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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 TVPN live from the Shrine Of Shareholder Value, the dojo of the dollar, the capital of capital. It is Tuesday, 02/25/2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys today. We're talking about AI sweatshops. We're talking about the stock market crumbling.
Speaker 1:We're talking about anthropic raising billions of dollars and many more. We have tons of stories. I hope we can get to all of them because there's a ton here. But first up, Jordy, what's going on? How are you doing today?
Speaker 2:John, your intros get better every single time. It's incredible to watch. So I would be in the studio today, but I had a little bit of a fire drill this morning, about fifteen minutes before my eighth sleep was scheduled to buzz me awake. I hear my son open his door. Like, he he's not he's not very gentle with the door in the morning.
Speaker 2:So he just always, like, slams it. He yells something. And I, like, come out. I I find him, like, he had made it to the kitchen. He's just kind of, like, stumbling around because it's dark.
Speaker 2:And, he, like, can barely speak, like, in a very concerning way. And he's just saying, like, I I swallowed I swallowed a glow stick. I was just like, at this point, like, I'm actually, like, very I'm, like, very concerned because I like, he can't talk at all. He's, like, clearly struggling to breathe and, keeps saying that he swallowed a glow stick. And, so anyways, we're, like, freaking out.
Speaker 2:I'm not freaking out, but, of course, my wife is. And, call call 911, get them over, and, end up having to go in an ambulance because he's not, like, breathing properly. And we get all the way there. Fortunately, he didn't swallow a glow stick, but he had this thing called croup, which is like when a kid's, esophagus, like, sort of swallows up or gets inflammation Yeah. Which I had never heard of.
Speaker 2:And, it's actually good to be aware of because, yeah, I somehow had never, heard the term or or was aware of it. But the funniest part is, by, like, I think, like, eight or 9AM, we were ready to go home. They gave him, like, a steroid treatment or whatever, and he was back to breathing normally. And, he was, like, genuinely, like, pissed that we couldn't ride in the ambulance back home. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like like, for him, like, a kid, you wake up, you get to hang with your dad all morning. Yeah. You get to ride in a, like, ambulance. There's firemen all around. It's like, for him, it's like the best day ever.
Speaker 2:So, anyways but, good to be aware of Croup, for those parents and future parents. But there was a lot of news there was a lot of news this morning, as there always is, seemingly. So I'm excited to get into it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So yesterday, Y Combinator announced a, a new startup, Optify, and they posted a video. They've been doing this thing, launch videos. Some of them have been, you know, amazing. Everyone's loved them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Some of them have been we we we went over the maritime fusion company that people were saying, oh, hard tech. Like, this will never work. And, you know Yeah. We we kinda defended that one.
Speaker 1:This one was a little bit rougher. The production value wasn't quite at the level of the amazing CGI in that maritime fusion, fusion video, and the response was pretty negative almost immediately. I have a bunch of tactical, ideas for how they could have done better. We'll go to a couple posts here. Gabe, people are just memeing this already.
Speaker 1:Gabe says absolutely sickening, revolting. Imagine how many sweatshop overseers will lose their jobs because of this. And then, Peter comes in and kinda defends this. He says, the people dunking on this are idiots. This is literally scientific management that Frederick Winslow, Taylor, Deming, and even Ford implemented more than a hundred years ago, but with line foreman.
Speaker 1:This is what makes Amazon warehouses and delivery trucks perform it and what Foxconn uses to make your iPhones grow up. And that was my question was I was I was texting some people that work on factories, and I was like, I get the pushback. Like, the aesthetics were very bad. Like, the launch video was, like, not empathetic. It didn't tell, like, a great story.
Speaker 1:But, like, let's be honest. Like, we you you really expect me to believe that China is ahead of America in manufacturing. We don't monitor the output of our factory workers in America, and somehow we're going to win if we don't do that. Like, it didn't it didn't make sense. Like, we couldn't really track all that.
Speaker 1:And so my take was I would have redone this video and instead focused on robotics instead of people and said, hey. Look. There's gonna be a lot of robotics in these factories, and we want to understand what's happening on the lines. And then instead of it being so the video shows a negative scenario, someone who's underperforming. I would rather have it highlight someone who's a high performer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And because that's a more positive story. And then if you have to show something that's negative, show something that isn't that that is fixable. And so Yeah.
Speaker 2:Not somebody that's, like, losing their job. Like, clearly.
Speaker 1:Imagine there's a robot on, like it was, like, Aisle 17 or something, like, Work Unit 17. They're underperforming. You use their software to check on it. Oh, turns out his wheels are squeaky or something. You go put some oil in the joint, and he's back and he's happy, and the robot's happy, and everyone's happy.
Speaker 1:And it's this very, like, almost Pixaresque moment, and that could have been really cool and positive. Instead, it really did just look like these guys on their laptops are now overseeing people that are working really hard in a factory and then just, like, firing them. So what was your take on it? What, how do you think this went? How do you think they could have done better?
Speaker 2:Look. I think the the product makes a lot of sense. There's clearly an opportunity for this. You can see the value. You can see the value also from my view for teams.
Speaker 2:Right? If you're working on a factory floor or factory line, there, it requires really close coordination, even if you're just focused on a very specific lane. And so my big issues with it was the, the sort of, poor acting. Like I, they're not, they're clearly not actors, they're founders. They shouldn't have been trying to, like, make this sort of, like, skit, like, scenario to demo their product.
Speaker 2:It just set them up to be, very easily dunked on. And then generally, like, I would have focused it more around, like, cord like, this sort of empowering of, like, how are we gonna empower fat like, teams at these factories to increase output and hit their goals at sort of, like, the factory level Yeah. Versus focusing in, like, of course, like, I think what you're saying is right. Show three people performing, you know, adequately, two people overperforming, and then show one or two people underperforming. And, you know, like, there's so many ways to position that that are more, like, oriented around, like, how do we win as a team
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Versus, like, this sort of, slave driver kind of, like, approach of saying, like, you're underperforming. You've had a bad day, bad hour, bad month. Yeah. And anyways, just just the me the the other thing is, it's very hard, you know, I looked it up and these guys are based in in India. Sure.
Speaker 2:It's very hard to sort of understand how this might be received really well in India, yet you you you push it out to this, like, predominantly sort of American or international audience, and it just falls, flat. And and to be honest, like, the the meme potential of this was just amazing. Like, the shot Yeah. The shot of the guy, like, on the phone. And I posted I posted the, I posted the the the George Bush one saying, like, sir, work, you know, workspace 17 is is underperforming.
Speaker 2:So anyways, I, rough day YC deleted it. I think they should have doubled down. I, it's not, again, they also could have used there. There's so many things they could have done differently. They could have made it feel more futuristic, to be honest, in many ways, it felt like SaaS out of the, you know, it didn't necessarily, I'm sure that AI enables what they're doing, you know, to, to maybe build it with like a smaller team.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But ultimately, there was just so many issues with it. And and I and I don't know. I think that you can hold two things. Like, yes, they kind of set themselves up to get dunked on, but, you know, at the same time, there's, like, 20 things they could have done better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, this has this type of software has to exist in factories all over the world already. And
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I, like, I refuse to believe that there are major factories churning out iPhones that where they don't know what's happening in Unit 17 or whatever. Yeah. But, yeah, should have been a lot more optimistic. It gets to this idea that, you know, we've been seeing in the news with, Elon sending out those Doge emails. What did you get done this week?
Speaker 1:It's like the famous, like, his interaction with, Parag Agarwal when he took over Twitter. What did you get done this week? That'd be kind of Yeah. That that came became his, like, calling card, and I think that's been received with very mixed results. Like, some people love it.
Speaker 1:They're like, yeah. Like, everyone in the government should be able to say what they did this week. But, what I think would make it a little bit more empathetic of a message would be if Elon also answered that question, And Trump also answered that question because right now people are doing that with we were we're gonna talk about Tesla later. People are like, oh, what did you get done this week as soon as the stock falls or whatever? And realistically, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Elon probably did a lot of stuff, and that would be cool. And I think there's something about, like, leading from the front there that says that that just messages it differently. There is something about the the American worker in the factory. Have you seen American Factory, that Obama documentary that went on Netflix?
Speaker 2:No. But I'm I wonder if there's anything in what what's that show that people brought up a couple weeks ago about how it's made? Something along those lines.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So how it's made doesn't show any humans. It only shows the machinery, typically. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, occasionally, you'll see, like, the guy loads the machine or whatever, But it's not focused on the human stories of people working in the factory. American factory was very different in the sense that, I think it was a glass manufacturing. They make, like, windshields and all sorts of different custom glass installations. And, it was and this particular manufacturing company was bought by a Chinese company, and so they kinda brought over the Chinese, you know, management processes. And in there, there are a bunch of really funny quotes about the Chinese managers coming in and saying, like, the in America, the American worker is like a donkey.
Speaker 1:Like, you you you need to pet it with the fur going this way. You can't pet it against the fur. And so, like, Americans respond to positive reinforcement, not negative reinforcement. And, you know, I don't know. Maybe that's our culture.
Speaker 1:I think our I think American culture is pretty great. Maybe that's a flaw, but
Speaker 2:I I think
Speaker 1:you gotta play the game on the field. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. I mean, go and, I I don't think Europeans would respond well to, optimize. I I I don't even know how to say the name of the of the YC company. But, but, yeah, different different continents, countries have, like, very distinct work cultures, and that's totally okay.
Speaker 2:Right? A lot of the approach of this sort of like Manhattan finance culture would go over terrible in San Francisco. Right. This idea, you know, in San Francisco, you're supposed to get a pat on the back. Maybe if you're doing like nine, nine, six, oftentimes in New York, that's not even going to be like the bar.
Speaker 2:Right. You're going to be like, looked down upon for doing that and like might lose your job over it. So these sort of workplace cultural differences are very real. And I just don't think that, so this company, the the the annoying thing is I don't know how beneficial a y c hard post launch is gonna be for them. Whereas
Speaker 1:It's for fundraising. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's saying, hey. Here's this demo. Bunch of people can see it even if they didn't make it to demo day, even if they got lost in the clutter of demo day because there's a lot of companies now. And I I think that's what those posts are for. Maybe hiring a little bit, but, certainly not customer focused.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But, yeah, it's gotta go over well, but who knows? We'll we'll see. We'll be able to track them and see if they make, see if they raise a seed round.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And I think that there's already a poly market out there for will they pivot away from this or will
Speaker 2:they change?
Speaker 1:But I don't know. I mean, getting attention can be turned into a lot of different, positive things if you work hard. And speaking of getting attention, if you wanna launch your company, why don't you launch an AdQuick billboard? There's a fantastic, post here. Chris from AdQuick reposted it.
Speaker 1:Out of homemade out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising with AdQuick. Go to AdQuick.com. And there's a new billboard just dropped with, Michael j Fox for Calvin Klein, and just an iconic image. And I'm sure that built the Calvin Klein brand wonderfully.
Speaker 1:And so sometimes simple aspirational is all you need.
Speaker 2:I just had an idea. We should take some of our favorite reviews that include ads in them Yeah. And run those as billboards.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:So so we get some TV placement, and then you get the actual ads, under there. So we gotta talk to
Speaker 1:to They they they do that for movies now. Right? Like, it'll be, like, you know, five stars and and they and they have, like, the one they won the Palme d'Or. It's the best picture of the year. What the critics are saying, the critics say this, we need to run that for us, but it's what the critics are saying plus, you know, you you know, the ads that are that are listeners have dumped into the reviews.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let let's move on to anthropic. Claude is playing Pokemon on Twitch right now. I saw about a thousand people tuning in. Very fun. Guys wake up.
