Technology Brothers

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The most profitable podcast in the world.

John:

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are breaking down a bunch of hot takes and predictions for 2025, getting you ready for this year. It's a new year. We had to cover Veil yesterday, But today, we're looking forward to the future, and we're starting with a great post from friend of the show, Molly O'Shea. She says, top 25 plus hot takes.

John:

There are, in fact, 33, hot takes for 2025. And, this was fun. We participated in this. She asked us for a hot take, and we gave 1. And she posted the full takes, and then she boiled them down.

Jordi:

We should start with ours.

John:

It's hilarious because ours got boiled down. She clearly, like, ran these through chat GPT to give, like, summaries, and you lose a lot of our humor. Yeah. You do it. But what

Jordi:

matters is ultimately that we're correct and vindicated. Yes.

John:

So what was ours again?

Jordi:

We're, ours was 31. The equestrian market will boom as exited tech founders and Neto journalists buy horses.

John:

Yeah. That's that.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, yeah, it's not the only thing I would say here, it it it got condensed. It's not just Neto journalists. There's people like Kara Swisher who make a $100,000 a netizen.

Jordi:

Also. Yes. Yes. But I'm just saying she she can buy her own horses. Right?

Jordi:

No. No. Yeah.

John:

Yeah. She doesn't have to go.

Jordi:

She could she could buy, you know, pretty world class. Yeah. Stallion. Almost every Yeah.

John:

There's kinda 2 dynamics going on in, like, the liquidity markets right now. It's like the IPO window's open, so there's gonna be more liquidity for early stage founders and employees and entrepreneurs who've been working really hard creating a lot of value

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Building real

Jordi:

And the m and a and the m and a market Yep. Broadly coming back.

John:

And then and then secondarily, as a as another factor, a lot of trust funds are unlocking

Jordi:

now Yep.

John:

For the journalists. And so there's just gonna be a a flood of cash coming in.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And and, obviously, that's gonna drive equestrian.

Jordi:

And we'll be participating as well.

John:

Yep. Yeah. Exactly. So let's go through these. Number 1, don't die will become the blueprint for Maha.

Jordi:

Okay. So one thing that's interesting too is these predictions were made by individuals, not just Molly. Yes. But we don't actually have the context on on who did it. So that allows us to be, pretty, unconflicted and and and ruthless.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

So, anyways, don't die will become the blueprint for Maha. I'm gonna say, hard no on this. I think don't die gets a bunch of stuff right. Yep. But Maha is so much more about getting the basics right.

Jordi:

Yep. Like, let's clean up our water supply. Let's, you know, fix school lunches Yep. You know, these sort of basic things where don't die is a sort of hyper optimization Yep. You know, get your biomarkers checked monthly type thing.

Jordi:

And it's kind of like overkill for the average. The average the average person should exercise daily Yeah. Eat whole foods

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Get some good sleep.

John:

You can kinda think about it like don't die is, like, bench pressing 2 plates. Maha is more about benching 3 plates.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And and it even goes further with, like, Brian Johnson is a vegetarian, doesn't eat meat. Baja, obviously, consuming a ton of meat. Yep. Meat almost every day,

Jordi:

multiple

John:

multiple steaks per day. And so, there is a there is a decent amount of alignment there. They're both, like, directionally in the same direction. But, you know, that's by

Jordi:

the way, it's, like, 10 10% of guys consume, like, 80% of the meat in the United States.

John:

Of course.

Jordi:

And, we know that our listeners are firmly in the in the in the 10%. Yeah.

John:

I I I've been on this for for weeks tweeting about how if you get a wedding invitation, you and they ask for, you know, chicken or fish, you should be able to say double meat.

Jordi:

Double steak?

John:

You should be able to say double steak. Yeah. I want double steak.

Jordi:

That was my that was my that was for for a period of my life, I would live on 2

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

I would get go to Chipotle. I get 2

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Bowls, double rice, double beans, double meat every time.

John:

There you go.

Jordi:

And that was like that was at least one meal for the day. Yeah.

John:

You know? Fantastic. Yeah. Everyone has every every bro has that story. It's great.

Jordi:

I think sweet green could really win over, you know, the the our listeners

John:

would lose by all this salad stuff and just

Jordi:

do it. Making the regular meat, like, amount, like, the the double for, like, an an you know, kava or whatever. Yeah.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

So if you go into a sweet green and you get double meat, you're actually getting quadruple.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. There needs to be, like, an arms race in the meat category of all these fast casual slot bowl places. Just like, you know, all the AI firms are benchmarking, oh, who's doing best on, you know, MMLU. I wanna know, okay, which fast casual restaurant is the most protein per dollar?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

I'm pushing it extreme. I want Yeah. Yeah. The base case to be a100 grams. I'm trying to do pound per, 1 gram per pound of body weight.

Jordi:

Honestly, but why stop there? Why not go to ยฃ3 per

John:

You know how you were joking? Oh, yeah. 3 grams. 1 and a half 1 and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight? Yeah.

John:

For me, that's 400 grams of protein a day. And I was like, damn. To do that, I would need to drink a gallon of milk a day. Go mad. Right?

Jordi:

You should.

John:

You know how much protein is a gallon of milk?

Jordi:

I actually don't.

John:

A 120 grams.

Jordi:

Solid. Solid.

John:

You have to drink, like, 3 gallons

Jordi:

of milk.

John:

It'd be great.

Jordi:

We gotta rip

John:

through these.

Jordi:

We got a lot of we got a lot of predictions.

John:

So AI will gain rights, religions, and even sue humans.

Jordi:

And this is this is what

John:

I 5, though. That's a little soon.

Jordi:

I don't I don't know. Yeah. Rights rights take a while, but, I I said this yesterday. I think that I think that AGI will be achieved when, AI agents are striking and forming labor unions.

John:

There's a little bit of that where

Jordi:

people have been

John:

like like, it's like, they behave lazily on certain days, and people think it's because it's been baked into the the LLM memory that, like, Friday is, like, a chill day.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so it acts like a like an employee on Friday.

Jordi:

And you have to say, like, work like it's Monday.

John:

Like, it's Monday. Yeah. There will be a Twitter files for government. That's interesting. I think Thornburg said that.

John:

Because I think

Jordi:

we went to Deepgram again.

John:

Happy with the declassifications that I've gone on. There's been so many times where it's like, oh, this person's gonna blow it wide open. Even the Twitter files, I didn't think were that crazy.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It was like, oh, really? Like, they they blocked some accounts? Like, we knew that when it happened. I

Jordi:

don't know. The new the new x files is there, you just can't post about the the guy, Adrian Dittman or whatever.

John:

If you

Jordi:

try to post the article, it just says, like, error.

John:

Yeah. Isn't that because it it doxes him, and he's a non? And so Elon's been against doxing. And

Jordi:

so I

John:

think that that's actually kinda consistent.

Jordi:

But, like

John:

It is it is The information's

Jordi:

already out there.

John:

Yeah. It is culturally important. Corporations will pay for emotional harvesting to train AI. I don't get it. Luigi Mangione and Sam Bankman Fried will launch a blockchain healthcare protocol from prison.

John:

Silly.

Jordi:

Silly. Yes.

John:

I I I don't think that they're aligned in any way, and it's just a wildly different like, SBF still maintains that, like, he, like, you know, fucked up on accounting, and Luigi, like, murdered someone. Like, I don't think they're as aligned as people think. Yep. Privacy will become a luxury with offline life becoming a status symbol. Wrong.

John:

Obviously, you wanna

Jordi:

be extraordinary. The second the second part is true, but that's also been true forever. But the the classic thing if you're making if if you're a VC making predictions, just say what was true for the last year.

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

And you sound like

John:

Also, it sounds like people who just are bad posters are like, actually, privacy is a luxury. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Likes on my banger.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I I prefer having a locked

Jordi:

account with Carrie Carrie no Carrie no interest, our friend.

