Elon vs OpenAI, Ads in ChatGPT, Leaked Tech Emails | Sean Frank, Bill Shufelt, Alex Mashrabov, Sonya Huang & Pat Grady

- You're watching TVPN. - Today is Friday, January 16th, 2026. We are live from the TVPin Ultra Dump. The Temple of Technology. - The Fortress of Finance. - The capital of capital. - El Capital Day Capital. Let's tell you about ramp times money, baby. Save both. These are used corporate guards, bell payments, accounting, and a whole lot more. All in one place. - It is the go-to. - My go. - Fintech, a Fintech go-to. - A bunch of news today. Lots of people dropping stuff on Fridays. What's the meaning behind that? I don't know, but we'll take you through it. Lots of AI news, lots of open AI news. Because there's new details, new discovery in the open AI versus Elon Musk lawsuit. That's heating up. - There's a whole lot of swoops. - Greg was waiting for. - Yes, for sure. For sure. There's a lot of crazy quotes. - Really, we're gonna go through it all. - Yeah. - 'Cause it's part of our job. - We're gonna go through both sides. - Do you have the steel man for Sam, the steel man for Elon? - Yeah, I would just say I have a lot of sympathy for Greg. This is like having your personal diary. - It is sort of crazy. - I mean, do we know what's his diary? - It's not, it's not. - Elon's calling. - It's framing it as a diary. - I think you had the best take of the day so far, which is that this is the Super Bowl for NEC. - NEC on X. - N-I-K is having the best day in the line. - Okay, I'd say number one-hater for three-year back of time. He's having a great time. Anyway, let's take you through the linear lineup, tell you who we're having on the show today. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development to 70% of enterprise work spaces on linear using agents now. And we will be having the co-founder and CEO, the founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing. We got the Athletic Brewing Beers here in the studio. - We got a lot of Pat Gradian Sonia Wong from Sequoia Capital coming on their co-authors of 2026. This is AGI. Then we have Sean Frank, emergency podcast. They put ads in chat, GBT. So we're calling the God of ads himself. Sean Frank, the CEO of Ridge. And then Alex from Higgsfield's coming back on the show. - They just updated. - 200. - Absolutely. - AR. - Absolutely. - And the past is growing. - So we're very excited for our guest, we have about 90 minutes here to lock in, talk about the two sides of the Elon versus open AI lawsuit. So let's kick it off with the Elon should lose side of the argument. I'm gonna be steel manning Sam, steel manning Greg. They did nothing wrong. Elon's wrong. He needs to back down. - Do you want your helmet? - I need the steel man helmet for the whole thing. It might be too much. Maybe let's put it on the turbo puffer, but we'll just let everyone know that we're steel manning. Like crazy. Put it on the puffer. - I'll wear it. Okay, you can wear it. Before we do, let me steel man some super intelligence cloud, specifically Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI super computers for training and inference. That scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So, okay. Elon made a donation to a non-profit organization. He got a tax write off on that donation and that non-profit open AI, the non-profit. It's now one of the best funded non-profits in history. And it's still focused on the original mission. Open AI, the non-profit, it still exists. It has just a tiny hundred plus billion dollar position in a for-profit company. They're gonna be able to do non-profit stuff forever, whatever they wanna do. If they wanna hire researchers, if they wanna write white papers, if they wanna train their own models, the open AI non-profit can do that. It's funded. Elon donated roughly $38 million alongside other donors who put in $90 million. There's some debate over how much Elon put in. I saw one report that was around $45. It's in the tens of millions of dollars. And he was a large do. - According to Open AI, they believe that I think there's sort of optimistic belief is that the damages would be $38 million. - If they lose. - The original donation. - If they lose. But I'm arguing right now that they're gonna win. They're gonna win. The jury's gonna say not guilty. Open AI did nothing wrong and here's why. So, Elon, yeah, he was a big donor. He put up tens of millions of dollars. But, play out the counterfactual. It's entirely reasonable to assume that things would have played out exactly the same. Even if Elon was never in the picture, even if he never donated. Sure, I mean, the office would have had to be a little bit smaller. You're working with $90 million instead of $120 million. But, we've seen folks raise $90 million Series Bs. We've seen folks raise $120 million Series Cs. Roughly the same company. You pay people a little bit less. A few less perks. The office snacks aren't as good. Maybe a skimp on the 45 pound plates. You just get the 10 pound plates. These things happen. So, if Elon had never donated, maybe Sam would have just stepped up his donation. He put in 10. He put in 10. You know, maybe he goes and leverages something. Yeah, he put in 10. He could have potentially sold more stock that he owned, taken alone, sold property, put the McLaren F1 up for sale. That's another $20 million. He could pour in, he could have filled that gap. Or he could have hit the road. He's a good fundraiser. He could have gone out and gotten money from a variety of people. Reed Hoffman, Peter Tiel, Dustin Moskivitz, all put in money. There are more tech billionaires in that crowd that could have written a $1 million check. So, Sam could have gotten $34, $1 million checks and filled the gap. So, it's not like if Elon didn't donate, he wouldn't have, like, open-air wouldn't exist, right? It's totally possible that everything would have been the same and that the Elon donations were not make or break for open AI. So, Elon should lose this case because everyone around the table came to the same realization at roughly the same time about the goal of creating AI responsibly. Basically, scaling laws ensured that AI progress would require vastly more capital than could ever be raised through donations. At a certain point, if you need $100 million for a nonprofit, you can do it if you're aligned with some of the world's richest people in tech, like Elon, Peter Tiel, the other folks that I mentioned. On the flip side, if you need $100 billion, or you need $50 billion, like open AI has already raised in the venture markets, that's just not gonna happen in the nonprofit sector, except it could have because if Elon really believed in the nonprofit mission and really said nonprofit or bust, yes, I see the scaling laws. Yes, I agree we'll need an insane amount of capital to get to AGI. Well, guess who has an insane amount of capital? Elon, if he wanted to, he could have said yes, I'm staying with the nonprofit strategy and I'm gonna put up the $50 billion. Every dollar that open AI has raised in the venture markets could have been a dollar donated by Elon Musk if he sold down all the positions. Now it's crazy, never gonna happen. It doesn't make any sense. Obviously, I think the nonprofit transition makes a ton of sense in the context of raising that amount of money. I think that's a reality. And truthfully, I think that everyone around the table agreed about that. And so one thing that seems clear here is there were a variety of different paths, but clearly a lot of big personalities in the room, a lot of ego, and it makes sense that eventually that just kind of blew up, right? Yeah, and so even if you were gonna keep funding the nonprofit, you're going up against Google, they have an economic flywheel that will provide the amount of capital required to advance AI, build massive, they're a hyperscaler, they're gonna build massive data centers and you're not gonna have a problem with this. Google was set up to make investments at this level. At 10 billion of CAPEX, Google's not blinking, the shareholders are all thumbs up on that. Yeah, very different. I remember when Sam was texting Elon, I think this was in 2023 saying like it pains me to see you attack opening AI publicly. I think we can both agree it's important that Google doesn't own AI. And that's been one of the only things that throughout this whole process, they've stayed in agreement on. Yes, yes, so they wanna create a counterbalance to Google specifically. And Elon actually agreed with this as they were shifting from maybe the nonprofit's not the ultimate way to win this AI race, this AI battle, this AI future, because Elon agreed according to Greg Brockman in emails that he said, he being Elon, said nonprofit was deaf the right one early on, the right structure at the beginning, but may not be the right one now. So according to these leaks, it seems like Elon wasn't always all in on the nonprofit. He was maybe open to the idea of a for-profit. And of course, that was a fork in the road. Elon did actually have the money to continue supporting open AI as a nonprofit. It would have been crazy, but technically could have sold down positions. But Elon clearly agreed that open AI should build a for-profit. And that's why he wanted equity, he wanted to be CEO. He was interested in open AI joining Tesla. Tesla's a for-profit. He wasn't saying we're gonna bring open AI over to Tesla and the whole thing's gonna be a nonprofit. Clearly, Elon is no purist about non-profit AI research. He runs XAI. It's a direct competitor to open AI. He started it as a benefit corporation, which meant it had an obligation to deliver environmental and social benefits. But after the merger with X, that benefit corporation status was dropped entirely. This whole lawsuit is clearly just corporate law fair. And the battle should be fought out in the financial markets, in the App Store, on the open internet, not the courtroom, let the best product win, let the best AI model win, let the best team win. And so let's wrap this court case up and let open AI go and compete it out. They got, they're fighting a war on five different fronts. Let them build, let them cook. Yeah, and that's the, it's worth noting that this is what, this is what winning, like today, is what winning looks like for Elon. I mean, he gets, if he gets, like, the damages awarded and he gets 38 million dollars, he's like, nice. Yeah. I can fund XAI for a week, you know, or even if he gets 20 million, if he gets, like, some points in open AI. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. He's like, great. This didn't, this is not a material jump in my net worth. I mean, my influencer power, whatever he's looking for, this doesn't really get me one step closer to Mars, right? It doesn't necessarily align. So the win state right now is just being disruptive, right? Basically buying, buying XAI time, putting opening AI in a position where they are trying to go public, right? And they've got this massive high profile trial going on. The helmet is really adding a lot to this conversation, I love it. The chat loves it too. Jordan and the Knight helmet is what winning looks like. So anyways, I'm just thinking-- Yeah, let me tell you about plaid. plaid powers the apps you use to spend, say, borrow, invest in securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve lending. Now with AI, we have fireworks today. Fireworks for plaid. I love it. Fire gets me fired up. This reminded me today of the deal rippling lawsuit or the actual win state for this deal rippling lawsuit is just rippling somewhat of an annoyance, right? Both companies are going to continue. There's no amount of money that's going to make Parker happy, right? But what will probably make him happy is just making it harder for a deal to go public, right? Did you see that line that apparently they were talking to Elon in one of these leaked emails? And Elon's like, oh, I don't really care about money. But I do need $80 billion just to handy in my back pocket for a city on Mars. It's like the most extreme thing. Yeah, I'm basically post-economic. But there's one more thing that I'm reaching for. And it just happens to be $80 billion, more liquidity than anyone has ever had in history. And I just need it ready to go for when I land on Mars and want to bet. I just need about $80 billion liquid. Just liquid. Liquid. It would fix me. He says $80 billion liquid would fix me. In fact, even then, I moved back to California. Because even if they're doing a 1% a year right, I can probably good. OK. Now let's argue the flip side. Elon Musk will win the open AI lawsuit. And before we tell you how and why Elon will win the open AI lawsuit, I'll tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So Elon will win the open AI lawsuit. And he should. And he should. He should win this. Judge Gonzalez Rogers already rejected open AI's motion to dismiss. Open AI wanted to throw this thing out. And the judge said no. The judge said, I think there's plenty of evidence that something happened here. Yes, it's all circumstantial. But that's how these things work. Open AI was trying to kill the case before the trial even started. They're trying to get rid of this thing. But it's clear that Elon is on to something here. OK, just look at the emails. Just look at the emails. It's so obvious that the open AI squad was trying to fleece Elon and push him out without giving him a fair share. Elon said, guys, I've had enough. This is a direct quote from Elon email. Guys, I've had enough. This is the final straw. Either go do something on your own, or continue with open AI as a nonprofit. Otherwise, I'm out. I'm not donating anymore. You guys, if you're going to do the for-profit, just go starting normal company. And why in this thing down? And that makes a ton of sense. It was an open invitation by him to just go build a tradition back to the party. And this is part of the trial. Part of the trial and this proceeding that I'm interested in is finding out why they didn't just do that. It's not like Sam and Greg couldn't have been cool. We worked on a nonprofit for a while. Can we set up a C-Corp? How do we set up a C-Corp? Sam's like, oh, I own a couple points of Stripe. I think they have something called Atlas. You can just make a C-Corp. Maybe you forgot. A few clicks. Maybe you just forgot. Oh, if I only remembered about Alex. If there was a very, very specific reason, the nonprofit had developed some IP at that point that meant that starting over or having to rebuild the team or whatever factor meant that that was going to set them back years. That's a big deal. And realistically, there's no indentured servitude. You can't keep nonprofit employees working there. Why is the workhorse? With a workhorse? With a workhorse? An open A-Corp? An open A-Corp? An open A-Corp? An open A-Corp? An open A-Corp? Was the workhorse at Open A-I? And you needed him to keep the excitement. Keep working. He developed a ton of the foundational technologies at Open A-I. And if he wanted to work at a nonprofit, and you say, hey, we're leaving to go do a for-profit, come over here. Who knows if he's going to come? And that applies to tons of different researchers that were instrumental in the development of what ultimately became ChatGPT, and GPT 3 and 4. And so Elon gave them an invitation. Just go out and build a traditional venture-back company, maybe I'll invest, maybe I'll be involved. Maybe I won't, but at least we'll have a clean slate to start from. It would have been trivial to set up a new entity as we discussed. You could start building a team. And then you run the classic venture playbook. But Sam told Elon that he remained, quote, "enthusiastic about the nonprofit structure." That was enough to get Elon to donate more. But Open A-I wasn't all in on staying in nonprofit mode. They were on the cusp of restructuring Open A-I and taking the $10 billion investment from Microsoft. The reality-- see, the reality of modern philanthropy. It's not fire and forget. You don't-- big donors like Elon, in this case, do have specific intentions and conditions attached to the gifts. It's not like he's just throwing 20 bucks in the Salvation Army donation box around Christmas. This is 30 something million. If you give that to a university and you want a building, they need to build that building. They probably need to build it to your specifications, even if you want-- - You might even put your name on it. - Yeah, they might even put your name on it. And you can dictate these things in a nonprofit donation. And you can ask that the donation is contingent on those results. You can pursue specific directions. He has every right to demand results. And so-- - Yeah, meanwhile, during this whole period, Greg is writing to himself allegedly that he cannot say we are committed to the nonprofit. He doesn't want to say that we're committed. If three months later, we're doing B-Corp, and it was a lie. And then later, saying, can't see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight. His story will correctly be that we weren't honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him. - Yeah. Before we continue our defense of Elon, let's tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Dev and the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So a big part of this, and why Elon is gonna win, why he should win, is that you can't just have corporate structure remorse, open AI. You can't pull the plug on promises made. Open AI's own certificates of incorporation talk about creating a company, quote, exclusively for charitable purposes. With the technology being intended to benefit the public, what's exclusively charitable about raising venture to build a subscription app with ads? That's not charity. Why are you doing that? Elon's right. Not only should Elon win this case against open AI, he will win this case. It's simple. A bunch of people, a bunch of San Francisco elite tech guys, they're fancy cars, promised to build AI for humanity. They took $38 million from one of their co-founders based on that promise. Then turned around and built off $500 billion for profit empire with Microsoft. It's a straightforward bait and switch story that will play well to 12 regular jurors, you know, Clint. And so that's the case. I mean, this is gonna be the big challenge. Finding 12 regular people in Oakland. Extremely offline. How illegal is it to try to be on a jury? Extremely stopped trying to get on the jury. Like I said this, I'm gonna vote. I'm on a vote in favor of whoever has the higher ARCH-AGI score. OK, I'm just pro AI progress. Yes, yes, yes. I don't care at all about who wins. I just want better models. You just want better AI. Whoever will build, whoever's scaling faster. Well, then I think you go with opening out. They have 50 billion in the bag. And in the bag. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's down in the bag, sure. What? We got to get somebody in the chat. Somebody in the chat, got to get-- Yeah, just a lot of tea we didn't get. Yeah, not in the corner while you're in the jury. Just like, yeah, hey guys, yeah. In the chat. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, this is incredibly dramatic. We're going to hear a bunch of crazy storylines learn a lot about the internal mechanics of both the Elon empire and OpenAI's world. But at the end of the day, OpenAI is signaling to investors, hey, the max damage is going to be 38 million, something like that. They did say it could be more. It could be more. Of course, it could always be more. It does feel like it won't be existential. And it feels like it's more of a vibe war than maybe a true economic war. I mean, you could go back and argue that Elon should get pro-rata equity at what it was effectively like a pre-seed round that was done as a non-profit. And that's 38 out of 120 that was raised in the non-profit, something like that. So you give him 25? Is there any precedent for a company going for a blockbuster IPO while having this lawsuit that is really going at the foundation of the entity itself, right? You can imagine a company going public where there in some legal process with a former executive or a specific customer or even a lender on some-- I can't think of anything this big ever happening. But opening it as a unique company. And if anything, it's going to draw a lot of attention to the company. And-- Yeah, it's interesting from the retail investor crowd. I think they're still going to be happy to be in this company, even if this is all not settled. But it's really a question of is Wall Street going to be on board? I think Wall Street will underwrite it as there's a potential settlement that could be in the tens of millions. It could be in the billions. But at the same time, you just calculate an expected value, take that off the valuation that you've built up. And if you're bullish on the long-term value and cash flow of the business, like you buy anyway, I think that's sort of what happens. Tyler? OK, so I've been reading through some of the documents. And so I just want to add some other details. Please. So one thing is I really do like you can actually see the arguments being made. One of them is from the defense of OpenAI and that Elon actually didn't directly donate to OpenAI, who is basically indirectly through a donor-advised fund through OpenAI's physical sponsor YC. And so because it's not direct, the idea of the specific charitable purpose doesn't hold up. And that it actually just defaults to OpenAI's. Yeah, because you don't need to want entity. And then that entity would have to make that claim. So their direct communication doesn't necessarily do as much weight. And then so there's a bunch of pages about the history of how you actually define these things. So it seems like it's going to be just come down to extremely esoteric legal definitions I like the trust. Well, I think we're out of steel man mode. Jority, of course, dawns the steel man helmet whenever he's trying to steel man an argument. We thank you for putting up with our shenanigans and our props. Let me tell you about vibe.co where D to C brands, B2B startups, and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences, and measure sales just like on Meta. And speaking of ads, there's ads and chat gpt. I like to regard them in the chat saying they're putting ads and chat gpt to help fund the trial. Oh, sorry, that was actually Dave. But regop did say open AI is nothing without its loss. It's what I think is very funny. Anyway, we want to know-- Let's go through some of the leaks. Let's go through some of the ad details. We also have Sean Frank from Ridge joining to break down the ad landscape, whether he will be advertising Ridge wallets in chat gpt anytime soon. Yeah, part of the last thing I would say there is part of open AI's defense is that through their actions they've created one of the most well capitalized foundations in history, right? And I think that they're going to continue to lean on that. Nova Nordisk has a foundation themselves focused on biomedical research. And it has the estimate is that they have $167 billion. OK. So that's why we're using the term one of the best funded, because it's possible that the open AI nonprofit might not be the best funded in history. Although if the stock continues to rip, they will probably become the best funded in history. Well, there's a whole bunch of leaks news in the timeline. There's so many documents that hit the timeline that it brought down all of X and X actually crashed, because so many people are logging on to read the Brockman files. Yeah, there's one more quote that's worth reading through, which is that from the Greg Files, from Greg Gate. Another realization from this meeting is that it'd be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him to convert to a B-Corp without him. That'd be pretty morally bankrupt. Yeah. It's really not an idiot. Yeah, I mean, but that sounds like it would be wrong to do that. And by their admission, they would argue that they didn't steal it from them. The funny thing, and here's the funny thing in years, like the-- And again, I love Greg. And I feel bad that this is all coming out. But his, like, very millennial coded writing, Brockman further wrote, under the heading, our plan, quote, "It would be nice to be making the billions." OK, I didn't see that one. That's the funny one. I do think that there's a very odd wrinkle where Elon didn't invest in the for-profit when any of those rounds were going, like the ships were so thoroughly burnt to a crisp that even when the new for-profit was doing the round, he was not-- at least we haven't seen a lot of emails or evidence saying, like, well, don't go with Microsoft. At least give me right a first refusal. Let's do this at Tesla, and I'll be the financier, and I'll take the equity. I'm bullish on this. And you don't have to-- I don't know how much that plays into the actual court case, but it is interesting just seeing, like, once the ships were burned and the bridges were burned and the paths started to diverge, like, they never really re-solidified. And