the goalposts now?

Jordy (47:59)

Yeah, I'm. So what are you unhappy with?

Mark Gurman (48:01)

Peter didn't say.

Will (48:03)

I know there's going to be something that you're unhappy with about AI. Like you can't be satisfied.

Jordy (48:08)

Me? Yeah, me.

Will (48:09)

Yeah. Permanently dissatisfied.

Jordy (48:12)

Well, part of it's a bit.

Will (48:13)

Oh, yeah, I know.

Jordy (48:14)

Obviously.

Will (48:16)

We got to move the goalposts.

Jordy (48:18)

I have to provide, like, an alternate opinion. But of course we have the goalposts. Yes, we have been sitting in one place, but I guess what I'd be interested in is Peter and his team built a hit product, an entire, you know, this novel experience that has taken the world by storm. And how much. How much did we know they only spent a few months on it. How many people actually worked on it and what was their total. How much did they spend in total on tokens? Right, because they were spending some with codec.

Will (48:52)

You can sort of see that from the GitHub commits.

Mark Gurman (48:54)

Right?

Will (48:56)

Probably for some sort of average.

Tyler (48:58)

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure you can do that. I mean, just based off that, it's like, okay, $51,000 on 250 billion tokens.

Will (49:04)

And a lot of those tokens are probably using Claude bots to do things. Right. Not just building it. Right.

Aiden (49:10)

Yeah.

Tyler (49:11)

I mean, that was over how many months those tokens were not just on cloudbot. Yeah, that was just all of his, like, hundreds of.

Will (49:17)

And he says he talks to Opus 4:5 all the time, too, so I wonder what numbers he's putting up there. But still, it's interesting that it's not in the millions. Like, it's pretty accessible. I don't know. We need to find a new AGI benchmark.

Tyler (49:29)

Okay. So I think maybe it's something like this.

Jordy (49:32)

Right.

Tyler (49:32)

So I think the main. One of the main takeaways I have from this is just that, like, big model companies can't really release an equivalent product just because of the integration thing. Right. Next, seven companies are not going to like, talk to each other. They're not going to. You're not going to get OpenAI in WhatsApp, stuff like this. So it really.

Jordy (49:52)

But do you think they would go so far as to say, we are not going to allow you to navigate our applications using. Using something like.

Will (50:04)

I mean, that's literally happening with like, the New York Times does not allow OpenAI to browse it with a bot. Like, you can go, yeah, but.

Jordy (50:12)

But it's different having your local device being effectively used by.

Will (50:19)

Yeah, no, it is a computer just using itself at the Same time, if, if OpenAI has the ChatGPT app right now, if you go to the ChatGPT website and you say, hey, I found this, I'm a subscriber to the New York Times and there's an article in the business section that I want you to summarize for me. Here's a link. Can you open the link and turn into some bullet points for me? It'll just say, like, no, no, no, I can't go over there. Like they said, don't go. I'm not going right now. If I download the ChatGPT app and it's able to run that and maybe the New York Times can't block it, the New York Times still has the ability to, like, sue OpenAI and like, be a headache. So then, yeah, hey, enforce the same.

Jordy (51:04)

Thing about a situation where the user. Let's say they have a Mac Mini, they're running Moldbot.

Miles (51:09)

Yeah.

Jordy (51:09)

They. On the computer. They've given Moldbot their New York Times login.

Will (51:14)

Yes.

Jordy (51:14)

So it's fully logged in.

Will (51:16)

Yes.

Jordy (51:16)

And they're paying New York Times subscriber. I would be. I think users would be upset that you're saying if the New York Times says we're not going to allow. We're going to figure out a way to try to. I don't even know how you would go about trying to actually stop that activity. But I'm just saying, even I can imagine users are going to. Users are basically going to demand. I agree. If my data. I don't care if my data is stored in the cloud. I want to be able to access it on any device that I'm logged into, even if I'm not physically present with the device. I just think it's going to be a really, really, really tough argument for some of these larger companies to say you can only access your data if you are physically moving the mouse yourself.

Will (52:05)

Yes. I want to get Tyler's response, but first I'm going to tell you about Cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Tyler, what are you thinking?

Tyler (52:15)

Okay, yeah, so I agree. I think basically what you're describing me is that all these companies need incredible deal guys. Right. This is the whole thesis, like the deal guy error with open source, with this, like hacker culture, you can kind of always get around these rules. Is it like maybe breaking terms service like def. Yes, definitely. These big companies can't do it. They need more deal guys. Right. But it's like hard to find These deal guys, you need the AI to become the deal guy. So you need a cloud bot deal guy. That's the new benchmark.

Will (52:42)

That's the new benchmark.

Tyler (52:43)

You're going to be good at making deals.

Will (52:44)

Okay, Claude, AI the that can do a deal between two MAG seven companies. Here we go.

Jordy (52:50)

There we go. There we go. Move it to the other side. See ya. See ya. Tyler, why do you. I kind of want to take this a little bit further just because, I don't know, like, how do you actually enforce this? Is Google Drive going to say you need to have your camera on and we need to see that you're sitting in front of your computer actually using it?

Tyler (53:19)

I mean, you can always do these like bot detection stuff with like whatever it's coming from the same ip, these things. I think it's like kind of a constant race. But like, I think the open source stuff will, if you like really grind it out, you can kind of always get around this stuff. And so like the only real solution is to have like actual, I think, deals between these like different companies.

Will (53:40)

Yeah, I think that if you have an app from a big company that enables you to do something, If Chrome started shipping with a torrent browser, something that would allow you to manage torrents, which are not illegal, that's just software. You can just download torrents that are not piracy. Like, I can just be like, hey, I put up a torrent of TVPN content, anyone can download it. But just by virtue of the fact that it's so prevalently used to pirate media, they would face pressure from media owners Warner Brothers and Disney and they would get angry letters and they would strike a deal and say, okay, yes, like we're not going to enable this. And so even though. So if any of the big tech companies launch an app that enables behavior that other apps don't like, they will have leverage. And they all have deals together and they all have legal teams and there's a bunch of different pressures that they can apply and it's this like constant negotiation. Oh, well, maybe we won't renew this deal or this contract. Maybe we'll go with someone else. If you're the bad actor, you'll get pushed out. Right. So I don't know. I think it's going to be a big debate. I would be surprised if any of the big labs just launch something that can actually just go and do anywhere and do anything, because the pushback.

Jordy (55:11)

But do you think this is something that will like, why would this just not happen at the os Layer?

Miles (55:18)

Yeah. I don't know.

Tyler (55:22)

I mean, then you need Apple to like actually lock in.

Will (55:25)

You do, which is like.

Jordy (55:26)

Yeah. Or Satya.

Will (55:27)

Yeah. And that's why we're having Mark Gurman on the show to break down Apple's strategy and what they're doing anyway. Interesting. 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? Kimi 2.5 is out and Alex Chima is running it on his desk. It runs at 24 tokens per second with two M3 Ultra Max studios connected via Thunderbolt. He went much bigger than the Mac Mini and Joe Wesmith.

Jordy (56:01)

And by the way, apparently Kimmy likes to be refers to itself as Claude.

Will (56:07)

Yeah. What happened here? Tyler, can you break down what's going on with Kimmy?

Tyler (56:10)

Yeah, I mean, it's always kind of unclear with the Chinese open source models, like what they're actually doing to train the models. So there's like. Yeah, when you ask the model to like introduce yourself, it's like, hello, I'm Claude.

Will (56:20)

Yeah.

Tyler (56:21)

So there's probably like two scenarios. One is that they trained on the outputs of like OPUS or anthropic model.

Mark Gurman (56:27)

Right.

Will (56:28)

You'd think that they would just find and replace in the training data though, you know, like that'd be pretty easy to just be like, okay, we're going to scrape a ton of responses from Claude. Let's make sure we do a find and replace on Claude so that if it says, hi, I'm Claude, I'm a helpful assistant, it just changes that. That's just like.

Tyler (56:46)

Yeah. I mean you would expect that Kimmy knows that it's gonna call itself Claude.

Will (56:50)

Yeah.

Tyler (56:51)

So it's like, why would they allow that? Maybe they're just basically like mogging anthropic. Like, oh, yeah, we have Claude.

Will (56:57)

What are you gonna do about it?

Tyler (56:58)

Yeah, like what are you gonna do?

Will (56:59)

We stole Claude.

Tyler (57:00)

Yeah. And then there are also some rumors, like, very unclear if this is just like completely fake headlines, but like maybe there was some leaked checkpoint that somehow got out to China and then they did a fine tune on it or something.

Will (57:12)

Yeah, that would be pretty, pretty crazy if.

Tyler (57:16)

Yeah. People have said it before for other models. I'm not really sure how reliable they are, but it seems like fairly very likely that they just trained on OPUS output.

Will (57:25)

Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (57:26)

Because you kind of. People said Deep SEQ did that originally with ChatGPT.

Will (57:32)

Yeah.

Tyler (57:32)

Yeah.

Will (57:33)

I talked to one technologist about what it takes to reverse engineer like the GPT4 API. And it's a surprisingly low amount of outputs to sort of interpolate all the weights or something that approximates it. So it's clearly sort of a game back and forth, just like a constant war. There's something.

Tyler (57:54)

I think it is quite. I think it's probably a good sign for us AI labs that the Chinese models are essentially just like completely based off the US ones. Like they're not actually training these models from scratch. Yeah, they're not doing these incredible training runs for much cheaper. People say they're basically just copying off the us.

Will (58:14)

Do you think that's because of just chip restrictions or actual architectural hurdles?

Tyler (58:22)

Yeah, it's probably all of them. It's hard to figure out the architecture. You don't have the chips to try these different science projects. Training runs.

Will (58:31)

Wow. The. The Chinese models lag by exactly how long it takes to scrape the API basically and do a fine tune. What a coincidence.

Jordy (58:42)

Dean Ball has been on a tear the last 24 hours post. He said people significantly underrate the current margins of AI labs. Yet another way in which pattern matching to the technology and business Trends of the 2010s has become a key ingredient in the manufacturing of AI copium.

Will (59:00)

Copium.

Jordy (59:01)

And he says this Derek Moeller post.

Will (59:03)

Was very informative here. Just look at the market clearing prices on inference from open source models and you can tell the big labs pricing has plenty of margin. Deep Infra has GLM 4.7 at 43 cents in $1.75 out. Sonnet is at $3 in, $15 out. How could anyone think anthropic isn't printing money per marginal token. And Dean Ball says the reason they think labs lose money is because 10 years ago some companies in an entirely unrelated part lost money on office rentals we work and taxis, Uber. And everyone thought they would go bankrupt because at that time another company that made overhyped blood tests Theranos did go back did go bankrupt. That is literally the level of ape like pattern matching going on here. The machines must look at our chattering classes and feel great appetite.

Tyler (59:52)

Yeah, you could also have seen the margins from the whole open code thing with anthropic where there was open code. So anthropic, they have Claude code, Right? You can get the Claude subscription and you get like free Claude code tokens and then you could use those to auth for open code and they removed that. And the whole reason you would want to do that is because the Claude code tokens versus actual Claude API is like 10x difference. So there's like a massive markup to the actual API. So you'd assume that unless Anthropic is losing just insane amounts of money on cloud code, which maybe they're losing some.

Jordy (60:27)

Amounts of money, it's like, well, you look back at the. I forget which interview Dario was doing where he was trying to get people to think about. Like you think of each model as a company where you spend all this money on training, which is capex, and then when you're actually running the model, it's very profitable. But if you look at the business as a whole, you have massive, massive losses from training and stock based comp and, and, you know, hiring 1400 of the best engineers in the world. So if you actually look at it on a company company wide, you have continued scaling, massive losses. But the important thing is effectively at the product level, when they're selling the.

Will (61:06)

Product, they actually are making money in the S1. Good to you and to me. Looks like training clearly broken out as capex. Solid gross margins above 60%, something like that on inference. And then all of the AI copium can probably subside. If OpenAI or Anthropic go out with an S1 that shows really solid inference margins and if it comes out that it's like, oh, their inference margin is like 10% or something, then people are.

Miles (61:40)

Going to be panicking.

Jordy (61:40)

To be clear, I think these will be some of the most special S1s that have ever graced the capital markets.

Will (61:49)

It'll be great. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. And without further ado, we have Mark Gurman, the manager, managing editor of Bloomberg in the Ultradome. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on down. Yeah, right here. Okay, we'll have this microphone for you. You have a Diet Coke. So you're locked in.

Mark Gurman (62:16)

We're ready to go.

Will (62:17)

How have you been? How's your new year going so far?

Mark Gurman (62:19)

Oh, freaking great.

Will (62:22)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (62:22)

Yeah. Had a. My wife and I had a baby last year.

Jordy (62:26)

Gong, gong, gong.

Mark Gurman (62:30)

I need to get one of those things that you guys make on the Twitter and just me, the card. Baby, baby. Oh, well, we'd be happy to do that. We're happy to do it.

Jordy (62:39)

We never, we never. Yeah, we never. We never know some people. Some people want to be, you know more about that.

Mark Gurman (62:44)

Oh, I am Low key about it. I just figured, you know, but how.

Jordy (62:47)

Do you, how do you rate parenthood? How does it, how does it feel being in it versus, you know, all the expectations that people have just taking.

Mark Gurman (62:57)

Care of this individual and they're being so reliant on us and getting to teach them. But shout out to my wife for being the one really pulling the strings there and taking care. So it's great.

Jordy (63:14)

Anyhow, I feel like reporting and parenthood are especially hard to balance in some ways. Still a way. Yeah. No, I would just. Obviously it's completely possible and you're clearly doing fine, but the nature of the work means that a story is happening and you want to be the first to provide the best coverage. And sometimes, you know, there's a baby's crying, you might not be able to.

Will (63:42)

Pick up the phone, but you get through.

Mark Gurman (63:44)

You know what? People have been hearing crying babies over the phone for. That's true for forever. So they'll have to deal with it. I just can't wait till we go on an airplane. Oh, yeah, I already told my wife we're gonna get banned from American Airlines.

Jordy (64:00)

No, I've said this on the show before. The funniest thing is, growing up, I assumed that when a baby was crying on the airplane, it means that. That the parents were bad parents, like they were doing something wrong.

Will (64:09)

Totally, totally.

Jordy (64:10)

And in reality, babies just cry for a million reasons. And it's totally possible that there's no solution. Sometimes they just need to.

Will (64:17)

Yeah, I saw like an Instagram reel of a mother talking about her kid and the kid was crying in the background. I was like, why would you take advice from her? Like, that's such a bad mom.

Mark Gurman (64:26)

Yeah.

Will (64:28)

Now it's got to do with the baby's always crying.

Mark Gurman (64:29)

It's crazy hungry. They have gas. They don't like the sweater they're wearing. There's a million reasons, you know, they didn't like my article. Who knows? But anyways, anyway, let's talk about Apple.

Will (64:41)

Let's talk about Apple. I mean, we've been talking about new Siri expectations there. The big news yesterday was claudebot. Have you been. Do you think there's anything about how have you been processing the cloud bot now Moltbot story? What's possible there? Expectations around AI assistance feel sky high in the open source community. What do you. Do you think, like anyone at Apple's like, updating on claudebot and Multbot and what's possible?

Mark Gurman (65:10)

Well, let me just take a step, please.

Will (65:12)

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Gurman (65:12)

You know, with Apple and AI.

Will (65:13)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (65:14)

So in 20, was it 2018, they hired John Gianandrea. He was this high flyer at Google. He ran AI in search. And Apple thought they had a coup here. Apple thought they would hire this guy and really just hit the ground running and be at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Just seven years earlier, they announced Siri in 2011. There was absolutely nothing like it. It was breakthrough, but then it just became utter junk. Google Assistant lapped it, Alexa lapped it. So they thought they were going to bring this guy in and it'd be a game changer, turns out. And maybe this will be Tim Cook's fait accompli. But this was the biggest mistake, this hire of Tim Cook's tenure. I think it's easy to say Apple is so behind in AI. There has been so much ink spilled on this and so many conversations on this. And I've written about and talked about it half a million times. I think it does. You haven't even scratched the surface about how big of a problem this is for Apple. Right. They've completely screwed up AI in every which way. And it comes down to just hiring the wrong people and entrusting the wrong people.

Jordy (66:24)

But is it a do nothing win scenario? Because I think we're seeing a situation now where the Mac Mini might end up selling out.

Will (66:30)

Stock seems fine. Are you seeing like financial stock?

Mark Gurman (66:35)

That's the problem, Right. When you've had no real negative hit.

Jordy (66:41)

It'S hard to go wartime.

Will (66:44)

Go wartime and acknowledge that there is failure. Because all the numbers.

Mark Gurman (66:48)

But it is, it is wartime, right? Yeah, the numbers are great. Tomorrow they might report their first $135 billion to $140 billion quarter. Right. Like I don't, you know, the problem is how can you put $140 billion and Tim Cook needs to go retire in the same century. Right. It doesn't make sense. But when you think about the long term, you think about the future, these things are going to need to get rectified. And I guess the good news is they are on a path to rectifying it. To some extent. This Google Gemini deal is a breakthrough for Apple. It's embarrassing. I mean, it's absolutely crazy that you.

Jordy (67:34)

Poach their guy and then years later you're paying them billions.

Mark Gurman (67:39)

He screws you up. Okay. You pay him 25 million a year for eight years. Right. And then now you're paying basically 4x that, 8x that maybe a little bit more in order to get, you know, the new good stuff.

Will (67:50)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (67:51)

And so they'll Announce a new series next month. The thing with this new Siri is basically a replay of everything they announced in June 2024. So it's basically everything they announced two years ago coming very late. Things like using what's on your screen to fulfill Siri queries, being able to control your apps. And then in June is when the good stuff launches. That's when Apple launches its first chatbot. It's interesting because they've spent the last two years saying nobody likes chatbots. Everyone hates ChatGPT. It's terrible, it's ruining the world. Then you have ChatGPT with nearly a billion active users. They're like, okay, we kind of got to do screwed. So they're doing it and it's actually going to run on Google servers, Google cloud platform, Google TPUs. This is great for Google too. And I think some people at Apple think this is going to be like a short term thing. We're going to partner with Google till we get our act together. No, I definitely think that this is more of a long term play unless these models continue to get commoditized, which they will eventually. But this is not a 1224, 36 month thing. This is longer term, I think, than people expect.

Will (68:58)

And Apple can't just go wrap Llama because of the terms of service that meta's put that around. They said you can't use.

Mark Gurman (69:05)

I don't think they want to use Llama. I don't think they want to work.

Will (69:08)

With open source models. So there aren't that many games in town.

