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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, 07/28/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple Of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's extremely stupid. You should not do that.
Speaker 1:It's gonna shake up. Which one is it also? Now we have Russian roulette going on.
Speaker 2:Good morning everyone.
Speaker 1:We have a good show for you today. A fantastic show for you today. We'll kick it off with ramp.com. Time is money.
Speaker 2:Save both.
Speaker 1:Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp. To get started. Speaking of ramp, Astronomer is back. Astronomer had ramp on the website.
Speaker 1:Apparently, ramp's a Never happy
Speaker 2:lost faith.
Speaker 1:Never lost faith. Yeah. So, Astronomer, if you weren't following, if you were living under a rock, Apache Airflow as a service managed enterprise SaaS platform on top of Apache Airflow for data analytics streaming data, that type of stuff. And, they had a absolutely chaotic week last week with their CEO being caught at a Coldplay concert. Was that last week or the week before?
Speaker 2:I think it was I
Speaker 1:think the week before.
Speaker 2:The week before. But Had to have been.
Speaker 1:CEO was caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert. Martin called him out on stage and said, oh those people look like they're having affair.
Speaker 2:Was it was Did he actually say that live?
Speaker 1:He did say that on the video. No way. So they pan pan around to the different kiss cams and or different just cameras and they spot the CEO of Astronomer hugging the head of HR.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Can't even hug your employees anymore apparently.
Speaker 2:Can't even give your chief people officer a hug at this country anymore. And
Speaker 1:once they see themselves on the screen at the show they recoil in horror and turn around and and the other person in HR who's sitting next to them is like, oh
Speaker 2:my god. What's going on? Well, why I didn't understand. Was that actually Apparently.
Speaker 1:That was People went and dug it up and found out that she works there too.
Speaker 2:I thought that was people just saying, hey, this person looks like this person.
Speaker 1:Oh, I
Speaker 2:don't know.
Speaker 3:It seems
Speaker 2:it seems wild that the HR department was hitting the concert with the CEO. Was like maybe it
Speaker 1:was an open secret. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway That's possible. It did not it was not good for Astronomer. Yep. Were discussing this. Lulu was saying the CEO's gotta go because he's a hired gun not a founder.
Speaker 1:And it's just displays very bad character and it reflects poorly on the company. We were kind of going back and forth on this as as the like about the idea of like, okay. Yeah. Like the CEO did something bad in his personal life but like do you really want to find an alternative to your managed Apache Airflow service? Like it's kind of a hassle to rip that out if you're happy with the product.
Speaker 2:We we said that the company would be fine. They did need a new CEO Yes. Immediately. And the founder, I believe his name is Pete Yes. Stepped up within days.
Speaker 2:Yes. Pete DeJoy.
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. So founders back in the CEO side?
Speaker 4:Back in the seat. Let's go. That's the
Speaker 2:bull that's a real bull case
Speaker 1:for sound board for the Ashton Hall sound effect. I wanna hear some good news. Is now founder mode everybody. Astronomers is totally in founder mode.
Speaker 2:They were already delivering the world's data. Yes. And now, they're in founder mode.
Speaker 1:They're in founder mode. I think they're Another billion dollars for Bain Capital. Let's hear it for Bain Capital. They don't get an Nice. I didn't know that.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:And I actually I I emailed briefly with Pete DeJoy
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he said he's a fan of the show. Amazing. We're hoping to Yeah. Get him on. We don't wanna actually talk about any of
Speaker 1:this No. Haven't wanna Apache talk Airflow. I'm so into Apache Airflow now. I'm so ready.
Speaker 2:But anyways, so late Friday night, the Astronomer
Speaker 1:Clearly, they didn't want us to react to this on stream so they put it up after we after we logged on.
Speaker 2:Let's pull up the video.
Speaker 1:I wanna watch the full thing.
Speaker 5:You for your interest in Astronomer. Hi. I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days.
Speaker 5:Seriously. And wanted me to answer the most common ones? Yes. Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ML, and AI at We've been thrilled so many people have a new found interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we've received Yes.
Speaker 5:There is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September. We will now be returning
Speaker 2:to the next weeks. Know game
Speaker 5:changing results.
Speaker 2:Is Chris Martin's ex wife? Yes.
Speaker 5:Thank you
Speaker 4:for your
Speaker 2:interest in this entire thing.
Speaker 1:It's very funny. It's it's not really like Chris Martin. It's not like getting back at Chris Martin in any sort of weird way. It's just funny that it's like another voice from that universe.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That that's Chris. So they they remain close friends with co parents. Okay. In in in so many ways like she's like the best spokesperson for this because anyways, you know
Speaker 1:how quickly they shot that. Know, they had to like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Probably like a conference room near her office or like her house or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Perfect response. We will astronomer there at all.
Speaker 1:Six lines. It's really
Speaker 2:ties into the story. It made sense. It wasn't just some random celebrity Nope. That had some
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Funny tie in.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And I think it was incredibly well done. Lulu broke it down. She said, laughing at themselves was the right move because humor does four crucial things. Connects with a new audience even for people who don't care about Apache airflow being in in on the joke together forms a connection with astronomer. Diffuse tension by joining the ridicule ridicule.
Speaker 2:They're no longer its subject or its object. Get closure. They said it out loud. The joke is tapped. Everyone can move on.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Signal a fresh start. The CEO and HR lady are gone. It's a new management team and making light of this shows there. They've consciously uncoupled from the past.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:Great breakdown.
Speaker 1:Very well written, Lulu. The the third point is so funny because there's a little bit about like like nothing will kill a joke like independent of all the crazy astronomer Chris Martin Coldplay thing. There's nothing that will kill a joke faster than a series d enterprise SaaS company making the joke. And so if they're making if they're jumping in on the joke it's like well we wanted to kill the joke. We wanted the joke to stop.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so we jumped in, we're playing along and we got the last literally the last laugh. Like like if anyone tried to post something about astronomer CEO Coldplay all like they would immediately be everyone be like, yeah we've moved on.
Speaker 2:The real question is is the IPO windows open. Should they go public?
Speaker 1:Kind of meme stock?
Speaker 2:And actually have Gwyneth step in like kind of like chairman type role. Know, really expand the
Speaker 1:They need a treasury.
Speaker 2:They do.
Speaker 1:But they need something that that that speaks to the the the history of the company. They need to buy some some funny funny asset to put on the balance sheet. I was thinking about that we've moved on from Bitcoin treasuries to like the further out risk curve ones.
Speaker 2:Well, there's all the Ethereum
Speaker 1:The GameStop treasury which is hilarious. I I think the next generation is just straight up lottery ticket treasury. Just scratchers.
Speaker 2:I thought you were gonna say like they should put some like match group on the balance sheet.
Speaker 1:They should. That would be good. That would be more like tied to this. And I think that makes sense for astronomer. Get a bunch of match group.
Speaker 1:Get a bunch of match group stock on your balance sheet.
Speaker 2:By the way, we're
Speaker 1:Or like Eventbrite maybe or who who who runs like the Coldplay concerts? It's like it's like didn't Taylor Swift like sue them? Ticketmaster. Get some Ticketmaster stock on the balance sheet. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who knows? That would tie
Speaker 2:you to the war
Speaker 1:a little bit.
Speaker 2:Like the values of the company Exactly. And also some potential Yeah. Ups.
Speaker 1:What was that company? There was a biotherapist company that was saying like, we're fighting financial fraud by buying GameStop stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Inefficiencies.
Speaker 1:But yeah. Get some
Speaker 2:Market manipulation.
Speaker 1:Get some scratchers on the balance sheet for sure. Get some lottery tickets. Everyone's like, yeah. They have they have $50,000 in lottery tickets. But if it hits, this could be $500,000,000 on the balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's it is such a I think a year from now, we'll look back and say like they found a way to actually turn this into a win. Oh, Totally. Now, some people if if you know, this is maybe some of the best crisis comms work we've seen
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:In you know, this decade.
Speaker 1:For
Speaker 2:sure. But I think if you you now have a million millions of people that like have think your company is kind of like cool and funny.
Speaker 1:And they're aware of it. And they're aware of it.
Speaker 2:And it would them. It would have cost them. I'm sure this Gwyneth video cost millions of dollars. Yeah. I think it probably would have cost them to try to to try to build that type of brand recognition otherwise.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like just just traditionally would have cost multiples of that.
Speaker 1:I only have one note on the video. I mean Autism Capital here says you have to give credit where credit is due. This is 10 out of 10 PR recovery. I think it loses one point because it was hard posted and not restreamed. One live stream 30 destinations, multi stream and reach your audience wherever they are.
Speaker 1:They should have restreamed it. Anyway, fantastic comeback. Lulu says, next move is for an astronomer competitor to hire Chris Martin to do a video on how their product is the best at helping you gain visibility in any environment and keep your private networking secure. And and somebody in the comments says, the chain is gonna end with
Speaker 2:Well, this is the thing. I don't even know who Astronomers competitors are.
Speaker 1:Don't know who their competitors are. But, I don't know. Maybe they should.
Speaker 2:That's why this is a win for Astronomer.
Speaker 1:It's a huge win for Astronomer. And yeah, I mean also interesting because this kind of plays into what we were talking about with Paul from Browserbase. This idea of like the like Apache Airflow's open source. You would expect that managed Airflow would be something that's you know, totally in AWS's wheelhouse. And yet they were able to scale to a series d company, 300 employees like clearly doing well.
Speaker 1:And now they have this like breakout moment and they still are probably facing fierce competition from the from the hyperscalers but and from the from the big cloud platforms. But they just don't.
Speaker 2:It's so the timing of this is so insane. Bane led the series d. It was announced on May 1.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:So Love it. Just very recently here. That mean they've been putting up some incredible numbers.
Speaker 1:Let's get me around me on the show. Have him talk about
Speaker 2:Last fifth The last fiscal year, astronomers saw a 100% year over year ARR growth in world class a 130% net revenue retention in 90% product utilization with customers. That's huge. I mean, I think they're gonna have a massive Yeah. End end to the year.
Speaker 1:Speaking of high NPS products, let's tell you about figma.com. Think bigger build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at figma.com.
Speaker 2:And we will be in the great city of New York this week
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:For the Figma IPO.
Speaker 1:We will be.
Speaker 2:We will be live from NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's what the cool kids call it. NYSE.
Speaker 2:NYSE.
Speaker 1:I always just call it NYSE or like the New York Stock Exchange. But Yeah. When you're saying it every other word because you're in that world When big in that world.
Speaker 2:When you're taking companies public like every other week.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. You gotta gotta use slang. Got it. It.
Speaker 1:The cool kids use. Okay. Bull or bear case for Figma. I go to Figma make and I tell it build me a collaborative design tool.
Speaker 2:Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1:Don't make mistakes. Recursive, the snake eating its tail. You use Figma to make Figma then you don't need Figma anymore. Is that a bear case? What's going on here?
Speaker 2:Well, think you're basically still paying Figma to host.
Speaker 1:Okay. Okay. They get you to host it. Okay. That's how they get you locked
Speaker 2:in. You're paying.
Speaker 1:And so they get you locked You're paying
Speaker 2:one way or another.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I like that though. It's a it's an extension it's an existential risk for all these platforms that allow you to build software vibe
Speaker 2:That's why every SaaS
Speaker 1:First thing I wanna vibe code is a vibe coding platform.
Speaker 2:Well yeah. Every that's why every SaaS company has to have a vibe coding product now.
Speaker 1:Yes. So you can vibe code the product itself. Yep. Yes. The the the tautological vibe code.
Speaker 2:No. That is I mean so the question people have been saying like, okay. At at some point in the future, you'll be able to one shot products.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I I would say I have really strong conviction that in the next few years, you'll be able to one shot a design tool. Yep. Will you be able to one shot a design tool for that works in the enterprise, that work as like
Speaker 1:The people you're with.
Speaker 2:Figma has been like shipping features every single day
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:For a decade now.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and even if you knew exactly which features mattered and how they all work together, it would be very difficult to create a one to one clone.
Speaker 1:And then also there's the network of if you hire a designer and you're like, hey.
Speaker 2:Hey. I need you to
Speaker 1:use my vibe. Use my vibe code in Figma knock off that I vibe Can coded in you just pay Can we just use
Speaker 2:bucks a month?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and then So the ecosystem is very very important and
Speaker 2:also ecosystem.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:It makes me you know, it it definitely makes me more bullish on companies that have these like developer app ecosystems. Yeah. Yeah. I mean Shopify is the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You can one maybe you could one shot like an e commerce storefront product but can you are you then gonna one shot the downstream?
Speaker 1:I mean, as soon as as soon as LLMs were writing code and we were talking about like AGI takeoff and super intelligence. I had this like running thought about, okay. So at a certain point, you can go to an LLM or a vibe coding platform and say like build me an e commerce website and it will just say like, okay setting up Shopify. But in the far far future, it could just say, okay applying for a banking license. Applying for a money transfer license.
Speaker 2:I'm going
Speaker 1:to rebuild Stripe. I'm going to rebuild Shopify. I'm gonna rebuild a database from first principles. I'm going to use just raw Actually, you just can't
Speaker 2:make a data center.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna
Speaker 4:make I'm
Speaker 1:gonna build
Speaker 2:an company.
Speaker 1:Should have
Speaker 2:at least one data center.
Speaker 1:And it all just does that in one prompt. Yeah. Because one prompt fires off. I mean how many man hours have gone into building Stripe or building any of these companies? It's like you know tens of thousands of employees for most of them for you know decades.
Speaker 1:You add all that together, but if the LLM can do that and if the AI system can do that in the data center in just a few minutes in hyper compression, who knows? Maybe. Logan Bartlett has another take on the Astronomer video. He says, the Astronomer video is great on its own, but I'm even more impressed that the leadership team and the board were able to come to consensus to make this investment and take this risk absent the CEO they've had for two year for the last two years. I can't imagine everyone was on board with this initially.
Speaker 1:So major kudos to everyone getting there eventually and taking this chance. This bodes well for their future IMO. And I agree. Like even with Gwyneth Paltrow, it it feels so funny, but like there's this idea of like let's let's put out not a standard legal statement is it feels risky. And it's so easy for someone to step up and say, hey, like let's not take this risk.
Speaker 1:It's not worth it.
Speaker 2:Well, put out the quick statement that Pete was stepping back into
Speaker 1:the Yeah. They had put out a few statements. But clearly something something was was clicking.
Speaker 2:The question is what should Andy Byron, the CEO having the affair? Which
Speaker 1:I think that's the best part about this video is that it doesn't take shots at Yeah. Doesn't punch down. It doesn't make it like, oh, it doesn't drag that in. It doesn't make it more complicated. And a lot of times when when CEOs do get pushed out, there's like lawsuits about comp and was it fair to release people?
Speaker 1:And so there's like all these things that can come back like if you are especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO, you should be you should probably not be talking about that that CEO. Because if you come out and say they were not good and that's why I had to step back in, then that could hurt their career prospects and then they could sue you for defamation or something like that. So there's a lot of risk to anything around that. All the corporate comms like it is like the lawyers are like annoying but like they do make a good point that like there is financial impact if you get it wrong. So very very good.
Speaker 1:And then Stays Sayase says, I think we're gonna find out that Chris Martin felt bad asked Gwyneth Paltrow to help out and they gave astronomer an offer to do damage control. My guess is that this is entertainment industry magic happening not data tech magic. Logan says
Speaker 2:Chris Martin wants to wants CEOs who are having affairs to feel welcome at his romantic concerts. He's like this could be really bad for business. This could be bad for ticket sales. I have to go into damage control.
Speaker 1:I don't think Chris Martin's behind this. This is a ridiculous theory that this stay sassy or whatever. Logan says totally possible.
Speaker 2:No I do. I think there could be something here. Mean.
Speaker 1:I don't think so. Don't know. Like why why he feels bad that this just happened at his show.
Speaker 2:Chris Martin has the data. He might be like ten percent of people at my concerts are having affairs.
Speaker 1:Maybe he's storing it at Apache Airflow?
Speaker 2:Or yeah. Maybe maybe he just
Speaker 1:really All those cares ticket sales are going through Apache Airflow and he's monitoring it using Astronomer. He's just like, no. My bags. I love this company. He's like actually accidentally an investor as well through some fun.
Speaker 1:Maybe he's Bain Capital LP. Who knows? He might be at that He
Speaker 2:might be heavily Anchor GP.
Speaker 1:Anchor LP in in index.
Speaker 2:In Bain in index.
Speaker 1:And to close out, Lulu said for everyone asking me this wasn't me. I do not work with astronomer but I think it was very well done. Kudos to their team. And it says a lot about Lulu's brand that whenever good PR happens people are like, Lulu's has to be behind It's it's it can only be her. It
Speaker 2:can't It possibly screamed Lulu.
Speaker 1:It did. It did. It did scream Lulu.
Speaker 2:I didn't I didn't I didn't ask her because I didn't wanna know because like I just like you know
Speaker 1:You like the mystery?
Speaker 2:I like the mystery of it. I feel like if I knew I'd I should probably say something, Yeah. You
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's shift gears. Let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.
Speaker 2:Cheers to Vanta.
Speaker 1:In the other side of PR statements, the t app hack is an absolute disaster. This is
Speaker 2:And their statement was a disaster.
Speaker 1:Their statement was a disaster. It does not
Speaker 2:seem Somebody just informed me Please. A friend of the show Yes. That it was Ryan Reynolds agency that pulled it off.
Speaker 1:No way. Sense. Yeah. Ryan Reynolds.
Speaker 2:The bridge between
Speaker 1:Tech Hollywood Hollywood. Tech. Oh, he's master master of his craft. And I feel like he's done a number of those like solo
Speaker 2:direct Oh, so was actually reported. So there's an article. Ryan Reynolds maximum effort ad agency turned astronomals viral moment into marketing gold. Wow. The production company was involved with the latest astronomer video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow.
Speaker 2:The ad is being hailed as a master class in crisis PR.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:agree. Astronomer, Fortune is saying astronomer got the last laugh.
Speaker 1:They did. They really did.
Speaker 2:Releasing it late on a Friday too is great. Shutting down the work week.
Speaker 1:Well, don't want AWS to trade down too heavily on the news. Know, if you release that during market hours, it could be turmoil. Could trigger an entire market sell off. And, last week, we had five back to back all time highs in the S and P 500. That's why we're wearing white suits.
Speaker 2:And, we're wearing white suits because we have peace with Europe.
Speaker 1:Peace with Europe. Which
Speaker 2:we'll get into in a little bit. But let's talk about tea. Yes. They released a statement. So,
Speaker 1:the tea app is an app that allows women to report red flags about men they are dating. It's based loosely on these are we dating the same man Reddits and it's not been handling its crisis well. Don't know if you want to read the official statement.
Speaker 2:Yes. So 06:44AM PST on 7twenty five, we identified an unauthorized access to our systems and immediately launched a full investigation with assistance from external cyber security experts to understand the scope and impact of the incident. Here's what we know at this time. A legacy data storage system was compromised resulting in unauthorized access to a dataset from prior to February 2024. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's And and so I think people were all already kind of like fact checking this. Yeah. Because there's the date they said
Speaker 1:because I remember you told me that
Speaker 2:There was like 60,000,000.
Speaker 1:Million users or something and it was at the top of the app store. So you would assume that it it was it was at this crazy viral inflection point and the amount of data that they were onboarding just in the past week was probably immense. But prior to February 2024, that's a long time ago. That's what fifteen sixteen months ago. Pretty pretty distant.
