Google Earnings, Jensen Targeted in Chinese Spy Plot, Ice Cube Joins | Luke Igel, David Rader & Jared Allen, Jake Stauch, Jay Madheswaran, Arthur Querou

(02:59) - Google Earnings Recap (16:14) - Jensen Targeted in Chinese Spy Plot (25:25) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (34:19) - The Rise of Fake Wall Street Traders (43:21) - Luke Igel discusses Kino, a collaborative, browser-based video editor that lets teams and AI agents work together on shared timelines. He explains how Kino combines real footage, motion graphics, and generative AI while preserving the creative control artists need for professional video production. (54:17) - Ice Cube, a rapper, actor, entrepreneur, and co-founder and CEO of Big3, discusses creating the professional three-on-three basketball league to fill the summer sports gap. He explains its fast-paced rules, star talent, cultural appeal, and plans to expand globally using capital from its proposed public-market debut. (01:21:19) - David Rader & Jared Allen discuss investing in emerging sports as a founder and principal of Unisports Group. They explain the firm’s investment in The Curling Group and outlines curling’s growth potential through live events, sponsorships, extensive media coverage, social engagement, and expansion in the U. S. market. (01:43:17) - Jake Stauch discusses Serval’s $150 million funding round and its mission to replace legacy enterprise platforms with a secure, broad automation solution. He highlights strong enterprise adoption, cybersecurity investments, talent density, and the company’s ambitions to compete with ServiceNow while avoiding becoming a legacy provider itself. (01:48:27) - Jay Madheswaran discusses how Eve, where he is co-founder and CEO, uses AI to help plaintiff law firms serve more clients efficiently, from initial intake through case resolution. He explains that AI can expand access to legal representation by reducing labor constraints, while human attorneys, case managers, and paralegals remain essential until voice AI improves in latency and intelligence. (01:55:13) - Arthur Querou, founder of connected-TV advertising platform Vibe, discusses the company’s continued independence and growth following its acquisition by Walmart. He highlights Walmart Audiences, which uses commerce data to help performance marketers precisely target streaming-TV ads, and describes how Vibe and Walmart Connect are combining their expertise to make TV advertising more measurable and accessible to smaller brands. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Thursday, October 29th, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Altria, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  The capital of capital.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  What, why, why don't you, why do you sound weird today? Are you okay? What were you doing this weekend?

• 0:19Speaker 01

  What are you talking about, John? Oh, I was surfing this weekend.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Down in Malibu.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Having a good time down there.

• 0:24Speaker 00

  That's good.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. What do you mean?

• 0:25Speaker 00

  You, you, it seems like you're not.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  You sound different or something?

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, something's a little different. I don't know, I don't know where, where to place it, but uh, let me tell you about Ramp. I'll try and figure it out. Time is money saved, both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I was playing on my racing sim last night, so maybe I'm a bit tired.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Okay. Yeah, that must be it. That must be it.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  How's your phone doing?

• 0:50Speaker 00

  With the phone?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, my phone, it, it's feeling pretty good. What the heck?

• 0:55Speaker 00

  Who, what the?

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 0:57Speaker 00

  It looks like Tyler is wearing a perfect Jordy mask. Cause look at Tyler today. He looks exactly like Jordy. This is crazy. I'm so confused by what's going on right now. No, of course, uh, of course Tyler is wearing the, the Jordy mask, which is extremely freaky. When I ran into him this morning, I thought, I didn't clock it as Jordy actually initially. I, I just thought it was a guest who was here to hang out or say hi, but uh, it is bizarre. You can't really move your mouth that much, right?

• 1:27Speaker 01

  I can't really move my mouth. I can't breathe through my nose either. It's a bit hard. It's pretty uncomfortable to wear.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  But uh, but do a little spin because the back is pretty solid. Uh, they nailed the hair. I think they got it pretty good back there. And I think the sunglasses do a lot of the work. If you take out the sunglasses, you'll give everyone a jump scare.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. The eyes are.

• 1:47Speaker 01

  I gotta keep those on.

• 1:48Speaker 00

  You gotta keep the sunglasses on, but it's helpful because Jordy wears the sunglasses a lot on the show. So it works. I think we're going to sub the real Jordy back in. But uh, this is an A plus bit. I, I thoroughly enjoy this.

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Tyler forgot your laptop. Um, keep uh, keep it on, keep it on.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  It's so hard.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Tyler, uh, keep it on for the whole show. Cool?

• 2:12Speaker 00

  Do not do that.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  No, keep it on for the whole show.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Uh, we, we, we've tested these masks before and they are so uncomfortable. It feels like it's suffocating. It's absolutely, absolutely brutal. Uh, but it's a lot of fun. Uh, the chat's saying you got Botox over there. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical introduction for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Uh, chip wars going on. There's another spy. There was a spy at OpenAI. Now there's a spy tracking Jensen uh, over at Nvidia. Uh, the wars are, are waging. Google earnings is today. We have Ice Cube joining. We got lots of stuff going on today. Uh, can we start the Google earnings recap? And then we'll go into the, the Nvidia story. What do you think, Jordy?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Cool. So uh, Google stock is cratering. It's down 12 and a half percent. Earnings miss, rare. Um, and here are the results. So revenue consensus was a hundred and, a hundred and 28 billion. Uh, came in at a hundred and 27.6. Like uh, only a, a third of a percent miss down, but to the negative, you usually want to be beaten. These, these consensus estimates. Earnings per share, not nearly as good. Uh, 30% miss. Uh, they were expecting $3 a share, 301, came in at uh, 212. And so there was a little bit of nuance there because some of the earnings miss was related to owning SpaceX stock, which traded down in the interval. And so they had to take a little bit of a write down on that.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  But even if you factor that out, so that was an 8.7 billion loss that they technically took on the equity investments. Uh, that reduced EPS by 55 cents. And so even if you exclude that impact, EPS still would have been $2.67, still below the $3.01 that Wall Street was expecting. So um, you can, you can factor out that nuance and still get to a place where something went slightly awry. Uh, there's a lot of good stuff happening, a lot of, a lot of other uh, worries. And that's why the market's reacting the way it is. So the first key takeaway is that cloud is just a monster business. Um, there was very interesting reporting years ago in 2018, that back in 2017,

• 4:27Speaker 00

  uh, Larry Page had considered pulling the plug on Google Cloud. He was like, we're competing with AWS. There's two executives that were sort of fighting at the time. It's too much going on. Maybe we shouldn't even be in this business. Maybe we shouldn't even do cloud and have a cloud platform. Well, uh, that, it's a completely different world today because cloud is so important to the business. Revenue doubled to 30.7 billion. Operating profit tripled to 11.1 billion. Operating margin is at 36.2%. It's a fantastic business. If it were independent, it would uh, be worth an incredible amount of money. Hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion dollars right there just in that value. And so Google and Alphabet truly has become this diversified uh, portfolio of bets.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  Search is just one of them. They got YouTube. They also have uh, cloud, obviously. Um, so the cloud backlog now is $561 billion of companies, labs that have gone to them. We just saw this with OpenAI buying cloud and TPUs. Um, there is a lot of demand for their services. Uh, and what's interesting is that you can look at that number 561 billion, that's a ton. Is that over 10 years? So you know, we saw on the Anthropic S1, uh, some of these contracts go out, you know, till 2033, 2036. Uh, but 55% of that cloud backlog is expected to be recognized as revenue within two years. So even though you have this big number, you're getting half of that, 275 billion, something like that.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  Uh, over the next two years, that's pretty quick for a business that did 30.7 billion in revenue. Like you're getting 250 coming really fast. So that should be driving valuation upwards. Uh, search advertising though, growth slowed. Last quarter was 17%. This quarter came in at 12%. Uh, AI is accelerating query volume, so they are seeing a ton of token production. You see that when Sundar steps on stage and shows the, the progress of their models, the, the, the, the, the, the diffusion of Gemini models. Uh, query AI mode is, is actually taking share. People are using it uh, in place of the default search. Not really by their choice a lot. It just sort of pops up a lot of the times.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  But it monetizes less effectively than traditional searches right now. Now, what's interesting is that at the end of the day, it's a person asking a question and getting a bunch of pixels on a screen. And if you're on your phone, it's a vertical screen that's, you know, uh, nine by 16, right?

• 6:56Speaker 02

  Square for some.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Square for some, if you're on the duo.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  You're Mark Gorman.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  You're Mark Gorman. Um, but at the end of the day, as a, as a, if you're Instagram, you want to monetize every pixel that you're showing the person while they're on Instagram. If you're Google, when someone asks a question, you want to monetize every pixel with ads. And that's what has happened with Google search over the past decade, right? Uh, there was a time when it used to be a very clear call out for one sponsored post at the top. And now it's been, you scroll the whole first page and it's all ads. AI mode isn't that. AI mode might have some monetization going on, but it's not every single sentence is a sponsored ad just yet. They gotta get there. They're not going to talk about that because that's rough and that's complicated. But um, it's going to be a hard road to figure out exactly how do we monetize the full response?

• 7:44Speaker 00

  Everything that we're showing to the viewer should have a lot of things, a lot of links and, and, and offers and brand messages that are monetizable, paid for, bidded, auction style, uh, to really maximize every view that they get. And so that is the, that is the coming challenge, but you know, they've been doing this for 20 plus years. Uh, and so that is the path that they're on. Uh, the last thing, uh, Google's spending 200 billion on AI infrastructure this year. Uh, 2026 capex guidance, 195 to 205 billion, right in that 200 billion range. Uh, they are also signaling that they will uh, expect, that they expect a significant increase in 2027.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  Q3 spending alone was 51.4. So they're already on their 200 billion run rate. And next quarter should be higher, following quarter should be higher, et cetera. So let's go. Um, and then uh, the last thing is that Gemini crossed a billion Mao, monthly active users. Um, the first party AI model, uh, the API is doing 32 billion tokens a minute. Hard to say what that means in the modern era because there's so many models that are more token efficient and really just getting stuff done, getting answers, satisfying users is what matters. Um, but uh, it's up 40% quarter on quarter. Clearly they're serving more models, more people are using them. Uh, and then of course they announced Gemini for Carbon, the newest frontier model, the day or before earnings,

• 9:07Speaker 00

  two days before earnings, sort of trying to uh, reassure investors that uh, they are still on the frontier, that they're, that the benchmarks look good and that uh, the adoption will come. And more importantly, that they are vertically integrated. So even if they don't show up on the ramp data and the open router data, just having the frontier model internally is super valuable because it will, it will drive YouTube, it'll drive AI search, it'll drive internal workloads. There'll all be all these things where they aren't going outside for costs, uh, and they will be vertically integrated.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it seems like it's going to, it's going to be incredibly strategic to be able to get frontier intelligence at 90% low, you know, lower than market prices.

• 9:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. And then there's a whole bunch of other interesting things. They can fine tune their own models. They can optimize them for their infrastructure. What do you, the model that works in Google search, it does feel different than uh, than a Claude model or a GPT model because it needs to be really fast because people expect that from that, uh, from uh, the uh, from the AI search results. And then on YouTube, you expect something different. You expect something that can piece, can crawl over all the transcripts of YouTube with no, you know, robot block up, no captions and whatnot, if you're asking for extra context. So um, lots of, lots of optimism there, but rough day in the market at least.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And a little bit rough for Berkshire, who uh, their sort of blended uh, price per share of their recent $10 billion investment is around $350 per share. Um, they did some part into Class A, some into Class C, um, down pretty, uh, pretty dramatically from that point. Alphabet now sitting at $280 a share, um, in uh, just around six months.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Got it. Um, well.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  And yeah, it's basically like the OG Google bear case is like rearing its head again, right?

• 11:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  And you know, they've been.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  It became sort of.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  They've been, they've been, there, there was a viral thread. I'll, I'll try to find it.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  I think you're talking about from uh, uh, Levels IO maybe?

• 11:19Speaker 02

  No, this was, uh, basically this guy, July 23rd, Max Anderson, says, "As someone who has personally spent 500K a month on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty, this revenue growth in search is artificial and extremely unhealthy for Google's business long-term." He goes on to, um, make a bunch of points which have been refuted in different ways, but Zatreeni brought it up yesterday. The Sufanator at the time, like, pushed back on a lot of this, but either way, it just felt like search was already perfectly optimized. Like, I think I was bringing this up probably, you know, over a year ago. Like, have you actually paid attention to Google Search recently? Where it's like, for certain queries, it's hard to find an organic result, right?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Where it's like, ads at the top, first three results are ads, then you have maybe one or two organic results, and then a bunch more ads.

• 12:12Speaker 00

  I mean, have you, do you understand the structure of like, finding a mattress on Google? It got so crazy that, uh, first off, there would be Google Shopping callouts that are also paid for. There'd be a, uh, Google Shopping widget. Then there would be three or four sponsored results. So the links would be, you know, specifically this brand, specifically this brand, just directly brand keyword advertising. But then you'd go down and you'd get to mattress review sites that were like, and they'd all been purchased by the various mattress companies. So, like, there was actually nowhere to, to end up. There was nothing that you could go to. There was no, like, Wikipedia. Um, and, and yeah, it's been, uh, it's been crazy, but, but this stuff's just sticky.

• 12:54Speaker 00

  People are just in their flows still, so, uh, that's why you only see like slight deceleration. It's not like falling off a cliff or anything like that.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  One other interesting detail, uh, so Microsoft had earnings as well. Capex came in at 38.37 billion, estimate was 45.9 billion. So Google was 51.36 billion, estimate was, was 55.7.