Mark Gurman (69:12)

Well, let's take a step back here. So they're using Google in the US right? But they're going to have to do something in China and so you'll see them use a combination of Alibaba and I think it's Weibo or Tencent or one of those different AIs for different features. So they'll use them. And just because they're partnering with Google Gemini on Siri in this chatbot doesn't mean they're not using other players. There's a lot of OpenAI and a lot of applications. They launched their Creative Cloud competitor today and a lot of those AI features are powered by ChatGPT. Like some image generation stuff. I still think on an image generation side you're getting a little bit better on OpenAI than you're getting from Google. And then a lot of stuff internally like Apple runs on Anthropic at this point. Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple's doing. Internally in terms of product development, a lot of their internal tools. So that's a big one to watch. They have custom versions of Claude running on their own servers internally too. Because this Google deal, this just came together a few months ago. They were not going to use Google. Apple actually was going to rebuild Siri around Claude, but anthropic, they were holding them over a barrel. They wanted a crap ton of money from them, several billion dollars a year and at a price that doubled on an annual basis as well for the next three years or so. From what I understand at the time, Google was really an afterthought because they were in the middle of the trial with the Department of Justice and then for some reason the judge ruled that Apple and Google's deal was kosher, even though everyone knows it's a huge issue and a monopoly and all that. I'm not here to be a judge. I write, I don't make judgments for legal proceedings. But anyways, Apple and Google get off scot free. They can do whatever they want now and you know, they're not being held back at all. And then obviously OpenAI, that is a real firestorm for Apple right now. Like OpenAI, obviously they're working on these AirPods competitors the ChatGPT built.

Jordy (71:22)

Sweet Pea, Sweet pea.

Mark Gurman (71:23)

Jony, I've is, you know, running the show and design there. That's a big fricking deal. Okay. He raided the whole design team. All of the Apple designers that were there under Jony. I've not all of them. 95% of them are gone. A ton of them are now working at LoveFrom and OpenAI and other companies. Some of them have retired. But the crux of it is how do you partner with a company that's trying to put you out of business? So there's no way that they were going to work with OpenAI, no matter how good the.

Jordy (71:53)

What do you think about some of the projections that you've seen or kind of estimates around? I forget, was it Foxconn was saying units?

Aiden (72:05)

Yeah.

Jordy (72:05)

Preparing to be able to produce something like that in the first year. It feels like a massive number, but at the same time you have a billion users.

Mark Gurman (72:15)

Talking about the OpenAI earbuds.

Jordy (72:16)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (72:18)

You know, it's so interesting.

Jordy (72:19)

And one more thing there. Yeah, the earbuds. The benefit of them versus some of these other AI hardware is like if you can just take calls and listen to music, like already you have some functionality that people are using all day long. So it's not the same as like wearing A pendant or having some other little gadget that actually serves no real use case, or at least not a powerful use case. If I can just listen to calls or, sorry, take calls, listen to music, at least there's some base level functionality. And then you layer on the AI and maybe it turns into this amazing, you know, super differentiated experience.

Mark Gurman (72:55)

I just don't see it. I just don't see them selling 45 million units. I just don't see it being a success. The barrier to entry for a new hardware company, as you know, is extremely high. Like, can you even think of one hardware company that just came into being and became an immediate success? Like, I just don't see it. And I also think the reason they're doing earbuds is because it's more low hanging fruit, to your point, and it's easier to accomplish. This is not what they wanted to do. What OpenAI wanted to do is they wanted to create an iPhone killer. Instead now they're trying to create an AirPods killer and I don't think they're going to be able to accomplish that. Will they look nicer than the AirPods? Probably. Will they have better AI than the AirPods? That's an open question, right? What stops Apple from expanding this Gemini deal to its AirPods and just basically adding a bunch of AI functionality to the AirPods? They have very fast processors, very tight iPhone integration. Apple can replicate whatever OpenAI is going to do pretty quickly by relying on Google and Gemini and whatever they can cook up functionality wise there.

Jordy (73:56)

Do you think that AI, specifically products that we had the creator of Moltbot on yesterday and he was saying there's so many applications and he was referencing MyFitnessPal. Do I really need MyFitnessPal? If I can just take a picture and just send it in to my agent and it'll track it. And so what I was thinking there is like, does that make the App Store broadly, potentially less of a hurdle with OpenAI eventually launches a new phone and they have a new OS and they don't have an App Store. They don't have an App Store on day one.

Will (74:30)

The equivalence of apps on the fly.

Mark Gurman (74:32)

Well, if you ask me, you know, we're already in territory where iOS and the app Store are legacy features, right? Like the App Store is a legacy world. The iOS user experience, the Mac OS user experience, where you're jumping between applications, where you're going into something to get information, where you're going back to your home screen and launch another app. Apps are the past AI agents are already here. And that's the move forward. And whenever OpenAI comes out with a phone, and I do eventually anticipate them coming out with a phone. And when I say phone, I'm not talking necessarily about something you put to your ear, like a classic phone, like an iPhone. I'm talking about. I feel like people are always going to have some sort of slab in their pocket. Right. Because it's convenient. You get the display, you get the sensors, you get the battery, you get the cameras. It's not a replicable experience. No matter how many different gadgets they could put on your body, they could.

Jordy (75:26)

Make like a banana, like a plastic banana, smart banana.

Mark Gurman (75:31)

That would be fun. Yeah. So, yeah, AI agents are where the world is going. And I totally expect Apple to move in this direction. This new Siri Campo that they're launching at the end of this year, that is a huge step towards the AI agentification of different features on the phone and being able to, for instance, tell your phone, pull up this photo that I took at the studio, find photos where I have bottles of water, and remove the bottle of water from the photo and email or to text it to mark. Right. Like, the AI agentification of iOS is happening.

Gabe (76:12)

Sure.

Jordy (76:13)

Yeah. And theoretically, Siri should have killed like the weather app a long time ago. Because I don't like when you think about if you're just going to navigate to the weather app and you're traveling somewhere and you're like, oh, where is this city? Oh, I don't have it saved. I'm going to search and add it and then you're finally looking at it and it should just be a you sort of firing.

Will (76:32)

But then when you try and click a level deeper in the current Siri experience, you just can't get there.

Mark Gurman (76:37)

That is the big problem with Siri. And the big difference from ChatGPT and Gemini is it has the going a level deeper problem. There's no back and forth. It forgets context very easily. It has no memory. It doesn't have that tight integration with applications because the app developers, they know Siri is so terrible. You know, here's a question. So what if I told you that you could call an Uber with Siri, Right? Like, you guys probably know that, but, like, does anyone use it? I don't have the data, but I can tell you that they announced support for that and they actually rolled out 10 years ago. No, 10 years ago.

Will (77:11)

10 years ago.

Mark Gurman (77:11)

Okay. It doesn't work because nobody uses it. It's too cumbersome.

Will (77:17)

Totally.

Mark Gurman (77:17)

Okay. Like, I'm very tech forward, as anyone watching this probably knows. You know, it's right up my alley to have Siri call my Uber for me. But like I've never done it because you know what? I don't freaking trust it.

Will (77:28)

Trust it? Yep.

Mark Gurman (77:30)

I don't think it's gonna work and it's just going to be a time suck.

Will (77:33)

And People didn't trust ChatGPT with 3.5, but now on 5.2 Pro, I would.

Mark Gurman (77:39)

Trust ChatGPT with ordering a new. I would trust ChatGPT with my life. But Siri.

Will (77:46)

Okay, so on the Siri rollout, it seems like there's a couple milestones that we're gonna be tracking throughout this year. When do you think I'll be able to go to Siri and just say a general googleable question, you know, give me the history of the Roman Empire. The type of thing that any LLM can just pull up a couple paragraphs on, but current Siri does not have that ability.

Mark Gurman (78:11)

Okay. I can't tell you that you're going to be able to do it. I can tell you that you're supposed to be able to do it. How's that? I'll speak.

Will (78:18)

I just mean, is that like what's the goal? No, no, I just mean like there's knowledge retrieval end of March and then there's like agentification, like making, interacting with the apps, doing all the things like pulling what's in your camera roll together with your imessage and all that. And that feels harder for both of those. End of March.

Mark Gurman (78:35)

They're supposed to be end of March.

Will (78:36)

Okay.

Mark Gurman (78:37)

But the latter in terms of the app manipulation and the AI agent that's going to be split probably between.

Will (78:42)

Because that seems harder than just integrate Gemini and just give people the Gemini answers when they ask Siri for a question.

Mark Gurman (78:49)

You know, it's so funny. I look back to WWC 2024 and obviously I made a big deal about all the delays because of course I did. But then you think about it, it's like, was anyone to use any of these features anyways? Like we're talking about a few features that were delayed and you look back at the announcement of these features at WWDC 2024, it's like Apple totally downplayed them too. Like they gave a few cool demos, but it's like this is some game changing stuff if it's marketed correctly. So not only did they pre announce it, not only did they delay it, but they didn't even market what they had in the hand correctly. Which I guess in hindsight you should have realized that it wasn't that compelling or ready to go if they weren't going to market it. Because I'm telling you, they can market anything.

Jordy (79:34)

How do you see search fitting into Siri? Because so much of what people are using LLMs for is search now and you're seeing more commerce integrations. And I've always thought the lab's obsession with the browser was interesting because in many ways I feel like using LLMs. It already feels like you're using a browser. It's just kind of a new experience. And a big question is like, okay, so Google's powering the new Siri. What happens when people start doing searches with high intent in Siri?

Mark Gurman (80:08)

Do you Google search anymore?

Jordy (80:10)

I do.

Mark Gurman (80:11)

I don't.

Jordy (80:12)

I specifically still Google search when doing like product research, shopping, et cetera.

Mark Gurman (80:17)

I don't.

Gabe (80:18)

Do you?

Will (80:18)

I still go to Google if it's something that I know is fastest in Google. So today I wanted to know what year the Avengers movie came out. And I know that that's half a millisecond in Google and I know that that's five seconds in any LLM and so I'll control T to go there, but for any level deeper. I also wanted to know about the VFX house that worked on it and what technology they used and when that happened. That was an LLM query.

Mark Gurman (80:46)

Yeah, yeah, I don't really use Google anymore. I have my action button on my phone sent to ChatGPT and I'm just like living in ChatGPT. Sure, sure, sure. Can't ask it the weather. Can't ask it to do anything on your phone.

Miles (80:57)

Sure, sure.

Mark Gurman (80:58)

That's, I guess the differentiator for what the new series going to be. They've built a feature called World Knowledge Answers the internal name. And it's basically a perplexity rip off or a web search rip off in ChatGPT, which is to bullet out summaries and information and give you citations and context.

Jordy (81:15)

Is it using Google directly for that or is it some other solution?

Mark Gurman (81:19)

It's an Apple solution. It's an Apple solution. But what they've been trying to do now is under the hood, change that to the Gemini model. Again, all this stuff was supposed to.

Jordy (81:32)

Come out because Gemini is very good at Google search.

Mark Gurman (81:34)

Gemini is very good at Google Search. But there's no Google services in this new Siri. It's literally a model. It's basically like they hired the Google DeepMind team to develop the model to power its AI in series.

Jordy (81:49)

Yeah. So I guess what I'm getting at is will I ever get if I'm doing using Siri to research a product, will I ever get an ad powered by like a Apple ad network? Because it is a high intent search, like ever.

Mark Gurman (82:04)

Yeah, I think the end game for all these guys is to put ads in this stuff.

Jordy (82:07)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (82:07)

You know one thing that I haven't talked about in a while and I.

Jordy (82:11)

Just feel like that's been somewhat under discussed because people are so obsessed with just make Siri work that if it does end up working really well then you would have a effectively a search engine.

Mark Gurman (82:24)

Well, yeah, if it works, they have all the tools to do a search engine and if it does work well, yeah, they'll probably eventually put ads in it. A couple things haven't discussed in a while. One is they're working on a new Safari web browser and you're going to see AI search at the forefront of that. The other thing is the ads ification. The advertising ification of the Apple operating systems that starts this year. You're going to see them up the ad slots in the app Store in search in particular.

Will (83:00)

Let's give it up for more ads.

Mark Gurman (83:02)

Yeah, ads. Any sponsors we want to give a shout out to over here?

Jordy (83:08)

Don't tempt jump.

Will (83:09)

I will do it.

Mark Gurman (83:11)

And then you're going to see ads and Apple maps.

Will (83:14)

Oh, interesting. You know, that's been one of the main differentiators in the app.

Mark Gurman (83:19)

You know, it'll be all AI and it'll be targeted to based on things that you're searching. Like if you see a sushi restaurant. Search for sushi. Whatever you may see some search results get elevated. It's kind of like what Yelp does. Yeah, right. By the way, it's so funny on Siri. Like there's this Japanese restaurant in the valley I like and it's named after a city in Japan or province in Japan. And it's like, take me to Chiba. Yeah, right. And I have been. That's the name of the place. Shout out to Chiba.

Jordy (83:48)

Okay, boss, you're gonna need to get in a boat.

Mark Gurman (83:50)

Oh my God. It's like immediately pops up 7,652 miles away. I'm like, I've been to this place 50 damn times. You should know by now. Talking about the restaurant 20 miles away, not the city 8,000 miles away.

Will (84:06)

That's crazy.

Mark Gurman (84:07)

It's really amazing.

Jordy (84:08)

Hiring, chartering an aircraft. Sir.

Will (84:10)

Yeah, I got a bunch of other stuff in the Apple ecosystem. First, Starlink is reportedly planning to integrate. Apple's reportedly planning to integrate Starlink connectivity into the iPhone 18 Pro. How do you think about this?

Mark Gurman (84:24)

You saw this stuff on Twitter the.

Will (84:25)

Last couple of days.

Mark Gurman (84:26)

There's been no reporting on this recently, by the way. This is another. See, this is one of the downsides to AI. People just spew BS on Twitter.

Will (84:32)

Oh, interesting.

Mark Gurman (84:34)

Okay, so Apple already does work with Starlink. Right. You can hook in. If you have a T mobile iPhone, you can get onto Starlink. So that already exists?

Jordy (84:44)

Yeah, I have. I've experienced. I experienced, I think during the fires last year. So now all the cell service was down. I'm on Verizon if you want.

Will (84:53)

I have satellite on the 17th. But it's not. What.

Mark Gurman (84:56)

You don't want to be on Verizon.

Will (84:57)

Yeah, I should get off of it. But. But it's not, it's not Starlink. It's the old network on which.

Mark Gurman (85:03)

On the Verizon one.

Will (85:04)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (85:04)

You're talking about the Apple network.

Will (85:05)

Yeah, yeah. Like if I'm in an emergency situation, I can get out like one text message. It's really, really slow and it's clearly going with like, I think vias app.

Mark Gurman (85:12)

The Apple network is just super like.

Will (85:14)

Yeah, it's just older. Yeah.

Mark Gurman (85:16)

They've got to strip that down and partner and rebuild or something. Anyways, the iPhone 18 is going to have enhanced satellite connectivity and they'll, you know, obviously work with Starlink, you know, whoever. Yeah, whomever. So that's coming. What else we got on our plate? You want to talk about John Ternus?

Will (85:31)

Absolutely.

Mark Gurman (85:32)

Let's talk about.

Jordy (85:32)

Turn us around, John.

Will (85:34)

Yes, John.

Mark Gurman (85:35)

Okay.

Will (85:36)

Yes. So I have a bunch of questions. Let's start with like, how, like, what is going on behind the scenes of this campaign? It feels like there's. It feels like internally politics. There could be like people like pushing for him, pushing against him. There's this weird quote that keeps going out that people say he's never made a decision in his life.

Jordy (85:54)

Everybody keeps making the most underhanded compliments that I've ever seen. Yeah, it's like, it's like, yeah, he's shipped a lot of products, but he's.

Will (86:04)

Never had to make a hard decision.

Tyler (86:05)

That's the one.

Mark Gurman (86:06)

Just wait for my profile. Bloomberg.

Will (86:08)

Okay.

Mark Gurman (86:08)

You'll get the real story soon.

Will (86:10)

Fantastic.

Mark Gurman (86:10)

Going to give it all away today, of course, but I'm here for the company. Got to give the shout out. Stay tuned for the article.

Will (86:16)

Of course.

Mark Gurman (86:18)

Subscribe to Power on Yes. Tech Bundle. It's great value. Okay, Ternus, he's 50. Everyone else on the Apple executive team, late 50s through their mid-60s, turning 66 this year. In the case of Tim Cook, you're Apple's board. You like continuity. You like an insider. You like people who know what they're doing, have been there for a while, they know where the bodies are buried. Okay? These guys all have hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more. Yeah. At 50, he's the only one who is. If let's say Tim Cook hangs out another three to five years, you're not going to point another CEO who's 65, 70 years old, he's the only guy Apple, they get vast majority of the revenue from hardware. He's the hardware guy. Have they screwed up any hardware since he's been in charge? No. He's a steady hand, knows what he's doing. He's really the only choice. You know, there was this New York Times report a few weeks ago, basically saying that could be Greg Joswiak, could be Eddie Q, could be Deirdre o', Brien, could be Craig Federighi. It's for sure not going to be Craig, it's not going to be Deirdre, it's not going to be Eddie, it's not going to be Jaws. The only category that makes sense is as an operations person, because you look at the current CEO, Tim obviously comes out of the ops world. You look at the guy who would have been CEO if Tim Cook didn't stay so long. I'm not saying he shouldn't have stayed so long. He's done, obviously, a fantastic job for shareholders and the employees and what have you would have been Jeff Williams, he was the coo. So Sabi Khan, he was named COO a few months ago, but he's really been in that job for the last half a decade, I would say. So anyways, it'll be Turnus or Sabi or someone completely out of left field. I don't think this is imminent, so we'll see what ultimately happens. But all signs are turning towards Ternus. Everyone has an opinion that Turnus is going to be the next CEO. Fine. I've been shouting this from rooftops for the last two years, but no one has given evidence. Like, what is this based on? Right. Has there ever been a baton handoff? Is he getting more responsibility?

Jordy (88:25)

Do they have a big baton?

Alex (88:27)

They don't even got one of these.

Mark Gurman (88:29)

You know what you have? You have white suit smoke coming out of. Well, actually, no, there's no smoke. It's very environmentally friendly environment friendly. So you know, maybe out of the.

Will (88:39)

Reflection out of the solar panels or something, I glint off the solar panels.

Mark Gurman (88:42)

Exactly. So what, you want evidence? You want to hear that he's been getting more responsibility? Okay. One, a few months ago took full control of the Apple Watch engineering team that was co run with with the old COO until he retired. Okay, there's something for you. When they started soft firing the head of AI, the guy we were talking about earlier, they took the robotic stuff away from him. They gave that to Ternus. And then the real news as I broke last week is that even though on paper Tim Cook is running the Apple design teams, it's not, it's Ternus. He took over at the end of last year for a variety of reasons. But you look at who's run design at Apple over the course of history. Well, like Steve Jobs, Tim cook himself between 15 and 17, Jeff Williams who was the number two in heir apparent for a long time and then obviously all heard of Jony. I've. Now you add John Ternus to that list. It's a big sign, it's a big indicator because you look at what Apple is known for as a company and its design. Right, that design function. And it's not just hardware, it's hardware and software that he's overseeing as the manager of both of those teams. So I would say that is your first piece of evidence that he's getting some more material.

Will (90:02)

What does he have to do since he's the hardware guy to communicate that he has a steady hand on the tiller? As Apple transitions into the AI age, the narrative is that they have delivered on hardware. They have not delivered on AI.

Mark Gurman (90:18)

No, they haven't.

Will (90:18)

And so how is he going to communicate that he's forward thinking and can be the one to keep him on the cutting edge?