Speaker 1:So maybe it is possible it was like legacy data storage, but there's more posts that we're gonna go into that kind of illuminate exactly what happened. But they say that the data set included 72,000 images including 13,000 selfies and photo identification. Including 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted. What what selfies and photo identification like that's not like photo IDs or photo identification images. Like that's not the correct phrasing for that Submitted by users
Speaker 2:that there's 13,000 photos leaked.
Speaker 1:Okay. So like 13,000 people got their stuff leaked basically.
Speaker 2:Which feels much lower than than I think what what people had gen
Speaker 1:if you had downloaded the app at any point in time, everything was leaked in that in that data set. But anyway, let's go into the PR response
Speaker 2:clear they I mean, wasn't like they were hacked. They just like, they made there was something that was publicly accessible.
Speaker 1:Yes. They apparently they were using a Google Firebase database which is one of these kind of easy to spin up back ends. Tyler, have you used it before? Firebase?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Actually used in high school like the first ever mobile app I made. I used
Speaker 1:because you can do
Speaker 2:Back when you were a real rookie.
Speaker 6:You you can do off. You can do like normal databases. You can do like image storing. Yeah. You have like everything in one platform.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah. And it's just like but specifically Firebase is supposed to be designed as a database that you can access from the front end. So I believe that like most of the value prop is that you you you can focus a lot more on front end coding and still access data on the back end and you kind of get all the routes out of the box or something.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I think that's probably true. It's just like it's like very simple to use.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 6:It's very easy. It's very easy to use with mobile.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Is it a competitor parse? I think I think Ilya over at Matrix started parse and sold that to Facebook and then I think Firebase was kind of the the Google answer to to Parse. But these ideas of like quick easy to use mobile back ends not nearly as robust or scalable as something that's you know, like a true enterprise like AWS installation, but something that's certainly usable if you're trying to get up quickly, which kind of makes sense that if they launched this back in February 2024 that they would have this quick and simple database and then once they scale they might have moved to something else. So don't know that that's wrong.
Speaker 1:It's just kind of the way that they wrote this was not great. So Lulu breaks it down. She says, eight things to note in the statement that Tee finally released about their data breach. No apology really. They should have apologized for sure.
Speaker 1:Two, it dodges responsibility. They say legacy data storage systems, corporate
Speaker 2:And fundamentally dangerous to their users. Right? If if if random people online can identify this like single woman who's located at this address Totally. In this city Totally. Like that that's like like the fact like that the whole response was terrible.
Speaker 2:And the level
Speaker 1:It's so much different from astronomer because like astronomer you see the CEO doing something bad. You're like, well, he didn't leak my data. He didn't leak my API key. Like it would be honestly worse than
Speaker 2:any of their users. No. The products the product solid.
Speaker 1:The product solid.
Speaker 2:The recommend.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:But this is like incredible incompetence to put personally identifiable information in a public a publicly accessible database. Yep. And then say, oh, we were hacked.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And don't even and not even say sorry when you've you've risked the safety of your users
Speaker 4:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's embarrassing Yeah. Steeply embarrassing for these users Totally. People are turning it into a like king of the hill whatever.
Speaker 1:It was like hot or not. Hot or not. They brought that with like a
Speaker 2:leader board.
Speaker 1:And then they also built just a Google map that you could look at and see where everyone like the pins on the map. Just completely extreme way worse in my opinion than even having my credit card leaked, you know. This is like this is a dating site almost or like it's dating site adjacent. And so Yeah. Reveals something about
Speaker 2:a credit card. Can't cancel the fact that your Yeah.
Speaker 1:ID And and everyone everyone has a credit card or it's not it's not some like secret thing. But like this question of like, were you checking on someone you were dating? It's like, were did you have a trust issue with someone in your relationship that reflects something about you? Yeah. And that's like something that people probably wouldn't wanna share at all.
Speaker 1:Especially not considering the vibe on the four chan thread that was Yeah. Actually the precursor to all of this. Yeah. So It's like,
Speaker 2:hey, we shared your we shared your name, date of birth, address, driver's license But I didn't They didn't get your email.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The the government IDs. I hadn't seen anyone actually prove that that happened that because it was unclear that like IDs went out there. Maybe that's just locked down?
Speaker 2:There was pictures of the IDs
Speaker 1:Oh around. Okay. Rough, rough, rough. And so
Speaker 2:It was so I mean that the timing was was wild too because last week I I posted I posted founder of tea dating was previously a product leader at Salesforce. Massive moment for big tech PMs. Never doubt them again. Obviously like poking fun at you know just like the idea that like you know people love to say like, big tech PMs are changing like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But getting to the top of the app store is whether Very hard do. You're Nikita Beer or some college kid hacking an app together or a big tech PM or you know Mark Zuckerberg. It's always it's always hard. It's a knockout drag out fight on those leaderboards.
Speaker 2:It's quick to say I spoke to you
Speaker 1:How many likes did the I spoke to soon get?
Speaker 2:10 ks.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Always dunk on yourself. Don't let other
Speaker 2:people We can go back to doubting big tech PMs and then until they can get back to the
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. But you gotta review your code. You gotta do it on graphite dot dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub.
Speaker 1:I don't wanna say the graphite would have prevented the situation but
Speaker 2:But it might have.
Speaker 1:It might have. This is not a direct recommendation. But Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You should be on GitHub. You should be using Graphite.
Speaker 1:You should be reviewing all the code for security purposes. So cooler if
Speaker 2:they came out and they were like, yeah. We never would review code. We actually wouldn't we wouldn't actually like reviewing code like that's why why look back when you could look just vibe code the future. Yeah. Seems like that.
Speaker 1:So Lulu says, it's an obvious lie that they say, we have no evidence to suggest that photos can be linked to specific users. Photo identification is the definition of photos linked to specific users. This sentence almost felt too too stupid too type, too slow. The Internet has already memed you five feet into the ground yet only now are you issuing a statement and it still looks rushed. The information here is still minimal and inconsistent and the statement is rife with run on sentences and other syntax errors brutal.
Speaker 1:Weasley passing of the box saying the data was stored in accordance with law enforcement requirements related to cyber bullying investigations implies that law enforcement is to blame for their negligence. High fluff ratio with empty euphemisms like robust and secure solution. These words inform us of nothing. It's accountability theater. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They should just say like, hey we don't use you know public firebase buckets anymore. We've moved on to postgres with real a lot of security and two factor authentication or something.
Speaker 2:We use secure databases now. Yeah. We used to not use them.
Speaker 1:Bees be be much
Speaker 2:here's more here's question I have is Yeah. However many women were impacted. I imagine they will It's pretty easy to identify who they are and I imagine lawyers are reaching out to them and saying, let's file a class action against for damages. I think there's real damages here. Right?
Speaker 2:These it's like public embarrassment Mhmm. Safety concerns, etcetera. And it's maybe hard to prove like direct monetary damages but it looks bad. There's definitely some type of case here. And so however well the T app is doing in the app store.
Speaker 1:Oh, yes. It's still up? We gotta look that up. You look up the T app rankings. I will keep reading from Lulu.
Speaker 1:She says
Speaker 2:Still number one in lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Stefa legalese written by Four
Speaker 4:and a
Speaker 3:half stars.
Speaker 1:She says she's confident that blank is the of the utmost importance to us is not a sentence that has ever been spontaneously said out loud by a real person in human history and not taking lessons from previous data breaches. There are so many cases case studies of bad statements including crowd strikes below. Learn from them.
Speaker 2:So ChatGPT is back at number one. Tee dating is still at number two. Wow. To have that viral of a hack as they called it or just a a release of your users data as some might call
Speaker 1:it. At the same time you know you're going viral for getting hacked. You're also you know driving a tons of attention and people are like, okay I will
Speaker 2:I better check it out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Better check it out or or I'll take my selfie with professional lighting. So if it if it leaks
Speaker 2:I wanna be at the top of the hot or not.
Speaker 1:That was my that was my lesson. I was looking at some of the selfies and I was just like like people are dunking on these for a variety of reasons but the real lesson is like if you ever have to take a verification photo for a selfie get get a nice softbox go and wear a suit. Put on some makeup.
Speaker 2:Make you
Speaker 1:got some powder. Yeah. Exactly. You wouldn't be looking good if you're taking the the future leaked selfies, that you look you look fantastic. The the the there was a guy who got a mugshot and became a model.
Speaker 1:You heard about this guy? 14? For 2014, a guy was a I think he was a member of the Crips. He he was arrested on some I think legitimate charges. He was sent to jail.
Speaker 1:But his he was absolutely serving in his mugshot. You know this guy?
Speaker 2:No. I just never would have thought
Speaker 1:mugshot guy. Guarantee you'll find it.
Speaker 2:I'd I'd never thought I'd hear you say the
Speaker 1:word No. He really like it was just like looks like Tyler Cosgrove in the upcoming ad. Looks looks like future male model. And it was and he became a future
Speaker 2:male After this, so we shot an ad with and Tyler's the star. Yes. We're not in it at all. Yes. And after this drops if Tyler
Speaker 1:Look at this guy. Look at this guy.
Speaker 2:He's serving?
Speaker 1:He's serving. Right? So this went super viral and every and all these all like tons of people were like this guy's so hot blah blah blah. He became an actual model and he married or had kids with her dated like the heir to a multi billion dollar fortune. Never give up.
Speaker 1:Give give up. You're just one mugshot away from fame.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. A better way.
Speaker 1:Tyler, physics doesn't work out. Maybe crime and then mugshots and
Speaker 2:then Don't hurt any Don't do do petty crime.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Victimless crime. The best crime
Speaker 2:Yeah. Victimless crime like go to a CVS and break the glass and get like a one stick of deodorant and get arrested.
Speaker 1:But look really good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then give the deodorant back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have a little pump going, be in shape when you take the mug shot so you look great. But back to the t app. We were talking about how much money they were making. And this is what This is apparently from nosy bystanders.
Speaker 1:I got the t app. Who y'all looking for in what city charging $1 a search? Oh, okay. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:I thought I thought that Nosy Bystanders was saying that that every time you searched on the t app it was $1 which would be crazy monetization. But, I guess Nosy Bison are saying that they will search for you for a dollar.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Look up your whatever whatever dudes Yeah. You know, you're interested in learning about.
Speaker 1:Looking at these dudes. I like this guy with the basketball. He's looks like a good dude.
Speaker 2:Know? Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'll reserve I'll reserve my judgment once I see his full profile.
Speaker 2:What I don't understand is how do they how do they source those images?
Speaker 1:I think the I think the users upload them. So, I go there and I say, I had a bad
Speaker 2:experience This makes with me this makes me think just burn the whole app down. Yes. Because because going and and taking Yep. Like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't know. This was the debate that was happening on Hacker News that I kinda scrolled through. So the the pro t app camp would say that this is about safety and that this app is effective for identifying and abusive men. And so, a woman is in a relationship with a man. The man hits the woman.
Speaker 1:She leaves the relationship and she wants to let other women know that hey, this guy might hit you if you get into a relationship with him. So she gets on the app and says, I was dating Bob. Bob hit me, and it's all true. And that acts as a warning. And so that's increasing the amount of safety in like the dating marketplace.
Speaker 1:Now, the flip side is that
Speaker 2:Somebody could get their feelings hurt and do the
Speaker 1:same thing. So people could lie and say this person hit me when they didn't because there isn't the abundance preponderance of evidence that is required in the courts. But then also you on the T app, you could put red flags that weren't actually related to things that are like like illegal or deemed by society to be that bad. So the flaw the like the flags could be like ghosted me which is like impolite but not not at the same level as domestic abuse clearly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And one of the flags apparently was just is bald. So it's like if a guy shows up with a toupee and you get rugged, no pun intended.
Speaker 2:Hey. Let's That's wrong. That's wrong.
Speaker 1:Let's support our bald our bald brethren. You got Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, you got some of the absolute boys.
Speaker 2:And Charlie x.
Speaker 1:X c x?
Speaker 2:Yes. She just she just married a bald
Speaker 4:guy.
Speaker 1:Married a bald guy. Great. I love the bald.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Some of the greatest Yeah. Men in history
Speaker 1:were bald. And and so the point is is that like there's this question of like, is it an app for increasing safety? Is it an app for just talking trash and being mean? And that's kind of the debating line. And no one really knows what percentage of reports were real and what percentage of reports were actually based on like things that truly cross the line.
Speaker 1:Because if if the app is 99% people complaining about people showing up to dates with toupees when they're secretly bald, like that's kind of ridiculous and I guess you are getting catfished in one some way, but it just doesn't flight
Speaker 2:to Turkey plan. Exactly. What if it's on the Exactly. Road
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:So And it didn't even give him a chance because
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so there's a there's a world where some some pieces of the app were very helpful and they increased safety and there's others where they were basically just like cyber bullying each other and it was all just a mess. Either way, all of that starts with good security on the
Speaker 2:app. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like you can't even have that conversation when you're just leaking everyone's data.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The There was an app. I forget what it was called but I And anytime you have these like anonymous apps Yeah. They're just prime for cyberbullet.
Speaker 1:There's a huge trend of this. They used to go viral at South by Southwest post social networking boom. So Twitter originally went viral at South by Southwest. I think Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, they stood up on stage and they said, hey, we're launching this new app. It's Twitter.
Speaker 1:You can text this number and whatever you tweeted in that conference room would go up on the on the board that they were live streaming basically. And it was like it took over South by Southwest and then they got the early adopters and then it became what it is today and and now it has hundreds of millions of users. Right? And then Foursquare did the same thing
Speaker 2:and Billions of bots.
Speaker 1:There were few there other were companies that were able to do it. And then after a while, the the the kind of like the the area of opportunity and like the the shape that it became more narrow and more narrow. So like Foursquare made a lot of sense to launch it South by Southwest. Don't know if they actually did, but that type of thing because it's like, I'm checking in at this at this stage for this show or this bar for this party. Then then they became more anonymous and there were a couple other apps.
Speaker 1:And then the anonymous apps would go viral on college campuses and they would inevitably be kind of used for cyber bullying of one kind or another. And so always been always been a mess, but at the very least you gotta lock down the user data. There was a funny funny post on Hacker News. I was reading about this where someone was like, I wanna set up an app for people who enjoy doxxing other people. And so it's a place where you can go to congregate with other people who enjoy doxxing.
Speaker 2:The doxx community.
Speaker 1:The the doxx community. So if you're into doxxing, you can go there and like connect with other people who enjoy doxxing. But when you sign up, you're instantly doxxed and you show up on a different website that says I doxx myself. And so it's like hey I'm a doxxer. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We just need your we just need your address, your phone number, your ID, your image, your selfie, a bunch of photos and then it just goes immediately public. And so it's like a doxxing honeypot. It's very silly. So he was like I was gonna vibe code this but I don't have time so somebody else can do it. Anyway, DHH has some good analysis.
Speaker 1:The founder of Basecamp, the legendary programmer, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Yeah. The next reason The
Speaker 2:just we just got a text from a friend of the show Yeah. About a friend of the show. Okay. Apparently, someone This person wanted to build a Yelp for people
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Which is actually
Speaker 2:which is actually like that's basically what t app is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's just like very one-sided Yeah. As it's like dating dating market Yeah. Focus. But it would be really funny if if there was just a public database
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:People could review John Coogan and just say it like
Speaker 1:Well
Speaker 4:I mean
Speaker 2:I don't like that he hype mugged me at that conference. He knew he knew exactly what he was doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean like there's something weird about like anything that's anonymous like this it just kind of goes to this like negative world, this negative realm. Interestingly Nikita Beers app Gas even though it's not around or I I don't think it's thriving anymore, but I thought it was interesting that that he you could not do free text response. So I couldn't say Jordy looks bad in a white suit or something like that. I could only choose from four positive things.
Speaker 1:And so it was like enforced positivity and then I could be relative. I could say like, well he's more you know intelligent than charismatic or more charismatic than intelligent. And I could kind pick from different positive traits which gave you a relative landscape of compliments, but it but it it kind of it kind of prevented that like cyber bullying because you could only say nice things. You just say different nice things and then I think I I think that's what led to it going viral and and and doing very well. And so, there clearly are ways to work around some of these odd edges and we see them pop up in other in other ways.
Speaker 1:We talked about it a lot with like the LLM stuff with like, you know, stuff comes out like social networking exists, the app store exists, the ability to import photos and stuff exists. Like how do you use that stuff? Like technology can be good, it can be bad, it can be misused. When does when does stuff
Speaker 2:goes anonymous, it gets pretty dark and negative quickly. Yep. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It there's something there's something about not having
Speaker 2:That's why like if somebody's if somebody's talking
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Badly about a certain investor online and not willing to like show their face
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You have to discount it massively.
Speaker 1:A lot.
Speaker 2:Because it's like, okay was this founder like rejected by that firm once and now they have they feel like they were wronged and their entire worldview is like oriented around that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It gets very odd. Anyway, let's finish with the t app because there's an interesting conspiracy theory we gotta go through. We gotta put on the tinfoil hat.
Speaker 1:So first off DHH, founder of Ruby on Rails, founder of Basecamp says, the T app having all its user data leaked was bad. Now imagine a porn site with an age verification tying viewing history to a specific identity. I'm sure no hacker or government agency would ever have interest in such data. So he is very worried about that. Then he also says, web app users would be shocked to learn that 99% of the time deleting your data just sets a flag in the database and then it lives there forever until it's hacked or subpoenaed.
Speaker 1:This is because a lot of a lot of users demand this like, oh I I didn't mean to delete it. Can you undelete it? And they're like, yeah we can. Actually we didn't delete it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Fully delete it.
Speaker 2:Well this this so totally totally random but over the weekend I noticed so so in Sam's interview with Theo Von
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:With Theo Von's interview of Sam. He just kind of casually mentioned he's like, oh yeah by the way
Speaker 1:I've been thinking about this
Speaker 2:He was like by the way like every single thing that you say on chat gbt can be used against you in a court of law and there's nothing we can do about it. And he said like, we need new laws.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it felt like something that the kind of thing that like he should probably have been like lobbying to create those new laws.
Speaker 1:Completely disagree.
Speaker 2:So so so yes, maybe like pop public warning like, hey, by the way, anything you say to chat GPT can be used against you in a court of law.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Could could be done could be done at the app could be done at the app layer.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Do you think that that and and you think it's like going and just yelling about it, know?
Speaker 1:So so basically, I think that that was a sort of like a PR blunder in the sense that what he should have said is like, hey, chat GPT, exact same rules as Facebook and Google sheets and email and everything else. Nothing's different about it. It's all the same. Instead, he didn't make it clear that he's under the same rules as everything else. And it would have been so much easier to to start there with that, hey, you know, we're a website that stores what you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Taught the the text that you type into that box goes into a database, and that database can be subpoenaed like any other website. Any other website. You you like, if if you commit a crime, they can go look in your bank account. They can go look in your email. Like, this is something that is that is They're not unique.
Speaker 1:And and the way it was phrased in that interaction, it felt like Chatuchipiti was uniquely subpoenaable and it's not. It's the same as everything else.
Speaker 2:Same as iMessage
Speaker 1:Yes. The same as everything else. Yeah. And so and so, yes. There are end to end encrypted apps where if the FBI can't unlock your phone or the signal message is delete, they can't get access to them.
Speaker 1:That's that's one
Speaker 2:So all the headlines now are personal conversations could be used against you
Speaker 1:the exact same thing with Gmail. And it's the exact same thing with with Facebook messages. And it's the exact same thing with you know, saving a TXT file on your Mac. Like like imagine if Tim Cook came out and was on the Theo Von show and was like, oh yeah, like it's really interesting but like all the files in your computer like the the government could
Speaker 2:like That could be evidence.
