A lot of other stuff. Welcome to the show. How are you doing? I'm doing well. Thank you so much for having me. Above anything. Please introduce yourself for everyone who's watching. Sure thing. So my name is Philippe Engelbrecht. My accent is Belgium. I'm a recently crowned American. Very proud of. Congratulations. Thank you. And I'm the CEO of a company called Tatari. We are, in short, technology for TV advertising. So that means that anybody who uses our product can manage their creatives, they can plan their TV campaigns, they can execute the campaigns or buy the inventory, measure it, optimize, rinse, repeat over and over. We do. So not just for streaming tv because I think there's a lot of talk about. But also linear. Yeah, cable and broadcast, kind of the old fashioned TV OTA over the air, right? Yes, yes. That's somewhat going away. Oh, that's going away. Yeah, it is. We'll get into all that. We'll get into that. Take us back. First, want to hear where you grew up, what you studied, your first company. I want to hear the journey. Ah, yes. And this is where I'm going to age myself. So as I mentioned, grew up in Belgium, but got called by the Silicon Valley and the dot com boom. Okay. And that's also where I started my first company. December 1799. Shazam. 1999. Yeah. Were you born. What a time. We were both alive. Just checking. I was just a boy. I was early a doctor. Although I don't know if I was using it in the 90s. Was it. Well, what was the product when you actually started it? Yeah, it was very. And I guess like, had you done any kind of scrappy startups back in Belgium or this was your first. Let me answer that, please. First, my parents had a small grocery store, supermarket, and I just worked hard, but I don't think I was an entrepreneur as we would define it today. Back then it was in the blood. Yes. That's where I learned what hardworking meant and what it can deliver. Shazam was very different. So I mean, look at, we put it together before, you know, even the iPhone existed or the itunes store. So the first version, which launched in August of 2002, is when you heard a song, you actually had to take your phone and then dial a short code on your handset. 2, 5, 8, 0. You didn't have to remember the number because if you can look on any telephone handset, 2580 are the four digits right in the middle. We then would listen to the song as if you were speaking into Your handset, do the recognition and then send a text message back with the name of the track and the artist to receive that text message that goes one step further. There would be what is called a reverse SMS charge. By dialing that shortcode, you accepted to be charged to receive that sms. And then just to top it off, because we were not a non profit, we had to make money but also cut a ref share with the mobile operators on the back of that. It sounds great, but it didn't really go anywhere. Yeah. To be honest also you started. So it takes you two years. Two years to build the product. Yeah. What's going on from 99 to launching the product, There's a massive market sell off in that time. Like did you. Yeah, we had a lot of fun. No kidding. No, I mean like timing is everything. Timing is everything. And if I look at Shazam, there's kind of what I would call good timing and bad timing. The good timing is industry transformation and that applies to any startups. The industry transformation for Shazam was evident in between 2000 and 2002. The recording industry in the United States shrank from about $15 billion to seven, $8 billion annually. Everybody claimed or blamed Napster and piracy for that. I somewhat disagree. I think it was Steve Jobs who unbundled the CD and allowed individual downloads. Interesting, right? But an industry in peril is good for a startup. So our timing there good. The bad part is, well, the technology wasn't ready for it. Sure we had the algorithm, but the experience. Tsushi Zama song was just. Did you have the algorithm or was it people on the other end recording it? No, no, no, no, no. The algorithm was real but the experience was just clunky. I mean like. Right. And it wasn't till the iPhone came along. Right. Where you had that beautiful experience with a touch color screen. You hold your phone to it and. And it comes back with rich information and that changed everything. Not to mention the distribution with the itunes store. So you start the company in 99 but the iPhone doesn't come out till 2007. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, either way. Yeah. So you're just chewing glass the whole time or was there any. Was there signs of life? No, no signs of life. I can show you a chart of time with music or Shazams. And so we were flatlining and when we were running the consumer business we were bleeding cash. So you had raised some money. We raised some money. The truth or the unknown story about Shazam is that around 2002 or 2003? I realized that there were big companies that actually needed music recognition for royalty tracking. Think of companies like BMI or ascap. And so I started cutting multi million dollar licenses with them. And so whilst we're raking in money on the business side, we were kind of quickly losing it on the consumer side. And then the iPhone came along, things changed. Walk me through the anatomy of one of those BMI deals. Where are they identifying music? Are they going to a bar and seeing that a song is being played and then they hit the bar up for entertainment? How does that actually work? Yeah, or just radio. Right. So rewind the clock back 20 years and you're an artist, you get paid to the extent that your song is being played on the radio. And the way that was done back then was sampling, literally pen and paper. You put a few college students in a warehouse and you let them sample to a few hours of music. You write it down. So. So sampling unfortunately doesn't work well if you're a small time artist because you're never going to show up in the artist. So they had a lot of complaints. They had to go from a sample survey to a consensus survey. That's what Shazam did in an industrial setting for them. Not every single song airwaved on, say the 2,000 radio stations in the United States was accounted for and royalties could be paid out. Did you have a direct link to the radio stations or were you receiving the radio waves? You take it from the radio waves. We still do that today for Tatari, by the way. Wow. Okay, so you had to set up radio antennas in every market then as well, and then encode that into a database that you could access over the Internet. Was that what was going on? Sure. We didn't place the antenna. This is kind of like equipment that you can lease. Okay, so you say I want to track Boston. Let me go lease an antenna in Boston. I will get a feed that then I can through the system on the server. Yeah, yeah, that part is easy. Yeah, it doesn't really sound that easy to say, but here's a part I actually quickly want to see. We talk a little about Shazami. I'll quickly share is that Shazami is a company that never should have existed. Because ultimately it was a coming together of four concepts, each improbable in their own right. We had to build the largest database of music in digital format to have the reference track in the year 2000. We had to invent the algorithm. Music recognition like we do for Shazam didn't exist yet. When we had the algorithm, we had to find a computer cluster to run it on. There was no Google Cloud or aws, so we had to came into the office. We were littered with screws and bolts and equipment on the floor. And then four, like I just alluded to, we had to get all the mobile operators on board to get this thing going. So even if I'm generous, I'm giving each of those four 10% probability. You compound them together. I'm probably going to drop a decimal here, but the chance of Shazam surviving and existing Today is what, 0.001%? Something like that. Crazy story Tatari was a whole lot easier. Okay, interesting. Well, to close the Shazam Story, talk about the decision to work with Apple. The company was sold to Apple, Right. But why? What was the motivation? What was the potential? Why was the right time? Yeah, I mean, I always say that Apple bought Shazam for a song, but I think at that time, Apple wanted to build its own Apple Music subscription service. And Shazam is incredible legion to that. You recognize the song, instead of buying or downloading the song, subscribe to Apple Music. And so that was, you know, in the business of music streaming, your true Hochev said, licensing the content is always variable to your revenue. And that's not a true cost of goods sold. Your true cost is user acquisition. And so Shazam Cave Apple that Trojan horse to get in there. Yeah. What was the. What were the secrets to user acquisition at Shazam? I mean, I feel like I must have found out about it from some tech blog talking about the coolest new apps or something. But what was the funnel? Three words, blood, sweat and tears. No kidding. It was difficult, right? As I mentioned, those first few years, we flatlined because nobody figured