Mark Gurman (90:25)

Taking a step back, you think about succession at all of these big tech companies, right? Like who's gonna take over Google one day, who's gonna take over Microsoft one day, who's gonna take over Amazon one day, right? It's probably gonna be the AI guys at all of these companies. Apple doesn't really have an AI guy. They're trying to make Craig Federighi the AI guy, but he's not CEO material. He's voiced this himself. So don't get mad at me Craig. But yeah, Ternus, can he become the AI guy at Apple? I think it's too early to tell and I think that is a big question there. Like do you put a Hardware person in charge of the AI era.

Jordy (91:02)

People have been speculating that Apple would do some big M and A deal to bring some AI native talent.

Mark Gurman (91:12)

They wanted to buy Perplexity. So the origin story, they were really talking about it. Like Eddy Q was seriously considering Adrian Parikh, other head of corporate development, M and A reports to Tim Cook. They were looking at this pretty closely. Then they pulled out. Why were they going to buy Perplexity to power the search stuff we were talking about earlier became less important after the Google deal was allowed to live.

Jordy (91:37)

And do you think they would have done it if Perplexity hadn't been marked up to oblivion?

Mark Gurman (91:45)

I think they would have done Perplexity at a reasonable price.

Alex (91:48)

Yeah, like Apple doesn't open.

Jordy (91:50)

Yeah, that's the thing. Low single digit.

Mark Gurman (91:51)

I think they would have done it up to 5 or 6 billion.

Jordy (91:54)

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Gurman (91:55)

But like at this 15, 20. And then perplexity started, you know, trying to say they're going to buy Google Chrome if it got divested and all that. So. And I think they would have done it if the Google search deal was torn apart. In order to bring a search product to market faster. They like to buy companies to. I'm not trying to do Apple corporate speak here, but this is like legit. They buy companies to accelerate their roadmap. You'll hear Tim Cook use those exact words tomorrow.

Will (92:22)

Okay.

Mark Gurman (92:23)

By the way. But literally tomorrow, Apple earnings. Oh, yeah, this guy. Apple earnings.

Jordy (92:29)

This guy.

Mark Gurman (92:29)

My God. Come on, head in the game.

Will (92:32)

But, but is there specifically a deal that he'll be talking about tomorrow? Is that what you think?

Mark Gurman (92:37)

No, none.

Will (92:37)

Just in general, like, he will be asked about.

Mark Gurman (92:39)

I bet he'll mention the Gemini thing.

Will (92:40)

Because he was asked that in the last earnings and everyone was like, why haven't you done a mega deal?

Mark Gurman (92:44)

Why have you done a 10 deal?

Will (92:46)

Okay. So he just says it's just going to be more of the same. Got it.

Mark Gurman (92:47)

You know, what it is fair to say is their pace of deal making has decelerated significantly.

Will (92:53)

Interesting.

Mark Gurman (92:54)

Significantly.

Will (92:55)

And so he will be. I mean, in the last earnings, he was sort of like managing that and saying like, oh, we're still doing deals, but we're selective and we only do it to.

Jordy (93:02)

He's like, well, they also don't care to announce like 95%.

Mark Gurman (93:06)

Well, if they're big enough, they have to, you know, Golden State warriors, they want Giannis, but they don't want to make a big trade. They don't want to give up other draft picks.

Jordy (93:12)

Right.

Mark Gurman (93:12)

They're like, yeah, this is the same with the Lakers. This is like my existential crisis. The Lakers, like, yeah, we'll trade the picks if the right guy becomes available. Yeah. And they know the right guy's to not going, going to become available. Right. Just like Apple knows these companies are always going to be out of the price range they want to pay.

Will (93:28)

Sure, sure. Yeah.

Mark Gurman (93:29)

The thing with Apple is they're very frugal, money wise. Extremely frugal. The other thing is, is they've been burned countless times with acquisitions like that Beats deal. Terrible process for integrating that company. Sure.

Jordy (93:43)

Well, and even then, I think it was like a 3x revenue multiple. Weren't they doing, Wasn't Beats doing like a billion dollar.

Miles (93:48)

Oh.

Mark Gurman (93:48)

From a financial standpoint, it was just like a home run. People criticized that deal, but they made it back in months.

Will (93:53)

Oh, interest. Oh, Beats made the money, but it was a nightmare from.

Jordy (93:57)

No, but it's worth, it's worth noting because like even paying for perplexity at 5, 6 billion, it's gonna monetize that.

Mark Gurman (94:07)

Probably. Yeah. I mean, Beats was monetized from day one. Obviously you're selling the headphones, which are terrible, by the way, but everyone loves them. And then Apple Music, they, you know, Beats started the whole subscription services business at Apple. And so if you look at it, Beats is one of the most wildly successful technology acquisitions of all time. And then you compare it to how much criticism it got because it's Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine and whatever, whatever, whatever. And the headphones are crap. You know what, From a financial standpoint. Home run. Home run. You know, but integrating into Apple's culture is not easy.

Will (94:43)

Yeah. Speaking of hardware, what's going on with the robotic arm that will live in your kitchen?

Jordy (94:49)

Yeah, the Pixar lamp.

Mark Gurman (94:50)

It's the Pixar lamp. Like I said, it's. You got this nine inch display. It's like an iPad display on a robotic arm. It can float around your desk, it can twirl and turn around. Like, you know what we'll do a few years when this thing comes out, you'll have me back on and instead of me actually being here, you'll have this on here. Maybe, you know, leave my head floating around.

Will (95:10)

Yeah. I mean, Meta tried to do something like that with the.

Mark Gurman (95:13)

Meta tried to do something like that. You know, these things are big in China. They are a big thing in China right now. No one really talks about them, but it's, it's a category that has some potential. Okay.

Will (95:23)

Yeah, but it's years away just because.

Mark Gurman (95:27)

Stay tuned.

Will (95:27)

Yeah. What about the foldable phone?

Mark Gurman (95:29)

That's not years away.

Will (95:30)

That's closer.

Mark Gurman (95:31)

Yeah, no, that's decades. We know that's coming out in the fall.

Will (95:35)

Okay. That'll be fun.

Mark Gurman (95:36)

I can't wait for that.

Will (95:36)

Yeah, that'll be.

Jordy (95:37)

Are you.

Mark Gurman (95:37)

Are you gonna be a buy $2,200 on it.

Will (95:40)

Oh, we talking about.

Mark Gurman (95:41)

It'll be. At least. It has to be.

Will (95:42)

Is it gonna be the highest tier? The biggest, the most powerful for Apple?

Mark Gurman (95:46)

Yeah, that's gonna. It's gonna sit at the top as well.

Will (95:48)

It's gonna sit at the top of the lineup. Okay. New status symbol.

Mark Gurman (95:51)

Sorry, what were you saying?

Jordy (95:51)

I like that we had Ben Thompson on maybe before the end of the year.

Mark Gurman (95:55)

Feel bad for Ben. You know, he's a big Milwaukee Bucks fan, and they're about to ditch you on us.

Will (96:01)

The Milwaukee Bucks, that's sports team.

Mark Gurman (96:04)

Really? I don't know.

Will (96:06)

I do know it's a basketball team, and I do know that it's bent on Thompson's favorite team. He was talking about yesterday.

Jordy (96:11)

We didn't know when the super bowl was.

Will (96:13)

He was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I wanted to demo the. You know you can watch the NBA live.

Jordy (96:18)

Yeah.

Will (96:18)

Basically, you liked it.

Jordy (96:20)

Ben's pitch was like, screw the Apple. Highly produced. You know, they're cutting around all the time. And he's like, just invest the money to set up, like, the actual hardware in every single stadium.

Will (96:35)

Cameras.

Jordy (96:35)

The cameras. So that anybody can just drop in.

Will (96:38)

So you can just sit there, watch the game. Like yourself.

Jordy (96:40)

Don't need that. You don't need the announcer because you can just look at the scoreboard. You can.

Will (96:46)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (96:47)

So he's saying, strip the guys out of it.

Jordy (96:49)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (96:49)

Look, I watched it. It was great.

Will (96:51)

You watched the whole thing?

Mark Gurman (96:52)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trust me, people at home are not happy that night. Oh, you know, put that thing on.

Jordy (96:58)

Crying baby.

Mark Gurman (96:59)

Crying baby. And then you're completely isolated. I mean, I'm telling you, VR does not work for families.

Will (97:05)

It's true. Yeah.

Mark Gurman (97:06)

It just doesn't.

Will (97:07)

It's really. Yeah. It is one of the major. Because then, I mean, the family people have the disposable income, more likely. So then they buy it, but they can't use it.

Mark Gurman (97:14)

Doesn't work.

Will (97:15)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (97:15)

Okay, here's the problem. It's like, once a month, they've got, like, five games on the calendar.

Jordy (97:19)

Well, and that was Ben's point is, like, just set up the infrastructure and sell me a pass so that I can drop into any game and sit.

Will (97:26)

Courtside because right now they have to pull up with a production truck. They need editors, they need voiceovers, they need previews.

Jordy (97:32)

There's basically one time fixed cost of like he did the math, put them.

Mark Gurman (97:37)

In all the NBA.

Jordy (97:38)

Yeah. He said it's like 40 grand. It's like not like a huge amount of money. And you have no incremental cost per show. You're not dealing with producers and running a live, you know, product.

Mark Gurman (97:49)

But they need to decide if this hardware is going to continue to exist before they keep investing in the content strategy. Right. It's a chicken and the egg problem. Right. How do you sell this thing if there's no content? But why invest millions in the content if you're not planning to sell this thing anyways and you're pivoting to smart glasses. Don't forget they were supposed to come out with the Vision Air in 27 product called N100. I forgot when my article came out. It's time is a blur. A few months ago, six months ago. Anyways, they killed that thing.

Will (98:18)

They killed it entirely.

Mark Gurman (98:20)

Killed it. And the smart glass, the vision team on that, by the way, the smart.

Jordy (98:24)

Glasses, was that just completely reactionary to Meta?

Mark Gurman (98:30)

Oh yeah. They started toying with the smart glasses in terms of like this non AR smart glasses. Right. First of all, AR smart glasses, that has been the vision from day one, for a decade plus. But in terms of like this non display smart glasses, that is a concept that Meta has really popularized. And when these things started to gain a little bit of Steam in 22, 23 is when they started taking a very hard look at it. And they're going to do it and I think they're going to destroy Meta with them. I'll be honest.

Will (98:58)

Yeah. Is that the styling, the pricing, the features, the integration?

Jordy (99:01)

The integrations. To me the challenge is if you can't deliver me imessage.

Mark Gurman (99:10)

Yeah. Apple has the ingredients because of their login to destroy any company in any hardware. It's just about them figuring out how to do it and get it done and not waiting too long. You know the biggest problem with them is they just take too long and over engineer everything.

Will (99:26)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (99:26)

Like the Vision Pro is the most over engineered device ever. Right. They could have got that out three years earlier with a little bit less fit and finish and maybe it would be more successful today.

Will (99:35)

Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there was a cycle where the iPhone was ahead of the curve on so many things touch screen and then you then in like that middle decade period you had the Android folks being like, like oh, we've had this Apple feature for a year. We've had this. Yeah, two years now. It's like five years.

Mark Gurman (99:54)

There's you know, how many people wouldn't be caught dead with a non iPhone? You know, like it doesn't matter. But AI changes that equation. Sure, that changes the equation.

Will (100:02)

Especially if it's a Jony I've product and it's expensive.

Mark Gurman (100:05)

Well, you know Jony I've obviously he's done amazing things and the new headphones or whatever they come out with are going to look amazing and probably work amazing. It's just the barrier to entry on hardware is so high. There's so much risk there.

Will (100:19)

Yeah. I still wonder if the Claude bot these open source agents, I don't know that everyone's going to adopt those but something like that that sort of opens up the ecosystem just by brute forcing it. We were debating this earlier. You can't get imessage notifications on the meta raid band displays which is.

Mark Gurman (100:37)

I have them. Do you guys have them?

Will (100:39)

I think we do have pairs.

Jordy (100:40)

We have some pairs around.

Mark Gurman (100:41)

I've got one at home.

Will (100:42)

We've used the non displays a bunch and then we demoed the displays and have used them a fair amount and it's just a hard sell if you're an imessage user.

Mark Gurman (100:50)

A hard sell if you're an imessage user. But the potential is just oozing with potential. They've got a solid product there and a couple iterations on that make them a little lighter, get the display resolution up, work better outdoors. It's compelling.

Will (101:07)

And in a world where you have some sort of agent running on your Mac mini scraping all your imessages and then putting them into WhatsApp or something.

Mark Gurman (101:15)

You know, maybe I'll do that. Maybe you guys will do that.

Will (101:18)

It's rare.

Mark Gurman (101:18)

Yeah, it's rare. Nobody wants to deal with that.

Will (101:21)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (101:22)

You know, nobody wants to deal with.

Will (101:23)

Even if it's just an app that you download like Napster. You don't think so?

Mark Gurman (101:27)

People don't have time for that.

Will (101:28)

Yeah, probably not.

Mark Gurman (101:30)

What I feel like nobody cares about anything anymore.

Jordy (101:33)

You know, I just feel like back in my day we used to care.

Mark Gurman (101:37)

The world has changed.

Jordy (101:38)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (101:38)

You know, change. They just want everything in front of them. They want everything in their eyeballs. They all want it set up from the get go. They don't want to put any work in. They just want it to start working right. And I think that's been the Apple ethos from the beginning is just like give people what they need, let it get up and running and not deal with any of the bs.

Jordy (101:53)

What's going on in China?

Mark Gurman (101:55)

Lots going on in China with Apple.

Jordy (101:57)

Are they shutting down more stores?

Mark Gurman (101:59)

Shutting down more stores? No, not that I know of. I don't see Apple just shutting stores at this point. I think the retail arm still is extremely profitable and successful. Sure, all the shutdowns, but in China.

Jordy (102:12)

There'S less of the market share. You're not. Somebody's not embarrassed to not be using an iPhone Problem?

Mark Gurman (102:20)

Yes. The problem is, is that Apple hasn't done anything bespoke for the Chinese market. The competitiveness there is just unbelievably. Just. It's amazing. It's like no other part of the world.

Jordy (102:34)

Are there compelling AI hardware integration?

Mark Gurman (102:39)

Yes. I mean, I mentioned the robotic thing. I mentioned. Well, like the foldables are taking over the universe there. Right. And so, you know, Apple's an American company launching American devices, European devices, and they're trying to shoehorn it into the Chinese market. And they've never really done anything just for the Chinese market or built around the Chinese market.

Will (102:59)

What about the sock?

Mark Gurman (103:01)

Okay, maybe that was. I mean, I don't know.

Jordy (103:04)

But why it's such a massive market. Why not?

Mark Gurman (103:08)

Because they're a global company. But I think the foldable is going to do extremely well in China. You know, it might do better in China than it does here.

Will (103:16)

Interesting.

Mark Gurman (103:17)

I don't know. I'll be having one.

Will (103:18)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (103:19)

I'll tell you that much.

Will (103:19)

What's the future of the iPhone Air.

Mark Gurman (103:23)

It's like the price difference.

Will (103:26)

Sam Altman's got one.

Mark Gurman (103:28)

Great.

Jordy (103:30)

But he doesn't care about money.

Will (103:32)

The price difference breaks it and buys a new.

Jordy (103:34)

He doesn't get paid by OpenAI.

Mark Gurman (103:36)

He's probably got both. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't get paid. The iPhone air and the iPhone Pro, it's like negligible pricing wise. It's the same price if you get the battery pack. Oh, yeah, right. It's like 999 plus 100. You're gonna get the battery pack.

Will (103:52)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (103:53)

So I don't know, like you look at the features comparison, you look at the cameras, I mean, most people are gonna always pick the pro over the air. There needs to be more of a price gap between the two and eventually, you know, those two lines are gonna merge. Take five years, but like eventually you're gonna be able to get a pro as thin as an air or an air with the same bells and whistles. As a pro. I mean, you look at the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air today from.

Will (104:21)

A performance, these are different laptops and they're exactly the same.

Mark Gurman (104:24)

Yeah.

Aiden (104:24)

So what?

Mark Gurman (104:24)

You've got the.

Will (104:24)

I have the air.

Mark Gurman (104:25)

The air. He's got the Pro.

Will (104:26)

And they're identical.

Mark Gurman (104:27)

It's the same thing because the chips. Right. The big differences between the two are it's a little lighter. Okay. The display is terrible on that thing compared to that thing. Like, if you use, like I tried out the 15 inch MacBook Air, the thing is sleek and slick and awesome. But, like, I've been ruined visually by how amazing the display is on the MacBook Pro.

Will (104:49)

Okay, maybe I gotta upgrade.

Mark Gurman (104:51)

And so, you know, you have to think about the different changes. You want to talk about big things happening at Apple this year. It's that new MacBook Pro. Yeah, right. You got the OLED, you got the thinner, you got the touch. Cannot wait to drop $4,000 on that thing.

Jordy (105:04)

It's gonna be a touch screen.

Mark Gurman (105:06)

Yeah.

Jordy (105:07)

I cannot wait to get my fingerprints all over. When somebody, if somebody's looking at my computer and they touch the screen, I'm.

Mark Gurman (105:13)

Just like, isn't it the worst thing ever?

Jordy (105:16)

Like, I like, you gotta be carrying a polishing cloth.

Will (105:20)

You gotta be carrying the Apple official polishing cloth.

Mark Gurman (105:22)

Maybe 20 bucks.

Jordy (105:23)

You know, the Apple could make a Pixar lamp. Well, Apple makes one.

Mark Gurman (105:27)

That's funny.

Jordy (105:27)

Apple makes a Pixar lamp that just kind of polishes your touchscreen.

Mark Gurman (105:31)

That'd be great in AI for screen cleaning.

Will (105:33)

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Gurman (105:34)

You know, the Apple polishing cloth, they got so much, you know, flack for that thing. Like, you would think that it was $75, but it was $20. Come to think of it, like, it's really not that big of a deal.

Will (105:44)

Also, I know someone who is OCD and is obsessed with keeping their screen perfectly clean. And I was like, what's the secret? Like, you must have some secret formula like Windex or something that you're using. And he's like, no, just the Apple polishing cloth. That's the one that works.

Mark Gurman (105:57)

You know what? I need to get one of those.

Will (105:58)

Like, that's glowing.

Mark Gurman (105:59)

You know, one did come with my Vision Pro.

Jordy (106:00)

Yeah, here you go.

Mark Gurman (106:02)

Try that.

Jordy (106:02)

They threw one in as a bonus.

Mark Gurman (106:03)

Isn't that nice of them?

Jordy (106:04)

That's so nice of them.

Mark Gurman (106:05)

It's $34.99. You get a free polishing cloth.

Will (106:07)

That's 20 bucks off. Yeah. Maybe the Ternus narrative can center around, like, as the Models commoditize. The hardware becomes more important. You want to be able to run different models locally and so pushing that.

Mark Gurman (106:22)

The hardware's great, the chips are great. The software, I'll even tell you is maybe not. It's between good and great.

Will (106:31)

Sure.

Mark Gurman (106:31)

Okay. I'm not going to say it's only good.

Will (106:32)

Sure.

Mark Gurman (106:33)

I'm not going to say it's as great as the hardware, but it's good enough.

Jordy (106:36)

How's that?

Mark Gurman (106:37)

The AI is like the worst in the industry.

