The UnitedHealthcare CEO Shooting, Amazon Takes On Nvidia, & 12 Days of OpenAI
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Today's number, 170,000. That's how many unique drinks you can order at Starbucks. True story, Ed. I walked into a Starbucks with my ex-wife, and the barista said, we don't recommend caffeine for pregnant women. And she said, well, I'm not pregnant. And he said, well, we do have diet-free lattes. 977. Don't tell me no. I don't understand.

Diet-free lattes does not make sense. Diet-free, sugar-free. Fuckin' A. I'm in the Cotswolds. Let's skip to the banter part. I'm in the Cotswolds with my dogs. Oh, lovely. And we're moving, so my job is to leave, take the dogs out to the countryside, and then I'm going to go to the bar.

and stay in some bougie place and just be out of the way. So here I am. Are you staying in a hotel or you got a house? What's the deal? It looks pretty nice, what you got behind you. It's called Heckfield Place. And I was going to go to Manor Estelle, but they didn't have any room. And then Soho Farmhouse can put up the dogs. So Heckfield's kind of a, it's the Lexus. Soho Farmhouse has a no dogs policy? No, only certain rooms, only certain sheds allow dogs. They all claim to be dog friendly and they have like two rooms for dogs.

And I can kind of understand because don't tell anyone. My dogs have ripped up this place. Jesus Christ. But we go on long walks. We're in the British countryside. I keep thinking I'm going to run into Ellen. Supposedly Ellen lives out here with her wife Portia de Rossi. She escaped once she got kicked out of the U.S. basically. Isn't the British countryside the best? It really is incredible, right? Let me think. Let me pour some tea first. Yeah.

I'm going to go with a no from you there. You just don't really like the outdoors. I think that's the problem. I don't like the UK from November to May. It's 40 degrees and just wet. I don't even see it rain. I just walk outside and it's wet. I'll give you this. When I first moved to New York, people said, oh, there's beautiful beaches in Long Island and the Hamptons. And I thought, I'm from California. These won't be beautiful beaches. And I went out there and found out that the beaches are beautiful.

People constantly talk about the British countryside, and I thought, you know, yeah, right. And I came out here. It is beautiful. It's just, it's dark at 3.30 today. That's all part of the vibe. You just got to get involved with that and get on board. No, I just want to listen to Simon and Garfunkel and self-harm. It's just... That's not the vibe. Simon and Garfunkel, get inside, have some tea, have a drink.

Head to bed pretty early. Yeah. What have you been up to, Ed? We're always talking about me. Let's talk about you, but keep it short because I'm not that interested. Well, speaking of weather, it snowed for the first time today, which is pretty exciting. So New York is getting cold. And that's the long and short of it in New York. Wow, are you engaging. He's a charmer. He's a charmer. Get to the headlines, Ed. Jesus Christ. That's right. Let's start with our weekly review of Market Vitals.

The S&P 500 rose, the dollar rose on Trump's tariff threats, but declined at the end of the week. Bitcoin hit, wait for it, $100,000 for the first time. And the yield on 10-year treasuries was volatile. Shifting to the headlines. Salesforce shares rose more than 10% after the company issued higher-than-expected guidance for the current quarter.

Revenue also beat expectations up 8% from a year earlier as the company secured more than 200 deals for its AI chatbot suite called AgentForce. Meta is seeking proposals from developers to construct nuclear power plants. The initiative aims to get the plants online by the early 2030s to help power the company's data centers. UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot and killed in what the authorities are calling a "brazen targeted attack."

The incident occurred just before the company's highly anticipated investor day in New York. I don't really know what to make of this, Scott. We've never covered anything like this. I guess the first question I'd ask you is, what do you think this means for UnitedHealth? Like, how is UnitedHealth supposed to respond to a crisis like this? Well, it's a tragedy for the family, no doubt about it. I think United's going to be fine.

But what's come out, which was really interesting, I found, is that the etchings on the casing said, Deny, Defend, Depose. And this is the name of a book that's about how insurance companies get out of claims. And so this appears to be politically motivated or thematically motivated. What's been shocking to me has been the response online and the...