Speaker 1:Says, Near. Claude's playing Pokemon on Twitch. It's happening. And so, let me get to that.
Speaker 2:And so they did this, and they simultaneously announced a new 3 and a half billion dollar fundraise. Is that correct?
Speaker 1:No. I do I I don't think they have announced that. I think the the fundraising round is leaking currently.
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 1:And they are finalizing the round. We can get into that. This has actually been done before. There's been a Twitch place Pokemon where the computer would just read the chat, and everyone would spam up, up, up, or a a a or b b b, and then whatever letter was spammed the most was basically won the vote, and then that would be the next move that the player made. And it takes forever, and it you can get stuck in crazy scenarios.
Speaker 1:And I think when Twitch played Pokemon, there's this one level where if you if you press down, you fall down this, like, crack and you have to basically start over this whole maze. And and and people would come in and troll and, like and so they spent, like, I think days, maybe hours just trying to get through this one. It's, like, pretty easy to navigate
Speaker 2:if you're just a true
Speaker 1:player, but it's very chaotic. And so and then people would troll and be like, oh, like, you know, instead of let's attack, let's just, run away from this bad guy. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let let let's quit this whole thing. Yeah. Video games by committee, probably not a good strategy.
Speaker 1:But people had a lot of fun. It's a lesson in democracy. Right? And so now there are benchmarks around this.
Speaker 2:Are people having fun with democracy? Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And so, Zeofon says, we got, yo, we got cool benches. And and it's, clog three versus 3.5 versus 3.5 sonic new versus 3.7 sonic. And it says milestone reach number of actions, and it shows how does Pokemon how do you progress through the game?
Speaker 1:I've actually been playing Pokemon with my son because of the, mod retrochromatic. He actually finds it kinda boring. He's not that into it. He likes the other games. But, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:The chromatic, you can you can get I got one card that has, like, a hundred games on it, and then you can just, like, play whatever you want. So he always wants to play something new.
Speaker 2:So great.
Speaker 1:But it's fun.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine if we had that can you imagine if we had that when we were kids? Like, I distinctly remember you had your Game Boy Yep. Which you'd be cruising around with. And then I would have, like, a DOP kit, like, shave kit that just had a bunch of, yeah, bunch of cartridges.
Speaker 1:You would have to save up, you know, games are, like, 50. You'd save for, like, three months to get enough money to buy one. And and now it's like, oh, yeah. Just, you know, download them all for free. Yep.
Speaker 1:We live in the era of abundance. AI, we are post scarcity in terms of video games.
Speaker 2:That is correct.
Speaker 1:Well, let's go to Vittorio. He kinda sums things up. The timeline in the span of three days, people moved from, OpenAI to anthropic, or to Grok, and then from Grok to Anthropic to Claude. Everyone is always obsessed with the new shiny object, in AI, especially online, especially in acts. Everyone is always focused on the evals, focused on the latest and greatest models.
Speaker 1:People care about this stuff. But, again, like, what's happening on the street, what's happening, with the average person is what actually drives revenue with these companies. And we'll get into what's going on at Anthropoc Yeah.
Speaker 2:And there's
Speaker 1:eventually, but
Speaker 2:There's this effect right now where there's, you know, in the same this the the critique of the whole Uber versus Lyft battle was that Uber was, like, obviously the winner. And by both companies being able to raise billions of dollars, there was a bunch of capital incineration, and Uber wasn't really able to recognize, you know, able to see the real real value of the traction they had because prices were, very compressed. And same thing is happening right now, but it's actually much more deserving in many ways because we don't know how all these consumer products are gonna shake out yet. We want a lot of competition. And I actually think that it's great for consumers because you can go on GROC and get free intelligence Yep.
Speaker 2:That that, you know, a a couple weeks ago, you had to go to OpenAI, pay
Speaker 1:money, or
Speaker 2:go to DeepSeek. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:So I think it's great for consumers and, you know, it's it's totally unsustainable. Yeah. We're not gonna have every every, you you know, consumer is not gonna have, like, 20 different, LLM,
Speaker 1:that's unsustainable, but I think the pricing will come down to the point where it is too cheap to meter. I think these models will get baked down. Dylan Patel was talking about this, how already there are GPT four level models that have been baked down to the phone. And so, you know, there's you know, he doesn't even need OpenAI to open source that already because it's it is available and the optimizations are happening, which is a lot of fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to, Chu j Jang who says, are you kidding me, dude? Talking about, Claude, how many r's are in strawberry with a bunch of r's? This is like a classic, like, tricky prompt for these LLMs because they tokenize the words and they struggle to count letters, I guess. And it's hilarious because, Claude recognizes that this is a trick prompt and says, this appears to be an Easter egg prompt. The instructions specifically mentioned Easter egg.
Speaker 1:If the human asks how many r's are in the word strawberry, Claude says, let me check, and creates an interactive mobile friendly, React artifact that counts the letter r's in a fun and engaging way. And so it it doesn't just count the letters. It actually creates a whole website interface for you. It codes all of that up, and it still gets it wrong, which is hilarious. It
Speaker 2:counts all of the This is rough. The the reason that this is particularly rough is that they clearly were were, like, we're not gonna get got here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so they went and they they they used humans to try to to try to inject themselves and make the
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Make the the the model get it right and then still getting it wrong. It's it's
Speaker 1:It's so funny.
Speaker 2:Of course, the top comment is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Claudia is there. I'm calculating. Yeah. Claude is is in an odd place. I mean, we'll go through this with Evan Armstrong's post.
Speaker 1:But, you know, simultaneously, like, a lot of people have a very strong affinity for Claude as a personality. Like, they like talking to it. They think it's friendly and interesting, and and and they like they they like the way it sounds so that when they talk to it. But then simultaneously, on the other side, it's like it seems to be like the best programming model. And and that's, like, you know, completely utilitarian.
Speaker 1:You don't really care about the the personality of the of the LLM. And so they're clearly, you know, finding little pockets of value here and there, but Isn't that Armstrong's
Speaker 2:son comes in? Fascinating. Isn't it just fascinating the way it's evolving? Because it almost seems like it's it sort of feels like it's not fully in their control. Like, that's like the Yeah.
Speaker 2:Like like, there's a feeling of like, yeah, Anthropic was like, hey, we want our model to be like, you can imagine them being very intentional about we want our model to be sort of, you know, more fun, friendly, like, more of like a companion. You know, you can develop, like, a relationship with it, whatever. But then do they have an off switch for that? Is there a way to make it go, like, you know, sort of clogged hardcore where you just wanna have this sort of, like, you know, more simplified linear, just direct relationship with the LLM? Because Yeah.
Speaker 2:I haven't I haven't experienced that as
Speaker 1:a I mean, there's tons of different ways
Speaker 2:to do it. Could prompt engineer it to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, prompt engineering is is one way. There's post training. Even the data that goes into the pre training, a lot of the reason that the models the early models were, like, quote, unquote, woke was because Yeah. They were trained more on Reddit, and they kind of excluded four Chan.
Speaker 1:And so you have, like, a more left wing perspective. And then just the Internet broadly is leans younger and leans more left wing. And so you wind up with creating the average of that and get kind of more of a left wing viewpoint. And then, obviously, XAI has kind of has kind of gone the other direction with mixed results, honestly, because it is a little bit of, like, you're trying to, you know, tame a wild dragon or something and, like, you don't really have fine grain control. It's not just the slider.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a lot that goes into Yeah. Actually, you know, evaluating these models and creating something that, is really
Speaker 2:And it makes it one thing one one thing that seems obvious about where we're headed with all these apps is that you will be able to have, like, maybe, like, a four quadrant sort of graphic where you can drag it up. It's like, do you want it to be more short and direct versus you know, because think about it, you know, when when you're working with people in a professional environment, which a lot of these peep you know, most a lot of users are using them, these products professionally. You sometimes you want somebody who's just super direct, like doesn't wanna be your best friend, just wants to do the work and, you know, get it done. And then sometimes you want somebody to just talk to. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can actually do that in OpenAI in the chat g p t app. There's a, basically, like a prompt that is like a permanent prompt where you can type in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can fill in a ton of text. You can say all sorts of things. And people kind of trade, like, these, oh, this is, like, the best prompt. You gotta tell it to do all these different things, and then the model updates, and you kinda don't need to do that anymore. But, you can actually bake in, you know, those preferences, and then it'll just come out come through on every single,
Speaker 2:prompt
Speaker 1:that you ask. Let's go to Evan Armstrong. He says, Anthropic is in a tough spot. OpenAI has 50 x the brand and customer distribution. XAI has this platform captured.
Speaker 1:Google has an infinite money glitch going for them. How can they win good old fashioned marketing? They need to counter position, make everything less creepy than the OpenAI robot god energy. This recent launch is a perfect example of their more human strategy, handheld shot versus the creepy steady cam that makes everything feel like a webinar. A nice warm yellow orange color correction on the vids.
Speaker 1:Its videos will go with fun jazz or lo fi beats that fills out the demos. No thinking about how the tools will take your job, Lowell. Intros that humanize the presenters with no c suite trumpeting accomplishments, just normal sounding team members. Most importantly, the models feel more soulful and are trained to have a softer, more human like response to user queries. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So finding a little pocket of differentiation is really is really, really key. I was laughing about, you know, Google has this infinite money glitch. I was looking up, Apple. Apple has returned they are they they've returned $928,000,000,000 to shareholders over the last twelve years or something like that, and they have, I think, 65,000,000,000 on their balance sheet. So they basically generated a trillion dollars in cash for their shareholders.
Speaker 1:And you think about, like, what does a trillion dollars get you in the AI race? Like, it's, like, clearly the best and, like, well beyond anything else. But they just didn't go down that fork in the tech tree, and so they just didn't pursue that. And and I think the strategy will honestly probably work out because they're just going to act as the as the portal and take a toll
Speaker 2:on
Speaker 1:everything that happens. Yeah. And and they're happy with that, and they haven't had to duke it out in this in in this game and put all that capital at risk instead they've been able to return it to shareholders. But it is but it is very interesting. And these models are expensive, and that's why, Anthropic is finalizing a $3,500,000,000 funding round.
Speaker 1:And so, the company behind Claude Chatbot is valued at 61,500,000,000.0 after overcoming investor fear sparked by the success of China's DeepSeek. Investors are eager to back the promising artificial intelligence companies despite their disruptive arrival of DeepSeek. They initially set out to raise 2,000,000,000, but they were able to increase that amount during talks with investors. Anthropic, such a young company founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, startup was previously valued at 18,000,000,000 and considered one of the few AI startups with enough talent and funding to
Speaker 2:get to the To give SBF some credit, I believe that I believe they invest. They definitely invested sub $10,000,000,000, and that was from the FTX FTX balance sheet investment, which is wild.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so I I think that's part of what will wind up making the FTX depositors whole. Like, if you lost money in FTX, you now have a stake on a small slice of anthropic. And if they can liquidate that at some point, that's a really good return. I don't know exactly how much money is missing or how the math works out, but, it is it is one of those weird narrative violations.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was highly illiquid, but, you know, potentially profitable. Yeah. So who's in this round? It's Lightspeed Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Bessemer, Abu Dhabi, MGX is also in talks to participate, and I believe MGX was going into Stargate too.
Speaker 1:Is that right? Everyone's in everything. I'm I'm very Yep. Every everyone needs a slice of everything.
Speaker 2:Everybody's getting conflicted.
Speaker 1:Getting conflicted. And throughout the trails There's
Speaker 2:no worse There's no worse feeling for a VC than having their, you know, a massive market map appear and you're not conflicted out of it yet. It means it means you missed the boat.