John:

He got

Jordi:

a he had a banger about wearing a nice jacket. Yeah. Got over a 1,000 likes, and then he deleted it for

John:

some reason. Did?

Jordi:

He see he made some posts about, oh, I I I never wanted to have an account that

John:

was like, you know, it's

Jordi:

like you can't handle the heat. Hey. Stay out of the kitchen.

John:

You're a menswear account. Sit down. Stop posting about buying out companies

Jordi:

and buying rare minds and building something buying, acquiring rare jackets.

John:

Exactly. You're There's a utility huge market for the the conservative menswear guy because the the current men's wear guy, Derek, is, like he only targets republicans, and he's just clearly very left wing. He's, like, more of a political project than, like, actually Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's a political project LARPing is a

John:

But no one's done it on the other side.

Jordi:

Yeah. Just been

John:

like, here's Bill Clinton, and it doesn't match.

Jordi:

I feel like people make fun of, like, Federman or whatever for wearing his basketball shorts.

John:

A little bit, but there's no one who's like, that's their shtick.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Right?

Jordi:

Big opportunity. 7, fertility rates will drop globally, prompting governments to fund reproduction startups. So, at the rate that we're having children, I think we're gonna be able to keep, rates

John:

I don't buy the government's funding reproduction startups. Drop the startups. There are other ways for governments to fund reproduction, And it's just, like, increasing incentives. It's just the trial of tax credit.

Jordi:

Like, the the tax credit's crazy.

John:

You don't matter. You don't matter. Startups. We learned this from Solyndra. Like, they they fuck it out.

Jordi:

Well, I I don't I don't remember what the actual tax credit is that you get for hiring, like, staff to help raise your kids. But it's something, like, we spend 15 times that credit amount on childcare every year. Like, just bringing up that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And would be a, you

John:

know, great tailwind for Charlotte. Style movement for for pronatalism fertility in America. Like, what laws would be changed? There's a big one about, car seats. You know this?

John:

Because the car seats are so bulky now, and they're so big. Yeah. And they're required, like, super late. Like, you can have, like, a 7 year old who's, like, a ยฃ100, and you're, like, still in the car seat.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

And you can't, like So

Jordi:

it requires family

John:

to have bigger cars and cars. Anymore. So you can't even get a station wagon. So they don't make them anymore. So you have to buy the 3 row SUV.

John:

That's obviously more expensive. Every SUV is, like, 10 k more than a car. And so, and and you talk to any parent, it's like, yeah. Like, we wore seat belts, but we sat in the back seat and there were 4 of us and we just, like, you know, buckled up and it was fine. AI agents will disrupt traditional search and Internet business models applying real pressure to Google's dominance.

John:

Interesting.

Jordi:

This is funny funny because I I don't know who made this prediction, but if you were gonna talk about this later, Fred over at, USV says, Apple and Google will leverage their existing market power to surpass OpenAI, chat gbt and consumer AI prompts by the end of 2025. It's a classic Like, I feel like the real risk here is that Apple just builds in basically I think

John:

Apple I think Google is the one.

Jordi:

No. I know. But eventually, Apple will say, hey, this twenty $1,000,000,000 a year from Google is nice Yeah. But we could just create a better I disagree with that.

John:

You think

Jordi:

they're just gonna

John:

I disagree with that because because that that $20,000,000,000 is 100% margin. They don't have to do anything. And they know that, like, anytime they need to manage a new business line, there's risk and it could go wrong and stuff and Google's just the best. And so, and And AirPods, which are, like,

Jordi:

the biggest hit ever.

John:

But this is the classic, like, is AI a disruptive technology or sustaining technology, sustaining innovation, disruptive innovation. Yeah. And, yeah, I mean, there's a poly market now for who will have the best model by the end of q 1 or q 2 or something, and Google is actually in the lead, which is interesting. They certainly have the scale and the data. And so, it'll be interesting to track that.

John:

Starlink will become the dominant Internet and cellular provider, a critical layer for AI data stacks. Interesting. I don't know about dominant Internet or cellular provider. That's like that's super And I don't know where

Jordi:

I'd love to hear why this is directly relevant to AI data stacks.

John:

I don't understand that part of you.

Jordi:

But, sounds cool.

John:

Yeah. I mean, super pro Starlink. I do think that Yeah. Every founder, CEO should buy a Starlink and have it because you cannot afford to not have good Internet whenever you're traveling. Like, if you're gonna be in some weird place, the Internet's not gonna be good.

John:

You're gonna miss calls. Yeah. And the cost is so low that you can't afford not to have it and you can't expense it. The S and P 500 will end below 6,000 down or flat on the year. Bearish.

John:

I completely disagree. I think things are gonna rip, but we'll see.

Jordi:

Cool.

John:

The RISE AI slop will put premium on handcrafted content much like this filmed in a beautiful

Jordi:

Possibly restoring trust in in mainstream media. I actually said I think that's an interesting point. So the rise of AI Slop will put a premium on on artisanal content possibly restoring trust in mainstream media. Yep. And it's funny because mainstream media despite everything that they've done Yep.

Jordi:

Still is the most trustworthy

John:

place 100%.

Jordi:

To get news.

John:

If you just go for, like, the facts, like, the fact checking at the New Yorker or the Wall Street Journal

Jordi:

It wasn't until we launched the truth zone that we became the most

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Trusted news source

John:

in our world. I also think it was very important that we launch this podcast when we did because, like, people joke, oh, it's AI generated or whatever. But, like, clearly, we're not actually generating 3 hours of above sort of level video per day. Like, just the cost. Even if we even if Sora was good enough, which it's not, there would be It

Jordi:

would destroy our profitability.

John:

It would be so expensive, and it'd be impossible. And so, like, anyone who knows the technology knows that this podcast is real. And so this is the last moment where where we can prove that this is real, and then we can carry that forward forever.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

So even if it's

Jordi:

not just flown us And and the other thing is

John:

You will know that we we didn't do it, and then we stayed forward as long as you trust us that we didn't swap ourselves out in the future.

Jordi:

Well, the reason that people can trust us is that we love podcasting so much. We love podcasters high. It's just a high that cannot be experienced in any other way.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And so even when the models get good enough to just fully generate the content, why we would be we would be not doing our favorite thing in the world Yeah. Right, which is podcasting. So Yeah. Will never happen.

John:

Let's go to 12. AGI is a marketing scam. It's overhyped and far from realization.

Jordi:

We talked about this earlier. Yeah. Yeah. Sam Altman runs a company with built not billions, but 100 of millions of DAUs. Yeah.

Jordi:

And so he's basically has credit now every once a month to come out and say, you know, in some new dramatic way, AGI is running around the globe. Figured it out, so we know how to do it now. So I think it's cool. It's I

John:

mean, it all goes back to the definition. Like, when I use when I use chat gpt for the first time, I was like, this is AGI.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Like, it's artificial for sure. It's very general. You can ask it about anything, and it's definitely intelligent. Now is it the smartest thing in the whole smarter than every human

Jordi:

And can you make it like, make mistakes.

John:

Yeah. Of course. But, like, it passes the bar for me for just, like, being artificial general and intelligent.

Jordi:

Show show chat gpt to somebody in the nineties. Nineties Yeah. And they they would

John:

And so clearly, I I I think we need to move from, like there's the AGI stuff, which I think we've achieved, and then there's ASI, the superintelligence where it's smarter than everyone. It's reinforcing itself. There's no employees at Open AI because it's just building its own system or whatever. But then there's this massive gap in the middle. I I was, kind of trying to come up with, like, a phrase for it, but, like, I like AEI, like artificial economic intelligence, and trying to measure it just in terms of profit, essentially, And say, you know, right now, OpenAI o 1, a Chat GPT Pro subscription, Sam said they're losing money on it because people are using it so much.