To say there's been a lack of empathy is an overstatement. People are circulating memes and acting as if, kind of quite frankly, the company and this person had it coming, is the way I read some of the memes I've been saying. And in the U.S., what you have is a healthcare system that is essentially bankrupting a lot of people. Forty percent of Americans have some form of debt.

as a function of dental or medical bills that they can't pay off. And the largest source or largest cause of bankruptcy is medical debt. And there's just no getting around it. The American health care system, in my view, is optimized for the top 10%. If you're in the top 10%, you have the best health care in the world. If you're in the bottom 90%, you have expensive but bad health care.

When income inequality gets to the point it's at, it usually self-corrects, but it self-corrects in a small number of ways, either through war, famine, or revolution. And I think this is an example. When you have the CEOs of companies being murdered, and it looks like it was politically motivated, it looks like it has some connection or link to the company and a viewpoint around the behavior of these types of companies, the healthcare system in the United States is

And this in no way justifies violence, but it does create a lot of despair and disability in our economy. What do you think the conversations in the boardroom are right now? Do you think if this is indeed politically motivated and it looks like it was, do you think the boardroom is like, okay, people are angry, we're going to change the way we do things? Or...

Is the boardroom thinking we need to up our security? I mean, just some statistics here. MetaSpend's

$23 million on protecting the personal safety of Mark Zuckerberg, and Google spends $7 million. So a lot of other companies know that people are kind of out to get their CEOs, and UnitedHealth, I don't believe, spends any money on executive personal safety or security. So what do you think is the response at the board level from UnitedHealth to

when something like this happens? Does it actually force them to sort of take a look at their business and how they make money? Or is it more like we need to do a better job of protecting our executives? Yeah, I would imagine the first reaction is we need to keep our executives safe. Those numbers that you quoted around CEO security are about to explode. That's a good business to be in right now, offering executive security.

This isn't going to be a moment of reflection for them. Like most for-profit companies, they do whatever they can to try and maximize their profits and rationalize. Like, I know, let's get some insulin, let's put a brand on it, and let's quadruple the price or whatever it is. But they're not going to say we need to really think through healthcare in the United States. Exactly.

But that's what everyone online seems to think is happening here. It's like all those trolls that you mentioned, they're like, oh yeah, well, someone finally showed them. This doesn't help the problem. It makes it worse. It makes it seem like the people who... I mean, this is just... In any way, if the murder of a 50-year-old man with a family is rationalized, you get a pretty serious chaos. And just the fact that these folks need security now is really...

You know, it's disappointing. So the short term, it's just going to be those numbers are going to go way up. You're going to see security across every—I've got to imagine every CEO of a health company is saying, do I need security now? Should it inspire a moment of reflection of why does everybody hate me or why are there so many people that hate me? Yeah. Will that happen? No. And the guilty party here is not the CEO of these companies. The guilty party is the electorate who continue to let their elected representatives—

be weaponized by lobbyists from the pharmaceutical and the healthcare industrial complex such that they can charge more for pharmaceuticals. They can charge more for diabetes medication. They can let insurance companies, you know, deny all sorts of claims. So,

The U.S. healthcare system is the most disruptible business in the history of business. It's raised prices faster than inflation. It's 17% of GDP. It used to be 5%, I think, as recently as 1962. So in 60 years, it's now almost four times the amount of our government. It's the biggest business in the U.S. And we need to turn folks into consumers again, where they actually look at the price and they demand more.

But this is going to inspire a lot of very interesting conversations. I'll just leave it at that. Let's move on to Salesforce earnings now. There we go. Salesforce, the agentic layer. They're killing it. They're reeking or getting efficiencies internally. Their quarterly earnings increased 8%, which isn't amazing, but it beat expectations. And their operating margins hit their highest number internally.

And current quarter guidance came in strong overall. Full year guidance for revenue growth stayed the same. Is this a little bit of rah-rah? Yeah, because of demand for the agent force was really as revolutionary as ever.