out about it. And it was a clunky experience. When the iPhone launched and they made right. They had to showcase the power of that device. Not to mention when the itunes store launched and they needed to fill it with great apps, we were front and center. That was our launching point. And it was such a differentiated app. There were so many apps for games and so many apps for 10 different Calculator, Flashlight, task tracking apps. It was only Shazam. I make it sound like as if we got incredibly lucky, but let's be realistic. We had to wait five years in the dark alleys for that to happen. So I feel like we earned it. Yeah, it's fun. We had Roger Lynn Chan, who was the CEO of Pandora, last week, and for me as a kid, Shazam and Pandora were the two magical Technology experiences like, so memorable. Going from, you know, you're listening to the radio, you hear a song. Google even Googling lyrics back then didn't work very well. You could. Nowadays you can string together three or four, five words and probably get the track and you have a phone right there. But back then, if you would do three or four words together, it wouldn't find the right song. And so just like going from having those moments where you hear a song, you love it and then it's just gone forever. Or maybe you hope you hear it on the radio again and you kind of catch something about who the artist is. I remember at one point it got so good there was an auto mode that you could turn on, leave it in your pocket if you're at a bar or something, and it would, at the end of the night show you the full playlist, every song that it detected. And you also had noticed that at the end of the night you would have a depleted battery. We've gotten better at those things. But there are some fantastic memories and some of those songs live on in playlists that I would listen to to this day. And to me, it's more than just knowing what the song is. It's about creating your playlist, knowing what to listen to right at the time. Yeah. So talk about your. Did you spend a lot of time at Apple? Were you there at all? Or did you move on immediately? Yeah, no. So I left kind of the company operationally around 2004. I joined Google. I was one of the early people at YouTube. Incredible ride, incredible experience. I then left and launched a product called TrueCar, actually here in LA. So I can live here. TrueCar did that for a few years, then moved back up north, was at another startup. We got acquired by yahoo eventually in 2016. I started my current company, Tatari, which we kind of started this whole conversation with. Yeah. So tell us it's been nine years now. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about the idea for Tatari. The timing, the blood, sweat and tears. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or lack thereof. Yeah. I think the kind of the idea for most startups comes from personal experiences. Right. Shazam. Not knowing what the song is. Truecar being afraid of going to the dealership. Tatari was actually the TV advertising experience which I witnessed at TrueCar. Yeah, not great, right? Sure. And so I knew we could do better. We started with TV measurement. Why? Because if you can measure TV campaigns and its effectiveness better, then we can optimize and make it run better. We quickly realized that there was an opportunity for injecting technology and data science in the buying process as well. You put the two together, buying and measurement. It makes for what the TARI is today. So we are 300 people strong. We're a US company. We're doing well over $100 million in net revenue. Right. And that's not media. That would be an order of market much higher. We've been profitable from day number one and been mostly self funded. Amazing. Can I get the gong for that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hit it yourself. Hit it yourself. You're here. There we go. Smash the gong. That's great. So you mentioned something. Shazam. Which is like starting a business in a sort of a troubled industry during the time of the music industry was struggling. Tatari looks very obvious in hindsight, but maybe some entrepreneurs wouldn't go into that because they're like TV's dead, right? This idea. And you were probably looking at sort of the global TV advertising spend and to my knowledge it's still growing, right? It is. All the modestly modest. Modest. Unlike you know, certain other media. But everyone, I mean if you just ask a random tech person, they'll be like it's down 20% every year and it's going to be zero in two years. Like that's the default assumption. Let's say unlike print and read, it's holding up nicely in the United states at about $90 billion per year. What's happening inside is this massive transformation out of, you know, cable or and broadcast TV and to streaming. I mean you experience this yourself every day. That is again the good timing component. Yes, for sure. I did see that. Right. I love your one liner TV as that starting this company in the Silicon Valley in San Francisco, for whom TV was a big. No, no. I mean I had to hear this many, many times. It's actually one of the reasons why I actually didn't really raise money for this company. Because I don't think that Sandhill would have given me those valuations we just heard. So sometimes it'd be better lucky than good. No, but it creates an opportunity, you know that you're not going to get the 50 other ultra talented teams going after the same problem. That has changed since then. But yeah, but that's good. Competition is good. Competition keeps you sharp, keeps you going, gets the best out of you. That's all cool. So talk about the early measurement struggles. Like if I'm running a TV ad campaign for the super bowl or NBC Sports or something like why can't I just call them and say tell me exactly what happened why don't they have the data? Is it a trust issue? Is it a measurement issue? Like what, what was the market opportunity? Yeah, let's unpack those. Because you're kind of referring to measurement and then the buying process. Sure, sure. So let's talk about the measurement. The way in which TV advertising has always been measured traditionally was via Nielsen. Nielsen ratings. Right. Yeah. The success of my campaign is defined by the extent to which I reach an audience. Yeah. Now, as newer brands came to TV with digital experience, they want more. They want to know the effectiveness to what extent has my campaign driven signups or installs of my apps or downloads of my products, whichever it is. Ltv. Yeah. Or LTV funnels that stuck around for a long time. And so that was actually one of the first things we did. The first thing we did was bring about a different type of measurement for tv. That outcome measurement, not the kind of the audience measurement. How do you do it? Built invent from scratch. My co founder just look at as many data sets that we can find and try to make the most out of it. And there's both deterministic and probabilistic approaches to this. A whole lot of algorithms and math to it. It's never ending. It's a little bit, I refer to it like the large language models or the Google search algorithm. Every month or two or three, we find a little tweak and then we release an update. And so it definitely has spoken to the smaller brands because when we now bring a smaller brand to tv, I don't like Spot and Tango. I don't know what their marketing campaigns are, but they're definitely heavy in digital. When they first get into tv, they would like to see a measurement that they compare on an apples to apples basis to. Exactly right. And once they get in and they grow and they gain confidence, then they can switch to that Nielsen recipe, which isn't necessarily bad, but it's more destined for the bigger brands. Do I create my reach and awareness? And so we'll do both. We'll do both continuously. The name of the game in the world of TV advertising is scaling up. Some of our brands start with. Actually, Sorry, most of our brands start with as little as $50,000 or $100,000. Last year we placed four or five brands in the Super Bowl. Right. Those are $50 million plus tickets. And these are all brands that we kind of took through that journey. So that's the. Maybe it's a good dovetail then into the buying experience. Yeah. Look, there's a Still of what they say, analog practices in tv, the super bowl, emails and phone calls. Yep, yep. That's how you buy it. There's obviously an incredible drive for this concept of programmatic in TV advertising. I will say this, and I'm not sure if I'm opening a can of worms here. I don't think it's the right model. Right. Programmatic. Ultimately, the TV advertising market and the supply of ad inventory is very concentrated. 