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- [00:01]
John
You're watching TVPN. Today is December 16th. Tuesday, 16th, 2025. Merry Christmas. Oh, oh, oh. We are live from the TPP and Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital, the north pole, the north pole of net income. Ramp time is money. Save both, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. You know what to get for that loved one in your life this Christmas. Get them on ramp. Introduce them to a ramp sdr. They will appreciate it. It's the gift that keeps on giving.
- [00:43]
Jordy
It really is.
- [00:43]
John
Anyway, you know what else is the gift that keeps on giving? Hiring a storyteller. Which apparently is the hottest topic in Silicon Valley. Thanks to our friend Katie Dayton over at the Wall Street Journal, who made this go mega viral by posting an article in the Wall Street Journal all about how startups are hiring storytellers. Companies are desperately seeking storytellers is the headline. Of course we are going to dive into it. Jordy wrote a take. If you have a storyteller, you want to tell a story, why don't you tell it on all of the streaming platforms simultaneously with Restream one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com Storytelling is the only way to impose meaning on abundance, says Signal. Coherence on noise, legitimacy on power. Strategy, ops and capital are all downstream. Without narrative control, none of it will ever stick. This has been one of the core premise of my account. In a world of infinite output, story is the scarce primitive. He's a very good writer. Signal whoever can compress chaos into something people can feel, remember, forgive and rally around actually runs the system. This skill is worth more than the entire C suite company combined. Okay, so lay off the CEO, the cfo, the cto. You just need a storyteller, you're good to go. Is that the pitch? No. People are having fun with this one. What was your take, Jordy? Break it down for me.
- [02:10]
Jordy
So I frame this.
- [02:11]
John
How do you process this?
- [02:13]
Jordy
I mean, should we read through the article briefly or at least summarize it?
- [02:16]
John
Yeah.
- [02:16]
Jordy
Yeah, for sure. So Katie writes, companies are desperately seeking storytellers. Brands trying to rest great greater control from their narratives or seeking storytelling skill sets without a campfire in sight. Maybe some of them have a warm hearth like we do. Anyways, Corporate America's.
- [02:35]
John
What is the campfire thing?
- [02:37]
Jordy
Normally you'd be telling a story.
- [02:39]
John
Oh, around a campfire. Yeah, that makes sense. I usually think of smoking cigars around campfires. That's what I associate mostly focused on the cigar.
- [02:48]
Jordy
But you like to yap between post. I do, I do Corporate America's latest hot job is also one of the oldest in history Storytellers. Some companies want a media relations manager by a flashier name. Others need people to produce blogs, podcasts, case studies and more types of branded content to attract customers, investors and potential recruits. All seem to use the word differently than in its usual application to novelist playwrights as storytellers, a Google job ad said last month, we play an integral role in driving customer acquisition and long term growth. The listing sought a customer storytelling manager to join the company's Google Cloud storytelling team. That sounds like a fantastic opportunity. In another life, personally, I'd be on the Google Cloud storytelling team. In some ways we are. One article the unit published this year was titled Lowe's Innovation How Vertex AI Helps Create Interactive Shopping Experiences. Microsoft Security Organization, meanwhile, is recruiting a senior director overseeing narrative and storytelling, described as part cybersecurity technologist, part communicator and part marketer. Sure. Vanta is also hiring a storyteller Notion head of storytelling. That's right, productivity apps. Notion recently merged its comm, social media and influencer functions into one 10 person team, a so called storytelling team. And so anyways, they go. Katie goes on and on. She talks about how more and more of these listings are popping up. They're. They're growing year over year. They're showing up in earnings calls. Yeah, and I went, I have a.
- [04:22]
John
Different take on this. I think, I think as soon as there's a Wall Street. I mean we love Katie, but as soon as there's a Wall Street Journal piece about a trend, the trend is effectively dead. And so there is no more alpha in hiring storytellers. You need to hire a yarn spinner. You need to hire a fabilist, someone who will go around to group chats and tell wild lies about your product, your company, how successful you are. You recruit this person and then they go around seeding little anecdotes, little tall tales and they spin yarns.
- [04:54]
Jordy
I think that's called securities fraud.
- [04:57]
John
I don't know. It certainly depends. Maybe if there's no securities changing hands. Anyway, so I telling tall tales.
- [05:04]
Kari
I do.
- [05:04]
Jordy
I tried to find a storyteller from a long time ago and I found none other than the legend Steve Clayton. He's currently vice president of Microsoft's communication strategy. But back in 2010, what was he hired for? The chief storyteller.
- [05:20]
John
No way. They were using that term 15 years ago. That's how that title feels like a very modern.
- [05:25]
Jordy
He held that title from 2010 to June 2021. And he says, in this role I led a team of 40 who engage in a wide variety of storytelling inside and outside Microsoft. And anyways, goes, goes on and on. I was trying to also kind of understand the. From like the early 1900s to the 1950s, you had copywriters like that. It was, it was like pretty elite to be a copywriter. This was like a high status job you were using.
- [05:53]
John
Don Draper isn't Don Draper.
- [05:54]
Jordy
He was a creative director, but also a writer. And the people that he worked with were copywriters because at that time, print media, you could. Being able to use your words to get people to take action that you want, that you benefit from is a very elite skill set at some point.
- [06:13]
Ali
Marketing.
- [06:14]
John
One more example that I mentioned earlier, early storytellers in Silicon Valley, Guy Kawasaki, he was one of Apple's employees originally responsible for marketing their Macintosh computer line. In 1984, he actually popularized the word evangelist in marketing the Macintosh as an Apple evangelist and the concepts of evangelism, marketing and technology, evangelism, platform evangelism in general. And he became this idea of word of mouth marketing. Not quite storytelling, different keyword around it. But he was also sort of one of the early turning points in tech marketing anyway.
- [06:57]
Jordy
Yeah. And around that time you started to get content strategists, right?
- [07:01]
John
Yeah.
- [07:02]
Jordy
And if you look back to the 80s and 90s, it was about. That was kind of like the boom of brand strategy, brand identity. Think like the Nike era of marketing.
- [07:14]
John
Biology recently went viral because there was a clip from an older podcast that was reposted on. Axe went viral and it was his take a few years ago during the creator economy boom, arguing that companies need a founding creator or like a.
- [07:33]
Jordy
Or like a creator and resident.
- [07:35]
John
No, it was, it was higher than creator and residence. It was like. It was like on the co founding team you should have a CTO and then you should have a creator. And it was like, you know, it's an interesting thought experiment, probably good for some companies, maybe not good for every company. You know, like any piece of tech advice or wisdom, you know, there's going to be a variety of cases where it makes sense. But it went viral and everyone was saying like, oh, this is so. It's. He's so behind. And I was. And I had to correct someone. I was like, no, no, like that clip is actually a couple of years old. He. When he was saying it, it was so it was sort of interesting. That way.
- [08:05]
Jordy
Early insight. Yeah. Anyways, I wrote a piece for the newsletter today@tvpn.com and of course I titled it you Don't Need a Storyteller. Said, according to a friend of the show, Katie at the Wall Street Journal, companies are desperate to hire storytellers. Hiring a storyteller is not a new phenomena. But it makes sense that companies feel the need to hire them right now. Why? Because it's never been more obvious that the best storytellers in the world create billions of dollars of value for their companies and create massive advantages using only their words. Their words are so powerful that no matter where they appear on the Internet, they draw millions of views and create a vortex of talent, capital, and customers.
- [08:41]
John
Yeah, yeah. There's this thing where like, if you have a hot take, you don't actually need to own the platform. You can just go do a circuit.
- [08:50]
Jordy
Of appearances, a podcast tour. Anyways, I'll continue. So the reality distortion field that emerges. Emerges. Often results in 100 XP ratios. Of course, every company in the world wants this. The problem is that it's impossible to hire the most elite storytellers because they are founders. Think Elon Karp and Palmer. I. New coinage alert. I call these types Joe Rogan CEO. Right. You know, if you have a Joe Rogan CEO, it's fine. If you don't, there's great CEOs that are not Joe Rogan CEOs, but there's a certain type of CEO that's a Joe Rogan CEO.
- [09:23]
John
And to be clear, you're not saying that the CEO has to have the same aesthetics as Joe Rogan or the same style.
- [09:30]
Jordy
Well, even Carp has not been on Joe Rogan.
- [09:32]
John
That's true.
- [09:33]
Jordy
But you know that if he went on, he would crush. It would be a electric slam.
- [09:37]
John
It'd be electric. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no. So it's more about being able to put on a performance in that particular environment. Makes you a dream.
- [09:45]
Jordy
Can you capture people's attention for three hours? Yes, just like rambling bas.
- [09:49]
John
Whereas there have been CEOs that have gone on Joe Rogan successfully, but they just haven't delivered a Joe Rogan experience.
- [09:57]
Jordy
And I think if you think about. I think if you think about like early stage founders who, who would, who would go on and just crush Joe Rogan. Discuss immediately comes to mind. You know, who these people are. And there's, there's CEOs, founder CEOs of his generation. He's a JRC that are amazing, even though they wouldn't necessarily. They're not necessarily a jrc, is a jrc. So I continue. The Internet is noisier than ever, with thousands of startups competing for mindshare. When every startup has a great launch video, no one does. And yet these storytellers consistently break through and dominate the timeline. Even though Genai allows marketing teams big and small to massively increase their output, it is often not even 1% as effective as one of these elite storyteller founders going on a podcast or just posting stream of consciousness on X. The white pill for savvy marketing teams is that even as we're seeing an exponential increase in content production, I'm not sure we're seeing an exponential increase in great ideas. That means that companies large and small that don't have the luxury of having an Elon or Palmer on the payroll still have a chance to break through the noise and be remembered. As I was personally reflecting on 2025, there were only a handful of like truly corporate storytelling moments that I remember, and each of them worked for different reasons. One don't work at Anduril. Iconic campaign. Palmer makes like a cameo in it, but he's not the star. He's just like a. He's like a kind of. He's just like a character in it. But you could remove Palmer and the ad would still carry weight. I thought that was one of the best campaigns of the year. The other one was Astronomer, their reaction to the crisis and the viral moment they had. The campaign is titled thank you for your interest in Astronomer. It obviously featured Gwyneth Paltrow. I think this one will be studied in 10 years. It was like really a perfect reaction to that moment. And I did not know Astronomer before then. I do now. I will never forget them. I thought Ramps expenses should do themselves with Saquon. That one was this combination of like, luck, incredible execution and timing. And ultimately it just like having the Eagles got it done and that like, was the cherry on top. It was a great campaign. It was a great first super bowl commercial for them. Next is Keep Thinking from Anthropic. This felt like very Apple inspired. They even had the piano crashing and then sort of like reversing up, right?
- [12:35]
John
Oh yeah.
- [12:36]
Jordy
Which I felt was a reference to that iPad ad in some way. And then finally Avi Schiffman's campaign, which I call Buy Every Billboard. He literally bought every billboard. We've talked about this before, but near our office there was a billboard that you could only see like a third of it. You could only see it say n.com because it was just facing. It was like 10ft away from a apartment building. And so I said, Friend did something absurd, which we can call the buy every billboard strategy. Many people criticize the campaign in the product, but the results from an awareness standpoint are undeniable. Avi spent 1 to 2 million, was my estimate, and became a household name, at least on the coast. And a lot of other brands have spent like 10 times that amount. And you don't even know who they are. Right. You wouldn't. Somebody could rattle off a handful of them. You'd be like, what? I'm actually not familiar. So that pain was notable to me because I think if you utilize that for the right product, it could be super impactful. Right? It could have. You know, I don't know if that campaign transformed Friend as a business, but it certainly put them on the map. And I think, like, it's very possible that billboards can have increasing returns to scale. So you might buy two billboards. Not really see any noticeable, like lift and awareness and attention and traffic, but if you buy like 200, it's sort of undeniable. You can't miss it.
- [14:05]
John
Well, we had a great result with literally two billboards. Could have just been one, basically just one billboard. But we were able to get a lot of photos taken of it. And so it broke through in a very interesting way. And so we probably got way more value out of that just because it was such a small, just one billboard. And then Avi went the opposite direction and bought every billboard. When he came on the show and was like, it's the biggest billboard campaign in history, I was like, there's no way. And then I saw it everywhere and I was like, okay, maybe it is. But I thought it would cost more than a million dollars to get that big of a billboard buy. I thought a billboard buy of that scale would be like 10 million or 20 million, but I guess not.
- [14:46]
Jordy
I guess I know he didn't spend that much because he hasn't raised that much.
- [14:49]
John
He hasn't raised that much, but I don't know. He also. He was like, financing his dot com, so is there possible, is it possible that he has, like, financing agreement to like, pay these billboards down over time or something?
- [15:02]
Jordy
Like, I don't know about that. You can finance a domain because the domain gets held in like third party custody. And so if somebody stops making payments, you just claw back the domain.
- [15:12]
John
Yeah.
- [15:13]
Jordy
Whereas billboards is like, you ran the ads, you. You took the spot of another advertiser that could have been Cash today. So I don't really know about that. I wouldn't be surprised if avi's levered up in more ways than one.
- [15:23]
Kari
That.
- [15:24]
Jordy
Anyways, I said hiring a storyteller to craft narratives and tell your story internally and externally is fine, but if the goal is to be remembered and you lack a Joe Rogan CEO, remember that one great campaign is worth 10,000 posts. And yeah, I would just like to see people, companies, instead of, you know, frantically just trying to make a lot of noise in a bunch of random ways as you go into 2026. How do you have one breakout moment campaign and truly be remembered?
- [15:56]
John
I like that. Yeah, that's interesting. I have more to say about that. But first, let me tell you about Fall, a generative media platform for developers develop and fine tune models of serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Yeah, I'm trying to square the problem that these job posts are trying to solve. So in the Wall Street Journal article, it says the percentage of LinkedIn job postings in the US that include the term storyteller doubled in the year ending November 26th, I guess to include some 50,000 listings under marketing and more than 20,000 job listings under media and communications that mentioned the term storyteller. Storytelling executives on earnings calls and investor days mentioned it 469 times relative, which is like three times as much as 10 years ago. So clearly, clearly people are, you know, business leaders are interested in storytelling both as a, you know, a narrative for investors, but also as an actual physical job. But I'm wondering, like, you get in the seat, it does feel like a little bit of what this, what this story is, what this Journal article is saying is like, is like you're going to be storytelling every single day. It's kind of counter to what, which I guess is what your whole point was, but it's very much counter to your point of like one big campaign, one breakthrough idea. And I'm wondering, just like, I don't know, is there a world where you need both, where you need inspiration, but you still need like, you know, at a certain point? You know, there was an example here. It's like, you know, they did a Lowe's case study on how Vertex AI helps create interactive shopping experiences. Like, is that going to be the.
- [17:45]
Jordy
Standout, standout moment for me this year from Microsoft? Was Satya saying, I'm happy to be a leaser. Yeah, I'm good for my, I'm good for my 80 billion?
- [17:53]
John
Yeah.
- [17:54]
Jordy
So when you think about when I, you know, I think, what does that.
- [17:57]
John
Do for Lowe's partnership? You know, like, if you're like. Like, this was actually Google's cloud storytelling team. They publish an article, and so if they just have to get out a blog post, maybe there is some benefit to just, like, shifting their mindset to at least being like, hey, instead of just doing, like, a list of facts, like, why don't you try and, like, tell it like a story? Meaning, like, three act, structure, conflict resolution, characters, antagonists. Like, you know, like. Because, like, a lot of it sounds like a low bar.
- [18:28]
Jordy
They didn't want Lowe's to have efficient cloud infrastructure.
- [18:32]
John
They didn't want the shopping experiences to be interactive. But then Google came in and changed it up and changed up the game.
- [18:39]
Jordy
Yeah, I mean, that is a little bit. You know, if I'm at a big company, if I'm an employee at a big company, it would be cool to have a. Like, a centralized resource that's like, here's how we talk about this product. Here's how we talk about our mission. Here's how we talked about. Talk about our roadmap in the near term and the medium term and the long term. Right. But ultimately that when you think of the companies that are great at storytelling, it is because a CEO is a great storyteller.
- [19:05]
John
Yes. I mean, yeah, there's two.
- [19:09]
Jordy
I would argue that Apple, who's historically been an amazing storyteller, is not currently an incredible storyteller, because Tim cook is like 11 out of 10 operationally. And he's not the guy to go on Joe. He's not like, I don't see Tim Cook popping up on a bunch of.
- [19:34]
John
They're also paying him enough to go do extra stuff. Like, if you're making that type of money, you're not gonna be like, yeah, I'm gonna go work on the weekends.
- [19:43]
Jordy
You're gonna. Five o' clock rolls around.
- [19:45]
John
Exactly.
- [19:45]
Jordy
You're bailing, you're bailing. But no. So, again, it hasn't mattered. He's told the story through the company's performance, which is that he is one of the most elite operators in his history.
- [19:59]
John
Last night, I feel like we had dinner with a great storyteller and he told us his entire life story. And what was interesting and why I thought it was a really great story was two things. One, the facts of the story, just the truth, was a lot of up and down, a lot of conflict.
- [20:15]
Jordy
Yeah, it was rivet.
- [20:16]
John
It was riveting.
- [20:17]
Jordy
Failure wins.
- [20:18]
John
He's the protagonist. But there were antagonists, and there Were. And there were mentors and trials and tribulations. Like, it really did fit the hero's journey. So the facts were there, and you could go fact check them and be like, oh, yeah, there were these story points, but then also the way he told the story didn't hide those. There's another version of that story where he only tells you the good moments in the story, and he doesn't tell you about any of the trial and tribulations. And we're like, okay, yeah, we get it. You're successful. You know, it's boring. Instead, we were like, whoa, like another downturn, another up, another swing. It was emotional. It was a roller coaster. It was a great story. And I feel like if there's anything that comes out of, like, the storyteller era of corporate marketing, it should be giving marketers, writers, storytellers permission to actually inject conflict into their marketing materials.
- [21:14]
Kari
Yeah.
- [21:14]
Jordy
Look at the way that Palmer responded to that Journal piece about how Andrew had a fire at one of their test sites. Right. He was like, yes, we had a. I'm paraphrasing, but it was effectively, yes, we had a fire at the. At the missile test site or whatever it was at the explosives test site. Right. Like, yes, we. And he was trying to do that. He was. He was. He was trying to do that in the Journal article when he Clearly. When he was talking to them, but they. They pulled out moments where it was like, we fail a lot, whereas Palmer was trying to tell a good story, which is like, yeah, we fail a lot because we test a lot, and we're trying to iterate faster than our competitors, and through that, we'll succeed. So, yeah.
- [21:55]
John
I don't know. I wonder what the net impact of that Journal article will be.
- [21:59]
Jordy
Yeah, ultimately. Ultimately, I think tech needs to fall in love with advertising again. Advertising is amazing. Like, I want to see companies hiring advertising specialists. Somebody that.
- [22:12]
John
That's funny.
- [22:13]
Jordy
Somebody that is just focused on doing really great advertising. Right. Not just, like, you know, I think. I think this gets lost because we're in this era of rapid testing, iterating through a bunch of assets, you know, volume. Right. You see this with, you know, companies that say, like, yeah, we just need to create 100 new ads for Meta every single week forever. And we're trying to get to 200. Right. But in that, it can oftentimes get lost of, like, what. What story are we telling? Right. Like, what is the. What is the through line between all this noise that we're creating and all this attention that we're getting.
- [22:47]
John
Yeah. Numeral compliance. Handle numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth. Do you think companies. We have some.
- [23:01]
Jordy
Ben made some new sound effects.
- [23:03]
John
Let's have a couple.
- [23:04]
Jordy
Just got a bit longer.
- [23:06]
John
What was that one?
- [23:07]
Kari
Santos Naughty list.
- [23:08]
Jordy
Just got a bit longer.
- [23:11]
John
There's a couple other good ones. You're surrounded by enemy snowmen.
- [23:15]
Jordy
Walk it down.
- [23:16]
John
You're surrounded by enemy snowmen.
- [23:18]
Ali
Hostile drummer boy. On your six.
- [23:21]
John
Take the shot. Hostile drummer boy. Very funny.
- [23:25]
Kari
Friendly reindeer in back.
- [23:28]
John
Friendly reindeer inbound. I like it.
- [23:31]
Jordy
Really fun.
- [23:32]
John
Anyways, so do you think it's going to be hard for companies to hire great storytellers? Ties here. Bronco says the Venn diagram of people who get tech get people can explain complex things simply and can make people care. Is tiny. So will these folks be.
- [23:54]
Jordy
I think a lot of these, I think a lot of these people actually are at advertising agencies. And if you're Coca Cola, you've been working with hundreds of advertising agencies for decades and decades and decades. Right. This has worked well for them. You're bringing in new ideas, new perspectives. You're hiring. It can be great to say, hey, we're gonna give this agency like $100,000, but in exchange we're gonna get a great campaign out of it. Right. So I just think people need to know what they actually want. I think what they want is to be remembered and to be thought about and to be, you know, have certain ideas associated with their company. Right. And I think just people that are like, oh, we want to be remembered, we should hire a storyteller. I don't think that's going to work really that well. Right. Because I mean, again, just because like in order to. It's about like cutting, cutting through the noise. Like you need an idea that is so good, like don't work at Anduril that it will just break out and people will remember it. Right. And people will watch a two minute ad.
- [24:58]
John
Yeah, there's a little bit of like the. Just like, you know, the story still has to be. We're talking about. We're not talking about yarn spinners. We're talking about actual real stories that potentially could be fact checked. And so you do have to do a little bit of the hard work to actually deliver some facts and some story points. Which is probably why it's extremely hard to tell a compelling story as like a seed stage company. Because you're a young company. That's why usually your story leans on like your backstory, like how you grew up or what you were doing before, why you quit that big cushy job to go out into, cross into the unknown and become the intrepid entrepreneur. I was reflecting on Keller at Zipline as having a great story this year in particular that sort of manifested itself in Zipline's solar punk style launch video. And Keller going around on different shows, coming on our show multiple times and talking about the progress of the business. But a lot of that story is just the fact that he's been running the business for a decade and it's now finally working. And it's this thing that the story of drone delivery was told a decade ago. Like I remember in San Francisco, people were saying there was somebody who was like building a drone delivery company as like a small startup and it would basically just be like a DJI drone that he would just like clip it to and like fly it to you.
