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Episode 1-14-2026
I think I got like a compact computer and I was running Ms. Dos and we're kind of more in the Ms. DOS phase of AI. You know, I don't, I think not to belittle the interfaces, but the Chatbot is not the end state interface. The current Chatbot is not the end state interface for AI. I mean think about your phone and your app. Do you want to chat to get the weather? Do you want to chat to like do most of the functions? The answer is no. And so I think the future AI interface will have a reference to chat, but it's probably going to be much more visual. Most people aren't completely text based. And I do think there's been a. It's kind of like we've been entering the engine of the car, but we haven't really redesigned the car. And so the Chatbot is really a pre AI interface that we've plugged onto this incredibly powerful engine. And so I think what we're trying to do is think through like what are, where can we take this interface? What is the like multi touch reference for an age of AI? And we're not going to do this overnight. We're not going to be the only company doing this. But I really think like the models are even more powerful than people realize because we have hardly harnessed them. And if you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So I totally agree with you and I think.
It would be an endless loop. And vine was very good about endlessly looping videos so you could do all these cool, fun things with it. I had a lot of fun with that format. It was great. Did you see that? Havana Syndrome is real, apparently. This is crazy. Noah Smith says Havana Syndrome was real and we got the device that causes it. Conspiracy theory that turned out apparently. A number of months ago, the US Captured a weapon that has been associated with Havana Syndrome. Havana Syndrome disputed medical conditions. Starting in 2016, in about a dozen overseas locations, U.S. and Canadian government officials and their families reported symptoms associated with a perceived localized loud sound. The symptoms lasted for months, including disabling cognitive problems, balance problems, dizziness, insomnia, and headaches. Havana Syndrome is not officially recognized as a disease by the medical community, but apparently there is reporting in CNN now that there's a device. Well, there's been a bunch of real investigations in this because it's happening all over the world. People are like, I feel terrible. Why do I feel terrible? I'm hearing things. I have a headache. I can't balance. And so this was just a great mystery. CNN now reports the device linked to it was purchased by Homeland Security in the waning days of the Biden administration, and DoD has spent a year testing it. It has Russian components and fits into just a backpack, which is scary. Will a defense tech startup build one and go through Y Combinator? Who knows? Stay tuned. We might see someone commercialize this technology any day now. Tyler, I want to see someone. If they're building it, I want them to use it on themselves. Like Jake Adler at Pilgrim. Oh, yeah. Cuts his leg open. Yeah, that'd be great. Prove that it works. He shoots the VC with the I'm so dizzy. I gotta write you a term sheet. Owls says the.
Yeah I really Indie rock music I think people aren't really noticing this but it's been on the rise for the last 18 months. My prediction is this is coinciding with this return to in person meta Indie rock music is probably the best kind of music for that so that's one see Claude code I think one of the interesting things with noises you kind of get to see where echo chambers are breaking. Right. Because cloud code was kind of this thing in Silicon Valley that took over the entire timeline and everybody assumed, you know, nobody's using ChatGPT at this point that these OpenAI products are basically in the dust. But the things that we were seeing is the engagement and the kinds of interest that people have in ChatGPT is still higher than Claude no matter what. So when you actually compare these things side by side at a very global level it's interesting to see where these trends are actually at. Yeah yeah. How do you think about relevancy to particular.
You kind of, kind of hit the nail on the head. This is something I think about pretty often because on the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. So I do like that a lot. At the same time, it's like kind of a brutal reminder of like, when you're in the early ages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard because you have all the problems of like a small company, in my case, all over again, right? Where you've got, like, you've got, you know, a function within your organization where there's like one person working, right? And that person, for whatever reason leaves, right? And then you're like, well, got to rebuild that thing from scratch. And so there's like a lot of those kinds of growing pains where you're like, up, there's nobody here that's doing that. I gotta go out and hire a recruiter. And then that person has to go out and recruit the person that's going to do the thing. So in many ways it's like, it's really hard. I guess that's what I'm trying to say is like, it's a reminder that starting companies is actually not that easy. Yeah, you get better, but it doesn't actually get easier because then if it's easier, it just means you need to be doing more and more and more and more and pushing yourself even further. I also did do something that I didn't have a ton of professional experience in, which was kind of the point, right? I wanted to do something that was net new because it was intellectually very interesting for me. But at the same time, and not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SaaS company, right? Like, that's. This is like new company on absolute hard mode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, there just is the reality that in enterprise software you can get a customer to pay you pretty quickly if you build something that works. And in hard tech and.
On there and all the other good stuff that you need to kind of. Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna give the. I'm gonna give my recap of John using Slackbot this morning because he. This was an ASI moment. He was like, I was very pleased with it. John, we do the show all day long. There's a lot going on in Slack, and so catching up is. Is tough. Yeah, this absolutely nailed the summary. Immediately found something that was like, very actually interesting and important. And we're like, whoa, we missed that. I probably truthfully had about like 200 notifications across 15 different channels as they build up. And it basically put together a deep research report of every little item, picked it out when am I mentioned? And it was exactly what I wanted to catch up. And then I went to it and I asked, okay, clear all of the notifications. It couldn't do it, but it gave me the shortcut shift escape and it didn't it in two seconds. So I was very satisfied. How has the response been from your. Customers, first of all? Well, there's the response of my customer right there. I would say. I'm so excited that we could finally get this out of the shop and into people's hands. I've been using it myself for months. It's completely changed my life. I think it will change your life. I think it'll change your show. I think it's going to make everything better. Because we've talked a long time about prompt engineering and AI. When you're writing your prompt, you're coming up with your question. Now you really see the power of context engineering. That is, it's looking at all the data about your show and everything you guys have ever said. It can even read your DMs. And then it's coming in and it's saying, hey, right here. This is what you need to ask Marc Benioff this question. This is the zinger for him. And that's the prompt you could give it, which is, hey, based on everything we know about Mark, everything that's ever happened in the show, everything that's happening inside Slack now, plus everything that Anthropic knows, everything that everyone knows, what's the zinger for Mark? And then it's going to come up with it. Yeah, talk to me about the tone and the speed. I noticed that it responds like an LLM. It's giving me a few paragraphs. It's not acting like a person who might respond with on it. And then, okay, here's what I found. And Then it's like six different messages. Is that intentional? Do you like the the tune or do you see it evolving to your style over time? Where does all this go in terms of the flavor of Slackbot's personality? Powered by. This is really different than our last interview. We're going deep in product. Okay, let's do it. So, number one, we love it. Number one, every company is gonna have a customer agent and an employee agent. And that's why we've been working on AgentForce to build the orchestration layer, the observability layer, so that companies can get out there with their agents. And that's what I've been so excited about. Then all the apps, like Slack is only one app we make. We have a whole bunch of apps like Tableau, our sales cloud, our service cloud, marketing, commerce, and on and on and on. We have a whole family of apps that help you run your business and then a huge set of data capabilities, including Informatica, Mulesoft, our Data360 layer that let you federate and integrate your data, which means that it's going to find all the data in your company and bring it together. Now, what you're not seeing yet in Slackbot, but what I have is that you just hit a button and it connects to all your Google sources. Also. And it connects to all your sources. You're keeping the good stuff for yourself. This is a fast takeoff scenario and you're like, we're keeping this for ourselves. You can't let it out. Well, I was at a conference for the last two days. Really cool conference in Honolulu, Hawaii. I live in Hawaii, so.
To. I just need to, like, I need to make something in this world. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of thoughts on this. It kind of kind of hit the nail on the head. This is something I think about pretty often because on the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. So I do like that a lot. At the same time, it's like kind of a brutal reminder of, like, when you're in the early ages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard because you have all the problems of like, a small company, in my case, all over again. Right. Where you've got, like, you've got, you know, a function within your organization where there's like one person working, right. And that person, for whatever reason leaves. Right. And then you're like, well, got to rebuild that thing from scratch. And so there's like a lot of those kinds of growing pains where you're like, up, there's nobody here that's doing that. I gotta go out and hire a recruiter. And then that person has to go out and recruit the person that's gonna do the thing. So in many ways, it's like, it's really hard. Yeah. I guess that's what I'm trying to say is like, it's a reminder that starting companies is actually not that easy. Yeah, you get. You get better, but it doesn't actually get easier because then if it's easier, it just means you need to be doing more and more and more and more and pushing yourself even further. Further. I also did do something that I didn't have a ton of professional experience in, which was kind of the point. Right. I wanted to do something that was net new because it was intellectually very interesting for me. But at the same time, and not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SAS company. Right? Like, that's. This is like new company on absolute hard mode. Yeah. I mean, there just is the reality that in enterprise software you can get a customer to pay you pretty quickly if you build something that works in hard tech. And.
You kind of, kind of hit the nail on the head. This is something I think about pretty often because on the one hand, starting companies and doing things at early stages when they're not really figured out is kind of my happy place. So I do like that a lot. At the same time, it's like kind of a brutal reminder of like, when you're in the early ages of starting something, it's actually pretty damn hard because you have all the problems of like a small company, in my case, all over again, right? Where you've got, like, you've got, you know, a function within your organization where there's like one person working, right? And that person, for whatever reason leaves, right? And then you're like, well, got to rebuild that thing from scratch. And so there's like a lot of those kinds of growing pains where you're like, up, there's nobody here that's doing that. I gotta go out and hire a recruiter. And then that person has to go out and recruit the person that's going to do the thing. So in many ways it's like, it's really hard. I guess that's what I'm trying to say is like, it's a reminder that starting companies is actually not that easy. Yeah, you get better, but it doesn't actually get easier because then if it's easier, it just means you need to be doing more and more and more and more and pushing yourself even further. I also did do something that I didn't have a ton of professional experience in, which was kind of the point, right? I wanted to do something that was net new because it was intellectually very interesting for me. But at the same time, and not to throw shade at anybody out there that's building an enterprise SaaS company, right? Like, that's. This is like new company on absolute hard mode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, like, there just is the reality that in enterprise software.
Era of AI. We need to move into the multi touch era. The chat is begging us to ask you for an arm routine. Is there a dedicated arm day? Are there any particular machines that you recommend? Free weights? What is the secret to those arms? Oh, thank you very much. Well, first of all, like genetically I better arms than shoulders or chest, so that's just one thing. But I actually don't have an arm day. I used to do a five day split where I do back legs, chest, shoulders, arms. I now do arms with shoulders. So I'll usually do two exercises of biceps, two exercises of triceps, typically a compound free weight movement and a machine movement. So maybe like a dumbbell curl followed by like a hammer strength cable with like a rope or a V bar and then triceps always doing a push down with a cable and then maybe like a French press or skull crusher, depending on what you call it. Okay, that's a good. I like to call them skull crushers. They sound a lot more hardcore. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's heavy metal. We don't know how to name exercises like that. We don't. The world's become soft. It really has the best, the best. I do think, I do think generally if you're like under 40, for sure, you should be doing almost entirely compound movements and free weights and dumbbells and barbells, you know, I'm 44, so I think transitioning to some more machines is good just because the tax it puts on your joints. But I still try to put in free weights. Are you using any AI in the gym? Are you tracking movements or going to the church of Iron John? Or is it all about nutrition? And nutrition. I have a, I have a trainer, he was a former Mr. Universe. He competed in Mr. Olympia. So I let him do that. He is. But my diet and my supplements are very much like, I put everything into AI and I get like, I do things. I don't know if it sounds eccentric, but like I'll get blood work and they'll give you a PDF and you can put the PDF in a chatbot and it'll tell you like to analyze it and it can even tell you what supplements you need based on your blood work. It's probably something everyone should do. It's not that hard. And so like I don't get, I don't go out enough. So I don't need more vitamin D. The blood work said that. So I take a vitamin D supplement because I'm not, I'm like inside working a lot. So stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, I view.
The multi touch era. The chat is begging us to ask you for an arm routine. Is there a dedicated arm day? Are there any particular machines that you recommend? Free weights? What is the secret to those arms? Oh, thank you very much. Well, first of all, like genetically I better arms than shoulders or chest, so that's just one thing. But I actually don't have an arm day. I used to do a five day split where I do back legs, chest, shoulders, arms. I now do arms with shoulders. So I'll usually do two exercises of biceps, two exercises of triceps, typically a compound free weight movement and a machine movement. So maybe like a dumbbell curl followed by like a hammer strength cable with like a rope or a V bar and then triceps always doing a push down with a cable and then maybe like a French press or skull crusher, depending on what you call it. Okay, that's a good. I like to call them skull crushers. They sound a lot more hardcore than. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's heavy metal. We don't know how to name exercises. Like, we don't. The world's become soft. It really has the best, the best. I do think, I do think generally if you're like under 40, for sure, you should be doing almost entirely compound movements and free weights and dumbbells and barbells. You know, I'm 44, so I think transitioning to some more machines is good just because the tax it puts on your joints. But I still try to put in free weights. Are you using any AI in the gym? Are there, are you tracking movements or asking questions, going to the church of Iron John or is nutrition and nutrition. I have a, I have a trainer. He was a former Mr. Universe. He competed in Mr. Olympia. So he, I let that, I let him do that. He is, he is, he is. But I. My diet and my supplements are very much like, I put everything into AI and I get like, I do, I do things. I don't know if it sounds eccentric, but like I'll get blood work and they'll give you a PDF and you can put the PDF in a chatbot and it'll tell you like to analyze it and it can even tell you what supplements you need based on your blood work. It's probably something everyone should do. It's not that hard. And so like I don't get, I don't go out enough. So I don't need more vitamin D. The blood work said that. So I take a vitamin D supplement because I'm not, I'm like, inside working a lot, so stuff like that.
There's plenty of cool old cars out there. Well, one exciting thing that I've been thinking about is I feel like in 15 years from now, it is not unreasonable to imagine that it is illegal to drive a car yourself on the roads. Like at some point autonomous vehicles will become so safe and driving a car yourself is so dangerous as it, you know, one of the number one causes, motor vehicle accidents being the number one causes of death, that car manufacturers will start making insane enthusiast cars that are effectively track only because you have some percentage of the population that's just like they're not buying a 911 to use as a daily. They're like, I love cars, so I'm gonna get this something. Like they're making a W1 track only edition, right? And I could see like track only cars having like a real renaissance. I mean, interesting. That kind of stuff is happening already. But I will tell you this. While such a thing might happen in California, Florida, man will never stand for that. I agree. They're like, texas will never stand for that. There are parts of this country that simply will not. From their cold dead hands. For sure. Yeah, for sure. But like Florida, man's not down to that. I don't know, I just feel like I see it. But at the same time, eventually, you know, these, the safety data is going. To be overwhelming for perfect self driving cars in a decade. Like they're just never going to get. It will literally be like moms against self driving. But they're talking about human driving self. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's so dystopian though, right? I'm not saying I'm excited, I'm not saying I'm excited about it because, because. Cars also, I mean, if I'm going to wax poetic here for a second on cars, like, cars are really important. They represent freedom in my opinion. Right. They represent the idea of like being able to have the freedom to explore the world, the geography of the landscape of everything around us. Right. It's the feeling of like the wind in your hair, the way the steering wheel feels in your hands when you go over a patch of road. Right. Like the way all of these things feel like it's not just about transportation. It's not just about the feeling of power. For me, I think it is like the embodiment of freedom and the idea of like going through a sort of like technological course and a course of human history where we make that freedom illegal. Man, that's. I find that to be super dystopian. Yeah, let's hope it doesn't happen. You can still ride a horse around if you want. On many streets. Yeah, we might see a resurgence in.
Deploy that AI technology. The CEO also did. I mean, you've spent your entire career in technology. Did this. Did the ChatGPT moment, did the AI boom? Were you expecting it, or did it hit you like a flashbang? Was it just. Was it just a. Just a massive flashback that just hit you like a ton of bricks? Hit me like a ton of bricks. I would say. We have a flashback. I had to use it. Ten years ago, I had the nastiest dream about AI and so I started a whole AI initiative at Salesforce called Einstein. Okay. And we became the number of.
Percent margins this year. I have. I have one last. Question coming on. The last question. Are dreams and underrated? Are dreams an underrated source of business? Alpha, you said. You said you had a. At a had almost a nightmare about AI and that started Einstein. Do you look for signal in your dreams? I pay attention to my dreams. I pay attention to my. My visions, my insights. And you know, Salesforce started because I was swimming with a pot of dolphins outside the coast of Hawaii, where I live. And I was in about 100 dolphins and I was one with the pod. And when I was one with the pod, all of a sudden in my mind I saw this vision of what Salesforce could look like. And I came into Larry Ellison and I said, hey, I think I'm going to quit my job. And he gave me $2 million. And we started Salesforce. And that was that. That was 26 years ago. It's amazing. Well, thank you so much for sharing the story with us. Thank you, dolphins. Thank you, dolphins. Thank you to the dolphins. Look at that. Thank you, dolphins. Thank you for coming on the show. Take care of the dolphins. We will talk to you soon. Have a great. Love, you guys.
Did this? Did the chatgpt moment, did the AI boom. Were you expecting it, or did it hit you like a flashbang? Was it just a massive flashbang that just hit you like a ton of bricks? Hit me like a ton of bricks. I would say. We have a flashback. I had to use it. 10 years ago. I had the nastiest dream about AI and so I started a whole.
Security through this or this market is market's low volume. It's now up to 57% chance that Elon wins. Yes. Interesting. Yes. What's at stake if Elon Musk wins? What does that do? Is that just a settlement? Is that just some monetary penalties? Does Elon have the have the chance of getting equity in OpenAI? Because at a certain point if you convert it to a for profit and you can get just have a settlement where he gets 10 billion in stock it doesn't really change the structure. He doesn't get a board seat. That's kind of a non issue even if he wins. But then there could be the nuclear option where he wins and he gets control and gets a board seat or gets a majority stake. I mean if you run back the clock and you look at how much he donated if you weight ownership by nonprofit donations which is a crazy thing to do that's I don't think on the table you would wind up with a very very different control structure. But it is an exciting time and I'm sure the court reporting will be fascinating. I wonder.
There is some funny dialogue happening. I'll fill you in. The Kalshi market Will Elon win? His case against OpenAI was at a 36% chance this morning. What's it doing now? He asked. What are the odds looking like? They responded. Now Elon is posting. I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war. Elon said that he just posted this oh my God. Absolutely score shirt.
More hardware. We are in the midst of a revolution, obviously. I mean, I don't want to be like saying what everyone already knows, but here's what I do want to say. Like the everyday life of the average person has barely changed in the last three years. We're on ChatGPT a lot. We're on Gemini, we're on Claude. People listening are much more technical than the average person. They're doing unique things, workflows. The average person's still mostly living the life they lived three years ago using the same devices. The world hasn't finally made the shift yet. It hasn't finally made the shift. It won't make the shift until daily life has changed. And daily life doesn't change until the devices have changed, the operating systems have changed, apps become agents, and we're all living in a completely natively consumer AI world. And we're not using chatbots, at least not today's chatbots. We are still living in the DOS era of AI and we need to move into the multi touch era.
Company now, because of the huge investment you've made in Slack, you're going to get a great outcome. I'm really confident. And, you know, I don't know if you've seen some of the videos that Mr. Beast has been doing, but he is really in it to win it on this. And he runs, you know, his whole company. People talk about Mr. Beast like. Like he's this consumer guy, but this guy loves enterprise software. Entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, yeah, it's true. Oh, he's amazing. The first time I ever talked to him was a couple of years ago. He goes, I am going to be like Steve Jobs. I am going to be like Larry Ellison. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, I want to be one of the great entrepreneurs of all time. So he really has a mental model that's super unusual. Well, he runs his whole companies on Slack, so now he has the ability to kind of get to a new level by bringing AI in. Because when you take AI data and the app together, as you see, you get a tremendous outcome. AI by itself. The models, great, fantastic. But they're commodities at this point. We all know that the data sets, those are commodities on the consumer side, but not your data set. The only one who has your data set is you. And then three, the app, you've chosen Slack. Thank you for that. And so now you put 1, 2 and 3 together and bam, you are ready to roll. You know, you can now sleep with one eye open. There we go. Give us a Super bowl preview. What's been exciting in the past that you've done? What do you want to do in the future?