90% of all the impressions of the ad impressions typically come from the top 10 publishers. Is what the three of us watch on TV. The big names, Disney, Peacock and Alai. And so if you have such concentration and supply, it really doesn't make sense to apply digital principles and technology that is programmatic to get into it. You're much better off with direct integrations. And so that's where we will differ a lot from the industry. Again, it works better for the publishers, it works better for the brands. You don't have the intermediaries, you don't have the. Just to repeat that back to you, basically, if I'm ESPN or one of the platforms, I want to know that a certain brand is allocating $5 million a year to my. Yep. To spend with me. And then you're just sort of like allocating that. It's not like they want to sell each individual slot for, you know, $10,000 here, $20,000 here, that kind of thing. That's the ideal. But that's, that's not always feasible. Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. How is, how is AI changing the, the TV ad buying space? And what I, what I'm interested in particularly is as the cost of generating new creative comes down, that feels like that could be a tailwind to more programmatic ad buying on TV. At the same time, there's something about if Matthew McConaughey is in the Salesforce ad or MrBeast is in the Salesforce ad. At the super bowl everyone saw the same ad. And so the fact that it's not personalized actually ads as a little kicker on top. Is that a mitigating factor? How are you assessing the tensions between things? Let me answer that part first and then I'll get to AI. Ultimately, you refer to targeting. Targeting is good. But always realize it's a double edged sword because the more you target, the smaller your audience become. And then you just find one person. Ultimately what you want to achieve with TV is finding people who've never heard about your product and service. Right. It's actually sometimes less about targeting, but it's about driving reach and awareness and generating demand. Not so much harvesting through targeting. Right. And so targeting is good, but it's more of a kind of like a feature. It's not the core strategy of finding a new audience. So I would say that AI, I mean, like, gosh, you know, like ad tech was primed for AI, right, because it lives on data. And look, I'll be honest, I think we got a little lucky when it comes to AI as a company. This is like three, four years ago as we grew so fast, we had to completely kind of like move out of a backend technology called redshift into databricks. Oh, interesting. Monstrous. But what it meant is that by the time the large language models became available, we were running hot. We were so ready for it. Oh, interesting. So in plain English, what does it mean as a Tatari client? Well, we can plan campaigns with technology and AI built on data sets and rich history and seconds with deadly accuracy across way more buying entities than a human being ever could do. If you're a human buyer and you've got to choose out of 40,000 linear network rotation entities and 10,000 streaming opportunities, you can't compute this in your head for a computer. This is, this is easy, right? And so AI and media planning, this is how we operate today. We actually, we announced this about a year ago. We pretty much doubled our revenue with the same amount of people with tools like that. We're kind of wondering, can we go to a four day work week now on the back of AI? The next thing out there is really leveraging AI in the media execution process. Right. Rather than running auctions, tens or hundreds of thousands of auctions a second to get the best impressions. Maybe we don't run auctions, but we use AI to pick the ones that we believe are most fitting based on the data and the knowledge in the database. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Do you have any interaction or opportunity with some of the newer first party advertisers? We talked to the president of advertising at Netflix and they at one point were partnering with an ad buyer. Now it feels very homegrown. Is there an opportunity for these other platforms? As time and attention shifts onto the YouTubes of the world, the metas of the world, is there a world where you play into that? Those companies, I think you're referring to the walled gardens. Yeah, the walled gardens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've got a name. You have a good drill? We've got a name for them, yes. Do you have a drill that can drill through the wall of the walled garden look, I mean ultimately, like there are certain, I think they're 10, 15% of all kind of viewership today. And of course we have products and services that lean into it. What's missing, and it's less for us, but it's more for the brands, is the data that allows us to bring that measurement about, close the loop as we refer to it. And so what we've seen over the years is that many of the new or larger publishers, they manifest themselves as a walled garden, but then they see that, hey, if I show a little bit of data that enables the measurement, then I get more advertisers, it drives more media and I get the flywheel going. So we're hopeful that will change over the years as brands. YouTube is no longer a website or an app. It's a TV channel. So you gotta be there, even if certain components aren't as fully built out as we would want it to be. Yeah, Jordy, are there any very odd random question. Are there any tv, Are there any TV networks that are effectively just an infinite feed of short videos that people scroll through like, like a vertical video? Because I can imagine you could make some pretty compelling television. Just I saw, I saw someone screen shared their TikTok or Instagram Reels in a theater and people showed up to watch in the theater. Mostly a prank, mostly a stunt, but a very funny social experiment. Look, when Twitch was first explained to me and you know, like, oh yeah, like I thought that was the silliest thing ever. Video games on the intern? Maybe not such an odd question. I mean, there's been said that TikTok would go to TV. That all makes a lot of sense. What is TV? It's really is, is as an advertiser, what is TV for? An advertiser is the ability to show your company, right? And a rich media, audio, visual, not with a few characters, but 15 to 30 seconds. Above all, to a consumer who is in a laid back experience, most likely accepting of the ads, right? And then, not to mention the last but most important piece, the largest audience possible, spending the most time, the reach of TV is bigger of that on say Instagram. But when people spend an average of 30 minutes per day on Instagram, they will spend three and a half hours and growing on TV every day. That's crazy. As an advertiser. Yeah, it is. You've got to be there. The debate around phone addiction has completely given TV air cover, you know, because when I, when I, when I was, you know, 10, 10 years ago, it was the average American spends X amount of time watching TV super stickers in the 80s and 90s. TV rots your brain. Oh yeah. My parents would give me hell for watching mtv. That would be the best thing. If I could only convince my teenage daughters to watch MTV instead of TikTok, I'd be so much happier. Yeah, you just don't like a business wall. You just want the Amora. I want more inventory. That's not about. It's not about any of the brain rot. It's a grassroots movement. Where do you see the business going? You said that you're lightly capitalized, haven't raised a lot of money. Where do you see this? Where do you see taking the business? Financially? Yeah, financially. I mean, look, we. I mean I can share this. We have a very clear plan to more than double the business in the next two and a half years. We started this plan actually like six months ago. Actually kind of exceeding the plan right now. We got to work it out. If I look back at my other businesses, Shazam or truecar, sometimes we would sit there at the beginning of the year planning product and we'd stare at each other, not necessarily knowing what to do or what would stick. Tatari is a little bit the opposite. We got more that we can chew off and we know we can monetize it all. So. So we are working very hard and so, yeah, I think we know exactly what we're doing. Maybe somewhat related outside Tatari, which could be interesting for the viewer or the listener to hear, is that I do believe that there is. It's not a collision, but a true conversion of influencer media and TV on the horizon. Stupid fly. The fly is terrorizing us. One fly versus so brutal. Because, you know, a great job. I was ready for that. But right, because look, as little as 10 years ago when you launched a TV advertising campaign, he had one creative, 30 seconds. He would spend a lot of time on that and emotional capital. What is that? Best creative. And nowadays you launch with 10 creatives and you see which performs best. If you look at influencer media, well, they create 100 videos, toss them all out, find out which one is best, and that's the winner. Well, you can easily see how these hundred influencer videos will now cross pollute into tv. So I think there is an incredible moment on the horizon for us in terms of conversions of two types of media. Well, thank you. Great to meet you. Thanks for having me, guys. That's our show, folks. Leave us 5 stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter@tvpn.com and we will see you tomorrow at 11am sharp. Love you. Goodbye.