- [26:21]
Jordy
Like.
- [26:22]
John
But it was like.
- [26:23]
Jordy
Well, an example also in the drone space of good storytelling is the nearest guys. So like Soren, for example, when he comes on, he's like, yeah, was competitive drone racer.
- [26:31]
John
Yeah.
- [26:32]
Jordy
It immediately doesn't matter that he's like young and doesn't have the most experience in the category.
- [26:38]
John
Yeah.
- [26:38]
Jordy
But you're like, okay, the guy that is making killer drones, you probably want him to be one of the best in the world at actually flying.
- [26:45]
John
Yeah, I completely agree with that. The hard part is that like, if you're, if you don't have that background, if you don't have the plot points, if you don't have plot, then no amount of storyteller hiring can fix it if you have a boring plot. So you got to go do things.
- [27:02]
Jordy
It's easier to be a great storyteller if you have motion than if you have aura.
- [27:06]
John
It is. But also, yeah, I don't know. Plot points. Plot points are. Things happen. Things like facts occur. Like, you know, things the. You know, Soren actually competed as a drone racer like. Or emotion that ties to it. But it's really.
- [27:26]
Jordy
You're saying that adds to the aura. Right. If you think about.
- [27:28]
John
Yes.
- [27:31]
Jordy
If Soren rewind a little bit, he starts fundraising for his company. Yeah, like that, that kind of just by that. That gives him a huge advantage. If that's just circulating of like there's a new startup raising and the founders were competitive drone racers.
- [27:46]
John
I mean even, even just like being on your second company, having sold your first company. That's just a plot point. No, no storyteller can come in and say like, hey, why don't we go tell everyone that you sold your last company for a billion dollars. It's like, yeah, that would make your story better, but it's not a fact, so you can't use it.
- [28:02]
Jordy
Yeah, there's always, you know, there's always something to latch onto. I think about with the Ridge Wallet guys, they never raise money. There was never any hype surrounding the business. And like, as a storyteller, everyone's a storyteller. So when I introduce them to people, I'd be like, you should talk to Sean and Connor. Yeah, they've bootstrapped this business to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and profit by being truly elite marketers. And that like, creates like a catalyst for people to be like, wow, I'm paying attention now.
- [28:34]
John
So, yeah, Figma, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Ali is chiming in. She says, wow, 23k likes, she says, Tech bro, obsessed with storytelling, but hasn't read a book in the last five years. Probably not a good sign. A lot of the classic stories have been told again and again and again and go back to the classics.
- [29:00]
Jordy
Instead of a launch video, somebody should just write an announcement in the full hero's journey.
- [29:07]
John
That actually sort of works. I mean, I would use the story circle when I would write YouTube videos. Dan Harmon's story Circle, it's basically like a three act structure but in eight parts and so there's like the crossing into the void. I would try and map out like, you know, all the different story beats pretty deliberately and try and map them on there. It's hard though.
- [29:27]
Tyler
I would like to see a launch post written in verse.
- [29:32]
John
Ooh, almost like getting back into poetry. Yeah, I mean, homeric. You should maybe drop an epic poem, like a true, true, like thousand page book of poetry. That's the way.
- [29:45]
Jordy
Or you could drop 20 haikus on your startup.
- [29:49]
John
Yeah. Graphite.dev, code review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. This really did become the current thing. There's a clue. Eric Zaworski says there's a big clue in the middle of the viral Wall Street Journal article by Dolly Dayton that explains why the people who would otherwise crush the role of storyteller, the hot new job at hot startups rarely get the gig in the end. As designer Stefan Sagmeister Observed back in 2014, it's all the people who are not storytellers who now suddenly want to be storytellers. Interesting. Says every so Often an article like this drops remember brand's the new moat or taste can't be taught that lays bare the repackaging of an oft taken for granted concept in communication human to human relation just enough that it entices reaction discourse today it's the idea that stories are telling stories is an important function of extending the lifespan of companies. A familiar debate on the timeline. Many are correctly pointing out that this is nothing new. Marketing 101 always has been. Jpg tier stuff. So how did storytelling, an idea fundamental to our existence, get Rubik's Cubed into a novel optimization strategy? That is funny. Rubik's Cubed is good.
- [31:13]
Jordy
Yeah, I just think a title like this would. I think a good test if you're trying to hire for a role like this is would the person be do they want the title storyteller or would they be okay with the title copywriter? Right. Because in my view, if you're hiring somebody to be a storyteller, their job is to like write down words in a structured, impactful way and help the entire organization share those words in a consistent manner. And I would say a lot of people want the title creative director, but do they want to be a project manager? No, they want to be a creative Director. There's just a status associated with that. There's maybe a status associated with Storyteller, but at the end of the day, if you're trying to hire for this, do you want somebody that is obsessed with writing?
- [32:08]
John
You should be willing to take the job of Storyteller. If I come to you and you say you want to work for me as a storyteller, I say I'm going to start you off with the title Fabilist. And if you're cool with that, then maybe we'll upgrade you to Storyteller. If you're OK coming to this organization with your title being Yarn Spinner, just Tall Tale Smith first project, you just.
- [32:32]
Jordy
Hand them a bunch of yarn. Say, spin this for me.
- [32:34]
John
Just tell me a lie. Tell me a lie about my company. You're actually a generational founder. You sold your last company for $10 billion. Yeah. Write the blog post and post it anyway. What is this? Andreessen Horowitz has a laws of new media coming from Marshall McLuhan. The laws of media, the new science. There are four of these. The laws of media. One is it enhances awareness of inclusive structural process obsolesces dominance of the logical method reverses into technology. Hardware becomes software, retrieves metaphor logos. That is I like some McLuhan where else is this Xerox enhances the speed of the printing press. Obsolesces the assembly line book reverses into everyone becomes a publisher retrieves the oral tradition. That's a cool framework. I like this dig through different value props. Essentially the iPhone one. It enhanced bringing the world into yourself. Into the world, the world into yourself, into the world. Obsolesces the house's home. Flips the end of the individual retrieves the nomadic hunter. What? That's weird for the. Here's one of his tetrads on the computer. The computer enhances instrument replay of information. It obsolesces hardware, it retrieves hunter. It flips pattern recognition. Huh. What a fascinating framework. ChatGPT has a new image model. They just launched this. Sam Altman teased it with a photo that at this point him and a bunch of polos looks great. He says most likely to launch a new image model. And Sam Altman says launching something really fun today. What is the actual announcement? How is this framed? I know the model got better, but what is. It's a good model.
- [34:30]
Tyler
It's a good model, sir.
- [34:31]
John
Yes, yes. Okay, so image 1.5. Image 1.5. What were they on before?
- [34:35]
Tyler
There's GPT image. Now there's GPT image 1.5.
- [34:38]
John
Were they on 1.0 before?
- [34:40]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [34:40]
John
Okay. Today we're releasing a new version of ChatGPT images powered by our new flagship image generation model. Now, whether you're creating something from scratch or editing a photo, you'll get the output you're picturing. It makes precise edits while keeping details intact and it's four times faster. You know, that's a big deal. You know that, that like that is the real thing where nanobanana has been very, very fast. They gotta speed this thing up and they clearly figured out a way to do it. Alongside, we're introducing the new Images feature within ChatGPT designed to make image generation delightful, to spark imagination, inspiration. And it is cool. It's like it has its own little corner of the app, its own little surface area. Before I tell you more about this, let me tell you about FIN AI, the number one agent. The number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel. Why is Jordy going over to the Gong? It's gong.
- [35:35]
Jordy
Just checking.
- [35:39]
John
Fantastic. So around here we have a benchmark for images for image generation. You come to us, you come to us with a new model. You know, we're going to try and generate a Where's Waldo and We have some Where's Waldos pulled up and we're getting better, we're getting closer. They're not ready for prime time, though.
- [36:03]
Jordy
Not ready for print.
- [36:04]
John
We didn't pass our personal internal benchmarks.
- [36:08]
Jordy
Can we pull it up?
- [36:09]
John
Let's pull up this first image of this Where's Waldo? It's going to be very small, so I don't know if you'll actually be able to see that. Can you zoom in a little bit? Yes. So this is the Where's Waldo.
- [36:19]
Jordy
Okay. The important thing is that from far away, this looks.
- [36:22]
John
It looks like a Where's Waldo. It looks ready to rock. Now, part of what makes Where's Waldo special is it has this unique perspective. Like the. It has. It's like infinite depth of field. It's. It's this 45 degree angle. Isomorphic. It's an isomorphic image. This is not perfectly isomorphic, but it's not bad. And there's a lot of interesting detail and texture. But as you zoom in, you start.
- [36:51]
Tyler
Noticing it's actually isometric.
- [36:53]
John
Oh, isometric. Isometric. Thank you. And so as you zoom in, you start to notice that some of the people are not quite to scale. And the telltale sign of a Where's Waldo? Is that there is story. Back to storytellers. The creators of Where's Waldo are storytellers because as you move around the image in the Where's Waldo, you see little scenes playing out. It will be a dog that is hungry for a ham, a Christmas ham. And that's part of what he goes for. As he goes for the ham, he knocks over a ladder where someone is painting and the paint bucket falls. And it tells you, like, there's these little vignettes that are playing out.
- [37:34]
Jordy
That's what makes it enjoyable to look.
- [37:36]
John
Around for Waldo 100%. Because you notice, and in fact, if you go to the back of the book Where's Waldo, oftentimes there will be bonus things to search for. So you will get a list of prompts for what to hunt for outside of just the main Waldo. You will also be prompted to, is this a real Waldo or is this an AI one?
- [37:54]
Jordy
No, this is.
- [37:55]
Ali
You made this.
- [37:55]
John
I made this one. This is the by hand. It looks great from this direction, but as you zoom in, you'll see that you're not quite getting the level of storytelling. And also the final check is like, there must be one and only one Waldo. And I'm not actually sure that this one included a Waldo.
- [38:15]
Jordy
Put it back in ChatGPT and say, Where's Waldo?
- [38:19]
John
Where's Waldo? Can it find it? So I'm not seeing a Waldo on this one. On the beach, there are a number of people that look sort of like Waldo, but none of them have the precise, like, walking stick backpack.
- [38:33]
Jordy
Old Rock in the chat says, couldn't you just generate that picture and then drop in a Waldo with an edit feature? Which is true. You could just say, generate a Where's Waldo scene, but don't include Waldo and then add him afterwards.
- [38:43]
John
No, I think you're 100%.
- [38:44]
Jordy
Where's Waldo was created by Martin Hanford, a British illustrator.
- [38:48]
John
Yes.
- [38:49]
Jordy
He gained worldwide fame in 1987 with the release of the first book. He, prior to that, specialized in drawing massive, detailed crowd scenes for commercial clients, which ended up becoming the foundation of the Where's Waldo series. A single illustration would take him up to eight weeks to complete.
- [39:08]
John
Wow.
- [39:10]
Tyler
And also imagine kind of like a generator verifier setup where, like, the generator gets better and better at generating them and the verifier can find them. So soon you'll have kind of Where's Waldo superintelligence.
- [39:21]
John
Do you think that it'd be adversarial? One could say that it could be generative, adversarial network, potentially. They could network these two together.
- [39:29]
Jordy
Can we work on. So Martin is based in the UK, just under 70 years old. We should get him on the show.
- [39:35]
John
The creator, Where's Waldo? Let's go.
- [39:38]
Jordy
Let's get that new challenge. New challenge for the team. Let's get Martin on the show.
- [39:44]
John
But yeah, the OpenAI news. The model excels at editing, adding, subtracting, combining, blending, transposing. It seems very clear that with a little bit of a harness, dare I say a wrapper, you could, in fact create a proper Where's Waldo? But you probably need to generate the images tile by tile, one tile at a time, and kind of work piece by piece, and then combined it all, blend it all together, and then, yes, you probably want to add one Waldo at the very end in some random spot. But you would not want to just one shot, the full image, because it's still a little bit too complex. But it's remarkable. I mean, these images are remarkable, and yet there's still room for improvement. It's crazy. It's like every time we see one of these, I'm like, okay, this is the final thing. We're done. It's good enough. It's great. And then another year goes by and there's more challenges.
- [40:41]
Jordy
Pull up this post that says Also very fun way to use it to easily get fun images and then scroll down. I thought this was somebody messing with Sam as a reply, but it is Sam himself as a firefighter with a calendar. And then there's a Sora video from Ramp Capital. Let's pull it up.
- [40:59]
John
That's funny. I'm the product.
- [41:02]
Jordy
Oh, it's showing up in my replies, but not your replies. I'll put it.
- [41:09]
John
Yeah. Going Back to the OpenAI announces ChatGPT images creative transformations. The model's creativity shines through transformations that change and add elements. Here, let's play this one. Well, this is not. What does it say?
- [41:27]
Kari
Impressive. Very nice.
- [41:29]
John
That's pretty funny. I like it.
- [41:31]
Kari
Now let's see more slop.
- [41:32]
John
Oh, my God. The ability to use Sora to make jokes at Sam's expense is truly new territory for. I mean, I guess there were probably people that were in Ms. Paint making fun of Bill Gates back in like the 90s, but mocking him. Yeah, mocking him. And he's just like, you wrote this takedown of me in Word. You wouldn't have been able to do this without me. But the feedback loop, the iteration cycle is way, way faster there. Let me tell you about cognition. They're the team behind the AI software engineer Devin. Crush your backlog with a personal AI engineering team. So these transformations work on both simple and more intricate concepts and are easy to try using preset styles and ideas in the new ChatGPT images feature. No written prompt required. That's very interesting. So in an effort to make it easier to prompt, we are now instantiating more ui. So as that image shows you, it's.
- [42:47]
Jordy
Like, as the models get better, we need more sass.
- [42:51]
John
Yeah, it's something like that. It's just that, like, it is. I mean, this was David Holz's insight during the mid journey Boom was that if you gave someone a blank text box and said, this is a magical text box, it's artificial intelligence, it can generate an image of anything. They would just type like dog, and they would just get a picture of a dog. And the picture of the dog was so photorealistic, it was just like, okay, cool. You could go to Google Images and get that. Like, what is special about this? There's nothing special about it because, like, we have images of dogs. Like, yes, it's amazing that a computer can generate it from nothing. Like, that's remarkable. Can always add more, but that fades away. And so. And he was like, then you ask them again. You can do anything and be like, dog, happy, dog. And people just weren't fully inspired. And so the beauty of midjourney was putting everything in this big chat room on discord so that letting people inspire each other, each other, each other. And it became this collaborative thing. And so with this, it feels like OpenAI and the ChatGPT app are definitely sort of embracing this idea that you will need to bring a little bit of. Of idea generation. I mean, when Images and ChatGPT launched for the first time, I wasn't the person that came up with the idea of Studio Ghibli. I needed to see that. And then once someone told me this is a great prompt, I was like, okay, I'm in. I'm going to go create a few more. I needed a jumping off point and they're bringing that jumping off point to their users in the images tab. And you know, there's going to be Disney in there pretty soon and that's going to be very cool. As you wrote in the newsletter last.
- [44:28]
Jordy
Ty in the X chat says no beards. I've never seen beards are coming. Beards are coming.
- [44:33]
John
Well, thank you for supporting the coziest podcast in all of. In the entire world right now. We really complete victory on the, on the cozy maxing we've been going back and forth on. Well, does it look ridiculous? I think the answer is yes, and.
- [44:48]
Jordy
That'S why we do it.
- [44:48]
John
But Merry Christmas to everyone and only a few more days. Only a few more days. One really good Christmas gift. Turbo Puffer Serverless vector in full text search for grandma. For your grandma.
- [45:02]
Jordy
This is built on fantastic.
- [45:04]
John
I know. Your grandma's saying, you get me a sweater every year. Well, this year, what about serverless vector and pull text? Exactly.
- [45:13]
Jordy
She's going to be linear.
- [45:16]
John
She's going to ask. She's going to unbox Turbo Puffer and she's going to say, well, is it built from first principles and object storage? You're going to be able to say yes.
- [45:23]
Jordy
And she's going to say, does Notion use this? Does Notion use this?
- [45:26]
John
Yes.
- [45:27]
Jordy
You're going to be able to say yes.
- [45:28]
John
Yes, yes. She's going to say, well, is it extremely scalable?
- [45:32]
Jordy
Absolutely.
- [45:33]
John
That's what most grandparents care about when.
- [45:35]
Jordy
It comes to Christmas scalability.
- [45:37]
Mike
Scalability.
- [45:38]
John
They want something scalable, they want something fast, and they definitely want it to be 10x cheaper. And so get your grandmother Turbo Puffer this, this Christmas.
- [45:48]
Jordy
Get them Bobby. Bobby already got his grandma Turbo Buffer. She says she's going to be so happy.
- [45:54]
John
That's amazing.
- [45:55]
Jordy
OpenAI hires an executive from Google to lead M and A according to Walter Bloomberg. According to the information more notably OpenAI hire comms chief Hannah Wong is departing the company. This came out yesterday. She's stepping down. She's going to depart the company at the end of January, Axio says. Why it matters Wong was the AI giants first chief comms officer and guided the company through the launch of ChatGPT, heightened regulatory scrutiny, controversies and a slew of deals and lawsuits. The Bigger picture Her departure part departure comes as the company is pushing on a variety of fronts from 1.4 trillion.
- [46:35]
John
Do you think that she asked for the Storyteller title and she didn't get it so she quit in protest?
- [46:39]
Jordy
Very, very possibly.
- [46:40]
Kari
John.
- [46:41]
Jordy
It's very possible. Yeah. I feel like she deserves, she deserves like a little bit of a vacation at this point. I can't think of a more stressful job since 2021 gray hair as the OpenAI top comms role. She joined OpenAI from Apple in 2021 and anyways, so vesting Cliff reached well.
- [47:10]
John
First off, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi asset investing and they're trusted by millions. Speaking of Merry Christmas, there is a fantastic article in the Wall Street Journal. We got to go through it in the Business and Finance section. It says advertisers start Christmas season early. This was written for us. This is fantastic news. Brands chase inflation, Weary shoppers with plentiful TV spots. There's a whole bunch of interesting stats in here. And so it starts with a very controversial question. It says, are you tired of Santas and relentlessly cheerful snowmen filling every screen?
- [47:52]
Jordy
No.
- [47:54]
John
Blame the advertisers. This is so funny. Advertisers kicked off the holiday season even earlier this year and they are inundating televisions with commercials. The activity comes despite continuing efforts by many businesses to rein in costs to contend with tariffs. Holiday TV ads started in earnest in early October and companies have spent a combined $1.47 billion over the past nine weeks, a 13% jump compared to with the year ago period, according to Ad Tracker. I spot. So keep this in mind. 1.47 billion on holiday TV ads. Guess how much holiday retail sales are expected to be this year?
- [48:47]
Jordy
Counting. Counting. Black Friday, Everything.
- [48:50]
John
Everything?
- [48:51]
Jordy
What do you mean it's big? All retail spend? Are you asking for all retail spend in Q4? Do I have to like pull out.
- [48:57]
John
Grocery and sales from November and December each year?
- [49:02]
Jordy
Does it include grocery spending? Food spending? I don't know.
- [49:06]
John
I think it might include everything. I'll give you a hint. In 2020, it was 0.7 trillion 700 billion. Then it went to 850 billion, then 900, then 950. Last year came in around 99. Something really close. What was it? It was $0.98 trillion $980 billion. This year it's expected to be over a trillion. We got to hit the gong for that. That is a. That is some fantastic news for this holiday season. Truly the first holiday season in history that will be over a trillion dollars. There's a bunch of interesting facts in here. So there are massive investments in digital promotions flooding social media, email inboxes and text messages. So of course the 1.47 billion that's happening on TV is just a small slice of the overall advertising that's happening this holiday season. Retailers spent 5.8 billion on digital ads in the US from November 1 to November 7, a 4% increase from last year. Holiday shopping season remains a critical moment for retailers with inflation. Inflation still weighing on household budgets. But brands aren't taking any chances of losing out on the action the National Retail Federation is projecting.
- [50:28]
Jordy
Let's give it up for the National Federation.
- [50:30]
John
Sales will surpass 1 trillion. A handful of retailers are proving particularly busy on the TV ad front. So far, Walmart's ads feature a Dr. Seuss inspired world starring Walter Goggins as the Grinch. Target, meanwhile, brings back Chris K. A jolly, bearded Christmas enthusiast introduced in a 2024 campaign. In target spot, a woman with whom he is on a coffee date gets a peek at his gift list and leaves him confused by referencing his naughty list. Interesting. Amazon.com this is the most interesting stat. So total minutes of US advertising by retailer. So Amazon last year was in 2023, they were around 7,000 minutes of US TV advertising. And to be clear, that's right in line with Walmart. Target was around 6,7000 minutes. Macy's was around 6,7000 minutes.
- [51:30]
Jordy
The joke's old.
- [51:31]
John
Even Verizon.
- [51:32]
Jordy
It's an old joke now, John, stop making it. You said six, seven.
- [51:36]
John
Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is ridiculous. That's actually where it is. But they doubled in 2025. They went to, they went to 14,000 minutes. Yeah, they went up to. So Amazon has doubled the amount that they're spending on, on TV advertising.
- [51:56]
Jordy
AB in the chat said Coca Cola invented the red and white Santa. I was trying to, I was trying to fact check it a little bit. Apparently it's an urban legend that Coca Cola invented the red and white Santa. In reality, Santa Claus was already appearing in red suits long before he appeared in soda advertisements. But apparently they did standardize the Santa look.