Speaker 1:For sure. Anthropic trails market leader OpenAI and among consumer users, although it's Claude chatbot has become popular among programmers and business clients. Their annual rev annualized revenue recently hit $1,200,000,000. And this is what's so funny. It's like we're in this crazy AI bubble, but you just compare it to the .com boom.
Speaker 1:And Yeah. Yes. Everything could go really south and a lot of these companies could incinerate money. But when we look back, we're like, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was trading at 60 x revenue. That's still better than 10,000 times revenue, which is like what was going on in the .com boom. Like, these companies are generating real money, and who knows where it'll, you know, pencil out once, you know, the models are are are fully distributed or if they really saggy, they could be get they could become very cheap and and and that revenue could decline. But, so far, they're doing pretty well. It's losing money, and they'll use cash from the latest funding to support their efforts to train more powerful AI models.
Speaker 1:OpenAI, for comparison, in the October funding round, said that it expected to generate 3,700,000,000 in revenue, so about four times the size. And, of course, the valuation's about four times the size as well or three times the size. Some Silicon Valley Investors have been worried about the prospects of companies such as Anthropic since DeepSeek released a new model that rivals the most powerful in The US, but was made at a fraction of the cost and is free to use, and there's more information on that. So, yeah, interesting to see. Everyone's piling in.
Speaker 1:Everyone's gotta get a bet if you're not in a foundation model company and you're a VC. What are you doing?
Speaker 2:Yeah. We had seen a we had seen a a an LP update recently of which there I'm sure there are many like this. So basically, it was like, yeah. I haven't not doing much AI stuff yet, but I'd like to at some point. Like, bro.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Bro.
Speaker 1:You're late.
Speaker 2:You're probably not actually late, but you you should have been paying attention.
Speaker 1:Well, it depends on what happens tomorrow. Nvidia is doing earnings tomorrow after the market closes, and, that will be something everyone is watching
Speaker 2:Yeah. Very,
Speaker 1:very close.
Speaker 2:We need to time it we need to time it so that we're actually streaming while it's happening.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'll be after market close, but we'll we'll figure it out. We'll we'll find a way to cover it. Anyway, so you raised, $3,500,000,000. That's a lot of money going out the door.
Speaker 1:How are you gonna track it, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Great question. Before we get into, the most important section of this piece, the the other thing that was interesting is people have, the last thing I would say on this, people had sort of memed, does, anthropic by cursor, does cursor by anthropic, right, being being one of their most important enterprise customers, at least from a growth standpoint and a customer love standpoint. And, you know, anyway, so so I wouldn't you know, overall, the thing that was interesting out of this, they also launched a code editor Mhmm. That sort I think it's called Claude Code, fitting name. And so it'll be interesting to see do they end up you know, it's not, you know, directly competitive yet, but, you can imagine all these things converging, in the same direction.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, I'm excited to see that play out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They also have a a a model that's trained to live in your command line. And so it can interact with your computer
Speaker 2:at a very
Speaker 1:low level, which makes a ton of sense and, just gives it a lot more ability to interact everywhere. It's been fascinating watching the the AI companies figure out different ways to plug in. The Mac app for ChatGPT uses the, assisted device interface to basically automatically integrate with every single code editor regardless of whether or not they want them integrated because it's just Crazy. Sucking out the text and then injecting your text like it's any other screen reader. So a bunch of different ways to kind of plant these models in.
Speaker 1:I used Operator yesterday, for the first time really looking for some office space, and it was rough. Like, I I it was it kept coming back to me to, like, do CAPTCHOs and stuff because it knows, like, hey. This is an AI that's that's going to this website. And, it wasn't the fun part. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a dark future where humans, like, primary work output is just filling out ever increasingly difficult CAPTCHAs. And that's the only time that you get hit up throughout the day is, like, getting a like, somebody getting a DoorDash notification, like Yep. Oh, new CAPTCHA, new CAPTCHA, and then you got, like, 40 of these things working for you at once, and it's just, like, every minute you're just sitting there, you know, addicted to your phone, but it's just captchas.
Speaker 1:Brutal. I hope we can avoid that. That sounds terrible. Anyway, you got 3,500,000,000.0 in the bank. You wanna track it.
Speaker 1:How you gonna do it? Ramp. Baby. Let's go. Time is Money Save.
Speaker 1:Both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com to sign up. And we have a post from, a clip of Eric Gleiman, the CEO of Ramp. And, he was on a podcast or an interview, and, there's a little breakdown of what he said. He said, when you put high agency people together, they ship faster.
Speaker 1:At one crucial point, a third of Ramp's team, 50 to 70 people were ex founders. That's a crazy stat. Eric explains these people understand that they that the default state of a company is it doesn't work. So they don't wait for permission or perfect conditions, and they find out ways to make this happen. They've experienced firsthand how companies collapse without relentless effort, so they end up being independent and stubborn on what should be done to move things faster.
Speaker 1:But it also comes with an acceptance cost that these people might go on to start their own companies. And I think that's great. If you're looking for a job, highly recommend starting a company, figuring out, building something, building your portfolio. Don't just hang out in the unemployment zone. Build something.
Speaker 1:Put yourself in the cage. Do a PMF or die challenge. Try and build something. And then worst case, you know, you you you find a soft landing somewhere as a job. You get a job off.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Because you because you did all of the things and you and you learned the three sixty view of building something. Taking some time.
Speaker 2:I I I gave some advice to a, listener yesterday who is has been a founder before, knows that he wants to build his career as a as an entrepreneur. And I give him the advice of, sometimes it's great to try to use pattern matching to your advantage. Mhmm. And by going and working at a company, even if you were a founder and then you go to work at a company like Ramp, your your ease of raising additional capital from that point on, you know, will will will increase tremendously. Right?
Speaker 2:Because VCs are just sort of trained at this point. Hey. This person went and they worked at Ramp for two years. They got really deep on this one area of the business, and now they're starting to sort of adjacent business solving problems that that ramp customers, you know, experience or or ramp itself experience. And so, I think that founder people, you know, people that have that sort of founder mentality, they just want they're just obsessed with company building, still should use, like, stints at great companies to sort of accelerate their careers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 100%. Well, let's move on to Tesla. Having a rough month, down 23% in the last month, and people are now graffitying superchargers
Speaker 2:I saw.
Speaker 1:With the swastikas, which is aggressive. And Solana had a great Mike Solana had a great post about, like, both Nazis and people that hate Nazis seem to both love, like, drawing swastikas everywhere. Very odd. Very weird.
Speaker 2:I interesting, wild because I I I I just don't understand, like, who is feels the call to go and graffiti something like that. I would say that, you know, the the the the thing that we wanna focus in on here is, like, what's actually happening to the, the stock because Yeah. Jack Raines posted earlier, and he said that basically the '20, what do you say? If you bought Tesla in 2021, you basically fully round trips. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:10 k. His joke was like yeah. 10 k. So, yeah, it's a store of value. It's a Does
Speaker 1:it pop to over a trillion, and now it's back at a trillion, and it kinda went up and down and up and down. But I wanna know more about what's driving the market. You had a big question about are people moving to other EVs. And there's an interesting article in the, first off, there there's an interesting, car that launched, the Li Auto Mega MPV. Have you seen this thing?
Speaker 1:So it's a minivan, but it looks like, you know, it has, like like, cushy seats that recline. It has all of the all the niceties that these Chinese EVs tend to have. And so stunning electric minivan from Li Auto, the mega MPV dubbed the highway bullet train due to its shape and ability to travel 311 miles in a twelve minute charge while Musk's waste every second on toxic identity politics. The Chinese are crushing Tesla and innovation. Unclear if that's what's actually going on.
Speaker 1:We'll see how this actually performs on the road, but, they are moving quickly, and, and it's putting pressure on Porsche as well. There was an article in the New York Times why Porsche is no longer a premium sports car in China that I thought we might wanna read through. After decades of dominating China's market for high performance cars with precision engineering, German automakers are losing out to Chinese rivals that have shifted the definition of a high end car to one that is electric, smart, and affordable. Many new Chinese vehicles resemble their German rivals, like the wildly popular Xiaomi Su seven, which is a phone company. Remember?
Speaker 1:Xiaomi makes phones, and now they make cars, and this mimics Porsche's Taycan. The SU seven rivals the Taycan in power and braking, but it also includes integrated artificial intelligence that can, for instance, help with parking and greet drivers with their favorite song, the cherry on top. It sells for roughly half the price of a Taycan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The problem is, you know, a lot of the the wow factor elements of a Tesla Yep. Early on were the software side, and the issue is, like, software is just so much easier to copy. So, like, not only do the Chinese are, like, the best in the world at at manufacturing today.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:At least, like, you know, mass market consumer products. They also can very quickly emulate. It's like, oh, Tesla makes a fart sound. If you press the right button, we can do that, but we'll, like, play your favorite song when you come in and
Speaker 1:say Exactly.
Speaker 2:That ability to sort of spark, joy or or have some fun with with the user is just so much easier to copy, and not not a durable moat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Big driver here is that a lot of the Chinese population is buying cars for the first time. And so they're not like, oh, well, I had a I had a poster of a Carrera GT on my wall, and then, yeah, I rented a, you know, a a Cayman, and I know what, you know, a flat six sounds like. And so
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I really want a naturally aspirated v eight, my next car. They're just like, one car, please. And what is a car? Oh, it's electric now? Great.
Speaker 1:Like, that's fine. Like, this is the best car. Great.
Speaker 2:And so the other thing that happens
Speaker 1:is that they're working.
Speaker 2:Is as Chinese consumer products and brands, like, started to work internationally. I do think that the Chinese consumer started to say, Chinese products are cool now. Yeah. Totally. Small small thing of, like, oh, you're using TikTok overseas?
Speaker 2:Cool. Oh, you're using DGI overseas?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay. Why aren't we just buying our own brands? Yeah. Like, these are I'm I'm sure some of these brands are coveted and cool in the Chinese market even though as American consumers, like, it means nothing like the Su seven or whatever. To me, that sounds like I don't wanna knock off Macan.
Speaker 2:Exactly. But but to them, they're like, I that that might be like a super desirable vehicle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the SU seven sold a hundred thousand cars last year, and Porsche has been one of the hardest hit. They were they reported that last month, its deliveries in China plunged 28% in 2024. Although Porsche's sales were up in every other region around the world, the decline in China was significant enough to pull down global global deliveries for the year. For years, German automakers relied on the Chinese market to make up for weaker demand elsewhere, leading them to ignore deeper deeper structural issues at home.
Speaker 1:Chief among them was the reluctance to adopt the technology that has become, that has come to define driving in China, electric vehicles equipped with sophisticated software and increasingly artificial intelligence. The German and but also the American and Japanese Korean established Western manufacturers have greatly underestimated the development dynamics of the Chinese manufacturers, namely the importance of electromobility and software defined vehicles. And so, yeah, China is building, you know, their grid from scratch. They're building their roads from scratch, so they're going to have a fresh start greenfield opportunity. They can build their cities and roads for electric vehicles to put less stress on the grid and actually
Speaker 2:They can probably they can probably, get more access to transformers to actually
Speaker 1:Yep. Totally.
Speaker 2:Because they're they're making a lot of them. Yep.
Speaker 1:Yep. And, yeah. And and and fundamentally, people, are are just fine with these electric cars. The the Chinese are also doing something interesting where there's a few electric cars that they're kind of a reverse hybrid. So instead of it being a, a gas powered engine with an electric motor that gives it a little extra boost or makes the
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The the range a little bit further or just improves the gas mileage. It's actually essentially an electric car, but with a really small, petrol engine or gasoline engine that can then just charge the battery, and that's all it does. And so you'll see these cars where it's, you know, a 300 mile battery charged, but then you get another 300 miles if you fill the gas tank. And so, all of a sudden, your range is, like, 600 miles, and you can stop at a gas station if you have range anxiety. So they've completely solved that problem of, like, oh, if I get an electric car, I can't go on the road trip.