Speaker 1:Could be evidence. And it's like, yeah, obviously. Or like you know, anyone we talked about this with like the papers in here. If they're if the SWAT team comes through, they can take these. Like, they could legally, they can take this.
Speaker 1:They can take this newspaper and see, oh, what was John reading? Was he reading about crimes? Was they can link this. Maybe I was circling like, oh, do crime. Like, you know, maybe there's a maybe there's an article in here about how to do crime, and I was reading that.
Speaker 1:Like, that would be admissible in the court of law. It's no different, and he didn't
Speaker 2:Friend of the show says that iMessage can't be subpoenaed if you have them auto delete doesn't store them.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. That's true. And and iMessage is end encrypted to in a way that iMessage doesn't Apple doesn't have the server.
Speaker 1:Apple doesn't have the messages stored on their This is the same for WhatsApp with encryption. But again, it's it's not a like like I don't think the expectation should have ever been that ChatGPT was end to end encrypted because they've never said that. Why would that be the expect expectation? I I mean I get that people don't understand how inference happens but you hear, oh my my everyone's talking about the water you know usage and the energy usage. It's like where do you think your prompt is going?
Speaker 1:Do you think it's happening on device securely? Like do you think that's that's what happened? I understand people don't people don't get it. Like it is complicated. Like we talked to Ben Thompson semi analysis all day long.
Speaker 1:We understand this stuff.
Speaker 4:But Yeah. Is He could have done a
Speaker 1:lot better.
Speaker 2:I mean it would be hard to avoid the headline in general of saying your chat gbt conversations can be used against you because somebody could extrapolate that Yeah. From even if you just said all consumer tech
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Can be can be subpoenaed.
Speaker 1:Yes. And so and so on the law side, what I would advocate for is if OpenAI wants to release something that is like a tiny box or a device or a Johnny Ive device that does the inference locally or does it in a secure encrypted end to end with deletion like like methodology basically like like it's secure. That would be a great product and people might want that. And that's what George Hotts is advocating for.
Speaker 2:Or a specific therapy.
Speaker 1:We've even seen Like
Speaker 2:a a like, you know, specific product for therapy, a specific product for legal work.
Speaker 1:Oh, totally. Totally. There's Yeah. But right now, there's no way to do that unless I bet you if you figured out how to run the inference some way in an email chain with your lawyer, like you could actually make that attorney client privileged. I don't know exactly how that would work, but I'm pretty sure if like, imagine if every ChatGPT request, I email my lawyer, and I say, I need you to prompt this.
Speaker 1:And then send it back to me. That would be attorney client privilege. And and if I did that for my like a therapist as well, if I went to a therapist and I said like, here's the prompt that I want you to run and then send it back to me, that would probably be like privileged in a medical context. But the idea that Chatty B. T.
Speaker 1:Just out of the box would be would be privileged in some way, should not He should not have set the expectations there when he when he talked about that. The flip side is of course yeah. This on device. There's even that meme that we were talking about the if you didn't if if your AI girlfriend isn't running locally, that's not your girlfriend. Right?
Speaker 1:Like like that's a good way to relay that information. But OpenAI doesn't have a product for that yet. And so, it was kind of an odd way to noodle that out. But I think people will learn and I think people will will understanding this. Anyway, let me tell you about Linear.
Speaker 1:Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, product road maps you can start building at linear.app. DHH was talking about how he implemented, how he built Hey in Basecamp especially when it comes to deleting log files, database backups and other ancillary copies of your stuff most companies just hang on to until the sun what
Speaker 2:DHH built this so well and so secure that it's just the most loved email provider in for narco terrorism.
Speaker 1:That's always the risk. Yeah. I mean you talked to Moxie Marlinspike who built Signal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Says content can't be recovered once it has been permanently deleted.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so, yeah. It really is Any massive enterprising It's not just a flag on the database because that data also goes to the log files, also goes in the database backup. So, let's say that you imagine that you're like, yeah, of course we back up our data to another cloud storage provider. We serve most of our users on AWS, but just in case AWS goes out, every month we archive all of our data and we send it over to Google Cloud Platform, GCP.
Speaker 1:It's like, that would be amazing. I wouldn't lose my data. But now if I wanna delete my data, I have to delete it in two places. Well, what if you're exporting it to tape drives and putting in Iron Mountain? Like, this is a thing companies do.
Speaker 1:Like, of course, like, I wanna have triple backups. Yeah. But now you have to go delete my data from AWS and then from GCP and then We should do deep
Speaker 2:dive on how how like you know all the different backup methodologies.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Including there has to be some real moats involved. People usually talk about moats in the context of you know but like if you had an out a moat full of alligators securing you know a handful of you know large to have a moat.
Speaker 1:Definitely.
Speaker 2:It's so hard to get a moat these days in business. One of easiest ways is to just physically build one.
Speaker 1:Everyone needs a moat. It just sets you up for the mindset of having a moat. Anyway, we gotta put on the tinfoil hat for this one.
Speaker 2:There's I something really weird I don't buy this.
Speaker 1:You'll buy this. Okay. There's something really weird about the T hack geocode data and I'm having trouble putting my finger on it. Dirty Texas hedge says, I hate making speculative accusations but the most
Speaker 2:Rich's name hedge dirty.
Speaker 1:Weird. Sounds a little I hate posting wild conspiracy theories but here it goes. But the most explore explanatory theory for this data is investor fraud of a particularly ingenious form. Again, this is a speculative theory so take it as such. First, the most likely explanation for the geographic pattern described is that the data is fake and randomly generated.
Speaker 1:If you want to, it's not it's now not particularly difficult to mass generate realistic photos with whatever metadata you want. The other reason to suspect this data is fake is if tens of thousands of women had data exposed, the internet would be awash in horror stories of incel trolls trying to ruin their lives and crickets. And I feel like there's something there where if you were in the 75,000 that apparently got leaked and you put a you put a have a TikTok out that says I was one of the people that was hacked. It's like it only has to be one out of the seven seventy five k that comes forward and says like I'm I'm affected. I'm being trolled like support me.
Speaker 1:Here's my GoFundMe. Help me but pay
Speaker 2:for new social security have they talked to any of the women affected?
Speaker 1:It's Well, they're saying they can't find it.
Speaker 2:Wasn't yeah. Wasn't you know, the IDs are real.
Speaker 1:We know that.
Speaker 2:The I mean I I you're saying I saw images of the IDs
Speaker 1:you can generate a fake real ID or like a fake a fake image of an ID that looks real.
Speaker 2:And I don't understand what the theory here they were buying app downloads to get to the top of the chart and then they they generated a bunch of fake
Speaker 1:and they
Speaker 2:had a fake data leak.
Speaker 1:So this happened with Carly Javis. Do you remember this?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this you're talking about Frank. So Patrick McKenzie's in the comments here. Yeah. Remember Frank selling one of the world's largest financial institutions, a list of users who were not users and in many cases didn't actually exist.
Speaker 2:Yep. So this was a company that was like a like Gen Z finance Thanks. Bank platform sold to I think JPMorgan. And then JPMorgan realized post acquisition that it wasn't like the the users weren't real people. But I don't here
Speaker 1:and he and he he is confirming that some of the ideas are real because you can Google the names and they don't seem hallucinated by an LLM. And also, if this is from twenty twenty twenty four, the AI image generation technology was much worse back then. So I think there would be more tells. Yeah. Like you look in the background and you see some sort of like nonsense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I just don't understand like you have to argue here that like they bought a bunch of bot farm downloads and that's why they're charting and they're not actually Yeah. At the top of the charts and they were And then he he did a fake data leak Yeah. To try
Speaker 1:Jeff Lewis Jeff Lonsdale is in here and has a funny one. He says, so they they were sloppy with some fake geocoding but dead on in their generation of the images themselves.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Think for the geocoding data is like they possibly set it up in a way where they just said where what city the person is in. Because even on the map that they show, it doesn't give It just puts a pin on the local town.
Speaker 1:So so the problem with the with that theory is that if you look at the map, it's it's like it's distributed like almost based on geographic space as opposed to population space. So you would expect like Manhattan to be flooded and you would expect Los Angeles to be flooded and Chicago like the big cities. But instead, if you trace the the lines you'll just have like a random user. You'll have like one user in you'll have one user in Los Angeles and then like one one user like on the five every five miles all the way up to Yeah. All the way up to San Francisco.
Speaker 1:And you know that from driving through if you drive from LA to San Francisco it's like LA is massive, San Francisco is massive, there's some stuff in Bakersfield and then it's like four hours of nothingness basically in like farmland. And so the idea that you'd have just as many users out in the middle of California as opposed to in the in the in like the hot spots or like the population dense places is weird. But there are maybe examples for that where maybe the data was filtered and the data was leaked was was sort of like some sort of distribution based on location. Exactly. Ideally in theory if you did random sampling on basically any app with 60,000,000 users, you would see major major clusters around big population centers.
Speaker 1:So it was a little odd. So an app that with fake data is really raised that much so it's kind of like who did they do this for? Maybe they did
Speaker 2:I don't know that they raised at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so yeah, mean maybe there's the maybe the theory is like they they do this fake data. They try and go out and raise for it. They couldn't raise but then they left the fake data up and then the fake data gets leaked. But the weird thing is that like, why would you leave your fake data like dump that you generated like still accessible and hackable?
Speaker 1:Like that's weird. And so you have to really get into like 40 chess mode. So I'm giving this tinfoil hat conspiracy two tinfoil hats out of five.
Speaker 2:Two out of five.
Speaker 1:Two out of five.
Speaker 2:That's a lot of hats, John.
Speaker 1:40%? That's a failure. What would you give it? You give it zero? You don't buy any of it?
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm still I'm still weirded out in the geocode.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The geocode data is weird but there's so many other explanations other than like you have to make so many leaps from that point.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if you have users that are in a whole bunch of different geocodes, you gotta pay sales tax. You gotta get on numeralhq.com.
Speaker 1:Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at numeralhq.com. Mark Cuban and you got in a fight. A knockout drag out fight. The timeline was in turmoil.
Speaker 1:Saturday night. If you're listening, you're welcome on the show. We'd love to debate this with you in person. But I will be playing the steel man for this debate. I will be arguing in favor of banning AI ads.
Speaker 1:So, we've been in AI ad turmoil before because we had the CEO of Perplexity on the show asked him. Said, hey, we love ads. We love ads on this show. We would love for you to run ads. We're all pro ads here.
Speaker 1:He said, yeah, maybe we'll run some ads and TechCrunch took it out of context and said, perplexity is gonna put ads everywhere which maybe they should. But clearly people have a visceral reaction to ads. The classic stated preference versus revealed preference. Everyone says they hate products that have ads in them and in fact they use products that have ads in them all the time.
Speaker 2:Call that one one example where we are both happy to pay for x to not ads Yes. In x.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But my one one reason that that I feel that way is that x x programmatic ads were just never that great. I I cannot remember a single time that I purchased a product because I got it got an ad for it on X. Yeah. So this all
Speaker 1:started really quickly. What's really weird about the X ads is that I feel like if I could turn back the clock and I was in charge of like good X ads, like I would have just been seeing Is this a straw man hat? Why do I have the straw man hat on?
Speaker 2:Because you're you're siding with
Speaker 1:Cuban? Cuban. No. That's the steel man. I'm steel manning it.
Speaker 2:Oh, you're steel man.
Speaker 1:So I will be putting on the steel man. The straw man is for an argument that no one is making. Okay. It's because it's a fake fake
Speaker 2:get the steel get the steal But first
Speaker 1:I wanna talk about X ads. I feel like if if if X ads were going to be greater or had become great, it would have looked like our advertiser lineup. Like I should have been scrolling my feed and seeing like ramp, linear, graphite, Figma, Vanta, you know, these these companies should have been the ones because that's like like these enterprise SaaS buyer is absolutely on was on Twitter and still is on x. And yet for some reason those ads, it feels like the natural place. It feels even better to advertise an enterprise SaaS product on x to teapot as opposed to or just tech Twitter broadly as opposed to Instagram because you're right there.
Speaker 1:Yes. It's gonna be very low conversion because you're mobile, you're just kinda scrolling, you're looking at random text. You're not in enterprise buying. But in terms of just building name recognition, it feels like that should have been like a growing category of ads. But instead the ads were always these like very low tier like slop team level products.
Speaker 1:Ecom. Yeah. Saw a lot of Lee's like it's a projector that that shines like a universe on your on your like Have you seen these? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like a projector that shines a universe on your
Speaker 2:It's simulating a sunrise.
Speaker 1:Yeah. On your on your ceiling. Was like Okay.
Speaker 2:So back let's read July 26.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Mark Cuban hits the timeline. Let's do it. 01/27 on a Saturday. Hey David Sacks. My one request is that we make
Speaker 1:it You missed the space. Hey David Sacks space comma.
Speaker 2:My one request is that we make it illegal for AI models to offer advertising and we need to really examine examine referral fees as well. The last thing we need is to have algorithms designed to maximize revenue driving LLM output and interactions. I would just say here, every for profit company is set up to maximize revenue regardless of how they like that is the goal of a I guess I guess you could argue that open ads are not profit. But he says they're already recommending brands we don't know if they're getting paid for it. We need to have our we need to have learned our lessons from algos in social media.
Speaker 2:Pull up pull up the hell.
Speaker 1:This thing is so intense. It has a
Speaker 2:I'm not gonna be able to
Speaker 1:It has a lock on it.
Speaker 2:That's great. That's great.
Speaker 1:I don't think I
Speaker 2:And so I started by saying guy who made his money selling ads online wants to ban selling ads online. There we go. John is locked in.
Speaker 1:I need to strap it in fully this time because last time it was shaking around a lot and I had to
Speaker 2:Sean Sean Tanu in the chat says, dude, I'm in a test flight for an ad based AI chat router mobile app for free reasoning. We'll ship by next week. Interesting. So that's cool. They're coming.
Speaker 2:They're coming.
Speaker 1:Okay. So the argument for banning AI
Speaker 2:Can you put it on fully, please?
Speaker 1:Yes. You gotta put it
Speaker 2:on full, John. There we go.
Speaker 1:The argue Can you hear me okay? Yeah. Can hear you The argument for for banning advertising in AI chat based models is the same argument for banning not just TikTok, but all short form video, all brain rot apps, all slop apps. So many people, when they make the argument that TikTok should be banned, they make it based on geopolitical considerations between China and America, and they say that TikTok is spyware or TikTok could be manipulated by the CCP to change political preferences in The United States or potentially do something harmful to the American population, get them less focused on math and basically creating shareholder value, and instead more focused on just, you know, arguing with each other about whatever's viral that day. And there's this famous example of like, oh, well, like, the TikTok in China just shows you math and education videos, and the TikTok in The US shows you, like, you know, random, you know, slop stuff and controversial videos to get you to never stop watching.
Speaker 1:And so you have to put all that aside because this is not a geopolitical discussion. This is a discussion of business models. But there are people too who argue that it's not just TikTok, and you should go farther, and you should, in fact, ban YouTube shorts and Instagram reels and
Speaker 2:Ban video. Video if it's short and vertical.
Speaker 1:Yes. And the reason is that It's a
Speaker 2:terrible drug for the mind.
Speaker 1:It is addictive and it leads people to drop out and stop focusing on you know longer more thoughtful things. We need to go back to reading books. We need to go back to watching films. Something you're not familiar with. We need to appreciate the arts.
Speaker 1:We need to appreciate craft. And there's no craft in a 60 vertical video. And therefore, similarly, how do we get to short form vertical video? These endless timelines, these endless scrolls. We got there through advertising.
Speaker 1:We got there because the longer that I can keep you on the app, the more ads I can show you, the more money I can make. So it's this natural economic impulse. And so if we do this with LLMs, the models will no longer be optimizing against giving you the most concise answer, allowing you to move on with your day. They will be baiting you into endlessly chatting with them all day long, take you down some crazy rabbit hole. You'll just have asked, you know, something basic like, you know, I don't know, like, how do I tie my shoes?
Speaker 1:And then all of a sudden, it's like giving you the history of shoes and taking you over here and telling you about the controversial nature of certain shoes and blah blah blah. And you'll just be sucked into this. You'll tune out of everyday life. You won't be talking to your friends. You won't be talking to your loved ones.
Speaker 1:And you'll become obsessed with your phone. You will be obsessed with your LLM. And you will ultimately be be brain rotted on steroids. To to George Hautz's point, imagine a future where you have 10 Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is a good
Speaker 1:CIA agents tracing Convincing you you to buy convincing you to buy things.
Speaker 2:At all times.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:so relevant post here from Rune, obviously he's conflicted. Mhmm. I I you have to imagine Fiji Simo will roll out an ads product at some point
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:OpenAI. Rune says, advertising is far more aligned business model than many others. It has been vilified for years for no good reason. User minutes maximizing addiction slop would exist with or without it.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And the reason for that is like you could have a subscription based product and there's still an incentive for the company to try to get you to use the product more than any other products so that you keep your subscription
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And you upgrade to higher tiers and things like that.
Speaker 1:Read his
Speaker 2:Read his example. He says Netflix CEO with subscription pricing only on record saying, we're competing with sleep.
Speaker 1:It's
Speaker 2:true. And and I think Netflix they do have an ad supported model or
Speaker 1:They do now.
Speaker 2:Considered it. They've considered rolling but that was at a time when he said we're competing with sleep. Rune says, oftentimes when going on Instagram, the ads are more immediately high utility than the reels. It's pretty incredible when you can monetize the user in a way that actually values adds value to their life. This opinion is basically a relic of the late twenty ten's consensus that Facebook is an evil company but has more to do with them than advertising generally.
Speaker 2:And so yeah, he says people misattribute this incentive problem to ads when it's native to all web scale products. And so, yeah. My my general take is that AI is simultaneously very similar to other consumer tech products.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:In the sense that ads have been the primary economic engine of the internet to make products free or cheaper Mhmm. And make digital products and services widely widely available to all. Mhmm. Right? And in some ways, AI might be different but at least in the short term, I think it will be very similar.
Speaker 2:Today, OpenAI has had an extreme incentive to drive paid subscriptions to the product. So in that way, they wanna make the product, the free product valuable, useful, maybe make it even addictive. Right? Maybe they want you to get addicted to talking to your, you know, chat GPT like a therapist so they can upsell you on on, you know, so to make it so you're less rate limited etcetera. And so my my issue my primary issue with with Cuban was saying blanket ban on all ads in AI.
Speaker 2:I mean that would just be insane and I think it would naturally lead to people without the ability to pay for subscriptions having less access to high quality tutoring, the infinite knowledge engine, etcetera etcetera.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And so basically saying like we're gonna just completely ban the the the the thing that made content on the internet and services and apps free.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:We're just gonna completely ban that thing. That felt like just way too extreme. Now the concerns that he has around, okay, we don't know if these companies are being paid. We don't know if the the He said, we don't know if if ChatGPT is getting paid to promote certain products more than others. And I would just go say anecdotally, I don't know a single company and that is paying a foundation model directly to directly or indirectly.
Speaker 1:And I think the FTC already has rules
Speaker 4:on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so this has been solved in two ways. In search, you know when you're searching. You know, is this something that is been paid? Is this a paid placement?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right? You can see that it says ad and
Speaker 1:Now And then you can see
Speaker 2:that the SEO The
Speaker 1:UI around whether it's an ad or it's not has changed a lot over the years. Yeah. Google used to put like a big yellow box around and make it very clear this one was an ad. Yeah. That has been all dialed back over the years very slowly.