- [52:20]
John
Right.
- [52:20]
Jordy
They're spending probably more on advertising than most other companies in the world for, like, many decades. Right. They had an opportunity to really define the look. Define the look that we are delivering this delivering today.
- [52:37]
John
Let me tell you about Addio. The AI native CRM Adeo builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Friendly reindeer. I'm glad. It's good to hear that it's a friendly reindeer.
- [52:49]
Jordy
Did you see the Journal going after core weave?
- [52:53]
John
Yes. We should get to that. There's one last stat that we need to share. Basically, it's like there's a lot of jitters in the economy as AI overheated. We're going to go into the core weave story. But overall, the health of the consumer seems to be good. Holiday retail sales are higher than ever in history and over a trillion dollars. Now everyone's advertising. There's one interesting stat in here, which is at the bottom of this Wall Street Journal article. They polled consumers. How do you feel about the timing of holiday ads? And so when holiday ads start, start. So Amazon, one of the largest advertisers in the country, aired its first holiday TV ad on October 13th.
- [53:38]
Jordy
Okay, but you got to give me more. Was Santa in the ad? Because I'm kind of a purist. I like to go full speed ahead on the Christmas spirit.
- [53:50]
John
The day after Thanksgiving, day after Thanksgiving, Black Friday.
- [53:52]
Jordy
I got our tree. We went and got our tree on Black Friday.
- [53:56]
John
Yes.
- [53:57]
Jordy
And that just feels like the right moment. I like to have enough.
- [54:02]
John
So you don't want to see Santa until the day after Thanksgiving, but then.
- [54:05]
Jordy
I want to see him everywhere.
- [54:06]
John
Yeah, you know, of course, it should be 0 to 100. So I'm with you. I generally agree with that. Tyler, how do you feel? When is it appropriate to see us After Thanksgiving? After Thanksgiving, but anytime before?
- [54:17]
Tyler
I can't even listen to them.
- [54:18]
John
Okay, so I will describe the ad and we could potentially pull it up here. But Amazon Home for the Holidays was the name of the ad, so let me. Oh, damn it.
- [54:29]
Jordy
We got more Christmas lore in the chat. Red and white Santa is because of amanita mascaria mushrooms. Reindeer eat them.
- [54:38]
John
What? What is that?
- [54:40]
Jordy
Okay, anyway, no, I can see, you know, the red and white mushrooms.
- [54:44]
John
I know. Candy canes. Sugar plum player. Plum fairies. So October 13, they run an ad. It shows a college student arriving home to see that her childhood bedroom now contains a Treadmill with her father running on it, awkwardly wearing short shorts, the young woman checks the Amazon app for more appropriate workout gear, and it's called Home for the Holidays. So no Santa. At least that I can tell from this ad. We can actually pull this up here. The Amazon TV spot. Home for the Holidays. Maybe it's not playing. Oh, it is. It is here. I have it here. If we can pull it up. Yeah. So we need to determine whether or not Jordi. Why are we zooming out like this? We need to determine whether or not Jordi decides that this ad is too early. Too early. And so let's pull up the Amazon TV spot on our side.
- [55:45]
Jordy
We have been drinking this podcast in a can all year. Yes, it's very Christmas themed.
- [55:50]
John
Okay, I think we have it here. So, Jordy, based on this is.
- [55:54]
Mike
What is the.
- [55:54]
John
What is the earliest day you could.
- [55:56]
Jordy
No, I'm getting red flags already.
- [55:57]
John
Red flags already. Okay, play it, play it. We're home for the holidays.
- [56:02]
Jordy
You've dreamt of this moment back in your old room.
- [56:08]
Ali
Oh.
- [56:10]
Jordy
Hey, kiddo. I'll be right there.
- [56:16]
John
At least you can get a deal.
- [56:17]
Jordy
On new shorts for dad. Something with a little more coverage.
- [56:22]
Kari
Hmm.
- [56:24]
John
There's no Sanskrit.
- [56:26]
Jordy
Way too early.
- [56:27]
John
You think that's too early? What's the earliest day? You still.
- [56:31]
Mike
You.
- [56:31]
John
You wouldn't even run that before Thanksgiving.
- [56:33]
Jordy
And that's like two. That's like almost two months before winter.
- [56:37]
John
It's before. I mean, they ran it before Halloween.
- [56:39]
Tyler
Well, so, yeah, I mean, this is October. There are some places in the US where it snows in October, right? You go up to Alaska. This could be like. This could be the college students fall break.
- [56:47]
John
Yeah, this could be. They're coming back for a weekend. They could be targeting Anchorage or Juneau.
- [56:52]
Jordy
Yeah, we don't know where it ran. So I did find an article from the Fungi foundation called the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms on Christmas. The story of Santa Claus is not the creation of Coca Cola, nor St. Nick, or a children's story. It exists because of a small living being with great powers. The Amanita muscaria mushroom. So I'm go out on a limb and say the Fungi foundation might have a little bias.
- [57:20]
John
Are you doing this research on Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning. Next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. Why don't you vibe code something for your family for Christmas? So would you say that the Christmas ads are, A, much too early, B, slightly too early, C, about The right time. Slightly too late or much too late? In terms of the timing of holiday ads this year, I think you can.
- [57:55]
Jordy
Start doing holiday advertising without putting snow on the ground and without.
- [57:59]
John
How would you do that? Wait, describe a holiday ad that doesn't at least have a little bit of snow.
- [58:04]
Jordy
I would like to see Amazon do a plain text ad that's Star wars style, where the text is just scrolling and it's like, get ready to buy stuff. This is about to be the super bowl of just buying stuff. Do it on Amazon.com it's time to buy.
- [58:19]
John
It's time to buy. It's time to buy. It sounds like you think that the holiday ads are at least slightly too early. Maybe much too early.
- [58:32]
Jordy
Much too early, or do you think.
- [58:33]
John
It'S about the right time?
- [58:33]
Jordy
I think Amazon should start dropping a billion dollars on ads just on Black Friday. I mean, they probably already do because.
- [58:42]
John
So this is the interesting stat from here. They pulled a bunch of consumers in and boomers complained the most about the ads being too early.
- [58:52]
Jordy
We're all the boomers, because they're locked in, they're paying for gen Z.
- [58:57]
John
Over 50% said, yeah, Christmas in October is great, sits perfectly with me. Only 20 something percent of boomers said, yeah, the holiday ads are about the right time. Whereas over 25%, 30% of boomers said the ads are much too early. Only 10% of Gen Z said, how.
- [59:19]
Tyler
Many said that they were too late? Did any say that?
- [59:22]
John
Yes. Millennials, Millennials actually led the whole pack by saying 4.34% of millennials said that the holiday ads started too late this year, which is funny. Gen Z, only 2% were in the we're in the too late camp, basically.
- [59:37]
Kari
AB.
- [59:37]
John
AB, the boomers, the boomers. Actually, less than 1, less than 2% of them said slightly too late. They were all saying too early, too early. Did they hate Christmas, the boomers? Yeah.
- [59:49]
Jordy
AB in the chat says, Santa discovered ChatGPT and now Christmas is 30% faster and the elves are unemployed. Trey says every time Jordi pushes back on Christmas on when Christmas starts, I'm going to move it up one month. It starts September 1st.
- [60:02]
John
Now, September 1st is great. September 1st. Well, let's.
- [60:08]
Jordy
Here's a. I would like to see Coca Cola get a blimp. You know, I'm a blimp maxi. I want to see more companies leveraging blimps for marketing. They get a blimp, but they hang a sleigh and a bunch of reindeers. And so they fly the blimps in the crowd and they have sort of like clear, you know, wiring so that it just looks like Santa's flying over the United States. Okay, somebody's got to do it.
- [60:34]
John
I like it. I like it.
- [60:36]
Jordy
Well, let's talk about Core Weave static.
- [60:38]
John
But first, let's talk 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.
- [60:48]
Jordy
Very aggressive title Core Weave Staggering fall from market grace Highlights AI bubble fears the data center providers Terrible Six week slides picked up speed when a famous short seller piled concerns on top of delays Core Weave's value dropped by 33 billion due to AI bubble concerns, a failed merger and short seller criticism. Core Weave, the largest of a new breed of companies driving the AI boom, has watched 33 billion in value vaporize in six weeks. The share price plunge of 46% comes as investors worry about a possible AI bubble fallout from a failed merger and public criticism from high profile seller Jim Chanos, known for predicting the collapse of Enron. Yeah, but some of the high tech companies biggest problems began with a very low tech nuisance unexpected turbulent rainstorms in North Texas over the summer. Heavy rains and winds caused a roughly 60 day delay at a construction site in Denton, a small city north of Dallas, preventing contractors from pouring concrete for a major complex. As a result, the completion date for the huge data center cluster, consisting of about 260 megawatts of computing power that CoreWeave plans to lease to OpenAI, has been pushed back several months. There were additional delays caused by revisions to design plans for some of the data centers a partner is building for Core Weave in Texas and elsewhere, according to filings. The slowdown was compounded by mixed messaging from Core Weave's chief executive officer Michael which spooked investors and accelerated the company's share price decline at a particularly vulnerable moment for the AI trade. Cor Weave's business model involves using high interest debt to pay thousands to buy thousands of advanced chips from Nvidia, installing them in server racks inside data centers that it leases from third party landlords, then renting access to the chips as capital spending on Infra has intensified. Core weave, which is 7% owned by Nvidia and backed by hedge funds such as Magnatar Capital and CO2 Management, has become the standard bearer for both the promise and the risk of the AI boom. Some critics point to the high levels of debt it has taken on to finance its data center buildout, while others worry that the company depends on just a handful of large customers such as OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta for the bulk of its revenue. Core Weave saw sales more than double in the most recent quarter to nearly 1.4 billion from half a billion a year earlier. But the company is unprofitable and lost 110 million in its most recent quarter in early November, before the construction delays were widely discussed. Intra Tor played down fears of an AI bubble at a Wall Street Journal event in Northern California. If you're building something that accelerates the economy and has fundamental value to the world, the world will find ways to finance an enormous amount of business, he said, adding that the number of buyers of data center computing services had convinced him that there is not a bubble inflating.
- [63:34]
John
I think this was the same Wall Street Journal event where Sarah Fryer made the the backstock comment that sort of went super viral. I think he this quote is actually pretty reasonable. This is something that I agree with. The question is always just like the dance of like, how much is it accelerating the economy? Is it showing up in the economic statistics yet? How much value is there being created? And then how are you financing that? Because naturally the capital markets will push everything to the edge. And if you're underwriting it against 10% GDP growth and that doesn't show up, you could have a bad time. But if it's more like, oh yeah, like, you know, new SaaS boom, bunch of great companies building on top of.
- [64:23]
Jordy
Us, like, I think it's super important to put it into context to their last private valuation in November 2024 was $650 million secondary. Jane street was in that magnetar. So again, the company today is at a $34 billion valuation. So meaningful premium in the last private.
- [64:41]
John
Round, like it was in the tens of billions.
- [64:45]
Jordy
23, 23 billion.
- [64:46]
John
So it's still up 50% since the last private round, but its round trip.
- [64:50]
Jordy
Yeah, it was seven in December, seven in December of 2023. And I mean even just today, 23 in November 2024.
- [64:57]
John
Rough, rough, rough.
- [64:59]
Jordy
Anyways, it's a lot of debt, but it's a lot of demand. Yeah, it was interesting yesterday. There was a pretty viral post from an account called Hunter Brook. They said Bethany Maclean broke the Enron scandal. Tomorrow she publishes her first investigation for Hunter Brook on a company that may epitomize the AI bubble. Sign up and say what it is. And then they shared it this morning. So I'm expecting like she broke the Enron scandal. She is. Her new investigation is on the company that epitomizes the AI bubble and the company.
- [65:36]
John
I saw something.
- [65:38]
Jordy
Radnet.
- [65:39]
Mike
Whoa.
- [65:40]
John
Okay.
- [65:40]
Jordy
Do you know the company? No, I wasn't familiar.
- [65:42]
John
I'm not familiar.
- [65:43]
Jordy
I'm somewhat of a bubble enthusiast. I used to pray for a bubble.
- [65:47]
John
And I did see a clip of her talking about how it's not the hyperscalers. So it's kind of like we're on the hunt for the. For the.
- [65:54]
Jordy
Yeah. So Radnet is a. As of today, it traded down on this report. It's a $5.37 billion company. I was expecting something in the hundred to trillion dollar range. Right. I wanted some real meat. Didn't get that. Hunter Brooks says RadNet, the AI story that doesn't add up.
- [66:15]
John
It's a radiology firm.
- [66:16]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [66:17]
John
Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Interesting.
- [66:18]
Jordy
Yeah. But again, like, this company.
- [66:21]
John
Huh?
- [66:21]
Jordy
I like. We'll dig into it. But again, this company, like, collapsing wouldn't make a dent in the broader kind of like, AI trade.
- [66:31]
John
Yeah. There's like, 25 different funds that could just write this off and be like, yeah, zeros are part of the game, you know, like.
- [66:38]
Jordy
Yeah. Anyway, so Hunter Brooks says radnet's much hyped AI business is a sideshow. Less than 5% of the medical imaging company's revenue, about 65 million out of 1 1/2 billion in the first nine months of 2025, comes from its newfangled digital health division. Much of that division's revenue and two thirds of its reported revenue growth, excluding recent acquisitions, come from selling software to Radnet's own imaging center, Imaging center. Radnet also charges mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. Again, I'm not seeing anything.
- [67:10]
John
The pre AI stock price of this company was around 20 bucks a share. Now it's 70 bucks a share. Something like that. And so you have seen, like, a 3X pump. The stock has definitely benefited from the AI narrative, if that's what they're alleging. But it's. Yeah. You know, you're going to have to do better if you're going to try and bring down the entire global economy. You got to service up something that's worth at least 100 billion. I agree with you on that.
- [67:40]
Jordy
Yeah. Somewhat of a clickbait. And yet the company's stock has soared in value since its AI rebrand, trading at a much higher multiple than historic norms and competitors.
- [67:48]
John
Yeah.
- [67:49]
Jordy
And so, again, I didn't. I think.
- [67:53]
John
Okay, well, let's tell everyone about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on Crypto rails securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Now there is interesting like everyone's been hunting for the Enron of this cycle because there was one in the past, there must be another one. We of course were joking around doing the letters lining up from OpenAI or Nvidia or whatever when those are obviously very real businesses and no one is alleging that they are doing anything inappropriate. It's more just like how fast will they grow? Will they be complete winners forever? Will there be will they face competition? Those are the questions that people are asking. But Buco Capital bloke had a good rebuttal to this question of Is it possible to argue that AI is not a bubble right now? Someone in the chat was putting AI bubble in quotes kind of sarcastically. Well Buko Capital is arguing that AI is not a bubble. He says real businesses are seeing real impact from AI coding and tech support Help are the are the two clear immediate role beneficiaries. Advertising is another clear beneficiary. Meta has talked about it in detail. We of course are sponsored by profound get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Traditional boring companies like C.H. robinson are pointing to AI and agentic workflows as making them more efficient. The market is responding quite rationally and scrutinizing these AI input companies diligently. See Broadcom and Oracle this past week. So that is the sign of yeah, I agree with him. Like the fact people are taking a victory lap dunking on Oracle. It's like this is how the market should be working. Like it should sort of be like okay, we're regarding this future RPO five years out with some skepticism. We're not going to give you that much credit for it up front, but you got to actually deliver some real value. You got to get some cash flow into the business. You got to actually deliver on the build out that you're promising. We're not just going to moon your stock because you said the biggest number mag 7 minus Tesla have reasonable valuations and the hyperscalers have more demand than they can handle, he says. I've been vocal that indiscriminately gunning all AI input companies is a dumb thing to do. Again, as Oracle, Broadcom, Neoclouds have shown this last week. But it doesn't mean AI is a bubble. I like it. I think it's a good, a good take.
- [70:27]
Jordy
But Duchant yeah, it's just, it's interesting going back to this Rad RadNet analysis.
- [70:33]
John
Sure.
- [70:34]
Jordy
Saying that they also charge mammogram patients $40 for an AI read using technology that experts say is commoditized. It's like, how is that? Like they're positioning that as a bad thing when this company clearly has distribution and they're just going to like vend in technology into that and it doesn't like, I don't, I don't. That's like it's basically making the argument that like rap, a rapper can never have value when clearly like they have a captive audience here.
- [71:00]
John
Yeah.
- [71:01]
Jordy
And they can put in commodity technology and charge premium for it.
- [71:06]
John
Yeah. I mean there's a huge incentive once everyone is is giving the stuff's overvalued take to then move into the like, it's fraud, it's crime take. But. But the bar for that is so much higher because it's legal. Obviously anything can be overvalued or undervalued at any moment in time. But fraud is very much like binary. The company's either cooking the books or they aren't. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. You got to stay compliant, Automate compliance and security AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Let's move on to the EV debate tomorrow. I want to get into how Rivian beat Ford in trucks, in electric trucks. That seems crazy to me. I want to get to the bottom of it, but there's a little bit of an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that I thought it might be useful to go through as some extra context. They say Ford learns a brutal you're taking the gloves off.
- [72:04]
Jordy
I'm putting the gloves on.
- [72:05]
John
Putting the gloves on. Wouldn't you be taking the gloves off to fight it out?
- [72:10]
Jordy
I don't know if we're going to be fighting yet.
- [72:11]
John
Okay, okay, maybe we'll be agreeing. Ford learns a brutal EV lesson. The carmaker takes a $19.5 billion write down on its electric vehicle business. And in this op ed they say not long ago automakers were touting electric cars as the future. Well, now they are slamming the brakes hard on that future as market reality has hit them like a 16 wheeler. See Ford Motors stunning announcement Monday that it will take a $19.5 billion charge on its electric vehicle business. Instead of plowing, quote, instead of plowing billions into future, into the future, knowing these large EVs will never make money, we are pivoting, Ford CEO Jim Farley said as he explained the company's plan to boost its lineup of gas powered cars and hybrids. Ford will also scrap Its all electric F150 Lightning pickup. Full scrap has been full scrap. They're not gonna sell them anymore. Which has been a favorite of the EV loving press. So it got very good reviews and obviously it was positioned in this interesting way. It has the aesthetics of the F150. It doesn't have the baggage of the Elon brand. Although does that really matter to the F150 buyer? It's so complicated. I just hope they make a Raptor. You know, they Raptor. Raptor R, the high performance version of the F150. Course they need to do the Raptor R Plus with a V12. That's.
- [73:34]
Jordy
You wouldn't want it to be the R max.
- [73:36]
John
Our max would be good too. So Ford has lost 13 billion on its EV business since 2023. With bigger losses expected in years to come. Last year ford lost about $50,000 for each EV sold. Wow, that's so much money to lose.
- [73:55]
Jordy
Don't do that.
- [73:56]
John
The truth is that the business case for EVs has always rested largely on government subsidies and mandates. Now that is now that this combination of government favoritism and coercion is mostly going away, most carmakers have much less reason to make EVs. I was listening to an interview with the CEO Ford yesterday and he was talking about some of the challenges of the supply chain. I think that they're doing it sort of like almost a JV with a Chinese company that has IP around battery manufacturing, but they're going to make them in the United States. And so they're very much negotiating like how do we get this new technology that we haven't been really developing? This hasn't been in our DNA for you know, 20 years. We got to get it up to speed. But it's been very costly because they have to pay everyone all down the supply chain and then deal with tariffs and deal with, you know, geopolitical considerations and all this other stuff. So the Biden administration sought to force feed the EV transition with ramped up fuel economy and greenhouse gas emission rules. Carmakers were required to produce increasing number of EVs which they had to sell at a loss because consumer demand was weak. The inflation Reduction Act's $7,500 EV tax credit boosted demand, but not enough to make the cars profitable. This year's GOP tax bill eliminated the tax credit credit in October, causing demand to fall off a cliff.
- [75:19]
Jordy
Yeah, I was talking to a buddy On Saturday, who manages a group of dealerships around la. And he was saying that, I mean, the market generally has been brutal for cars. This year you've had just like chaos and uncertainty around tariffs. And then also there was a huge boom right before the tax credit ended. And then everything fell off a cliff.
- [75:43]
John
Yeah. So the deregulation has enabled Ford to cut its losses, sizable as they are. $19.5 billion charge will hurt, but it's better than spending tens of billions of more dollars on making cars that are not enough, that not enough Americans want to buy. Ford can focus its investments on gas powered trucks and SUVs that are popular with customers and earn, dare we say the forbidden word, profits. If Ford makes more money, workers also make more in profit sharing. General Motors this fall also rolled back its EV plans and took a $1.6 billion charge. Way less. The American car industry would be stronger today had its CEOs not embarked on the EV joyride with politicians promising subsidies. So, yeah, always dangerous to over rotate on a government mandate or government action because we change governments every couple years. That's the nature of America. Democracy. You know what? What?
- [76:35]
Jordy
You don't think Forge would over rotate and get like a. Like maybe 4v12s into a single Raptor? Like put them. Put them at an angle like they do? Yeah, no, the Bugatti, but just do it like copy and paste.
- [76:51]
John
Yeah, definitely. Definitely something there. Something eight liter.
- [76:56]
Jordy
It looked. The front of the car looks like a train.
- [76:57]
John
Exactly.
- [76:58]
Jordy
And it's just. It's just engineering.
- [77:00]
John
This is the goal. This is what they should go for. No, to more seriously investigate it. Like, do you. Can you think of a way that the Ford F1 Lightning would have been successful? Like, it doesn't seem like it was like wildly mispriced. It doesn't seem like it was. I mean, it had a classic silhouette, so it wasn't like you could. The cybertruck hasn't been selling fantastically well, but it's like so bold that you could easily say, well, okay, it's not doing that well because it's such an edgy choice. It's such a bold design decision. Like, you have to really want to yell to everyone, like, I own a cybertruck. You can get an F150 Lightning. And unless someone's really checking out the badge, they're just gonna be like, oh, truck.