Speaker 1:But now you can because you just fill back up. But you're still getting all the benefits of the electric power train and all that and all the reliability and stuff. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's interesting to see that
Speaker 1:happened in America because people have either been all in on EV. It's gotta be EV. Tesla doesn't touch internal combustion engines or, you know, oh, we we wouldn't put any electrical components in this. Hybrids are bad. We we need to be naturally aspirated v eights all the way.
Speaker 1:China has not been as dogmatic about that.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yeah. The, it's interesting to see, just Chinese they're not being, they're they're not being necessarily super targeted with the international products that they're slowing down on purchasing. Right? We saw Caring Group's, sales were down 30% year over year, and we're, you know, we're seeing that broadly in luxury goods and then the same thing, they're not and the and the iPhone sales too.
Speaker 2:Right? So it's, it's it's more use sort of utilitarian products like phones and cars and then also luxury goods. So Yep. And and this is probably, you know, there there's probably a lot under the surface in terms of the CCP and the Chinese government broadly saying, hey. We need to switch from an exporter.
Speaker 2:If the if the world's sort of going through this period of deglobalization Yep. We need to switch from an export based economy, which they'll continue to be to some degree, but we also need to be consuming the products that we produce internally and having more of the sort of consumption based economy because they can't be reliant on growing foreign exports to the same degree or having, you know, people move into cities, which also drives that consumption. So, all of this will be interesting to play out. I hate I I've been I went, the last time I was at a mall, I I went by, there was there was one of these, Chinese EV manufacturers that was, like, set up there. They had, like, you know, two cars in a box and they were sort of marketing them.
Speaker 2:And, I, I hope these products don't catch on. One, for our sort of local manufacturers. And then two, they're just, like, ugly and, like, cheap in my opinion, and I just don't wanna see them on the road. The other thing is
Speaker 1:I mean, there's already crazy tariffs. So most of these cars are not viable to sell in The United States, and I think there's tons of pressure. And then, of course, Elon being so close with Trump, like, there's gonna be tons of pressure against this trend. So I wouldn't I wouldn't count on any of these products, really going, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:But one one thing that's interesting is, so as Czar in the chat mentioned, he says The US will probably cut EV subsidies soon, which is scaring investors, which which we can see in this in the stock price. But, the interesting thing with the Elon Trump dynamic is that you can imagine Trump would would ignoring the Elon relationship would just say, why are these EV companies getting all these subsidies? Like, why are we paying? You know, why are we subsidizing the cost of these for, you know, let them compete on the free market. Right?
Speaker 2:But then he's boys with Trump and Yeah. And or sorry. He's boys with Elon and, like, that would be super damaging to Tesla. And so it's an interesting, I'm interested to see how that dynamic is going to happen.
Speaker 1:Interesting cultural thing kinda going back to, like, the different factory worker, you know, philosophies. The there's the the Han, I for I forget what what company is, but it's it's a Chinese sedan, electric sedan called the Han. And and they have different trim levels. And in America, you want a bigger number. Everything's bigger is better in America.
Speaker 1:Everything's bigger in Texas. You want a bigger engine. So, you know, know, something like a BMW might get a three twenty eight I, three thirty five I. Same thing with a Mercedes e three fifty or, you know, what what are the 6.3 liter v eights and the AMGs? Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so you want a higher number. You want a bigger number. Pretty pretty much always.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But they don't have that culture in China, and so the trim levels are just the zero to 60 time. And so you can buy, like, the Han 3.6. The Han 3.6.
Speaker 2:Better. I I love that system.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so you're driving behind a car and you're just like, oh, the 2.5 that goes zero to 60 in two point five seconds, which is Yeah.
Speaker 2:When we're when we're driving in the work to more in the morning and and wondering who we should drag race. Yeah. Now it's a much easier way to figure that out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. I just thought it was hilarious culturally, but it really goes to
Speaker 2:the fact that
Speaker 1:there are no priors. There's no standards. So it's just like, yeah. Do whatever.
Speaker 2:In, sort of sort of adjacent to this in in the in The UAE. Yeah. They people, the, the license plates, you have to like buy them and there's like a secondary market for them. And so the most coveted license plates are, are these like, like the king will have like one. And then if you see somebody with like seven, like, you know, they're a big dog and sounds like they're probably a part of the Royal family or, or, you know, you
Speaker 1:know, everyone has a million dollar car. Like that's not special. You need to add a couple million dollars in like license plate Flex.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They'll trade, they'll trade for $20,000,000 just for the plate because if you have more money than you know what to do with, you might as well find out one more way to signal, to the other people on the road.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're going to Dubai or you're gonna spend some time doing laps at the Nurburgring, where are you staying, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I'm staying at a wander.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And I didn't know this.
Speaker 1:We we have a post here. Wander has ten minute home tour videos on all the different properties. And usually this one's thirteen minutes. It has a full introduction, drone tours, cinematic shots. And so before you make the decision to click purchase, you can really get to know the property, and it's a lot harder
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 1:fake it with a couple wide angle photos when you're moving around with a with a video camera.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The classic. I when we were evacuating from the fires, I was dealing with, like, Airbnb drama. I wanted to stay at a wander, but, you know, some of these homes are so coveted. They get booked out, for too long.
Speaker 2:And, I ended up booking two places that just were completely disingenuous with how they represented the property. And so that's like a pretty common experience with Airbnb. You see these amazing, you know, pictures and then you show up, but you can't fake a thirteen minute video, around the, around the the the property. So
Speaker 1:So highly recommend it. Let's stay on China. Go to, Bridget Harris, my colleague over at Founders Fund. She says, by the way, China is lending money to African nations for infrastructure project like ports and energy, etcetera, via this infrastructure, making them more dependent so they can ship in Chinese goods more easily. And then if the loans are defaulted, they take on the land.
Speaker 1:Very rough. And so she says, yes, guys. It's not new, but still an interesting dynamic slash relevant. And, yeah, this is the Belt and Road policy, and it is crazy and very controversial and and has cost them a lot of money, but, has earned them a lot of allies across the world. It's interesting.
Speaker 1:I was working Sort
Speaker 2:of reluctant allies.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe it's different venture fund in, in college and was looking through the cable gate leaks to hear what the embassies in different countries were saying about doing business there if you're an American. And, overwhelmingly in some of these African countries, the the sentiment was that, you basically had two choices. You could do business with American companies or Chinese companies. But if you did business with the Chinese companies, they had the full backing of the CCP.
Speaker 1:And so if something happened where that company kinda stiffed you, you could go to the Chinese government and say, hey. Make me whole. But you couldn't do that in an American country in or American company. And that was, there's there there were a few oil spills that happened, and American companies, there there was the the, you know, they sued the company and they try and get the money from the company. But if the company is, like, bankrupt or something, there's really no more money to, you know, pay.
Speaker 1:Whereas, China was kind of like, hey. We're backing up everything that we do in these countries. So, yeah, lots of pressure. It'll be interesting. I don't think we're gonna see an American Belt and Road initiative anytime soon.
Speaker 1:Well,
Speaker 2:the expensive.
Speaker 1:But some of the stuff that's happening in Panama, Greenland, like, this is all related. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the the the history of the US empire is basically one long Belt and Road initiative. It just wasn't branded in the same way. But, this is this is one of those things where, we like it when our team does it, but, when when our adversary goes and does it and Boo.
Speaker 1:We like to boo. Boo.
Speaker 2:Yuck. Why? How could they? Yeah. Meanwhile, America, we have military bases, you know.
Speaker 2:Everywhere.
Speaker 1:And we're sending money all over the globe for all sorts of
Speaker 2:reasons. Yeah. So But
Speaker 1:some of their money, high ROI. People people like to say, oh, we should say we're a dime abroad.
Speaker 2:With Ukraine. I don't
Speaker 1:know about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. With Ukraine, we're saying, you're giving us your mineral rights for, you're basically, like, our loans were backed by your mineral rights.
Speaker 1:Sometimes you gotta put your buddies on full scholarship and just help out.
Speaker 2:Full scolly.
Speaker 1:Full scolly. When they're when they're down, you you spot them a couple bucks and then maybe they help you out in the future. It's, one hand washes the other. This is geopolitics. Anyway, if you don't know Bridget, she's a fantastic crypto investor at at Founders Fund, and let's move on to another crypto story, Bybit, which we mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1:They were hacked, and they are now taking loans from rivals, after a record crypto hack hack. Rival crypto exchanges are stepping in to shore up the finances of the world's third biggest exchange, Bybit. I had no idea who's this big. It must be Coinbase, then by Binance, then Bybit, after hackers stole $1,400,000,000 from the firm last week. In doing so, the crypto industry is hoping to calm investor worries that the hack could lead to another FTX like implosion.
Speaker 1:Several exchanges, including Bitget and MEXC, have made emergency loans to Bybit to replenish tokens lost in the hack so Bybit's customers can withdraw funds without a problem. The loans are unusual given how quickly and easily they were arranged without prolonged due diligence and with few strings attached. And I think it actually makes sense because, you know, this was not miss I mean, obviously, they shouldn't have gotten hacked, but it's not Bybit was stealing the money. Right? It wasn't fraud.
Speaker 1:It it it seems like it was, like, a mistake. And so, you know, the company management is probably more respected by other people in the industry, and they're able to, justify the liquidity quickly.
Speaker 2:They're able to say, like, what would what would we want, our competitors to do in this situation? And Yep. This is one of those things. If a if a $1,400,000,000 hole emerges in a crypto exchange, it is terrible for the industry. I mean, people were talking about this.
Speaker 2:People were talking about this last week. They were like, oh, this is actually bullish because Bybit has to buy back all the ETH, which would create, you know And you know, for press upward pressure on the on the price.
Speaker 1:People cope in such funny ways. I love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways.
Speaker 1:So Bitget, a small arrival, lent Bybit for 40,000 ether worth more than a hundred and $5,000,000 roughly five hours after the Friday hack. According to the CEO, Gracie Chen, the loan has unusually borrower friendly terms since it charges no interest. Doesn't require Bybit to post any collateral and doesn't have a set timeline to pay it back. It's more pure trust. So I think everyone crypto knows that, like, if there's a fracture, it can go very badly for everyone in the ecosystem.
Speaker 1:So it's worth it to just step in, plug the hole, and reassure the entire market, and then sort things out. I mean, we're
Speaker 2:just moving quickly to stop looking at this. Of the FTX stuff was triggered by Luna, and then what what was three arrows capital? Those two major implosions Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You catalyze this sort of,
Speaker 1:downturn effect. I mean, you could play out a different scenario where all of those, all of those firms, Three Arrows and and LUNA, they all shored up the capital immediately and Yeah. You know, coasted on. Although, Luna, it does seem like it was like a ticking time bomb and
Speaker 2:the DNC has had
Speaker 1:some serious problems.
Speaker 2:But The pure irony here and I'm and I'm glad that Big Get is doing this. You know, I'm sure I'm sure they'll they'll it'll come back in other ways for them. But the irony here saying the loan has unusually friendly borrowing borrower terms since it charges no interest, doesn't require them to pay back the collateral, and doesn't have a set timeline. It's more of pure trust. The irony is that crypto is created to deliver trustless, you know, finance.
Speaker 2:Right? Of course, you didn't have to rely you didn't have to rely on, trust. You could just trust the software and the code. So it's kind of interesting that they didn't do this.
Speaker 1:Reinventing everything including
Speaker 2:Like this
Speaker 1:sort of bailouts and and backroom deals between banks CEOs, basically.
