LIVE CLIPS
EpisodeĀ 1-21-2026
We didn't even talk about CIA. We are officially signed with CIA. We went Hollywood mode. That's very exciting. I think everyone's. Yeah, very, very excited. We're pleased to be partnered with them. We put up a trading card. We're very excited team. Yes. They're going to be helping us navigate the entertainment landscape. Yeah. Very excited. Yeah. We went down. We took some headshots at CAAHQ also. You know, I like to. Of course, we had to make them a little goofy. The Creative Artists Agency, sort of the anthropic of agencies. Do you know the lore? Did you actually get up to speed on this? So Creative Artists Agency was formed by five agents. They were at WME, they were at William Morris Agency in 1975. Who you got? There's a dinner. You got Michael Ovitz, Michael Rosenfeld, Ronald Meyer, and Roland Perkins and William Haber. And they're at this dinner and they decide to create their own agency. What happens? They're like, okay, we need some financing. We're gonna start a rival agency. We're leaving wme. We're starting CIA. What happens before they can get financing? They all get fired. They all get fired. Seriously? This is real. This is on the Wikipedia. Sounds like a thinking machines dynamic in the. Yeah, no, it really is like AI lab talent wars all over again. And I don't know if they're the anthropic or the thinking machines, but maybe they're the open eye on this. But the metaphor is extremely messy. But it's fun lore. Of course, CIA was incorporated in Delaw and had a $35,000 line of credit and a $21,000 bank loan. They rented a small office in Century City, and within a week they sold a game show called Rhyme and Reason, the Little Rich show, and the Jackson 5. An early plan was to form a medium sized full service agency, share proceeds equally and do without name plates on doors or formal titles or individual client lists with guidelines like be a team player and return for phone calls promptly. I like those rules. Great rules. We're very happy to be partnered with them. So I got to reread who is Michael Ovitz. For sure. For sure. Fantastic book. Absolute legend. And we, when we were at CAA last week. Yeah, we or yeah, last week. We did confirm that the mail room still exists. It does. There was a lot of mail. A lot of people in it. They were moving the mail around. Apparently. They said we were the only. Only talent to ever. That was crazy. I think they tell everyone. They probably tell everyone. But There was a lot of aura. There was a lot of positive energy. You could see that the next generation is already cooking, chomping it and. Yeah, getting ready to build. Anyway, thank you so much.
Becoming the significant other. You know, you gotta take a little responsibility. You know, everyone is assuming that this is a romantic relationship. They never reported that this is a romantic relationship. They just said that he had a relationship with someone else and it was undisclosed. And I think that more companies need to be clear about the rules around disclosures of relationships. Like, if you and Tyler start an esports team, for example, like, you would have a relationship. You would be teammates on playing Call of Duty. And if you didn't disclose that to me, I would feel left out. I'd be like, why don't I? Why am I not on the team if I find out that Tyler and Scott are going off and drinking a bunch of athletic brews every night without me? That's a relationship that bros. And it wasn't disclosed. It wasn't disclosed. And you might be very angry. I might be angry they didn't disclose. So I think relationship. Disclosures need to go beyond romantic relationship disclosures. If you're. If you're just broing down with people, that actually. That actually is kind of a real thing sometimes. Catching up Monday after the weekend, somebody's like, oh, yeah, I was hanging with so and so on Saturday. Like, wait, where was my. Invite? You guys hang out on Saturday? What? You didn't disclose that relationship? Yeah. Oh, so you have a relationship where you go to Korean barbecue together. Okay. And you just didn't think to tell the rest of the company. That K BBQ.
Consumer hardware. There is more news from Wayne Ma. Yeah, Keanu Liu. Apple is developing an AI powered wearable pin the size of an AirTag that is equipped with multiple cameras, a speaker, microphones, and wireless charging. Shots fired. The device could be released as early as 2027. Yeah. Wait, wait. Why are you reacting? I'm just like, like a lot of reason why people like do the pin or something is because they can't get all the features from the iPhone. But like they already have the iPhone, so why don't they just make that good? I guess they probably will. But like, what do you think this is a good idea, Jordy? I feel like I'd rather just have it in my phone. Yeah, it is, it is crazy. If you're in the Apple ecosystem and you have a MacBook, an iPad, a watch, earbuds, AirPods and the phone and the Vision Pro, it's like they got 90% of your body covered with tech. Like, you're pretty good. I can do a wired headphone guy. Yeah, I've been rocking Apple wired headphones. Yeah. Yeah. So if this was wired in, you'd. Be good to go probably five, five years now. No, no, I'm not in the, I'm not in the, in the market for this. I'm not in the market for this, but I got to wait and see. I'll continue here. So Apple's trying to release their device as early as 2027 as well. Such a product would position Apple to compete more effectively with OpenAI, which is planning its own AI powered devices, and Meta, which is already selling smart glasses that offer access to its AI assistant. Google also plans to release smart glasses in conjunction with Samsung. Apple's development is still in the early stages and could still be canceled. Still, Apple is endeavoring to move faster than usual to try to stay competitive. Because of OpenAI, it's planning to ManU manufacture roughly 20 million units at launch. The person added. Apple's pin joins a growing portfolio of AI powered products the tech giant has under development, including AirPods equipped with enhanced sensors. Like, yeah, I. It's kind of a. It's like, are people really going to have like their pin on and their AirPods in and have their phone? Just how many AI enabled devices do we need? Shoulder pads, the smart cane, you want the breastplate. And there's the Apple, there's the Apple home device that's going to be like. Okay, I actually do we have to get to our next.
Clip from Emily Chang interviewing Dennis to. Give regulation time to catch up, to give society time to sort of adjust to some of these changes. In a perfect world, you knew that every other company would would pause if every country would pause. Would you advocate for that? I think so. I mean, I've been on record saying what I'd like to see happen. This was always my dream of the kind of the roadmap, at least I had when I started out DeepMind 15 years ago and started working on AI, you know, 25 years ago now, was that as we got close to this moment, this threshold moment of AGI arriving, we would maybe collaborate in a scientific way. I sometimes talk about setting up an international CERN equivalent for AI, where all the best minds in the world would collaborate together and do the final steps in a very rigorous scientific way involving all of society, maybe philosophers and social scientists and economists as well as technologists, to kind of figure out what we want from this technology and how to utilize it in a way that benefits all of humanity. And I think that's what's at stake. Unfortunately, it kind of needs international collaboration, though, because even if one company or even one nation or even the west decided to do that, it has no use unless the whole world agrees at least on some kind of minimum standards. And, you know, international corporations, a little bit tricky at the moment. So that's going to have to change if we want to have that kind of rigorous scientific approach to the final steps to AGI. Pod friendly guy in the YouTube chat says Damas is the Steve job of AI. You're wearing the TVP and turtleneck today. Maybe we need to make a turtleneck and award it to who we crown the Steve Jobs. He's a fantastic communicator. Demis is inspiring, balanced, measured, knowledgeable. Just not he's not completely accelerationist at all cost, but also not completely doomerist. I don't know. It's a really, it's a really great take. I don't know. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, I think there's maybe an interesting way to look at this, like the question of pausing where if so if you take Dario says that he's not competing with, with DeepMind or OpenAI. Right. Because he's an enterprise, they're a consumer. Yeah. Wait, wait, sorry, sorry, clarify who's who there. So Dario, Dario at Anthropic. Anthropic is enterprise is saying we're not. Competing with DeepMind because that's a consumer company. Is that what they said? Yeah. And OpenAI that's what he said yesterday, like broadly he was like, we don't have to monetize billion users, whatever. He's like, just ignore those companies and their enterprise businesses. They don't matter. Okay, yeah, but so if you take that and then, so that means, you know, there's some way in which, you know, DeepMind's real only competitors. OpenAI if, you know, we were just talking about how DeepMind doesn't have to raise money, right. They're funded by cash flow. So basically there's a way to look at it where you can either pause for safety reasons so we can catch up with regulation or whatever, or it's just because if we basically pause all AI, it's actually fine for anthropic. Right. Because they don't have a super direct competitor. Right. OpenAI is trying to get more into enterprise. Maybe DMind is as well too. But they have 50 fairly strong position perhaps. And then it's going to hurt OpenAI a lot. Right, because they need to raise a lot of money to compete with DeepMind. So if you can basically make this almost cartel looking thing group with Anthropic and DeepMind, you can basically try to take out OpenAI. No. Interesting, interesting. I mean that's a very cynical way to look at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you. The other interesting thing is that he says he would maybe potentially support a pause, but then what he describes, I.