- [77:47]
Jordy
You know, I don't know. I disagree. I think real ball knowers can clock that from a quarter mile away.
- [77:55]
John
Okay.
- [77:57]
Jordy
It's nuanced, but I can Clock a Lightning over.
- [78:01]
John
Cause you see the little blue trim.
- [78:03]
Jordy
Yeah. It's just, you can just.
- [78:05]
John
I know you can, but is that. But it has to be. So would you have gone crazier in the design and put more distance between the Lightning and the classic F150?
- [78:17]
Jordy
I think maybe. I also think like truck buyers, it's very possible that they're, they're making purchasing decisions not for how the average person views it, but how other truck buyers are going to view it. Right. There's so much like, oh, you have.
- [78:30]
John
A. I think that's true for almost every category.
- [78:33]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [78:34]
John
Even in like the mid sized.
- [78:35]
Jordy
Yeah. Look at handbags.
- [78:37]
John
What does it say about.
- [78:38]
Jordy
You see a handbag? Yeah, your wife might see. I mean. Oh, that's.
- [78:42]
John
Every car goes the speed limit. There is no real argument for, oh, I need this car because it's more efficient or something like that. Yeah, they all go the speed limit. They all basically get you from point A to B in the right time. So it becomes very quickly about some differentiation in amenities, but really the brand and what it says about you, the silhouette, the trim, the silhouette. And so maybe they needed to go more like. It's even more obvious that you made the eco friendly choice. But again, I think that the truck buyer just doesn't. Is not interested in signaling I made the eco friendly choice at all. And that seems very intuitive to me. Am I crazy? But I know that the reason everyone went after trucks was because it's just such a big market. Americans buy so many trucks. You had to go after that market and Rivian wound up winning it, essentially, it seems like. But it is weird that that Ford wasn't able to break through. I guess it's just like their core customers weren't able to get over the hurdle to actually get into the brand.
- [79:52]
Jordy
I'm going to try to figure out how many Rivian trucks actually sold.
- [79:58]
John
Yeah, yeah. We'll have to pull up all the data and run through it. Maybe tomorrow.
- [80:03]
Jordy
But I'm pulling it up if you want to.
- [80:05]
John
So in other news. I mean we can move on from this. We have our guests joining in just a few minutes. In other news, SpaceX is now initiating a bake off to select which investment banks will advise on its planned 2026 IPO. They are very much moving forward with the IPO. It feels very real. It does feel like there's a bit of a race between SpaceX and OpenAI to some degree. But SpaceX has to be set up for this. Like they have to be, you Know, there's a whole, whenever you talk to somebody about going public, they're always talking about, well, the financial requirements are much more onerous. Like you need to be really, you know, like reconciling your books, like understanding the business, like you need to be, you know, really mature. CFO operation, office CFO needs to be really dialed in. You probably need, you know, clarity about whether or not you're a for profit or a non profit. Right. And you have to imagine that SpaceX has been effectively ready to go IPO at any moment in time for a decade because it's just been such a real business and they've been working with the government and so the government comes in and says, hey, we want to know that you are actually generating real revenue or you're knocking the books if we're going to be working with you, all that other stuff. So we'll see.
- [81:15]
Jordy
I just want to take a second to give it up for everyone out there that's currently in a bake off. No matter what side you're on, I just want you to know we are.
- [81:25]
John
Rooting for you like a Christmas cookie. Bake off.
- [81:27]
Jordy
Yeah. A lot of people this time of year, they're winding down and some people are just getting started on some, some of these bake offs.
- [81:31]
Kari
Right.
- [81:31]
Jordy
There's going to be intense, you know, it's going to be intense all the way through the end of the year. So I just wanted to give a, give a shout out to the bankers. Not getting enough love.
- [81:42]
John
If you're a banker, get yourself a nice luxury watch on getbezel.com Shop over 26,000 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Bilal asks Bill Gurley, shouldn't SpaceX just do a direct listing? And Bill Gurley says 100%. I would love to know how that will actually play out, what the decision making will be, because it has to be. I mean, you imagine an Elon stock, the chance that it moons on day one is like it feels guaranteed, right?
- [82:20]
Jordy
Yeah. So the question is, yeah, I don't know. So looking at Figma's ipo, right, they did not raise very much money in the actual IPO, right. So they priced it around. It was around 20, like forget it was something around $20 billion valuation. It immediately popped like crazy did. And people were like, oh, you're leaving a lot of money on the table. But they never had an intention of. They wanted to price the business fairly. So of course people had invested pre IPO in that pre IPO round. Right. Or as part of the IPO benefit a lot. But again, it's very real possibility that they, like Elon, wants to sell the incremental 30. They raised the 30 billion at one and a half. And I could see there being that much demand.
- [83:16]
John
Yeah. I mean, I wonder if you're an investor who's supposed to potentially come in as permanent capital, stay as an investor for a very long time. Even in the public markets, if you come in at a lower cost basis, even if the stock moons and then round trips, you're like, okay, well, I'm still kind of where I was. I'm not day trading it. My point is to hold this company, not trade it, own it, not trade it. And so I could imagine a situation where we're going out at a logical price, even if you miss the pop. And then round trip could be good for keeping those types of investors on board.
- [83:53]
Jordy
I just don't think people are prepared for it to price at 1.5 trillion and go to 3 on the day of the IPO.
- [84:00]
John
That would be very, very crazy. But it could happen. I mean, anything could happen with Elon. He's a Joe Rogan CEO. He's a jrc.
- [84:08]
Jordy
That's right. This was a funny post from Andrew Benson. He says, Peter Thiel will personally make 42 billion from the SpaceX IPO at a $1.5 trillion valuation. What a recovery from the mistake of exiting Facebook early. Betty never stopped.
- [84:26]
Tyler
He was down to his last like 20k.
- [84:28]
Jordy
I think maybe so. I think so. I've never seen.
- [84:31]
John
He was actually.
- [84:32]
Jordy
I've never seen PT do a money spread. I've never seen him wearing Rick Owens.
- [84:36]
John
No.
- [84:37]
Jordy
I'd never seen an RM on the wrist. Never. Spotted in chrome hearts.
- [84:41]
Elliot
Never.
- [84:42]
Jordy
So how do we know that he's not down to his last 20 grand?
- [84:45]
John
He doesn't have spinners on his car.
- [84:47]
Jordy
True.
- [84:48]
John
He doesn't have his wheels stop when he stops. They don't keep rolling. It's ridiculous.
- [84:55]
Jordy
So it's really hard to clock.
- [84:56]
John
He doesn't have hydraulics on his car. Hydraulics would be a good one. You gotta get hydraulics on your car. That's elite. And two 12s in the back. You gotta get subwoofers. Mod your car. That's what real power is.
- [85:10]
Jordy
Should we talk about venture?
- [85:12]
John
Yeah. FF2 holds 10% of SpaceX. PT funded 10% of that carry of 20%. Assuming that in the early days he was entitled to all of it. I have no idea if this math is accurate, but it's to be a remarkable result, probably one of the greatest, one of the greatest investments of all time, certainly in the venture world. It also will be interesting because this will be the second, this will be the second trillion dollar early stage investment for pt. And there aren't that many funds that have done any. If you remember, the Holy Trinity calculation was have you done the first institutional round into a Mag 7 company? And it was just Kleiner Founders Fund and Sequoia that fit that criteria. If you take it to. You need.
- [86:03]
Jordy
Well, the other thing is companies are just going so much. They were going public so much earlier.
- [86:07]
John
Yes.
- [86:07]
Jordy
It's not like they just stayed private and let. I. I'm just saying if you actually, I don't know the same amount of time.
- [86:14]
John
Yeah, yeah. I don't knock that at all because like a lot of of the Sequoia guys did hold the Nvidia shares. Right. Even though they were distributed. I still count it as one of the big wins. But this. Yeah.
- [86:27]
Jordy
Says never seen him with a grill either.
- [86:30]
John
There we go. That's a great point. No, grill is crazy. When you have that amount of money, you got to get a grill, get it iced out. Did you see this venture capital compensation in the United States? Dee Dee Das has been in some hot water lately because he's taking shots at OpenAI. Lot of OpenAI folks.
- [86:51]
Jordy
Well, he was right in the center of the whole Klein.
- [86:53]
John
Oh, that was also dramatic. But you know, we're back on the top.
- [86:57]
Jordy
He was born viral stuff. He likes being in hot water.
- [87:00]
John
I mean he did not stop posting so VC compensation by fund size. So this is a chart that shows what level are you at and how big is your fund. And so if you have a sub $50 million fund, even if you're the GP, you're probably only making 200k. But if you're at a $3 billion fund, you might be making $1.2 million in salary. And so I had some call.
- [87:24]
Jordy
This is why these smaller solo GP funds, you're really in it for the glory. It's a carry game.
- [87:32]
John
And so one of the really, it's.
- [87:33]
Jordy
One of the hardest ways to make 200k a year.
- [87:37]
John
Indeed, indeed. I mean some of the associates here, if you're an associate at a small fund, you might be making 150k, 170k. Even at the big funds, the associates are making 238. The principal VP at a big fund might be making 450. So I had some recommendations for cars. If you're making $153,000 a year as an associate in a small fund. You're going to take. That's about $12,000 a month, $13,000 a month. You're going to put that into a. A leased Ferrari SF90 strudel.
- [88:08]
Jordy
Okay. Okay, great. Yeah.
- [88:09]
John
You have no money left over, so you have to sleep in it. But I think it's gonna make a statement. You're gonna get that promotion.
- [88:14]
Jordy
You can sleep in an SF90. You can't drive a house to work.
- [88:17]
John
Yeah, when you get that promotion. And now you're making 250, well, that's 20k a month. For your lease, you're gonna upgrade to a used Bugatti Veyron.
- [88:25]
Jordy
What about taxes?
- [88:29]
John
We're not paying taxes in this model. We're deferring the taxes. But I think if you pull up, if you're making 250. So what role do you have to do to make 250? To make 250 you have to be. Where are you? You have to get promoted to partner at a small fund or principal at a $250 million fund. So you're making 250, that's 200k, that's 20k a month. That's enough for the used Bugatti Veyron lease. That'll get you the bump up to 350 a year. That's 30k a month. At this point you're in Ferrari F40 territory.
- [89:07]
Jordy
There you go. The other thing I was going to say is you could go to the managing partner and say, instead of a bonus this year, will you guarantee the loan on a Porsche st? Go for something really timeless. And the benefit of that, assuming you live close to work, you're not going to be losing a lot of. There's not a lot of depreciation there. I mean that's a special car. And so you gotta get creative here.
- [89:31]
John
The really crazy thing, okay, so obviously, so once you get promoted, you'll be making $600,000 a year. That's 50k a month. That's enough for a multi car garage. You're gonna get the Ferrari F40 plus a daily driver per Assangui, which you'll.
- [89:48]
Jordy
Be sleeping in, of course. Sleeping in it, but of course sleeping.
- [89:51]
John
In it at that point.
- [89:52]
Jordy
But at that point you have some diversity.
- [89:54]
John
You can finally upgrade. You're making 1.2 mil a year. You're making 100,000amonth. That's enough for the Bugatti Chiron or the Pagani Huayra roadster. But the interesting Question is that the current market value of a McLaren F1 is $20 million. And so the carrying cost to lease that is probably around $2 million a year. And so if you see someone dailying in F1, you know that they are post exit. It's truly the most.
- [90:24]
Jordy
They're in the. They're in the carry.
- [90:25]
John
You got to do it. Yeah, they're into the carry. They're into the carry.
- [90:27]
Jordy
Carry mode.
- [90:29]
John
Our speaking of Kari from linear, he's our next guest. Let's bring in Kari from linear. Welcome to the stream. He's in the Reese Bean room. How are you doing, Kari? Good to see you.
- [90:40]
Jordy
What's happening?
- [90:41]
Kari
I'm doing well. How are you guys?
- [90:42]
John
We're doing fantastic. We're in the Christmas spirit. Obviously we're dressed up like Santa Claus. Both Santa Claus.
- [90:48]
Jordy
If you didn't notice.
- [90:49]
John
If you didn't notice.
- [90:50]
Kari
Yeah, I mean it's going to look similar to what you usually look like. So yeah, notice it.
- [90:55]
Jordy
When do you think is the right time for companies to start getting into the Christmas spirit? Because Amazon was running kind of Christmas themed ads back in October. That felt a little early for us.
- [91:08]
Kari
Yeah, I mean, like, I don't really have an opinion on this on the company level. Like we don't do anything about it. I think personally, I believe in that, in the like, after Thanksgiving it's okay to start it so you can get a Christmas tree after Thanksgiving.
- [91:25]
John
Let's hear it for another respecter of after Thanksgiving.
- [91:27]
Jordy
I said the exact same thing earlier.
- [91:29]
John
Everyone says this, but there's clearly been a sort of erosion and every day, every year, one day earlier. And now they're running Christmas ads in October. It's an outrage. But anyway, we're not here to talk about Christmas anymore. We're here to talk about design. We're here to talk about your essay. Design is Search. I would love for you to just kick us off with the inspiration behind the essay, why you felt the need to set the record straight on this particular topic and then we can go into some of the actual, the actual thesis and hopefully bat around some different ideas around it.
- [92:09]
Kari
Yeah, I think this whole debate on Twitter or on X started on Friday. I was just sitting on the couch in the midnight and thinking about this, that this is probably like, I don't know, the 10th time I've seen a company launch this design to code tools or code indesign or designing code kind of tools. And I think it's like people always see that that's the final form of design. Now we can finally design in the actual medium, actually in the code. I think there's definitely some benefits to that. It is a great tool. But I always think design is not just the tools. It's broader than the tools in a designer's toolkit. You always have many tools and depending what you're designing, what is the environment, who are designing for what's the domain, what's the product, you use different tools. So I think it's not that clear cut that design, any code is the best way to do design. So I kind of wanted to highlight that. There's some challenges with this and what I started with was that I think that what also happened to me in the past when I was designing and building front ends for apps, what I often start feeling happening to me is that I become less idealistic or I become more conservative because I know that whatever I design, I also have to build. So there's already you start hesitating yourself or you don't believe you can actually build certain things because you start to collapse the design and build more too much. But I think also if you are designing against an existing code base, I think it also introduces additional bias where it's like the code base is this kind of collection of decisions and architecture and layers and product features that have been built over the years or over the months and you are now kind of trying to fit something new into that. So the natural tendency there is to fit something that fits and kind of like any kind of new or alien idea can kind of feel like it doesn't fit and doesn't feel like a good idea. So you are too, too much reflecting the design against the state of the world versus like thinking about design more in abstract like what the world could be.
- [94:27]
Jordy
It's like an artificial constraint.
- [94:30]
Kari
Yeah, I mean it's, it's all. Yeah. I don't know if it's an artificial constraint, but it's a constraints what arrives too early. So like eventually any design has to be like manufactured or coded or something like made it real. Like design is not real. It's like it's an idea or like a concept or like it's something but it's not something people use. So I think it's eventually you have to deal with the constraints. Similar architects has to deal with their constraints. Like how does the building, how can we build this building, how can we stay under budget or how do we.
- [95:03]
Jordy
Make sure the materials, how much usable land do we have?
- [95:08]
Kari
Yeah, but I think a lot of science architects still don't Start from the constraints, they might start, acknowledge the constraints, but then they go to start sketching something what they want to see. So I just wanted to highlight that every tool has certain kind of strengths and weaknesses and if you're not mindful, they can influence your thinking a lot. So what I worry about is that if we start thinking design is about coding, then I think we lose something. We lose that space to think more broadly or without those constraints and we jump into, let's build this solution. That was, I think some people were pushing back on this essay or these ideas I was talking about that, well, now the design can be better because we can build it better and the quality can be better. But again, this proves my point. It's like I don't think that, I think construction and execution is different from designing and I actually think that while it can help to construct the design better, does it really make the design better? So I'm still looking for that. How do these tools actually make the design process better? How do we make better things with these tools versus we just execute them faster?
- [96:24]
Jordy
Yes. Is your view that doing design within code is something that should effectively happen at a refinement stage where maybe you have a process of like planning how you want to build a product or a feature and then, you know, you think really deeply about how you want to do it. You make a bunch of decisions based on your intuition and what you know about the customers and how the thing should work and then you build it and then at a certain point you're able to make like more kind of like micro level changes to it when you've already, you've already done all the work of the kind of like heavy planning and being really thoughtful about something versus, I don't know, I'd be worried if somebody was building me a house and they just came to the land and they threw up a box, like a frame and then they started just kind of like, okay, we're going to add a door over here and oh, we actually have to add some pipes under here. So let's dig under there. And you want, when you're trying to build things that are high quality and great, I think that pre planning process and doing things in the right order matters a lot. So I feel like with these new tools you have to be thinking about where do you actually slot in that? Where do you slot into the tool to the overall process?
- [97:41]
Kari
Yeah, yeah. I think these new tools can help to blend this. So I think in the past, I think there's more like this. I Don't know the way things operate is much more that there's a design and then there's a handoff, then there's engineering, and then nothing crosses this border. And I think that's a bad way to do as well. And I think there should be this blended mode where I like to think that design is kind of essentially two phases. You have a conceptual design, so you're kind of trying to understand the problem and then you're trying to explore multiple directions how to solve that problem. And I always tell my designers to do that. Even if you know the solution, you're just still explore something else because maybe you find something better. Or sometimes you should even explore bad ideas, because sometimes bad ideas actually turn out to be good ideas. And then sometimes bad ideas can show why other ideas are good. So I think there's this stage where what my essay was about was design is a search. So you are searching for the direction and you're searching for the concept. You're kind of like removed from the execution states of actually making it work. So the conceptual design is like, it's kind of like car industry has a concept cars. Like those cars are not in production yet and they never will be. But it's an idea what the car could be. And like car industry never like, seems like they never really take anything from those concept cars, but they could.
- [99:11]
Jordy
We took the handle, we took the handle from the passenger door.
- [99:15]
John
We made this crazy gull wing super fast crazy car. And it's like, yeah, the lights.
- [99:19]
Kari
So that's kind of like the idea. There's a concept that is cool and we should try to execute it. But I don't know what happens in the car industry. They just kind of can't do it. But I think in a software you can do it. And then there's the execution design where you like, how do we actually make this work? Well in this context of the application or fix the problems we didn't think about in the concept, like the edge cases or performance or just like we get user feedback, we make some fixes. So at that stage, I think the coding tools can be really useful because you are iterating on the. You're refining the design. But you had first this other stage where you kind of thought about it more like, I don't know, not exactly first principles way. But you started from kind of like a pure problem or an idea, and then you created some concept that you think is worth executing on.
- [100:15]
John
Yeah. How do you think about it feels like so much of what AI is Great is maybe. I mean, AI is pretty good at search, but I still feel like we probably agree that there's elements that are lacking around inspiration and design is certainly not a solved problem from an AI perspective, but a lot of times translation is more or less solved. So what stuck out to me was in your essay you noted that a lot of architects will start by sketching with like pencil and paper. And we are in the era of like, you could sketch it and maybe you have to come up with the brilliant idea or the brilliant, beautiful design, but then you can just take a picture of that sometimes and get a floor plan out of it potentially. But do you think that something's lost there or do you think that text. Are these all going to be lossy? And so you want to avoid text to image to code and you want to be able to dip in at every single level. How do you think about the different translation modes? Because some of them are really helpful at the end of the day. Some of them are just autocomplete. And that's amazing.
- [101:27]
Kari
Yeah, I feel like there could be always something lost. I think when you actually, if you draw something and then you try to draw it again, for example, you kind of like, even if you just took the sketch and then draw it again on a paper, you probably start noticing different things, you start thinking about the problem slightly different way. So I think what the AI is always doing is kind of like it's shortcutting you to the output without actually you yourself going through the process. So I think something always gets lost there. I think, again, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. You can just take a sketch and generate an idea and you see it in a different way and that can be good too. But I think there's that problem. And yeah, some of the comments I got that's like, well, now the AI is so good, so you don't even have to code. So it's like you just describe what you want and the AI kind of creates it for you. But then now you're kind of adding another layer of influence there. The AI is influencing the output. And the LLMs are kind of like statistic models, whereas they're always looking for the correct kind of statistically correct answer. They're not looking for necessarily the unique answer or your best answer for you personally or for this context or something. So there can be this danger of like everyone starts to average towards the means or the kind of like the common standard patterns or standard practices. Again, I think it's Fine to use AI, but it's just like, kind of like you have to understand, like, what are you giving out or what is the trade off? And like, if.
- [103:09]
John
The M dash of.
- [103:10]
Jordy
Co. Well, one interesting example, earlier in the show, we were talking about, about Where's Waldo, we use like Waldo Bench. So we'll test like a new image model by just making like a Where's Waldo illustration. And like, none of the models can do it yet. It's like really complicated. They can make it visually look like it's perfect, at least from far away. And then you zoom in and it's like chaotic and there's no story happening around the page. And maybe Waldo's just not even on the page. Like, it's the ultimate Where's Waldo? He just bounced. But we looked back at the history and the original illustrators, this guy Martin, and he would spend like eight weeks to make a full spread, Right. And you could imagine part of that was just like hand illustrating everything. But it's also like planning out what is the storyline and what is the experience of being in this page and what is the experience of finding Waldo.
- [103:59]
Tyler
Right.
- [103:59]
Jordy
And I feel like that is still the thing that is ultimately gonna give products edge and make products have that craft is when you know that a team that's building software could have one shotted a dashboard and got it to the point where it's like, it's functionally a dashboard. Like, we can functionally make a Where's Waldo illustration that you can go on the page and search for Where's Waldo? But is it like an enjoyable. Is it an enjoyable experience? Like, right now we're not seeing AI that like maybe that you could find the right prompts, but right now you're not doing. You're not one shotting an illustration like this. And it is still something you have to put an immense amount of like, thought and planning into and try things and revert them. Things like that.