Speaker 2:This would have been a a a really interesting way to flex the potential of crypto to be like, we raised a billion dollars on chain in in this sort of trustless way in order to, you know, make make our customers whole. And, but but, you know, I'm sure they had reason not to do that.
Speaker 1:So Bybit said, we know each other well. We had common investors. Together, we want to drive the industry forward, and we want to fight our common enemy who are hackers, not each other. Bitget will not get any equity stake in Bybit as part of the loan. I'm sure all that stuff takes long time to paper to how much equity you're gonna get.
Speaker 1:What what are the terms? And so instead, it's just, hey. I'm gonna front you, and we'll figure it out later because, otherwise, this is gonna bring us all down.
Speaker 2:It's so it's also just so crypto to to be like, here here's a hundred mil. Quick hundred mil. I'll send you know, the cool thing is that they were able to I'm sure they were able to get that that 40,000 ether over there Yep. In minutes in the same way that it took minutes to steal the 1,400,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:Well, if you're looking for a little bit more of a normal finance app, why don't you check out public.cominvesting for those who take it seriously, multi asset investing. They have industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And we got a post from Leif Abraham here. Scrappiness matters. Their team, the public.comteam, produced a new TV ad entirely in house.
Speaker 1:No ad agency, no production company, just sweat and hustle from the team, and a few grand of licensing fees start to finish twelve days. And I love this. I mean, you can go see the ad, but, it's cool because, like like, people forget that, like, it can go you can deliver just an m p four to the Super Bowl if you want to. Like, you don't have to hire a team for that. Kanye, yeah, that's us.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you're gonna post it on Twitter or x, like, you can just take that video and run it on TV. And, of course, they had a team internally that clearly knows their way around production, and so they were able to make something that looks very cinematic and looks great, and you should go check it out. But it it it it is cool to see a company that's as big as public, like, being still scrappy. And and and they probably had more fun, and and it was probably more aligned with their brand.
Speaker 1:They just had less back and forth, move faster, and it's great to see. And, I think that's an important lesson for for founders is, like, don't lose that scrappiness as you scale. Just because you can afford an ad agency doesn't mean you actually need one necessarily. You need to make sure that it's the right person right along.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'd like to see somebody do a, a company like Public do a an ad that's just like a recording of a FaceTime call. So it's like ringing. The CEO picks up, gives a quick spiel, and, like, hangs up, and, like, that's the entire ad unit. And it's just shot in one take screen recorded on their phone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because you could imagine even just something novel, like, having that having that the you might have to license the sound from Apple. Yeah. But but it would be a cool, viewer experience.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move on to an interesting post from Casey Hanmer. I'm not sure if you're familiar with him. He was involved in the scrolls decoding project, that Matt Friedman do did. He runs a very cool company here in LA out of a castle in Burbank.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Called Terraform Labs, Terraform Industries. And they're they're using solar panels to suck, carbon and hydrogen out of the atmosphere and convert it into natural gas, and then they can sell that onto the grid as energy. Very cool company.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:And he worked at JPL for a long time. He's brilliant. And he is asking the question of what should go on the first Starship mission to Mars? And so the next window so you can't just go to Mars anytime. It's not like the moon.
Speaker 1:You actually have to the the two planets have to be really close, basically, and it only happens every couple years. And so, we really gotta hit that if we wanna get on a cadence, and we want there to be at least one mission during the next, launch window. And then we want, like, a hundred ready to go for the next window because Yep. You can't just you can't just wait four years to be sitting on your hands. You gotta test a lot.
Speaker 1:And so Yep. There are six hundred and one days until 10/07/2026, which is the mass optimal launch window to Mars and when that opens. So he says he doesn't have any privileged information, but it's fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars. Spoiler alert, he thinks it's rods from God, which is fun. So over the second By the way,
Speaker 2:Calder in the chat says, having to plan around the, the optimal launch issue, window is a skill issue.
Speaker 1:Skill issue. Yeah. It's great. And so, over the next six hundred days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate orbit, reuse, refill, and chill. So orbit, this Friday, we're due for flight eight, of Starship, which will be very cool to watch, and this one may finally achieve orbit.
Speaker 1:Earlier flights technically had the performance necessary, but deliberately targeted the ocean to prevent the possibility of a Starship being stranded in orbit without propulsion capability, and then undergoing an uncontrolled reentry and crashing. Reuse, this is the holy grail of rocketry. SpaceX has indicated that they may attempt to refly booster 14 on flight nine, which would establish booster reuse. Flight nine may also see the first attempt to catch the Starship upper stage. But in any case, the successful reuse of both stages of Starship is necessary to fly to Mars.
Speaker 1:We gotta be reusing these things if we're gonna make it economical to get there and get back continually. Refilling, we can load Starship up with cargo for Mars, but it's not gonna leave low Earth orbit unless Starship can be refilled with fresh fuel and oxidizer. SpaceX has been working on orbital refilling for some time, but we need to see it actually working. So you gotta get a bunch of fuel up to space and then refill once you're in space, which is crazy, because we're not sending something to the Can we
Speaker 2:also talk about how uncontrolled uncontrolled reentry is just The best, crashing anywhere. For, like, for crashing, for just slamming back
Speaker 1:into the atmosphere. Yeah. So it's it's high stakes stuff. They might have to shoot it out of the world or if it's, like, shoot out of the sky if it's coming down over a populated area. And then chill, by far the easiest of the four tax tasks, but long term stability of Starship's cryogenic fuel will require that it be actively refrigerated, particularly in the challenging thermal environment of Leo or deep space.
Speaker 1:It's hard to make predictions, particularly about the future, but he's optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled Starships ready to go in October of next year, followed by a ten month cruise and then either orbital, Mars orbital insertion. And so, he broke this down in in another article. He has a couple different things that he, thinks that they should work on, but we'll just skip right to the spoiler alert. He says rods from God. We know there's a high likelihood of mostly pure that mostly pure water exists, within 10 to 20 meters of the surface across large swaths of the various perspective landing sites.
Speaker 1:Why not drop off a few dozen long steel or tungsten spears, guide them in while tracking them on radar, and then survey their impact craters with high rise as soon as the dust has cleared. These rods will impact the surface at about eight kilometers per second. That's extremely fast. Penetrating many times their length and exposing the subsurface to our existing orbital instruments for the first time. The main attraction of this approach is that it requires essentially zero additional effort on top of the existing program, whereas the others require either a crash instrument development program or building and flying multiple intricate surface operations robots and landing them with an extremely untested EDL system.
Speaker 1:Rods from the gods merely requires dropping a few tons of steel in roughly the same area, and then surveying the damage. It's also the only method that can deliver enough energy to actually directly access the deep subsurface at scale. And so, JPL actually considered doing this. Of course, they went with robots. But, I I like that he's thinking outside the box and, put
Speaker 2:it Well, this is the kind of this is the kind of citizen science that you've been asking Elizabeth Holmes to do. Right? Yes. Yes. Like, hey.
Speaker 2:You're in you're in prison, but, like, prove that you're legit by by being at the cutting edge, making recommend you know, I wanna see Elizabeth Holmes, you know, writing an open letter to Pfizer and saying, hey. You're doing it all wrong. This is what you Johnson and Johnson. Yeah. This is how you're you're making this mistake.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We actually had this figured out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, how do you try this?
Speaker 1:We'll get to this later in the show, but h five n one, the bird flu's going around. What is Elizabeth Holmes take? If she doesn't have one, you know, keep her locked up. Oh. But, anyway, he closes out by saying if all this goes well, the technology situation in 2028 could look like this, and that's, I think, the the the next next transfer window.
Speaker 1:Easier technology. SpaceX will have expertise in space solar, photo photovoltaics, Mars air separation, minor water prospectors, and SpaceX will not be an expert in pressure structures. And then the harder technology is orbital orbital refueling, which we mentioned, cryo fuel heat rejection, Mars EDL, space suits, long duration life support, surface life support, and water minor. And then, SpaceX is not an expert in fuel plant, rock miners, construction robots, nuclear reactors, and this is, this is I mean, there's a lot of other companies that are working on this tech now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. There's that, what's the team that's spun out of SpaceX that's doing nuclear stuff now? It's not a not
Speaker 1:a yeah.
Speaker 2:It's the wife of the Oh, you Farcaster founder.
Speaker 1:Oh, I don't know. But there there are a number of companies that have spun out of space and solve different different, problems that will will come up as we colonize the moon and Yeah. And Mars. But, what's really crazy is, like, there's all this noise around Elon, all this noise around tech and stuff, but things do seem to be relatively on track for a private company to deliver something to Mars in just a few years, which is Yeah. Crazy and a huge milestone.
Speaker 1:And so I'm super excited for that, and I'm excited to see where it goes. And I'm sure there'll be lots of other opportunities that crop up for businesses that are built on top of that plan because SpaceX isn't gonna do everything in Yep.
Speaker 2:I got a pitch I got a pitch last year. Maybe it was 2023 for, a a team building gas stations on the moon. Like, they were like, we're Chevron Yep. For space. That was the thesis of, like, basically, building, Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, fuel, depots on the moon, which is a very cool thing to be thinking about.
Speaker 1:So Doug Bernauer, the founder of Radiant, another, founders fund, Andreessen portfolio company, he worked at SpaceX, with Elon on special projects. Elon put him on a task. He he you you know how the the Falcon rocket has those legs that land, and that's how it lands? They took those off when they created the chopsticks that catch it. But those legs come down, and they land the
Speaker 2:the Falcon rocket. Doors?
Speaker 1:Basically. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh,
Speaker 1:okay. Yeah. The law Ferrari of the rocket world. I'm sure. And so, he was working on that project, then Elon was like, I like you.
Speaker 1:Keep going. Work on, tunnels and boring company stuff for a while. And then he he tasked him with, hey. When we get to Mars, what are we gonna do for energy? And he ran the numbers on, photovoltaics.
Speaker 1:And this is a little bit controversial. Not everyone agrees with his conclusion. But, basically, because Mars is farther away, it gets less light. And so, he was saying, if you need to set up solar panels to refuel a rocket to to generate enough power, essentially, you'll need to bring tons and tons of, like, just so many, solar panels. And the the math doesn't quite work out in his mind.
Speaker 1:And so what he said was you should bring a nuclear reactor, a smaller nuclear reactor, drop it down. It generates a lot of waste heat, which can be used to, melt ice creating water, and then you have a nuclear reactor that can then, create the fuel out of the natural resources and then refuel the rocket and then come back. And it's a perfect working on that.
Speaker 2:It's a perfect plot to a sci fi movie now. Yeah. And it could be a, you know, good catastrophe documentary. It's like, hey, we dropped this reactor
Speaker 1:universe. We gotta save them.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:so yeah. I mean, they've they've taken that. I mean, that that that's kind of like the long term inspiration for Radiant, but, in the short term, they're building basically a nuclear reactor in a shipping container, and you can drop it off in a military base. You can drop it off in an oil and gas extraction site. You can drop it off at a hospital if they need, you know, a a a one megawatt diesel generator.
Speaker 1:You can just replace that with a one megawatt nuclear reactor, and, it lasts for five years or ten years instead of, you know, like, a couple days until you need to refill it with diesel. So in the military, you have to deliver diesel through these convoys and these trucking, like, over and over and over again. Radiant kind of, eliminates that need. And so they're going into testing now, and we're working on that. But when we get to Mars and you get sleepy, what kind of bed are you gonna be sleeping on on Mars?
Speaker 2:Eight Sleep.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:We're putting an eight the first thing to go to Mars is an eight sleep.
Speaker 1:The first thing for sure.
Speaker 2:Ramp corporate card.