John:

But Yeah. There should be a there should be a, like, an evaluation where you go and the prompt is just make money, and it goes and finds a job. Maybe that's just on Upwork doing, like, little tiny tasks, but it goes and and does that and just makes money. Yeah. And and then what is the total value?

John:

And at some point, the value of, like, these AI systems directly producing cash flow will be higher than humans. Yeah.

Jordi:

It'll be 5050. What's happened to the the market caps of of Fiverr and Upwork and these these

John:

I mean, I think that those will still be valuable because their their aggregation platforms around, like, the type of task, they they are independent of who's doing the task.

Jordi:

No. I just I I just mean more that's that's true to some degree, but I'm just saying so much of the work being done on those platforms is very low hanging fruit for

John:

Yes. Models. True. True. The question is just, like, how does the how does

Jordi:

the model go But it's interesting Fiverr still Trying to find? 30% over the past.

John:

Yeah. So, I mean, yeah, I I I like tracking things more quantitatively than these, like, qualitative, oh, we move the we move the the goalposts every 6 months for what AGI is. It's like

Jordi:

I yeah. I think I saw AGI

John:

because it was binary, and it was very clear that we jumped past that. And then We

Jordi:

need to change swap the benchmarks to the models getting money.

John:

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Jordi:

AI is, like, how much yeah.

John:

How much money are they making?

Jordi:

What's your hustle?

John:

Exactly. And are they making are they making 1% as much as humans in terms of total global GDP? Are they making 50%? At certain point, there's gonna be like, okay. They're doing everything, but there aren't humanoids yet.

John:

So they aren't doing, like, the farming and the plumbing or whatever, but they're doing a lot of the white collar work. And then there and then there'll be a question about, like also just just literally just tracking how big the models are and how much energy is being expended on AI. That's a that's a much more valuable thing to track because everyone's saying if we scale up another two orders of magnitude, it's AGI, it's ASI, whatever. But the question is just, like, how are we tracking against that? Because if we go through, like, a Moore's Law flat line for a couple years, like, we're gonna feel that one way or another.

Jordi:

Yeah. And so just tracking clear. Clearly, intelligence is a spectrum. Yep. We're already on that.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

We're already on it. And yet it's still beneficial for people that are having to raise 1,000,000,000 of dollars to to constantly say, we're on the precipice of this great moment. You need to get in before Yep. AGI.

John:

So I wouldn't call it, like, a marketing scam, but it's certainly a buzzword. Yeah. Right? In a sense that, like, the cloud was a buzzword, but it wasn't a scam. Yeah.

John:

Right? What's the next one? Climate startups will rebrand as energy dependent energy independence to appeal to conservatives. Yeah. That makes sense.

John:

If you're doing solar or wind or nuclear, like, Isaiah Taylor's going down to Mar a Lago in a few days to do a conference on nuclear. And a lot of the nuclear companies that a lot I I know a lot of these founders, they don't care about politics at all, really.

Jordi:

Yeah. That's just about and energy itself doesn't really care about politics either.

John:

No. Of course not.

Jordi:

When there's subsidies involved. Yeah. But in general, energy is energy. Yeah. We need a lot of it.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

I

Jordi:

mean, you should make more of it. Yeah. And, I don't think it should be Yeah.

John:

I talked to a guy who is, consulting for, like, the oil

Jordi:

gas industry. Take your climate tech company, rebrand around energy independence, you might be able to get some cash from Donald Trump Junior.

John:

There you go.

Jordi:

1789 Capital. He's big into the anti,

John:

Let's go 14 AI wearables will flop, but meta will dominate AI hardware. Those seem at odds. What isn't AI wearable if not a headset?

Jordi:

If not AI hardware. Yeah. I I I I think, Lindyman said something recently where he was like, we need to get the phone built into glasses because the aesthetics of a bunch of people at a cafe sitting around with your neck cranked over just just, you know, using your device are terrible. So I don't I think What about AI wearables will flop. And I also I just I think it's I think it's too early to say that.

Jordi:

I think you have smart people like Avi who are who are so

John:

AI. I'm I was thinking VR wearables. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah. That's

John:

okay. AI wearables like

Jordi:

So this is like friend.com.

John:

The humane well, a lot of them are have already kind of flocked. Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

There was that there's the humane pin that was really rough, and then, what was that other one that was a little Rabbit. Rabbit.

Jordi:

Rabbit.

John:

That one seemed cool for kids.

Jordi:

So humane also pivoted. I don't know if you saw this. They basically are making this OS for your devices now, and it seems

John:

I really thought Rabbit should just focus on on a cool device for kids that gets them off

Jordi:

the screen.

John:

Yeah. Go take a picture of a flower, tells you what the flower is.

Jordi:

Or it's basically redesign it as a radio for parents and their

John:

kids. Exactly. Like, we we we've talked about the Yoda, how that's a really cool device. Like, there's a bunch of things that you can do there.

Jordi:

Yeah. I always felt that the a lot of the world companies would have done better going for the kids' market because kids don't have phones already. Parents want them off devices. So if you give them an audio native device Yeah. It makes sense.

John:

And so Meta will dominate AI hardware. The Ray Bans are decent. It is cool to be able to wear the glasses and listen to a podcast and then immediately say, hey, Meta, you know, what what year was this building made that I'm looking at? Like, that is cool. I like having an LLM just that I can talk to whenever.

John:

That's nice. Yeah. But Apple still has, like, so many modes there with the AirPods and the watch and the phone. Like, I I think that they're I don't know. Dominate is the right word.

John:

Yeah. Let's move on to 15. The taste renaissance will replace content creation with artists. I like we think of ourselves as artists.

Jordi:

We think of ourselves as capitalists.

John:

Capitalists.

Jordi:

Capitalists first artists. A good artist is the best artists are highly commercial. So

John:

Andy Warhol said that.

Jordi:

But I do so I think, like, I would just take this in a different direction where I think that it's gonna become increasingly hard to compete as part time content creators

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

When there's any when there's Yeah. Billions of machines Yeah. Creating AI slop constantly. Yeah. So Yeah.

John:

You look at David Centra. That's like he just focuses on podcast 247, and it's impossible to compete with him. Independent media will overtake mainstream media number 16. That's the flip side of the other restoring trust in MSM. I agree.

Jordi:

I I I just feel like there's still so much value in the stamps of of CNBC said this is true. CNN said this is true. There's Yeah. Always gonna be

John:

I guess the question is, like, is, like, if you're adding up the market cap of News Corp, New York Times, CNN, all these different everyone that owns Wall Street Journal and all that, you add up all those market caps and then you add up how much cash flow is Rogan making, Huberman, and you apply some sort of EBITDA multiple to that, are yeah. This independent media is probably still smaller, and it's probably not gonna overtake it in 2025.

Jordi:

That's an interesting

John:

Do we include Spotify? Do we include YouTube? Because Yeah. YouTube is definitely bigger than the mainstream media if you include that in the market. Cap.

Jordi:

I do think independent media will eclipse mainstream media eventually from a revenue standpoint.

John:

I think it already has if you include YouTube.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Yep. And and Spotify. Yeah. But then the question is what, you know, like

Jordi:

But the only thing this this to me is is kind of a is kind of a bullshit prediction because it's calling out a bunch of things that have been happening for decade plus.

John:

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Jordi:

So not not the most interesting.

John:

Number 17, empire building will be valued over get rich quick schemes. Little bit of a shift in the trend there. Big question about the zoomers.

Jordi:

But I I've I feel like

John:

money crowd.

Jordi:

Every it's always been cool to build empires. Get rich quick schemes have always been

John:

cool to get rich quick.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Isn't that what you did?

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. I did I did get rich quick. Yeah. But,

John:

And you I mean, you would describe your business as a scheme in some ways.

Jordi:

Every business is a scheme.

John:

I think so.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

It's a conspiracy theory.