Seems pretty cool. This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. He says, this isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her farm by a Data Center Company. 11.2 million total. This is what Big Tech is doing in Michigan. So anyway, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan. Yeah. I remember on the University of Michigan campus, there's these stickers and posters everywhere that are Stop the AI Data Center. Or it was Stop the data center build out. And that's when you knew you had to drop out. This place is not fixing organ rejection. You got to go back, take the fight to them. Put up some posters that say yes on data centers. Put a data center, subsidized data centers. Tear down the stadium. Yeah. So just, just some context on that last exchange. Matthew Zaitlin at heatmap says, I think this is shared as an example of Big Tech doing a bad thing. But I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6,200 per acre. So they're paying over 10x the price. Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean, they could easily be paying a premium because of this land specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. I wouldn't be surprised if some, some landmaxers are going out and just buying up, you know, why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes? I wonder how real this text message is because I get a lot of spam text messages for business financing. Oh, we'll invest in your company. You just get like random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out random numbers just for price discovery, just to sort of like aggregate some sort of metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out. If this person had said yes, what's the problem? My wife got a spam text today.
Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You're in favor of data center subsidies, right? Like, you want data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable to. Have government backed data centers. Electrical subsidies. You got to feed Claude. I mean, I just think, like, this is kind of disappointing because it's telling me that, like, if you imagine we have like a real free market, there should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply. And that's obviously not happening because energy price would be going down, they're going up. So it's like this is just like this is telling me that in the future we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want. Yes. Or at least on any kind of like short term scale. Yeah, it does feel, I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is, at least in the short term, much more zero sum than people thought. There's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But the pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want. Which is why I was a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy. And a lot of work being done across all different technologies, unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not be unaffordable. Because people, people do want to scroll Instagram reels and they want to watch AI slop and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone after watching four hours of Instagram reels. Taiwan.
Yeah. One thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers have very real reasons to push back. Right. It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products. Right. Like, it doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's jobs. Jobs. I hope we have a job that come. I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. I want one. There's empty buildings out there. We did joke about moving the show to Abilene. That would be good. But yeah, it's very real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built and sudden you're going to be able to. Go, yeah, like you could be a football fan, but even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard. Yeah. You're just like, I. That's so true. That's the big thing. And so power bill goes up, you know, what do you get in return? Nothing. Aura. Aura. A nice view. A nice view. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a data center appreciator. Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So $64 billion in data cent projects are currently held up and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because prices are going up. Now, there's a couple other reasons some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard. I just don't want a big white square building. Maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should. Maybe it should have some aesthetics. Put some windows on Token Cathedral. I don't know. I don't know how big that feels like a less important one. But there's a lot of communities that care about the beauty of the community, the natural beauty of whatever they have, and the fact that it feels like homes and it feels like, yes, there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there and I know the cashier and I go there and I walk in the data center. You'll never go in. They don't do tours. There's no reason for you to buy Walmart is. It employs top people and it's a product for the community. Exactly, exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly, at least as a brand, and, you know, okay, well, I can get something there. It does something to me. Whereas this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know. My slop might be coming from somewhere else. So, interestingly, the anti AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts, the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So pretty much just across the board, a bipartisan issue. And you know, tech has obviously been. Worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans more in the more recent history, but now they're facing. Yeah, and I think. I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, you're just. You're. These are Luddites, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive? Why do I want this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because, like, it's gonna get built somewhere. It might as well not be in my neighborhood. Yeah, it's very. It's the easiest nimby. NIMBY argument to make. Yeah. So let me tell you.
And the good news is that it feels like Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers. Electricity represents 40% of data center opex, about 7 and a half million dollars annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers. And so energy is a significant line item. I think like 3 billion a year in electricity, something like that. That's very rough. Probably gotta go to semianalysis for the real number. But this is back of the envelope stuff. 3 billion in energy costs for 245 billion in revenue. Microsoft's going to be okay if they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio. We're talking about a billion dollars of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a major rethink on the company, but it is a big step towards, towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of higher energy prices. Satya is simply the goat. He's my goat. He does appear to be the goat. Play that goat noise while I tell everyone about Apple.
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Both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. That doesn't work very well. Well, but you know about ramp. You also know about Microsoft, who's making some waves because they jumped. They were on Truth Social, scrolling as they do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on now? Of course, they were talking to the Trump administration. Have you ever scrolled through Social, by the way? It's like five, five ads for every one post. The ads are crazy. And they're crazy. They're crazy. The ads are like, are you a real patriot? Yes or no? And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next phase of the funnel. And then I'll just be like, glad to hear it, patriot. How about $200 donated? You're like actually 100. And they're like 200 it is. I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons. Well, they have Truth Social. They have a Truth Social ETF now. Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social etf? Invest in the Patriot economy. Oh, okay. Truth Social is really the building everything. Everything Multi product. They build nuclear power plants too now what? I'm sure they are. What a time to be alive. Well, we have a lot of great folks joining the show today. Let's chess day the linear lineup. It's the system for modern software development. Linear is building is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. And we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb. It's Cesk day. That's right. We have Baiju Robinhood now aetherflox. He's the founder and CEO of that company, Spaceman Space Data Centers. Gabriel from Noise, Alfred from Listen Labs. And of course, capping it off with. Mark Benioff is the Lightning round somehow sound theme we got Noise Labs and then Listen Labs. We need Signal. We need the founder of Signal on. The show, Moxie Marlinspike. Moxie is going to come on the show today. He's got to know. So we got Noise on the show. We need Signal. But he has a new foxy Focus LLM fantastic called Confer. No way we're going to get him on the show. Yeah. No, I'm a huge fan of Moxie Marlin's bike and I'm excited to hear that he's coming on the show. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stock options, cryptos, bonds, treasuries and more with all amazing customer service. What did you write about? I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social and the key line in here is really just that. He says he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't, quote, pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills. There's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025. You know, the new technology came out. Everyone was, there's a lot of excitement in 23, 24 and 25. Things got serious, the numbers got really big, the impacts got big and the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up. And one of the challenges is the early AI generated videos were pretty bad. And so people were like, these are bad. My power bill is going up. I don't like this. What's the point? Now this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting, they're really good. So I think people might start saying. Hey, it's totally worth it. It's actually totally worth it. You saw those, those four cats on the boat that was. I haven't seen that one. Pull it up, Tyler. Find the four cats. Find the four cats. We will get to at some point. I did see an AI video of people racing full 18 wheelers with the boxes in the back. You know how sometimes there will be real races with. Yeah, this video Riggs see, I think most people would See this and say, can we get some sound? Yeah, there's no amount of power bills. That's pretty fun. Okay, turn it off. Turn off the sound. But anyways, yeah, it's worth it. Worth it. It's worth every penny, clearly. Yeah. You see that and you're like, yeah. I think most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that they're getting this content for free. They got to pay for it somehow. There's no free lunch, of course. Yeah. The power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in 26. The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly. There were a number of just, it seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys and they're like, yeah, we actually, we do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it and we just circle it around and we actually don't dump it out and waste it. And so you're just like, yeah, why would we waste. And then we're like, but what about the power? Like, no, as soon as we use the power, the power's gone forever. Like, we trans. We. We use the power to generate, and then we need more power. So the power thing stuck around. There were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up. The one shotting stories were very harrowing, and a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails when GPT psychosis like that one felt real. But it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails. The whole time it seemed like, look, these labs are. As soon as they're made aware of this, they're going to put a reality checker in the flow. And so if you're 20 prompts deep, it'll just run an extra query and say, does this seem crazy? Does this seem like two crazy people talking to each other? Okay, let's shut it down. It was pretty simple. And you could solve it just in software. And when it's a product issue, you can solve it with a weekend hackathon. You can just lock in. It can be one Claude code prompt for all I know, you can make the change to the app. And I actually noticed this. The Claude app has a pretty short context window, like chat length. Like, if you're chatting with Claude and having it do. I wanted it to pull the market caps for every single one of our sponsors. And I was a couple prompts deep and it was just like, this is. You've maxed out the context window. You got to start a new chat, which is sort of annoying. But what was the market cap? Over 5 trillion. Let's go. We have some breaking news today, but TVPN sponsors have been having a good year. Obviously, Google Gemini is a big piece of that. But. But we do have some, we do have some very large companies supporting the show, and we thank them for their support. We also thank the smaller companies that haven't raised a lot of money, like turbopuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Hey, one day, maybe it's a $10 trillion company, maybe it's the cap. I could see it. So the power one was tricky because with power, you know, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers, and then you just see demand is increasing, supply staying flat, as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When, when demand increases and supply stays flat, we know what happens to prices. They increase. This is basic supply and demand. Yes, we can build nuclear power plants, but we had Scott Nolan from General Matter on the show yesterday. He's working extremely hard on this. He says, hey, we're going to be online in end of the decade. Of the decade. There's a lot of amazing folks. We've had Doug Bernauer from Radiant on the show. We've had Isaiah Taylor on the show. As aggressive as these founders are, they're. Trying to go this year. Yeah, that just means. Think of it as testing. Exactly. It's still years away. And so. And then solar panels. Solar panels, we can deploy those, but that's still slow. And that doesn't solve the baseload power. What if you want to use a deep research report in the middle of the night or generate a cat video at 2am when the sun isn't shining? Of course you can do it somewhere else, but it doesn't solve. It's not a panacea. And so you got to build more power infrastructure. That takes time. And I don't think very many Americans care about what the supply dynamic of power in America will be in 2035. If just last month they saw their power bill go up by 20%. Yeah. They're like, this is hitting my pocketbook today, and I'm upset. So Bloomberg reported that IT reported a 267% wholesale electricity price increase. If you're near a data center so basically, if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way. Although there's a huge amount of variation. And it's. Now, even, even if you're, you know, like, like even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center build out. So there's $64 billion. Yeah. One, one thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers if have. Have very real reasons to push back. Right. It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products. Right. Like, it doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's jobs that come. I'm kind of, I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. I want one. There's empty buildings. We did, we did joke about moving the show to Abilene. That would be good. But. But yeah, it's very real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built and suddenly you're going to be able to. Go, yeah, like you could be a football fan. Yeah. But even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard. Yeah. You're just like, I. That's so true. Yeah. That's the big thing. It's like power bill goes up, you know, what do you get in return? Nothing. Aura. Aura. A nice view. A nice view. Yeah. Yeah. If you're a data center appreciator. Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So $64 billion in data center projects are currently held up and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because prices are going up. Now, there's a couple other reasons some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard. I just don't want a big white square building. Maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should, maybe should have some cathedral aesthetics, put some windows on token Cathedral. I don't know, I don't know how big that feels like a less important one. But there's a lot of communities that care about the beauty of the community, the natural beauty of whatever they have, and the fact that it feels like homes. And it feels like, yes, there's a Walmart there, but I know a guy who works there and I know the cashier and I go there and I walk in the data center. You'll never go in. They don't do tours. There's no reason for you to go in. Walmart is. It employs and it's a product for the community. Exactly, exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly, at least it has a brand. And, you know, okay, well, I can get something there. It does something to me. Whereas this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know. My slop might be coming from somewhere else. So, interestingly, the anti AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts, the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So pretty much just across the board, a bipartisan issue. And, you know, tech has obviously been. Worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans, more in the more recent history, but now they're facing. Yeah, and I think, I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, you're just, You're. These are Luddites, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive? Why do I want this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because, like, it's gonna get built somewhere. It might as well not be in my neighborhood. Yeah, it's very. It's the easiest nimby, nimby Argum argument to make. Yeah. So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. We're going to talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first, and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong, actually. I think it's a very good move. Now, to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the Clean Transition Tariff, where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers. And Amazon pays a surplus above electricity costs already. But Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement. Like it's a whole story in the Wall Street Journal. And they've actually put a face to the program With Brad Smith, who's the president and the vice chair of Microsoft, giving quotes, laying out a five point plan. He talks about a number of environmental issues as well. He talks about water too, that they want to be net zero on the water that they use. In fact, I think Microsoft again, that's. Such a, that's such a. It's a layup. It's a layup. Yeah, it should be a layup. But it's still good to just say, hey, you know, if that was the talking point that you were going to hit me with, we already got it sorted. Yeah. Also, Microsoft is planning to be, I think, completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050 they want to be so carbon negative that they will, as a company since the dawn of Microsoft in the 70s, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire life cycle of the company. Which is interesting, but. So Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers. Now, a true free marketer is probably against this. Why is 1 watt of electricity more expensive for one person or another? If I'm watching TikTok and you're building the next and you're curing cancer on your laptop, why do you have to pay less than me? Why are we putting a value judgment on a particular use of a public good? Most public goods, the roads cost what they cost, whether you're driving an ambulance. Or whether you're driving Zach Meyer says would be cool to see a Microsoft liquid death collab for water that was used in a data center. Used water somehow. I have no idea if the water that comes out of a data center is drinkable. Well, of course you can just filter it, filter it again and it'll be good to go. So the die hard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply and demand issues. Let prices rise and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally, but there are political realities and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things. Even if you're just going with natural gas, it takes time. There are backlogs. At a certain point you buy all of the natural gas turbines and then you need to build more turbine factories. That's why boom, supersonic is getting in the game. And at a certain point you have to build more factories that build more factories and it does get slow. And then there's also a capex consideration because if you're an electric, if you're a power company and you say, oh great, the rates are going up. There's a data center in my area. They're going to buy a ton of electricity. I got to bring a new power plant online. That's great. And then you go to your team and you're like, okay, we need to put up how much money and where's that money coming from? And we got to pay for, yeah, we're going to finance it, but we still have to pay for a bunch in the front and it's going to hurt the interest payments on that. We're not going to, we're not going to be making money from this new power plant for a while. So we have to pay the interest. So we have to raise prices. So then prices do go up even if they are responding as fast as they can. So, so there's a, there's a few different dynamics there that basically Microsoft and the big tech companies I think will be saying, hey, look, we want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up capacity. And so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully you can pass that revenue on into bringing up capacity. So I think overall, Brad Smith is playing the game on the field. And the good news is that it feels like Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers. Electricity represents 40% of data center opex, about $7.5 million annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers. And so energy is a significant line item. I think like 3 billion a year in electricity, something like that. That's very rough. Probably got to go to semianalysis for the real number, but this is back to the envelope stuff. But again, 3 billion in energy costs for 245 billion in revenue. Microsoft's going to be okay if they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio. We're talking about $1 billion of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a major rethink on the company, but it is a big step towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of, of higher energy prices. Satya is simply the goat. He's my goat. He does appear to be the goat. Play that goat noise while I tell everyone about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. No, I think it's super smart. I think it was inevitable Trump needs this for the midterms. He's putting pressure on everyone. Right. Credit card stuff, data center stuff. We'll see more of this. And yet being being the first mover, ultimately only the first mover, the one that sort of like says like hey yeah, we're excited about this. Yeah. Is the one that gets any credit. Right. Amazon doing this. It's it. They don't. They're not going to get credit for it. Yeah. It's a weird sort of game theory dynamic where this will probably wind up landing like a small tax on the entire, on all the hyperscalers or all data centers as a broad like unenforced. It won't be a true tax, but they will all be paying it because the political reality is necessitate it. But the first mover gets the compressed cycle, which is funny. It is from truth social to corporate concession. Like that is the era, the pipeline. Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You're in favor of data center subsidies, right? Like you want the data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable. To have government backed data centers electrical subsidies. You got to feed Claude. I mean I just think like this is kind of disappointing because it's telling me that like if you imagine we have like a real free market, there should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply. And that's obviously not happening because energy price would be going down. They're going up. Yeah. So it's like this is just like this is telling me that in the future we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want. Yes. Or at least on any kind of like short term scale. Yeah. It does feel, I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is, is at least in the short term much more zero sum than people thought. It's. There's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But it's. The pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want. Which is why I was, I was, you know, a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy and, and a lot of work being done across all different technologies, unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not, and not be unaffordable because people do want to scroll Instagram reels and they want to watch AI slop and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone after watching four hours of. Instagram Reels, Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent $200 million at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property, which will reportedly be used for, for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal. Seems like as part of that, TSMC will expand their operations in Arizona, which is very exciting. And they are basing their design for this off of Costco warehouses. Nick here, the render here is very sci fi. I've seen renders of their facilities Taiwan. It looks beautiful. Seems like they're bringing some of that aesthetic to Arizona. Seems, seems pretty cool. This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. He says this isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her farm by a Data Center Company. 11.2 million total. This is what Big Tech is doing in Michigan. So anyway, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan. Yeah. I remember on the University of Michigan campus there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like stop the AI Data Center. Or it was Stop the data center build out. And that's when you knew you had to drop out. This place is not organ rejection. You got to go back, take the, Take the fight to them. Put up some posters that say yes on data centers. Put a data center. Subsidize data centers. Tear down the stadium. Yeah, so just, just some context on that last exchange. Matthew Zaitlin at heatmap says, I think this is shared as an example of Big Tech doing a bad thing. But I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6200 per acre. So they're paying over 10x the price. Yeah. I mean, who, who knows? I mean it's. They could easily be paying a premium because of this land specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. I wouldn't be surprised if some landmaxers are going out and just buying up. Why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes. I wonder how real this text message is because I get a lot of spam text messages. For business financing, we'll invest in your company. You just get like random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out random numbers just for price discovery, just to sort of like aggregate some sort of metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out. Like if this person had said, yes, what's the problem? My wife got a spam text today that just said, babe, I dropped my phone and it broke. She immediately texted me and said, this isn't you, right? Oh, interesting. But it's pretty interesting. Interesting. Kind of like loop to get somebody and to, I imagine, send, send me a thousand dollars so I can get a new phone. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Do you remember the text that Ben got? He was asking him if you want to get steaks. Oh, that's the best spam. That was the best spam. It said, let's get steak tonight. Get steak tonight. I mean, yes. Yeah. Did you respond and just say I'm in? No, I just posted it. I should have responded. Missed opportunity to make a new friend. Well, now is a great time to tell you about our newest sponsor, Cisco. Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. They're building the foundation for. Let's Howard go. We are very excited to be partnered with Cisco. It's truly an honor. It is. It is truly an honor. In other news, the stock market is down. The Dow falls weighed down by JP Morgan. Not good news. There was a rocky quarter for JP Morgan and it weighed on the Dow Jones Industrial average. Headline prices rose 2.7 from a year earlier. 2.7% according to the CPI. This was in line with expectations and November's rate core cpi, which excludes food and energy prices, also held at the prior month rate. Now, overall, weren't things doing. What did they say here? I don't have this. JP Morgan earnings, investment fees both fall off. JP Morgan reported that the bank's profit fell 7% in the fourth quarter, dragged down by a change from its deal to take over the Apple card credit card program and surprising slip in investment banking fees. The investment bankers are not making enough money. Still, the nation's biggest bank saw revenue increase for both the quarter and for the full year and was optimistic about the trajectory of the US Economy and consumer. From Jamie Dimon. He said consumers have money. There are still jobs even though it's weakened a little bit. He said on a call with analysts. I saw a great Jamie Dimon hype reel on Instagram reels the other day. It was fantastic. In other news, there's more details about that Apple card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through. We should pull this up behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs after two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time. We'll see Goldman replaced by JP Morgan on Apple's credit card. Before we read through this, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with agents. So in early December, a long delayed deal hung over a call between JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, executive. If you don't know David Solomon, you probably know him because as DJ D Soul. DJ D Soul. But he also runs a big bank called Goldman Sachs. Very cool. Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program and its roughly $20 billion in balances. But the talks had stalled. Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations. You're moving too slow. JP Morgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, they'd secured a discount on the balances. We talked about this where normally these balances, they traded a premium because people expect them to be paid back with interest. But in this case they were. J.P. morgan was going to get a discount, but they wanted more protection in case the loans grew worse, in case there were higher than expected defaults. Goldman executives, meanwhile, didn't feel the need to bend much. Now that the Apple program was finally looking profitable. Some executives on both sides had started questioning whether to walk away. Dimon and Solomon got on a call on December 8, according to people familiar with the matter. They discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon, people said. Just before the new year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week, confirming the Wall Street Journal's earlier report. A little patting on the back for the Wall Street Journal getting the scoop. The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together. JP Morgan is adding the flashy program to its credit lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances. Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card. Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses. A chapter it is hoping to forget. Moving the Apple credit card was never going to be simple. Card programs this big aren't put up for sale often and few buyers, few potential buyers exist. Apple is famously finicky about details and control including with its credit card. Before launching the program in 2019, Goldman and Apple agreed to unusual terms that other banks balked at taking over. Interested executives were especially worried about higher than normal delinquencies and subprime exposure, and wanted huge discounts to consider a deal. Even still, almost nothing about the process of finding a bank to replace Goldman has been normal to begin with. Goldman began looking to exit from the contract with Apple only a few months after it had extended its partnership with the tech giant to the end of the decade. Apple and Goldman had discussions with larger and smaller credit card issuers, American Express, Capital One, Synchrony, Barclays and Santander, as well as tiny fintechs. Apple even debated bringing in private credit firms to help a smaller card issuing entity take over. But it didn't go that way, and they landed with JP Morgan. So very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. Get a label box. A label box. Moving on. OpenAI is going to be running another super bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl. Why don't we we play their last. Year'S ad, react to that, and see what we think will change? What will stay the same? What will they do? The artificial intelligence company behind the popular ChatGPT tool is set to broadcast a 60 second commercial during NBC's broadcast. All right. With sound. Let's watch it with sound if we can. The ad is the latest component of OpenAI's expansive marketing expensive marketing offensive, which began last year with its first super bowl commercial. We don't have sound. Okay, okay. The production team is telling us, unfortunately we do not have the technology to play sound on a video. Let's work on that. But if I remember the song correctly, it's like doom. Doom. Like something. Oh, really? Is it. Is it a. Is it a licensed song? Because you were thinking that they should. They should license creeds. Can you take me higher for this next one? Right? That was what you thought. Yes. Can you take me higher? And it's like to a higher plan. You're on the free plan. Please upgrade to the $200 a month plan. Oh, we got it. Let's go. We do have the technology. AGI is here. Okay, so there's someone throwing a spear. We create fire. Then the wheel. Then the wheel with spokes. Then the horse. The horse created the horse. We created the horse. And Korn. We created Korn. Maybe they should use a Korn song. Freak on a Leash. That's the song they should license. A nod to corn. I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like, it is very well done piece. So they go inside the skeleton, build the 747, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV news. That's us. They go to the moon. Somewhat equally important, create the Internet and then you start talking to the computer. And now the merge. You got AI. What do you want to create next? And then you get the blue chatgpt dot. Yeah. So I love, I love this. Yeah. It was just not necessarily. I didn't need a Super bowl ad for me. Yeah. I need a Super bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd. Right. The people who are maybe on the fence about AI. But yeah, as a technologist, it has the aesthetics of like, wow, this is the coolest tech company ever. And this is like, this has the vibe of Apple. This has, it has a lot of throwback stuff. It feels like high technology. It feels techie elite. Very, very cool designed. It feels refined. It's possible at the time they were like, look, we're growing so quickly. We don't really need to run a Super bowl ad. Yeah, let's just, let's just flex on everybody a little bit by running one. I mean, there's a certain. But this year I expect it to be much more pragmatic about what you. Can use to do something. Exactly how they want the average American to think about ChatGPT. Yes. Yes. Where it integrates into their life. Right. And so do you think it'll be one specific use case? Like there's been OpenAI videos about ChatGPT helping you cook dinner. And I actually got an odd email from a friend all about how he loves cooking with friends and how food is this important thing. And then he was calling out the ChatGPT video on food being like, I don't like this because it's taking away the one thing I like as a human. I actually had a funny thing about it practically. I think it's fine. Using an LLM for a pancake recipe last week and it completely. The pancakes really did not work because it's basically taking the average of all pancakes. You made a mid pancake and it. Just made the most runny mid pancakes really bad. Interesting. I don't know. It'd be interesting. I wonder if they try to do anything on the like, anything on the. It's probably too early for commerce side. You could see some of that. Maybe they want people to know commerce is coming. I could also see them trying to make it interactive somehow you could imagine like when maybe this. When is gamble. No, no, no, no. But I was going to be like ask like talk like, like chat with Chat chat, like tell chatgpt you want it. I don't know. Well, it could like they could sort of launch like Chat GPT Sports or something where you know, you're like the demo of what it's showing you is that if you have ChatGPT as your second screen during the super bowl, you're going to pull up more interesting stories about the players, you're going to pull up statistics, you're going to be able to understand the, add more context to your experience of super bowl watching. Even like oftentimes if I'm watching the Super Bowl, I'll see an ad and I'll go and go to Google and say, well, what are the greatest super bowl ads of all time? And I'll wind up on some listicle. And ChatGPT of course can generate that type of stuff all the time. You could filter and say, show me the best super bowl ads from tech companies back in the dot com boom. I want to know about those. And you can go anywhere. And that is the magic of ChatGPT. There's a whole bunch of other ways that they could try and contextualize it. They could try and be emotional, go with ChatGPT Health. I wonder if they'll do anything on the dis with the new Disney integration. Like if they wanted to spark another studio Ghibli moment, that would be really good that he is coming online originally they said in January, so maybe the timing lines up. Yeah. Be really wild. Yeah, you get Darth Vader in there or something. Or I mean there's a lot of characters to choose. No, I was, yeah, I was saying like try to, try to use the super bowl ad to prompt people to make, go to, go to ChatGPT and. Make your turn yourself. Turn your super bowl party into, into. A Disney themed thing. Yeah, that would be very good. Yeah. Surprise celebrity appearance or celebrity endorsement would be. Would be good. They've sort of shied away for Scarlett Johansson. Maybe they can bring her back in reversal. Reversal and getting her back on the team would be fantastic. But, but I expect that this will be, this will be the AI Super Bowl. You think there'll be even more ads? I'm sure there will. So for context, tech companies across anthropic Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity collectively spent 333 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the United States. Just last year, and that was up 43% from the prior year, according to estimates from an ad tracker, iSpot. They also shelled out 426 million on digital ads in 2025, more than triple their 2024 outlays. So interesting. Digital is growing faster than linear. I would not expect that. I would expect the digital to have been really, really popular and then them to have just jumped into linear. But I guess they've been. Wait, are they talking about streaming ads? Maybe it's from Sensor Tower. It just says digital ads, which I assume is Facebook, Google Ads, all that sorts of stuff. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL, NBA, and college sports games with ads for its Claude chatbot. It shelled out an estimated 16 and a half million dollars on linear TV ads in 2025. Despite boasting a base of over 800 million weekly users. OpenAI is. And that is such a stale number. They got to download this app. What do you mean? Like, they just. They really can. They're not in the top 25 apps. Wait, which one? Clot. Oh, you're talking cloud. So Sorry, sorry. That 800 million weekly active users is for OpenAI for chat. No, I know, but. I know, I know. So they spent. They've been spending money all over. Well, you know, you know why? You know, you know why the Claude is not at the top of the app store charts? Because if you generate a deep research report on the iOS app, it will not read it to you out loud. It doesn't have that functionality. And that's clearly a gap that everyone has experienced and recognizes. And as soon as they run into that, they uninstall it and they don't recommend it to their friends. So if you're listening Anthropic, please add that functionality. I want to be able to listen to deep research reports. Yeah. Just think, how do they figure out how to get it? How do they figure out how to become a real player in consumer? Because clearly they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be spending that money. I mean, they need hooks. You need some viral Flywheel. So the ChatGPT number, 800 million weekly active users, that feels woefully out of date. It feels like they were well over a billion and they're just waiting to actually drop that press release at a key moment. And now is not the right time to wow everyone with the real usage numbers. But I definitely think that they're beyond that. This number is very stale. Like, we got this 800 million weekly number, months and months ago, and it must have grown. Google obviously has a whole bunch of hooks into the Gemini ecosystem through Gmail and Google. There's so many different entry points. Claude as an independent app doesn't really have that. Also, I think just on a product sense, ChatGPT, I do think that the holidays were successful and it was not discussed on X. The tech elite and the tech, you know, like anyone who's like in tech was focused on Claude code. They were doing vibe coding projects. They had time off from work and time to lock in and play around with like the hottest new coding agent. So people weren't. People were. People knew that ChatGPT could do images. But right before the holiday started, ChatGPT launched the image tab. And if you go to the Image tab in the app, the most interesting thing there is that it's not just a prompt box. They have preloaded. Have you seen these? It will show you retro anime, it will show you ideas. Turn yourself into a bobblehead, turn yourself into a sugar cookie or fisheye lens or ink work or pop art. And so it's taking the work out of someone. Like most people in tech, an image model comes out. Studio Ghibli thing happens. Everyone's like, what's the prompt? They were like, it's too much to ask people to have an idea. It is. We need to give them the idea and we need to make the image for them. It actually is too much. It actually. And then eventually when you have your little sweet pea, whatever they're calling their new device, it will just be generating images on the fly based on your day. Yes, yes. And then eventually you'll just be able to stay laying in bed all day long. Yeah, but I mean, just from a product perspective, the ChatGPT Images tab is I think, an important just growth hack, which is something that they just have to do now because they're at that scale. And I saw that people were generating images and then sharing them and they weren't screenshotting them or downloading them with some watermark. They were clicking the share button in the ChatGPT app and sharing a link to the ChatGPT app that would show you the image in a preview if you shared it in imessage or in a group chat. And that would onboard more people and those sorts of viral loops. They feel like, oh, the tech is so magical. It just should. It should just grow organically. But it already grew organically. Like the organic growth was a billion people. Now how do you get the next billion. Well, you probably have to do some growth hacking and a product like images in ChatGPT with Disney characters and links that beg you to install the app for yourself. And Claude isn't quite there yet, where there's an obvious thing that a huge swath of people can go to and then hook in and we can collaborate and I send you a link and then you install. Yeah. The tough thing is, like, if you're spending all this money trying to drive consumer downloads, but then you don't have image generation at all, at what point? Why don't they just. Even if that's not a priority for them, it still feels like a product that consumers really want in their daily driver. And at some point they may have to capitulate that. I don't know if they care about the app race at all, the consumer app race. It feels like Anthropic's been super focused on the enterprise, super focused on coding, and that's been. I know, I know, but they say, like. All I'm saying is you can say that you're not focused on consumer, but you. They run billboard ads all over la. Yeah. They're spending a lot of money on television. And so you kind of need to like, make up your mind. Yeah, you don't really advertise in NFL and NBA. I mean, I guess enterprise buyers, you know, watch those shows. So 16 million, maybe it's worth it. But I agree with you, generally, their. Ad campaigns have been great and maybe they just want to rub it in the face of the other labs. They're also going public, so developing real name recognition broadly, I think is important. I mean, in theory, if they host Claude code in a virtual machine that you can access from a phone and have it write software for you, it should be able to go and set up an API with an image generator and generate you images. So you should be able to do that from the app. If I ask Claude Code to generate an image for me, it will figure out how to find an image generator, sign up for the API almost, or at least I will give it the API key and then it will be able to generate images for me, Correct? Yeah, it would ask you to, like, you would have to go generate the API key and stuff. Yeah, but that's actually, I'll try that right now. Yeah. What happens if you just ask Claude Code to generate you a picture of four cats on a boat or something? Like, how does it actually work through solving that? At some point it should prompt you to at least maybe make a decision about which image generator you want to use and at least ask for credit card information to pay for it. Maybe it goes to a free image generator, I don't know. But the Wall Street Journal continues, and we will continue after telling you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise money, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Selling AI to the masses isn't easy, says the Wall Street Journal. Due to sustained public fear about the technology's potential downsides, businesses have already cut jobs using AI for tasks previously performed by humans, and executives have articulated plans. Why would the masses be scared? Why would they be scared of this technology? Half of us adults are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence, according to a spring survey by Pew Research. That's a while ago, but only 10% say excitement outweighs their worry. Skill issue. Just be in the 10%, right, Tyler? Yeah. Yeah. Well. OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between. Wait, this would actually be a great bit. We should make an AI Tyler that we can go to and say. And just. We'll. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We'll compare the two of you guys, and this can just be a good barometer for AI progress. How do you feel about that? It could probably do a pretty good job because it's. I mean, it can already do like a talking head. If you just put an image of me and then the voice you can clone. I know, but I don't think it would have your takes. I don't think you would have your takes. Just say, like, or your. Or Dwarkesh. Or you would say, I'm sorry, that's too controversial. I can't hold that opinion while opening eyes. First Big game ad position ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions such as the light bulb. More recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. They feature people using the chatbot for everyday problems, such as finding a recipe or searching for exercise tips. Which way will OpenAI go in the new super bowl ad? I imagine that they will go more proactive, more productive, more tangible. There will be a human shot with a camera using the app, probably on the phone, but we'll see in its ads, Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Yeah, why would you want to run an ad saying that? This strategy anchored by the super bowl. Ad concept, we are not a threat to human intelligence. We are not a threat. Don't worry about us. Yeah, how about a Super bowl analysis? We hear you. We hear that you're concerned. Yeah, just concerned. Massive super bowl warranted. Our PDOOM is actually really low relative to the true risk. We think that the PDUM should be low. Everyone's like what are they talking about? 5% chance of annihilation by end of year? Well if you're running the super bowl you gotta get on restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations I want to be able to watch the Super bowl on LinkedIn. If you want a multi stream go to restream.com and I know the folks who have the rights to the super. Bowl satya really should push to get LinkedIn the streaming rights for sure. Be a game changer for the Super Bowl. Okay, so Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today designed for you. Personal Intelligence they're calling it. Personal Intelligence draws insights from across your Google apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below. They say Gemini already remembers your past chats to provide relevant responses, but today we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of Personal Intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google search and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses. Here are some ways you can start using it. Planning Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel because it'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been. It'll know that I went to Austria and recommend a different city, maybe shopping. Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level, help you find items you love faster. Motivation Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards. Look at your to do list. Privacy is central to Personal Intelligence. How you connect other apps to Gemini. The new beta feature is off by default. You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect and can turn it off at any time. Personal Intelligence begins rolling out today as a beta to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. That that's me. So I gotta turn this on. I'm very interested in seeing I imagine that I will not be able to link multiple Google accounts because I have a personal Gmail and then I have a work Gmail and then I sort of want to integrate my old work Gmails that I think I have access to still because that says a lot about me even though I'm not really using that stuff anymore and I'm not actioning Those emails, I could see that being important in terms of building out. A yeah, you were sick of switching between constantly switching between calendars in Chrome and having your personal calendar calendar. Get ready to be sick of switching between LLMs. Yeah, some of them have been surprisingly good at bootstrapping knowledge. I feel like a few of the LLMs have been have surprised me by I'll ask a question and it'll just be like and here's the context for tvpn, here's the TVPN angle. And I'm like, oh, I forgot that I mentioned that to you. Or like you figured that out somehow. Or like, yeah, you did something. I don't know. The personalization is getting better. Maybe this is the year when it really hits. I know ChatGPT introduced it as a concept a while ago, maybe almost a full year ago, and it hasn't felt magical yet. Pulse was cool, but it I never became like a daily active user of Pulse. The interesting question is like, yeah, is it a data source problem? Is it an architectural problem, or is it an actual model level problem? Are the models just not smart enough? Do they not have enough data or are they not designed in the right way where they can actually go over all of your information? I was using the new Salesforce Slack bot that we're going to talk to Marc Benioff about at 2pm and it was remarkably useful in Slack because I'm not on Slack a lot and so I had a ton of notifications that had built up over months and I was able to go in and write a prompt or just talk to Chat Slack bot and say, hey, catch me up. What's been happening in Slack in this Slack workspace? And it did a good job summarizing all the different key things where I was mentioned. What was relevant to me. I did prod it on what anthropic model it's using exactly. And it's not using the Latest and greatest 4.5. It was using, I think 3.5. It didn't seem aware of the latest models and also it didn't have the ability to search the web. It didn't have the ability to act as like a full fledged LLM. You can just, just ask IT things. It was very confined to Slack, but within that domain it was pretty useful. And it did help me sort of get to Inbox zero in just a couple minutes because I was able to just scan a digest of everything that's happening across all the channels instead of clicking through them, scanning, reading the threads going down the it was just able to be like, here's the deep research report on it. Yeah, I am waiting. I'm waiting for the moment where people are like, I'm not really interested in trying to a new LLM that's hot because like having memory in the LLM and personalization is so important. Like waiting for that lock in moment. Don't think it's really. You have some force lock in where a company is saying like we use. This LLM or, or I mean vice versa. Where you know, they're just, it's just like, yeah, in the course of my day I use 5 different LLMs. Like on my phone I use Apple Intelligence and that's routing to Gemini and then I log into Slack and that's using the Anthropic APIs. But it doesn't really matter because I don't care that they don't talk to each other like it's all fine and they work. They're good enough for the particular thing that I'm trying to do at a particular time. That's another possible outcome here. Andrew Curran is summarizing some of the news here, saying that it includes Google Workspace, Google. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into Nano Banana. You can have more suggested images. Hey, do you want to touch this photo up? Do you want to create some sort of holiday card like what ChatGPT ultimately wound up doing with images? Go through Google Photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every photo I've ever taken. Set the GPUs on fire for sure before we move on. Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. New York Times has some coverage today talking about IPOs of this year 2026, maybe the year of the mega IPO. Not really new news for those of you listening. SpaceX OpenAI anthropic are going public. They talk about. Eddie Malloy from Morgan Stanley says we're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented IPO deal sizes. We are confident they're executable given the scale of these companies and the investor interest. In two decades I haven't seen private companies that are this meaningful and are this impactful, said Jeremy Abelson, an investor at Irving Investors. Not only are they bigger and more relevant, but they're incredible companies with numbers that we haven't, that we've never seen before, ever. I can't. I think they're. I think everybody's excited to just get into these S1s. I expect them to be extremely impressive. There was a ton of. There's been a number of reports about, like, how bad the gross margins are, how much money they're losing. We're, we're about to find out the real details. It's going to be exciting times. Exciting times. So, yeah, we'll see. All the geopolitical chaos, even this ruling around tariffs, which we didn't get today, all this stuff is going to play into whether or not the window stays open. Yeah. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Saks Fifth Ave. Oh. Neiman Marcus. Bergdorf Goodman filed for bankruptcy. Are you selling this guy? You shop at Saks Fifth Avenue, have you? No, I've never been a department store guy. Department store guy, ever. Straight to the Chrome Heart Store. You're the guy in line outside Supreme. Go Direct. And they don't sell supreme at Sachs. Right. Maybe that's why they're going bankrupt. The hype beats Zero Chrome. Zero Chrome. Anyways, they filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday, crumbling under billions of dollars in debt, affirming relationship with vendors and lagging sales. The filing is the latest sign that America's luxury department stores, once landmarks that served as immersive fantasy worlds for the wealthy and aspirational, are becoming an endangered species. Jeffrey Van Raymondon, the former Neiman Marcus chief executive, will return as Sachs Global CEO. He succeeds Richard Baker, the chief executive and executive chairman who in 2024 orchestrated a $2.7 billion acquisition by Sachs of the Neiman Marcus Group, which owns Bergdorf Goodman. Sachs said it had secured roughly? 1.75 billion to help finance the company through bankruptcy, much of it coming from its bondholders. Sachs said it intended to emerge from bankruptcy later this year, and it expected to honor all customer programs, make payments to vendors and continue to pay employees. Saks has brought in additional executives to help sewer the company, including Darcy Pennock, former president of Bergdorf Goodman, as president and chief commercial officer. This is a defining moment for Sachs Global, and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future. This is good messaging. Trump was messaging around the Supreme Court ruling. He said, if they rule against us, we're screwed. He just was like, if they rule against the tariffs, we're screwed. We're cooked. We're chopped and we're cooked. Ridiculous things. Yeah. I mean, I feel like these stores are, if anything, just nostalgic. Right. It really feels like an end of an era. Essence obviously went bankrupt earlier this year. In that case, too, founders are going to actually maintain control, so we'll see how they navigate through. But again, I just wonder, you know, as these stores shut down, like, who. Who can even fill these spaces? Like, there's just not. There's not companies that want to come in and occupy a bunch of this. A bunch of this Real estate. You gotta get Rick Caruso in there. He's like the master of this. Like, yeah, have you seen him? A little bit more durable. About the mall that you go to for, there's restaurants, there's a movie theater, there's a coffee shop, bookstore. Escape room. Escape room. Probably Laser tag VR maybe. Maybe a sphere. But there's a few key stores that are anchor tenants. The Apple store and there's electronics, and then there are a few. There's a Louis Vuitton store, a coach store, Bottega store. And those brands want to own the entire retail experience, I think. More now, I don't. I'm not sure. But it seems like as much as we joke about the supreme store having lines out front, there is a deliberate strategy to that you control the full experience, not just a corner or a display table in a larger store. So these aggregator retail stores seem to be having.