you would think that, you know, if you wanted to continue, you would try and build a position one way or another, get some captable ownership. It is odd that we're in a situation where Elon has zero equity in OpenAI-- in OpenAI for-profit. There were clearly many opportunities to get exposure. But again, bad blood. So who knows? At least Greg didn't go in front of Congress and say, I'm just doing this because I love it. Because I would make these other notes on-- it would be nice to be making the billions. But-- oh, yeah, for sure. But the other interesting thing is that-- do we know where Sam Altman sits in terms of equity? It's been going back in four, yes, seven? There isn't a number. But in one of the documents, I lost it. But it said he had indirect exposure via YC. OK. OK. Yeah. Into the for-profit as well? Yes. So look through your exposure there. But then in terms of an actual grant, is there a number that's been thrown around? To my knowledge, nothing has been shared publicly other than the idea of him getting around 7%. OK, OK. But yeah, that still feels low for a co-founder of a-- No, but that was happening. That's a lot of delusional happened by that point. But it's just like the Mark Zuckerberg or the Bill Gates or the Jeff Bezos scenario. I mean, yeah, if anything, these files make a lot of Elon's kind of antics more understandable. Like he's been the one saying that they're morally bankrupt. And here, they just straight up say it was a pretty morally bankrupt to steal the non-profit from him. Yeah. Like, yeah. I don't think anyone ever expected the language to come out, came out that was this specific about their moment to moment thinking during that point in time. Yeah, what's the phrase that Elon uses? Scam defaultment? Scamual? Scamual defaultment? The timeline is really so stupid. The deportment has. But I mean, one thing that is real is that it's very clear that at some point the core open AI team was either Elon as CEO, financial backer, like complete control. Greg Brockman said, this is the only chance we have to get out from Elon. Is he the glorious leader that I would pick? We truly have a chance to make this happen financially. What will take me to 1B? Which is interesting because there are definitely people who have been taking to 1B alongside Elon with Elon in the glorious leader seat. Like, there are people on the Tesla train. There are people on the SpaceX train. Where truly, they are completely hands off. Elon is the glorious leader of those companies. They don't have any control over Elon. But Elon has given them effectively billions and billions through either their direct work with the company or their investment in the company. Like, there's a whole bunch of ways that those two things can actually be very compatible. But it would be weird, especially if you want more of an egalitarian organization, more of a equal board, more of a dynamic. Well, you look at the run that Sam has gone on, and you can imagine a situation where they're sitting at the table and saying, this board room ain't big enough for the two of us, right? And it really feels that way. Big e-guys, yeah. Sam notoriously is able to draw in capital using many of the same sort of methods that Elon has. Yeah. I do think the financially, what will take me to 1B? That's just a good question now. Everybody needs to be asking themselves this. Yes. This is something that should be taught in grade school, really. I see people on Instagram reels all the time asking this question. Alex Hermosi makes reels about this. He's asking himself this question. The only other question is, why aren't you asking yourself that question you should? You should also get on the 11 labs, build intelligent, real-time and conversational agents, reimagine human technology interaction with 11 labs, baby. Continuing with the timeline, a federal judge denied open AI's motion for summary judgment. The case is going to trial. And Tyler is moving to Oakland, East Bay. Should we read through some of Alex Heath's coverage in sources, dot news? And talk about a scoop athlete that is really given-- I call him Scoop God. --really given Kylie over at Core Memory. I mean, these two are just going ahead to head, right? Yeah. Yeah. It is a knockout dragout fight for Scoop athlete of the year. But they're both doing great stuff. And Alex read through thousands of pages in Musk versus Altman. So you don't have to. We'll go through some of the summary here. There's some news about Ilya Sutskiver. Ilya had early concerns about treating open source AI as a side show. In 2022, open AI's leaders seemed quite concerned about the prominence of open source lab stability AI. We don't talk about stable diffusion that often anymore. But I believe stability AI was the team behind that, right? Amod must stock, I believe, runs it. Sutskiver voiced his worry over text with Murati and others. Sutskiver, my trepidation around open source is that we're treating it as a side show, e.g. deaf not going far enough to really hurt stability. So they're not taking it seriously. And if open source takes off, everyone could standardize on that. For God's sake, bro, scooping harder than a Ben and Jerry's employee. That's God. This is good. This is good. Alex, he-- he scooped harder than a Ben and Jerry's employee. We're going to use that for now on. This is fantastic. Murati, Murah said, we're missing the opportunity-- And let's just stand here as the real winner here. Yeah. She's winning today simply because good attention has shifted away from a good number of people, leaving their own co-founder, exodus, drama, firings, who knows what's happening. But good to have the narrative shift and the vibes move on to opening on versus Elon Musk. So Murati said, we're missing the opportunity to set standards with this massive growing group of developers. People are hungry to build things and we should lean in and bring our tech to as many people as possible, long-term maximize our chance of maintaining lead, reducing competition. But if we do everything to get this in a couple of weeks at any cost out because we heard stability is open sourcing a similar model, that's not in line at all with my motivation. So reducing competition, never something you want to see in discovery, always something you want to see in a page meeting with a VC. But you usually don't want to put it in writing. Opening eye leaders were divided over early investor Reid Hoffman's decision to start a rival AI lab inflection. And Reid Hoffman's interesting, because he was one of the big early donors. I believe maybe 10 million, something like that in the millions. And he has not joined the lawsuit. He has not jumped in and said, hey, I need equity in open AI. I'm also wrong to like Elon. Now, in order to make the claim that Elon's making, you need a lot more correspondence, a lot more proof of misleading around the donation. And I don't think Reid necessarily has that. But also, he doesn't seem to be savouraddling about it. So they were also already considering prohibiting investors from backing competing labs from an October 2022 exchange. So it's given. I guess I just felt betrayed by him founding a direct competitor. While simultaneously telling me, quote, I could not possibly imagine you'd find it objectionable. And this is inflection AI. Of course he'd find it objection. Infllection AI, which was ultimately sort of like acquired by Microsoft and licensing to you. Was that Mustafa Suleiman's company, I think? Infllection? Altman, here's how I'd summarize my thoughts on this. Pros, he supported us in a moment when no one else would. And it was pretty existential. OK, so we're learning more about the existentialness of certain donations when they came in during the open AI non-profit era. There are times when if somebody didn't come in and write a check, it would have been very, very rough for them. And Sam says, Reid helped out at a key moment. I think open AI would have been pretty affed if he hadn't stepped up. Also, he was instrumental in getting the first Microsoft deal done, and has generally been quite helpful with Microsoft related stuff. And he's generally a good board member. Cons. He's very motivated by collecting status. Although I personally think he cares much more about open AI than an inflection. He was blinded enough by the startup of being able to call himself the co-founder of a company. He made an uncareful decision. Also, at this point, I think at this point, open AI has the leverage to ask for a soft promise for new investors, not to invest in competitors. But only a select few companies ever get to do that. And we heard stories of this during one of the bigger fundraisers, where even Gleene was targeted as something that they didn't want their investors to also invest in. They wanted you to be open AI, ride, or die. Of course, tons of fun said, I'd like a basket of labs. Actually, I'm going to invest in all of them. >> I would like broad-based exposure. And so I'm doing SSI and thinking machines that I'm doing, not entropic doing them, also on the board of meta. And I'm also investing in open AI, NX AI. You've got to get a little taste of all of them. Brockman, Chimes Danny, says, oh, also on a side after talking to Sam Altman, I'm planning to meet Patrick Collison tomorrow in Demo, and Demo, DV3. We'll ask if he's interested in participating in the tender under the condition of not investing in AGI/BigModel competitors. So we talked about the Brockman diary. >> Well, yeah, the funny thing is he must, I'd find it hard to believe that he didn't get to 1 billion just off of Stripe. Obviously, Stripe was much smaller back then. But Greg was a CTO of Stripe from 2010 to 2015. Stripe was founded in 2010. He was there for certainly longer than a four-year vest. So who knows? >> Well, we don't know about his consumption habits. He might have been selling off Stripe. Equity is fastest possible to-- >> He might have been using shares to pay for coffee. That's like saying, OK, I'll give you a forward contract. I'm going to share as if you give me a free cup of gel. >> Yeah. >> Such an Adele was worried about Microsoft's position in AI. >> When he started looking at AI. >> Yes, Stripe was in 2017. Stripe was valued at 9.2 billion. >> Which are wheelads. >> Just to Stripe. From Sachin Adele's deposition, the question to Sachin Adele, the CEO of Microsoft, did you feel that your progress was moving more slowly than you had liked? And the answer, Sachin Adele says, "I mean, always as a CEO of a company, I feel my job is to sort of be dissatisfied with the rate of progress at all times." And so, yes, would be the answer, which is both in the absolute sense, which is, can we build products that are more capable in any particular domain, and also vis-a-vis competition? There were others achieving things that we looked at and said, "Hey, that's great." And also, how can we make sure we're competitive with it? And so, Sachin Adele was obviously motivated to invest. And now, he has a huge stack of open AI shares, ready to rock. Also, Sachin Adele almost wrote a book about an AI about an inflection point. I think he definitely should write that book. That sounds amazing. According to an exhibit filed in the case it was co-written with Marco Ian City and was in development in 2023 from the first chapter on Wednesday, August 24, 2022, with the Pacific Northwest summer showing all of its beauty. Bill Gates hosted a dinner at his home in Lake Washington, just a few miles from Microsoft's campus. No longer a Microsoft board member, or even Microsoft's largest shareholder, Bill remained the iconic co-founder and trusted advisor of the company's senior technical leaders. Sachin suggested the gathering, which included Chief Technology, Kevin Scott, and a handful of top researchers. Food and drinks would be served, but the main entree was a hush-hush demo by open AI co-founder Sam Altman. On a forthcoming release of chat GPT-powered by GPT-4, an AI built on large language models, Bill had long encouraged researchers to develop a truly accomplished AI assistant, but had voiced his skepticism about this particular approach. That sounds like I'm listening to an audible. Thank you. CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Air business is securing. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches, baby. That's right. CrowdStrike. So that would be fun. I hope that book gets published. It'd be fun to have some of those little stories about. I don't feel like we don't have enough oral histories of AI who is in the room at one time. I feel like there's a whole series of books to be written about open AI. I know that they're writing. They've written a few. But most of them are sort of these skeptical drama pieces. I'd be much more interested in two different books. One would be the technical histories. Like exactly what researchers were doing, what, and what times. And also, I want to know the feeling that was going through Ilya's head, and what was the vibe when he said, like, I'm heading the button and I'm running the training run. What would you think? You're just describing Dora Ketch's book. Yeah, but the scaling era in oral history of AI 2019 to 2025. So yes, yes. And these have used Ilya. Yeah. So I hear you on that being a great tour of AI progress across lab. I think you're talking about within a single lab. Within a single lab, and you're in the room account of narrow it just to the GPT models. And so imagine the scaling era, but just for the progress-- Basically, basically, it's going to be a quiet episode. Yeah. There's that-- I mean, isn't there news that there's a book on Demis Hasibis that's coming out about DeepMind? That's going to be fantastic. It's written by Sebastian Malibai, one of the goats of business writing. He wrote the power law, all about the history of Silicon Valley. I know that book is going to be incredible. So I'd be very interested in the research side, how the research developed, who was doing what. And then I'd also be interested in the financial side. I want to know, OK, how did this SPV actually get done? What were the terms on this? Who was jumping in in this round at what terms-- who were they talking to? Who were their LPs? Were they LPs skeptical? We've talked to and seen a little bit of the other side of that-- And then layering in, layering in all of this information from the deposition. Totally, totally. And some of those evidence that's come out that we read. And so there are a few writers that will take different cracks at the open AI story. I think the definitive book probably has yet to be written. But it will come. And hopefully, such an adult can play a role in that, because he's such a key figure in the full story. Vanta, automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Like a fog horn. Microsoft beat out Amazon when it initially started working with open AI. Elon Musk was opposed to working with Jeff Bezos and wrote the following in an early email to Sam Altman. He said, I think Jeff is a bit of a tool. And Sasha is not. So I slightly prefer Microsoft. But I hate the marketing department. Altman responded that Amazon had started, quote, "really dicking us around." Yeah. Oh, my. That's such a crazy lie. He's like, I don't like his taste in champagne. Have you seen what that guy drinks in St. Bart's? It's unacceptable. He should be taking that up another notch. And the sparklers. The sparklers. It's just over the time. It's very vulgar. He knew he was going to get mocked. Yeah, true, true. Yeah. I like a Tesla tequila over a St. Bart's champagne bathtub. I don't know. Credit to Jeff, he, of course, was a bit more locked in during that era. So the upside on Microsoft's initial $1 billion investment in open AI was capped at $500 billion. Hopefully they hit that cap from a filing written by Musk's lawyers. In November 2018, after dinner with Sam Altman, Scott told Nadella that OpenAI's new corporate structure offered, both, quote, a commercial vehicle for monetizing OpenAI, AIP, and investment returns capped at $500 billion. That's not bad. A 500x bagger is going to move the needle for Microsoft, for sure. Altman claimed the nonprofit would eventually benefit because, though, OpenAI has yet to make a single dollar of returns of OpenAI ever does get to $500 billion in returns. The balance over that goes directly to the 501c3. That's exciting. Microsoft's board initially approved a capital investment of $2 billion, but ultimately decided to limit its initial investment to $1 billion in the hopes that a smaller investment would increase OpenAI to commercialize-- Satya. Go. Hey, we got him. We can't give him too much. Let's put a little fire into them. Let's make sure that they're thinking about dollars and cents. Well, you see what you've seen. You've seen what happened with thinking machines. You give somebody $2 billion, maybe less pressure to commercialize-- Maybe. More money on weight racks. Yes, yes. In exchange for its investment, Microsoft received a convertible limited partnership interest in rights to OpenAI's profits with returns capped at 2,000% of its $1 billion investment. Microsoft CFO noted an internal email that the cap is actually larger than 90% of public companies. And the limit on Microsoft's profits is not terribly constraining nor terribly altruistic. In fact, it was a good investment at Microsoft's request true. OpenAI agreed to keep any mention of Microsoft's promise 2,000% of return on its investment out of its public announcement. Imagine going to someone and pinching them, oh, we'll give you 2,000% return and then actually delivering it. What a crazy, crazy story. Gusto, the United platform for payroll benefits NHR bill to evolve with modern small and medium sized businesses get on it, stop making excuses. Second, the second update to Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI in 2021 included another $2 billion investment that wasn't reported and came with a lower upside. This is also a filing for Musk's lawyers. In March of 2021, Microsoft quietly invested another $2 billion in OpenAI. Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft publicly announced the investment, which was subject to a lower 6x return multiple in place of its 2019 license to a single OpenAI model. Microsoft secured rights to commercialize any OpenAI model developed during the term of the agreement, except AGI. Facilitating its commercial use of OpenAI's IP, Microsoft was permitted to embed up to 10 of its employees on site in OpenAI. That's interesting. Anticipating increased product commercialization, Microsoft and OpenAI agreed to share any resulting revenue just three months later. In June of 2021, Microsoft released GitHub co-pilot. It's first product incorporating OpenAI's technology. Well, there are many, many more scoops in this piece by Alex Heath over at Sources.News, so I encourage you to go subscribe, go sign up for his substack, and read the full thing for yourself, 'cause there's a lot of interesting stuff going on. But we should move on to the timeline. There's so much more news. Let's find some post to run through. Everyone is having fun with financially. What will take me to one beat sitting on the edge of the bed? I love it. - Eat up. - You gotta be asking yourself this. It's just so clear. This could have saved OpenAI from Elon, and it's a diary with a lock on it. I think the diary framing is like woefully wrong. That's probably the worst part of this whole thing is because most of the thoughts that Greg's putting out are completely reasonable. It's like, yeah, we shouldn't screw this guy over. Do we really want him to have a complete authority? This is all reasonable things to be thinking out loud. It's just when you write them down, they get recontextualized in the courtroom, and then the fact that it's framed as a diary, very questionable. - I don't think it makes Greg look that bad, because he wasn't ultimately, it's not like he was like secretly, the Sam's puppet mask. - No, no, no. And a lot of this went back and forth, and there were lots of opportunities for both sides to yield. It was like a long ongoing negotiation. But everyone's picking their sides. Owen Sparks says, case closed. Elon has opened AI dead to rights, based on this quote here. He wrote, "Can't see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight. I'm just thinking about the office and we're in the office and his story will correctly be that we weren't honest with him in the end about still wanting to do the for-profit just without him." So that was absolutely-- - I had it. - That's a bad one, that's a bad one. We will see. Anyway, we should move on from all this. Are there any other things in the timeline that we should run through here? Elon says, "They stole a charity, plain and simple." - They're really on the, for all the jurors, they're really gonna have to, I imagine you get, if it's Oakland 12 people on the jurors, I'd guess like four of them are driving Teslas. They're really gonna have to go check all the cars, make sure they don't have the bought this before Elon went crazy, bumper sticker on it. They're gonna have to throw those candidates. - Well, they should also throw out any jurors that shop in Conexx. 'Cause they're probably in the Conexxx owner meetup and they're at cars and coffee and they're like, well, yeah, I mean, I don't really like electric cars, okay? I do have a bias against electric cars. I need a V12. And anyone who drives a V12, I'm gonna give 'em some leeway. I'm gonna give 'em some leeway. - The thing about a Conexxx owner's meetup is that a lot of them are probably not driving the Conexxx 'cause they don't work that well. They're not, they're not reliable. Frequently, it's been frequently reported that they're not quite reliable. - The one debt you get to start cars and cars. - There's paparazzi there, taking pictures of you. Just one of the chances. - Seriously, it's the worst luck. - The one debt, the worst luck. - The worst luck. Anyway, century, good luck for your systems. Century shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations used it to keep their apps working. - Elon, a whole Mars catalog was asking chat GPT. - Yeah. - What chat GPT thinks and it says, "If I were grading this purely as an analyst, "not as an open AI model, "the documents are legitimately bad." Brockman notes, not ambiguous. - I was asking, I was asking Claude about this and it was very funny because it does, you can't not read into it, like you're talking to someone at Anthropic because it's taking shots at both of them being like, "Oh, well, you know, Elon has xai and that's a for-profit, "so he's an hypocrite." And like, maybe that's just objectively true and the model's just, you know, accurate, but it's funny he's just reading it in Claude's voice being like, Claude sitting there being like, "Alright, don't like either of these companies." - Yeah, anyway. - One more post, Elon said yesterday, we talked about this yesterday. He was quoting the kalshi odds on his case against open AI. - Yeah. - And he said, "I've lost a few battles over the years "but I've never lost a war." I think that what this comes down to though is like, what is, the same thing is like, what is winning the AI race actually look like with China? What is, what is Elon winning against open AI? - So the odds now, it's 68% chance will Elon win his case against open AI. That's up from 34% back in January, January 14th, just a few days ago. And so this new trove really did move the market at least on kalshi. So we will see where this goes. If the US District Court in Northern California sides with Elon Musk, in Musk versus Altman, before January 1st, 2027, then the market results to yes. Of course, this doesn't take into account appeals, which will obviously happen. And there's always the chance that there's a settlement before this, although I think it feels like we're just past all that and we are fully in. It's going to trial, there's gonna be some drama, there's gonna be some courtroom sketches. So get ready, 'cause it's gonna be beautiful. And I wonder who they're gonna call to testify. A bunch of people will be on the stand presumably. - Joe Weisenthal. - What's he saying? - He is highlighting Goldman, raising 16 billion in record, Wall Street bank, Bonsail. Joe Weisenthal says, right here, right here. - Toss to me. Toss to me. - Woo. (triumphant music) (triumphant music) - Joe says. - I know some goodness. Huge congrats to Goldman Sachs. I've been following them a long time. Holds him and Holds her is so impressive. I can't wait to see where they're going and what they do next. - Yes, yes, yes. - Goldman's really just getting started. They're really just, today's really just day one. - It's day one for Goldman. - Will Manitus, he thinks of Goldman as kind of the ideal firm, right? He has this idea of firm versus company. - Yes, yes. - Where the company's just the people, the firm is the core ethos. - Sure, sure, sure. - And Goldman is kind of the perfect firm. There are some absolute dogs over there. We talked about a bunch, but one of the most legendary things going into the