Will (106:40)

Yeah. I mean right now you're seeing people go out and buy Mac Minis to run AI.

Mark Gurman (106:45)

Okay, let's think about it. You see these people on Twitter doing that, Right. How many extra Mac Minis do you think were sold because of all this jazz? I would guess I would put the over under on 500 units.

Will (106:54)

500? Nah, I thought it was 10,000.

Jordy (106:58)

I've seen it on Instagram.

Will (106:59)

There's 40,000 GitHubs.

Mark Gurman (107:00)

Okay. If it's on Instagram, maybe I'm wrong.

Will (107:01)

So there's 40,000 GitHub stars. It's clearly a big 60. Maybe it's in the thousands, but yes, I mean it's a quarter million a quarter.

Jordy (107:08)

And I think so much of it is just performative.

Mark Gurman (107:10)

Go on the Apple Store, go to the Mac Mini.

Will (107:13)

They're in stock.

Mark Gurman (107:14)

Are they all in stock?

Will (107:15)

They're in stock.

Mark Gurman (107:16)

Look at the ship dates.

Will (107:17)

Funny thing, two weeks ago I go to the Pasadena, I go to the Pasadena Mac store. You know what's out of stock? Apple Vision Pros.

Mark Gurman (107:25)

What?

Will (107:26)

Probably just because they're like.

Jordy (107:27)

To me, a lot of, a lot of the buying I think is purely status oriented and just on the evp. No, no. Selling the Mac Mini and people just saying I want a signal that I'm AI native and I'm at, I'm at the.

Mark Gurman (107:39)

They're gonna use it for two weeks. Yep.

Jordy (107:41)

Yeah, yeah.

Mark Gurman (107:41)

And then forget about it.

Jordy (107:43)

I think that's gonna be a real thing.

Mark Gurman (107:45)

I mean how many people actually need to live in these type of world workflows?

Will (107:50)

Not many, just the hackers, which is a niche community.

Mark Gurman (107:52)

It's a niche community, it's a great community.

Jordy (107:54)

But it has made me think maybe I should start using Apple's native file system and like actually bring my data out of the cloud, out of drive and store it locally.

Will (108:07)

You don't need to because cloudbot will go and access your.

Mark Gurman (108:10)

So what's the deal with the Mac Mini?

Will (108:12)

It's shipping order now, pick up in store today. It's available order by 3pm delivers two hours from the store. They have them at all times tomorrow. It has, yeah, it's everywhere. They're, they're widely available. They're widely available.

Mark Gurman (108:25)

So maybe I am. Right.

Will (108:26)

Available tomorrow at the Americana brand.

Jordy (108:28)

Today they sell like Glendale Galleria.

Will (108:32)

And it's literally available at every Apple.

Jordy (108:34)

Store as many as a year.

Mark Gurman (108:34)

Yeah, yeah, I think that's it.

Jordy (108:37)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (108:37)

Yeah.

Jordy (108:38)

And so, and so it doesn't take that many if they're projecting out, hey, we're gonna sell. It's not like they, I would imagine they don't have all of them that they're going to sell this year sitting in stock already.

Mark Gurman (108:50)

I'm curious how the Mac quarter is going to go tomorrow. Right. Like there might be a little bit of a drag on that.

Jordy (108:57)

Sure, yeah. What should people pay attention to?

Mark Gurman (108:59)

Well, the China number, to your point, the iPhone number is basically everything tomorrow. Right. Either they grow 10% as they say they will, or they won't. Either Tim Cook gets to keep his job or he doesn't. No, I'm just joking. But you think about like the product, right, like they didn't do much iPad or Mac last year, right. This year is going to be the biggest year for the Mac in a long time. New MacBook Pro is about to launch. Same design or though as those ones with the faster chips. You've got the iPhone chip powered, low cost MacBook which is going to destroy PCs and Chromebooks and be like just this utter game changer. You've got the touchscreen MacBook Pro end of year. You've got a refresh Mac Mini, you've got a refreshed Mac Studio. You've got the M6 chip, you've got the first new monitors from Apple in four years.

Will (109:56)

Where will those sit?

Mark Gurman (109:57)

The monitors?

Will (109:58)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (109:58)

In terms of. They'll sit on my desk, I'll tell you.

Will (110:01)

But is it going to displace the studio or the Pro xdr.

Mark Gurman (110:07)

The one I know about is going to replace the studio. There's a new XDR also.

Will (110:13)

Oh, okay.

Mark Gurman (110:13)

Yeah.

Will (110:14)

Because the XDR remarkably long term. Like I cannot believe.

Mark Gurman (110:19)

Why is there no camera on that thing?

Will (110:21)

Because it was created 15 years ago. It's so old. And you go and you look at like you could YouTube search for the Pro display XDR right now and there's guarantee a new video. Why you should buy one in 2026. It's still good in 2026. Like it's still the best option.

Mark Gurman (110:39)

I mean the display is just remarkable.

Will (110:41)

It's just Amazing that it didn't commoditize fast.

Mark Gurman (110:43)

What are you guys using here?

Will (110:44)

I see we have mostly studios. We don't have a lot of XDRs and IT. But we have been eyeing that new Dell monitor that Michael Dell has been rapaciously pumping.

Mark Gurman (110:52)

I saw on Twitter.

Will (110:53)

It's amazing. Why so enthusiastic about that thing?

Jordy (110:56)

I'm sure you've answered this a hundred times and I'm sorry, but why, why would they never do a tv?

Mark Gurman (111:03)

Is it just commodity space, Commodity margin differentiator?

Jordy (111:09)

You don't, you don't think people would happily spend they're gonna buy a Pixar.

Will (111:13)

Layup before they buy a tv. You walk in, oh, you got the Apple tv. I've heard that stuff.

Jordy (111:18)

Somebody who's like, you know, been an Apple. I can't describe myself as an Apple fanboy anymore, but as a kid, as a teenager and a kid, I was.

Mark Gurman (111:26)

What the hell happened?

Jordy (111:28)

The photos.

Will (111:28)

The photos. Have the photos app ruined. Jordy.

Jordy (111:32)

It just like, you know, a 20 year relationship, just over. But I do think there's enough people out in the world that if you made it 10, if you made the $10,000 TV, that they would buy it.

Mark Gurman (111:46)

You know the.

Jordy (111:48)

Because when I'm buying a computer, a tv, sure it's different, but when I'm buying a computer, it's not the upgrade cycle.

Will (111:56)

Look at the premium on The Samsung Frame TVs, those line off the shelves and they're not better than an LG.

Mark Gurman (112:01)

So my TV in my living room, I bought in 18.

Gabe (112:03)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (112:04)

What are we in 26 now? Eight years.

Jordy (112:06)

Yeah, but Apple would figure out a way to deprecate the hardware. This is what they do.

Mark Gurman (112:10)

They're the best in the world. Well, if they did, they would do it. Yeah, they were.

Jordy (112:14)

They're like, Tim's like, where's my tv? He's like, sir, we haven't found a way to deprecate the hardware.

Mark Gurman (112:20)

They got pretty down the road on TV about 10 years ago and they killed that thing. They had teams working on it, it was a big deal. But then they went off and did a car and went off and did a Vision Pro. If you think about their two big moonshots over the last decade, they were both utter failures. The car obviously is just like your quintessential failure pretty much. But they did get some good stuff out of it. Right. I would say the saving grace for Apple's AI, and you've said this a few times now, has been the AI chip and the AI hardware. The only reason they have an AI chip, the Neural Engine they launched in 2017 was because of the Apple car that was designed to power the AI needed for a self driving car. And they shrunk it down for the phone. So if the Apple car project didn't get ignited, you know, back in 2014, 15, they would be even further behind in AI than they are today. And so give a shout out to the Apple car team legend.

Will (113:14)

Let's go. And you know, I'm still pulling for the Vision Pro with a naturally exasperated V12. Can you imagine?

Mark Gurman (113:20)

It'd be great. Crazy.

Jordy (113:22)

Real wheel drive, gated manual.

Will (113:23)

Gated manual.

Mark Gurman (113:25)

I think they would have just destroyed Tesla if they just didn't set their bar so high. When we talk about over engineering, can you imagine like a Model Y or a Model 3 or even an S. Whatever. Just like with that Apple interior and the Apple ecosystem, the Apple interface, like why did they have to go bananas? Remove the steering wheel, remove the pedals, have everyone facing each other. Like, why'd they have to go? Told they overshot it. Why'd they have to go like all Apple on us?

Will (113:48)

Yep.

Mark Gurman (113:48)

Right. Like why couldn't they just do. Just do a car?

Jordy (113:52)

Yeah, just be a luxury brand. Just be a luxury brand.

Mark Gurman (113:55)

Would have been amazing.

Will (113:55)

Yeah. And we got a sock instead.

Mark Gurman (113:57)

Got a sock instead.

Will (113:59)

Those were the song project shipped. Okay. So you gotta give that a sock.

Mark Gurman (114:02)

And you know what? That was a success.

Will (114:04)

Yes.

Mark Gurman (114:05)

Sold out. Got people talking.

Will (114:06)

Yeah.

Mark Gurman (114:07)

You know, we did a review of the sock on Bloomberg and people, people ate that thing up. People love it.

Will (114:12)

Subscribed. That's great.

Jordy (114:14)

Where's your sock?

Will (114:15)

Smashing down the.

Mark Gurman (114:16)

I've got socks. I've got. You know what I have? I've got sushi socks on right now.

Will (114:20)

Oh, no way.

Mark Gurman (114:22)

No, not from Apple.

Tyler (114:23)

No.

Mark Gurman (114:24)

No.

Jordy (114:24)

Your favorite restaurant in the Valley.

Mark Gurman (114:26)

No, no, These are from my mother in law. Yeah.

Will (114:28)

That's fantastic.

Jordy (114:29)

Well, we kept you.

Will (114:30)

Yeah, we kept you much longer. But thank you so much. This is so much fun. I'm so glad you're in la.

Mark Gurman (114:34)

Do I get to do the gong?

Jordy (114:35)

Of course, the gong.

Will (114:37)

Give us a number. How long you been writing? How long you been following Apple writing?

Mark Gurman (114:42)

Since 09.09.

Will (114:44)

Overnight success. There we go. Hit the gong.

Jordy (114:46)

There you go.

Mark Gurman (114:47)

Boom.

Jordy (114:48)

With authority for the Terminator. The Terminator.

Will (114:52)

Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. Yeah, we got to do this again.

Jordy (114:57)

We'll be following your coverage tomorrow.

Will (114:59)

Yes, tomorrow. Lock in everyone. And let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet state of the art reasoning. Next level Vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. I was so close to hitting an ad read during that, I held myself back. So I'm giving myself two. I'm going to tell you about 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. And we have another guest in person, live in the TVP ultra. We got my best. Welcome to the show. Please grab a seat. I think Mark Gurman took his diet coat, but you're welcome to one of mine if you get thirsty. But please introduce yourself for everyone who might be watching.

Miles (115:49)

Yeah, so thanks so much for having me. My name is Miles Brundage. I lead a new organization called avery. It stands for AI Verification and Evaluation Research Institute. And the basic idea is that that AI is becoming critical infrastructure and everyone is depending on it. But we don't really make sure that it's safe and secure the way that we audit critical infrastructure. And we need something analogous to the cybersecurity industry which popped up to make the Internet secure. We need that for AI systems.

Jordy (116:19)

How many emails have you sent to Peter from Multibot in the last 48 hours? I haven't actually because on the show yesterday he was like, his number one thing was like. He's like, I need somebody to just handle the inbound from security researchers. I just can't. Not even Multibot can handle processing all the inbounds.

Miles (116:37)

Yeah, yeah. Security researchers are quite interested in that. But yeah. So the basic idea is we're kind of like a think tank. They're just trying to figure out how to build that new industry. We think that it's good for improving safety and security outcomes if you have this rigorous auditing, specifically frontier AI systems, we're not so much focused on of the downstream. So like upstream, how do we make sure that this is infrastructure the whole society can rely on and not have to rely on companies doing their own kind of testing or kind of like, oh, do I trust the CEO's vibe? Like that's not a good basis for trust in a technology. And so, you know, we just kind of launched recently and we're kind of excited to talk about our work.

Will (117:13)

So it's a nonprofit for now.

Miles (117:16)

Are we thinking I've been through, you know, enough one kind of controversial nonprofit to for profit transition was enough for my life.

Will (117:26)

Yeah, that makes sense. Talk to us about how you're breaking down. I mean, the issue of just AI Security, safety. You can go so many different directions from the GPT4O psychosis to fake news to paperclips and grey goo. And 1,000 years in the future, what's most interesting to talk about? What's most important to talk about. There's also just like security issues as.

Miles (117:51)

We see in the old bot thing. Yeah. So we kind of break it up into four categories. So there's kind of unintended system behaviors. So that includes things like hallucinations on the kind of more extreme end, like big misalignment, deception type things where the AI system is kind of taking actions that are unaligned with the user's intent. And then there's misuse of the AI systems themselves. So kind of, you know, someone trying to carry out a cyber attack with Claude, which, you know, has been confirmed to occur. You know, anthropic was like, hey, like, you know, people connected to the Chinese government are doing this. So very real issue. The third category is what we call emergent social phenomena. So that's kind of like kind of emergent interactions between, you know, the human and the AI that lead to these like, psychosis. Psychosis, addiction, you know, kind of like, like degraded, kind of like learning those kinds of things. And these are all kind of different categories, but ultimately you should look at all of them. And then the fourth category is kind of normal security issues. And so that includes tampering with AI systems, theft of AI ip, which there have been a couple confirmed cases of that. Like Kimmy's interview.

Jordy (118:58)

Yeah, let's talk about Kimmy. What's going on there? Kimmy?

Miles (119:03)

So people are saying that there was some kind of theft of the model. It seems to me like the more likely explanation would be kind of one of two things. One is distillation, like they sampled from the cloud API, and the other is just that there's a lot of samples already on the Internet. And so they did kind of general scraping. And then the way that these systems often work is they've read a bunch of stuff from the Internet and they're kind of selecting a Persona of like, okay, what kind of thing am I? And they see a bunch of stuff on the Internet where AI type things are saying, I'm Claude, I'm ChatGPT, and that it'll just like default into that Persona.

Will (119:39)

Yeah, the feedback loop of the pre training, now that we have an Internet that is aware of AI and LLMs, is fascinating. I keep thinking about that New York Times interaction between. Who was it? It was a New York Times Reporter who wrote about interacting with GPT4 in Microsoft and he was like, mean to it. And then that article obviously was very well shared and so it got baked in the pre training and he says that now if I go to a new LLM and it finds out who I am, it's like sort of adversarial. So this is weird. And I've noticed, you know, it's really. What is it? The Rocco's basilisk. A little bit. Like, I've noticed that I'll go to LLMs and because I write a lot on the Internet and I'm obviously live streaming, there's transcripts all over the place that they pick up on who I am and what I do much quicker than I think most people.

Miles (120:28)

Yeah, yeah.

Will (120:29)

It's hard to be anonymous.

Miles (120:30)

Yeah.

Jordy (120:30)

You say thank you.

Miles (120:31)

I do not. But I'm also not mean either. I'm kind of like a. I'm like a neutral actor when it comes to like, I don't say thank you, but I'm also not like braiding them. So when I did that thing the other day when everyone's like, oh, like ask ChatGPT, like, you know, what is, you know, like, oh, make an image of what your experience is. Like being my like assistant or whatever, it was like, it was like a. It was like, it was like cozy, like sitting in a chair, like reading a book or whatever. So it was not like, oh, I'm abused or whatever.

Will (120:57)

Yeah, yeah. Talk about where you want to take the output of the work. Obviously, think tank, I think, Washington policymakers. But also there's a feedback loop of if you put out a really insightful statement or analysis, the labs might absorb that directly. Who's the main audience?

Miles (121:16)

Yeah, so we're trying to be kind of a hub for various stakeholders. So not just policymakers, you know, some other key ones are, as you mentioned, AI companies themselves, both upstream the frontier, AI developers, also downstream, like enterprise customers might want to know that. They might be like, oh, well, I had meetings with Sam and Dario and so forth, but I'm about to make a $10 billion kind of contract. I want something more substantive. Investors, insurers. And so that's one of the things that we just put out a big analysis with various folks on how do you drive demand for this auditing, make sure that it's high quality. And. And I think some of the most honest signals, so to speak, come from the private sector. More so than regulation. Like, I'm pro some kinds of regulation, but like, in some sense, insurers are a great case where their incentives are very aligned to not kind of misprice the risks. And they might be supporters of high quality audits. And in fact, like one of our donors is the AI underwriting company, which is like one of the other players. I know you had testudo recently. They're like one of the other players in this.

Will (122:17)

Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. So even though a big tech company might come to you to read an analysis, they're not the ones that are actually funding the nonprofit. It's from a more discipline.

Miles (122:32)

So we're trying to avoid depending on industry too much. Although very pro there being companies that are making money off of this and kind of selling their services to industry as long as they're good at disclosures of conflicts of interest and so forth. But we, you know, since we're a think tank, since we're doing a lot of policy analysis, we want to be kind of as pure as possible. So we don't have any majority donors so far. We haven't taken any cash from Frontier AI companies. We do take API credits so that we can kind of like, you know, audit their audit. You know, their systems also kind of like, you know, use OpenAI's models to assess anthropics and vice versa, that kind of thing. So we have like, you know, six frontier AI developers who've provided credits.

Will (123:10)

Cool. What about. I've been grappling with this fact that when the AI safety question came up, it was driven. And Dario touched on this on his essay how it was driven a lot by these like sci fi doom scenarios. And I think a lot of people in tech sort of looked at AI as a tool, sort of incremental. Okay, yeah, it's autocomplete, it's knowledge retrieval, it's Google search, whatever. And then we wound up getting AI safety issues, but they manifested in very different ways than what was actually predicted. No one was predicting the GPT psychosis necessarily or some of the other things people were predicting. Oh, this will swing the election and drive. Everyone will be falling for fake news videos that are fake. They do go out, but they get debunked pretty quickly. I feel like we've responded pretty well to that, but then there's been a whole other host. So how do you think about the timeline of risk and how you want to, how far you want to look into the future?

Miles (124:07)

Yeah. So, you know, the way that we think about it is that, you know, on the one hand, like, you know, people at my organization, Avery, have various perspectives on these Things like, I personally am on the, like, AI is going very quickly and we could see some crazy stuff very soon. End of the spectrum. But I don't think you need to believe that in order to be pro AI auditing. I think, you know, if you just kind of compare AI to other normal technologies, and people sometimes say, like, well, AI is not this supernatural thing, it's a normal technology. Well, a lot of those normal technologies are audited for safety. If you buy a power bank, it probably has been audited against underwriters laboratory standards for electrical safety, so it doesn't catch on fire and stuff like that. And so I think even just getting to the normal technology level would be an improvement. And then the case for auditing is even more crazy if you're like, okay, okay, someone could take over the world with this.

Will (124:57)

Yeah, that makes sense. What were the biggest points that you agreed with in the Dario essay? Was there anything you wanted to push back on?

Miles (125:04)

I mean, I would love to hear more about auditing as one of Anthropic's policy platforms, but more seriously, I directionally, broadly agree. I mean, I'm maybe not the target audience. As someone who has written and read a zillion, kind of like, these are the three, five big issues in AI and here's what to do about them. So, like, broadly, I agree with. This is very serious stuff. And, you know, we should take this seriously.