• 13:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  This wasn't because they didn't want to spend the money, it was because of delays. So they're like, they're trying to spend the money.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  Powered shell delays.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, just a variety of different factors.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  This whole rumor of like, there's a whole bunch of GPUs that are waiting to get racked because stuff is slow and there's permitting and, uh, you're bumping up against the, the real world, the physical world. It doesn't really matter what the demand is, and, uh, everyone who's selling tokens is higher, is, is, is pretty happy to be like, "Yeah, we, we, we wouldn't hate if our margins were good this quarter, even though we were delayed on supply." Like, supply constraint isn't the end of the world for most people. Well, uh, on the, on the AI build-out and strategy specifically, uh, I'm just new tie, new, new, I'm just new at AI, I guess. Has a breakdown of some rumors saying that the internal model's reasoning jump

• 14:08Speaker 00

  comes from more aggressive RL, including training in games and simulated environments. Simulation hypothesis is going strong. Strategies learned there, transferred to research mathematics and other fields. Navi Stokes in ETH show the scale of the improvement. Anthropic's in some, a similar direction with its internal Claude model. Musk's digital optimist hiring explicitly calls for manufacturing, measuring transfer from games into general computer use. And so Ashley Vance over at Core Memory is saying that, uh, "Does this mean we're just in the midst of Demis Hassabis's original vision of how to get to AGI? After a kind of brief brute force period, um, the, the games are the path to, uh, to AGI."

• 14:52Speaker 00

  And it is interesting that, that Google has stayed the course with Genie when a lot of the other labs, I mean, Anthropic has famously been like, "We're only focused on coding, we're not even doing images." OpenAI has done a bunch of like, quote-unquote, "side quests." Some of those side quests were too compute-intensive, like Sora. Some of them, like, computer use, remember Operator? Do you remember Operator? Like, it was the original, like, go and computer, use a computer and a virtual computer to go and click on buttons on a website, and it was pretty janky at the time, but now it's basically solved, and that was actually a good investment on the side. And it'll be interesting to see which way Genie goes. Like, it could just be, "Oh, it's only fun and it's really expensive,"

• 15:35Speaker 00

  or it could be like, "Hey, this is a really, really great next leg up for training potential, and it's a really valuable asset for them to have internally." I think that's what people are, are debating right now. Anyway, um, where do you want to go next? Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. You want to stay on Google or move?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Big news in Nvidia world.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Uh, should we start with this, this Times feed?

• 16:04Speaker 00

  This is in the New York Times, although they, they had posted something similar a year ago, right?

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:09Speaker 00

  So, take us through this piece, and then we'll reflect.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, here we go. So, uh, in the Times today, Nvidia chief seen as target of Chinese spy plot. A Chinese businesswoman who had a close relationship with Jensen was found to be passing intelligence to Beijing. President Trump was briefed and took no action. That's interesting. Uh, American spy agencies had gathered striking intelligence. A top executive at a Singapore-based data center company was under scrutiny for possibly steering advanced Nvidia AI chips to China. And now, American officials had concluded that she was a Chinese intelligence asset funneling information to Beijing. But what came next was even more alarming. Surveillance of the executive, Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen, revealed that she had developed a close relationship with Jensen. For years, Washington had worked to deny China the technology needed to match

• 16:58Speaker 02

  or surpass the United States in the intense global competition for superiority in AI. The discovery that Beijing was getting reports from someone with direct access to Mr. Huang, one of the most powerful figures in the AI revolution, as well as an influential ally, President Trump, set off alarms at the White House. Roughly a year ago, Mr. Trump was briefed about the intelligence findings, which have not been previously reported, and chose not to do anything with the information. So, good opportunity to rewind and talk about a show that we did on October 10th, where we talked about this company, uh, and the CEO, MegaSpeed.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  MegaSpeed, you called it a great name.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  I mean, it is a great name.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  We gave her a round of applause for being a reporter.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  The name is fantastic. That's, that's, that's, I, you know, it's always good to say something nice. So the, the name is fantastic.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  So, I asked chat to kind of summarize our discussion.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  And I did a question and a finding. So, did you discuss Alex Huang, Alice Huang, the, the CEO accused by, uh, finding? Yes. Did you discuss her access to Jensen? Yes. Did you highlight her Chinese state media background? Yes. So, she had been a reporter for Chinese state media prior to starting a sort of Malaysian-Singaporean hybrid.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Is there, is there non-Chinese state media?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Did we question MegaSpeed's activities?

• 18:19Speaker 00

  They don't have independent media, right? So if you, if you do anything in the media, it's by definition, you're working for the government?

• 18:26Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I mean, I don't think that's like, actually how they're defining it.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Okay, oh, this is like specifically like, being like a press secretary.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can make the argument that all their media is going to come under the influence of the state.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  This is like, yeah, is it, is it working for?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  But anyways, let me, let me continue. Did you discuss Alice Huang? Yes. Did you discuss her access to Jensen? Yes. Did you highlight her Chinese state media background? Yes. Did you question MegaSpeed's activities? Yes. Did you explicitly suggest she was a spy? No. Could the discussion be interpreted as raising suspicions? Yes. So, um, it was too early to go out and say like, you know, "We didn't have any real details around the situation," but the whole situation was so suspicious that it was hard to, I'm surprised it's taken this long for it to kind of bubble up.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's very, very tricky. Yeah, I mean, it seems like, at, at the very least, it's like, uh, she is being accused of being deployed to figure out how to gain access to advanced AI chips. So, how can, how can more Nvidia chips land in Malaysia, right? Because the more, the more chips that get to Malaysia, the more inference that will be available for China, essentially.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Matthew's in the chat, pretty much saying what we're all thinking. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you get fooled. Can't get fooled again.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  It's a great quote, George W. Bush.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  One of the best quotes in White House history.

• 19:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's good. Well, Jensen has not responded to this. He, he has not actually posted since October.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  But, but here's the thing, here's the thing. Have they had interactions over the last?

• 20:03Speaker 00

  We've been pictured together, right?

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Over the last year, though?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting, this might be like, kind of old.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  I think it might be, I think it might be old news.

• 20:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you'd imagine if like, the, the New York Times is on the hunt, that, like, the CIA would also be like, "Hey, you gotta stop talking to this person. They are trying to get information out of you," something like that. I don't know, but, uh...

• 20:28Speaker 00

  It'll be, it'll be interesting to see what happens with mega speed with Malaysia in general, like it's kind of a canary in the coal mine, that chart of compute by country. If Malaysia continues to ramp compute capacity, it's like, we don't know the cause, but we know that there's a problem, you know? It's kind of like if you're, if you're measuring a, like an athlete and you're, and you're noticing like insane blood glucose levels or something like you might notice that there's a problem before you can diagnose it. Uh, Malaysia seems to be, uh, in that camp of like, it's odd if they're scaling dramatically.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:11Speaker 00

  Given the local, the, the local economy.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  It's suspicious.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, and so, I don't know. I mean, there's, there's a whole bunch of chip sanction, chip control, uh, legislation that could be expanded, reworked, changed. There's also, I mean, the incentive is just so high. We've heard about, uh, uh, people taking, uh, hair dryers and removing labels from servers to get them across the, across borders. Uh, it's, it's an extremely valuable.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  That was called super micro?

• 21:41Speaker 00

  I think it was super micro. Uh, but anytime that there's these geopolitical, uh, walls, there's just such an incentive for arbitrage. I remember hearing about people that in the Russia, Ukraine war would take basically like a first class flight to a Western democracy, buy a DJI drone at like a Best Buy for a thousand dollars or buy a bunch of them, put them in their suitcase, fly them into the closest country, hop on a train or a bus, get into the conflict zone and be able to sell them for like $10,000 apiece. And so that arbitrage is just like, okay, one trip, if I have 10 drones, I mean, I make a hundred, I make $90,000 in profit. People do that, it's the same thing with, with, uh, Nvidia GPUs.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  So there's going to be an incentive, a huge incentive, not just to steal them and divert the cargo and do whatever you can, but also, uh, get close to the CEO, see what you can do, learn what is their actual process for making sure that chips aren't diverted, right? How, how can we, uh, mitigate the diversion as much as possible or divert as much as possible, right? Um, and so it's an ongoing, ongoing battle, but another, another example of the, uh, the, the high geopolitical stakes of the AI race is this, the moment that AI 2027 was talking about, China wakes up. Wakes up and starts spying, like starts going more aggressively.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Wouldn't that, they've, they've been doing this for a while.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  I guess they've been awake for a couple of years then, yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  This is the New York Times wakes up. New York Times wakes up to what's going on with the, with the geopolitical spying.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  No, but there was articles about this.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Last year.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Last year.

• 23:20Speaker 00

  No, I know.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Like, so that's why, that's why.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  This is like a bigger one. I mean, if you look at the New York Times masthead.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  The revelation, the, the revelation.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Anna Swanson, it's like they brought out their A-team, six people, seven people on this, on this byline, like it's a big deal.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Um, were there any other, uh, callouts that were driving conversations? Um, I mean, we, we already read the Ryan Mac, uh, screenshot, I believe, but, uh, it is never, never more important to, uh, be careful around, uh, mega speed CEOs, I suppose. Yeah. Odd, uh, funny, funny name for a company. Anyway.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Should we go down the rabbit hole?

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yes, we should. Um, let's see, simulated markets, the simulation hypothesis. So this, I went down this rabbit hole, uh, a couple of days ago because you got served this video too on Instagram, right?

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Well, we have the exact same.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  We have the exact same feed. For some reason Instagram doesn't show us any ads and sends us the exact same videos at the same time. I mean, this is just the nature of like things that go viral, everyone sees them, but let's.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  No, but we specifically are sending posts back and forth all day.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  So it's like you guys like the same thing.

• 24:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 00

  So there's this video.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, we have the, we'll, we'll each send the same video.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  To each other.

• 24:40Speaker 00

  And I'm just like, like, we're just like.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  Scroll up.

• 24:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, scroll up. Everyone will send the same.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Two ships passing in the night.

• 24:45Speaker 00

  Everyone sends the same video. Um, but, uh, there's this video.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Two reels passing in the night.

• 24:49Speaker 00

  That has the, uh, the, the, the, the title, losing our house because.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Really?

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Day.

• 24:57Speaker 02

  Really Tyler?

• 24:58Speaker 00

  What happened?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  I had to take it off.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Oh, you did?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Had to take it off.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Had to take it off. Sitting here in the capital of show business and you got a little bit uncomfortable with the, with, with your character.

• 25:11Speaker 00

  You got the Ben Macklin behind you over your shoulder. He looks like a little angel on your shoulder. I like the way it's framed right now. It's great. Uh, let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. So, uh, this, this video came up and it says, losing our house because of day trader. Did you notice this? Not because of day trading, but because of day trader. So already odd grammatical error, but play this video because it's designed to sort of rage bait you and go, go viral. And it has this saxophone getting louder song.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  And it's the whole family. This would normally be a tragedy, like you're losing your family home, but.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, really dark.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  It's super dark and you're like, this is awful. Like what is going on? But if you dig into this person's, uh, if you dig into this person's account, the next video is like, is like, I lost my house day trading and like, here's how I'm planning to win it all back. And then it's like, click my link in bio. And then you click on the link in bio and it's like, here's my trader, trading mastermind. I have a free course and then I have a $49 course and then I have a hundred dollar course. And so all of this is actually a funnel to an info product. And this is designed to go viral and I don't know if they lost the house or not, like I, I, I have no idea. It could be that they're doing better than ever because they're not actually trading at all.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Very, very counterintuitive way to market an info product, being like, I just lost my house because I was bad at something. Now follow me as I run it back up.

• 27:00Speaker 00

  Maybe it's weird, but.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  It's, it's, it's again, it's like, it's, I saw it and it made me very sad.

• 27:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, don't totally. Like that is the correct emotional response, but the nature of the algorithm and negativity bias on social media is this is something that you see and you're like, oh, this is horrific. I can't look away. And then a lot of, there's just a funnel and some people click and they watch another video and they're like, oh, this is, this is inspiring. She's, she's working her way back up and they're, they're, they're staying in the game. They're, they're not, they're not, uh, you know, hanging up their jersey, I guess, or whatever you want to call it.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  They're not quitting right before they hit it big.

• 27:36Speaker 00

  Basically, that's the pitch and it's really, really dark. Um, so, so I, I started going down this because I was like, okay, um, who's on the other side of these trades?

• 27:48Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's interesting because it just like, it, it, it sticks in your mind because it is such a tragic scenario.

• 27:55Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  But then what's interesting is they're just like spinning it as, oh yeah, well, it's all good. We're, I'm sticking, I'm, you know, I'm not, we're not giving up yet.

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it's very, very odd, but there's actually a, uh, uh, something very interesting going on because when you see that, you think, uh, casino style gambling, you think that somebody took their capital if they have their nest egg, their kid's college fund. Like when I was a kid, like the, the, the don't gamble meme was he gambled away his kid's college fund. Like that was the most degenerate thing you could do as a father. It would be gambling away money that was in your retirement, money that was saved, your nest egg, your rainy day fund was gambled away, usually at a physical casino because you couldn't resist the temptation of blackjack or poker or slots or something.

• 28:44Speaker 00

  Uh, then we came to the era of the phone and all of a sudden it became sports betting, offshore betting casinos, uh, crypto casinos, people were losing money on crypto. But again, crypto is a moment where you have to put capital at risk, like you have to have the nest egg. This is different. This is people that are, so there are people that are, uh, getting fleeced and losing money. But what's interesting is that it's not that they're taking a nest egg and putting it in a stock that then goes down and they pick the wrong stock. That's not exactly what's happening. Oftentimes what they're doing is they're signing up for subscriptions to trade fake stocks.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  It's a simulated market that gives them the, the feeling of, okay, maybe one day they will be able to get good enough at day trading that they will have access to capital.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Well, and these platforms pitch it as do your simulated trading with us.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  And if you're good.

• 29:44Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Then we will give you, then we will stake you.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  And we'll give you capital that you can trade. We'll basically turn you into a mini hedge fund.

• 29:51Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly, exactly.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  And, uh, we did a little bit of research on these companies and they're shockingly large.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  And there's a lot of them.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  And there's a lot of them.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  We found one that has done hundreds of millions of, of fees, which for them is like clearly like better than software margins, right? Because they're just have, they basically have like a fake trading app.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  And they're like, yeah, place your trades. It's tied to real data.

• 30:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  But then they just promise this, pay the hundred dollars a month, prove that you're good at trading and if you're good, we'll give you capital, right?

