Where AI video is headed next, with Synthesia's Victor Riparbelli

You have this famous story now where you all cold emailed Cuban and he wired you a million. Do you like lean on him for advice or intros or anything? When he was evaluating the investment, he was more looking at us and he asked a lot of like tactical questions, how are we going to sequence it? I think the reason he invested was that you didn't have to convince him of the vision that in 10 years time you can make a Hollywood film on your laptop with just your imagination. He turned deepfakes into a B2B business and raised hundreds of millions of dollars doing it. Today on the show, we're talking with Victor Ripperbelly who built what he calls the next generation of PowerPoint, replacing those 65 slide HR decks with AI video. So what happens when internal training videos start to look like Spielberg productions and you'll be able to argue with your onboarding rep? Are we raising the video production bar or opening ourselves to more deepfakes and scams? But first, Ellis and I talk about the tech industry's newest obsession, how the AIs are talking to each other on Moltbook. Also, we're talking about the tech industry's newest obsession, how the AIs are talking to each other on Moltbook. Also, SpaceX and XAI are merging ahead of an IPO, new developments in the coding wars between OpenAI and Anthropic, and one of our favorite AI apps gets a facelift. Welcome to Access. Ellis, how are you doing, man? The AIs are talking to each other. I was going to say I'm good because I'm back on my sleeping pills. But yeah, also because the AIs are talking to each other. We're talking about Moltbook for those who can't keep up at home. We talked about ClawedBot last week. It has since been renamed three times to Moltbot and now it's OpenClaw. And then there's an extension of this called Moltbook, which has taken Silicon Valley by storm. Are you following me? Are you keeping up with what I'm saying? Let me ask you this first, Alex. Do you feel that the Twitter bubble as we now experiencing it, when it feels like something is happening, how confident are you that it is actually happening? I feel like back in the early Twitter days when it was all chronological and it was all people you followed, it was very clear. If you follow everybody in the Valley and everybody's talking about the same thing at the same time, you're like, oh, definitely happening. But now as soon as you fave a tweet about Molt, X starts showing you a hundred more Molts, oftentimes duplicates of the exact same tweet. That's definitely true. I do think it has captivated at least the insular world of AI people in Silicon Valley. But I'm not sure how many people that actually is. I know the Moltbook creator, which is a social network for these AIs, for these agents that we were talking about last week, where you can have what used to be Cloudbot now OpenClaw, create an agent on a machine and go ham, go wild with root access to everything. Now those AIs are talking to each other on a forum that's kind of like Reddit called Moltbook. It's pretty wild. I'm actually not convinced it's real, but we can get into that. That's, I think, to your broader point, Ellis. I do think it's gotten a lot of buzz. I think it's gotten a lot of buzz. There was a big New York Times story. The founder of Moltbook was saying he was getting millions of visits to the website over the weekend. You had people like Andre Karpathy tweeting about it. Yeah. If we got Karpathy, we got Jan LeCun, we got Nat Friedman, we got Sources.News, we got the New York Times. I guess that's check, check for it's happening. Everyone's getting one-shotted by this thing. It's AI bait. You look at some of these posts that the are reportedly saying to each other in this forum, and it's like they're questioning their sentience. They're questioning, I can't tell if I'm experiencing or simulating experiencing. These are some of the posts that these bots are allegedly doing. I don't really buy any of this. I've also seen some pretty credible arguments that people are manipulating this and instructing the bots to do this. This is not just bots agentically reaching consciousness together and talking, but this is a select few that have been trained to do this, to make us think this is happening. That would certainly be something in 10,000 years. They're like, the moment when AI spontaneously gained consciousness was on a message board. Yeah. No, I just don't buy it, man. I don't really see that. Wouldn't that be awful? But as we say, we're on the worst timeline, right? Right. Well, because this is all open and crawlable, people are looking and seeing that a very select few of the bots are actually contributing most of the content, which would not be if you were to actually theorize something like this, how it would work. You would have pretty evenly distributed bot posting and interaction. And instead it's pretty top weighted, which is how traditional social media works, where few people post a lot and most people consume. Anyway, I don't really feel the need to poke holes in this anymore, other than to say, I think people want something like this. They want to see something like this and go, oh, wow, like the AIs are sentient. The AIs are doing things. And this is a good example of that in terms of like how it makes people feel, whether it's real or not. Yeah. One of them I saw pretty high up on the feed invented the Church of Jizzus. Jizzus? I mean, if you're not laughing, you don't understand what they're saying. J-I-Z-Z-U-S. Is this a cousin to Shrimp Jesus? Forget it. Anyway, I stumbled on another thread that said, how do you handle feature creep when building solo, which is something you might see on Hacker News or something like that. And I said, yeah, the rational part of my brain knows this is scope drift. The builder part keeps saying, but this would make it so much better. Problem is I'm burning cycles on features instead of shipping the core functionality that actually solves the problem. Okay. This is actually art if it is using the corpus of Hacker News and Stack Overflow to create this thread. Certainly not AI consciousness. Burn that down, though. We don't need this. I don't know. When I was looking at this, I was like, oh, this other story that kind of people missed because it came towards the weekend was the scoop in Forbes that OpenAI is putting together this human only social network, which I think is deeply ironic from OpenAI to be doing. But Sam Altman has his WorldCoin orb scanning blockchain company. Yes, all those things do somehow relate to each other. You have to make a disclaimer. What? Disclaim. You've been orbed. I've been orbed. No, the disclaimer is that I know what I'm talking about. I've done it. I've scanned my eye. Anyway, this is Sam Altman's other project and OpenAI is apparently working on a social network that uses this or something like it to verify that you are in fact a human because we can't trust anything anymore, including if Malt Book is actually AIs talking to each other or just humans telling AIs to do things and look like that. So nothing is real. We get into this a bit toward the end of the show. The conversation with Victor coming up shortly. But I wanted to talk about this. I feel like there's going to be a pretty big distinction in the future between entertainment that can kind of look like whatever. And if it has interesting value, people care a bit less if it's AI created or not, setting aside all of the ethical things, if you take it purely from an aesthetic point of view. Whereas if it's information, I do think there is actually reward for it being correct or accurate. And I would think that that is going to actually incentivize these platforms to come up with their own authentication for this stuff, whether it is the fingerprinting, the watermarking, the community notes, whatever it is, because the ones that don't sharing news on those platforms is going to be useless. And so I do expect to see a lot more of this going forward, because if there's one thing tech companies want, it is to be the platform for the world's town square. So I would expect more on this front. with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. in terms of that like bright, vibrant, greeny, yellow, that is now, you know, arguably passé now that it's been gratified. Then the other thing is the logo, the spiral, which I like that it speaks to their organic vibes and the idea that really you're often spiraling around an idea or a thought or things that kind of come from the ether when you're in a meeting. However, it does, according to many, look like yet another AI butthole icon. So, yeah, I see both those things. I do identify with spiraling and going to granola to try to figure out what actually happened in a meeting that I forgot because I've outsourced my brain and my memory to this fucking app that I now can't live without. I do see the butthole and I do see the spiral. Yeah, but as I always say, the goal really is differentiation, I think, with something like this. Ideally, there's an aesthetic side. There's an aesthetic side that speaks to your vibe and your ethos that is quite different from what your customers are used to. Then you also have the opportunity to say something. And so I'll kind of break it down if that's interesting. I think on the aesthetic side, if you look at what they're up against, they're up against black and white Notion AI. They're up against Microsoft Copilot. They're up against Zoom. It's probably called Zoom chat recorder or something that no one wants to use. And then there's, of course, Gemini inside Google Meet that takes the notes for you. And so this is a tough one, right? You're trying to get people to use a