Mark Benioff described it, they probably would have guided up. I mean, NVIDIA says, this is revolutionary and we're taking our guidance up. They're like, this is amazing. It's revolutionary, but we're maintaining guidance. Yeah, I think the story of this earnings call was AI. They mentioned the word AI 21 times and they mentioned the word agent force 67 times. So they are very optimistic about AI. The question is whether that will actually pan out in the numbers themselves because...

They talked a lot about AgentForce, and they said that they've signed a lot of deals with AgentForce. And Salesforce only launched AgentForce a month ago, so we don't know yet. So I think the thing that we'll want to keep an eye on over the next few quarters is whether or not AgentForce, this new AI bot army, is hype, or if it actually is going to have a meaningful impact on

on revenue, because, you know, just saying over and over again, it's great, it's great, it's great. We're so excited to deploy it. That's just not really, that's not really enough for Wall Street, I don't think. And let's just wrap up here with Meta's new proposal for nuclear power plants, or at least they're seeking proposals from other

development companies to construct nuclear power plants. Do you have any initial thoughts on that? Well, it's interesting. These companies are now kind of taking on the role of government in the sense that the only people who have the capital to build nuclear power plants is either the government or a giant utility that was government regulated and given a monopoly. I mean, nuclear has just had such a terrible brand. I remember I was in fixed income at Morgan Stanley and going up to Washington for a dinner and

And there was something called the Washington Public Power Supply, which was supposed to build a nuclear power plant. It overran and it ended up being just this giant hole in the ground. I'm not sure if it ever finished or not. And they used to call the bonds whoops bonds. And there's just been, it's been so out of favor. And all of a sudden it is white hot because the friction in AI isn't people, it isn't customers. It's something unusual. It's energy to power it all. And we said in our prediction stack that nuclear would be the technology of 2025.

Why nuclear? It's reliable, efficient, carbon-free, and powerful. One nuclear plant produces as much energy as 3 million solar panels or 430 wind turbines. And there's just few ways to kind of spin up in three to five years something that could potentially power 750,000 to 3 million homes, which is what AI is going to require. Meta's energy consumption increased 1,500% in the last 10 years.

And in August, Zuckerberg said Lama Thor met his next generation of their AI model will need 10 times more compute to train than the previous generation. I think the thing that jumped out to me is the point that you made about the idea that you have meta basically taking on the role of the government at this point. Because the thing that Jigar Shah told us, and this was the head of the loan office at the Department of Energy office,

is he said, "We need the government to be funding this because we're the only ones with the capital to make these risky investments." I mean, you look at Vogel, the new big nuclear plant in Georgia that was just built. That thing cost $35 billion to build, and it went $17 billion over budget. So these things are extremely capital-intensive.

But to your point, it's like, actually, there is another entity that can make these forward-leading investments, and it is big tech. You know, it's Meta, it's Amazon, it's Google, it's potentially Apple at some point. And I guess where my mind goes, it feels a little bit dystopian,

that we're at a place in society where the two gatekeepers of the future of our energy industry are one, the government, and then two, like a handful of tech executives. Like the idea that Mark Zuckerberg, who originally was the guy who built a social media network, and now he's kind of shepherding the direction of clean energy in America.

which will just give him even greater and an even tighter grip on all of the infrastructure in the US from advertising to computing power and now to just pure raw energy. Maybe I'm being a little bit

you know, tin hat, but it just feels like we're going into a slightly scary place. Well, you got to ask yourself, what's next? They control the news or can elect a president? You're just figuring this out, Ed? Wait, let me get this. Your thesis is that tech executives are growing too powerful that there might be a problem here. Huh? Really? It's almost, this is the least mendacious thing that Meta's done. I mean, if they,

I don't know if there's a way for the government to get in the middle and say, okay, it's like when they build a building or a developer wants to build a skyscraper in downtown San Francisco. They say, fine, but it's not going to be as big as you want and you have to build a park or 10% of the residences have to be for artists or whatever, for people raising allergy fee, labradoodles or whatever.

I think this is a good thing. I think that AI, similar, one of the things that always bothered me about crypto is it seems like we have this self-invented incremental usage of electricity that's equivalent to Argentina and that it's, I'm not sure that we really needed that.