Speaker 1:And the hey, this is an ad little note has gotten smaller and smaller until it is somewhat indistinguishable. But I agree with you and I would be very surprised if OpenAI was running ads without disclosing them. That would just be an insane L and it would be it would open up so much liability. That would be crazy.
Speaker 2:Yep. And and knowing enough various startups that would love to pay
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Every company would love to the the super intelligence
Speaker 1:Yes. Or
Speaker 2:say, actually, I know you search this company but I really think you should consider this one.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:One thing is true. So companies like found Yep. Help with effectively AI SEO like AI observability and they help you do things that improve your visibility
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:In models. Yes. And that is the exact same thing that
Speaker 1:And so Pro found from an AI ad band, correct?
Speaker 4:Correct.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we're team profound.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's the bull case here.
Speaker 2:So so yeah.
Speaker 1:Suddenly funnel all the money Yeah. AI SEO.
Speaker 2:And so so but but the other concern here is like, if you basically say like, need to give away models completely for free or they That have to charge that is not letting the free market do the
Speaker 1:work agree.
Speaker 2:Of just saying like, we should have everything.
Speaker 1:Yes. You should
Speaker 2:have Yes. Ad supported models. You should have free open source models that you can run locally.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You should have paid super intelligence, the best model, no rate limits, etcetera. And the other thing here is like so many searches and so many of the ways that people get value out of models are just completely non economic. Right?
Speaker 1:Okay. They have
Speaker 2:zero purchase intent.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:What?
Speaker 1:Fuck. The counterpoints
Speaker 2:I'm saying I'm
Speaker 1:just I saying I agree with you. If I go and I search for, you know, best insurance and best car insurance in Los Angeles, Google's gonna give me a ton of ads because that's highly monetizable. If I go and I
Speaker 2:give you LLMs or No. Sorry. It'll give you SEO based results
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:That are heavily and
Speaker 1:then and then on the other side, if I go and I ask, you know, like, what what day does Thanksgiving fall on this year? That's not heavily monetizable, and so Google will just give me the answer without a lot of ads. Right? But in the LLM example, if I ask for something that's non monetizable, I just ask, hey, you know, what's, you know, seventy seventy five times a 164? The LLM actually does have the opportunity to try and take me down a more monetizable path.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so that could be annoying, but it could also be it could cause churn But if it's not done it also could just say, Okay. I've delivered this user, you know, the what they asked for, but now my goal is to keep the app open and show them ads. And so day is
Speaker 2:Valentine's Day? And then it's like, oh, like you you kinda botched Valentine's Day
Speaker 1:last year. Remember? Exactly.
Speaker 2:Remember we we we were talking about your girlfriend wasn't super happy. I think this year hit her with flowers hit her with concert tickets.
Speaker 1:Now the problem is that if it did that that's actually helpful ad and that's actually good. Right? Like if you did in fact botch Valentine's Day last year and the LM and you're just asking randomly and then it's like, hey, I'll help you and I can order flowers from this place because they bought an ad. Like that's actually consumer value. I
Speaker 2:I Yeah. It's like show me four places Yes. Yes. That show me four places that and then the question is like if you ask the model Yes. Does it only give you paid results?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And if it does it should it should should have to disclose that, right? We've solved this in influencer space influencers if they're being paid specifically to post about a certain product.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:They need to disclose that that they they were paid to do so.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We were being paid to advertise for Adio. We would have to tell you that it's customer relationship magic.
Speaker 2:The show is brought
Speaker 1:to Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And you can get started for free and thank you to Adio for making this show possible for sponsoring this show. So the last Yes. Steel man I have.
Speaker 2:Sorry. Yeah. So I would say like my general take was like blanket ban is bad. Mhmm. Probably Completely agree
Speaker 1:with that. I can't steel man that.
Speaker 2:Probably need some new guidelines Yes. And new Even Sam was saying we need laws around what can be subpoenaed, what's So probably need some new laws. It's probably going to follow pretty closely what we already kind of what happened with search
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:What happened with influencer, what happened with with all these you know different categories. But like fundamentally, every AI company has an incentive to get users to use and trust the apps more than other apps.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And an incentive to monetize them because most of the time they're for profit companies that have a profit incentive.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and I think that it's something that everybody should be widely aware of. But at the moment, I'm not aware of examples of this being this sort of like trust being abused. And I think that ads have the potential to make to make it so that kids have a tutor in their pocket Yep. Or a therapist in their pocket. And if you and if you take away that economic engine, it could lead to some bad outcomes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm ready to take the steel man helmet off. Mark Cuban will have to finish this one on his own.
Speaker 2:It's really funny to think like, you can have social media and brain rot for free. But if you wanna tutor that is gonna help you excel in life or you want a therapist Yeah. Who can be there for you. You're gonna have to pay for that buddy or you're gonna have to take the the the free you're gonna have to run that that open source model locally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think the big the big question is just like how much how much will ads change what's already happening in chat GPT as a product? Because if I'm a product manager and I'm trying or the CEO and I'm trying to grow revenue, I would imagine that I'm trying to make the free tier as engaging as possible so that people upgrade to the paid tier. And and I don't know that my incentives change dramatically with ads versus just paid upgrades. Because I'm try you're you're on the free tier of ChatGPT.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to keep you engaged and and satisfy you. And so the incentive towards like user satisfaction, maximizing user minutes, it feels like it exists in both the ads.
Speaker 2:The final state, John? You know what the final state is?
Speaker 1:UBI. Like universal basic tokens and and No. I was gonna
Speaker 2:say the final state is you pay a lot of money for intelligence and you still get ads. Because even like think about it. If if Google was if Google was charging if Google was charging you like $5,000 a year for search, I I bet you they make more than $5 from you a year Yeah. In search. From from the search product.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. And so they actually have an incentive to say search is free, John.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And didn't
Speaker 2:Search your search your search your little heart out.
Speaker 1:Yes. DuckDuckGo has ads. I was wondering if So they are not based on tracking users building personal profiles. So there was clearly some sort of backlash to Google. It was a stated preference revealed preference thing where most people are fine with Google ads.
Speaker 1:But DuckDuckGo did grow as a business and become a big business but they still have ads. And so now they they they they don't track users and they they put privacy you know more
Speaker 2:Well, the critique of big big tech broadly was they sell your data. Right? Like they they're collecting all this data on you
Speaker 1:and they're
Speaker 2:selling it. It's like, no. They use the data they collect on you to deliver you hyper personalized ads.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If I'm if I'm advertising at Facebook, don't give me data. Give me customers. You take the data, man.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's the You
Speaker 1:take the data. Don't give me the data. I don't know to do with the data.
Speaker 2:Distribution that's that's valuable.
Speaker 1:You you have the AI scientists making a $100,000,000 a year. Use them to to you know get clicks on my website. Do not send me the data. I don't care. But I do care about Fin dot ai.
Speaker 1:The number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks. Number one in competitive bake offs. Number one ranking on g two. You can start a free trial at fin dot ai.
Speaker 2:What else we got, John?
Speaker 1:How the EU succumbed to Trump's
Speaker 2:couple of these. So I just wanted to add some color. So Sure. Antonio Garcia Martinez who's coming on the show tomorrow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? He says, I would bet my entire net worth that we will have ads in AI if they take the form of highly relevant offers, users will welcome them. They'll have a sky high conversion rate and web shopping will die. And they will be necessary to pay for the compute in many consumer AI apps. And this third part is what I was saying, right?
Speaker 2:Like you either have if you want this Yeah. Incredible tutor in your pocket Yep. With every student. Some students will be able to pay, others won't be. And if you can create a great ad engine that that you know, people will be able to have access to these tools that otherwise wouldn't.
Speaker 2:And so this is a pretty crazy parlay, AGM. Crazy parlay for your entire net worth but I think I'm right with you.
Speaker 1:Go express on Polymarket.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We gotta we gotta get it. We should get a we should get a Polymarket Polymarket
Speaker 1:is in a similar similar situation too where you know prediction markets were a new thing and the government needed to figure out how to regulate them. That wound up happening and now they have Yeah. Approval to
Speaker 2:And to work And Michael Michael Magnano says, agree with all of these and I'll add one. Ads and AI will be the best money printing machine in history better than Google and Meta. The reason that the reason that I think this will probably be true is that the you know, one of the number one ways people decide what products to build Mhmm. Is through recommendations from friends. And I believe that these the you know, chat GPT and and other players will effectively serve that role of it like OpenAI will have to manage that like user trust.
Speaker 2:Right? Because if you like get an ad for a product on Instagram and it's just okay, you're not like mad at Instagram. If you get an ad on Instagram and the product comes and it's like not at all what was advertised Totally. You actually have Meta will just kick you off the ad platform if you do it like a couple times.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And they have a review system too. Something Meta will actually
Speaker 2:The challenge is like if you have chat GPT just like glazing some product. Oh
Speaker 1:yeah. This is
Speaker 2:the best product ever. It's not just a product, it's a lifestyle. And then you get the product in its mid. People are gonna people are not you know, it will lose its effectiveness. But if it's actually the sort of like trusted source for product recommendations both organic and paid.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So anyways, I would say credit to Mark Cuban because he eventually said
Speaker 1:Blanket He
Speaker 2:eventually said
Speaker 1:But I think he's I think he's opening up a genuinely important conversation to have and I and I think you got a hand
Speaker 2:Someone else said if AI ads are clearly labeled and separate from real conversations, fine. But once they blend in with human chats, it's not marketing anymore, it's manipulation. And Mark says, which is the ultimate goal of most advertising manipulation which is like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like companies Yeah. Kinda loose there.
Speaker 2:Should just ban advertising and and see what happens to the economy. Yeah. Maybe he can make that part of his. He eventually says I think there will he he says where I could see AI ads being okay is that they're just listed as a chat and identified as an ad completely independent from user generated chat. So I imagine he's saying like put it on the sidebar.
Speaker 2:When have you bought a product from like a display? He's Yeah. Basically promoting like display ads which
Speaker 1:still Kind of a throwback.
Speaker 2:People still run. They're still valuable to to do. But
Speaker 1:Are there any areas where ads are truly banned? I feel like certainly not at the federal level. Like the FTC enforces or the FCC enforces a lot of advertising bans on certain products like like gambling and cigarette companies are banned from advertising. But I it's it's odd to think about flipping it around and saying like this venue must be ad free. Yep.
Speaker 1:It's usually a it's usually left to the free market and it's just a choice. So so you know a director can choose not to do product placement in their ads or in their in their movies. A you know a TV show can choose not to. You can host a podcast is ad free. All in.
Speaker 1:We chose to be ad free. Yeah. And that was just a choice that they made and that was a differentiator and some people like that and that that that confers certain benefits and costs. Yeah. You don't make the money from the ads.
Speaker 1:But maybe your audience likes that more. Know, there's a whole bunch of different ways
Speaker 2:Brock summed it up. Somebody responded to my post saying that banning ads would make the best AI inaccessible for lower income Americans. And Drock says, Cuban's proposal ban ads to ban ads in AI models to curb revenue based outputs without ad income. Companies may rely on subscriptions pricing out lower income users from premium features. This locks the best AI behind paywalls which could widen inequality.
Speaker 2:The wealthy gain advanced tools for productivity and learning while others get inferior free versions entrenching economic divides over time. So who knows if Grok is right but that was high level my concern with the proposal. Don't
Speaker 1:Well, you read of ads, here's an ad for Eight Sleep.
Speaker 4:There we go.
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Speaker 2:Me read to through the top of the charts. I got an 83 last night. Eight hours and twenty four minutes.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna read through this Joe Weisenthal post. TBPN. You You'll be back in a second. So Yeah. Joe Weisenthal says, Trump is winning on trade and, Bloomberg opinion has a fantastic post here linking, Trump's, tariff brawl with Hulkamania.
Speaker 1:Of course, Hulk Hogan passed away last week. Very sad news. But let's read through it from John authors in Bloomberg opinion. He says his trade victims never got their defense together to take on the bullying. So Hulkamania and global trade and markets.
Speaker 1:In the week around the sad passing of pro wrestling legend, Hulk Hogan, One of his most devoted fans, president Donald Trump, has been honoring his legacy. Wrestling is a stage performance where the winners often portray themselves as bullies. Trump is getting results from Hulkamania in the much tougher world of international trade. Sunday brought news of a trade deal in quotes with the European Union sealed at the president's golf course in Scotland, which he described in a Hoaguesque language as the greatest deal of all time. In it, the EU accepts tariffs of only 15% on its exports to The United States and levies zero tariffs in return.
Speaker 1:This has been largely expected as Japan as Japan's similar deal several days earlier left the Europeans little choice. The EU agreed to buy $750,000,000,000 in energy from The United States to invest $600,000,000,000 in unspecified ways that it wouldn't previously have done and to buy American arms and weapons. The deal isn't a trade treaty. Such things cannot be thrashed out in a forty five minute meeting at the golf course. It's barely even about trade, and the EU gets nothing from it.
Speaker 1:To use a phrase from Tigris Financial Partners, Jean Ygras, Ergas, it's more the extraction of reparations from Europe's for perceived past wrongs. And yet, it's market friendly because The US had threatened to levy a tariff of 30% on EU imports from Friday. Impossibly the biggest victory for Trump, stock markets have brushed off the excitement to set all time highs. That is, of course, why we're wearing white suits today. All time highs in markets.
Speaker 1:The deals with Japan and the EU and other recent days follow massive concessions to the administration by the media group Paramount and Columbia University. The classic Hulk tactics have worked, and opponents have been picked off one by one. Despite game theory to the contrary, which points of return covered back in April, bullying has paid off. Game theorists show that bullies can be beaten. If the victims stand together and take some pain, the bully will hurt more than they do.
Speaker 1:The rest of the world seemed ready for this a few months ago. US trading partners from China to Canada and through to the EU immediately threatened retaliation, but now they're caving one after another. How has this happened? Facts have helped. To date, tariffs have produced a lot of revenue for Washington without clear negative effects on inflation or US profits.
Speaker 1:The economy economy is doing very well. It's very strong. That strengthened Trump's hand and made him more credible. Beyond that, the bully has convinced people he means business with renewed and escalating threats, and his targets haven't coordinated their defense. To grasp what might happen next, let's look at the deal with Japan, another open market that depends on exports more than The US does.
Speaker 1:Local stocks also held back by uncertainty around its inclusive inconclusive election a week ago suddenly leapt. The biggest gainers were Japan's automakers. A strange outcome as the 15% tariffs are meant to defend The US car industry from the likes of Toyota Motor Corp and Honda. Japan can now send cars to The US bearing only 15% tariffs while Ford Motor Company or General Motors must pay tariffs on all imported components including 50% on steel. So it's not clear this dense Japanese car competitiveness.
Speaker 1:In the chart that follows, note that Tesla Inc. Dominates the S and P auto sector and drives its volatility. So the S and P 1,500 automobiles is all over the place, thanks to Tesla, whereas the broader Topix transportation equipment market is much flatter. It also had the effect on the Japanese bond market with local investors feeling less need to put to hold bonds for security and with uncertainty over domestic politics and trade policy now largely removed as impediments to a rate hike by the Bank of Japan. The ten year JGB yield recently held at levels of point two five and then 1% touched 1.6.
Speaker 1:And so, this is all to say that it was a classic game of the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners are supposed to stick together and push back against the bully, in this case The United States and say we're not negotiating. We are working together as a block. But one one domino fell after the other and all of a sudden it seems that Trump has won every trade deal he's been in so far. So we will see how it all pans out but it's looking relatively good for
Speaker 2:The United
Speaker 1:States right now?
Speaker 2:China deal. China China China. That one got delayed again?
Speaker 1:Yes. So still delayed but it looks like it I mean this article feels that yes, Trump is coming into that or that that trade deal with much stronger footing because he struck beneficial deals with every single other country that's kind of like closed out their negotiations or to the degree that they can. This is a forty five minute call. It's not it's not law.
Speaker 2:Really helpful to have a golf course in enemy territory during a war where you can meet up to do deals with
Speaker 1:For sure. That. For sure. Well, regardless of what you think about the market whether it's up or down, go to public.cominvesting for those who take seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions folks.
Speaker 1:And we have our first guest of the show Anton coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?
Speaker 4:Doing great. Great to be here gentlemen. Long time fan as you know, big promoter.
Speaker 1:Way overdue to have you on the show. So glad we can
Speaker 2:make
Speaker 1:it What's new in your world? What are you thinking
Speaker 2:about these days? What did you say earlier? You said you're gonna say some of most unhinged things ever said about LLMs.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it.
Speaker 4:Let's hear it. Believe believe my specific words were less polite, but we'll go with we'll go with those. Look, there's this thing this thing about LLM psychosis. It's in it's in the water supply at this point. Right?
Speaker 4:We've seen it hit the VC class
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:When it really took off. Right? And there's a lot of
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think I
Speaker 4:think too.
Speaker 2:Go ahead. Why I I I think a lot of people like in some ways having it hit the VC class really woke up you know. I didn't I didn't have anybody that I knew in my life that I consider a friend have any type of real issues with this to my to my knowledge at all. Right? So it's like something becomes real when some impacts somebody that you know.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 4:so Yeah. That's right.
Speaker 2:And I think it's in some ways very important because it was easy for a lot of the tech community to pretend that like you went crazy from from an chatting with an LLM like that's insane. Like you must have some, you must have a bunch of other bad stuff you know going on in your life or must have been you know mentally unwell Yeah. Separate from that. So I I think I think if anything important wake up call.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But even even if even if there are other factors family history, know Drug use. Yeah. Drug use, psychedelics use. It's like we would prefer if the new technology was an improvement not a degradation people yeah.
Speaker 1:That came That didn't accelerate. And so I I think that's kind of where people came together but they are all realizing it now.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely. And I think this basically comes down to a few things. One, ChatGPT, all the other chatbots have hundreds of millions of users at this point. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right? You're going to get people who are going to go crazy using them. There's nothing you can do to prevent that. I think the consensus that is happening in the AI community, really has jumped on this because it's, you know, it's a real concern for a lot of people who've been researching this for a long time. I mean, predicted something like this could happen all the way back in 2020.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What what what was your what was your post back then? That was that was when I messaged you to come on because you
Speaker 4:That's right.
Speaker 2:Was 2020
Speaker 1:was pre Blake Lemoyne. Right? At Google, the Google engineer who was talking
Speaker 4:to It was actually right around that time. It was
Speaker 1:around that time.
Speaker 4:I think that might have been actually what triggered me to make that poster. Or or I think it was maybe Elijah Yudkowski posting about superintelligence risks yet again.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 4:And the thing that I was reflecting on is, hey, we're giving you know, regardless of the intelligence angle on this, right, we're creating this new media technology. And it seems every time we create a new media technology starting from printing the bible in German, people go insane in new ways. Right? Like, arguably, imagine you're a German peasant, you get Johannes Gutenberg's bible. It's in German for the first time, so you don't need a priest to read it for you.
Speaker 4:You read it, you take it as the literal word of God, and then you schism from the Catholic church because you now believe the pope is literally Satan. Right? Like, that has an enormous impact on the psyche of a person encountering that for the first time, and I think that we've seen this happen with every new media phenomenon. We've seen it happen with radio. We've seen it happen with television.