Jordi:

Every business is a conspiracy. It's just a small group of people

John:

trying

Jordi:

to get money together.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Now the AIs are trying to figure out how to get money. Exactly. Humans have an edge there Yeah. For now. For the next year, humans have an edge on getting money.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you could become a millionaire before 40, I think you got rich pretty quick. So you just don't wanna get rich slowly. That's not the way to do it.

Jordi:

Yeah. Do not. Do not.

John:

18 AI related litigation and fraud will accelerate. Yeah. We talked about this. A little bit of interesting, like, game theoretic dynamic where it's like Yeah. How it's gonna be so easy to sue people with AI.

John:

There's gonna be a million losses. It's like, well, it's also gonna be very easy to defend yourself with AI. And so the AIs will battle it out and maybe it'll net out and there's just like

Jordi:

The courts are gonna get even more and more and more backed up. Like, they're already

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

There's already year long delays and cycles.

John:

The adoption level of some of the tech is insane. I mean, they still don't use cameras. They use a person that

Jordi:

draws stuff. For AI in the legal industry is it's so good at text. Yeah. And the legal industry is just completely dependent on documents and text.

John:

Sure.

Jordi:

And so that adoption could be faster.

John:

It's been 100 years since we invented the camera, and they're still doing courtroom sketch artists. And and then they also have stenographers that write everything down instead of just recording it and transcribing it. Yeah.

Jordi:

It's crazy.

John:

Yeah. Rough. A lot of this stuff is just so entrenched in, like, a bunch of, like, laws and stuff. And and then there's jobs and politicians and people don't wanna change. It's just rough.

John:

Number 19, state governments will increase sales tax audits to address deficits. What a wonky prediction. Just like

Jordi:

I I I wish we knew who did this. I mean, it's probably true just because that's true in general. Governments are trying to, you know, constantly squeeze.

John:

I don't know. I mean, I I I don't know how big sales tax is in in some kind in some states, but I know that, like, if you everyone says, like, oh, go to Florida, no income tax, but,

Jordi:

The property

John:

tax tax. Actually has the lowest state tax burden of any of any state because they have they might even have an income tax. It's very, very low, but then they also have really low fees and lit really low sales taxes and stuff. So something like Florida or Texas might have no income tax, but they might have higher business taxes or higher licenses or they might make money in different ways. Because you can't run a state with no money.

John:

Like, it's Yeah. It doesn't make sense. Number 20, tech consolidation will accelerate with bundling cycles dominating. Yeah. I mean, let me

Jordi:

talk about tech. I feel like the How much more consolidate could you get? The un the un like, it's it's you can't say that tech is just bundling or tech is just unbundling because it's such a ridiculously massive industry at this point. It's arguably not even one standalone industry.

John:

It's

Jordi:

it's hundreds of industries combined. So I don't know. I I think that we're gonna get into this later, but, Gokul Rajaram talks about how really there's gonna be this battle between new Agentech b to b software and traditional SaaS Yep. And this sort of, like,

John:

dashboard model. Yep.

Jordi:

And how much of a board model.

John:

Yep. And how much of a dance can they do? Like, even even Salesforce is changing their business model to, like, performance outcomes instead of seat licensing. Yeah. And so if if a company is big and old as Salesforce is leading that charge and, like, hey.

John:

It's okay to change your business model.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

I could see a lot of, like, the the the mid tier SaaS companies that are charging seats say, hey. Yeah. We should do do the switch. Like, if Salesforce could do it,

Jordi:

we could

John:

definitely figure it out. 21. And video

Jordi:

will peak. I don't like this. I don't like when people are bearish.

John:

I mean, look. Get a

Jordi:

real get a real hobby.

John:

Look at the breakdown in in, by Dylan Patel in semi analysis of AMD. Yeah. I mean, it was like a fucking nuclear bomb going off on that company. It was

Jordi:

so rough.

John:

Just like Yeah. Their culture's broken. They can't do anything. George has been talking about this for a long time. Like like, you literally cannot train a model on their chips because it's so buggy and their software is so bad.

John:

And it's like, on a performance base, AMD is in some ways better than NVIDIA just on, like, cost per flop. But, like, you just cannot actually run the training. And so it's like, who's their competition? Who's gonna do it? And, yeah, there's a couple startups that are doing custom chips and stuff and there's TPUs, but, like, everyone just needs Nvidia.

John:

So they're just gonna keep buying it for a long time. And, I don't know. My my, my shoeshine boy has not, has not told me to buy Nvidia yet. So that's the top signal usually or the the taxi driver. What what what's that phrase from the from the great depression?

John:

It was like I think it was shoeshine boy or something.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

It was like when when when when your butler's telling giving you the stock tip, then you know it's down.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

So I'm

Jordi:

like Sell everything.

John:

The IPO market will see 12 plus high quality debuts.

Jordi:

Let's go. We'd love to see the window open.

John:

Yep. Brain health will be prioritized with the creation of aura for the brain. Yeah. There are some pretty cool people working on brain stuff. Obviously, Neuralink's like the big one, but that's more for

Jordi:

apparently switching the The dreaming, lucid dreaming one.

John:

And then the the the former Neuralink guy has left and started a new company. And then also, Fred Ehrsam started one with Jeremy Barinholtz who was at Neuralink, and that I think that's noninvasive. And all the I mean, just seeing what's possible with Neuralink opens up so many

Jordi:

new Yep.

John:

Like, opportunities.

Jordi:

I mean, imagine a device that gave you podcasters high throughout the entire day. Yeah. You could just sit in a tank of

John:

fluid and live in the matrix. It'd be great. AI innovation will shift from scaling compute to algorithmic advancements. Yep. That makes sense.

John:

That's kind of happening. We're seeing that with, like, the o 1, o 3 models. Like, there's clearly so much

Jordi:

lagging Yeah. But at the same at the same time We haven't seen this time. Saying we're gonna spend $80,000,000,000 on new

John:

data centers. Yes. But it's unclear if that's inference or or training. I don't think that they specified that.

Jordi:

That's Because

John:

Yeah. It's

Jordi:

clearly both.

John:

I yeah. I I I think it's clearly both, but

Jordi:

But they're clearly scaling. They're clearly Yeah. Planning on scaling.

John:

Everyone is scaling. Like, everyone is everyone is thinking about what's the next order of magnitude larger, pre training run or whatever.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And there's a bit of a data wall, but they'll figure that out. And once they get all that together, there should be another level of of value just from getting a GPT 5 model under the hood Yeah. Of something that's already been, reinforcement learned to death like the o one zero three models. 25, real world AI will impact Fortune 500 companies showing up in their financial performance. That's kind of vague.

John:

I mean, certainly I I don't

Jordi:

know if this is saying it's good or bad, but I think you see companies like

John:

stocks because every company's like call McKinsey and get something.

Jordi:

Yeah. And you see companies like Klarna. Klarna is the CEO has been very smart on getting out, just saying we haven't hired anybody in a year type of thing. I don't know if that's true.

John:

Take it further. You should be like, I don't even go to work anymore.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

My my team wants something to do.

Jordi:

Actually doing this interview right now.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

This is I'm fully generated.

John:

I'm retired. Yeah. I'm I'm post economic, post AGI Yeah. In my, you know, what is it? Fully automated luxury communist era.

John:

Yeah. I love that. Data center sending will shift significantly towards inference. That's what we were talking about with Microsoft. We already know.

John:

We'll see. Tier 1 GPs from firms like Sequoia will leave to start their own funds. Maybe, maybe not. It's unclear. There's a lot of people that made a ton of money in the last run, and they might just retire.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

And so I I I I agree with the departure.

Jordi:

Do the smart thing, Sean Maguire. You just make take over the fund. Yeah. Just become the fund.

John:

Yes. And then pivot the entire brand towards being dark MAGA.

Jordi:

Dark MAGA. Yeah. It's great. Big move.

John:

The creation of Doge will bring back civic duty with tech talent competing with See,

Jordi:

this is my favorite kind of prediction. You just say the thing that's been happening for the last few months. Everybody's like, wow. What an insight. But it's cool.