Home device that's gonna be like, okay, I actually do we have to get to our next guest. But I do have a hot take that there might be a future wearable that looks like the Pip Boy from Fallout. Are you familiar the Fallout series? I'm actually not kidding about this. And I'll unpack it. So, basically, in Fallout, you wear a device on your arm and you turn it, and it's basically a phone that's, like, glued to your arm. And then on. You can access your menus through here, right? Yep. And it was always, like, something fun that, like the, you know, the cosplay community would build out. Yeah, there's the Pip Boy, and people have made real versions of this. It has this cool retro aesthetic. It's never taken off. But I've noticed that if you look at the live streamers like Ishowspeed Kaisana, when they're out in the world, they often have free phones strapped to their arms to read, chat while they're going around. Like when I think it was Speed that went to China and he went on this world tour, he toured America. He keeps a phone strapped to his arm so he can use both hands. And it feels like weird and cyberpunk, but it feels like a glimpse of the future. Like, we're all going to be living like Speed in the future maybe. And maybe we're going to have phones or something like it glued to our arms. That could just be an accessory that actually helps you glue the phone to the arm. It could be some sort of modified device that's curved to wrap. Wrap around your arm. But I feel like the. The end state is like more technology on your body constantly, and that's like an easy one that people could adopt. You've already seen. You've seen Apple circumstances.
What about Disney? Disney did the big deal with OpenAI. Yeah. I wanted to ask if you're hearing about other IP holders rushing to try to do like, when we saw that deal happen, I was like, wow, this having like a one year, maybe more exclusive on all the Disney ip, I feel like could be pretty significant. Once it's live, it's going to be incredibly viral. Parents are going to Jordy, what's the. Last time you used Sora? I was never bullish on Sora specifically. But that's the problem. Right. Like, so all of this is. I don't know what I was gonna say. What I was gonna say I was bullish on the, on the Disney IP deal specifically because parents are gonna be willing to pay to bring joy to their children by turning their life into Disney scenes. Yeah. Or I mean, do kids just love watching bluey? Cause they love bluey. Like, I don't. Do you want to watch yourself in a, you know, I guess for the creative parent that can actually tell an interesting story, I mean, I get the gimmick. Like, I remember when Sora first came out, we all did it, right? Like we were all trading these around, sending around. I remember I was in a Knicks jersey before they put the copyright controls and I was in a Knicks jersey on the court dunking like it was. I was catching the game winning pass and you know, for the Giants, like, and I think, I think, I think. You'Re a little, I think you're a little bit jaded. I mean, Disney has a whole business of just like have lunch with a character. Right? Right. Parents are spending, I mean, it goes. Back to, you're at Disneyland. The kid puts their face through the cardboard cutout and they appear to be Superman. Anecdotally, when I first took an image of my son and I turned the two of us into dinosaurs. He has never forgotten that moment. And he'll bring it up all the time, turn us into dinosaurs. And I'm really like, we're not using AI right now. We're gonna go, we're going to go to the beach. Look, I think it all depends on how sort of how preconceived it is. Like, is it just turning it in and you have to go figure out how to make something interesting and compelling or is it sort of already pre engineered and preset where you stick in your faces and the scene comes to life? Like, I think it's got to not be a lot of work because I think, you know, people don't. I think I will say I am Not a terribly creative from like a writing stories like, you know, people need to be taught how to do it. I think that initial how to prompt, how to make it good is not easy. And so it'll be interesting to see how easy they make it for parents to make this really a great experience. So I like the idea and look, I give Disney credit. You would not have expected Disney to be the one to jump out in front on AI, given how much they're focused on sort of protecting their ip. So I give them a lot of credit for trying. And I think the key is Sora needs to become something that really becomes less of a gimmick and more where you actually want to sit down and actually like, watch the content. Because I still feel like it right now. It feels very gimmicky. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I wonder, I wonder what open air is getting out of it. Right. Disney has 150 million people visit the parks annually. If they're. If in the line, there's like a QR code that's like turn yourself into such and such character. I think, like right now, OpenAI has a challenge, which is that free LLMs are pretty great. Right? And they have this gap. Free is great. Yeah. They have this real gap between turning on commerce and turning on ads and really unlocking that from a revenue standpoint. And I think if they can making these sort of like magical products that are unique to OpenAI that you're not going to be able to get at at through Gemini or any of these other LLMs, I think it could buy them a little bit of time to turn on some of the other monetization. But again, I think you're right on Sora. I wonder how they're doing. See if they're still in the App Store.
Good for it. And the part of the Bay that's the best place to do it, that is five times bigger than anywhere else is the area of which we've acquired about 90% over the last 10 years. So this is a very old idea that we've dusted off and obviously we're building something different that when they would have built there in the 50s, but lots of routes in regional planning. So in terms of development, it feels like AI has been the megatrend over the last few years. Most of the building that's happening around AI is happening in Abilene, Texas and just wherever the natural gas plant lines are and sort of all over America in pretty low population areas. No one's really thinking that, oh, you know, Meta needs a data center right next to their Menlo park campus. But the AI megatrend also might drive up housing prices in San Francisco a ton. A lot of people are predicting this based on the IPO schedule. If OpenAI anthropic get out, there's a trillion plus in liquidity going loosely into the San Francisco housing market. You could see some really crazy dislocations in that market. Is that, is that something you're tracking as an accelerant of your plans? Yeah, 100%. Okay. And I think it's, and I think it's, it's. Honestly, it's more from the policy perspective because the last time, I mean, this has happened in the Bay Area periodically for the last 20 years. The problem is we haven't done anything about it in 50 years and every time it gets worse and then there's a bit of a pullback and like, oh, it's going to be, be better and then it just comes back stronger than before. Right. And.com boom then social crypto now. And so from a policy perspective, the argument that we've made is we need to get ahead of this because if we don't, this is going to be way worse than what we saw in 2017, 2018 and when it last happened in 2017, 2018. The problem is tech is going to get blamed for this. Oh, yeah, of course. It'S wrong and it makes no sense because you just create all of these really well paid jobs, but you're going to get blamed for it or we going to get blamed for it. And so we as an industry need to get ahead of it. And you saw attempts at this in 2017 and 2018, and Google and Apple and Facebook and I think Amazon up in Seattle all made these 501 billion $2 billion commitments to go and build affordable housing. But what happened when you look at the numbers is they would maybe build a few hundred units or a few thousand units, because building in existing cities is just so time consuming, so expensive. It costs a million dollars to build a small two bed affordable apartment in San Jose. Yeah, a million dollars. And it takes 11 years of planning. Whereas our argument. Affordable housing for millionaires. Yeah, exactly. Heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. Sure. Whereas our argument is if you create a place where you can build, you can get the private capital markets to build it. And we are proposing to build 174,000 homes. For context, 174,000 homes is more homes than San Francisco has built since 1950. Since 1950. And sure, we should build a lot more housing in San Francisco. The idea that you can solve the Bay Area housing problem, the trends are the trends in San Francisco or in Menlo park is insane. No city in the world has ever solved housing affordability issue with. Without spreading out a little bit. And then the question is, do you spread out just by spreading out with sprawl, or do you spread out and actually thoughtfully plan it and be able to build something really magical? What is the number of homes that.