- [104:44]
Kari
Yeah. And I think there's different modes. Like, I think you can use AI like creative ways of generating a lot of output or different ideas. But I think it's like, yeah, there's always like, you now have this influence of the AI model, how it creates those outputs and decides things. And then you have the tool that is doing the code base versus you're kind of directly working on a sketch or a screen where there's very little influence what can be do, how the design can be. The other reason why I even talked about this, I don't have any tool to sell here. I don't have a design tool to sell, but it's more like I worry about the. If we start to see design as coding then or start to see design as construction that we like already the incentives to ship things fast is so strong that we start to see that, oh, now we don't need to design because we can just build it and designers are going to design and build it. And then I think we start losing the other phases. Where can we just think about the problem? Can we think about the concepts? Like, how could this work really nicely? And then I think we. It's like very like, it's very exciting idea for companies or founders or someone's like, I don't have to think about design anymore. It just like happens with the. When we build it. And I think it's maybe like a good for the business, but I think it's just like not good for the world or like, good to get like my kind of like motivation with linear and like talking about some of this stuff is always that, like, can we just have nicer things in the world? Can we spend more time on the craft and quality and value it again, even if it's not something that can be measured? And I think the Silicon Valley and technology companies always had trouble with this. It's hard to value something that is not quantum fail easily. If there's no data for it, then it doesn't exist. And good design is something. Sometimes it's. It cannot be measured. So I think this again, shipping speed and how many things you ship can be measured. But if someone makes a design really good, it's hard to measure that. And then designing things or sketching things can be seen as unproductive because it's not directly contributing to that shipping speed or shipping more things.
- [107:21]
Jordy
What's your philosophy on storytelling? Is Matt your storyteller? Do you like that word?
- [107:32]
Kari
Yeah, I mean, I like it because I think. I don't know what happened to marketing, but I think marketing kind of like lost his story or lost the plot there. At some point it became very quantitative.
- [107:43]
John
It became more mathematical. Like just buy the ads and run all the AB tests and all. It became more of a science. And so the art needed a new brand maybe.
- [107:54]
Kari
Yeah, that makes sense. I would kind of like think like, storytelling is kind of like. I think it the same way as I think the brand. I think the brand and storytelling is maybe like the same thing. It's like so. And like to me, brand is something just that you have a belief or like some kind of worldview. And you. And you have some values or things you stand for. We always had that on linear. And that's kind of like from the place I always articulate my things. I try to keep true to that brand. Can we have nicer things or quality things or something? And so the brand or the storytelling is never about again about the output. It's a deeper thing. It's like do you believe in something? And then I think the storytelling or the brand is like how do you express that belief? So anyone like people can't read your mind. So you have to either tell stories or you have to show visuals or videos or something. So how do you express your beliefs? So the problem when people are looking for storytellers is that again, do you have the story to tell? Do you believe in anything? And is that needs to be applied? And if you believe in something, is it engaging? Do we people. Do people want to hear that story? So hiring a storyteller doesn't help if you don't have this like a good story or engaging story.
- [109:14]
Jordy
Yeah. And someone in the chat noticed you guys are hiring a writer, which is something I was pushing for. Like if I wanted to hire a storyteller, I would want to personally. I'd want to hire somebody that is very good at writing and wants to come in and write a lot and like enjoys the craft of writing and not somebody that wants like a pretty title that like sounds cool but then ultimately just wants to collaborate cross functionally across the org or whatever it is. Last question I have. What are your thoughts on holiday gimmicks in products? I got into my car this morning and on my profile it had a Santa hat on it and I got some enjoyment out of it. It had some cobwebs for Halloween too. But is that cheapen a product? It feels like something that I don't, I don't know which way you're going to go.
- [110:08]
Kari
Yeah, I would think about it like again like from the point of brand is like does it like fit the brand? Like I think we haven't done those things because we kind of like linear kind of the brand is more that it's like a serious tool for work. And it's, it's. I think some of those kind of things can, can kind of feel off and I don't know. For example, it's always these situations where I don't know, a company is using linear and then something goes down, their service goes down, the whole company is scrambling and then suddenly some Santa hat appears and everyone's like what is this thing we have? Our product or customer base is on fire and there's some Santa hats flying around so it can be distracting. And so I think it's kind of depends on your brand and like how critical like infrastructure you are and where do you put these things? I think it's, it can be fun thing for the team to do Easter eggs. Like we do Easter eggs that are hidden so they, there's like you can, there's games you can, there's an arcade you can enter in linear and then there's like old arcade games you can play but you know, you don't find them. Like you have to really find them too. Like you need to find the Easter egg to access it. So there's like these kind of things that you make secrets. But yeah, I don't personally like putting the decorations on your face and professional tools.
- [111:30]
Jordy
Yep, makes total sense. Well, great having you on and yeah, we'll save the Santa hats for the podcasters.
- [111:39]
John
Yeah, thanks for having fun.
- [111:41]
Jordy
Great catching up. Good to see you.
- [111:43]
John
We went. Yeah, thank you. We'll talk to you soon. Merry Christmas. We went way over. So we are going to skip Pranav Mayana and get him on the show tomorrow.
- [111:53]
Jordy
Great.
- [111:53]
John
Instead we will be joined by Mike at liquid death at 1pm and we will catch up with the space Data center debate. Pranav of course, built a first principles model on the economics of data centers on earth and data centers in space. I'm really enjoying the way the space Data center debate has evolved. We are now vibe coding full applications to get to the bottom of the economics of these. The decisions and people are still split on it.
- [112:26]
Jordy
Santa came early for lightspeed this year.
- [112:28]
John
Yes, that's right.
- [112:29]
Jordy
They have 9 billion in new capital for a new family of funds. Their largest raise in 25 years. AI is rewriting the rules. We're backing the founders building. What comes next, comes next. Congratulations to lightspeed guys. Aaron, Michael. Yeah, and all hanging out with you guys.
- [112:51]
John
Interesting. I mean we saw that chart of like the new venture funds raised really falling off a cliff.
- [112:57]
Jordy
Something like 50 billion to date.
- [112:59]
John
This feels like a huge chunk of it.
- [113:01]
Jordy
Potentially that chart was already getting debated or yeah, potentially.
- [113:06]
John
Maybe. Maybe stuff been reclassified. Like it's possible that this 9 billion, well, some of it's in a growth fund. They reclassified it or something like that. Do you have more context there on that one? No. Okay, let me tell you about 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 by better folks.
- [113:27]
Jordy
Pavel Prata says look at Haystack Ventures Fund 3. Okay, it was $8.2 million fund.
- [113:35]
John
Semel Shah Semel, former guest on the.
- [113:38]
Jordy
Show, bought three decacorns, invested early in DoorDash, Centicorn alert, Figma Public Company Instacart 12 billion carta.
- [113:50]
John
Well, he did Instacart and Doordash. That's interesting. You'd think that that would be like a little bit of like, hey, what are you doing investing in a competitor?
- [113:59]
Jordy
But it was restaurant delivery versus grocery.
- [114:01]
John
Grocery, which is different. Yeah, I guess it's different.
- [114:03]
Jordy
Yeah. Hashicorp carta open door 7 billion. Opendoor 6 billion.
- [114:08]
John
Best solo GP fund in history.
- [114:10]
Jordy
Oh, and apparently this fund 3 was solo. Though Ashe says Applied Intuition was also in this fund, currently at a 15 billion.
- [114:17]
John
Wow, that's very, very impressive. Well, congrats to Semel Haystack Legend.
- [114:24]
Jordy
We gotta have him back on the show.
- [114:27]
John
Wow, I'm liking the gong today. Not warmed up. Still has a nice little ring to it.
- [114:33]
Jordy
Kind of a wild ring to it. Harry Stebbing says venture investors are going through an existential crisis. If you are not an OpenAI, anthropic, cursor, Mercour, et cetera, et cetera, you do not freaking matter. And we were with somebody yesterday for dinner and they were in OpenAI and Anthropic in. They were doing fine back in 2020, early 2023, he was feeling pretty good, feeling relaxed.
- [114:59]
John
I do know some VCs that have been early to the category, but missed all of those. And it is a hard story to tell, you know, to bring it back to storytelling. If you're a VC right now and you haven't done anything like that at the same time. If you're early, early stage. If you're early stage, it doesn't seem that crazy. There are only so many people that could be in these firms really, really early. But if you're a growth investor, I mean, we've seen many growth funds that are in both Anthropic and OpenAI, which is typically a no no, but they figured out how to do it.
- [115:41]
Jordy
Well, why don't you and Tyler read this post from dede?
- [115:46]
John
I will.
- [115:46]
Jordy
I'll be right back.
- [115:47]
John
So Didi Das says a few software engineers at some of the best tech companies told me this week my entire job these days is prompting Cursor or Claude Code with Opus 4.5 to do what I need and then sanity Checking it. Tyler, do you agree this is the new life of a software engineer?
- [116:09]
Tyler
I mean yeah, kind of like cloud code is like really good and I mean also codecs. The Gemini, cli, basically they're all like very similar. But that form factor is really, really good. I find it to be.
- [116:21]
John
It says we've crossed some intangible threshold of AI generalizing to most software. Opus 4.5 is the first model that makes me actually fear for my job. All models so far were okay. Ish at best. Opus 4.5 really is something else. People who haven't tried it yet do not know what's coming for us in the next two to three years. Hell, even next year might be the final turning point. Already I don't know how to adapt from here on. Sure I can watch Opus do my work all day long and make sure to intervene if it Fs up here or there. But how long will it be until it's not even. Until I'm not even needed anymore? Yeah. I mean do you think there's any sort of like overweight here on the type of like you know, vibe coding, small apps, new features like are you hearing about big like big hairy code bases, things that need to be very fault tolerant where it's not just throwaway software still?
- [117:24]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [117:24]
Tyler
I mean I think he says he still has to intervene if it messes up.
- [117:30]
John
Yeah.
- [117:32]
Tyler
Which I think is like that's extremely valuable. Like you need someone to do that. It's like it's like the law firm thing where people talk about you can't just place everyone with AI because.
- [117:40]
John
Yeah.
- [117:40]
Tyler
So much of like a law firm is like you need to have them be accountable.
- [117:43]
John
Yeah.
- [117:44]
Tyler
Where I think it's very similar with engineers.
- [117:46]
John
Yeah.
- [117:47]
Tyler
I also think like a lot of the stuff I do is like kind of fairly like low risk. Like it's not super important if it messes up a little bit.
- [117:54]
John
Yeah.
- [117:54]
Tyler
So there I can like disagree models. Well it's, it's not going to bring down like a nation state or it's not like important government data or whatever. So if it's not super efficient or stuff like this, it's not that big of a deal. Where I think it's still. It's much harder. I often find that if I'm trying to completely one shot a project and then I keep iterating on it, a lot of times I have to do some sort of architecture rework because it just doesn't make sense. If you really want to keep scaling it the tech debt, then you can use the model to fix the tech debt, but it's kind of not as smooth as you would really ideally want it to be.
- [118:30]
John
Yeah, interesting. Anyway, eight sleep. Maybe you just hit clog code and then you go to sleep overnight, Take a nap on an eight sleep exceptional sleep without exception, fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, and wake up energized.
- [118:42]
Jordy
8 Sleep should really make overnight success into a campaign.
- [118:46]
John
Ooh, that would be good. That's a great tagline for them. Overnight success. I like it. What most discussions of AGI feel like nowadays says Rota Cars have windows and can move. Houses have windows and can't move. So it's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely. Wow. Yeah, that's a good point. It's not the car. It's not the windows that make the car go. It's something else entirely. What a great post.
- [119:15]
Jordy
PJ Cooked.
- [119:16]
John
PJ cooked with this one. It's fantastic. What is this long post?
- [119:23]
Jordy
Crazy image.
- [119:24]
John
That is a crazy image. Martin Shkreli shared some clearly a screenshot of a spreadsheet. I don't know how accurate this data is, but he's pulling minutes spent on AI sites. Last month alone 64% were on ChatGPT, 15% on Gemini. Deepseek and Grok are the only two on a trajectory to come even close. Grok.com is only at 3% of the total of these users that were growing on web. Growing, but it's growing very fast. Deepseek.com is the same thing, 3% but growing very fast, whereas some of the other ones are shrinking. Interesting to see perplexity is at 2% Claude. AI is at 2%. Some of these have they bend themselves into other systems and also these are of course websites. So you know, app based LLMs are not going to be quite captured here. But you know, continues to tell the story that, you know, ChatGPT is still the dominant consumer platform for just hopping on an LLM and answering some questions. Anyway, let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable Plan, Buy and measure out of home with precision. Our next guest, Mike from Liquid Death, is in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVPN ultradome.
- [120:52]
Jordy
What's happening, Mike?
- [120:54]
John
How you doing? Welcome to the show. What's new in your world here?
- [120:58]
Jordy
You didn't get the memo?
- [120:59]
John
What memo? Oh yeah, just kidding. He's not wearing a Santa suit.
- [121:02]
Jordy
No. We're the only ones wearing Santa suits today.
- [121:04]
John
But we are feeling the holiday spirit. Merry Christmas.
- [121:08]
Mike
Merry Christmas.
- [121:09]
John
Yeah. Welcome to the show. First time on the show. There's a ton of stuff I want to talk about, about marketing and launching this business and how comedy scales. But maybe can you just take us back and really quickly give us the intro on the actual launch? I feel like. Is it fair to say that Liquid Death had like a viral launch video strategy? Was that the cornerstone of the launch or were there other pieces that were at play in the early days?
- [121:42]
Mike
Well, the way we launched Liquid Death was actually a bit different. So when I had the idea, it was a little bit too crazy to most people to find investment to make it. So I basically created a Facebook page and we made it seem like a real brand just to see, like, what kind of traction did it get in the world if people thought this was a real thing. Then we shot a cheap commercial for the product that didn't exist yet. And we probably spent 1500 bucks to shoot the commercial. And we put a little bit of paid media behind the video, maybe like a few thousand dollars. And then after five months, the video had 3 million views. The Facebook page had 60, 70,000 followers, which was more than Aquafina had on Facebook at the time. So then I use all that kind of market traffic to then go raise like a small.
- [122:39]
Jordy
I'm so surprised that more CPG brands don't do that. It takes so long to make. Even if somebody's making a drink like this, right, if they actually start working hard on it today, they might have something close to a product that they can sell in six to 12 months, something in that range to really go through rapid iteration and. And getting it made and scaling up, production and testing and all that stuff. When you could just actually make an image of something like this and just like start running ads against it and see, like, do people care at all? Do they click through at a good rate, even with ads that aren't super refined? I did that once on a project in college. I had the idea I was shooting a lot of film photos and I was super frustrated. It was like a 30 minute drive to the place you drop off film. And so I wanted to make like basically like kind of Netflix model for film, so you could just like get sent a roll of film, send it back once you shot it. And I was shocked. I just ran ads against it and I had like immediately like A$10, like customer acquisition cost. Of course, I didn't actually have the service set up, so I just refunded everyone immediately. But it's so much easier to validate stuff. And I think people waste so much time. And when you're in that sort of like pre product. Pre product and CPG is just like the death zone. Like, it's just so hard to get people to care and like actually risk capital when it's like you don't even have a product that I can like sample and you want me to give you like $100,000 or 250k. It's just. It's a big ask completely.
- [124:09]
Mike
And it's something I hear from people, you know, who are aspiring entrepreneurs or have an idea. I think there's just like a general sense that, oh, I have this great idea for something. How do I now go raise money? Well, the reality is investors like to invest in businesses, not ideas. So how can you start in some way to prove out that there might be some traction, however you might be able to do that. And that's going to get you a lot further than just saying, hey, I have this great idea. Give me some money.
- [124:45]
John
The first. So that video that you described, was that the animated video, or I think.
- [124:49]
Jordy
That was before this.
- [124:50]
John
That animated video happened later. Can you take me through, like, how. Like the. I mean, I imagine that cost more than $1,500 to produce that. What was the story behind picking animation? I feel like a lot of brands were doing sort of like the founder testimonial direct to camera. You tell the vision of the business or you go on a podcast tour. And Liquid Death came out with that really aggressive animated style. What was the story behind that particular video?
- [125:20]
Mike
Yeah, I mean, with most businesses, I think you need to look at where are your strengths, what is your network, what are your connections, and utilizing what you have near you to the best of your advantage. So another way put is play the hand of cards that you have that's unique to you. So for me, you know, I was a big fan of this animated TV show on Adult Swim called Mr. Pickles. It's this bizarre acid trip of a violently funny cartoon. And I ended up reaching out to the guy who was the creator of it. There was two creators, he was one of the two. And in the early days of Liquid Death, saying, hey, I'm a huge fan of your show. I feel like we have similar creative sensibilities. Maybe you'd want to be involved in this Liquid Death thing. I'm trying to get going. And sure enough, he responded. We met, we got along really well. And he's actually the one who drew the skull that is the logo on all of our cans to this date. And then once we actually got the brand off the ground and we had real product and we were selling and we were making, you know, real revenue, we had slightly bigger marketing budgets. We were able to use the animation firm that he was working on his TV show with. And they said, hey, we'll do this for super cheap because Will's already here, he can just do this on the side and we can make it happen. So animation is very expensive. 30 seconds or 40 seconds of animation is very expensive. But we were able to get it. I think we spent all in 30k on that. But that should have costed probably a quarter million dollars if you were just trying to go do that normally, minimum. So, yeah, it was kind of like that. That was something that was in our quiver and we were a big fan of it and we had some great resources there to make a really funny. And that was always our thing. How do we make something that's the funniest thing someone's gonna see in their feed and spread it for us for free?
- [127:22]
John
Yeah, I mean, obviously we love comedy here. You're being interviewed by two Santa Clauses. I'm interested to know, take me a couple years into my future, do I regret this or do I lose this? How do you maintain a level of humor while still coming to the customer and the business partners with like, hey, yeah, we're not joking around about quality assurance or something. There's a serious side of the business now. There's still some humor that's still there. At the same time, the market marketing is probably not last minute anymore. How have you thought about like scaling comedy?
- [127:59]
Mike
No, it's a really great question. It's something that I've had to push through multiple departments of the company, which, yes, we're a funny brand in the way we market, but if you think about a brand like a person, like think about someone you know that's funny, like they're not funny in every scenario. You don't tell them that, hey, my dad died and they cracked a joke. Like people, a lot of really funny people, they just know people really well. Like they know how to make people laugh. They know when to tone it down. Like the number one rule of comedy is like, know your audience. So I think it's important that it's always like, hey, when someone sends in an email saying, hey, my case of liquid death from Amazon got all screwed up in the mail, you don't crack a joke. Like, act very earnest. Hey, I am so sorry about that, like, that sucks. Like, we will completely figure it out. So it's all about knowing where it's important to be, you know, real and authentic and caring, and then where it's important to be funny and irreverent and that you always got to be cognizant.
- [129:11]
John
How much did you predict the death of the alcohol culture? It feels like this is perfectly timed. We've talked to so many folks on the show about the next generation just drinking way less, and it feels like you've been a beneficiary of this. But was that something where you had seen a chart and you'd actually seen a trend line or you just had a vibe, or it just kind of came to you naturally, or you just got lucky? How do you frame the fact that you're selling an alternative to alcohol in a ton of bars? And I see it all the time at a time when people are looking for an alternative.
- [129:48]
Mike
Yeah, it was a little bit luck. I think the bigger conceptual drive behind Liquid Death's inception was that how do we make a truly healthy beverage company that markets more like a fun alcohol or junk food company? Because you think about all the funny, irreverent marketing over time. It's all like, stickers, Cheetos, Dos Equis, like, it's beer, it's candy, it's fast food.
- [130:15]
Jordy
Yeah. My biggest criticism of healthy brands historically is it's so hard to build a brand if you're not making people feel any real emotion. Right. Like, how many healthy brands are funny at all? Like, almost zero. Right. It's like toned down colors, like just kind of like simple, straightforward copy. There's not a lot of. There's no energy coming through the brand. So how are you going to make somebody feel something? And if you want to be remembered, you have to make somebody feel something.
- [130:47]
Mike
Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it's also just strategically unhealthy. Brands, like, in their marketing boardrooms, they're like, we want people to associate our products with fun, so everything we do is going to be centered around fun. And like, we want this to be fun. Or they think about their audience like, hey, we are selling to teenagers. Like, this is how we want to make teenagers love us. Where healthy products were not ever marketing to teenagers. They were marketing to 35 plus females and they would market a certain way there. So, yeah, part of what I love about Liquid Death and why I wanted to do it is so many healthy companies just preach to the choir. People who already make healthy decisions. How can I use a brand to get people who don't typically make healthy decisions. And now every once in a while pick up a low calorie water just because they identify with the brand and they think it's cool.
- [131:42]
John
Yeah.
- [131:43]
Mike
Then you still get the healthy people because they're already buying in those categories. But how do you start bringing new people into healthy categories who weren't there before?
- [131:50]
Jordy
What's your, what's your philosophy on storytelling on on x? The last 24 hours, everyone has just been debating. Everyone's been debating, like, do you need to hire a chief storyteller? I took the point of view of like, truly the most elite storytellers are founders, CEOs who are the ones communicating to customers and vendors and the media and all that kind of thing. And if you're feeling like you need to hire a storyteller, it's very possible that you just don't know what story to tell. But I don't know that hiring somebody off the street to tell your story is going to actually get you what you want, which is like a plot and, you know, meaning and all these other things that great, great stories and brands have.
- [132:36]
Mike
Yeah, I mean, it's like storytelling is such a broad thing. It's like storytelling isn't everything. And as a founder specifically, or if you work in sales, it's like just being able to tell a story is not just important to a consumer. How do you get employees that want to follow you if you can't articulate a vision, a story that gets people excited and believing in the mission? Like, you're not going to be a very good leader either because it's so important. So I don't know if hiring a chief storyteller is like the equivalent of having like, you know, a language translator, hey, storyteller. Tell everybody in the company why what I say, you know, matters.