Jordi:

It's cool. It's cool trend. I'm I'm I'm bullish.

John:

It is definitely happening. A lot of tech people are are going in and considering government jobs that wouldn't have in the past, but it is rough. I mean, you need to be post economic because I think, like Yeah. Like, a lot of these Or or

Jordi:

there is a thing where if when you go into, certain positions in the government, you have to sell all of your assets. So, the private markets are often, you know, a lot of insider trading happening happening if if you're sitting, you know, somebody's sitting on a $10,000,000 position of something they don't actually think is worth nearly that much. They can go into the government, sell their, you know, bags, and then, you know, it's a good way to get out.

John:

Yeah. AI will accelerate drug development timelines by 3 to 5 years. I buy this just on the paperwork side. I mean, honestly, when we when we were, release when we were dealing with the FDA and submitting PMTAs for these different nicotine pouch products, Every single one of these, different color, different application. Another 100,000 pages of text.

John:

We actually got to a point where I was talking to our software developer about, like, using a Python API to manipulate Word documents

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

To see if there's a way to go and basically do a very advanced, like, find and replace. Well, LLMs do that basically perfectly. And so there's there's a million ways

Jordi:

paperwork side.

John:

Just the paperwork side is huge on reducing the cost of this higher throughput. And then also, ideally, on the FDA side, they're using these tools too to comb through and find obvious errors and act as a first pass. Now I imagine there's a bunch of laws that tell them they can't do that and it needs to be human and stuff, and it's gonna be very difficult. But, and then there's also all, like, the actual AI drug development stuff where it's like, oh, let's pull all the data from modeling and prediction and stuff. I mean, they solve the protein folding problem with, with, AI.

John:

What was interesting about the protein folding thing was that when DeepMind solved that, the biotech stocks didn't move. And so I talked to a buddy of mine who's a biotech investor, and I was like, everyone in tech is freaking out about this. Like, they're they're acting like it's like AGI, like the biggest breakthrough ever. And it is really cool because it was this fundamentally hard problem, and DeepMind solved it. But why aren't why isn't it moving the market?

John:

And he was like, well, like, it's not actually that big of a like, protein folding is something that you can like, yes. It's awesome to be able to just, like, click a button on the computer and get the result. But before that, it was, like, send it off to a machine that costs 50 k and a research, like, assistant at a PhD program will do it for you. Background. And it's and it's it's annoying, and it takes time, but it's not actually the real barrier to, like, innovation in the space.

John:

Happiness will be seen as the key to health even over strict wellness routines. It is funny.

Jordi:

AI is making trying to predict the future so much more interesting because 5 years ago, 6 years ago, 10 years ago, it's like, okay. We're gonna have more mobile apps Yeah. Yeah. And have more sass. Yeah.

Jordi:

And now it it's becoming harder and harder and harder because we're getting the sense that AI is gonna disrupt so much of our lives and the way that we work and how our governments work and all these things.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

It actually makes these, you know,

John:

Software development will become as easy as creating YouTube videos thanks to AI coding assistance.

Jordi:

Wait. Already happening. Did we miss 30? Happiness will be seen. No.

John:

I just said that.

Jordi:

Okay. So I have gotta disagree with this.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

Business performance is the key to health even more so than strict wellness routines. That's where I push back. I love it. Because, if you have business performance, you'll be happy. But if you're don't have business performance, how how could you possibly

John:

Yep. You

Jordi:

know, actually be happy?

John:

So software development becomes easy as creating YouTube videos thanks to AI coding assistance. That's true and happening with Cursor and Devon. We're seeing this, I mean, even, like, the software developers. Like, people in the community are just building tools now Yeah. For us that previously would be, like, a 10 k contract on

Jordi:

their work or something.

John:

And they're just doing it in, like, an hour for their free time for fun. And it's great. Like, we have these ideas and, like, they can just be instantiated so quick. It's amazing. And I do think it will be very cool.

Jordi:

This guy, you know, Trevor, who from Broad?

John:

No.

Jordi:

He, said Trevor I'm why am I I don't know. I'm blanking on his last name. But he he just posted today that he I I tried to put it in the stack that he just, like, made a SaaS tool for artists that are Yep. Managing their, like, tubers, basically, and and it's becoming it's so much easier. It's now in the same way that 10 years ago, it was like, oh, I want a website.

Jordi:

And you just, like, make a website.

John:

Now you can

Jordi:

just Becoming like, oh, I want this app. Yeah. And you just make it.

John:

I gotta get back into some sort of development stack and, like, get the tooling ready. Like, the hardest part is for me is not actually, like, I'm pretty good at, like, writing the actual code. What sucks is, like, setting up the environment, figuring out how to deploy it, making sure it stays up. And if there's a cron job, it needs to run every hour and stuff. Like, all these different, like, DevOps stuff, I always get hung up on.

John:

Back in, like, the Heroku era, it was pretty good. And I've seen, like, Replit, and I've and I've played with, like, a bunch of these different tools, but I like I I wanna I want to be able to just, like

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Get with this, but I always need, like, a couple days of dedicated time, and I can just never find the time. And the last one, Molly O'Shea will become the next Joe Rogan.

Jordi:

Do it, Molly.

John:

Do it. But you got a podcast a lot more and you got a podcast for a lot longer. This one hour, Rogen built his business on the 3 hour podcast. Yep. And he started with people that were comedians.

John:

You you go back and you look at the very first Rogen episodes, and they're literally everyone's famous. It was insane what a taste maker that guy was. It was like Bill Burr.

Jordi:

Oh, they weren't necessary were they not No. No. No. Famous at

John:

that time. They were, like, okay comedians back then because it was 20 years ago or something. But it's it's literally every single person from the first, like, season or 1st year of Rogan has been on Rogan the last year. Yeah. Because he put he picked everyone correctly.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

And and and that's what we asked when you're doing an interview show is, do I really think

Jordi:

Joe Rogan

John:

I'm doing this interview with, I will have them on in 20 years because I'm that confident they'll be successful.

Jordi:

Joe Rogan should have been a head head trend manager. I'm actually capitalist.

John:

Okay. Great. Let's move on to Romine Seth. Romine. Met this guy in New York with Pump.

John:

Great dude.

Jordi:

He also hosts a very cool event

John:

Oh, really?

Jordi:

Down in Newport

John:

I've heard of him.

Jordi:

Intersection of of pro sports Yeah. And venture.

John:

He did he did some sort of, like I think he made his money rolling up staffing agencies.

Jordi:

And Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

Built a staffing agency, and I think sold his private equity.

Jordi:

We love private equity.

John:

Really, really interesting guy. 25 he gives 25 predictions for 2025. Bitcoin hits 200 k. Love it. A little bit lower than our price target, which I believe was 25,000,000, but but we'd love to see 200 k.

Jordi:

It's It's a good start.

John:

Yeah. One Bitcoin really should get you out of the nautilus territory and into the, Yep. The the grand complication territory

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

At retail. S and P 500 sees another 15% gain. I agree. AI deflates SaaS. We're still, like, iffy on that because maybe the SaaS companies pivot, but, like, in general

Jordi:

Well, yeah. And the SaaS companies have one thing that upstarts don't, which is distribution. Yep. Big customer bases. A lot of them can introduce new products, so we'll see.

John:

Ozempic GLP ones will cross a 100,000,000,000 in annual sales. I don't know what the annual sales are right now, but that sounds right. I was thinking about what is holding people back from being on GLP ones. There was this kidney risk for a while. People thought that it gave you thyroid your

Jordi:

heart a little bit. Is that true? I've seen that. I've heard

John:

You gotta put the tinfoil hat on for that? Or

Jordi:

No. No. Not if there's studies studies came out Okay. Showing that it it might shrink your heart a little bit.

John:

Well, that could be good because you could be more ruthless. You don't wanna Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordi:

You don't wanna have too big of a heart in this world.