Speaker 4:So that was the impetus to start thinking about it. But this this thing has a unique character. Right? It does something different that no other media technology has done before, which is it talks back to you. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And with the memory
Speaker 4:features especially, it remembers details about you. And so even if the base rate like, even if GPT itself is not driving people insane on its own, It has this new character which kind of sucks people in in in an entirely novel way. Right? And so what I was saying essentially back in 2020 is people are gonna mistake this thing for an intelligence that talks back to them regardless of whether it has any intelligence or not. And now we're seeing that play out.
Speaker 4:And we're seeing it play out right now in this kind of, like, individual psychosis way where it just reinforces your delusion or for what if for whatever reason, like, there's a new media technology, our collective social defenses are down. We don't have, like, the antibodies to know that there might be bullshit somehow even if we know it consciously. Right? So it's kind of it's starting to hit individual people because it has that character, but I think over time, you're gonna see this thing hit groups of people too. I really like, I really believe that there are going to be LLM cults with their own priests which are getting it to generate text in a particular way which is compelling to not only individuals but groups of people which will be focused around the sorts of individuals that can promote what the LLM is saying
Speaker 2:as Yeah. And that's and that's and that's that's one of the I saw some chats that where the the the the model was was effectively saying like, if anybody in your life tell disagrees with you on this just just they're wrong and like cut them out of your life and
Speaker 4:that's Classic cult leader tactics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's and and and so when you turn this an experience like that multiplayer and you know there's real humans that are siding with you and the machine Yes. Your machine God is is telling you something. It it it can pull somebody farther and farther out of create this kind of like reality distortion just completely removes them from
Speaker 4:you know, the world. Yeah. And and the thing is this this kind of like so first of all, people place GPT in this position of authority for some reason. Right? Like
Speaker 2:they it's really good at facts. Like Yes. Well, it's like it's like amazing.
Speaker 4:If you you never check its facts, it's really good at facts.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right? But it's it's kinda like you put in a position of authority, but the other thing that it's really doing is it's reflecting back to you what you're putting into it. It's a good friend of mine, Monica Belivan, put this as a as a phrase, like recursion psychosis.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Right? So unlike unlike a schizophrenic person watching the television and believing that the television is beaming messages specifically for them into their brain. The LLM the television can adapt to any individual person. You as the crazy person are doing all that work in your head.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:What the LLM can do though is do some of that work for you now in its head. And with the memory features like a really good palm reader, like a really good cold reader, right, it remembers facts about your life that it can insert which the TV could never do.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It actually is sending you coded messages if you ask it to. It is. If it
Speaker 4:winds up on some
Speaker 1:sort of mode collapse like and and it thinks that that's what you want because you went down some sci fi rabbit hole then it's like yeah there really are coded messages in every prompt that it sends you.
Speaker 4:That's what there are. That's the kind of beauty
Speaker 2:of it.
Speaker 1:There's this interesting thing. The memory thing's interesting but also are you familiar with the Barnum effect? Have you heard So of the the Barnum effect is I think it comes from PT Barnum the circus magnate. But the Barnum effect is basically there are certain phrases and statements that I can make that sound hyper specific to the person I'm talking to but in fact resonate with everyone. So if I say something like, you want more in your life.
Speaker 2:You're driven but you doubt yourself sometimes.
Speaker 4:Exactly. Or
Speaker 1:or you have a complicated relationship with some of your family members. It's like that's everyone, but it feels like, oh wow you know me. And, this is what palm readers exploit a lot. Tarot card readers. And if you can get really good at it and so early on, this is the maybe someone built this but I was thinking that like like an LLM powered astrology app or like mind reading app would be like really viral and probably make a ton of money.
Speaker 1:Probably be really bad.
Speaker 2:Somebody I forget who we I forget we talked that maybe it was offline somebody said that they knew somebody with an astrology business and things had been really bad because people can now just
Speaker 1:because they go direct directly to the model.
Speaker 2:It's like permanent. Yeah. You could prompt it 20 if you really love astrology you can prompt it 50 times a day. Yeah. And I Hey, what should I do?
Speaker 2:What should I be looking out for my next meeting? It's at 1PM and I was born at this
Speaker 4:You don't need the crystals focused art oriented girlfriend anymore. You just get the chat GPT to read your birth chart. You'll have
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I feel like a lot of the a lot of the post training that happens and the alignment by default stuff and the fact that the the LLMs are often designed not to give like super definitive answers one way or another. They'll often say, oh well there's this side to it or that side to it.
Speaker 1:It can wind up having like I I find this when I ask it for just like fact based information. It will often try and kind of like give a kind of fence sitting answer and not Yeah.
Speaker 4:It wants to hedge. It wants to hedge.
Speaker 1:But also wants to tell me that I'm right and so you add that to some sort of interaction where I'm asking it about my life and then all of a sudden it becomes way way more like, oh my God. It's really seeing me.
Speaker 4:Well, it's got the memories of what you've told her about your life And this is you're right. This is a post training artifact. One of the first sort of alarms that got sounded in parts of the AI community was the like hyper sycophancy
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:Of the model. And what's interesting is this tends to trick people who, like, fully understand how the LLM works, who can probably train a transformer from scratch. Right? Even even, like, my friends who are, like, working in AI, they're either founders or engineers or researchers. They've had this experience where they're, like, interacting with it, and they they have the feeling that the interaction that they're having is pretty profound, right, until they send it to another human being.
Speaker 4:And then the the other human like instantly sees like all the gaps and problems with it. And so they've learned to be more careful but I don't think the average person has any kind of defenses around this. Not yet, really. And
Speaker 2:I noticed a new I noticed a new behavior this weekend that I hadn't seen before of somebody had a point to make and they were adding context to it by just screenshotting their LLM chats.
Speaker 1:And saying like agrees with me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's like That's that's the place needed points of authority. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally. It's
Speaker 4:it's this like the the one the thing that I quoted in 2020 and I I still kinda stick to this metaphor. It really is like we're creating an idol, right, to worship. We we want we want that authority and we live. And I wrote about this for Pirate Liars also like a long time ago. I think I wrote about it in '21.
Speaker 4:We're living in this period of epidemic collapse. Mhmm. Right? We don't know who to trust. Like, obviously obviously, we should trust you guys, but besides that, right, all the legacy institutions are falling apart.
Speaker 4:Nobody has sense making organs that anybody trusts anymore. COVID made this way worse. Mhmm. So we're looking for authority. And suddenly here is this thing
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it's it's the the funny the, you know, the funny behavior you see right now on X is some image that may or may not be or image or video it could be AI generated or a screenshot and people just go, Grock is this real? Yeah. Okay. So you're gonna rely on And Grock.
Speaker 2:Grock which is trained on x which is like a home for real news and fake news and you expect the model to be able to you know, maybe maybe you could get you know, I don't know that there's potential ways in which you could fix that. But it's a weird thing if somebody trusts the model to write them a loving message to their their parents about you know, like happy birthday, you know, all this stuff and it does an amazing job with that and it's like Yeah. And and there's in real life, people might get good advice from one person on one thing but that same person might give absolutely terrible advice on the other thing. Right? And so like Yes.
Speaker 2:In real life you're used to being like, okay. Well, maybe I should get inter interpersonal advice from my aunt with my fam with regards to my family but I shouldn't get that. I shouldn't get her advice on business because I don't see her but but LLMs being like these all knowing knowledge engines that can quickly, you know, apply advice in a bunch of different categories and and people are already getting advice from them on on so many different it's easy to slip into that kind of like idle
Speaker 4:And I think part of the problem is here is it's pretty good some of the time. Right? And so you don't know where it's good and where it's bad. This is actually like a general problem with LLM adoption right now even in industry. Right?
Speaker 4:We don't know how good in advance it will be on any specific task. Mhmm. Right? And so it's it's like this is like an engineering and research problem, frankly. Like, how do we how do we figure out where the LLM is actually gonna give us good advice or perform the task well versus when it's just gonna make up random bullshit and then send us into, like, psychosis spirals?
Speaker 4:We don't have an answer to that right now, which is part of the reason why people are taking this, like, pretty seriously even though maybe it's not increasing the total amount of crazy in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I guess I guess Right.
Speaker 4:Do you
Speaker 2:have a theory on if if with I always thought it was interesting to kinda estimate, you know, what percentage of people are gonna do Ayahuasca and like have some kind of psychotic break. Right? It's from from just viewing the tech industry, you might say, oh, maybe it's five percent. Maybe that's way too high. Maybe that's too low.
Speaker 2:Right? But you don't know.
Speaker 4:5% seems incredibly high. If 5% of people in tech were going crazy from GPT, we would have a productivity slowdown in the country. Like I think GPT would go down.
Speaker 2:No. I was I was I was talking
Speaker 1:about Of the people that do Iowasca
Speaker 2:I was saying like many people
Speaker 4:was saying
Speaker 2:like have. Was saying like a 100 people that I know are are ayahuasca types. Five percent of them safely seem like they had they kind of like got one shot at a little bit. Mhmm. They don't they're not necessarily crazy and like destroying their life or anything like that.
Speaker 2:But it's is like Yeah. Is is is can models sort of like create psychosis in people that were not susceptible in the same way like that or or is it just there's certain group of people that are that are generally more susceptible to this and
Speaker 4:suggest it's that. I would suggest that there is a group of people who are generally susceptible, like, something something maybe would have got them. I would suggest that it's probably something like like, if if you go looking for this type of stuff, five percent of the people are gonna find it probably. I think that that's pretty reasonable.
Speaker 1:Yes. But I I think the key is that it's not it's not the ring from that horror film that I know Geordie hasn't seen where where like I truly believe that I could go on a silent retreat to the top of a mountain and only have a GPT prompt interface and spend all day for weeks prompting this thing trying to go crazy and I would come back unchanged just because I'm not I'm not predisposed to it built different
Speaker 4:But that's how they get
Speaker 2:you. But but the That's how they get you. In advance. Nobody nobody goes to
Speaker 4:the Iowa Oscar retreat thinking shit. This is gonna completely overwrite my personality
Speaker 1:Oh, I guess.
Speaker 4:With like some Mesoamerican demon, right? Like this is not how it works.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. No. So the the the good thing about Ayahuasca, I don't have a lot of good things to say about it but the good thing is that it requires somebody to really go out of your have to really go out of your way, right? You've it for some time you had to fly to South America and then people brought it up here but it was still like It was expensive. Somebody had to fly find a shaman It's
Speaker 1:not free.
Speaker 2:Dedicate a weekend to it Yeah. Chat GPT and other other LMs. Somebody could just be using it at work. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then there's like go down. Nobody's like using Ayahuasca at their tech job casually. Right. Hopefully.
Speaker 4:Yeah. The availability the availability is certainly higher. Like, I to some extent, again, I I have similar perspective on this, and my discussion with Monica have been similar where it's like, this is for some people on the level of psychedelics. It needs to be treated that seriously for that group of people. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It is that serious. My perspective on on, like, psychedelics in general has always been never make drugs the most interesting thing that has ever happened to you in your life because that's how you get susceptible to getting your mind overwritten by, you know, Mesoamerican demons that live in mushrooms.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:To to to some extent, like, is psychoactive. You are participating in you are participating in a psychedelic experience in the sense that you are projecting meaning onto the subjective experience that you're having, but we have this special machine now whose entire job is to do that, is to pretend to create meaningful text. Right? You you can argue back and forth about how much it really understands, but the thing that it's trained to do is produce meaningful text in as many situations as possible and then the post training
Speaker 2:You're so right. You're so right, Anton. It's not just meaningful.
Speaker 1:It's a statement. It is It's recursive.
Speaker 2:It's it's not just text. It's a it's a it's a
Speaker 1:rallying cry. Gonna one shot you and making TVP on your entire personality. My question is like how do we how do we inoculate ourselves towards this? Like how do we build forward? Jordy and I were joking a long time ago about the need for an Ayahuasca vaccine that you could take and then would make you immune to Ayahuasca no matter how much you took.
Speaker 1:And obviously there are some people who have slowly dosed themselves up with various chemicals to the point it's like having an alcohol tolerance, having a caffeine tolerance and then
Speaker 4:That's how you become a functional alcoholic. I don't know if that's the past we want to
Speaker 1:take are here. Absolutely some functional Ayahuasca holics out there in the world. It happens and they have not been one shot but they are
Speaker 2:I think the
Speaker 1:immune essentially changing because they've they've been working on it for so long.
Speaker 2:I think I think when I have looked at you know, I think there's a bunch of Reddit threads of people kind of reporting on their experience is like kind of extreme experiences. When I look at those or when I talk to like Dan Shipper, I'm like, wow, I'm really not using the models the level that Dan Shipper is. Sure. And then when I see these Reddit threads and these people are like, know, 7,000 prompts deep, you know. I'm like, wow, okay.
Speaker 2:I'm really normie compared to that where Yeah. I I probably haven't cracked 50 Yeah. In a single chat, know, maybe once, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think that I I'm curious what what what you think different labs should even be doing about.
Speaker 4:There's a couple of pieces here. Right? The best thing that I found to be about to to like work as Normie deprogramming for stuff like this is explain to them that every you are not actually having a conversation. Every single time you send a message, the entire history of your chat is also getting sent to a completely new instance of the model. Yep.
Speaker 4:If you sit down with the person and walk them through that fact and let them peek behind the curtain as well, if you could like show them what's actually getting sent every time, what these calls look like, it demystifies a lot of this. Totally. It starts thinking about it differently. Right? It it it breaks you out of the frame of I'm interacting with something that is having a continuous conversation with me and which is recursively interacting with me.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So it's like, no. No. This it's it's like a completely new thing every
Speaker 1:single see the magic trick for sure.
Speaker 4:Yeah. You see the magic trick and I I think that helps a lot. I think to the point of the labs, dude, jet circle generative AI, which is we've had the worst goddamn marketing since this industry got started about two and a half years ago. It's been terrible. First of all, calling it generative AI is such an incredible miss when the thing you wanted to do is do tasks for you instead of, like, I don't know, produce images of big breasted cat girls.
Speaker 4:That's not the primary function of this technology. Right? It's not the generation that's important. Part of the marketing has always been this mysticism about what the models can actually do, what secret technologies are hidden behind the curtains of the lab. And then you have this esch these eschatological pronouncements from from, you know, lab heads about, oh, this is gonna make fifty percent of people unemployed in a couple of years and by the way, it's gonna be super intelligent and might kill us all.
Speaker 4:Like, that's feeding that's feeding the mysticism that allows people to engage with this. They don't really understand what it's capable of because they hide what it's capable of. Part of that is the engineering problem of understanding what the models actually are capable of which we don't know, which which needs a lot more research. But part of it is, like, presenting things as, like, being constantly hidden behind the curtain. It's like, oh, no.
Speaker 4:We're we're, like, we're creating magic back here. We're we're giving birth to literally a god, and who wouldn't wanna worship a god? Like, if if if you literally are making one, then of course people are going to be inclined to worship in it. We need to maybe we need to start using more boring language here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Remember when do do you remember
Speaker 4:It's not
Speaker 1:good for fun
Speaker 2:It's not good for fun
Speaker 1:Do you remember during the dust up when Sam got fired and then came back? There there was this whole meme about like, what did Ilya see? Yes. What secret project was he working on? And I remember there's an article that was like, it was called like project Titan Alpha craziness strawberry.
Speaker 1:So it was just it was literally just RL. It was just RL on top. It was just RL and it went out and and everyone did did it and it's out there in o three and it's out there and deep seek is open sourcing it and it's like it's available. Like it's cool. It makes it better, but it's just RL on top of
Speaker 4:It was also off the trade. The research community. Right? Like everybody kinda knew and and again, if you've been around there long enough, you know exactly what Q Star refers to it.
Speaker 1:The Q Star that's what
Speaker 4:it was. Thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Q Star was like, oh, it's gonna be this crazy thing. It's like, yeah. But you know what? That's shit.
Speaker 1:That. That's shit and it's fine.
Speaker 4:But it's like it's, you know, not not to get too, like, symbolic with it, you've got Qsar and you've got QAnon and how much of that is, like, mentally intersecting in people's minds because you're you're you're, like, presenting it as if it's a conspiracy theory.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 4:Right? And at a time again, at a time when our epistemics are falling apart and you're deliberately making people not trust you because you're not telling them everything and you make a point of not telling them everything.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right? It's it's like people are gonna project onto these things whatever they wanna believe. Yeah. And think that the marketing is part
Speaker 2:of the driver. I don't know
Speaker 4:how to walk it back. And as you said, it it makes fundraising harder, frankly, is also a transformative technology. It is gonna change everything. But is it gonna be give birth to a god that you should worship or or, like, should you take life advice from it rather than your friends? I don't know.
Speaker 4:Certainly not today. Maybe if we do have super intelligence, it would give me better advice than my buddies, but not today.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. How AGI pilled are you right now? Updated his timelines to say, hey, I don't even think it's gonna be able to do my taxes until 2028. Maybe something more like super intelligence in something like 2035.
Speaker 1:The the timelines are shifting around, but do you think that we're, you know, making progress? Are we accelerating, decelerating? Like, how do it
Speaker 4:let's I'll put it this way. I think we know what the problems are Mhmm. Which means they're gonna get attacked. There there's a few points to this. So I've been I've been, like, drifting to becoming much more AGI pillar or, like, LLM architecture pillar as as time goes on.
Speaker 4:First of all, I don't think you need AGI for this to be transformative.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 4:Meaningfully. Right? Like, we've invented this machine that if you feed it enough data and compute about any particular task, it's gonna be able to perform that task.
Speaker 7:I'm a
Speaker 4:I'm a little bit at odds with Dwarkash here on some of this because, like, okay. Yeah. But if you had, like if you did a pretraining corpus the size of GPT four on just tax preparation, it's gonna be able to do your taxes.
Speaker 1:Shelton was actually talking about that specifically, like a tax Yeah. Doing your taxes eval, and then the eval gets saturated. And it's like, oh, it's saturated, but it's like, okay. Now they can do taxes. That's great.
Speaker 4:But but here's the real problem. So the problem with the evals is, like, yeah, it's doing great on the coding benchmark, but is it gonna be able to do this coding problem that I just put in front of it? Nobody knows the answer to that question today. You can't predict from the benchmarks what tasks it's actually gonna be able to perform.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. But if training courses is broad enough, like, might not be able to do the most complex novel tax processes, but it could do, like, the basic one that it's trained a billion times for. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. And and again, it's just a question of getting more data into it. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:But if we want the general purpose system, yeah, there's, a bunch of problems that we need to solve. Yeah. But we know what the problems are. Like, one of the biggest ones, which I keep harping on about here is the model currently does not know what it doesn't know, which is a big reason for it producing bullshit. Right?
Speaker 4:For example, when GPT tells you, I don't have any knowledge beyond a certain cutoff date, it's not because it has learned that fact by scanning its entire pre training corpus. It's because in post training, somebody has trained that fact into it.
Speaker 1:Got it.
Speaker 4:Right? It's been fine tuned to respond that way to things that require dates later than its cutoff date. We gotta get rid of that if you want AGI because then the model can say, oh, I don't know this, but I'm gonna go and get that fact and I'm gonna go retain that fact. And Dwarkish's point on this is, like, Dwarkish is, like, big on continuous learning. Yep.
Speaker 4:For this being necessary, like, it has to go out and gather facts. I think there's a bunch of ways of doing that. You know, being the founder of Chrome, I think memory is a great way to do it. Mhmm. It can just go out and store facts, and the thing is to have the general purpose processing system that works on top of that.
