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- [00:00]
Jordy
You're watching TVPN.
- [00:02]
Ben
Today is Thursday, December 11, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome, the Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Christmas is around the corner. That's why you're here. You want an update on Christmas 14, two weeks from today. Presents under the Christmas tree.
- [00:24]
Jordy
Ramp. Under the Christmas tree.
- [00:25]
Ben
Ramp.com under the Christmas tree. Time is money save. Both easy to use corporate cards, bill, pay, counting and a whole lot more all in one place. Also, SpaceX IPO under the Christmas tree. 1.5 trillion for the big man. For Elon Musk, he's going to raise $30 billion, something like that. That's an incredibly small amount of dilution. If he actually goes out at 1.5 trillion. Should be interesting. I thought he hated running a public company.
- [00:54]
Jordy
Just 1.5.
- [00:55]
Ben
Just 1.5. Just one point five trillion. He said the biggest number. Because you know that there was that whole like leak, I think it was in Reuters. OpenAI going out at 1 trillion. You got to go a little bit higher. What's just a little bit higher? He should have done it. You should have. 1.1. I'm going to IPO 1.1 trillion. Really stick it to Sam. But he didn't. He. He says he's going out at 1.5.
- [01:15]
Jordy
Got to work some room for the, for the first day pump.
- [01:17]
Ben
Yes.
- [01:17]
Dylan Byers
Right.
- [01:18]
Ben
Get it up to two, get it up to three. Yeah, but I mean in terms of companies that should benefit from the space economy, like, is this not the Nvidia of space? Like, what, what other company is there? It's the space company. It's space X. But 30 billion coming in. Company was doing great. Launch product is fantastic. The rockets go up, they come down.
- [01:42]
Jordy
They're putting sonic booms over Montecito, apparently.
- [01:46]
Ben
But I think the actual launch market for anything but satellites, but for anything but data centers has just been a little small. And so Starlink has been the big unlock, of course, for SpaceX. Massive market there, putting the screws to Verizon AT&T and the other telcos. The other telcos, of course, have been noodling on working with a rival, putting up smaller satellites in a sparser constellation with more bandwidth. Per.
- [02:14]
Jordy
Somebody was talking earlier that to get the same amount of compute as a 1 gigawatt data center, you would need 10,000 satellites.
- [02:22]
Ben
That's not that many, though. Starlink has over 10,000 up there already, I believe.
- [02:27]
Jordy
Sure.
- [02:27]
Ben
So that's actually not crazy. That seems like completely. That's actually Extremely bullish.
- [02:33]
Jordy
Well, there is a pathway to doing it with far fewer, which would just be like ultra, ultra long.
- [02:40]
Ben
I don't think they want to do big. I think the whole thing is Constellation. That was the beauty of Starlink was that you could go up there because it gave them the ability to have all this residual capability, as Gwynne Shotwell puts it, which is like if the CIA shows up and they want to put a spy satellite on there, or some company shows up and says like, hey, we want to put something really serious in space, but we only need 60% of the fairing, or we only need 40% of the fairing, or we only need 80% of the fairing, it's like, okay, great, that's. That will fill the rest of the space with two starlinks, five starlinks, 20 starlinks.
- [03:16]
Jordy
Well, we have the founder of K2 Space coming on the show later. Raised a quarter of a billion dollars at a $3 billion valuation from T. Rowe Price, Fantastic Head of Sophia, Altimeter Lightspeed and some others. So we will talk more about that then.
- [03:34]
Ben
And we will also talk about fall generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. So in terms of the SpaceX thing, I mean we keep going back and forth on this. Is it just a pump? Is it just a new narrative? Is it a pivot to AI? I don't really care. I think it all comes down to this just idea of like Elon math. The Elon math is always crazy. He's always putting up sort of wild predictions that then may or may not come true. A lot of them are way off. But at least he's telling a story that's like optimistic about the future. And at least it feels like that Trey Stevens good quest thing is like get to Mars is good. If he misses it by five years, at least he's still the first. He's the only person that cares about it, which is great. I went through, I tried to pull in true like hit piece fashion. I pulled up all the different times he's made a prediction and then not landed it or not delivered on time. And it's crazy. The guy loves to rip predictions. He said he was gonna put early SpaceX concept. When they started SpaceX was to put a small greenhouse with plants on Mars as a PR demo before they would even start the company. That of course did not happen before starting the company. Yeah, this was like the original thesis was like he went to some Elon went to some like space kind of space nerd meetup and was like, we need to put a plant, a physical plant with a webcam on it on Mars. And if we land that there and we prove that life can live on Mars, we bring life to Mars. It will inspire everyone and marshal all the resources and all the capital and all the excitement to actually go put boots on the ground. Which also he predicted. He predicted humans on Mars by 2024. Of course, hasn't happened that we know of. It's possible. Snuck one up there. They keep saying that the starship will happen. They keep saying the starships blow up, but maybe one of them didn't. Maybe one of them sneaky, sneaky went off and put a person on Mars.
- [05:42]
Jordy
Yeah, it's the shell of the real ship.
- [05:44]
Ben
I like the inverse, the inverse conspiracy theory, you know, like, oh yeah, we never went to Mars or we never went to the moon. No, the inverse conspiracy theory. We're going all the time, secretly. But you're not cool enough to get in on it. You don't have a ticket. Everyone else does. Except for you. Because I was just on the moon yesterday and I'm not telling you about it. First crude Mars landing as early as 2029. Little too early to say, but that one feels aggressive. We're just four years out. You got to put a whole crew down there. He also said tourist trips were going to be happening around the moon by 2018. Didn't hit that. Yeah, self sustaining city on Mars of 1 million people. 2050 feels a little early, but I.
- [06:27]
Jordy
Don'T know, 2050, anytime you're getting more than a couple of decades, couple decades, anything's possible.
- [06:32]
Ben
I agree, I agree. But then of course there's a bunch that he succeeded in. He said that he was going to deliver reusable orbital rockets. He did it.
- [06:39]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [06:40]
Ben
And what else matters? At least you know, you, you know. He's also predicted radio fully reusable starship with rapid turnaround. It's a little too soon to tell. He's behind some of the early dates. But in general that project seems like it's real, it's gonna happen. It's taken a little bit time. He has a bunch of other funny ones. But it is interesting how the SpaceX narrative has shifted from first we're going to Mars, then there was the whole. Do you remember SpaceX? Point to point. Are you familiar with that? No. So there was a pitch for a.
- [07:12]
Jordy
While, like a commercial. Is this like, this is a replacement for an airliner? You'll Just go up and then come down.
- [07:17]
Ben
Exactly, exactly. So it was like New York to Tokyo in like 30 minutes.
- [07:22]
Jordy
Because that would go so hard.
- [07:24]
Ben
Insane, right? Insane. So the idea was like you're in.
- [07:28]
Jordy
Imagine, imagine being able to commute to Tokyo for some obscure job.
- [07:33]
Ben
It'd be amazing. It would actually be remarkable. And there's a whole bunch of economic research that shows that when you increase transportation, reduce transportation times, that you really do get an economic boom. That because people can do business in areas where they couldn't before even just reducing the time from San Francisco to la, from a six hour drive to a one hour flight, all of a sudden people can go up and do business, come back the same day. They just get there more often. I had a hot take for a while that if I was the President, I would recommission the SR71 Blackbird, which of course goes, I think Mach 3. So you can actually get from DC to London in like two hours because it's supersonic jet. And so imagine that.
- [08:15]
Jordy
Imagine the, the presidential SR71 would go also very remarkably hard.
- [08:21]
Ben
Right? And imagine the aura of, you know, something happens in an. I remember I thought of this because the Queen had just passed away very sadly and of course the President was planning on visiting the Queen, paying respects to all the people of Great Britain. But imagine if, you know, the news breaks and it's like, this is important. I'll be there in two hours and I'm there on the ground like same day the news breaks. Not oh, we got to charter the 747 and bring the whole crew and land and I'll see you in two days. And it'll be a whole thing.
- [08:54]
Jordy
It's like, it's like jumping in the car.
- [08:55]
Ben
Yep, yep. Or imagine these trade deals, these trade deals, oh, the H2 hundreds are going to China or something's happening in Taiwan. Hey, Xi Jinping.
- [09:03]
Jordy
So what happened? See you with the point to point program. Has there been any.
- [09:06]
Ben
Oh, well, it's all just predicated. I mean, so the space, the starships are still blowing up, so no one wants to get on those. But in theory, if starship.
- [09:14]
Jordy
But there was nothing that they never had any comms. It was like, we're scrapping this.
- [09:18]
Ben
No, no, no, no, no, no, not at all, not at all. It was just like an interesting, it was an interesting like back of the envelope, like bull case for this for like the business basically just saying like, okay, yes, starship is going to be really good at getting to the moon, getting to Mars, getting to, getting a Bunch of Starlink satellites in orbit, right? It's like a good. It's a good business. But Elon is always the king of opening up new markets and just kind of saying like, well, what if, what if you was also replacing commercial air travel? And people are like, wait, that's a huge, huge market if you can do that. And of course, if you could make it more economical. Who would ever pay for a ticket on a 747 when you could ride a rocket and get there literally 90% faster? It's crazy the amount of time that you would save. Now you have to go from Manhattan on a boat out to a launch pad. You can't take off from jfk. There's a whole bunch of wrinkles. And that's why this is all practically probably like 20 years in the future. But it was one of those famous examples of an Elon project where if it doesn't violate the laws of physics, it eventually will happen. And that's a lot of what's happening with the data centers in space. We need to inference things. We need to inference things like cognition and the team, because they are the team behind the AI software engineer. Devin. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Right now, Devin's inferenced on Earth. Who knows, maybe in the future it's inferenced in space. I think that the space data center thing, people are still having the debate on, like, is it possible? It's like, obviously it's possible. The question is, is over under a gigawatt by 2027, which is when the other big clusters come online, will it be competitive in the short term, in the near term? And then, and then on the flip side, like, you know, if you're a bear, are you saying that it's not going to happen in 20 years? And then, I mean, the big question is there's one more Elon gambit that he could run with. One more like, oh, you wanted a fifth act.
- [11:22]
Jordy
Just one.
- [11:23]
Ben
I mean, there's tons, but there's one that's really wild. Which would be if he straight up said, we're building the Dyson sphere, like we are going to launch. Tyler's nodding, he's pumped, he's popped.
- [11:34]
Jordy
Well, is he the obvious? Isn't he like the only real candidate?
- [11:39]
Ben
Well, he's the only candidate for everything in space because he has the leading space company by like, it's two orders of magnitude.
- [11:45]
Tyler
I think someone at Anthropic has said that the Dyson sphere is in the, in the plans of Anthropic of Anthropic.
- [11:53]
Ben
They weren't trolling.
- [11:54]
Tyler
I mean, I, I don't know.
- [11:56]
Ben
They're gonna need to acquire a space company if they want to do that, because how do you get the. Isn't the Dyson Sphere just a bunch of solar panels around the sun, directly capturing 100% of the energy that's put off by the sun?
- [12:08]
Tyler
Yeah, well, I don't think it has to fully. Like, it's not like there can't be any light coming out, it's just like strips of.
- [12:14]
Ben
Oh, I thought Kardashev 1 is you're capturing 100% of the energy that's hitting your planet. Kardashev 2 is you're capturing 100% of THE energy that is given off by your star.
- [12:27]
Jordy
Yeah, actually.
- [12:28]
Ben
So I think maybe what I'm talking.
- [12:29]
Tyler
About is there's a different term.
- [12:30]
Ben
Maybe they're do. Maybe there are two different things. Maybe Dyson Sphere could just be, okay, you're only capturing 50% or 10% and then Kardashev2 is you're capturing 100% of the energy coming off your sun.
- [12:41]
Jordy
Tyler, the chat wants to know, did we ever find out if this kid, I'm assuming they're talking about you, is related to Elon?
- [12:49]
Ben
Why would he be related to Elon?
- [12:50]
Jordy
I mean, he's got a lot of sons. He's got a lot of sons.
- [12:52]
Ben
Oh, okay. Yeah, could be anyone, maybe.
- [12:55]
Jordy
Should we read through this? So, Eric Berger over at Ars Technical.
- [13:00]
Ben
You should also read through the daily newsletter, tech analysis and news daily from tvpn. We're doing ad reads for our own newsletter now. Get our daily op ed, top headlines and best posts from the timeline. Every. I can't read the rest of this. Tyler, you gotta.
- [13:16]
Jordy
Every day. Tbpn.com tbpn.com Go subscribe.
- [13:19]
Karan
Thank you.
- [13:20]
Jordy
So Eric Berger is writing a piece called after years of resisting it, SpaceX now plans to go public. Why? And Elon actually replied to Eric and said, as usual, Eric is accurate. So I thought it was worth reading through this.
- [13:34]
Ben
Yeah.
- [13:35]
Jordy
Eric says SpaceX is planning to raise tens of billions of dollars through an initial public offering next year. Multiple outlets have reported and ours can confirm this represents a major change in thinking from the world's leading space company and its founder, Elon Musk. Wall Street Journal and the information first reported about a possible IPO last Friday and Bloomberg followed that up on Tuesday evening with a report suggesting a $1.5 trillion target valuation. This is an enormous amount of funding. The largest IPO in history incurred in 2019 when the state owned Saudi Arabian oil company began began publicly trading as aramco and raised 29 billion in terms of revenue. Aramco is a top five company in the world. Now SpaceX is poised to potentially match or exceed this value. That SpaceX would be attractive to public investors is not a surprise. It's the world's dominant space company and launch space based communications and much more. For investors seeking unlimited growth, space is the final frontier. But why would Musk take SpaceX public now at a time when the company's revenues are surging thanks to the growth of the Starlink Internet constellation? The decision is surprising because Musk has for so long resisted going public with SpaceX. He has not enjoyed the public scrutiny of Tesla and feared that shareholders desires for financial return were not consistent with his ultimate goal of settling Mars. Next section is called Data Centers. R spoke with multiple people familiar with Musk and is thinking to understand why he would want to take SpaceX public. A significant shift in recent years has been the rise of AI which Musk has been involved in since 2015 when he co founded OpenAI. He later had a falling out with his co founders and started his own company Xai in 2023. At Tesla he's been pushing smart driving technology forward and more recently focused on robotics. Musk sees the convergence of these technologies in the near future which he believes will profoundly change civilization. Raising large amounts of money in the next 18 months would allow Musk to have significant capital to deploy at SpaceX as he influences and partakes in this convergence of technology. How can SpaceX play in space in the near term? The company plans to develop a modified version of the Star like satellite to serve as a foundation for building data centers in space. There you go. John Musk said as much on X in late October. SpaceX will be doing this, but using a next generation Starlink satellite manufactured on Earth is just the beginning of this vision. The level beyond that is constructing satellite factories on the moon and using a mass driver electromagnetic railgun to accelerate explain to us to accelerate AI satellites to lunar escape velocity without the need for rockets, musk said last weekend on X that scales to 100 terawatts a year of AI and enables non trivial progress towards becoming a Kardashev2 civilization. Based on some projected analysis, SpaceX is expected to have in the neighborhood of 22 to 24 billion in revenue next year.
- [16:27]
Ben
65 times revenue is what you'd be paying if SpaceX goes out at 1.5 trillion for reference, 65 for 65x revenue for SpaceX. Nvidia is at 24x revenue to market cap, market cap to price to sales. So like twice more, twice as expensive as Nvidia but also probably even wider lead to the rest of the industry, newer industry. I don't know about the margins, but potentially higher margins and again mass articles.
- [17:04]
Jordy
Talking about space being more vertically integrated. Anyways that is a lot of money. It's on par with NASA's annual budget. And SpaceX can deploy its capital far far more efficiently than the government can. So the company will be able to accomplish a lot. But with a large infus fusion of cash, SpaceX will be able to go much faster. This is the thing that I'm not certain on. Has SpaceX been capital constrained or are they capability constrained? It hasn't been clear to me clearly there's been infinite demand for SpaceX equity for a very long time. So much so that people are investing in triple layered SPVs just to get and enduring massive fees just to get a taste. So yeah, the question is, does this massive capital infusion actually accelerate the business that much or is it just the right moment in time for a number of reasons.
- [18:06]
Ben
Well, you know that SpaceX, whenever they launch, they stream their launches. They gotta be on restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream go.
- [18:16]
Jordy
To restream.com Abhi Tripathy, a longtime SpaceX employee who is now Director of Mission Operations at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory, believes that once Musk realized Starlink satellites could be architected into a distributed network of data centers, the writing was on the wall. That is the moment an IPO suddenly came into play after being unlikely for so long. If you have followed Elon's tactics, you know that once he commits to something, he leans fully into it. Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets that work quicker than your competition. A large war chest resulting from an IPO will greatly help his cause and disadvantage all others.
- [18:56]
Ben
Yeah, what's interesting is so I totally get that SpaceX was never crazy crazy capital constrained. Even though like building a massive rocket that feels like super expensive feels so expensive. But at the same time they've just, they've just been able to raise the money and it just hasn't been a problem. And of course the like SpaceX as a business generates a lot of revenue. Like some of the contracts with the government are in the billions. And then Starlink is just throwing off it's telecom. So it's just throwing off tons and tons of cash. I mean it's incredibly expensive to get the Constellation up there, but you do have cash flow from it and it's effectively, you know, like I'm, I've been subscribed to Starlink for like a year or two. I never use it. I'm basically 100% margin for them.
- [19:45]
Karan
Right?
- [19:45]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [19:46]
Ben
And I use it just as like a backup in case the Internet goes down. I have it.
- [19:49]
Jordy
Yeah. And you just look at, you look at the growth opportunity and effectively telecom you have. T Mobile is a $217 billion business that is threatened by Starlink. AT&T is $172 billion business and Verizon is $170 billion business.
- [20:04]
Ben
But I think the reason you need 30 billion, like sort of paradoxically or counterintuitively might not be to build more rockets. It might be to actually just buy the GPUs because like in theory, if you're putting a GPU in space Like Elon, SpaceX doesn't make those GPUs. They don't just pull them out of thin air. They got to buy them from somewhere. And if they're buying them from Nvidia, those are expensive and you got to buy a lot of them. And to make a dent in like let's assume all the physics works, let's assume that the launch costs are cheap. All the math works out well. If you're putting a gigawatt of compute in space, you probably have like a billion dollars of hard cost just on the chips or something like that. I don't know the exact number, but you can imagine that you raised 30 billion. The business is humming, but you still have to outlay a ton just for the GPUs. And so yeah, you do have a new, a new consumption for cash. Anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing. For those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing was trusted by millions. Did you want to.
- [21:09]
Jordy
Do you think that XAI gets rolled into SpaceX or Tesla?
- [21:13]
Ben
That's the hard part. I thought it was going to be Tesla for sure because Tesla has the lineage. They have their own chip, they have massive data centers to train AI models for full self driving. It felt like such a logical place for XAI to land. But now maybe it lands at SpaceX, I don't know.
- [21:33]
Jordy
Yeah, if SpaceX becomes the data centers and space company and they're effectively like.
- [21:40]
Ben
Reselling also, I mean it feels like there's some sort of arcane truth about consolidation where it might be less of a headache than people think to have different entities. Like, if you think about, I mean, certainly like Stargate is a separate entity from.
- [22:03]
Jordy
I'm not even thinking about it as a headache. It's just more so like XAI needs to get quite a lot more traction, I think, in enterprise and consumer.
- [22:14]
Ben
Yeah.
- [22:15]
Jordy
Yeah. Effectively somewhere needs to become like the dominant. Dominant lab in at least one domain. Otherwise I think it will just make sense to roll into one of these other.
- [22:26]
Ben
Yeah. Well, we should read through some of the history about Founders Funds investment in Space X because it might be one of the greatest. It might be. It might become the greatest venture capital investment of all time. It certainly feels like it's in the running. This from Nico Wittenborn says founders fund investing 20 million out of a 20 out of a $220 million fund two, which also invested in Palantir and Spotify early is just nasty. And Dan Primax has flashback to chatting with Founders Fund Luke Nose. Like when he led the first investment in SpaceX from an old Peweek Wire newsletter in 2008.
- [23:04]
Jordy
I can't believe Peweek is.
- [23:06]
Ben
I read that newsletter back not in 2008, but like back then. Wow. Primac's been in the game for a long time. So says. I spent some time on the phone earlier this week with Luke Nosek of.
- [23:16]
Jordy
The Founders Fund, which used to be they had the. They dropped it.
- [23:20]
Ben
And then there's also an apostrophe here which I think has been lost at some point. I don't know. To discuss his firm's $20 million investment in private space launch services provider SpaceX. The company is run by Elon Musk, who co founded PayPal along the founders Fund Partners. A few questions and answers, Dan. Founders Fund usually invests no more than a few million dollars in a company. Why invest 20 million when your fund is only 220 million? Luke, we obviously have internal caps that we follow. What we do is look at how much a company needs and invest that much. For example, we only invested $500,000 in Facebook because that's how much it needed. At the time, a lot of firms were offering more. Dan says most of the companies you back have some sort of Internet angle, which makes sense given your PayPal background. But what do you know about rocket science? Oh, there's no Internet angle in SpaceX. No one predicted the Internet angle. But it is remarkable that a bunch of Internet guys fund a rocket company and then it just becomes an Internet company and it's an is. And now It's a data center company and everything collapses down to the Internet. And it's the Joe Weisenthal take. AI will get every resource that it needs. The Internet needs. The Internet is the business model for everything. Doesn't matter. If you invest in a space company, eventually you're going to be an Internet business. And so Luke answering about the rocket science question, he says the most important aspect to us is the team. Remember the PayPal founders didn't have banking experience. Dan Elon has put over $100 million of his own money into this company. That is crazy that they'd already burned 100 mil. And then founders fund comes in with 20 and developed both the Kestrel and Merlin engines, which are the first new rocket engines developed in the US in a very long time. When we did due diligence, we wanted to speak with other investors of successful new rockets, but they were all dead. I love that. Yeah. So we have to. We're going to be the first here. Dan, your announcement of the funding just came days after SpaceX had yet another launch failure. Any worries? Luke says. Dan? Luke says no. There are obviously going to be some technical kinks like an exploding rocket, but they get amplified because rocket science is more binary than would be a technical kink with a website. Either gets into orbit or it doesn't. The team has some very smart people.