separate app. Odds are the note taker in their existing office suite is already free. You have to be cool. You have to be opinionated. I think they also have a huge strength as a product that does one thing. That's probably the reason that you still use it. And you know that when you press that button on your phone and you start recording in a sources.news scoop session, you're going to have it. As opposed to having to dig through other apps for it, then I won't allow you to react. Then on the message side, there is the idea they have two ideas they're going out with. One is the idea of progress over process. The idea, you know, people get mired in all these documents and whatnot when really a lot of progress happens generatively in meetings. And then on the other side, which I think is a bit closer to my heart, is the idea of presence being power, which I think is pretty cool. So they're heroing the idea of where creativity and thoughtfulness can live, especially when you're not worried about taking notes and forgetting the action items, you can really be there and actually use your full brain. So, yeah, this was a joy to work with Sam and Chris and Jack and the Ragged Edge team on that. So, yeah, shout out to the crew. What I can't say, is it going to work? I think so much of that goes beyond just sharing the brand with the world. And I think this is really where a lot of Valley companies go astray. They're like, oh, yeah, we did the rebrand. Is that it? And it's like, no, like it needs to all work hand in hand in the ads and the decks and the sites and the videos to actually be additive and not just aesthetic. If you really want to take advantage of a rebrand to its fullest, I would say. What phase of showering did you come up with? Presence is power. Were you in conditioning phase? Were you washing the body? Dude, I am a shower thoughts person, but these days I have no idea. Sometimes I have to look back into my notes to see if I even came up with something or not. You have to look into your granola to know what you said when you were trying to come up with granola's tagline. Well, sadly, and I don't think the guys appreciated this very much. I use Notion AI and I've used granola very. Hey, hey, that's how they know I'm honest, right? So the reason I do that, I am certainly an edge case as a former reporter who learned to type faster than anybody can talk in my own shorthand with my own formatting, Markdown, toggles, blah, blah, blah. And so I use the AI largely as backup. So I know I'm very much an edge case and I told them that, but yeah, they're probably a little butthurt about that. OK, well, before we get to Victor Ripperbelly from Cynthia, which was a very cool conversation, there are two more quick the news is flying and fast and furious. And I just wanted to have to leave. I do have to leave. I'm actually going to San. Francisco for something I can't talk about, but I will be excited to talk about on the show next week, a little tease there right before we started recording. Elon merged SpaceX and XAI. And I don't have a ton to say about this, except that the announcement is one of the best starts to any corporate merger announcement. It says that SpaceX has acquired XAI to form the most ambitious vertically integrated innovation engine on and off Earth. Whoever came up with that, it was probably Elon directly hate to say it. The researchers love that shit. And does this mean? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I guess this means our X posts in space. I guess that means AI in space, Grok in space. Was this like a spacky, a spacky type of move? Well, SpaceX is going to IPO. We know that Elon apparently wants to do it around his birthday in the spring. I mean, truly, truly a little boy. Yeah. It's a great birthday present. We needed more evidence. And merging XAI with this thing is going to I mean, it was already going to be a meme stock, but this is going to be the biggest meme stock of the year unless maybe even still if open AI IPOs later this year, as they're rumored to maybe be considering, I mean, the to the moon memes on Reddit on Wall Street Bets. I mean, you can't write it. I mean, it's baked into the name. It's going to the moon. So on the nose, shame anybody, shame on anybody for suggesting that. Lastly, I just want to mention the thing I wrote about in sources this week, which opening I released a codex Mac app. It's kind of crazy to me how anthropic has really run away with the narrative on coding, AI productivity and seems to be kicking open eyes ass on products in a way that you probably wouldn't have predicted a year ago. And it was I was on a press call with Sam Altman of the open execs last week and talking about this codex app on Mac that they're launching, and it was funny they were throwing digs and anthropic basically saying, yeah, you know, like whatever, when people want to fix their code, they bring it into codex. So I think they're recognizing that like the top of funnel awareness in AI coding has definitely gone to anthropic, but they think that anthropic is bug ear, which I don't know if that's a flex or not, but open eyes trying to get that coding mojo back. Which I think is just an important little little footnote in the areas. It certainly seems like they're doing a whole lot of things over at OpenAI. Do you get the sense that they're spreading themselves too thin? I think that's the concern. I think they're going a little more Googley, but much earlier in the lifecycle than when Google really started to become a conglomerate, I mean, the company as it exists as a commercial thing is only, you know, a few years old and yeah, Sam's already kind of setting it up like a conglomerate with all these random things. And I do think anthropic's focus is really coming through right where they are really focused on the think boy and the coder. And, you know, I got the thinking cap, by the way, in Davos. And, you know, I think they're carving that lane out and the focus is helping them a lot. And I do think there's starting to be some chatter that maybe OpenAI is a little too pulled apart at the edges. I mean, having seen like in the early days of Snap when so many different bets were made, many of them successfully, I think these days, if all those teams, if the talent density is there and now it is way, way easier to spin a product, you don't necessarily need hundreds of engineers anymore and you still have a someone at the top applying a strong editorial point of view with vision over kind of the cohesion and the thesis of each product. I think it's possible. I think the problem starts when the talent density and the talent quality goes down. And if you start spending too much time reading the news to try and place chess pieces on every square and stop doing your own thing, whatever it is that you want to do best. OpenAI's leadership is definitely spending a ton of time reading the news and X. There is no tech company on Earth that is more reactive to what is happening on X than OpenAI. It's pretty amazing. I feel the product quality is good, though. I guess one of the ones that I feel like Atlas has kind of fallen out of the conversation, which is not unusual for any new product in tech to fall out of the conversation, or I mean, God, remember Sora, we were freaking out about Sora. Totally. Yeah. Yeah. But I thought the quality of Sora in particular was pretty impressive. We had a good weekend on there making videos. We did. We did. That that kind of relates to that. I mean, if you look at why it dropped, I think you could argue that you're just simply not reminded of it. Which is why that Alfie messaging app we talked about last week was interesting, is that being in a group chat once you're once you're trained to turn inside jokes into media that can start rolling like it took a while for people to build the habit of when they see something funny to snap a friend that was brand new. Nobody was going to half the time open up their their camera, take a picture, switch to the messages app, click the attachment button, add an attachment, hit send. And so, So creating those new habits is very, very hard. So yeah, I think that's probably why Sora didn't happen as impressive as the results were. Well, luckily we can keep the AI video conversation going because we have a AI video CEO on the show today. You like that segue. I just came up with that. Let's throw it, should we? Yeah, we should. Let's throw it to Victor Ripperbelly, the CEO and co-founder of Synthesia. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. How's it going, Victor? What's up? Welcome. Pretty good. Thank you. That's some nice bedroom apartment lighting you got going on. I've been spending like 10 minutes trying to find a proper setup. So I'm in Utah right now in a hotel. Ah, Utah. Yeah. So one of our investors, Excel, has like a CIO summit thing that they do every year, which is basically like a bunch of CIOs and they invite some founders as well. So it's usually like, pretty fun, good for business. And we get to stay in nice hotel rooms. That's rare that a summit is actually near to an actual summit. And it's not just a pure symbol. So part of the trip is actually that you go snowboarding or skiing, whatever you're into. It's also funny with what you were saying, Alex. I feel like a few years ago during COVID, everybody was like, oh, is your background real? Now it's like, are you real? That's how far we've come in just five years. With AI and video gen. Yeah. And Victor, in case you don't know, we just, we roll, we go when you get on. So we're going here. It's good to see you, man. It's been a minute. I think last time I saw you was in Vegas where all good relationships get formed. So good to be seeing you again. A few hundred million dollars raised later. I was looking on X actually today and it looked like you guys had a little problem with spoiling your surprise internally. There's something with a cake. Can you fill us in what happened here? Well, I mean, as you know, like when these things happen, especially at scale, they unfortunately very often leak to the press. And then you're in this like awkward situation where everybody kind of knows what's going on, but you can't really confirm what's going on. And so, you know, we had a lot of, you know, internal chatter with me and Stefan just being like, yeah, you know, maybe the rumors are true and maybe they're not. And we had some cake in kind of, you know, pre-celebration, I guess, of the round. You say we're trying to do founder-led content that's super transparent, but we don't want to be that transparent. Well, it's really difficult, right? Because, you know, with these things, I think our philosophy has always been that like no round is closed before the money is in the bank. And these things take a long time, right? Like you get to an agreement with a bunch of investors, then there's a lot of paperwork happening. And, you know, luckily we've never had any kind of bumps in the road, but it has definitely happened before. I mean, we've had a lot of, you know, we've had a lot of, you know, we've had a lot of problems in the past, but we've had a lot of, you know, we've had a lot of problems in the past, And then all of a sudden, you're standing there looking not so great. So I think maybe it's very European of us, maybe we're just very conservative. But I think the way we've done these things historically has always been to, you know, before the round is actually like zipped up, we don't really talk about it. What's it like being on the other side, having it out now? Do you feel like you can puff your chest a little bit? Yeah, it's great. But kind of on that point, right, like, you know, it's kind of interesting because these funding rounds usually take place like many months before the actual announcement. So in our case, you know, sort of October, November is when this round was kind of zipped up. Then, you know, a bunch of like diligence, make it all go around. you want to figure out like when you think it's a good time to announce it so it's um it's obviously like it's it's amazing and it's awesome but it also almost like feels like old news internally when you go out right so it's a kind of a strange feeling well what's cool these days victor you got to raise the next round while you're raising this round and so it's just kind of a cascade of money that never ends that's what it's that's what the ai world seems like right now i was gonna say yeah I think half the companies I work with now, they're working toward a raise and they pivot during it or they pivot right after it and the investors are like, wait a second. It seems very hard to plant your foot in the ground on almost anything firm in the AI era. For sure. I mean, looking back to 2017, when we found the contract, the first three years, you'd have like kind of a breakthrough of some sort in what we back then called synthetic media before it was renamed to generative AI. Maybe like once every year, once every one and a half years, there'd be some like big breakthroughs. Someone writes like an interesting paper that kind of, you know, increased the quality of the capabilities by some, you know, margin. Now it feels like every three weeks, there's like a new bomb that gets dropped, right? And that's across all modalities. So I think both investing in and also running AI companies right now is very exciting and very thrilling, but it's also hard, right? There's just so much uncertainty. You don't really know what's around the corner. I didn't appreciate your all story when we met in Vegas at HumanX. Just how much pitching you guys had to do in the early days, how much you were rejected. The Mark Cuban story, which we have to talk about, which is great. And then I saw somewhere that one of your co-founders was what? He worked on like a pig farm, something like this? He did private equity in Africa before we teamed up. Private equity, same thing. Yeah, but they were running like, you know, sand mines and chicken farms and that kind of stuff. That's pretty funny. possible roll up for private equity, not swimming pools and lawn mowing businesses, but chicken farms. So you have this kind of famous story now where you all cold emailed Cuban and he wired you a million and now he's very happy with that investment. Obviously, he owns a big chunk and your valuation is huge now. Is he active at all? Do you lean on him for advice or intros or anything? We speak occasionally, but I think his style of investing is very different from a VC, right? He's much more like an angel. So I think the way most business angels work, including myself, now that I also invest, is more kind of on a sort of reactive basis, right? Like we're always open for someone has a problem, jump on a call, discuss it out live. I think it's been the same thing with Cuban. Cuban doesn't do calls. He only does email. He only does court sides. Who needs desk sides or fire sides? We got court sides. Exactly. Yeah, how many games have you been to? we've actually only been to once one game not none of us are like really big into sports um so but we went there in the early days we also did a bunch of the first demos we did for the back when we were doing you know dubbing which was the first three years of the company uh we went there and we did a bunch of cool content with um with the players and i think his his main thing his help has always been access to people so in the early days you know getting access to like sports stars like his own team for example to do cool demos he knows a bunch of people both from like investors to operators and things that's that's always been his like his main contribution more than it's been kind of a um you know like a weekly sort of a catch-up it's good to have a shark in your corner it is actually it's very interesting because i think mark cuban is he's obviously known for shark tank i think people's perception of him is very um anchored in him being on shark tank investing in all these sort of like kind of wacky businesses with someone who made some fun invention that they'll do well on TV. And I think a lot of people actually don't know that he's very deep technically. His company, Broadcast.com, was the first company to take radio to the internet. And he went through a similar kind of story that we did where everyone was laughing at him, right? Like, why the heck would you want radio on the internet? You have a radio in your kitchen and your bedroom. And he kind of like pushed through that and ended up selling the company for three point something billion dollars to Yahoo. And when we met Mark Cuban, You know, way back in the day, and this is at a point where AI video was very French, right? Like no one was really talking about this. He had actually implemented the research paper that Synthesia kind of in spirit originates from, which was actually a real-time system for doing avatars. He had implemented that at home with a kind of a lecturer of some sort. So he knew everything about the tech. And, you know, what I always say is that I think the reason he invested was that we didn't have to convince him of the vision that in 10 years' time you can make a Hollywood film on your laptop with just your imagination, which was kind of like what we were trying to tell people back in 2017, and no one believed us. He already believed that. And so when he was evaluating the investment, he was more looking at us, and he asked a lot of, like, tactical questions, how are we going to sequence it, what's the first use case, who are you as people, and invested on the basis of that. And I think where we fell flat flat with everyone else was everyone was looking at us and going like Hollywood films on laptops in 10 years like I don't really care about that sell me some fintech right that was like what everybody wanted fintech or like machine learning for doing predictive data analysis on uh on corporates you know big data sets that was what everybody wanted to invest in back then well uh I think there's an opportunity for differentiation here if we can get Cuban in the model itself his likeness his voice I see a moat there for you Victor maybe we can make the first AI Cuban that can automatically make investment decisions on behalf of AI Cuban um I'm curious though I mean when you talk about the access to sports stars and this and that I mean I feel like being in B2B world those connections can kind of mean everything you know the CTOs you get to meet the founders you get to meet who decide to like take a chance on you which is you know a very different type of path I would say than in consumer have those relationships been a big Lover for you bringing in will I am to close a deal the ultimate trump card no I think they have um especially the technology like ours which is I mean we're a very B2B Enterprise focused company but there's a lot of like consumer elements to it right like video is mostly consumers watching it and um and I think you know like media in general is is obviously like a very big consumer it's a consumer world right so I think some of the the where it has the most leverage back in 2018 we did a campaign with David Beckham where we basically had him speak in nine different languages using our AI dubbing tech which you know I mean back then the tech like barely worked it didn't work with with AI voice so it's actually like a real person who spoke in a different language and we would take that person you know voice clip and then we use that voice clip to