If you were running Apple, what would your AI strategy be? That's a big question. Oh, wow. I would, I, I, I would say that like the devices should be completely built from the ground up. AI. Native AI first. Probably not even AI first. AGI first we should ask ourselves, what is it going to look like in a few years? It's probably going to be fully agentic. These devices are going to be able to work while you sleep, and you should work backwards from that. These devices and the paradigms haven't changed since the advent of AI. These are pre AI devices running AI. So my question is, what would it look like if you designed it from the ground up? Knowing what we know today, it would probably look pretty different. Yeah. So less Genmoji, more actual hardware. More hardware. We are in the midst of a revolution, obviously. I mean, I don't want to be like saying what everyone already knows, but here's what I do want to say. Like the everyday life of the average person has barely changed in the last three years. We're on ChatGPT a lot. We're on Gemini, we're on Claude. People listening are much more technical than the average person. They're doing unique things, workflows. The average person's still mostly living the life they lived three years ago using the same devices. The world hasn't funnily made the shift yet. It hasn't funnel made the shift. It won't make the shift until daily life has changed. And daily life doesn't change until the devices have changed, the operating systems have changed, apps become agents, and we're all living in a completely natively consumer AI world. And we're not using chat bots, at least not today's chat bots. We are still living in the DOS era of AI and we need to move into the multi touch era.
So I take a vitamin D supplement because I'm not, I'm like inside working a lot. So stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Have you been surprised? Seeing the explosion of peptides? I wouldn't have imagined a world where, you know, people are clamoring to do like actual injections. And given how popular it was, I mean, it's. In the bodybuilding world, there was always like a divide between how hardcore you were, which was like, are you like natural or are you gonna, Are. You natty or not? Yeah, yeah, Natty or not. And now nobody's natty anymore. Seemingly no one's natty. I'm not surprised. I'm surprised actually a little bit how much the tech community's embraced fitness. I mean, like when I came to Silicon Valley, I was slightly self conscious about wearing long sleeve shirts. Cause I thought if I wear a short sleeve shirt, people think I'm a me head and therefore an idiot. And people just didn't really lift weights in like 2007, 2008. And I really think that everyone's come around probably to just the science that nutrition and weightlifting is good. It's good, good for longevity, it's good for your mind, you'll live longer, you'll feel better. And honestly, weightlifting is far superior to cardio. You should do both. But weightlifting is far superior, increases bone density. It's just you can only do one thing you should do lift weight, weightlifting. And so I'm really excited to see people actually embracing this.
With something that's more tailored. What's been working? Where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, so many things. One of the other problems with consumer that to keep coming back to it is there's a business model challenge. Right. Like these models are not cheap. And so there's probably one of three ways you can make money in consumer. You can put ads in your chatbot, you can pay a subscription, or you can do essentially transactions. Well, Airbnb luckily has the business model. We have transactions and our transactions are pretty high dollar transactions. So we actually have the, really the business model going for us. We also have a lot of data. We do about 50 billion searches a year on Airbnb. That's nothing compared to Google, but 50 billion. So that's the number of times somebody's typing in something into an Airbnb search box. So we actually do have quite a bit of data about people, their preferences, and we can bring it in. And so in part what we want to do is if the interface is a little more chat like, again, won't be per se, a chatbot. Exactly. OpenAI. But if it's a little more of a turn by turn chat like connection, you're going to get a lot more information from people. And I think, you know, the one benefit of the current chat bots are they have memory. And so you're putting a lot of context in the window. And I think memory, by the way, is something I think we're going to want to technically innovate on because the chatbots still are stateless. And so you're essentially the prompt is putting in this kind of, you know, obviously a lot of your memory. So I do think there's going to be an area around how can Airbnb understand people's preferences? Learn more about you, understand what you care about and just be really thoughtful. Like, what's your bucket list? Who are you traveling with? One of the other things Airbnb can be really good at is the majority of trips have multiple people. Most chatbots are single player mode, they have collaborative tools. But most people are not chatting with multiple people. Most people in Airbnb are searching for an Airbnb with multiple other people. So I think another thing we really want to do is really be great at like understanding two people. They have totally different preferences. How do we help them figure out the right choices for them? So a lot of collaboration tools I think are going to be really important. But I think at our heart, what we want to do is really build out these robust profiles deeply understand people and give them what they want in the real world.
And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Someone's guilty here. Skilled AI has. Well, okay, so through this or this market is market's low volume, it's now up to 57%. Chance that Elon wins. Yes. Interesting. Yes. What's at stake if Elon Musk wins? What does that do? Is that just a settlement? Is that just some monetary penalties? Does Elon have the have the chance of getting equity in OpenAI? Because at a certain point, if you convert it to a for profit and you can just have a settlement where he gets 10 billion in stock, it doesn't really change the structure. He doesn't get a board seat. That's kind of a, that's kind of a non issue even if he wins. But then there could be the nuclear option where he wins and he, and he gets control and gets a board seat or gets a majority stake. I mean, if you run back the clock and you look at how much he donated, if you, if you weight ownership by nonprofit donations, which is a crazy thing to do, that's I don't think on the table you would wind up with a very, very different control structure. But it is an exciting time and I'm sure the court reporting will be fascinating. I wonder if there will be cameras in the courtroom and if we'll get more testimonies. Every time or just somebody sketching maybe. Yeah, we might just get the court. Have we figured out why they still do.
Glaze. Double glaze. Triple glaze. Double kill. Five coat. Wings. Team death match. Wing correct. Triple. Let's just roll right. Market clearing order in balance. Come get up. You're surrounded by journalists. Hold your. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go retriever. Market clearing order inbound. 5 p. You enjoy it? This is Perfect. You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, January 14, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultradome Temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We have a smoke grenade. And it's not a sponsored smoke grenade. We should have put a brand on there. You should throw that smoke grenade. Jordy. Let's check out the new graphics. Oh, you want to see it again? I want to see a grenade throwing smoke. Ramp.com. time is money. Save both. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot all in one place. That doesn't work very well. You know about Ramp. You also know about Microsoft, who's making some waves because they jumped. They were on Truth Social scrolling as they do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on now? Of course, they were talking to the Trump administration. Have you ever scrolled through Social, by the way? It's like five, five ads for every one post. The ads are crazy and they're crazy. They're crazy. Ra. The ads are like, like, are you a real patriot? Yes or no. And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next state, like next phase of the funnel. And then you'll just be like, glad to hear it, patriot. How about $200 donated? You're like actually 100. And they're like 200 it is. Okay, this is. I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons. Well, they have Truth Social. They have a Truth Social ETF now. Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social etf? Invest in the patriot economy. Oh, okay. Truth Social is really the building everything. Everything multi product. Are they building nuclear power plants too now? What? I'm sure they are. What a time to be alive. Well, we have a lot of great folks joining the show today. Let's chess day the linear line up. It's the system for modern softw. Linear's building is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. And we have Brian Chesky from Airbnb. It's Chesk day. That's right. We have Baiju Robinhood now Aetherflox. He's the founder and CEO of that company Spaceman Space data centers. Gabriel from Noise, Alfred from Listen Labs. And of course, capping it off with. Mark Benioff is the lightning round somehow sound theme. We got Noise Labs and then Listen Labs. We need Signal. We need the. The founder of Signal on the show, Moxie Marley Spike. Well, actually Moxie's going to come on the show today. He's got to know he's got Noise on the show. We need Signal. But he has a new privacy focus LLM. Fantastic. Called Confer. No way I'm going to get him on the show. Awesome. Yeah. No, I'm a huge fan of Moxie Marlin Spike and I'm excited to hear that he's coming on the show. Well, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got stock options, cryptos, bonds, treasuries and more with all with amazing customer service. So Microsoft, what did you write about? I wrote about Microsoft and how they are negotiating the political backlash to AI data centers increasing power prices. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. And the key line in here is really just that. He says he's talking to all the American tech companies, but mostly he wants to make sure Microsoft is going first and they will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't, quote, pick up the tab for their power consumption in the form of paying higher utility bills. There's been a number of AI backlashes that have happened over 2025. You know, the new technology came out, everyone was, there's a lot of excitement in 23, 24, in 25 things got serious. The numbers got really big, the impacts got big. And the stories about the potential risks to the rewards started cropping up. And one of the challenges is the early AI generated videos were pretty bad. And so people were like, these are bad. My power bill is going up. I don't like this. What's the point? Now this move from Trump and Microsoft almost seems a little late because the videos are getting, they're really good. So I think people might start saying. Hey, it's totally worth it. It's actually totally worth it. You saw those, those four cats on the boat that was. I haven't seen that one. Pull it up, Tyler. Find the four cats. Find the four cats. We will get to at some point. I did see an AI video of people racing full 18 wheelers with the boxes in the back. You know how sometimes there will be real races with. Yeah, this video Riggs see, I think most people would see this and say, can we get some sound? Yeah, there's no amount of power bills. That's pretty fun. Okay, turn it off. Turn off the sound. But anyways, yeah, it's worth it. Worth it. I think it's worth every bet, clearly. Yeah, you see that and you're like, yeah. I think most people would see their power bill ticking up and realize that they're getting this content for free. They got to pay for it somehow. There's no free lunch, of course. Yeah. The power bill narrative is the one that I think stuck the most and became the biggest issue for AI companies to contend with in 26. The water debate was sort of debunked pretty quickly. There were a number of just, it seemed like mathematical errors in some of the reporting that was claiming that data centers used a lot of water. And then you just talk to the data center guys and they're like, yeah, we actually, we do use a bunch of water, but then we recycle it and we just circle it around and we actually don't dump it out and waste it. And so you're just like, yeah, why would we waste. That's over. And then we're like, but what about the power? Like, no, as soon as we use the power, the power's gone forever. Like, we. We use the power to generate, and then we need more power. So the power thing stuck around. There were other AI backlash narratives that were cropping up. The one shotting stories were very harrowing, and a lot of people experienced someone who sort of went off the rails when GPT psychosis like that one felt real, but it also seemed very preventable with aggressive guardrails. The whole time it seemed like, look, these labs are. As soon as they're made aware of this, they're going to put a reality checker in the flow. And so if you're 20 prompts deep, it'll just run an extra query and say, does this seem crazy? Does this seem like two crazy people talking to each other? Okay, let's shut it down. It was pretty simple. And you could solve it just in software. And when it's a product issue, you can solve it with a weekend hackathon. You can just lock in. It can be one Claude code prompt for all I know, you can make the change to the app. And I actually noticed this. The Claude app has a pretty short context window, like chat length. Like if you're chatting with Claude and having it do. I wanted it to pull the market caps for every single one of our sponsors. And I was a couple prompts deep. And it was just like, this is. You've maxed out the context window. You got to start a new chat, which is sort of annoying, but what. Was the market cap? Over 5 trillion. Let's go. We have some breaking news today, but TVPN sponsors have been having a good year. Obviously, Google Gemini is a big piece of that, but we do have some very large companies supporting the show and we thank them for their support. We also thank the smaller companies that haven't raised a lot of money, like TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper, extremely scalable. Hey, one day, maybe it's a $10 trillion company, maybe it's the entire capital. I could see it. So the power one was tricky because with power, the data seemed real on the actual price increases. You looked at the power usage numbers and then you just see demand is increasing, supply is staying flat, as it always has been for decades in America. We haven't been building a lot of power infrastructure. When demand increases and supply stays flat, we know what happens to prices. They increase. This is basic supply and demand. Yes, we can build nuclear power plants, but we had Scott Nolan from General Matter on the show yesterday. He's working extremely hard on this. He says, hey, we're going to be online in end of the decade. End of the decade. There's a lot of amazing folks. We've had Doug Bernauer from Radiant on the show. We've had Isaiah Taylor on the show. As aggressive as these founders are, they're. Trying to go critical this year. Yeah, that just means. Think of it as testing. Exactly. It's still years away. And then solar panels. Solar panels, we can deploy those, but that's still slow. And that doesn't solve the baseload power. What if you want to use a deep research report in the middle of the night or generate a cat video at 2am when the sun isn't shining? Of course you can do it somewhere else, but it doesn't solve. It's not a panacea. And so you got to build more power infrastructure. That takes time. And I don't think very many Americans care about what the supply dynamic of power in America will be in 2035. If just last month they saw their power bill go up by 20%. Yeah, they're like, this is hitting my pocketbook today, and I'm upset. So Bloomberg reported that reported a 267% wholesale electricity price increase if you're near a data center. So basically, if you're within 50 miles of a data center, this is probably affecting you in some way, although there's a huge amount of variation. And it's. Now, even, even if you're, you know, like, like, even if you were able to pass that cost on to consumers, which is what's happening in the short term, it's starting to actually cause delays in data center buildouts. So there's $64 billion. Yeah. One. One thing here that I think is worth noting is consumers if have. Have very real reasons to push back. Right. It's not like if they don't have a local data center, they can't use AI products. Right. Like, it doesn't impact them at all. Maybe there's jobs. I don't think we have a data jobs that come. I'm kind of. I feel like I'm missing out. I want one. I want one. There's empty buildings. We did joke about moving the show to Abilene. That would be good. But. But yeah, it's very real thing. It's not like, hey, you know, there's a new football stadium being built and suddenly you're going to be able to go walk. Yeah. Like you could be a football fan, but even if you're an AI fan, you're like, I don't need it in my backyard. Yeah. You're just like, I don't have all the product. That's the big thing. It's like power bill goes up, you know, what do you get in return? Nothing. Aura. Aura. A nice view. A nice view. Yeah, yeah. If you're a data center appreciator. Yeah. Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition. They are the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. So $64 billion in data center projects are currently held up and they face delays or cancellation because of opposition from local communities who say, we don't want this data center because prices are going up. Now, there's a couple other reasons some communities are still focused on the water issue. There's environmental impact questions, noise pollution during the construction process, and even aesthetics. There are some people who say, not in my backyard. I just don't want a big white square building. Maybe it needs to look ornate. Maybe it should. Maybe should have some aesthetics. Put some windows on Token Cathedral. I don't know. I don't know how big that feels like a less important one. But there's a lot of communities that care about the beauty of the community, the natural beauty of whatever they have, and the fact that it feels like homes and it feels like, yes, there's A Walmart there. But I know a guy who works there and I know the cashier and I go there and I walk in the data center. You'll never go in. They don't do tours. There's no reason for you to go in. Walmart is. It employs 10 people and it's a product for the community. Exactly, exactly. So even if the Walmart's sort of ugly, at least it has a brand. And, you know, okay, well, I can get something there. It does something to me. Whereas this data center, is it serving me Netflix? Is it serving me slop? I don't know. My slop might be coming from somewhere else. So, interestingly, the anti AI issue is seemingly very bipartisan. Data Center Watch, which is this research group, claims in the affected districts, the opposition is 55% Republican, 45% Democrat. So pretty much just across the board, a bipartisan issue. And, you know, tech has obviously been worked very closely with Democrats in the past, worked very closely with Republicans, more in the more recent history, but now they're facing. Yeah, and I think, I think it's easy for people in tech to say, oh, you're just, you're. These are Luddites, blah, blah, blah. But it's actually not that. What's the incentive? Why do I want this? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially because, like, it's going to get built somewhere. It might as well not be in my neighborhood. Yeah, it's very. It's the easiest nimby, nimby argument to make. Yeah. So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Trump picked up the story on Monday. He says he's working with American tech companies to make major changes to ensure that Americans don't pick up the tab for their power consumption. We're going to talk more about how that actually works out in the form of higher utility bills. Microsoft stepped up first, and I think the first mover advantage here from a messaging perspective is pretty strong, actually. I think it's a very good move. Now, to be clear, this isn't entirely new for the hyperscalers. Google actually has a program called the Clean Tariff, Clean Transition Tariff, where they overpay for electricity in certain markets, certain data centers, and Amazon pays a surplus above electricity costs already. But Microsoft, Microsoft is unique in the timing and in the volume of the announcement, like it's a whole story in the Wall Street Journal. And they've actually put a face to the program with Brad Smith, who's The president and the vice chair of Microsoft giving quotes laying out a five point plan. He talks about a number of environmental issues as well. He talks about water too, that they want to be net zero on the water that they use. In fact, I think Microsoft again, that's. Such a, that's such a. It's a layup. It's a layup. Yeah, it should be a layup. But it's still good to just say, hey, you know, if that was the talking point that you were going to hit me with, we already got it sorted. Yeah. Also, Microsoft is planning to be, I think completely net zero on the carbon emissions by 2030. And by 2050 they want to be so carbon negative that they will as a company since the dawn of Microsoft in the 70s, they will have emitted negative carbon emissions over the entire lifecycle of the company. Which is interesting, but so Microsoft's exact language is they are committed to paying high enough electricity rates to cover the electricity costs of the data centers so that they aren't passed on to consumers. Now, a true free marketer is probably against this. Why is 1 watt of electricity more expensive for one person or another? If I'm watching TikTok and you're building the next and you're curing cancer, you know, on your laptop, why do you have to pay less than me? Why are we putting a value judgment on a particular use of a public good? Most public goods, the roads cost what they cost, whether you're driving an ambulance. Or whether you're driving Zach Meyer says would be cool to see a Microsoft liquid death collab for water that was used in a data center. Used water somehow. I have no idea if the water that comes out of a data center is drinkable. Well, of course you can just filter it, filter it again and it'll be good to go. So the die hard free marketers would argue that the government should stay out of supply and demand issues. Let prices rise and there will be more of an incentive to build more power generation capacity. Prices will stabilize naturally, but there are political realities and new capacity cannot be brought online in the blink of an eye. It takes time to build these things. Even if you're just going with natural gas. It takes time. There are backlogs. At a certain point you buy all of the natural gas turbines and then you need to build more turbine factories. That's why boom, supersonic is getting in the game. And at a certain point you have to build more factories that build more factories. And it does get slow. And then there's also a Capex consideration because if you're a, if you're an electric, if you're a power company and you say, oh great, the rates are going up, there's a data center in my area, they're going to buy a ton of electricity. I got to bring a new power plant online. That's great. And then you go to your team and you're like, okay, we need to put up how much money and