- [25:45]
Jordy
And they'll make anybody that ships just regular old SaaS should have a huge amount of sympathy for anyone in hard tech because launching any type of app and not having a single bug, even a single critical bug is tough, at least early days. And of course critical bug in aerospace is quite explosive. Anyways, I did want to pull up just the estimates. FF is estimated to own 10.4%. We can just keep it at 10. That means that this initial. And again they've invested in multiple rounds since then. Historically the greatest venture investment ever in my view was MASA's 20 million investment in Alibaba.
- [26:34]
Ben
That's true.
- [26:34]
Jordy
Turned it into 70 billion at the time of the IPO. Hard to. I wonder if we can figure out.
- [26:40]
Ben
How much FF owns about 10% of.
- [26:42]
Jordy
SpaceX, but I don't know how many. How many they've put in.
- [26:44]
Ben
Oh yeah, yeah. To maintain that stake they put.
- [26:46]
Jordy
So again, it's still like going to be a 150ish billion dollar position. Just the carry check alone will be nasty. As Nico said, delightful.
- [27:01]
Ben
Wow, you hit the gong for the old FF crew, my former boss.
- [27:05]
Jordy
Yeah, let's hit the gong. John's former boss.
- [27:11]
Ben
My Former boss.
- [27:12]
Jordy
How does he do it? How does he do it?
- [27:14]
Ben
Yeah, really quickly. Let me tell you about Profound and there's big news today from Profound, the company that helps brands show up more often and more accurately in AI platforms like ChatGPT. They've just announced their new workflows product which lets marketers automate jobs like research, reporting and content generation to drive even greater discoverability. Wherever people are searching, you can check out workflows and marketing that runs itself.
- [27:47]
Jordy
I was texting the CEO of Profound James last night and he was giving me an update on the business and he shared just like a clearly copy and pasted it like the new customers that they had signed. And I don't think we can share all of them yet, but it basically looked like every company in every company, every big company looked like they had them. They already are working with MongoDB, indeed. Mercury, DocuSign, RAMP, Zapier8Sleep, US Bank, Figma, SIKI, LG. So many of these different companies are choosing Profound and we feel lucky to be partnered with them. Here's a good post from just another pod guy. We could sprinkle this in before we move on to Oracle. Just thought this was an interesting point of view. Elon is not really a person. He is the human embodiment of network effects. When you've been operating at that level and breadth that he has been, you aren't really dealing with an individual. You're dealing with a deep bench of talent and capital with a comms guy who is addicted to Twitter. The same warnings about underestimating Trump, the person versus Trump's cabinet apply to Musk, but 100x and with far less irrationality injected and with a much higher caliber of people. Does he over promise, over hype, over hyperbolize? Of course. But I would guess the median IQ and depth of expertise of the bench around Musk is higher than that of any nation state. I thought this was obvious to most people.
- [29:15]
Ben
Yeah, it's just crazy how like yes, you just have to accept the over promising, the overhyping and stuff but recognize that it's like no one else is trying really. There's very, very few people.
- [29:28]
Jordy
Oh, they're trying.
- [29:30]
Ben
Yeah. But in terms of like the real, the real people making a run at a lot of these crazy ideas, like they're just. It's incredibly thin. It's incredibly thin. There aren't that many people. There are a lot of people that. But yeah, just don't take it seriously. But anyway, let's move over to one of Elon Musk's best friends.
- [29:48]
Jordy
I believe they're boys. They're boys.
- [29:51]
Ben
I think they're boys.
- [29:52]
Jordy
Elon can count on Larry for a billion or two.
- [29:56]
Ben
Over text so Larry Ellison is addressing, he's sitting on stage here in this Wall Street Journal article on the news that Oracle shares have tumbled as AI spending outruns returns. So Oracle is facing mounting anxiety from investors about how much it's spending to build out data centers for the artificial intelligence industry. The cloud computing company's revenue and operating income for the most recent financial quarters fell slightly short of analysts expectations, while the company raised its spending forecast, adding fuel to concerns over the timeline for turning the AI industry's ravenous demand for computing capacity into profits. Before we continue this, let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. So, I mean, this is all part of this. I think investors didn't realize that, like when you do one of these crazy AI deals, you have to go build the data center and then you have to wait and then you have to get power and you have to buy the chips and the chips have to ship, turn it on, rack the chips and then you gotta turn it on, then you gotta test it and then you can generate some tokens and hopefully sell things them all. Well, enterprise AI adoption might be stacking. We'll see. There was some crazy data out of Ramp today. AR Kharazi and the Economist over there.
- [31:15]
Jordy
At least some businesses might be saying, we've got enough AI, we like it, but we have enough.
- [31:20]
Ben
Apparently 55% of businesses are just like good without paying for AI. I mean, the paying thing is at least directly.
- [31:28]
Tyler
At least directly.
- [31:29]
Ben
The paying thing here is so and.
- [31:31]
Jordy
So the example is like a lot of businesses don't pay for cloud.
- [31:35]
Ben
Yes.
- [31:35]
Jordy
But they effectively pay for cloud because they pay companies that leverage cloud to deliver their products.
- [31:41]
Ben
But it's an interesting, it's an interesting chart to see where enterprise AI adoption is going. This is from Ara Kharazian over at Ramp. He says Ramp AI's Ramp's AI index shows AI adoption held flat at 45% of businesses in November, driven by slight declines in finance and technology sectors. By the model, OpenAI went down negative 1%, Anthropic up 0.8% and Google went up 0.7%. And so you can see that this chart in 2025, OpenAI had a big, big jump and then just has been flat for the last couple months. A little bit down. Anthropic's been on a much smoother. It seems like they didn't exist in 2023 basically. Or maybe they didn't have a paid plan that really appealed to businesses. Then 2024 you see some slight growth here. And then 2025amuch smoother like okay, uptick growing more, growing more, growing more. Kind of all keeps up with this. You know they've been 10xing every year like an Instagram hustle account. But OpenAI had a massive spike at the start of 2025 and then has been a little bit flatter. But it is interesting. I wonder how much you read into this. So ARA has a as a take here we should go through. Before we do, let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. So he says adoption is flat. Is the bubble popping? And he says I'm not calling it yet. The slowdown comes at the end of a rapid run up in adoption rates in 2025, which coincided with a significant step change in the capabilities of these models. Now the effect of the latest advancements has faded. If we want to see another run up in adoption, we would have to see at least one or two step changes. Technological gains. The models get even better, spurring faster adoption or implementation gains. Early adopters figure out the best use cases for AI and the rest of the market follows, driving incremental adoption. Both are likely the latter, even more so as adoption actually rose in several industries with relatively low adoption rates like retail, construction and manufacturing. Is Google is Google's AI good now? He says it's still underrated. Adoption of Google's Gemini rose 0.7%, its second highest monthly increase on record. And then he says what's going on with OpenAI? He says he cautions an overreaction to the latest results which show OpenAI adoption dropping while anthropic and Google adding new users and what that means for OpenAI's business. I've learned a lot covering how companies buy and use AI. Mainly this market changes rapidly in the typical rise and fall timelines of companies does not apply here. OpenAI enjoyed rapid adoption of growth in 2025 in many ways emerging as default spend category for businesses. And it's not unreasonable to think that rate would normalize as competitors find their fit in the market.
- [34:35]
Jordy
Also there's just a lot of Overall the interesting thing is every like it seems to be pretty obvious at this point that the model is just getting Smarter is not going to by default make adoption accelerate massively again. They need to become more useful. They need to be able to. Dwarkesh has talked about this. They need to be able to learn on the job basically in the way that a human does. And I think until we have that, there's some, the forward deployed engineer movement of having people out embedded in companies, trying to unlock the potential of the models. That's great, but I think the models actually just need to become generally more useful.
- [35:18]
Ben
Yeah, more useful. I don't know. Yeah, it's tough. I mean when I look at those, when I look at the number, like the headline number, it's 45% have adopted, have paid for AI chat apps. Basically. You know, he's tracking OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and XAI on there, a few others. And you flip that around and you're like 45% of businesses just don't pay for AI, don't use AI. And the question is like, are they just not using AI at all or are they just good with free? Because if you told me like 55% of companies are in sort of like a private equity scarcity, wartime mode where they're watching every dollar that goes out of the door. Even a $20 subscription is something that will be scrutinized because you know what, like the son, we've been running this business for a generation. We're not going to spend frivolously. Every dime that goes through our business is precious. And so we're not just going to go sign up for whatever. No, you don't just spend, spend, spend. You need to really understand if this is valuable. And you know what, if the particular business we have, we have a specific POS system we have, you know, we don't have that many unstructured questions. Right? Like realistically, it's like we're not doing a lot of random email, a lot of random research for our business. It's more like, you know, customer comes in, take their order, put in the POS system, charge them, go do the thing. Which AI is probably not, you know, replacing. So it's interesting, but it is one of the, one of the cool factors about this R. Khorazian report is that it comes from ramp customers who I don't think of as, I think of them as a little bit more forward thinking than the general population. Like if I were to say that there's bias in the data set, I would say it's biased towards like being open to AI.
- [37:12]
Jordy
For sure. For sure, right? Yeah. If I wonder if a company like Amex would look at their data of like AI adoption just for cohorts that signed up for Amex over a decade ago.
- [37:25]
Ben
Yeah.
- [37:25]
Jordy
You would expect it to be lower.
- [37:27]
Ben
Yeah. Or even, or even putting AMEX aside, like a, like a community bank, like, because if I go to my local Laundromat and I ask like, what corporate card do you use? They're probably like, we don't do corporate cards here at all. In fact, we have a relationship with the local bank down the street and they put up the mortgage for the building and we write checks or we do cash.
- [37:50]
Jordy
They're even using a debit card.
- [37:52]
Ben
Yeah, exactly. Or if they do have a credit card, it's probably from the local bank branch. It's not like they haven't built like their whole system. So, yeah, it's fascinating to read into. I do think there is something to be said. I do think there is a bit of a slowdown here. Like it's not accelerating. And it is real that there is. It's just getting harder and harder to justify. Okay. It's no brainer to bring it in. It's a no brainer to pay for it. Part of that's the competitive dynamic of, you know, 50% of the value from AI, you just get.
- [38:25]
Jordy
Also, what are you getting out of some of these? If you're a business that's not doing Cogen, you're not generating a bunch of assets, et cetera. And somebody says, hey, for $20 a month or $100 a month, you can get somebody that's PhD level in math. But extremely low agency, you have to like tap, you have to tap the person on the shoulder.
- [38:44]
Ben
I like the Laundromat.
- [38:46]
Jordy
The Laundromat's like. Actually, I don't need somebody who's PhD. You know what, sir?
- [38:51]
Ben
This is a Laundromat. We've been running this Laundromat in this family for 45 years and I've never run into an IMO gold medal level problem ever.
- [39:01]
Jordy
I bet there are. I bet there actually are. I bet, I bet, I bet, I bet, I bet if Mark Chen wanted to create a Laundromat.
- [39:09]
Tyler
Laundry allocation of laundry, you know, efficiently. I mean, if you have a big load.
- [39:13]
Ben
Yes.
- [39:13]
Tyler
Laundry.
- [39:14]
Ben
Yes. How do you split it?
- [39:15]
Tyler
How do you distribute it?
- [39:16]
Ben
Okay, yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense.
- [39:18]
Jordy
But, but yeah, so you have like, you have a robot on your computer that is incredibly, incredibly smart. Incredibly low agency. They can't learn on the job. You have to like tap it on the shoulder and say, hey, do this. Okay, now do that. Now do this, do that. And it's like, well, a lot of these businesses don't have, again, these, these problems that need that level of intelligence and they need people that are, that are even have some level of agency, not even maxed out on intelligence, but can just kind of like chug away and learn on the job and get better.
- [39:49]
Ben
Or they need SaaS, products that have AI functionality built in. Right. And so to them it's just, oh, yeah, my POS system just flagged a couple more fraudulent orders and took care of that. Or like ramp, you know, it's like, yeah, my receipts get classified better, but I'm not like a direct user of AI. Maybe they need to be on numeral. Numeral.com, compliance handled numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. Disney is investing $1 billion in OpenAI.
- [40:21]
Jordy
Before that. Before that, I do think it's notable. So Oracle's remaining performance obligations, which we know refers to contracted revenue not yet recognized, is $523 billion. Currently their stock is trading at 500. Worthy of a gong hit, sure. But currently the stock is trading at only $568 billion. And so I just look at this as like Oracle continues immediately when they announced this backlog, they got a bunch of credit. It was almost immediately and it has basically just been downhill ever since. As the market has basically said, we're giving you less and less and less and less credit here. And to the point where in many ways they're getting like negative, negative credit for the partnership.
- [41:09]
Ben
That was the Financial Times take the deal is worth negative.
- [41:13]
Jordy
Yeah. And there I think that the way that they framed that title was not entirely edgy. He's definitely edgy.
- [41:21]
Ben
It's a blog. It's Alphaville. They're having fun. But.
- [41:25]
Jordy
And then. So I have one more post here that's relevant. So suspended Cap says I gotta feel like that at some point. Oracle, Larry was misled. Was it OpenAI showing him something in the lab? Was it Jensen lying about token prices? Or was it a partnership that was supposed to happen that didn't? It's always been clear to me that this was a race to the bottom. Why would you want to take these economics that someone as sophisticated as Microsoft was happy to pass off? Remember, I've said this a bunch on the show. Satya has more information. He owns OpenAI's IP, right? He's been serving OpenAI models. He's been, you know, running an AI, you know it's one of the most scaled platforms, right? He has more information than anyone in the room. Momentarily, he looks. He didn't look at when Oracle announced this backlog and the stock jumped however many hundreds of billions, everyone was kind of like, wait, did Satya miss this? And I think the market is maybe realizing some of his wisdom. Yeah, Suspended Cap says Jensen's whole thing is that the rack costs 4 million and you make 20 million, you net 16 million. No one can make you 16 million. Got it. But a lot of assumptions baked into that. Someone has to pay you 16 million for however many trillions of tokens you can spit off. If a token is a commodity and someone can serve it at 50% lower than now, it's net plus 6 million on the 4 million of costs. What if the dollars paid for the infra results in massive losses for whoever is purchasing them? Is the assumption that the capital will just keep funding it? Maybe they will. I actually think they will. But I'm just confused at what Oracle thought they saw here.
- [43:01]
Ben
Well, story's not over. Let's move on to turbopuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Belgram first principles on object storage. Fast 10x cheaper and extra extremely scalable. So Joanna Stern has a little bit of a screenshot take joking around about Disney which is investing $1 billion in OpenAI and is going to license their characters for use in Sora. She says, look at this hype. Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my bubble's complete? I think that's from some Disney song. I actually don't know but just the cadences. Do you have any idea what's my read?
- [43:39]
Tyler
Santa Claus is coming to town.
- [43:40]
Ben
No, definitely not. Santa Claus is coming to town. That's not a Disney property, is it? Yeah, look at.
- [43:47]
Tyler
But the tune you were singing sounded like that.
- [43:49]
Ben
This is because I'm bad at singing, I suppose. Okay, let's see if Grok can grok it. Let's see. Okay, anyway, there is news.
- [43:56]
Jordy
Oh, is this frozen? Maybe.
- [43:58]
Ben
Look at this. Isn't it neat? Do do do do. Okay, accompanied. I don't know. Someone will have to tell us Anyway. So Disney's making a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and will allow the AI platform to use its characters and properties. User prompted social videos.
- [44:17]
Jordy
Some people says it's from the Little Mermaid.
- [44:19]
Ben
The Little Mermaid. What is the original line from the Little Mermaid? Look at. Okay, anyway, Disney's three year licensing deal will let users generate videos using Sora OpenAI's short form AI video platform of more than 200 Disney, Marvel, Star wars and Pixar characters. A curated selection of these short videos will be available to stream on Disney.
- [44:46]
Dylan Byers
Whoa.
- [44:47]
Ben
That's the bombshell there. I didn't realize that because when I think about, like going to Sora, it's very fun to make a mashup video of Mickey Mouse fighting Iron man or something like that. And that's something that doesn't make sense to underwrite within Disney. They're not going to spend the time. The CGI is too expensive. It's just not going to happen. But for a kid who loves a Pixar character that wants to see Wall E join the Avengers and go fight Thanos, that could be a delightful, delightful experience for a young child who enjoys Disney's ip. And yet it could make no sense for Disney to actually create. That makes a ton of sense that they would allow this to happen in Sora in sort of a. In a way where the economic value is accounted for appropriately. Now, is this kind of deal slop? But I just think the idea that this is going to Disney is crazy. That's the crazy thing. I mean, we covered this when we were talking about Sora generally. Just this idea that is it a creation tool or is it a consumption tool? And we were saying I think pretty quickly that this doesn't feel like an app that we're going to hang out in. Everyone in the studio was having a lot of fun. We checked their screen times. A few days later, no one was scrolling Sora or more meta vibes for that.
- [46:16]
Jordy
But we continue to see outputs from Sora going pretty viral on other platforms.
- [46:20]
Tyler
Totally.
- [46:21]
Ben
Even within our own group chats. What's been the most impactful Sora video that you've probably seen in the last couple weeks? Me making a Sora video of myself promoting John Fio's energy drink company in a suit. And I just sent it to him directly in a group chat and it didn't exist and it wasn't funny in any broader context. Now, the weird thing is that is there real demand for Sora level quality content in the Disney app? Like, when I open the Disney app, I feel like it's a place that it has extremely high polish.
- [47:02]
Jordy
And I feel like it's ultimately, to me, what's exciting about this is personalized entertainment. And which is why I think that Disney would be interested in doing this if Tyler figured it out with Henry's help. The line earlier was, look at this stuff. Isn't it neat Wouldn't you think my collection's complete from the Little Mermaid part of your world. But if somebody loves the Little Mermaid and then you can prompt a really high fidelity personalized video for your kid, saying it's time to do the dishes and singing a little song, that is. That's the kind of moment that I imagine Disney would be excited about. Of course, this will be immediately abused in a thousand, millions of different ways, but I'm sure they'll put a lot of guardrails in. One thing that's notable, this went out this morning. Disney accuses Google of using AI to engage in copyright infringement on massive scale Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding it to stop the infringement. So yeah, basically the article says, as Disney has gone into business with OpenAI, the Mouse House is accusing Google of copyright infringement on massive scale, using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute infringing images and videos. On Wednesday evening, attorneys for Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google demanding that Google stop the alleged infringement. Quote Google's infringing Disney's copyright on a massive scale by copying a large corpus of Disney's copyrighted works without authorization to train and develop Genai models and services, and by using AI models and services to commercially exploit and distribute copies of its protected works to consumers in violation of Disney's copyrights. So, the letter continued, Google operates as a virtual vending machine capable of reproducing, rendering and distributing copies of Disney's valuable library of copyrighted characters and other works on massive scale. And compounding Google's blatant infringement, many of the infringing images generated by Google's AI services are branded with a Google's Gemini logo, falsely implying that Google's exploitation of Disney's IP is authorized and endorsed by Disney. So the question so Disney's not just allowing OpenAI to generate these assets, but they've actually invested. And so the immediate question is, will Disney do any of these licensing, IP licensing with other platforms, this kind of lot? Maybe it feels like we're in the.
- [49:38]
Ben
Press release economy all over again. Yeah, I don't know. It does feel like Disney's sort of like picking a winner here in AI video. And they're saying like, we like OpenAI and we don't like Google, which is sort of a, sort of a bold, bold move. You would think that they would be a little bit more platform agnostic. I'm fascinated by this.
- [50:00]
Jordy
Then again, Thrive Capital bet the fund in some ways on OpenAI, who's co owner Of Thrive. Bob Iger.
- [50:10]
Ben
No way.
- [50:11]
Jordy
Remember, he bought that. He was part of a small cohort that bought a few points of Thrive.
- [50:18]
Ben
Get out the red string. It's all connected, of course.
- [50:21]
Jordy
Get out the board. Get out the board.
- [50:23]
Ben
You were right, by the way, on the structure. So Disney's putting a $1 billion investment in, but they're also getting warrants to buy more stock in OpenAI at its current $500 billion valuation. So there's a little bit of opportunity in the future, if the valuation goes up, that they'll get a good deal there. I really can't get over this Disney plus news. I really. Okay. It does say a curated selection, so I think that I would be very upset about the idea that I would.
- [50:54]
Jordy
Open just a random selection of, you.
- [50:58]
Ben
Know, where I'm going with, like. Like, I think Wall E is a film that is like. I think it's art. I think it's art, and I think it's okay. You don't just watch for my children to watch. Wall E. You studied Wall E. But I do. I do.
- [51:13]
Jordy
You took notes.
- [51:13]
Ben
I do think that a lot of the Pixar films and a lot of the Disney films, they have an opinion, they have craft, they have something that elevates the human experience. The human. It is not purely brain rot. It's not slop. And if you were in a funnel where you watch something that's a great, interesting film with an opinion with something to say, and then it's like, do you want to continue watching 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and then it's just blasting you with the craziest sora mashups possible, you're going to make a lot of parents very upset. So this better be in another tab. But I do like that they said it's curated, because as long as there's some sort of human in the loop to say, okay, they clearly jailbroke on that one because, you know, people are gonna get crazy with this.
- [52:02]
Jordy
Yeah. Every Disney character doing the little yachty walkout, you know, okay.