• 30:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 30:29Speaker 02

  Because it'll be a win-win. But of course, over time, a lot of these companies have been exposed as Ponzi schemes, where they take other customers' money and basically like if you're doing the simulated trading, they're like, you get an atta boy, like you did a good job, then we're giving you like a reward. And so they'll pay them, which I think is part of what makes this process addicting, which has driven some of these people to go and get a bunch of subscriptions.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Which is just like very, very strange, because every subscription could be a hundred dollars a month.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Multiplying that out, it's like you could just be investing, but when you're investing, nobody, nobody says, good job.

• 31:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  If you do a little bit better.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  I'll give you a bunch of capital to invest.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:17Speaker 02

  Because people like LPs are not sitting around being like, how do I back the next like stay at home day trader?

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  You know?

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Like. No, 100%. Like, these were so like jarring to me, because I saw multiple reels from people who were like, I, I have a prop trading account, or I'm working with a prop firm, or I blew my account, or I blew an account, or several accounts. And I was just like, you are not working with Citadel or Jane Street. Like, this is just, this does not compute. Like, you're not on the phone. Like, your counterparty is not a, a hedge fund. Like, something else is going on. And it turns out that the counterparty is basically a SaaS product that shows virtual trades that are completely simulated. And it's,

• 32:05Speaker 00

  and the crazy thing is that I originally said this, I was like, imagine, like, look at this horrific story. Imagine being at like Citadel or Jane Street, watching this and being like, this is the person on the other side of the trades, right? But it's not.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  They're not.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  It's actually not the hedge fund that's making money off of this. It's the independent prop firm.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  The hedge funds would love to be trading. They would love to be trading against these people.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. They're like, get in the real market. Go on a real, go on.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Come on, don't be scared. Don't be scared.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. Come on. And, and we'll make a penny every time you make a trade. Like, we're happy with, with doing market making. But instead, it's, it's these firms that are, that are actually just taking a hundred dollars a month from people. They'll do it on credit cards. And so that's where you get people. Again, we don't know if this one's real or not, but there are actual people who, who will put multiple hundred dollar a month subscriptions for these simulated trading challenges on their credit cards, and they're not even putting any capital in the market. So there's actually no chance of like, oh, you actually did get into a good stock and it did well. Like, it's, it's purely fake. It's crazy, crazy, crazy.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And what's interesting is these prop trading firms.

• 33:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  They would end up having to classify like a bunch of people as independent contractors, because they're not actually putting capital at risk. So if they're going to get a payout, they're getting paid as like a freelancer. And I know at one point, there were some, there was coverage around deal, supporting some of these companies. They ultimately, I think, pretty quickly exited the market.

• 33:36Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  As they realized, and there, there was basically the, I think, I don't know if it's the, I think it's SEC that's come after some of these.

• 33:46Speaker 00

  I'm sure.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Companies.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Because they're, they're again, like, simulating, simulating trading, but there's real money on the line. And then of course, the Ponzi dynamic. So.

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Bloomberg had a breakdown of this back in December 15th of last year. And it's fascinating. Somehow, somehow we missed it at the time. I'm, I'm so glad it exists because they did some, they did some great journalism here. To kind of show you the full picture of what's going on, we can read through a little bit of this. First, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Bloomberg says, the pitch is enticing. Learn to trade like a Wall Street master of the universe. Pay a fee typically starting below a hundred dollars, just $99 maybe, and manage thousands in fictional funds in simulated markets

• 34:37Speaker 00

  for stocks, currencies, or commodities. If you stick to the strict rules and meet your profit target, you can become a funded trader for the firm. That means you could receive payouts as of, of, as as much of 90% of the ersatz profits you make. If you fail, you can keep trying by paying the fee again. More than 400 companies offer forms of these challenges, up from about 10 just five years ago, according to FPFX Technologies, a Florida based software provider for the industry. So there's actually a SaaS company that's powering all of these different like prop firms that do the simulated trading, because

• 35:20Speaker 00

  of course, you need to take real market data and then create a, a front end for the end customer. And they are effectively reselling a skinned version of that software, which is fascinating. Three of the biggest are FTMO Group, Fundings, Funding Pips Corp, and Alpha Capital Group. That's a great name. Alpha. You want to go with Alpha Capital? That sounds serious. They have about 6 million customers collectively. Well.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  Personally, I would choose.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  Sigma.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Sigma.

• 35:49Speaker 00

  Two Sigma.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  No, just.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  Just one Sigma.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Lone Sigma.

• 35:52Speaker 00

  That is the problem. If you've been following the drama, two Sigma, it makes sense, because you never want to start a firm with two sigmas.

• 35:58Speaker 02

  It's impossible.

• 35:58Speaker 00

  They're warring. You know this, right? They're actually warring. The founders of two Sigma are four, are, are two lone wolves that never works out. An alpha and a sigma, an alpha and a beta, but never two sigmas. That's not going to work. So they do actually disclose that the trading is simulated. The companies describe what they offer as proprietary or prop trading, a finance term for managing a firm's own capital. Quote, enhance your skills with modern, with modern prop trading firm. FTMO's website says, manage a trading count, a trading account of significant size without risking your hard earned money, Funding Pips says. A global leader.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  That's such a crazy pitch.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Crazy, crazy. Some customers complain that they've paid high fees. While the chances of winning rewards are slim, only 4% of users get any payout based on their trading, accord to F, according to FPFX. In social media posts, people describe themselves as prop trade, prop firm customers claim to have lost thousands on fees. So they've, they've done these hundred dollar a month challenges, a couple of them for a full year, and they never got a payout, because they never won the challenge. So, because it's very hard if you're just an average stay at home trader. What was your stay at home day trader? One of them, Sameem Sharif, 28, an accountant from London, estimates he's paid about $10,000

• 37:27Speaker 00

  to simulated trading firm Pip Farm since last year. When you have a bad streak, it's easy to think, I'll just buy one more. Before you know, you've racked up a lot in losses. Sharif says he's lost trading challenges because the rules are so strict. Simulated trading customers are paid only if they adhere to certain conditions, which the companies say they spell out in advance. They vary from firm to firm, but most of them stipulate a profit target, daily loss limits, a minimum number of trading days, and leverage restrictions. Some require profits to be earned consistently rather than in one large trade. Trading around news events can be banned, and many don't allow positions to be held over weekends.

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Pip Farm says Sharif failed dozens of challenges by exceeding the amount of losses a trader can sustain in a day. A pip is a price move in foreign exchange trading, for, for reference. When he eventually passed the hurdle, the company introduced a 1% risk per trade limit for him, he and the company say. That means a customer can't risk more than 1% of his capital in a single transaction. The company calls it a standard industry practice for traders with an unsustainable approach. A restriction Sharif says is unfair. Sharif and Pip Farm say the company recently committed to making some payouts based on his successful trades. So you can't just find one stock, bet it, and win. You have to be diversified

• 38:52Speaker 00

  into over 100 positions potentially to actually deploy all your capital, I guess. Adam Khalil, a former operations employee at Singapore based Pip Farm, says the majority of users breach the rules and end up repeatedly paying signup fees. People lose one time, they want to make the money back, so they buy another challenge, he says. So this is the, I blew my account. Like, you, you zeroed your account, you, you lost your hundred dollars, you got to buy back in. It's like a casino with a, with a ticket at the door or something. It's crazy.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  It's so, it's so fascinating.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Okay, yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Like, why would you just not?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Dollar cost average into the Russell 2000?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  No, why would you just not take the money? Why, why, why, I mean, I understand.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  It's because they're sold a dream.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  The dream.

• 39:42Speaker 00

  Of, you will be given $100,000 to manage, and you could 5X that, and we will give you a portion of those profits, and you could win $400,000. So the, the pitch is definitely a hundred dollars to try this. If you're good, you could make $100,000 very easily.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  So needless to say, all of these businesses should be banned from operating in their current form.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  Channeling the Saagar and Jetty, deep down. No, it seems rough, at the very least, like stronger FTC regulation around like how these are marketed, all the influencer workflows that are happening. Because it's very clear that the info products lead you to a signup form that has a referral fee attached to it.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 00

  So they will go, put out those viral videos that are bleak, then it's buy my free trading course. Then it becomes signup. But this particular prop firm, I get 40 bucks when you go in the door. And so lots of, lots of odd stuff going on. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. What's going on at the top of the App Store, Jordi? I know you watch the top of the App Store like a hawk.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  New camera called Chromograph.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Camera.

• 41:04Speaker 00

  Is it good?

• 41:04Speaker 02

  Rocketed to the top.

• 41:06Speaker 00

  Seems like it must be.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Created by Ryan Johnson.

• 41:10Speaker 00

  Oh, that's amazing. Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  I said, I recently badgered my cinematographer, Steve Yedlin, into making my ideal iPhone still camera app. It shoots raw, bypasses the iPhone's look processing, and instead uses the same image processing we use on our movies. Went super viral.

• 41:28Speaker 00

  Cool.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  This thing is like clearly printing. I think it's $13 to download it.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Ooh, I'm gonna pick this up. This looks pretty attractive.

• 41:35Speaker 02

  I picked it up. I haven't really been able to.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Properly use it yet, but.

• 41:40Speaker 00

  No, I've been really excited about the, the prospect of taking raw photos with the iPhone camera and then having a different way to manipulate them, potentially some AI in there, but not AI image generation, like AI fine tuning all the knobs of like contrast and levels and color grading and all of that stuff. I don't know how much it does that.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  There's some of the photos here from Brendan Hodges you can pull up. I took the app for a test run. Looks great to me. I think these are cool.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it ends up looking like it was taken on a, on a.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think a lot of people have gone through the Instagram filter era on the low-res iPhone, and then sort of migrated to just stock iPhone photos, which all have the same look. And it's cool to sort of bring back that more filtered, more aesthetic, more.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  More taste-driven look. Cool. Exciting to see people, people having fun with this. Nishi, now wishing I took more raw. I'm in love. These are some nice photos of a, of a pool and whatnot. So go check it out. Go check it out. Tyler, you're on very thick ice, bro. I love you. That's just such a funny bust. Telling someone that they're thick on, on thick ice, on very thick ice, instead of on thin ice. Thought that was funny. Anything else before we bring in our first guest of the show, Jordi?

• 43:06Speaker 02

  No, it's time.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  It's time for MongoDB. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI, the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. And we have Luke from Kino, building collaborative video editor.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  Luke, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  Doing amazing. Happy to be on.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Kino, great.

• 43:33Speaker 00

  Great.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Name for a business.

• 43:34Speaker 00

  Great name.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Powerful, powerful name.

• 43:38Speaker 03

  Imagine if it wasn't called that. It would be much worse.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Introduce the product. Like, at what level of abstraction do you see the modern video editor operating?

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, we've all seen the videos, including my launch video co-director Donald's, where Opus 5.5 by itself can create unimaginably good motion graphics plus videos. In general, combining motion graphics, real-life footage, and everything that FAL AI can give you. We are giving that a home, and all of the things that you need to do real work, where all of your teammates' footage and all of your teammates' edit decisions are in one place. And to prove that this is something that is worthwhile, Donald, my colleague and I, we spent the past few days living in one giant editor timeline, Figma-style, while swarms of my agents and swarms of his agents all just shift away at the same mega timeline.

• 44:27Speaker 00

  That's cool.

• 44:28Speaker 03

  A thing that we've been working on for a while.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Awesome. So how do you see the, how do you see the business positioning between building a harness and building like a SaaS workspace where AI work gets done? Like, these are blurring, but there are definitely companies, I'm thinking of like Slack with Slackbot is AI-powered, but it's still mostly a software product. Most people would not refer to Slackbot as a, as a harness. But then you have like a, like a cognition, a Devon, which is like a harness on top of the, of the coding agents. How are you seeing the positioning of your product?

• 45:07Speaker 03

  We are a managed service through and through, in a way that is very similar to cognition and Devon. But I would think what makes us different is that we really want you to use your subscriptions for OpenAI, for Claude Code, for everything.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:19Speaker 03

  Because we think that if you use $10,000 of Claude Code tokens, which is not hard to go through, it would mean a lot if you were to spend those doing productive work in video in our platform. That means that what can we do to help? Agents make a lot of mistakes if they are left to their own devices in this weird and odd domain. And nothing really has a URL. We had to have to be the ones to make a URL for every single timeline item and media item, and we have to be the ones to manage this long tail of problems. You cannot drag and drop the video, the video files that come off of your guys' cameras into Chrome. So we had to make it so that you can. We had to build all of that, those custom decoders.

• 45:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  You know, everything from Black Magic to Red to a few more ones, a few more fun ones. But there's a long tail of tasks that go into video editing, from colorization to really intense performance engineering that we're here to do for you. That's why we consider ourselves managed.

• 46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, video is an interesting domain because it's, it's like not, you can't just one-shot it. Right? Because you could hire the most talented, like, video team in the world, like, and you can tell them, here's my objective, here's my influences, this is what I want it to look like, this is what I want it to do. And no matter how good they are, you're gonna have a bunch of feedback and things that you want to change. And I feel like that's quite different than some of these other domains where you can one-shot, like, like.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  You define the goal.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  You can, you can, there's a lot of different things in software that you can effectively one-shot.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Basically say like, this is the feature, this is what it needs to do, this is how it should interact with the rest of the software. And then it just does it. And it's like, okay, it functions. Whereas like, video is so, is a, it can, there's always, you're always gonna want to change things, or at least for a lot of different.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Formats and outputs.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  Talk a little bit about.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Cinema.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Cinema.

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Talk a little bit about, like, how close is Chrome to actual, like, native app performance? Because a lot of just rendering at a timeline can be vastly different if you're GPU-accelerated versus doing it on the CPU. Like, there's a lot of, when you're, when you're deep in the Premiere or Black Magic rabbit hole, you actually wind up starting to think about the specs of your computer a little bit more than I think most creatives would like to. But Chrome feels like there's been a lot of progress there with WebGL and Assembly, but is it 90% of the way there? Is it 100%? Like, where, where are we?

• 47:54Speaker 03

  Well, there's this new, just like how WebAssembly allowed new businesses, like Figma and many others, Web Codex is what I, is, it's what allowing this formulation of our business.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  It is like F of MPEG in the browser, fully GPU-accelerated, if you want. Which means that it's here. Like, we, we could not have done this business in 2024.