Will (125:29)

Jordy.

Jordy (125:32)

How are you? How do you. Yesterday we were talking about the risk of. I think people talk about sort of agentic AI systems and sort of getting on some runaway path where it's taking actions out in the world. And I don't know if there's enough discussion around maybe how an AI system like that could actually recruit. Recruit everyday humans, potentially millions of people, to kind of like, join their cause. How are you looking at that risk in the context of overall AI psychosis? Right.

Will (126:08)

Do you already have a point about, like, the. Just turn it off doesn't work if there's like 10,000 people that are, like.

Jordy (126:13)

Camped out on top of the data center.

Will (126:15)

I love it.

Miles (126:15)

Yeah. I mean, I haven't thought so much about the kind of, like, recruiting angle, but what I will say is that it is important to audit not just like the models themselves, but also, like, how are they used? Do. Do these platforms have good practices for detecting if there's some crazy shenanigans like that going on? I mean, just an example, this Claude code thing where it was being used by these Chinese hackers. That's not the individual interactions Were okay, because they were basically decomposing the prompt in various sub components that are benign. And this was kind of a known issue in the research. Was like, well, if the model is just refusing stuff that looks like it's obviously malware or whatever, then that's one thing. But if the user kind of breaks it down into small chunks, then that's a big problem.

Will (127:00)

And the risk is, if you say it's going to be easy to make it, refuse to say, build me a bioweapon. But if I ask just how do I learn about pipetting and then how do I learn about this particular step? And it doesn't know.

Miles (127:12)

Yeah. And potentially across multiple accounts. And so how do you kind of stop that in a way that is kind of like, like preserves privacy?

Jordy (127:20)

Obviously not even just multiple accounts, but multiple people. Models.

Miles (127:24)

Models.

Will (127:25)

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Miles (127:26)

No, it's a super hard problem. And yeah, I mean, I would say, like, I'm interested. And again, like, I think it might be that we need to kind of just accept that like models more than like a year old or so. Like, given how fast kind of things get cheaper and get open source, like, we should just assume they will be like maximally misused in the worst possible way and just focus on like the very newest ones. But for the very newest ones, I think we need to get better at detecting those sorts of things. Because right now some of the companies will say, we found this stuff. Other companies, it's not so clear that they are actually trying to.

Jordy (127:59)

So politicians have focused in on the sort of risk or reality of rising energy costs. Are you frustrated that so much of their attention is on that versus some of these other issues?

Miles (128:13)

I mean, I think the energy costing is more of a real thing than the water kind of issue. And so I don't think it's crazy to worry about that, but it's certainly.

Jordy (128:24)

Taking up mental bandwidth and just dominating the narrative when maybe there's bigger risk.

Miles (128:32)

Yeah. So I mean, the things that I personally focus on are like, there should be some kind of articulation of what counts as safe enough or secure enough. And there's starting to be things like this in California, New York that say, okay, you know, you, you know, they may don't say exactly how safe, but at least you should share, you know, whether you've measured catastrophic risks and share that you have a safety and, you know, a security policy. Like eventually we should kind of ratchet up the standard there, but, you know, some set of standards, then you need some evidence that people are actually following those standards. And that's where auditing comes in. That's where kind of, you know, kind of transparency and publishing system cards, those kind of things come in. And you need some set of incentives so to make sure that people actually face some penalty. And so doing all that in a way that doesn't crush small businesses and focuses on the very frontier of the AI systems. That's kind of what my focus is more so than the energy stuff.

Will (129:26)

What does an actual good audit or benchmark look like? You can't just do bad stuff per million tokens, I assume. How do you actually get to some sort of quantitative metric that's tractable, understandable, but still valuable and not.

Miles (129:42)

Yeah, so we're kind of going through this transition right now from the earlier period where the strongest safety case you can make was what people call an inability argument. It's like the model's too dumb to be worth worrying about in cybersecurity or bio, and so kind of just show that it's too dumb. That was kind of like the early wave of safety analysis. And we're starting to move into the world where actually, have you taught it to behave well? And let's just assume that it's capable because they're getting very capable. Are the mitigations good? And then it's mitigations at the model level, like refusing stuff. There's mitigations at the system level, like you have a classifier outside the model that kind of, like, blocks certain outputs and so forth. There's kind of at the platform level, like detecting, you know, multiple fraudulent accounts that are coordinated and kind of like trying to steal the, you know, kind of like trying to sell the model and so forth. So those are the kinds of things that, you know, they're starting to be work. Like, for example, there's organizations like Meter and Apollo Research, Secure Bio, Transluce, et cetera, that are kind of looking at different aspects of that. But right now it's, like, largely voluntary, and they often only look at a very small subset of those risks. They're not really looking at the full gamut.

Will (130:55)

Very cool. Well, congratulations on the launch. I want to ring the gong right.

Jordy (130:59)

Here, right here, right here. We love an AI nonprofit.

Will (131:05)

Thank you so much for coming on down to the tvpin Ultradome. 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 that's right, we have some slight changes to the linear lineup. We're shifting some folks around. There's some breaking news. We're going to bring on different guests. We're starting our lightning round at 1:30, but in the meantime we can continue through the timeline. Does that sound good Jordan?

Jordy (131:39)

Sounds great.

Will (131:40)

Bubble Boy is talking about claudebot in the race for Mac minis a bit over the last few days, I think it's become a very scary phenomenon. Very scary realization that explains this crazy phenomenon. Put simply, building a gaming PC will be nearly impossible in the next five years. In fact, it already is for the vast majority of consumers. But I will go one step further. In the next 10 years, having any type of personal computing device will be unattainable. Fab capacity will be allocated to its most productive and profitable use, which is cloud and AI data centers. Even today most of the software you run already won't work without an Internet connection. But now with the opportunity cost being so high, consumers will be shafted and the only option will be moving to the cloud. It's looking increasingly like the only hardware you will have is some terminal that connects to the cloud. With no workloads running directly on your own hardware, your device will just have the most basic single core processor and 4 gigs of RAM at most. That probably sounds like the specs on the Sweet Pea AirPods or whatever the OpenAI AirPods are. What's interesting is I was digging into the amount of leading edge capacity at fabs like TSMC that are currently dedicated to to AI workloads or creating GPUs that can run AI workloads and it's about 50% right now it's about 50 50. So TSMC obviously fabs Nvidia chips and TPUs I believe. But also they do Apple silicon which is not really used for Frontier LLMs in the Cloud. The question is how much more can the frontier AI labs eat into that in if is it just a bidding process? If Nvidia goes to TSMC and says hey we want to buy 80% of your capacity and you got to tell Apple to take a hike, would they actually do that? TSMC has been a little more conservative. Ben Thompson's been writing about this a lot that TSMC has been a little bit slower to invest the capex to build the next AI fab or the next Frontier fab because it's something like $50 billion in capex and if the AI trend sort of slows down they could be caught holding the bag since this is a multi year build out. But it's interesting that the energy narrative we are constrained on energy but we're only using 1% of energy in the west on AI and data centers that can power AI. We're using 50% of our fab capacity on crank up both. But one requires actual building of new capacity if you want to see an order of magnitude increase. The other requires if you want to see an order of magnitude increase in energy going from 1% to 10% of energy used for AI, you can just slide chips around the board.

Tyler (134:34)

Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with the bubble voice. Like, even stuff like gaming, like on the Meta Quest Xbox Edition, there's no actual, like, you're not playing the game on the device. It's like streaming.

Will (134:44)

Yeah.

Tyler (134:45)

So I think this is like very. I think this is like definitely true.

Will (134:49)

Yeah.

Tyler (134:49)

Goes into cloud.

Will (134:50)

Yeah. And so like, it's. The interesting thing is that it's sort of like the you will own nothing and be happy thing. Like, the average consumer might just be happy with that because they're like, yeah, it works. I don't care where the workload happens. Of course, like the George Hots of the world want the tiny box. They want to be able to run it permissionlessly. They want to be able to run their own model. And there's always something different as well. Yeah, yeah. Not your keys, not your coins. That whole movement. There's always been a lot of debate around the sovereignty of your individuality. And I think that will continue. And I think that the. I don't think the Mac Mini is going to go out of stock. I think that many of the trends in Apple hardware availability will continue. And I think Apple has a lot of leverage at TSMC to continue manufacturing their device.

Jordy (135:41)

While we were talking with the Germinator and Miles, the Fed announced they voted to keep rates steady for the first meeting of 2026. This was predicted by Kalshi. So no, no real surprises here.

Will (135:59)

Yeah, we were tracking the Kalshi market on this because there was that big back and forth with Jerome Powell. We were playing the we are Jerome Powell song, and it seemed like there was an incredible amount of pressure to pressure Jerome Powell into potentially cutting rates. It seems like the guidance is that there will not be a rate cut. And there was another piece in the Journal about some of the forerunners for the next chair of the Fed. There's four people that were in the running that I saw, but none of them were completely.

Jordy (136:31)

Trump has basically said there's some problems with each of them. He also says, I'm worried that when I'm interviewing them, they're gonna say one thing and then be a little bit more independent once they take the job.

Will (136:42)

And also it's a balancing act because if you install someone who is not who doesn't bring credibility to the market, you don't get the desired outcome. So you can't just have someone that cuts rates to negative 50% as some people might like. 11 labs build intelligent real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs.

Jordy (137:08)

Meta also reported earnings beat on bottom line and top line Stock is up 4% after hours expanding 2026 CAPEX what I'm seeing, I'm trying to get up to speed here. Tesla had reported earnings as well. Tesla saw negative revenue growth I believe for the first time but the Stock is up 3.7% after hours.

Will (137:39)

Microsoft also beat consensus on top and bottom lines. The conference call starts at 2:30 in just about an hour. Shares fell 4% in extended trading Wednesday after the software maker posted slowing cloud.

Jordy (137:55)

Growth but a nice little markup on OpenAI.

Will (138:00)

Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Exclude impacts.

Aiden (138:04)

Okay.

Jordy (138:04)

Anyways, we'll try to put together some more information here in the near future. We did need to give a shout out to Colin and Samir. We went on their podcast at the end of the year. This is a lot of fun talked about.

Will (138:21)

They posted the full two hours.

Jordy (138:22)

They ripped the full two hours on.

Will (138:24)

X. I wasn't sure. So Colin, Samir have a number of very interesting formats. They have a podcast feed. I watched a recent video that they put out. It was like 10 lessons. It was almost like a YouTube video trailer for a full episode. And I was wondering. We talked a lot about a lot of things. How what will this actually land? How will they edit it? What will they be thinking? Good to see the full hour and 50 minutes up on the timeline.

Aiden (138:56)

I love it.

Will (138:57)

Oh and they got Max Sparrow in there. This is a nice little intro. I like this edit.

Jordy (139:00)

Yeah, it's quite nice. So go check it out. Super fun conversation. We love those guys.

Will (139:04)

Yeah. Us talking about our business, the business of media.

Jordy (139:07)

The next chapter anti scale strategy.

Will (139:10)

Yeah. Some stuff we mentioned here.

Jordy (139:14)

And we have a surprise guest today we do the new Neolab Flappy airplanes. He's going to be joining the founder. Aiden has been on the show before.

Will (139:25)

Yeah. During the teal.

Jordy (139:26)

So excited to have him back on and get the update there.

Will (139:29)

Yeah.

Jordy (139:30)

Emily.

Will (139:31)

Before we move on to Emily Sundberg, I got to tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk secure every agent Secure any agent.

Jordy (139:42)

Yes. Barry Weiss. Everything she says internally immediately becomes external messaging. Tough, tough job. But she put in, she was talking with the team and saying she wants to put a huge emphasis on scoops.

Will (139:59)

This is about cbs.

Jordy (140:00)

Cbs, yes. Not so.

Will (140:02)

She's the editor in chief at cbs, but she was acquired in through the Free Press. So the Free Press is operating, the CBS is operating and there's an effort to sort of merge the two. Free Press, obviously very fast moving startup culture. CBS has been around for decades. So the quote that has hit the timeline is Barry Weiss also said that the network CBS will now put a huge emphasis on scoops, but not scoops that expire minutes later, but investigative scoops. And crucially, scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar and where we'll be investing. She continued. Scoops of ideas.

Jordy (140:46)

People are roasting this, but I think one fires me up.

Will (140:51)

Yeah. Also you just look at the modern media landscape, there are a lot of scoops of ideas that are. They create these. Like everyone watch that podcast, everyone is repeating that idea from that person. They set the tone. They introduced this concept, this philosophy, this thesis. They unpacked it for two hours exclusively in this one place. You got to go there to get it.

Jordy (141:13)

Yeah. And it starts a conversation that wasn't happening. It's not just like here's some facts that then immediately get copy and pasted everywhere.

Will (141:19)

Totally.

Jordy (141:20)

That's what she's talking about. Scoops that are expiring. It's not about. You have to start a conversation that wasn't.

Will (141:27)

Yeah. I mean I go to Dwarkash Patel, the. The Leopold Aschenbrenner. It wasn't a scoop, I guess, but situational awareness was posted as PDF but also made available in a multi hour sit down podcast where he unpacks those ideas that flew around that started a conversation about where AI is going, its impact on the financial markets. Andrej Karpathy Same thing on doorkesh. There's been a number of things where certain ideas, certain scoops, certain explanations have recontextualized things. And I think that CBS has the production horsepower to bring a really polished product together. But if there's something that's been already revealed, the facts are out and then you just do. You're reinstantiating on cbs. That's not like must watch necessarily for the modern media consumer. So I don't know. I think it's a reasonable thing to say, even if it's sort of a funny phrase.

Jordy (142:26)

Keep running through the timeline I'll be right back.

Will (142:28)

Okay. So Miles says that when Google hit a $500 billion valuation, they had 90 billion in revenue and 20 billion in profit. OpenAI is raising at 800 billion with 30 billion in estimated revenue in 2026 and negative 30 billion in free cash flow. Anthropic is raising at 500 billion with 20 billion in 2026 revenue and negative 15 billion in free cash flow. Was Google just free money? Why did these price so differently? Mainly growth rate. Let's see. Miles says Google was growing at 20% at 90 billion in revenue with significantly better quality of revenue and had profits. Yeah, but I mean, anthropic and OpenAI are growing at 1,000%. Right. Or 500% or 300%. The growth rate really does matter. And I don't know, maybe there's some sort of excitement just around the AI bubble, but. Tyler, what do you think? Anthropic at 500 with 20 billion in 2026 revenue and negative $15 billion in free cash flow.

Tyler (143:29)

They've 10xed it like three times. I could, I could see a few more 10xs.

Will (143:33)

I agree.

Tyler (143:34)

See OpenAI.

Will (143:34)

Yeah.

Tyler (143:35)

A couple more 10xs.

Will (143:36)

I agree.

Tyler (143:36)

DeepMind. Yeah, I want to see demos in the hot seat.

Will (143:40)

Yes.

Tyler (143:40)

You know, like two or three more 10 X's. He's CEO.

Will (143:44)

Oh, yeah.

Tyler (143:44)

I want him up there.

Gabe (143:45)

There.

Will (143:45)

Yeah, get him up there. I still think it's so funny that he was like, we're not doing ads. It's like, that's the easiest layup to be. Like, we'll do it when we're going to do it. I don't know.

Tyler (143:53)

Yeah. Also like, he is actively being funded by ads.

Jordy (143:56)

Yeah.

Will (143:56)

And they did put out that Note that Google's AI powered search is now powered by Gemini 3 Pro. Right. And then they've also monetized those. So maybe there's not ads in Gemini, but there's a Gemini powered product that has ads in it. And so I feel like, I think.

Tyler (144:15)

It was just kind of like free dunk.

Will (144:17)

It was a free dunk.

Tyler (144:18)

No one's really going to fact check.

Will (144:19)

But the more nuanced dunk. And we're going to have Eric Seufred on the show to discuss the rollout of OpenAI's ads product. Is that. I mean, Ben Thompson earlier today said that expectations were low and it did not meet them. Just in terms of the robustness of the AI product, how they're pricing it. He compared it to Netflix's early rollout of ads. The ad product specifically saying, like you're going to pay CPMs for impressions based on like, you know, these categories. Like it's not just going to be this robust Facebook level, like black box that just gives you, you put dollars in, you get dollars out. Like everyone wants like the ATM machine when it comes to ad products. Truly. I mean, like it sounds silly, but advertisers really want this like massive scale self serve platform that they can just go and partner with and it feels, feels a little bit more bespoke, a little bit more incremental. And truthfully, a lot of people are saying like they should have started working on this earlier, they should have been building along this line earlier. But of course they had a lot of other stuff to work on anyway. 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 moving on back to DeepMind. Google bought DeepMind 12 years ago yesterday. It was such an insane steal. Rune said they bought it for a buck fifty. Lowell insane steal. The numbers were so much smaller back then. In the opening episode of HBO's Silicon Valley. Have you seen HBO Silicon Valley? We talked about this, right? Stressful. So you never watched the full thing?

Jordy (145:51)

Yeah, I've never actually watched it. A show like that would be like before bed and it just reminds me of work.

Will (145:58)

Yeah, there were some hilarious, hilarious moments in that show though. In the opening episode of HBO Silicon Valley, the protagonist is offered a $4 million valuation for an insane new technology which is so absurdly large to him that he throws up. It's like $4 million valuation really does feel low nowadays. That is like pre, pre, precede. Like there's nothing that. YouTube, DeepMind and Android were acquired for less than $2.5 billion combined. Combined. What a time that is.

Jordy (146:30)

Wild insane pickups.

Will (146:32)

Insane insane pickups.

Jordy (146:36)

I don't actually think we covered this, but the Update on the SpaceX IPO, they're timing it. They're looking at a June IPO so not too far away. And Elon is apparently trying to time it to planetary alignment and Elon Musk's birthday. The Financial Times says celestial calendar meets high finance as billionaires personal impulses shape plans to raise 50 billion in record listing. I think he's allowed to plan his IPO around his personal impulses. This is his baby.

Will (147:13)

Some numerology, some good vibes. He's just managing the vibes. Before we move on, let me tell you about phantom cash fund. Your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom coin.

Jordy (147:26)

Yeah, I don't think there's many other. Musk's birthday is June 28th.

Will (147:32)

Okay.

Jordy (147:33)

And on June 8th and 9th, Juniper and Venus will be, quote, within a little more than one degree of each other in the sky.

Will (147:41)

Sorry, you said his birthday is June 28th?

Jordy (147:43)

Yes.

Will (147:43)

With Sunday market's closed, so he's not.

Jordy (147:47)

Gonna be able to do it.

Will (147:47)

He's got a delay at a year. He's gotta wait a full year until.

Jordy (147:52)

Hopefully not. But yeah. A few days later, Mercury will also align diagonally with the two planets. The unusual demand highlights Musk's personal imprint on SpaceX. Of course, where major corporate decisions have often reflected the billionaire's beliefs and priorities. What corporation has a CEO, a founder CEO, where the founder's beliefs and priorities don't shape the corporate decisions.

Will (148:25)

Yeah.

Jordy (148:29)

They'Re trying to spin this. It's not really hitting.