where's that money coming from? And we got to pay for, yeah, we're going to finance it, but we still have to pay for a bunch in the front and it's going to hurt the interest payments on that. We're not going to, we're not going to be making money from this new power plant for a while. So we have to pay the interest. So we have to raise prices. So then prices do go up even if they are responding as fast as they can. So there's a few different dynamics there that basically Microsoft and the big tech company I think will be saying, hey look, we want no excuses from power companies to ramp up production, ramp up capacity and so we're willing to pay higher rates. Hopefully you can pass those, that revenue on into bringing up capacity. So I think overall Brad Smith is playing the game on the field. And the good news is that it feels like Microsoft, it seems like Microsoft can afford this. So some numbers. Electricity represents 40% of data center opex, about 7 and a half million dollars annually per major facility. Now Microsoft has over 400 data centers and so energy is a significant line item I think think like 3 billion a year in electricity, something like that. That's very rough. Probably got to go to semi analysis for the real number but this is back to the envelope stuff. But again, 3 billion in energy costs for 245 billion in revenue. Microsoft's going to be okay if they pay a 50% premium on all of their electricity across the entire portfolio. We're talking about a billion dollars of extra cost. That's less than 1% of their operating income. So this shouldn't be a major rethink on the company, but it is a big step towards alleviating the political pressure and the fears of higher energy prices. Satya is simply the goat. He's my goat. He does appear to be the goat. Play that goat noise while I tell everyone about Applovin. Profitable advertising made Easy with Axon AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today. No, I think it's super smart. I think it was inevitable. Trump needs this for the midterms. He's putting pressure on everyone. Right. Credit card stuff, data center stuff, we'll see more of this. And yet being the first mover, ultimately only the first mover, the one that sort of says hey yeah, we're excited about this, is the one that gets any credit. Right. Amazon doing this, they're not going to get credit for it. Yeah. It's a weird sort of game theory dynamic where this will probably wind up landing like a small tax on the entire, on all the hyperscalers or all data centers as a broad like unenforced. It won't be a true tax, but they will all be paying it because the political reality is necessitate it. But the first mover gets the compressed cycle, which is funny. It is from truth social to corporate concession like that is the era, the pipeline. Tyler, what was your reaction to this news? You're in favor of data center subsidies, right? Like you want the data centers to pay lower rates because it's more valuable. To have government backed data centers. Electrical subsidies. You gotta feed Claude. I mean, I just think like this is kind of disappointing because it just, it's telling me that like if you imagine we have like a real free market. Yeah. There should be already insane incentives to build new energy supply. Yep. And that's obviously not happening because energy price would be going down. They're going up. Yeah. So it's like this is just like this is telling me that in the future we're not going to build nearly as much energy power as we want. Yes. Or at least on any kind of like short term scale. Yeah. It does feel, I think it feels like the energy market as a whole is at least in the short term, much more zero sum than people thought. There's a somewhat fixed pool of energy capacity and we're shuffling chips around the poker table trying to allocate energy effectively. But the pie is not growing nearly as fast as people want. Which is why I was a big advocate for the theme of 2026 being energy and, and a lot of work being done across all different technologies, unblocking all the different bottlenecks that exist to actually ramping supply so that prices can neutralize and not be unaffordable. Because people do want to scroll Instagram reels and they want to watch AI slop and they don't want their bills to be through the roof when they go to charge their phone after watching four hours of Instagram Reels. Taiwan Semiconductor last week spent $200 million at a public auction to buy 900 acres of land adjacent to its existing Arizona property, which will reportedly be used for the planned new facility. So we're still waiting on this Taiwan trade deal. Seems like as part of that, TSMC will, will expand their operations in Arizona, which is very exciting. And, and they are basing their design for this off of Costco warehouses. Nick here, the render here is very sci fi. I've seen renders of their facility in Taiwan. It looks beautiful. Seems like they're bringing some of that aesthetic to Arizona. Seems pretty cool. This was an interesting exchange. Somebody named Tom Leonard, candidate for governor in Michigan. He says this isn't a joke. A friend of mine was offered 70,000 an acre for her family farmed by a Data Center Company. 11.2 million total. This is what Big Tech is doing in Michigan. So anyway, somebody willing to basically overpay for farmland in Michigan. Yeah. I remember on the University of Michigan campus there's like these stickers and posters everywhere that are like, stop the AI data Center. Or it was Stop the data Center Build out. And that's when you knew you had to drop out. This place is not for me. Oregon rejection. You gotta go back, take the fight to them. Put up some posters that say yes on data centers. Put a data center in the media. Subsidize data centers. Tear down the stadium. Yeah, so just some context on that last exchange. Matthew Zaitlin at heatmap says, I think this is shared as an example of Big Tech doing a bad thing. But I don't know, man. 11.2 is a lot of money. The USDA says the average Michigan farm real estate value is $6,200 per acre. So they're paying over 10x the price. Yeah, I mean, who knows? I mean it's. They could easily be paying a premium because of this land specific location or proximity to other projects that they have. I wouldn't be surprised if some landmaxers are going out and just buying up. Why wouldn't you try to buy up the farmland in proximity to some of these other projects in hopes that somebody comes. I wonder how real this text message is because I get a lot of spam text messages for business financing. Oh, we'll invest in your company. You just, you just get like random spam all the time. And you wonder if people are just throwing out like random numbers just for price discovery, just to sort of like aggregate some sort of, you know, metrics across a whole pool of phone numbers and they're just sort of spamming it out. Like if this person had said yes. What's the problem? My wife got a spam text today that just said, babe, I dropped my phone and it broke. She immediately texted me and said, this isn't you, right? Oh, interesting. But it's pretty interesting. Interesting. Kind of like loop to get somebody and to, I imagine, send me $1,000 so I can get a new phone. Oh, sure, sure, sure. Do you remember the text that Ben got? It was asking him if you want to get steaks. Oh, that's the best spam. That was the best spam ever. It said, let's get steak tonight. Let's get steak tonight. I mean, just said yes. Yeah. Did you respond and just say, I'm in? No, I just posted it. I should have responded. Missed opportunity to make a new friend. Well, now is a great time to tell you about our newest sponsor, Cisco. Cisco is critical infrastructure for the AI era. They're building the foundation for. Let's. Howard, we are very excited to be partnered with Cisco. It's truly an honor. It is. It is truly an honor. In other news, the stock market is down. The Dow falls weighed down by JP Morgan. Not good news. There was a rocky quarter for JP Morgan and it weighed on the Dow Jones Industrial average. Headline prices rose 2.7 from a year earlier. 2.7% according to the CPI. This was in line with expectations and November's rate core cpi, which excludes food and energy prices, also held at the prior month rate. Now, overall, weren't things doing. What did they say here? I don't have this. JP Morgan earnings, investment fees both fall off. JP Morgan reported that the bank's profit fell 7% in the fourth quarter, dragged down by a change from its deal to take over the Apple card credit card program and surprising slip in investment banking fees. The investment bankers are not making enough money. Still, the nation's biggest bank saw revenue increase for both the quarter and for the full year and was optimistic about the trajectory of the US Economy and consumer. From Jamie Dimon. He said consumers have money. They're still jobs even though it's weakened a little bit. He said on a call with analysts. I saw a great Jamie Dimon hype reel on Instagram reels the other day. I was fantastic, fantastic. In other news, there's more details about that Apple card deal that Jamie Dimon worked through. We should pull this up. Behind the unraveling of Apple's credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs. After two years of negotiations, one of the biggest credit card deals of all time. We'll see Goldman replaced by JP Morgan on Apple's credit card. Before we read through this, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. So in early December, a long delayed deal hung over a call between JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon executive. If you don't know David Solomon, you probably know him because as DJ D Soul. DJ D Soul. But he also runs a big bank called Goldman Sachs. Very cool. Executives of the two banks had been negotiating for months on trading the massive Apple credit card program, and it's roughly $20 billion in balances. But the talks had stalled. Privately, bankers on each side were blaming the other side for needlessly slowing down the negotiations. You're moving too slow. JP Morgan had secured a discount on the balances, but to help cover potential losses, they'd secured a discount on the balances. We talked about this where normally these balances, they traded a premium because people expect them to be paid back with interest. But in this case they were. J.P. morgan was going to get a discount, but they wanted more protection in case the loans grew worse, in case they were higher than expected defaults. Goldman executives, meanwhile, didn't feel the need to bend much. Now that the Apple program was finally looking profitable, some executives on both sides had started questioning whether to walk away. Dimon and Solomon got on a call on December 8, according to people familiar with the matter. They discussed why the Apple deal was taking so long to close and agreed to break the logjam to see the deal through soon, people said. Just before the new year, the banks finalized a deal that was announced last week, confirming the Wall Street Journal's earlier report. A little patting on the back for the Wall Street Journal getting the scoop. The deal brings two of the country's most influential companies together. JP Morgan is adding the flashy program to its credit card lending operation and strengthening its connections to the trillion dollar tech giant at a time consumers are increasingly using phones and watches for payments and managing their finances. Apple gets a new partner with a sprawling consumer base that is eager to build the card. Goldman gets closure on its failed venture into consumer lending that has brought the firm billions of dollars in losses. A chapter it is hoping to forget. Moving the Apple credit card was never going to be simple. Card programs this big aren't put up for sale often and few buyers, few potential buyers exist. Apple is famously finicky about details and control, including with its credit card before launching the program in 2019, Goldman and Apple agreed to unusual terms that other banks balked at taking over. Interested executives were especially worried about higher than normal delinquencies and subprime exposure and wanted huge discounts to consider a deal. Even still, almost nothing about the process of finding a bank to replace Goldman has been normal to begin with. Goldman began looking to exit from the contract with Apple only a few months after it had extended its partnership with the tech giant to the end of the decade. Apple and Goldman had discussions with larger and smaller credit card issuers, American Express, Capital One, Synchrony, Barclays and Santander, as well as tiny fintechs. Apple even debated bringing in private credit firms to help a smaller card issuing entity take over. But it didn't go that way, and they landed with JP Morgan. So very interesting. Anyway, let me tell you about label box. Delivering you the highest quality data for Frontier AI. Get in the box. Get a label box. A label box. Moving on. OpenAI is going to be running another super bowl ad. It's in the Wall Street Journal. OpenAI to run ad during Super Bowl. Why don't we. We need to play their last year's. Ad, react to that, and see what we think will change. What will stay the same? What will they do? The artificial intelligence company behind the popular ChatGPT tool is set to broadcast a 60 second commercial during NBC's broadcast. All right. With sound. With sound. Let's watch it with sound if we can. The ad is the latest component of OpenAI's expansive marketing. Expensive marketing offensive, which began last year with its first super bowl commercial. We don't have sound. Okay, okay. We. The production team is telling us, unfortunately, we do not have the technology to play sound on a video. Let's work on that. But if I remember the song correctly, it's like doom. Doom. Like something. Oh, really? Is it. Is it a. Is it a licensed song? Because you were thinking that they should. They should license creeds. Can you take me higher for this next one? Right? That was what you thought. Yes. Can you take me higher? And it's like to a higher plan. You're on the free plan. Please upgrade to the $200 a month plan. Oh, we got it. Let's go. We do have the technology. AGI is here. Okay, so there's someone throwing a spear. We create fire. Then the wheel. Then the wheel with spokes. Then the horse. The horse created the horse. We created the horse. And corn. We created Korn. Maybe they should use a corn song. Freak on a leash. That's the song they should license a nod to corn. I mean, the motion design is incredible. Like it is. It is very well done. So they go inside the skeleton, build the 747, take a look at DNA, invent movies, TV news. That's us. They go to the moon. Somewhat equally important, create the Internet and then you start talking to the computer. And now the merge. You got AI. What do you want to create next? And then you get the blue chatgpt dot. Yeah. So I love. I love it. Yeah. It was just not necessarily. I didn't need a Super bowl ad for me. Yeah. I need a Super bowl ad for the Clydesdale crowd. Right. The people who are maybe on the fence about AI. But yeah, as a technologist, it has the aesthetics of like, wow, this is the coolest tech company ever. And this is like, this has the vibe of Apple. It has a lot of throwback stuff. It feels like high technology. It feels techie elite. Very, very cool. It feels designed, it feels refined. It's possible at the time they were like, look, we're growing so quickly. We don't really need to run a Super bowl ad. Yeah. Let's just flex on everybody a little bit by running one. I mean, there's a certain. But this year, I expect it to be much more pragmatic about what you. Can use to do something. Exactly how they want the average American to think about ChatGPT. Yes. Yes. Where it integrates into their life. Right. And so do you think it'll be one specific use case? Like, there's been OpenAI videos about ChatGPT helping you cook dinner. And I actually got an odd email from a friend all about how he loves cooking with friends and how food is this important thing. And then he was calling out the ChatGPT video on food being like, I don't like this because it's taking away the one thing I like as a human. I actually had a funny thing about it practically. I think it's fine. Using an LLM for a pancake recipe last week and it completely. The pancakes really did not work because it's basically taking the average of all pancakes. You made a mid pancake and it. Just made the most runny mid pancakes really bad. Interesting. I don't know. It'd be interesting. I wonder if they try to do anything on the cool, like anything on the. It's probably too early for commerce side. You could see some of that. Maybe they want people to know commerce is coming. I could also see them trying to make it interactive somehow. You could imagine like when maybe this win is gamble. No, no, no, no. But I was going to be like, ask chat with Chat. Tell chatgpt you want it. I don't know. Well, it could like, they could sort of launch like ChatGPT Sports or something where, you know, you're like, the demo of what it's showing you is that if you have ChatGPT as your second screen during the super bowl, you're going to pull up more interesting stories about the players, you're going to pull up statistics, you're going to be able to understand the. Add more context to your experience of super bowl watching. Even like, oftentimes if I'm watching the Super Bowl, I'll see an ad and I'll go and go to Google and say, well, what are the greatest super bowl ads of all time? And I'll wind up on some listicle. And ChatGPT, of course, can generate that type of stuff all the time. You could filter and say, show me the best super bowl ads from tech companies back in the dot com boom. I want to know about those. And you can go anywhere. And that is the magic of ChatGPT. There's a whole bunch of other ways that they could try and contextualize it. They could try and be emotional, go with ChatGPT Health. I wonder if they'll do anything on the Disney, with the new Disney integration. Like if they wanted to spark like another Studio Ghibli moment that would be. Is coming online originally they said some in January, so maybe the timing lines up. Yeah. Be really wild. Yeah. You get Darth Vader in there or something. Or I mean, there's a lot of characters to choose. No, I was, yeah, I was saying, like, try to, try to use the super bowl ad to prompt people to make. Go to. Go to Chat GBT and make your turn yourself. Turn your super bowl party into. Into a Disney theme thing. Yeah, that would be very good. Yeah. Surprise celebrity appearance or celebrity endorsement would be. Would be good. They. They've sort of shied away for Scarlett Johansson. Maybe they can bring her back reversal. Reversal and getting her back on the team would be fantastic. But, but I expect that this will be, this will be the AI Super Bowl. You think there'll be even more ads? I'm sure there will. So for context, tech companies across anthropic Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and Perplexity collectively spent 333 million on linear TV ads promoting their AI offerings in the United States just last year. And that was up 43% from the prior Year, according to estimates from an ad tracker I spot, they also shelled out 426 million on digital ads in 2025, more than triple their 2024 outlays. So interesting. Digital is growing faster than linear. That's. I would not expect that. I would expect the digital to have been really, really popular and then them to have just jumped into linear. But I guess they've been. Wait, are they talking about streaming ads? Maybe it's from Sensor Tower. It just says digital ads, which I assume is Facebook, Google Ads, all that sorts of stuff. Anthropic kicked off its first major push into advertising in September and has been blanketing NFL, NBA and college sports games with ads for its Claude Chatbot. It shelled out an estimated 16 and a half million dollars on linear TV ads in 2025, despite boasting a base of over 2,800 million weekly users. OpenAI is. And that is such a scale. They've got it to download this app. What do you mean? Like, they just. They really can. I mean, they're not in the top 25 apps. Wait, which one? Clot. Oh, oh, you're talking Claude. So Sorry, sorry. That 800 million weekly active users is for OpenAI for checking. No, I know, but. I know, I know. So they spent. They've been spending money all over. Well, you know why? You know why the. The Claude is not at the top of the app store charts? Because if you generate a Deep Research report on the iOS app, it will not read it to you out loud. It doesn't have that functionality. And that's clearly a gap that everyone has experienced and recognizes. And as soon as they run into that, they uninstall it and they don't recommend it to their friends. So if you're listening Anthropic, please add that functionality. I want to be able to listen to Deep Research reports. Yeah. Just think, how do they figure out how to get it? How do they figure out how to become a real player in consumer? Because clearly they want to, otherwise they wouldn't be spending that money. I mean, they need hooks. You need some viral Flywheel. So the ChatGPT number, 800 million weekly active users, that feels woefully out of date. It feels like they were well over a billion and they're just waiting to actually drop that press release at a key moment. And now is not the right time to wow everyone with the real usage numbers. But I definitely think that they're beyond that. This number is very stale. Like, we got this 800 million weekly number months and months ago and it must have grown. Google obviously has a whole bunch of hooks into the Gemini ecosystem through Gmail and Google. There's so many different entry points. Claude, as an independent app, doesn't really have that. Also, I think just on a product sense, ChatGPT, I do think that the holidays were successful and it was not discussed on X. The tech elite and the tech, you know, like anyone who's like in tech was focused on cloud code. They were doing vibe coding projects. They had time off from work and time to lock in and play around with like the hottest new coding agent. So people weren't. People were. People knew that ChatGPT could do images. But right before the Holocaust started, ChatGPT launched the image tab. And if you go to the Image tab in the app, the most interesting thing there is that it's not just a prompt box. They have preloaded. Have you seen these? It will show you retro anime. It will show you ideas. Turn yourself into a bobblehead, turn yourself into a sugar cookie or fisheye lens or ink work or pop art. And so. So it's taking the work out of someone. Like most people in tech, an image model comes out. Studio Ghibli thing happens. Everyone's like, what's the prompt? They were like, it's too much to ask people to have an idea. It is. We need to give them the idea and we need to make the image for them. It actually is too much. And then eventually when you have your little sweet pea, whatever they're calling their new device, it will just be generating images on the fly based on your day. Yes, yes. And then eventually you'll just be able to stay laying in bed all day long. Yeah, but I mean, just from a product perspective, the ChatGPT Images tab is, I think, an important just growth hack, which is something that they just have to do now because they're at that scale. And I saw that people were generating images and then sharing them and they weren't screenshotting them or downloading them with some watermark. They were clicking the share button button in the ChatGPT app and sharing a link to the ChatGPT app that would show you the image in a preview if you shared it in imessage or in a group chat. And that would onboard more people and those sorts of viral loops. They feel like, oh, the tech is so magical. It should just grow organically. But it already grew organically. Like the organic growth was a billion people. Now how do you get the next billion? Well, you probably have to do Some growth hacking and a product like