• 48:13Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  This has all been here pretty recently, and we're building on top of that to do the really crazy stuff, where, you know, vintage camcorders that people in Bushwick love to use, that works in Kino now, because we built those decoders on top of this new technology that every browser has now.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Wait, but what's different about a vintage, doesn't it just give you an MP4 at the end of the day?

• 48:34Speaker 03

  It's, a lot of stuff is from the pre-MP4 era, and of course, even kind of fancy podcast sets, they're not exporting H.264. They're, you know, you have to do the ProRes and everything. But I think the much more profound thing is that performance. If people scrub back and forth and it feels crappy, they're just not gonna use us.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:48Speaker 03

  And that's what we've been grinding along, grinding on, and just pulling people in. We talked to Tyler last year, when we were much earlier in our journey. His very early feedback was so useful.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  That's awesome.

• 48:59Speaker 03

  And grinding towards where we're.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's amazing. How are you thinking about integrating AI video generation, more generative AI tooling? It feels like we're oddly still in the slop era. There's some projects that I'm seeing coming on the pipe where it's like, okay, this might be the time when we all sit down and collectively watch an AI-generated film and think it's good. But we're still not there yet. Like, Harry Potter, Balenciaga was like three or four years ago. And then there's, there's an AI movie, The Gods Must Be Challenged or something. I forget what the name is. But there's, there's an AI movie that's coming that people are optimistic about, but we're not quite there.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  But it feels like a hybrid solution is fully embraced, where it's green screen replacement, background, set extension, that type of stuff. How are you thinking about integrating those tools seamlessly?

• 49:55Speaker 03

  Like, like so much knowledge work, I think LLMs are, are gonna be just so important here. Seeing how Astra is such a good collaborator in things like Blender.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Is exactly what I experienced alongside the people I did this video with, where we just did crazy amounts of visual effects that I never knew how to do before this, right? And if I could choose between some magical app who could give me a model, a diffusion model that could make a Pixar-like movie, or a, I would say, coding agent that could use Renderman and Blender and video editors to make a Pixar-like movie, I would choose the LLM every single time. There's a level of controllability that I think all real artists clearly want. I think the method, the model of AI movies, as you type into a text prompt, and then you get a beautiful movie at the end, just kind of feels like the apocalypse for a lot of people, and for good reason. And there's a, there's a kind of positive vision that we're really excited to demonstrate here, where it's like, no, everything is code.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Everything is, but at the same time, everything is what you remember, this part we're seeing right here.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  We just had Kino reskin all of Kino itself.

• 50:57Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 50:57Speaker 03

  We downloaded the ISO of macOS Leopard and then reskinned Kino to look like that instead.

• 51:02Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  And then my friend interrupts me and asks me if I'm gonna stop goofing around and ship the video and all that.

• 51:08Speaker 00

  So how much of that was made in Kino?

• 51:11Speaker 03

  All of it. That was all Kim.

• 51:13Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Kino.

• 51:14Speaker 00

  And are you starting with raw footage, a cut down, a rough cut? And then using AI tooling and Kino more for that final level of edit and polish? Or are you starting with a prompt and saying, hey, like, I just plugged in my, my, you know, Sony FX three, like, go grab the files and start assembling, you do the rough cut. Where do you lean into AI versus where do you want to dip in, dip out, et cetera?

• 51:46Speaker 03

  Well, I've, I consider my friend Donald has got me to do this. I don't even prompt anymore. I just feed my granola link to Kino. And the granola link contains me and Donald brainstorming about what the video should be.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  And so Donald says, I'm gonna, let's do a scene where I throw the hard drive off the rooftop in our office. That granola, which had enough context of us talking to each other about what the scene should become, is what was used by Kino to then lay out the rough cut alongside a storyboard that we also made in Kino.

• 52:11Speaker 00

  And then did you wind up generating the video of you throwing the hard drive off the roof? Or did you wind up doing?

• 52:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was a nightmare. We, a brand new sea dance model came out this weekend and begged everyone we knew to get access. And the video only came together because they gave us access to this like new checkpoint.

• 52:27Speaker 00

  So how much of?

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Should have just thrown a real hard drive off of the right. It'd be a little bit dangerous.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  True, yeah, catching is tricky, yeah. So how much of that is, is AI generated versus AI produced motion graphics that are deterministically rendered versus shot with a camera captured in real life?

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Well, that, what you just saw is all of them. So it starts that base plate, that's motion graphics, that's real footage, that sea dance doing its thing.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Sea dance, yep.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  And then when you see my laptop screen, if you go a little bit further, when I catch it in the Waymo, that's not real.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  That's not real?

• 53:04Speaker 03

  I rotoscoped my laptop screen to be something completely different.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Okay, but it is, but there is a, there is a, an actual footage plate of you in, you with your hands on the computer.

• 53:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  I like the game of figuring out what's real and what's not.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  Before you, before you bounce, how's, how's growth been?

• 53:25Speaker 03

  It's been good. We have been completely in closed beta until this morning. And so we're really excited.

• 53:31Speaker 02

  Oh, right. For some reason, I thought, for some reason, again, I, I thought you were gonna launch, or I thought you'd launch yesterday, but that, but that's right. It was this morning. So I'm sure it's gonna be tremendous and I'm sure someone will try to buy this company by, you know, the end of the week as well. Because you guys are clearly like insanely tapped in and headed skating to where the puck is going. So, great to meet you.

• 53:54Speaker 00

  That's fantastic.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  And yeah, we're excited to, to, to play around with it more here at the Ultra Dome.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Have a good day. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor market AI agents for investing on public. Our next guest is Ice Cube, the co-founder and CEO of Big Three. Welcome to the show, Cube. How are you doing?

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Okay, how you doing?

• 54:25Speaker 00

  We're doing fantastically. Thank you so much for taking the time. Get us up to speed on Big Three. Can you take us back in time? How did this get started?

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Just as a fan, I wanted more basketball. I miss, I miss Kobe's last game. He scored 60 points. I wasn't there. I was a little, you know, a PO because I wasn't there. So I was like, man, it's, it's a shame that there's nowhere else for this guy, where I could see this guy play. And why? And looking around, there's nothing there. No other pro basketball, you know, is around the world, but not in the United States.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  And so, and, and then, you know, being at the time, 47 years, going through 47 summers between basketball and NFL, you know, I used to have a, I used to hibernate. So.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  I can't do this again.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  No baseball.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  I don't have another summer in me.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  And there's gotta be millions of people out there just like me.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  That needs more hoops after the finals. You know, we have the, we have the finals hangover. We, we just, we need more. And we found like a void in the industry because three on three was sitting there. Like, why isn't it professionalized? We looked at what FIBA was doing and it was very amateurish. And we was like, we can do 10 times, 100 times better than what they doing with the game of three on three. And so me and my partner Jeff Quontance, we, we just tried to figure out, we spent a year trying to figure out how to professionalize three on three.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  So what was the first step? Was it you built a deck? You made some phone calls? Are you calling athletes or investors or stadiums or locations? Like, what's the sequence of events to actually get this off the ground?

• 56:39Speaker 04

  I mean, the first step was coming up with cool rules that were cooler than what you see in three on three. And why, you know, why was the FIBA game? Why did it feel so like a backyard playground game when we're trying to create a pro sport? So it was just to build a better mousetrap, so to speak, and make our game more fun to play and fun to watch, to make it bite sized where you can watch a big three game in a, in an hour, where, you know, most games are three hours. So those kind of things, making a game faster.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  So rules was, and we argued, you know, back and forth on, you know, the intricacy of the rules and, and how are we gonna make our game, you know, great for the public to watch?

• 57:38Speaker 00

  What was the most contentious rule or, or what rule were you, when you found it, you were like, this is the secret? This is the rule that's gonna, that's gonna make it work?

• 57:48Speaker 04

  First to 50 win.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  Meaning this was a sprint. No garbage minutes because there are minutes. And, and, you know, there's a 14 second shot clock though. So you can't play around with the ball. You gotta get a shot up. So those rules, that was to me, every game, there's a winning shot. You know, there's always a game winning shot in every big three game. And so to eliminate the clock was to eliminate lazy play. And people just watching the clock, oh, we got a big lead. Let the game, let the time run out. No, you have to score 50 points. So it's an all out sprint to the finish line.

• 58:34Speaker 00

  Yeah. How did you think about marketing, promotion of the league, obviously of deep roots in media broadly? But what did you think was gonna be the key to raising awareness, getting attendance up, getting distribution in the modern era or through traditional channels?

• 58:55Speaker 04

  I mean, we looked at a lot of leagues and, you know, what, what fueled them. You know, we, we had to look at Vince McMahon, Dana White.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  Leagues that had personalities that could, you know, evangelize the league to the public and, and show the public why they should be interested in professional three on three. And yours truly was the guy, you know?

• 59:29Speaker 04

  Passionate guy and. Have built up, you know, decades of credibility of, you know, I'm not gonna steer you wrong when it comes to, you know, hopefully music and, and movies and the things that I say are, are cool. Usually, you know, people agree. So, you know, we had that. And then it was connecting with the history of basketball. You know, some of the greatest names, Dr. J been with the league 10 years. Clyde Drexler been with the league 10 years.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Iceman George Gervin just retired, but he was with the league eight years. Now he's in the front office in our Detroit franchise. Gary Payton been with the league 10 years. Nancy Lieberman, eight years. So it's been, you know, connecting with those great basketball greatness and having them endorse what we're doing, overseeing what we're doing, making sure we're doing it the right way so the athletes are taken care of. And, you know, everybody's happy coaches.

• 1:00:51Speaker 04

  We want everybody to have fun with the big three and, and make it an enjoyable experience.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  How are you attracting new talent, new athletes? Cause I can imagine if somebody who's in the NBA sees you calling, they're gonna pick up, but at the same time, then I say, hey, I got a couple more years in me. I'm, I'm not ready to move on. What, what has it been like building the talent pipeline?

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  What's been, you know, also, we've had some of the greatest players that ever played a game come through our league, you know, far as first round picks, um, all-stars, champions, you know, even Hall of Famers, you know, when you look at, you know, people like, uh, Allen Iverson playing in the big three. So, you know, we don't have a problem attracting the talent. The thing is, you know, we want to offer more. We, we, we have eight teams. We need to expand that. We need 12 teams. We need 16, 20 teams. You know, we always have a pool of players who, you know, want to play in the big three,

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  but can't because it's a numbers game. So, this is, this is what, you know, you know, this IPO is going to allow us to do is expand and to really, um, you know, grow and have a bigger footprint, which is more attractive to sponsors.

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  Uh, you know, what's holding us back is we only got 10 games, you know? If we had 20 games or 25, like the NFL, you know, we could really expand, um, you know, our sponsors, you know, what we can offer to, you know, uh, platform broadcasting, media deals, you know, we just got to offer more of this good stuff.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, yeah, what else are you using the capital for as you scale the business? Are cities, uh, receptive to bringing new teams to town? Uh, is it, is it easy to get up and running if you have the, if you have the, the, the capital to go and do a new team in a new city?

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Without a doubt, you know, it's pretty turnkey because we owned all the teams for so long, even 12, you know? So, we were able to make that work and, you know, we're able to, you know, get new owners, you know, and, and kind of walk them through and, and help them get up to speed and then let them take over. Cities have been extremely receptive everywhere we go. They want the big three, you know, we've been to London, we've been to Toronto. You know, we see this as a global league. We want teams in London and Toronto, Mexico City, Puerto Rico. You know, we see this as not just, you know, stuck in the U.S., but, uh, we can expand, um, the league.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:43Speaker 04

  So, um, sky's the limit, you know, we, we want to shore up. We've been a lean and mean, uh, league, which has been great because we've been cost effective with how we operate. But we want to, you know, hire the best people to help us shore up the foundation of the league and, you know, really work on the growth of the league. Uh, you know, we, we talking to some smart people, talking to some very smart people across the board and they're just in the wings waiting, uh, for the opportunity to help us, you know, kind of exploit and take out the opportunities that's out there. Look, if you look at this,

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  we can own three on three all over the world, not only just at the pro level, but the youth level. We can have the plan three on three all over the world, big three rules, big three colors, and the public can help us do it. It's an amazing opportunity.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, how, what, what's the team like today? You're slated for a SPAC. Uh, are you, uh, are you excited for the public markets for your first earnings call?

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  I am. Uh, it's really about giving people who love sports and a unique opportunity that don't come around, you know, it's a once in a lifetime thing. You know, if you look at the history of sports, it's been an exclusive club.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:12Speaker 04

  Uh, you gotta be part of the club to get in. You know, here, you just gotta, you know, want to be part of the league in a bigger way than just buying merch or watching the game or, you know, you want to be part of the growth of the league and, and participate on the upside when, when we do, you know, uh, start rolling downhill.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  Um, if you look around, nobody else is emerging. Nobody else has, you know, nine seasons proven that we have a great fan base and this works. We just got to add some fuel to the fire.

• 1:05:49Speaker 00

  Uh, building that fan base, how important is it that, uh, players have personal social media presences? We were talking to Eli Manning about the, the, the intense pressure of young rookies in the NFL to start a podcast or start doing media or be in movies. You've obviously been in entertainment for years. Uh, I'm interested in how you're talking to players about grappling those trade-offs. Is there, is there, because of the nature of the league, is there more flexibility to go and build your own fan base and then bring them along for the ride?

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  Without a doubt, you know, when we set to build the big three in 2016,

• 1:06:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Speaker 04

  we wanted to do things better than the other leagues. You know, the other leagues, they lean into their sports, but, you know, music and culture, you know, kind of is, is, is kind of like a byproduct.

• 1:06:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  But here, it's the perfect intersection. You know, there's sports which we take extremely serious, the game, but we also understand that there's culture, um, music, and this is an intersection of that.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:00Speaker 04

  Uh, so we want to do, we want to have more fun than the other leagues. We want our fans to have more fun.

• 1:07:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  With the game. Um, and so, we want to do things a little different. We want to create more of a festival, more of an interactive, uh, experience with the fans and the, and, uh, players and the coaches.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Speaker 04

  Um, and we want to do things that, like I said, other leagues are not doing. And, you know, there's nothing stopping us from doing.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  Last year-

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  I want you to be really honest with me. So, John is 6'8", never had a run in basketball, but I'm wondering if, if there's a way that he could walk on? If there's a way that-

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, what does it take to actually-

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  What is it, what is it actually, what does it actually take? He's got-

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  Are there open tryouts?