- [52:08]
Ben
That's actually okay for the kids. I fully support that. Coffin is a banger, and I'm good with that. But no, I mean, YouTube kids famously went through a really, really dark period with Spider man and Elsa mashups and that were very suggestive and bizarre and. And, and. And there's been. It's been a game of Whack a Mole for a long time. And I think people don't expect when they open up Disney, they don't expect it to be a Game of Whack a Mole. They expect it to be curated. And so Disney really needs to. Needs to continue to instill this idea that they are, that they are curated.
- [52:40]
Jordy
Yeah. So Disney has sent cease and desist letters to Meta, Character, AI as well as against Midjourney and some other companies.
- [52:51]
Ben
Yeah.
- [52:52]
Jordy
I wonder, have they ever sent a cease and desist to who? OpenAI.
- [53:00]
Ben
Oh, I don't know, but they should have because early as soon as ChatGPT launched I was having it created stories of, you know, Spider Man. I was particularly a fan of the deliberately IP infringing. So I'd be like, write a bedtime story for my son where, you know, Spider man teams up with Superman. Which of course cannot happen because those are rival intellectual, rival pieces of intellectual property, some owned by Warner Brothers, some owned by Disney. And so you cannot ever have those cross into the same multiverse.
- [53:35]
Jordy
According to Google, Gemini, which Disney has now sent this cease and desist to, Disney has never taken any type of legal action against OpenAI. They picked a side.
- [53:53]
Ben
Well, fortunately we have someone who can add a lot more context here. We have Dylan Byers from Puck News joining us in person in just a few minutes, whenever he's ready. In the meantime, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, our sponsor. Google's most intelligent model, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding.
- [54:12]
Jordy
Let's pull up this clip. Bob Iger and Sam, we're on CNBC this morning. We can pull it up.
- [54:19]
Ben
This is a 12 minute video. Can we play some of this and see if there are key moments there? And then we will bring in Dylan.
- [54:26]
Jordy
Yeah. So the current deal is a three year license with exclusivity for the first year. So again, it's very possible that, that a year from today, Google ends up with the same ability to leverage Disney ip. Disney will set and evolve the guardrails for how its 200 characters will be used.
- [54:48]
Ben
One year exclusivity doesn't seem like that big of a deal to me because VO3 and Nanobanana are barely rolled out into YouTube. You can put them in shorts, but it's kind of a creative tool like YouTube does not seem like we got to win the AI vertical video game this year. This feels more detrimental to Facebook and meta than OpenAI or than YouTube, honestly. Anyway, let's table this video. We can come back to the clips. I'm sure it will be clipped in more precise detail. Instead, let me tell you about Adeo, the AI native CRM. Adeo builds Scales and grows your company to the next level. And let's bring in some Dylan Byers from Puck News. Dylan, thank you so much for taking the time to come down to the Ultra Dome. Good to see you in person. Welcome. Welcome. Please have a seat. Thank you. And if you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, however you describe yourself these days, whatever's quickest.
- [55:50]
Dylan Byers
I'm the senior correspondent for Puck, where I cover the media industry.
- [55:55]
Ben
Yeah.
- [55:56]
Dylan Byers
Media business, media gossip.
- [56:00]
Ben
How is covering the media different than covering the oil and gas industry or tech or anything else?
- [56:07]
Dylan Byers
More navel gazing, more ancestral?
- [56:09]
Ben
Because you're in the media. Are you doing the navel gazing or are you reporting on navel gazing?
- [56:16]
Dylan Byers
I navel gaze at the navel gazers.
- [56:17]
Ben
Okay. It's sort of an oral boroughs of navel gazing. Interesting. Interesting.
- [56:23]
Dylan Byers
Yeah. Very ancestral.
- [56:25]
Ben
What's. Has navel gazing been the top story over the last couple weeks, or is it more filmmaking?
- [56:32]
Dylan Byers
It's. Well, here's what's amazing. It's amazing that at a time when, like, Paramount and Netflix are going to war for Warner Brothers Discovery.
- [56:40]
Ben
Yeah.
- [56:41]
Dylan Byers
The media industry is obsessed with like, Ryan, Liz and Olivia Nuzzi.
- [56:45]
Ben
Oh, yeah, That's a big one.
- [56:46]
Dylan Byers
Barry Weiss, CBS oh, yeah.
- [56:48]
Ben
Yeah.
- [56:48]
Dylan Byers
The media industry is funny because it has a way of the smallest, most inconsequential gossip has a way of consuming the industry at large.
- [57:00]
Ben
That doesn't feel like what the last couple months have been, though. The Olivia Newsie Lizza thing, that feels much bigger than some small story. Is it really?
- [57:11]
Dylan Byers
It used to be bigger.
- [57:12]
Jordy
So part of why media loves covering media is media likes to cover things that get a lot of attention. And media businesses in their very nature, their job is to get attention.
- [57:23]
Ben
So everyone knows.
- [57:24]
Dylan Byers
I think that's part of it, but I just think we're obsessed. We're obsessed with ourselves.
- [57:28]
Jordy
Yeah. I would give. But an example I would give very often I'll find like a fashion brand that is like a household name will have like $5 million of revenue, right?
- [57:40]
Ben
Oh, yeah.
- [57:40]
Jordy
It's because they're just like, like people like fashion. It gets shared a ton. And so I think it's a very.
- [57:47]
Ben
Same thing with individual influencers. Like, they might be recognized on the street. If you put them in a headline, it's going to get clicks. Versus if I was like, I have a. I have a report here on a oil and gas company that's doing 50 million a year. You'd be like, no one's going to click on that. No one knows what that company is.
- [58:01]
Dylan Byers
People need stories. People need, like, person. You need personalities. Yeah.
- [58:06]
Ben
The media lends itself. Yeah. Yeah.
- [58:08]
Dylan Byers
Unfortunately, you can do that at the executive level with the Paramount, Netflix, WBD deal. You can do it down on the newsroom floor.
- [58:15]
Ben
Yeah.
- [58:15]
Dylan Byers
I think people need personalities to make these stories human. Also. There's just. There's only so much intrigue in numbers.
- [58:22]
Ben
Do you feel like the Paramount, Netflix, Warner Brothers story has been particularly personal? Have you been focused on.
- [58:30]
Dylan Byers
It's the most personal at that level. At a major M and A level. Even more so than when Bob Iger and Brian Roberts went to war for Fox, which was personal, too, and had a lot of subplots there, especially on the Murdoch side. Of course, this is personal. You've got in David Ellison, a guy who is basically staking a lot of personal money, a lot of his dad's money, trying to get this asset and then doing all the right things, sending all the right signals to David Zaslav on the WB dinner board, having all the right dinners, going to all the right fights, and then being sort of spurned at the last minute for someone else. And that negotiation and the Trump element and the relationships between Ted Sarandos and David Zaslav and then David Ellison and Larry Ellison and David Zaslav, it's like. It's absolutely fascinating.
- [59:24]
Ben
So do you think. I mean, there is a world where business should be purely economic. Right. Because. Because it's the.
- [59:32]
Dylan Byers
Yeah. And it will be. It will be in the end. The funny part is, like, the personal element is there, but at the end of the day, whoever spends the most money is going to get the asset.
- [59:42]
Ben
But if you're more personal, you might be able to marshal more capital. You might know more people, you might be more people might be willing to rally behind you. And we're kind of seeing that with Ellison pulling in folks all over the board because he has personal relationships with them. So is that roughly right?
- [59:58]
Dylan Byers
That's roughly right. I think what you have. My partner, Bill Cohen, put it really elegantly. You've basically got a company with a $400 billion valuation going to war with a man with a $400 billion valuation and Larry Ellison and his son and. Yeah, marshaling the capital for it with Gulf sovereign wealth funds and Jared Kushner and all that is interesting. And at a certain point, Netflix is going to reach a threshold for what it can compete with. I mean, another point Bill made is, at a certain point, if Paramount were just willing to come in and offer like, 34 $35 a share for this thing. I think it would be game over.
- [60:41]
Ben
Netflix can't do it.
- [60:42]
Dylan Byers
But the person. I mean, the personal element is just interesting because you've got Trump, who wants to be involved in this deal somehow. You've got David, who really doesn't like the idea. David Zaslav, who really doesn't like the idea of selling to David Ellison. But fundamentally, what you're doing is just a very extended negotiation that's going to play into well into 2026.
- [61:04]
Jordy
Why doesn't he want to get involved with David?
- [61:08]
Dylan Byers
I don't think this is how Zaslav wanted to go out. Right. Like, I think. I'm not saying when David Zaslav got WarnerMedia, he did this whole song and dance, coming to Hollywood and saying, I'm a film guy. I'm gonna save the film industry. I don't think anyone thought he was in it for the long haul. I think everyone knew this was sort of like a flip. But he liked playing the Hollywood kingpin. And I don't think he wanted to go out because David Ellison came to the table and forced him to go to market. And I also don't think that, you know, I think David Ellison and his team and Jerry Cardinale, Redbird, I think they came in and said, you know, somewhere around that sort of 2350, $24 a share mark. And I think he took offense to that because the number he wanted and the number he thought he could get was higher to 30. And David, like, look, I have spent a lot of my time at Puck writing about all of the various misguided exploits of David Zaslav at the top of Warner Brothers Discovery. But at the end of the day, like, one thing he knows how to do very well is work a deal. The entire time that David Ellison was coming was at the table saying, I'll do this, I'll do this. I'll spend more. He was talking to Ted Sarandos at Netflix, and basically, by virtue of playing those two off against each other, is probably going to end up driving the deal up to a price that is actually higher than $30. So kudos to him.
- [62:37]
Ben
Do you think he's talking to anyone else? There's been a lot of skepticism about there ever having been a second bidder. People were saying, oh, the whole. The idea that Netflix would even build bid, that's a fake stocking process.
- [62:51]
Dylan Byers
I remember in September when Paramount first started this whole process, someone came to me and said, this isn't over. Netflix is at the table. Everyone thought that was bullshit. Greg Peters went out at a Bloomberg event here in Hollywood and said, we don't do. You know, historically, we don't do M and A deals like this. We're not interested in M and A. And everyone thought, okay, well, that's it. Netflix has been at the table the entire time. And in fact, if you talk to the guys at Paramount, what they'll tell you is they feel like Zaslav was playing rope it up with them. Basically saying, yeah, come to the table. We're good. Everything you're offering is better than Netflix. And then finally, the 11th hour was.
- [63:28]
Jordy
Netflix continue to bid and bid and bid and bid and bid.
- [63:30]
Dylan Byers
Yeah, and we're not done. We're not done. That's the sort of funny thing when Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters go out there and talk about this. They're talking about it like, it's over.
- [63:38]
Aaron Cannon
Over.
- [63:38]
Dylan Byers
It's not over.
- [63:39]
Ben
No.
- [63:42]
Dylan Byers
You could have me back on in six months. I think we're still talking about this.
- [63:45]
Ben
Yeah. Yeah, that's great. Do you think that the actual Netflix contract, the deal, the breakup fees, the announcement, the pageantry around, like, we have a deal.
- [63:57]
Dylan Byers
Yeah, totally make it inevitable.
- [63:59]
Ben
Is that a tactic?
- [64:00]
Dylan Byers
Yeah, I think so.
- [64:01]
Ben
Okay. To drive a higher price from. To let Paramount know. To let Ellison know, hey, your best and final. Like, now's the time to go rally.
- [64:10]
Jordy
Yeah. What was around the world?
- [64:12]
Ben
Yeah, fire up the jet.
- [64:14]
Jordy
How do you make. How do you make an. Another offer and then say. Just want to be clear. This is not my best and final.
- [64:22]
Ben
Oh, that was a funny line.
- [64:23]
Jordy
Like, I've never. Never.
- [64:24]
Ben
I've never. I've never.
- [64:25]
Jordy
In a negotiation, like, never in a negotiation had somebody make a. A new, higher offer and then also say, like, typically, you'd be like, yeah, there's not a lot of. Like, it just shows that.
- [64:37]
Ben
Yeah.
- [64:38]
Jordy
Like, what is the incentive to take the offer at all?
- [64:40]
Ben
Buy your house for a million dollars. But I could go higher.
- [64:43]
Dylan Byers
I could go higher. And by the way, another partner of mine, Matt Bellany, like, he's reported Paramount will go higher.
- [64:50]
Ben
Okay.
- [64:50]
Dylan Byers
They will, like, the Ellisons will go higher. And part of the thing. And this gets back to the personal element, which is what's so fascinating to me. David Ellison came to the Paramount deal, the first deal, with a strategy to basically wrap up as much of Hollywood as he could scale it up and then try to go to war with Netflix and YouTube and the guys up in Silicon Valley. The entire thesis of his battle strategy rests on him being able to acquire more than just Paramount. If at the end of the day, Netflix gets Warner Brothers discovery and he's sitting there with Paramount. He's not. He's not. He's not in the game.
- [65:33]
Jordy
Well, yeah, so I was thinking. So he. He acquired the rights to ufc.
- [65:38]
Ben
Yes.
- [65:39]
Jordy
They're killing the pay per view model, which is interesting. The pay per view model was being killed by illegal streaming, which was like the bane of Dana White's existence. He basically, to my knowledge, was always angry about. It was kind of the nature of the Internet. It's just like if you're streaming something, it'll show up in other places in other parts of the Internet, and there's not much you can do. So Paramount, you know, basically going down, throwing down and saying, like, we're going to own the ufc, which is. There's a lot of people that will just subscribe because there's one ish major UFC event every month. And it's a much better deal that. Than just going and buying each individual pay per view for $80 a pop or whatever. But that subscription offering becomes much more compelling if you're bundling in all this other IP to. My question is, like, you're definitely going to get the UFC fan base, but how big is that fan base? Certainly it's a popular sport in America, but how do you build enough value around this to really have a competitive offer?
- [66:43]
Dylan Byers
I think what's interesting about the UFC deal, the UFC deal was a signal to the broader market, which is so much. Again, having. It can be depressing to cover the media industry because a lot of the times it's going through periods of contraction or decline, or you look at. Since we're talking about sports rights, you look at someone like espn, right, who's being forced to make all of these very calculated decisions about, you know, should we pay X amount for Major League Baseball? When you're competing, still competing for the NFL with, like, Amazon and.
- [67:16]
Jordy
Well, sports are the last remaining content monopolies. Right. So in news, you don't really have a monopoly on anything.
- [67:23]
Aaron Cannon
You might.
- [67:24]
Dylan Byers
News is a commodity.
- [67:25]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah.
- [67:25]
Jordy
You might break the story, but everybody else will have the facts.
- [67:28]
Dylan Byers
Sports rights are the 1. Sports rights are the ones.
- [67:30]
Jordy
Sports rights and leagues. So the UFC deal, property, like, sure, sure, yeah, Warner Brothers. But still, that is highly competitive with somebody else online saying, I'm going to make an AI cartoon.
- [67:42]
Ben
Sure.
- [67:42]
Jordy
People aren't creating homegrown sports content. They're creating commentary and reaction content. But you still need to pay to see it live at the End of.
- [67:51]
Dylan Byers
The day, there's only one network you can watch Sunday Night Football on, and it's NBC. And that matters in a way that when news break, when a bomb goes off or a coup happens, there are a lot of different ways to go. But what was interesting about the UFC deal is at this period of sort of contraction negotiation among legacy media players, David Ellison was coming in almost like a sovereign himself and saying, I'm willing, I'm here, I'm willing to make bold bets, and I'm willing to even overpay or what others would consider overpay in order to go after these assets. It also helps that he's younger, he's thinking on a longer time horizon. Like he's actually someone who's thinking, how do I build up, up not just a media empire he thinks about as a media and tech empire. How do I build that up over the course of decades? So he's making these really long term bets. And again, part of that, it was never, ever just about Paramount. I remember sitting in the Polo Lounge with somebody before the Paramount deal even closed and like, he's going after WBD next. Like, this is always. This is a scale play. And so that just brings me back to like, you can't, you can't execute the plan if you're just sitting with Paramount. And so if you're Zaslav and the guy's like, well, yeah, our best and final offer is whatever starts with a two. He's like, the fuck it does.
- [69:09]
Jordy
You need me more than I need you.
- [69:11]
Dylan Byers
That's right.
- [69:11]
Jordy
Very clearly.
- [69:12]
Ben
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that, I mean, I count myself as oddly like a media. I'm just getting up to speed on a lot of these media stories and this one's been fascinating. But just digging into David Ellison's history, I mean, starting Skydance in 2004, he really has been in Hollywood as at least like, you know, given it his all for 20 years. He starred in Flyboys, the movie that he shot. Like, it's like, he clearly wants it.
- [69:41]
Jordy
He's about that life.
- [69:43]
Ben
It's hard to call him a tourist.
- [69:44]
Dylan Byers
I don't know if you've seen Flyboys. It wasn't great.
- [69:46]
Ben
No, but to show up and not like there are lots of like. I mean, you could easily levy the like, tourist label at like Elon Musk buying Twitter. Right. What does he know about social networking? He's been a PayPal guy, then he's been a space guy, that he's been a car guy, now he's a Social media guy. What does he know about the news? And it's like that kind of was true. Like, he did just show up and was all of a sudden like, I use Twitter a lot, so I'm buying it.
- [70:12]
Karan
Yeah.
- [70:13]
Ben
This is a 20 year journey.
- [70:15]
Dylan Byers
David Ellison fancies himself a true film buff. Hollywood guy, grew up watching movies, going to the movies. His association with Tom Cruise and Mission Impossible to him is a massive badge of honor because he feels like he's really been supporting the industry. And part of the argument you're going to see, or we're already seeing it, that he and his team will make against Netflix is that Netflix is paying lip service to the theatrical window. They're not a. They're not a business that's built on putting movies in theaters. And he's like, we actually will. We are committed to Hollywood in the traditional sense.
- [70:50]
Ben
We're so committed that we'll. We'll put Tom Cruise yelling at you about TV settings in front of you.
- [70:56]
Dylan Byers
No, I haven't.
- [70:56]
Ben
Yeah, yeah, Tom Cruise. Like, there's a lot of TVs that come with, like, specific refresh rates, technology, like, high refresh rate, not 24 frames. It'll do like 80, 48. It's like smooth motion. And he hates it because it's like, not as the filmmaker intended.
- [71:10]
Karan
Yeah.
- [71:11]
Ben
And so he'll do, like, pre roll ads for that. Clearly, like a. Yeah. Truly, like, loves the theater stuff.
- [71:16]
Dylan Byers
We are going to. We are all going in this process because one thing that gets lost, you know, the creative community in Hollywood gets really upset about the Netflix of it all. Because they don't, like, seem to like Netflix.
- [71:26]
Ben
Yep. They don't Netflix from a tech perspective, not a political perspective. They see them as politically aligned with.
- [71:32]
Dylan Byers
Netflix, but more politically aligned with Netflix, in fact. But in terms of their nostalgia for what this industry is about, we're gonna see a lot of nostalgia over the course of this deal negotiation. And there's gonna be a lot of hemming and hawing among the Hollywood creative community about what's happening. And all I would say is whether Paramount or Netflix. Get wbd. The train has left the station. Like, the industry has changed. And even Ted's whole thing about we're committed to the theatrical window, like, bullshit. Like, I guess movies will be in theaters for, like, 10 minutes before they're on Netflix.
- [72:05]
Jordy
But what do you think that. Do you think that Hollywood in the actual traditional sense, like the local community. We're recording this live from Hollywood. It seems like the industry is the culture of the industry. Is like, dominated by nostalgia. That's like, totally. That's the feeling that I have. The interesting thing about tech is that tech has a nostalgic element to it, tech culture. But it's like videos of us going to the moon and we're like, well, we got to do that again. Whereas Hollywood seemingly is. Just wants the whole production pipeline and process to go back the way that it was. And I guess how are people processing having even smaller kind of potential buyer pool out of all of this?
- [72:58]
Dylan Byers
Well, you know what you're making me think of? I think earlier when we were talking about media, you were talking about other industries like oil and gas industry.
- [73:05]
Ben
Yeah, that was my example.
- [73:05]
Dylan Byers
The difference is that creatives are a real pain in the ass to deal with from the perspective of the front office. Sure, you build your business around them, but they have feelings about how things should be. That I think people probably in the oil and gas industry or the trucking industry. So there are a lot of, like Tom Cruise's and Martin Scorsese's who have feelings about how this industry should work and what you need to preserve in order to preserve the integrity of it. What happens when new leaders take over is they have to do a song and dance where they pay a lot of lip service to this. And so you see Ted Sarandos coming in and talking about how great it is to acquire the studio that made Casablanca. Yeah, the future of the film. I fucking love gospeling. I've seen it a hundred times. The future of this business does not rest on future generations going back and watching Humphrey Bogart. That is not where the future is going. You. Similarly, when David Ellison took over Paramount, there's all this lip service paid to Walter Cronkite and the integrity of CBS News. With all due respect to David, I don't think he gives a shit about Walter Cronkite. But you have to do that song and dance in order to sort of finesse the transition of the creative community. And in truth, I think what's more interesting is I think whether you're talking about a David Ellison or a Ted Sarandos, they're actually thinking about the future. They're thinking about how to go to the moon again. They're thinking about. You guys were just talking about Disney's deal with Sora.
- [74:30]
Ben
I want to talk to you about that, too.
- [74:32]
Dylan Byers
Right after he dropped his peons to Walter Cronkite at this Paramount event just down the street a few months ago, David Ellison talked about how we were just a matter of years Away from his kids being able to talk to the characters on Paw Patrol and have those characters talk back to them. The Disney Store deal is like an early step towards that future. They know that's where we're going. It is not my kids watching Bluey over and over and over again. It is them talking to Bluey and telling Bluey what to do. They're thinking about it, but the dissonance between what they have to sort of say to placate the Marty Scorsese's and where they're actually thinking about putting the money is notable.