financial crisis, they know that real estate's gonna sell off. They sell their corporate headquarters and lease it back for 10 years, so they're not exposed to the financial risk of their building. You gotta be careful if you're on the other side of a deal. If they're selling wine, why are you buying? - Yeah, it's a good question. - But a fantastic firm, fantastic results from them and congrats, Joe. And speaking of the financial markets, you gotta get in on them with public.com, investing for those tickets seriously. Stocks, options, crypto, bonds, treasuries, and more with incredible customer service. - Joe has some more news. - Yes. - He's news maxing, news news out of AP, Beijing. Breaking with the United States, Canada has agreed to cut it to 100% tariff on Chinese electric cars in return for lower tariffs on Canadian farm products. Prime Minister Mark Carney said on Friday, Carney made the announcements after two days of meetings with Chinese leaders. He said there would be an initial annual cap of 49,000 vehicles on Chinese EV exports growing to about 70,000 over five years. China will reduce its total tariffs on canola seeds. A major concern. - Okay, yeah, canola oil, they're getting seed oils. They're like, we gotta have them. - Okay, okay. Maybe this is part of a grander strategy. - Oh. - He's like, yeah, we need to, this is our version of fentanyl. (laughing) - So he actually did. Carney said that Canada's partnership with China sets us Canada up well for the new world order. So this is, the seed oil is all the first step. - First step. - Yeah, that was a crazy quote. That was a crazy quote. When I first saw that, I saw the video as like, okay, like funny, deep fake. (laughing) Prime Minister saying like, "We're excited for this new world order." - Yeah. - But it was real. - Yeah. - Real. - You know, there are electric car news. Ford and BYD are in talks for car batteries. Let's give it up for some talks. US car makers need Ford, the US car maker, needs more batteries for hybrid vehicles because shifting away from the full EVs, they cancel the Ford lightning, but they are gonna do a lot of hybrids and so they need a lot of batteries and they're calling up BYD to help with it. Ford and BYD are gonna do a partnership or they're in discussions for it, in which the American car maker would buy batteries from the Chinese auto company for some of Ford's hybrid vehicle models, according to people familiar with the matter. The two companies are still discussing how the arrangement would work. One idea is that Ford would import batteries from BYD to Ford's factories outside of the US. Some of the people said talks continue. And it's possible the deal won't materialize. The tie up, if completed, would pair Ford with the largest Chinese car company that has struck fear in much of the auto industry over its ability to produce affordable models that carry sophisticated technology. For Ford, it solves a problem. As the company pulls back from electric vehicles and ramps up its lineup of hybrids, it needs a battery supplier and BYD is able to produce high quality car batteries. We talk to lots of companies about many things of Ford spokesman said, a BYD spokesman declined to comment. That's a good comment. And we talk to a lot of people about a lot of things. Why are you focusing on the Chinese batteries today? Stop calling me Ryan Felton from the Wall Street Journal. Move on, I talk to a lot of people. Before becoming one of the world's biggest car makers in the world, BYD developed a robust battery, manufacturing business, including batteries for hybrid models. It currently produces most batteries in China, but the company is building up capacity and its overseas plants as it expands to markets, such as Southeast Asia, Europe, and Brazil. Bernstein Research estimated the BYD's battery shipments rose 47% last year, 286 gigawatt hours. President Trump's Trade Advisor, Peter Navarro, criticized the idea on X. He said, so Ford wants to simultaneously prop up a Chinese competitors supply chain and make it more vulnerable to the same supply chain extortion. What could go wrong here? That's Peter Navarro on X, the Trade Advisor. Last month, Ford said it would pivot away from making electric vehicles in the face of slumping demand and take it expected $19.5 billion in charge is primarily tied to its EV business. So, very interesting news. Anyway, let's move on to the next big story of the day. But first, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. - Agents, so and relevant because the day has finally come. Not to see ads in chat GBT, but they're coming. - They're coming. - They're coming. We're talking, we're no longer in talks. We're no longer in advanced talks. We're talking about in the coming weeks, opening AI plans to start testing ads in chat GBT free and go tiers. It's go time. - Go tiers, I am. - Chat GBT can go. - They said, we're sharing our principles early on how we'll approach ads guided by putting user trust and transparency first as we work to make AI accessible to everyone, we got to check in with Mark Cuban, with Mark Cuban, but they say what matters most? Responses in chat GBT will not be influenced by ads. That is important. - There's a firewall. Editorial is over here, ad sales is over here. They don't interface with each other at all. And so the models that generate the responses will not be aware of who's advertising on what. This seems extremely easy to do technically, extremely good for product reliability. It's what the consumer wants. You want to know when you go to Google, if you scroll down far enough, you eventually get past the ads and you see the real results. And you're gonna want that in your LLM, even if there's an ad up at the top or in the middle, as long as it's clearly labeled, which they say they will be. So ads will always be separate and clearly labeled. Your conversations are private from advertisers. And plus pro business and enterprise tiers will not have ads. So I'm gonna have to downgrade. 'Cause I'm on the pro $200 a month here, but I want ads. I want to experience the ad products. - Yeah. - So everybody's got to downgrade. - But I think they're gonna be making way more than 200 a month off me on ads. - Oh yeah. - Oh yeah. - Oh yeah. - Oh yeah. They're gonna be advertising crazy stuff to me. They're gonna be every other results. They're gonna be conicsec. Here's a McLaren F1 in your area. You can go pick it up right now. It's gonna be insane. - Yeah, so people have been so concerned, specifically Mark Cuban. We obviously had him on the show to talk about this last year about this idea of like ads showing up in the results. And part of it, the reason I was never that concerned is like, if I just search best backpack for men, which is kind of a joke in itself. - It's gonna turn rich. - Well, a man shouldn't wear a backpack in the first place, so sorry to any backpacks, super fans out there. (laughing) - Well, you're not a man yet, you're not 21. - Oh, true. - So you're good. You got, you got, you enjoy your backpack. - Yeah, you should switch to a stainless steel briefcase that you handcuffed to your hand. That's the correct thing for someone of your stature, someone of your importance. You got an important stuff carrying around one backpack. - But anyways, when I search best backpack for men, I can scroll down and find a reddit result from, it's a second result after Nordstrom. But they also serve me a bunch of ads. I don't assume that the best backpack for men is the first ad, right? It's not, like, when it's clearly labeled and separated, I just assume this is an ad for somebody that sells backpack. - Yeah, but now I'm aware of that particular backpack. - Yeah, maybe. - So I think it's fairly aligned, right? - Yeah, that's why I don't search like best backpack for men. I search, I search best, highest margin, highest margin backpack, men's backpack, men's backpack. - 'Cause you appreciate- - From the- - You celebrate the physics of the business. - Yeah, of the business. - You want to support business. - Yeah, 'cause then, and then, so I want to know what's the highest margin backpack for whoever I'm buying from, then I go to Shopping tab. And then it tells me, okay, this is the highest margin one. If you want to support that corporation, make sure the most number of dollars flow to their shareholder's. This is the backpack you should buy. - Back forward slash in the chat says, he uses a Spider-Man lunch box. (laughing) See, I can appreciate a Spider-Man lunch box. - And soon you'll be able to generate a Sora of Spider-Man in Chatchy-B-T. It'll serve you an ad for that Spider-Man lunch box and the virtuous cycle of commerce will continue. MongoDB, choose a database built or flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build, what's next? - Anyways, so plus pro business and enterprise tiers will not have ads. - Yes, so super disappointed. - They need to hammer, hammer, hammer, the first bullet point here. Responses in Chatchy-B-T will not be influenced by ads. We know that this is what they're gonna do. Technically, it makes sense. It's completely the industry standard. Everyone knows that, everyone in tech knows that this is how it works, but consumers will have all sorts of conspiracy theories. I mean, remember how big the whole Facebook listens to your audio and then targets ads off of that. And there's been so many viral conspiracy theories around how ads work, how monetization works on these platforms. There's gonna be a huge amount of just noise out there basically saying that Chatchy-B-T is polluted by ads, so really influenced by ads. And so they need to beat that drum really, really hard. It's good that they're doing the main account. It's good that they're doing the FGC most post, but they're going to have to, they're gonna have to emphasize this in comms on every podcast that they do, every announcement. - Yeah, people seem to be really riled up about this. I'm seeing a bunch of comments on the posts. They're upset. I don't get it at all. The whole point is that ads have made it so that wonderful services on the internet have been free for decades. They're generally aligned. Even target people report, they like targeted ads. So knowing, getting an ad, that's not targeted. Like, why are you wasting my time? This is funny, somebody in here says, some poor fifth grade teacher grating the worst World War II paper ever turned in when it suddenly starts talking about world of tanks in North Korea. (all laughing) - There's a copy fasting the ads. - Honestly, maybe that's a feature though. 'Cause you got two impressions. - Yeah, two impressions. - Here's, yeah, there's gonna be some hilarious hallucinations where someone's reading from their press release, and they accidentally have an ad in there. Oh, that's gonna be amazing. I love it, I love it. Well, the Wall Street Journal had a little bit of an overview on this, OpenAI, to begin testing ads and chat GPT and push for fresh revenue. The company will be showing ads in the free version of the chatbot, as well as it's-- - Let's give it up for fresh revenue. - Fresh revenue. Ads will appear at the bottom of chat GPT's answers and be labeled. Interesting, the bottom of the answer. I wanted at the top and the middle and the bottom, and I also definitely want to show the ads while it's thinking, like show you, 'cause you can run an ad auction and show an ad while you're waiting, I mean, Uber has done this while you're waiting for the car. There's no reason why that shouldn't be there, especially if you're doing a deep research report or anything. I do wonder how the ads will surface in the audio summary. So if you fire off a deep research report, it throws an ad at the end. If you're listening to that audio, will that play the ad at the end? Will that sound like a podcast ad, or will it sound like something else? Like, who would be calling me? I'm assuming that they're not doing audio in these, right? Imagine if you do a Google search and it pops up a video, it's like trying to play sound. - It's annoying, you would be throwing your laptop. - Yeah, yeah, but I mean, a lot of times people will go to chat GPT, fire off a query, and then when the query comes back, they will just hit the play, the audio button, and will it read the ad as well? I don't know, maybe. But the company said ads wouldn't influence the chat bot's answers, of course, and that user conversations wouldn't be sold to advertisers. That also makes a lot of sense. Also advertisers don't really care. - Well, to be clear, my understanding is they will use what they know about you to offer better targeted ads to advertisers. They're just saying they won't explicitly be like, hey, we have, here's this person's email, and here's what they like and actually sell that specifically. - Or even, or even, not at least. - They're like, there's not even an option to go to open AI and say, hey, I'd like to buy 10,000 conversations about backpacks. That's not an option. What you can say is you can say, I have a backpack. Find me some customers who want to buy backpacks, and they will say, sure, we'll do that. And we will go into the black box and sort and match you and give you the lowest cost per acquisition. You tell us that you're willing to pay five bucks per customer, two dollars per customer, we'll get you two dollar customers. We'll do our best. This is the auction model. - Yeah, and the thing here is that-- - Companies don't hear us like, if you are a business owner. - Yes. - You should be incredibly excited about this. - Yes. - Every time a major new ad platform has come out. - Yes. - It is an opportunity to drive a tremendous amount of growth really, really quickly because they typically under price, under price the ads in the short room. In the short run, just to get volume, it just gets a lot of customers in. So when Sean Frank comes on later, we can talk with him about this. I remember early days of Snapchat advertising, like Connor over at the Ridge was getting a tremendous, tremendous result. - Yeah. Cisco. Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. - Thank you to Cisco for powering TDPN. Dean Ball is back on the timeline. - We know Dean Ball. - We know Dean Ball. He says, "Flowers, no way." Reacting to the screenshot that flowers hinted math before numerals. Pottery made by people of the Halifian culture who had inhabited northern Mesopotamia between 6,205,500 BC painted flowers with 4,816, 32 petals. Some of them have 64 petals. They were obsessed with exponential growth. They were obsessed with compounding, the power of compounding. - It's the Claude logo. - It is the Claude logo. - That's hilarious. I love it. - It's amazing. Anyway. - This is good. - Graphite.dev. Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship with higher quality software faster. Where would you like to go next? - This thing has a fantastic post. He says, "Had dinner with wife at a Mexican restaurant last night. Looked at the menu. They were trying to raise prices from $18 to $24 for her favorite entree. Wife was like, "I think we can have Claude make this." Cold waitress trying to gouge us. They done. One week sprint. Claude cloned and replaced. - Coach, you need to put bill and car needs us. Restaurant manager freaks out, "How do we solve this?" This is gonna happen so much in 2026. - Just telling the restaurant owner. Are you gonna do it at home again? - We cloned your entree with Claude. - We cloned you. - We cloned it. We cloned it. I just cloned it. - This is pretty funny, Jeff Huber sharing. This post from our slash teacher. Every year, these kids come back with a new annoying quirk. That Claude boys are apparently the new thing. In my 10th year of teaching, mostly freshman, ever since the pandemic, there's always a new thing. Students bring to school that they learned over the summer from the internet or wherever. The newest thing here is a flock of self-proclaimed Claude boys who carry AI on hand at all times and constantly ask you what to do. They have their entire personality revolve around Claude prompting an AI. When we went around doing an icebreaker, four of the five kids, somebody, and if I lived by Claude and died by the Claude, that's their fact. Just about an hour ago, when I assigned the first assignment of the school year, one of the Claude boys was bold enough to say, if Claude says I do it, otherwise I don't. I told him if he asked Claude, he would be getting a call home on the first week of high school. He asked it anyway and it said to do the homework. (laughing) - That's amazing. - This is a copypasta from the coin boys. - Yeah, it's the same thing except instead of asking Claude, you flip a coin. - Yeah, it's the coin boys. - The coin boys are fairly new. - This is very funny, I like the copypasta. This is amazing. Very, very funny. Well, you've been trying to make Jimmy boys happen, which I think is underrated. We should get a copypasta whipped up, of course, because we are sponsored by Gemini 3 Pro. Google's most intelligent model yet. They got state of the art reasoning. Next level of ad coding, a deep multi-modal fund with standing. - I have some advice for Jeff Hubert. He's the founder of Chroma and, you know, he's trying to change the world. And if he wants to change the world, he should raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Jeff, it's that simple. Head over to New York Stock Exchange. When you want to change the world, you raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange, Martin. - Call in Martin. Let's get into the mansion section. - Let's get into the mansion section. I've been waiting all day. The first big piece is about the great property, transfer, gen exers, and millennials will inherit trillions of dollars of real estate over the next decade. And it's already reshaping how luxury homes are bought and sold. So over the next decade, roughly 1.2 million individuals with net worth of over $5 million are projected to pass down more than three point, the 38 trillion globally. That is a huge amount. Real estate is poised to play a significant role in the great wealth transfer. Gen exers and millennials are set to inherit 4.6 trillion global real estate over the next 10 years. And this is why it's so important to win the genetic lottery when you're born. - We didn't, but. - I want to be inheriting anything. - But, stop making excuses and maybe get a time machine and go back in time and be born to someone with a luxurious state that you can inherit. - Yes, maybe even multiple. - We already read about that. - So M6, let's kick it over to M6, what is it? - Parents are buying earlier and bigger. It isn't a new phenomenon for well off parents to give children a helping hand in securing a first home. But at the high end of the market, agents say more parents aren't waiting for kids to inherit their wealth. They are buying them luxury properties sooner. It's reshaping the definition of luxury real estate as more sellers cater to the tastes and preferences of a younger generation. - The price points have gone wild, said Ian Slater, a compass agent who works with ultra wealthy families in New York. I used to commonly see people buy 3 million to 5 million apartments for their 25 to 30 year old kids. Now I see them buying 15 million to 30 million dollar apartments for their kids. That is absolutely crazy. When you're buying for children, co-ops are a real no now. Since many co-op boards want the occupants of the units to be financially independent. By contrast, condos offer flexibility, which is especially not available for global. - What makes you more financially independent than having a trust fund that just-- - Yeah, I don't know. I guess if you're a co-op, you want to just be around other people who aren't nappos or something. You want people to build their own businesses or something? I don't know. Yeah, I won't stand for nappos landers. Seriously, I love one of nappos. Utilizes every available resource and just absolutely dominates. - Yeah, it's beautiful. - You got to appreciate it. - Well, let's look at Gene Hackman's Santa Fe Compound, which just listed-- - Wait, how did he-- How did Gene Hackman make his money? Actor. - You didn't know that? - No. - I don't-- this guy was born in 1930. - Oh, he's amazing. He's a Hollywood icon. - He's not a hack. - No, he's not a hack. French connection, unforgiven, Superman, the movie, enemy of the state. That's where I know him from. Enemy of the state's a great movie. He's in the-- - Guys, is this on the movie list? - He's in the firm. - Are any Hackman movies in the TV Gen chat movie list? - Behind enemy lines. That's a great movie about a downed fighter pilot or spy, a YouTube spy plane. I think it's Owen Wilson, who goes down and crashes and needs to get back to his team, to his side. It's a fun ride. I recommend it. So nearly a year after the shocking deaths of Hollywood icon Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arcawa, their compound in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the couple's 53 acre estate is coming on the market for just $6.5 million. I had no idea that Santa Fe, New Mexico, was so affordable. We were looking at a place in Nashville, which I would put at the same level as Santa Fe. - Oh, John, I got to stop you there. - Why, explain. - I mean, saying that is this a bit? - No. - Saying it's so at six and a half million, it's so affordable. - It is. I mean, we looked at a three bedroom apartment that was like $25 million in Nashville last week. This is 13,000 square feet, 53 acre estate, and it's one fifth of the price. I'm just saying like on a relative basis, do you go Santa Fe at six and you get 53 acres or you're living next to John Fio and you paid 25 mil. Which one would you go for? Pick it, pick it, which one would you go for? I'm going Santa Fe all day, personally. Hackman, the two-time Oscar winner. Let's see, there will be some buyers who just adverse to purchasing property, blah, blah, blah. Let's move on to Washington, DC, where the prices are way up, but way over six, six is low. Compared to this $28 million home, it's DC's most expensive home, and it's now owned by the owner of the Washington commanders, Joshua Harris. And this is one of those interesting things where you can build a massive private equity firm, a massive financial institution, Josh Harris, of course, built Apollo, the co-founder of Apollo. But he's known as the owner of the Washington commanders, even though that's not like his life's work. It's an interesting thing, but when you buy a sports team, that's the thing that follows you around forever. And so the billionaire investor, Josh Harris, the owner of Washington commanders NFL team, and his wife, Marjorie Harris, have paid $28 million for a storied Washington DC landmark with plans to return it to its original use as a single family home. The sale is a record for the city. It's known as the Halcyon House. The federal style building in Georgetown dates to the late 1700s, the roughly 30,000 square foot house, which has a large garden with a pool in the back wasn't publicly listed at the time of the sale, and then the deal happened quietly off market. - Would you live in a house like this, John? - 100%. - I knew it. - Absolutely, would you not do it? It's amazing. - This style of architecture is extremely depressing to me. - What do you mean? This is like the lindiest thing. You know who lived here first? This was built for the first secretary of the name of Navy. - No, I understand. - And you may be stoddored. You are in the habit of-- - I understand the appeal for you. But, and many others. - What is depressing about this? - This is a beautiful house. Is it not enough light or something? - I don't know. Potentially if they did a pretty hardcore remodel to it, really, really brought it. - What's not to like? It looks beautiful. I don't understand. - Just looks a little too vintage. - Oh, it's ridiculous. It does have a crazy, like, there's a roof inside. - And it looks like a frat house. - Do you see this? It does look like a grass. - It looks like it looks like roof inside under your roof. Do you see what happened here? - It looks like they just built another house, an addition on top and so forth. - Yeah, it's a chaos here. - It's a little too frat. - A little too fratty for me. It looks like the floor will be sticky with that. - The floor's sticky. Somehow, I don't think this $28 million property has a sticky floor, but you never know. They have three TVs up there. That's sort of fratty. You watch the three different football games. - Well, if you own an NFL team. - You got to watch all the games. - Yeah. - The market, the previous record in DC was set in 2024 when Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnik purchased Fox News anchor Brett Beyer's Fox Hall estate for 25 million. Mark and Hunter McFadden of Compass, represented Dr. Kuno in the Georgetown sale. Harris was represented by Southern BC International. Figma, FigmaMake isn't your average vibe, including two lives in Figma. So outputs, look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build great code-back prototypes and