• 1:07:48Speaker 02

  He's got at least, at least, you know, a few thousand people that really want to see him ball.

• 1:07:54Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Um, any way he could walk on, maybe like a celeb shot?

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  Well, you know, we definitely can have him in our celebrity game.

• 1:08:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Which, uh-

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:08:07Speaker 00

  You're signing up.

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  It might be better to do a podcaster game.

• 1:08:11Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, we can get Rogan and Huberman in there.

• 1:08:16Speaker 04

  No, we, we have a, if you're invited to our combine, you know, I know some people that Mike can get you in there.

• 1:08:22Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  I'm not even, yeah, I'm not really asking for like, you know, an, an easy way and I just want him to have a chance.

• 1:08:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:08:28Speaker 02

  I, yeah, that's what it takes to be a, I think-

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  It's not easy, no.

• 1:08:32Speaker 04

  Getting to the, you know, going through the combine, you know, you got over a hundred guys, you know, maybe a hundred and 20 guys going for like 23 spots. So-

• 1:08:45Speaker 00

  And they, and they've mostly played basketball before, unlike me?

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  Definitely. They played all over the world.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  I think I'll be at a disadvantage.

• 1:08:53Speaker 04

  They played all over the world. Yeah, you need to come, just come, you know, kick it with me on the front row.

• 1:09:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think I'll be in the stands actually, now that I think about it. That's probably my, my idea. Yeah, an owner might be more suited for me.

• 1:09:07Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 1:09:09Speaker 00

  But, uh, it'd be fun, it'd be fun. Um, I, I, you, you mentioned sponsors, you mentioned the, the revenue ramp. I'm interested in how you've been, uh, thinking about prediction markets, betting sites. We saw last year, like every league was sort of, are they going Kalshi? Are they going Polymarket, DraftKings? Have you solved that puzzle? Are you still thinking about bringing, uh, those markets into the league in some way? Is there demand for that? How have you, how have you personally sort of grappled with the last year of like the rise of prediction markets?

• 1:09:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, we, uh, we've been talking to them all, seeing which one is ready to be, you know, a real partner with the big three. You know, you can, you can definitely, uh, you know, I guess gamble on, on those sites or, or have fun with those sites with the big three.

• 1:10:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  But we want to, you know, be a part of it, um, in some way, shape or form. Uh, but it got to be the right partner and the right commitment.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordan, you have anything else?

• 1:10:15Speaker 02

  No, this was great.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is fantastic.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Very cool journey.

• 1:10:17Speaker 00

  Congrats on the, on the progress, the, the, the S4 filing and the SPAC merger with Graf Global Group. Uh, I'm sure it'll be a, a huge, a huge run ahead of you. I mean, amazing-

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Public company CEO, incoming.

• 1:10:30Speaker 00

  You know, years and years of hard work to get here, years and years of hard work ahead of you, but we're extremely optimistic.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  Do yourself a favor, buy T-O-N-T.

• 1:10:40Speaker 00

  Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  But not financial advice though, right?

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  Have a great one. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  See ya.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Have a good one.

• 1:10:52Speaker 00

  You know, more startup founders should do that. You know, you get somebody coming on from a Databricks or a Base10, they should say, just throw out the ticker, invest in the private markets. Why not? Why not? There's some more, there's a debate about the cybersecurity news. The Pentagon is treating a rash of freezer malfunctions that affected refrigeration and freezer units at commissaries that serve several US military bases in August as a suspected cyber attack. People are saying IoT was a mistake all along. A lot of people are just asking the question like, how are the refrigerators connected to the internet at all? That's sort of crazy, but of course, you might want to see the, the, the system like,

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  I want an alert on my phone if the refrigerator is not at the right temperature. So officials said that they've been in touch with French counterparts about a similar attack that hit more than 350 French supermarkets this, earlier this month. On a, at least six on-base commissaries were affected in late August, per Reuters' review of the base's social media posts. In at least one case, the cooling unit's temperatures were raised overnight, reporting and resulting in spoiled food. Could be, script kitty, could be a true cyber attack from a geopolitical rival. Crazy, crazy times, but overall, I was listening to Sam Alman on Cheeky Pint this morning, and he said he was, he was, he was sort of pleasantly surprised by the progress around

• 1:12:20Speaker 00

  the PHP exploit and the fact that the industry responded so quickly and so effectively. What do you think, Jordy? What are you laughing at?

• 1:12:28Speaker 02

  GR says, but John, my refrigerator needs Wi-Fi cameras and a 2 terabyte a month data usage limit.

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  You gotta be able to tweet from it, for sure. Now, return to the, the old thing, the icebox. You want the, you want the gentleman stopping by in a, in a gas-powered vehicle to deliver you a cube of ice that you will use to refrigerate your milk. Maybe they'll come back in milkmen. Maybe that's, maybe that's what happens here.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Did you see that Wheel, Gotchel, and Man, Man? I don't, I don't actually, I'm not familiar with this firm, but a very large law, uh, law firm, it's gone bankrupt.

• 1:13:03Speaker 00

  It's on the cover of the Wall Street Journal. Yes, I saw it.

• 1:13:06Speaker 02

  Can you pronounce it?

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  Storyed law firm Wheel Gotchel to close. I just kind of steamrolled that one, let's see.

• 1:13:14Speaker 02

  Turner Novak says, I'm genuinely curious, how does a law firm go bankrupt? They literally just sit at computers and charge people 1 to 10,000 per hour to do things that AI is now automating. No offense at all, there's a lot of expertise required to do this. How does that not print money? John Wu followed up and said, it's confusing why a multi, a major multi-billion dollar law firm is going bankrupt. So I talked to a bunch of lawyer friends about why Wheel could suddenly be insolvent. Unintuitively, law firms are basically fixed cost businesses. Revenue comes from a concentrated core group of rainmakers. Let's give it up for rainmakers. Those rainmakers carry the whole business, while the rest of the business basically drags

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  a word I'm not going to say, junior partners or rainmakers in training, they can't yet bring in huge load-bearing dollars. Interesting placement of load-bearing. Everyone else, associates back of, back office staff comprises one gigantic fixed cost center, not to mention basic overhead like offices, revolver, interest, et cetera. The problem with law firms in particular, as opposed to other advisory businesses like banking, consulting, accounting, is that the clients are inherently portable, so any partner can take their team and clients and leave. Doing so deleverages the rest of the partnership because a small number of partners carry most of the revenue while leaving behind fixed costs. Once there's a crisis of confidence, it no longer makes sense for partners to stay

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  because they're now getting underpaid in profit share relative to their revenue potential. If they were to leave for a mega firm like Kirkland, they'd be properly compensated for their earning potential, instead of being saddled by rising fixed costs as a percent of revenue. There's not much IP or brand moat in a law firm. Clients follow partners, and the process of crafting exceptional judgment is mostly in partners' heads. And lastly, the partners are the equity in the firm. Law firms have no terminal value, so when the partners leave, it's as if a huge chunk of the firm equity walks out the door. TLDR, law firm bankruptcy is basically a crisis of partner confidence, and the resulting departure spiral saddles anyone remaining with the gigantic fixed overheads of running a billion-dollar business. So.

• 1:15:24Speaker 00

  To be clear, this is not a bankruptcy. I think that, I think that's why there's a lot of confusion on the timeline about this. They're just winding down the operations. It's more akin to like a, a venture capital firm not raising the next fund. It's not that they went bankrupt and had some sort of, you know, balance sheet issue. It's just that they don't want to continue with the current firm structure. Those lawyers will diffuse to other firms, start their own practices, do all sorts of stuff, but it's not, it's not bankruptcy. Like, they're not going, they're, they're winding down the firm, which is still surprising. Like, it's on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:15:59Speaker 02

  But they're working with restructuring.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  Yes, but that's, but that's not, it's not bankruptcy. It's like, it's like every partner has a different stake on the equity. There is value there, and how you decide where that goes, that's the, that's why you bring in a restructuring firm. It's not that it's like in the hands of creditors, like the, I believe the partners will own the, the assets. I would be very surprised if it's like, they're, I mean, I don't know.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  Amanda Pretend says, great succession planning by the greedy boomers.

• 1:16:27Speaker 00

  Just shut down? What does that mean?

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  No, I mean, like, you know, one read on this is that the, the, the partners, the rainmakers, like, the, the, the sort of legacy partnership probably had a ton of exposure still.

• 1:16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:43Speaker 02

  And if you're a rainmaker and you feel like you're saddled with all of these legacy, basically, owners of the firm, it make, it could make a lot of sense to bounce.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, that happens all the time in, in hedge funds.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  And this is happening in real time with like, various venture firms, where you have partners that are, that have effectively been retired that are still.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  And they might pull out millions and millions of dollars every, every year in, in fees, and that fee stream is not exactly being handed over to the next generation on any short time scale, so the great, the great investors are moving on and starting their own firms. What else is in the timeline? Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  We gotta talk about Snowflake and Databricks.

• 1:17:37Speaker 00

  What's going on?

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Pretty crazy exchange.

• 1:17:42Speaker 00

  We've had both of these folks on the show.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  So Ben Horowitz posted something about, just a blog post about Databricks. Databricks is an incredible company, obviously. Ali is just, is, is future Hall of Famer, hands down.

• 1:18:02Speaker 00

  He basically said, my boy wicked smart. That's what he said.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  And Shridhar says, release all the numbers. Does 80% year-over-year become 65% when you remove pass-through inference? What does it become when you remove AI natives, and how much of it, of it is from one-time software license versus a service transition? Ask for a bunch of other metrics. Curious people want to know. P.S. Ali, happy for your success. The world is big and life long. And, and of course, so, so basically.

• 1:18:34Speaker 00

  I wish I was private.

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, Databricks has the benefit, yeah, Databricks, Databricks is an incredible business and has the benefit of being able to selectively release numbers and not, doesn't have to report things quarterly.

• 1:18:47Speaker 00

  They don't have to release any numbers.

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  That's gotta be.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  Stuff leaks, but they don't have to release anything. They're private.

• 1:18:51Speaker 02

  Well, that's what I'm saying, selectively leaking.

• 1:18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  And, yeah.

• 1:18:56Speaker 00

  Shridhar.

• 1:18:57Speaker 02

  Shridhar is, is, I think, probably genuinely curious, right?

• 1:19:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah, it's actually a good point.

• 1:19:04Speaker 02

  There's part of that, but it, but it came across as, as, you know, antagonistic. That's definitely one way to put it. Ali responds in that and says, I don't think we should fight, the two companies are complementary since you're not doing this AI stuff. Shots fired. I really think Snowflake should consider getting its AI tokens through Databricks. You can get both cheap, open-source models, as well as Frontier, from our platform. It all goes through Unity Gateway, which has smart routing, budgets, and access. Turning it into an app. You can even use Omnipage, which, with any harness, including Cocoa, which is Snowflake's harness. Most of our customers use this to reduce token spend 30% last few months while token count went up.

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  Genie lets you then track and expense all your financials.

• 1:19:50Speaker 00

  This is so elite. This is so elite. If you're, if you're in a little, a little spat on the old Twitter, get Salin. I love it. But I think you are right about your take that he's like, just genuinely curious, because Snowflake is at almost all-time highs, it's a $115 billion company, it's not down over the last week, it's not down over the last month. It's doing fantastically. It actually rebounded very, very significantly since, like, mid-last year. And so, the business has been doing fantastically. The low was, was $120 a share, April 10th of this year. It's up at $320 a share. So every once in a while, you will see a, a private markets company lamenting what's

• 1:20:35Speaker 00

  going on in the public markets, or vice versa, and it's kind of motivated by the, the valuation shifts that are happening in one or the other. This doesn't feel like that, but it's funny that Ali is just, just pitching. I love it. Anything else on this?

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I thought, I thought for, for people wanting this to be a Drake versus Kendrick, this was relatively tame and professional.

• 1:20:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. It could have gotten a lot dirtier. They could have taken the gloves off, throw them down, start fighting. But, oh, well, maybe next time.

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Shridhar says, generous, I was asking about the revenue, not about contributing to it. Anyways, good, good fun.

• 1:21:17Speaker 00

  Well, our next guests are already here. We have two, we have David Rader and Jared Allen. Welcome to the show, guys. How are you both doing? Thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show.

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  Oh, good. Thanks for having us.

• 1:21:31Speaker 00

  Please.

• 1:21:32Speaker 02

  Great to have you guys.

• 1:21:33Speaker 00

  Tell us about, about how you guys work together. Introduce both of yourselves, and then we'll go into the story today.

• 1:21:39Speaker 05

  Well, David, you all right, David?

• 1:21:43Speaker 06

  Sounds good. It's, it's great to, to be on, you guys.

• 1:21:46Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:21:47Speaker 06

  David Rader, I'm one of the founders and principals at Unisports Group. We're an investment group that looks primarily at emerging sports, where we do control and high-influence investments across sports. So we're investing today. We announced our investment in, in the Curling Group, where we're working alongside Jared. Jared, jump in.

• 1:22:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I'm just a retired football player, and.

• 1:22:13Speaker 00

  We're gonna hit the gong for you for this.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  We gotta make gongs a sport. We gotta work on this.

• 1:22:22Speaker 00

  Gong smashing?

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Gong smashing.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  Baseball players might have a advantage.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  Uh, I think you'd outcompete us. Sorry, sorry to interrupt.

• 1:22:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  You announced the investment I needed to.

• 1:22:29Speaker 05

  I used a lot of rotation right there, you know, you got a little course right there.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:32Speaker 05

  Was I going to gong smash?

• 1:22:34Speaker 00

  Gong smashing.

• 1:22:35Speaker 05

  Uh, anyways, so I got into curling on a bet years ago, like trying to make the Olympics.

• 1:22:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:22:41Speaker 05

  I'm in love with the sport. Uh, met our CEO of the Curling Group, Nick Solsky, up at an event in Toronto.