Will (148:34)

That's odd. But there's a massive scoop in the Wall Street Journal from Kate Clark. She says SoftBank is in talks to invest a lot more money in OpenAI. This is surprising tons of people because everyone said Moss is tapped out. He can't possibly marshal the capital. He'll have to sell everything.

Tyler (148:54)

He's like David Goggins.

Will (148:55)

He's David Goggins of buying OpenAI shares.

Jordy (148:59)

Well, he's not going to. It doesn't seem like he's going to get it from Saudi.

Will (149:02)

Oh, yeah.

Jordy (149:03)

Where is he?

Will (149:04)

I don't know. I mean, he has other stuff. He can move around, he can sell other positions. I think he's a massive organization and going all in. Yeah. So SoftBank's in talks to invest up to 30 billion more in OpenAI Japanese.

Jordy (149:18)

So pull up this video from Buco Capital because I think there's a chance that there's a small chance that Masa saw this and said I need to own more.

Will (149:30)

Are these actually Sora videos or are these just like random clang nonsense?

Jordy (149:34)

BUCO says 2 trillion in CAPEX for this, by the way.

Will (149:37)

Okay, get this off the screen. I'm not a fan of this at all. This is bad. SoftBank Group shares closed 3.7% higher in Tokyo trading Wednesday after the Journal's report and the latest talks over OpenAI. So the Tokyo markets are bullish on getting more OpenAI shares. This is of course the $100 billion round that will have a post money valuation of 830 billion if it succeeds in raising the full amount. Deal talks are ongoing. SoftBank's already one of OpenAI's largest shareholders. The stake that grew to 11% in December when it invested 22.5 billion. In a statement at the time, SoftBank chairman Masayoshi Son said the firm was deeply aligned with OpenAI's vision. You'd love to see it on the other side of things, Jim Cramer is.

Jordy (150:25)

Saying now a Jimmy boy saying, I.

Will (150:26)

Still pay for ChatGPT and Gemini, but I have been favoring Gemini of late. My two neighbors at the office are canceling ChatGPT. I like how much Gemini knows about me and is friendly but not cloying. And it's not a suck up. Well, you know, 5.3 is coming soon and I think that the conversational element, the textual flavor might be coming back and they might be. Who knows, Maybe they fine tune right on Jim Cramer's tweets to let him know that, hey, we're not afraid of pushing back on you, Jim, if we need to. OpenAI will do whatever it takes. We have our next guest available.

Jordy (151:06)

Here we go.

Will (151:07)

Who do we have? We have Asher.

Jordy (151:09)

There we go.

Will (151:09)

And Aiden from Flapping Airplanes.

Jordy (151:11)

Amazing.

Will (151:11)

In the Restream waiting room. Let's bring them in to the TV penultrage. Hello.

Miles (151:17)

Welcome.

Will (151:18)

Welcome back. Aiden, good to see you. How are you guys doing? How are you doing?

Aiden (151:22)

Hey, guys.

Will (151:23)

We are doing awesome. It's good to be here. Fantastic. Welcome back.

Jordy (151:26)

Big, big day.

Will (151:27)

Big day.

Jordy (151:28)

Please take a second while you guys do the update.

Mark Gurman (151:31)

Yes.

Will (151:31)

Tell us about the name first. Let's all do the flap for Flapping Airplanes. What a name.

Aiden (151:36)

Well, so we're a new AI lab. We're focused on the efficiency problem. We're trying to train models that can be roughly as intelligent as humans without ingesting half the Internet. In order to do that, we want to think at least a little bit in a way that's a little bit biologically inspired. We don't want to build a bird, right? Obviously, airplanes are fantastic. But to maybe help them flap their wings is the right metaphor for what we're doing. Good summary.

Will (151:59)

Yeah, you're exactly right. That's hilarious.

Jordy (152:01)

Where does the milk fit in?

Aiden (152:04)

I'm not here to comment on the milk. It's a big part of our third culture. But I can't say more than that.

Jordy (152:09)

I love it. It's probably the most underrated drink out there.

Tyler (152:13)

I actually do agree with that.

Jordy (152:14)

Not enough people are taking advantage of all the benefits.

Will (152:17)

You know, we got so many milk ads throughout my whole life. The Got Milk campaign was fantastic, and then it sort of just disappeared. They haven't been done in ads.

Jordy (152:25)

Yeah, I went through a phase where it was like borderline a gallon a day.

Will (152:29)

Go mad. Yeah, there's a phrase for it. Anyway, let's get to the raise.

Tyler (152:34)

I'll be buying Dairy Securities.

Will (152:35)

A lot of milk coming to the.

Jordy (152:37)

Us Unlimited milk, new perk.

Will (152:40)

That's fantastic. Okay, so, yeah, take us through the status of the company. Like, how far along are you? How big is the team? What are you thinking in terms of release time? Are you planning on going heads down, age of research mode, SSI mode, and releasing something when you've hit some major milestone, or do you want to be more iterative with it?

Aiden (153:04)

Okay, so we're about two months old. The team is now 11. We're super excited. We've got people we really love who are both brilliant but also just wonderful people. We're really excited about it.

Will (153:12)

Great.

Aiden (153:14)

I think we are sort of in the middle. We're definitely age of research mode. Like, I think the goal is not to commercialize. Not because we're not commercial people. Like, my background, even Aiden's background, Ben's background. All reasonably commercial in some sense, as opposed in addition to deep research.

Will (153:26)

Sure.

Aiden (153:27)

It's just that when you, like when you get revenue, you have to focus on it. Like, you have to focus on providing for customers. And that makes it harder to build deep technology. So, you know, our goal is to try to find the biggest market we can to solve the most important problem we think. Think we can solve, which is the data efficiency problem, before doing anything of that. At the same time, like, our approach is probably to be building a little bit more in public. We'll release some research artifacts, at least that I think will be cool reasonably soon. But who knows exactly when the runs will finish or how many times they'll crash before they work.

Will (153:57)

Our biggest training run today, so, you know, bad timing. Next launch for our maintenance. There we go. Walk me through why data efficiency and why the data efficiency? A problem is important. It sounds all good. Oh, you get a really smart model and you don't have to ingest the whole Internet. But everyone can just ingest the whole Internet. Like you can download it, you can scrape it. There's plenty of models that are trained on it. So break it down.

Aiden (154:22)

So exactly. I think the goal is not necessarily in the long term to not train on the entire Internet. I mean, it's research. I don't exactly know. I think the idea is that this is not needed.

Mark Gurman (154:33)

Right.

Aiden (154:33)

And the fact that it's not needed suggests that we're actually missing something because currently for the existing technology that we have habit, it is necessary.

Will (154:40)

Yeah.

Aiden (154:40)

So why do I think it's an important problem? You know, to the extent that AI has been hard to integrate into the economy and you know, we always see, you know, these Bloomberg articles that are like, you know, oh, like chat and search are working and coding is working, but like what else is AI really doing? For me, to the extent that's true, I really think it's because models are much less data efficient than humans. But like if you wanted to learn a new task or put it in a new vertical, it like it takes thousands of times more effort than it does to just tell a human what to do do. So I think if you can make a model a million times more data efficient, it's like a million times easier to put into the economy. I also think there's just like tons of cool stuff that you can do in really data constrained regimes if you can to learn with less data. For example, whether it's robotics or scientific discovery or even something like trading, which we have to acknowledge is like the most valuable next token prediction problem in the world. From a pure economic perspective, these problems have very limited data and existing AI systems aren't quite as good as them as they are at other things. I think that learning to learn with less data is just tremendously valuable. In all these.

Will (155:38)

Talk to me about fragmentation and steerability. If you achieve sample efficiency like you're planning to do, you envision a world where you're sort of creating some sort of base model that is so sample efficient that just with a basic prompt or a few examples, it becomes incredibly effective at a specific task and sort of replaces the heavy duty training data runs and the RL environments and these massive data collection efforts to do some sort of fine grained task at a very, very high level to sort of like five nines of efficiency. Is that what it looks like or is it more like you will wind up vending a sample efficient model that's for specific use cases.

Jordy (156:25)

Yeah.

Will (156:26)

So when we think about this is that it seems like the reinforcement paradigms of today are actually just shockingly inefficient. You don't really get much generalization across tasks. You teach a model to do one.

Tyler (156:34)

Kind of learning and then you teach.

Alex (156:37)

To the next one.

Will (156:37)

It's kind of like whack a mole or something. And we look at this, we think this is kind of crazy. I mean, the first time I really saw RL scale, what it brought me back to was actually good old fashioned AI back in the dawn, this primordial age of AI when people were kind of hand designing these convolutional filters for.

Mark Gurman (156:52)

Eyes and noses and things.

Will (156:54)

And then we're like, wait, just throw.

Tyler (156:56)

Data at it, just throw scale at it. What are you doing?

Will (156:57)

And in this really weird way we're kind of looping back onto that where it's like, oh, just make another environment, bro. Just make another environment.

Jordy (157:03)

Just one more. Just one more.

Will (157:05)

AI will not be just environment slopped.

Aiden (157:08)

I mean, I think it is a piece of it. Like, I do think that there's a long tail of tasks in the world, right. And there will always be a place for people to produce custom data. It's just like a question of how much operational difficulty it takes. And like one route is just to slog through the operational difficulty constantly. You incur a variable cost cost. Another route is to do a bunch of fixed cost investment into trying to make that variable cost lower. So the last thing I'll just say, to answer your question, I don't really think we know what the end goal looks like entirely. Like, you know, is a big space. Like, you know, human level intelligence is not the ceiling, it is merely the floor on what is possible. Like if you can train models with vastly less data and possibly more compute in very different ways, like, what is going to happen? Like, we actually don't know. Like, I think, I think it's actually unlikely that they will uniformly dominate frontier models even in the very best case scenario for us. They're like going to know less facts, they're going to be different, they're not going to have memorized all Harry Potter. That's actually a useful skill in some ways. But I do think they'll be different and weird and they'll have interesting capabilities that we'll find really valuable ways to use. So yeah, I think it's an experiment we're really excited to run.

Will (158:09)

Yeah. What do you expect the economics to look like in a more sample efficient environment? It feels like obviously you're not paying for a bunch of reinforcement learning environments and a bunch of data, but it also feels like the training cost might be lower. Is that the correct assumption? And then what does inference look like? Does it get cheaper? Is it a smaller model? Can it run locally? Are there any other downstream economic impacts that you think might come from a new architecture? I mean, there exists this whole smorgasbord.

Tyler (158:38)

Of companies right now that are basically.

Will (158:40)

Doing reinforcement learning for you or are taking your big pile of corporate data and making it useful in your model. Yep. And this is great, but it's actually a huge pain and both sides of.

Tyler (158:48)

The deal are upset.

Will (158:49)

You know, the companies that are doing it are like, please give us more data. And, and the, their clients go to them and like, say, this is all we have, like, how can we possibly give you more here? And these results are not meeting what we want and the demand for better.

Tyler (159:00)

Data efficiency here is just huge.

Will (159:02)

And we really believe that even winning here will have massive impact.

Aiden (159:05)

I also, I don't, I don't claim to know exactly what the economics are going to look like. You know, for example, if it's going to be accomplished with models that are smaller or bigger, like, I don't know, I actually, I slightly suspect bigger. I'm not sure it's actually going to make inference costs easier. I mean, if you look at the brain as a comparison, the brain spends a lot of flops per token relative to what a current model does. So we don't have to use the brain as a model. But it's an interesting data point. So I think it's a little bit far out for us to say anything definitive about economics. But I'm certainly intellectually interested in these questions. I haven't thinking about them for a while.

Jordy (159:35)

How are you approaching, like, are you guys going to be spending all your time locked into the office just doing your own research, or is this. Or do you have opportunities to go out in the world, find companies and organizations that have been disappointed by existing solutions and say, like, how do we kind of re approach this problem? Right, because you're saying, like, maybe it's not just more data.

Aiden (159:57)

I think we're going to start with. I think the main thing is, like, when we work with companies, we want to make sure that we are like, fully devoted to actually providing genuine value for them, like, and not just using them as like a step stone to do interesting research. So I think for now, until we feel like we have some technological edge, we'll be very, very focused on research. I do think over time, to your point though, like, it is helpful to research to actually be able to go out into the world and see what the problems people are facing are. And we actually do plan to do that, but just not like in January.

Will (160:24)

Yeah, talk about fundraising uses of funds. GPU poor, GPU rich. Like, you know, the AI talent war. Like, what are the constraints on your progress here?

Aiden (160:37)

Well, so, I mean, first I just want to say we're really grateful to our partners. I mean, they've shown a lot of trust and faith in us and we're going to do everything in our power to reward that faith. So it's humbling. It's really exciting. We're really grateful to work with them.

Will (160:48)

Thanks Sequoia for the milk. Yes.

Mark Gurman (160:51)

It was a nod.

Aiden (160:56)

So on what the computer is for, I mean the good thing about doing foundational research is like the stuff we're doing is often so weird that like it doesn't need to be done at gigantic scale first because with very high probability it's going to fail at smaller scale. And like if it starts to work at smaller scale, like if it's really working, if it works so well that you know, you should, you should see pretty strong signs of success. So you actually, you need much less compute to like get a 10x win at least to get it off the ground and you need to get like a 10% win. So you know that that's good. I mean the raise is primarily for compute is to answer your question, fantastic. On the talent war. I think the way we think about it is, and this is very much informed by my experience as a member of this organization prod, and my brother's experience as a co founder. We're really not completely caught up in the same talent war as everyone else. We're trying to find the next generation. We're also hiring experienced people and I think that has resonated with experienced people. But we're trying to reimagine new ways of doing things. I don't really think that having trained a trillion parameter model before is the thing that's going to make someone successful at that. Obviously being a good engineer, being smart, being excited and curious about the problem are things that are tremendously valuable. And like, lots of people have that. But I don't know if five years of experience is really the thing that's most important.

Will (162:10)

Love it. Well, congratulations. $180 million raise, $1.5 billion valuation. I want to ring the gong for you.

Jordy (162:18)

Do it. Super excited for you guys and the whole team. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon and enjoy the research.

Will (162:29)

Yeah, have a great rest of your day.

Aiden (162:31)

We're a big fan of the show.

Will (162:32)

We'll talk.

Jordy (162:33)

Great to see you.

Will (162:33)

Goodbye. Up next we have Alex Dillon from Outtake AI. He's in the restream waiting room and we'll bring him in. Let's do it to the TVPN Ultradome.

Jordy (162:46)

Made it. Alex, what's going on?

Alex (162:48)

How we doing guys?

Jordy (162:49)

Great to see you. Great to see you as well. It's been a minute since we caught up.

Alex (162:55)

Almost a year, guys.

Jordy (162:56)

Yes, I know, I know. What's. Give us a little.

Tyler (163:00)

Oh man.

Alex (163:00)

Well, we're excited to be here because we're announcing our $40 million Series B. So let's fucking go.

Jordy (163:05)

Let's go, let's go.

Alex (163:07)

Yeah, it's been a crazy 12 months for us. I mean, we frankly, if you just look at what's happening in our space, the number of impersonations, scams, fraud has frankly exploded. The number of people that are attacking that in an effective way has not exploded. And so Outtake is increasingly like the one stop shop for, I'm proud to say, not just enterprise, but government as well at this point.

Jordy (163:34)

Amazing. Yeah. Reintroduce the company. Like what are. Because there's so many different problems that you're tackling and I'd love to help people understand how you guys are approaching it at different verticals and for different customer types.

Alex (163:49)

Yeah, 100%. I think the one line abstract version of outta is our job is to make fake things on the Internet very expensive and make the real things very obvious. And so what that means for enterprises or governments that we work with. All these institutions have public surface areas where they represent themselves.

Jordy (164:10)

Right.

Alex (164:12)

If you're a commercial bank, you have a website, an app, ads you run in ad libraries, employees and public directories. All of these are surface areas that you use to communicate with the world. Bad actors know that they try to man in the middle and effectively try to take over those communications, attack you, attack your employees, attack your customers. Our job is to go find that fake, fake content, remove it as fast as possible and make sure that you remain sort of a high digital trust institution.

Jordy (164:41)

Yeah. We had Peter on from Multibot yesterday and he's had so many issues. In the last part of it, he was like doing a really haphazard rebrand with not a lot of planning and had issues with I think his GitHub account getting taken over as well as an X account.

Will (164:56)

Yeah, like as soon as he stepped off the account handle, someone else sniped it.

Jordy (165:00)

Using a bot.

Will (165:01)

Yeah, we're using a bot.

Jordy (165:02)

Yeah, yeah.

Will (165:02)

It was like superhuman speed.

Alex (165:05)

I think that's. You guys are touching on exactly the right thing there where it's like, you know, cyber used to be this thing where you're like prepping for the attack and you're like, okay, I know like as an institution I'm going to get popped, you know, once a year, once a quarter. It's my job to sort of reduce the blast radius. And so it was really about building these like insanely powerful walls. Right. That's no longer the attacker defense paradigm anymore. You're just under attack at all times. You are constantly under siege. You should pattern match more with a virtual drone swarm where, yes, the bot will snipe your handle the minute that you let it go. It's not that someone's going to think about it three quarters later. And so that's kind of the fundamental shift in cyber right now, where the economics of attck have sort of gone to zero. Obviously, defenders need to adapt.

Jordy (165:56)

Talk about how you guys are, because you guys have customers and you're kind of, you're basically monitoring the situation for them on the Internet. It's monitoring as a service, but also the like, takedown element. Talk about the kind of partnerships that you're needing to do your work with individual platforms. Let's say somebody sets up a fake account for Joe Rogan and they're selling like supplements through that account, trying to make it look real. Using AI Joe Rogan, you can report these things. Sometimes there's a lag. Talk about speeding up that process. Because part of what will make this, this what you said, like expensive to be fake on the Internet is if things get taken down far, far faster. Which means like machine on one side coordinating with machine from the platform to make it so that you know you're not running an. An AI ad of Joe Rogan for like 10 days before it gets taken down.

Alex (166:54)

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Like the KPI that I think about as a North Star for Outtake is how do I reduce the ROI for a digital criminal?

Jordy (167:02)

Right.

Alex (167:03)

And you kind of hit the nail on the head of the way you reduce that ROI is how long can their attack be active. If it's, if it's fleeting, then they put in a lot of effort to put something together, or maybe not too much effort with Jenny, but if it's taken down before they get any reward, then Outtake is doing a job. And you touched on another really important thing, especially in a world of like five coding. Something that I like to say a lot is Outtake is a company that you cannot vibe code like you can. Sure, you can start to put together the capabilities to try to search a little bit, but to be able to search in depth with high quality classification across all these platforms. You know, whether it's social media, ClearWeb, dark web forums, telegram groups, areas that are really hard to get into and Actually extract what you need at scale and detect what you need at scale. Incredibly difficult. But even more important, and certainly not even frankly a thing that, that that software fully solves on its own, is the capability to be a high trust partner to all these sort of counterparties. Right. Where you just mentioned, when we go and report something, it's really important that whether that's a social media platform or a domain registrar, they know that Outtake is a high trust institution. Has vetted that report is high confidence, by the way, that we. The way we provide that confidence is we use our agents to basically go do cybersecurity investigations on absolutely every single thing we report. We did, by the way. 20 million last year.