Yeah. Turn approvals over faster throughout the build process. You can still have a tremendous impact. I want like a synthetic permitting office in, like, embedded in CAD or something. So as you're designing your structure, you put a window there and it runs a simulation to say, hey, if you were to submit this, the permitting office would say no to that. Or. And then you slide the window over 2 inches and says, okay, now you're good. And you just have like sort of red, green lights on everything you're designing. So you're getting feedback instead of having to submit, wait for them to come back with the revision. What you submit should be almost always approved and accepted, but there's still all of this uncertainty when you submit permits. I think that's much closer than it might seem. Yeah. And I think there's a. And even before we get to it, I'm really optimistic about AI tools that you basically embed in cities. Sure. And then as they get these applications come in, instead of people manually review them, you just do a pre scan. And I actually had discussions with legislators in Sacramento who want to run those bills that you could basically. Actually, it's very much what you said. You can submit your application and it just runs it through and it says, we think that this is acceptable, or here are some issues to fix. So that's kind of the front end to the client, to the architect or to the builder, but then even to the employees who are working those jobs and improving it. You could see a system where it comes to them and is like, recommendation is that you approve it. And the five areas where me, the AI have the least confidence is these five. Go check them. Because I think it's easy to vilify some of the permitting authorities and some of the people who work there, but they just trying to do their best. And some of it is real. I mean, I don't know the details of it, but the tragedy in the nightclub in Switzerland. I was talking to a friend who is on.
We have to get to our next guest. But I do have a hot take that there might be a future wearable that looks like the Pip Boy from Fallout. Are you familiar the Fallout series? I'm actually not kidding about this. And I'll unpack it. So, basically, in Fallout, you wear a device on your arm and you turn it, and it's basically a phone that's glued to your arm. And then you can access your menus through here. And it's. And it was always, like, something fun that, like the, you know, the cosplay community would build out. Yeah, there's the Pip Boy, and people have made real versions of this. It has this cool retro aesthetic. It's never taken off. But I've noticed that if you look at the live streamers like Ishowspeed Kaisana, when they're out in the world, they often have phones strapped to their arms to read, chat while they're going around. Like when I. I think it was Speed that went to China and he went on this world tour, he toured America. He keeps a phone strapped to his arm so he can use both hands. And it feels like weird and cyberpunk, but it feels like a glimpse of the future. Like, we're all going to be living like Speed in the future maybe, and maybe we're going to have phones or something like it glued to our arms. That could just be an accessory that actually helps you glue the phone to the arm. It could be some sort of modified device that's curved to wrap around your arm. But I feel like the end state is more technology on your body constantly, and that's an easy one that people could adopt. You've seen Apple sells the sock that you can keep your phone. And a lot of people are wearing almost necklaces with their phones, so their phone never goes in their bag, never goes in their pockets. It's always just here. And then they can just pull it out and take a picture, do whatever, because they're so glued to their phone. I think an interim wearable is just something that makes your phone permanently dangle here because. Because the phone is powerful, it has a lot going on in that. But you just never want to.
Population areas. No one's really thinking that, oh, you know, Meta needs a data center right next to their Menlo park campus. But the AI megatrend also might drive up housing prices in San Francisco a ton. A lot of people are predicting this based on the IPO schedule. If OpenAI anthropic get out, there's a trillion plus in liquidity going loosely into the San Francisco housing market. You can see some really crazy dislocations in that market. Is that something you're tracking as an accelerant of your plans? Yeah, 100%. Okay. And I think it's honestly, it's more from the policy perspective because the last time, I mean, this has happened in the Bay Area periodically for the last 20 years. The problem is we haven't done anything about it in 50 years. And every time it gets worse and then there's a bit of a pullback and like, oh, it's gonna be better and then it just comes back stronger than before. Right. And.com boom, then social crypto, now AI. And so from a policy perspective, the argument that we've made is we need to get ahead of this because if we don't, this is going to be way worse than what we saw in 2017, 2018, and when it last happened in 2017, 2018. The problem is tech is going to get blamed for this. Oh, yeah, of course. It'S wrong and it makes no sense because you just create all of these really well paid jobs, but you're going to get blamed for it or we going to get blamed for it. And so we as an industry need to get ahead of it. And you saw attempts at this in 2017 and 2018, and Google and Apple and Facebook and I think Amazon up in Seattle all made these 501 billion $2 billion commitments to go and build affordable housing. But what happened when you look at the numbers is they would maybe build a few hundred units or a few thousand units because building in existing cities is just so time consuming, so expensive. It costs a million dollars to build a small two bed affordable apartment in San Jose. A million dollars. And it takes 11 years of planning. Whereas our argument. Affordable housing for millionaires. Yeah, exactly. Heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. Whereas our argument is if you create a place where you can build, you can get the private capital markets to build it. And we are proposing to build 174,000 homes. For context, 174,000 homes is more homes than San Francisco has built since 1950. Since 1950. And sure, we should build a lot more housing in San Francisco. The idea that you can solve the Bay Area housing problem, the trends are the trends in San Francisco or in Menlo park is insane. No city in the world has ever solved housing affordability issue with without spreading out a little bit. And then the question is, do you spread out just by spreading out with sprawl, or do you spread out and actually thoughtfully plan it and be able to build something really magical? What is the number of homes that.
Take that leap and be the first one. I mean, we start with there has to be a reason for them to be in Solano. Sure. And generally the ones not just price, not just, not just pricing. And the biggest one that we found, two big ones. The first one is manufacturing. Sure. You have this whole wave of companies doing manufacturing. A bunch of them are headquartered in the Bay Area. Yeah. And then I think the sweet spot is you are a company, you figure out a new way to do x. You've raised 20 million, you have 20 people, you've perfected it. Now you've raised 100 million. And you need to build a factory. And the factory is going to have 100 or 200 employees. And you want to build it somewhere. Right. Now, what happens for virtually every single company, and we've spoken to 400 of them, is they say we really want to build it in California because we still figuring out how the factory works. Yeah. And the factory is the product. The factory is the product. And if every time that our software engineers or AI engineers need to go to the factory, they need to go on a plane and fly to another state, that's a three day trip. Yeah. It's like, oh, it's three hours to go to Austin. No, it's not three hours. Yeah, yeah. It's an hour and a half to the airport, then it's tsa, then it's late, then you fly in, then it's to get there, then. So it's a free day trip. Right. And our value prop is put the factory in Solano. Because if you get in a car in Menlo park in the morning, you can be in the factory of 80 minutes and you can be back home and have dinner with your kids. And that really works. Now what means, what that means is if you put the first factory there, then you go and you raise $500 million and you need to build factory number two. Our value prop is we have so much land that if you want to build factory one, which is 100,000 square feet, we can reserve enough land around it for five or ten years that you can put factory 2, 3, 4, 5 next to it. You can have them all in the same place instead of having to solve this problem over and over and over again in a different place. Now that means that we get the factory that employs 500 or 1,000 people. Now, if you want to build a gigafactory that employs 10,000 people, where you are really, really cost sensitive, maybe that still goes to Ohio, but that's okay. But a lot of the cutting edge stuff would be in Solano. And to your point about.