Double kill. Five cups. Raw. Cook is. Team deathmatch. We are experts. Triple blaze. Let's just roll, right. Market clearing order Inbo. Come on, get up. You're surrounded by gentlemen. Hold your position. Strike 1. Strike 2. Activate. Go to retriever Road. Trust. Market clearing order inbound. Vibe. Founder, You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, May 19, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Realm Temple Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Google I O starts today and the stock is ripping. I think people might have missed this if you haven't been watching closely, but Google is up 140% in the last year. Absolute ripper. It's almost a $5 trillion company now. 4.6. Yeah, I was really confused what chart you're reading because it's down 1.3% today. Today. Okay. No, it is up. It is up, we think in years, decades. Yes, yes. And yeah, they pulled in just shy of $110 billion revenue last quarter and they're in a great position for the next era of the AI story. So GCP is growing faster than AWS and Azure. Wall street has basically fully repriced the company as a full stack AI winner. That's the new narrative across Google Cloud. Google search, Gemini, the models, DeepMind, everything that they're doing. So long gone are the concerns about Google's search weakness because even core Google search is showing resiliency. Google search, the business continues to grow. Queries are at an all time high. They're not reporting exact numbers of queries, but Sundar said that in the last call that it's at an all time high, certainly not going down. And search and other revenue, which is their bucket There is up 19% year over year, so holding up well. And Google I owe, generally offers consumers launches or previews of tons of new products. I'm getting called previews of tons of new products and features. And the Verge was saying that there might be some like AI fatigue, which is maybe an overstatement given that people are getting booed. Actually, the former CEO of Google. Yeah, understatement, giving that. The former CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, was booed off stage at a commencement speech. And so that is a good point. But the people that watch Google IO, the Google Core consumers, they are fans of this stuff. I think they're generally pro AI, excited about new features. Some of the new features that we'll show are very, very cool. But there is this goal of being ambient and useful instead of pushy and desperate. Many Google experiences now have duplicative Gemini panels. And I was writing this update in a Google Doc and I noticed that I had two Gemini stars. Basically one Gemini star in my Doc and then another in the Chrome browser that I'm using to load Google Docs. And it's a really hilarious outcome because I was writing this in sort of like a half window to the side of the screen. And if I open both Gemini panels, the Google Doc disappears entirely and I'm just left with two chat boxes to interface with the Google Doc, which I don't really use AI in the actual Google Doc, I just kind of write it. But there's stuff it everywhere and then actually make it useful, make it ambient, make it delightful. And so that is, I think, what consumers are looking for more than just an AI button in a new place. But they're certainly showing that already. And so the new Gemini video model looks incredible. We'll play some videos of that and there will be tons of delightful experiments that may turn out to be blockbuster products or they may get shelved by year end. That's kind of the beauty of Google's culture, is that they have plenty of opportunity for experimentation. We sort of. Some people remember all of the things that are in the Google graveyard, but most people just remember Gemini and whatnot. So yeah, we can play this video with sound because the sound is. Features eight cylinders arranged in a V shape, driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth, massive. That's pure mechanical genius at work. A V8 engine features eight cylinders. So I feel like this got rid. I mean, the video fidelity is incredibly high quality. There's no six fingers. It looks hd, the motion looks good, the lips are synced and I feel like they got rid of that hollow sound that you used to hear in AI video that where the audio was generated, still clock it, but it's a lot more subtle. It's really subtle. There is one weird thing in this where it says pure. He says deliver pure massive. And then it just cuts to the next scene. If you. That's pure mechanical genius. Go back. A V8 engine features eight cylinders arranged in a V shape driving a single crankshaft. They take turns firing to deliver smooth massive. That's purely smooth massive energy or smooth massive propulsion, something like that. So like it's crazy because you see these and you're like, ah. They're like, this is it. Like it's done. Like this is fully, fully done. And then there's just like we're at 99.9% now and I want to be at 99.999%. Also, like, this is kind of a nitpick, but isn't that a V6, right? Oh, is it? Wait, play the video again. Let's see. I want to see if it's a V6 or V8, because when I look at those graphics, I think, okay, let's count the cylinders. Oh, yeah, no, no, it looks like an 8. It looks like 8 cylinders in the back. No, count them up. I can't really tell. But, yeah, it's odd. It's so passive. But I don't know. Is this good for video explainer channels on YouTube, bad for video explainer channels on YouTube? Certainly. Commoditizing the production of video explainers. I've seen a lot of these video explainers that will show you, like, inside of a rocket or inside of an RPG or an AK47 or Glock, and those get, like, tens of millions of views. They can be viewed in any language, but they're very intense from a CGI perspective. You have to go and model every little detail, every pin in the weapon or whatever the object is that's being visualized in this particular video explainer close to being on command. And then the question is, where does the value sit? If you prompt YouTube and you ask for a video explainer of a chair, break it down, explode it, show me the innards. Will it just do it on demand for you? Will it just generate that, or will this still sit below the creator's? Yeah, I've always had the question, at what point do you go to YouTube and there's just a series of videos waiting for you that were generated based on your interests. Right. Sometimes you might be going to YouTube because your favorite sports team just played and you want some analysis on the game or, you know, your favorite fighter or something like that, or some news is happening. And it doesn't seem like we're that far from a future where you land on YouTube and YouTube is just, again, fully generated. A video based on what it knows about your interests. That said, that would cause potentially creator strike because it's YouTube starting to compete against their own, you know, content producers on the platform. Yeah. So we'll see. Yeah. At least in the interim, it feels like the dawn of stock footage. YouTubers have been creating these, have been using these tools for a long time. They have been getting cheaper. Even the. The CGI world has become increasingly commoditized every year as you get more to templates and. And the tools become cheaper. You used to have to pay Thousands and thousands of dollars for a license of Cinema 4D or 3DS Max to render anything. Now Blender is open source and free and there are tons of Blender artists out there with custom packs. But yes, this is a new capability and it'll be interesting to see how this gets integrated, what the pushback is like how clockable it is once it's actually in the hands of creators and they are pushing it out. Let's watch this other science explainer from the timeline. Gemini Omni explains science with video. Thanks a lot for this, says Czechosloua. Now every student will get a custom video for the topic of science and math. I'm so happy like while typing. I want to see all your actions to this. I don't know. This is about photosynthesis, I think every color of the rainbow. As this light enters our atmosphere, it crashes into molecules of nitrogen and oxygen. This triggers a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering. Because gas molecules are tiny, they affect shorter wavelengths much more than longer ones. Blue light has a very short wavelength, so it's scattered in every direction, filling the sky with color. Meanwhile, longer red wavelengths pass through the wall. There has been a big push on YouTube for like as people ask questions like they would go to Google and say like how do I fix this particular washing machine? You type in the number of the washing machine and it would take you to not just a single video about someone fixing that washing machine, but the actual section in the video with the solution to the exact problem you had and being able to read a manual and constitute a video on the fly of exactly that is pretty incredible. And you can imagine satisfies that use case very, very quickly. And then of course there will just be entertainment and all sorts of different use cases. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, says introducing Gemini Omni. Omni is our new model that can create anything from any input, starting with video. Starting with video. Think Nanobanana but for video. Okay, yeah, let's play this because there's some amazing like different styles here going on. I wonder if those if that motion graphic transition was created in Omni because that's something that you'd normally bump out to after effects for or like the edit here. I wonder if you'll be able to upload multiple clips and have it edited together to the beat of a song that you pick or will it be able to AI generate a video and then match the footage to the beat of the video. So it says give it anything. So I think you could potentially give it A bunch of videos and it could edit it together into a vibreal, something like that. Swap style, swap environment, swap angle. They've been having a lot of fun with this. Everyone is very, very excited about this. The other news out of Google today is Gemini 3.5 Flash, our most powerful model to date. It pushes the frontier of intelligence, speed and cost, putting 3.5 flash in a class of its own. We spent the last six months making sure Flash is great for real world use cases. It's the strongest agentic coding model yet from Google. It delivers frontier level performance at 4x the speed of comparable frontier models, often at less than half the cost. So dominating the Pareto frontier has been the goal for a long time. The speed is being heralded as a key feature. Google just showed a demo of Gemini flash running between 600 and 1400 tokens per second on TPU8i. It peaked out around 1480 tokens per second with an average of around 800 tokens per second. So very, very, very, very fast. The flip side is it's more expensive than previous Flash models. But that's been the trend with smart, smarter intelligence for a while. So investors are focused across three key areas. Not so much the consumer story, more the next Gemini model. So where this fits in and then what adoption and diffusion looks like, how Google through Google Cloud will be getting this out into enterprises, into coding agents. Obviously they have anti gravity, but Gemini CLI has not seen as much traction and so better model might pull that forward, might wind up seeing more traction there. Overall I think token generation at Google is up 7x year over year, which seems great. It's unclear how much of that is because there's more reasoning happening, but given the fact that the Gemini models are sort of stuffed all over the product services, I'm not surprised that there's massive growth. That makes a lot of sense on the core Gemini model. Everyone was wondering are we getting 4.3.5 launched and there's a stage rollout with Flash going first. Andrew Curran had an interesting post here talking about the lack of vague posting. The DeepMind folks have not been vague posting about the new Gemini model, so he did some vague posting for them. He says at this point everyone knows it's arriving tomorrow along with their personal agent named Spark. This reticence of course can be interpreted in many ways. I'm choosing to interpret it in accordance with my nature. I think they trained the largest model they've ever successfully trained, possibly the largest one anyone ever has, and something unexpected emerged at scale. They had their Mythos moment, but not in the same way Anthropic did. Gemini has always been a very different model from Claude. The benchmarks will go out tonight under embargo. They probably already are, but I don't think they will fully reflect what I'm talking about. I think they hit something. Even they weren't aiming for something that surprised them. If I'm right, that surprise will be part of tomorrow's show. We shall find out together in the morning. I don't think tomorrow's show because IO is a number of days and there's a whole host of different announcements that could. That could happen in the interim. There's a lot of other things going on. Yeah. Has anyone been vague posting around, will there be a 3.5Pro this week? Yeah, that's going to happen over the course of the next few days. They just started with Flash. Okay. Starting with Flash. Cool. And then they also announced Spark. Yes. Which is a personal agent that lives in anti gravity. Oh, okay. It's my understanding. Oh, interesting. And so trying to make. When I hear personal agent, I think more like Gemini app, Google search, like Gmail, like the very like the consumer product services. I think. Well, I guess I just think personal and I think consumer. But given how much people are using Codex cloud code for like, personal, like things like just because writing code creates a more dynamic agentic surface. Open claw. We saw all of this. It's helpful to have something running on a MacBook Pro that can go around and find different stuff. Yeah. Just Some additional context. 3.5 Pro is coming out next month. Next month. So not this week. A little bit of a delay there. I wonder, I wonder what else is in the bag of like, Mythos, like surprises. Because the cybersecurity one was like sort of predicted by the AI 2027. I feel like Bio is next. Like, it feels like, okay, we're tested a bunch of stuff and we talked to a bunch of scientists and like this thing can come up with like super viruses and it's really scary. So we got to give it to all the pharmaceutical companies in advance. And like Moderna gets it and creates like antiviruses or something like that. I don't know what else, but I'm sure there will be surprises. There always are in the AI era. So from, from an investor perspective, obviously I don't think Google IO is necessarily the correct forum for discussion of a Mythos level breakthrough or surprising new emerging capabilities. I would just be surprised if that's where you stand on stage and you say hey, we had this crazy breakthrough. It's a more serious thing if you're talking about new capabilities. But given the talent and resources of the DeepMind team TPU, I think that there's just a lot of broad optimism about the next iteration of Gemini. They've hired a bunch of people, they have a bunch of surface area to deploy this into, so no one's expecting like the model to underperform. Agenda commerce will also be top of mind for investors since messaging around the Google, the Gemini app has sort of strayed away from advertising as an immediate monetization engine. I think Demis said that at Davos, Google has a lot of capabilities when it comes to closing the consumer shopping loop. Like they have Google Shopping. They have a bunch of hooks into all sorts of different e commerce services. They have massive product catalogs. People search for stuff on Google all the time to buy. But e commerce customer behavior seems to be lagging expectations here. Generally. There's been a lot of announcements from companies around agentic shopping protocols and the numbers. Whenever we dig into them, we're always like is it going to get to 1% this year? Are we going to see? And everyone's talking about the growth, which means we're growing from zero, obviously. Obviously. Because this didn't exist. But where is it going? Will Google have something to show here? Will they have some sort of demo of a new user experience, a new flow for agentic commerce that results in a faster takeoff of that adoption of that behavior? Personally, I've done a ton of research about products through LLMs, but I pretty much always hesitate to have AI fully process the checkout. And there's a few reasons like Apple pay is pretty good, pretty seamless. Shopify saves all my annoying info. Autofill is also not that bad. It's usually pretty good in whatever native. If I'm in Chrome on Mac or I'm on Safari on iPhone, it's usually pretty good. And then I feel like I still like reality Checking carts before clicking pay we talked to Joanna Stern about this too, where she was talking about having an AI agent assemble a cart of even like something like groceries. But then she will be the one to actually go to the hydrated final link with the cookie and then go and validate everything before clicking pay. The last focus area for investors generally is tpu. There's been a lot of back and forth around. Are too many of the TPUs going anthropic? Are too many of them? Are they sitting idle at DeepMind? What's going on with The TPU and what are the margin structure? How is revenue booked around tpu? How is the backlog accounted for? These are questions that that investors on Wall street are asking. I don't think we'll get answers at I O, but investors will be watching for anything that sort of contextualizes the shape of Google's TPU business and their plans over the next few years. And so as I mentioned yesterday on the show, we had a lovely conversation with Joanna Stern from thenewthings.com and the author of I Am Not a Robot. And we had lots of fun takes about like the AI tools that I think most of us have interacted with. Everyone's use used agents. Everyone's sort of felt