images in ChatGPT with Disney characters and links that beg you to install the app for yourself. And Claude isn't quite there yet, where there's an obvious thing that a huge swath of people can go to and then hook in and we can collaborate and I send you a link and. Then you install the app. Yeah. The tough thing is, if you're spending all this money trying to drive consumer downloads, but then you don't have image generation at all, at what point? Why don't they just. Even if that's not a priority for them, it still feels like a product that consumers really want in their daily driver. And at some point they may have to capitulate that. I don't know if they care about the app race at all, the consumer app race. It feels like Anthropic's been super focused on the enterprise, super focused on coding, and that's been. I know, I know, but they say, like. All I'm saying is you can say that you're not focused on consumer. But they run billboard ads all over la. They're spending a lot of money on television. And so you kind of need to make up your mind. Yeah, you don't really advertise in NFL and NBA. I mean, I guess enterprise buyers watch those shows. So 16 million, maybe it's worth it. But I agree with you. Generally, their ad campaigns have been great and maybe they just want to rub it in the face of the other labs. They're also going public, so developing real name recognition broadly, I think is important. I mean, in theory, if they host Claude code in a virtual machine that you can access from a phone and have it write software for you, it should be able to go and set up an API with an image generator and generate you images. And so you should be able to do that from the app. Like Claude Code. If I ask Claude Code to generate an image for me, it will figure out how to find an image generator, sign up for the API almost, or at least I will give it the API key and then it will be able to generate images for me, Correct? Yeah, it would ask you to, like, you would have to go generate the API key and stuff. Yeah, but that's. Actually, I'll try that right now. Yeah. What happens if you just ask Claude Code to generate you a picture of four cats on a boat or something? How does it actually work through solving that? At some point, it should prompt you to at least maybe make a decision about which image generator you want to use. And at Least ask for credit card information to pay for it. Maybe it goes to a free image generator, I don't know. But the Wall Street Journal continues, and we will continue after telling you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise money, Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Selling AI to the masses isn't easy, says the Wall Street Journal. Due to sustained public fear about the technology's potential downsides, businesses have already cut jobs using AI tasks for tasks previously performed by humans, and executives have articulated plans. Why would the masses be scared? Why would they be scared of this technology? Half of us adults are more concerned than excited about artificial intelligence, according to a spring survey by Pew Research. That's a while ago, but only 10% say excitement outweighs their worry. Skill issue. Just be in the 10%, right, Tyler? Yeah. Yeah. Well, OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance in human innovation, drawing parallels between. Wait, this would actually be a great bit. We should make an AI Tyler that we can go to and just. We'll. He's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We'll compare the two of you guys, and this can just be a good barometer for AI progress. How do you feel about that? It could probably do a pretty good job because it's. I mean, it can already do like a talking head. If you just put an image of me and then the voice, you can clone. I know, but I don't think it would have your takes. I don't think it would have your takes. Just say like. Or your. Or Dwarkesh. Or even say, I'm sorry, that's too controversial. I can't hold that opinion. While OpenAI's first big game ad positioned ChatGPT as the next significant advance and human innovation, drawing parallels between AI and transformative inventions such as the light bulb, more recent ads frame the technology as a relatable tool. They feature people using the chatbot for everyday problems, such as finding a recipe or searching for exercise tips. Which way will OpenAI go in the new super bowl ad? I imagine that they will go more proactive, more productive, more tangible. There will be a human shot with a camera using the app, probably on the phone, but we'll see in its ads. Anthropic has been positioning Claude as a partner for problem solvers rather than a threat to human intelligence. Yeah, why would you want to run an ad saying that? This strategy, anchored by the this is. A Super bowl ad concept. We are not a threat to human intelligence. We are not a threat. Don't worry about us. Yeah, how about a super rule? This is. We hear you. We hear that you're concerned. Yeah, just concerned. Massive super rule warranted. Our PDOOM is actually really low relative to the true risk. We think that the PDUM should be low. Everyone's like what are they talking about? 5% chance of annihilation by end of year? Well if you're running the super bowl, you gotta get on restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations I want to be able to watch the Super bowl on LinkedIn. If you want to multi stream go to restream.com and I know the folks who have the rights to the Super Bowl. Sasha really should push to get LinkedIn the streaming rights for sure. Be a game changer for the Super Bowl. Okay, so so Gemini introduced a more personal Gemini today designed for you. Personal Intelligence they're calling it. Personal Intelligence draws insights from across your Google apps to provide truly customized responses for Gemini. Learn all about it below. They say Gemini already remembers your past chats to provide relevant responses, but today we're taking the next step forward with the introduction of Personal Intelligence. You can choose to let Gemini connect information from your Gmail, Google Photos, Google search and YouTube history to receive more personalized responses. Here are some ways you can start using it. Planning Gemini will be able to suggest hidden gems that feel right up your alley for upcoming trips or work travel because it'll know where you've stayed before, where you've been. It'll know that I went to Austria and recommend a different city, maybe shopping. Gemini will get to know your taste and preferences on a deeper level, help you find items you love faster. Motivation Gemini will have a deeper understanding of the goals you're working towards. Look at your to do list. Privacy is central to Personal intelligence. How you connect other apps to Gemini. The new beta feature is off by default. You can choose to turn it on, decide exactly which apps to connect and can turn it off at any time. Personal Intelligence begins rolling out today as a beta to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. That that's me. So I gotta turn this on. I'm very interested in seeing. I imagine that I will not be able to link multiple Google accounts because I have a personal Gmail and then I have a work Gmail and then I sort of want to integrate my old work Gmails that I think I have access to still because that says a lot about me. Even though I'm not really using that stuff anymore and I'm not actioning those emails. I could see that being Important in terms of building out a yeah, you. Were sick of switching between constantly switching between calendars and Chrome and having your personal calendar calendar. Get ready to be sick of switching between LLMs. Yeah, some of them have been surprisingly good at bootstrapping knowledge. I feel like a few of the LLMs have been have surprised me by I'll ask a question and it'll just be like, and here's the context for tvpn, here's the TVPN angle. And I'm like, oh, I forgot that I mentioned that to you. Or like you figured that out somehow. Or like, yeah, you did something. I don't know. The personalization is getting better. Maybe this is the year when it really hits. I know ChatGPT introduced it as a concept a while ago, maybe almost a full year ago, and it hasn't felt magical yet. Pulse was cool, but it I never became like a daily active user of Pulse. The interesting question is like, yeah, is it a data source problem? Is it an architectural problem, or is it an actual model level problem? Are the models just not smart enough? Do they not have enough data or are they not designed in the right way where they can actually go over all of your information? I was using the new Salesforce Slack bot that we're going to talk to Marc Benioff about at 2pm and it was remarkably useful in Slack because I'm not on Slack a lot and so I had a ton of notifications that had built up over months and I was able to go in and write a prompt or just talk to Chat Slack bot and say, hey, catch me up. What's been happening in this Slack workspace? And it did a good job summarizing all the different key things where I was mentioned, what was relevant to me. I did prod it on what anthropic model it's using exactly. And it's not using the Latest and greatest 4.5. It was using, I think 3.5. It didn't seem aware of the latest models and also it didn't have the ability to search the web. It didn't have the ability to act as like a full fledged LLM. You couldn't just ask it things. It was very confined to Slack, but within that domain it was pretty useful. And it did help me like sort of get to like inbox zero in just like a couple minutes because I was able to just scan a digest of everything that's happening across all the channels instead of clicking through them, scanning, reading the threads, the going down the it was just able to be like, here's the deep research report on it. Yeah, I am waiting. I'm waiting for the moment where people are like, I'm not really interested in trying a new LLM that's hot because like having memory in the LLM and personalization is so important. Like waiting for that lock in moment. Don't think it's really. You have some force lock in where a company is saying like we use. This LLM or, or I mean vice versa. Where, you know, they're just, it's just like, yeah, in the course of my day I use 5 different LLMs. Like on my phone I use Apple Intelligence and that's routing to Gemini and then I log in into Slack and that's using the anthropic APIs. But it doesn't really matter because I don't care that they don't talk to each other like it's all fine and they work. They're good enough for the particular thing that I'm trying to do at a particular time. That's another possible outcome here. Andrew Curran is summarizing some of the news here, saying that it includes Google Workspace. Google Photos is sort of interesting. I wonder if that plays into Nano Banana. You can have more suggested images. Hey, do you want to touch this photo up? Do you want to create some sort of holiday card like what ChatGPT ultimately wound up doing with images? Go through Google Photos and turn me into a dinosaur in every photo I've ever taken. Set the GPUs on fire for sure before we move on. Phantom cash Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. New York Times has some coverage today talking about IPOs of this year. 2026 may be the year of the mega IPO. Not really new news for those of you listening. SpaceX, OpenAI Anthropic are going public. They talk about. Eddie Malloy from Morgan Stanley says we're going to get into a period of potentially unprecedented IPO deal sizes. We are confident they're executable given the scale of these companies and the investor interest. In two decades I haven't seen private companies that are this meaningful and are this impactful, said Jeremy Abelson, an investor at Irving Investors. Not only are they bigger and more relevant, but they're incredible companies with numbers that we haven't, that we've never seen before, ever. I think everybody's excited to just get into these S1s. I expect them to be extremely impressive. There was a ton. There's been a number of reports about how bad the gross margins are, how much money they're losing. We're about to find out the real details. It's going to be exciting times. Exciting times. So, yeah, we'll see. All the geopolitical chaos, even this ruling around tariffs, which we didn't get today, all this stuff is going to play into whether or not the window stays open. Yeah. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of it. HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Saks Fifth Ave. Oh. Neiman Marcus. Bergdorff Goodman filed for bankruptcy, crumbling. You shop at Saks Fifth Avenue, have you? No, I've never been a department store guy. Apartment store guy. Ever? Straight to the Chrome Heart store. You're the guy in line outside Supreme. Go Direct. And they don't sell supreme at Sachs. Right. Maybe that's why they're going bankrupt. The hype beats Zero Chrome. Zero Chrome. Anyways, they filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday, crumbling under billions of dollars in debt, affirming relationship with vendors and lagging sales. The filing is the latest sign that America's luxury department stores, once landmarks that served as immersive fantasy worlds for the wealthy and aspirational, are becoming an endangered species. Jeffrey Van Raymondon, the former Neiman Marcus chief executive, will return as Sachs Global CEO. He succeeds Richard Baker, the chief executive and executive chairman, who in 2024 orchestrated a $2.7 billion acquisition by Sachs of the Neiman Marcus Group, which owns Bergdorf Goodman. Sachs said it had secured roughly $1.75 billion to help finance the company through bankruptcy, much of it coming from its bondholders. Sachs said it intended to emerge from bankruptcy later this year, and it expected to honor all customer programs, make payments to vendors and continue to pay employees. Saks has brought in additional executives to help sewer the company, including Darcy Pennock, former president of Bergdorf Goodman, as president and chief commercial officer. This is a defining moment for Sachs Global, and the path ahead presents a meaningful opportunity to strengthen the foundation of our business and position it for the future. This is good messaging. Trump was messaging around the Supreme Court ruling. He said, if they rule against this, we're screwed. He just was like, if they rule against the tariffs, we're screwed. We're cooked. We're chopped and we're cooked. Ridiculous things. Yeah. I mean, I feel like these stores are, if anything, just nostalgic. Right? It really feels like an end of an era. ESSENCE obviously went bankrupt earlier this year. In that case, too, founders are going to actually maintain control, so we'll see how they Navigate through. But again, I just wonder, you know, as these stores shut down, like, who. Who can even fill these spaces? Like, there's just not. There's not companies that want to come in and occupy a bunch of this. A bunch of this real estate. You gotta get Rick Caruso in there. He's like the master of this. Like. Yeah. Have you seen things a little bit. More durable about the mall that you go to for? There's restaurants, there's a movie theater, there's a coffee shop, bookstore. Escape Room. Escape Room. Probably Laser tag VR maybe. Maybe a sphere. But there's a few key stores that are anchor tenants. The Apple store and there's electronics, and then there are a few. There's a Louis Vuitton store, a coach store, Bottega store. And those brands want to own the entire retail experience. I think more now I don't. I'm not sure. But it seems like as much as we joke about the supreme store having lines out front, there is a deliberate strategy to that you control the full experience, not just a corner or a display table in a larger store. So these aggregator retail stores seem to be having a lot of trouble. Yeah, it's not good. Well, MongoDB choose a database built for flexibility and scale. With best in class embedding models and re rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build. What's next. Larry Ellison is being profiled in Vulture for New York magazine. It's a very long profile that we should read through. First, we should debate this story that we almost got to from Reddit yesterday. Are there any real candy innovations right now? R Candy, which I didn't know existed. Hey, everyone, I'm curious to hear your perspective as candy lovers. Do you feel like there's any real innovation happening in candy right now? Are there any sweets brands or flavors that are new? Someone's been reading zero to one, the stagnation theory has come to the candy industry. We're seeing progress in the world of bits, less so in the world of sugars, of candy. Some people did make the good point that, yes, there has been a phenomenal breakout success in the candy industry. Do you know what I'm talking about, Jordy? No. There's one really big winner recently, and it is nerds. Gummy clusters. These nerds. Gummy clusters. I don't know where this got buried in this. This went very viral, I guess. But Nerds was a brand of candy that had been around for a long time and was doing, I think, fine, sort of like, you know, stagnant revenue. And then they came up with this way to create like. Have you ever had nerds? Are you familiar with this? Of course. Yeah. It's like this like grainy, like sand texture or something. I don't know, it's like a bunch of little pellets and it's sort of like. Are you mansplaining nerds? Yeah, it's sort of like hard to wrap. I don't know, it's not that accessible. It's like you either dump it all in your mouth and then you just have a tunnel. It's not a great user experience. It's a little outdated really? I think so. I thought it was fantastic growing up. You did? Yeah. Interesting nerd ropes too. Yeah. Yeah. So basically what they did with the nerd rope, they cut it up into these little clusters. And this product has been selling fantastically well and has done very, very well. And there were also some. Yeah, there's a bunch of people chiming in in the comments. Peelers, gummy mangoes. There's a whole bunch of stuff. There were even some companies that did like sugar free candies that I think have done well. There's been a number of sort of new startups. There really isn't like a David's protein bar type of breakout success in candy that I'm familiar with. I love candy. I just assume that it all wants to kill me and so bring me the poison. The poison. What was your favorite candy growing up? Hmm. I don't know. That's a tough one. Maybe Starburst, Skittles, the classics. Oh, wow. Is there anything else? Hot tamales. Hot tamales. Okay. Interesting. Tyler, what candy do you get? More of a chocolate guy. Chocolate guy. I don't really like any. Find chocolate interesting? Yeah, I don't know, I pick up candy from time to time at the airport. Something. Oh yeah, you do? Yeah, yeah. If we're getting on a plane, I like to have some candy hanging around. But you know the nerds. Gummy clusters. I've had those on plane flights a few times. But good to see that the candy community is coming out in full force in support of candy innovation. Well, I went and found this original post on R Candy. You did? What do they say? The post seems written by ChatGPT, EM dashes all of it. And yeah, basically everybody's just nostalgia maxing. What are they most nostalgic for? What do they like? They're just saying they like the old school stuff. Willy Wonka candy. Does a Reese's peanut butter cup count as a Candy or is that a chocolate? I think of chocolate as a subcategory candy. Oh, interesting. Halloween candy. I gotta buy Halloween candy. Snickers came in there. Okay. Yeah, Snickers. Snickers counts. That's good. It's also an ingredient that you could use. You wouldn't say like a chocolate cake is candy. There's something about the size. Producer Ben wants a protein Twix. I would be surprised if that could. If that revitalizes the candy industry. Anyway, let's move on to this story about David Ellison, the Sun King of Hollywood. Before we read through this, we'll tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken, helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So with help from his billionaire father, Larry David Ellison is trying to become the biggest studio mogul in history. One weekend in 2006, Dean Devlin, a movie producer, was driving across Los Angeles to deal with an emergency. His new movie, Flyboys, had opened that weekend to reviews so bad that one of the stars has had abruptly checked into the hospital. What? On his way to visit the actor, another potential crisis appeared on his phone. I was terrified when the phone rang and it was Larry Ellison, Devlin said. Devlin made a name for himself with a string of blockbusters in the 1990s. Stargate, Independence Day, Godzilla. Wow, what a run. But he'd struggled to come up with the money to make Flyboys, a script about a band of World War I fighter pilots. Then, in a stroke of luck, he learned that Ellison, the founder of Oracle and one of the world's richest men, had a college aged son named David, who was not only trying to break into Hollywood, but was also an amateur pilot. David even had a nascent film production company with an aerial name, Skydance. Larry agreed to help fund the movie, which cost $60 million, and Skydance was listed as a producer. David, meanwhile, got a plum role alongside James Franco as a pilot named Eddie who can't shoot straight. Come on, Eddie. Can we try to find the climactic fight scene? Can we try to find Flyboys? Yeah, let's find. Let's find a David Ellison hype reel. Or maybe just the trailer. And do you see the photo that Vulture chose for? This is sort of a collage, a rendition of David Ellison, but, you know, they put him in the Royal oak right there in the photo. You love to see it. So, Devlin, let's. Yeah, let's watch the Flyboys trailer. I'd love to see this. I haven't I actually haven't seen this movie back. We had no idea what to expect. Franco. Maybe this is the movie to watch this weekend. Nothing in common. I can. Wanted to learn to fly. No, that's a cool shot. Gentlemen, you have bravely volunteered to preserve freedom. Captain Tell you we got to turn this. I think that's David, right? Oh, really? Six weeks. Guy sure knows how to make friends. All his friends out there. This is your quarter French. You sure put on a nice war. That's it. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. Wow. Let's go. Hurt. It's good luck to rub your head. I wouldn't do that if I were you. Sorry, fellas. This room's reserved for killers. Killer going to war in two days. Worried about me. The Germans are moving towards her. I definitely saw this. This movie as a kid because I just love. I love playing. Yeah, back by lunch. There he is. We'll be back by lunch. This is pretty Sweet movie for 2001. Worth the 60 million they underpaid. Are they missing a zero? Seems like a $600 million movie to me. Zero. I'm going to turn this into a cult classic for. For fans of. Of enterprise databases. If you're. If you're a fan of hyperscale and data center build out and data center construction like the rest, you got to be watching. You got to be a Flyboys guy. You got to get the original Flyboys merch. You got to get the DVD copies. You start collecting this stuff, okay? So Devlin, he thought. Devlin thought he knew why Larry was calling. Flyboys had bombed at the box office, and Larry stood to lose millions. As it turned out, Larry wasn't all that stressed about the money. He had spent tens of millions more just trying to win a sailing race. Sick. He was, however, concerned about his son, the actor in the hospital. Wait. Whoa, whoa. Big blow. The reaction to Flyboys had so unsettled David that he was experiencing an episode of atrial fibrillation. Doctors had to shock his heart back into rhythm. Wow. That's crazy. This is bullish. Yeah, this is bullish. He was so upset about losing that he was hospitalized. That's crazy. You think he's gonna lose Warner Brothers? Maybe not. Maybe he's coming back and getting it. I don't know. I think this is a guy you want. Yeah, this is good. Okay. He was thinking, that whole weekend, I just lost my dad a bunch of money. He was upset about letting his father down. Larry told Devlin to make sure David knew he was still proud of him. Flyboys was the humble beginning of the Ellisons family adventures in Hollywood. After giving up on acting, David spent more than a decade building Skydance into a player in the blockbuster business, financing such hits as Top Gun, Maverick and Mission Impossible series, along with a number of largely forgettable movies. Have you seen Top Gun? Yes. Sick. Have you seen Top Gun, Maverick? No. It's good. It's not as iconic as the first one, but it is a great ride. What about Mission Impossible? There's like seven movies in the series. Have you seen any of them? No. The first one's great. No. He was, in other words, a producer, much like many others in town. Then last year, David's father put up billions to help him buy Paramount, one of Hollywood's legendary movie studios and a company more than 10 times the size of Skydance. This past fall, the Ellisons set their sights on an even bigger prize. Warner Brothers. At 43, David is now the first millennial. Let's give it up for the Millennials to control a major Hollywood studio. While running Skydance, he'd built a reputation as someone with an earnest love for the kinds of action PAC blockbuster movies he adored as a kid and the money to actually make them. But his pursuit of Paramount and now Warner Brothers had revealed an empire building streak in line with his father, who is currently the fifth wealthiest person in the world. It's possible to sum up the divergent fortunes of the tech and entertainment industries over the past 20 years. And the simple fact that when Flyboys came out in 2006, Larry was worth 18 billion and couldn't afford Paramount, which was valued at 22 billion. By last year. The 6 billion Larry spent to help David by the company barely made a dent, which briefly peaked in his fortune, which briefly peaked in September at close to 400 billion. Oracle, Larry's company, is the world's most boring tech giant. Disagree. Disagree. Company. It's one of the most exciting to me. Tell that to Chase, Locke, Miller Crusoe. Okay, we'll see who's boring then. We'll see how boring Oracle is when we talk about Abilene, Texas. Go to Abilene, Texas and tell me that Oracle's boring. Come on. Who's writing this? Who's writing this? But Larry had long harbored more globe spanning ambitions. Even before starting Oracle, he dreamed up a giant conglomerate he would someday build called Universal, Titanic, Octopus. What? That's so sick. Today, he keeps some of his wealth, which includes 98% of a Hawaiian island, in an entity called Octopus holdings lp. In the past year, Oracle has become Central to the AI boom, providing back and forth computing power for OpenAI and others looking to build alums. In September, after Oracle reported a potential windfall of AI infused revenue, its stocks shot up so much that Larry's net worth increased by 89 billion in a single day. That still was such a wild moment. 15 Paramounts. Basically you get 15 Paramounts in one day and you're like, okay, yeah, I'll take 10% of the gain from this day and buy a movie studio. Later this month, the company is also set to acquire a stake in the American version of TikTok. All of that, combined with David's ownership of one and perhaps two major studios, as well as one and perhaps two major news network networks, Paramount owns CBS and Warner owns cnn, has spurred concerns that the suddenly omnipresent Ellisons are building an empire that could dwarf even the Murdoch Wow. What the Ellisons want with their conglomerate individually and together will affect the future of what appears on all kinds of screens. And the relationship between father and son has provoked no shortage of psychoanalysis. Larry divorced David's mother when he was young and the two became close only as David grew older and especially once he got into business. David has always struck many people as his father's opposite. Shy and competent, not a bombastic, world conquering visionary. David's ambition was initially as humble as making movies he likes, but the current climate has thrown him together with his father and shown him a path to something greater. If he can pull it off here, I'll continue. But first I'll tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. So last month the Warner board spurned the Ellisons and Paramount's offer and agreed to sell its movie and TV studio to the HBO Max and the HBO Max service to Netflix, creating a potential streaming colossus. The true streaming octopus is forming under Netflix's reign. The Ellisons have continued to argue that their offer for all of Warner Brothers, including its cable networks, is superior. They are currently attempting a hostile takeover and trying to persuade Warner Brothers shareholders to accept Paramount's offer instead. The battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Glad to be in the media business covering this because it's certainly entertaining. Of course, thanks to Dylan Byers over at Puck for Put in the Sunlight radar by posting it on X, the battle is expected to extend well into 2026. Some observers believe that acquiring Warner Brothers is in fact critical to Paramount's Survival. Either way, now that he has made his move to become one of the industry's leading moguls, David Ellison is faced with proving to a skeptical Hollywood that he's up to the task. David's mentors are Steve Jobs and David Geffen and obviously his dad. Those guys are ruthless killers, single minded people with a different DNA. A former Skydance employee who worked closely with David said. On the record. A former Skydance employee said, david is a smart dude who is reasonably shrewd, but he's not that. He's not the ruthless killer. He's not the Steve Jobs, the David Geffen. He's something else entirely. During the Warner Brothers auction, the company gave code names to each of its suitors. These are the code names. Netflix was noble. Comcast was charm. Paramount was given the name Prince. Interesting. One of the reasons David Ellison loves blockbuster movies is the way in which a spectacle can contain a more intimate story. How a battle for an intergalactic peace or control of an empire can really be a story about a family. He has often described the formative experience of seeing Terminator 2 Judgment Day as a child. The fate of humanity was at stake. But what David remembers is Arnold Schwarzenegger rampaging across the screen to protect a young boy who never knew his father. It's emotional. It's a Great movie. Terminator 2, have you seen it? No. Brutal. It's like one of the greatest movies. So good. Is that what I should add? You should, you should. And truthfully, you can watch Terminator 2 without watching Terminator 1. They have very different vibes, very different pacings. You should watch both. But Terminator 2 is just a fantastic movie. It's so, so good. And there's iconic like memes and gifs that I feel like you should know. I'll be back, you know. Okay. So Czar and some of the chat actually put together. What'd they put a film list for me. Sent it to my DMs. Thank you. Interstellar Heat, Inception, Shawshank, Steve Jobs, American Hustle, Silver Lining, Playbook, Almost famous, the talented Mr. Ripley, this thing. The issue is these are so, so many movies. You could easily be messing with me and just sprinkle in like 10 that are just like really the worst movie ever. I'm like, well, the boys said I had to watch it. I think that's notoriously one of the worst movies. There's a lot. There's a lot here. Three. Three pages of movies. So I promise I will do my best to watch all these. It may take Me, multiple decades at my current pace, but I'll work down the list. Well, so at the end of Terminator 2, David Ellison sitting in the theater. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not to spoil the story, but Arnold Schwarzenegger sacrifices himself in a vat of molten steel in front of the boy. And the eight year old David Ellison starts to cry. Wow. Larry wasn't around much when David was a kid. One of the only similarities in their very different childhoods. Larry was born in New York City in 1944 to an unwed teenage mother who gave him up for adoption at 9 months old. His adopted father, Louis Ellison, was a Russian immigrant who took his last name at Ellis Island. And a foundational part of the Larry Ellison story is that Lewis regularly told Larry he would never amount to anything. Wow, what a crazy thing. Why did you adopt this nine month old kid? Just to dunk on him. This is so, so bad. But clearly it lit a fire in Larry, and he went on to build one of the greatest tech companies in history. Maybe Larry should write a book called Hardcore Parenting. You know, people talk about soft parenting, right? You want to, you know, but hardcore parenting, it's like wake up every morning, tell your children you'll never amount to anything crazy. As a result, Larry likes to say that he had all the disadvantages necessary for success. And colleagues at Oracle got the sense that Larry's seemingly endless ambition came partly from a desire to prove himself to his adopted father. I'm not sure I would recommend that everyone raise their children like this, Larry later said, but it certainly worked. Wow. That's crazy. David's mother, Barbara Booth, was Oracle's 10th employee. He hired his mom when he needed a 10th employee. And Larry's third wife. Oh, David's mother. Sorry. Larry hired David's mother, Barbara Booth. They divorced shortly after David's third birthday and right after his sister Megan was born. When Larry and his first wife tried couples counseling to save their marriage, Larry told the therapist that the very idea of love eluded him. I don't understand love. I don't understand people bonding to one another. What is it? Larry said that he spent crazy obligatory weekends with the kids and seemed to only realize later that a family was something he wanted. One night. Guy doesn't understand love, but has been is on his fifth marriage something he's like, I just, I just need to get my reps in marriage. Yeah. Larry called Booth to say he was lonely. You're never alone because you have the kids. You always have a body. Larry said, I'm here by I'm here all by myself. David credits his love of movies to his mother. The family had a collection of 3,000 VHS tapes. And David's ideal day as a child was to watch the Star wars trilogy or all the Rocky movies back to back. I did the exact same thing when I was a kid. It was fantastic. I had the Star wars trilogy on vhs, was one of my prized possessions. Quickly, let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. Thousands. It wasn't until David became a teenager that he and Larry started taking flying lessons together that they grew close, eventually staging mock dog fights over the Pacific. These guys are dog fighting each other. This is insane. Yes, I bond with your son. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do have that dog in me. I literally dog fight with my dad in planes that we fly over the Pacific. David went on to compete as a an aerobatic pilot, whipping barrel rolls, flying at 300 miles an hour, just 15ft above the ground and pulling off his signature move, the Devilator. He has a signature move. This is incredible. After graduating from high school in 2001, David went to Pepperdine University as a prospective business major. He hated it, and he transferred to film school at usc. He commuted from the beach in Malibu, where he lived in one of the many homes Larry had purchased there on a $65 million buying spree. His neighbors included Jennifer Aniston, who was renting one of the of Larry's other houses for a senior thesis. David wrote, directed and starred in a thriller called When All Else Fails, in which he plays a billionaire son who has to rescue his diabetic girlfriend from kidnappers before her insulin runs out. That's an interesting frame for a plot. His girlfriend at the time, who was a diabetic, played the part, according to people who worked on the production. David was respectful and eager to learn, if a bit oblivious to the ways in which he wasn't making an ordinary student film. The budget was close to $100,000, and he shot two part of it in one of his father's giant homes in the Bay Area. When they ran out of film, David offered to fly his plane to Los Angeles to pick some up. Instead of graduating, David left USC to film flyboys. He worked with an acting coach to prepare, but his performance didn't do any favors to a mediocre script. David spent the next several years going to auditions and landed a few more roles from Devlin, the Flyboys producer. He played a bumbling assistant to a corrupt mayor on a TNT show and a shirtless drug addict who punches an FBI agent before leaping from the second floor of a motel in a TV movie. His most significant screen time came in a raunchy 2009 comedy called Hole in One, in which he plays John. Have you seen this? No, I haven't. Should I have? Do you expect me to see every movie? I haven't seen every movie. He plays the owner of a golf apparel company, and there's picture of him here in a sort of golf polo, whose partner loses a bet that leads two nefarious plastic surgeons to give him breast implants, sending David's character on a quest to drum up enough money to help him get them removed. What a wacky plot. Only in 2009 are you making movies like that. That is wild. He delivers one of his first lines in the movie after a woman takes off her shirt. That was pimp. He says. Wow, that is a phrase straight out of 2009. No one uses those words anymore. That slang has fully died. His acting career more or less came to an end a few years later after he wrote a script called Northern Lights about a pilot friend of his who had died. Taylor Lautner signed on to play the lead, but dropped out after finding David had written a role for himself. Rough. What did Taylor have against David? I guess he was like, I don't want to act with him or something, or I don't want to be in. I mean, you know, it's like in F1, there's always, always like the. Oh, is. Who is this person? Do they deserve the seat? Or, you know, are they there for the. Because they just have the money. And so, you know, you. You sign up for this, you. You're in this role. The movie bombs, and it's seen as, you know, a black mark on your IMDb resume, I suppose. Anyway, before we move on, let me tell you about Vanta Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. While David inherited a love for movies from his mother, it became clear that if he wanted to stay in the business, he needed to think more like his father. David wanted to be an actor, and when that didn't work, he was like, if I'm not going to be on screen, I'm going to be the biggest guy in the room. A person who knew him at the time told me the writer of this Vulture piece, Larry's friend David Geffen, introduced David to Skip Brittenham, a legendary Hollywood lawyer who had represented Pixar which was co founded by Steve Jobs, who was Larry's best friend. Brittenham helped David make a business plan for building a production company and learn to navigate the web of agencies, producers and studios in Hollywood. David wanted Skydance to make the type of movies he loved. Movies with explosions. Finally, like the last. The last Hollywood producer who understands how to get me in the theater. You know how Truth has their ETFs, their Patriot ETFs. I think they got to get Paramount, apparently Skydance in there because this movie studio committed to explosions. Explosions. Very American. Yes, something there. So Andy Kessler was an investor who worked with David to raise money for Skydance early on. And they had a rule. They said, he swore to me, no rom coms, no touchy feely, emotional Oscar bait, just explosions. But funding the Hollywood dreams of the 25 year old failed actor son of one of the world's richest men was a tough sell to investors. Will people show up to these movies? And Larry ultimately made the point moot. In 2010, he stepped in to provide almost all of the initial $150 million David was trying to raise, according to multiple people with knowledge of the company's finances. Their timing was good. The late aughts, Hollywood was roiled by the financial crisis and Paramount, the studio behind the Godfather and Titanic, was struggling movie was the struggling movie making arm of the Redstone family's Viacom cable TV empire. Deutsche bank had bailed on an agreement to fund Paramount's movies and the studio needed cash. When Larry's funding for Skydance came through, David signed a deal to co finance Paramount's movies, which meant he would help fund production in exchange for a share of the profits. David had initially considered partnering with Relativity Media, which would later collapse in a fiery bankruptcy. While co financiers often get stuck funding risky projects, Paramount's desperate state opened the door for David to negotiate his involvement in some of the studio's biggest franchises like Star Trek and Mission Impossible. The first feature film David backs a Coen Brothers remake of the Western True Grit. I've seen that. It's a great movie. Have you seen it? No. No. Went on to make $250 million. But they couldn't get a dime out of Jordy Hayes, apparently. And it earned 10 Oscar nominations. But couldn't get Jordi to throw it on streaming on one random Sunday night. His sister Megan followed him into the industry, co financing True Grit and launching her own company, Annapurna Pictures. Oh, I didn't know that. Interesting. Annapurna has been On a run. I think they also have an interactive division, although that might not be related. I'm not sure. Skydance thesis, according to a person that worked closely with David, was that Hollywood wasn't prepared for the overwhelming economic force of a Silicon Valley billionaire throwing around his wealth and ambition. Plenty of dumb money came into town, but producers and talent mostly viewed it as something to take advantage of. Money in Hollywood is not appreciated, the person said. This was an opportunity to reverse that, to make Hollywood treat money with respect. We gotta respect the dollar in Hollywood. Nicolas Cage was earlier here. Yeah, he famously said, I do not chuckle when I get a big check. I have respect for the dollar. That's right. David Cage, Nicholas Cage. Shortly after signing the deal with Paramount in 2009, a person who knew David then said that he had declared, quote, we are going to buy Paramount one day. He called his shot in 2009. Well, here he is. He did it. David proved to be a savvy enough operator, negotiating better terms with Paramount when his deal came up for renewal and working hard to pick up the quirks of a job that involved everything from managing the egos of talent to negotiating debt facilities with JP Morgan. He would sometimes tell colleagues about an instructive conversation he'd had years earlier about running a company in Hollywood. At the premiere of Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, he walked up to congratulate David Geffen, who had produced the movie through his company, DreamWorks. As David told it, Geffen shook his hand. Steve is getting paid. Tom is getting paid. How much do you think DreamWorks is getting paid? Geffen said he held his hand up in the shape of a zero. DreamWorks was making a relative pittance on the movie, an early lesson in the confusing economics of the business, where a poorly structured deal could mean even a hit might generate little for the company that produced it. It was always in the back of David's mind on Minority Report. Everybody got paid except for DreamWorks. A former Skydance executive said, have you seen Minority Report? That is one of my favorite movies of all time. It is a fascinating, fascinating movie. It is amazing. It's not on the list sci fi. It's not on the list of the chat made. Add it to the list. Add it to the list. Minority Report is fantastic. Really great vision of what the future of VR and augmented reality could look like. Has a whole bunch of other interesting sci fi elements. Tom Cruise obviously puts off a. Puts on a masterful performance, but the interactive how they interact with computer technology is remarkable in that anyway. Let me tell you about Fin AI, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Fin AI. Okay, I think we're running out of time.
Quality software faster. Matthew McConaughey is taking a novel legal approach to combat unauthorized AI fakes trademarking himself. The actor plans to use trademarks of himself saying, all right, all right, all right. And staring at a camera to combat AI fakes. And the print headline is actor is not all right with AI fakes. I love it. Over the past year, over the past several months, the Interstellar and Magic Mike star has had has had eight trademark applications approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office featuring him starring, smiling and talking. His attorney said the trademarks are meant to stop AI apps or users from simulating McConaughey's voice or likeness without permission, an increasingly common concern for performers. Maybe we'll have to get a trademark on. You're watching TVPN so we will get paid when someone generates a deepfake of us. The trademarks include a seven second clip of the Oscar winner standing on a porch. A three second clip of him sitting in front of a Christmas tree in an audio. An audio of him saying, all right, all right, all right. His famous line from the 1993 movie Dazed and Confused, which I know you haven't seen, but I don't think I've seen Dazed and Confused either. Tyler, have you seen Dazed and Confused? No. Yeah, just a little bit. Before all of our times, maybe we gotta lock in and watch that. Is there anything else in this Matthew McConaughey? What else is he doing here? He says, my team and I want to know that when my voice or likeness is ever used, it's because I approved and signed off on it. We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership with consent and attribution the norm in an AI world. So lawyers, lawyers finding a way. Well, if you do pay Matthew McConaughey like Salesforce has for an advertisement and you want to run it on connected TV, on streaming TV, you got to go to Vibe Co, where D2C brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV, pick channels, target audiences and measure sales. Just like on Meta. Yeah, this is interesting. It doesn't seem like they're going to trademark this and then go to ChatGPT and say like, hey, you want to license my likeness? It feels like he realizes the value of like doing a handful of big deals with a salesforce. Sure. And probably wants to keep, keep doing that. It'd be interesting to see if every all talent needs to go trademarks at a certain level. I wonder what his total all in cost for all of those trademarks is. It's not super cheap to file a trademark. We've done it. It's not nothing. It's not a billion dollars, but.
Excited to see people actually embracing this. I mean, one of the things I learned about bodybuilding that I think is very much consistent with Silicon Valley is I was like, you know, I was like, £120 in high school. I played hockey. I remember I broke my leg. And I had to do physical therapy. And through my physical therapy, I said, I'm gonna, like, I want to learn about, like, my body. And there wasn't a lot of information on the Internet, so I'd, like, go to the Barnes and Noble and read as many books as possible. And I learned something about bodybuilding, and that was, if I can change my body, I can change my life. And it was about control. And it's about this idea that you don't get in shape in one workout. It's 1% a day. And frankly, those are the lessons I learned with Silicon Valley. There's. It's not about one idea. It's about grinding every single day, year after year, with consistency. And overnight successes take thousands of days, actually, typically. And so I think there's a lot of lessons from bodybuilding that I brought to silicone.