- [133:17]
John
So.
- [133:18]
Mike
But I think that great CEOs have been successful because they're great storytellers, naturally. And that goes far beyond just knowing how to tell a consumer story, but how to get investors excited, how to get employees excited. You got to be able to speak in a way that makes people believe.
- [133:36]
Jordy
You have an advertising background. How do you work with ad agencies? Today? Another thing I was advised, kind of sharing with the audience, my point of view is that more tech companies should work with traditional ad agencies to actually just come up with novel campaigns to try to cut through the noise. I think people get too focused on, we just need a pretty website that will solve our problem or we need a nice logo and it's like spending not enough time thinking about really clear messaging and actually thinking in campaigns. I know companies that will spend $50 million next year on marketing and they're not thinking about, they're not even thinking about what campaigns are we going to do. They're just thinking about what channels are we doing, how are we spending, who are our segments and they're not thinking of this kind of through line messaging. And so I think that that's an area that traditional ad agencies, not necessarily the biggest ones in the world, but the sort of classic ad agency can actually really be really helpful on.
- [134:41]
Mike
Yeah, I think another way to think about it is thinking about all different kinds of companies, tech or what have you thinking about more of the full funnel. Because when you talk about campaign, you're kind of talking about top of funnel, like more general awareness around the brand and then you've got other marketing assets further down the funnel that are focused more on converting somebody into a customer. I think you have so much focus, especially in the tech world on the lower funnel where you know, hey, I put this money in and then this much money comes out because of conversion. But what happens is if you're not bringing in enough people at the top of funnel at the brand level, you don't have enough people to convert. Then it starts getting really expensive to convert low level performance people because you start running out of people and it just starts getting more expensive. And I think like a great example is like AI. All the LLMs now are fairly comparable in what they can do, but still ChatGPT is by far the biggest because it's the most notable brand. It's just the thing that people. Oh chatgpt. It's easy to say, it's fun to say. I know that. I'm just going to use that one. Look at Google. How many other search engines tried to come about and just because of Google's brand and something that's emotional just made that the go to place where nobody else could really come and take it away. And to your point, a lot of that has to come from more brand marketing and not just like nuanced performance functional marketing.
- [136:11]
John
How are you thinking about the new sparkling energy drink? I feel like there's a sort of like positive positioning. Hey, we're the only ones that have this particular benefit or there's the free of strategy where everyone else has this bad thing and we don't. Is that the framework you think about when you go to launch a new product? What was your thesis behind getting into energy?
- [136:35]
Mike
I mean We've been asked about when we were going into energy since probably like year one of Liquid Dap, because people just think the brand is so.
- [136:42]
Jordy
Much more like it's got a lot of energy.
- [136:45]
John
It does.
- [136:48]
Mike
And even it's still funny to this day. In consumer research that we have, we make flavored sparkling water, we make plain water, we make iced tea. Like 60% of the country has heard of liquid debt. 20% know that we make flavored sparkling water, which is our biggest actually category now. But 19% of the country thinks we make an energy drink. So literally our biggest category has as much awareness as a category we don't even make yet. That's crazy, because the brand just sounds more like an energy drink than it sounds like a flavored sparkling water. So the reason we got into energy was because I think we finally found a way to stay to our brand ethos, which is to truly be a better for you brand. And we were able to find a way to do what we feel is a truly better for you brand energy drink product. And now that the better for you segment of energy is the fastest growing within energy, the Celsius of The World, Alani, C4, these other brands that are low, zero sugar, low calorie, etc. It just became the right window for us to kind of offer something that really felt better for you within the category. And that's a combination of things with just. We thought the category was getting a little insane with the caffeine, like Celsius, Alani, all these brands are like 200 milligrams of caffeine.
- [138:19]
Jordy
We started this show, by the way. John would have 3 Celsius in a single show.
- [138:23]
John
It was insane. It was so bad. Now I do three Diet Cokes, which is like, I think around 100 or 200 milligrams of caffeine. It's not too bad.
- [138:32]
Mike
Yeah. I mean, most people don't think of Red Bull as a weak energy drink. It's the number one selling energy drink. Red bull is 114 milligrams in a 12 ounce can. So a Celsius is like pounding two red bulls at one time.
- [138:43]
John
Yeah, it's crazy, you know, so.
- [138:45]
Mike
And I don't think a lot of people realize that. And the more we've talked to people, they kind of feel like, oh, yeah, you know, I stopped drinking, you know, Celsius or Alani, because I don't know, I started feeling a little like cracked out.
- [138:56]
John
Oh, that's crazy.
- [138:57]
Mike
You know, I just thought there was like, you know, we Thought there was like a good opportunity to come in with something that was not weak. But this just was. We're calling a sane level of energy in a category that I think is to going. Starting to go a little insane.
- [139:10]
John
Do you have a tagline for it? Murder your sleep or something?
- [139:15]
Mike
Well, we actually have on the can. It's like, it's not really the tagline, but it's a small one that says death to drowsy.
- [139:20]
John
There we go. I knew it was going to be something good.
- [139:23]
Jordy
What, how. What's the. What's the go to market with energy? I can imagine. I buddy of mine is like a pro skateboarder. And like in skating, there's like some fatigue around the. The big energy drink brands, and it feels like there's room. Like energy drinks have had a big place in the industry for a long time. So I can imagine there's like an athlete angle to this. There's kind of campaign, broader campaign. But how are all the different ways you're planning to really bring it to market?
- [139:56]
Mike
It's funny. It's actually not that at all because, you know, Monster and Red Bull, both companies valued like upwards of 60 billion apiece East. They've got endless checkbooks to buy athletes. And that's the thing when you do sports marketing. Anybody with a big enough checkbook can buy any athlete. That's how they make their money.
- [140:15]
Elliot
Right?
- [140:16]
Mike
So if Liquid Death tries to go in and buy athletes competing with the checkbooks of Monster and Red Bull, we're never going to make enough of a dent to have it move the needle for us. So for us, like, what makes Liquid Death unique is we're arguably the funniest beverage brand in the world and we're better at being funny than anybody else. And big companies have a really hard time producing comedy because you go through that bureaucracy of focus groups and layers. It's hard to make something legit funny the way we can, and no amount of money can fix that. So we want to focus on being the only funny energy drink brand in a sea of extreme.
- [140:58]
Elliot
Right.
- [140:59]
John
I love that. I love that. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Different positioning. This is what a great guest for today. Thank you so much for hopping on the show. We gotta jump to our next guest, but we'd love to have you back, go way deeper.
- [141:10]
Jordy
This is. No one loves advertising more than me. Maybe you, you're a leader.
- [141:14]
John
You're very elite. So thank you.
- [141:16]
Jordy
It's always great, super fun conversation. Let's do it. Let's do it again soon.
- [141:19]
John
Let's do something again soon, please.
- [141:20]
Jordy
Congrats to the whole team on the launch.
- [141:22]
John
Have a good one.
- [141:22]
Elliot
Appreciate it.
- [141:23]
John
Thank you.
- [141:23]
Jordy
Cheers.
- [141:24]
John
Bye. You heard from Kari? Linear. Let me actually tell you about Linear. Linear Meet the system for modern software development. Linear streamline work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release. We have Elliot Cohen from General Medicine in the Restream waiting room. Next is coming in. Previously co founder Pill Pack with friend of the show.
- [141:50]
Jordy
What's happening?
- [141:51]
John
Merry Christmas. How are you doing? Happy Hanukkah.
- [141:53]
Elliot
Merry Christmas.
- [141:55]
Ali
Thank you.
- [141:55]
John
Happy holidays.
- [141:57]
Elliot
Exactly.
- [141:58]
John
Please. Since this is your first time on the show, I mean, we've talked about general medicine before, but introduce yourself. I'd love to get a little bit of your journey, your story and then I'm sure we can go into a ton of different aspects of the healthcare industry and general medicine generally also.
- [142:15]
Jordy
Hello, tj. Oh, yes, you're watching.
- [142:17]
John
Oh yeah, I hope so too.
- [142:19]
Jordy
We love you. Anyways, Elliot, thanks for having me on.
- [142:23]
Elliot
He was joking that maybe he would have actually been better for this because he's got the nice Santa beard.
- [142:27]
John
You know, he does have the Santa beard sometimes. Sometimes. Anyway.
- [142:31]
Jordy
But it's great to dress up, you know, prepared.
- [142:33]
Elliot
It's great to meet you guys. My name's Elliot Cohen. I was one of the other founders of PillPack along with TJ Parker and we started that business in 2013. We sold it to Amazon in 2018 and then both of us stayed at Amazon.
- [142:47]
Jordy
Success.
- [142:48]
Elliot
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It was like, you know, a month or two and it all just worked out.
- [142:54]
John
Yeah.
- [142:55]
Jordy
Yeah. What's the latest at General Medicine? I hear you guys are ripping.
- [143:01]
John
Yeah.
- [143:01]
Jordy
But would love, would love for you to share kind of the state of the business.
- [143:07]
Elliot
Business is doing great. We launched in May and since then we just been expanding. It's available nationwide. I think it's got the most insurance coverage of any provider group in the. And even if we don't take your insurance at our provider group, we can always route you to the right care locally or anywhere else. And really we started with this sort of first touch experience. We wanted to make sure it was as easy as possible to get access to immediate care. And the ambition has always been to build entry point to healthcare where you should be able to come to us for absolutely anything. And what we're launching today is a new way to do that with a chat that has all of your health history in it. You know, we've been watching, I think probably like you guys, people have been chatting with ChatGPT and Gemini and others about their healthcare. And you know, it's something like 60 or 70% of probably any, all adults out there. And what we've noticed though is that those chats don't go anywhere. They, they aren't connected back into the rest of your care. And so at General Medicine, what we've been building is the ability to go from that chat straight into actual care. And all of it is health history aware. So we import all of your records, make it really easy for you to have a conversation with them.
- [144:23]
John
How are you importing records? I feel like my records are all over the place. Sometimes the doctor just hands me a piece of paper, I lose it. Sometimes it's an email, sometimes there's a web form or a web portal that I have access to. Sometimes I went and used some one off, like, you know, Internet product that I signed up for. Did some labs have some, some data over there? It feels very messy. I understand that AI could do cool stuff with it, but I feel like I will be very lazy about actually centralizing all the data in my life since it's not organized.
- [144:52]
Jordy
You need an agent that goes and finds everyone.
- [144:55]
John
Yeah, maybe. But how do you see actually the most important pieces of health information? Pulling those in. What's the workflow like? How does the user actually experience. Experience this?
- [145:08]
Elliot
We, we have a bunch of elves and you tell us, yeah, they just.
- [145:13]
Jordy
Stay right out there.
- [145:15]
John
He's gonna ruin the gong for the elves. We completely lost him on the camera too. You dodged him completely.
- [145:27]
Jordy
Where am I? Here I am.
- [145:28]
John
There we go. Okay.
- [145:30]
Elliot
You know that, that's the. I think we've been willing to wrestle with the complexity of healthcare. That's the difference of being willing to take people's insurance, being willing to embed yourself in the entire healthcare system. And so you look at what traditional healthcare, or sorry, tech companies have been doing, they've given you these ways to import your records. One off. And the problem with that is exactly what you said. You get one record from one care event. When I imported my records into general medicine, I had stuff going back to 2005, more than 20 years of records that got automatically imported. And the difference is we're an actual provider group and we're providing real treatment. And that gives us the ability to go collect a lot more information because it's critical to the way that we provide care. Ultimately, this is the context that we're using that lets us provide this much richer care to folks when they come through the front door.
- [146:21]
Jordy
So Is the goal for this to be effectively passive, where even if I'm not immediately seeking a treatment and I'm just trying to understand my health, maybe I have, like, shoulder pain, and I want to understand that this is some. I'm coming to General Medicine to just, like, have a conversation with an LLM. And maybe later I come back and I'm like, oh, okay, I actually want to pursue treatment now. Whatever. Whatever I learned, it's not going away or whatever. And then. And then you guys can help route it. Is that. Is that the goal?
- [146:51]
Elliot
I think, you know, honestly, whenever anybody comes in, if you're experiencing shoulder pain, there's always advice that we can help support you with that's going to help you figure out when's the right time to seek imaging or when's the right time to go to pt, when's the right time to talk to a clinician about it. And that's the. That's the whole point of trying to have the care deeply embedded into the experience is you shouldn't have to just wait to see if it magically gets better or doesn't before deciding to really engage with the healthcare system. If it was easy to engage with, you'd do it right away. And that's what we want to enable. Actually, I've had foot pain for the last two years, and the connection I had never made in my head, I've been wrestling with this. I'm talking to doctors about it, I've been exploring it. And when I loaded all this into General Medicine, it was the first time I made this connection back to an injury I had in 2005 on my. On my left foot. And it was the LM that helped me appreciate that there might be a connection between these two. And it started helping me explore, you know, what are the different options to figure this out. We decided, you know, one of the options that came out of that was imaging. I ultimately booked a visit so I could debate whether the imaging was really the right thing or whether PT was the right thing. Since this had been going on for so long, we decided, my clinician and I decided that really jumping straight to imaging was probably the right next step. And the imaging ended up finding these cysts in my ankle. And I'm a relatively. Yeah, I'm a relatively educated consumer. And I read the report and I didn't really understand it. You get, like that mri, you log into your portal, you're downloading all this stuff. It's like this really technical language. And I started reading. I just didn't really get it. And I dumped it all into general AI and it started explaining it to me perfectly. In fact, it was so different though than my understanding of it. I had to give it to one of my buddies who's a radiologist because I thought it meant that this thing was wrong. He was like, no, no, it's given you a perfect interpretation. That's exactly what the radiologist said in the read. And so that I was then able to start exploring with it all of these different pathways. Is surgery the right next step? Is there a different, less invasive approach? And ultimately this thing is not going to diagnose me, it's not going to tell me what the right next step in the care is, but being able to have that very exploratory, in depth dialogue by the time I get to the actual visit to talk about the different options with a doctor. Now I've got this clear idea in my head of man, there's these three or four different options. I actually don't know which one's right for me, but here are kind of the puts and takes and just makes it way easier to then have this super rich dialogue with the doctor about which of those pathways is best for me.
- [149:31]
Jordy
What is it like being a doctor post LLM in general? Do you think patients in general are coming in more informed or more freaked out for no reason? Everyone's been told by a doctor, you know, don't Google it, you know, don't, don't, don't search and then add Reddit to the end. You just go down a rabbit hole. But I think everybody's experienced at this point of like, actually it can be very empowering to like do research and maybe it has some negative side effects, but in general, I think this is, people want information, they want to understand their health and you're never going to stop them from exploring.
- [150:10]
Elliot
I think we're, we're pretty clearly on the side of like, you want to give people these tools. More, more data and information is helpful. You want consumers to be empowered. You know, it's their bodies, it's their health. They're the ones who get to make the decision. The clinician should not be a gatekeeper. The clinician should be a guide, a quarterback, helping them get to the best care for them. And we think AI is a really critical tool in that process. It helps the consumer understand more upfront, so they come to the visit way better prepared to have a really rich dialogue. We also then have a bunch of tools that let us share that conversation in a nicely Summarized way with the doctors, the doctor, when you show up, they know a conversation you've been having. They have a sense of that history and what you're interested in exploring in a visit. And so in a 15, 20 minute visit, you can just dive right into the meat of the conversation. You know, you don't have to spend the entire time just ramping up on the history.
- [151:01]
John
How do clinicians see you? Is do they see you as just like a funnel for business broadly? Like they all want to be on general medicine, having you funnel customers to them. Is there any sort of negotiation that happens? Is all of this just happening sort of by default, is there opt in, opt out? Like what is the relationship between you and the radiologist? For example, in that example you gave.
- [151:30]
Elliot
We'Ve got two ways that you could work with us. One is you can join the platform and see patients directly through the platform. And in that scenario you're getting paid just like you would as part of any health system. You're getting paid for providing care separately from that. We have these really rich tools that help us understand the quality and the different services that each physician across the country provides. And so when a customer needs follow up care, we can help them search very precisely for the exact right care. So to come back to my ankle example, you know, I can go hunting in that, in that database for the doctor that is going to be the perfect one to remove this cyst from a, not just a general orthopedist, but someone who has experience in that exact surgery and that exact repair. And I think this is actually where physicians and consumers are perfectly aligned. Consumers want to get to the exact right doctor for their need as quickly as possible. It's just really hard to know what that is because you didn't go to med school, you didn't go to residency. Like you don't have the same expertise, same thing on the other side. The doctor wants to practice, they want to focus on the patients they're going to be the absolute best at seeing. And today there's just no good way for the consumer to know that they're going to the right doctor for them. And there's no good way for that doctor to say, hey, these are exactly the type of patients that I'm going to be really good at. I'm really good at these ankle repairs.
- [152:46]
Kari
But I don't want the knees.
- [152:48]
Elliot
There's no way to filter for that today.
- [152:51]
John
One more question from me and then you can close it out. In terms of AI and health, it feels like we're still very much in like the abstract era of like, maybe it'll cure cancer. And it feels like a couple years ago when in broadly in AI we were like, maybe there'll be like an economic explosion. We'll be growing at 10% GDP. And like the economic data at least this year has been like pretty fine, like same. It's like not bad, but also not great. And like the unemployment rate just came back and like sort of mixed and like the stock market's doing well, but it's not like, oh, 10% GDP growth. And I'm interested in if you know, Satya Nadella said I'll believe the AI fast takeoff narrative when I see GDP growing really, really fast. What are some of the health metrics that you would look to judge in 5 years, 10 years? Is AI having a really dramatic impact on health? We've seen, I think everyone has expectations about what's happening with the peptides and GLP1s. Right. And we would expect that if the GLP1 mission works, you'll see obesity rates fall. But is there a broader health metric that you could imagine tracking to understand the impact of what you're doing, but also just broadly like AI in medicine having an impact?
- [154:16]
Elliot
You want us to get a metric that's not like Chinese peptide shipments into the country?
- [154:21]
John
I mean that one would be probably worth tracking as well.
- [154:25]
Mike
Yeah.
- [154:25]
John
I'm just wondering, like, what are the high level KPIs for? Like, we look at a lot of like the health of the American consumer. How much did they spend on Black Friday? What about the health of the. Just the health of the American. Like how are we tracking that?
- [154:39]
Elliot
I think we look at this stuff all wrong, honestly. Like we spent the last 20 years optimizing for the financial relationship between the doctor and the system. And so all of our health metrics, the way we talk about it, it's all about cost. I personally, I don't think that's what we should be optimizing for. I think we should be optimizing for the consumer and their enjoyment and their fulfillment that they get out of that experience. So to me, if you want to boil that down as a metric, it's something like net promoter score, like how much do you love interacting with the system, health care system? And today that's a silly question because the answer is nobody, nobody loves interact. That's the craziest thing. Like it's the most, it's, it's the definition of wealth. Right. The most important thing that any of us have in our life is probably our own health. We should love interacting with it, we should love engaging with it. And to me, that'll be. That's the metric I would look for, particularly around AI. You know, it has this opportunity to completely shift the way consumers engage with their health and how empowered they are in it and really make them the customer. You know, at the end of the day, I think so much of our health care system today, the consumer is not actually the customer. And our ambition at General Medicine is to build a completely new health system where the consumer gets to be the actual customer of their own care. And my personal belief is if we do that, we will solve most of the problems in health care. Most of the stuff we complain about, it's because the customer is the employer, the customer is the doctor, it's the insurance company, it's the government, it's not the consumer. And I think health care, I think AI has a real chance to shift that back around and make the consumer the center of that.
- [156:05]
Jordy
Drew, I love it all comes back to mps. Yeah. Final metric.
- [156:10]
John
Final boss.
- [156:10]
Jordy
If you think about it like in times that I've rate like my NPS score for a company would be like one.
- [156:16]
John
Yeah.
- [156:17]
Jordy
It was like a healthcare related experience, you know.
- [156:20]
John
Sure.
- [156:20]
Jordy
Like where if you get misdiagnosed or just get bad advice or you get prescribed a drug that you shouldn't be on or whatever, it's like you're gonna time. And a lot of that I think is avoidable with just yet better, better understanding, better. More personalization, et cetera.
- [156:37]
John
Makes it in a sense.
- [156:38]
Jordy
Anyways, congratulations to the whole team. Very, very exciting and thanks for coming on the show. Great to have you on.
- [156:45]
Elliot
Hey, thanks for having me. This was great. I love that.
- [156:48]
John
Have a great day. Rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. So has weighed in on the word of the year situation. He says the word of the everyone's word of the year is slop. Thus making the word of the year as an article category slop. What do you think? Word of the year. Still underrated. Still room to run. Does the word of the year as an article category have motion?
- [157:15]
Jordy
Yeah, we were trying to figure out our word. The word that we landed on was motion. I love motion. Right. It's hard to perfectly define. You know it when you see it.
- [157:27]
John
Sure.
- [157:27]
Jordy
You know when someone has it, you know when someone doesn't have it. And I just felt like this year.
- [157:33]
John
When they're sleeping, you know when they're awake, you know that who's been bad and good Are you on the motion list?
- [157:39]
Jordy
Are you on the motion list?
- [157:42]
John
Are you on the motion list? Yeah, it does feel like everyone sort of landed on the slopping. Anyway, you had another story you wanted to run through.
- [157:53]
Jordy
Warner is preparing to tell shareholders to reject Paramount offer. Wow. Company to recommend existing Netflix deal as soon as Wednesday. So we'll be looking out for that tomorrow. If you want to participate. I'm kind of tempted to. At least I'm not a Warner shareholder. I'm tempted to buy a share.
- [158:12]
John
Just to vote.
- [158:13]
Jordy
Participate.
- [158:14]
John
Just to vote yes or vote no.
- [158:15]
Jordy
No. No. I haven't decided yet.