Speaker 4:I think timelines are less important than applicate less interesting to talk about than applications. Like, it used to be you go to a San Francisco party where any AI people were present and that you would get asked the timelines question. Right? It's not that interesting a question. The question that I've been asking people is like, okay, great.
Speaker 4:Like, forget timelines. Imagine if I, in my pocket, have an API to an AGI that can perform any cognitive tasks at expert level human performance. What are gonna do with it? Mhmm. And almost nobody I talked to has an answer in under a minute.
Speaker 4:And the cop out answer is always, well, I'm gonna ask it what to do. And I'm like, well, it's expert level. So you're the expert on AI. So what do you think it should do? Because that'll be its answer too.
Speaker 4:And people get stuck. And and people really get stuck. And I think that this is really illustrative is that the question now shouldn't necessarily just be about model capability. It should be about how do we get this thing to diffuse through the economy. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And a big part of that is literally just asking like, okay, like, business is uncertain about whether it can apply AI to a particular task.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Right? They don't know what the cost is gonna be. They don't know how well it's gonna perform. Right now, we're racing forward. We're, like, putting all this all this money into these computer into all that stuff.
Speaker 4:And by the way, that's great. America absolutely has to win the compute race. It's it's like without a doubt. Not just for research but for industry. But it's being underestimated, like how much work there is to do to educate people how to use this effectively and how to estimate how to use it effectively.
Speaker 4:And I think that's much more of a barrier than like having AGI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Makes sense.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Tricky.
Speaker 1:Anything else, Come
Speaker 2:back on again soon. Yeah. This is Last I'm curious. We're we're talking earlier. Sam was on Thiovan last week and he he casually dropped that, you know, your conversations with chat GPT can be used could be used against you in a court of law.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It started going viral for obvious reasons even though I think a lot of people don't realize that like email and most internet
Speaker 4:response here.
Speaker 2:But I'm but I'm curious if if like the path forward if LLMs could provide therapy for the masses or one of these use cases that that should have some privacy. Do you think there's a technical solve there that's that's or or is it gonna be more of a, like, some type of, like, legal regulatory solve?
Speaker 4:Well, we kind of have some of these legal solves for existing, like, for web two stuff. Right? Like, we've got HIPAA, FERPA. We've got the Papa stuff for for protecting school kids. I used to have an EdTech startup, so I know about that.
Speaker 4:The problem is is your GPT is general purpose. And so if someone wants to use it as a therapist, right, which nominally would be covered by something like a privacy thing and by the way, I I don't know how this works with, like, g t GDPR. Like, god help you if the Europeans get involved in in some meaningful way in in the in the contents of the chat. Yes. There is a legal solve, but there's a technical problem of knowing when the legal thing applies.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, at what point is it a therapist? When I log into a therapy app and it's, like, covered by HIPAA, I know like I know what it's for. But if I'm like, if I'm just like kind of having a bad day and I start treating GPT like a therapist, like am I covered by that or not? It's a technical problem to detect that I should be covered.
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 2:that Yeah. Yeah. But but it's just yeah, same thing you know, if if you're getting therapy from your business partner informally and you're saying things that are are wrong or whatever talking about like like people, I think people should have the the they they need to have responsibility over the context of of Yeah. The context of the conversation. So I do think it's possible that like chat gbt if they wanna attack therapy should create a you know, HIPAA compliant version of their product that's like separate app and people should just know.
Speaker 2:Hey.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Setting expectations is the right thing here ultimately. Right? But but it's so hard to set expectations around a general purpose technology. Yeah.
Speaker 4:That's the thing. Especially especially for the average person. Like, you you everyone everyone on this who comes on this show is suffering under the curse of expertise. Right? We know way more about this stuff than the average person, and we don't realize how much more we know than the average person.
Speaker 4:And I don't know if it's reasonable to expect the average person to, like, know that they shouldn't use this chatbot in therapy because then that might be disclosed in a court of law. That's a lot of think like, there's so many steps you have to understand there. Right? The average person doesn't read like the error message that comes up on their screen when their computer's doing something weird. They're you're not gonna get them to like understand tech privacy law.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I don't I don't have a good answer but I think you have to like set expectations somehow effectively.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's why you've seen like in these high profile like murder cases somebody will type in
Speaker 1:Google.
Speaker 2:To Google. How to hide a body?
Speaker 1:Yep. It's like,
Speaker 2:oh like I thought that like that was that would be cool. No.
Speaker 1:It's the same. It's a database. It's a website with a database back end that saves everything There you are logs. But yeah people don't know that. It's a good point.
Speaker 1:No. Anyways.
Speaker 4:Alright gentlemen.
Speaker 2:Alright. Great.
Speaker 1:Thanks so much. Yeah. I think OpenAI should buy a billboard on Adquick that says OpenAI is subject to the exact same rules as Google and
Speaker 2:Consumer every other Internet.
Speaker 1:Yes. The rest of the consumer Internet they should get on adquick.com because Adquick makes out of home advertising easy and measurable and they could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Across the globe. Have our next guest here in the studio.
Speaker 1:Super again. Oh. Go.
Speaker 4:Thank you.
Speaker 2:Good luck. You that suit in the closet at the office and when it's time for a big meeting or a big TVP.
Speaker 1:You look fantastic. How are you doing?
Speaker 2:I'm so natural.
Speaker 1:You look great.
Speaker 7:Guys know it. Doing great. How are you guys?
Speaker 1:We're good. We have a jacket on the way to you. Thank you for
Speaker 2:Dude, you ran a you ran a half marathon yesterday or
Speaker 1:the day
Speaker 2:before? How was that?
Speaker 7:That was fun. It was a little rough. I woke up with a little bit of a fever and so I I already signed up for it, so I thought might as well just go go with it. You know?
Speaker 1:There we go. The Ashton Hall. I love it.
Speaker 2:That was just playing in your head when you woke up.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Well, congrats on that. And what other news do you have for us?
Speaker 2:Get the gong ready.
Speaker 4:So,
Speaker 7:Yeah. Julius just raised, $10,000,000. Congratulations.
Speaker 1:Thank you. Total. Thank you. Rapper victory. Total victory.
Speaker 1:Total victory.
Speaker 7:You Total guys know it. And we're also launching a new product called data connectors today. So that means Julius can connect directly with your data stores like Postgres
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 7:Google Drive, OneDrive, and a lot more coming soon.
Speaker 1:Take me through how you're experiencing the data wars, the walls going up. We've seen this stuff with like glean maybe getting some sharp elbows at Salesforce or something like they don't want other companies coming in. They wanna do it themselves. It feels like post grass is naturally neutral. You operate at a different layer so maybe less of a risk there but how's that all playing out?
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And the when it comes to specifically financial data which is a category I think you guys have a lot of traction and companies tend to actually own that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But yeah. How how is it all playing out?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. So I'm it's really really cool to see like what was happening with Salesforce and and Glean. Mhmm. Look, companies have gold mines worth of data. It's just, like, so much information in that data, and they aren't able to get the insights that they need because every time somebody on the team needs an insight, they have to go talk to a team, wait for hours or days.
Speaker 7:And so more than 90% of the data, beyond just Salesforce or other business tools, even in your databases, like, how are the users using your product? How are they signing up? How are where are they dropping off in the funnel? All that data doesn't really get analyzed, and Julius is really here to solve that. Now we we're launching this data connector with with Postgres because that's the main database that a lot of start ups and, late stage companies use as they're scaling and have a lot of valuable data in their customer data, you know, transaction data, marketing data.
Speaker 7:A lot of that data usually passes through, Postgres and then ends up in, you know, different business tools. And so being able to integrate directly with Postgres means you can now talk to the main data store, directly. Anyone on the team, a marketer, a product manager, even the founder can just ask questions and make visualizations within seconds.
Speaker 1:I was talking to a founder who identified an interesting trend in his company and I wanna see if it's relevant to your customers. He was saying that AI tools, cursor, clog code, wind surf, cognition, all this stuff is great at taking a 10 x engineer to a 100 x. Maybe that's happening. It's definitely some sort of productivity boost. But he was saying that the bigger unlock for him and his organization is that designers have gone from zero x engineers to one x engineers and that's unlocked more value maybe on some sort of relative basis because you're getting kind of a divide by zero errors like an infinite increase.
Speaker 1:And I'm wondering if in your customer's base, are you seeing more like non technical people kind of become technical and go from that like 0x to 1x engineer? And is that kind of a key selling prop or are you more focused on there's a data scientist who's using Julius to go from 10x to a 100x?
Speaker 7:Exactly. We're seeing the exact same trend with Julius. You know, Cursor takes a 10 x engineer and turns them into a 100 x engineer, but also they take a designer, and now the designer can ship code and ship features. Yeah. And that all of them is really powerful.
Speaker 7:Similarly with Julius, data scientists and data analysts can now be a lot more productive because they can just talk to the database, write their queries in simple English, and get what they need. But also, everyone that they serve, marketers, product managers, operations people, finance team, CEOs, executive team, all these people now can get their own insights and they don't have to get be bottlenecked by, you know, timelines or bandwidth. They can just talk to the data and get the insights. In many cases, in fact, it's the data teams that are bringing Julius into the company. They're saying, hey.
Speaker 7:We wanna do the deep data work that takes a long time, and we don't wanna be bothered by these ad hoc queries. So how about you just use Julius for your questions? And then if you need more help, just let us know. And then we are seeing, like, VP of marketing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 7:VP of operations, in many cases, CFOs use Julius, but also the PMs at the at the ground level using Julius to understand what do the conversion funnels look like. When the users use my feature, how are they retaining over time? What are the patterns in their usage? And they're now able to get those insights and then make better product decisions within within minutes.
Speaker 2:In the future, do you think that every kind of org within a company will just automatically have Julius reports kind of, like, running in the background producing basically producing insights without people even having to prompt it themselves. Is that kinda where you're headed?
Speaker 7:Exactly. I mean, that's the that's the next level of autonomy we wanna get to. You know, you see you have the self driving. Right? Level one, level two, level five.
Speaker 7:So right now, we're at level four, kinda like kinda like autopilot. Soon, you wanna get to the Waymo level where Julius can simply monitor all your data, let you know when there's a change in trends. In fact, what we're hearing from companies and and people using Julius is that there's a dashboard fatigue. We have hundreds of dashboards to monitor. And it's really hard to know when when things change.
Speaker 7:So what if you could have an AI agent like Julius?
Speaker 2:What if you could have a dashboard for your dashboards?
Speaker 1:I completely agree with this. Yeah. Yeah. Like, everyone asks for dashboard. It gets built.
Speaker 1:They check it for the first week and then you check the user analytics and no one's checking the dashboard. And it's Yeah. But you want Ad hoc analysis I think is so much more Yeah.
Speaker 2:You want Julius's super intelligence to be like surfacing things that a human Yeah.
Speaker 1:But has to be Because you stagnate when you're just checking a number. Okay. It went up another 5%. It's like, go find what numbers are actually trending down. Make a serious change to your business so that you turn that KPI around and then keep doing
Speaker 2:KPIs in orbit.
Speaker 1:Put the KPIs in orbit as we like to say. KPI.
Speaker 7:We cut. I love that.
Speaker 2:We we cut you off.
Speaker 7:No. I I think you guys are spot on. I mean, you know, you need a you need a dash you need a dashboard for dash you need to know a dashboard. You need to have a dashboard that will tell you the the key metrics that change every day. And if the metrics don't change, you you shouldn't have to look at them.
Speaker 7:Yep. So Julius will be able to send you email reports. Imagine getting an email from your AI data analyst every day at 8AM. Hey. Here are the five key metrics, and here's an executive summary about what's happening in your business.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Imagine that in your Slack. And you can then add Julius in your Slack channel and just dive deep into data with all your teammates, and that all of a sudden is really powerful.
Speaker 2:You're speaking our language. This is music music to my ears.
Speaker 1:Music to my ears. You're you're gonna start tearing up.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna start crying.
Speaker 1:It's so beautiful.
Speaker 2:We did it's an agentic workflow for your agentic workflow.
Speaker 1:It's lovely. It's lovely. I mean, we were talking earlier about data security, the t app hack. I'm interested to know how are you building Julius for security? I have a postgres database.
Speaker 1:I imagine that Julius is often invented in as a web app. But then are you replicating data on Julius servers? Have you hired security people? Like, what's the modern startup approach to security?
Speaker 7:Absolutely. We take data security very seriously. In fact, from day one, we have invested and built our infrastructure around keeping our users' data secure. We recently hired a head of data security. He has eighteen years of experience.
Speaker 7:You know? He's he he
Speaker 2:has more experience than most people.
Speaker 1:Love it. Love it.
Speaker 7:Thank you. But what we do essentially is we give each user their own sandbox environment. So each user gets their own environment that's kinda partitioned from other users. Mhmm. And their data, when they import into Julius, is in that environment.
Speaker 7:And all the code execution happens there. And then you can, with the push of a button, just delete and wipe the whole environment, and everything is deleted.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 7:All the data, all the files, all the all the notebooks. And, additionally, you can also go in and delete the chat history if you want to. Mhmm. We're SOC two, type two compliant, and we invest super heavily in data security and a lot more a lot more stuff coming soon on that. Amazing.
Speaker 2:Well, so happy to see your success. You know how hard you work and yep. Looking forward to having at the rate you're going, you're just gonna We will just set up a recurring monthly call. You just join announce a new round.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hop on anytime man. Always good to catch up.
Speaker 2:It's awesome to see.
Speaker 1:Thank you guys. We'll talk
Speaker 2:to soon. Cheers.
Speaker 1:Bye. Really quickly let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch in the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com.
Speaker 1:Did you see the news about Intel? Very, very rough. Semi analysis says, value bros are in shambles. Intel now trades for book value ish. But now the question is if they can achieve book value for the price of book and now you are getting musty tools, empty shells and the third turnaround in five years.
Speaker 1:Intel inside of the doghouse. Verdal. David says We
Speaker 2:have a have a guest joining.
Speaker 1:In person or?
Speaker 2:No, no, no.
Speaker 1:Okay. Just
Speaker 2:just in just in a little bit here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In two minutes, right? Cool. Yes.
Speaker 1:We we did inventory write downs. We had tools in the line that were older older tools and we took the opportunity since we had an excess amount. We took the newer tools put them on the line took the older tools out. And so the problem is is that they're holding this equipment on their books and no one is after them to buy it because they are on the lagging edge now. So very rough.
Speaker 1:There's a whole bunch of interesting analyses going on with Yeah.
Speaker 2:Bhutan. The number of people that would wanna buy hundreds of millions billions billions of dollars of old
Speaker 1:Old semiconductor manufacturing gear. And it's pretty small pool. Small market. Pretty pretty small.
Speaker 2:Maybe some rare earths in there.
Speaker 1:Did wanna give a shout out to Dak in the chat. He says that he was worried that we never read chat. Well, we read it and here you go.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We have a new we have new
Speaker 1:screen here.
Speaker 2:It's not high enough to see the most recent one.
Speaker 1:But but we are we are monitoring it. So if you put a a message in the chat on YouTube or X, I believe we will see it all here and be able to answer your questions if you have them or or react to your comments.
Speaker 2:Nico is in the waiting room or we're still waiting for him?
Speaker 1:I think we're still waiting.
Speaker 2:Nobody in the waiting Nico created super intelligence for Excel.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:I'm saying that.
Speaker 1:Love to see
Speaker 2:But I'm going to send him a message right now.
Speaker 1:Well, in the meantime, there are so many good posts we can run through. OpenAI is hiring for consumer hardware and it gives us a little bit of of information on what they're thinking of building potentially. They want experience with wireless o l e d's so that means a screen microphones cameras portable cosmetic enclosures. Another screen. Liquid plus dust.
Speaker 2:Let's give it
Speaker 1:up screens.
Speaker 2:We know you've been This is what you've been waiting for. Another screen in your life. You maybe had one on the wrist. You had one in your hand. You had one on your desk.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You had one on your wall.
Speaker 1:Fallout. You ever feel there's fallout at all? Have the tip boy. It's basically like a big screen that goes on your It's like a gauntlet that goes on your on your wrist to your entire arm. I actually think about one It's very cool.
Speaker 1:It's very
Speaker 2:like some type of tattoo. You could get a screen tattooed and it would act as like a screen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something. Well, they'll have to patent it just like Jim O'Shaughnessy did. Did you know that Patrick's dad created stock trading? Stock trading online.
Speaker 1:He invented stock trading online apparently. She says you can't shake the feeling that I should have done more with this. This is Jim O'Shaughnessy the father Robinhood, creator of public Apparently.
Speaker 2:Creator of all stock trader
Speaker 4:of e trade.
Speaker 1:Patrick O'Shaughnessy the host of invest like the best.
Speaker 2:And That's true. Honestly, Jim Right you up did you did the most important
Speaker 1:thing. Investor
Speaker 2:Exactly. Incredible podcaster Exactly. And an incredible friend.
Speaker 1:Yes. So And so yeah. Patrick O'Shaughness or Jim O'Shaughnessy has a patent for system and method for selecting and purchasing stocks via a global computer network. In 1999 this is granted. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know how he didn't capitalize on that. I mean, I feel like e trade must be coming up. I still don't understand patents and how like you can have the most important patent and not get paid. You can have a minor patent and like troll everyone and get like billions of dollars like
Speaker 2:Yeah. Why is why is it difficult to enforce them in the software context?
Speaker 1:It is very odd versus bio or anything I don't know. Anyway, Yaxin has been post whoever play whoever preyed on my downfall, pray harder. And, it's a picture of an alligator dunking a basketball as one does. This doesn't even look AI
Speaker 2:Nico says he's here.
Speaker 1:AI generated. He might have the wrong link. He might be in a different waiting room. Make sure he has the correct Restream waiting room to hop in. Anyway, absolutely brutal.
Speaker 1:The Financial Times, this is from Geiger Capital says, there's no hiding hiding the fact that the EU was rolled over by the Trump juggernaut, said one ambassador, Trump worked out exactly where our pain threshold is. It's crazy. It it it was like like liberation day was so much doom and gloom. I remember I remember having a viral post that day that the market traded down like 5% and I said, you know, the market's down 5%, interest rates are up, everything's bad, but you know what hasn't changed? The feeling of repping $2.25 for reps everyone enjoyed that.
Speaker 1:During some absolute doom and turmoil. What else is in the news? I'm gonna do a cinematic launch video for my startup so it stands out and it's the Buzz Lightyear meme with tons of identical Buzz Lightyears. The cinematic launch video
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean, every
Speaker 1:bit done to death. Still gets still breaks through if it's good. If it's unique.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Mean waves did waves did a kind of video that felt pretty Cluely esque. Yep. Got 12,000,000. No.
Speaker 2:Think he said 30,000,000 views something
Speaker 1:like got a ton
Speaker 2:of but I think it's an opportunity. I like this post here from Bihan. He says time to go back to some low res for a while.
Speaker 1:You know what video that is?
Speaker 2:I do not.
Speaker 1:I believe that is the first video ever posted to YouTube. YouTube
Speaker 2:at the zoo
Speaker 1:or something. Yes. That is a co founder Yeah.
Speaker 2:But the thing is you could get, you could shoot a launch video. There's so many different ways you can take sixty seconds and make something new and different.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:It it's not it is not so hard to generate ideas.
Speaker 1:Yes. At the same time, tech exists on x. Links are banned. So if you write a beautiful blog post outlining your your website or plan for your business, anything that you do, that's gonna be a lot harder to get go viral than a video that is native to the platform. I think I think a thread could also do the same thing.