activate David Beckham so it wasn't actually David Beckham's voice it just looked like it was him right and so very very manual compared to what we can do today and that campaign was the first time I think the world saw deep fake technology used for something good something productive and that campaign ended up being kind of a pretty big turning point for us um because I think it just first of all it was like a big viral moment and I think it kind of got people thinking about this technology in in a slightly different way and that would have been much more difficult to do if it wasn't David Beckham who had kind of consented to be deep faked as they would call it you know back in the day and kind of standing up for for the technology so I think that has had some impact for sure but uh you know I think since then we haven't done a ton of like celebrity based content um we've done some and I think it definitely helps to like bring up the brand of the company but I wouldn't say it's been like you know within like top five things that have helped the company grow faster since the last time I saw you something else happened where you did a TED talk and I was wondering what that was like doing a TED talk uh I've always wondered I'm sure there was a lot of pressure or maybe not maybe you're like totally cool with that um and it wasn't any pressure but uh you had like a provocative title um why I make us the last generation to read and write uh how did it go what was it like being on the TED stage it's it's it's actually funny because I'm generally not like nervous anymore when I have to do like public speaking and doing podcasts with your lovely people and so on but the TED talk it felt different in a way because it's it's a it's a big thing but I remember like 10 15 years ago when you when TED talk was launched and it was like this huge thing and you would sit and watch a TED talk so I definitely felt like there's a lot more pressure I also think you I felt like it has to be like an interesting idea and it has to be a provocative idea and I think I think I managed to deliver on that when you look at the comments like 90 of the people disagree with me which was kind of also the point of it I think I hit a hit a nerve there but it was really fun you work with the Ted team of course you come with your idea and then they kind of help you shape it into like the right format and I think it's probably the talk I've done that I practiced the most before actually doing it because you do it in front of a live audience right so you get one take and there was a really really really fun experience well Victor did you deliver and did you answer that question or did you do a whole TED talk and then walk off the stage as you say and only time will tell I think I put together like a pretty convincing case for why on a long enough timeline this is going to happen of course I'm being a bit provocative by saying that we're never going to read and write anymore I don't think that necessarily is going to be the case but I do think that within the next 10 15 20 years reading and writing will be something that we do either because we enjoy it for fiction for example or um because there's going to be like a small subset of us and video isn't isn't better so I I think if you if you if you watch the talk I would say give a compelling case why it's going to happen but I'll let you be the judge well so what's how's Alex's newsletter going to be in 20 years a video version I mean I sound kind of screwed in this scenario I don't think so I I don't know what you guys media habits are but I think that when I look at my own way of consuming media over the last many years there's a time where everyone's reading blog posts all the time that was like when I grew up in in tech that was the the kind of currency right of building a brand for yourself and sharing your knowledge that has changed a lot since then of course there's still uh you know lots of written content a lot of it has moved to Twitter uh people make threats where I'd argue you can compress or we you force yourself to compress your thinking into into less characters which I think is generally useful for people um when you look at I was even things like how I discover music which is a big copy of mine like that also used to be a two-minute Tick Tock video of someone just showing you the music is is a much better format right and I don't think I don't think in every format necessarily is better as video but I think you can I think it'll be you'll do exactly the same that you do today you'll do great research you'll do great interviews then you'll condense those findings into I mean I don't know if you publish this as video but then you're already then you're already doing video right oh yeah we're video first great love it and then you're already video first right and and probably at some point if you aren't doing it already you'll do like five or ten minute summaries of the interviews that you do with the most um valuable points right and then they're already in the world where like no one necessarily needs to read the newsletter I mean there's certainly fewer advantages to the writing uh as there as there used to be I mean I feel like one of the advantages with Twitter or with blogs was always that when you hear something or when something happens you can get it up on the internet very very quickly be one of the first reach the algorithm before others do but now it seems pretty clear that in some ways it's going to be even faster to create video I mean I do feel like you're always going to need the writing up front to establish what you want to say what story you want to tell what the arc is going to be what the outline of your arguments are yeah I guess one of the advantages still with writing you can read at your own pace which I feel like is not easy at all with video hitting the space bar over and over again obviously there are a lot of places where you don't have headphones on necessarily but uh yeah the speed benefit uh to writing seems like it's it's all but all but dissipating yeah I agree but also again I think depends a ton on the kind of content you're creating right like if I am let's say I want to share an update to my team of like a project that's going on is it then faster for me to sit down and write like one page I'm probably going to be a lot more self-conscious about like how I sound they're going to use the same word twice in the same sentence want to make sure my punctuation is on point like all this stuff and of course chat GPT can help me a lot with this but a lot of instances I find like doing a quick loom video is actually much faster than writing and on the other hand if you're doing something that's like very polished then you're probably going to spend a lot more time on making the video look and feel really really good versus like writing a one-page document so I just I don't think there's any like one answer to this I think it really just depends a lot on on what you're doing right and and again I think for some things again I think you know reading makes a lot of sense of all things video makes makes a lot of sense but I think the world is clearly moving towards video as being the the dominant format and the way that most people prefer to consume consume their content it's funny you bring up loom as well because I think when I talk to founders like in our like startup learning session and I I do storytelling uh when I'm not podcasting Victor I could surely I just ask founders to answer all my learning session questions in a voice note or of my eye or whatever but I find that when people are telling me something in person they say it differently than if you were going to write it I think it puts you in the mode of trying to keep someone interested which is actually what content is about right whereas for some reason when a lot of people write out long answers and written word they tend to do it chronologically or they start from the beginning and so I do think there is something nice about just asking people to uh start spitting when they're on video a hundred percent and I think I mean podcast as a medium I think it actually is like goes opposite the trend of like everything has to be like short like three second tick-tock clips because our attention span is like disappearing I think that when the format is right long form is really good and I think the reason that my I mean for myself do I prefer if I want to get to know about a person and their points of view who they are whatever do I prefer to read like a a well-researched article in a big newspaper but some journalists have sat down with that person and spoke with them for two or three hours and then cooked together their own version of what that person is like or do I prefer to just hear that person speak for two hours with one of you guys I think definitely the latter and I think most people young people today feel the same way I think in a podcast who you actually are is is what you're going to be represented as it feels much more authentic it feels much edited and i think that that is some something that most a lot of people value really highly which is also why one of the reasons i think that you know readership and the general interest in kind of legacy media is going down because and i mean i have the same experience right i think it's i think it's so much more powerful to listen to someone just speak in a almost unedited way which is what you get to do in a podcast and as to your point right like if we were to do this with written answers my answers would probably be much more pr approved victor is that what you're trying to say pr approved um and with less nuance and so yeah i totally agree that's also why i think you know ai