When she confronted Zof about the possibility of an undisclosed relationship with a female employee who was junior to him at the company but did not report to him, he initially denied it, according to people familiar with the situation. By June, however, both Zof and the woman had told Moratti about the relationship, which had begun when they were colleagues at OpenAI. People with knowledge of those discussions said the woman then left the company and returned to OpenAI, which is sort of a wrinkle in this. Zoph told his boss that he had been manipulated by the woman into a relationship, according to people familiar with the matter. Shortly after that conversation, he took a break from work. Okay, I gotta. I generally think that the. Mira. She told me it was cuffing season. I didn't know what it meant, so I just said, okay, I got cuffed. Is that what happened? Yeah, I mean, I think. Just saying, like, I was manipulated into becoming the significant other. You know, you gotta take a little responsibility. You know, everyone is assuming that this is a romantic relationship. They never reported that this is a romantic relationship. They just said that he had a relationship with someone else, and it was undisclosed. And I think that more companies need to be clear about the rules around disclosures of relationships. Like, if you and Tyler start an esports team, for example, like, you would have a relationship. You would be teammates on playing Call of Duty. And if you didn't disclose that to me, I would feel left out. I'd be like, why don't I. Why am I not on the team? If I find out that Tyler and Scott are going off and drinking a bunch of athletic brews every night without me? That's a relationship that bros. And it wasn't disclosed. It wasn't disclosed. And you might be very angry. I might be angry they didn't disclose. So I think relationship disc disclosures need to go beyond romantic relationship disclosures. If you're. If you're just broing down with people, that actually. That actually is kind of a real thing sometimes. Catching up Monday after the weekend, somebody's like, oh, yeah, I was hanging with so and so on Saturday. Like, wait, where was my invite? You guys hang out on Saturday? What, you didn't disclose that relationship? Korean barbecue. Yeah. Oh, so you have a relationship where you go to Korean barbecue together. Okay. And you just didn't think to tell the rest of the company that? Kbbq. Yeah. What's your thoughts? I was going to say, I like to imagine there's some kind of, like, Shakespearean tragedy here. Right. The Montagues and the Capulets that's OpenAI and thinking machines.
There's this really interesting thing that's happened where a lot of things have come together at the same time for us, where we've announced it, what is it? Two years ago. And of course it was very controversial. You come to a community and it's a guy with a funny accent. And we want to build a major new city, which we haven't done in America in 100 years. So nobody even thinks that you can build new cities. And it's like, oh, it's not just going to be a city, it's going to be a massive manufacturing park. And by the way, we'll build the biggest shipyard in, in America on the south end of the property. And everyone is like, you guys are crazy and we don't trust you. But what's happened over the last two years is we've actually done the work, we've put together this incredible team and so we've built a lot of trust and now there's a tremendous amount of support for it in the community. And then what's happened at the same time at the state level and at a national level? I mean, think back to where we were as a country two years ago. Abundance wasn't really a thing. Built wasn't really a thing. We didn't just have an election on affordability. Re industrialization was kind of beginning. And so at a macro level, there's been this massive shift towards we need to do this. And that exists in California. And so right now where we are is. We had a big announcement this morning that we can talk about, but basically the goal for this year is the stretch goal for this year, I'll say there is to break ground. And there's lots of reasons for why that makes sense for Solano county, it makes sense for California, it makes sense for the country. Sorry, going back, closing the loop.
You know, one of our questions for Netflix on their earnings call was like, how big of a miss is it that K pop Demon Hunters 2 isn't coming out until 2029? Like, that's embarrassing, Isaac. Right? Like, it shouldn't take four years to get that sequel out. But that's because of the timeline for animation that's going to compress dramatically. Is that everything? Because I thought that there was also sort of just an unpredictable. It was an unpredictable success that they hadn't negotiated the contract with Sony and so they kind of got caught flat footed when it became such a success. And again, it was like it was a success that only would have happened on Netflix, where a movie can go viral, where if that had had some limited run in theaters, it probably would have just been forgotten. It's true. But they struck the deal at the end of 25 and you're not getting a movie till 29. Yeah, that. Is just the timeline. Like Sony Pictures Animation, which is up in Canada. Sure, there's a backlog of films that are before this and there's just no way to accelerate at the moment. But I think I want to go back to Jordyn.
Retail and, or let's say car dealerships, things like that. A lot of the early adoption is where you'd expect. I mean, the vast majority of tech companies, for example, we do track their adoption and it's been high for a long time. The vast majority are already using some AI models. Finance directly follows that and I think that makes sense especially for tech. Right. These are the tools that were developed by engineers for engineers and therefore the best productivity enhancing tools were things like COL or the AI code editors, things that would directly help the people who were building the technology in the first place. What we're going to start to see soon though is how it's going to affect other parts of the labor force. Especially now, you know, cloud cowork is out. Increasingly there are AI agent tools that can automate and have access to the broader context of a worker outside of like a coding tool. So you can start to imagine a more typical office worker benefit from these tools now. And that's where we're going to see the greatest productivity gains as those tools proliferate. And we're starting to see that change in business strategy now from the model companies themselves. Anthropic is doubling down on subscriptions, increasingly growing their subscription revenue. They used to be sort of seen as like, oh, it's just about APIs, that's their business model. No, they're like really leaning into the consumer side and the employee subscription side. I think we're going to see that from OpenAI, a lot of competitors too. Can you help me?
Exactly. And right now the challenge is basically all of the jobs are between San Francisco and San Jose and then up in Sacramento. Yeah. And then you have 4 million people in places like East Contra Costa county and Solano and Stockton and San Joaquin. There's basically no jobs. Yeah. So what happens in the morning is all of those people get in a car and they have a two hour commute to Menlo Park. The number of people who live in Solano county who work in Menlo park and have a two hour commute each way every day would blow your socks off. It's half. More than half of the county commute outside of the county. So, yeah, it's completely insane. So the first solution, and this is actually our big contribution to the region, is to take a bunch of jobs and put them in the middle of the region, which makes life better for everyone who lives in Palo Alto, San Francisco, because you don't have all of those people sitting on the 101 or 2 coming. So. Big office buildings for tech companies or big companies, big employers, big manufacturing employees, big. Manufacturers. Have you talked to companies? Are they receptive to that? Because there's sort of.
I just, I'm just thinking about, you know. There were some, there was some FUD around OpenAI towards the back half of last year. Is OpenAI cooked? What does the data say? There's no definitive leader in terms of the AI race. Markets changing really quickly. OpenAI is a distinct advantage as far as distribution. It's at the most businesses now. Google also has a distinct advantage. Yeah. Because it integrates Gemini for free across all of workspace. Sure. So in our data set I think we likely undercount gemini adoption. But OpenAI just by nature of being kind of this consumer default. If you're a company that is going to make some early business investment in AI model for your employees, it's kind of a no brainer oftentimes to just go with hey, what do you know about as a consumer and what do your employees know? And so for that reason OpenAI I think is in a very safe place. Cool. But it's a pretty tense race and we have seen particularly in the sort of product layer, you know, large incumbents being losing a lot of market share very quickly to like a new entrant GitHub copilot. A couple of years ago that was the major, that was pretty much the only AI code editor available for enterprise. Six months later cursor comes down, it's at 50% market share. Wow. So I don't think any company should feel particularly comfortable even if they have the enterprise backing and distribution. Yeah. Only the paranoid survive. So OpenAI is growing. Anthropic's also growing.
Anyway. Cisco. The davos of cisco. Cisco AI summit. It's february 3rd. It brings together leaders from Nvidia, OpenAI, aws and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a gigastream. Mark your calendars. February 3rd. Cisco AI summit. See many of you there.