have facts. - Okay, I hate to interrupt the mansion section, but we have to pull up this video from the Houston Texans. - Do it. - They are, their new video is called "DutyTheme." - No way. - And I just got a wonder, we created Cod. - Yeah, son, 100%. - We created the-- - We'll let switch over to reacting to the latest video from the Houston Texans. - It is in the timelines. And while we pull this up-- - Here it is, here it is. - What is this? - And we get to-- - The match begins in 4-3 check. - The match begins in 4-3 check. - On the 9th, the end of the team. - Jogs long down the upside and Kirk with a tie to get tapped and he's got that catch. - Oh, the hit marker. The hit marker sounds good. Long shot. - It's so funny 'cause we were just on make sure earlier this week we did the hit marker sound effect. - Touchdown. - Showsteady. - Hit marker sound. - Air raid. Air raid. Kick. - What's sound effect? UAV online. Another hit marker. UAV online. That's us. That's not that, right? That was you. - We got to figure out if they did this before-- - The graphics package, I didn't realize how iconic the text was in Cod. - All right, you can turn off. - That's a deep glow right there, the glowing letters. That's just a cod to a tee. They really nailed that. That's very fun. - I wonder what inspired that. Anyway, let's move on to the last story in the mansion section, but first, let me tell you about Railway. Railway simplifies software deployment. Web app, servers and databases running one place with scaling and modern and security built in. So, this is a renovation. I want your take on this renovation. A Texas couple transformed a 945 square foot room into a space where they could watch sports and entertain friends. - And this looks fantastic. - Thank you. - This is what I want to see. - This is what I want to see on the last screen. - I want to see this. - More target now. - Yes. - To the last property. - But I feel like this does capture some of the opulence, some of the detail, some of the texture. - Yeah. - This is not flat white walls. There's lots of layers. There's trim. I like the blue, the way it goes, the brown, the gray couches. Everything sort of like harmonizes, but it's not bland, it's not flat. There's a lot of detail and layering there. Even behind the TV, you see a sort of like textured back splash. I think they did a fantastic job on this and they spent $465,000. So, when financial consultants, Damon, Cronus and Julie Cronus decided last year that it was time to renovate their game room, they wanted to keep it fun for their two teenagers, but add a layer of sophistication. You always gotta do that. They're in their early 50s and they drew inspiration for their new entertainment lounge during a visit to Manhattan and a stop by the UBS Arena Preview Club, a temporary showroom for the Arena's premium space under construction. Styled, in vintage hues of rich gold and deep blue with dark brown wood, the space had just the upscale feel they wanted for their home. They brought in pulp design studios and they transformed it. The owners wanted it to look like a lounge, like a private sports club. We took the inspiration and created our vision to suit their needs and lifestyle. The 945-foot-square-foot space was designed for versatility, allowing guests to enjoy different activities. At once, it was tailored to host movie nights, lively cocktail parties and Sunday football gatherings. The room had to have maximum flow for people to move about. And so, what you see, they have a horseshoe couch, but there's a gap in the middle so you can flow around either way. So, it's kind of like two L couches nestled next to each other. Very, very smart. Two L's. - The custom-- - Almost making a W here. - Two P's. - Hmm, I like it. The custom two P's sectional sofa set them back $26,000 and it allows guests to move in and out of the TV. - So you can tell the floors are not sticky here. - Yeah, it's definitely-- - It's just key. The room is narrow and we didn't want to have a sectional that you had to walk all the way around. And so, for additional seating, Ottomans pull out from under the coffee table, swivel stools accompany console tables beside the sofas. Tall stools are tucked under the nearby bar top and custom banquet hugs a curve of windows. Performance fabrics and durable materials were chosen to endure active crowds. They're not letting the beer soak the walls. They got performance fabrics and durable materials in there. They're not worried about a sticky floor. A sticky floor here, a sticky floor there. It's going to be okay. They're going to mop it up. Those performance fabrics are built to handle the sticky of spear. Maybe even the athletic broo-- - So, the athletic broo-- - Yeah. - The athletic broo-- - You're chugging athletic broo's. You're spraying them all over. You're cheersing, slamming them on your head. And they get on the floor. - Honestly, so athletic brooing, which we have a few here. Athletic brooing really needs to do a hard sell to cheeky pint and be like, look, you guys are hardly drinking. We can tell. - We'll have to ask him if he uses stripe currently because maybe there's one hand washing-- - We can tell. - We can-- - The other deal there. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. - We can tell you don't have it in you to get hammered on. - The podcast. - Yeah. - But we want you to be able to enjoy the taste of beer. - Yeah, I like that. A little cheeky athletic brooing. I like that. - Cheeky broo. - Beyond watching sports cross two TVs, the family enjoys competition of their own. Oversize, scrabble, board hangs on the wall to set the tone. They spent $25,000 on a table. Who knew tables can get so expensive we've been looking at tables. - I mean, I feel like we-- - We did, we did. - We're just trying to get a new table. - I know. - We want a bigger table. - We want a slightly bigger table. - Some features, but very quickly you get up into these big numbers. So the table, the round Cambria table was crafted from man-made quartz with a metal base. We bolted the base to the floor because Damon and Julie wanted to be sure. It wouldn't topple around the teens if people are getting hammered down there, standing on the table, they don't want it falling over. So they bolted into the floor. The chandelier set them back $3,900. The Cavalino X large radial chandelier from visual comfort adds sculptural interest and focus lighting to the game table. Chairs, $2,400 bucks each, covered in everly fabric, having coasters, castors allowed them to move freely, perfect for group activities. You can move them around. The window shades, $12,000, motorized Roman shades, create a blackout environment that's ideal for TV watching. That's a cool feature. And the banquet cost $27,000. The bottom is covered in ultra-sweighed green and ochre from Krovat and the back in Luluvel, like the soundtrack from S. Harris. We had to do a custom banquet so that it fit the curve of the window to maximize seating. They're all about maximizing seating over here. Well, you're welcome. And also, in dot AI, the a number one AI agent for customer service, if you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. What other news do we have, Jordi? Harmonic. Harmonic is investing in math. They're investing in floods. AI start up Harmonic. They're investing $120 million. I'm going to hit Emerson collecting. Collective is also joining as a new investor. Alongside existing backers, ribbit, ribbit, ribbit. We need a frog sound effect. Mickey Melk is doubling down. Or Mickey. He's a big robin. Koyote index and Kleiner. Oh, Sequoia. Yeah, we'll have to talk to the Sequoia folks about how Harmonic fits into the post-AGI age. Because we have Pat Grady, and Sonia. What if it comes out that Harmonic is just working on a chat GPT style app to help kids do math problems? That's it. That's a play. Yes. It's a trillion dollar opportunity. Yes. I love it. Well, we have our next guest in the restroom waiting room. Let me tell you about the labeled box while we bring him in. Get in the box. Reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And we have, ooh, nice and cold, athletic brewing, hazy IPAs. I will enjoy one of these while we bring in our guest, Bill Schufolt, from-- Here we go. --Restroom waiting room. Well, cheers. So the TV fan ultra, how you doing, Bill? Incredible to be here. Love the show. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Even though I'm East Coast and not in the AI world, I just sell things that hurt when you drop them on your feet over here, but I'm a huge-- It's a huge fan of the show and some excited to be here. Yeah, so great to have you. I was just trying to remember, I've listened to about 90 minutes of you on A podcast. It must have been four or five years ago at this point. I listened to you on Logan Bartlett. That was a fun one. Yeah. You'd recall numbers. He's great, yeah. Yeah, he's awesome. What do you think about the pitch of getting-- are you familiar with the cheeky pint podcast from Stripe? Have you seen this? I love it. Yeah. So you're actually thinking about cold emailing them to get all of it? So the elephant in their pub is that they're not really crushing beers. They're not getting actually drunk. So I think you should make a special addition for the team over there so they can really start indulging. Cool. Oh, I love that. I'm a fan of them. Ireland. I've got a bunch of their books. Yeah. Would love to reach out to them. Fantastic. Interesting. Let's take it back to the beginning since it's your first time on the show. Give me the founding story. Give me what you were doing before. It's such a huge trend now. Mostly thanks to you. Did you imagine that a trend would become so big? What were the inciting elements? Yeah, I think there's like both like the personal story and the category story and like the health and wellness mega trend behind it, even zooming out to the trend. I know so much of the mega trends in business these days and big numbers around AI and it's rare to see something that is so solidified, very visible, long term. And I can get more into how big I think the trend will be and why it'll be so big over time and why I've got line of sight to that. My personal story really is, I was working in the hedge fund world at a great finance job. I went to college, I went to college with that view, went right into it and never thought I'd do anything different. But I was living this high performance lifestyle where you know 12 years ago I was about to get married, thinking about my future life and alcohol was kind of a ceiling on my work productivity, my relationships, my sleep, my workouts, you know all the things that are like so commonplace and knowledge now that like you know all the fitness variables, the podcasts like Peter Tia, Huberman, Ronda, like all these things are like so evident now, but I was like living that and feeling it myself. I was you know, I had a very intellectually intense job at Steve Cohen's hedge fund where you're graded on your output every day, I was at the desk from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. 150 worked in there's a year than out with friends and family on weekends and 100 work dinners is insane. One for us, I mean we have like a maybe not as intense as your schedule with Steve Cohen, but it's very, you know we're here, we have to get to the studio at 9, we go live at 11, there's very little downtime and so we do one work dinner and it throws everything on it. It's like throws off. I have huge admiration for you're always on like I think about that all the time, but yeah, we had I had 200 brokers and I had to do research, then it was also and you have to have good relationships so when you like pick up the phone and need to convey something in 10 seconds that you know that person. So anyway, that's a long way of saying like I was very interested in health, longevity, my fitness, my performance way before it became such a commonplace trend and I was living that and I really started saying to people like I really wish I could go out to all these dinners and be in the moment without alcohol and you know I saw the trend happening over my finance career where people were just as excited to go to Barry's boot camp or something in the morning rather than go to a steak dinner at night and so but I just really wish there was another side of it. Keep the boy for Barry's boot camps. So why not Shirley temples? Why didn't you just become the Shirley temple king, drinking six of those like what were you doing before you actually decided to build a new product in the category? Were you on just like soda water in line? What was the what were the options? Well, so I saw that huge impact on my life just by like moderating my drinking and ultimately stopping my drinking and then thought you know if I could just bring moderation to the masses and just make it accessible. Like I've no view on like bring back prohibition, sobriety or anything like that but just making the other side of the menu delicious like match the culinary expectation and the experience that and as I started to look into the numbers behind it 50% of adults even at that point had point one drinks or less per week and it was really only like the top 10% of adults have more than like seven drinks a week and it kind of hit me that the adult beverage world is also just totally missing a majority of the population and their needs and so I'll skip like the years of business research and surveys and stuff like that to get conviction around it but ultimately it was like right out of my lived experience and I wanted it to exist and quit my job to build that. How much credit do you give just how good the product is with the success of the company because I think in CPG you're not the first finance Chad to like wake up one day and say I want to start it like it's it's kind of a common path like you know they're kind of like bored they're you know they they try some drink like I met as an angel I met so many people over the years that like are trying to make the leap from finance to being an entrepreneur and CPG because it's like you're going from like spreadsheets to something that's like super tangible and you still have to use spend plenty of time in spreadsheets and I think there's something really appealing about like going from like finance to like the tangibility of CPG but the issue is like so many people that are incredibly talented they just end up like they end up developing a product that's not amazing and then it just you can't even live up to your talent level or your potential because you're just like handicapped by the product and when I try that you know having this product even when I had it for the first time it's like it's just a fantastic product it tastes exactly like a beer it tastes like a sort of a self you know celebratory moment or tastes like you know winding down at the end of the day which is like it delivers something unique in the way that like a like a croix or just some other like non-alcohol you know alternative actually works yeah that is exactly it and we have an incredible co-founder John Walker and the two of us homeward on Gatorade Jucks and we took it down to the screws and reinvented the way non-alcoholic beer is made rather than where historically non-alcoholic beer was a very industrialized heavily processed thing it was only a log or category as well and so we took the time and John said he wouldn't even sign on if I if I didn't agree that we wouldn't launch the beer if it wasn't indistinguishable from top craft beers from day one yeah and I think that's the huge differentiation we we made the very unattractive decision to investors to take take a capital intensive route we've built all our own breweries we've put over 130 million into our manufacturing just yeah very unattractive to investors if I can be but it was so we could own our proprietary process own the quality of what we're doing every step of the way where yeah as you were saying if you were to like Nick Shirley a lot of CPG or especially the competitors in our category like you would find that they just totally outsource all the production their own brewers on the team and it truly had to be different quality and different experience and we really invested to change that perception of the category and that's still very rare non-alcoholic beer there been 280 brands since we launched and a lot have had very disparate futures well yeah and what's happening with the category right now broadly because you know I've again as an angel in LA there's so many CPG founders I've seen so many of these companies try to come up not just in kind of the non-alcoholic beer category but another categories and one of the things I always struggle with as somebody who you know dramatically reduced my drinking probably like six years ago from like drinking like a handful of drinks once a week to like drinking like one or two drinks like once a month really like so really limited it and so I'd get these pitches and people would be pitching like something that doesn't taste like alcohol at all and I'm like I I I'm in the buyer here but you're selling me a product that I can I can drink a diet coke I can drink any number of other things and so like your competition is just is not like the non-alcoholic category for some of these new non-alcohol brands their competition is just like every single drink that doesn't have alcohol in it and that just felt like a super tough position whereas for this it's like if you want a beer but you don't want alcohol like your options are like much more limited yeah for sure and as as I looked at the time of the market the way I thought about it was a 50% of the people really aren't drinking and 99% of people are even people who do drink are not drinking like 99% of the time they're awake so there's a huge opportunity to meet new occasions and those occasions you just described losing over the years we're trying to bring those back bring the social connection back get people out multiple times a week but I think they're like the clearest way I think I could say this isn't like why I think it's such a big trend is you know the overall beer category per the Brewers Association is north of a hundred billion dollars in all retail sales craft craft beer itself is 28 billion supposedly per the crapper's association if you go back like 50 years light beer was one of the biggest mega trends to ever hit beer and that is an enormous part of the beer category today and but that was a huge trend up until about the turn of the millennia and then we started to see like people well the light beer trend was driven by like the nutritionals where people wanted superior nutritionals to what existed previously then you had big trends in craft beer and flavored RTDs which were you know light beer might not have that flavor we want to like have the nutritionals but the flavor and where non-alcoholic beer comes in is all the experience superior nutritionals it's about 20 30% of the calories plus all the flavor of great craft beer and it's emerging in this new big mega trend that I think has really good line of sight to be the next huge thing in beer and I'm a very delusionaly optimistic person but I do think non-alcoholic beer will be significantly bigger than craft beer and a huge part of the overall beer category in the future yeah where where else in beer is there like meaningful growth well that's also the problem too is every other like most CPG overall but especially bevelque all the innovation is like a one-for-one substitute for the same consumer in the same occasion and and even some of them are like you're substituting one thing for many like a THC drink is a one one for like six substitutes oh sure yeah and so what we're doing is we're bringing in like a lot of people drink our beers within the same night as alcohol our 80% of our consumers drink so we're bringing a lot of people back into the category plus 25% of our drinkers are new to beer altogether so like this is really additive to the beer world for the first time yeah and then yeah as you think about those occasions there's just a lot of occasions to layer in I guess on the broader beer category too the last few years have been the worst beer years of our generation in alcohol for a number of reasons I think part of it is the category is not connecting to the next wave of consumers if you look across the spokespeople in the major brand TV ads most of them in their 70s one of them in their 80s one brand is about to bring back an 87 year old spokesperson from 10 years ago so like this is a cohort this like this is not the cohort we need to meet like it is like we are bringing beer for the modern healthy active adult we have great aspirational athletes and chefs and people behind it but more than anything we're just trying to build like a really timeless brand and I could share more about our marketing and how we're thinking about that differently too I want to get to that but first I want to know about how is your business different or similar to other beer companies that are higher alcohol do you need to be 21 to buy this or you subject to the three tiered system can you sell this online what's different or similar to just higher alcohol beer distribution in sales yeah I mean as a finance chat coming into this category I was like wow there is there is no tech in the sector and there is margin everywhere yeah and like I very quickly got on the ground and realized that there's a lot of reasons why like beer distributors are great at what they do it's an incredibly capital intensive they're basically big logistics business and so we do largely plug into the three tier system but that's our opt-in and then we legally you don't have to necessarily because you're regulated slightly differently correct and then we were the first beer brand to launch nationally on D to C also and so that was like an absolutely enormous marketing advantage where you know any high-flying brewery of the 2010s you'd have to wait in line outside of the brewery for a limited release in the locale where you know we could we could lose tons of money shipping beer all across the country so I mean is there any age restriction not in most states now but yeah typically it's you know we we're trying to establish it for adults in typical beer occasions celebrating life special moments yeah I'm mostly trying to catch Tyler because I saw him grab one and if if there's some rule that he's violating I'm gonna call the cops right now I mean we are huge on the Michigan campus and you know we like some I mean some of the like just like colleges across the country were enormous this next generation is so much more moderate than prior generations and I think the perception of alcohol has changed something like 14 percentage points in three years which you know it's it's happening really fast talk about the the formulation process a little bit not to go too far back but a lot of folks when they're doing a CPG project they go to a co-packer and they get a dog and pony show and they come out and they're like we form the perfect thing for you or flavor house or some supplier they tell you this is the best thing possible and then if you're not sharp sort of the dog and pony show can kind of overpower you was there any any point where you were working with a manufacturer and you had to sort of override them or what was the the initial scale up like it's really been all internal since day one yeah I I basically put my life savings into our first 10,000 square foot warehouse gateway jugs me and john salaries a bit and then raised raised an angel round to build that first brewery that 120 meetings huge rejection percentage but yeah in that we wanted to approach it in a totally different way and so we're confident we arrived at the point I feel like a consumer is the one category where you just really don't know until you start selling the product like I can easily imagine getting this pitch and just being in the mindset of like like if I'm if I want to drink a beer I want I want alcohol and it just turns out it's like totally just totally false right I wanted to ask I know you did a ton of like community IRL marketing early on and I wanted to ask you about how you advise other consumer brands when they're early on and thinking about how to spend their time what channels to really focus on because for a certain consumer categories if somebody's like yeah we're going to really focus on events and community I'm just looking at them being like you should just sell the product like just sell the product like spend all your time selling the product whereas you guys like I know invested a lot in the in kind of the running running world and saw 10 agree results yeah I mean by invested a lot like a lot of my time and weekends yeah we had no more resources after all the stainless steel to put it in the marketing so that was like all on us but yeah just touching quickly on two things you said there where like a lot of people both a don't contemplate non-alcoholic beer they're almost like non-considers and then think