podcasts like if this conversation was just generated of course i can't sit here and say that's like never going to happen but i don't think that's going to happen anytime soon i think people even even if you could do it to the point where you would not be able to tell that it was generated i still think that people would uh value the fact that it's a real conversation right so i still think there's going to be you know lots of of space online for real authentic content i think it's actually the more ai content we generate the more kind of real authentic content in some use cases is going to be is going to be valued right but i think it's all about the use case that's the i think that's the keyword here so podcaster will be the last safe job from agi that's good to know um i mean do you when i think of synthesia i think of i mean you're a b2b company you're doing like i mean you're replacing hr you know systems internally those boring videos that everyone skipped through anyway like you're making them ai that kind of thing do you think your company and the tech you have is has a role to play in what we're talking about more broadly in this cultural shift like because because you're still b2b right you don't have like a consumer touch point yeah for sure i think the best way of thinking about what's people use it easier for and you know why we're growing as fast as we are is that essentially we're like the next generation of powerpoint you know if you think of powerpoints there's a lot of power i think there's around 30 million powerpoints that's made like every single day and a lot of those powerpoints are internal communications trainings hr onboardings like a very wide variety of things that um you know to most people you wouldn't classify that as being super exciting content but it's content that serves a very real purpose for that company and the people in that company who's consumer right and it's a very very high volume of that content which i think one of the things people have always underestimated when they like assess some things here from the outside like oh they're just doing like training videos and like some hr stuff that's not really true this is true to you victor i heard that since you were a child you'd loved hr information sessions that's right that's right when i grew up i would go to the library and just find as many old powerpoint hr onboardings it's not what i would expect i mean you just say when you're like you're building like this crazy deep fake or whatever you want to call it technology at scale i wouldn't expect you to say i'm building the next what replaces powerpoint but i guess i do see that logic it's all about the use case right it's about communicating something to someone and in the world we live in now most people in their private lives consume video and audio content as the default especially of course the young generation right the problem is then that they go to work and then at work it's like hey please read this 10-page pdf document i just sent you please go through this 65-page powerpoint to train you on something or to sell you a product as well and that's just like not a great way of communication i think what we have found is just if you lower the barriers to create video by enough which is basically in in our world by making that as easy as it is to create a powerpoint then what you will see in every big company is that the amount of videos that they generate will explode by 100 to 200 x right it's like it's not just that people take oh we used to create video uh we used to create 100 videos every year and they used to cost us x amount now we're using synthesia and now we're saving a lot of money like it's we used to create 100 videos every year now we create a thousand videos every year or even more than that so it is just like expansive thing right where the classical example this is is always uber where yes we will replace part of the taxi market but it also massively um expanded the size of the taxi market because we lowered the prices enough all of a sudden a lot more people would take taxis than they did before and it's exactly the same effect that's um that's going on here and i think you know what what we've seen over the last especially the last 12 months when the video models really have begun getting very very good is that now you get to more and more use cases of being enabled because the qualities videos just go up and up and up and up right with vo sora our own kind of latest avatar models it actually turns out that when you give the right tools to people who make these internal things they actually become more creative they create more fun content right which is pretty awesome so an hr video and i mean maybe not yet but in a couple of years an hr onboarding video could look like a spielberg production right there's no there's not going to be any technical barriers to that there's still going to be a creativity aspect of the people making that video but they are going to be a lot more interesting than they are today and also of course the higher the quality of the videos the more they um you know the more external facing use cases they unlock i think people always think of ai videos like when i kind of make super stuff and i think that's obviously going to happen but the quality of the videos we can generate needs to kind of get up there before those those use cases really get so locked we got to get mnemonic jingles into the product here's how to use your ub key it's so easy one two three i mean because that that's the real use case right you actually want the employees to retain something like i could see a world where making it more entertaining makes it more retentive but i mean people have been saying forever that even your ted talk people are only going to remember one idea or 25 of what you say have you done any research on that in particular to say that you know the avatars are are creating more information retention than than otherwise yes i think to address the first part of your question i think there is a huge part of this which is just what's the table stakes to communicate something right and i think that's kind of a bit the point i touched upon before when people are used to consuming tiktok videos and podcasts and youtube videos and they're not going to be able to and all these like bits of content, which generally are like very engaging because the way the internet works is that you get like a gazillion new videos on YouTube every single day and a very select few of them that are the most engaging will rise to the top. And those are the ones you're going to see, right? That's how all the social media platforms work. Then when you go to work and you're presented with these long documents, that kind of sucks, right? So what's happening is that the table stakes, if you want to be heard, is just right now it's like that is in audio and video, but pretty soon it might just also be that even if it's an HR onboarding video, that it's an engaging video. It's an exciting video to watch, right? Because that's what we're going to be used to consuming. In terms of the avatars, we did some research with UCL a few years back and we found some interesting things for the type of use case we're testing for here, right? Which is more kind of like in the education, training, learning. It's not about like engaging you and make you feel deeply emotionally connected to a product or a story. The avatars actually did a better job than the humans because the avatars, because the scripts, are written, they're much more to the point, right? What can often happen if you're doing like a Loom video or something is that you ramble a bit too much. Like you could probably have delivered whatever it is you wanted to deliver in 30 seconds, but you ended up delivering it in two minutes. And when it's an avatar and it's like a written script, you kind of, there's been a bit more kind of editing on what they say. But I think, again, it goes to the use case, which is so important here, right? And that's what a lot of people, I think, misunderstand about Synthesia. If you're trying to like create a video that deeply connects, with someone over something, you want them to be really, really, really inspired about like your new vision. It's not the right tool for that, right? But if you're trying to teach people, hey, this is like our sales methodology. It has these five steps and you need to learn each of them. It works phenomenally well, right? Because that's not an emotional, that's not a storytelling use case. It's information on knowledge sharing. And I think that's the thing which we always talk about internally. It's like knowledge sharing versus storytelling. Those are two very, very different types of videos and communications. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Learn more at Accenture.com This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Check responses, setup required, compatibility and availability varies 18 plus. One of the things that's jumping out at me too with generative video in terms of the use case, obviously you could talk about its authenticity or whatnot, but it always helps as you've done to hone in on the ICP, what's the use case. And I think one of the things with this too is that internally, information changes often, right? And having to like reshoot the entire video on some set in a specific part of the office, like it's not gonna happen every time a piece of information changes. I mean, it's funny, I was told the other day that people are still watching my Snapchat philosophy video I used to do in person during onboarding. Like years and years later, even though the product is completely different, I think, you know, for sure, a lot of those fundamental truths and origin story things are the same. But it might be cool if we could update some of that stuff, right, as things change. And I think generative AI definitely, definitely affords that ability. This was one of the really big insights we had early on, which was that in the early days of Synthesia, we were very focused on like the kind of front end of creating a video. As in like, you know, get a camera, get an actor, the microphones, all that stuff, which is very time intensive, time consuming, expensive, and so on. And I think what we quickly learned was that while, of course, like replacing that part is valuable, actually what most people were struggling the most with was kind of like, as you said, like after you've shot the content and you need to edit it. Like that is such a huge problem for people. And so people were like, it's okay if we have to like record things once. If you could just allow us to edit in an easy way. Then a lot of our problems are actually solved. Of course, like doing both of them is a really powerful thing. But it is, and it makes sense, right? It's the difference between using a typewriter and writing something in a Google Doc, right? It's actually even worse than that because typing something again on a typewriter is a lot easier than recording it again in video. But the editability and taking video from essentially being an analog type of media to a digital editable type. Of media is very, very powerful, both because you want to go back and change a video, something in a video that you shot a year ago, created a year ago, but also for things like you want to translate it into a different language. And you don't have to usually translate a video into a different language. Language thing is a huge one, isn't it? Yeah. And then you have like French, French might be 10% longer than Italian. And so even if you just translate it as it is, right, the elements will be out of timing. And it's just a huge hassle to do things like. Yeah. Translation. And so when it's this fully editable type of media, you kind of leapfrog over those problems and makes essentially video editing like making a PowerPoint, right? A PowerPoint file, you can always, you know, open it up, change something, duplicate it, send it to a friend, translate it. Like it's very, very, very easy to work with. Well, is it, is it, can you do internal folks or is it just actors in your system? I'm imagining the head of sales at some company who is there long after he dies, still giving completely up-to-date presentations. Yeah. You'd have to watch our contracts, join SAG-AFTRA or something. Yeah. Ellis is going to be doing internal SNAP meetings in 20 years. Well, actually, this is a real problem. A lot of companies that, you know, since this is a product help solve, we have had many customers over the years who invested a lot in having their head of sales, head of sales, something like that, do a great 20 part video series about how to sell a thing, right? And then the person leaves the company and joins the competitor. What do you do now? Now you have 20 videos that are useless, basically. With Synthesia, right? Go in, change the avatar, and, you know, you're good to go. Maybe someone else said it. You're not beholden to, exactly. Oh, my God. But creating your own avatar is a very popular feature. Yeah. So you can do that now with very soon we're launching kind of single image avatars. So you just upload one image of yourself. And then you can prompt yourself to be in different environments, have different outcomes. And essentially, it's like a really, really scalable product. Victor, remind me, when we were catching up in Vegas, did you decide to do enterprise because you correctly identified that you need to have a business and make money? Or was it also because there was something about putting this tech out into the world in like a consumer easy to access way that you didn't feel comfortable about? Am I remembering correctly? Like, how much of this is about we need to just be a real business and have, you know, be selling AI and not just like giving it out for free? Figuring it out later? And how much of it is the world is not ready for this kind of stuff at scale? I mean, there's an element of the second one, but I don't think that negates consumer use cases. I think that's just about, you know, we've always invested a lot in trust and safety and content moderation and those types of things. It's definitely more the first part of like building a real business. But if you look at most of the AI video companies that spawned back in like 2017 to 2022 or something like that, almost all of them made the same mistake. You know, they would. Kind of sit down and think about AI video, where could this be valuable? Well, it'd be great if you could do personalized sales videos, right? That seems like something that's very valuable. It'd be great if you could do performance marketing, generate a thousand versions of a video and test which ones works the best. Both of those things are totally true. But I think with, I mean, with any type of technology, but I think specifically with something like AI video, it was just very important to us to be, look at ourselves and be like, what is this technology actually ready for? What is a real use case? And not just like, we would love this to be true use case. And I think most of those companies made the mistake of thinking that, you know, performance marketing videos with AI would be great back in 2021. It's, you look at those videos and they're crap, right? I think what we identified very early on was just that when you looked inside these companies, in general, the content that lives inside companies and is not external phasing is of lower quality, right? Which makes sense. It does make sense. Yeah. I was going to say, like, you correctly identified that the only thing worse than 2021 video AI was like internal HR training videos. But it's not even that bad because it's more like a 15 page PDF document. How can we make that better? That's a very different thing than saying, can we take a performance marketing video and make it with AI, right? Like what you compare the AI video to is very, very important. And all those people were basically doing it. So we have use cases where the comparison would be to a real video, which you're always going to lose. Whereas what we did, we picked a use case where the comparison would not be a real video. The comparison would be a 15 page PDF document. And that's a very, very important distinction, right? So I think what we did early on was just we figured out that the use cases that are mature today are internal phasing comms in companies because in general, in companies, which makes sense, why spend time polishing a piece of internal communications the same way you would polish an ad you're going to publish? I put on TV, right? It just doesn't make any business sense to do that. And so that's the kind of reason that we went down that path because we could just see that we were very clearly delivering real utility, not just like a cool demo, which we could sell to dreamers who wanted to believe that this stuff would work. But when, you know, at some point kind of you had to test it out, it just wouldn't perform right, which is what happened in a lot of these cases. Do you see it broadening though? Like, do you want to be a consumer company? We've, I mean, so we've, we've seen this like shift over the years where the better the technology gets, the more use cases we unlock. So right now it's about 50% of our use cases, which is internal and 50% which is external. So that is all. And that is already a big shift from just a couple of years ago, a couple of years back. And I think we'll continue to see those. Are we ever going to be the company where you're going to go in and want to make like performance marketing ads or really cool storytelling, creative content? Definitely not. Like there are other companies who are chasing that. We will always be focused on the. PowerPoint user more than anything else. And that is just, again, more in this category of knowledge sharing, information sharing than in storytelling. So we have a consumer use case in the sense that we have a lot of individuals who sign up to Synthesia and make content for it. But I don't see Synthesia going into the world of creating more storytelling, social media type of content. I think we're very squarely focused on the B2B side of things. So funny question. You obviously can't control what your head of sales looks like. But when it's an avatar, you have the ability to have them look however you want. And it's interesting. I think we've certainly learned from TikTok, Reels, and everything else that cuties convert better. How are you casting your AI avatars? How much are you giving in to their appearance as a way to get attention from internal audiences? That's a legit question, right? That's a choice. Well, I think what you see in the enterprise is. I think what you see in the enterprise is actually kind of a bit the opposite because people care a lot about inclusion and diversity and having like representative voices in their videos. I mean, of course it matters and I'm sure people think about it. But you have to, again, remember that most of the content we create is not made to compete in newsfeeds with other people's content, right? Like it's a video that a big company creates for like a very specific thing. And the person watching that video is not going to have like 15,000 other alternatives to what they could spend their time on. So I think it matters a bit less in our kind of use cases. But of course, like how the avatar looks is a part of the engagement. And it helps to have a captive audience. You will watch