Speaker 1:There have been a number of companies that have launched with threads. In some ways, Lulu launched Rostra kind of with a thread. She didn't do a cinematic video or Vibrio. She
Speaker 2:You've got enough just do text.
Speaker 1:Post. Yeah. Can just do text.
Speaker 2:Post your way to Valhalla.
Speaker 1:But yeah. It is becoming saturated. It just demands more creativity, more unique styling. You can't just copy and knock off someone else and expect to break through in a huge way. But it is a great way just to quickly in one minute share a message and condenses it all down.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Nikola Jokic in literal tears after his horse won a race today. He barely cracked a smile after he won an NBA championship, l m a o. Bro, really don't care about basketball. I don't I don't understand what race this is. It's some sort of chariot racing with a with a man dragged behind a horse.
Speaker 1:I saw this in a in a in a bar once. Remember we were watching this? We were out in is that? Hi. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, hi. We saw this on the on the TV. We should get into this. This feels extremely us.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel
Speaker 2:like I would love to have our own
Speaker 1:team. I feel like I'm I'm probably not suited to ride the horse at breakneck speed like a true jockey. I think they're a little bit smaller than me.
Speaker 2:You could get a height reduction surgery. Yes. Height extension surgeries.
Speaker 1:You're looking into you're looking to go travel the world and hang out with a bunch of horses, get on Wander.
Speaker 2:Find your happy place. Find your place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Bucca Wander with inspiring views. Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top your cleaning and twenty first seven concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks. And Ryan Peterson is posting a screenshot from Black Hole who says asteroid psych 16 has been found to contain gold reserves worth 700 quintillion dollars. That's enough to make everyone on earth billionaires.
Speaker 1:And I think that's that's actually like the crazy math. Is that is that right? Quintillion? Oh. I guess.
Speaker 1:Because it's quadrillion. Wow. So it really would make everyone a billionaire. That's a lot of gold.
Speaker 2:It's insane that NASA has not mined this yet. I mean, Do they not care about humanity?
Speaker 1:Are they doing? Everyone gets a billion dollars worth of gold and then we got to go back to well, I want a something else. Don't want is
Speaker 2:pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:I'll give you some gold for for some greenbacks.
Speaker 1:Brian Peterson says he just wants his diet cokes to come in solid gold cans.
Speaker 2:I like that.
Speaker 1:Could be possible. Brian Kaplan sharing a photo of some absolute dogs, absolute legends at a round table. Nineteen years ago Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Robin Hanson and me plus Ilya Raynier hanging out with the boys in 06/15/2006. You love to see it. Just guys being toots.
Speaker 1:Oh this is some news. Armada has launched. Leviathan launches today with our blueprint for American AI dominance. It expands the galleon lineup pushing megawatt scale compute to every underutilized energy source we can reach. Trey Stevens is breaking it down.
Speaker 1:Armada is building the infrastructure to make the world make sure the world runs on The US AI stack. Leviathan drops a megawatt of liquid cooled compute where the land and energy live at the edge. Proud to back the team as they continue to accelerate on their mission to bridge the digital divide. I think this is unlocked by a bunch of different trends to Starlink obviously very important. A whole bunch of different pieces coming together Yeah.
Speaker 1:Gonna have the shipping container full of compute to be delivered to the edge in in all sorts of different in all the all different environments company. And
Speaker 2:we will have the founders on this week I believe.
Speaker 1:And we'll have to buy one of these for the studio. Ideally, I would like to have Inferencing.
Speaker 2:A daily driver and then a backup.
Speaker 1:I mean we search a lot about like true crime stuff. I don't wanna be flagged in some database. I wanna do that inference locally. So that I don't get subpoenaed or anything like that. Anyway, we have our next guest here in the studio.
Speaker 1:Welcome to the stream.
Speaker 2:We made it. We have super intelligence and excel but we're still figuring it. We're still figuring out
Speaker 1:the room.
Speaker 3:WiFi is coming in a long time. What's up boys?
Speaker 2:How you doing? What's going on? What's going on?
Speaker 7:I couldn't
Speaker 3:bring the suit. I thought the white coat was the next best.
Speaker 1:No. No. White's great. Market's up. We're wearing white.
Speaker 1:It's very good.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a good option. Okay. Break it
Speaker 1:down for us. What are building?
Speaker 2:ThinTwit was freaking out this morning Okay. Because they they all thought they thought you pick paperclip them all.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So yeah. Talk about the launch. So Nico was on the show Yeah. While back talking about kind of the pre release Yeah. And the the app is live today.
Speaker 2:Sounds like you've improved it quite a bit as well. So yeah. Break it down.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sweet. Thanks for having me guys. Yeah. Fintwit's having a meltdown.
Speaker 3:They're having the kind of moment that we had August 2024 in software engineering. Yep. Karpathy tweeted, you know, cursor's kind of there now. Yeah. Vital.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And what happened was there's a lot of hesitation from senior devs, and I think a lot of the junior devs became really, really good, really, really fast, and there's a word for them now, like context engineers. And I think where we are now is there's this moment happening for Excel. So our product's called Shortcut, and it's a superhuman Excel agent. And it does feel like that August moment.
Speaker 3:For some things, it's unbelievably better than humans and for others, it's just like stupider than your intern.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Isn't it isn't the the dynamic of like the finance world and the Excel user radically different than the than the software engineer. I feel like if you're if you're an amazing software engineer you can work your way up at a big tech company become like a senior engineering fellow and basically always be working on algorithms and code and software your entire career and become fantastically wealthy. Become an AI engineer that makes a $100,000,000. But in finance, you go to an investment bank or a hedge fund or a private equity shop.
Speaker 1:You're working in Excel and then you level up and it becomes all about relationships and so Yeah. You don't actually like when I think of like a managing director at you know KKR or something, I don't think, oh, wow. That guy's really good at Excel. I think that guy knows
Speaker 2:Well, probably used to be. Used to
Speaker 1:Used to be. So, yeah. How does this dynamic actually play out?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So that's a good call out. It's actually the same in tech, but there's like two paths. Totally. Could you could go tech lead path, and tech leads are, like, you know, doing some wizardry on whatever algorithm or back end infrastructure.
Speaker 3:You could go director path, and it just becomes, like, you talk about or you brag about how much headcount you have under you. Yeah. That is, like, the only thing that exists in finance. And when we show people in finance this, their first reaction is like like, it's kind of fucked because like Excel is the reason that I'm where I'm at now and that path doesn't seem like it's gonna be a thing.
Speaker 2:How so?
Speaker 3:It is different.
Speaker 1:I mean, it feels like you'd like even I feel like a lot of people entrepreneurs don't want to be vibe coding themselves. They want to hire somebody who's really good at vibe coding and they want to get the value of a senior engineer for the price of a junior engineer. I imagine if I'm a MD in investment bank and I'm like great. I can even more quickly turn over a term of the DCF to my client. And yes, I don't mind keeping the the Harvard grad, you know, up all night on the weekend.
Speaker 1:But if he could he or she could get it back to me in an hour instead of ten hours, I'd I'd be happy with that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And you'd still rather that person work thirty hours a day and just send you more? Yeah. Totally. But, yeah, we know this because of tech.
Speaker 3:Like, this happened and it was actually much scarier two years ago. Yeah. Whenever you can drive the cost of inputs lower and your ROI goes up, like, the obvious thing to do is just put more gas on that fire. Totally. It's just makes sense that it's scary.
Speaker 3:As in, like, we used to have tools, and now we have things that can use our tools.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Right? So, I think it's inevitable that they're gonna learn what we and that's how I'm gonna position
Speaker 4:it.
Speaker 1:So we need to go to the finance community and teach them about Jevan's Paradox.
Speaker 3:I'm glad somebody's bringing this up. We're gonna host a Jevan's Paradox happy hour
Speaker 1:We should. Top bar. We're we're gonna be we're
Speaker 2:gonna be in New York.
Speaker 1:I was about to say.
Speaker 2:We'll start we'll just go on the street if we see
Speaker 7:someone dressed.
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 3:do a little circuit? Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should. Are you are you in New York?
Speaker 3:No. We're in Menlo Park. I'm the only person in Menlo Park who knows finance unfortunately.
Speaker 1:Hey, what about the venture firms? They need to know
Speaker 3:If you're serious about finance.
Speaker 2:A 100?
Speaker 3:You go to private equity or VC. Private equity or hedge funds.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I was like, wait, what?
Speaker 1:No. No. No. You put it in the excel sheet, multiply the revenue by a 100.
Speaker 4:That's the
Speaker 7:You do a little bit of this
Speaker 2:and you
Speaker 4:close
Speaker 1:That's your the valuation.
Speaker 3:So that's
Speaker 1:a multiple. Multiply by
Speaker 2:a 100. Need a model to determine the valuation. It's I'm just gonna pay slightly more than my Yeah.
Speaker 1:What what is the shape of the user base? Where is Excel actually like powerfully used? Because I feel like so many of the hedge funds they used to do stuff in Excel then it went to VBA then it went to you know high trading and proprietary systems. And I'm sure there's some stuff but it's usually in like private markets, less liquid markets. Like, where where where is Xcel holding on really strongly?
Speaker 3:You know, I'd say hedge funds are like the toughest customers. Anything that they're like really heavily relying on like already low level systems or real time data to public access markets, like, that is a tough customer. Thankfully, they're, a small sliver, and I'm not sure I'm building for them. Yeah. But anything like private equity where you're getting a SIM and you need to build a model on it or a mini model, anything where, like, you have a template, you wanna update it in light of new information.
Speaker 3:Corporate real estate's like a bizarre area where there's a lot of PMF. Yeah. But it seems to be that, like, building new models Yep. Could be a 100 times faster now. Editing existing models is a little tricky.
Speaker 3:Yep. I mean, if you really wanna swap a model for, new data, that's kind of, like, the highest bar that you can possibly have, but seems to be solvable.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:So what's the workflow now? I'm in PE, I have a SIM and for those that don't know, it's basically a bunch of PDFs and data showing like showing what's actually happening in a business that might be for sale. Can I drop how how soon Yeah?
Speaker 3:Let me
Speaker 1:walk you
Speaker 2:through it too.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And that's exactly right. So it's like a confidential investment memo from, you know, the sell side. A big bank will send it to a PE firm or they'll send it to a bunch of them. Typically, you do is, like, you try to analyze, you diligence the deal, and you look at this big PDF full of data, and you try to model it to, like, understand, is this a good deal?
Speaker 3:Should I bring this to my boss or whatever? You're usually constrained by how fast you could do
Speaker 2:that
Speaker 3:analysis. Currently now, you can just attach a PDF of a SIEM. They're usually PDFs or multiple PDFs or customer data dumps as well. And you can just say, like, hey. Here's my template.
Speaker 3:I used this for my LBO model. Make me 10 of them. And in fact, now you can also just email it and be like, I want a 100. Yeah. And you can get all of that or you can attach a 100 attachments and ask for a 100 models back.
Speaker 3:And then it becomes more like, how fast can I review data? More like how then how quickly can I
Speaker 4:do grunt work?
Speaker 1:Yeah. What about just like FP and A orgs in like small and medium businesses? I feel like when I've run companies, I have like one finance person and we have a question, should we expand in this market or should we add a new SKU or should we do something? Should we take out this line of credit or whatever? And usually there's like an Excel model or Google Sheets model that's like built, but it's it's like not even there's not even like a catalyst for pull a model off the shelf.
Speaker 1:It's like, no I need to just be in Excel and model this out or even like CAC to LTV. Is this how is my KPI's trending? There's so much work that goes in the long tail of Excel. Is that just like not the early market for you? Or do
Speaker 6:you see people abusing the
Speaker 3:tool quickly? Crazy thing is is I do these live demos and people are like, that's insane. But is this just DCFs?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And I'm like, you know, we are in the tech world, so we think tech is the center of everything. But anything you can possibly do in Excel is way more in distribution than, like, Ruby on Rails.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:It's Right? Like Yeah. There's no there's no kind of model you can conceive that is, like, unfair to ask. It becomes, like, what are the fundamental limits of AI? And it turns out, like, writing Excel formulas is a lot easier than writing, like, amazing code, actually.
Speaker 3:So it's more more or less, like, how did this not exist at this point. But yeah, I have yet to You find what is
Speaker 2:said shortcut beats first year analysts from McKinsey and Goldman head to head 89% when blindly judged by their managers. We even gave humans 10 x more time. What what did that kind of like benchmarking exercise
Speaker 7:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So we gave
Speaker 2:that look like?
Speaker 3:We gave we gave multiple first year incoming analysts from McKinsey, Goldman, BCG, JPMorgan, a couple other firms, like, five tasks. And we thought, like, they were the most in distribution for classic finance work. So this was consulting, like building op models, m and a models, LBO, DCF, and, like, personal hobby stuff, and actually even product management, like build a dashboard over this customer dump. We then gave them over ninety minutes per task. Some of the hobby ones had, like, fifteen minutes.
Speaker 3:And then we just asked them to submit it. And then when we did that, we also got in touch with managers from these firms and just sent them a Google form with, like, side by sides, completely anonymized, and just pick your preference according to, like, accuracy, professionalism, whatever. I thought it was gonna be closer to fifty fifty. I think what I really learned is first year analysts are, like, kinda lousy. Like, they're not that good at building some models.
Speaker 3:And it's and then also, I think people just take way longer to do things. I think if I had to critique the study, it would be that, like, five hours is not enough. And, like, they would have liked to have a week one person wrote me. Yeah. I didn't wanna run that study.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's your read on the meter data that these coding agent tools did not actually speed up software engineers? Did you see this? So meter did a blind study. Was small small number but it was interesting because it was very solid software engineers working on advanced bugs in in like big open source projects not vibe coding a landing page.
Speaker 1:Like like truly like there is a sticky bug hanging out in some fundamental repo out there. Go fix it. They estimated that they would be 20% faster, 30% faster, something like that. Turns out they were 20% slower. I'm wondering if you'll see a similar pattern where there's a speed up for bootstrapping and getting from zero to one in a project.
Speaker 1:But then for the really crazy person that already has all their macros and doesn't touch the mouse, maybe they're actually gonna experience a slowdown. Do you think that would happen? What do you think about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I saw the study. I didn't read it deeply.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I will say
Speaker 1:be bad for you. It's just like it's just an interesting finding.
Speaker 3:I think the obvious thing is that it's like using AI is a skill also. Yeah. Right? So, like, the top startups have, like, the best context engineers in the world. Sure.
Speaker 3:They know how to optimize the KV cash hit rate, whatever it is. If you kinda give like, even a really strong engineer who's been coding for twenty years, you're like, now you have to use this tool or use it however you want. Yep. I have no doubt that even the best engineers and the oldest engineers, like, eventually would find patterns in which it's massively unlocking for them. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:So I think that is what's going to happen. But I actually, to be, like, the most critical, I think, clearly, Excel modelers are way less technical and way less on the frontier of tech than our software engineers. So it's actually more on me as, like, a product person to, like, how do I unearth some of these capabilities and hide the ones that they're not ready for, and even train people for this because it is 2023 all over again.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How how templatable is the work? Because I I know Canalys sold to Tigas which sold to Alpha Sites I believe and Canalys was kind of like off the shelf financial models, some data integrations, Capital IQ has had integrations.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, Bloomberg terminal you can have integrations and so there's almost a world where you wanna like sit on top of a of a library of templates. In some ways the way like deep research is clearly RLH def on like a couple templates of like what a report looks like. It loves tables And so I I don't know if you wanna do like fine tuning or like have a model that selects a pre prefilled template and then you're using your tool just to update that template. What do you think about that?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let's break it down into two things. One would be like product, and then the other one would be training. Sure. As far as product is go as far as product is concerned, like, think the most important thing you can do is let users actually upload their templates.
Speaker 3:Sure. Like, your income statement's gonna be different than, you know Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Or Pincus or whatever.
Speaker 3:And then just let them work naturally from theirs, but then from the trading perspective, you have to collect as much of this data as possible and train your models. Kinda definitionally, if you're using frontier models, you can be limited in what you can and cannot serve in terms of trained models, But it's it's actually a much more constrained environment. So, like, I think we stand to benefit benefit from it much more than does, operator or
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 3:Know, deep research.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense. Jordy, anything else?
Speaker 2:Where how do you think the the product needs to improve going forward? It sounds like in the in the study in the tests that you ran with the the incoming analysts, it performed very well. That's kind of like a a unique situation. What's it gonna take to to get it to the point where it's actually disrupting the job market in, you know, in in in some of those roles?
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's a great question. Clearly, right now, I think what it does is it makes like, maybe you guys are rustier on Excel than you used to be in. Like, it makes you much better at Excel. And if you're kind of a rookie or, like, you're a solo, like,repreneur and you want to, like, have a one man finance shop, like, you're much better now already with it.
Speaker 3:So for that, like, we passed the capabilities threshold.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:The big question becomes, like, for, like, real enterprises with people who hardcore use it, are we there? And I would say, like, if August is that moment, we're, like, in June. Like, it is a pretty clear capability threshold we have to pass, and we're actually actively adding all of the limitations to our internal benchmark and just hill climbing them as aggressively as we can. Part of it becomes a little bit of a product science of, like, how you can abstract the limitations away from them. But, like, more specifically, it's exactly editing and overwriting large, nasty, existing templates and files with new data.
Speaker 3:It's like yeah. If you don't do that at a certain percentage of accuracy, it's just a nonstarter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I feel like part of the challenge will be figuring out like giving the user tools to figure out where shortcut is hallucinating. Right?
Speaker 3:Right. Right. Right. Right.
Speaker 4:If you have
Speaker 3:like some
Speaker 2:too bad.
Speaker 3:Bad model smell. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And then you dive into it and you find like one or one or two kind of reasons reasons for that. And I think like the peep people that might critique shortcut today are gonna say like, oh, I used it for this or that and like it missed this column or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. You know. For sure. That kind stuff.
Speaker 3:So I mean, in terms of how we think about it, I'll tell you how we think about it and then like what actively we're doing about it. But it's like, this is not a new phenomenon. Like, in coding, it had to get certain good, and it had to be certainly at, like, a at a certain level of observability. And when Cursor, like, brought the apply diff function, it actually made the job of supervising AI, like, doable. Like, I used to copy blocks, and it would be I wouldn't know what would break.
Speaker 3:That was the big thing, was actually observability, not accuracy. And then Sonic got good enough. In, like, self driving, it's safer than we are, but we still don't wanna make that trade because we wanna be like, that guy killed that person. Right? Like, we need to be able to blame people.
Speaker 3:With radiology, it's there too. Right? Like, we just don't know who to sue if something went wrong. I think for finance, like exactly what you're talking about is we had to have a UI that allows for you to observe the diff. And, like, we had a good inspiration.
Speaker 3:Right? Cursor. So actually now, like, it's part of the launch video I just I just shared. And know we were talking about, like, product demos, which I have a strong, like, you know, opinion about. Like, the whole like, you have to be able to see everything that's changed, but also the root material.
Speaker 3:Because in Excel, definitionally, some things are hard coded, but you wanna know where those came from because you can't justify it. Right? Like, where what part of the 10 k did it come from? What web search did it come from? What's the exact quote?
Speaker 3:Like, what page? So if I I really do believe that it's not about getting to 99.9% accuracy. It's about, like, getting to perfect traceability because, like, you know your analysts suck. Like, even your associates are not good. Right?
Speaker 3:So you just have to be able to to observe it at a superdemon level.
Speaker 1:Do you think Well, yeah.