Founder mode 5 coded. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Standby. Uav online. Glaze. Double blaze. Triple glaze. Double kill. Five color. Raw. Cup is hot. Glaze. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just roll, right. Market clearing order. Inbo. Come on, get up. You're surrounded by journalists. All your position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go. Golden retriever mode. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. I see multiple journalists on the horizon. Founder. You're watching TVPN. Today is Wednesday, January 21, 2025. 2026. 2026. Throw and smoke. It's a new year. We're live from the TVP and Ultradome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. And now that the smoke has cleared, I can tell you about ramp.com time is money save. Both easy use, corporate cards, bill pay accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And big news. We have our Corazian from Ramp live in the ultradome at 2pm today here with us, let's show everyone the linear lineup because we got a lot of great stuff for you. We got Rich Greenfield coming on at 11:30. Many people are saying he has one of the best names of all time. He does, he does. If you enjoy business, if you're a business enthusiast, lots of people like greenfield projects. You start fresh. Greenfield projects are where it's at. Yan Srimak, founder and CEO of California Forever, is in the ultradome at 1. Then we have George from Testudo at 140 and Ara closing at 150 in person. It's going to be a fun show. Linear, of course, is the ultimate product. This system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on Linear are using agents today. And you should be too. So Cling AI. Cling AI. The video generation video model has been on a tear. There's an article in the Wall Street Journal showing some pretty staggering Numbers. They hit 12 million monthly active users and they generated more than 20 million in revenue just last year. I wanted to dig in and understand where this came from. The history of Kuaishou, the Chinese company behind it. There's a new farmer filling up the trough for everyone. Really interesting that they're so neck and neck with Higsfield. Higsfield last week comes out, announces they got to 200 million. This story drops. Yeah, that cling seems to be just slightly ahead of them, but really neck and neck and seemingly competing over the same opportunity. Yeah, I mean, on the enterprise model, API level, even the prosumer level, I think 30% of their revenue is coming from API and 70% is for prosumer. So basically you have someone in a marketing role or they're just a fun individual creator and they want some AI video products, some generative video. And the silence at Davos on cling, it's crazy. It's insane. It's actually crazy. It's insane. They refuse to ask any hard questions. You got Demis on stage, you got Dario on stage and you're not asking them about Kling and the absolute terror that Kwasha has been on. Actually, I mean, Dario did address the Chinese question. He said that they don't lose. They're not losing enterprise deals to Chinese companies right now. They're. They're going up against OpenAI and DeepMind. There is an interesting Chinese export control issue that I think we should get into at some point with regard to this story. But first let's tell you about Restream 1 livestream 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to restream.com. so cling has hit 12 million MAUs, 20 million revenue in the last month. Now they seem to be on the up and to the right curve. It's a pretty massive ramp. The product launched 18 months ago. But CLING is not its own startup, is a new project from Kuaishou Technology. This is a Chinese company and the founders. I couldn't find a single product. Jon, I'm blow your mind right now, please. Guess who worked at Kuaishou, who's been on the show? Okay, I share a name with him. Wait, Connor Hayes. No, no. Jordan Schneider. Jordan Schneider worked at Kuaishou? Yes. No way. Yes. Yes. He just responded to the daily newsletter. Does he went off and said lol. I worked at Kai show. What a comeback. Jordan, tell all. Jordan, come get on the show. You're welcome. Come hang out if you want to. I'll send him a note. It'd be great to hear more of more of the story from him directly. But he might be the only person that we can get to go on the record about Kuaishou. Because the founders, I don't think they've ever done a podcast appearance. They haven't been certainly on the victory lap podcast American circuit. Like many founders that get a company to this scale. But there are some interesting links to other American companies. So Kuaishow is pretty old, especially for the AI boom. It launched in 2011 as a mobile app for creating and sharing GIFs. This was before vine and before Musical Ly. They were sort of like precursor, all those just by a year or two. So you could almost say that Jordan Schneider made his money in GIFs. I think so. I think he created TikTok. Basically. We should put him in charge. We should get him in the CEOC, put him in charge. We're bringing TikTok back to America and Jordan should be running it for sure. So there's some similar threads. So Dom Hoffman, the founder of vine, he worked at Yahoo before founding Vine. And Alex zhu at Musical Ly worked at eBay and Microsoft and I think SAP as well. And so both of those companies, they had like big tech experience. Then they went and founded these companies. And the founders of Kuaishou, Xu Hua and Cheng Yi Xiao also did the same. One of them worked at Google, one of them worked at Hewlett Packard. And then they jumped into the social media boom that was going on in the early aughts or the late, I guess the late aughts, early 2000 and tens. Is there a word for the period between 2010, the teens, the 2010s, the tens? I don't know. But that era, like Post, Facebook, there was Foursquare, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap, there were just like a new one every year was popping up. And so they jump in on this. And the mobile Internet was expanding really rapidly in China at that time. There was a big boom. There were a bunch of big winners that came out of that era. Guaishou hit 100 million Dauntless by 2013. So basically 18 months after they launch, they're a pretty sizable social media app. And they actually pivoted in that 18 month timeline from GIFs to videos. And so once they had the new product dialed, they ramped pretty quickly. Now there was a little bit of a slowdown between 2013 and 2019 because they didn't hit 200 million DAU until 2019. So they were sort of saturating then. But they were on a fundraising tear the whole time. They raised $350 million from Tencent in 2017, they integrated with WeChat to accelerate distrib, and the company was worth around $18 billion by 2018, just seven years into the journey. So not bad, not bad. The quiet IPO was a particularly crazy moment for the company. So they raised $5.4 billion at the IPO. They were massively oversubscribed for that. So they say, hey, we want to raise 5 billion. And 165 billion of demand shows up from the market. So retail investors just went insane. They were like what? 165 billion of demand, only 5 billion for sale. And so the stock trades up 192% at the open and all of a sudden the company's worth $180 billion. And both of the founders are Deca billionaires. Pretty sick Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the phantom card. So that didn't last though. There was a massive sell off and there were a couple speed bumps that Kuaishou seemingly hit shortly after going public. So China had a big crackdown on in regulation on local tech companies. ByteDance became much more dominant as a competitor and was, you know, had Kuaishou in their sights. And then the Kuaishou user growth just sort of slowed down. And so there were a couple misses on, you know, Dau MAU growth. The metrics weren't looking as good and so the investors said, hey, we're rotating to other things. Hey, we're pulling out. And so the Stock traded down 80% within six months. So not great. But today the market cap's around $40 billion. Like it's still a very real business. And just financially the business is very solid, like it's not losing money. You can think about it this way. So it's a $40 billion market cap. This is all USD. I converted everything so 40 billion market cap, 20 billion revenue, 11 billion gross profit, net profit 2.6 billion, two and a half billion. So that's like a lot of cash flow, a lot of net income to work with, certainly enough to do some training runs, start a NEO lab or a video lab or you know, take some new bets. And so that's exactly what they did. So in 28, 24, 2024, they launched the first version of cling. And they did this just three months after OpenAI demoed Sora. So it was kind of like the Chinese answer to Sora. Since then they've updated Clang 30 times and carved out a nice little place in the grid of trade offs around model performance and cost. For cinematic footage, people often recommend VO3 still. But for Klang, it has some really strong characteristics in motion control and physics simulations. There's a number of places where clings been outperforming there. And then there's a number of other sort of niche applications where cling's really great. And at $0.10 per second, pricing has been very attractive relative to some of the other options in the market. Although there are a bunch of ways to get free credits. And then if you buy bulk none of the pricing is exactly apples to apples, but they've certainly come out as a frontier quality model at a very affordable price. And that's led to a bunch of adoption as we've seen with the 12 million monthly active users. Interestingly, Kuaishou claims that CLING is gross margin positive and so now it's unclear. That doesn't include training and we don't really. I mean it's gross profit so it doesn't include the hundred or so R and D people on the team. But my question is like what happens if they try and scale another order of magnitude? Will they be paying more for inference? Will they be able to get those chips? Because there's still this big debate over how many Nvidia GPUs should be able to be sent over