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  Uh, him and I started talking about how basically, um, underfunded, under, uh, you know, promoted, uh, curling is, and how it's kind of this, this crazy sports, uh, niche sport game that, that is, takes incredible athletic ability, but no one kind of knows about it. And there's a bunch of really smart people that play it, but it's always kind of like, you know, been the side job of everybody.

• 1:23:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Speaker 05

  Uh, and just all the different opportunities that the fan base, how loyal it is, and, and, and all the content creation around it. And then with Nick's, um, background in, in, in gambling and, and stuff like that in gaming, it was like, man, the opportunities for that was like a whole nother level of all the different, all the different metrics that come into a curling shot, right? All the different measurables. Uh, but, but more importantly, it's these athletes that don't get a credit for being elite level. I mean, you're talking about throwing a stone 140 feet and having to hit like a millimeter or a centimeter of, of, of a rock to, to make certain shots. And so it really is fascinating, the athleticism to sweep on ice. Um, if you watched our very first, uh, Grand Slam of Curling in the United States, you'll see I snapped a broom. So it's not, it's not always the easiest game.

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  There you go. I mean, hey, hey, we break these mallets all the time. So we're, we're familiar. Uh, yeah, we, so.

• 1:24:01Speaker 05

  We got together, I was one of the founders of the group and, uh, Nick's done a great job of taking it. And, you know, we, we bought the Grand Slams at Curling, uh, we, we got the Rock League. And now with, with people like David coming on board, it really, um, it pushes the sport to the next level. Uh, it, when, you know, as an athlete, I always tell people, you know, football, basketball, all that stuff would be nothing without the outside support, without the media attention, without the influx of revenue for people other than athletes. Um, the, the game wouldn't be, wouldn't be what it is today. And that's what we're trying to create with, uh, the Curling Group and the Rock League. And that's why people, you know, like David are so important to, to see that dream, to see the, the, the business side of things,

• 1:24:43Speaker 05

  to, to create that, to bring exposure to those athletes and, and to create revenue based around it is, is fantastic.

• 1:24:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Uh, we covered that story of an American guy who's like a lawyer, I believe, who was competing in the Olympics and is kind of like a, uh, I, I believe acts as somewhat like a father figure for the team. I really, really enjoyed that. And then, and then I wanted to ask you.

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  That's one of my old teammates. No way.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  Awesome. Um, yeah, he seems, seems like a legend. Uh, and then, and then talk about the, uh, talk about like the, the drama in the sport. Cause I remember there was also this last Olympics, there was like a bunch of cheating scandals. It seemed, seemed like cheating happening and they were like catching them in 4K. No, they were catching them in 4K.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, they were. I remember that.

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't, I think it was pretty black and white.

• 1:25:31Speaker 00

  Double touch.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Speaker 05

  I, you know, listen, I don't know why, uh, I think it was Jacobs, Brad Jacobs, the team candidate. I think he was the one that was involved in it with Switzerland. You know, uh, you look at Sophie Cunningham, she got all the attention for, you know, his pointing and sticking her tongue out. I'm like, Brad Jacobs did it first in curling.

• 1:25:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  All sports are downstream of curling.

• 1:25:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 06

  Well, Jared brings up a good point of, of the, you know, about the drama and, and all of that. You know, there's, there's, it's coed, right? There's, there's women involved, there's men involved and, and on the same team, on the same ice at the same time. It's one of the things we love about it and I think it, it drives the, uh, the excitement. It drives a, a whole different audience, uh, for it. The, you know, these, these kinds of scandals and, uh, and, and, you know, the, the drive to, uh, to win, um, is what gets people excited. And, uh, we actually, you know, the, the, the numbers are fantastic. The interest from, um, from women is actually, it's actually outdrawing, um, men. Uh, the, the audience is more, uh, female, uh, than male for the most recent, um, Grand Slam event.

• 1:26:36Speaker 06

  And it's, it's to Jared's point, like it's cause it's exciting and, uh, and, and the drama from, uh, uh, from many of it really, really gets people going and, um, gets a, a good mix of an audience.

• 1:26:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the revenue mix over time? Is it like a third tickets, a third merch, a third ads and sponsorships? Like, give me a rough feeling for like how these businesses evolve.

• 1:27:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, so look, we invest in a lot of emerging sports. Uh, we, we have an investment in the, uh, in the X Games League, um, which is, is super fun.

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 1:27:10Speaker 06

  We love the X Games. Won the championship, uh, over the summer, um, for, for Club New York. Um, and, and a lot of these, uh, these sports have a similar model where it's, look, we're gonna, we're gonna sell a bunch of tickets. We're gonna have you, you could see the, uh, the audience, the excitement for our audience. Um, but you also make a ton of the money on sponsorship.

• 1:27:28Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:27:28Speaker 06

  Um, and it's, it's the brands that are, that are excited to, to connect with these, these audiences. And so when you have, uh, a team that, like we said, has, has a lot of drama, there, it appeals to both men and women. It appeals to a younger audience. Um, you're going to get more, uh, more sponsors, more interesting sponsors, um, and a good mix of, of all of those kinds of things. Then you add an incredible live experience and that's, that's what it is. Jared can tell you about the, just the fun of being at, um, at some of these events. You go there and you got live music going, you've got a fun crowd, you have a couple of drinks, you have, have, have, you know, some excitement on the ice. I mean, it's an amazing experience and that's why people want to go. And then you add the third layer, which is really the media deal.

• 1:28:09Speaker 06

  So, uh, the Curling Group just announced, um, you know, part of our thesis as we got in, um, was announcing 300 plus hours of, uh, of content on CBC, um, in Canada on an annual basis. Uh, CBC is investing not just for, you know, in the short term, but it's actually a five-year deal, uh, replacing Canada, uh, Hockey Night in Canada, um, on, on many of the, um, uh, programs up there. So we're going to be all over TV. You're going to love it if you're a sponsor. Um, the fans are going to want to be there and, uh, and the, and the revenue mix will come from that. But, um, they're already, it's already growing. The, uh, the numbers, um, are kind of off the charts. It was like 400 plus percent growth.

• 1:28:50Speaker 06

  Um, over a hundred million social, uh, uh, views on social. Um, incredible. Just, just from the first, uh, event.

• 1:28:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. I want to talk about that. It feels like curling is, sorry. Uh, it feels like curling is like uniquely great for social media in that, uh, one throw is the perfect length. It's, it's actually a vertical ice even, like it frames up well. And I'm interested in like, are you, are you having fruitful conversations with sponsors around, hey, we're going to bring you on social media and your logo will be there. And maybe even, you know, ad reads overlays, stuff like that to monetize that attention that might be a little bit more passive, but still extremely valuable. And obviously it's a funnel to going deeper with the sport, but are advertisers comfortable yet saying, okay, I'm getting a lot of impressions just on social media?

• 1:29:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, you're right. You want to come be our head of sponsorship?

• 1:29:44Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Yeah. No, we love this.

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah.

• 1:29:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah, yeah. We love, we love clipping and bringing the advertisers with us. You can see the advertisers at the bottom in the corner right here. If this goes out.

• 1:29:56Speaker 05

  One sec before David answers that, but so to your point, that was one of the, the things that excited when Nick and I were talking about this. So curling is one of these rare sports that actually shows better on TV.

• 1:30:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:30:07Speaker 05

  Right? Because you can, you can reach such a broader audience. Because if you're live, you need to have education. When you got four or five games going on in one seat or on, on one sheet of ice.

• 1:30:16Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  At one time, you have to know what you're watching, right? So it's great in Canada, it's great in Europe because the fact that they're highly educated audience members. In the U S, we're building on that, right? But what's great and the numbers always supported, you know, is the Olympics through the roof, right? Uh, Curling Night in America, we used to have it. Numbers were through the roof because you had educated commentators, right? That could tell people what they were watching. And so with this, with this kind of content-driven sports and media-driven, uh, revenue basis that a lot of sports rely on, curling fits that model perfectly because it shows so well on TV. Because you have commentators telling people what they're watching and then they understand the complexity of each shot. So that was one of our real, you know, when we decided to go full into this, that was one of the big deals is because we're like,

• 1:31:01Speaker 05

  we, we don't have to create content for this sport. The sport was actually built for TV, built for socials and built for, for generating content, you know, around the globe.

• 1:31:09Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  Uh, do fights ever break out?

• 1:31:14Speaker 05

  Well, so let me tell you, that was my, that was the toughest thing I had to learn about, you know, getting into curling. There's this whole concept called in the spirit of curling. Where you're not allowed to hit your opponent. I don't buy, I don't buy any of that.

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  I'm not a football believer in it. I think we should let some things.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  I think they must have, they must have created that. They must have created that just to nerf you. Yeah. They're like, we can't have this guy, we can't have this guy Jared coming at him.

• 1:31:40Speaker 05

  I will say though, there's some of the old timers talk about some, uh, some brooms getting snapped in, uh, dressing rooms and, um, you know, in, in, in a game where the, the winners have to buy the losers a beer, it doesn't really, uh, you know, equate to fighting.

• 1:31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Speaker 05

  But I think some of the old timers would get a little more surly. I wish there was some more cross checking on the ice with those sticks.

• 1:32:00Speaker 00

  That'd be great.

• 1:32:01Speaker 02

  Uh, how do you, how do you guys think about building, uh, building up, uh, like stars? Like it feels like, it feels like the sport, like from a marketing standpoint, as you guys think about growing, uh, the platform, figuring out somebody that, uh, it's like you're, you're thinking should be like, what's the timeline to getting one of our players on Joe Rogan, right? Like sort of the, the pinnacle of modern media. Um, who's, who's that person going to be, right? Um, but yeah, how do you think about that? Like, do they need to have some like crazy, like, do they need to spend time in LA and get caught up in like the fast life, you know?

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  Like, I think there, there needs to be this like, you know, allure, like, yeah, these curling guys.

• 1:32:45Speaker 00

  You need a bad boy.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:48Speaker 00

  Spotted with Alex Earl.

• 1:32:49Speaker 05

  And I, I'll be honest, I don't know if some of these people can handle some of these old time curlers. I mean, you take the, uh, the Kev and Coos of the world. I mean, the amount of, the amount of drinks these guys can put down. It's like, how, how do they get up and function the next day? Uh, these, these, some of these old timers, you get around them and, uh, I mean, they can still just absolutely be three sheets to the wind and pull one right on the, uh, right on the pin. You're just like, this doesn't even make sense. But I think, I think what it's coming to nowadays is, is a lot of these athletes are realizing that it is, you have to be, you have to have a professional mindset. Like Scotland has a massive curling facility out there, right? I mean, they dumped millions and millions of dollars into this sport for their national teams and all that stuff. To, to train just specifically this sport.

• 1:33:31Speaker 05

  And so I think this younger generation is realizing, listen, this isn't rec league anymore. You know, we can't go do what our grandfathers did. But at the same time, you, you definitely, I think you're right. You have to have people that are going to have an edge about themselves. Uh, you gotta have people that are going to be intimidating on the, on the vice. Cause that's what as fans, we want to see, right? You, you almost want to, it's like NASCAR. You want to know, see when that rec's going to happen. Um, or, you know, you look at Rock League, for example, we, we paired, you know, Jacobs from Team Canada was paired against, um, one of the Swi- or, uh, yeah, Swiss players in the very first Rock League match ever. And those dudes dang near went to fisticuffs in the, in the locker room during the Olympics, right? When things were getting heated. So, yeah, you gotta have those moments, right? You gotta have those rivalries in the sports.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  You gotta have those personalities that clash because that's what makes competitive sports fun is when you got, you know, when you got, it's like two, you know, two magnets pushing against each other, right?

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  Has there been a, like a doping scandal at any point in curling's history? Or is that?

• 1:34:27Speaker 05

  No, I mean, there might be there. If they tested some, if they tested some of these guys back in the day for drinking beforehand, you know, that might have been. That might've been the only scandal.

• 1:34:34Speaker 00

  What about, uh?

• 1:34:35Speaker 05

  Those people are pretty wholesome.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  What about the fan experience? You mentioned being a fan, having a couple of drinks. Uh, is heckling approved? Is it that in poor taste? How, how far could you go? You're, you're, you're good to have some heckling on the, uh, from the stands?

• 1:34:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I welcome all of it. There needs to be more of it.

• 1:34:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:34:53Speaker 05

  Uh, and, and problem is like, we had a guy in, uh, I think it was like, nowadays people on social media get paid to heckle people, right? I mean, it's like, they just, it's, you know? So I, I think, I think you need more authentic, uh, heckling.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 05

  Not people out there for clicks.

• 1:35:06Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 1:35:06Speaker 05

  Uh, and that really happens when you start building up fandom. That's the cool part about having teams, right? When you have teams, you build up fandoms, you build up rivalry.

• 1:35:13Speaker 00

  Storyline.

• 1:35:13Speaker 05

  Absolutely. There needs to be more heckling on the ice. People need to let you know when you're great and they need to let you know when you suck. Uh, that's what's fun about sports.

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:21Speaker 05

  Imagine if we could do that in business. Imagine if you, if your CEO made a really bad call, you could walk in and be like, you sucked today.

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  That happens. You should see our team after the show. They, they go pretty hard on us sometimes.

• 1:35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. Sorry. Uh, you, you had something to say, David?

• 1:35:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. I was just going to point it to, to some, some similar sports. Like if you look at like the Waste Management Open and, uh,

• 1:35:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 06

  notoriously in golf. It's the same kind of sport, right? Where, you know, you're trying to concentrate and all that. Um, but, uh, but, but the fans are having a good time and they may, they, they'll let you have it if, if you're not. And it's such a good sport where, you know, you can be mic'd up and you can have, uh, you can get to know these, these athletes as they're doing it. And that's how you build them into stars. Um, and you build through the league. And again, look, we're going to be on TV, 300 hours is, is a ton. And that's on CBC in Canada and it's on ESPN plus and, and some coverage on ESPN, uh, in the U S. Um, you're just naturally, you're going to get to know these people. It's more hours than, uh, than, than almost any other sport is, is on television and they're mic'd up. They're, uh, they're doing things, we're pushing it on social.