But this is going to make that energy consumption look like a walk in the park. This, in my view, is the most exciting technology outside of GLP-1 drugs. I think it's really exciting, and I'm glad they're making these sorts of investments. The key is, do we need some sort of oversight to make sure they don't begin to sequester all power to a small number of companies and then use that as a weapon where other companies are basically dealing with brownouts every day?

We'll be right back after the break with a look at how Amazon might start competing with Nvidia. If you're enjoying the show so far, hit follow and leave us a review on ProfitGMarkets. Support for ProfitGMarkets comes from Mint Mobile. We've all been there. You take someone up on a great intro deal, only to find out later that that great price is going to skyrocket after the first month. Well, no more. Not if you go with Mint Mobile, because when they say you can get a three-month mobile plan for just $15 a month, they mean it.

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Amazon is building an AI supercomputer known as an UltraCluster that will be powered by hundreds of thousands of its own Tranium-2 semiconductors. The chip cluster will quintuple the processing power for AI startup Anthropic, which recently received an additional $4 billion investment from Amazon. And when the cluster goes live next year, it will be one of the largest AI training clusters in the world. So, Scott, I think the...

Most important thing here is the fact that Amazon is deciding to build a giant supercomputer, not with NVIDIA chips, but with its own chips, these Tranium 2 chips. Your thoughts on this news? I was really, well, one, you know, I haven't participated in the kind of the Bitcoin explosion and I haven't really participated in the AI explosion yet.

And I was happy to see this because I own Amazon stock. And I just thought this was brilliant and really exciting. And I love the idea of NVIDIA having a competitor. I wish it was a smaller company. But it reminds me that some kid or some PhD student, you're too young to remember this, 10 or 20 years ago.

strung together a bunch of Nintendo game sets or game consoles and created like a supercomputer just stringing these things all together. And this architecture just seems really fascinating. And as you said, if they can in any way, in any way, somehow create a credible competitor

around their chips, even in the same universe as NVIDIA, just their operational excellence, their B2B, their cloud offering, you got to think they're going to take a trillion dollars in market cap away from NVIDIA. So I thought, wow, this is really exciting for Amazon.

shareholders, and they're kind of offering cost reduction and control by reducing reliance on NVIDIA. Amazon can now lower AI infrastructure costs for its business customers while gaining greater control over its supply chain. I mean, this is—I just thought this was—

You know, whenever you get a company that comes out of nowhere and becomes the most valuable company in the world, it's just imagine, you know, Lake Erie of blood being poured into the water and the megalodons that attracts. And this has attracted one of the scariest megalodons in the history of business, and that is Amazon.

And they have the money to do this. The firm's most recent $4 billion investment in Anthropic included an agreement that Anthropic would use Amazon's AI chips. So the number two in LLMs is about to use Amazon chips, which will train the chips. They'll get better on it. NVIDIA stock fell 3%, but that's not that big a deal. And just one add-on here, Amazon is already trading at a pretty rich valuation, but it's potentially going to get some of that NVIDIA or that GPU magic back.

We did a predictions podcast on Pivot, and we asked Anthony Scaramucci, our friend, to come up with a prediction. And his big prediction is that he thinks that IBM is going to explode because IBM actually has some really strong IP and scientists around AI that effectively Watson was the first kind of AI offering.

And then he thinks with their CEO and their current offering that this stock is going to explode. And I thought, wow, that's a really interesting take. But it'll be interesting to see what companies are able to draft off of or kind of become remora fish on NVIDIA and OpenAI success. But I just thought this was genius. I mean, you got to give it to the folks in Amazon. This is, I feel like this is a masterstroke. Yeah. It's also just like the perfect marketing message too, because...

I mean, when you think about standard marketing, the standard play is that you go out in public and you'll just say out loud or you'll advertise, like, "We have the best chips in the world." Or maybe you'll have some research report that says, "Our chips are 5% faster than Nvidia's," or whatever. And that's what we've been seeing most of these chip maker competitors doing right now. You just sort of make a statement about your chip. "Ours is more efficient, it's cheaper, it's faster," whatever, and then you just hope that the market believes you.