they don't like the taste of beer are two things we like combat like over and over again because like it really is hard to imagine non-alcoholic beer and the social experience until you actually experience the social experience with that alcohol and you're like oh like I kind of really like this I'm actually in it for my friends the food the moment and not the alcohol that mostly hits you after the moment that was like a big lie bolt to me and the thing we hear all the time is people say oh I don't like the taste of beer well actually the ingredient a lot of people don't like in beers the ethanol which at times is up to like 80 85 percent of the calories of beer like in a normal light beer the ethanol calories is more than 80 other calories of like the 95 to 100 calories and so we actually do have a pretty big flavor advantage too and like no comparison large brand yeah on the the in real life too that was almost at necessity like I was like going around our early grocery stores like Whole Foods and nobody was even looking at the non-alcoholic beer shelf and so I was like okay I got to get out in the world and bring people in and so I like I was running a lot of races and like trail up marathons and Spartan races anyway and so I just started pouring beer at those giving out hundreds of beers a weekend and getting people to like to the actual like table and trying the beer where they're like happy sweaty thirsty and actually considering it so how do you yeah how do you measure success with an initiative like that you're pouring you're you're sampling with people you're seeing their reaction are you trying to like are you already at that time stocked in shelves and local stores and then you're trying to like see hey if I if I do like a bunch of weekends back to back am I going to see an uptick and sell through or is it more just like this is like I'm basically spending my time to get more people aware of the brand and I have more time than I have capital yeah we have down to zip code and store level sales and so I was able to see like ripples fairly quickly could run regressions on that separately like it has to be authentic to the brand proposition like everything about this brand like the canned the mountains the outdoor aesthetic the taste was like all out of me and john's life and like primarily my life and so where I was going to market the brand and talk to people were like I didn't have to like go to a focus group or google where people like me hang out because it was all built around me and so I have seen a lot of people like try to bring non-alcoholic spirits to like races and it's just like it's like absolutely laughably terrible fit but you can tell some DCs to start pushing someone up to yeah they heard you on a podcast and they're like yeah let's just run it and I'll do the same thing it'll have the same thing we did also take a very intentionally like long track with things to wear so like that like yeah talking to someone face to face is very unscalable and like doing things digitally is so much more scalable and awareness but like if you do it enough and if you're doing it all the time all of a sudden it is scalable on a long time horizon and even up until this year last year we probably did 2,500 events as a company and handed out well over a million samples probably in all 50 states and three other countries and so those things do scale over time and then we've been really consistent with our marketing messages too you know I knew my core skill site isn't like me being a social media persona and like just turning on the cameras all the time we wanted to create a timeless brand that just compounds over time we talk about the same things like over and over again I think of it somewhat is like a red bull model of advertising consistency where most of CPG these days is like chasing that next hit it's like you've got to be on the next trend you've got to be like the next video's got to be a home run yeah or even shorter duration like celebrity trends you know we've had upwards of 10 celebrities into our category we have a whole range of superheroes at this point and it's so funny because you probably know all of them you could list them all off and I've never heard of any of them and that tells you everything about the level of focus and actually it's probably harder to watch their movies now yeah well we've got one more at least one more superhero coming into the category this year this one's being launched at us from a French castle you know it's gonna be draped in Americana imagery so we're excited for that one but there's all different taxes like the short-term celebrity spike and like hope you can ride it where we've kind of just done the thing and been authentic like who we are inside the walls is who we are outside the walls over and over again I think that really compounds over time and matches with our like manufacturing strategy our continuous investments and quality every one of our teammates is full-time teammates and like all this capital investment is it looks really good right now but in 2018 this was super out of oak for sure yeah yeah well yeah the beautiful thing with CBG it is it is incredibly competitive you are gonna do if you're successful at all you'll deal with a million knockoffs and new entrants but you can look backwards and say like or even just look at your business today and realize like even with everything you know now imagine trying to compete with yourself from zero by it would be an absolute nightmare you know so it's just the the benefits of great product operational excellence and then compounding talk more about the decline in alcohol assumption amongst young people what are you seeing in the data how real is the trend and what are the key drivers of what's going on yeah how much basically how much does the alcohol industry I hate Andrew Eberman he basically he basically needs to be in witness protection yeah the the new dietary guidelines were basically like don't not drink alcohol it was like it was like as close to don't drink alcohol as it gets and the industry was like yeah but at the end of the day like I think a lot of this is potentially skewed by covid and you know generations that were maybe like I mean if you go back to the start of our careers it was so easy like I lived above a bar in the West Village in the New York and like I had friends in that bar every afternoon it was so easy to find where people were after work and I I feel for this generation that like is kind of losing the work happy hours the mentorship and stuff and I don't think we're going to have generations that don't love social connection and blowing off steam and having fun I think the industry and the world has to meet people where they're at and so I do think they'll normalize but I also don't think you know in a world of cell phones and videos always on and like high work performance expectations it's going to be really tough to get back those like volume drinkers as well so I think you've got a layer in more occasions throughout the week you've got to find ways to keep people at bars longer with moderate beverages so I the industry on the alcohol side will have continued volume challenges and then there's like new non-alcoholic functional drinks too of which THC is the most obvious and those are not like high volume drinks either so yeah they're low volume and they destroy your sleep so yeah no fan talk to me about label claims uh the only real label claim that I see on here is non-alcoholic brew um it doesn't say it has creatine in it or protein or caffeine or anything else any protein but I mean you guys have you guys have you guys ever have you ever made like a uh have you been tempted currently of the protein beer the high protein beer we've 50 grams why not we've had some fond with like caffeine and protein okay funny videos and stuff um I I do think there could be a world of functional beers in the future but I I also think like beer and function is like just kind of different things for the most part and so um but that being said like one of the hardest things of starting a CPG business is like the plaintiff's bar and all the like how tight the FTC rules are from website to label claims to everything and there are a thousand eyes waiting people for people to misstep even the smallest trip wires and yeah that was right earlier last year there was somebody there was a viral brand doing like nicotine drinks yeah and that that uh but at the same time I mean I just look like it was like okay you you're just you're just making stuff and talent at this George you don't think an athletic for loco could work an athletic loco athletic loco that has a nice ring to it no that one got me what's the what's the scale of the business today um steadily compounding um I guess we we've moved into like the top five of overall crappies out of 10,000 crappers top 20 beer producers overall yeah we passed um 100 million in revenue in 2024 and have been growing very healthy double digits since then last year was the worst beer year of our lifetime probably and we had really strong growth into that and you know we're just coming back with more exciting partnerships more marketing spend next year as a business grows and kind of steadily just chugging along and you know comparable I think could be the energy during category which red bull really put on the map in the 90s monster arrived in like 2002 and those brands didn't have a lot of 100% years it was just a like five to 15% compounder for 25 years and that's really what we're looking for also it's just to like make really high quality beer timeless marketing and just ride that health and well in this way yeah that's always the I feel like founders can get a big carried away of like I'm making an energy drink look how big monster is it's like or look how big red bull is it's like you don't they didn't just like be like oh yeah we just executed well for six years and suddenly we're a 50 billion dollar company it's like decades and decades and decades and I think I I get excited about TVG founders that are like you know I think of like Peter with David where he he doesn't want to sell out to the last gen he wants to just compound launch new products launch new brands to get to the point where he is the the the 800 pound gorilla industry and so I'm sure you've had a bunch of opportunities to sell and turn them down to date so I'm a fan of the compounding well you guys know better than ever too like the rules of private capital have totally changed since we launched the business and we have like an amazing cap table through all that rejection I went through and just people who are super excited about we're doing with a really long time horizon and you know there's the whole public versus private debate and like do we want to go public and spend 80% of our time on the regulatory of that versus how great it is for awareness and then the public can also invest in the business for like super fans in it so there's a lot of push pull on public versus private too that we're working out. Are you getting any pushback from other alcoholic beer producers we saw this with the milk lobby pushing back against like the alternative milks and saying how you can't use the word milk. Are there words you can't use? There's actually like the alcohol industry definitely tries to put up walls around things like this we can't use like all the normal beer words like logger stout ale like you name it and so like we have to call our Mexican logger copper for example our stout a dark but I do did look at like those analogs and beyond me and companies like that and how they made enemies with the incumbent industry and you know we want to make it really clear from day one like we're not out to stay in our soapbox and kill alcohol like we're here to add to it bring a lot of new consumers into it and actually create a really new exciting viable part of the industry that just helps build the whole thing so yeah definitely learnings from that. Well thank you so much for coming on time thanks for all the drinks here we're working through it we're working through it. I mean it says under half a percent I think if I drink 50 of these I can get a buzz going so how are high waters. Yeah there's a major placebo effect so it's like having one with lunch on stressful work days or like my commute beers my favorite beer time one like yeah it's like all these new occasions. I like it. It's delicious yeah so thank you so much for taking the time to come. Yeah great great to meet you super super impressed with everything as it built and come back on anytime. Anytime. Yeah thank you so much. Love the show thanks so much. We'll talk to you soon. Good bye. Cheers. Let me tell you about Turbo Puffer serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. It's fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable our next. Switching years just a little bit. We're going from non-oncruing to AGI. We have Pat Grady and Sonia Wong from Sequoia Capital in the History Blanery welcome. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Cheers. Thanks for having us. It's Friday. It's been way too long Pat. We missed you too. Most shows it's like you know maybe once a year we'll have someone on. I like that. I like that we can just get you every week. We'll start scheduling next week's appearance too. Sonia it's also been too long. We enjoyed the candles that you sent us after our last hang out here. I'm so glad. I think you're the ideas for this year swag. Just wait. Yes. It's the conference. It's still called AIS send. It's going to be on 420 this year. So that'll give you room. Yeah you were early to the whole ascend trend. Everyone's talking about ascending this year and so it's just a great brand for you guys. I love it. Anyway take me through the article 2026. This is AGI. Why were you writing it now? What was the one thing that you saw? Was the inciting element? Don't you start? I think there were two. Let me start with there were two purposes to the article and there was something that we saw that catalyzed the article. One purpose was to kind of put a stake in the ground because there's this thing that people call the AI effect where once the technology is actually out there and working we stop to believe that it's AI and we start to just call it by the specific name of the technology. That's not AI. That's just RLHF. And so there's this mythical quest for AGI and best we can tell we're there. Yeah. And so we just kind of want to put a stake in the ground and say hey look we're there and then you say okay well what's the point of doing now? Why put a stake in the ground? Well that leads to purpose number two of the article which is it is time this is meant to be a call to arms for founders. It is time to take stock of what capabilities are available in the world today and apply those to real world problems as vigorously as possible. And so there is enough great technology out there available to founders today to go solve so many real world problems and particularly what we've seen over the last couple of months and this is kind of the triggering thing for the article with cloud code and opus 45 and these long horizon agents which to us are kind of the tipping point that's gotten us into AGI like in particular what is possible now with that is sort of the third big inflection point of the last five years is pretty remarkable. And so it's kind of meant to be a call to arms. Yeah we're not helping because we have physical goalposts here. Yeah exactly. We always should take the goalposts off if we've achieved it. No, no, let's just mount let's mount it to the ground like we actually have to bring it. You're smelled AGI stuff was amazing. Yeah see it's there we're there. We're there. We do. Congratulations. You're in the goalpost now. You're physically in the goalposts because you have declared AGI. Take me through a little bit of the history of Sequoia, the history of previous technological revolutions. I don't remember a you know a 1999 this is internet but as you reflect on the work the firm has done what can you tell us and what can you share about how the firm has processed these you know broad proclamations about the impact of technologies that are coming and then arrival dates when they are ready and that maybe changes the stance of the firm. Yeah I love that as a question so thank you for asking that. We've been pretty quiet historically as a partnership and so this idea sharing our thoughts with the world is is kind of new and hopefully it's a useful service to the founder community. If you go back to our founding so 1972 and Don Valentine started Sequoia Capital he was the go-to-market guy at a company called Fairchild Semiconductor which is a household name for people who studied the history of Silicon Valley but but not really outside of that. It was kind of like the opening eye of its day or is the envy of its day like it was the it company of its day because it was the first company to to really commercialize Silicon based transistors like it was kind of the company that gave Silicon Valley its name and as the go-to-market guy that company Don's job was to take this magical new capability and figure out how to apply it to real world problems. Yeah make it use make it useful. Make it useful and that sort of led him into venture capital because a lot of his customers were these founders and he just kind of fell in love with them and their quest to build these businesses and so I mentioned that because we grew out of this Semiconductor Revolution where all of a sudden computation is a thing that was available to the masses we move from that into systems in the next generation with the with the apples and the oracles you know taking these chips and turning them into more computing systems we move from that into the networking and PC era where all of a sudden you have endpoints on it on every desk and every office thanks to the PC and you can connect them all up with networks thanks to Cisco and the router we move from that into a more sophisticated form of networking which is known as the internet we move from that into applications which are a more sophisticated way to make use in the internet those applications start to show up on mobile devices and then eventually now that everybody has one of these mobile devices in their pocket there's an enormous amount of data people started doing interesting stuff with data and now we have AI and so this lineage of Silicon Valley is kind of built up over the decades and each successive wave has built on the one that's come before and and being in this very fortunate position to kind of be in the mix on a lot of these transitions and and actually being the only partnership that's kind of made it through these different tectonic shifts and kind of has a sense of the knowledge you know gives us this broader view on okay what's the importance knowing what we know about past tectonic shifts what's the importance of the current moment and and with that I'll hand it off to Sonia because Sonia was the one who you know three four years ago prior to the release of Chatchee PT kind of called this for what it was and put out the original generative AI host back in back in the fall of 2022 yeah the other thing I think that's interesting about this moment is I feel like people have had this sense of like AGI will be here when it's just like so obvious in the economic data and like that's like that's when it'll really feel like okay that's when you can declare it of like it's here it's working the economy and I think part of why I appreciated your guys' pieces it's like it actually is going to require a lot of human agency and like human application of this it's not just gonna it may not just like happen fully organically running away by itself right and yeah I wanted I want to hear from you Sonia but I wanted to ask like has there been any type of shift in in founders coming and pitching Sequoia with like an entirely like I felt like last year I kept seeing like agent businesses that were exciting and the teams were talented but I felt like they were just in many cases just like kind of rebranded SaaS it's like okay like you're pitching me this as an agent but like if I log into the product it's gonna look like traditional software and maybe that's the this maybe maybe SaaS is ever green and we're just going to live in dashboards forever but I've I kept wanting like wanting like more basically and I think we have started to see some new paradigms but has there been any type of shift in terms of the companies coming in where maybe somebody spent a few years at a lab and they're like okay we're actually going to kind of we've seen the future and now we're going to really reinvent the you know the entire product experience from the ground up based on this new set of capabilities. I'll start but that is our app layer guys so you should you should talk as well um we from this with one of our posts like from talkers to doers and I think maybe that describes a little bit of what you're describing of like first iteration um at gen AI companies um including some of the the great ones like it did feel like you know it was it was a it was a the next generation of SaaS was how it felt like um they weren't actually getting work done for you um part of the reason for this Paul the arm is like we're going from talkers to doers which is and I think it is both the long horizon agent is the thing but it's both the underlying model capabilities and the harness around it so like that these models can now take action and iterate and persist in the world around us um and so what we're seeing now is that founders are selling companies that are not just doing the you know the you know newer brighter newer shining your version of SaaS but actually something that takes real agency and takes real time horizons to execute so for example a traversal in the troubleshooting space like when there's a bug that goes down data dog says like ding ding ding there's an issue um typically you have a war room that goes back in triage is what the hell happened goes back and scrolls through dashboards goes through traces etc eventually root causes it fixes it um this is a you know several hour to um day long process for companies that's funny to think of the it's it's funny to think of the human analog there it's like if you have an employee that comes to you and they just tell you there's a problem and they're not doing anything about it they're just like we got a big problem here boss and you're like okay okay like what are you doing about it and it's like so traversals like okay like we're actually going to be what a good employee would do which is like we have a problem here's like how we're going to fix it and hopefully it's just solved before it even gets to you right exactly and so in this case there is no SaaS equivalent to that right this it doesn't even feel like SaaS it feels like talking to a co-worker and that's why the litmus test here is you know are you are you so can you actually sell work and say the founders that came into our door a few years ago they all sell that vision like it's it's not it's not a new idea that you can build agents I think what's new is that you can actually execute on that vision because these models are finally smart enough capable enough to actually stay on the rails where you can just let them run yeah I would say founders have done a really nice job of making use of what is available technologically at the time and I think I think over the last five years we kind of had three big inflection points you know inflection point one was chat GPT when we saw the benefits of pre-training and pre-training kind of gives you baseline world knowledge and some kind of instinctive judgment so to speak inflection point number three was late 2024 when oh one came out and we had a reasoning and so the ability to kind of take your time and really think through particular questions and come up with deeper answers and better conclusions and then inflection point number three has sort of been these last couple of months where we saw the impact of these long horizon agents and so you've got some baseline knowledge you can do some reasoning over that knowledge now you can actually bail recover stay on task persist all the way through to some sort of an outcome and I think if you map those three capabilities to the applications that people have built it's no surprise that the initial applications were kind of like good Q&A or good summarization or good basic content generation like it was the stuff that pre-training sort of gives you the next generation of those agents could could think a little bit harder you know like in the case of in the case of notion as an example which I think is done a really good job of staying on top of all this stuff you know you could now it's how notion okay can you build me a database and it can actually reason through like what kind of database do you need how should I build then it can actually build you a database it's pretty good and then now with with these long horizon