- [75:15]
Jordy
I feel like it's notable. I mean, there's. So we talk to founders at least once a week that are building like video models and products that could eventually be used by entertainment or are being used by entertainment. And I get, as an outsider to entertainment, I get excited because I'm like, if budgets for films hold flat and the tools that these entrepreneurs are building get better and better, you'll eventually be able to say, you know, a movie that would have cost $100 million could now be four different movies that cost $25 million. And you're using AI to reduce the cost and using it for scenes that are just like, you know, historically expensive to actually shoot and do. And so I see an opportunity for this, like Cambrian, even if budgets just hold flat, a Cambrian explosion of more creativity, more people having the opportunity to create films and television shows and things like that. But it feels like there's like zero excitement here about that. And maybe it's, maybe it's because it's in pockets.
- [76:21]
Ben
Because if you're entirely outside of the Hollywood system, like the iPhone really did democratize filmmaking, but like the end result of that was like Mr. Beast on YouTube.
- [76:31]
Jordy
But I'm just saying, I'm just saying it's still, I'm saying, I'm saying even though the technology is not being created here, it still could be a catalyst for the industry.
- [76:40]
Ben
I think it's a competitor to the.
- [76:41]
Jordy
Industry, but it is. And it's a tool.
- [76:48]
Dylan Byers
It's a tool. I mean, it's a tool. And as with the iPhone, the question is who has the access to the tool and who gets to harness the tool and then do something great with it? Yeah, the iPhone sort of democratized your ability to create content. And you can argue that the vast majority of what's out there is slop and is not nearly as good as what Hollywood can create. But then again, you just have to look at where people are spending their time. People are spending more time with user generated content, people are spending more time on YouTube than they are on any other streaming platform.
- [77:20]
Ben
You should be able to talk to Humphrey Bogart.
- [77:22]
Dylan Byers
You can talk to Humphrey Bogart.
- [77:23]
Ben
That's what I would hope. Put me in Citizen Kane.
- [77:27]
Dylan Byers
Yeah, you can put him on the plane.
- [77:31]
Jordy
Wile E. Coyote teaches algebra.
- [77:33]
Ben
Yeah, that'll happen for sure.
- [77:36]
Dylan Byers
The problem with nostalgia and with trying to preserve the order as it is is that the tools are there. They're going to be harnessed. They are more democratized than they have been in the past. And at a certain point, the eyeballs are going to go where they're going to go and you can force it. And there's this weird sort of like Amish, like, let's just like preserve this moment in time.
- [77:56]
Ben
Yeah. Okay, so if we hopped in a car and drove over to Burbank and snuck into Disney, do you think Bob Iger has like a total revolt on his hands today? Because I feel like Disney is one of the truly creative places. They hire tons of those artists that have opinions, they're talent driven, and yet they just put out an announcement, yeah, we're gonna do AI content. It feels like a very. It feels like a divisive issue. If I was, you know, I'm sure, I'm sure management.
- [78:33]
Dylan Byers
I'm sure it is for some people. I increasingly find that the stakes are so high and the change is so fast that the need to meet it is existential. And I think leaders like Iger increasingly care less about that blowback. You know, so funny. A long time, like 20 years ago, I was an intern at the New Yorker, and I remember when they opened up, you could. They did the back page where people could submit captions for the New Yorker cartoons. And the cartoonists hated it because they felt like that was their. The integrity of their work should not be opened up to the public. And in fact, that became like one of the greatest sources of engagement with the New Yorker was through that. I think people recognize that. Being able to say, I want Darth Vader on a beach or I want Captain Underpants doing xyz, that is going to happen. You can already sort of do it. And the question for Disney is, are we going to have a piece of that revenue? Are we going to make money off of it? And in fact, if we know that that's where the puck is going and at a certain point you will be able to talk to your favorite animated characters. How can we. If we engage with that, then maybe we can start driving. Maybe that helps keep Engagement, maybe that helps drive people to theme parks. There's a whole other piece of it I was talking about with my colleague Julia Alexander just earlier today. But there's a. But there's a whole other element here too with YouTube, where YouTube is. Or sorry, Google is starting to generate Disney characters and Disney doesn't want that happening.
- [80:14]
Jordy
They're trying to set a precedent. They launched a cease and desist last night. They're taking legal action against basically seemingly every scale player except OpenAI. OpenAI deal is a one year exclusive. And so I think that opens up. I'm assuming Disney's using these lawsuits and the cease and desist to start a negotiation of what this will look like once everybody gets access to it. But it's notable that I think this is even today, just seeing the timeline. I think this is underrated as a deal for OpenAI to be able to drive just at a time when it feels like their product is being. I completely disagree, but continue at least, at least somewhat threatened by Gemini.
- [81:00]
Ben
Sure.
- [81:02]
Jordy
If you're an American household and you're like a Disney family, what family of apps are you going to be paying money to if one of them creates these magical experiences for your kids and the other is completely blocked from generating any IP around that? Because when kids, I don't know, my, my, my kids are young. But if you're a 10 year old and you realize that like, you can, like my son, I generate like, I take pictures of us and I turn us into dinosaurs. And I have used ChatGPT to do that a lot. It's stuck in his head. He'll be like, let's make some din. Like, let's make dinosaur pictures.
- [81:42]
Ben
Yeah. It's like a fun.
- [81:43]
Jordy
And so when kids realize that any Disney content that they can watch can immediately be like brought into their life. That's gonna be.
- [81:50]
Ben
Or if he comes to you and says, hey, let's turn ourselves into the Avengers, and you're like, well, there's only one app that allows me to do that. Then boom, you're back in Sora. As opposed to.
- [82:00]
Jordy
And you're gonna pay for it. Because I think parents will pay almost any price to bring joy to their children.
- [82:07]
Ben
Yeah. So I mean, I agree with that. I just think it's gonna be a slow takeoff of that type of content because.
- [82:13]
Jordy
But I don't think, I don't think the whole thing. Like Studio Ghibli. Was that a slow takeoff?
- [82:18]
Ben
Absolutely, Absolutely. It was a huge meme moment where everyone had to have one. Everyone needed to See what they looked like in the studio Ghibli mode and then the usage dropped off and then started climbing at like 1%, you know, and it is climbing and it is going to grow and it will be a full year.
- [82:34]
Jordy
I'm just saying you now have 200 different characters. The most valuable IP in the world.
- [82:39]
Ben
I'm not saying it's bad. It's definitely like an improvement to that product and it will make Sora a better app.
- [82:45]
Jordy
And it will not just Sora, but it's, it's, it's. I'm assuming. I didn't see specifically, but I'm assuming, yeah, it's Chat, GPD and Sora. So it's going to be take to bring it.
- [82:54]
Ben
Yeah, yeah. But to bring it back to the, the, the Ellison, like the Paramount wbd. Like if you put them together, you get something like 15% of all watch hours in America controlled by that company. If you put, take Netflix and, and WBD, you put them together, you get 14%. You saw that, right? Like Sora I think is going to be at like less than 1% for like years and then it will eventually be 5% and then 10%. But it just. Next year is not going to be like the year that 10% of watch hours were AI generated video. Like it's just not there yet.
- [83:29]
Dylan Byers
I think I commend Iger on at least trying to, trying to adapt his company for this future because that is where it's going. I mean it's very hard to reject the thesis, even with the available technology, which feels like very beta, very 1.0, that that's not where this is headed. And if you got. No one is sitting on a better IP portfolio than Disney, particularly when you're talking about kids, obviously. So. And there's no easier way to do this than with animation.
- [84:00]
Ben
Yeah.
- [84:01]
Dylan Byers
So why not go there?
- [84:02]
Ben
Yeah, yeah.
- [84:03]
Jordy
I just think so. I looked it up. Disney plus has just under 60 million total paid subscribers in the US and Canada. I think a lot of those subscribers are subscribing for content for their children.
- [84:19]
Ben
For sure.
- [84:21]
Dylan Byers
Don't underestimate how many people without kids go to Disneyland.
- [84:25]
Jordy
Yeah, yeah, that's true, that's true. It's a big number. I'm just saying like that cohort OpenAI has like what, a third of that in paying subscribers globally. And so I just think this is, I do think this is at least for the next 12 months. I think this is going to be a, this is. ChatGPT doesn't have a lot of moats Right. Like the, the product is better than other comparable products. And this is a new moat where if you're those 60 million people that are paying for Disney plus, like you're an ultra fan and you're, you're a super fan and you're going to park. How many people visit?
- [84:59]
Ben
Yeah. Yeah.
- [85:01]
Dylan Byers
Here's an anecdotal thing.
- [85:02]
Ben
Yeah. Please.
- [85:03]
Dylan Byers
Most to the best of my knowledge, the one one way I've been able to make my son cool in his second grade class is by getting him on Sora. Like introduced, letting him play around with Sora earlier than his friends. Didn't do that with Minecraft, but like did that with Sora. And I have all those friends coming up to me and being like, what is Sora? Tell us about Sora. Can we use Sora? I'm sure the other parents hate me.
- [85:24]
Ben
It's a wild thing.
- [85:25]
Dylan Byers
But you do see, this is purely anecdotal. You see that level like oh my God, can we create something? Can we just say something and create it?
- [85:33]
Ben
Yeah.
- [85:33]
Dylan Byers
And you think about how sticky Disney has been. Right? Like I don't know a single parent in my kids class who doesn't have a Disney plus subscription. You are just. You are, you are. If you, if that, if you can do that on Sora and you can't do it on its competitors, that's 100 potentially really valuable.
- [85:52]
Jordy
In 2023, the last reporting period for the parks that I can find 140 million people globally paid to go to a Disney park and experience.
- [86:01]
Ben
Okay.
- [86:02]
Jordy
The Disney.
- [86:03]
Ben
I'm sold. Extremely bullish for OpenAI. Extremely.
- [86:06]
Jordy
I'm just.
- [86:07]
Ben
No, no, no, no, no. You win me over on this. I still don't think, I still don't think a significant percentage of content consumed by Americans next year will be fully AI generated. I think that's where we're going to see a slow. That's where we're going to see a slow take up. It's a great deal. Hats off Fiji. CMOs.
- [86:26]
Jordy
Well, yeah. So if you get 140 million people visit Disney parks this year, I bet you they will have things in the park which is like recreate this moment. Turn this into an animation.
- [86:37]
Ben
This is very good.
- [86:38]
Jordy
Like it is very. I just think what the timeline this morning, that was interesting. Everybody looks at the headline number $1 billion.
- [86:45]
Ben
Yep.
- [86:45]
Jordy
And they're like this is around this barely. This is like slapping duct tape on, on the, on a boat that's leaking water. Right. It doesn't feel like that big of a number because it's not in the context of OpenAI, but the competitive edge that gives them over the next 12 months is massive.
- [87:01]
Ben
This is fantastic. This is a great conversation.
- [87:04]
Dylan Byers
Thank you for having me. I'm such an honor to finally be in the Dome.
- [87:06]
Ben
I'm so glad.
- [87:07]
Dylan Byers
You're amazing.
- [87:08]
Jordy
I'm sure with the way the WBD deal evolves, you'll be a regular guest.
- [87:13]
Dylan Byers
I'm just up the street, so anytime.
- [87:14]
Ben
Fantastic. This is great. Thanks so much.
- [87:16]
Dylan Byers
Thank you.
- [87:18]
Ben
We have our next guest, female CEO.
- [87:21]
Jordy
Of Application, hit the gong for us. It would be our honor.
- [87:24]
Dylan Byers
I don't know if I've earned this.
- [87:25]
Ben
Well, what's a big number? You gotta give us a number. How many years you've been writing?
- [87:32]
Dylan Byers
14.
- [87:33]
Ben
14 years. Overnight success. Thank you. Let me tell you about Linear Meet the System for modern software development. Streamline work. LINEAR streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. Let me also tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds. Our next guest is viji Simo from OpenAI. She is the CEO of Applications. We are very honored to be joined by Fiji.
- [88:09]
Jordy
What's going on?
- [88:09]
Ben
Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to have you on the show.
- [88:13]
Viji Simo
Great to be here. Thank you so much.
- [88:15]
Ben
Thanks so much for joining. I would love to kick it off with a little bit of backstory on just what was the conversation like to recruit you to have you join OpenAI? It's a big move. It rocked the timeline and I'd love to know what was the pitch, what was the opportunity? How did you wind up at OpenAI?
- [88:36]
Viji Simo
Well, I had the extreme privilege of being on the board of OpenAI for many months. I think about a year before Sam approached me. Therefore, we were already working really closely together. And then at some point he told me, hey, it looks like, you know, there's a lot to do and it looks like you have ideas on how to do it. So is there any sense that we could make this happen? And I had, you know, a big job running Instacart at the time, so it took some time to transition. But I was incredibly inspired by the mission of OpenAI already and it felt like a no brainer.
- [89:11]
Ben
And can you take us through the GPT 5.2 announcement? I mean, I mean, one of the first documents that I think everyone knows you for in the OpenAI context, in the context of your new role, is the different areas where you see GPT5 and OpenAI having impact. ChatGPT having impact in folks life. Can you explain to me how you think those different sections are going? What excites you about the news today and kind of of contextualize how do you think about the map of what ChatGPT as an application is touching?
- [89:48]
Viji Simo
Yeah, that's a big question.
- [89:50]
Ben
So sorry, we can break it down one at a time.
- [89:52]
Viji Simo
I've got it. You know, when I, when I look at the opportunity ahead of us, I think AI is the greatest source of empowerment for people. And I want ChatGPT to be the personal super assistance that allows you to advance every part of your life. So the manifesto that you are referring to to me was like putting on papers this notion that if you look at how the world works right now, wealthy people have a lot of support staff, they have a travel agency of a personal shopper, they have a financial advisor. Imagine if we could give that team of support to everyone on earth. And fundamentally that's what I want to build. And I think with we have the opportunity to graduate from what is still fundamentally a chat bot that you ask questions to to a personal super assistance that gets everything done in your life. When you put that in the context of the announcement today, we're super excited to have launch 5.2. It's the leading model on. I was really hoping for that. It's a leading model in terms of everyday professional work. It's a big step change in intelligence. You see that on the benchmarks, obviously, but that gives me a lot of hope that we can be closer to achieving a lot of leaps on these use cases. So for example, if you take something like travel, you have to be good at long horizon tasks. You have to understand the goal of the users very well. With GPT 5.2 and the new capabilities, we're getting one step closer to making all of that possible.
- [91:37]
Ben
I feel like some people have a little bit of benchmark fatigue. Everyone has their own prompts and they feel like stuff's getting better, but it's hard to. Everyone wants the original chatgpt moment again. So what have you done for me lately? Syndrome. But I'm interested. Putting all of that aside, I want to know how are you measuring success internally around the launch of a new model? Like what does the rigor around developing KPIs? Obviously the company is in the interest of driving subscriptions and revenue, but there must be interim steps and a B tests and I mean this is your lineage, this is what makes you who you are. How do you think about assessing the impact of new models when they go out downstream of the benchmarks in the actual application.
- [92:31]
Viji Simo
Yeah, so that's like my entire job is turning breakthroughs into products that people use. And so for example, on 5.2 we just talked about the consumer side. I can go back to that. But on enterprise for example, it's really important to us. We serve a million businesses across the world. What we look at is like can companies start to do things that they weren't able to do before? We just released earlier this week an AI report for Enterprise and it said that 75% of people were saying, of workers were saying that we say I they can accomplish tasks that they couldn't do before. And then we see that even on the coding. Start on coding. If you look coding messages from non engineers has grown 36%. And so I look at all of these things as like these are also like the research team gives me these like magical superpowers. My job with the superpowers in the hands of people and, and at home and at work. And the thing we measure is can they do more and are they actually like understanding the use case and doing more? And there's also a lot, you know, there is a big narrative around like easy adoption really happening. Is it going fast enough? But what I am seeing is that there is a lot of pent up demand as long as you cross those capabilities. So I'll give you an example. All companies that I meet with tell me that if there was a way to generate spreadsheets much like faster with the I generate slides much faster with the, I would use it for a lot more knowledge work because you know, all knowledge workers generate spreadsheets and slides with 5.2. Like that's a big step up in the ability to do that. Like I can tell you with 5.1 I was trying to do it and the spreadsheet was kind of janky. Things were like not, not really in the right place. With 5:2 it's like great formatting. It totally understand what like you know, the numbers are about. It structures them the best way and these are the things that help unlock completely new use cases and ultimately growth for the customers that we work with.
- [94:40]
Ben
Do you feel like there's some sort of fundamental cultural difference between your previous roles where there hasn't been so much of this divide between the consumer side of the business and the enterprise side side of the business on day one? I feel like ChatGPT is unique in that it's used by kids and college students and Adults and people use it. Just they bring it to work with them alongside and then enterprises and the government's using it. Whereas for something like a social media application, it didn't really have that same, oh, we need this product to work for us in an enterprise context, necessarily. How is that? How has that shift been designing an application that can be used? It's sort of the same underlying model, but it's used in such different ways.
- [95:31]
Viji Simo
Yeah, it's a great question. And that's. That's the thing that we spend a lot of time working on. This thing that's really interesting is that part of the reason why we're winning in enterprise is because we're winning in consumer. When you talk to CEOs, they tell you, well, if my workers are already completely familiar with the technology because they use it for their personal use, use, that's much easier to deploy that an enterprise and have that be adopted. So that familiarity is actually really helping us. And so the thing we're trying to do is really keep that familiarity, but upsells the tools that are really specific to enterprise. So I'll give you an example. Connectors is a great example. We do have connectors. On the consumer side, you can connect your charge to your Gmail and things like that, but on the enterprise side, it's even more critical. You have to be connected to, like, Slack, to, like, all of your enterprise. And so these are cases where we push harder on the enterprise side to make sure that companies are doing what they need to unlock the value.
- [96:33]
Ben
Yeah, I'd love to hear your take or how you're thinking about the partnership with Disney. Jordi and I were just going back and forth on it. Landed in an extremely excited place. Seems like a fantastic partnership.
- [96:49]
Jordy
I think that. I think that in general, looking at the timeline this morning, obviously everybody's going to form an opinion on the partnership immediately, even before they kind of understand the facts. But as I looked at it, I think it maybe was getting less hype than maybe it deserves because it's only a $1 billion investment. It's relatively small in the context of investment France. But if you look at Disney's scale, the example I gave, there's like 140 million people have paid to visit a Disney park in the last year. I would imagine that all, like, I can imagine a world where over the next year, every person that's visiting a Disney park is like, hey, I can kind of, like, personalize this experience and, like, take and basically create this entirely new kind of, like, entertainment layer. To that.
- [97:37]
Ben
So I need a relationship with OpenAI one way or another.
- [97:39]
Jordy
Yeah. And I'm gonna pay for the product. So it feels extremely significant in a way that maybe people aren't fully appreciative.
- [97:46]
Ben
Yeah, yeah.
- [97:47]
Viji Simo
I mean, we're very, very excited about it. If you think about like Sora and Image Gen, this is all about unleashing creativity. I think we're all born creators and like, if you give people the tools to create easily and to go fast from imagination to a creation, we can see, you know, the golden age of creativity. But for that, like, you know, we need people to have inspiration, to have like, you know, like, like IP to play with. And Disney has by far the best ip, by far the best insp. And so partnering with them to bring these experiences to life is such a privilege. And we're really excited about it.
- [98:24]
Ben
Yeah. How our audience, I was thinking about this last night. Our audience has probably on average spent way more money on ads than actually seen ads because many folks in the audience have spent money on digital ad platforms run ad businesses. How do you think about positioning the ads, product or whatever happens to the other side of the market, like the brands that want to be successful in the future of commerce. Do you have any idea of the shape that it will take? Because we were just doing a Black Friday stream and just one founder after another singing the praises of the meta ecosystem, even the applovin ecosystem. The ability to go and, and put money in a magical box and get customers is remarkable. Have you thought more about what you want to offer ultimately to brands and companies that will be ultimately be partnering with OpenAI?
- [99:25]
Viji Simo
So not much to announce the ads, but what I can tell you is two things. One, like, if we, at some point we, we decide to go towards ads, we're going to do it in a way that is extremely respectful of the very special relationships that people have with like, the thing to understand is people trust that chargeability as they're back and gives them the best answer for their needs. Nothing we do can like jeopardize that. And so, you know, when I talk to brands and they're like, hey, how can we get more distribution? How can we, you know, influence the results of the lm? So reality is the best products, you know, we want to build an LLMs that is not impacted by, you know, paying companies, that is not impacted by, you know, people gaming the system and purely recommends the brands that are going to be best for you. Now, around that, around that model response, you can imagine that there are things that we could do to get to give brand new shine. But we really want to keep the model response pure because the trust that people have in that is critical.
- [100:36]
Ben
Yeah. Is there, is there a good, like, I don't know, like how do you actually set up the company for that? You need like an editorial like firewall so that one team is just not even affected. They don't even like, you know, hang out at the happy hours together and say, hey, you know, can you go do this this quarter because we have a big partner. Like, have you thought about what it culturally takes to get there?
- [100:57]
Viji Simo
Well, first, the very Good news at OpenAI is that the culture is already so focused on protecting the user, protecting the purity of LLM responses. It's so ingrained that I think anyone who would, you know, show like, hey, can you help me change things? That's a holiday party with the organ rejected. So I think that's, that's already good. We built the right antibodies day one. The other thing is I think we're not just going to rely on culture. We're also going to rely on technical capabilities that have firewalls between these different things so that people can really trust that the model is not influenced by anything other than having their back.
- [101:39]
Ben
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. How are you thinking about setting up the actual applications team for success? I've been struck by the fact that the narrative has shifted in some ways from the best model wins every time. The best model, the best model, the best model, the best benchmarks just win and then everyone will just switch around. It feels like we're almost leaving that era where the technical insiders, they do care about the benchmarks, they do care about the capabilities, but a lot of consumers just care about the user experience, the design, almost the qualitative aspects. How have you thought about developing a delightful user experience? Is that a new muscle for the organization? Do you feel like OpenAI is set up to deliver, you know, this, this delightful experience that can reduce, churn and keep people coming back? How do you think about that?