- [158:17]
John
Oh, okay. Okay. You could be swung. Yeah, you could be swung. You're a swing.
- [158:20]
Jordy
I want to put the word out.
- [158:21]
John
I'm a single. Hey, I'm gonna buy some and I'm gonna be a single issue voter. Foghorn Leghorn.
- [158:28]
Jordy
I need a new.
- [158:28]
John
I need a trilogy. I'm gonna need a trilogy. I'm gonna need a Foghorn Leghorn trilogy with a lot of Porky Pig on there. I'm gonna need a massive cinematic universe all around the world. Yeah.
- [158:40]
Jordy
You want to hold up the process until you can get clarity on how they're gonna treat that ip.
- [158:45]
Ali
Right.
- [158:46]
Jordy
That's really.
- [158:46]
John
Foghorn Leghorn is very, very important. Anyway, our next guest is already in the Restream waiting room. We have Ali from Databricks. Welcome to the show. How are you?
- [158:58]
Jordy
So sharp? So sharp.
- [158:59]
John
You look very sharp.
- [159:01]
Jordy
It feels like you're wearing a suit, but you're not. It's your own.
- [159:04]
John
Good to see you again. How are you doing?
- [159:06]
Ali
Likewise. Good, Good, good. I didn't get the memo. I'm not dressed up the right way.
- [159:09]
John
We should have. No, you look fantastic. Don't worry about that.
- [159:12]
Jordy
I'm back on tomorrow. We'll ship you a Santa. Outfit can raise the next round.
- [159:16]
John
We still have a few letters left, but Congratulations. Give us the news. What happened?
- [159:23]
Ali
Yeah, what happened is that we're just seeing an acceleration in the business, especially with respect to AI and actually we slice and dice. We're data companies. We slice and dice that data in many, many different ways. Is the particular customer concentration. Is it the particular cloud? Is the particular product? No, it's like broad based acceleration throughout the business. You know, we passed $4.8 billion run rate revenue.
- [159:48]
John
Oh, wow.
- [159:50]
Ali
I wasn't asking. I get a gong.
- [159:52]
Kari
Thank you.
- [159:52]
John
Of course, of course.
- [159:54]
Jordy
Maybe multiple.
- [159:54]
John
Maybe multiple.
- [159:55]
Ali
Perfect. Yeah. So over 55% growth. But you know, more interestingly, we're now passing $1 billion on our data warehousing. Product, which we announced four years ago. And we also passed $1 billion run rate in AI revenue, which, you know, makes it, you know, over 25% of our revenue. You know, not that many companies in it. There's a lot of talk about AI. What's going on with AI? Is there a bubble or not? Not many Companies have over 25% of their business in AI and, you know, over a billion dollars. So we're excited about that.
- [160:26]
John
Yeah. How are you thinking about classifying that? Because I imagine that in some ways, a lot of the data warehouse revenue is from AI companies that want a warehouse data because there's more and more need for data, because everyone's doing more things with it. We're in this era where everything is becoming AI, and yet it can feel a little disingenuous when companies slap AI on the back of their name.
- [160:49]
Jordy
And it's hard to classify, too, because we were looking at some data earlier this week from Ramp that basically said, like, 50% of businesses aren't spending any money on AI directly, yet they're clearly buying things from companies that are using AI.
- [161:01]
John
Yes. Where in the supply chain is it? But how do you think about what is the main driver of that data warehouse growth?
- [161:08]
Ali
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of interesting. So, you know, we started the company 2013, and one of the reasons we started was because we wanted to do AI. And the problem is, since 2013, up until November 2022, no one wanted to hear AI. No one was interested in it. And then come November 2022, ChatGPT gets released, and now everyone wants to just talk about AI, you know, so now it's like, you know, well, are you an AI company? Are you doing AI? What's AI? But yeah, when we. We split our revenue up, right, you can think of it like, you know, roughly 2 billion of data munging and securing that data, 1 billion of data warehousing, and then 1 billion of AI. So you can, like, separate these out. So it's not like overlapping, triple, quadruple counting or anything like that.
- [161:48]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [161:49]
Ali
So what are they doing with AI? I mean, there's just lots of use cases. So let me give you an example. So we have this product called Agent Bricks. You know, one of the favorite use cases I have is that Merck actually created a model. These are called Transformer models, these AI models. They created something called teddy, which stands for transformer enabled drug discovery. And this is an AI model. Instead of predicting the next word in English sentence, it can predict cells, and cell Expressions. So it's called gene regulatory network. This is super important for drug discovery because then the drug companies can target those genes that are responsible for diseases. So that's like a game changer. And lots of use cases like this 711 was able to automate most of their marketing stack. So before you would have to do your own segmentation, like who should I show this material to? Who this will be interesting to. And then you would have to create the material for that segment manually. Now the agents can actually prepare a lot of that material themselves. They can generate images, they can rewrite the text to target a specific group. You can do that much faster now. You know, I could keep going. RBC Royal bank of Canada. Basically, when an earnings call comes out, you guys will like this. Earning comps comes out, it fetches the earnings call, it looks at all the previous earnings calls, looks at earnings calls of competitors, looks at what's going on in the market, looks on the sentiment, and then writes up the equity research report using the tone of the equity research analyst. And they can get this out in 15 minutes, which is usually in the industry. It's at least two hours or several hours.
- [163:19]
Jordy
Every minute. Every minute. It matters. Every second.
- [163:22]
Ali
Exactly, exactly. So those are some of the use cases you're seeing out there. So it is taking off. We're kind of focused on this, I call it sort of get stuff done or GSD AI rather than super intelligence AI.
- [163:37]
John
How much of those examples, I mean, there's a great case study is very tangible in a world where there's not many tangible AI narratives. How many of those case studies came from companies that were already using Lakehouse or a data warehousing product? And then you came to them and they were comfortable working with you or they felt like they would be sped up on working with you on the AI side because they were already comfortable with you housing the data for probably years.
- [164:10]
Ali
Yeah, almost all of them. Let me explain why, though. There's a reason why it's not just, hey, we know each other and I'm comfortable with you. Yeah, it's the fact that AI today, like large language models, are actually a commodity. I mean, they're the coolest thing that have ever happened, but they're already a commodity. What I mean by commodity is just like oil. You know, you could get your gas from this gas station, you can get it from that gas station. Slightly different. The price, it doesn't really matter for your car. Right. Same thing with LLMs. You can get this LLM or that LLM. You don't even know the difference. This week this one is better. That week that one is better at, you know, coding. This week this one can do reasoning, this one can do images. So it's a commodity. So actually it's now a commodity to have a generative AI model that can answer any question about the world and the history. And it's super smart. What is super elusive and you can't get your hands on is an AI that can actually reason on proprietary private enterprise data. Okay, that's, that actually doesn't exist because the techniques used to generate these AI models work on huge amounts of data. Like when I mean huge, I mean like the whole Internet, like take all the data and crunch it. It doesn't work on a smaller data that enterprises have. So how do you then make the AI work on that data that you already have inside the enterprise?
- [165:22]
Kari
Right.
- [165:22]
Ali
This could be electronic medical records that are sensitive, it could be financial models that are super secretive. It's your recipe for your alpha generation. So what you need to do is you need to get a good data foundation. There's, and that's the lakehouse that you're talking about. And then the governance and the security on top of that with Unity catalog. Those are the kind of things you have to get in place first before you can unleash the AI on it. So that's why it's not that they just know us, it's that they've been at it for a long time. And actually if you haven't gone that foundation, right. If your data is a mess, it doesn't help if your data is sitting in on premise in some old database, some Oracle database and it's locked away. What help is this commodity AI that you have on the top?
- [166:01]
John
Yeah. What advice do you have for founders that are building their business around in and around open source technologies? We talk to a lot of young founders that are open sourcing something really cool. They have a bunch of GitHub stars, there's energy. They don't really have a business model yet, but you can see that they're delivering value and at some point they're going to capture it. What are the do's and don'ts of growing up and being a good steward of an open source project or being a good partner to the open source ecosystem. What would you counsel a founder in that situation?
- [166:39]
Ali
Yeah, that's a billion dollar question. It's very hard to get that right. What I would say is, number one, there's actually kind of two requirements and there's like an analogy I have that you kind of have to get right. First of all, realize it's a very difficult sport. The sport that you're about to get into, open source and to monetize and create this, not an easy sport. So preferably don't get into it because you might get hurt. But if you decided, if you're hell bent on doing this, then you can think of it as your strategy basically is to hit two home runs after each other consecutively. The first home run and you're banking on hitting that home run is for your open source project to take over the world. Everybody wants to download it. It's the greatest thing ever. If you don't hit that first home run, you just shot yourself in the foot because you just gave away all of your intellectual property and you got nothing back for it and now you have nothing. So you better have a first home run and the open source project takes over the world. So that's like step number one. Now you've achieved that. Congrats to you. Everybody's paying attention. They're downloading your open source project. The GitHub stars are just like, you know, going vertical. It's awesome. You don't have any monetizable business, you cannot make any money. So then comes home run number two. Home run number two is now you have a 10x, just as good as the first one innovation on top of the open source and that's the proprietary value that you're going to provide to these companies. That's why they come to you. Otherwise they can get open source anywhere and that's how you monetize. And now you have the sort of secret sauce to a really successful company if you don't hit the second one. The problem is now the big guys, the hyperscalers and others just pick up your open source model and they offer it up for almost free. How do you compete with that? How do you compete with that?
- [168:22]
Kari
Free.
- [168:23]
Ali
That's where you need your second home run. So it's very difficult.
- [168:26]
John
Yeah. So I want to double click on that part. Particularly how do you compete that we have because we have other founders that have an open source project and it's growing and they're doing well. And then we see the press release from one of the hyperscalers that their product is now a feature, their child has been abducted into the cloud. And it's always a. You can just tell no matter how they respond. It's a scary moment, it's an existential moment. We know that there's A board meeting happening. If you're in a board meeting, a fly on the wall, an advisor or something, and there's a founder who says, oh, one of the hyperscalers just launched a clone of our product. They're really going to come for us this quarter, maybe next quarter. What do you advise them to stay in the game while the capital cannon of the mag 7 is pointed directly at them.
- [169:18]
Ali
Well formulated. So I actually get that call from the founder day before the board meeting and they're like, oh my God, you know, what do I do? My life is over. And I tell them, congratulations, you just proved that you hit your first home run. They're paying attention to you. So now they're coming after you. So now you need to do another home run. Okay, but your first home run, you just actually succeeded. Yeah, they would not, yeah, they would not direct all those cannons towards you if you didn't have anything. So you have something. Now they're direct, now they're coming after you. So now you need to innovate and you need to actually monetize that. And that portion. You cannot open source. If you do, they'll just keep, you know, milking that with their cannons, right? So that's the way to go about it. And it's normal part of life. And by the way, we all went through it. I went through it. I remember like, you know, waking up, you know, cold sweats in the middle of the night and freaking out about like, oh my God, this thing will kill us. But, you know, the good news is if you continue innovating, you can stay ahead because, you know, the people that want to copy you, they're always going to be a few years behind. So if you continue executing, you can stay ahead. And if you did a home run once, you can probably do it again if you set your mind to it. So just the trick is to stay behind, stay ahead, right? Because the way it works is that startups, the main, the main thing going on is that they don't have time on their side, right? Like if you could freeze all startups for 12 months, all the max seven would catch up immediately and there would be no startups, right? So your whole thing is outrun the big guys very, very fast. So that's another thing I tell them, don't slow down, move very, very fast. Continue innovating.
- [170:46]
John
Yeah, I love that.
- [170:48]
Jordy
How do you, how do you categorize everything that's happening in AI? Like what, what is your personal framework? Because, like, what you're doing is very different than let's say a foundation model lab, which is different than, you know, maybe. Maybe an end wrapper company.
- [171:03]
John
Is picks and shovels a pejorative? Is that a pejorative?
- [171:07]
Ali
No. I mean, look, Levi's still around. I don't know how many of those gold diggers are around.
- [171:10]
Jordy
That's true.
- [171:11]
John
That's a great point. I never thought about that.
- [171:15]
Ali
Yeah, it's still here kicking, you know, here in San Francisco. But I would say there's kind of like three paradigms going on at the same time. Paradigm number one is the quest for super intelligence. And the quest for super intelligence, you know, requires bigger and bigger data centers, more and more gigawatts, and it's very resource intensive. And the idea is to come up with such a smart model that can improve itself to the point that we don't like, you know, it's just curing cancer and coming up with new AI models. And of course, we should be really afraid of the safety aspects of that. So that's like, you know, what the Frontier Labs are doing. I would say, you know, category two is the researchers that created these models in the first place, like Yann Lecun or Rich Sutton, who created reinforcement learning. That technique, they'll actually tell you, like, hey, that's not going to actually work. You're not going to get to superintelligence that way, because that's not how humans learn or animals learn and so on. So they're like, hey, leave us alone and we'll get to something in 20 years. Which to me sounds like a little bit like, hey, we don't really know. Leave us alone. Then there's the third camp. The third camp is, hey, we already have all the AGI we already need. We might not have super intelligence, but we have artificial general intelligence. I'm in that camp. I believe we already have artificial general intelligence. It's generally intelligent. Just use it and you'll be convinced within, like, five minutes. Pretty smart. Okay, so now start applying it and get stuff done inside of an enterprise or inside of an organization. Just gsd. Deliver AI value on basic tasks. And if you're unsure, start with the simplest mundane tasks that, you know, are, you know, really low cost right now. See if you can start augmenting and automating that.
- [172:45]
Jordy
How did you process the talent wars this year? I think the question on my mind is, will we see a $1 billion pay package in two years from now or even in next year? Right. But I'm curious how you processed it as somebody.
- [173:05]
John
Who was it a One time thing or is it a new normal?
- [173:08]
Ali
That was last year, guys. I think Noam at character got like a billion.
- [173:12]
Tyler
Right.
- [173:12]
Ali
I mean they paid billions for character AI.
- [173:15]
John
Yeah.
- [173:15]
Ali
And that was literally a billion dollars for one guy. At least 1 billion. So that's already done that. So I mean, 10 billion is the next, I guess, package to go for. And maybe that was Alex at Meta, but no, but you know, joking aside, I think that it's also in everybody's interest to exaggerate these numbers.
- [173:30]
John
Yeah.
- [173:31]
Ali
Like the joke among CEOs is let's exaggerate that number. Right. So, oh, you know, companies are making like $100 billion offers for my employees. Because when you say that, what happens is that first of all, you must.
- [173:42]
Jordy
Have a great team.
- [173:44]
Ali
Yeah. First of all, it's like a compliment to your team. Second, if someone comes after someone in your team now, they're going to expect at least that amount. If they don't, they feel insulted.
- [173:51]
John
Yeah.
- [173:51]
Ali
You know, you're not even offering me a billion dollars. What's going on here?
- [173:54]
John
Yeah, yeah.
- [173:55]
Ali
So that's.
- [173:56]
Jordy
They don't value. They don't value my skill set, clearly.
- [173:58]
Ali
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Right. So it dissuades everyone. So I think there's also a little bit like self reported numbers here going on. The market is not as crazy as, you know, people say, but it has been pretty nutty and especially on the research side in AI. But actually I think it's coming like it used to be the case that if you're a big shot professor in AI, you could get funding, huge amounts of funding for crazy valuations. And if you could just say, I want to just do research and get to superintelligence. Those days are over actually already. It's no longer the case that you could. That pitch doesn't work anymore and there's no capital. Like you're not going to get a billion or $2 billion to go just do research on AI. You need to have something more than that. So I do think actually the market is coming to its sense.
- [174:41]
Jordy
The timeline, the last 24 hours has been fixated on the role of storytelling within companies. You're a fantastic storyteller, like very. Just fun to listen to and animated. I'm curious, were you always goaded or did you have humble beginnings?
- [175:00]
Ali
There's no way to answer that question. Right, Like a trick question.
- [175:03]
Jordy
No, it's not. No, no, no. I genuinely believe there are founders that come out and they're seed stage and they're hyper engaging and they're incredible to listen to and they get you excited and motivated. And then there are other founders that like have to really learn. But I think it's like in some ways it's like you either have it or you don't.
- [175:22]
Ali
Yeah, look, I think that there are many things that go into like running companies. Like one of them, ingredient number one is to be engaging and excite people and get people excited about your vision. Right. But number two, you also need a good strategy. If you don't have a good strategy, eventually it's going to catch up to you. Number three, you need to put together amazing, stellar, world class team. Right? That's all that matters. Because if you're amazing, but your team is not, then you're not going to go anywhere. Even if you have all of these, it's not enough. You need to also execute. Like you need to actually get the team to execute again and again and again and get to the results. And that kind of matters more than anything else. I mean, look at aws like, they're phenomenal at executing.
- [175:55]
Mike
Right?
- [175:55]
Ali
And then finally, five, you need to do it with good culture. If the culture is not good, it will eat you up from inside. The key people will leave. You know, we've seen, you know, companies that went under because the culture was bad or the CEO got fired and you know, they went through tough times and you know, the, you know, authorities were after them for fraud and these kind of things. So you kind of have to nail all these five. You know, it's the unfortunate truth.
- [176:19]
John
Well, is it series L now? You're quickly running out of letters of the Alphabet. We have to ask, are you going to be hanging out with us at the New York Stock Exchange anytime soon? Or are there, are there no plans to go public? Because we'd love to hang out.
- [176:38]
Ali
We can hang out there. We can hang out there anytime at the New York Stock Exchange or nasdaq, you know, but, but whether we're going to go public. Look, we're, I mean, I wouldn't be, I wouldn't rule it out. Okay. We would be public by end of next year. But, you know, it's also not like it's guaranteed.
- [176:52]
John
Sure.
- [176:52]
Ali
Because the thing I want to avoid is what happened in 2022.
- [176:55]
John
Yeah.
- [176:55]
Ali
In 2021, I had a lot of peers that were too excited. They took their companies public. They're, by the way, great storytellers, great execution machines. They're awesome.
- [177:04]
John
Yeah.
- [177:04]
Ali
But then interest rates went up, inflation went up, and in 2022, they said, hey, man, you gotta like get EBITDA, you gotta produce margins. So what do they do? They all did layoffs and they all produced ebitda. And what do they cut down on? All the futuristic stuff, all the innovation, all the new products and also employee morale kind of tanked because, you know, employees are like, I don't trust you anymore. You said this company is going to do well, but now you know, you're firing my friend here. So you know, you know, as you can see, we're now growing twice the growth rate of many of those companies.
- [177:34]
Elliot
Sure.
- [177:34]
Ali
And I think staying private in 2022 had something to do with it as well. So, you know, you know, we're not trying to exactly time the market, we're trying to win it.
- [177:42]
John
Yeah. Do you think that the, the narrative around open source LLMs is like, is over? Do you think it's understood? Because, you know, the deep SEQ moment was a moment when everyone was saying, oh, maybe open source will win or it'll have a serious shaping of the market structure in AI. It feels like folks have a much more concrete thesis around the shape of the AI market with, you know, like an aggregator winning in consumer and then maybe more of an oligopoly and in enterprise code gen and API businesses. And certainly the open source models fit into that. But how are you thinking about open source AI models developing maybe next year or the year after?
- [178:30]
Ali
Yeah, I would just say that open source has always been a commoditizer in business.
- [178:34]
John
Sure.
- [178:35]
Ali
Like when Linux showed up is the greatest thing that's happening right now in the world. Linux? No, but what did it do? It kind of commoditized Windows. Right. And significantly so. And we've seen that again and again and again. So what it does, it really, it's. It sets the price of the IP of the open source project down to zero. So that price of that intellectual property shrinks to zero overnight.
- [178:57]
John
Yeah.
- [178:57]
Ali
And that's great because that basically puts pressure on the LLM foundation model layer to have lower and lower prices. And the lower those prices go, the complementary market, the you know, market on top, which is us with Agent Brick and you know, Lake base are, you know, our database for agents helps that market because you know, it makes our cogs our cost of goods sold, which is we would pay for those LLMs lower. So I think that's going to continue happening. And in particular one interesting trend is that China is putting the pressure on just open sourcing everything. They're not just open sourcing the large language models and the weights they're open sourcing the whole stack. Everything they did. This is the way we open source it, this is the data we use. He has a research paper and they're having really fast diffusion of innovation happening in China and that also puts pressure on the west over here. We're like, okay, we can't fall behind so we're doing the same thing over here. So I think that's just going to continue.
- [179:50]
John
Yeah, so I mean people, I completely understand that narrative and it does seem like it feels like China's commoditizing American foundation labs and it and you easily like fall into this like geopolitical narrative. But is there a world where in China it's really just like the classic open source technology with a for profit corporation wrapped around it and they're trying to build like the red hat of LLMs over there and like that's the real motivation more than just some like crazy wrench in the system.
- [180:24]
Ali
Well, I think that I don't exactly know how the Communist party thinks and what they are doing but I think that over here we will have companies that are already doing that. Like if you talk to stories startups already many, many of the startups in the United States are actually using the open source models and the Chinese models. By the way, what's already happened, which people don't talk about openly, it's really hush hush, is that they're taking these Chinese models and kind of distilling them and you get an American model, right, with an American name and you don't know that it actually tracks back to Quinn from Alibaba or something like that. That's already happening in this market. Look at the vast majority of startups, a huge amount of open source Chinese models that are being used, used by American open source models. And I think you'll have actually red hat like companies here, even here in the United States that will say, hey, you know, we'll help you get up to speed, use the right ones, make sure it has the right safety and guardrails and you're not taking any risk. And we do it at low cost. That's already happening in some sense. And then there are people who do that in the cloud. We actually help you do that at databricks we are multi LLM, so we have OEM. So OpenAI is available natively to all of our customers, customers. Anthropic is natively available to all of our customers and Gemini is natively available. So it's like if you're using databricks, those three are actually under the hood and then we have all the open source models to let you. So since we are the next layer on top, right. That's the complementary market that I was talking about. So I think this will continue and I think actually that's good for innovation that that's happening. There's so much pressure on that middle layer because it is a very lucrative layer, right? I mean, you know, as judging from the evaluations of anthropic and OpenAI that are very well deserved, you know, that's an important market. So I think this will just continue. You'll see more and more open source. That's not going to stop. And it's going to be from China. My prediction is that you're going to also see that now from Europe and United States because you know, do we want Chinese models to take over the whole planet in open source? I think that some nations will say hey, why don't we just get together and fund a supercomputer and then build one here? By the way, we used to do that back in the day was called supercomputers national labs that had supercomputers. The largest computers on the planet used to be supercomputers state funded. That's going to start happening, you know, in either this country or that country. And once that starts, you know, everyone wants to get in like you know, United States is going to have the biggest one. Right? So that's my prediction.