what it's like to talk to a chatbot. But one place where she went deeper than I think most consumers and like AI fans have is in the wearables because she was wearing that recording device consistently. And she maintains that like humanoids are farther away. You need a lot more training data. The AI chat apps are here. We already know they're diffused. Waymo is now boring. But the next big wave she's sort of predicting is in the next few years. Wearables will have like a big moment and everyone will be sort of adopting these and contending with them. And it is interesting how, you know, we talk about a capability overhang in the enterprise with AI deployments and that's why the big labs are partnering with consulting firms and private equity groups to get AI installed into large corporations. There's even more of a capability overhang in consumer consumer hardware. Apple iterates extremely methodically. You know, they made a big story about Apple intelligence. Was that just one year ago? I guess that was one year ago because WWDC is in a few weeks, but feels like longer than that they had. I just remember they did a global billboard campaign for Apple Intelligence. Yeah. But anyway, like the actually changing anything in hardware takes Apple a long time. They still haven't launched a folding phone. They take their time to deliver a great product at the right time. And then if you're a challenger and you just want to manufacture new devices at scale that takes years to ramp up. And then you also have to distribute, sell. It's not one click away. It's go to the store or wait for the mail. And then hardware decisions that get made around certain AI workflows can potentially be obsolete in months is the underlying technology technology changes. So you could, you could build a device that assumes that, you know, LLMs are the end State and then reasoning models come and you're not set up for that. Potentially on device compute could change. It's unclear. And so you, you, you don't want to get locked in these things. And you were talking about the humane AI pin, how that maybe could have been successful at Apple, even the R1. I think like. Well, my, my main point was that if that was an internal project at a bigger company, just showing like a potential future state for consumer hardware. Yeah. It would have been an amazing demo. Yeah. Probably been able to receive more funding at let's say a hyperscaler. Yeah. As a standalone company. Yeah. Sales come in, people don't like the product and then nobody's willing to give them more money. Yeah. I mean you look at how many shots on Gold Mark Zuckerberg has taken with the Meta Ray ban displays and Meta Ray bans, like that was something that I would be surprised if you look back at the R and D cost, the manufacturing cost, the early sales figures of the version 1 of the meta Ray bans and it's off to the races. Like he clearly said, you know what, I'm going to double down on this for years. We're going to continue to invest in this, get this to a place where it can actually become known, become a product that people consider. When I show them another ad, they'll consider it because they've seen it, maybe they've tried it. Maybe I went skiing with someone who had a pair and they were talking, they're sending text messages. And so just familiarity with the product takes time. And Google's had some fun swings at these preview emerging hardware platforms. Google Glass, I mean, way ahead of its time. We're now there with the Meta Ray ban displays, but even those are not selling by the millions and millions. They're very early stage. Google Cardboard, I don't know if you remember that one. This is you put your phone in a cardboard box that they send you and then you can put it on your face and use it as a VR headset. Whoa. Yeah, it was a tiny little, I think it was open source. Just like a fun preview of like how do we get more people to be able to watch 3D stereoscopic VR type content. Little experiment of how can we strap someone's phone to their face, basically serve the match. And then they also did the Samsung Galaxy Go at point blank range, which was. Yeah, you'd slot it into like a piece of hardware, but much cheaper than buying an Oculus at the time. Fitbit also sort of fits in there. There were previews of the new Google book and the Fitbit from last week and I'm excited about the possibility of a new swing from Google like being like the wild card headline that makes it out of IO this year. So anyway, are there any other Google I O posts? I mean like the actual conference is going on as we're doing the stream, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are announcements hitting the timeline right now. Yeah, there's. People are pulling some of the benchmarks comparing it on the AI Artificial Analysis Coding Index. Lee San Al Gaib says 3.5flash scores kind of low on coding index due to rough terminal bench hard scores. So I think the big question coming out of I O today is how do developers respond to the updates to anti gravity to 3.5flash? The speed is amazing. We know how much people care about that in just like day to day coding. But the model has to be able to perform so we'll see what people's reactions are and we'll see if. We'll see if Google can really start to ramp revenue on the Cogen side or still get exposure to that through Anthropic. It did come out yesterday that Demis is an angel in Anthropic himself. And I don't. Not super surprising, although less pushback. Yeah. When did they meet? I wonder what the story is there, how early he got in. He might be sitting on a bag. Well, who else is going to Anthropic? Andre Karpathy has gone from OpenAI to Tesla to Anthropic. I think he went back to OpenAI at one point in there. And Andre, a different account is pointing out this KMT general who defected and subsequently betrayed five different. Five different countries in Asia ending in Japan jumping around. He's seen it all certainly the world tour of. Of AI labs. I guess he. I guess Andrej Karpathi was never inside of X AI because he was sort of the precursor at Tesla. But yeah, Elon, he was poached by Elon. Did he work at Google in the early days? I feel like he might have been at Google before OpenAI. I don't know. I know that there were some people that got. Maybe it was Ilia. So he interned there. He interned there. So he's everywhere. He's got the Thanos rings, huge pickup and excited to see what they do together. He's apparently according to Alex Heath going to be working on basically rsi. Rsi? Yeah, continuing on his auto research project. Oh yeah, he's been doing RSI basically in the Open Source World Auto Research is open source, right? Yes. Okay. Yeah. I think you can read into this that it was effectively an acqui hire of the company he was working on, so. Oh, interesting. I don't. Yeah. I'm assuming he said he was going to get back to the education project that he was working on. Did he have. I thought he had, I thought he had raised for it. I don't think he did. Maybe not. I don't know. It's always helpful but that was a cool idea and I wonder how that fits in. It was always interesting to think about. Like you know LLMs are really good at education. I mean we're seeing that today with the, with Gemini Omni like it can generate a video for you. Now we haven't really pushed it to the limit. Like I wonder if you give it a PhD level problem, is it going to teach you as well as a great professor who has thought about all the different responses? Maybe it's not fully there but education certainly seems on the core path of the models. Whereas there are plenty of things that sit outside the core path in things with network effects and things that touch the real world and physical world world and all these different things. But just going to a computer and asking teach me something felt something, felt like something most of the AI models would get very, very good at because there's a lot of training data, there's a lot of open source educational materials, all the textbooks have been scanned. Wikipedia is in the models. There's so much information that's readily available. It isn't tightly held secrets that are hard to bring to bear in the pre training data. But one, one more thing out of IO that we forgot to cover. Google's new Synth ID framework that 11 Labs, OpenAI and Nvidia are joining forces. This is to help identify AI generated content basically creating a standard for across platforms so that yeah when you generate an asset 11 labs OpenAI omni it'll it should be auto detected by the different platforms. Yeah, I've seen that on X recently there's been a little tag that says like made with AI and but I feel like you can get around that if you screenshot it and well so I think the ones on X are just in the metadata. In the metadata you can actually change it like fairly easily. I don't think it's actually using like, like on, on nano banana images on GPT2 there are like watermarks. Yeah. You've seen these like weird patterns people posted. Yeah, I think subtle changes to the, to the saturation or, yeah, I think they've just been. It's