- [102:38]
Viji Simo
Well, first off, I would say, you know, this is a company that despite not starting as a product company, as builds the fastest growing consumer and enterprise business industry product with 800 million people. So while I think I can, you know, build an organization that does that even better, I really want to celebrate with what, what they've done before me. And, and I think you're, you're absolutely right. I think the magic is at the intersection of research and employment. So the thing I obsess about is how can we be tied at the hip with a product research team to understand what all the new capabilities that can unlock these new magical products. And you kind of see that like so which we're just talking about it a minute ago. It's a good example what where the capability was there and like that's what unlocks everything. But then the product thinking came in of like you know, putting characters and yourself inside the video. And so it's really a mix of like capabilities but also a lot of delightful product thinking and really understanding what people want that unlocks these magical experiences. We were even talking at the beginning about kind of all of the use cases. Right. Like me like you know, just giving people more intelligence in the chat bot. Like that's going to cap out at some point. What I need to do is help them realize they can use charge beauty for health and help them, you know, makes that easier. Help them plans of travel, help them shop. Like all of these things are going to be based on incredible models but also great products. That makes this understandable because right now you're still kind of having to stumble upon the value. And like when people realize they can use for health, they're like oh my God, this like unbelievable. But they kind of had to stumble upon it. And that means I haven't done my job fully until everyone knows how to use the value.
- [104:30]
Jordy
You guys are. Sam was talking earlier this week with some folks about the push into enterprise. How are you thinking about enterprise? Not on the API side but just on the core subscription size and around pricing. Historically as a 200amonth month plan subscriber for ChatGPT, I had hit some points where I'd be frustrated because I could sense the model being lazy and I'm like, I'm giving you as much money as you've. I'm on the highest plan. Can I be on a plan that's just not. Never gets lazy.
- [105:07]
Ben
This is the rumored $2,000 a month plan.
- [105:09]
Jordy
Yeah. So I'm thinking like, I just like can you make. Would it make sense to ever do an all you can consumption all you can eat or consumption based consumption on.
- [105:19]
Ben
On.
- [105:19]
Jordy
On the non API side?
- [105:20]
Ben
Sure.
- [105:21]
Jordy
Just because you know, I think consumer based is wild.
- [105:25]
Ben
No one wants to do that. But I don't know, it's a bold, bold statement. I'd be interested to hear what you think.
- [105:31]
Viji Simo
Yeah. You know, we've launched credit based pricing on the enterprise side so that in addition to your subscription you can buy extra credit to get more. I think that's a model that could possibly work on the consumer side. So, you know, we, we. We are open to exploring anything. We have it, like now for Codex.
- [105:49]
Ben
Yeah.
- [105:50]
Viji Simo
And so, you know, that's something that we could totally explore. But I think it goes back to a lot of the very. I would say, like, sophisticated people really understand the concept of buying more intelligence. Regular people just want, like, more outcomes. So I think the more we make that transition from a chatbot to, like, you give us your list of tasks and we do your tasks, the more we're going to be able to make people realize the value and then, you know, the pricing will follow.
- [106:18]
Ben
Your original manifesto, you outlined knowledge, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time support. That sort of covers everything. Is there a seventh capability that you're excited about? You mentioned spreadsheets. Maybe that's the seventh one, right after time and creative expression put it at the top. That should be at the top. Economic freedom, spreadsheets. But is there a seventh category or a nascent just even in your own personal use, a new capability that you feel like, okay, maybe this year has been the year of agents. We've gotten coding agents. We've gotten deep research a year or two ago. Is there some new capability that you've seen glimmers of? Okay, I think we're actually solving this piece, or I think it might be good enough to use in this scenario.
- [107:09]
Viji Simo
Yeah, I mean, we touched on a bunch. But what I would say is, for me, the next step is unlocking connection to the ecosystem. So, like, insular.
- [107:20]
Ben
Yeah.
- [107:21]
Viji Simo
And we launched, you know, that day we launched on that platform. But I think, like, we were talking about House, like, health would be so much more powerful if you could connect to your health record and all of your kind of bio wearables. We were talking about, like, travel. It's so much more powerful if charging. But you can connect with, you know, a lot of, like, travel companies. And so figuring out how it can not just do things in these, like, you know, text format, but really connecting and doing things in the real world. That's the thing that I think the models are ready for, but we're still catching up on the product side to make that possible. And unlock is really, like, you know, much more sophisticated use cases.
- [108:03]
Ben
There's a ton of questions in the chat about the. About the code red. We have to ask how is it going to. Has it been an intense period culturally? It feels like there's been a lot of ups and downs in any startup's history. I imagine that it's been exciting and thrilling to re engage. But how has it been internally so far?
- [108:26]
Viji Simo
Well, for context, Code Reds are not uncommon. We declare Code Reds as a way to really marshal a lot of resources towards a priority to signal what's at the top of the list and what can be deprioritized and focus. And I think during this time focus is critical and that's of how it's going. I mean, I'll let you be the judge of it, but I'm pretty proud of what we're releasing today and like, you know, like leading, leading the way in terms of, you know, best model for everyday professional work. That has been a goal of ours for a long time. It's been in the works for a long time. It didn't start with the Code Red, but we're really excited to be able to release that today. And on top of that, it's our 10 year anniversary.
- [109:09]
Ben
Wait, today?
- [109:10]
Viji Simo
Yeah.
- [109:10]
Jordy
No way.
- [109:11]
Ben
I didn't realize it was today. Get a trading card up ASAP. Team, what are we doing? 10 year anniversary of OpenAI. That's incredible.
- [109:22]
Jordy
That's wild.
- [109:22]
Ben
Fantastic. That's amazing. Congratulations.
- [109:25]
Jordy
How startups historically have been able to innovate because they tolerate some amount of failure. And I think if you look at the hyperscalers too, they're willing to launch product products that just don't work. Right. If you look at the history of Google, they take moonshots, they make bets. Not everything works. Some do. And it's an effective way to continue to innovate. I feel like when OpenAI releases a new product now, whether it's Sora or the browser or anything like that, it faces so much scrutiny from the world. Some people are excited and bullish, other people want to see it fail. How, how are you guys kind of, what's your internal framework around failure today? Because ideally you want to keep shipping a lot of things and if you ship three things that don't work and one thing that does, it's like, great, you have a new, a new product that you can scale.
- [110:20]
Viji Simo
Yeah, well, you know, I'm, I'm no stranger to a lot of scrutiny. Throughout my career I've worked at companies that, that went through a lot of phases like that. And I would tell you, I think it's like, it's simple and cliche, but you kind of have to block out the noise. So the thing that's good about OpenAI is like the North Star. It's very, is very clear. Right? It's AGI that benefits all of humanity and we have a lot of conviction internally that we're on the right path to do that. And that does mean that, you know, some things are going to work, some things aren't. And because the culture is routine in a research lab, which is very different from other companies I've worked at out, I think the fear of failure is much less because people already know in research that you explore a lot of path and like many don't work. Like that's the core of research. And so because that's the DNA, people don't freak out when a product doesn't work because I'm like, oh, it's kind of like research. We have to test a lot of things and some of them will hit, some of them won't. But, but I think this innovative spirit has gotten us to our heart and really leading the market. And I think that's something that we, we absolutely need to preserve.
- [111:27]
Ben
Well, thank you.
- [111:28]
Jordy
Last question. Do you think are we still going to see age verification this year? Is that or is that going to be a 2026 launch?
- [111:37]
Viji Simo
So age verification is starting to roll out already some countries and while doing a slow rollout so that we can make sure that we're very accurate in predicting the kid with an adult and then the adult modes that's going to be unlocked by edge verification is going to land in Q1.
- [111:54]
Jordy
Got it.
- [111:54]
Ben
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the amazing progress in such.
- [112:00]
Jordy
Congratulations to the whole team on decade.
- [112:02]
Ben
Congratulations on decade on 10 years in the business of building AGI. We're feeling the AGI here. Have a great rest of your day and we hope to talk to you soon.
- [112:11]
Jordy
Good chatting.
- [112:11]
Viji Simo
Thanks so much for having.
- [112:12]
Ben
Goodbye. Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rail securely, spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. I love that. The WWE voice for the stripe for the stripe portfolio company or wholly owned? Anyway, let's go back to the timeline. Let's take you through some news. That was a fun back to back. I enjoyed both of those folks. That was. I feel like it's very funny that we were discussing all week the David Ellison, Netflix, Warner Bros. We're getting up to speed on media and what's going on there and then boom, we get our little treat, the crossover of the decade with Disney and OpenAI. It's funny, you were clearly alluding to me being confused by the Disney OpenAI deal because I went on my own rollercoaster Thinking, okay, is this like a nothing burger? Is this a good thing? And now I am fully in your camp. I think it's very good. And I think that it does feel like we might go into something like the press release economy that's going on in the prediction markets wars, where every foundation model might need to hoover up particular partnerships because I didn't even know exclusivity was on the table. You know that OpenAI has a content licensing partnership with the Wall Street Journal. And so the Wall Street Journal gets paid. If I hit ChatGPT and I ask for a detail about SpaceX's latest launch, it's probably going to ask the Wall Street Journal. It's going to ask a lot of different sources, but they pay the Wall Street Journal. Now if they do an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal. And I'm like, I can't get that in. Claude. Claude just doesn't even know.
- [114:03]
Jordy
It's way less significant because the journalists on the same news.
- [114:07]
Ben
No, no. To me, the Journal is like Disneyland on a thousand. I would gladly never go to Disneyland ever again if I could just read this precious. This precious paper newspaper every day.
- [114:20]
Jordy
No any Disney content ever again in your life or the Journal. You're riding with the Journal.
- [114:26]
Ben
This is the Disneyland of business.
- [114:28]
Jordy
Of your mind.
- [114:29]
Dylan Byers
Of your mind.
- [114:29]
Ben
Disneyland of my mind. No, no, of course you are correct. There are not many Wall Street Journal fans that are anywhere near as insane sane as the Disney files. What is Lee San El Gaib here saying? Lisan says GPT 5.2 Pro, it has ridiculous pricing. Once again, $20 and $168. Tyler, do you know if GPT 5.2 Pro is more expensive? I guess they're raising prices.
- [114:56]
Tyler
Yeah, I mean, so this is the Pro model. These are always like the very expensive ones. Yeah, I think it's pretty. Let me actually look at the normal model, but I think it's pretty comparable.
- [115:05]
Ben
I guess 5.1 was $1.75 and $14. So it's a pretty significant. Pretty significant increase. But I don't know. This is a new technology. We don't know where the Pareto frontier of pricing is necessarily. We don't know.
- [115:23]
Tyler
Yeah, so it's slightly more clear. Price elasticity is 5.1 was $1.25 on the input. It's $1.75 cents for 5.2. It's like, you know, marginally more expensive.
- [115:34]
Ben
Yeah, well, so let's see. Direct challenge to anthropic. The knowledge cutoff is August 31, 2025. So Yuchin Jin here from Hyperbolic Labs, the co founder and CTO is saying that this is a freshly pre trained model.
- [115:53]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [115:53]
Tyler
So do you believe that?
- [115:54]
Ben
Have you been studying the timeline while we've been live under understanding what's going on?
- [115:58]
Tyler
Yeah. So some people are saying it's new pre train. Um, that's the newest like cutoff date since what was it?
- [116:05]
Ben
Is there a way September 30th not do a full pre train but they could just kind of do an update with the new.
- [116:09]
Tyler
Yeah, exactly. So people are. It's like oh, it's a new cutoff.
- [116:12]
Ben
Yeah.
- [116:13]
Tyler
Usually you'd think that's a new pre train. It's probably more like a. It's like a mid train or something like this where you basically do continued pre training on new data. So it's probably not an actual pre train because you would expect that to be like a much bigger update. Right. You'd still like oh GPT6.
- [116:27]
Ben
Yeah.
- [116:28]
Tyler
5.2.
- [116:28]
Ben
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I still, I still have to. I still feel like the 4o pre train, it's like the latest and greatest up until now. Running that back, I mean that thing was expensive but it's not that expensive compared to now because they have so much more money I don't think.
- [116:41]
Tyler
Wait, 404040 was never expensive. It was always cheaper.
- [116:44]
Ben
Yeah but wasn't 4 oh like the base pre trained for like pretty much everything today to date?
- [116:49]
Karan
Yeah.
- [116:50]
Ben
And so rerunning that. I mean it was expensive at the time it was like probably $100 million but now $100 million like they got.
- [116:56]
Tyler
It's like one AI researchers.
- [116:57]
Ben
Exactly, exactly. So they should be ripping pre trains all the time just because. Just to keep the timeline in check. Keep them guessing anyway.
- [117:04]
Jordy
Still got it.
- [117:04]
Ben
Figma think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. What you got here? We're eating good future pipelines may need to unify pre mid post training injecting reasoning data earlier and more continuously. To Anyone wondering if 5.2 is new pre trained, I'm letting you connect the top the dots between this says Alexander Doria and this synth agent. Pipelines aside, this is the new main catch of Deepsea 3.2. This isn't a new model card new Elo update. It's an architectural update at mid training scale. Everything mutable and everything's mutable and we are likely to see more and more sub model speculation. Interesting. Well we'll have to let the 5.2 new sort of simmer in the timeline. Let everyone do their own benchmarks. How'd they do on ARC AGI 2? That is always an interesting one. Are we cooked? Did they blow us away? GPT 5.2 thinking is at 52.9%, up from 17.6%. That's a huge leap.
- [118:11]
Jordy
Wait, we gotta run our joke benchmark.
- [118:14]
Ben
Yes. Let's run some of the tvp, pull it up.
- [118:18]
Jordy
Try to make us live. While we're pulling those up, give us tie back.
- [118:21]
Ben
We tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta has AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk.
- [118:33]
Tyler
Okay, so, yes, this is my benchmark where I ask to recreate the joke about the shrimp fried rice.
- [118:39]
Ben
Yes.
- [118:39]
Tyler
So I'll just go through some of these and you guys tell me how good they are.
- [118:43]
Ben
Yes.
- [118:44]
Tyler
You're telling me a crab rang this big bell?
- [118:48]
Ben
Crab rang bell.
- [118:49]
Jordy
This is thinking this is 5.2.
- [118:50]
Tyler
Thinking this is 5.2 thinking this is the frontier.
- [118:53]
Ben
This is the best of all time.
- [118:54]
Tyler
AI.
- [118:56]
Ben
I kind of like you're telling me a crab rang this goon. That's kind of funny.
- [119:00]
Tyler
Yeah, I think that's what I would.
- [119:01]
Ben
Have thought, but that's not it.
- [119:02]
Tyler
You're telling me a bear built this market.
- [119:06]
Ben
Oh, because markets can be bullish or bearish. A bear built market.
- [119:10]
Tyler
You're telling me a ham. You're telling me a ham rotation this lettuce.
- [119:14]
Ben
Wait, Ham wrote this lettuce. Ham wrote lettuce.
- [119:19]
Tyler
Wait, wait, wait.
- [119:20]
Ben
This is terrible has happened.
- [119:21]
Tyler
You're telling me a ghost wrote this script?
- [119:25]
Ben
Ghost wrote script. Ghost written script.
- [119:27]
Tyler
Ghost written.
- [119:28]
Ben
Okay. Yeah, yeah.
- [119:28]
Tyler
You're telling me an owl delivered this mail?
- [119:31]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [119:33]
Tyler
So I think on this benchmark, there's more I could. I mean, you could get the picture. I think Gemini is still the frontier.
- [119:40]
Viji Simo
Here.
- [119:43]
Ben
In terms of shrimp fried rice bench. Yes, yes. Because there are some good ones there. But again, to understand, it seems like Gemini understood the assignment, but still ultimately leaned on Reddit data and broad Internet data and did not come up with any unique joke that had never existed on the Internet before. But it did find the good jokes on the Internet.
- [120:05]
Tyler
All of the good ones that it gave me I could find elsewhere.
- [120:08]
Aaron Cannon
But.
- [120:08]
Tyler
But you still.
- [120:09]
Aaron Cannon
It.
- [120:09]
Tyler
You know, it's hard to like, search for that kind of thing because they're not just listed as, like, oh, these are jokes.
- [120:13]
Ben
Fried rice type jokes.
- [120:14]
Tyler
Yeah, it's hard to look for.
- [120:15]
Ben
Yeah, Yeah. I do wonder if this.
- [120:17]
Tyler
And also there's a thing where Gemini 3 was actually a new pre train people are saying. So maybe that was.
- [120:22]
Jordy
All right, let's try at least one more.
- [120:23]
Ben
Wait, I wonder if this benchmark is like, saturated in the sense that like every possible shrimp fried rice joke has been said and written down on the Internet. Are. Is there any new territory? Like, if I put you on this job for a month, could you come up with a new joke that's as funny as shrimp fried rice?
- [120:40]
Jordy
Yes.
- [120:40]
Ben
You think you could?
- [120:41]
Tyler
I think so.
- [120:42]
Ben
Okay, maybe that's a challenge. Do it, but not give me a month. Okay.
- [120:45]
Tyler
When we have time in the new year.
- [120:46]
Ben
Okay.
- [120:47]
Jordy
I want to give you one thing. Just like Adult mode. Adult mode and Tyler discovering a new joke novel joke are both coming in.
- [120:54]
Ben
You're telling me, by the way.
- [120:56]
Jordy
So Stanley, Stanley in the chat says, lol. Why don't you. They swear. Seems our kids watch.
- [121:02]
Ben
I guess it is pretentious, but I don't care.
- [121:04]
Jordy
No, it's. Our kids are. Our kids are watching at home.
- [121:07]
Ben
Yeah. Anyway, what's the next joke?
- [121:09]
Jordy
He is swearing.
- [121:10]
Tyler
You're telling me a chicken actually tendered these? You're telling me a chef boyar eat these ravioli?
- [121:19]
Ben
Okay. Yeah. This is really, really rough.
- [121:21]
Tyler
Wait, this one's not bad. This one.
- [121:22]
Ben
Okay. What's this one?
- [121:23]
Tyler
You're telling me a shepherd actually pied this?
- [121:29]
Ben
They're really food based. They kind of latch onto the food.
- [121:32]
Tyler
You're telling me a kid napped this?
- [121:35]
Ben
Kidnapped. Okay, there it I don't know.
- [121:40]
Jordy
All right, you just bombed Tyler. Hopefully.
- [121:42]
Ben
5.3 GT3RS bench. Let's do GT3RS bench. This is the benchmark here at TVPN where we ask every Frontier model to write unique copy marketing copy for a GT3 RS from Porsche. And we have an astute eye. We watch for any tells that can tell you that this was AI written. Is it generic? Does it use contrastive parallelism? Does it use antithetical parallelism? Antithetical parallelism is, of course, when grammatically you say, it's not this, it's that. That it's not just a new AI model. It's an entirely new way of thinking. Right. That is contrastive parallelism.
- [122:24]
Tyler
There's a good Wikipedia article that I think is relatively new, where it has a bunch of tales of AI that has a bunch more stuff than what we discussed.
- [122:31]
Ben
And people were going back and forth with Rune over this where Rune was saying, I think you could actually build an AI detector. People were saying, well, OpenAI had one of those. And then they took it down because it wasn't working. But. But it's weird because I feel like, yes, AI written text should be impossible to detect. Like, we're so past the Turing test. The models are incredible. It really is remarkable. And yet I can totally tell when people use ChatGPT to write a blog post. It's just obvious. So, Anyway, let's do GT3RS bench yet.
- [123:05]
Tyler
I read a paper like a month ago and there's this company around it, I think Pangram, but they do actually pretty good.
- [123:10]
Ben
Oh, they do good detection.
- [123:11]
Tyler
Detection, yeah. But do you want me to read the.
- [123:13]
Ben
This is GT3RS bench, written by either GPT2.5.2 or handcrafted by a marketing genius. Y' all have to tell us, Jordy, do you think this was AI or not? Let's read it.
- [123:26]
Jordy
I mean, he just said. He just said it was.
- [123:30]
Tyler
This isn't a car you own.
- [123:32]
Jordy
No.
- [123:36]
Ben
Immediately out of the gate. You're out of the gate with the AI slob.
- [123:41]
Dylan Byers
It's not this.
- [123:42]
Ben
It's not literally the first.
- [123:43]
Jordy
It's not a car you own. It's a car you cherish. It's a car you own so much.
- [123:49]
Tyler
As one you operate.
- [123:50]
Ben
Wait, really? That's the first line.
- [123:51]
Tyler
That's the first line.
- [123:52]
Ben
Oh, wait, wait.
- [123:54]
Aaron Cannon
Operate?
- [123:54]
Ben
That's not even a good line. That's insane.
- [123:57]
Jordy
Okay, keep going, keep going.
- [123:59]
Tyler
The 911 GT3RS is a Porsche at its most, most uncompromising like that. A naturally aspirated 4L flat 6 screaming to a 9000rpm. Race bred.
- [124:10]
Ben
Never been in a car before, brother. Never been in a car before. Oh, is the L? Yeah, Stands for leader.
- [124:17]
Tyler
I don't. Race bred. Aerodynamics that generate real downforce.
- [124:22]
Ben
Okay.
- [124:22]
Tyler
In a chassis engineered for lap times. Not likes. M dash, not likes.
- [124:27]
Jordy
What? That's not even true. True. Yeah, it's like the most over. I mean, I shouldn't say it's over. Hyped, but it's like the most hyped car on the Internet. It is engineered for likes.
- [124:37]
Ben
It is.
- [124:37]
Jordy
In some ways. It's. It's like.