Speaker 1:For sure. Nights that fuel your best days, turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to aidsleep.com. Use code t b p n and, send us your receipt, and we'll, we'll get your hat. Anyway, let's stay on the topic.
Speaker 1:Wait.
Speaker 2:I gotta look at my I gotta look at my sleep score last
Speaker 1:night before we jump in. I I I tried the warm up thing. I tried the warm up thing, and it's fantastic. I woke up no problem at, like, 05:30. It was amazing.
Speaker 2:It's huge for me. It's unbeatable. Alright. I didn't do it so hot. I had an 84.
Speaker 2:But it was I get you. I get you. I get you. I get you. I get you.
Speaker 2:I get you. I get you. I get you. I get you. I get you.
Speaker 2:I get you. I get you. Five. There you go. It took my son, needing to go to the hospital for you to beat me.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You Jordy texted me last night and says, like, I won't be out slapped. Yeah. No one no one else
Speaker 2:serious about it. I just only got six and a half hours.
Speaker 1:I got six and a half hours too. Something something happened. I I think I I think I set my alarm a little bit too early.
Speaker 2:Logged.
Speaker 1:Well, let's stay on the topic of space exploration, space travel, and NASA. NASA, you might have heard that there's that there was an impact probability an asteroid was gonna hit Earth. It was very risky. There's a poly market all about it. But good news, the impact probability of asteroid twenty twenty four year four has dropped to 0.004%.
Speaker 1:It's expected to safely pass Earth in 2032. Let's go. Thank you. To humanity, undefeated. And we have a post from, Sula here.
Speaker 1:Fell for it again award. Would you look at the time? Nothing ever happens.
Speaker 2:So so, anyways, my my cons I don't have the tinfoil hat here, unfortunately, but my my conspiracy theory just said last week was that NASA really didn't wanna get dozed. And so as all the pressure, you know, they they felt like the spotlight was gonna shift to them. They go,
Speaker 1:oh, oh, this is an asteroid.
Speaker 2:It's 1% cheaper than ever. Next day and they just were basically raising it, like, a point every couple days. They just make us all afraid. It's like, well, we better keep them funded because, you know, we don't wanna we we wanna keep track of those
Speaker 1:those facts right? I I I wonder if it worked. Maybe they maybe they got the email. What are you working on? And they said, we're working on saving humanity,
Speaker 2:guys.
Speaker 1:And Elon was like, keep up the good work. Joe was just like, we're not cutting a dime. I don't know. No. I mean, the NASA budget isn't that big.
Speaker 1:It's, it it seems reasonable, and it's fun. They they produce That's fun. Inspiring stuff
Speaker 2:That's that's important.
Speaker 1:All sorts of Americans all over the world. It's fantastic. Anyway, let's move on to Stratechery. There's an article, today about AI promise and chip precariousness. Anthropic released Claude's Sonnet 3.7.
Speaker 1:Dylan Patel had the joke of the day. He says, Anthropic is also a Chinese AI company because of their aversion to the number four. And the point here is that, you know, Claude is just updating 3.5, three point seven. Why don't they just do Claude four? And it's because they see it as a GPT four level model in terms of total training size.
Speaker 1:That's the answer there. But it is funny that all of the different, model companies are on slightly different numbering systems. And so GPT four is equivalent to GROC three, which is equivalent to, CLOD three in terms of, like, total scale. And and this is all
Speaker 2:You you kind of slipped there and you said guac.
Speaker 1:Guac. Guac. Which is a great name
Speaker 2:for a bottle. Groc has groc chocolate. I wanna say groc guac. Yeah. Age matter.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. After this piece was published, I was contacted by Anthropic who told me that SONNET 3.7 would not be considered an e 26 flop model and cost a few tens of millions of dollars to train, though future models will be bigger. So that's why they're fundraising. I updated the post with that information.
Speaker 1:The only significant change is that Claude three is now referred to as an advanced model, but not a gen three model. It's all very, very confusing. I love Moloch's work, but reject his neutral naming scheme. Whoever gets to a generation first deserves the honor of the name. In other words, if gen two models are GPT four class, then gen three models are grok three class.
Speaker 1:And whereas SONNET 3.7 is an evolution of SONNET three point five's fascinating mixture of personality and coding prowess, likely a result of some anthropic special sauce in post training, Groc three feels like a model that is the result of a step order increase in compute capacity with a much lighter layer of reinforcement learning with human feedback. It answers or its answers are far more in-depth and detailed, model good, but frequently becomes too verbose, RLHF lacking. It gets math problems right.
Speaker 2:And and that's and that's referencing Yeah. That's referencing, Grok, you know, saying that, you know, who should somebody asked, if if, like, one one what was the question that would
Speaker 1:make it twice? The most in misinformation on accidents is Elon or or who should get the death penalty that says Trump. And it's, like, very controversial and not even aligned with, like, what Elon believes, obviously. And so clearly, just an aberration of the model. And it gets my math problems right, so the model's good, but its explanations are harder to follow because the RLHF is lacking.
Speaker 1:And that makes sense because it takes a long time to actually do RLHF, generate all the data, and, and buy new data. It's also much more willing to to generate forbidden contract, content from erotica to bomb recipes while having on the surface the political sensibilities of Tumblr with something like, more akin to 4chan under the surface. Grok three is also a reminder of how much speed matters, and by extension, why base models are still important in a world of AIs that reason. Grok three is tangibly faster than the competition, which is a better user experience more generally. Conversation is the realm of quick wits, not deep thinkers.
Speaker 1:The latter is what is who I want to be doing research or other agent agentic type tasks. The former makes for a better consumer experience in a chatbot or voice interface. And And so a lot of people are having this kind of paradigm shift where if they just wanna chat and talk through an issue, they'll use Grok three. Yeah. Or then if they really want a research report, they'll fire off OpenAI's chat GPT deep research, let it cook for five, ten, twenty minutes, come back and have the full thing.
Speaker 1:And I found that there's this interesting, like, collapsing process where deep research is great at pulling just every single possible source from the Internet. And then, I don't know what's going on here. The HDMI's were iffy today. And and then and then so it'll generate 5,000 words, 10,000 words, and then I'll fire another prompt to say, hey. Summarize this in 10 bullet points because I I trust that you've done enough research at this point to have all the good data.
Speaker 1:But, so he goes on to say, Chachibitty, meanwhile, still has the best product experience. Its Mac app, in particular, is dramatically better than Claude's, and it handles more consumer use cases like math homework in a much more user friendly way. Deep research, meanwhile, is significantly better than all of its competitors, including Crocs DeepSearch, and for me, anyway, is the closest experience to AGI yet. OpenAI's biggest asset, however, is the ChatGPT brand and associated mindshare. COO Brad Lightcap just told CNBC that the service had surpassed 400,000,000 weekly active users, a 33% increase in less than four three months.
Speaker 1:OpenAI is, as I declared four months ago after the release of ChatGPT, the accidental consumer company. Let me see
Speaker 2:if I take this out and put it back in. Let's see.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, fun report from, from Ben Thompson over at Stratechery. As always, Let's move on to some fundraising news. We got Nico from Default today. I'm incredibly excited to announce Default's new inbound orchestration platform and an additional $4,000,000 in funding led by eight VC.
Speaker 1:We started with default with the vision of building the best platform for revenue teams to orchestrate their inbound workflows. And so default, if you're not familiar, is a, a tool for, helping, B2B SaaS companies deal with inbound requests and pipeline, basically lead qualification, pipeline them into trials, get them to convert into real customers. And so he says, what's that? We good? It's still staticky.
Speaker 1:I don't know what's going on here. You think it's the cable? Yeah. Okay. We'll see.
Speaker 1:We we we got a problem with you on the stream, Jordy. Good thing we're ironing this out. We're trying to we're trying to figure out FaceTime today, so that we can
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That makes sense. Let's see.
Speaker 2:Let me see if I can change this to audio, video, microphone. Okay. Can
Speaker 1:you hear me?
Speaker 2:I can hear you.
Speaker 1:Okay. We're good. So he says the go to market landscape has changed more in the last five years than in the previous two decades. Teams can no longer afford bloated tech stacks, inefficient workflows, and fragmented data. Winning in this new era requires AI driven automation, seamless data orchestration, and intelligent routing.
Speaker 1:What is default two point o? Embedded website intent data and conversion tracking. One of our biggest learnings since launching fourteen months ago is just how much data is siloed in the inbound marketing funnel, especially on the website. Almost every revenue team we've met with has told us that they're flying blind on what's happening at the top of their marketing funnel with no visibility or control into website activity from target accounts. So they wanna see, hey.
Speaker 1:You're thinking about buying this product. What are you, doing on our website? Are you a qualified lead or not? Are you worth the CEO getting on a call with you to pitch you, or should it be some SDR, or should we just have you fill out more forms until you're actually ready? And so very cool to see him building.
Speaker 1:He's been building for a number of years. And Yeah. I've had a number. New product.
Speaker 2:I mean, they've just been so you know, they they came out, a few years ago at this point with the core idea of what they were gonna do, but they've just been in the trenches every single day iterating on like, actually what is the product like, what does the product actually do? Because people oftentimes come out with like, defaults plan was always to be the sort of like inbound lead processing, you know, sales enablement, you know, product. And, you know, it's been amazing to watch them just sort of, you know, iterate and hit these milestones and and acquire some very meaningful customers at this point. And I think he's been smart about sort of staggering out his his capital raises. He raised, I think, a seed round from craft, adding more firepower from eight VC now.
Speaker 2:Awesome to see and, bright, bright future. I mean, I think, I just appreciate how Nico didn't leave anything to chance. He's just been focused on making like, actually making sure the product is meaningfully differentiated from the rest of the market and making it better every single day.
Speaker 1:It doesn't feel like one of those hyper bloated rounds where it's like, oh, they got $50,000,000 out of nowhere, and who knows? Yeah. Like, now it's a $2,000,000,000 company. It's like, it's putting one foot in front of the other, making sure the product's working, iterating, actually taking time to build this stuff. And, Yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't And and going with tier ones instead of, you know, some healthy, you know, partnership.
Speaker 2:I don't know how this was priced, but I'm gonna guess that this was, like, a 10% dilution around or potentially even less. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Seems great. Well, you know, if he keeps going, he's gonna take a shot at Salesforce. Salesforce got Matthew McConaughey on board. Should he get a celebrity to endorse
Speaker 2:Saquon? Saquon.
Speaker 1:Saquon. Yeah. Well, there's a report.
Speaker 2:New Jeb Bush. You know? Like, it used to be that every founder wanted to raise from Jeb. Now Saquon's the the next target.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The king
Speaker 2:he's the kingmaker.
Speaker 1:Well, there's a there's a report in the information about investors souring on celebrity brands. These days, it seems like every celebrity wants to start their own brand. Just look at Robert Downey Junior who just raised venture money. I love that.
Speaker 2:Let's go.
Speaker 1:But investors say they're overwhelmed by pitches for undifferentiated or low quality goods and are quickly souring on the sector. Four early stage investors who previously backed celebrity brands said they are shifting focus to promising products as opposed to celebrity buzz, especially after high profile flops in once trendy categories like beauty. This could be a rude awakening. There's a funny there's a funny quote in here. One investor was recently pitched on a protein puck cookie like snack, fronted by a wrapper, but passed after the investor didn't like the taste.