But this is so much more compelling because to go out and build a supercomputer that is this big and this expensive with only your own chips, not with Nvidia's, implicit in that investment is a belief that your chips are better than Nvidia's. Like it's the perfect show-don't-tell strategy, which I find so much more compelling. And I would also assume that the market is going to find this

a lot more compelling, especially, you know, the AI companies who want to use these chips. And that's sort of the most important thing here. So we've been talking a lot about all of these different chip makers. We talked about Cerebrus, who came out and said, you know, we have the biggest chips in the world, and therefore ours are the best. And I didn't really buy it. And this thing

I'm suddenly like, okay, this is really going to shake things up for the first time in a market where NVIDIA has 95% market dominance. It feels like Amazon could be the first one to actually disrupt this. Well, see above the biggest Megalodons, the great white sharks in the world are coming for that 95% market share. Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Apple are all developing custom AI chips.

to reduce their dependence on the market leader. And then there's just a suite of AI startups looking to get a piece of the pie. You mentioned Cerebrus. There's Grok, Accelera, and Tensterent, which recently raised nearly $700 million in new funding from investors, including Bezos. So there's a $3.5 trillion carcass that

that everybody wants a piece of, and that's NVIDIA. There's also just this one quote from the chief executive of AWS, which I find so compelling because it's so understated and so simple compared to all of the other marketing messages of these other chip startups. He said, quote, "'Today, there's really only one choice on the GPU side, and we think customers would appreciate having multiple choices.'"

That was the statement. It's just so simple and so compelling. Yeah, there you go. And kudos to them. Kudos to them. They're out first, right? Yeah, exactly. But you mentioned some of those other companies that are building. So you talked about Google. They're working on their, what's known as their tensor processing units. Microsoft is working with OpenAI on chips. Meta is working on a chip called Artemis. These companies are all

not dipping their toes, but maybe dipping their ankles into chip making. But the wrinkle is that they all still have big partnerships with NVIDIA. Like they all still...

heavily rely on NVIDIA. And so we're getting to this point now where they're all working with NVIDIA because they have to, but on the side, they're starting to build out their own businesses because they all recognize, well, we rely on NVIDIA too much. So I would be interested to get your perspective on how is that all going to play out? And have you ever seen a dynamic before where sort of you're friends with

the big company, but then you start trying to nip at their heels and ultimately you're trying to compete with them. Yeah, it was a similar dynamic back in, I think, in the 90s. I think Apple got sick of being so reliant on Intel and they started developing their own chips. So, yeah, you have seen this before. NVIDIA clearly doesn't have the power. They'd be worried about antitrust concern. If NVIDIA wanted to play hardball, they'd say, well, if you're in the business of building your own chips, we're out. I think that would probably create antitrust scrutiny given their dominance in the market. So, yeah,

All of these guys, every year they spend more and more money on NVIDIA. They're waiting in line. They're price takers. These folks are not used to being price takers. These folks are the biggest, you know, they're the biggest gorilla in the room. And when they meet with their vendors, they're used to saying, no, I want you to cut your prices by 10% this year and I need it faster and I'm going to delay my payment terms. They're used to dictating terms.

And so when a company shows up and starts dictating terms to them, they are just they're just not used to it. They just they can't imagine what world they're in all of a sudden. So I go, wait, all of a sudden I'm not the hot the hot girl at the party and I have to kiss your ass and you're ignoring my texts. I mean, it's just this is an alien place for these guys.

We'll be right back after the break with a look at an interesting new take on product launches from OpenAI.

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We're back with Prof G Markets. OpenAI has unveiled a new initiative for December called 12 Days of OpenAI, where it'll showcase upcoming products through live streams held on its website across those 12 days. The event has already gained traction with the company's tweet about the initiative racking up 2.6 million views and attracting coverage from more than 10 different media outlets. Scott, we've been talking a lot about

public relations and investor relations and how that's all changing this year. What's your take on OpenAI strategy here?

specifically the fact that they are deciding to go into live streaming. Yeah. So first off, I hear the term 12 days of open AI and I want to like go into the garage, close the door, turn on the car. I mean, 12 days of open AI. It's like, okay, couldn't they have gone with like three days of open? I mean, so two weeks of this shit. Anyways, you've been talking a lot about this and how the earnings call needed to be disrupted or investor relations disrupted.