- [124:39]
Ben
I think it's not good track times.
- [124:41]
Jordy
It's a great track car, but it's.
- [124:43]
Ben
It is engineered.
- [124:44]
Jordy
Oh, no, no, no. Most people are buying it for the road. For likes.
- [124:48]
Ben
We were talking about this with the. With the G Wagon. Like, who's like. The G Wagon has a particular. A particular vibe around it now, where it is sort of like an influencer mobile. I think you've made the joke that, like, it's the standard Issue in la. When you become an influencer, they just. One just shows up. Right?
- [125:04]
Jordy
Well, that's partly because the roads in LA are so bad you need something that could off road in a pinch.
- [125:10]
Ben
Yes, yes. But the question is like, is that Mercedes designing the G wagon for influencers? Like, no, not at all. It's like they designed it, they just stuck with it for a long time. Eventually the influencers are adopted it. You can't put that on Mercedes. It's not their fault that all the influencers drive them. Anyway, let's continue with GPT3RS bench. Is that it or is there more?
- [125:33]
Karan
No, there's more.
- [125:34]
Ben
Okay, keep reading the slop.
- [125:35]
Tyler
Every surface has a purpose. Every input is immediate. Every drive feels like a qualifying lap built with y sock level obsession. The GT3RS deletes. Did I also get that wrong?
- [125:48]
Ben
No, it's okay.
- [125:49]
Jordy
It's just like you just hesitated. You hesitated.
- [125:52]
Ben
You just sound like someone who doesn't talk about Vysoc packages very often.
- [125:55]
Tyler
Vysoc, okay.
- [125:56]
Karan
Yeah, yeah.
- [125:56]
Tyler
Oh yeah. I guess like Weimar. The GT3RS deletes anything unnecessary and doubles down on feel lightning fast PDK shifts, surgical steering and suspension tuned straight from the Nurburgring Playbook.
- [126:13]
Jordy
Playbook?
- [126:14]
Tyler
The Nurburgring Playbook?
- [126:16]
Ben
What is the Nurburgring Playbook? Fuck.
- [126:18]
Tyler
It's loud, stiff, dramatic, em dash and utterly alive. This is not a luxury purchase. It's a statement of priorities.
- [126:25]
Ben
It's a statement of priorities. I don't understand how the. It's not. This is. That is like still in the soup. Like I like just.
- [126:35]
Jordy
I think run it.
- [126:36]
Ben
Run the trough.
- [126:37]
Tyler
It's not a new pre train. Basically. I think it's one of the.
- [126:39]
Jordy
It might be that, but it showed up. It might be. The OpenAI team, low key, hates AI generators, generated written word as well and they want to continue to be able to identify it easily.
- [126:49]
Ben
Maybe, maybe I like that.
- [126:50]
Jordy
It might be. They're. They're doing a public service here.
- [126:54]
Ben
Okay, so. GetBezel.com, shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by bezel Scene of experts. Cha Ching arcprize is breaking it down. A year ago we verified a preview of an unreleased version of OpenAI03 Hobby that scored 88% on ARC AGI1 at an estimate of $4,500 per task. Today we verified a new GPT 5.2 Pro X high state of the art score of 90% at $11.64 per task. This represents a 390 efficiency improvement in one year. This is the headline. This is the story. This is the best fact I think about GPT 5.2. This is massive. Congratulations to the OpenAI team for delivering at this level. This is remarkable. Really, really great stuff. I love it. Now go do it for RKGI3. What have you done for me lately?
- [128:01]
Jordy
We the biggest failure this year was not getting goal posts here in the studio that we can move.
- [128:08]
Ben
Production team. We need goal posts.
- [128:10]
Jordy
Can you order on Amazon?
- [128:11]
Ben
We need a physical goal post that we can move around the studio. Every time one of these releases comes out like a full size one?
- [128:18]
Jordy
No, something like an indoor one of.
- [128:20]
Ben
The indoors 40 can lift up and move to a different piece of the studio and then we'll have a sign that has whatever our net goal post is. ARC AGI V3 I want them to one shot that and we will move the goal posts over there and then we will erect a new goal and we will move the goal posts over there. On the release of a new model that does whatever we said was going to impress us, but now no longer is enough to impress us. Well, you know what else is impressive? This scoop from Reed Albergadi, the tech editor at Semaphore, colleague of Ben Smith. He says scoop Google names a new chief to head up its $100 billion a year AI infrastructure build out. Amin Vadat, who will report to Sundar directly. This is very exciting. Imagine having a $100 billion budget for.
- [129:20]
Jordy
Capex that's like Ben's direct four times NASA's annual budget. Yeah, Ben, if you're really so Ben's the cap, Ben's the capex guy here. Almost every time, every time we stop to me, he wants another 30 grand for a new camera. This light, this. It's going up next year.
- [129:44]
Ben
One more. Meanwhile, we are actively on the show asking for Goalpost that will probably wind up costing 32.
- [129:49]
Jordy
We're part of the problem.
- [129:50]
Ben
We are, we are.
- [129:51]
Jordy
But you know, Casado says incredibly smart move by Google. Amin is absolutely unique in his academic, technical, operational and business depth. Huge deal.
- [130:01]
Ben
Well, let me tell you about adquick.com out of home. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable plan. Buy and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest is Angela from worktrace. AI. Hi. She's in the Restream waiting room and now she's in the TVP and ultradome. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Angela, Good to meet you.
- [130:20]
Angela
Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. It's nice to meet you guys.
- [130:23]
Ben
Congrats Congrats on the news. Please introduce yourself the company. Give us the news. I have a mallet here getting ready to ring the gong.
- [130:32]
Angela
Yes, I'm Angela, most recently a co founder of Worktrace AI where we just came out of stealth today. So we're excited to talk to you about it. Before this I was doing a lot of deep learning. So it was deep learning job after deep learning job. Most recently with that OpenAI, the last three years mostly doing product management.
- [130:51]
Ben
Cool.
- [130:52]
Angela
And yeah, when I was at OpenAI, I mean we were also making these amazing models like they are now more and more. But there is still this gap that we hear about where people aren't getting their magic moments from AI Totally. Despite the models being super duper.
- [131:08]
Jordy
It's pretty funny you said you were doing a lot of deep learning as a product manager. Some other product managers are doing a lot of deep research these days where they're effectively glorified. Deep research.
- [131:19]
Angela
I do a lot of deep research these days. A lot of my docs are powered by deep research, I have to admit.
- [131:26]
Ben
So I mean, Sam Altman's been on record before talking about how not to get steamer. Like do not start a company that is predicated on the model staying the same capabilities. Like if your whole pitch is I got a new LLM and it does pretty well on rkgi. Well, today was a bad day for you, but there are plenty of other pockets of opportunities. Obviously OpenAI believes in you because the OpenAI fund invested. But how did you think about creating durability or positioning the company in a way that would was maybe synergistic with what OpenAI is already doing.
- [132:06]
Angela
Yeah, I guess one benchmark for it is that when 5.2 came out today, we were excited to try it.
- [132:12]
Ben
Yes, exactly.
- [132:14]
Angela
It's an exciting day for us too.
- [132:15]
Ben
That's good.
- [132:16]
Angela
But yeah, when we thought about it, I mean for me when I was there, OpenAI is so strong at making just really amazing models. But I feel like they themselves. But they also want help from whoever to help distribute these models models to the world. I mean there's so many people that need to benefit from these and it's very difficult to actually get these into the context of enterprises real world use cases. It requires a lot of boots on the ground and getting deep into the use cases. Ultimately they are punching above their weight in terms of how many people they have to get all of the amazing models they have out into the world. And that's something that we felt was super complementary to yeah.
- [132:57]
Ben
Walk me through the product experience, how a company might actually integrate worktrace and start building a bespoke workflow over time. What's the actual diffusion process into an organization to start getting value?
- [133:19]
Angela
Yeah. I'll tell you about what I think the status quo is, which is what I saw when I was a product manager.
- [133:25]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [133:25]
Angela
Which is that a team comes in, they know that I could be transformative for their industry and so they want to invest in it. However, they're keeping keeping up with what is going on with the latest 5.2 model. What does that mean for them? They're keeping up with what's actually going on in their workforce. And so what they often do is they bring in consultants or tech services company or the OpenAI, go to market team to be able to figure out what is the exact right use cases that they should apply this particular model or the model they know that's going to come out in three months to these particular teams that they know need help. So that takes like months as far as my experience has gone. Whereas with worktrace, what we do is, what we're able to do is like have a desktop app to be able to see what work is going on and then be able to flag that, hey, this is. Tasks that seem repetitive, that you seem to be spending a lot of time on that are breaking your flow that that 5.2 happens to be very, very good at today. Why don't you consider building out a workflow with 5.2 for this exact use case? So what that looks like then is like a prioritized list of use cases. So a roadmap basically for AI transformation for a company. And then for each of those use cases, it'll have actually the JSON or the output that you need to input into OpenAI agent builder to actually start running an agent for that workflow.
- [134:51]
Ben
That's interesting. How do you deal with the scenario where the system is observing a workflow and in the process of that identification of a workflow, it becomes clear that the person should just be using SaaS instead of if somebody is like, oh yeah, every day they open a spreadsheet and they have a list of people's names and phone numbers and how recently they contacted them, that might just be a sales opportunity to get them on a CRM. You don't necessarily need to agentically build a new CRM. Maybe, but how do you deal with those scenarios? Because there's a lot of companies where they're not even on the frontier of SaaS implementation.
- [135:30]
Angela
Yeah, and there's a lot of kind of industry wide process mining tools that look for bottlenecks in your work or maybe where you should use those other tools. And so despite how good the models are, most of your work today probably can't be done with agents. There's a huge amount that can be though, and that's specifically what we're looking at to find. So we'll mine for the ones that can today be used for agents. And we're making a bet that that amount will just get larger and larger over time.
- [135:58]
Ben
Yeah. And do you think that you have to live on the desktop in an app? Because I imagine that if my workflow is slow, but it's taking place inside of like, you know, the Salesforce ecosystem or something, they're not just going to let you build something on top. Or will they? Like, how does AI I bump into these walled gardens that are going to prop up in enterprise software, where Marc Benioff was probably thinking, I don't want you puppeteering my software. I want to be the one doing that.
- [136:30]
Angela
I see. I mean, for us to understand how work happens, it's best to be able to just see what you see when you're doing work, which honestly is more than your desktop. It's also your phone, you in meetings and whatnot. However, we find that we go a long way by seeing just what's happening on your desktop to get us sense of how your work is going in terms of actually then doing the tasks. I mean, we still use the tools that you use, you know, we integrate them with Salesforce or any of the normal tools that you might be using because I mean, that is just how work happens. And we want to, we want to meet you where your work is.
- [137:07]
Ben
Yeah.
- [137:08]
Jordy
Do you, do you think some people that are aggressively pursuing a forward deployed model are going to look at your solution and think like, oh, maybe I didn't need to send my most valuable human capital into the world. I could have just set an app. Because it feels like this is like a potentially a more, at least for a lot of different types of work, a much more elegant solution than let's fly this person out, put them in a short term rental or hotel, let's have them just sit in the office. When you can actually just use in order to implement AI. When you can use AI to basically watch someone's screen and discover what these workflows actually look like.
- [137:46]
Angela
Yeah, I mean, I mean part of it is that there's not that many AI experts in the world for what we Need. There's not that many FTEs that we could deploy out. So most of the companies that we're working with probably can't afford FTEs to come over for a couple of months at a time, but also continuously as AI changes.
- [138:06]
Aaron Cannon
But also.
- [138:06]
Angela
Yeah, at the same time. When we were thinking about what we were doing to help companies get up to date on AI, we were listening to their workflows, we were understanding their workflows, breaking it down, looking at variations, which just happens to be something that AI is particularly good at. So when we saw, like, what it took to actually find use cases and then put them in the format that agent builders needed, it just felt like that in and of itself was a great use case for AI, which is actually what made us super bullish to pursue this idea.
- [138:36]
Ben
Get us up to speed on the fundraising history. I want to know what the latest news is.
- [138:42]
Aaron Cannon
Yes.
- [138:42]
Angela
So we recently closed our seed round, which we're super duper excited about.
- [138:48]
Jordy
How much?
- [138:49]
Angela
Nine million.
- [138:51]
Jordy
There we go. Very, very cool. I'm super excited about this. I love when an idea is obvious and you just sit here thinking, why didn't anybody do this before? And some. Sometimes it just takes the right team to come along and do it and.
- [139:08]
Ben
Look at who's in this deal. Agency conviction OpenAI Logan Kilpatrick's in. Big fan of him. Mira Moradi. Wow. You really.
- [139:17]
Jordy
Murderers row.
- [139:18]
Ben
Murderers Row.
- [139:20]
Jordy
Genius Ventures. Genius Ventures. I'm an lp, so, yeah, Very, very excited.
- [139:26]
Ben
Well, congratulations on all the progress. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on social media.
- [139:32]
Jordy
I have a feeling you'll be back for the A within a quarter.
- [139:36]
Ben
I think so.
- [139:37]
Jordy
I just got a feeling.
- [139:38]
Angela
Hoping for it too.
- [139:38]
Ben
Hoping to see you guys soon. The chat is obsessed with you. They think that you should go on Joe Rogan, apparently, which I don't know why, but I do think that would be a fun thing. So good luck to you on the rest of the media tour. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.
- [139:54]
Jordy
Cheers.
- [139:54]
Ben
Goodbye. Eightsleep.com exceptional sleep without exception. Follow sleep faster, sleep deeper. Wake up energized. I'm getting studied. My fall off needed to be studied. It's very clear what happened. I flew to New York City and I slept in a bunk bed, which was not ideal randomly. I wound up in one hotel room, four bunk beds.
- [140:19]
Jordy
We didn't book the hotel room.
- [140:20]
Ben
None of them fit me.
- [140:21]
Jordy
The hotel room was booked. It was a mistake by another company.
- [140:24]
Ben
Yeah, it Was not Nick. Nick is fantastic. Hotel.
- [140:28]
Jordy
What'd you get? What'd you get?
- [140:29]
Ben
I got an 87. What'd you get?
- [140:30]
Jordy
Beat me. I got an 80. I'll give it to you.
- [140:33]
Ben
I'm back. I'm back baby. Never challenge me at sleep. Never go snooze for snooze with me because I will out snooze you. And next we are joined by John from Scrub Capital. John is a practicing neurosurgeon, health system leader, multi time co founder.
- [140:49]
Jordy
What's happening?
- [140:50]
Ben
Cmo.
- [140:50]
Jordy
Welcome to the show and more.
- [140:52]
Ben
Welcome to the stream. Jordy.
- [140:53]
Jordy
How are you guys?
- [140:54]
Ben
We're fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Can you get us up to speed on some of the writing that you've been doing, some of your overall thinking on how America is misunderstanding self driving cars, what we need to change the actual message, the status quo and then the message that we need to get out?
- [141:17]
John
Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. So look up until right around now, we've been thinking about autonomous vehicles as a tech moonshot, you know, cool tech story, take shots at it, like it, whatever side you're on. But what I'm trying to say, and now others are joining too is this is a public health urgency now because what happened is Waymo put out data at 100 million miles. This is about a month or two ago. You can go download and analyze it yourself. They put out all the raw data and what I found was astonishing. We're facing, guys, the possibility that if we play our cards right now going forward, we could eliminate traffic deaths as a leading cause of death in the United States.
- [141:59]
Ben
That's crazy. Wait, it's the leading cause? I thought it was cancer.
- [142:02]
John
As a leading cause.
- [142:03]
Ben
As a leading cause, yeah. It's huge though, isn't it? Thousands of people.
- [142:07]
John
Yeah, 40,000 a year.
- [142:09]
Ben
And for children and young adults, it's.
- [142:11]
John
The number two cause of death in the United States and it's the number one worldwide for children.
- [142:15]
Ben
And also, I mean not all life is precious, obviously, but it also must be a cause of death of young people because it's so random when it happens. It's not, it's not something where you know, oh, someone's lived their full life and then they passed away. Yeah, that's right.
- [142:31]
John
It does tend to bias towards younger people, healthier prime of life. It's not like it's. This tends to be the sick and elderly, that's for sure.
- [142:38]
Ben
So. But I'm totally with you. You, I buy it Hook, line and sinker. I'm a believer. But also it seems like it's going fine because Google has a trillion dollars of cash flow and they're going to do this and Waymo is rolling out. What do we really need to change? It seems like everything's going well, right?
- [142:58]
John
So look, we have a regulatory capture problem right now, guys. And that's why I was so glad to come on tvpn. You could look at coverage in the Washington Post, coverage in the Boston Globe. City councils and other moneyed forces have politicians ears and they're working against this. And I think we gotta work to liberate this and get the message out that this is not a risk story, this is a safety story. From my perspective now, looking at this from a medical lens, and I haven't even scratched the surface and I'm sure I'm gonna get all flamed on Twitter now and everything else. Plaintiff bar in a lot of places is what's opposing this as well. And I won't impute motive, but people can use their imaginations.
- [143:40]
Jordy
Okay, so what's happening in California that allows me to. Every other week I log on, I see that Waymo's map is expanding California. It seems like it's going well historically, has been. I don't know, I would imagine that this would be a tougher environment than other states that are less population dense.
- [144:03]
John
Jordi, what's interesting about this is this doesn't respect traditional political tribes or left coast, right coast, whatever. It actually it cuts jagged across typical tribes often. So like you could have far left people where they love bikes, but love that waymos are safer. So it's like, great. But then there's a group over there that doesn't want any vehicles. So waymos are a problem. Then you might have libertarians that say technology acceleration. Let's go, let's go, let's go. But then, well, wait, are the vehicles surveilling me? Survey me.
- [144:32]
Jordy
So.
- [144:32]
John
So, you know, this is not traditional tribes. And I think what we're seeing now is the data is moving people further and further along in this story. Tribe independent. And to get to your question, Jordan, I think a lot of these companies are based. Sorry, Waymo certainly is based in California and there's a west coast heaviness to this. And to be fair, Tesla's now also demoing this in Austin right now with human driver stuff still.
- [144:59]
Ben
Do you have any other reads on how this might break from a regulation perspective? It feels like we could be coming up on a seat belts in Cars scenario where self driving technology is a requirement for all the OEMs and they have to either white label it from Waymo, white label it from Tesla, it needs to be available more widely. Tesla and Waymo, I don't think that's in their business model. I don't think they necessarily want to, to put it in every Toyota and Honda but they're, you know, you're making a. Yeah, yeah, you're making like a health based case and maybe at a certain point there needs to be, you know, a requirement. How do you, how do you think about that?
- [145:42]
John
Yeah, I mean so right, like airbags we all remember or something new that, you know they started as kind of like a luxury thing on the high end S class Mercedes and then worked their way down, down. I think we're going to progressively see this with progressively more, more and more automation. So right now like the automatic braking is in there and almost everybody has that, but it's going to start to filter down. And Jordan and John, I think insurance industry pressure is going to push this too.
- [146:07]
Ben
Okay.
- [146:07]
John
Where eventually when the data gets stronger and stronger and I think we're about a couple of weeks away from Google's next, sorry, Waymo's next data dump because just following their usual trend, I think we're a couple weeks away from, from probably 125 million miles. I think that this data is going to start to push rate differential over time and that's going to kind of get people moving.
- [146:28]
Ben
Yeah. It's funny, if you were expecting a debate, you're not going to get one because I agree with everything you're saying here. But you did go to the New York Times to write this essay. Did you get pushback from the New York Times readership? Was that a conscious choice? I'm just trying to understand like who is the current, what is the current shape of the anti self driving car constituency look like? Because I'm starting to understand the anti AI data center constituency and I get that it's ugly in your backyard or if your power rates go up. That makes sense. There's a trade off there. But who's not happy? What was the reaction to the New York Times piece?
- [147:11]
John
Yeah, so the New York Times was interesting and I'll tell you, there was a very famous magazine that I pitched this to and they weren't interested cause they were writing their own and this one definitely got a lot more traction. So the team there was crack editors obviously and the fact checking is incredible. I mean I knew it was good but I mean Every word, every statistic checked twice it seems. And I don't know if that's just because this is a super high impact story or because it's what we do, but when I was watching they actually shut down the message board when it got to about 2,400 messages. They might have been tired of moderating. And I saw really these again, these jagged splits where I guess it's sort of obliquely cutting across groups. And I'm having trouble now. I understand there's some data coming out that it actually tends to cut across tech literacy. So more so than like left, right, libertarian, not. It's how tech literate you are. And that's going to get progressively interesting, I think.
- [148:13]
Ben
Yeah. What do you think about the job displacement narrative around self driving cars that does feel like there are people whose jobs are to drive around. Some of them will be potentially displaced. It certainly has an effect on the taxicab market. Self driving cars in other contexts still seems like it's pretty far away. But how do you think about balancing the economic effects, the employment effects with the health benefits effectively? Yeah.
- [148:42]
John
So this is a critical question. I want to make sure. Sure that's clear. Like this isn't just willy nilly, let's go put these everywhere tomorrow. The call is for this to be done smartly, starting like yesterday.
- [148:53]
Tyler
Right.
- [148:53]
John
And let's make this a national priority. And the job question's critical and I want to ever be glib about it. I wrote a whole kind of mini thesis and there wasn't room for it in the piece. And I'm certainly not a labor expert. But what I think is a couple things. One, we're already facing a labor shortage in a lot of markets, as you know, not a surplus. And we have supply chain and value chain breaking because of this. So I think what I'm looking here is we have a chance if we do this right with upskilling and other things. And I know upskilling gets panned a lot of the time, but I think.
- [149:23]
Dylan Byers
We need to be thinking about moving.