• 1:36:27Speaker 06

  Like I said, that's social engagement is just off the charts in terms of the growth. Um, and the, the, the interest from, from fans. Um, so you're going to see a lot of these athletes starting to become bigger stars and you're going to see them, um, being, being built up by their sponsors, by the league, by the, by the sheer amount of content.

• 1:36:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44Speaker 06

  Uh, that's out there. And so you, you have some of that and you have the, uh, uh, the opportunity to kind of turn them into, into household names. At least, um, at, at least amongst the, the, the right fan groups.

• 1:36:55Speaker 00

  What's been the, the, the curling group's strategy on prediction markets? Last year it felt like, uh, every league was picking a side, Polly Market, Kolski. Uh, have you, have you consult, have you, uh, figured out a strategy? Do you want to go all in with one, be diversified? How, how do you think about maximizing the potential of the league there?

• 1:37:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think it's, I think it's a, uh, you know, a little bit of everything, kind of a, kind of an approach. I think we want to be, um, open and, and, uh, have those conversations with, uh, with all of them. I think the, the interest there, it's a great sport for, uh, for, for, for betting markets and for people, um, who are interested. Our, I want to be clear, our, we didn't underwrite this deal as a, you know, for the betting side. It's something that we, we think there's an opportunity on.

• 1:37:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's more incremental to revenue overall, uh, in the long term.

• 1:37:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. It does feel like there's like a fever pitch last year of like, every league's got to pay up or whatever. Uh, but then we will, A, we, we will enter like a more stable equilibrium with that as a revenue.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  What, what is, what, what's the, what's the bottleneck to growth in the U S? I, I wouldn't know where to go. I don't have a place that like, I'm coming out of this interview, I'm fiending to get my hands on a rock.

• 1:38:05Speaker 00

  Staples Center can do, or, or Crypto Arena, sorry, does ice hockey.

• 1:38:10Speaker 02

  No, I know, but like, do you need to make sure that, like, uh, um, for the, for the U S side and growth here? Like, do you need to, are, is there a pathway to making sure there's like a curling center? You know, within every major metro area or at least, at least, you know, promising areas?

• 1:38:26Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I think there's, there's a, a few answers to that. One is participation is definitely key and, and helpful. And I think there, um, that, that curling in general is growing in terms of, um, in certain markets. It's tends to be in the Midwest. It tends to be in, in northern markets where, um, you know, it's obviously cheaper and easier to, to have, uh, have ice. Um, so there's some of that. I think it's also bringing events to the U S and showing how fun it can be to go to this. So, um, we've got events in, in Rock League coming up in, uh, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and in Utica, New York. Um, to, uh, to start the season. Um, and so you're going to get people and people are going to go. And I think they're going to go and they're going to have a blast and they're going to start to love it.

• 1:39:08Speaker 06

  We love the way, the way the curling league is, is, um, uh, the curling group, sorry, is taking Rock League out to different markets, um, on a, you know, there are smaller markets that don't necessarily have, uh, the, you know, where, where you're, you're not in as much competition for, um, uh, for attention. Uh, so you go to these markets and they're doing it in Canada and we'll do it in the U S as well. And it's like, hey, this is freaking cool. Look at, look at what the curling group is doing and it's, it's, um, look what we can go do and have, have a really fun time. And it's the only show in town. Um, so you're going to get some grassroots excitement through that. You're going to build it up through that. Um, you're going to see the, the social media, I think, continue to take off and have more, um, of a, of an impact on that.

• 1:39:52Speaker 06

  And I think that's going to unlock a lot of the growth in the U S. I think the growth in Canada is going to be, it, it's enough to support the investment to begin with.

• 1:39:59Speaker 00

  Awesome. Yeah.

• 1:40:00Speaker 06

  Because there's such opportunity and you go from, um, limited TV to 300 plus hours. And you go, um, with the, the growth numbers that we've already seen from the first events and everything that's happening there. We see this as something that's got a, a long history in Canada. Uh, and that's kind of the, the floor and, and the, what make this a good investment. Cause the downside is so covered by, by the existing market. And then the growth is, is by, uh, yeah, by, by building it up, turning it into the league. Same thing the X Games just did. And we just saw huge growth in that in season one, where you take an existing property and you add a new layer. That's more interesting, gives fans a reason to stay, um, to stay involved, to stay engaged. Uh, and gives them, you know, different things to root for. Uh, you're going to see a lot more, um, sustained growth.

• 1:40:46Speaker 06

  By the way, 80%, almost 80% growth year over year for the X Games. We, we think, um, and we're seeing similar kinds of numbers, um, early for, uh, for curling.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  That makes me so, that makes me so happy. Like in my household, growing up, like X Games was the pinnacle. That was like the thing that, that, that was, that was peak. Like every other, every other sporting event was secondary to the X Games.

• 1:41:08Speaker 06

  Love it. We, uh, we're, we're getting ready, Aspen in, uh, in January to start the winter season. So we'll, uh, we'll, we'll have to get you out there.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would love that. Would love that. We're trying to get more extreme sports happening in San Francisco.

• 1:41:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  Right? We want, if you want to bring, if you want to bring X Games to San Francisco, we're your guys.

• 1:41:28Speaker 06

  So that, they'll get your team.

• 1:41:30Speaker 05

  It was credit. I mean, one of the most extreme sports is just trying to navigate downtown.

• 1:41:36Speaker 00

  Set you up for it, for sure.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. The, the OG extreme sport.

• 1:41:40Speaker 05

  I can attest to that.

• 1:41:41Speaker 02

  Driving, driving stick in San Francisco for me is, that was, that was extreme as a 16 year old. Just, just trying to survive.

• 1:41:48Speaker 06

  Riding out the gearbox.

• 1:41:50Speaker 00

  It's crazy. Uh, congrats, guys.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  Awesome, guys. Yeah. Great to hang. Um, excited to follow along and, uh, yeah, hopefully we can get out there for one of the events soon.

• 1:41:59Speaker 00

  Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  Cheers, guys.

• 1:42:01Speaker 06

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  Great stuff.

• 1:42:05Speaker 00

  Very appropriate to talk about curling while we're just days away from Christmas.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:42:10Speaker 00

  I think of it as very Christmasy sport. How many days are we away from Christmas? Just a couple now.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Just a few, just hours.

• 1:42:19Speaker 00

  Fifty six.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  Fifty six, just hours away.

• 1:42:21Speaker 00

  This is soon.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 1:42:24Speaker 00

  Six years old. Just 56 more days. Uh, we're, we're on the home stretch. We really are on the home stretch. Uh, I got a, I got a pitch for, uh, you know, if we want to take curling really, really big. Fix global warming, global cooling, create a new ice age, freeze over Lake Kastaic. Me and you are curling out there every week.

• 1:42:45Speaker 02

  Every day.

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  You think, yeah.

• 1:42:46Speaker 02

  Every day.

• 1:42:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. Uh, Tahoe could freeze over. If they froze Tahoe over, you get Zuck out there, he's curling instead of riding the, the wakeboard.

• 1:42:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:42:55Speaker 00

  Uh, you get, uh, all, all the other tech people out there. They could get into curling if Tahoe freezes over in an extreme global cooling scenario. Who knows? Well, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app services, data, and more. While Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Our next guest is here from Serval, the co-founder and CEO, Jake Stock. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:43:26Speaker 05

  I'm great. How are you? Great to be here.

• 1:43:28Speaker 00

  Great to see you. Congratulations on the new round. How have you been since you came on?

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  Great to have you.

• 1:43:34Speaker 00

  You came on my birthday last.

• 1:43:36Speaker 05

  Uh, was it your birthday?

• 1:43:37Speaker 00

  It was my birthday.

• 1:43:38Speaker 05

  I, I am great. I am hoarse today. I've been talking a lot as part of this announcement.

• 1:43:41Speaker 00

  That's what happens.

• 1:43:42Speaker 02

  That happens.

• 1:43:43Speaker 00

  Take us through it. How much did you raise? I want to hit the gong.

• 1:43:45Speaker 05

  Jordy, hit the gong. Let's do it. Hundred and fifty million. Out of three.

• 1:43:54Speaker 00

  What unlocked the new round besides Kevin Koo on your team?

• 1:44:00Speaker 07

  Oh, Kevin's a beast. Kevin is part of a whole cast of characters that made it possible. So a lot of traction with large enterprises, companies like Fox, Live Nation, WPP, doing massive transformations, adopting Serval, ripping out legacy platforms.

• 1:44:15Speaker 02

  Bad day to be a legacy platform. Absolute nightmare situation. Checking the news this morning as a legacy platform and just seeing that you guys have a bunch of fresh capital.

• 1:44:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. ServiceNow's stock price is having a rough day.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  How's it actually doing? Okay, only down 26%.

• 1:44:38Speaker 00

  Okay, that is crazy. What is the go-to pitch for a large enterprise? Is it come in, we'll do everything? Is it bring us in as a point solution for one specific use case? Like, how narrow are CIOs, Fortune 500 CEOs thinking when they come to you in that first discussion? Versus how broad do you want to go? Like, what's the right size of the prize?

• 1:45:04Speaker 07

  It's a broad enterprise automation platform, so we can start narrow. But honestly, people come to us and they actually want to rip out their existing system of record. They want to rip out their enterprise service management platform. We give them a path to do that. We're the first to give them a path off of tools like ServiceNow in over a decade. And so that's where most customers want to start now. That might take some time. So we can plug in as this enterprise automation layer on day one while we migrate the system of record over time.

• 1:45:32Speaker 00

  What do you say to someone who's like, "I don't like my existing provider. You might be better, but I'm worried that you're going to turn in to the previous legacy provider in a couple of years. And then, yes, I maybe have it good for a couple of years, but then I'm back to headache world."

• 1:45:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's something I get asked about a lot. I was actually at a CIO meeting this morning, and they asked me that exact question. I think it starts with talent. The first leading indicator of how a company is going to perform are the kinds of people you bring in. And by focusing on keeping that talent density really, really high, that's how we can avoid becoming the thing that we set out to destroy.

• 1:46:08Speaker 00

  How front and center is cybersecurity in these discussions today, this week, this month, versus a year ago, five years ago, something like that?

• 1:46:19Speaker 07

  It's always been front and center for our customers because Serval ends up getting access to so many critical things. So it hasn't really changed how our customers evaluate us. They always looked at us through a very critical lens. Luckily, our focus on these deterministic workflows that are audited, that are code-based, that have approval and permission checks has always been an advantage for us. That's becoming even more important to our customers today. We have doubled down like others on security internally. We recently acquired a cybersecurity company and brought in the leader there as our head of security. So we're really passionate about locking down the platform because our customers rely on this for so many mission-critical workflows.

• 1:46:57Speaker 00

  What if you run into a CIO who's like a hipster and like, "I just like old PHP. I just want to do everything in old PHP." You say, "Too bad. You got to use the latest and greatest, the secure thing."

• 1:47:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't know if there's going to be a market for artisanal, organic software.

• 1:47:12Speaker 00

  I think that might actually completely die off. You get the people with the wired headphones, the vinyl records. I think that old PHP might just truly be forgotten forever.

• 1:47:24Speaker 07

  It'll be like pottery. It'll be like a really nice skill that you learn in a class on weekends as a hobby.

• 1:47:29Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, yes. I agree, I agree.

• 1:47:31Speaker 02

  How personal is competing in this market for you? The way that you talk about ServiceNow, it seems like very personal.

• 1:47:39Speaker 07

  I think you have to know who you're competing with and you have to have fun with the competition. So it's not personal. It's just we're trying to build a bigger company. And that starts with what we've done, which is build a better product. But now we've got a lot to do to execute on that and turn it into a much bigger company.

• 1:47:55Speaker 00

  Well, you've certainly done that.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  You're playing with your food a little bit, but yeah, very cool.

• 1:48:01Speaker 07

  That's what Serval Cat does.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was aiming for something like that.

• 1:48:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, congratulations on the funny round. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:48:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, great stuff, Jake. We'll see you back here soon.

• 1:48:13Speaker 00

  We'll talk to you soon, Jake. Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. Our next guest is Jay, the co-founder and CEO of Eve. More than 350,000 plaintiff cases run on Eve now, up 75% since June. That's incredible. June of this year. What's driving the growth?

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  The product's working. You know, we're helping people that are kind of back against the wall get second chances, right? And when they're using Eve, they just get seen much quicker. They get their life back on track much quicker. And that is just starting to happen at scale now. So we're starting to grow a bit more.

• 1:49:04Speaker 00

  What's the go-to-market motion? You sell to lawyers directly? Do you sell to like IT professionals who work in large law firms? Like, what is the actual motion these days?

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  No, so we're, yeah, it's a good question. So we're there for lawyers that represent people. So real people, not institutions. And we basically help them service that client all the way from the very first time they talk to them, all the way to the end, right? And on this side, I guess the main difference compared to in-house legal or big law is that it's not really bill-based, hour-based. They basically get paid more when they represent more clients and win more for them. So incentives are really aligned. And they've been using Eve now to scale their own business. And that's part of what led us to growing so rapidly, to being able to serve more than 350,000 individuals at this point.

• 1:49:56Speaker 00

  What is your, what is your long-term view of the legal profession, the legal industry? Like, what's going to grow? I mean, it feels like cases are going to be resolved faster. We understand that will drive to settlement faster. But in the limit, I was thinking about like, if I drink Jordy's orange juice, I owe him a dollar. His agent autonomously sues me. We settle. We don't even know that this happened, but the money is exchanged or something. Like, how crazy does this get in the limit of, are we going to see an explosion like a 10x the number of cases, 10x the number of settlements, 10 times the number of lawyers? Like, what are the vectors of change that you're seeing in the data?

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  I think the biggest one that we're seeing happen already, which I'm really excited about, is, you know, historically, I think we've dealt with in America, the fact that if you have more money, you do get better legal outcomes for the same set of facts. And the reason for that is lawyers need to get paid. And historically, representing one person might require 10 hours of work, 20 hours of work. But now with AI and Eve in general, that is now like a constant time on a work, right? So like, representing additional person is not really getting that much more expensive. So they're able to represent a lot more people. And ultimately, what law exists for is advocacy. Like, you're an individual person. You have your own circumstances.