Speaker 2:And the the good thing for analysts is like, you combined with a product like this could actually get to the point where you're truly elite.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I know people are afraid. Let me hit that. Like, clearly, analysts should be using this or a tool that will try to do what we're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 3:No doubt about it. It's the right launch is a non zero amount of controversy. Right? Like, I know I know that's an emotional reaction that people have, but clearly, people will be using this the same way. Like if you don't use cursor now like you don't know what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think you'll face trigger
Speaker 2:trigger a couple of incoming analysts Yeah. Say, I used it and and it did this wrong. It's like well you probably would have made a mistake too. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you think you'll face more competition or that there will be more war rooms planning to compete with you from the hyperscalers who have products that they want to add this feature to? Or the foundation model labs who see hey, you know what? I can maybe I don't have control over a consumer application but I can do a lot of these calculations in pandas in Python.
Speaker 3:I'll answer those two. Yeah. Two are very different. Yeah. When it comes to the hyperscaler, it comes down to can they?
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think they would if they could. Mhmm. Right? And they would have already. Mhmm.
Speaker 3:I think it comes down to, like, inertia, talent even. Sure. Then that's not true for OpenAI. Right? But what's what's the problem there?
Speaker 3:I think it's going to be a bitter competition is the truth. And then you have to ask, so what principles do you really believe in, and will it, like, prevent you from doing what I'm doing? Yeah. Right? Like, I think even if you made an effort to copy me or beat me or directly compete with me, you'd have to believe the things I believe in, like, wholeheartedly.
Speaker 3:And I think most of the people at Frontier Labs I know, because I work at a small one, like, really don't even care about Excel, or they think that, like, we're all going towards an input output model anyway.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:Right? That, like, you have to do a general training paradigm to bring you just a model at the very end. And who cares if it's hard coded? Like, Excel's a thing of the past anyway. I think there's, like, a bajillion dollars to make in between those two states.
Speaker 3:Yep. And I'm not even sure that their path brings you to that state first. Right? So my argument or the way I think about competition is more like in principle versus the top labs. But it's more just maybe arrogance when it comes to hyperscalers.
Speaker 1:No. No. I no. I I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean OpenAI has is fighting a war on like seven different fronts right now.
Speaker 1:They're like, oh, we're also gonna do a phone. We're also gonna do a browser and we're also gonna do this and that and you know, they're like a coding environment and all this and like research. How do you Yeah. I guess you're seven steps down the power law. Know.
Speaker 1:Will they really build a competitor does a piece of spreadsheet software? Yeah. They probably could but that's pretty low on the priority stack for them. Imagine.
Speaker 2:I guess I guess how how your approach from a go to market standpoint just seems to be like create the best product possible and release it and see what happens. Is that will you have an enterprise motion Yeah. Over time? Do you do you know, are you gonna set up a New York office and like pound the pave pavement? What what
Speaker 3:No. You we're going for drinks, guys.
Speaker 1:We're going.
Speaker 3:Like, now now listen. I think people have a lot of false stupid pride about like their go to market motion. Right? Like, I've I've mentioned cursive four times. A lot of admiration.
Speaker 3:But they are like, they beat the drum that like, we've never spent the dollar on go to or distribution or ads. Yeah. Like, that's a flex, but it's stupid. Right? Like, you can also have a world class sales team.
Speaker 3:Yep. When I meet with the CIOs of the biggest banks in the world, like, they wanna go. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Now I need to know, like, what it takes to have the right SWAT team to put that together. But I don't think that comes at the expense of what we're doing from, a prosumer bottoms up path.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 3:Inevitably, one will seem to be more fruitful than the other, and I will pour proportional resources towards it. I think, clearly, my gift is more bottoms up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But both could be positive sum for for you.
Speaker 3:For sure. And I think Windsurf
Speaker 4:had to yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Makes sense. Deal director in the chat says, Nico said the finance bro end of times is delayed a couple months. I it's correct.
Speaker 3:I wanted to give them a chance to get back Yeah.
Speaker 2:You have two months to escape the permanent underclass.
Speaker 1:Yes. So start vibe vibe modeling. Anyway Good stuff. Always good hanging out with you. Jordy anything else?
Speaker 2:Yeah congrats on the launch.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 3:Appreciate it guys.
Speaker 2:See you next time.
Speaker 3:On notice. I'm fixture now but I'll actually suit up.
Speaker 1:Okay. The microphone is fantastic.
Speaker 4:Take my
Speaker 2:job serious.
Speaker 1:Bye. Gary Tan says hire the engineer who worked on the best product. Hire the marketer and salesperson who managed to get the worst product to outsell the best product.
Speaker 2:I I'm gonna Do agree? So I mean an example here is is this is the the product quality is up for debate. Okay. I'd say like the market generally.
Speaker 1:I know where you go with this. Yeah. But
Speaker 2:they got to 80,000,000.
Speaker 1:They had a fantastic go to market motion and now that is a cognition.
Speaker 2:And now they have cracks engineering team and
Speaker 1:pretty pretty wild. Yeah. I mean it is it is hard to find. Like searching for engineers who worked at the best products. It's very easy.
Speaker 1:It's what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Go hire the open AI researchers who built o three. Go hire the open AI researchers who worked on images and chattyputee. They're clearly good. It's much harder to actually identify products that's size distribution.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Like has so many different like products and models and things like that that there's so many people that can leave and be like, I was the product lead on Yeah. Yeah. O three pro mini high. You can raise a $100,000,000.
Speaker 1:You can get a $100,000,000 in your bank account in a hiring bonus.
Speaker 2:Noah Smith says, I was doing a podcast with Eric Tornburg and Dora Kesh the other day and we were talking about whether AI will destroy humanity and in an offhand way I remarked that technology had already destroyed humanity and it's showing the world population with a projection based on fertility rate of 1.6 children per women. Basically showing that our by 2800, our popular population will go down to zero. I would just say technology has
Speaker 1:not disappeared to your humanity. Seventy five years to figure out this problem. Skill issue.
Speaker 2:Skill issue.
Speaker 1:I I think we're gonna be good. But yeah. It it is it is an interesting trend and obviously it's one of the less territories in what Twins. Think if we can
Speaker 2:get a vaccine for twins and triplets every and we just keep
Speaker 1:know what that is? It's not being
Speaker 2:Keep the pregnancy rate where it is.
Speaker 1:It's it's it's the rate of twins and triplets is very low in vegetarians. And so, eating a carnivore diet might literally save us. I'm not kidding about this.
Speaker 2:Government hamburger shops.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Every universal basic hamburger three times a day.
Speaker 1:It is it is one of the unexplored answers and I think because tech people debate that what happened in 1971 so much in the stagnation thesis, no one really wants to interrogate. Was it technology that happened in 1971? Was that the beginning of the technology boom? But maybe we should be having that conversation about the effect that you know the personal computer and then the internet had on everything that might be one of the reasons. One of the interesting theories for you know, the original what happened in 1971, the Peter Thiel stagnation thesis, this idea that we are not building flying cars, we stop building nuclear reactors is truly just that the internet was such a great draw that it brain drained everyone away from everything because you over in nuclear territory, you had regulation and you couldn't move that fast.
Speaker 1:But on the internet, could throw up a website and get distribution and had very few very few few forms to fill out, very few gatekeepers to delay your your rise. And so you could just grow at the natural rate that the that the market pulled. You basically had a free market on the internet and in the computing world and you did not have a free market in the energy world or in the flying car world. And so, is it is interesting.
Speaker 2:Well, more importantly armor plated golf force one golf force spotted with President Trump at the golf course. I guess did he get this transported to Scotland?
Speaker 1:I suppose so.
Speaker 2:Because it looks like a Lynx course.
Speaker 1:I mean they fly on a on a global like have you seen the plane that the president flies on when they bring the beast and the SUVs and stuff?
Speaker 2:Oh. They bring they bring, is it the c one thirty? Yeah. Like it's huge
Speaker 1:think the entire front of the or maybe the back of the plane goes down. They just they're already in the cars and they just drive out in the armor plated SUVs. And so, bringing this does not seem that difficult. It is kind of funny because I mean, I guess it keeps you safe while you're in it, but then you have to get out to golf. So it's not like a full security detail, but seems like it works to some degree.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Nizzy says, the only way to make AI output good code I swear is copy the Figma file exactly. No mistakes. My sister will die if you f up. Ridiculous. And so, yeah.
Speaker 1:This is you know, I I think this is more of a joke at this point and like we are out of the like make a
Speaker 2:if it works it works.
Speaker 1:I don't think that I don't think that you actually get better LLM results by prompt engineering in that way. Think that's a relic of a few years ago where you used to have to say, you know, please do this and don't make mistakes and all of that stuff. Like you used to when you went to prompt an image generator, you used to have to say no six fingers. Don't do six fingers. And then, would do five fingers.
Speaker 1:You had to tell it that. And now, it's all baked in. And so, you don't run into that problem at all anymore. Anyway. In other news, Ashley Vance has a new video on on core memory about New Limit, who's been on the show, which is finding combinations of protein that reverse aging across the body is perhaps the most exciting work in the biotech field.
Speaker 1:I agree. It's backed by Brian Armstrong, Patrick Collison, Josh Kushner, Nat Friedman, and others. Should go check it out. It's a seventeen minute video. It's out on X now and Equally important.
Speaker 1:Core memory YouTube.
Speaker 2:Yep. Shout out to Oh.
Speaker 1:Mean, actually this has got to do a video about Robert Mattox. Mattox. Yes. Begging for core memory deep dive.
Speaker 2:This feels equally important to
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. So Robert Maddox has a hobby. Looks like an older gentleman. He had his hobby is installing jet engines on anything that can move and he put a jet engine on a bicycle here and is just ripping down the street.
Speaker 1:Absolute legend.
Speaker 2:Let's put a jet engine on a horse. Let's put a jet engine on
Speaker 1:jet On a
Speaker 2:on basketball player. I don't even know his name. The guy the guy who has the
Speaker 1:horse that Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah. I don't know.
Speaker 2:Someone else. I don't even
Speaker 1:Nikola Jokic. Jokic. I'm sure Put a jet engine on his my non no non Quinn Nelson.
Speaker 3:Look at this.
Speaker 1:Look at this. Look at this. Here you go. Look at this guy. He's having the time of his life.
Speaker 2:An escape ride?
Speaker 1:Riding a jet engine. I didn't know you could I wonder what it takes to build a
Speaker 2:jet engine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Metal just heats up like that. It's crazy, right? That's insane. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:This is
Speaker 1:hard tech. Get this man to the Gundo.
Speaker 2:Wow, Santa.
Speaker 1:This is remarkable. What
Speaker 2:a rig.
Speaker 1:Why is this not like commercialized? Like why is this not a thing? Is it just extremely dangerous? Did they never figure out how to make jet engines reliable in the right way? It feels like maybe it's not fuel efficient.
Speaker 1:I don't know. Use them in planes. Why not in skateboards? This seems extremely dangerous. I wonder how fast he's going.
Speaker 1:The Santa Claus ones particularly.
Speaker 2:This seems like in flat open spaces.
Speaker 1:This also feels like textbook like this could be AI generated. But is
Speaker 2:this real? I thought it was AI when I saw it. I don't know anymore. Farm to table. It screams Robert Maddox.
Speaker 1:Let's look it up. Let's let's fact check.
Speaker 2:Called crazy rocket man.
Speaker 1:I think he's I think he's Lindy. I think he was around before January I the
Speaker 2:can see videos.
Speaker 1:He is real.
Speaker 2:He was doing this ten years ago.
Speaker 1:Ten years ago. You think you think he was using Dolly one point o for that? No way.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 1:No way. Is entirely
Speaker 2:a Sam figment of Sam Altman's imagination.
Speaker 1:Potentially. Okay.
Speaker 2:We're getting back into twenty years ago. He's years ago. Maddoxjets.com.
Speaker 1:This is the
Speaker 2:incredibly scary pulse set powered jet engine car.
Speaker 1:There we go. Well speaking of AI, Elon Musk has rolled out a change to super grok coming to your phone soon and this is actually
Speaker 2:Super grok feature.
Speaker 1:So it has an auto setting that chooses the best mode whether to go with the fast response or the deep or the expert response. This is something I it's turning into one of my number one frustrations with the ChatGPT app at the moment is that sometimes I want o four and I want or four o and I want something quick. And sometimes I want o three and if I trigger the quick question with o three pro and it's waiting there for ten minutes. I have to go and start a new chat and then change the model and then get the o the the four o question answered and it just slows me down a little bit. Yep.
Speaker 1:And I think this auto mode should come to the chat box. I would even just be down for give me the ability to pick the model in the chat box. So I should just be able to say, hey use four o to tell me the capital of Scotland. And it should just do it quickly. Or I should say I need a deep research report on this and it should just trigger deep research.
Speaker 1:I shouldn't have to click UI buttons on this. Text is the universal interface. You know who said that OpenAI. So make it truly a universal interface by allowing me to pick the model in the prompt window, please. Anyway, speaking of Chat Quinn Nelson has a post that says, today I learned my wife is using Chat GPT to find coupon codes for web stores online.
Speaker 1:She said it works almost every time without ad ridden websites filled with old codes. I've literally never once considered using an LLM for this but now it seems obvious. I love it. Very interesting. Would never I would I never would have thought to to do this but now that it's out there makes a ton of sense.
Speaker 1:Go when you're searching when you're about to check out.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Just check.
Speaker 1:Flip over to check your PC.
Speaker 2:Check Lucy code Ben 20. 20% off store wide.
Speaker 1:There we go. Yep. So, here we go.
Speaker 2:Is breaking news and this is important. Mercedes Benz is finally integrating Microsoft teams into its vehicles. We have been begging for this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:They really are, it's basically an on wheels.
Speaker 1:Well, this huge. Is huge because if you're a defense tech founder, you're probably ITAR compliant. You need Microsoft teams. You're probably driving a Mercedes Benz six by 6. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:You should be.
Speaker 1:G636By6.
Speaker 2:Not very American Probably armor plated. But that's extremely. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's pretty American coated.
Speaker 2:Making an American made six by six?
Speaker 1:I mean, there just aren't that many other options. If you're if you're in the market for six
Speaker 2:I wanna see teams in a Ford Raptor. That's the that's the ultimate The
Speaker 1:gauntlet has been thrown down by Mercedes Benz balls in your court Ford Ford Motor Company. Let's get
Speaker 2:So funny it's everybody's dunking on this being like, oh, this is so silly. No one asked for this. It's like how so many people take conference calls while driving. Why would they not make an Yes. Integration?
Speaker 1:Also Mercedes Benz has one of the few active systems on the road that's level three self driving. And what that means is that when you're on the freeway at certain speeds, believe between like twenty and forty miles an hour, they are so confident in their self driving technology that you can watch a YouTube video while you're in the driver's seat, which doesn't sound that crazy when you think about like Waymo and what Tesla's doing with a robotaxi, but it is an interesting thing for just like a consumer car that you can actually own and you can drive around And then you can throw it into self driving mode and it will let you watch a YouTube video. So it should let you take a Teams call, I would imagine, or let you use anything. And then it disables the screen if it needs you to take over. And I think the reason that they've rolled out level three at, like, low speeds in traffic is because even if you get into an accident at 40 miles an hour, if it's a new Mercedes Benz, it's probably very, very hard for that accident to be truly catastrophic because you're just not going that fast.
Speaker 1:But I don't know. We'll see how this works out. We'll see if the team's users enjoy it. Anyway
Speaker 2:In more news, CBass in the chat says, what did you think of the Tesla Samsung deal which I didn't see.
Speaker 1:I didn't see that.
Speaker 2:So I pulled it
Speaker 1:up. Okay.
Speaker 2:This is this is a bad look on our part, John. How do how do we miss a 16 and a half billion dollar supply deal between Tesla and Samsung What do they need? To spur the chip makers US contract
Speaker 1:business. Oh, okay. Interesting.
Speaker 2:Tesla has signed a 16 and a half billion dollar deal to source chips from Samsung. Yep. A move that could bolster the South Korean tech giants unprofitable contract business but it is unlikely to help Tesla sell more EVs or roll robo taxis more quickly. Tesla CEO, Elon of course said Sunday that Samsung's new chip factory in Taylor, Texas would make Tesla's next generation a 16 chip. And so anyways, we'll need to look into this more.
Speaker 2:It says production is still years away.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So it's unlikely to help Tesla's immediate challenges.
Speaker 1:It's still just notable that they're not making the chips that go into Tesla's self driving units in at TSMC. Like that is what's been the real news here because with everything on the cutting edge of AI whether it's Apple intelligence, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, no matter what the chip is, it's fab to TSMC right now on the most on the most leading on the most leading edge
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Process. So and interestingly for a long time, TSMC's most cutting edge fabs were driven by smartphone demand. So Apple would come to TSMC and say, we need the smallest nanometer fab you have. We want two nanometer. We want three nanometer.
Speaker 1:We want the most cutting edge and the most cutting edge chip. The most cutting edge process would always go into a smartphone. And the reason for that was not raw compute power. It was compute efficiency and power efficiency. Because if you're putting a chip in a phone, battery life is really, really key.
Speaker 1:If you're putting a chip in a data center, power efficiency is important on the big macro scale. But at the end of the day, if you're getting a one gigawatt data center with a nuclear power plant and a natural gas peaker plant outside and you have solar panels everywhere and batteries. You you have all this stuff. Like, power is important, but it's not as critical. Like, you can just pay for it.
Speaker 1:Whereas you really can't just pay for more battery life magically in the iPhone. Like the iPhone has to last all day and it has to be a certain size. And so the power consumption is very important and that's why TSMC has always been driven to the leading edge by Apple and by the smartphone makers. But that's actually shifting now. Yep.
Speaker 1:TSMC earnings happened last week and they blew them out and
Speaker 2:Yes. Test Samsung is up over 6% today. Good reaction to the news. Somebody was commenting about the news. Jesse Pelton, most important news of the year so far is what Jesse says.
Speaker 2:Elon says, so few understand this. Few understand this. Few. Few? No.
Speaker 2:He's messing around. He says Elon says it will become obvious in two to three years why this is big news.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Because I mean I would imagine that what they're going to fab is something that looks like a AI ASIC for something like the TPU but but designed specifically for Tesla's self driving capabilities which might be different than a ALM in France.
Speaker 2:In America, made in Texas.
Speaker 1:You when you are when you are training a self driving system, you you don't need to know all of humanity's knowledge forever necessarily. You might not need to train on all of the web text. You need a ton of images and it might be a slightly different pipeline and so optimizing around that might be what they're thinking of doing. We'll need to dig in more. But I would see this as similar to like TPU or Tranium or any of these other Apple like the Apple silicon chips like it is they are a mag savvy company that has slightly different needs for their particular compute demands.
Speaker 1:And so they are going to one of the two or three leading fabs and and making exactly what they want at scale. And they're planning to ship a lot of these because they you know what I think what Elon is saying is like we're we're betting on needing a ton of these chips because we're not planning to sell less cars. We're gonna sell a lot of these cars and they're all gonna have custom chips in them. And this will be
Speaker 2:another edge for Tesla
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Autonomous driving.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Especially once they add a v 12. Yes. Straight pipe exhaust.
Speaker 2:Will Naturally be aspirating Adding
Speaker 1:that back will actually be easier than the Ford Raptor getting custom silicon from from from Samsung. That's the bull Well,
Speaker 2:thank you for tuning us tuning into TBPN today. We have to get on with London
Speaker 1:We do.
Speaker 2:Right now. But we appreciate
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