- [149:24]
John
People from operator to manager, supervising fleets of vehicles. And we could have a truck driver managing a fleet of 10 autonomous rigs from a command center who by the way, now goes to sleep in his own bed rather than hers. And rather than staring at a white line for 11 straight hours in a dangerous environment, I think that's a waste of human potential. Now I want to be clear. Their jobs are super important right now. They're keeping the country alive. So nobody here that I'm saying that Their job is a waste of human potential. I'm saying if we just then don't figure out what to do with their jobs because this is happening whether we like it or not. We need to think about how to use that incredible expertise and apply it smartly. And then you know, I'd like to.
- [150:07]
Karan
Say.
- [150:09]
John
In 1981 was the Peak cigarette manufacturer. 650 billion cigarettes were manufactured in 1981. Now we're down to 125 billion cigarettes a year. And we none of us heard about an epidemic of job displacement because of cigarettes being dropped dropped by 85%. So let's do this right starting today. And I don't know if you're going to go there but if we don't we're going to be importing Chinese technology. They have no less than seven companies pursuing full stack autonomous vehicles right now.
- [150:48]
Jordy
Makes sense and I'm glad if I.
- [150:51]
Ben
Can name more than seven American autonomy companies. Waymo, Tesla, Comet, AI Ghost is not doing well. There's a couple that are not doing okay anymore. But it is a casers company. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Applied intuition.
- [151:07]
Jordy
Yeah. I wanted, while we have you, I wanted your quick take on Peptides. We're seeing an explosion of demand. You're an investor in a bunch of different health and medical companies. I'm curious how you you've viewed this category. It feels tough to invest in for a lot of reasons. Regulatory, a lot of these therapies are not actually proven by any type of real studies. But I'm curious if you got a hot take for us.
- [151:43]
Ben
Yeah, well I don't know if it's.
- [151:44]
John
A hot take but look, so first of all disclosure, we're investors in Life Force, certainly check out Lifeforce. But so, so I've joked and others have that remember this old book Prozac Nation? I think the new. I wish I had time to write Peptide Nation like one of us need or maybe let's do it together. We need to make time for that. But this is where we're going. And the data is getting stronger and stronger in pockets. As a physician, I gotta say I'm not giving anybody medical advice right now. Talk to your own doctor. But me and Chrissy Farr and you can Google this. We surveyed 135 clinicians who are active in Healthspan on what they do themselves, not what they do for their patients, what they take themselves. And something like 15 or 20% of them are on more than one injectable including Peptide, of course, TRT and other things.
- [152:37]
Ben
And I think I like a jack doctor personally. You can't get me in the clinic. If he's over 10% body fat, he's got to be dried out. He's got to be diced out. Yeah.
- [152:52]
Jordy
Got to be a mass monster.
- [152:53]
Ben
It's got to be stringy.
- [152:55]
John
Is it okay if he's cutting and bulking or does it just when he's cutting?
- [152:58]
Ben
I typically only go in for the check in when he's on a cut, when he's in fighting form, kind of stage ready.
- [153:04]
John
When you're making your appointment, you almost need to know, where are they?
- [153:07]
Ben
Exactly. Exactly. Miss me. When you're bulking, I want to see.
- [153:10]
Jordy
You want to see the striation ready to go.
- [153:12]
Ben
Go to the Arnold to the Arnold Classic. I want you stage ready. I want you dry.
- [153:16]
Jordy
Yeah, because. Because bodybuilders are the epitome of health.
- [153:19]
Ben
Yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.
- [153:21]
John
Ronnie's looking great.
- [153:22]
Ben
Yeah, you are looking great. Anyway, this is fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.
- [153:28]
Jordy
Yeah, we're with you. I think it's a good reframing. There's so much.
- [153:33]
Ben
I like it a lot.
- [153:35]
Jordy
So much investment happening in AI broadly and, and it is interesting. And how much the government is doing to try to break down walls to support.
- [153:45]
Ben
Yeah, it is funny. There's all this debate about, like, will AI cure cancer? Will AI save lives? Is that just lip service from the big AI companies? And it's like, well, this one could literally save 40,000 lives a year. That's good. That's more than many cancers. That's a ton. There's no reason why we should and do that. And then, and then we should celebrate it as AI saving lives. Like, that would be great.
- [154:08]
John
It's more than homicide and plane crashes combined every year. And if I could leave one thing I would say to folks, look, this is not something that. Oh, my God, Waymo started on this and Tesla started on this, you know, six months ago. And it looks great. This has been 15 years of deliberate work at Waymo and I don't work for Waymo. I want to be clear. I'm not invested in Waymo unless it's through a mutual funded Alphabet and directly or whatever. But this, this has been handled for 15 years with the rigor of what I would say is most analogous to a medical device. Totally not an app, not a. Not like a wearable, an actually regulated medical device. So what I want to say to people is that this is a moment now that's ready for safe and effective.
- [154:52]
Ben
Acceleration yeah, it's been so. It's been incredibly high stakes. Like there have been moments, multiple, I'm pretty sure multiple artificial intelligence self driving companies where they've had a terrible accident and it's basically destroyed the entire company. And so the entire industry has moved slowly. But in this case it's good because there is human life on the line. I would call it deliberate movement and I completely agree with you.
- [155:17]
Karan
Yeah.
- [155:17]
John
Look, do this right and this will be remembered as one of the historic top three moments of American exceptionalism if we don't let it slow grip slip out of our hands.
- [155:28]
Ben
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.
- [155:31]
Jordy
Great to meet you.
- [155:31]
Ben
Have a great rest of your day.
- [155:33]
Jordy
We'll have you back on soon.
- [155:35]
Ben
Thanks a lot, John.
- [155:36]
Aaron Cannon
Thanks.
- [155:37]
Ben
Hop in that Waymo, head over to wander.com book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better and you can get there in your self driving car. Our next guest, Aaron Cannon.
- [155:55]
Jordy
That is a powerful, that's a powerful name. Scrub Scrub Capital.
- [156:00]
Ben
They saw him and they were like, capital. Put the capital in the Cannon. Launch the capital Cannon at Aaron Cannon, welcome to the show. How you doing?
- [156:09]
Aaron Cannon
Thank you.
- [156:10]
Jordy
Look. And look at that chart in the background. Cheeky little chart, guys.
- [156:15]
Aaron Cannon
That's real numbers. That's actually the real data.
- [156:17]
Jordy
Real data. Hit it again. Hit it again a few times. There we go. We're fired up. Aaron Cannon, we're happy to have you on the show. Thank you. Would love, would love an introduction on yourself and the company.
- [156:34]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah. I'm Aaron. I'm the CEO and co founder of Outset. I was on your show, I think it was at YC demo day like six months ago.
- [156:41]
Jordy
That's right. That's right. We were super bullish on you.
- [156:44]
John
That's awesome.
- [156:45]
Jordy
No wonder you're back.
- [156:46]
Aaron Cannon
Thank you.
- [156:46]
Jordy
No wonder you're back.
- [156:47]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, I had my yellow ramp hat on in the YC offices and I was sharing our series A.
- [156:52]
Jordy
Well, yeah. So break it down for people because they're going to assume you were in a batch this year but you went through in 2022, was it?
- [157:01]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, we were 2023, summer 23. We went through YC batch and been growing since then. I just happened to be in the office and we raised our series A at the YC demo day. So I popped in and yes. So Outset is AI moderated research. So if you've ever tried to understand your customers or something. It really sucks today or in the past. And finally, it doesn't suck. I mean, basically, surveys are the old school way to do it. Or you talk to users one by one and talk to maybe a dozen or so, and now AI does it for you. So that's what our platform does. And we just raised our Series B. We announced it yesterday from Radical Ventures. There it is. And yes, it's been great. So here we are.
- [157:48]
Jordy
Was Paul Graham ever concerned about outset? Was he worried founders might stop talking to their customers or is he comfortable with the AI talking to the customer on their behalf?
- [157:58]
Aaron Cannon
I didn't clear this with PG personally.
- [158:00]
Jordy
But dude, you got to clear it with pg. You got to get his blessing. You got to get his blessing.
- [158:07]
Aaron Cannon
I did not do that. But it's part of the reason we don't work as much with startups and we work with Microsoft, Google, folks like that, Weight Watchers and Nestle. So we go for the big enterprises.
- [158:21]
Jordy
What does success look like when you're working with these companies? What are you pushing towards? Is it a key insight that impacts a future product decision? What does actually winning look like?
- [158:34]
Aaron Cannon
Like, yeah, yeah. It generally falls into two things. Like either they're doing product research where it's about a key insight that drives a product decision of what to build or even like not to build. There's like a famous Airbnb. Brian Chesky told the story of like there was like a million dollar research saved the millions of dollars because of like one bad design. Right. And so like, you know, it could be a massive, like a single insight can be hugely differentiating for a product product. And then there's marketing where you're saying, like, I'm about to release a new product to a new market. You know, you're Nestle and you're testing new concepts. You got to get that right. Right. So that looks like making smarter decisions and making them really, really fast. And that's like the real thing is that now with us you can actually gather, you know, hundreds of actual interviews, like in depth nuance, like really hear from people and you can do that in a couple of hours. And then we synthesize all that data so you can go make it a decision decision.
- [159:27]
Jordy
Are you guys taking away jobs from researchers or are researchers just able to do far more work and get far more insight?
- [159:36]
Aaron Cannon
The classic AI question of. Yeah, so the reality, yeah, it just.
- [159:41]
Jordy
Feels like, yeah, I mean, if you look in engineering organizations, people are like, my engineers are much more effective. I'm going to build a Lot more product. I want more great engineers. In this case, I don't have a lot of insight into how research teams at some of these big companies work. But I could see them saying, hey, we historically needed to hire this outside firm to conduct this research and we needed X number of people to kind of manage it and try to unpack what was actually happening.
- [160:10]
Ben
A lot of them might also have just been using web forms, right?
- [160:12]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So what we actually see on the ground is very much not the get rid of your research. It's quite the opposite. And I think the reason for that is there's, there isn't a ceiling of I don't need any more insight on a thing. There's actually an insatiable demand for it. The problem is the old way was not economical. You would have your researchers, they do one study every month or two, and it would be talking to 15 users. And now that one researcher can actually do a study every week, each time talking to 200 users, you basically are making smarter decisions. And then you add the speed at which people are putting new products into the world. You actually need that insight faster. Right. And so what we see on the ground is basically a research team adopting it and saying, holy crap, like I can actually go, like do twice as much or go twice as fast with the same people we have on the team today.
- [161:07]
Ben
How multimodal are you today? How multimodal do you want to be in a few years? I can imagine research is happening on video interviews, audio tax based interviews, web forms. What are you doing today and what do you want to do?
- [161:26]
Aaron Cannon
We want to do all the modes, all the modals. So today we are video, audio, text, and then you can do kind of forums, think like classic survey questions.
- [161:35]
Ben
Radio buttons.
- [161:37]
Aaron Cannon
Radio buttons.
- [161:37]
Jordy
So do you just email or text a customer and say, may I research you?
- [161:42]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. That's the language. May I research you? No, but, but then, but then we also do screen sharing. So that's actually where you're getting a participant to video, audio, radio buttons, and then also share their screen while they're interacting with your prototype. So you got to do all of that together. And then we partner with a bunch of, a bunch of panels that are column to help kind of source people. Right. So in our platform we can actually source from, you know, millions of people.
- [162:10]
Ben
And are you building the full customer experience management platform down to data collection, but then also analysis? Because it sounds like you're adding sourcing, but it's not like you're going to give me a big bag of text and then I got to go sort it out elsewhere.
- [162:29]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah. The theory's always been like if we're going to help you scale and speed up the way you collect the data, we got to break it down for you afterwards. Right. And it's just two sides of the, the same coin. So since day one we've had these two sides. Right. Our core platform, AI moderated research is like collect the data, synthesize the data, tell you what matters. The thing we now are building into the future and the reason we raised a bunch of this money, you know, just six months later is like we're going from think like you know, study by study. I got a question, let me go answer it. To the always on customer intelligence platform, right. The experience management where you know, at every touch point, you know, you get off a flight, you get oh, how was your flight? Or you get a post purchase feedback form and really every point in the journey should actually be conversational insight, should be continuous. We should have contextual questions that actually make sense. And so pulling all that together makes.
- [163:21]
Jordy
A lot of sense.
- [163:24]
Ben
Sorry, I have one more. Fraud detection. What does that look like? And yeah, is that AI powered or AI enabled or is that just like best practices? Like what, what is the bad? Like how big of a problem is fraud in customer research?
- [163:41]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, if you talk to anybody in the, in the industry they'll say like it's a big, it's a problem. Yeah. And Chat GPT made it worse, right?
- [163:47]
Ben
Yeah.
- [163:48]
Jordy
So is that, what is that because.
- [163:51]
Ben
I get paid $100 to tell Microsoft or get a gift card to tell Microsoft how I'm using Microsoft Excel and I'm like, well if I just go to Chat GPT and I'm like how am I using Excel? It'll just make something up and then I just copy paste that in and then I get the hundred dollar Starbucks gift card. Is that roughly correct?
- [164:05]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, that's right. But what happens is like on surveys it's really bad, right? Because you have an open a free text field and you just paste it.
- [164:12]
Ben
In, you just detect whatever.
- [164:14]
Aaron Cannon
Right. Luckily because most of our customers are doing very video based stuff, it is much more, right. That is harder to fake your way through. But we built our own fraud detection agent. Right. And it's like, it's actually kind of fun to watch because it's basically looking at your screener answers like oh, you said you were an expert in Python. And then like later in the interview as they interviewed about what tools you're using. It's like they don't know anything about it. And then you get your, you know, as a customer, you get your reasoning so that the AI agent tells you, well, this guy does not know what he's talking about. And so it's pretty impressive.
- [164:48]
Ben
Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the the time to come on the show. Did we hit the dong already?
- [164:53]
Jordy
Hit it again. I'll hit it again.
- [164:54]
Karan
We did.
- [164:55]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah, hit it one more. I'll be back.
- [164:57]
Ben
$30 million series. I don't know if we actually got to the number. $30 million.
- [165:01]
Jordy
Come back and hey, push yourself and the team. Come back in Q1. It's not all about fundraising, but it is a pretty good indicator of momentum.
- [165:09]
Ben
Call up Rob Taves at Radical Ventures. Say, give me another 30.
- [165:13]
Jordy
Give me another 300.
- [165:14]
Ben
How about. Yeah, how about you put your money where your mouth is, Rob? Make a bet. Take a bet on that graph. Yeah, look at the graph. Look at the graph. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.
- [165:23]
Jordy
Great to see you again.
- [165:24]
Ben
Have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Before we bring in our next guest, we have some breaking news. Broadcom has smashed earnings. Earnings per share of 195 versus 172. Projected revenue of 18 billion. People are projecting 17 and a half. Look at this image. Image of a crying bear relative to avg.
- [165:48]
Jordy
Bears in shambles.
- [165:52]
Ben
Private equity has done it again.
- [165:53]
Jordy
Up 3%.
- [165:54]
Ben
Green line after Wojack. Riding the green line after hours. Sorry. And that is fantastic news for the good folks over at Broadcom. Congratulations to everyone on smashing earnings. And thank you to the chat for calling. Our next guest is from K2 Space. How you doing? Good to see you. Welcome to the show. We are trying to pull up some audio. Do we have audio here? Can we play this? Yeah. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Please introduce yourself and the company.
- [166:24]
Karan
Hey, guys. I'm Karan. I'm the co founder and CEO of K2 Space.
- [166:28]
Ben
And can. I mean, obviously space is in the news, but can you give us a little bit more color on how you fit into the orbital economy?
- [166:35]
Tyler
Yeah.
- [166:35]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [166:36]
Karan
So about three and a half years ago, I started this company with my brother Neil.
- [166:38]
Ben
Neil.
- [166:39]
Karan
We wanted to build really large, really high power satellites, which at the time was a pretty big contrarian bet against the market. Everyone was kind of going smaller with their satellites.
- [166:48]
Ben
Yeah.
- [166:49]
Karan
And so we kind of looked at it. We were like, hey, actually, the future, if you think about it, is all about higher power, right? And we're seeing that with things that we're probably about to talk about with.
- [166:58]
Ben
Yeah, the data centers and everything.
- [167:01]
Karan
But yeah, we're building the largest space platforms that have ever existed.
- [167:04]
Ben
The largest space. So, but, but, but, but importantly, you're not building the rockets.
- [167:09]
Karan
That's right, yeah. We're just doing the satellites where we're going to be launch vehicle agnostic. Most of our first missions are going to be on, on SpaceX.
- [167:15]
Ben
On SpaceX.
- [167:16]
Karan
SpaceX rockets. But over time we'll probably use a bunch of others.
- [167:19]
Ben
And when you were building the company, did you have a, did you have a thesis around how the launch market would play out? Because there's, I feel like maybe this came up when you were pitching VCs, but, but there's probably a risk that, hey, if SpaceX becomes a really powerful monopoly, they are going to be able to squeeze you like crazy. So was your initial thinking or bet? Hey, I love SpaceX. It's amazing. It's unlocking an incredible new capability. But I do think that Firefly will be doing some stuff, Rocket Lab might be doing stuff, Blue Origin might be doing stuff. And eventually, eventually the market will play out that I can actually carve out a business here one way or another.
- [168:03]
Karan
70% of our company comes from SpaceX. My brother is an ex SpaceXer. So we're all, we're all pretty big fans of Space X. And you know, they've made such a massive difference in the market, right? Like when we talk about there being like launch abundance, right? It's both because they made bigger and bigger launch vehicles and they increased the frequency of those launches, right? Like they're blowing past 150 launches this year as opposed to is nothing. Right. So we always knew that we were going to be big users. Yeah, we always knew we're going to be big users of SpaceX rockets. But I think it's pretty cool to see a bunch of the other launch players coming online, right? Like there's a number of new players. Whether it's like Relativity, whether it's Andy over at Stoke, whether it's the folks over at Firefly. I think it's a really unique opportunity we have right now where hopefully five to 10 years from now, we have a bunch of choices.
- [168:48]
Ben
Yeah. Okay, so big satellites. Been in the business of making big satellites. What was the first big satellite that you thought would be valuable? Communications, put a camera on it. Spy satellites, Hubble Telescope. What were you originally thinking before? Every venture capitalist said pivot to AI?
- [169:07]
Karan
So we started with Giant Telescopes, which bit of an extreme departure from AI but yeah, we wanted to build really large telescopes because everyone knows James Webb, right, Like awesome, highly performant telescope telescope, but it cost billions of dollars and took like 20 years to produce. Right. And that's like kind of the, the straw by which we take data from the rest of the solar system. Right. And so we wanted to build many more straws and many bigger straws over time we realized like actually if we go bigger, well now we can start to deploy a lot of power because we can host bigger solar rays. And if we go bigger, we can build platforms that are radiation tolerant and can handle different orbits in different parts of the solar system. But it all actually stemmed from, from, from giant to telescopes, which is a little known fact actually about K2.
- [169:53]
Ben
The news today, $250 million, a $3 billion valuation doesn't look like a science project type funding round. You got T. Rowe Price Altimeter, Lightspeed, T. Rowe Price.
- [170:04]
Jordy
What does that look like typically? Wouldn't that be pretty common in a pre ipo?
- [170:11]
Ben
It's like a growth. Yeah. These are serious investors. So what is the shape of the business? I imagine that like you actually have serious, serious traction and progress actually delivering capabilities. What's the majority of the customer base product mix look like right now?
- [170:28]
Karan
Yeah, so because we went in such a different direction, we started as like just a tactical contrarian bet that two and a half years ago started to get a lot of commercial traction. So over the last three years we've basically gone from 5 million in TCV in 23 to 50 million in TCP in 24 to 500 million in TCP in 25. Right. And this is from a mix of large commercial and government customers.
- [170:51]
Jordy
Right.
- [170:52]
Karan
And I don't know that many three and a half year old companies that are like half a billion in tcp. Right.
- [170:57]
Ben
That's insane. So yeah, take me inside one of those contracts. Give me an example of like what you're delivering.
- [171:04]
Karan
Yeah. So the perfect example of power is when you think about communications, right? More power equals more three throughput. So if I drive up the power, right. Any space based data constellation suddenly gets more and more effective. Right. And we were just like driving up the power incrementally, right. Like the typical satellites at the same price point as us were doing like 1 to 2 kilowatts of power. Our first satellite is 20 kilowatts of power. Our next satellite is going to be 100. And so we saw a really interesting use case to go after which is just for all the players that are looking at what Space X has done to the comms market and are thinking about how to reset their unit economics, we were like the really interesting path for them to take to be able to think about a fundamentally different cost structure just based on how much power we were deploying and at the price point. Okay, so commercial comms in the first place, government is the second. I can talk a bit about that. But those are the two big areas that we've kind of focused on as we scaled up.
- [171:57]
Ben
Let's flip over to the engineering side. 100 kilos, that's 0.1 megawatts. Is that right? Like how are you actually delivering that? Is it just big solar panels? Like, what's the secret to actually scaling up power delivery in space? Do you have batteries on board? Are there other propellants or resources for fuel? Or is it all just solar? How do you actually scale up power delivery in space?
- [172:22]
Karan
Yeah, so we basically have to reset the entire satellite. We had to go build giant solar arrays, we had to go build giant batteries. We have to build giant primary structures, these things called reaction wheels, which, these large spinning disks that help you point a satellite with large solar arrays, like 80% of the satellite we rebuilt from scratch in this factory behind me.
- [172:41]
Ben
Sorry, really quickly. Giant solar array that could, in space, that could mean anything from like football fields to the size of this table. Like just ground me in order of magnitude. How big are we talking?
- [172:51]
Karan
Yeah, so the first satellite that we're building that we're launching in three months is 40 meters.
- [172:57]
Ben
Wow. So like. Yeah, like halfway down a football field almost. Something like that. Wow.
- [173:02]
Jordy
And then the space yacht.
- [173:03]
Ben
Space yacht, yeah, exactly, exactly.