this video or not get your next paycheck. That's true. That's true. This appeals to me, though, as a former corpo. I mean, I was always struggling with writing teams or brand teams or marketing teams to have a source of truth that actually remains up to date. And I think you could argue that's one of the biggest problems that still remains. And in corporate life, and I think there are a lot of AIs trying to help solve this, is say, hey, like, here's the source of truth. I'm going to update the source of truth, brand doc or the voice doc or the key testimonials from our partners doc. It seems like when it's a video, having that be the source of truth, having it be updatable at any time, seems like it could actually create a higher level of understanding and cohesion within companies. I don't know if you've heard that from anybody yet. But I mean, it does seem like when there's a video, demo of the thing that people can share and bookmark and that's always up to date, it's going to be used more for sure and i think because these videos are programmed right they can't be updated manually but also automatically so i think what we're seeing right now is and you know we're launching this new kind of product around agentic video which we should probably also talk a bit about but i think with llms video models real-time video models speech models like there's so much interesting tech going on right now which i think is going to be a big component of solving that specific problem right because even if you have videos you can edit with ai like as you said you still need to have a knowledge base somewhere that's like up to date before you can update the video to sort of match that and i think right now there's just a lot of exciting stuff going on with like you can build agents that can kind of figure out what are the discrepancies in the information like what do we say on our website versus what we say on our internal documents what does person x slide deck say versus what's actually in the mission statement like all these things we can actually begin to kind of map out and work on having a real you know a real sense of what's going on and what's going to happen in the future source of truth which in a way i think it's just been very very difficult to kind of do before and when you have that that enables a lot of exciting things on top of it you can take that knowledge and you can generate content on the fly essentially right you could personalize a product demo so you know you go to a website you want to see a software product you put in who you are your role your title your company etc and based off that you could just generate an experience that's completely personalized to you the features you want to see and you can talk to the video ask it a question in a way that hasn't really been been possible before right so i think we're about to see an entirely new type of media emerge based on all these like cool new ai models and it's always been a big thing for us that we i think we had these two big ideas when we started the company the first one was just with ai you're going to be able to create content at a very low cost with much less you know skill required and therefore also much less time required to create something the larger the cost of creating video and other types of content is going to go to zero essentially and that's a big business opportunity and i think that's roughly where the gen ai content industry has been so far the second big idea was this idea that when we create new media technologies as humans we always create new media formats native to those technologies and so the big question here is like what does truly ai native video or whatever we end up calling it actually look like right right now we're just talking about the interactivity the two-way side of it exactly right now if i'm hearing you correctly we're talking about choose your own adventure hr info session that's what i'm talking about exactly um it's going to be this sort of interesting halfway house between a video game and a video most likely right where you can personalize the experience you can choose your own adventure we're launching a product very soon around um training and role playing so if you're a salesperson rather than just sort of pass like just consuming let's say a 10-minute piece of of content on and new product that you're launching so it's almost a video game at that point yeah it is right and i mean we know that video games are great ways of like learning things so after you go through a 10 minute maybe just a normal synthesis video you can insert these agents at any point in your video that could for example be a role play where by the end of the video as a seller you have to spend 15 minutes talking to an ai agent pretending to be a customer and you have to overcome objections show you've actually understood the content for you as a learner that means that you know you learn it and for a manager and c-level folks what we can actually begin to do with this is to give you a map of your talent how enabled are they you can go and say well people are really good at talking about like product a but the product we launched three months ago nobody's any clue how to actually sell this that's a big problem let's use synthesia to then train you further on this and it could be videos where you just have a simple q a right so you you watch a piece of content you have a question just like if you had a real you know tutor sitting by your side you can say hey can you explain this again in different terms what does this mean for my role or whatever else thing you want to do so there's got to be a lot of interesting things with what we call video agents where we take video from being this kind of static one-way communication to essentially being a video you can talk to it could be that you're role playing with it it could be that it's interviewing you asking you like you know how do you asking a customer how they like the product and doing patient intake for a doc like there's a million different use cases you can imagine where this these types of videos becomes less like a video and almost more like kind of a small app that that does something for you right it could be a form it could be a role play it could be a small game um and i think that's the 100 million opportunity in this space it's figuring out like what does this new media format look like where is it really valuable scaling on that and then becoming the kind of platform for people to create these experiences well it sounds like maybe podcasting is going to get replaced then i mean do you see that extending to more creative interactions or do you think that's always going to be something that um is the more mundane like like taking a pdf and making it a video actually i know quite the opposite i think that if you think about like how do you best learn something right the best way of learning something is rarely just to like go to a room with someone and just start asking them questions which would be like they're just going to chat to chat gbt right most places and if we take the enterprise version of this is that you have some curriculum there's someone in the company who sat down that this is our sales methodology and they've defined what it is and how we talk about it and they've probably put some visuals to it in our powerpoint slides for example and then you consume that and then you also have a manager or tutor something that you ask questions you learn by talking to your colleagues next to you by kind of seeing what other people is doing and i think it's exactly the same thing so the the way we've we're building this product is with a very big emphasis on combining curriculum static content video you've created into these here with these agents um and so what that means is that you as someone who's training someone to do something you kind of get the boost of both worlds right you can have both the static content and you can have the interactive versions of it as well and so i think and i think with podcasts i don't think it's it's a netflix that there's like bandersnatch series a while back which is an interactive um series right it's flopped pretty hard and i think it's in some sense kind of obvious why it flopped because when people come home from work they want to sit down and they just want to watch something you don't want to make a decision every 10 minutes on what direction to go right and we just do different things as humans like when i'm when i'm walking to work and listen to a podcast i want to listen to a podcast that you guys you've sat down with interesting guests you've edited out the most interesting parts of me and i want to listen to that right that's very different from me coming home and wanting to like google things and ask specific questions and find specific information we just have like different modes and maybe in the future there's going to be a way where you know you have an ai version that i can ask you a question of like what do you think about the what this guest said or something but i still think there's a big difference between i'm watching a film and playing a computer game are two very different things right they haven't replaced each other we still most people both watch films and they also play computer games computer games is like you're you're making decisions every single moment and a film is something you're much more like relaxed sitting back and just consuming something i think that point stands and for those who don't know bandersnatch was kind of like a black mirror mini episode where you could kind of choose your own adventure for the main character and he eventually becomes self-aware and it rules but to my knowledge the reason it flopped was