just been metadata so far. Yeah. But, yeah, the trick with all of those is that, like, it's in theory, pretty easy to rip that out if you're running an advanced AI slop avoidance detection system or something. But just to know, okay, for the average poster, if this is an AI image, that's certainly helpful. But as you start bringing different assets and you bring in some stock footage, you bring in some AI footage, you blend them together, you're doing a lot of different things. You'll probably lose a little bit of that AI detection ability, but hopefully people aren't too annoyed by it. If it's used tastefully, I guess it shouldn't matter at the end of the day anyway. Do you think Spotify used AI to create their new disco ball icon? This was burning up the timeline this weekend. I was shocked at all the negative reactions to this icon. Me too, for a bunch of reasons. What's wrong with you? What's wrong with you? Seriously, if you don't like this. At first, it threw me off. I was like, where did my Spotify app go? Because it's too dark. Genius. I think it was genius. I opened up my phone and I was. And I was drawn to it. Immediately. My eyes jumped because I was like, something's wrong with my phone. Something's wrong with my home screen. Things don't look the way they normally look. It drew my eye. I saw. Oh, Spotify. Okay, look a little bit deeper. The icon looks a little bit different. The color's a little bit deeper. Oh, there's something else going on there. Peel back the onion. You see that there's a disco ball. And then, of course, that there is a meaning behind it. They didn't just. There's a whole. There's a whole reason why they did this. It's the 20th anniversary of the company and so lots of people complained, but party your party of the year. It's so funny because I don't. I don't know, prior to this, were people sitting around being like, wow, I really hope they never change the Spotify logo, even for a few weeks. I just love it so much. Yeah, right. I think it's fun. I think it's a nice change from, you know, the flat, minimalist logos that we've all grown accustomed to. Keep it. Yeah. So, yeah, let's go through some of the reactions. So Dylan said, I thought this was fun. I'm sure the complainers thought so, too. But when tapping an icon is second nature, after being citizens have used to it. I told my wife to cancel our subscription for so long. Even the slightest change in appearance can make you double take when searching for it. And that's annoying. When trying to open an app. Mass says that it's too. It's too dark. And so. Yeah, because turned up the. You're at the Disco John. Oh yeah. A disco ball would never look that bright in a nightclub. Okay. Yeah. I mean it is the black ball Knowers. Yeah. That's way too light. I like Notion played along. This is like really a testament to the power of Gen AI imagery these days. Every brand could like jump on this meme very quickly and it's hard to. It's so funny that I guess, you know, this still went super viral but even five years ago, if you could create an asset that was a 3D render, you almost automatically got attention because anybody could make them. But you needed to work with like a 3D artist. Yeah. Artists to do it and it take. It's not something you can do instantly. They have to figure, you know, actually render it can. I mean yeah, probably like a couple hours of work in cinema 4D. I mean getting the lighting right too and making sure that you're not have the wrong reflections on there. There's a bunch of nuance to actually getting this to look good. I think it's fun when I don't know the. The other brands like joining in on like a meme can be like done really poorly. This one seemed like it was fine. Yeah. Andy Asley had the best take. He said everyone complains about minimalist design until the company tries some. Until the company tries something fun and everyone reveals why all the companies have been following forced into minimalist. 66,000 likes on this. People really, really agreed. This is how I feel when people complain about cybertrucks being ugly. Like yes, but it's different. Of course not everyone is going to like it. Trying to get everyone to like things is how we wound up with all cars converging on the same colors and designs. Interesting. Yeah, that's a good point. I like the disco ball. Someone Nathan Halberstrad had a very nice comment. He said this is TVPN inspired, which I don't think it is. But the ARC may be long. But tech companies now appear to be universally bend to universally bend towards ape. I mean look at our. Look at our. Look at our. So we do have the globe and it was funny because. So you can go a little bit further. And I did this with our logo. I Was like, turn our logo into a disco ball. And it looked kind of the same because we sort of have the globe in there already. And so for all of like this meme, like sort of didn't work with us because I guess we have been taking that like 3D render aesthetic with the globe. Although ours is pixelated, not squares like on a disco ball, but there is a little bit of TVPN in the disco ball. What do you think of the TVPN disco ball logo? Should we run this for a while or has the trend already moved on? I like the globe. You like being global? Yeah, I think keep the globe with the pixelation, the dots. I think it works. The era of discomorphism has arrived, says Feachara. And this individual Disco ballified all of their apps, including X, Claude, Slack. What's that one? The App Store, I guess. Google Calendar. I don't know if you ran this. If you ran this full. Do people know why Spotify was a disco ball? This kind of loud, maximalist design is coming back whether you like it or not. You think so? Things go. And these things go in waves. Yeah, they go in waves. Coming back. Well, one story that we didn't get to yesterday that I want to discuss is the root cause of the fertility crisis. The Financial Times has a deep dive. Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once. And I was going back and forth with Tyler on this, trying to understand. And we'll see where you stand on this, Jordy. So the demographic landslide defining our era is gaining speed and terrain. In more than two thirds of the world's 195 countries, the average number of children born to each woman has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1. That keeps population stable without immigration. In 66 countries, the average is closer to 1 than 2 in some of the. In sum, the most common number of children born to each woman is zero. Both the pace and the breadth of the decline are defying expectations. Just five years ago, the UN predicted that there would be 350,000 births in South Korea in 2023. That was a 50% overestimate. The real figure was 2300 or 230,000. Sorry, not 2300. While high and middle income countries have been wrestling with demographic decline for more than half a century, the phenomenon has markedly accelerated in the past 10 years. Analysts of data ranging from population records to Google searches indicate that although many factors contribute to falling birth rates, the most recent plunge appears connected with our use of technology. And so this is the question that the Financial Times is Trying to answer should you put the blame on the recent decline in fertility on smartphones in particular? And so you can go through a whole bunch of the charts. It's a great article. But the final image is this image where they took a whole bunch of different countries and they adjusted the charts to show when did smartphones actually take off in that particular country? Because America had the iPhone moment in 2007, but different countries got wide smartphone adoption or 4G or actual rollout of cell phones or smartphones at different times. And so they adjusted all the figures. And when you look at this chart that Luis Giancarlo is sharing, the screenshot from the Financial Times, you'll see all of the charts seem to be very, very closely aligned at the exact same time. And so Louis Giancarlo says pushes back, though he says no smoking gun. But the preponderance of evidence points to smartphones, not economics, as the culprit. Yeah, there's the chart. It looks like a smoking gun. He says. It's not, though. He says in the US and UK, births fell first and fastest in areas that got 4G. Earliest birth rates were stable in the United States, UK, Australia until 2007, in France and Poland until 2009, Mexico and Indonesia until 2011, and Ghana, Nigeria and Senegal until 2023, 2013, 2015. Each of these inflection points matches local smartphone adoption. The younger the age group, the sharper the drop in person socializing among young adults is. Dropping in Singapore, in South Korea by 50% in 20 years. Effect is largest in culturally traditional societies. Middle East, Latin America, sub Saharan Africa. Decline holds across countries hit hard by GFC and those who were not hit by the global financial crisis. And so it teases out a bunch of the other possible explanations and puts the blame firmly on smartphones. But people have been pushing back. So Ross Douthit says on the latest