- [182:37]
Jordy
What does your sales process look like at this stage? Like where, where are you investing time specifically with, with customers that are, that are in the pipeline? Like what's the, what's the highest leverage of and what does even the workflow look like?
- [182:53]
Ali
I mean we have many different segments at Databricks. There is a self serve segment. You can actually sign up. There's a free edition of Databricks. That's really important funnel for us, the free edition. Anyone can just sign up with their Gmail and use Databricks forever. But you don't get lots of compute. You don't get lots of AI, you get a little sliver. So you get a taste of Databricks forever. Then we have good.
- [183:15]
Jordy
This is your sales process. You're selling, selling right now. Always.
- [183:18]
Ali
You should try it out. You guys have a Gmail address. If you have a Gmail address go to databricks.com try. Once you've done that, then comes the trial. It's like okay, but that was just a sliver of compute. I want to process a lot of LLMs. I want to use the bigger Models. I want to do more interesting things with agentbricks or I want to have my database with lake base. Then I would say get the free trial. So free trial will give you I think $200 or something like that and you get to spend $200 for free with us. And so that's sort of the funnel and then from there people convert. This is really how most SMBs, mid market companies, that's how they get started on databricks.
- [183:59]
Jordy
I'm talking about the big dogs. Yeah.
- [184:01]
John
How different is the organization? Do these people like the person who maybe is responsible at some level for the biggest deal you've ever done and the person who's responsible for the smallest deal, are these like, have these people ever met in the organization? Are they completely separate? Is there some cross functional opportunity? Because they're very different functions. I imagine one is steak dinner, the other is like UI ux I would imagine, but I don't know.
- [184:22]
Ali
Well, believe it, believe it or not, the steak dinner days are kind of over.
- [184:25]
John
Okay.
- [184:25]
Ali
You know, I mean like it's not like, hey, we'll just take you out and just. We have like the best golf players and we have the best drinkers that.
- [184:32]
John
You know, to be clear, if you take us out to a steak dinner, I mean go to databricks.com try. I would.
- [184:38]
Ali
Yeah, yeah. And you pay me $0.
- [184:40]
John
Exactly.
- [184:42]
Ali
Right.
- [184:43]
John
I was hoping I would sneak that by you and you know.
- [184:46]
Ali
Exactly.
- [184:47]
Jordy
Stake futures are selling off massively right now.
- [184:52]
Ali
Exactly. I'm sorry guys, but what I would say is that, you know, we actually have a funnel. So you know, you start maybe as a sales development leader. Actually we have one at databricks. You know, guy called Matt started just, you know, hitting the phone, just getting these SMBs and then grew with the business, then got into the sort of more mid market accounts and then now like on the enterprise side. So you know, we have people who grew up with databricks and they can, you know, you learn to do the whole. All the way to the, you know, it's a lot of it is just getting comfortable. Right. Because it's like it's one thing if I'm negotiating with you a $30,000 deal.
- [185:24]
John
Yeah.
- [185:24]
Ali
It's another thing if I'm negotiating with you, you know, $250 million deal. And you know, a lot of folks will just get nervous and they'll just start shaking. Right. So but, but how do you do that? How do you get that $200 million deal? It actually goes back to those free editions and those things in that conversation with an exec high up, we will say, did you know that you're already leveraging open source spark throughout the organization already? Did you know that you're already having people using the free edition with their Gmail accounts? You have all these trials, by the way, the things I'm telling you about today, if you don't trust me, you can go yourself. Try it out in the free edition. So. So actually that kind of motion, bottom up motion helps a lot, even in the top down big enterprise sales. But there the goal is, what are the transformational projects that you want us to help you with and how do we really drive business value for your organization? What's a big strategic board level initiative? Let us help you make you successful with that.
- [186:21]
Jordy
We're trying to get to 24 hours a day. And so we're really trying to use AI 24 hours a day, live, use AI to optimize when John sleeps, when I sleep, all that stuff. Anyways, this has been super fun. Congratulations to the whole team on the milestone.
- [186:35]
John
We'll save it for next time.
- [186:36]
Jordy
Looking forward to the next letter.
- [186:38]
Ali
Awesome.
- [186:39]
John
Have a great rest of your day. Thanks so much for coming on the show.
- [186:41]
Ali
Thank you.
- [186:41]
John
We'll talk to you soon.
- [186:43]
Jordy
What a legend.
- [186:44]
John
Yeah, what a legend. He's such a great CEO. Such a great conversation.
- [186:49]
Jordy
More breaking news. Kushner's Affinity withdraws from Warner Bros. No way. Takeover. Wow.
- [186:56]
John
This is breaking news right now.
- [186:58]
Jordy
Jared Kushner is exiting from the takeover battle. Affinity was helping to finance Paramount's bid for Warner Brothers, but now believes the dynamics of an investment have changed since it became involved in the process. The battle for Warner Brothers stands to reshape the entertainment industry regardless of which bidder emerges victorious with both bids.
- [187:16]
John
Read between the lines. I think we know what happened. Jared Kushner, clearly a Foghorn Leghorn fan. Not enough Looney Tunes in the deal. Not enough Porky Pig.
- [187:27]
Kari
I'm out.
- [187:27]
John
Not enough Foghorn Leghorn.
- [187:29]
Jordy
And on that, I'm out.
- [187:30]
John
I'm out. I can't support this if David Allison is gonna pull the plug on the Looney Tunes cinematic universe reboot and three trilogies of Foghorn Leghorn live action.
- [187:39]
Kari
I'm out.
- [187:40]
John
I'm not doing it. This is very exciting. It feels like. Is it gonna land with Netflix? We're back and forth on this now, but it feels like Netflix has certainly the upper hand. A lot of support and barring some wild card in Washington. Wild card with the shareholders. They're set up. I mean the board has accepted the offers. Aslov is moving his thumbs up.
- [188:05]
Jordy
I don't know. Allisons haven't given their best and final offer though we know that. They said that themselves. Maybe so.
- [188:10]
John
And I mean to be clear, there are other sources of capital beyond affinity partner, so they could clearly marshal the capital. Larry Ellison himself has it. He's worth 250 billion. We're talking 80, we're talking 90, we're talking 100. It's a lot. But there is a lot of money there to pool around if you need to.
- [188:32]
Jordy
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if in the next 24 hours we see a new offer right there. You have current one likely, you know, Zaslav pushing to reject the offer. This is the moment where they kind of need to up the ante a little bit.
- [188:52]
John
Well, we gotta get one of our media correspondents back on the show because that's been the highlight of last week was talking to Dylan Byers and Ben Smith about media and getting up to speed on the story behind the Warner Brothers Netflix Paramount deal. Anyway, another big company news. The Unilever CEO disclosed Nutrafol and Liquid IV revenues. Have you ever been a Liquid IV guy?
- [189:23]
Jordy
No. Element guy.
- [189:25]
John
You're an element guy. That's right. You like salt. Not whatever's in Liquid iv.
- [189:29]
Mike
Sugar.
- [189:30]
Jordy
Sugar. It is based though. Sugar is very good for hydration.
- [189:33]
John
You like it? I really enjoy the Liquid iv actually, I gotta say, I just turned from Liquid IV because I'm on the new Chris Williamson creatine in the stick pack. Yeah, that one. The new tonic that the elf is putting under the tree this week. The new tonic creatine stick stick pack. You can open it up and show what they actually look like. Just pull the whole thing off. Oh, yeah, that's fine. So it's this little stick pack, like Liquid Ivy, like the one that you were having. Elementi. But it has creatine in there. Five grams of creatine in there. And normally I'm used to drinking the sand, the creatine sand. And this is fantastic. It's so delicious. Yes, you can just shoot it back if you want to be the boldest elf in Santa's workshop and just test it.
- [190:25]
Jordy
Wrist check the elf.
- [190:28]
John
Risk, check the health. That's hilarious. But anyway, back to Liquid IV world. In a fireside chat with JP Morgan, the Unilever CEO revealed that both Nutrafol and Liquid IV have entered the billion dollar brand club. I don't know. If you want to ring the bell, go for it.
- [190:46]
Jordy
I'll take the next one. Entered the billion dollar brand club. Great execution from Unilever. Sometimes when they announce these acquisitions, it sounds a little crazy. They pay a lot, but they know how to scale. They have the distribution.
- [190:58]
John
Yeah.
- [190:59]
Jordy
They are soft circling 1 1/2 billion euros per year for M and A. I was thrilled to see this. I have a lot of friends with cpg businesses that are starting to get to a scale where they are prime targets. And I am. I'm just very excited for them.
- [191:17]
John
So Liquid IV, they bought it when it was doing 120 and now it's doing over a billion. What a good run. Do we know what they paid for Liquid IV back in the day? How much, actually, how much did that deal cost them? That would be interesting because. But I mean, it just. It is a Testament to the CPG founders.
- [191:38]
Jordy
500 million.
- [191:39]
John
500 million. And now they're making a billion a year in revenue. I mean, I don't know that they're very 50% net margins, but I would think it's high margin. And so imagine you sell for 500. You're the founder of this company. You're doing 120. You sell for 500 and you're like, this is amazing. I have $120 million business. But then five years later, they're making 500 what they paid for you in that one year. They're making that every year for as long as the brand's around. So don't underestimate just compounding at scale with these businesses. Get what you deserve. Don't.
- [192:15]
Jordy
No, I think. I think Liquid Death will be a good case study there because they certainly would have had opportunities to sell. They raised a huge amount of money and they kind of probably took them out.
- [192:24]
John
And there were a lot of people saying, oh, it's overvalued now. But, you know, if you just keep compounding and getting more. I completely agree. Just like there's no one else that's really going after that particular brand positioning. You let it compound. It becomes this unique thing. It becomes Lindy, basically.
- [192:40]
Jordy
And whenever we talk about speaking of compounding, what's compounding? Ann over at Forbes says beloved productivity app Notion told employees today it is doing a $300 million tender at an $11 billion valuation. The company crossed 600 million ARR. Half of which comes from AI.
- [192:57]
John
That is fantastic.
- [192:58]
Jordy
Watch out for more notion rounds. Slash an ipo. I expect that they will get out in, God willing, in the year 2026. Yeah, but we'll see, we'll see. They Are on. On a tear notion was a $2 million seed, according to Jason, to 11 billion in 12 years.
- [193:20]
John
That's crazy.
- [193:21]
Jordy
Case study of growing into your valuation. Jason says 2013, $2 million seed.
- [193:26]
John
Yeah. If you scroll down on this, on this, this chart, you can see a huge jump in valuation and it takes them a while to catch.
- [193:33]
Jordy
This was the journey. So they. 2013 they had a $2,000,000 seed. 2019 they had 3 million of ARR and they got to a. An $800,000,000 valuation.
- [193:40]
John
That's crazy.
- [193:41]
Jordy
2020, they're at 13 million of ARR to a $2,000,000 valuation. 2021, 31,000,000 of ARR to a $2 billion valuation.
- [193:49]
John
That is so crazy because I mean if this number's right, they basically triple revenue. Not even triple revenue. And they. And they see their multiple double. Their multiple doubles from 150x to 300.
- [194:00]
Jordy
But then from 2021 they grew. They grew revenue from 31 million to 600 million and the valuation went up 10%.
- [194:08]
John
And it was the correct. Yeah, it was the correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eventually caught up. Wow.
- [194:15]
Jordy
Amazing execution. Obviously the delivered 2021. Congrats are not getting an insane IRR on that.
- [194:22]
John
But jobs not jobs not finished and not over.
- [194:27]
Jordy
But you're in the green.
- [194:28]
John
Yeah. What. Yeah. What a. What a remarkable revenue ramp.
- [194:31]
Jordy
So paying for it there says price of the brick going up. We missed saying that we should have hit him with the bricks, Ali.
- [194:41]
John
But it was good chatting with him. So, yeah, as we know, databricks raised us.
- [194:44]
Jordy
Brandon Baylo says this is crazy. The Lululemon leggings to oil ratio just hit a new high. You couldn't now buy two barrels of oil for every one barrel of Lululemon. High rise like this is one of the most important economic metrics in the world, John. Obviously. What this says so much about the state of markets.
- [195:07]
John
Yeah, hilarious. Also, it is making me feel like Lululemon leggings are made from oil.
- [195:15]
Jordy
Well, I think they sort of are, right, isn't it?
- [195:18]
John
It's like petroleum based polyester or something. I don't know.
- [195:21]
Jordy
Yes. There's something my understanding. Yes. T.J. parker.
- [195:24]
John
Maybe this is fake news.
- [195:25]
Jordy
Posted this. This is so good. Before there was tvpn.
- [195:29]
John
Look at him on Fox.
- [195:30]
Jordy
It's funny because this headline is crazy. The CVS killer. He looks kind of like the guy that would kill someone in a CVS.
- [195:37]
John
I love. Who is the CVS killer? Did they ever find the real one or did he ever got. Did he ever get brought in for questioning, he does.
- [195:46]
Jordy
I'm gonna say. I'm gonna say he looks more like a young Santa Claus.
- [195:50]
John
Okay. Yeah, that's a much nicer thing to say.
- [195:54]
Jordy
I take it back.
- [195:55]
John
But wow. Countdown to the closing bell in three minutes. He hops on CVS Killer. And I don't know, he didn't quite kill cvs, but what a fantastic run with Pillpack. Absolutely legendary business. And he's already onto the next one at General Medicine. So it's fantastic.
- [196:14]
Jordy
Singer vehicles just put up a minute 22.
- [196:17]
John
This is huge news. This is the biggest news in technology these days, I think. I think so. Laguna Seca, the legendary racetrack in California. This is an American hypercar.
- [196:29]
Jordy
So the production car lap record.
- [196:31]
John
The story here is that the. The story here is that Koenigsegg set the lap record just a few weeks ago. And Lucas Singer took it personally and he said, I'm gonna go and put up a better time. And he did. But this car is insane. So it's a two seater, but they're both centered. So it's like a fighter jet. I don't know why everyone's lying.
- [197:03]
Jordy
That's a very cool setup. That's a very cool setup.
- [197:05]
John
Yeah. So you sit like this, one after the other. And the doors we need to pull up a picture of.
- [197:11]
Jordy
Why are you guys laughing?
- [197:12]
Tyler
That's just fire.
- [197:13]
John
I've never heard anything like that. If you go to four seconds on this, on this main video, the Laguna Seca video here on X, you can see the doors. So the door. Yeah, the doors are two. Two doors long. Because you need to let two people in. So when you open the doors.
- [197:34]
Jordy
And I'm sure they're planning to let it fly at some point.
- [197:36]
John
It's crazy. Yeah.
- [197:37]
Jordy
Don't you think? Part of that it's ready to. They have a secret feature. Trying to beat Elon Musk to the flying car like he was alluding on Joe Rogan.
- [197:44]
John
So there has been a recent hypercar war at Laguna. This is specifically for the production car record. Zinger just took it by two seconds. So in August of 2024, Koenigsegg strikes. Koenigsegg brought the Jesko attack to Laguna Seca for the first time. They got a 124 86, beating the previous long standing benchmark held by the Singer 21C and the McLaren Senna at 125, 120 and 127. So Singer had it at 125. Then Koenigsegg shows up with the Jesko attack gets it at 124. Then they come back, lowered the speed record. There was this new. There's this new noise limit at Laguna Seiko. Your car cannot make more than 90 decibels of noise from the exhaust. I assume Brian Johnson had something to do with this. But you have to bolt on a special exhaust so you're not too loud while you're going out and going on the track. And of course that affects track performance. And so they reset the record. Koenigsegg comes back. They have a specific Jesco attack for this new Laguna restriction. They get a 124. And then Singer comes back on December 9th. Just weeks after their Koenigsegg's November run, Singer returns with their 3D printed Hybrid 21C driver Joel Miller runs a blistering 122. And so.
- [199:18]
Jordy
And put into context, the 992 GT3RS is doing it at 128. So quite a big deal.
- [199:27]
John
Basically walking. Basically walking speed.
- [199:30]
Jordy
Walking speed. Wow.
- [199:31]
John
Congrats to Lucas.
- [199:32]
Jordy
This is almost unbelievable. For me to believe that it's real, he's gonna have to drive it into the.
- [199:39]
John
I think he is. He wants us to believe this was built by humans. It seems like alien technology. Probably.
- [199:45]
Jordy
Make it make sense. Make it make sense.
- [199:46]
John
Make it make sense. No, it's a beautiful, beautiful vehicle.
- [199:51]
Jordy
Anyways, final. Final post of the show. We posted this yesterday as well. But Future was named Friend of the House by Louis Vuitton for embodying its values. And Louis Pisano says. And what values would those be?
- [200:11]
John
I don't know enough about Louis Vuitton to understand what this means.
- [200:13]
Jordy
Well, it's funny. Do you know about futures values?
- [200:16]
John
No.
- [200:16]
Jordy
Have you ever. You haven't listened to a Future song?
- [200:18]
John
I just know. No, I really don't know.
- [200:21]
Jordy
I mean, I think his primary value is getting. Getting the bag.
- [200:25]
John
Getting the bag.
- [200:26]
Jordy
And so that's kind of how I. Well, they make bags. Other people, you know, he. He has, I think, a lot of. A lot of children with a lot of different women. Well, I think maybe that's. I don't know if that's one of Louis Vuitton's values.
- [200:39]
John
We were talking about a friend and he was saying, like, the whole goal. We're in the getting the bag business. Everyone wants to get their bag, get the bag, secure the bag. And I thought that that is a good goal. But there is an alternative, which is to secure a series of smaller bags every two weeks. Every two weeks, paid directly to You. The bag that you have on your bank account. Yes, exactly. So you're getting a series of small bags that then compound over time. You throw them in a large sack like. Like your Santa Claus. No one talks about getting the sack. Everyone talks about getting the bag. No one talks about getting the Santa Claus sack. But you have to get the bag. You get a series of small bags, and over a lifetime, you accumulate a bag that gets larger and larger until you have the real bag.
- [201:26]
Jordy
Well, here's another post about life from Cultibra. I know I said it was the last one, but I take it back. Cultibra says, a fantastic poster over the years. He says you can just do things. Go from Olympic snowboarder to head of cartel. $50 million reward from FBI on your head. Life is short. Let it rip.
- [201:45]
John
Absolutely. Do not let it rip. I do not recommend becoming the head of a cartel. That is insane. But of course, is a very wild story.
- [201:54]
Jordy
Maybe become, you know, maybe become the head of a $50 million annual revenue business in a sort of legal domain.
- [202:03]
John
Maybe an enterprise software.
- [202:04]
Jordy
Enterprise software SaaS, maybe a database. Life is short. Go from an Olympic snowboarder to a SaaS icon. Let it rip. Life is short. And we'll leave it at that. We are actually going.
- [202:17]
John
Breaking news from Tyler.
- [202:18]
Tyler
Breaking news. If we want. OpenAI got rid of their model router for free users. I thought that was pretty.
- [202:24]
John
What does that mean? Wait. They got rid of it for free users, but it's getting rid of is always there for. Is it the model picker or the model router? Is it always on auto or can you still. Or do you have to pick thinking pro legacy models? How do you pick the model?
- [202:42]
Tyler
Yeah, so I think it's the router. So that means the picker's still there, but it doesn't automatically do it for you.
- [202:47]
John
It just defaults to fast or the basic model.
- [202:53]
Tyler
I don't know which one it does.
- [202:54]
John
Unless you.
- [202:55]
Tyler
But I would imagine that, like, if I was thinking through it, I would think it would be the opposite.
- [203:00]
Jordy
Right?
- [203:00]
John
Yeah, totally.
- [203:01]
Tyler
Because as a pro user, I want.
- [203:02]
John
To do pro all the time.
- [203:04]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [203:04]
John
I want to get what you paid for. Yeah. Yeah, you want to get what you paid for. But the free user.
- [203:09]
Jordy
Yeah.
- [203:09]
Tyler
Who you think is, like, the unsophisticated person. They don't know which one to use.
- [203:14]
John
Interesting. Well, we'll have to dig in. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in. Merry Christmas to everyone.
- [203:20]
Jordy
Trey says cartels only get a bad rap because they don't have a head storyteller. I feel like some of the. I feel like Escobar was low key, an incredible storyteller.
- [203:30]
John
I don't think so. I think people told stories about him. I don't think he was doing.
- [203:33]
Jordy
He was in politics, maybe.
- [203:35]
John
Okay, well, we'll get to the bottom of that part.
- [203:37]
Jordy
He was a politician.
- [203:38]
John
Have a good rest of your day. Merry Christmas.
- [203:40]
Jordy
Thanks for hanging out with us.
- [203:40]
John
We will see you tomorrow.
- [203:42]
Jordy
It feels like a Friday.
- [203:43]
John
It does. When you put on the Santa suit.
- [203:45]
Jordy
It does feel like a Friday. We are going go karting. We are doing a little end of year team outing. We're going go karting as a team.
- [203:51]
Elliot
As a team.
- [203:52]
John
Which should be fun.
- [203:53]
Jordy
Very excited for that. Well, we will see you guys tomorrow.
- [203:55]
John
Tomorrow. Love you. Goodby.