John:

If you have to fire a lot of people. Yeah. Venture capital reverts to a cottage industry.

Jordi:

Interesting. It's interesting. I Not gonna happen. I feel like I feel like sizes we're saving. I feel like I I we probably agree on this if we were to have a longer conversation.

Jordi:

I think it's clear that if you wanna be an independent GP, you gotta be really

John:

fucking good.

Jordi:

Yeah. But it's also never been more commercialized. It's

John:

also, yeah, it's also, like, a definition issue because, well, like, if I think about venture capital in the sense of, like, a person with $50,000,000 fund who's gonna write $51,000,000 seed checks, lead them, and and really be the first money in at these very early stage companies, that feels like venture capital, that feels like a cottage industry. You can go and raise a $50,000,000,000 fund and say, I'm only talking to companies that have a market cap that's higher than 10,000,000,000. And I'm just gonna do SpaceX secondary, Stripe secondary, and we're all secondary. And and and that can also be venture capital. Yeah.

John:

When it's, like, clearly a different thing, you're like Yeah. You're just, like I mean, we saw in the dotcom It's

Jordi:

private market investing.

John:

Yeah. It's private market investing, and and during the dotcom boom, like, these companies were, like, overvalued, and it was like, they IPOed $500,000,000. It's like, that's a series a now. Yeah. Valuation dispersion widens.

John:

Okay. Seems reasonable. I mean, there's still a washout from the post zerp era. 7 US IPO market reopens, m and a accelerates. We talked about this.

John:

A new top tier college is born. How would that happen? Would that just be, like, an escalation of

Jordi:

That'd be, like, a new UT University of Austin.

John:

Oh oh, you you think he's, like, he's just talking about a brand new one or just, like, it it it Born

Jordi:

born to me. Because it's

John:

possible it's, like, all of a sudden, like, Cal has a couple good years, and it's, like, Cal's in the Ivies now.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

I mean, Stanford certainly did that where Stanford's, like, you know, above Brown, clearly. And it's like MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, basically. And a lot of the a lot of the Ivies have kinda fallen off. An AI teacher teaches millions of students at 0 cost. I don't know how, like, concentrated the AI teaching will be because yeah.

John:

I mean, yes. You could say, like, chat gbt will teach a million.

Jordi:

Already. Yeah.

John:

For sure. That's already happening. But then you could also say that there's gonna be, like, someone that uses AI to create a YouTube channel that's, like, introduction to economics, and that gets a 1,000,000 views. But then there's gonna be someone else that does it for physics and someone else that does it for chemistry. And it's like, is that all one AI?

John:

There's gonna be a constant question about, like, what constitutes a single instance of an AI. Yep. But but I I do agree AI. It will be I mean, it's teaching me so much.

Jordi:

I'm trying to look

John:

this stuff up. India has a blockbuster startup IPO. Don't care. Outcome based pricing models just because it's international. Outcome based software pricing models go mainstream.

John:

We talked about this with the Yep. Salesforce. With Salesforce. Independent media overtakes legacy media. This is the exact same phrasing as the other one.

Jordi:

Private credit doing it here. We're doing it here, folks.

John:

Private credit bubble pops.

Jordi:

Will LBO, Bloomberg. Private credit bubble bubble pops. Hopefully not.

John:

Know that much about private credit, honestly.

Jordi:

Hopefully not. I I hate to see bubbles pop.

John:

Yeah. Mag 7 continues to outperform the rest of the market. True. Longevity products go mainstream. Brian Johnson's kinda doing that.

John:

S and B, M and A arbitrage goes away. True. Your Harvard

Jordi:

credit I think that.

John:

It's gonna be hard to start a plumbing company.

Jordi:

Yeah. That we're gonna look back and and laugh that it became high status making the search fund, repackaging, SMB ownership. And SMBs are awesome, in so many ways, but there's a lot of them that are better built from the ground up than, than, you know, buying a company with 700 k in Yep. Earnings.

John:

Digital detoxes go mainstream.

Jordi:

Hopefully not in this podcast. That'd be devastating to the show if we if we did a digital detox.

John:

I mean, hopefully the iPad thing or the iPad kid thing. Yeah. That was more mainstream.

Jordi:

I definitely it's it's there's a very firm divide among moms and parents from what I'm seeing between the iPad, the pro iPad, and because when when anti iPad moms see a kid on glued to an iPad, they literally look at it like the kid is just smoking heaters. Yeah. Like, that is the reaction of the mom. They're just like, I cannot believe that this kid is just glued to the slot machine, basically, just going, anyways.

John:

Inflation moderates to sub 2.5%. I think that's right. Waymo becomes a clear market leader for self driving.

Jordi:

Probably already

John:

it depends on how you define market leader for self driving. There's a lot of Tesla's on the road, total value of Tesla's

Jordi:

with Yeah. But are Tesla's really self driving? Every video

John:

3 versus level 4 or whatever.

Jordi:

You know?

John:

It's like all these levels and stuff. I don't know. I mean, yeah, with, with Cruz out of the game, who else is even trying in full self driving?

Jordi:

Who? Holtz. Not Craig. George. Sorry.

John:

George Hotz is an aftermarket kid. He Yeah. Is firmly in the level 2 camp. He is wants to be he thinks Tesla will still win. They will be the iPhone.

John:

He will be the Android.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And he thinks Waymo will go away because of the cost structure and the design and stuff like that. But I don't know. I'm a little bit more bullish than him on Waymo. It seems to be working really well. And when I was in 1, it was a great experience.

John:

It wasn't slow, and it seems good. Patience reemerges as a virtue. That's funny. Hubris decreases. Humility increases.

John:

You know, I I don't know about hubris. Like, I've been thinking about getting into it. And because I just think I'm built different and maybe maybe it doesn't work for other people, but maybe for me.

Jordi:

I think it I think it it it it wears nicely on you.

John:

Yeah. I think I could pull it off.

Jordi:

It's got a when you do it, it's just Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. When other people, not Yeah. Not so much, but other podcasters

John:

Other people struggled with it, but, I think I could pull it off.

Jordi:

Yeah. And hubris is just one of those things you gotta you gotta indulge in it and see if it's right for you. Yeah.

John:

Exactly. Exactly.

Jordi:

Not everybody looks I mean, I was just gonna say not everybody looks good in a suit. Not true. Everybody looks better in a suit, but you get what I'm getting at.

John:

Let's go to 22. Logic and reason return to all walks of life, business, and politics. That's hilarious.

Jordi:

That's a good that's a good

John:

It feels like the opposite of what's happening. It feels like crazier than ever. I I'm full on.

Jordi:

Oh, but but in some but in some but in some ways, like, the Zach announcement today

John:

True. True.

Jordi:

Saying, hey, free speech is important. Yep. It's also content moderation is also important. We're gonna try to

John:

Yep. Threading the

Jordi:

needle here better. That just seems like logic and reason. Yep. Standard and standard. Standards have been going up dramatically.

John:

The innovation train continues to roll. Love it.

Jordi:

There's good list. Good list.

John:

Let's go to Fred Wilson with his what will happen in 2025. I've been doing these

Jordi:

he's been doing these for a while. We should honestly go back

John:

Yeah. We should.

Jordi:

And look at some of that. Deep dive for sure.

John:

I've done a lot of these January 1st look forward post in the 20 years I've been blogging, used many different approaches. Here are some of his predictions. Apple and Google will leverage their existing market power to surpass OpenAI, ChatGPT, and consumer AI prompts by the end of 2025. What's interesting is I

Jordi:

mean but so the so they arguably Google already has because I'm now getting so much AI summaries. Yeah.

John:

And I don't know about Apple because I mean, have you tried the new Apple Intelligence?

Jordi:

I mean, he sent me a summary. He sent

John:

me a summary. The summaries are funny, and they're okay. They're not super useful. But, like, just actually opening up Siri, like, I want to be able to just treat it like chat gpt. Like like, hey, Siri.