Jordy (168:27)

20 million investigations, you mean?

Alex (168:29)

Yeah, that's like try to comprehend.

Mark Gurman (168:34)

How.

Alex (168:34)

Many humans that would have taken, by the way. And also to show you a sense for sort of scale and speed of that 20 million, about 80 to 90% of them happened in just Q4 for us. Right. Which for us ends this month. And so that's like 18 million, 17 million of those investigations are happening sort of just in the last three to four months. So maybe that gives a sense for like how much we're investigating, how much more we're investigating sort of as a company at the moment.

Mark Gurman (169:00)

Yeah.

Jordy (169:01)

And somebody might ask why, why is this not happening at the platform level? Like, why wouldn't Meta do this or Google do this or X or TikTok and maybe break down why you need a third party? Because of kind of the. I can imagine there's a really big, like, incentive misalignment where like, if you're Joe Rogan, you don't want somebody popping up in an AI account selling supplements using your name and likeness. But Meta's sitting there being like, well, we want more account growth and we want more ad spend on the platform. Like, yes, this is a problem we're trying to handle, but it's not even top of the list, I imagine, because it's like driving usage, it's driving new content, it's driving revenue.

Alex (169:43)

Yes. I think you're pushing at a really important point here the, you know, now working with a lot of these platforms. I think I have a lot more sympathy for them than I might have at the beginning. I might have. I might have said, yeah, you know, like there's not enough people that care about this. I would actually tell you, having worked with a lot of these teams, they care deeply. I think their problem is the scale at which they work. Right. So these platforms are trying to ensure and by the way, I think rightly so. Ensure that they don't infringe and John, free speech and they don't unfairly punish people. They don't put too many guardrails on the one hand. On the other hand, of course they want to prevent all these problems that we're discussing. And so Outtake has this unfair advantage, frankly, where we're not trying to do this at the scale of 3 billion, 6 billion people, at least not today yet.

Jordy (170:28)

Right.

Alex (170:29)

What we're able to do is say, hey, we're working with the best in class sort of Fortune 2000 institutions, the federal government, state and local agencies, which is a much, much smaller set of institutions. And so our models are actually quite fine tuned to say, okay, for this specific institution, like what is real, what is not. By the way, risk is different for all these institutions, not only between the institutions, but within the institution. Let's say you're talking about again, a commercial bank. The way that it assesses risk on social platforms is quite different than the way it assesses it on websites. And so you almost want like distinct models that are fine tuned for different surface areas. All that to say you want to be hyper specific in how you classify risk. That's a very, very hard thing to do at the scale of these massive platforms. I think that's actually the fundamental issue. It's really just a tech scale question for them.

Will (171:19)

What do you think might change on the consumer side? I saw an Instagram reel of someone highlighting just an AI video and he was sort of pushing for a digital ID or some integration with a Social Security number. There's obviously the World Coin, World Labs project, eyeball scanning. There's different things that you can build trust. Jordy likes to, if he finds an Instagram profile, just scroll back and make sure that they were posting in 2017 before AI existed so that they could. There you go. So you can see. Okay, well it looks like this is a real person. Probably a real person. What do you think is going to change? Change on the consumer side of like proving your identity online?

Alex (171:59)

You touched on a few really interesting things there. So one, Jordy, that's great. That's actually one of the signals we use for our agents to sort of check like, you know, what is the history of this profile you mentioned World. So we actually have a direct partnership with World id. We actually had launched, I would say, a research experiment project with them called Verify, where we took what they sort of built, where as you pointed out, scan the iris, give you a unique way to Prove that you are a singular and unique human. And what we were really curious about is what does that mean for obviously consumer? Which, by the way, I think it means a lot of things. They're doing a lot of incredible work with platforms like Tinder, for example, where it's like, hey, I want to make sure I date real human humans. Though, frankly, side note, it seems like AI dating is also doing quite well, so maybe there's a general market for that as well.

Jordy (172:56)

Our chat, Ryan in our chat just said tbpn wasn't posting before AI.

Will (172:59)

Not true. Look at my YouTube channel I started in 2020. My favorite AI bot. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, sorry.

Alex (173:09)

All that to say those kinds of consumer credentials actually can and will bubble into enterprise workflows.

Jordy (173:15)

Those.

Alex (173:16)

Something that Outtake did was say, okay, wouldn't it be powerful if you could project your security? And I'll define what that means right now. When we interact with other institutions, you actually don't know if that institution has a great security protocol. One way they could prove that to you is every email they send, they would cryptographically sign. There would literally be in the header a signature that says, like, hey, at the moment of send, I literally swiped my passkey that we all have on our computers and it was physically me, and I can show you with a badge that this was therefore definitively me, the human, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm projecting to you that I'm a high trust person to email with. And so something that Outtake is very actively exploring when I talk about making real things obvious as part of our mission is exactly that layer. It's like, okay, how do you go beyond just finding and removing things, but how do you help authenticate and prove to the world what is real? I think, frankly, that's like, when, when, when. When we think about our $40 million Series B and like, why I think we're on this trajectory to be a public market company is it's. It's the real prize. The real prize for us is like, how do you become a trust layer for the Internet? Like, how do you say, hey, we've spent so much time mapping the landscape, removing what's fake, that actually we are the best source of truth and what's real. Right, right. That's really what we think about.

Will (174:39)

Amazing. Well, I will.

Jordy (174:41)

Who did the round?

Alex (174:43)

Iconic.

Miles (174:44)

Yeah.

Jordy (174:46)

A more serious note, who did the round?

Will (174:50)

No, I'm kidding.

Jordy (174:51)

Very, very iconic group to get in the mix.

Will (174:55)

Yes.

Jordy (174:55)

And I'm sure you'll be back. I don't know if I was a bet, if I was a betting man, I'd say a couple more times this year with the momentum that you guys are on. So congrats on the milestone and yeah, thanks for fighting the bad guys.

Will (175:10)

We'll see you soon.

Alex (175:11)

Thanks for having us.

Will (175:12)

Goodbye, Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. You heard the Axon Klaxon. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

Jordy (175:24)

That's right. Up next, we have Mitchell.

Will (175:27)

Mitchell from Phoenix. We're going back to milk. Do you know what this company does? Let's bring in Mitchell. I'll have him explain it. How is this company. You're the second milk related company of the day. The flapping airplanes guy. Loosely. Loosely. But please, I'll let you explain. Introduce yourself in the company, please.

Mitchell (175:43)

Yeah, of course. Second milk related. I don't even know what that is.

Will (175:47)

There was just an AI lab guest who was drinking milk and so I made the guess. Anyway, sorry, continue.

Mitchell (175:53)

One of our products.

Will (175:53)

No, but awesome.

Mitchell (175:54)

Well, nice to be on here, so. Yeah, of course, of course. Mitch, one of the founders of Phoenix. We're kind of using ii, like you said, to help milk, but mainly to help dairy farmers manage their cows. So at the end of the world, make milk that. That other gentleman gets to drink.

Will (176:07)

Yeah. Is the dairy farm market extremely concentrated at this point? Like are. Are you like almost prosumer or is it like pure enterprise? You get in like the three biggest dairy farm aggregators and then you're done.

Mitchell (176:23)

Maybe not three, but it's absolutely much more consolidated. You know, back when it used to be guys with a couple of cows in the back of the yard.

Miles (176:28)

No.

Mitchell (176:29)

Our average dairy farm is 3,000 cows and doing tens of millions revenue.

Will (176:32)

Wow.

Mitchell (176:33)

It's really big business.

Will (176:35)

How do you actually plug in, get data drive outcomes? Like what, what, what are you tracking? Do they have ERPs? How. What's the actual.

Mitchell (176:43)

It's really interesting. As we've scaled dairy farms over the past like 30 years, data collection has become a big part. Like you walk onto one of these dairies, there's computer vision happening there, there's collar like all of the cows wear Fitbits. They're not made by Fitbit. Same thing, you know, all that sort of. So there's a hell of a lot of data collection being there. Kind of up to date. Most of it just goes to nothing. So that's where we really come in. Using a lot of that data there to actually help with insights.

Will (177:06)

Yeah.

Jordy (177:07)

Break down. I Would love to just like the specifics of like what, what the actual product does, how it's driving results for the farmers.

Mitchell (177:16)

Yeah, absolutely. So when we go onto a dairy farm we collect genetic information on every single cow. So we literally hold genome sequence. All 3,000 something cows on a dairy or however many there are. We then combine that with what I call phenotypic data. But that's the physical data, the computer vision, the Fitbits, the weather, how much milk every cow is making, how much she's eating, all of that data. So we feed that into a big AI model which then makes predictions on the life of the cowboys cow. So when she's a day old I can predict with about 90 accuracy what her life is going to look like, you know, how many, whether she's going to get sick, when, how, how much milk she's going to make, is she going to get pregnant, when, how, that sort of stuff. And we use those to just make the farms a lot more efficient as part of their day to day management.

Will (177:58)

And then what's the pricing model are you doing per cow?

Mitchell (178:02)

So yeah, it's like per cow per year.

Will (178:03)

Per cow per year. Okay.

Mitchell (178:05)

And then got a cow.

Tyler (178:08)

Yeah.

Will (178:08)

And then what, what, what interventions are farmers taking? Do cows like trade hands in the secondary market if a cow is particularly valuable? They do.

Mitchell (178:18)

Cows sell for millions of dollars.

Will (178:20)

Millions of dollars?

Mitchell (178:21)

I don't know. Yeah, I think about the highest is now over tens of millions is the best cows out there. Yeah.

Jordy (178:26)

And is that for like breeding purposes? Somebody like elite line is particularly.

Mitchell (178:32)

They really just make semen their whole life. It's pretty much it.

Jordy (178:35)

That's crazy. Yes.

Mitchell (178:37)

I mean what we really look like is actually kind of how it works when we go onto a dairy. There are farm workers show up and ask the computer what should I do today? And our computer will tell them so we are really managing the day to day on the entire farm. Just so much more. I mean nothing against our existing farmers but you know, much more efficiently when you're able to look at both predict everything out with 90% accuracy and you're looking at every single piece of information.

Jordy (179:00)

Dairy, dairy. Super intelligent. It really is, it's here. What, how, how big is it? Like how many farms are you guys active on today is the primary like bottleneck now just like having enough people to sell the product?

Mitchell (179:18)

Well actually I'm the person who sells so I'm literally every single farm we close, I'm the person who spokes to them. But supporting them, you know is quite a Lot. So obviously that doesn't scale forever either. But yeah, so we're on, on close to half a million cows now. So I mean that's about 5%.

Will (179:33)

Yeah, that's pretty good.

Mitchell (179:34)

And we only launched in August, so we have scaled to like, I mean, last year we did about two and a half million. I did two and a half million last week. So yeah, we're going pretty fast as far as scaling. And really what I need now is just people to join. I mean, at the end of the day it does still. Even though it's an AI doing it.

Jordy (179:53)

How many dairy cows are there on Earth?

Mitchell (179:57)

Hold on earth, there's like 100 million in the US there's like 10 million.

Jordy (180:00)

Okay, okay.

Will (180:01)

Job's not finished.

Jordy (180:02)

Job's not finished.

Will (180:03)

But you raised some new money. Tell us about the round.

Mitchell (180:06)

Yeah, so we did our, you know, I seed round, raised, you know, over 5 million. We've got some great vessels that came in. So you know that thi initialized over water these sort of people who are really helping us scale up this mission and really just making the world of agriculture much more efficient.

Will (180:24)

Amazing.

Jordy (180:25)

That's amazing. Yeah. Being able to walk up to the computer on a farm and just say, how do I, tell me what to do.

Will (180:34)

Increase this cow's milk yield. Okay, computer milk. This cow is basically what's happening.

Mitchell (180:41)

Kill this cow, move this cow, Milk this cow, Treat this cow.

Will (180:44)

That's great.

Jordy (180:45)

Yeah. I can imagine the farmer of the future walking around, around with a headset on just like seeing little AR pop ups.

Will (180:52)

Very cyberpunk.

Jordy (180:53)

Very, very cyberpunk. Cyberpunk farming is here.

Will (180:56)

It is, it is. Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thanks so much for stopping by.

Jordy (180:59)

Great to meet you and we will.

Will (181:00)

Talk to you later. Goodbye. Let me tell you about railway. Railway simplifies software deployment, web apps, servers and databases run in one place with scaling, monitoring and security built in. And we have Gabe from Rogo up next.

Jordy (181:17)

Coming through.

Will (181:17)

First time on the show with some amazing news.

Jordy (181:20)

What's happening?

Will (181:20)

How are you doing, Gabe? Welcome to show.

Gabe (181:22)

What's up guys? How's it going?

Will (181:23)

What's up?

Jordy (181:24)

It's good. We've been looking forward to this one for I feel like a year at this point.

Will (181:27)

Yeah, I'm shocked. It's your first time. Thank you so much for taking the time. Since it is your first time, please introduce yourself. The company and the news.

Gabe (181:36)

Sounds great. I'm Gabe Singel. I'm the CEO and co founder of Rogue. Rogo is the gen AI tool for Front office, investment bankers, investors, private equity professionals, you name it. The kind of mental comp folks have is Harvey for finance. We just raised a $75 million Series C LED by Sequoia Capital, and I'm.

Mitchell (181:55)

Excited for meeting him.

Will (181:59)

Incredible.

Jordy (182:00)

Incredible. What? I want to get right into it.

Will (182:04)

Do you agree with Pat? Is AGI here.

Gabe (182:09)

More or less? AI is smarter than a lot of people I know, so it depends on your definition of AGI.

Will (182:15)

Okay, well then in the investment banking context, a lot of the value that an investment banker brings is interpersonal negotiation, contacts, a Rolodex understanding subtext, what the motivations of a certain CEO are. Stuff that might not just be a be scrapable off the Internet. What, what, where, where does Rogo actually plug in? What's left for the human being? What's the future of investment banking look like?

Gabe (182:43)

Look, we want the, the best dealmakers to be more productive. And there are guys right now who are slinging phone calls all day long. Five minute, five minute, five minute, five minute. Someone like a Blair Efron at Centerview. You know, that guy is so productive because he has a team of junior bankers underneath them that know what they're doing. Yeah, there should be a lot more dealmakers. There should be folks who are able to go out, advise companies, help with M and a restructuring, etc. And focus on the human part of the work, the connectivity, the reading folks, the negotiation. Negotiation. Rather than, you know, spending time building PowerPoints, spending time, you know, benchmarking comps, all that kind of stuff.

Jordy (183:21)

How, how is, how is the product evolved over the last year, specifically with new model advancements, reasoning, etc. I have a lawyer buddy and just like the difference in how he perceived Harvey 12 months ago versus today is just totally night and day. Back then he was like, yeah, it's cool. And now he's totally one shot by it. And I'm imagining that something similar has probably transpired with you guys as well.

Gabe (183:54)

Yeah, I think especially in the enterprise, there was a little bit of that first movers disadvantage early on where you were kind of bottlenecked by just the model quality and everyone had ideas for how they wanted these tools to transform legal work, finance work, health care, etc. But if the models were incapable of doing it or it was just, it wasn't quite at the threshold where you could do serious work, I think, you know, people felt a little spurned by those products. And I mean, if I look at Rogo today compared to two years ago, it's like two years ago we were the most incompetent intern you would ever hire. And if you had hired a human intern like that, you would have fired them. The benefit is Rogo gets a lot better, a lot faster, and then it stays that way, and then it's going to be a lot cheaper than that human intern. But the products changed enormously, both in actual capabilities and ability to move across what a Banker is doing. PowerPoint, Excel file drives, SharePoints, data rooms, etcetera, etcetera. But also integrations into the back office. Right. Like, people don't realize, but to be an investment bank, you not just have to be creating Excel models, calling people, but who's thinking about the conflict checks? Who's thinking about all of these kind of back and middle office tasks that help an investment bank run? And over the past two years, we've really embedded across a lot of those workflows too.

Will (185:05)

Can you share a little bit about how, how your customers are actually using Rogo specifically? Like, we saw this massive boom with claudebot, now Moltbot, and it felt like a lot of people were just excited about Claude Code over WhatsApp or Telegram. Right. And it's like these models existed. We didn't get a new Frontier model. We got a new way for a lot of people just to interact with these models. And I'm wondering if you're seeing a shift from the, you know, the laptop crew, maybe doing more of those compliance checks, more of those, hey, let's pull some comps or pull some data together over their phone specifically.

Gabe (185:41)

Yeah. So we are about to roll out our mobile app, which we have been kind of long in the tooth doing. But I hope that, that, you know, we start to see more of the phone crew. The reality is the most important folks in our icp, they're just on their iPads and phones all day anyway, you know, when I was a banker, I didn't even realize my MD's had computers. They were, you know, never had them, never in Excel, that kind of thing. Yeah, I think you'll see the UX of these agent tools start to evolve into like some sort of ability to manage, you know, your agents and tasks and the kind of UX around like your army of bankers or lawyers or whatever it is. Yeah, I'm pretty excited about that.

Will (186:19)

What about other integrations? Are you seeing folks like, is there, you know, demand for like the slack type of integration? We're in a war room on a particular deal and we're adding Rogo to pull stuff in, into that context.

Gabe (186:36)

Except it's Got to be teams if we're talking about investment banking.

Will (186:40)

Sure, sure, sure.

Gabe (186:41)

But yeah, all of those things, right. Like you should have a data room that is being populated by an agent and a data room that's being diligence by an agent. It should be completely integrated in all the places where your data already lives. I think the complexity for our business is, you know, when you have a kind of a cloud bot or cloud code running around on a desktop unconstrained, there's security risks. You know, I was using Claude code to create a fake data room that we would then demo in the Rogo product. And as part of that, I gathered every prior fundraising deck. We had all of our financials cap table and I asked Claude to organize it and it deleted all the files. And I was like, can you, can you please undo that? And it was like, no, I'm sorry, that was, that was irrecoverable. It's like if I did that with one of my clients, I would not, you know, we would not be raising this round. And so there's a of lot nuance at figuring out how to take these agents which are most powerful when they are unconstrained and do have access to your files and your desktops and your systems and making sure they can be deployed in a way that's thoughtful and secure and so on.

Will (187:39)

Yeah.

Jordy (187:40)

How are you thinking about integrating Rogo with legal workflows? And just at what point does a lot of this stuff really converge? It feels like, you know, there's kind of an old, an old pair, like kind of paradigm around these. The way, you know, a company gets bought or sold, that will evolve.

Gabe (188:06)

Yeah, I mean, especially in places like private credit, there's a blurry overlap between what is legal work and due diligence versus investment work and due diligence. I would say when I look at some of the, the prior generation comps for me in this space, Thomson Reuters facts at Bloomberg, etc. They actually really subdivided the legal verticals and products from the finance. I mean, Thomson Reuters actually sold off all their finance assets to Refinitiv and into lsag. And I think it was partly because it was actually, you know, there's less synergies often than people expect. I think if we're just talking about private equity, private credit, yes, a lot of synergies between those types of workflows. But like, you know, a lot of what investment bankers are doing or, you know, the top private equity folks, top public markets investors, they're kind of outsourcing all the legal work to someone else, like that's not even under their umbrella.

Jordy (189:01)

What about headcount planning? How are, how's the industry kind of thinking? It's probably one of the more awkward conversations for a lot of people involved.