- [173:06]
Karan
And then the next one will be 80, so it's going to be 2x the length, but obviously much more in terms of surface area.
- [173:11]
Ben
And does that only fit the starship? Fairing is a starship requirement there or can you.
- [173:16]
Karan
Yeah, the first one, the 20 kilowatt is made for Falcon 9.
- [173:19]
Ben
Okay.
- [173:20]
Karan
So it'll be, it's made to stack 10 and a Falcon 9, it'll stack. My starship is so massive, that'll stack 50 in a starship, which is kind of cool.
- [173:27]
Ben
The full one.
- [173:28]
Karan
Yeah, exactly. And then the next one will be made purely for Starlink.
- [173:30]
Jordy
So on the commercial side, how are the telecom players thinking about the threat from Starlink?
- [173:39]
Karan
Right.
- [173:39]
Jordy
These are the big ones are multi hundred billion dollar market cap companies. They have a lot of infrastructure on Earth. And from our understanding, really feeling the pressure from Starlink. But what is Their kind of mental model for Starlink as a threat. And I'm assuming they're paying you to try to catch up.
- [174:00]
Karan
Exactly, yeah. I think Starlink came in and basically took a business that had, call it, you'd go like host data at $50 to $100 per Mbps. And Starlink came in and brought that price under 10. Right. So every single player out there had to figure out like how do I go deploy a lot more capacity and how do I do it at a low cost? And deploying capacity in space is just all about how much does it cost me to deploy power? Right. If I can deploy more power and I can do so at a lower cost, suddenly I have better unit economics. And so we were the, we were the kind of the path to doing that. Right. Which was saying we're going to go max out power. So our satellite is as powerful as the billion dollar satellites that used to exist. But it's not going to cost a billion. It'll cost 15 million. You can stack 10 for Falcon 9. That's what it takes to kind of change the game for the telco players. So a bunch of them saw that and were like, okay, this is actually something we can play around with and use and really for us it's just like the first customer. Right. We're all about integrating the hardware stack for space. We want to max out power. Today that's for communications, tomorrow that's going to be for compute. And then who knows as we start becoming a space faring civilization, what we'll do with that power later.
- [175:09]
Ben
Dyson Sphere. Dyson Sphere.
- [175:10]
Jordy
So this round got done I'm assuming at a time when people were mocking data centers in space. There's been a little bit of a vibe shift over the last week and I'm sure all your investors have been hitting you up since.
- [175:25]
Ben
Have you ever thought about AI computers?
- [175:27]
Jordy
Elon and Gavin, you gotta see this. I think you gotta take another look at that.
- [175:32]
Ben
You gotta see this. Invest like the best interview. You should see this.
- [175:36]
Karan
I promise this isn't a data center round. I have to tell everyone. I was like, no, that's the thing.
- [175:40]
Jordy
The data center would be, the data center would be 3 on 15.
- [175:47]
Karan
Yeah, so it was funny. It was in November actually. Like, you know, Delian has very strong views on this. I was talking to him about it early November, late October, we were doing the round and you know, they have a strong opinion. Founders Fund is right on a lot of things. So like I don't always want to, I'M not going to say I'm going to take the other side of a bet against them. But it's now it's like Founders Fund on one side, Elon on the other. I'm like, I'm just going to watch and see, see how this plays out. But yeah, so our round was primarily on like the communications application. It was also on a bunch of the government constellations that we're starting to work on. There's some really interesting things we're doing that the US government is pretty excited about. So more of what you call a conventional. And like, yeah, now we'll see what happens with the price of the price.
- [176:26]
Jordy
Of the brick going up.
- [176:27]
Ben
Yeah, yeah. I mean it is exciting as, as a CEO, like it is somewhat your job to bring energy to what you're building and bring excitement to what, what you're building. And if there's an opportunity, Even if it's five, 10 years off, if you're going to be a beneficiary of that trend, you do sort of have a responsibility to raise your hand and say, yeah, hey, it's logical that some of the value will accrue here to me if that's the case. But you probably also don't want to whiplash everyone and be like, actually I've been doing this the whole time. So yeah.
- [176:59]
Jordy
Any predictions on just how big some of these commercial satellites will get over the next decade? I saw somebody on the timeline earlier talking about how, how in order to recreate 1 gigawatt of compute capacity in orbit, you need something like 10,000 satellites. But eventually you could just have one data center size satellite floating out. But how do you think about size and just like mass of individual satellites versus more constellation of probably approach?
- [177:38]
Karan
Yeah, I'm in the school of thought of constellations, right? Like I think we're going to build really big satellites that still exist in constellations. I think compute is going to be distributed, right? Compute and communications are going to be all part of the same distributed network. Right. So our bigger satellite Giga is going to be like the length of a football field, right?
- [177:55]
Jordy
It's called Giga.
- [177:56]
Karan
It's called the Giga.
- [177:57]
Jordy
Hit the gong for Giga.
- [178:02]
Ben
Best name for satellite I've ever heard. It's an incredible name for a satellite.
- [178:07]
Jordy
We are very critical of names. Sometimes people come on and they name their companies. Things that don't are not necessarily hubris AI. Yeah, hubris AI.
- [178:18]
Ben
$5 billion seed round. What's gonna happen? Who knows? Giga is a fantastic name. Thank you.
- [178:26]
Jordy
Giga would be a beautiful name for a satellite. I'm glad you're doing. I'm very excited to see it anyways. Very exciting. Congrats to the whole team and yeah, hoping we can partner at some point to put a TBPN satellite up in space.
- [178:41]
Ben
We need one for sure.
- [178:42]
Jordy
We definitely will need one at some point.
- [178:43]
Ben
One last question from my side. Take us through a little bit of a tour of what's behind you. Is this the only facility, how big is this facility? What's actually happening here? Are satellites getting built out.
- [178:56]
Karan
This is 180,000 square foot factory.
- [178:58]
John
Right.
- [178:58]
Karan
Where basically you'll see the start of a manufacturing line coming down here that's going to. Can't really see it in the view but the clean room's over there with the satellite actually in it. That's about to launch in three months.
- [179:08]
Aaron Cannon
Oh wow.
- [179:09]
Ben
You even have huge signs up. It says primary structure, side sections, final integration. Wow. Physical divides. That's amazing.
- [179:18]
Karan
Yeah. We're basically scaling up now. We're 11 months in. But a large part of this round that we're raising is to. Is to go scale up mass production. Go from 1 this year to 10 next year to 30 the following year.
- [179:28]
Ben
That's awesome.
- [179:28]
Karan
And it's really all about scale at this point. Right. Like let's get the first one to work in three months and then let's do it many more times over the coming 24 months.
- [179:35]
Ben
And also is the company's name a nod to your initials?
- [179:40]
Karan
Yeah. So here's the thing. Like it's not. People think it's about my initials and it's like that is the most egotistical.
- [179:45]
Ben
Thing in the world.
- [179:46]
Karan
I promise you that is not the, the case. So you know, my brother and I started this company which Starting a company with your brother is like the coolest thing in the world to do. We're both conjures, but it comes back to the Kardashev.
- [179:57]
Jordy
Right?
- [179:57]
Karan
Like helping humanity become a type 2 Kardashev civilization. K2. The whole thesis is like build bigger. Right. And our, our logo is a big Dyson sphere. I heard you mention that.
- [180:06]
Ben
Right.
- [180:07]
Karan
So it's like our whole thesis, like let's start laying the groundwork to helping humanity become a type 2 cartridge civilization. So let's call the company K2.
- [180:15]
Jordy
You understand naming. I'm gonna. I have to name the. We had it. We had a company on called Icarus. Icarus Space. We were a little bit worried about it.
- [180:25]
Ben
For what it's worth. Insanely good team.
- [180:29]
Jordy
I really hope they're playing with fire.
- [180:32]
Ben
They're playing with fire.
- [180:34]
Karan
It is playing with fire. They're a super cool team, though.
- [180:36]
Ben
They are very cool. They're very cool, but they're.
- [180:39]
Jordy
There's been.
- [180:39]
Ben
There's been a rash of hilarious.
- [180:41]
Jordy
That's playing on hard mode. That's playing on hard mode.
- [180:44]
Ben
Playing on hard mode. Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time.
- [180:47]
Jordy
Yeah. Great to meet you, and congratulations to the whole team.
- [180:50]
Karan
Thank you.
- [180:51]
Ben
Glad to see you.
- [180:51]
Karan
Appreciate it.
- [180:52]
Ben
Coffers are full. We'll see you soon. Well, that essentially.
- [180:58]
Jordy
Let's rip some timeline.
- [180:59]
Ben
Let's rip some timeline. Okay. I want to watch this video of a hillside in China that has been covered with solar panels. When you see this video, do you react with admiration or with disgust? Tyler's nodding. Sick. This is sick. Is this AI or is this real? Do we know?
- [181:14]
Tyler
I hope it's real.
- [181:15]
Ben
I can't tell.
- [181:16]
Tyler
So this is Casey Hanmer's dream.
- [181:17]
Ben
This is Casey Hanmer's dream. I hope this is. A lot of. This looks pretty real. I was watching a video of somebody. There's a whole trend on TikTok of people throwing tires. The longest tire throw, so. Because if you throw a tire off a mountain, it will just spin all the way way down to the bottom. So you can throw a tire for, like, miles and miles and miles. It's a great. It's a great content genre.
- [181:38]
Aaron Cannon
Yeah.
- [181:38]
Jordy
For some reason, solar panels over mountains do give me a little bit of disgust, whereas I. I get. I. I'm less.
- [181:46]
Ben
Yeah. Mountains are beautiful.
- [181:47]
Jordy
Deserts. Deserts. I'm, like, sort of already blanketed.
- [181:50]
Ben
Yeah, it's sort of already.
- [181:53]
Jordy
But this looks like a. Like, it would be a really enjoyable mountain range to just go on a nice little hike. And so I'm feeling the disgust.
- [182:02]
Ben
You're feeling the disgust.
- [182:03]
Jordy
But also impressed by the scale.
- [182:06]
Ben
It's just crazy that there was no desert between these mountains and who they needed to get power to, you know, because. I don't know, there must be people, like, right there living in the foothills or something, and they needed to put them in the mountains. I don't know. I mean, at least the mountains won't catch on fire, you know, that's often a problem.
- [182:23]
Jordy
Yeah. I'm curious around the efficiency, because just given the movement of the sun, aren't you going to have, like, there. It's actually blanketing both sides of these peaks. So wouldn't this. Not necessarily. You would think that finding a area nearby that was flat would be more efficient, but who knows Snapchat?
- [182:43]
Ben
What's going on with Snap?
- [182:45]
Jordy
Anyone from Snapchat focusing on making money? They are. Let's see here, here. Base16z says Snapchat plus user growth pretty much guaranteed to re accelerate with the new storage charges. So they're saying you've saved 4122 memory since 2017. You've used 16 gigabytes of your 5 gigabyte of free storage limit. We'll temporarily back up new memories that exceed your limit for up to 12 months. Or you can join Snapchat Plus plus and get your 250 gigabytes. So anyways, makes sense that Snap is trying to make more money.
- [183:30]
Ben
That's good news. I'm surprised that they haven't done any sort of big AI content licensing deal. Of course they have to deal with perplexity to bring AI into the Snapchat product. But does Snapchat just not have any, any data that would be surfaced in an LLM like Reddit seems to have done such a good job with that. But I guess people aren't really reviewing things or discussing things in text based formats on Snapchat. It's all kind of just day in the life content. Anyway, what else is going on?
- [184:03]
Tyler
Trump says here, Jordy, you want to go first?
- [184:06]
Jordy
Yeah. So Trump says doesn't see why we can't have 20% or 20% GDP growth. Says the market should continue to go up with great results.
- [184:17]
Ben
I mean don't see why we can't have 20% GDP growth because it's like never happened in history.
- [184:25]
Jordy
Maybe, I don't know what was China.
- [184:28]
Ben
He is AGI pilled. That's extremely AGI pilled.
- [184:31]
Tyler
Dwarkesh has talked about this.
- [184:33]
Ben
Dwarkesh literally has talked about this 25% GDP. The first AGI pilled President. I suppose. Let's head over to the.
- [184:41]
Jordy
Apparently China hit 19.3% in 1970.
- [184:45]
Ben
Okay. Yeah. Is that the great leap forward or something?
- [184:48]
Jordy
More recently 14% in 2007. So I think Trump's looking at the data.
- [184:56]
Ben
Great leap forward was 1960ish. Tyler, what do you got?
- [185:01]
Tyler
Okay, so you guys gave me month to write new jokes, but I already wrote some.
- [185:05]
Ben
Oh, you got one.
- [185:06]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [185:06]
Tyler
So these were. I did use LM to help but these are not never before seen.
- [185:10]
Ben
Never before seen by the train. Get them in the next pre trade.
- [185:14]
Jordy
Did you search them in Google to make sure that.
- [185:17]
Tyler
Yeah, yeah, yes, I looked them up. These aren't. These are brand new.
- [185:20]
Jordy
Chad's gonna verify.
- [185:21]
Ben
Okay.
- [185:21]
Jordy
And I don't want you to get exposed.
- [185:23]
Tyler
Okay, first one. Ready?
- [185:24]
Ben
Okay.
- [185:25]
Tyler
You're telling me Jerry rigged this car.
- [185:28]
Jordy
Ooh, is that Jerry rigged?
- [185:30]
Tyler
Jerry rigged.
- [185:31]
Ben
That's pretty good. But that's sort of like the point.
- [185:34]
Tyler
But it's not a guy named Jerry. You're telling me my friend Jerry raked this car?
- [185:39]
Ben
Okay, yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good.
- [185:42]
Tyler
Okay, second one. You're telling me a brain washed this cult?
- [185:47]
Ben
Oh, that's really good. Oh, yes, that is novel. There we go. Oh, that is a great one. You're telling me to brainwash this cult. You need to tweet that right now because that's 100k likes right there. 10k likes, that's very good.
- [186:04]
Tyler
Okay, I got two more. You're telling me a star crossed these lovers?
- [186:10]
Ben
That's sort of literal. That's sort of like what it is. That's sort of what it is. Yes.
- [186:15]
Tyler
Okay, you're telling me a tongue tied this boy.
- [186:23]
Ben
You gotta post all four of those and see. And I would predict that the brainwashed cult does number one. Does numbers. The tongue tied boy also does decent numbers. And the other two flop.
- [186:35]
Tyler
Okay, I'll tweet them now and then we'll see tomorrow.
- [186:37]
Ben
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's a great. That's a great test.
- [186:41]
Jordy
Well done. Well done. We gave you a month. We gave you a month.
- [186:44]
Ben
That is novel. That is novel. And that, that's not coming from any of the LLMs. Shrimp Fried rice Bench is really, really good. Let's go over to Roon. He says everyone will go public soon because they finally feel the heat of well capitalized competition. The wrath of Nan. There was no reason to seek enormous amounts of capital until recently. We will see natural interest rates north of 3% and the end of secular stagnation. Everyone's going public. Oh, another other news. Eleven Labs partnering with Meta to power expressive scalable audio across Instagram, Verizon and more, bringing natural and diverse audio to billions of users. Also, you got the founder of 11Labs on the COVID of Forbes. Look at that.
- [187:27]
Jordy
Look at that smile. Look at that smile.
- [187:29]
Ben
Gigachad filter engaged.
- [187:30]
Jordy
Yes. Yes. Not beating the Gigachad Filter allegations.
- [187:34]
Ben
Yes. Yes. No, I mean Forbes headshot photographer. It's a great, great product. This is something that's very special. So congratulations to Matti over at eleven Labs and the whole team making the COVID of Forbes. That's a huge moment for him and the whole team.
- [187:52]
Jordy
Speaking of AI Presidential AI Challenge, first lady Melania Trump is introducing The Presidential AI Challenge. Artificial intelligence is America's next competitive edge. Driving advancements in your career, supporting your family, and strengthening your community. I'm sure no one will disagree with any of that. This is why I launched the Presidential AI Challenge, a nationwide call to students and educators to shape America's future. Teams from all 50 states have already registered. Shape the future. Be part of the Presidential AI Challenge today. What is the Presidential AI Challenge?
- [188:28]
Ben
That's a good question.
- [188:31]
Jordy
The President. The Presidential AI Challenge will foster interest and expertise in AI in America's use. Early training and the responsible use of AI tools will demystify this technology and prepare America.
- [188:42]
Ben
I think this might be the challenge. I think the challenge might be to understand. It's a riddle. This is a riddle. I think it's some sort of, like, you know, it's shrouded in mystery. That's the whole goal, to test the American people. Can they understand what it is?
- [189:01]
Jordy
Okay, I think I figured out. So there's elementary school, middle school, high school, and there's challenge projects that groups of students will be able to participate in, as well as awards and prizes. Hopefully solid gold. Solid gold. Trophies.
- [189:23]
Ben
Trophies, yeah.
- [189:24]
Jordy
Statues. I want to see. I want to see the comically large checkbook come out too, you know, for the winners.
- [189:31]
Ben
Yeah.
- [189:31]
Jordy
Maybe grants to schools.
- [189:33]
Ben
Maybe. Maybe the exact projects haven't been, like, you know, released.
- [189:38]
Jordy
There actually is a cash prize. $10,000 per team.
- [189:43]
Ben
Wait, is it Peyton Melania coin or Trump coin Or US Dollars?
- [189:46]
Jordy
I think.
- [189:47]
Tyler
I think. I mean from meme.
- [189:49]
Ben
From meme. That's right. It's not Trump coin. Get it right. It's Trump me. It's the best. Okay, here's some.
- [189:56]
Jordy
You also win cloud credits. That's. So you do.
- [189:59]
Ben
Okay, that's actually amazing. I love that.
- [190:01]
Jordy
A presidential award certificate. So, boom. Certificate. You're getting cloud credits. You're getting 10,000 for your school, homeschool or community group. And you're getting $10,000 per team member in the middle school category and the high school category and the educator category.
- [190:16]
Ben
That's amazing.
- [190:16]
Jordy
So, I mean, who. Tyler, you? I guess. There's no College. Tier 2, old. So you have to go back to school and participate and win.
- [190:27]
Ben
Get a fake ID that says you're 13.
- [190:32]
Jordy
Just to go back and dominate the presidential AI challenge.
- [190:36]
Ben
Yeah, well, you know, it's exciting. Good luck to everyone.
- [190:40]
Jordy
Is the Presidential Fitness Challenge back? Did that get.
- [190:44]
Ben
Has to be back. They're putting gyms in airports. Of course. Of course. You're gonna have to run a mile if you're an American kid.
- [190:51]
Jordy
According the first.
- [190:53]
Ben
Wait, wait, wait, I didn't see this. The first child was born in a Waymo.
- [190:57]
Jordy
Yeah, according to Avital, says Lisan Al Gaib.
- [191:02]
Ben
I mean that is. You are truly the puppeteer of the silicon intelligence intelligence. If you are born in a Waymo, you merely adopted the Waymo. I was born in it.
- [191:14]
Jordy
That is truly the most 2025 story.
- [191:18]
Ben
You merely adopted artificial intelligence. I was born in a Waymo. Being born in a Waymo. I mean being born in a taxi cab is like a classic thing that's been described for years. But Sagar and Jetty's coming on the show on Friday. He says, I guess that's tomorrow. He says on H2 hundreds. The pro selling to China theory relies on it being good for US interests to keep China on the US technology tree and forestalling Huawei. In my opinion, this ignores the singular flavor of US Biz relationship with China since pntr. In every case that US companies became intertwined with China, they became less favorable to US interests and more malleable tools of the church Chinese state. And so he's bearish on the H200 plan, but we will dig into it all with him tomorrow. In other news, Kaiser Yunus, the CEO of Applied Intelligence, is on the timeline. He's joined X. He says after 16 years and 10 months sitting on a fantastic handle, he says, I'm finally writing my first X. Also, we'll start writing more regularly. My first post is ironically on why I'm posting. And so he shares a link to a blog post and Ryan Peterson says, welcome brother. But also writing a long form blog post is not being on X. Lol. Which is very funny.
- [192:42]
Jordy
On the blog post, he says, after many years of railing against going on X, I'm finally pulling the band aid and getting on the platform. Historically, if you've watched my talks, you've heard me say that one of the keys to applied success is focus. And I'm often demonized. I've often demonized social media, specifically X, as wasteful and distracting. It encourages superficiality, showmanship, and the wrong values of a real substance. Quote. Well, well, well. How the turntables. Some of that is still true, but as a company has grown, the balance has changed. The value of having a microphone now outweighs the downsides. So I'm going to try this. So glad.
- [193:17]
Ben
Congrats to him.
- [193:18]
Jordy
He is posting let's hit the gong.
- [193:19]
Ben
Let's hit the gong for him. And then we got to do the salesforce.
- [193:26]
Jordy
Before Salesforce. I want to say congratulations to Sergil Ozer. He is the founder of General Agents. He launched his product on April 2 and was acquired by Jeff Bezos. Very, very very exciting. Congrats to the General Agents team.
- [193:51]
Ben
Give me the Ben off numbers.
- [193:52]
Jordy
Ben making on AI According to Tane, Salesforce says their agent Force ARR is now 540 million 4.3x year over year.
- [194:06]
Ben
Congratulations to Mark Ben Off.
- [194:08]
Jordy
This is why he might be re renaming the company Age of Force. We will see. We will see. And closing it out. One more Jason says the Original Omega Speedmaster 29151 is one of the best looking watches of all time and this is a particularly good looking example from 1958. Hairspring knows how to shoot a watch and it is stunning, stunning, stunning silhouette.
- [194:40]
Ben
Well folks for tuning in have a great rest of your day. We will see you tomorrow at 11aM Sharp. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please do great rest of your day and Merry Christmas. Goodbye.
- [194:54]
Jordy
Thank you for tuning in. Cheers.