John:

Give me a summary of, you know, of Fred Wilson's predictions over the last 20 years, and I should just get Chat GPT. But with this, it's like you have to link your account and then tell it, like, hey. Go to Chat GPT. Don't stick around on the local phone. I want you to go to the actual big model, and it's like, it's iffy.

John:

I they'll figure it out, but it's like it is tricky. And I still think chat.com and and chat gbt is still just, like, mentally a place where people go. And I think underrated is like is like I see I think if you look at some of the new product developments that OpenAI is working on, it's a lot of, like, creating, like, a notebook almost where it's more collaborative and you can edit and develop a document. And that's I I see it as a new workspace, like a spreadsheet. And I'm like, okay.

John:

I'm going to go do some work with an LLM, and I want to and I need a new browser tab for that.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And Google doesn't have that yet. Like, they have Gemini Studio in a 1000000 different, like like, beta products. They have the Google search results, which are, like, kind of helpful if you're just searching. You don't wanna see a 1,000,000 sponsored posts and links and stuff. But I'm never going to Google with, like, I'm going to work on it collaboratively and really understand this topic in-depth.

John:

And Yeah. Because if I'm if I'm researching cars or something, I'm gonna want to follow-up and ask a bunch of different questions. Okay. Give me the full history of Ferrari. Now compare it to Lamborghini.

John:

Now create a table. Now export all that. Now give me the highest, rank it, resort it, all this stuff. That's something that I wanna do in its own environment, its own UI, and and they don't have that. Waymo will surpass Uber in rides taken in San Francisco and Los Angeles by the end of 2025.

John:

Certainly seems like that's happening in San Francisco, and I can see it happening in LA.

Jordi:

I don't know about LA just based on they would have to drop 10 times more. I mean, depends on what Yeah.

John:

A lot lot more cost.

Jordi:

You could figure out how many they're planning to deliver.

John:

City or county, Fred, you gotta be more precise because there's wildly different geographic areas between Los Angeles City and Los Angeles County. But the if they're just in downtown, absolutely. Yeah. No problem. Direct bank to bank payments will surpass credit card interchange payments in a few categories in the US in 2025.

John:

I have no idea how they're tracking right now.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It could have been either one of those could be 10 x the other, and I wouldn't know. But cool.

Jordi:

The real prediction is will the technology brothers use stable coins to purchase a g t three r s, by the end of 2025.

John:

We'll definitely be using, that that Bitcoin leverage one.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Lava.

John:

Lava where we can pull the debt out of the Bitcoin.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

I want a g t three r s secured by my Bitcoin for sure. A decentralized clinical trial attracts millions of participants and produces a favorable outcome in Trump's FDA, not only approves the drug, but celebrates the approach. Seems like an

Jordi:

aggressive timeline.

John:

Short timeline. Yep.

Jordi:

Yeah. But seems

John:

somewhat reasonable. But what's weird is that it's, like, how do you do a decentralized clinical trial that also requires testing a drug? Because, like so let's say I'm a drug developer, and I'm like, okay.

Jordi:

What's the what's what's

John:

a very basic thing that, like, okay. Everyone's having trouble sleeping, so I'm gonna make melatonin 2.0. Right? And I formulate it in my kitchen. I'm like, I got something that I think is good, but we don't know if it's safe or effective.

John:

And so we're gonna do decentralized trial. You're listening to the podcast. Go to melatonin2.0.com to, like, test it out, and we'll send it to you. Okay. You're immediately violating FDA rules, so they need to change those.

John:

I could see a decentralized clinical trial happening where it's, like, everyone is sharing their sleep data and then something a recommendation comes out of I

Jordi:

think it has to be data oriented.

John:

I would see I I could see Maha pulling something in where it's, like, we wanna know everyone in America now has the opportunity to share their seed oil consumption and their body fat percentage, and we're gonna run some massive correlative study on this. Like, that could be interesting. But, just just alone, like, drug development I I just think a year is too short. Yeah. A housekeeper robot named Judy is launched by Dyson, and it becomes a massive success selling millions of units.

Jordi:

Again, timeline issue here.

John:

Are they planning to do this?

Jordi:

I don't I I looked it up, and I didn't see anything from Dyson. Yeah. I think Judy is some reference to a robot in some movie at some point.

John:

I I just wonder, like okay. So Dyson

Jordi:

would be

John:

have a Roomba. Right? And would Roomba count as a housekeeping robot?

Jordi:

Yeah. I don't know. Dyson's such a cool company.

John:

It is. Yeah. Senra's done 3 episodes. Yeah. Yeah.

John:

You gotta go listen to founders.

Jordi:

I don't

John:

know the exact numbers, but he's posted about it. So you can go find those. NFT art left for dead in the in at the end of 2024 makes a remarkable comeback, and the MOMA purchases the 6529 Museum of Art for an undisclosed sum. I don't know exactly what NFT project that is.

Jordi:

I don't it's not a specific project. It's a collector who's

John:

put

Jordi:

together Yeah.

John:

A bunch of stuff.

Jordi:

A bunch of great That's

John:

cool.

Jordi:

NFT works.

John:

I mean, I I think that art values come from stories. Yeah. You like wasn't it Van Gogh cut off his ear?

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Like, by doing that, he canonized himself. And the art there's probably another person brother era.

Jordi:

Cut off your ear, put it on the blockchain Yeah. Sell it to the moment.

John:

No. I mean, da Vinci, like, why is the Mona Lisa so valuable? Like, it's not it is, like, this, like, groundbreaking beautiful portrait, but also, like, there's the whole history of da Vinci inventing flying machines and stuff. Like, like, that gives it more value.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And and it's the same thing with, like, you know, Andy Warhol and commenting on capitalism and consumers and stuff. Like, the story is always what drives the value with these things. And so will some NFT project wind up having a fantastic story? Absolutely. I think Moxie Marlins

Jordi:

Pudgy Penguins selling in Target.

John:

Pudgy Penguins is almost a different thing because it's, like, it's just a commercial, like, business. It's almost like

Jordi:

a Pudgy.

John:

Yeah. It's almost like a brand like Supreme or something where it will have value as a commercial brand. But I think just pure NFT art, which I wouldn't even put Pudgy Penguins in, will have value in the sense of, like, the

Jordi:

One of my favorite things that we did back in the day at party round is we posted on there was this time that was like it was like everybody would post, like, reply with your wallet address and we'll airdrop you something. And so we had a bunch of people do that, and then we airdropped everyone NFTs. There were ads for Party Round, which is great because you send somebody an NFT and it just sits in their wallet and they actually have to pay to get it out of their wallet. So you we just airdrop. I remember we put an ad in, like, Dylan Fields wallet that was like, this is an ad for party around and, like, like, Comic Sans.

John:

Yeah. See, like, that has that has a provenance where it's, like, the stunt, there's history around it, there's a story. Like, those might actually Yeah. Ironically wind up being worth something. Yeah.

John:

The the the NFT that I think has almost the most value is Moxie Marlins' spikes as you sell. So he was very bearish on NFTs. And what he did was he said, you know, everyone's saying these are decentralized, but I created he created an NFT that when it's viewed on Open Sea, it shows you one thing. When it's viewed in a Ethereum wallet, it shows you a different thing. Phantom wallet shows you a different one.

John:

And and one of them was just like a it showed it rendered a kind of a poop emoji. The other one rendered some joke. And and then funny. Yeah. And he wrote this real blog post, like, taking down and, like, really analyzing what was wrong with NFTs and where people were getting over their skis.

John:

And and I was like, that NFT, it's only it's a one of 1, and it's by Moxie Marlins, Mike, the founder of signal, like a

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

World historic figure in terms of, like, cyber security. Yeah. It's like and he's not an artist, but he's the only one he's made, and it's, like, super interesting. I tried to buy it off of him, but he was like, how much do you how how much will you pay me? And I was like, I don't actually know.