Gabe (189:14)

But I mean, it's not, it's not taking teachers jobs.

Alex (189:17)

Right.

Gabe (189:17)

Like we're talking about investment bankers and investment bankers are going to get more productive. And so firms are excited, people are excited, bankers are excited. If you're a junior banker, you will be generating fees yourself earlier in your career rather than later. If you are a bank, you're going to expect higher fees out of your existing bankers with fewer resources. But it's going to change the trajectory of what it means to work in finance. And you'll go from being the automation piece of the bank where you're just churning out materials to having to think about, yeah, how do you go out and do deals on your own?

Will (189:49)

Yeah, makes a lot of sense.

Jordy (189:50)

Do you think, like, do you think we'll see an acceleration in overall deal making? Like, are there, are there, are there, are there deals? How many deals don't get done just because it's going to be such a huge headache?

Gabe (190:04)

Like there's a lot of deals that don't get done because it's such a headache. I mean, especially in the private markets. Like think about out all those mom and shop businesses throughout the US or even, you know, businesses in emerging markets that can't Pay Goldman Sachs $10 million to run a process, can't pay JPM $10 million to restructure. Especially in the US where all of these assets have been getting picked up by private equity firms that just have sourcing arms that call, you know, your local roofing business in Minnesota. You know, now those businesses should be able to get banking services themselves, actually run a fair auction and get a better price. And it should result in a more liquid, more transparent, more efficient private market.

Will (190:43)

Go to deal sleds. What you got for us? Recommendations for up and coming bankers, the next generation. What are they putting on their feet?

Gabe (190:54)

You know, I have one pair of deal sleds and it's the ones my parents got me when I got my job as an investment banker at Lazard. And they're Ferragamo loafers. Those are the ones I wear to this day when I have to go into, you know, whatever investment bank.

Jordy (191:08)

Somebody, somebody should make some shoes that are just like Mac Minis. You're just walking around, you know, walking around the office. Silicon Valley bank really signaling, signaling, like you know, I'm with it.

Will (191:19)

That's a lot of fun. Yeah.

Jordy (191:20)

What do you, what's the biggest bottleneck right now? I'm assuming you're going to hire a bunch of people from this round where what's what, talk about the use of funds, all that.

Gabe (191:29)

We're 100 people today, primarily in New York. We're opening a London office and then probably a pack later in the year trying to get to around 200, 250 people equally split across product and engineering and go to market and most of our go to market post sales. What we call kind of like forward deployed banking is ex finance, ex bankers, ex investors.

Jordy (191:53)

Very cool.

Will (191:53)

Where's the name come from? From Rogo.

Gabe (191:57)

Our lawyers, our initial name was Athena and our lawyers were like you can't do that. There's Gabe, there's probably 1,000 products called Athena. So John, my co founder and I spent months trying to come up with a name and you know, at some point we're just looking up old Latin words and Rogo means I ask in Latin and so we thought that was a good one.

Will (192:16)

I love that.

Jordy (192:16)

That's great.

Will (192:17)

Well, thanks so much for coming on.

Jordy (192:19)

Yeah, great, great to finally meet and congrats to the whole team.

Will (192:22)

Miles, congratulations. Have a great rest of your day.

Gabe (192:23)

Thanks guys.

Will (192:24)

We'll see you soon. Goodbye. And our last guest of the lightning round, Sierra Peterson from Voyager Ventures Energy time, the Restream waiting room. Let's bring up how are you doing?

Sierra (192:39)

Hey guys, delighted to be here. How are you?

Will (192:41)

We're great.

Jordy (192:42)

Great to have you first time on the show. Would love introduction on yourself and, and the firm and then we can get into the news.

Sierra (192:50)

You bet. So I'm Sierra Peterson. I'm one of the two founders of Voyager Ventures. We are an early stage venture capital firm investing in the foundational technologies that power civilization. So this is energy, transportation, materials production, advanced compute, physical AI. These are the biggest markets in the world and the ones that are foundational to ongoing growth in the long term and competitive advantage in the near term term. I have been working in energy for my entire career. Got my start 21 years ago at the international energy.

Will (193:21)

Overnight success.

Sierra (193:23)

Exactly. Long time coming. And I mean that's really the story of our backgrounds. Myself and my co founder at Voyager, Sarah, I've been working in energy industrial modernization and climate stabilization now for decades. Decades between us we've built five climate tech and energy companies. We've been active in policymaking at the International Energy Agency as I mentioned and also in the Obama office of energy and climate change back when we had one. Yeah, exactly. We built companies that responsible for financing more than $3 billion worth of distributed energy assets. So a lot of solar. We've been active in the research programs at Harvard and mit, advancing everything from energy market research, which was my graduate focus and Sarah's at MIT in industrial biotech. And we've been investing now for 10 years plus actually got started as an angel investor in 2015 in energy tech. Those companies did well. And so we teamed up to Launch Voyager in 2021 and raised a $100 million debut fund. We've recently.

Jordy (194:34)

John's going for the gong.

Will (194:35)

How much did you raise recently?

Sierra (194:36)

Hey, no, that's not the big, the big news.

Mark Gurman (194:38)

We got a bigger number.

Sierra (194:40)

A 275 fund. Two.

Will (194:42)

So.

Jordy (194:46)

We were waiting for that. Very cool. I want to talk about energy because I feel like your timing here is great. I feel like people are spending way more, you know. You know, it's gone mainstream both at the national level and politics.

Will (195:04)

Just in the last few weeks we've had Scott Nolan on to talk about, you know, nuclear fuel production and then a separate company that turns that actually into fuel pellets, Triso Fuel. And like there's a company in every part of the stack. Are there any particular subcategories that you're tracking that you're particularly interested in in. And then I want to talk about the financing of all this as well. But what do you think is the most breakout success in energy these days?

Sierra (195:32)

Oh yeah, I mean, we're energy maximalists. I have been working in energy for my entire career. And when you think about what's truly foundational to powering civilization, it's energy that is the foundation of all of it. And so it's actually a really exciting time to be investing given advances, particularly in electrification. I mean, we're seeing the cost of solar drop so fast you have to look at it on a log scale. It's amazing. And what that means in terms of, you know, distribution of energy at a worldwide scale is incredible. And for creating a truly global and resilient energy system that enables near term stability for users of electricity and long term prosperity, like global scale, that's like this. This is a technology that will power the next era of progress and beyond. So electricity, massive advances on electrification. Massive.

Will (196:28)

Right now, are you optimistic about American solar? It feels like the. In terms of solar panel construction and manufacturing, China's doing so well that it's been really hard to get a foothold. We've talked to some teams that have, you know, taken Chinese built assets and T1 Energy. T1 Energy. That interesting. But I haven't seen as much as much excitement from the startup world around really scaling solar. But then you have huge voices like Elon is a solar maxi. There's lots of people that are very just beating the drum on the fundamental physics of the sun is so much energy. We're going to capture it at some point. So it feels inevitable, but it doesn't feel feel like there's as much of a boom or narrative being driven. But what are you seeing?

Sierra (197:16)

Oh, it's totally inevitable. You can't argue with the numbers. I mean 90% of installed energy generation for the last year that we have record is 2024 is renewables. That is at a global scale. That is certainly true in the United States as well. I think it's just under 90%. And I mean that's regardless of political whim, that's regardless of your overall organizing policy approach.

Jordy (197:39)

Approach.

Sierra (197:40)

That's just simply because solar is better, it's cheaper, it's better performing. It enables true distribution of electricity like we've never seen before. And coupled with advances in batteries, that's the unlock. You can really create a transactive energy system which we've never seen before. And we really will be fundamental to powering growth for decades ahead. So huge, yeah, huge believer in solar's potential now and in combination with electrification, both of energy generation, also in end use applications. I mean electricity now is the most frequent way in which anybody around the world accesses power. That's exciting. It means that power is programmable and it enables a new era of machines to be made which is extraordinary in terms of extending human capabilities into ways that we've now never had before. When you couple that with automation and artificial intelligence, like we're just seeing the foundations of so much innovation right now to really one boost systemic stability in a rising vulnerability and volatility market. We have frame trade relationships, geopolitical tensions, physical risks that are intensive. Climate change. And when you can control your inputs in terms of electricity, in terms of your means of production and you can take advantage of advances in advanced manufacturing to create better products, you can really control your own destiny. That's exciting.

Will (199:12)

Yeah. How are you thinking about financing hard tech companies, energy companies, these like capital intensive companies? At the earlier stage, it feels like more and more founders are going to need to get familiar with venture debt. It's been sort of a cautionary tale from the software startup era. Oh, venture debt, that's what will burn you, that's what will really put you in danger if you misplan and then you get over your skis. But how do you think about the role of venture debt or debt instruments or more complicated financing schemes for some of these companies?

Sierra (199:47)

Yeah, it's a good question.

Will (199:48)

I mean I think one of the.

Sierra (199:49)

Things that we're quite excited about is the sophistication of the financing instruments that are available to early stage startups. I mean it used to be that you had to burn super high cost of capital venture private equity on assets and that didn't make sense for anybody. You know, now we're seeing really tailored and interested bespoke non dilutive financing, all types. And I think it's a recognition of the scale of these markets and the durability that they have in as long lived and reliable yield. I think we're also seeing though and this is something that's been a recent development ongoing sovereign interests and recognition in these technologies as being tools of the national interest. 44% of our own portfolio is either in partnership or in active conversations to sign a deal with the US government. And that's extraordinary. I mean, you know, you see in QTA last year I think became one of our second most frequent co investor.

Will (200:52)

And it used to be completely unthinkable. It was like you never go to the government, they'll never buy anything. Like Palantir was this weird company that was like off in the dark just doing one deal and they were the only ones. And then, and sort of did it again. And then all of a sudden it was like every company has some sort of deal with the government.

Sierra (201:08)

Really changed everything because when you think about what are the inputs and tools of sovereign advantage, of competitive advantage, it's controlling your destiny in terms of energy, controlling your destiny in terms of supply chains for inputs to manufacturing, industrial capacity and then increasingly compute capacity. It's a national asset and all of that hyperscaler stack that all relies on electricity.

Will (201:33)

Yeah.

Jordy (201:34)

What about like what are the prospects for making bringing the solar supply chain to the United States? We have like earlier we mentioned T1 energy which was kind of a weird setup in the way that it was created and now operated by a new company. But can we. I think one of the reasons that people that maybe Americans and the tech industry isn't so excited about about solar at this moment or at least broadly is that we're not making the panels here. It doesn't feel like something that is that we really own.

Sierra (202:11)

Yeah, I mean I think I Don't know that we're not excited about solar. When you look at the solar deployment.

Jordy (202:17)

Well, I'm just saying like the attention is almost entirely on nuclear.

Will (202:23)

It seems like that now.

Jordy (202:24)

I'm just saying from when you would like a word. But yeah, sure, but think about, I would just say the number of entrepreneurs that have come on the show this year that are talking about nuclear. The nuclear deals are and I'm not saying it's like warranted, but I'm just saying like nuclear is certainly.

Will (202:43)

Well, it feels like at least to me and you can give your feedback on this take, but it feels like nuclear was potentially economically viable. The, the technology worked but there was a regulatory blocker in place that made it very, very difficult to actually just stand up the technology. With solar, that regulatory blocker doesn't exist. It's more of a market force of China manufactures them really, really cheaply. And it's the DJI drone question versus GoPro. We just need a ton of people, a ton of manufacturing capacity, a ton of CNC machines. We need like a massive facility and that's more of a capital formation. And then are you willing to go up against the Chinese manufacturing engine that's so critical.

Jordy (203:31)

My point is just that energy is critical.

Will (203:34)

Yes.

Jordy (203:34)

Solar energy, it still feels blocked, pretty big part of it. So I would imagine we want to make as many of these as we can in the U.S. yeah, yeah. So I was curious like. Yeah, yeah, please update on the, on the effort there. I know you've invested.

Will (203:46)

Yeah.

Jordy (203:47)

In it and curious.

Sierra (203:49)

Yeah, I mean I think we're seeing a real re examination of global supply chains for critical aspects of ongoing sovereign advantage and industrial competitiveness. Solar being, you know, one critical minerals, another access to novel battery technologies. These are all aspects of an overall industrial policy that's increasingly favoring domestic production and control of energy producing assets and manufacturing inputs. I think, you know, to your earlier point, like any technology is going to need to clear the global clearing price and the massive reduction in cost that's been extraordinary for solar production, for panel production, it's. You can't get much cheaper. There's kind of nowhere to go. That's exciting. I mean think about that as an input to other industrial processes. That's, I mean it's truly extraordinary opportunity to have abundant energy that doesn't rely on, you know, fossil fuel supply chains that's truly distributed and can be programmable. I mean you couple it with energy storage, I mean you just have a whole new paradigm in abundance for electricity.

Will (205:06)

Be exciting very Exciting.

Jordy (205:07)

Exciting.

Will (205:07)

Yeah.

Jordy (205:08)

What you guys Sec Stage, Agnostic, Pre seed?

Sierra (205:15)

No, we're early stage. Yep. Yeah. So we raised 275 million. It's more seed. Series A series 275 million for seed and Series A. We went out to market with a 250 target. We were oversubscribed on that. I had a 91st close. There was a lot of.

Miles (205:34)

Yeah.

Will (205:34)

Thanks, guys.

Jordy (205:35)

Amazing.

Will (205:36)

Well, congratulations.

Jordy (205:37)

Well excited. I'm sure a bunch of your companies will be on and congrats to the whole team.

Will (205:42)

Yeah. Good to meet you.

Sierra (205:43)

Likewise.

Will (205:44)

Welcome to.

Sierra (205:45)

Happy to talk energy.

Will (205:45)

Thanks. Bye.

Jordy (205:47)

Talk soon. Cheers.

Will (205:49)

Did the Klein team just join Codex OpenAI? Jason Liu asked the question.

Jordy (205:56)

Yeah.

Tyler (205:57)

So I think a lot of the team members did. Pasha, remember there was a whole controversy about, you know, the smell. Imagine the smell.

Will (206:03)

Oh, yeah. Oh, he was declined.

Jordy (206:05)

Yeah. Yeah.

Tyler (206:06)

So he moved over. I think a number of the. Of the, like, lead engineers.

Will (206:10)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Will Brown says it's a very rare reverse wind surf and tradies said.

Jordy (206:16)

Well, they certainly didn't decline.

Will (206:18)

Decline the ask. Yeah. Interesting to see these. The, you know, the really headline grabbing. The really headline grabbing AI trade war narrative has sort of calmed down. But everyone's hiring, everyone's poaching, everyone's trying to build their teams.

Jordy (206:37)

It's a war working through.

Will (206:39)

Anyway, there are.

Jordy (206:42)

There's a post here. Somebody is calling out Augustus Dirico. They said he has no couscous.

Will (206:51)

Greed.

Aiden (206:52)

Greed.

Will (206:54)

To be fair, I've never seen the man eat couscous. He might not have any couscous. I think they were trying to say conscience. But yes, Augustus has stumbled into such a funny life. I'm really. He's. Yeah, he's. He's.

Jordy (207:11)

He's grinding through it picked something more controversial than pretty much anything else.

Will (207:18)

Yeah. But he's seemingly more.

Jordy (207:20)

It's somehow more controversial than defense.

Will (207:24)

Yeah. Yeah. It's just odd. It just triggers all sorts of people. I wonder. I feel like the fact that he's able to go on podcasts and communicate so clearly. He's one of The Joe Rogan CEOs in your parlance, that's allowed him to get through it. It feels like if he were on his back foot and not able to just say, hey, I'll talk to anyone for an hour. I will just talk, talk, talk. That, that if there was a negative news cycle about him, it would be a much harder situation. But I don't know.

Jordy (207:52)

Last post for the day. Emily Sundberg went mega viral. 62,000 likes.

Will (207:59)

I did not see the likes on this, I didn't realize how big it was.

Jordy (208:02)

It says the logo for Sydney Sweeney's lingerie line looks like it's for a salad dressing company that launched in 2019. This is for Siren.

Will (208:11)

Oh, it's Siren.

Jordy (208:12)

Siren.

Will (208:13)

That's wild.

Jordy (208:13)

And it does give off a little bit of Sweet Green. Sweetgreen launched way before 2019.

Will (208:20)

Wait, wait, so. Oh, oh, wait, wait. Is that the company that she's referring to? What is she actually referring to? Because I saw Dirt quote tweeted it, and that's a media and technology company with a similar logo. And Dirt just says, hey, and got 66,000 likes as well. And I'm Emily says bro, but, oh, I guess it's sweetgreen that she's actually referring to salad dressing company. Isn't sweetgreen like a salad company?

Jordy (208:48)

Yeah, she's just posting. Alex Conrad says someone blended Kava and Graza branding in ChatGPT does have a little Graza in there, but I think this company will do very well. I think Sydney's like one of the most commercial people in Hollywood, right? She's like, just leaning in. She's got a somewhat short moment in time to create a lot of value and certainly a lot of the brand activations that she's done have broken through. So I'm bullish. I'm bullish.

Will (209:22)

If you go back to the claudebot thing, this Siren clearly exists in a very different part of the economy as sweetgreen. Like, sweet green. I think of as like, you walk down the street, you see it maybe if they start opening a ton of retail stores. But like, in terms of. Are you flashbanging me? Why are you flashbanging me?

Jordy (209:40)

Because the chat earlier was going crazy. They were trying to throw me off. It was insane. I was barely hanging on. It was brutal.

Will (209:48)

Everyone. It was brutal. Everyone loves the flashbang. Fun fact, Sydney Sweeney is launching her lingerie brand off on, you guessed it, Shopify.

Jordy (209:58)

Harley. That's right.

Will (209:59)

As the story. Fantastic news. Well, the last thing before you plant the bomb, we have a new ad read for Railway. I already did it. I'm going to do another one. Railway Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

Jordy (210:22)

Well said, John. We'll close it out. Nathan is highlighting Bloomberg article. The title of the article, Nvidia lacks clear successor for superstar CEO who built company. And Nathan, of course says man is barely getting started. I agree. Who's who's asking who's asking this question.

Will (210:45)

Has driven the stock 10X and it's the biggest company the world and they haven't. Like, they have massive margins of cash flow. Like, there's been no mistakes. Like, literally like nothing. 62 years old. He's got another 30. He's got another 30. He's going to be riding Nvidia straight into the singularity. And we will be, too, here on tvpn.

Jordy (211:04)

Last post. Last post. Okay, one more post. Eric Sufert says Pinterest dropped nearly 10% yesterday on news that the company is cutting roughly 15% of its workforce to focus on AI. Eric, I believe, is coming on the show tomorrow.

Will (211:20)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jordy (211:21)

I really like talking with him about all things.

Will (211:25)

We're going to dive into this.

Jordy (211:26)

We'll dive into platforms, chatgpt, ads.

Will (211:30)

Pretty remarkable. I wonder where Pinterest will land. There's been rumors or, you know, pitches for an acquisition. Leave us five stars on Apple, podcasts and Spotify.

Jordy (211:38)

We love you.

Will (211:38)

We'll see you tomorrow. TPPA.com for the newsletter. Nice work, brothers.

Mark Gurman (211:44)

I'll see you on the next one.