agents we're finally getting to the point where you can make a couple of mistakes you can take a test a couple hypotheses and you can actually iterate your way toward the right outcome and so look at again you can look at a notion and you can effectively have your personal chief of staff doing stuff that you would otherwise be doing while you are in a meeting running in the background you know or in the case of Harvey you can effectively deploy an AI associate after a data room or a deposition or some other legal workflow it actually complete it into end while you're doing something else and so I think this maybe one way to put it is with this third inflection point you don't have to babysit the model you can just like give it instructions and let it go and you can have a few instances of it running in parallel and you you kind of go from this is a cool tool that allows me to be more productive to holy cow this is kind of like a team of co-workers that I have at my disposal yeah totally help me reconcile these two things that I'm feeling simultaneously I agree with your declaration the call to action the just the idea of so much opportunity for founders to use a GI to create all sorts of different value and products and services at the same time towards the back half of 2025 I was seeing Ilya on door cash talking about hey maybe we're in age of research and Richard Sutton and Andre Carr-Pathy talking about some of the more some of the more restrictive aspects of the research progress and so is that something else that we're working on how are you thinking about the progress that's happening in more purely research contexts what even needs to happen there your role as venture capitalists in helping that happen how do you blend those two things that both feel true but are but feel somewhat at odds I think it's an end and we're putting our money on both in both camps okay like on the research side there's there's absolute fundamental research that needs to be done right now yeah I'm personally I don't know if you've you guys have read Dave Silver and Rich Sutton's age of experience paper like that to me kind of outlines the premise like we're going from you know learning from existing data internet data et cetera yeah I was like the paradigm for pre-training to running from experience which is like reinforcement learning the paradigm is you interact with the environment you get reward signals you improve yeah and so I think there's a lot that's going to happen in terms of learning from experience and and have been following you know what rich Sutton's doing with keen yeah and very excited about some of that direction I'll give you an example also we back to company called recursive intelligence they formally help the chip at Google and this is like recursive chip designs of similar to in the game of go you can have you can play the agent can play itself and get superhuman at go you can actually get superhuman at chip design and very surprising things come out of that like you end up having chip design that looks you know not like them in Hatton distance kind of like square grid stuff you actually have what looks kind of like alien like chip design layouts and so we are absolutely back in research labs but then if you if you freeze research progress where it is I am convinced there is so much value to be built in the world and it's just like it's it's just lacking founders like agencies to actually go out and and and productize and build companies around those like one of my samples go ahead I was going to say how are you guys thinking about like more passive product experiences because people talk about agents and most of the time they're talking about like giving agents tasks like hey go do this thing and spend as much time as you need on it and you know we'll see the result right like selling work but when you think about actually working with people some of the best employees are just without direct guidance constantly doing work in the background and coming to you only when maybe they need some type of like input and so it's like more like you're just kind of reacting to the work that they're doing and and giving guidance and so an example I would think of is you know with Harvey it's like if somebody sends me legal docs I should get a some type of notification from Harvey really when it's when it's already done some type of like I already jumped on it already did the work you only done so I'm not even worried about yeah I'm just I'm getting a ping from Harvey hey you should pay attention to this thing yeah you're gonna need to make a decision here I've done all the work and so and even like with an email experience like I would love to log into my email and not see just like the order at which the emails came in but like here's three decisions you need to make and again like when you work with great people they're gonna if they have five minutes of your time they don't just tell you here's the last 20 things that's happened they're like here's the three things that you need to make a decision on and so I'm really excited to see more of these like passive product experiences where the work is just being done and you only need to chime in when it's really necessary or if you're actually a bottleneck yes I think this is a great question and a great direction and to me this kind of gets at the software as a service versus services as a software you know the the nature of software is really changing as we go from an era of apps to an era of agents in the era of apps you want a lot of surface area with your customers you want them to spend a lot of time in your product you want to put workflows around them they're going to be really sticky that they're going to get accustomed to in an era of agents to your point things can just be running passively in the background the actual amount of surface area you have with your customers might be de minimis the amount of time they spend in your product might be de minimis so the nature of the mode that you build is different and the nature of the mode that you build kind of what Sony was saying with the age of experience it's all about context it's all about like the environmental context of the job that you are trying to achieve and the feedback that that agent gets as it runs off and does something and comes back and you say actually you know like you did this part a little bit a little bit wrong you need to do this part a little bit different and I think in a perfect world you have something you have something like what Harvey does which you know Harvey kind of bridges that gap where there are workflows today for people who want to do the work kind of how they've done it in the past just a lot better faster cheaper with the benefit of the AI brain and you can deploy agents to go out and do the work on your behalf and then come back to you when it is done and I think that I think that I think we'll see a lot of that over the next handful of years where there are companies who can kind of bridge that gap where they can live in the software world and have some of the workflows better workflows because of the AI but some of the workflows people might be accustomed to and then separately they can deploy in the background with these passive agents that kind of function as co-workers who just come back to you when things are done but it's two very different like design paradigms it's two very different business paradigms the fact that there's a different is one of the reasons why I think it's going to be tricky for a lot of the incumbent you know software companies to make the leap the same way as tricky for a lot of on-prem companies to make the leap to cloud yeah can you help me understand where you sit on the level of software eating the world we talked to Tyler Cowan about one of the problems with AGI showing up in economics statistics is that AGI needs to live in a digital realm it has to affect the digital economy the services economy and that there's so much of the GDP is made up of the healthcare sector non-profit sector he highlights a number of sectors that are sort of AGI resistant or AI resistant and so that's why he has longer timelines for significant impact to the overall GDP figures do you agree with that or do you think that there's something different about AGI that should allow tech to finally move the needle on those stickier industries well I do think as like I fully agree with the premise that you know this AGI stuff is only good it's only embodied in the digital world right now right and so like we we seem to be you know getting tantalizing close to solving the entire digital world that is very exciting at some point the physical world does become the next bottleneck yep I think exciting thing is actually that like hey robotics is also going through Renaissance right now as well like some of the smartest people are going out and working on robots and so I do think like similar the pace of progress is so high right now and I didn't think we're going to have digital embodiment that was reliable this early and now you can just let the thing run on your machine I think that increasingly we're going to get to physical embodiment and we're going to have a smooth curve there I do agree with the premise of like if you want if you believe in the super fast takeoff recursive self-improving like you know everything is just going to you know go vertical line like I just yeah we're not going to get there we're not going to get there without the physical world but probably not going to get there even if we have the physical world I just think the reality life is is really messy so I don't think we're at we're at ASI we're not at that kind of like takeoff moment whatsoever that's not the stake at the ground that we're putting but we're almost saying here is hey guys is this quasi religious concept of AGI like is the thing you know in general intelligent and you know instead of just waiting for it to arrive it's here let's let's let's build that here that's yeah there's so much there's there's such a there's kind of this toxic idea that I feel like is ingrained in so many people's head which is like AGI is just going to do that yeah like AGI is just going to do that I was like AGI is going to cure cancer yeah and it's like it's at least in the near term yeah from everything we're seeing it's going to be a human properly you know a group of talented people properly using the tools to solve all the most pressing problems that we have and so it's been and and for young people it's extremely paralyzing to be like in 2027 I'm either dead or billionaire retired on a space yacht and so I can probably just chill for the next two years because it's what are going to be one of the other no and I worry that I worry that we'll have the sort of like lost generation of people that have let yeah be ingrained in their head that it's not worth trying no now is the time to build enterprise sats even even I heard it from the choir capital getting the arena folks yeah I feel I feel bad because seriously I feel bad because a friend of mine was pitching me this idea of like an an agent to help consumers switch between like insurance products like an insurance company will will sell you in a policy and then I'll just kind of jack up the price a little bit every year because they assume a lot of people won't switch in a churn yeah and at the time I think Chats GPT agent had come out and I was just like dude like like the the labs are going to like one shot this problem like right like I think pretty quickly I think you could work on this for like you know six months and get steamrolled and like it's very possible that like if he had just focused on that one yeah it'd be a decent business you wouldn't figure that's a unique and it's a big category and so I felt bad there's lots of examples how much do you guys I wanted to ask like like like processing signal because obviously there's so much noise right now and something that I've appreciated is kind of comparing like the X timeline to the App Store charts because every single day on the X timeline like vibes are fluctuating and some news will break or some product will be released in the common response is like it's so over for XYZ company and then you look at the App Store chart and it's like the company that just launched the thing is like not actually even in the picture at all like they're not in the top 25 of any category and so like I feel like there's this insane disconnect between the real world the real world is using chat GBT all the time but they're clearly not paying attention to X our little bubble so it's like where are you guys really looking for signal and noise especially in the later stages where you know the you're you're investing in companies that should be out in the real world at some point yeah hopefully look before I get to that point I think it is so amazing that like all of this AI discourse is happening on X right now like you could imagine world where you know all this dialogue was like happening in behind closed doors or you know scattered across different channels the fact that it's all next is amazing and you know it's a combination of a research and not takes what's happening in the lab it's like it's I think it's awesome that's all happening in one place it's remotely for young people they can just like jump in and learn by osmosis and understand yeah it'd be bad if it was only happening in valonore Valor I still have to figure out what the Alps comment was about but but putting that aside like yes our like our job is like you know you know to kind of try to piece signal from the noise we have we're obviously doing everything we can in the background credit card panels web signals etc and I'll say like sometimes we see a you know trending web signal take on X and it's just it's just like we look at our own source of the ground truth the example like this some of the stuff on you know chat GPT is losing losing market share we actually cut it by like US US web traffic it's a very different story and so for us it's like it's really important that we're on X I think all of that all the discourse happening here very important but then like let's get to graduate mostly just know that as venture capitalists if someone refers to you as smog it's sort of a compliment but also sort of a dig so that's what you need to know in terms of Lord of the Rings references for for where you sit in the ecosystem specifically smog is the dragon that hordes all the gold and isn't antagonist in the hobbit but does have the gold which is kind of like what you do you know you got a lot of capital over there it's a coagapital sorry Jordy no what we're gonna say bad bad sorry oh I was just gonna say you know to the question on signal yeah you know interesting one of the big themes of the last few years on on X thanks to Lulu is the go direct idea and I think for us go direct is a little bit of try to you know let the world know what we're thinking but probably even more so just go direct to the founders you know the best sort of signal we get as the founders we spend you know we spend many hours every day just meeting with founders out there doing interesting things and we kind of have the ability to do primary research that not everybody gets a chance to do and I think that's that's still the best source of signal yeah what's uh what what is changing in the AGI age in terms of adoption and uh just AI diffusing itself through the economy this is something that obviously every company has to deal with because they can build a great product but then they need to get it into businesses if they're in enterprise SaaS they need to get adoption make sure that it's being used correctly there's the forward deployed model there's self-serve models is anything changing there structurally or is it all just uh you know the same playbooks and one thought is like I think we're going from over the last decade we went from sales led growth to product led growth yeah I think we're going from product led growth to agent led growth okay and I think you see this most clearly actually if you're using for example cloud code act actively like it says hey you should use for database you should use super base uh for hosting use for sale etc and like it's using for you um the stuff you should be using and um I think increasingly like so it's it's most obvious to me with code like your agent is choosing your infrastructure um but I think it's going to happen across the entire economy like your chat chip team is going to tell you like hey this is the um this is the place uh this is the travel you should be booking this is the you know and and so I think we are going to back to channel channel sales like old school yeah old school but I think that the difference is like you don't have competing incentives here um and I think the open ag is treasuries like principles that I think are it's a very principled take on you know how do you want to tell users what users what to use and I think product led growth brought us closer to the vision of best product wins but like ultimately people are still lazy they can't read all these reviews they kind of default to like what looks cool on the website whereas agent led growth like your agent has remember your agent has infinite time to go and make this for you and so it can go and you know read all the documentation read all the user comments like figure out for your use case it also has an experience like building on top of the infrastructure it's like yeah like eventually it's like while you work yeah it feels like yeah reputation reputation management is going to be very important the way you show up in these LLMs is important both in the pre-training and in all the research that they do and then also this whole idea of like you know SaaS companies that don't have customers they have hostages well if it's one click or one prompt to re-platform from the database that has those trying to keep you hostage to the database that's trying to keep you happy yeah but it's also like I think it's good alignment compared to like if you're building a home yeah and like the the person like you know like running like the the construction firm that you choose like uses really bad cement yeah and then you have like a terrible foundation like you're going to be mad at you're actually going to be mad at that like the firm sure like why did you pick this yeah you know this is like and so I do think there's a good alignment where it's like the best like you're saying the best product should win yeah because the the agent is incentivized to make sure that you're on the best like footing and using the best product yeah cost is the factor quality reliability all these things I do think there's that good alignment that makes sense agent can have accelerate this you know best product wins notion and best product for the human is maybe different like best product the agents in terms fantastic well thank you so much for taking the time to come and chat with us today have a great weekend and we'll talk to you soon Pat will see you next week two for two for two have a great see you guys have a great Friday goodbye phantom cash fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card meet phantom cash and you read special a Sequoia capital company we have some breaking news before we bring in Sean Frank Sam Altman has taken to the timeline he posts the melting smiley face emoji with a screenshot from Elon's court filing the the in the court filing here's what it said musk insisted that any new entity quote support the nonprofit mission and that open AI remain quote essentially a philanthropic endeavor now Sam Altman's putting it in the truth zone he says here are the actual September 2017 call notes from Elon coming weeks top priority got to figure out how we transition from nonprofit to something which is essentially philanthropic endeavor and is be corp or see corp or something must tell the story and not lose moral high ground absolutely vital so we'll see if we'll see how Elon reacts to that but if that is the case Sam Altman is upset about he says Elon is cherry picking things to make Greg look bad but the full story is that Elon was pushing for a new structure and Greg and Ilya spent a lot of time trying to figure out if they could meet his demands I remember a lot of this but here's a part I had forgotten quote Elon said he wanted to accumulate 80 billion dollars for a self-sustaining city on Mars and that he needed and deserved majority equity he said that he needed full control since he'd been burnt by not having it in the past and when we discussed succession he surprised us by talking about his children controlling AGI I appreciate people saying what they want and think it enables people to resolve things or not this is Sam speaking he's no longer quoting but Elon saying he wants the above is important context for Greg trying to figure out what he wants and hopes revenge says oh my god girl he's such a snake the drama continues the drama continues on the timeline well let me tell you about app loving profitable advertising made easy with axon dot AI get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today and we have a happy app loving customer in the restream waiting room we have Sean Frank from Ridge he's the CEO welcome to the show how you do oh good to see you we got the hello what's this is that the winter Olympics always the USA it is the newest drop guys you guys like it I put on this for you insane fantastic fantastic same brought the brought the okay so emergency podcast we have way we wanted to have you on because opening i introduced ads how quickly are you thinking about ramping up testing it out what is most of our waiting in line at opening i'd have tried to be the first to know joke we are we would be the first advertiser if they let us you know we measure a lot of traffic are still rich and the most like revenue per user out of all traffic ever i mean google branded meta whatever is chatchy pt we get like twelve dollars from every one of those sessions and it like you know for meta you'd be lucky to get a dollar per user right so the revenue procession from a AI user is just through the roof and you know we have some data i don't know if you want to share it out but like north beam put up their 2025 report and they track you know probably two thousand merchants billions of dollars in revenue and AI search in January was like point oh one percent of all traffic on all the commerce websites and now it's like point seven so it's just like shout through the roof yeah yeah and there's not ads yet as soon as ads roll out i am so excited okay we would expect the dollar per user to fall based on ads correct but do you still expect them to be high intent because there were you know we were talking about Thompson about this and he was saying that they should have launched two years earlier because it's going to take a while for the ads product to work its way up i imagine that the the chatchy pt users that land on your website are super high intent because they've probably been asking chatchy pt about your product specifically or wallet specifically or product specifically uh now if they're researching the Roman Empire and they just see a little ad at the end that you purchased and it's not targeted at all they might click on and check it out but it's probably going to be lower intent how optimistic are you about chatchy pt ads delivering at a level above facebook quickly well google is drawing out their direct AI offer right and what that is is if someone asks hey what are the best gifts for dads right they're going to have that specific you know question yeah i can now bid to show up with an offer for those people it's like hey the rich wall it's a really good gift for dads yeah and they're going to give you 20% offer right now if you click this link right so it's incredibly bottom of the funnel like people who are ready to purchase and that's google's ad offering inside of the i and that's coming out soon so i think that i was like what push chatchy pt over the ice chowel this out they probably do a carbon copy of that so it's not going to be discovery ads like you get on a apple oven or a neta right what it's going to be is um you know like that last point of sale almost like an affiliate like push you over the door like a honey competitor or whatever which i think is do it would you be unhappy if uh the offering was just give us a dollar amount per customer and we'll go find you customers uh something that's fully black box you're not doing any demographic targeting no keyword targeting or would you like those features well that is historically if you can tell somebody like here's 20 bucks find me customers and you're you just look at your average order size that's like the holy grail of advertising but it usually ends up being yeah bit more but but is the is the initial product that they roll out it doesn't matter to you or we just take what they what they give you yeah it's it's what we've seen the organic traffic from any AI search is already so