And whether I think it was Alexander Karp walking around, live stream, Instagram, going direct to kind of retail investors, there's a ton of innovation around investor communications right now. And this isn't investor communications as much as it is a product launch.

And Apple sort of redefined the tech product launch, and they literally ripped off fashion brands. They said, all right, highly curated, highly orchestrated, lighting, celebrities, big reveal. And instead of having Gisele Bundchen come down the aisle, we have Steve Jobs. He has a uniform. I mean, the lighting, the production value is capturing a perfect moment in time. And it's now moved to, they've kind of zagged.

to their Zig and that they want it to be more authentic. I'm sure they rehearsed, but they want it to feel raw and they want it to feel genuine. And bottom line is, this is a prediction. I bet more people watch this product launch than watch CNN during those days. This will get more viewership from a more valuable audience than any cable network. Maybe not Fox, because Fox still gets a lot of people. There's a lot of people when oxygen takes and go, ah, ah.

She's a looker. I love that Brett Baer. I'd like to grab a steak with him. He reminds me of a guy I served a nom with. Anyways, I think this is going to be hugely popular news.

and redefine product releases. And I think the main takeaway for me is that I think that companies should be thinking about their earnings and their product launches less as just press releases and announcements, but more as content. Like ultimately, that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to produce content in the same way that we're trying to produce content on this podcast that is engaging and that gets people excited and

And that gets people interested. And you're not going to do that with just a simple press release. The way you're going to do that is with videos and with podcasts. And I think it's just very impressive that OpenAI has really led this transformation here. And they said, well, why don't we do a live stream?

I mean, they're sort of at the forefront of the transformation of content right now. So I'm very impressed by the fact that they're taking this route for a product launch. I would like to just get your thoughts on live streaming as a medium, which I'm just finding very fascinating right now. Like, I feel like live streaming was...

Not very long ago, this very niche concept, this very niche kind of weird corner of the internet, the idea of a live streamer was not something that held much cultural currency at all.

But in the past year, we've seen like an explosion of live streamers and live streamers. I mean, we've seen like Aiden Ross, who is a big live streamer, who ended up interviewing Donald Trump before he was elected. And now Aiden Ross is all over the news. And we've seen Kai Sinat, who's built this gigantic following on Twitch. His last live stream reached 50 million viewers, which is around 15% of the United States population.

And then here's this one stat that blew me away. More than a quarter of internet users today watch a live stream every week. So I would like to just get your take on live streaming as a medium. Why do you think we're seeing this explosion right now in media? The only stats was I don't know. I kind of feel like live streaming is to original scripted television or video or just streaming.

what podcasting is to radio. And that is initially out of the gates. An old guy like me says, what's the difference? It's just radio. No podcasting is different. Live streaming. I feel as if, you know, I hear this and think, okay, we should do a live stream, right? Like everybody else, but I'm sure it's hard. I mean, you did a live stream like last week, right? You did it on section. Actually, I did it earlier today. I'm just not thinking correctly. I did a live stream in AMA for, for section. Yeah. It's look, the,

It's been around a while, I guess, celebs. I don't know what the—I guess live streaming is going B2C, where it's mostly been B2B. You know, Section, we did a live stream on AI ROI. What a name! And 10,000 people registered, and I think 3,500 showed up, but that's a good audience. I guess when you have Robert Downey Jr. or Terry Crews show up, I'd be kind of curious to understand what is the zeitgeist, what's working, what isn't.

But it just feels like, again, it's all kind of the same thing. And that is if you're Walls and AOC and you go on a live stream, you're basically going direct to consumer and you're cutting out the means of production. And the means of production is CNBC or Fox or CNN. And so you can do it much more inexpensively. You get to dictate the terms of it. Any economic rewards, you get to reap the majority of it.