Absolutely. Scorched earth. Well, we have Brian Cheskey, the co founder and CEO of Airbnb in the Restream waiting room. We'll bring him to the TVP and Ultra. Brian, great to see you again. How are you doing? Hey guys, good to see you. Thank you for having me back on. Of course. You're welcome anytime. It's great to be here with you. First, kick us off with the news. You've been acquiring talent, building the roster. You have a new cto. How did it come about? Tell me about this person. Yeah, so like, you know, obviously a couple years ago I started asking around, like, who are some of the best leaders in AI? And I started meeting people and one of the names that came up over and over was this guy named Ahmed Aldal, and he was head of Generative AI at Meta. We met and I just was completely blown away by him. You know, not only was he at Meta and he essentially created, led the team that created the Llama models. It's been downloaded a billion times. There's been over 60,000 derivative models. But he was also at Apple. He actually joined Apple out of college, worked on the original iPhone in 2005, led a lot of the multi touch technology. He led the autonomous technology group that was the self driving car project at Apple. So he was somebody at the frontier. He really understood both frontier technology, but he also understood that like kind of Apple design craft, which I think Airbnb also is really passionate about. And we just really hit it off, became friends. And as my current cto, we were talking about handing the baton to somebody. We thought I'm going to be really great. Yeah. How are you thinking about design in the era of Generative AI? These apps are amazing. And the models, you see the benchmarks, you use the models and it's magical. It's like we created fire and then one rough edge, one button that doesn't quite work the way you expected it. I was lamenting the fact that I was using Claude and I couldn't get a deep research report to read it out loud. To me, that feature is in one app and there's different features there. How do you feel about it? Yeah, it feels very notable that even in all the leading alums, there's still so many rough edges in the product. Little low hanging. Part of that is like a new, new product paradigm. We're kind of figuring out what the edges are. Yeah, yeah. Maybe there's all sorts of metaphors. You know, I remember when I was a kid, I had, I think I Got like a compact computer and I was running Ms. Dos and we're kind of more in the Ms. DOS phase of AI. You know, I don't, I think not to belittle the interfaces, but the Chatbot is not the end state interface. The current Chatbot is not the end state interface for AI. I mean think about your phone and your app. Do you want a chat to get the weather? Do you want to chat to like do most of the functions? The answer is no. And so I think the future AI interface will have a reference to chat, but it's probably going to be much more visual. Most people aren't completely text based. And I do think there's been a. It's kind of like we've been entering the engine of the car, but we haven't really redesigned the car. And so the Chatbot is really a pre AI interface that we've plugged onto this incredibly powerful engine. And so I think what we're trying to do is think through like what are, where can we take this interface? What is the like multi touch reference for an age of AI? And we're not going to do this overnight. We're not going to be the only company doing this. But I really think like the models are even more powerful than people realize because we have hardly harnessed them. And if you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to like skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So I totally agree with you. And I think the other thing I'd say is like I'm on the board of Y Combinator and I think the Last I checked, 87% of the companies are enterprise companies per batch. People aren't. I know we're all, we go and we meet with every batch and to have them on the show and we're always trying to, hey, every, we want every consumer company to come on because they're oftentimes. Yeah, oftentimes they give you. Yeah. And the interesting thing is all of them, all these founders started doing consumer businesses. You asked them, they're doing Minecraft servers, flipping sneakers and stuff. So they actually have some consumer DNA. But they end up. You're bringing up a really good point. I joined Y Combinator 2009 and that was not like two years after the iPhone was introduced. And almost every startup was a consumer company. And enterprise is awesome. And I think it makes complete sense why AI is starting with enterprise. Because the models are not cheap to run. You can basically vertically integrate any business and completely automate the workflow. It's going to revolutionize how we do work. But the point is that the biggest prize is consumer because that is what's going to reach daily life for billions of people. And I think a lot of people are a little bit, a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to go into consumer. That's the biggest thing we've heard. They're afraid, partly, they're worried that OpenAI or Google are going to essentially eat their lunch and vertically integrate. The other concern is consumers is hard. It's a little bit more of a hipsterism business. Distribution's a little more mature because of the App Store. There's not really new distribution channels in the same way. At the same time. We are in the midst of a revolution and more than just a couple chatbots have to be the way that you interface with the world. And I also, this might be self serving to say, but I also believe this independently. I don't think we're going to use just one agent. I don't think we don't have just one person in our life. I don't think we're going to have just one agent in our life. I don't think we'll use thousands. But I think there is going to be some level specialization that's going to help and there's going to be too much specialization where I wouldn't download that agent or use that agent. But I think even if you want a meta orchestrator, whether it's Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, specialization is going to help even within consumer. So we want to do some really cool stuff within traveling and living. Yeah. What advice do you Give to the 13% of y Combinator founders that are going after consumer, at least for now or at least at this moment, is it, hey, keep your burn really low, run a ton of experiments, stick it out. Because it feels like part of the reason why 87% wind up in enterprises because businesses are just throwing money at them. They're saying, yeah, you're doing consumer, but if you come solve this one really small problem for me and build this API for me, I'll give you a contract, I'll be your first customer. It's very easy to get the money flowing on the business side potentially. But how can you actually make it as a consumer founder when there is a big prize? But it might be a harder road. Yeah, so many thoughts here. I mean one of the things that Paul Graham taught us and Gary Tan teaches, which I think is very effective, is use other Y combinator as your early adopters. Hence why a lot of companies go into enterprise. If you have an artist company, don't go to, like, Boeing to try to use your service. Go to a young startup and work your way up to the large companies. And so they've developed this incredible ecosystem where thousands of companies are adopting each other's tools and they bootstrap each other. And that's actually been part of the explanation for why Y Combinator has so successfully created so many enterprise companies. But when I was in Y Combinator, we got everyone to use Airbnb. And so, in other words, like, we have a huge alumni network. I would tell people that are going into consumer number one, don't be afraid to do AI consumer. It might fail. But, like, investors aren't going to hold it against you that a startup failed. They're going to, like, a founder who's failed is more fundable the next time than someone who's never started unless they really blew it. Yeah, because you have experience. And I think that's what's so great about this. Number two, you got a lot of early adopters within Y Combinator who are normal people, too. They have daily life. I would agree to keep your burn rate low. I would pick a niche. I wouldn't pick a niche that's too narrow. So, like, maybe, like, AI to do something incredibly narrow is gonna get really, really difficult for somebody to want to, like, change their workflow and behavior. But just think about all the parts of daily life that are kind of annoying and maybe pay attention to, like, your sister, your significant other, your children, like, whoever's in your life, and just look at their life and ask, like, how could their daily life be a little bit easier? And I would just go for it. I mean, and by the way, like, the App Store is mature. That's a little bit of an issue. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are AI apps. So if something is truly great and truly breakthrough, people will seek it out. And I do think my prediction is that AI is going to revolutionize consumer applications in the coming years. And they might not be apps. They might become agents. Agents might be the new apps. We have to figure out what that means. What's new platform paradigm is probably agents, not apps, but we'll see. But ultimately, I think that's the big takeaway here. And so what we're going to do is we want to really innovate on the consumer experience. We want to interface on. Like, what does consumer interface look like in the age of AI and I think they should evolve past the current design paradigm and we'll see where it goes. Yeah, it would be. I'm not expecting to open the Airbnb app and see a blank text box. Purely. There's so much more that you can do. Have you thought more about. The Airbnb app is unique, I think because it's not this reactive. People are opening it 10 times a day. There is an intention and there's probably a lot of value in understanding, okay, this person, they like to travel around the holidays. They're opening the app in October. Let's think that through. Agents and LLMs can probably work through a customer's history, their preferences, just do better recommendations, what you're servicing them. How much have you thought about being proactive about reaching the customer with something that's more tailored? What's been working? Where do you see it going? Yeah, I mean, so many things. One of the other problems with consumer that's a keep coming back to it is there's a business model challenge. Right. Like these models are not cheap. And so there's probably one of three ways you can make money in consumer. You can put ads in your chatbot, you can pay a subscription, or you can do essentially transactions. Well, Airbnb luckily has the business model we have transactions in. Our transactions are pretty high dollar transactions. So we actually have the really the business model going for us. We also have a lot of data. We do about 50 billion searches a year on Airbnb. That's nothing compared to Google, but 50 billion. So that's that number of times somebody's typing in something into an Airbnb search box. So we actually do have quite a bit of data about people, their preferences, and we can bring it in. And so in part what we want to do is if the interface is a little more chat like, again, won't be per se, a chatbot. Exactly. OpenAI. But if it's a little more of a turn by turn chat like connection, you're going to get a lot more information from people. And I think, you know, the one benefit of the current chatbots are they have memory. And so you're putting a lot of context in the window. And I think memory, by the way, is something I think we're going to want to technically innovate on because the chatbots still are stateless. And so you're essentially the prompt is putting in this kind of, you know, obviously a lot of your memory. So I do think there's going to be an area around how can Airbnb understand people's preferences, learn more about you, understand what you care about, and just be really thoughtful. Like, what's your bucket list? Who are you traveling with? One of the other things Airbnb can be really good at is the majority of trips have multiple people. Most chatbots are single player mode, they have collaborative tools. But most people are not chatting with multiple people. Most people on Airbnb are searching for an Airbnb with multiple other people. So I think another thing we really want to do is really be great at, like, understanding to people. They have totally different preferences. How do we help them figure out the right choices for them? So a lot of collaboration tools, are they going to be really important? But I think at our heart, what we want to do is really build out these robust profiles, deeply understand people and give them what they want in the real world. How are you thinking about the challenges of generative AI imagery in Airbnb listings? I can imagine there's sort of a risk of, what is it called? Catfishing, where someone takes a photo. It is their house. But they said, hey, like, patch up the walls and you. Let's. Let's change the lighting and make it look a little bit warmer, a little bit nicer, and there's probably a little bit of that. That's fine. You know, if you took it on a phone, you want it to look nice, but you want it to represent the actual experience. How are you thinking about the challenges with that? Yeah, I mean, like, it's really interesting, right? Like, I don't know, I saw on Twitter yesterday, like, the Stranger Things where, like, you can turn your face into someone else's face. And so what this really means is that, like, know your customer authentication. A lot of it is like, you know, you do a selfie and an ID or you do a video. A lot of this stuff now AI can get around. And so, I mean, we should remember AI stands for artificial. And so we're now starting to live in a world where if you see in a screen, it might be artificial. And so I think authentication is going to be critical. And one of the best authentications is in the real world. I mean, we're going to be pretty soon living in a world where you don't know something's real unless you've seen it in the real world, unless we have authentication. One example of the way everybody can solve this, for example, is we do have a network of professional photographers, over 5,000 around the world. In fact, we built an on demand professional photography network before Uber even launched. Where you hit a button and if a cartographer shows up and takes photos your home. And the advantage of that is those photos are by Airbnb. And so if we took them, a customer would know those are authenticated photos from us. That's just an example of something that is possible. But I do think, like solving this. Is this real? Is this authenticated? Is really important. So we're going to have to have something. We're going to have to have technology solutions for it. Yeah. What's your latest thinking on integrating Airbnb with various alarms? Like, how are these conversations going? Yeah, I'm interested. I think, I think last time I was on, I said they weren't ready. Yeah, yeah. And I. My view, you know, we chose not to. To launch with chatbots. They launched Expedia Booking and the reason why wasn't like. Like, I was a huge fan of that project and gave him some advice on it and stuff. And I think it's awesome. I would love to show up on ChatGPT. I would love to show up on Gemini. I'd love to show up on Claude. Here's the thing. I don't want to be the first. I want to be the best. Like, we want to have the best integration, not the first integration. There are some limitations. 90% of people booking Airbnb send a message to a host ahead of time. You have to have a verified id. There's just some things we need in integration for Airbnb to have a really good integration. We'd love that. By the way, the traffic coming from ChatGPT converts higher on Airbnb to a booking than the traffic coming from Google Search. Yeah. So actually there's a way. Various, like e commerce brands have been reporting this too. Like, the traffic is super high intent because people are informed. Yeah. So I get, I get this question's asked to me often as an existential thing, as in, are you going to partner with them or not? And are they going to kill you? And there's going to be no app in the future. And my answer is there probably are no apps at some point in the future. They're probably agents. That's. There's probably some platform like paradigm. We're probably designing agents. I don't know for sure, but I think that we're going to exist on those platforms. But I also think specialization is going to matter. I don't think there's just going to be a few chatbots and they do everything and you are separated from every application that's going to be True of some apps, and that's going to be true if you need, like, maybe a commodity. But there are going to still be reasons to work with different agents or different applications. I think some specialization will make a difference. What are the big. What is your super. One sec, one thing. One thing I appreciate about your framing of, like, we don't want to be first, we want to be the best is because I think other CEOs in travel that are not tapped into Silicon Valley, that aren't on the board of Y Combinator, feel this pressure to be like, I have to prove that I'm like, at least trying to be AI native, whereas I feel like you don't have any, like, there's no ego around. Like, can we build great products with AI? It's simply like, yeah, we're going to. But, like, I don't need to, I don't need to prove it by, like, rushing into something. I remember, I appreciate you saying, I remember when the metaverse launched, I had somebody who didn't on my team that. Which metaverse? You mean the idea of the metaverse? Yeah, yeah. Sorry, when, yes, when it was announced. Mark Zuckerberg. Sure, sure. Like, what's our metaverse strategy? And I remember, like, other companies, like, we have to have a metaverse strategy. And it's like, that is definitely like what someone usually would say if they're not really steeped into it. So, you know, I think it's important that you do something really, really well. But I don't think you want to be first to signal we care about AI. That's kind of vanity. You don't need to do that. And so when it's ready, we'll do something great. And we want to add value to customers and that's kind of all that really matters. If you were running Apple, what would your AI strategy be? It's a big question. Oh, wow. I would, I, I, I would say that, like, the devices should be completely built from the ground up. AI native. AI first. Probably not even AI first. AGI first, we should ask ourselves, what is it going to look like in a few years? It's probably going to be fully agentic. These devices are going to be able to work while you sleep, and you should work backwards from that. These devices and the paradigms haven't changed since the advent of AI. These are pre AI devices running AI. So my question is, what would it look like if you designed it from the ground up? Knowing what we know today, it would probably look pretty different. Yeah. So less Genmoji More actual hardware. More hardware. We are in the midst of a revolution, obviously. I mean, I don't want to be like saying what everyone already knows, but here's what I do want to say. Like, the everyday life of the average person has barely changed in the last three years. We're on ChatGPT a lot. We're on Gemini, we're on Claude. People listening are much more technical than the average person. They're doing unique things, workflows. The average person's still mostly living the life they lived three years ago using the same devices. The world hasn't finally made the shift yet. It hasn't finally made the shift. It won't make the shift until daily life has changed. And daily life doesn't change until the devices have changed, the operating systems have changed, apps become agents, and we're all living in a completely natively consumer AI world. And we're not using chatbots, at least not today's chatbots. We are still living in the DOS era of AI and we need to move into the multi touch era. The chat is begging us to ask you for an arm routine. Is there a dedicated arm day? Are there any particular machines that you recommend? Free weights? What is the secret to those arms? Oh, thank you very much. Well, first of all, like, genetically I have better arms than shoulders or chest, so that's just one thing. But I actually don't have an arm day. I used to do a five day split where I do back legs, chest, shoulders, arms. I now do arms with shoulders. So I'll usually do two exercises of biceps, two exercises of triceps, typically a compound free weight movement and a machine movement. So maybe like a dumbbell curl followed by like a hammer strength cable with like a rope or a V bar and then triceps, always doing a push down with a cable and then maybe like a French press or skull crusher, depending on what you don't call it. Okay, that's a good one. I like to call them skull crushers. They sound a lot more hardcore than. Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah. You know, there's heavy metal. We don't know how to name exercises like that. We don't. The world's become soft. It really has the best. The best. I do think, I do think generally if you're like under 40 for sure, you should be doing almost entirely compound movements and free weights and dumbbells and barbells. You know, I'm 44, so I think transitioning to some more machines is good just because the tax it puts on your joints But I still try to put in free weights. Are you using any AI in the gym? Are there, are you tracking movements or, or aspects going to the Church of Iron Johnny? Or is it all nutrition and nutrition. I have a. Okay. I have a trainer, he was a former Mr. Universe. He competed in Mr. Olympia. So he, I let that, I let him do that. He is, he is, he is. But I, my diet and my supplements are very much like, I put everything into AI and I get like, I do, I do things. I don't know if it sounds eccentric, but like, I'll get blood work and they'll give you a PDF and you can put the PDF in a chatbot and it'll tell you, like to analyze it and it can even tell you what supplements you need based on your blood work. It's probably something everyone should do. It's not that hard. And so like I don't get, I don't go out enough. So I don't need more vitamin D. The blood work said that. So I take a vitamin D supplement because I'm not, I'm like inside working a lot. So stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. Have you been surprised, seeing the explosion of peptides? I wouldn't have imagined a world where, you know, people are clamoring to do like actual injections. Injections. And given how popular it was, I mean, it's. In the bodybuilding world, there was always like a divide between how hardcore you were, which was like, are you like. Natural or are you gonna, Are you natty or not? Yeah, natty or not. And now nobody's natty anymore. Seemingly no one's natty. I'm not surprised. I'm surprised actually a little bit how much the tech community's embrace fitness. I mean, like, when I came to Silicon Valley, I was like slightly self conscious about like wearing long sleeve shirts because I thought if I wore a short sleeve, people think I'm a mija and therefore an idiot. And people just didn't really lift weights in like 2007, 2008. And I really think that, like everyone's come around probably to just the science that like nutrition and weightlifting is good. It's good for longevity, it's good for your mind, you'll live longer, you'll feel better. And honestly, weightlifting is far superior to cardio. You should do both. The weightlifting is far superior, increases bone density. It's just you can only do one thing you should do lift weight, weightlifting. And so I'm really excited to see people actually embracing this. I mean, one of the things I learned about bodybuilding that I think is very much consistent with Silicon Valley is I was like, you know, I was like £120 in high school. I played hockey. I remember I broke my leg. And I had to do physical therapy. And through my physical therapy, I said, I'm going to, like, I want to learn about, like, my body. And there wasn't a lot of information on the Internet, so I'd like go to Barnes and Noble and read as many books as possible. And I learned something about bodybuilding, and that was, if I can change my body, I can change my life. And it was about control. And it's about this idea that you don't get in shape in one workout. It's 1% a day. And frankly, those are the lessons I learned with Silicon Valley. It's not about one idea. It's about grinding every single day, year after year, with consistency. And overnight successes take thousands of days, actually, typically. And so I think there's a lot of lessons from bodybuilding that I brought to Silicon valley. Yeah, no, 100%. It's a really. Yeah, it's a really important frame of mind. And we appreciate you sharing all of that with us. We know. So we got to get them out of here. Oh, hard stop. Yeah. But thank you so much for taking this time. We have time for one more. Enjoy. I hope to be back soon, guys. Thank you for having me here. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, awesome. Great. We appreciate having you on the show. We'll talk to you soon, Brian. Have a good time.
Harness them. And if you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So I totally agree with you. And I think the other thing I'd say is I'm on the board of Y Combinator and I think the Last I checked, 87% of the companies are enterprise companies per batch. People aren't. I know we go and we meet with every batch and to have them on the show and we're always trying to. Hey, every. We want every consumer company to come on because they're Oftentimes. Yeah, oftentimes they give you. Yeah. And the interesting thing is all of them, all these founders started doing consumer businesses. You asked them, they're doing Minecraft servers, flipping sneakers and stuff. So they actually have some consumer DNA. But they end up. You're bringing up a really good point. I joined Y Combinator 2009 and that was not like two years after the iPhone was introduced and almost every startup was a consumer company. And enterprise is awesome. And I think it makes complete sense why AI is starting with enterprise. Because the models are not cheap to run. You can basically vertically integrate any business and completely automate the workflow. It's going to revolutionize how we do work. But the point is that the biggest prize is consumer because that is what's going to reach daily life for billions of people. And I think a lot of people are a little bit, a lot of entrepreneurs are afraid to go into consumer. That's the biggest thing we've heard. They're afraid, partly they're worried that like OpenAI or Google are going to essentially eat their lunch and vertically integrate. The other concern is consumer is just hard. It's a little bit more of a hipsterism business. Distribution's a little more mature because of the App Store. There's not really new distribution channels in the same way. At the same time. We are in the midst of a revolution and more than just a couple chatbots have to be the way that you interface with the world. And I also, this might be self serving to say, but I also believe this independently. I don't think we're going to use just one agent. I don't think we don't have just one person in our life. I don't think we're have just one agent in our life. I don't think we'll use thousands. But I think there is going to be some level specialization that's going to help. And there's Going to be too much specialization where I wouldn't download that agent or use that agent. But I think even if you want a meta orchestrator, whether it's Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, specialization is going to help even within consumers. So we want to do some really cool stuff within traveling and living. Yeah. What advice do you Give to the 13% of y Combinator founders that are going after consumer? At least for now, or at least at this moment, is it, hey, keep your burn really low, run a ton of experiments, stick it out. Because it feels like part of the reason why 87% wind up in enterprises. Because businesses are just throwing money at them. They're saying, yeah, you're doing consumer, but if you come solve this one really small problem for me and build this API for me, I'll give you a contract, I'll be your first customer. It's very easy to get the money flowing on the business side potentially. But how can you actually make it as a consumer founder when there is a big prize? But it might be a harder road. Yeah, so many thoughts here. I mean, one of the things that Paul Graham taught us and Gary Tan teaches, which I think is very effective, is use other Y Combinator companies as your early adopters. Hence why a lot of companies go into enterprise. If you have an artist company, don't go to like Boeing to try to use your service. Go to a young startup and work your way up to the large companies. And so they've developed this incredible ecosystem where thousands of companies are adopting each other's tools and they bootstrap each other. And that's actually been part of the explanation for why Y Combinator has so successfully created so many enterprise companies. But when I was in Y Combinator, we got everyone to use Airbnb. And so, in other words, like, we have a huge alumni network. I would tell people that are going into consumer number one, don't be afraid to do AI consumer. It might fail. But, like, investors aren't going to hold it against you that a startup failed. They're going to, like, a founder who's failed is more fundable the next time than someone who's never started unless they really blew it. Yeah, because you have experience and I think that's what's so great about this. Number two, you got a lot of early adopters within Y Combinator who are normal people too. They have daily life. I would agree to keep your burn rate low. I would pick a niche. I wouldn't pick a niche that's too narrow. So, like, maybe Like, AI to do something incredibly narrow is going to get really, really difficult for somebody to want to, like, change their workflow and behavior. But just think about all the parts of daily life that are kind of annoying and maybe pay attention to, like, your sister, your significant other, your children, like, whoever's in your life and just look at their life and ask, like, how could their daily life be a little bit easier? And I would just go for it. I mean, and by the way, like, the App Store is mature. That's a little bit of an issue. At the same time, the top apps in the App Store are AI apps. So if something is truly great and truly breakthrough, people will seek it out. And I do think my prediction is that AI is going to revolutionize consumer applications in the coming years. And they might not be apps. They might become agents. Agents might be the new apps. We have to figure out what that means. What's new platform paradigm is probably agents, not apps, but we'll see. But I ultimately, I think that's the big takeaway here. And so what we're going to do is we want to really innovate on the consumer experience. We want to integrate, we want to interface on, like, what does consumer interface look like in the age of AI? And I think they should evolve past the current design paradigm and we'll see where it goes. Yeah, it would be. I'm not expecting to open the Airbnb app and see a blank technical.
I was running Ms. Dos and we're kind of more in the Ms. DOS phase of AI. You know, I don't, I think not to belittle the interfaces, but the chat bot is not the end state interface. The current chatbot is not the end state interface for AI. I mean think about your phone and your app. Do you want to chat to get the weather? Do you want to chat to like do most of the functions? The answer is no. And so I think the future AI interface will have a reference to chat, but it's probably going to be much more visual. Most people aren't completely text based and I do think there's been a. It's kind of like we've been entering the engine of the car, but we haven't really redesigned the car. And so the chatbot is really a pre AI interface that we've plugged onto this incredibly powerful engine. And so I think what we're trying to do is think through like what are, where can we take this interface? What is the like multi touch reference for an age of AI? And we're not going to do this overnight. We're not going to be the only company doing this. But I really think the models are even more powerful than people realize because we have hardly harnessed them. And if you look at where they're going to be in a year or two, we really want to skate to where the puck is going and do something really, really cool. So I totally agree with you. And I think the other thing I.
Cesky is going to join in a second. There is some funny dialogue happening. I'll fill you in. The Kalshi market. Will Elon win? His case against OpenAI was at a 36% chance this morning. What's it doing now? Yes, what are the odds? Looking like they responded. Now Elon is posting. I've lost a few battles over the years, but I've never lost a war. Elon said that? Absolutely. Scorched earth. Well, we have.
They do. Their comms department was probably like, what's going on now? Of course, they were talking to the Trump administration. Have you ever scrolled through Social, by the way? It's. It's like five. Five ads for every one post. The ads are crazy. And they're crazy. They're crazy. Rating. The ads are like. Are like, are you a real patriot? Yes or no. And no matter what you click, you just immediately go on to the next state, like, next phase of the funnel. And then they'll just be like, glad to hear it, patriot. How about $200 donated? You're like, actually 100. And they're like, 200 it is. Okay, I'm clearly clicking an entire image that just has buttons there. They're not actually buttons. Well, they have Truth Social. They have a Truth Social ETF now. Wait, what? What's in the Truth Social etf? Invest in the Patriot economy. Oh, okay. Truth Social is really the building. Everything multi product. Are they building nuclear power plants too now? I'm sure they are. What a time to be alive.