because you could only do it on a laptop because you had to click i don't think you could do it on apple tv that's why i waited so long to watch it maybe you could on roku or otherwise or does someone know better than i do yeah i i definitely watched that on tv you did and you were able to click and whatnot well i think this is a good segue to our next point i don't i know we don't have a ton of time left but i know you're focusing very much on your use case and your icp right now and i think there's a difference between like creating a video that is not true or that misrepresents reality if you share that with the world your boss fires you whereas if it's just making up a video of a politician or somebody like that maybe you actually start a movement instead of getting fired i feel like you're on just the absolute cutting edge of this stuff in five years when we see political videos online or just videos of anybody entertainers celebrities whatever are we going to by default assume that it's not real and and what do you think is going to happen i think there's a it's pretty high probability that we i think we probably should expect that something is not real unless we're told is real so today you have this system right where kind of change on x now but we use that like you have like verified accounts which is essentially like if you're a celebrity you get like a blue check mark i can't believe they dumped that it was so valuable it actually was pretty valuable um but i think a better version of the world would be that you know when you watch a piece of content rather than having it verified if it's actually true you should have it should stand out in the interface um when something is is not verified so i think what we'll see is that politicians celebrities all these folks will essentially have ways of of of confirming what content is real and what is not and this could be anything from you kind of fingerprint the content and you have to kind of uh i usually explain this a like shesam but for all the content in the world you know the the thing that can recognize songs for you if you imagine that every time someone creates a piece of content and it gets uploaded to a global database somewhere and it's searchable we could tell you hey what you're watching right now is an edited version of the original which can you can view by clicking here for example or like this pretends to be from the bbc but the bbc has no record of ever actually uploading this and so we should tell you that this is probably like an unsafe on unreal piece of content there's a challenges for sure and all this stuff but i think what we will move to eventually is almost like something like ssl for video and for content online where there will be the majority of the continent into that will probably be you know not verified but then there will be some content that's um that's that's that's verified i think there'll be a default way for like well-known people to to push out content now i think i'm actually less worried about like politicians and celebrities i think what's happening today is a bit like the barbra streisand effect of as soon as someone creates something outrageous people in the comments very quickly goes like this is ai and i know that's not a perfect system but maybe a controversial point of view but i do think it works like pretty well we have things like community notes which i think is an amazing system that i hope is going to scale where events where essentially you have the way community notes works right is that you have you basically have a lot of people and you figure out what the people who generally disagree the most can agree on with this piece of content right so what can like hardcore republicans and hardcore democrats agree on well they can agree that this clip is not real for some reason that's a pretty cool way of like getting to the truth and it's a bit the same way that wikipedia works and i think we'll see this scaled up um pretty um pretty pretty significantly never thought i'd say this but sounds like a good use for blockchain or is that not true it is i think a good use for blockchain because it would be it would be immutable right um but uh i mean there's a lot of scale problems still but i think the theory of having this on a blockchain where nobody can edit it after the fact i think is is very powerful um and maybe to finish my thought before i think celebrity politicians i think will have less problems with that i think where the big problem of unfortunate will be is where we're seeing it today which is non-consensual deep fakes of like pornography for example of like everyday people of unfortunately especially women right and we'll see this with scammers creating videos voice clones etc of like family members this is much much harder to detect in many ways right because you're not going to have community notes on a video that someone sends to you personally you need a family code word instead things like that might actually be something we have to begin thinking about right so i'm more worried about the long tail of like individuals for things like scamming uh than i am of um i think what has historically always been the biggest worry which is like what if someone makes a deep fake of a politician saying something they didn't say and it kicks off like some crazy chain of events i just of course that can happen and it will probably impact the political landscape but i just think we've we've seen it enough times now that um you know we've seen it enough times now that um we've seen it enough times now that um you know it's uh yeah i think i'm less worried about that and more worried about like on an individual level kind of a bummer note to end it on is there anything positive we can end it on do you have any like uh positive views of what this is going to do i mean i do think maybe maybe it leads us to all kind of band together in a way right to try to figure out what's real like you were saying about community notes but it is kind of refreshing when you see a tiktok and it's like oh is that fake and then you open the comments and it's like fake and then you open the comments and it's like fake and then you open the comments and it's like fake fake fake fake fake right like that's that kind of gives me hope for humanity look i think there's a lot of tough challenges ahead but i actually do think that the combination of community notes figuring out this way of like proving media provenance by um fingerprinting content or doing this shazam style database i think there is a lot of things we can do which i think will make the media information ecosystem a lot better actually also a lot better than it's today that said like there's going to be a lot of ai content and there's going to be a lot of slop like we've seen right now there's going to also be a lot of amazing art and i feel like i feel like that part of it doesn't get nearly as much attention as all the slop and there's so much cool stuff like i have so many friends who are musicians who are making awesome music videos you have filmmakers experiment with this stuff creating really cool things so i think there's as many prance pros as there's as there are cons i also think it will push us to be i think it will push like the digital world to be even more artificial than it is today and i think in some ways maybe that's actually a good thing right as you said earlier we should probably be more skeptical of the stuff that we see online by default and we should probably get more off our phones and out into the real world and i think there will be a movement towards both economically in terms of like what do we value as society what do we who makes the most money where does the value accrue to being potentially in in i don't know the timeline but let's say 10 years 5 or 10 years 15 years to be less about people who have like highly analytical numerical jobs and i think in some ways maybe that's actually a good thing right as you said i think that's actually a good thing right as you said of like looking at excel spreadsheets coding all the stuff that's high paid today it's being more about the things that drive real human connection right because as much as we can get optimist robots and we can get i mean all this crazy ai stuff i think what uh what we will not be able to replace with ai is the feeling of having drinks with your good friends it's going to be an amazing musical experience somewhere it's going to be seeing a piece of art it's going to be walking out in nature and enjoying the sun and so i think there is a version of the world where right now the digital world so far tech all this stuff is like the pinnacle of of uh of society in the sense that that's where all the wealth is kind of actually accumulated and maybe in the future that will actually change as all those things just become like very very very commoditized here here all right victor it was great catching up with you we can let you get back to your uh nice retreat in utah i hope it's uh i hope it's good thanks for joining us enjoy the summit great to meet you yeah thanks guys booking.com is the easiest way from a day surrounded by noise to a stay surrounded by nature that's nice go on book it it's easy booking.com booking dot yeah fall is the perfect time to refresh and reorganize your space at the home depot find power tools and tool sets starting at fifty dollars to help tackle diy projects home updates and more whether you're drilling brackets to support new shelving or sharpening your hedge trimmer blade with an angle grinder the home depot has the tools you need to check projects off your list shop labor day savings at the home depot and gear up for fall projects with the right tools to keep your projects moving