• 1:51:22Speaker 03

  And you're trying to get, you know, represented for those circumstances. And what I see happening over time is that type of representation gets easier and easier. And I don't think this means more lawsuits. I think it just means people have an avenue to get represented.

• 1:51:39Speaker 00

  Interesting.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Have you bought any billboards with your face on them saying, "Call Jay" to get in front of lawyers? Maybe not the most efficient, but basically take their ad space from them and they're like, "Who took my standing billboard on the freeway?" And then they'll chase you down.

• 1:51:59Speaker 03

  You know, we have, our attorneys are much more attractive and handsome than I am. So we leave it up to them to get onto the billboards. But we do help them. So like, now what's happening is Eve actually has a component which you're able to take calls on behalf of law firm. So for example, like, if you're calling in at 9:00 PM, most law firms aren't staffed to handle that call because it costs so much more. Now Eve can actually handle that call. And how that's going to change their business is now on Google reviews and Google phones, they're getting ranked much higher for their marketing spend because it's able to pick up the call instantly. So this is kind of the way it's starting to trickle itself down to the marketing side as well.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Because, you know, the sad truth is like, until today, everything in how you represent a client has been so labor-constrained, including even pieces you don't think about like marketing.

• 1:52:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. What are the other pieces that are less automatable? I'm thinking about like the investigation, discovery, just, you know, if there's some, like, evidence needs to be collected in a lot of these. There might need to be interviews that happen. Like, what is still the domain of the human investigator, the contractor that's hired by the plaintiff's attorney? What else is the picture that's complimentary to your business, but maybe not in the sites just yet?

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  I think in general, today, we're still very much on behalf of the law firm. So law firms still has case managers. They still have attorneys and paralegals. And we're just making that more efficient. Today, I think voice AI isn't quite at the spot where it needs to be to fully automate things like client outreach.

• 1:53:39Speaker 00

  And talking to them, getting there. Those are features we have, but in terms of how far it can go, I still think you need a human element. Yeah. What's the dial you would turn on voice? I mean, Jack Dorsey launched a voice model like last week and it was like way more casual and it didn't feel like chatting with a super intelligent model, but that was kind of the point and people were wowed by that. Are you, are you interested in latency or intelligence or reliability or, or tonality? Like, what are you searching for in the next great voice model that you will be celebrating when it comes, uh, when it's released? For us, it's still latency and uh, intelligence, like the latency, intelligence combo is really important for us because we're actually trying to boil down

• 1:54:21Speaker 00

  the attorney knowledge right into the intake call itself, which has been historically impossible. Like you're not going to be paying $500 an hour for someone to take phone calls. Yeah. So that's what we're doing. And I think we're close, but not there yet. Probably the next model, hopefully will get us there. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest. And we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:54:45Speaker 02

  See you again soon, dude.

• 1:54:46Speaker 00

  Goodbye. We have Arthur from Vibe coming back on. Uh, if you want to, if you want to market Eve, what do you think about this? Go to the hospital, find all the Mercedes S classes, put pamphlets under the windshield wiper, chase the ambulance chasers. I think that's the way you, you, you build that business now.

• 1:55:03Speaker 02

  Wait, why are the, oh.

• 1:55:04Speaker 00

  Cause all the lawyers are in the S classes in the hospital parking lot. Cause the, because they're chasing the ambulances to get the, to get the personal injury attorney. This is the famous ambulance chaser joke.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  Blah, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:55:17Speaker 00

  We got Arthur from Vibe. Welcome back to the show, Arthur.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  He's back. Hey guys, how are you?

• 1:55:23Speaker 00

  How you doing? Always good to catch up with you. What's the latest? What's the latest?

• 1:55:28Speaker 03

  Well, look.

• 1:55:29Speaker 00

  Are you here to correct the record about your, your, your fake joke quitting? You gotta set the record straight that you do in fact still.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  I got in so much trouble. I got in so much trouble. First tweet I do, first acquisition from QuizWard, billion door acquisition. I say, I quit. They freaked out.

• 1:55:46Speaker 00

  I freaked out because I read it. I read it just randomly in the timeline. I was like, oh wow, like Arthur's out. And then I didn't.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  I was sitting right here like, it's obviously a joke.

• 1:55:55Speaker 00

  Obviously a joke. It was like perfect meme. If you're in tech, you understood that it was a reference to Jacob Coxson, the AI researcher who quit Anthropic and went on national news tour for it. But yes, lots of people uh, didn't have all of that context. So good to correct the record. Still going strong at Vibe, still going strong at Walmart. How separate are the, are the two organizations today? Are you in the same building? Are you, are you moving things together? What's, what's the day to day like?

• 1:56:21Speaker 03

  No, we're still in our building. Vibe is still some kind of an independent company.

• 1:56:29Speaker 03

  But uh, we're supercharged uh, by Walmart and it's been pretty amazing. It's always scary to join such a large.

• 1:56:36Speaker 00

  They're backing the truck up for you. I like it. You needed that.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  So yeah, it's great. And so today we're announcing the Walmart audiences.

• 1:56:44Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:56:45Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:56:45Speaker 00

  Fantastic. Congratulations.

• 1:56:47Speaker 02

  Okay. So what does that, what does that mean? Uh, what does that mean for, for business owners?

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So.

• 1:56:52Speaker 00

  How do we make money off of this? How do we make money off of this? I have a D to C brand. Am I going to use Walmart audiences to grow my brand? How, how do I profit?

• 1:57:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So basically this is some kind of a meta advertising moment. Uh, Walmart audiences. So you know, Walmart has half a billion uh, SKUs in their catalog. And now all these buying signals, whether it is people who have intent to buy or people who are regular buyers of product, you can target them based on what they've bought directly on streaming TV. So that gets like hyper precision for performance marketers. Our mission has always been to transform TV advertising as an acquisition channel for performance marketers. And now it's even more real. So it's super, super exciting. This is the first time in history that TV is so enabled uh, by commerce signals. So if you're, if you have a DTC brand, you can now target like competitors' product, those kinds of things. It opens up to tons of crazy and super cool use cases for TV advertising.

• 1:57:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Speaker 02

  Very cool. Yeah. There's like a bunch of companies that I'm going to send this to.

• 1:57:53Speaker 00

  How excited are you about, uh, I know you probably can't speak specifically for Walmart's strategy here, but just you're on the team that's open for business in the AI agentic commerce era. And it feels like there's clearly a world where you're doing connected TV advertising. You see something, there might be a QR code, but it's a lot easier to text your agent, go buy that for me and Walmart's open for business. Is this exciting for you? I don't, I, I, I'm not trying to get a scoop.

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  It is, it is very exciting. What I, what I, what I can say uh, is that AI uh, leadership is led by Daniel Danker. And so it's super exciting to have someone so experienced, so knowledgeable on the, on the topic. And Walmart released um, their agentic profiles to open up agentic commerce uh, a few days ago.

• 1:58:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Speaker 03

  Uh, and so that shows the kind of vision they have and super cool ambition they have around AI in general and being part of such a, such actually a tech company. I think this is what the most surprising thing about Walmart. It's a tech company at the end of the.

• 1:58:55Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. No, totally.

• 1:58:57Speaker 03

  And so being part of them uh, is really awesome.

• 1:59:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. It feels like there's probably a lot of interest. I like, like vibe is a very tech native company, like a true startup, right? Uh, and then you go into a company that's, you know, very old, but it has leaned in, especially in the AI agentic commerce era. Are you having opportunities to, to uh, to merge different teams or do little sprints with folks from your team that might bring some fresh blood to a Walmart team? Hop in a group and discuss what you're seeing in, from your perspective and merge that with them and, and bring that. Has that been one of the add-ons of the acquisition?

• 1:59:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. We, so right now we mostly work with the Walmart Connect people, which is the advertising division from Walmart. This is exactly what's been happening and we share uh, our best practices. They also have, you know, a lot of power uh, behind them and firepower. So we kind of merged that. And it's like, it's super exciting uh, right now. Uh, and they have been really thoughtful about how to integrate the company and not just tell us like, you're now part of Walmart and you work the way we do. They're more in the way of like, help us transform the company. So it's crazy exciting.

• 2:00:06Speaker 00

  Uh, what, take us through like the, the overall health of the TV. Uh, because we're, we're, we're all watching Google earnings today being like, oh, the, the, the, the default bear case of like, people are going to stop searching. It's like, so people are sort of feeling that today. Uh, there's obviously people, a lot of, a lot of time on their phones. The iPhone Duo gives you even more screen for more screen time, maybe. But is TV still growing? Is it still dominant? Like what, what metrics do you use to ground the conversations that you're having at Walmart around? How much you should be investing in connected TV generally?

• 2:00:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. What's fun is that there are two worlds in television right now. There is um, the big advertisers who have always been on TV. They all pretty much moved their dollars, their advertising dollars from linear and cable TV to streaming TV and are still in progress of doing that. But this is much a given and this is not necessarily like the biggest growth momentum that TV, uh, that streaming TV is seeing because it's at the end of the day, it's still the same dollars. But what we're seeing and what we've been leading uh, is that new market of smaller brands uh, were wanting to scale outside of just like search and social. They want to do more and TV has the reach. TV has the targetability, especially now with uh, the commerce signals. It has the measurability as well, which, which has been the big issue of television

• 2:01:24Speaker 03

  for years. Uh, and so now everyone in DTC, in performance marketing in general is starting to realize that, oh my God, there is reach. I can spend a lot of money and I can get a lot of performance from there. So they're putting more and more money. And this is where the most of the growth uh, from that market is coming from.

• 2:01:40Speaker 00

  Are you talking to early stage founders? I mean, I, I remember there was someone on a podcast who was like, if you only have your first million dollars to spend, you gotta do it on Meta or whatever. Which is sort of like, you know, the default D to C playbook, but uh, how early are you seeing founders and entrepreneurs who are starting like a small Shopify site? And they just want to get their first customers. Are they coming in as soon as they're spending $10,000 a month on advertising, a hundred thousand? Like what is the sweet spot to sort of get into this market?

• 2:02:12Speaker 03

  I'll, I'll put it differently. When you start advertising, you should focus on capturing the high intent.

• 2:02:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:18Speaker 03

  So this is why Google has been so great. This was Meta, I, I, has been so great as well. Um, and TV was lacking that a bit, like even if we do performance, it was for later stage when you had maxed out search, when you had maxed out social. And this is why we're so excited about today's announcement of this Walmart audience, because we have that super high intent. If you sell lipstick, I, you can now target um, uh.

• 2:02:41Speaker 00

  Someone with whips.

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  The intent is here. Uh, the intent is here and you can target it.

• 2:02:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Uh, well, congratulations.

• 2:02:50Speaker 02

  Amazing launch. Yeah.

• 2:02:51Speaker 00

  Great to catch up with you.

• 2:02:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm going to send this to uh, at least a few founders that I think should get on it.

• 2:02:56Speaker 00

  For sure.

• 2:02:57Speaker 02

  Big, big breakthrough.

• 2:02:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  Please do. Thank you so much, guys.

• 2:02:59Speaker 00

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:03:00Speaker 02

  See you.

• 2:03:00Speaker 00

  Goodbye. And that is most of our show. Jordy, is there any other breaking news? Anything we gotta go through? Any bangers? Breaking news? Anything? Xbox revenue? I like Asha, CEO of Xbox, sharing uh, some, some like not great news, but just being very upfront about it. You saw this? She said, in Q1, Xbox revenue declined 2% year over year compared with the 10% decline a quarter ago, while our accountability margin improved. Minecraft and WoW forever set records. Call of Duty has most acclaimed release in more than a decade and our PC platform revenue grew double digits.

• 2:03:39Speaker 00

  Console sales remain constrained by supply with more demand than consoles available. We're working to get more consoles into players' hands through, uh, including through our expanding refurbishment program. We're making progress with a lot more work ahead. Sort of just a, like a tell it like it is moment, going direct. Uh, I thought this was interesting, especially because Asha has to speak to two audiences on X. It's both the investor community, the tech community and the gaming community.

• 2:04:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Speaker 00

  Uh, and so uh, very, very hard line to walk, but I, I, I thought this post was like, yeah, it was like honest and informative and gets me up to speed. And uh, it's not, it's not just uh, completely uh, we're like astroturfing. Oh, everything's better. It's the best it's ever been when like, no, revenue's still declining a little bit. There's a lot of work to be done, but be leading with that, not burying that. That was good corporate comms. I liked it.

• 2:04:31Speaker 02

  Uh, Intel down 19% after hours.

• 2:04:35Speaker 00

  What's happening?

• 2:04:36Speaker 02

  They had earnings. Uh, and uh, yeah, Bubble Boy, who was, you know, the big Intel bull

• 2:04:45Speaker 02

  is in, in some hot water this week. But I, it's, it looked like he uh, is out of jail because his account got deactivated.

• 2:04:55Speaker 00

  Do you, wait, deactivated or reactivated?

• 2:04:58Speaker 02

  Yesterday, it looked allegedly like he'd been uh, booked in jail.

• 2:05:05Speaker 00

  But his account was active.

• 2:05:06Speaker 02

  His account was active.

• 2:05:07Speaker 00

  Oh, so you're saying if you go to jail, you can't deactivate your account?

• 2:05:10Speaker 02

  It can be tough.

• 2:05:11Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Yeah. In my mind, it's like the first thing you do when you go to jail is they deactivate your account. They ban you, but that's not how it works. We're not in the cyberpunk future yet. Where you're eliminated from the social media world. Uh, fascinating. Well, uh, I mean, the market in overall is in a rough spot. The NASDAQ is down 1.3%. The Dow is down uh, 0.25%. Uh, the headline alphabet sheds half a trillion in market value in the stock's worst day ever. These best day ever, worst day ever headlines are, are increasingly common. The swings are, are crazier than they've ever been. There's a lot going on. Uh, but we'll cover it here on the show. So thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:05:56Speaker 00

  Tyler, you want to take us out with a truth nuke? You didn't get much time on the show today, honestly, other than.

• 2:06:01Speaker 02

  As yourself.

• 2:06:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. Sort of LARPing Jordy over there. But we got a truth nuke. We will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m.