to China. So there's a little bit of debate there and it's also just. It honestly gets me excited about MSL dropping a video model because a lot of the same, a lot of the same sort of like precursor elements in terms of like the training data in the ecosystem. When you think about just the raw data in reels that it could wind up being a model that's a little bit more opinionated. Maybe it has some mid journey sprinkled in there. Like I think that the msl, the pressure on MSL has been intense and the initial Vibes launch was not loved. But they certainly have the compute, they have the team now, they have the data, they have all the key ingredients to a really successful video generation model launch. The only question is when will it happen and will it be one of those temporary leapfrogs where it's better than Sora and VO3 for a month until the other labs update. Will it have its own characteristics? Because VO3 when it came out it was like, oh, we can do audio in there. Then Sora was really good at vertical video. And a lot of these labs it feels like if you're in video there's more room to be opinionated and come out with something where it's like we're really good at making content that's all one scene or our model by default will do cuts and cut from different shots to another. Or it's really good at front facing videos or it gets the faces really accurate or does face replacement. You can upload your own. All these features that you can win on. I think nowadays since all the different base video models are starting to look pretty photorealistic. So a lot of it's about. Yeah, I mean I can't wait to see Meta's next real launch here. Right? Yeah. They have so many advantages. They have the talent now the pressure is immense, but they should be able to come out with something that's super competitive. Yeah. Turbopuffer search, everybyte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. So last month they did 20 million and of course Kuaishou put out a statement about it. Their shares went 3.6% higher to rank among the top gainers on the Hong Kong exchange year to date, Kuaishow's up 23%. So they've been on a run and there's a lot of investor optimism about Kuaishow's potential to monetize AI. The company's AI powered video and graphics generation capabilities will likely drive earnings over the next few years, S and P Global ratings analysts wrote in a recent note. That could lower content creation and advertising costs and boost content creation on Kuaishou Short form video platform the company has the second largest independent short form video platform after ByteDance's Douyin, which is basically the Chinese version of TikTok. And so I, you know, is this going to be, you know, super important to the AI race in America? Probably not. Like we're still living in a world where you have OpenAI, anthropic Google really battling it out and then Xai is doing interesting stuff, MSL has interesting stuff and then there's a couple NEO labs that are maybe doing interesting stuff, but the Chinese labs haven't been putting a ton of pressure. But I think it's interesting because we're actually getting firm data on how these products are monetizing. Of course Google, they're not even breaking out Gemini revenue or metrics. They'll throw out sort of random numbers, but it's not like YouTube where they have to report out specific things, or like Amazon with AWS where they have to break out those financials. Kuaishou is kind of doing a service to the public markets at least they're creating a comp for what revenue looks like relative to MAUs. And I mean right now if they're doing 20 million in revenue on 12 million monthly active users, they're getting what, $1.80 per monthly active user, $1.80 a month, basically like a $20 a year subscription. That still feels a little low, but not bad for total arpu for such a new service that really, we don't know the mix of enterprise versus prosumer where they. Yeah. And they're not breaking out where their users are. Right. So CLING is available on aws. Like you can go and provision it in America. And so yeah, we're not exactly sure and I think some of that inference might run in America in that case. So not exactly sure where their biggest customers are. But it's just interesting to see like you're not going to get this level of detail from Google because De Mine's its own thing and then Gemini's in there and then you can't even just subscribe to just VO3. You have to subscribe to Gemini Ultra and then you get VO3 credits. And so even Google like, I mean I'm sure Google knows how much like I pay for Gemini Ultra and then they know how many deep research reports I file, how many normal prompts I use, how many times I just talk to it. And they know my my usage pattern relative to how many VO3 generations I'm doing per month for my $250 or whatever I pay. Yeah. Anyway, moving on. Vanta Automate Compliance and Security Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. There is another interesting, just sort of like nuanced narrative that I hadn't really noticed while I was digging into Kuaishou One is this China's aging tech workers issue the curse of 35. They're firing unks over there. That's what's happening. They're firing. You can't even be an unk. You truly can't. You truly can't. Discrimination against older employees particularly apparent in sector where executives openly state a preference for youth. And so different approach. We've had back and forth in VC Twitter about oh, should your team be really young and cracked or should you get the experts in there? What's you know obviously in America that you cannot discriminate based on age. But that hasn't stopped plenty of people from opining about what the correct mix is, whether or not you should follow those rules. But there's an article in the Financial Times that sort of has some charts here about how big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. We can go through that. But let's read through a little bit of this China's aging tech workforce. First hint Lao Bai, 34 received that his position at short video app Kwai show might be at risk was when a 35 year old colleague was sacked. I was both shocked and anxious. I realized that our situations were very similar and the same thing could soon happen to me, said Li Bai Lau Bai, using his nickname to avoid repercussions from his former employer. Just months from his 35th birthday, the developer was dismissed, another victim of the group's reorganization, known internally as Limestone. Wow. They're giving code names to age discrimination. That's insane. Brutal. Kuaishou is pushing out junior workers in their mid-30s, according to five people with direct knowledge of Limestone, including current and former employees. Lao Bai was told his termination was part of the company's overall redundancy program. The so called curse of 35 has long plagued workers across white collar professions, with older staff widely perceived as being less willing to put up with long working hours because of responsibilities at home. As China's tech sector reels from Beijing's crackdown, this article is from 2024, by the way, and economic slowdown. Tens of thousands of jobs have been cut over the past several months, and older workers are seen as particularly vulnerable. Technology companies have made no secret of favoring young and unmarried workers. Ageism in the tech sector is a big problem. There's a perception that older workers don't keep up with the latest technological developments, they don't have the energy to keep up the hard work, and that they're too expensive. Thankfully, our very own John Coogan, who is. You're very much keeping up with the latest technological developments. Otherwise we wouldn't be talking about this, because you didn't just read about cling, you studied and you wrote about it. While China's labor law prohibits employers from discriminating on the grounds of attributes such as ethnicity, gender, and religion, it does not explicitly refer to age. Whoa. Hence Project Limestone. But Yang said some had interpreted the law more broadly as prohibiting discrimination against older people, meaning employers would not explicitly cite age as a reason for dismissal. Chinese tech executives have long publicly voiced their preference for younger workers. In 2019, Tencent President Martin Lau announced a plan to reshuffle 10% of the company's managers, saying their jobs will be taken up by younger people. New colleagues who may be more passionate. Baidu chief Robin Lin, in an internal letter also made public in 2019, announced the company's plan to become more youthful by promoting more workers born after 1980 and 1990. This thinking is deeply embedded across most tech companies. Well, let me tell you about Label Box, Reinforcement learning environments, Voice robotics, evals, and expert human data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI team. That's right, between 20 and 30, most people are full of energy. You're more willing to march forward and sacrifice yourself for the company. But once you become a parent, your body starts aging. How are you going to keep up with the 996 schedule? Says a former sales manager at Meituan, referring to the Chinese tech sector's infamous work routine of 9am to 9pm six days a week. ByteDance, which owns the video app TikTok, and e commerce giant Pinduoduo have some of the youngest recruits among Chinese tech companies. Data suggests the average age of their workers is just 27. According to the latest figures, the average age of staff at Kuaishou is 28 against the 33 years old. At ride hailing app Didi, the average age of the worker in China is 38, according to the All China Federation of Trade Unions. This trend has become only more entrenched with progressive waves of layoffs. And this is the chart that I wanted to show you. So big tech groups in China have been downsizing in the past few years. So this is 2021, 2022 and 2023 for Alibaba, Baidu, Kuaishou and Tencent. And they're all downsizing across those three years. Now I was wondering if this was just an anomaly post Covid, just one particular period during some economic gyrations. So I went and pulled more recent data on what's going on, and it feels like they're all continuing to shrink. The one that's growing again is Tencent, but Baidu has significantly downsized. Alibaba has continued to downsize and shrink, and I think Kuaishou has as well. And so there's an interesting dynamic there that I didn't. I mean, we hear about layoffs in big tech in America, but it feels like, like it's like a very temporary layoff and shrinkage and then it starts growing again pretty quickly as they do more acquisitions. Now to be clear, some of these, some of these companies have shrunk because they've divested whole business units or sold off a piece of a company. And so you can't really count that because it's like the two. The jobs still exist. They're just at a separate company. Anyway. Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building AI, supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands of. We have our first guest. Before we jump in, it's worth noting I pulled up Mag 7 employee counts, and every single company in the Mag 7 has increased headcount over that same period that we just showed. Yeah, yeah, there have been like periods of layoffs, but even when Mark Zuckerberg comes out and says, hey, we're laying off a thousand people in the Metaverse team, in the Reality Labs team. It's like, well, he's adding tons of people to the AI teams and tons of people to the Instagram teams and threads teams and Facebook core and marketing and salespeople and events people. Like the whole organization is just growing so fast that one niche layoff is not really going to cause a multi year trend. At least in America we're still growing. So just sort of interesting that I didn't realize that was going on that there was such a concerted effort across four major Chinese tech companies to really reduce headcount. But it is happening. Yeah. It is worth noting though that in the chat is sharing this as well, that 2022 headcount and current headcount look very, very similar. So there hasn't been a ton of growth. Yeah. Anyway, anyways, with that graphite code review. For the age of AI, Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we'll bring in our first guest of the show, Rich. Welcome to the TVPN ultradam. How are you doing, Rich? Great to have you back. Busy week, Busy week in media world. Earnings kicking off? Yes, earnings. What's top of mind? What's, what's keeping you the busiest? Look, I think everyone's trying to figure out what is the future of Netflix. What happens to Warner Brothers? Does Paramount come back? I mean, we talked about this on your show a few weeks ago, right? We were talking about sort of this battle. Does Paramount come back? You know, they haven't raised their bid since we talked, you know, before the holidays. They have not raised their bid as of yet. But they did say it wasn't there. They said it wasn't their best and final. Right. That is true. But you know, the, when you look at sort of the how much Netflix clearly wants this, you know, Netflix yesterday went to all cash on their offer. The Warner Brothers board came out and talked about the piece that Netflix isn't buying, which Paramount said was worthless, the Warner Brothers board said was worth, you know, $3, maybe even more, as much as 4 to 5, even more if it gets sold into pieces, which we think is possible. And so the bar, you know, in terms of like what does Paramount have to do to win that bar is going up and up and up. And I think that's the challenge right now is how badly do they want this? Do they want to over lever the company to get this or Is there a better use of capital? I mean, it's not like there aren't other assets out there. I mean, you could go into the video game world, right? Like, there's assets like, take two. Two of the biggest. Enter actually the two biggest entertainment franchises in the world. Okay, but what's actually important for Paramount is it to build a compelling consumer subscription. Right? Like, because when you look at them overpaying for ufc, or maybe. Maybe they're not overpaying, but if they. If they. It launches this Saturday. Yeah, which. Which I'm. I'm excited for. But they pay 700 million or. Sorry, no, it was more than that. What was it? It's like a billion one on UFC. Yeah, billion. About 2x. What? It was what ESPN was paying. Yeah. And I guess my question is, how effed are they if they don't get the Warner Brothers assets? And I mean that from like. But how compelling is their. Is their subscription platform without Warner Brothers those assets? Look, you can license a lot of content. I mean, Netflix, despite trying to buy Warner Brothers, Netflix actually just went out and did a global licensing deal with Sony. So after Sony movies are in movie theaters, the next place they go is to Netflix all around the world. That's a deal that Paramount could have done. They could have outbid Netflix for that deal. Those licensing deals are out there. I mean, Universal movies are actually going to now be. After they do a short stint on Peacock, they're going to show up on Netflix. Like, if you want to license catalog content, there is lots of ways to do it. I mean, heck, Amazon, like. Like the craziest thing that's happened this week. Honestly, Amazon, you probably remember a few years ago, they went out and they spent $8 billion on MGM. Everyone thought that was absolutely insane. Then they had to go back because you actually, Even for that 8 billion, you didn't control the James Bond franchise. They ended up paying the Broccoli family another billion dollars to get access to control the James Bond franchise. And then what happened today, guys? Today the entire James Bond franchise is licensed to Netflix. Netflix. Like, literally, you can go watch Dr. No on Netflix right now instead of watching this show. Like, it's crazy, right? So there is lots of content to license, but you have to be aggressive. And so I think, you know, again, if Paramount has, you know, Larry Ellison's willing to put $12 billion into the Warner Brothers deal, the Middle east is willing to give them 24 billion to invest in this transaction. That's a heck of a lot of capital. If you want to start really both creating a lot more content internally and licensing a lot more. Paramount has the ability to do that. There's more NFL rights coming up for bids soon. Like, there are many ways to attack this beyond buying Warner Brothers. And I just think there comes a point where overpaying for something gets silly and you're better off finding an alternative. And I think that's sort of the question mark because remember, for, for, for Paramount, they need to buy all of these linear cable networks because unlike Netflix, remember, Netflix generates $11 billion of free cash flow a year. Paramount has negative free cash flow. So, like, the ability to bid here is very different. These are very different companies. So what's Netflix's rationale for buying versus licensing? Is that just thinking long term that they'll make more money over the long term, or is there some other rationale or value that they would get from owning the whole thing as opposed to just licensing, licensing it? John, it's a great question because I think if you step back and they even said this, I asked this question like, you know, what changed? Because Netflix had not been interested in making acquisitions. They were a builder, not a buyer, you know, throughout their entire history. And I don't. If Paramount hadn't put this in play and like this asset hadn't become sort of in play, I don't think we'd be sitting here talking about Netflix buying Warner Brothers. I think once it became clear this asset was going to trade and that there was a way to buy it without getting all of those sort of dying cable networks, that there was a way to just buy the streaming business and most importantly, the studio. Because what this is really about, this is like when Bob Iger at Disney, remember years ago, he bought Pixar, he bought Marvel, he bought LucasFilms. Those three iconic acquisitions of IP have totally transformed the Walt Disney Company opportunity. I think that's what Netflix sees here is, hey, these IP libraries are going to trade. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Someone's going to own them. Let it be us. Like, let's not let this get away from us, because we can do so. Just like Amazon for Bond needs Netflix, the ability to take all of that Warner Brothers catalog and shine a light on it. The way Netflix can, I think, was just too big of a, you know, talk about a 5, 10 year old opportunity is too big to pass up. How do you think the studios and the platforms are kind of trying to process how Gen AI will impact the value of ip? Because I look at this and I'm like if you have IP and the cost to produce new content drops dramatically, which I think is my assumption generally is that you're going to be able to produce like when you look at animated content and even like kind of blockbuster films, I expect the, I expect the cost to produce these things is going to drop dramatically. Which means if you actually have a monopoly on the ip, you can create a lot more different content around it. And I think that Genai will also mean that there's just a bunch of more and more and more and more content like net new content, net new IP being created. But it's unclear if you have. It will maybe even become harder to generate real breakout hits if the whole zone is just being flooded with with a ton of content. Well, look, in a world where, first of all, let me just step back, I agree with you, Jenny. Is going to lead to an explosion of content. I don't think this is just video content. I think it's an explosion of content. So whether it's gaming content, you think about a UGC platform like Roblox, you think about a short form or shorter form UGC world of video like YouTube, you think about Spotify, like all of the platforms. In a world where content creation gets cheaper, the platforms, when that is exactly part of the long term investment thesis on why own Netflix now. Yes, it will get easier to make content from the Warner Brothers library. It'll get cheaper for Netflix. I mean certainly animated content which takes three to four years to make. I mean, look, you know, one of our questions for