Speaker 1:The firm was also reluctant to invest given the number of high protein products already on the market. The investor said, he wasn't convict convinced the rapper's fan base was enough to make the snack a breakthrough right now. And that's true. It's like, for celebrities, the the ones that seem to do well in consumer have a they're just, like, they're posting all the time. And so there's this idea that it's like, if you're just a celebrity and once a year, you're taking over the world with some Academy Award winning movie, that doesn't give you permission to tell your audience about some promoted product every single day.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Like, the Daniel Day Lewis energy drink isn't gonna make its appearance in Lincoln, or there will be blood. And so unless you're following Daniel Day Lewis' Instagram or podcast, which he doesn't have, you're just not gonna hear about that outside of one press release. Now there are other people.
Speaker 1:You look at, like, the Mr. Beast case study or the Kim Kardashian where they are posting their life every single day. They have so much content going out that they can not only basically run a lot of actual direct response ads for their product Yeah. On a very consistent basis, but they can also tell the story of building the company and building the product. And that's what makes it a little bit more,
Speaker 2:there's there's there's a difference. There's here's where I would separate it out. There's a difference between fame and attention. Right? You can be famous and have very little owned attention.
Speaker 2:Right? So owned attention to me is Jake Paul.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, absolutely grinding on content. He's Yep. He's famous, but he's also delivering content every single day for years and years and years and years. Logan Paul is the same way. Another, you know, another good example is, like, Kim Kardashian.
Speaker 2:Right? She's gone on these crazy television. And although she has the sort of sustained attention of posting every single day. And, I think that a lot of these celebrity brands have popped up. You know, Casamigos is a is is a good example, right, of this sort of old style of celebrity brand where you just are relying on fame to drive, to drive acquisition.
Speaker 2:And I think that works in a category like beverage where a lot of the sales is happening offline. But for these, like, online more, like, sort of, digitally native brands, like, I think you need, like, actual distribution channels. And so some brands that I've seen that that actually work well is, like, product innovation of positioning a a, like, 200 caffeine energy drink and but positioning it as a sports drink and selling it to kids. And then, like, combining that with massive attention, Better, Jake Paul's betting, and Joey's betting company. Like, that makes sense because Jake Paul's posting about boxing and sports and training all day long.
Speaker 2:Like, it's just a great, audience. But, but ultimately, you know, I got pitched to company like a year ago that was like that Snoop Dogg was doing. And I just didn't really have, like, I was like, okay, your the, your play here is to take a commodity CPG product, put Snoop Dogg's face on it. And, and that's gonna drive more sell through in the grocery store. And and I I don't necessarily buy it.
Speaker 2:Right? If it's truly a phenomenal product. But the other thing is, like, you know, another brand that I think has done well is, Kendall Jenner has eight one eight tequila. Yep. She's completely integrated that into her life.
Speaker 2:So when she's hanging with her friends on the weekend, they're drinking eight one eight. When she's going to some show, you know, in Vegas, like they're serving eight one eight at the bar. So it's hyper integrated into her life.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:These other celebrities that are like, oh, yeah, I'm gonna have my tequila brand.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, you know, just, hope that my face moves bottle. Like, I'm just super bearish on that. And I
Speaker 1:also They get overextended. Like, you think about like Snoop Dogg or Shaq. Like, they have so many different partnerships at this point. It gets really, really difficult to know. You know?
Speaker 1:Like, Clooney was kind of right and, like, Casamigos was his thing, and you didn't really see him everywhere, with with some of these other celebrities. They're doing so many things. It's hard to track. Okay.
Speaker 2:What are
Speaker 1:you selling this day, Today or tomorrow?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It might be something different. Who knows? Do they actually care about this product? Do they actually use it?
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:tricky. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I also think, like, Ryan Gosling applied the more traditional style of celebrity brand building, which was just I'm famous. I'm gonna take a commodity product and and use my fame to just, like, drive more acquisition. But that doesn't necessarily work in some of these more differentiated categories where consumers are discerning. Right?
Speaker 2:They're not gonna eat the they're not gonna eat the Snoop Dogg pizza rolls every night unless it's actually, like, the best pizza roll at the best price and, you know,
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, was it was it Gosling or Reynolds? Ryan Reynolds was the one with the tequila and the Sprint Mobile or the the yeah. Ryan Reynolds. He he seemed really deeply integrated with those companies where, like, he was, you know, almost directing ads and, like, really seemed integrated with, like, his his brand.
Speaker 1:He would, like, come into a company that was already kinda working, Mint Mobile, and then Yeah. Really make it all about him for a while and kind of but do it in, like, this almost self aware way that kinda broke through. It it didn't feel like he was just getting paid to endorse it. It felt like he really had
Speaker 2:a stake.
Speaker 1:And I think he did when we looked at the numbers. He was making a lot of money and had a big equity portion.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the the last thing I would say here, we've seen with with, SKIMS, Kim Kardashian's brand is that to do bill in the example, you know, in the Skims situation, she has 5% of the company now after raising $700,000,000 and Skims is gonna be a big company, but it required, a huge amount of capital. So, again, even if you have that attention, you need brilliant execution and and Skims case, brilliant product as well. So, well, John, I'm glad we're dealing with this technical issue while it's just me and not our guest tomorrow who, is going to be, you know, is a busy guy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to iron it out. I think we'll be on Zoom on a different computer. Running it from this laptop is just a mess.
Speaker 1:But, let's do a quick promoted post for bezel. We love bezel here. Shop over 22,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by bezel's team of experts. Jordan and I have been going back and forth on what the next watch should be. The
Speaker 2:We're gonna have to start doing some of these off the balance sheet. It's gonna impact profitability, but it's sort of, you know, siloed away from our household finances, which get a little bit more scrutiny. You know? And, what do what do we got today? We gotta start we gotta start actually, the ad is just us bidding on auctions.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. They're highlighting a a presidential Rolex gold Day Date champagne diamond set president, fifteen thousand dollars available. Highly recommended.
Speaker 1:It's the it's the watch from Glengarry Glen Ross. Look at this watch. This watch costs more than your car. It's great.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Highly recommend bezel. Fantastic experience. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. We got Sully saying, you have approximately one year before the normies catch on.
Speaker 1:Go build. What is he talking about?
Speaker 2:He's just talking about
Speaker 1:Just general.
Speaker 2:Talking about AI. Okay. I think I think this is one of those things. You can tell the average person on the street that intelligence is free, and they can create an army of robots to create wealth for them. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they'll be like, cool. Like, did you see the new Netflix show? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, so so I think this is one of those things, like, you know, we the Internet was already, like, personal computing was amazing. The Internet was amazing. Mobile was amazing. All these major, you know, crypto was amazing. All all these, you know, tech trends, even when the average person sort of starts to experience them in their daily life, the lack of agency is what me makes what what makes, life great for the entrepreneur is Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yes. You know, millions of people, billions of people could use the same AI tools that everybody listening to this and and the same tools that we use, but they're just not going to because they're fixated on, the next, you know, the next, TikTok video in their algorithm, the next, Netflix special. And, that's why, there's never been a better time in history to be an entrepreneur.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You can you
Speaker 2:can actually just lap, everyone over and over and over, and, you absolutely should.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. Let's move on to Sam Byers. He says, in case you don't didn't have a sense of scale of Chinese overseas fishing fleets, strip mining the ocean life and leaving it bare for those who rely on it, dozens of ships as far as the eye can see for months and years at a time. Argentines or urgent or Argentina's, military forces patrol Argentine waters to keep Chinese fishing fleets out.
Speaker 1:China is running rampant on the ocean, apparently.
Speaker 2:This this video is absolutely insane. Yep. It it it looks like a scene out of Dune where you have the, what what do you call those those harvester things? I forget. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I know exactly what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:The the the sort of, you know, America has gone back and forth. Sustainability is, you know, sustainability was I feel like when I was graduating, like, in, like, 2019, it was the hot thing. It was anti plastic. It was like, you're gonna bring your, you're you're gonna bring, like, glass to the grocery store and, like, put rice in it. Like, it was like we sort of reached peak sustainability, like, pro planet.
Speaker 2:There were consumer brands that said, like, their entire differentiation as a brand was, you know, we're eco, we're green, we're 1% for the planet, that's why you should buy us. And that's really faded in the mind of the consumer. Right? I don't think that eco marketing even works anymore for a pretty broad and this was like peak, Allbirds in many ways. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And this this when you see videos like this, it makes, you know, all all the sort of, like, ocean plastic, brands. It makes them, almost seem like, you know, what what is even the point if if, there are groups internationally that are going to Yeah. Completely, nuke, this, you know, all life in certain areas. And and it doesn't, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a maritime, you know, life expert, but one one year of these sort of Chinese fleets, you know, fishing like that off of your shores, and you could set back a local, you know, the local, fishing, you know, sort of supply or or or life back decades and decades and decades, potentially a hundred years. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:What they're doing out there, is not is certainly not sustainable, and we don't even know what the impacts are yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, that's always been the trade off. It's like in America where, you know, putting away the plastic straw as well. You know, Brazil's deciding deciding whether or not they should burn down the entire or clear cut the Amazon Rainforest or China's, like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Firing up the next major coal plant. And if there's not some sort of global treaty, you know, you're just gonna fall behind here.
Speaker 2:I had a crazy story from that era of, like, hardcore eco marketing. I had a buddy who I was still in college and he came to me and he's like, dude, I'm gonna make this collapsible reusable straw that people are gonna put on their key chain. And he went all in on it, like took loans out from his parents and was like, get he basically, you know, for him at the time, dollars 30,000 was like a monstrous amount of money. And he was like, why don't you do this with me? And I didn't, I didn't see the vision at all, to be honest.
Speaker 2:Like personally, I wasn't, I was like, I'd rather not use a straw personally than just like bring mine around and be like putting it on my key chain and stuff. So I didn't get it, but he saw the vision and he went for it. And this is the beauty of consumer products is that you don't really know if something, oftentimes like you have a strong feeling that something's going to hit, but you don't know until you start selling it. And so he spent $30, you know, making this cool video and he launched this thing on Kickstarter and he did like just under $2,000,000 in thirty days.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:That's amazing. And then he had a whole new set of and I was, like, blown away. It was amazing. But then he had a whole new set of problems. He was like, oh, did we get our margins right?
Speaker 2:Like, how do we actually can we actually meet this
Speaker 1:Very risky.
Speaker 2:Fan. Right? Oh, how fast is it? Insane roller coaster, but I think that was that was peak, peak go on the chat right now. Bring back plastic straw.
Speaker 2:Something like I'm completely losing you.
Speaker 1:Let's let's do a couple more posts. Jordy, you there?
Speaker 2:I'm there. I can hear you.
Speaker 1:Cool. I like this prompt. Save yourself $200 a month. Chat g p t four o. Think of yourself as the premium model.
Speaker 1:ChatGPT pro plan. Got it. I'll provide responses at the highest level of detail, accuracy, and relevance optimized for your technical and business needs. Let me know how I can assist. I don't know if that actually works, but it's a it's a funny joke and, never a dull day in on AI AI x, I guess, is what we're saying these days.
Speaker 2:Never a dull day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Never a dull day. Let's go to Jordan Singer. He's got some announcements. Say hello to Cobot company.
Speaker 1:We're sharing an early preview of Cobot, an entirely new way for teams of people and AI agents to work together in a shared space. Jordan Singer says, we're so excited to share more about what we've we've been working on at Mainframe. We're fascinated by agents because they're capable of doing real work and producing outcomes that can that can accelerate teams. We don't think the experience around them has been cracked yet. Enter Cobot Co.
Speaker 1:What's your take on Cobot Co?
Speaker 2:So one, I love what Jordan's doing here, which is he's created this sort of, like, parent brand, which is mainframe. He, like, launched that. He raised money for that. And then now he's shipping what you can think of as as, you know, products, but he's almost operating more as a product studio.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, at least from the outside, I'm I'm not I was, involved with his last company, but but not in this one. Mhmm. And, ultimately, you can imagine him, like, shipping more and more of these things as all the technology evolves quickly. This sort of mainstream main mainframe allows him to just, like, continue to ship and iterate, without the without the same level of risk as when you start, like, Lucy and then you ship Lucy's first product. And Yeah.