valuable right um anyway to get more of that we would we would spend a lot of money for but you know the beauty of the facebook ad product is that they've figured out a way to take half of everybody's revenue right like affiliate is like people give it up yeah i'll take you do the work i'll take half yeah take talk shop affiliate people don't want to give more than 15 percent of a sale they're like oh that is too much right but all performance marketing is is just a is affiliate in a different coat right it's like they're they're able to like oh you're gonna generate your demand and if you have a better offer you'll get a better return right but really they just figured out exactly how much money they could take from everybody at the optimal level and that's why they do a hundred billion dollars here in revenue um so if the offer from jgbt inside all sam altman is hey give us 40 percent of your revenue and we'll give you new customers you wouldn't get otherwise i would take that deal because i'm already giving mark Zuckerberg 50 percent yeah one thing that's exciting is i think once people start seeing more once they start seeing ads for products they will just naturally start using elums for more product research like i still find myself if i'm like if i'm doing like product research i'll still go to google search quite a lot even though in many ways the experiences inferior just because i'm so trained on that and so i think like as they roll out ads they're just there's gonna be like more organic activity so hopefully as a brand you should be getting more people just landing on the site organically because they're just finding out uh finding out uh through their own research totally half of all product searches start on amazon so like amazon has been able to take over what the product search box from google but they spent 500 billion dollars in two decades doing it so if jgbt can start stealing some of that you know glow that amazon's been able to do they'll have an amazing affiliate business and ads business and whatever you yeah what do you what do you you guys sell a ton on amazon what do you think amazon's like play here really is because they obviously don't want to give up the golden goose of their massive ad revenue business uh they want to like protect that uh Alexa's like not even in the picture as far as i'm concerned in terms of like a shopping assistant so what's the play well you know amazon has a beautiful ad arbitrage system where they spend they're like the number one spender on amazon on meta and on google because they can spend two dollars to get a user and then those users click on a bunch of ads on amazon it's a free money machine that they've invented so yeah i think they would um we'll love the partner with everybody because once you're on amazon you're still gonna click around you're still gonna do shopping and they have an ad product the more interesting question is what is Shopify deal because you know Shopify is a product feedable these merchants right um but will they be able to win over any sort of of these deals they they don't have an ad product like they make all of their money on me hosted my website and then a percentage of the sales i drive and it's a very small percentage it's a payment processing company so it's like how are they going to survive if more and more of those transactions are happening inside of chat GPT or inside of Gemini i think amazon's fine they have a big enough product you know feed they could feed it everywhere and if you do come to amazon they get all their money back without the clicks but walk me through walk me through the risk to Shopify because if i am if i'm looking to there's a lot of there's a lot of brands like there's a ton of i would say like the real like shopping that i've done over the last five years is like almost always on Shopify stores right like amazon for like essentials and things like batteries and things of that nature but i feel like a lot of my uh like like um like lifestyle consumption is happening on Shopify and so you mentioned the that not having that like ad flywheel but am i not still like discovering ridge and just popping over to your Shopify store and like to complete the transaction and if they're effectively a payment processor like they're still making their money right well it's just if websites continue to be important like i you know i i'm i'm going to operate on the assumption that yeah but all but calling calling Shopify just like a website company like in my view it's like a catalog and it's a CRM and it's a payment processor oh for sure it has all those things incredibly well bro i'm so bullish on Shopify i love i love Shopify as a thing but the challenge is the website will become less important in the future just like mobile apps had a moment they're not important anymore where's less of you guys open to shopping mobile app and before that it was catalogs right so like the user experience has has become easier and easier and easier and the way you interact with brands has changed and i think the website will kind of be replaced just by asking chat to buy you stuff and maybe you'll still go to websites but kind of like how you still kind of open catalogs and i don't know about catalogs yeah straight in the recycling i'm like i did not ask for this totally right and that's just like the the worry of the website so show them as incredibly important for us but they do have to plug into every single lm right they have to be that product feed everywhere and yeah but i think they're they're they've taken the approach of just like being more quick to partner with the lm's than an amazon has because again they don't have that same like they have like less to lose right they're not worried because they don't have an ad business they're not like i feel like amazon has to be a lot more when you look at the when you look at the marketplaces that have partnered with chat Gbt it's like etsy right etsy doesn't really have anything to lose right like they're they just want more traffic more more sales like they'll take it however they can get it whereas like amazon has something to lose right you know and it was big news when Shopify partnered with chat gbt intel amazon partner with chat gbt and amazon comes with an equity round but like now all of those products are going to be feeding chat gbt and that's one of the the worries of Shopify it's like how do you stand out right now it's like beautiful brands with beautiful websites with shopping experiences and that is different from what amazon offers but if all of those products are just going to be discoverable inside of chat gbt and competing for the same space i didn't know the value of my website in three years like that's one thing that we're we're worried about it right now well what about ad creative there's this weird trend where d2c companies were effectively making tv commercials with tv production techniques cinema cameras high res photos what not but wound at what what wound up working on tiktok and instagram reels and youtube shorts was a lot of u gc a lot of stuff shot on iphone a lot of stuff that feels more natural is there a world where maybe you want to get good at creating sore videos or or ai generated images even if they don't look like a real photo it looks more natural within that app within the chat app you're expecting to see ai images and so you want to lean into ai image versions of your products even if the background is a little little crazy hallucinogenic it's what people will be used to they'll be in that mode yeah i think when chat gbt launches their ad product it's probably going to be thumbnails to websites with really aggressive offers yeah um but right now in our ad account if you guys go to the facebook ad library and pull up bridge we are running full blown ai videos right and they are they're getting spend a mayor winners in the ad account um so we're all probably underestimating how much is going to affect the ad industry it's like by the end of the year video is going to be if you want to make ai video it'll look just like human video and like the highest level productions are already being basically monopolized by ai and something i've been thinking about that feels inevitable is you know two years from now we'll look back and laugh that people would like make an ad and then serve the same ad to like a hundred thousand people or a million people because it's like if you're going to spend a lot of money serving somebody an ad you should serve them the most like hyper targeted like shan frank i have an athletic brewing company beer for here for you i got an offer for you shan just click the link and check out like eventually it will just get so so so so targeted that it's basically like ads are being generated on the fly for individual customers oh dude that's for sure coming meta is working on it and not only that they'll put you in the ads they'll be like hey look how cool you can look in the sweater you should buy the sweater and they want to do that because then the cpm's just co-up right now i get a twelve dollar cpm on meta they would much prefer me get a two hundred dollar cpm and just show way less ads to everybody right so i think that the personalization of ads is coming and we've already just seen it like in my ad account right now today maybe a third of all my spenders will be a i ads and that's crazy that's crazy double click on the the the a i ads that you're running are you running stuff that you could shoot that's indistinguishable from human photography human videography or is there a unique value to saying look there's just no way that we could take a ridge wallet to the top of Mount Everest shooting to space have it turned into cake have it turned into a cat like crazy stuff that's just impossible maybe with like a massive CGI budget but truly like breaking the laws of physics or are you just trying to do like hey it's just a ridge wallet on a beautiful background and you know we were able to generate that yeah so really what it is is you know we have walked with every college and let's say there's two hundred colleges in america right now i could get two hundred jerseys and i could get two hundred fans and i could have them talk about this particular wallet with this jersey with this fan like they're really bespoke ad and then serve it into a market like a file i could do that but that would cost i don't know eighty five thousand dollars to run that campaign or i can have one guy do it in one day with a higgs field or whatever right so that's what we're doing right now and are you guys using higgs field we're having them with the show in just a couple minutes yeah i love higgs field so yeah and i i don't think like you know i think normies are using chatchy pt now like it fully worked with through the mainstream but like i like the all of the the tools around that i mean everyone knows lovable they're both not new but like if you want to make a video that scale higgs feels like the best easiest way to do that yeah so the pipeline is you specifically want to multiply your creatives so you are filming one human video and then you're creating variations with a i is that the correct use case right now as a as that example no so so what we're doing is we we have b-roll of actual wallets being used that we've shot right but we need an opening hook of a a buckeye fan right in a joe's ear whenever so that is that is being done with a i an intro to the wallet guy okay and you can pull up a radica right now there's a woman like hunter she's walking talking about like hey like i want this for my husband he's like you know whatever that she's doesn't exist that is all right and it's because for us to find a woman hunter who's out in a field or whatever we could we could do that it would just take you know two days and it probably cost two thousand dollars and we can test that concept right now in real time inside the facebook ad library so it's going to be interesting i'm so curious to see what happens to the brands that like try to take like some type of like moral aesthetic or ethical high ground and just say like we never use a i and like what actually happens to those yeah it's like not using an i it's like if somebody said like yeah we don't use computers i'm like i don't even know what you mean it's like everything's going to be a i so look incredibly bullish on ads coming to any surface of the internet so there's any service of the internet that doesn't have an ad i would love an ad to be there uh so you guys you guys did the app loving ad read um brand new to e-commerce and i spent millions of dollars there and i love i love it as an ad product so more of that is just really good for me so if it comes to Gemini or chat GPT now i just don't think they'll do big beautiful display ads i don't think there'll be any video ads it's just going to be hey you're looking for a gift ritual it will give you the best price ever right now and then it'll take a 30% commission i really want to see more flashbangs count as long as i can watch out watch out we got you uh do you have any flashbangs on your podcast you're the one show that we would give you the the the effect if you want if you want to flashbang your boys okay cool i'll get the ad right to that we also have a horse that runs across the screen now we'll we'll save that save that but right now uh wait have you have you uh have you used any other of the uh a i ads uh uh like a i's uh basically like i heard perplexity was rolling out ads in their product did you demo that have you have you thought about using that i know it's like smaller and earlier do they have they are they actually live give me an experience now and i have a list of in front of me like all i told you earlier north bit that a report yeah and chat shbt is 99.5% of all a i traffic the e-commerce websites right now what so it's a big one so this is a big announcement today so uh we have what does it take to actually get ridge live i don't know man you got you guys know sam did hit him up say he's got his first paint customer right now he's a little busy today he's gonna go back and forth between oakland traffic now uh yeah well we'll put in a good word for you i would love to what what take your first word we're kind of broader consumer trends are you tracking this year we were talking about the sauna wars in new york city uh people setting up these like bath houses i was somewhat bearish on the trend like nationally i just think there's a lot of places in america where people will be like am i gonna pay a couple hundred bucks a month for this like sauna like bathhouse membership or do i just want to buy one uh you know for my house and and uh but what what are you tracking uh well on the sauna wars i mean pause is a franchise based sauna business they have them in bns and in southern California i was at a e-commerce we're like a productivity conference i think those guys are going to expand aggressively so i think they're selling to you know here's the thing i used to live down the street from a pause i would go there i enjoyed it i was like i like using a sauna and i like using an ice bath so i just bought one because it was like a hundred dollars every time i went i just did the math and i was like it's nice to go there but it's it's nicer to just have it in my house and so that's that's one of those things i don't know how much like actual spend that they can capture long-term or what the l tv is like if you get somebody hooked on using the sauna eventually they just run the numbers right it's not like a gym where it's like a gym i'll pay that however much it is a month because it's nice to go somewhere out of my house to work out and i don't want 300 different machines and all these different plates so i'm not convinced that it's actually going to scale that well outside of you know major metros like li in new york yeah also the cost per use of a gym is really well compared to a hundred bucks every pop of a pause but i they're gonna expand like crazy it'll be a great private equity transaction for somebody but yeah long-term it's i don't i don't think it's a good trend the thing we're most interested in is fiber i think fiber is gonna have a protein like moment and protein's been like on a mega trend for 20 years or whatever and has billions of dollars and spend behind it you know creatine have like a little taste of that but fiber will be like the next you know thing that even reaches something like a protein so we think fibers like that the obvious big trend right now that's going mainstream well we see what we see you you guys enter enter the category this year oh we're secretly in the fiber space already so we're not talking about it but we have we have a brand bubbling up we have real customers that are paying they don't know it's behind Ridge but we'll talk about that uh maybe offline amazing so you're gonna post your revenue every single month to invite thousands of competitors in the category right yeah yeah she's the smartest thing to do right no it's like i i the the the build the build in public movement brought to consumer is just an absolute nightmare it's like if you brag to the world about how much revenue you're doing there are gonna be smart people that enter your category and they're gonna do it fast and they might out execute you i don't think they'd out execute you guys but um i've yet to see you see a consumer founder build in public that didn't ultimately regret it oh yeah you know we're pretty public with rage just because i think you have to be stupid to try to sell the wallets in twenty twenty six or whatever yeah but but for you guys it was it was never like you were just like here's our investor update i'm publishing it because it's so good like you guys don't have investors but like it was never like i'm gonna flex monthly on the timeline which is the approach that i think a lot of people have had uh like on the the consumer side yeah i mean because consumers and i fight man but there's no modes at all it's it's the digital equivalent of opening a restaurant i think so you know like you're you're fighting for every single transaction right you guys are just having you know sequay on talking about it's a great time to sell enterprise because you guys have hostages and not customers and he's like yeah i would love i would love to have yeah there's truly no lock it and once you buy one it's not that you have to come back the next year where is that for a less enterprise sass if you stop paying your entire business shuts down so yeah the the mode is like scale operational excellence but those things like those things can erode very team-based well thank you so much for taking the time to hop on it's great to see you next time you come on come in person you know it's not that long of a drive dude i would love to and wait once your once you once you actually have the the open a i add platform live let's come here let's put it on the big screen we've got a bunch of monitors yeah and we'll just monitor the situation together and we'll clap every time a sale comes in yes yes yes and thank you for hooking the team up with Ridge wallet oh yeah you guys are too kind i was in the gym this morning with some of the folks they had the suitcase look at the suitcase there is the corner every single member of the team is rocking a Ridge suitcase there are more Ridge wallets that you can possibly count in this ultra-dome it's amazing we're huge fans we love you i carry a Ridge wallet every day i love it toxic others thank you keep crushing goodbye goodbye goodbye we stream one live stream 30 plus destinations if you want a multi-stream go to reestream.com i want to talk about ads more i want to talk about vibe.co's ads they're a sponsor of us but they've also been burning up a timeline with a number of billboard ads in san francisco shield monot friend of the show says these ads are very clever what else is in the collection and i got a preview of some other one so this is jensen on target jensen on tv that's a brilliant billboard it only works in san francisco but jensen wong the ceo of in video his leather jacket is iconic and so you see the shoulder of the leather jacket with jensen you know what they're talking about if you want to get to him you're going to go to vibe.co what else did they do they did say target mark on tv they put just marking dresses head there it's an iconic image and it lets you know immediately how can you target someone like mark in druson it's hard he's not going to be everywhere vibe.co has great targeting so i got a little teaser of what else is available we got sam ultman target sama on tv with the McLaren real one yeah that real and then we'll go to the next one target zuck on tv and it's a wrist with the with the fp jorn on there or a poteca you made these and then the next one they have a target turkey on tv and it is a barbell yeah so this is the type of marketing that that you got to be doing you got to be thinking okay how do i how do i send a message there's there's one more uh we'll go to this target augustus on tv of course everyone knows augustus terrico knows known for carrying white like a human version of the white monster if you put this billboard up everyone's going to get it immediately they're going to know that you're you're cool they're going to know that they should go to vibe.co and they should start targeting folks like augustus terrico the ceo a founder of rainmaker who's known for having a white monster every once in a while not every once in a while pretty much cost every hour on the hour by the way you drink diet coke so i imagine he drinks white monster yes yes he's just like oh oh it's two o'clock no no the four of those that uh that we just displayed i did generate in nano banana with jeman i3 pro google most intelligent model yeah lia says love trash day love here in that truck humans getting stuff done cooperation logistics municipal services civilization couldn't agree more it's a reminder that we haven't collapsed yet dude a four year old the way their face lights up when the trash truck comes and it's just pure wonder at the massive machinery moving up and down the street the beeping when it backs up that is childlike wonder that you should never lose no matter whatever it is it you should always take take a moment to show some respect for the trash truck i completely agree i love it joe wasnt all is crashing out he says he never wants to use the web again said in today's odd lots newsletter he wrote about how depressing the internet's become will read his piece and we need to catch up with joe i think he's coming on the show soon he says i swear i swear this is not another piece about my personal forays and divide coding okay maybe it is a little bit but not really so last year we didn't have a episode with the COO of perplexity whose name is Demetri he says which is kind of a hybrid LLM search engine you'll be familiar with it it's it's very tethered to the real world so if you asked it about hey maybe the latest developments in Venezuela it will obviously produce text but also links to the latest reporting from reputable news outlets and other sources it generally works well if you want to get up to speed on something that's happening right now anyway one of the questions that joe tried to get across with Demetri but he doesn't think he phrased it all that particularly well is what happens to the future of the web as we know it if more and more of our news is coming to us from chatbot form uh. let's just imagine people start regularly making perplexity their first destination each morning to capture up on the news and let's just imagine for sake of a thought experiment that the traditional news publishers come out fine in this relationship so the new york times is and the cnn's and the alge zeros of this world are getting adequately compensated for their reporting to be summarized and displayed in perplexity it's hard for me to imagine the future but whatever is beside the point so he's just saying it's not an economic issue uh. let's talk about the the vibes that would result from this so he says this is his question in the future why do websites still exist if more and more people start consuming the new york times his content through chatbot why continue to invest in maintaining a well functioning website called ny times dot com i suppose that to some extent this is a question that precedes the existence of chatbots there was almost certainly a time when a majority when a major priority for the new york times was to have a well functioning elegant website and while there are people still paid to work on it this is probably not the top priority right now a tech budget that might have once gone to web development might now be going to figure out the best strategy for instagram reels or whatever nonetheless do you ever uh. comment toward yeah maybe maybe this is just because i turned thirty uh. on now on but i'd like going into the world of the content i'd like going to the wall street journal i like going to the new york times app i like going to these