So it just feels like it's another collapse of the media industrial complex where the creators get to garner more of the rewards because it's taking advantage of the infrastructure called DARPA and the internet, as opposed to trying to kiss the ass of some means of production that gets in the middle.

whether it's Netflix, whether it's CNBC, whether it's Comcast, whether it's Disney, and you can just go straight to these folks. And so it strikes me as if it's going to follow the arc of podcasting, it's going to grow substantially. It felt like it had a moment a few years ago with gaming, and then it kind of went quiet again, and now it feels like it's coming back. Yeah, something I would add on to that, that I've been thinking a lot about recently in content. As I've said to you before, I've just become fascinated with YouTube.

And I look at what's happening with our YouTube channel, which is growing enormously. I mean, we're getting like hundreds of thousands of views on our videos now, and I've been sort of wondering why is that? Like, why would you opt to watch this podcast on YouTube

versus just listen to it in your headphones. And I don't think it's because people want to see our faces. I don't think that adds that much to it. I was thinking about this. I think the big differentiator with YouTube and with live streaming is the comment section. I feel like having a comment section is just an entirely different experience because you get to share your own opinions, you get to hear what other people think,

And suddenly the experience transforms from not just consumption, but it actually becomes like a social experience. And so what I'm finding with live streams right now, my take is, it feels like live streaming is the comment section on steroids. Like you're getting to participate in the content with a group of people who are watching it at the same time. And I'm starting to think that any form of content that doesn't

figure out a way to interact with the audience in a meaningful way where the audience can comment and have an opinion and engage interactively. I'm starting to think that any of that content is really just behind the ball. It's such an interesting point. You just inspired an analogy. I don't know if it's the correct one, but

The reason you go to Premier League games, you know, during COVID, they didn't have fans or they had a limited number of fans. And they're just, you watch it on TV and it's the same players and it's the same rules in the same game. And it just fell flat without the fans in the stadium. And I wonder if this is effectively a game, you know, traditional video now is a game where there's no fans. And that is interesting.

When I was on this AI ROI live stream, I occasionally would stop and read a comment. And we tried to interact with the audience, and it just had such a nice vibe. And the thing I love about Premier League is you go and the fans are just amazing. It creates such—they're so engaged in everything, you know, screaming and booing at every little thing and, you know, making fun of people. And they're hilarious.

But to your point, maybe that's what this is. Maybe the next level of kind of interaction and dope and entertainment is, all right, you have two streams. One stream is the content, and the second stream is the fan reaction to the content. Because what I noticed myself doing today on this live stream was occasionally when someone put something really interesting or funny or asked a question in the chat, I'd be like, oh, this is a good idea.

I would sort of selectively pull stuff out and highlight it. And think how fun that is for the viewer. I mean, it brings on a whole different dimension, the idea that you're watching the content and the guy you're watching is actually interacting with you in real time. You compare that to just watching like Jimmy Fallon, where they have these very kind of awkward interviews and it sort of feels like you're watching like

robots put on a production. It's a completely, it's so much more human, I guess. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point. It's sort of, you know, this company I'm on the board of right now, OpenWeb, manages the comment section of media companies, but comments are asynchronous. Someone posts a comment and people comment on the comment, but it creates a lot more engagement, which creates incremental opportunity

For advertising. This is, all right, if we engage the audience, it's like the players yelling back or kicking the ball in an audience member, right? It's sort of... Yeah, those are the best moments. Or when the dad in left field catches the ball while holding his kid, right? It just sort of engages the whole audience. I think this is really neat. I think we should announce now that we're going to do a live stream so people...

People can see you live, see how the edit really does impact our ability to make you sound intelligent.

Yeah. I don't know if we're cut out for live streams. No. We've got faces for podcasting and content for asynchronous. Yeah. But it is very interesting that we're seeing companies start to embrace this. And I think this is all headed in one direction, which is that the press release is dead and newer forms of media like videos, TikToks, live streams, that is the future. That is the future of public relations.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our associate producer is Alison Weiss. Mia Silverio is our research lead. Jessica Lange is our research associate. Drew Burrows is our technical director. And Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Profity Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Join us on Thursday for our conversation with Tom Lee, only on Profity Markets.

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