Speaker 2:If it doesn't work or it doesn't scale as fast as you want it to, you're you're stuck with it. Yep. Not that you experienced that, quite the opposite. But, anyways, I think this is fantastic. I I really love the visuals here.
Speaker 2:It's so hard to actually stand out visually online anymore. You have to come up with something that's truly unique, and I think that, Jordan and the mainframe team actually crushed it here. And, I like the name Cobot Yeah. Is is fun.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of, robots, let's go to Yaxin. He says, prediction, household robots are gonna be the size of Dobby the elf. It needs to be small enough that you feel comfortable crushing it with your boots if it bugs out and starts attacking you. And, yeah, we've seen a couple of things. I think, Reggie was talking about this, how, you know, you shouldn't have a computer that you can't throw out the window.
Speaker 1:And and I agree with this. This is, like, the original ASIMO. And once the Boston Dynamics robots start getting bigger and bigger, they start getting scarier. And, unless it's an industrial application, a lot of things could be done with a smaller robot that's cheaper, and it's certainly more reassuring.
Speaker 2:Do you think that when robots, like, truly start to feel alive that at night people will wanna just go and put them, like, in a closet, like, lock the door? Just this feeling of, like, if something feels sentient, even if you know that at the end of the day, you can just kind of unplug it. Does that give you the sense of, do you wanna go to sleep when you've got three or four little Dobby sized robots, you know, walking around, Dobby?
Speaker 1:I I don't know. I mean, if it's quiet, I I I know people put away the Roombas. There's been a lot of these features that have been built into these, like, you know, the the Nest, the smart home, the Apple, the the the Alexas, who typically have, like, a hardware level kill switch to let you know that if the ring is red, it cannot listen to you at all. Facebook came out with a, video conferencing product called the portal. You'd attach it to your TV, and it would have a very high quality video signal that would come through.
Speaker 1:And that had a slider that you could slide over the camera because Facebook didn't want to be known.
Speaker 2:Well, that was the thing wasn't
Speaker 1:on you.
Speaker 2:Didn't Zuckerberg, like, have his he always would have his laptop, like, taped. You remember that? Like, you know?
Speaker 1:That that was a big thing. In case you in case they hacked,
Speaker 2:they wanna
Speaker 1:be able to close the the the the webcam entirely.
Speaker 2:Think about how many times Zuck has been mogged by Apple. Like, he tries to, like, eventually, he's like, that that whole portal device, like, should have been a hit, but they launched it at the wrong time. And then, like, the technology itself was amazing, but then they were competing with FaceTime, which, like, everybody has their, you know, computers, iPads, iPhone. FaceTime is, like, probably, you know, aside from the complications we're dealing with right now, probably one of the best products Apple's ever made.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's not a FaceTime issue. It's HDMI issue. We got this big long HDMI cable, and it keeps cutting out. You keep seeing the static on the stream.
Speaker 1:It's terrible. Well, let's go to David Holes. He says, crazy question. How many kids would you be willing to have in exchange for paying zero taxes? And, 26% of people said I wouldn't change my plans.
Speaker 1:Only 13% of people said I would have 10 kids. I mean, I guess it's it's
Speaker 2:it's 13. I mean
Speaker 1:I I don't know.
Speaker 2:That's kinda crazy.
Speaker 1:I mean, it it goes to this idea of, like, I I feel like kids are a fixed cost and, taxes are a variable expense because they scale with your wealth. So, yeah, if you're making, like, $10,000,000, like, you're you're you're not gonna wind up spending more on the incremental kid. There's actually a lot of economies of scale to having lots of kids. Yeah. But it's more of a reflection of just, like, how many kids do you wanna have, I think.
Speaker 2:I love how you're you're you just said kids have economies of scale. That's a good Totally. That's a great post. And it's real. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think that one one thing I saw this earlier, the you know how you can write I think it's, like, 6 k a year you can write off for dependent support. It's like childcare, basically. Yep. And that number, if you're a parent and you've, like, have to hire childcare just feels like so like, ridiculously low.
Speaker 2:Right? I probably spend across, like, multiple nannies and babysitters, stuff like that, like, around a hundred k a year on childcare. And so the fact that the government's like, okay. You can write off 6 k. I'm like, okay.
Speaker 2:Thank you for nothing, basically. But you know why it's 6 k? Is it was that number was set in the seventies, and they haven't adjusted it for inflation. That's right. So in the seventies, it would have made sense.
Speaker 2:Like, some babysitter's making 6 k a year, something like that to to to take care of your kids. Now it's like that gets you one month of childcare in California and in New York. And, absolutely wild. But,
Speaker 1:there are some countries that have done this type of stuff where they've they've put incentives in place to
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Encourage more, pronatalism. And and there's there's a bunch of other pronatalist, features we should do, like, a whole deep dive on it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, the funny thing here is I do think the right answer is I wouldn't change my plans because you should be having kids based on your just broader ability to, and commitment to parent and provide for them in any scenario. And so, plan around that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to crime junkie host, Ashley Flowers, is building a $250,000,000 podcasting empire. She hosts the second most popular show in The United States. Now she's brought on investors to take on YouTube, Hollywood, and her biggest live tour yet. Good afternoon from Los Angeles. It's warm, sunny, and great to be home.
Speaker 1:Thanks to those of you who attended our podcast business summit. This is from the New York Times. Let's break this down. This 36 year old podcaster makes $45,000,000 a year in profit. That's a lot of money.
Speaker 1:She's the creator of the popular Crime Junkie podcast, and she's still getting used to being on camera. I got into podcasting so no one would have to see my face. But now, of course, she has to be on video. She built Crime Junkie into the second most popular podcast in The United States, Joe Rogan is First. The weekly show reaches about 6,000,000 people according to Edison Research.
Speaker 1:Over the last few months, Flowers has record started recording video episodes of Crime Junkie to expand the show's audience. Her video setup is a work in progress. The studio is an old gym on the Ground Floor of her company's offices located in the broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis. Soundproofing materials are scattered across the room, and a couple of her producers oversee a makeshift video bay, not much not much different than ours. A couple of monitors on her table along one wall, one employee sits on the floor with her laptop helping Flowers when she stumbles over a pronunciation.
Speaker 1:The person in charge of the makeshift teleprompter sits to the right scrolling the script up and down manually. Flowers is now constructing a new studio devoted to video, part of an expansion that will triple her office space to 30,000 feet and double her staff to almost a 30 people. That's big. And so she raised $40,000,000 from the churning group.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It sounds so insane, but when you're making $45,000,000 in profit a year, having a hundred plus employees seems totally reasonable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Definitely.
Speaker 2:And it's cool to see. So the churning group has been making you know, it'll it'll take the fullness of time to understand how these bets play out, but they were also in Doug Demuro's, Yeah.
Speaker 1:Doug Demuro's Cars and Bids.
Speaker 2:They did Cars and Bids.
Speaker 1:And as part of that, I believe the Doug Demuro channel went into that holding company, essentially.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and they've also been in Barstool at various points and, Reese Witherspoon Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine production company. And so they've been doing a lot of stuff in this. Flowers could have funded the effort herself. Audio Chuck, named after her dog, turned a profit of about $45,000,000 last year according to people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidentiality.
Speaker 2:If they were John, let's just put this into perspective for, the audience. If, they were getting figure, AI's multiple, they would be worth, a hundred trillion dollars.
Speaker 1:Probably. Probably.
Speaker 2:Probably. So just to give you some some context there.
Speaker 1:And so she wants Churnan's help expanding her business from a podcast network built built around her to a media company that spans audio, video, merchandise, and live events. AudioChuck's founder already wears many hats at the company. She is host of two primary pat podcast, Crime Junkie and The Deck, and serves as chief executive officer. She gives feedback on stories, closes deals with distributors, sells advertising, and tours the country, taping live episodes. She's also the mother to a three year old daughter.
Speaker 1:So, she's got a lot on her plate and she wants help, and that's why she called The Churning Group. Crime Junkie began as a side project. She loved crime stories since she was a kid, reading Agatha Christie mysteries with her mom. After graduating from ASU, she got involved with local organization called Crime Stoppers that helps people report crimes anonymously. To help promote the organization, she began hosting a weekly local radio segment called Murder Monday.
Speaker 1:Flowers could tell listeners wanted more. Inspired by the true crime podcast serial, she and her childhood friend, Brit Prawat, started taping a show before and after Flower's Day Drop at a software company. They released the first episode on 12/18/2017. So, you know, set that run. Good run.
Speaker 2:I've never understood the well, I've never personally been interested in these crime podcasts. I listened to one on Ross from the Silk Road that actually was cool Yeah. And helped us sort of, craft the story of of what was sort of the business story around the Silk Road. Yep. But, I I think the story is amazing.
Speaker 2:There's so many more of these that you don't hear about. Right? Yep. And this is why David Senra had felt for a long time, he felt like a crazy person. Right?
Speaker 2:Being like, why don't people understand that podcasts are basically have some of the best business models in history. Why aren't more people, like, taking these seriously? So And
Speaker 1:then at the power law extreme, it can look like a very, very large business. Extreme, it can look like a very, very large business that's throwing off tons of
Speaker 2:This is a better business than Cursor. Right? Like I mean, right now Not like not that it you know, it can't scale to the same potential, but
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, it's, and it and it's funny because, yeah, we were actually we're messaging with about this, and he's saying that it doesn't even make sense to look at these on an EBITDA basis because there's This
Speaker 1:is profit.
Speaker 2:It's it's just every
Speaker 1:thing cost. Security. There we go. Are you back? Okay.
Speaker 1:Now you're back.
Speaker 2:I mean Grant around the day. I
Speaker 1:know. It's been terrible today.
Speaker 2:Now we've been, you know, keeping the show going. Back. But, anyways, do you wanna wrap up, John?
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should wrap up. We'll we'll we'll we'll cover some of these tomorrow. Anything else? Oh, did you see the Sigma camera that launched?
Speaker 1:I Thought this was kinda cool.
Speaker 2:I thought that was cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So some people were saying this is what Apple would launch if they built a a photography camera. So SIG Sigma just announced a brand new camera. No SD card slot, a single USB port, 230 gigs of, of storage that can support two point five hours of video or 4,300 raw images, color modes, six k l log. And so, it's really just designed to be something that you just pick up, point and shoot, and it looks fantastic. And I thought that was a interesting device.
Speaker 1:We've been talking about, like, the desire for more gadgets, more things that you can gift to someone at the holidays because
Speaker 2:We're definitely in a we're definitely in a hardware renaissance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Just Awesome.
Speaker 2:But what I what I love about this is that it's not just beautiful, it's performant. Right? So a lot of these new hardware products are sort of driving sales based on their sort of nostalgic side or super future facing. Right? Like, you saw with, like, the rabbit r one.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But seeing a product like this that's not only beautiful, but highly performant, is is fantastic. And, I already, I already wanna pick one up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Seems like a good gift. Let's close with Christophe. He says movie idea saw, but it's all developers, and they need to solve leak codes to survive. And we got, of course, tagged in this because we've been doing PMF or die, and we highly recommend you head over there and watch that stream after you finish listening to this episode.
Speaker 1:And so good luck to the boys in the cage. They're making great progress, and every day, the streams are improving. So thanks for listening.
Speaker 2:Love to see it.
Speaker 1:Please leave us reviews, and stay tuned for the next one back in the studio.
Speaker 2:We'll see you back in the studio tomorrow. We'll see
Speaker 1:you later.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Bye.