Netflix on their earnings call was like how big of a miss is it that K pop Demon Hunters 2 isn't coming out until 2029? Like that's embarrassing, right? Like it shouldn't take four years to get that sequel out. But that's because of the timeline for animation that's going to compress dramatically. That. Is that everything? Because I thought that there was also sort of just an unpredictable. It was an unpredictable success. They hadn't negotiated the contract with Sony and so they kind of got caught flat footed when it became such a success. And again it was like it was a success that only would have happened on Netflix where a movie can go viral, where if that had had some limited run in theaters, it probably would have just been forgotten. It's true. But they struck the deal at the end of 25 and you're not getting a movie till 29. Yeah, it's just the timeline, like Sony Pictures Animation which is up in Canada. Sure, there's a backlog of Films that are before this. And there's just no way to accelerate that at the moment. But, but I think I want to go back to Jordy's point. Yeah. Making it cheaper to make content does mean the value of existing content probably comes under pressure. Like, there is no doubt that since you're going to have so much more content created, existing content will have less value. I think that's a negative for Netflix, it's a negative for Disney. But the platform side of the equation, which is what Netflix is known for, just like YouTube and Spotify and Roblox products, I think all of those platforms become huge beneficiaries because people are going to have so much more content on those platforms than they do today. So I think it ultimately becomes an advantage, hurts one side of the business, but I think as you look at it holistically, becomes a big, long term advantage because the platform, big platforms have the eyeballs. Like that's where people turn to. Right. Like you come home from work and you turn on Netflix, you turn on YouTube. Like those are the fundamental winning platforms and they're battling it out. And I think AI makes that battle, even both of those companies even more powerful. And so sounds like if I could summarize, the place that you're getting to is maybe not believing that Paramount and the Ellisons should just lever up to this insane degree when they could potentially take some more, take maybe still tens of billions of dollars, but just allocate it across a, a wider variety of deals. Is that, is that, is that one path that you're seeing? I think this is they're stretching, right. Like when they tried to buy this thing at 19 and there were no other bidders, it was a brilliant idea. Maybe even at 23, it was a brilliant idea. As you start getting, you start to realize that like you're not winning at 30. That's pretty, I would assume to both of you and me, like, they're not winning at 30. Yeah, right. Like, so they're going to have to bump and they're going to have to bump meaningfully. And so to pay 34, $35, like, you start to get to valuation levels, I don't think you can put any more debt on this. And so you got to come up with 10, 12, $14 billion more equity. Like, and even that is too levered. Like, I wouldn't want, I would not want to be in this transformative AI media world sitting there with seven times leverage. That is not a great place to be. And so I truly believe David Ellison has a huge opportunity over the next decade, but I don't think over levering to buy Warner Brothers is the best path forward. Also, it's worth noting that State Oracle at The beginning of Q4 was trading at $313 a share. It's now trading at $174 a share. That has to be a factor, too, in terms of everyone's confidence around, hey, how much. How much cash do you have available? Yeah, look, Larry's got plenty of capital. If you wanted to buy this for all cash, he could. But remember, he's not. This is $100 billion transaction. The Ellison family's putting in 12. Yeah. You know, so, like, there is a limit on how much I think the Ellison family, they put in, you know, $8 billion or, sorry, they put in 6 of the 8 billion of cash into the Paramount transaction. Redbird put in the other two. So six plus 12. That's an $18 billion commitment between the two deals. It's a big number. But on the flip side, you know, given the size of this transaction, you know, I think there is a limit to how much they probably want to invest in this sector. And again, I just think leverage is not your friend. Like I look at.
Announced that we need more energy. And also he broke the story, at least to me, that Jensen's parents own the most expensive Mercedes in the world. I wonder if they still have it anyway.
And I believe the CEO of eleven Labs is there at Davos. But what do you want to move on to? Jordy? This is, I mean this was the probably the story that got reported on the least out of Davos over the last 24 hours, but is arguably the most important, the most expensive car in the world. Everyone wants to know, of course, it is the car that Jensen bought his parents. So let's pull up this clip. I love it. This is great on that journey and I know we have many more years of that journey ahead of us. Thank you. I appreciate that. My only regret was at the ipo. After the ipo, I wanted to buy my parents something nice. And so I sold Nvidia stock at a valuation of $300 million. The company was at a valuation of $300 million and I bought them a Mercedes S Class. It is the most expensive car in the world. Yeah. They regret it. Do they still have it? Oh sure, yeah, they still have it. Yeah. Good. Jensen, congratulations on that jury. Yeah. What is five? So it's currently a four and a half trillion dollar four and a half and an S Class When Trillion? They went public in 1999. So what was ask cost like 60k something back then? I don't know, 80k. How much? What did I mean, you're talking about. A maybe a billion dollar car. I don't know if I have the. Math right there, but it seems like, yeah, around 65k. It seems like the stock might be up to 15,000x. I don't know. It's definitely up 1,000x. Right? Because it's yeah, 300 million. 300 billion and then you get another zero. So 10,000x. Wow, that is brutal. Brutal. Worse than the TV I bought with a bitcoin. Hey, worth it. I bought a TV with a Bitcoin. Terrible. Not even 4k things in the trash now. It was like $1000 back then. It was ridiculous. Anyway, Cisco.
Need more energy. And also he broke the story, at least to me, that Jensen's parents own the most expensive Mercedes in the world. I wonder if they still have it anyway.
Of prominent global executives. And they were talking about how I was changing their business. Was so fun. And I said, let's go around the table and let's each share a story as to how we're using AI to make our business better. I heard five or six great stories, not one involved. Generative AI. Does that mean that the product is. Mog you to Generative AI, bro, you're telling me a big company is inefficient in implementing technology? You know, as Dario Amadeus says, you know, half of all entry level white collar jobs will, you know, be gone in the next five years. Is it that kind of change? Or, you know, put yourself in his shoes. How. How much money does the AI community need to raise over the next five years? He's wrong about this, right? Demos doesn't spend the United States this year over half Google is doing this. Cash flow over $500 billion. Like that's true for every other lab lead. Except for demons you would expect to make a promise. You're going to profoundly question about Dario. Oh, Dario. Okay, so is it hype? Yes, of course, of course, of course. How else are you going to people to write $500 billion of checks just this year alone? Right? There needs to be a level of like, AI is your savior almost. And the question is, where will I land in productivity gains at the end of the day, in certain areas, we know it's going to be profound, whether it's call centers, whether it's helping to improve the productivity of software engineers. But in a number of white collar jobs. There was a, there was a recent Harvard paper on this. They called it a work slop, that it looks good, but if you sort of peel back the onion, the substance isn't there. I was with one of my colleagues who runs our commodities business, and they, he handed a report on that we were generating with an AI engine. Doesn't matter what the topic was. The first few sentences like wow, that's, that's really insightful. And then you go down below that and it's all garbage. So that's going to. And we are, we are running out of time. But that suggests that is not going to come to the rescue to make up for the various negatives that we discussed about in the first part of this conversation. So in 10 seconds. So, but remember, spending on technology writ large is having a clear positive impact on the economy. So which economy in the world benefits most from this conflagration of geopolitics, economic policy and technology change? I mean, who benefits the most that's a really interesting way to put it. In 10 seconds. In 10 seconds. You know, when it's all said and done, it's somewhat ironic, but it's, it's. The United States and China are the two big beneficiaries of this moment. Yeah. So one thing, the way that I process this is as somebody who's not indexed to AI scaling and AI progress, but a lot of the most talented people he's ever worked with have ended up working in AI. They've gone from the east coast and gone over to the west coast and started working at the labs. And so while he's not working in a lab, I do feel like, and you can argue he's not AGI pilled, he clearly is not processing models, developing more advanced reasoning and agency and all these things that are going to work. We could be here next year and he could be like, oh, I got a report from a commodities trader. It was AI generated. It was amazing. That's happened in so many other fields where people have said, oh, I'll always be able to clock generative imagery. And. And then they look at the latest nanobanana Pro output and they're like, yeah, okay, actually, I can't. I have updated. That certainly happens. The interesting thing about his. So I like the point about the incentives of lab leads to.