round of fertility discourse. Friends don't let Friends share Chart 1 without the important context of Chart 2, which is the child survival adjustment. And so if you look at the total fertility rate, if you click on that left graph, you will see that the baby boom is remarkably pronounced there. But in fact, birth rates had been declining since the 1800s and had been falling steadily throughout the 19th. Is it the 19th century? Yes. And then in the 20th century, there was a brief baby boom in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and then the rate starts declining. I asked 5.5 Pro a bunch of questions about this, trying to dig in further, and it had a bunch of funny answers about how children Used to be economically valuable. And so people would have a lot of them to like, work the farm for them. And the economics of having a child flipped at a certain point where it became expensive and a net, sort of a net burden on the parent, as opposed to before it would be, you had a kid, you didn't have to pay for college, you didn't have to pay for education or really anything. And they would work the fields for you. And so it was advantageous to have as many children as possible. Ross Douthit also chimed in saying, by the way, another way to look at the second chart is that the baby boom was even more unexpected than generally understood. And also, if any major population repeated that kind of unexpectedness, now, they would dominate the human future. Interesting opportunity for different societies out there. Do you think children yearning for the minds is sort of like a survival mechanism? Right. They want to be economically valuable, they want to be productive. Right. They're saying we can carry our own weight. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it would be. I, I look at all these charts and I just think, it's over, it's over. But then I remind myself to never black pill. Yes. Never black pill, even if it's down. Never black pill. Never black pill. Never black pill, even if it's down only. Yeah, it's crazy. It's really crazy to look at these charts, looking at looks. I mean, if this were, you know, any animal in the wild, there would be huge amounts of fundraising happening to try to save the species. But when it's us. Yeah. We just sort of like, you know, see the chart and just keep scrolling. Yeah. I think it demands investigation to go a level deeper to understand. Okay, so diffusion of smartphones appears correlated with declines in fertility. But within populations, there are groups that have higher than average fertility and lower than average fertility. Of course, as any distribution suggests. And the question is, like, what are the high fertility members of the population doing on their phones differently? Like, are they using social media less. Are they using dating apps less? Are they texting their friends to come and hang out? Are they organized? Because the smartphones have diffused so widely that you need to cut in and understand for the groups that are above fertility rate, what are they doing differently? Obviously, the Amish are an interesting case study because they do have a higher than replacement rate fertility and they're not technology. They actually have adopted some cell phones, but not smartphones. So they will use the, you know, like a dumb phone, a flip phone to make phone calls occasionally. And I'm sure that, you know, these Are all gradations. There's not. No smartphones whatsoever. But certainly the Amish have steered away from technology and the fertility rate has stayed high. But even within the more modern enclaves or high smartphone adopters, I do wonder what else is going on, because there's a bunch of other interesting factors going on with childcare and the relation with how people spend their time. Yeah. Specifically with the. Also, what else happened around the launch of the iPhone? What, like massive economic disruption? Right. They controlled for that, though. That's the point of the Financial Times article, is to control for the economic gyrations of different countries. So there were some countries that were unaffected by the financial crisis. There were some countries that went through boom periods. There were some countries that went through economic contractions, and they were all sort of affected equally. Like even China. China has the lowest replacement rate, 1 per family or something like that. Whereas we're America's at like 1.8. Many societies, many modern societies at 1.6, all below replacement rate, but China's the lowest. But China's going through like an economic boom the entire time. Like GDP is up at 6, 7, 8, sometimes 10% a year. Like, they're not going through an economic contraction, certainly not from 2007 to today. And yet, although that is a little bit different because it's confounded by the one child policy, which obviously resulted in exactly one child. So they set their policy and they got their result, and now they have to sort of contend with that. The aging population. There's an article that Derek Thompson shared dad books, which this article and some publishing insiders used to describe Serious nonfiction books across biography, current affairs and business and economics are reportedly in free fall. With sales declining every year for the last years, the trend couldn't be clearer, said Jonathan Karp, former chief executive at Simon and Schuster and publisher of the new Simon 6 imprint. When we have internal meetings to talk about this problem, it always comes around to podcasts. Interesting saying podcasts are eating the dad book. Serious nonfiction journey. We gotta figure out who's doing this. We're all looking for the guy who did this. I do listen to a lot of podcasts. I still listen to audiobooks of serious nonfiction, but it is increasingly hard to find the time. Fedspeak says it's not podcasts, it's kids. Because the millennial generation, the Gen X generation, is spending basically twice as much time with kids based on their age. When you adjust for age. So this is a curve of time spent with children, honestly, every. Every time on the weekend. Yeah. You know, when I'm holding, you know, one or two of my children and I just stare at, you know, the stack of books from Amazon that pile up and I just look at them and think, okay, if I open one of those, I will get exactly three pages before I'm disrupted. Yeah. And so what was the silent generation doing? What were the baby boomers doing? Were they just like, kid, hit the mines, buddy. I gotta read. I gotta read some nonfiction. I don't know, I mean, the podcasts creep in, but it's. I listen to podcasts when I'm not at home, when I can't read. Yeah, right, exactly. Maybe self driving cars bullish for serious nonfiction because, oh, maybe people will get sick. Self driving cars are bullish for the infinite scroll. Bearish. They're bearish for the podcast and long form mediums book and the serious nonfiction, the dad book. Anyway, nothing can compete with the feed. Yes. Sorry to black belt, but it's over. Well, it's not over for our next guest because Jim Balosic from sencat Send is with us. He's in the waiting room and he has some exciting news about senkats. And welcome back to the show, Jim. How are you doing? Good, good. Thanks for having me. Thanks for hopping on short notice. Congratulations, reintroduce the company. And then I want to hear the news. Yeah. Send is a on demand manufacturer. Elastic capacity is what I was told. So we make stuff. This guy has VCs now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Buzzwords come, they come sheet. I can offer you capital and buzzwords. They're good at both. Yes, but I like it. I like it. Elastic capacity. Yeah. We do sheet metal and CNC and, you know, whatever. People need something made. We make it warm. Yeah. And the news today, what happened? I finally raised some money. How much money? 110 million. Boom. Massive. Let's go, let's go. It's sort of bittersweet, bittersweet moment because Send cut. Send is a company. You know, we've interviewed thousands of founders now and you have been, you know, out of all the conversations we've had, at the top of our list in terms of like, you know, companies and cultures and teams that we're bullish on and we always appreciated that you were doing it independently. But I'm sure you've raised for very good reasons and you have some excellent new partners and we're very excited for you. Yeah. I want to talk about the use of funds, the reasoning. But first, take me through the pitch that you received. Who did the round how did you meet them? Take us through the kind of story of the deal. So just through X, I got introduced to Patrick Collison, which was awesome. And he's like, oh, yeah, I've heard about your company. You guys sound really awesome. I'll invest. And I was like, well, that's amazing. Thank you. I was like, how does this work? Like, I don't know how investment works. And he was like, I'll just introduce you to a couple other people. So interesting. He's like, we can just use standard YC terms.

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