places because i like the physical paper we like the physical paper this isn't going anywhere from my cold dead hands me and you to wise and thought we are keeping the newspaper alive i guess you'll be on the web like some hot new young in and i will read in the paper yeah ultimately i still care about like it matters i care a lot about who wrote it to totally i don't want to just serve but that can be instantiated perplexity or chat you can tell you who wrote it you you could in theory if the if the deals are structured properly now you can't uh. get i i don't think you can get the new york times content in the new in chatbots because they have a lawsuit you can get wall street journal content so in theory you could kick off your morning with a query to chatcpt hey tell me the most interesting pieces that are on the front page of the wall street journal and it would just do it for you and it would bring that in it would pay news corp accordingly um. but there's something fun about holding a nice piece of paper in your hands uh. i think it will die but a very very slow death we're still reading newspapers i imagine i'll still be reading newspapers in a while i imagine that we'll still be going to the websites uh. but he is correct to to to highlight that there is a change of foot so he says nonetheless the web browser is by and large still a dominant piece of software for accessing content and services that exist on the internet and in fact if we step out of the news context and think about it say buying a car and buying car insurance then the website as we know it is still incredibly important anyway i was thinking about this again because my vibe coding for a easily the most annoying parts were when i had to leave the terminal interface and do something on the web so it's still an unbelievably annoying process to do something simple like redirected domain name i found go daddies where i've been registering various domain names for years interface to be a borderline unusable backcheck true it is difficult sometimes every time i'm i'm just trying to make sure that like a domain is renewed they're like how about you buy a thousand we have one billion websites for you yeah yeah uh. as i mentioned in the piece he wrote on twos day uh. one of the first things jo did to make it so he could update his website correct directly from cloud code rather than having to update the files via cloud flare back end uh. this is the first very small thing but the point is that every time i had to operate in the browser it felt deflating typing in urls clicking buttons checking boxes pulling down drop downs entering fields no thank you he's genuinely curious what happens to visual the visual web that's designed for humans i know there's plenty of work that's being done to allow agents such as cloud code to go to a website click around at what human does just the same way the chatbots were trained on billions of reddit post and everything else on the internet these agents are being trained by ingesting numerous sessions of people moving a mouse on the screen and so forth until they can do that process so that's all well and good but it still gets to this issue that we currently have much of the internet present in the form web pages that are designed to be logical and pleasing to the human eye we still do so much on the web but now every time i have to use the web it feels kind of like a personal failure feels inefficient and if the web is increasingly going to be navigated by bots working on a human user's behalf then why even bother optimizing it for visuality at all i don't know where any of this is going but my guess is that uh. it's pretty big structural changes are in store for what people think of as the internet uh. yes it's interesting no i feel like the internet is already living in apps so much uh. like when i think about uh. world in the future where an elama is just generating me an article that was in the New York Times that day yeah imagine it just generating it in the visual style the New York Times like decides themselves yeah i mean you can already do this in nano banana you can you can say write me a New York Times style article about this topic it will write it instantiate it it will search the web to find the fact so it'll probably not hallucinate that much and then you could say turn it into an image that looks like a New York Times screenshot and it'll do that too uh. so people people will be met where their preferences are um. i don't know i i i think that uh. uh. i mean the flip side is like he's he's making this argument that as more and more traffic shifts away from the web it will get fewer and fewer resources within those organizations so the New York Times will say hey you know we're not getting that much traffic to our website so let's not spend that much effort making it better but you also get ten times as much leverage because the folks at the New York Times will be able to fire off an agent and say hey make it look better and so you would imagine i would hope that even as you go from okay maybe there's there's ten people working on a website now uh. five of them move over to instagram and youtube strategy and four of them move over to generative optimization optimization strategies and l_l_m_ and a_i_ stuff well there's one person left the person on the the japanese soldier on the island who hasn't gotten the memo that no one's going to the website well some people are going there and they fire off a prompt make it perfect don't make mistakes and boom they're good they're in business so some costs for optimism we'll see what do you think Tyler well i i was just gonna update on the uh. on the same altman please give us an update what's up okay so so first um just if you want to look at prediction markets right so will elan win his case against open a yes earlier today basically at the peak of like the uh oh my gosh like sam is so cooked yes he was at uh. seventy four and a half percent chance it's now down at fifty four point one this is fascinating we're watching them like do you get out in real time yeah prediction when you know elan he doesn't have to work too much uh. because uh. nik oh nick his broadest soldier from the right yeah he sang it reads as uh. elan's emails yeah it reads as obviously fabricated elan doesn't talk like that oh well you know case case closed case closed i wonder if nick will be caused called to testify we'd love to see him on the stand that would be very entertaining uh anyway uh. jensen wang doesn't care about gamers allegedly uh. asus reportedly says the rtx fifty seventy ti is no longer being produced rtx fifty sixty ti uh. sixteen gig to follow the gamers have been having a rough time i want to play with jensen says i don't want to play with gamers anymore ai all the time yes uh. gamers are being squeezed left and right uh. we we we we we need to make everyone aware of of the rights of gamers with our cod sounds in our flashbangs in our smoker needs to let people know let jensen know maybe we'll have to bring jensen on the show throw smoke grenade and when the smoke clears he can tell us that he is still committed to gamers let's move on to world labs world labs launched a box they shipped a box it's a video of they took world labs i think this is real i have no idea how to process this but it looks like they they built a screen put in a box that has uh. and it was an i_m_u_ inertial measurement unit that can measure how the box is being rotated and then it can re-render the world so you're looking into it in this box this seems really really cool this seems like just a piece of hardware that people would actually buy and sell um. we've seen this with the holographic display that you put next to your your gaming rig made by asus or a razor i guess razor is the one that makes it uh. this is really cool uh. i'm a big fan of world labs and uh. and i like that they're they're productizing this i i wonder if this is like a stunt if this is just for fun i really hope we can get our hands on one of these because this looks amazing um. well there is more news in the a_i_ talent war uh. the total the total number of employees that are leaving thinking machines alex heath is hearing that it's up to six now true scoop god is on uh. on the trail of another scoop he posted this at two a.m. he's up burn in the midnight oil getting the scoops on thinking machines maybe up to six people leaving the fall says california based unicorns because of ads do you think it do you think all the thinking machines people folks were like wait a minute we want to work on ads they're gonna do ads at open a_i_ i gotta go back there i gotta go to open a_i_ i gotta get out of here it's been my dream mera hasn't said anything about it or maybe it's maybe it's they wanted to work on adult mode maybe maybe there's lots of reasons or sora they could be trying to grind up the the disney i_p_ they want to get their hands on that i_p_ yeah they want to sloth it up and they say we're not doing any of that at thinking machines so we're going over to open uh. talk about this nvall says california based unicorns being routed to the glue factory not mintsing words yeah we will protect the unicorns unicorns our horses we'll protect them they are to read through david street bird space yeah fantastic piece california started with the gold rush and might end with the golden exit there's been under reported how much wealth has left california because of the asset seizure tax being proposed it's important that we continue to call it the asset seizure tax uh. he's going a private poll was conducted amongst affected individuals a few days ago and eighty to ninety percent survey that already left california in twenty twenty five or will leave in twenty twenty six if the ballot measure looks likely to pass of course the ballot measure currently is retroactive so they would be subject to the five percent one-time tax and of course we get litigated uh. day free bird continues to to two and a half ass uh. half trillion of assets gone representing twenty billion of annual in uh. annual revenue for the state government unlikely hundreds of thousands of jobs now at risk less reported is the bigger exodus underway from folks who are not directly affected but worry as they should that this law will quickly transition from billionaires to everyone else uh. the initiative actually gives california legislators the right to take anyone's post-tax assets anytime in the future based on a majority vote uh. this isn't about billionaires it's a new tax system that simply destroys private property rights in america all private property is now public property even after paying your taxes it's not legally your property anymore it's the governments you were just borrowing it legislators will decide where you get to keep and temporarily use each year countless founders CEOs and other business leaders are actively looking to move their companies out of state not just tech not just AI not just billionaires but the core engine of california's prosperity since 1847 is unraveling and here is how this initiative risks unraveling america ten states have explicit or implicit prohibitions against asset seizure tax individuals affected in california and other states trying to do the same will move to these states that uh. in debt and doubt private property rights california already has a twenty thirty billion dollar budget deficit and unfunded one trillion pension liability for public employees unions and five hundred billion of debt outstanding the state cannot afford to borrow more much more and will launch more assets seizures to meet its obligations asset seizures will transition to millionaires and eventually to the entire middle class as more assets seizures drive more people to leave the state the debt uh. the deficit debt and job loss will spiral the gold next it notes us state has ever declared bankruptcy in addition to california dozens of other states face similar fiscal crises legislators promise future benefits that can't be paid worth left and waste have a lot have been allowed to run rampant and unabated for years struggling states will eventually request federal government assistance as they always have in time to fiscal crisis effective effectively federalizing state debt states not in crisis will declare enough is enough individuals in those states will refuse to pay their federal taxes why pay for other people's mistakes some states may try to succeed from the union and a constitutional and civil crisis will erupt i i i i i know the sounds crazy but i think at some point states will just say like people citizens will be like why am i sending thirty percent of every dollar i make to bureaucrats in washington uh. that hate me and so i think the sounds wild but uh. i don't i don't think it's as far fetched yeah very dark uh. it's uh. it's like a little friday black not we just do the answer the answer is is clearly just a g_i_ pilling all of the uh. california regulators to say a g_i_ will solve the deficit we will just ask a g_i_ to fix the debt fix the fiscal crisis fix the pension liabilities fix the budget deficit uh. don't make mistakes and uh. and so much value will be created by a g_i_ here just the income taxes will pay for that a thousand times over a thousand times over so you don't need to you can respect private property don't worry it's going to be fine a g_i_s_ here to save it that's the solution got a picture anyway back to the a_i_ world we have Alex from higgs field a_i_ in the racetrack let's bring him in the t_v_p_ and ultra that's how are you doing he's great great today back it was like you do we're just talking about the billionaire tax you got something that uh. fortunately your business is doing so well yeah focus on growth focus on the good things tell us the tell us the best news in your world this year give me that mallet oh yeah with the yeah what's the latest what's the latest metric absolutely so what's exciting uh. about higgs field is that's we see emergent soft a_i_ native social media agency so really teams from me the sense of thirty people making commercial ads and so ends with a_i_ yeah and just talk to you yeah we just talk to Sean frank he said he's a huge fan he uses for rich wallet and has been able to generate custom ads for you know tons of different markets local areas where it was just completely unfeasible to to cast so many actors to do to play so many different parts for every single different college team that he sells products for uh. yeah it's uh. it's a fascinating time so this is mostly driven by agents or brands going direct uh. what's the biggest driver of growth for you absolutely we're excited to see fortune for five brands relief hiring really hiring smaller really higher in smaller agencies yeah so that's they then use higgs will to make those ads and i think although the most exciting segment is definitely direct to consumer especially when i can deliver not just the efficiency not the cost efficiency but also higher level of personalization so the example issued that brought up completely make sense whenever someone needs to customize for thirty six six hundred difference uh. user groups but they support teams generally i delivers again this uh. goal and pixel is at first front of this what are the compute cost looked like looking like these days i mean uh. the big the big uh. news is that you you jump from a hundred million to two hundred million top line in just two months that's a insane congratulations jordie hit the apple congratulations but but but on the flip side i mean if you were i mean you are raising money obviously the capital markets are open but uh. if you were really spending on inference that could be uh. you know difficult how is how are the margins developing how are you uh. optimizing for inference cost what are you seeing on just inference cost trends broadly uh. are you are you happy with the progress or what else can you tell us about uh. the the the cost structure of this business i have good news that i have been used look i think on the good news is that's video models gets more capable so that's over time marketors can just upload all the brand assets in one place and then the model just remembers all the context and this helps to make not just one video but multiple videos and uh. extend existing marketing campaigns i think that this is going to be a major unlock think about marketing occasions who actually remember all the previous campaigns all the performance of the previous campaigns and so on that although there is a bad thing like these models that gets bigger and bigger there is not a there is no other path around i think most of the video models this last year where maybe between ten and fifty billion parameters and it's going to scale well beyond how to be a prime source so i think uh. so that although the good news is that in the same time we're seeing customer spending thousands dollars a month on the platform which tells us that slay likely make thousands of videos cost for one video is sealed quite below one's all right this is uh. this is very interesting times as we move from a concept of well yeah that's an insane that's an insane reduction in costs because uh. i think most of the video shoot on your iphone you're going to spend a day even if you're paying a month and then turn twenty dollars an hour yeah when brands are doing trying to generate u_d_c_ content historic you know now they can use higgs field and generate stuff on the fly but historically be like okay i'm setting a budget of like two a hundred dollars an asset and then you'd have a bunch of people like actually record on their iphone generate and so if you're saying it's it you know dollar an asset or sub a dollar it's like a hundred x reduction in cost pretty significant absolutely i think cost reduction has already i mean it has already happens compared to physical production and i think this uh. batch content generation meaning that we make not just one video but hundreds of videos simultaneously i think this change happening this year so the goal for higgs field is to leave those agent like this new wave of agents and behaviors and bills of course are for video what about uh. getting the ingesting the data on performance do you have api integrations with all the big platforms where you're ingesting uh. add data from metta and apple oven or whoever else you're distributing video content through or uh. are you is it pdf upload csv upload like how are you thinking about actually creating that feedback loop because that seems extremely powerful yeah absolutely on that angle i can sell that's probably when to 27 is going to be a year of major revolution and adsequals as connecting generation with performance data is going to become a major points got it uh. this year we collect a lot of these dates from social media platforms we build most of these integration and establishing direct relationships with the platforms uh. very we collect a lot of very valuable data points directly as we see which generations uh. result in an actual ad so that we can actually run reinforcements learning so streamline content creation process i think this is the main priority for twenty six and twenty seven is going to be a year of full revolution in advertising to college space what uh. what's going on the hardware side what would be most valuable to you we saw in video a choir groc with the q uh. groc's whole pitch has been very fast inference uh. usually for text based l_l_m_ models when i think about the work of a marketer generating a bunch of different video variations if they fire that off and they come back an hour later that doesn't seem like a terrible experience so are you more focused on higher fidelity larger parameter counts uh. over speed are you interested in what's happening in custom silicon in a particular area or do you just want more and more in video gps at your disposal like what's what's important on the infrastructure side for your plans over the next few years uh. this is this is great question i think we've seen that's custom silicon can perform really well uh. jimin itry is the first multi-model l_l_m_ which has these emerging capabilities like which is not a banana from model yeah um. this model essentially made a droby absolute yeah who needs to yeah because i mean who needs to go to fatasha yeah look i mean i i'm not saying like who like especially for social media marketing yeah if we're being serious so does i mean going and if let's say uh Georgia you sign needs to go and make uh. five ads for you as a yeah and try completely different stuff uh. i don't have time to go to fatasha and push every pixel to make it perfect i better use uh. model like like man the banana prod to really uh. to deliver against the vision and it's a semantic based editing not just like pixel pushing yeah so um i kind of miss i kind of miss when you used to be all used to see uh. like a like really high quality photoshop on the timeline and part of why you appreciate it is like somebody really needed to put effort in or they need it even if they're not creative photoshop they hired somebody and it's like you had in and nowadays you know they got the lasso tool and they cut that character out and slap that text over there through a drop shadow on it now it's just a prompt it's fascinating and that was just a prompt and it's done with custom silicon so i think we're gonna see or any sense of custom silicon for sure i mean jimmy and uh. uh. a banana prod are come are amazing model with these emerging capabilities uh. we we really embrace those create those creators and central media marketers who creates uh. ads with the i and two ends so they don't have to go to something that's linked at all uh. how are you tracking the uh. the problem of understanding what's what's a i generated what's real this is now a daily i feel like he used to be like even like twelve months ago it was like you know once a once a month you see something and you're like oh is that AI or is that real now it's like almost every single day uh. well i see stuff on instagram all the time where i know it's a i but then i go to the comments and and everyone's happy no one's used to be people would clock it and then even if they couldn't tell they would key off of the comments and and then kind of pile on now people are just like yeah this is good content uh. well yeah what's your take on on AI detection uh. how it's working through its way through the internet okay i think that's where we're going to see more standard it's emerging i think in europe the european it's a big thing we're gonna see something by the end of the year coming on that front i guess um i can just tell you that direct-to-consumer brands they primarily don't care if that looks like a i generated kind of or non-a i generated content as long as it catches eyeballs and it sells um they just keep coming to Hicksville than making more of such videos so the best the best performing a i generated ads they look like a i ads and they don't look like real ads i think that's my main observation yeah yeah i mean there's a certain element where you know the the iphone the selfie video it never actually wound up looking like an hbo show or james camera and film it never wound up looking like you know it was shot with a hundred thousand dollar camera but everyone just got used to it and they liked the aesthetic and we grew accustomed to that aesthetic and it has its own aesthetic and so of AI content even if it retains its aesthetic for a very long time even though i think it's going to be indistinguishable already sort of is but even if it does people could just become fans of that and be like yeah i like that like the way it looks yeah yeah interesting uh you know very cool well i also my buddy texted me it's uh Alex Kassin you guys just had lunch no no way absolutely we're just chatting about that um small holes yeah he he's a great guy to know uh in this in this town so you are you an L.A. right now yes i'm an L.A. i love i mean i should have come you should have come by the studio next time could i be sitting here you could have been hitting the gong could have been moving the gall posts next time uh absolutely anyway thank you so much for taking time well yeah it's on the progress the growth is absolutely insane and look forward to talking more this year yeah we'll talk to you soon thank you guys thank you we can go by all right we can close with one of the best ideas that i've heard recently it's from Ryan Peterson he says we should have an AI transfer portal like in the NCAA couldn't agree more well that's our show the bomb has been planted thank you for tuning in today thank you for watching leave us five stars on podcasts and Spotify and sign up for our daily newsletter at tbpn.com we send out our newsletter every week to enjoy the weekend enjoy the live monday we will be live monday but we're back at 11 a.m. pacific so tune in we have a couple live in person guess a couple touch some grass it's going to be a lot of fun well hope you have a great weekend here with us and goodbye