John:

I haven't thought about what what it's worth, but I should go and buy it from him. Let's keep going. An AI doctor with the personality of mister Rogers will treat millions of patients at at zero cost in 2025.

Jordi:

This is basically just chat gpt, and you just prompt it to to to to talk like mister Rogers and then boom. I actually do wonder. I wonder how many queries on chat gpt are are ready, like, medical diagnosis type things?

John:

Probably a lot. I just wonder, like, this makes it sound like it's someone fine tuning it, and when you go there, you always get mister Rogers. And I don't know if that's the winning world. What what's up? Can see the

Jordi:

fire from, Woah.

John:

There's a fire going on in In the Palisades. In the Palisades right now.

Jordi:

Yeah. Oh. And this is Roughly, I just lost sending a picture from Century City.

John:

Okay.

Jordi:

So you can see the flames just ripping.

John:

Not good.

Jordi:

Crazy. Alright. Back to the podcast.

John:

Bitcoin mining operation will pair with a wind farm in Newfoundland and grid scale battery storage to power an AI data center showcasing a new model for sustainable infrastructure.

Jordi:

A lot of buzzwords in

John:

This is already happening. This is, this is Crusoe. Crusoe. This is Crusoe Cloud. Like, they were a Bitcoin mine op mining operation.

John:

They had peaker plants on natural gas, extraction and but they also use wind and all sorts of stuff. They use grid scale battery storage, and they power AI data centers now. So, yeah, bullish on Chris, I guess. Yeah. Arizona's ESA program attracts over 25% of k twelve students in the state leading to a number of local school closures.

John:

I don't know enough about the ESA program to come to this school or something like that.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But always bullish on new models of education. 10, an AI produces an animated feature film that is nominated for an Oscar. Not gonna happen in 2025, but probably soon. I wouldn't be surprised if there's an Oscar nominated film that uses an AI generated image or sequence.

Jordi:

Yeah. I

John:

don't know about the whole film and certainly not where

Jordi:

we shot from. If Hollywood is not creating their own, like, proprietary tools

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

To generate Yep. Content, they're fucked.

John:

It it is the the best example of AI being used in Hollywood right now, there's a few. One was in, in the Marvel Endgame Avengers movie with Thanos, they have to animate his mouth and his skin. And when they,

Jordi:

did he not chew enough masks on or something?

John:

Yeah. When they when they put the dots on his face and then they, do the facial capture to get the motion, but it's not high resolution enough, and they use an AI model to upscale the motion capture data essentially. And then I saw another version where a film that was that was, produced in maybe Polish or German was translated into English, and they used AI to do replace the mouth movements.

Jordi:

Interesting.

John:

But they also use CGI. So a lot of these a lot of this AI stuff is going deeper into the CGI pipelines. And so right now, if if you're whenever you see those behind the scenes and it's like some some soldier fighting on a green screen, it's like that's not always just one click of the button and the green screen goes away. A lot of times, it's like, well, there's wires and stuff, so they still send it out usually to abroad. And they have a bunch of people literally drawing around the edges of every single frame, and they just have hundreds of people doing it called rotoscoping.

John:

And then there might be an AI tool that also is integrated in there. And so, you know, a lot of it's like, what what's the definition? I disagree with the idea that there'll be a one shot AI. Like, make me a movie. Oscar.

John:

No way. Yeah. But if there's someone who has a great vision and they need a couple frames of, like, b roll and stuff and they fill in the story Yeah.

Jordi:

I think in 2025, the the one shot the one shot videos are still gonna be

John:

They're gonna slop. They they they're they're gonna fight back against this, and they're not gonna give it just because of the statement it makes.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

A taxi an air taxi service launches in New York City offering an alternative to the L train commute. I would love that. Are we talking helicopters, or are we talking flying cars?

Jordi:

What about the the the the blades are VTOL? You know, there's Archer, the the the figure founders. Yeah. Last company will someday

John:

be the first flight. Scale in terms of manufacturing yet, and I don't think many of them are FA

Jordi:

approved. But the thing so I think what I like about what Fred does with these is he's just putting out what he wants to happen. Yep. He doesn't really care if it happens now or

John:

or in

Jordi:

10 years. Yep. He just wants it to happen. No.

John:

No. No. These are just like it's almost like a request for sharks. Yeah. It's great.

John:

TikTok turns

Jordi:

all over the

John:

world into meme coins that can be traded on decentralized exchanges all over the world. That's funny. I wonder, like, that I that that feels like useless if it's just collector items, but maybe valuable if you're able to instantly sell the revenue from a video. The problem is is that TikTok doesn't have really long half lives. Like, you get a 1,000,000 views, and then you're done.

John:

And maybe the creator payout that week is a Yeah.

Jordi:

It's kind of interesting to think, okay. I'm watching this video at sub 10,000 views. Yeah. Can I buy a piece of it? Yeah.

Jordi:

Maybe it trades

John:

Some of my videos get millions of views every month forever. Like like, I put one out that's on the history of Donald Trump. It has 3,000,000 views now. That video alone probably generates over $1,000 a month.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And so I could, in theory, sell that off and then Yeah. Share that whoever buys it gets that revenue stream.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And there are services that do that. It was called there was something that was really hot in the YouTube space and a bunch of YouTubers, like, sold their back catalogs and then, like, oh, yeah. Was pretty sick.

Jordi:

Yeah. It wasn't I I I I do think that,

John:

Spotter.

Jordi:

Didn't mister beast do that Yep. To help fund some of these bigger videos?

John:

Great. And and and there's a long history of this with, like, the Beatles selling the back catalog, Michael Jackson.

Jordi:

Yeah. Big artists have been doing this forever.

John:

And there were a lot of people that made a ton of money doing that because they bought Hedge funds. They bought the right asset, and it went really big. And then there's obviously, like, the famous Taylor Swift argument about how she sold it and then that buyer's or seller's remorse. Very interesting. And number 13, the USV librarian goes rogue, gets access to USV's crypto wallet, and starts making seed investments, one of which turns into a fund returner.

Jordi:

He's just manifesting at this point. Love it.

John:

He's like yeah. So I guess the librarian is like a AI that they trained on something else. Should we go to Nikhil Basu Trivedi who writes the next big thing in 2025?

Jordi:

What do you think? I've always Nikhil's got a very dialed format.

John:

Yeah. These are great because he runs a blog, but for his predictions, he asks a ton of people to, to give their predictions, then he just aggregates them. And he gets some really top people. I mean, the general partner at Benchmark.

Jordi:

Dara. 3.5. Dara from Delphi.

John:

Partner at Tim at Timiter. Oh, he's in here? That's great. Jess Lee at Sequoia. Lots of good people.

John:

So, we should just kinda skip through these pick, like, the maybe the best one from each category. Let's go with AI agents, and I wanna hear what Claude has to say. That's funny. He asked Claude 3.5 Sonnet. And Claude says the next big thing in 2025 will be the widespread adoption of AI agents that can autonomously handle complex multistep tasks from scheduling your entire vacation to managing your small business operations while being fully aligned with individual users' preferences and values.

John:

This shift will mark the beginning of truly personalized AI assistance that goes far beyond today's basic chat bots and virtual assistants. I mean, it's certainly happening in niche categories right now with, like, dedicated start ups that do things from end to end. And I would love to see more of this because we have plenty of multi step tasks that can be prompted. I mean, we saw Dworkash talking about just doing the transcripts from his, like, messy podcast transcripts with lots of umms and ahs, and he has a master prompt, but it's really just one shotting it. It's one it's one prompt.

John:

It's much better if he could just have a an AI agent sitting there and says, hey. As soon as this RSS feed gets updated, step 1, download the download the MP 3. Step 2, send it over to Whisper, get it transcribed. Step 3, run the transcript. Step 4, upload the better transcript.

John:

Like, do that for me too. Don't just give me the text. I want it I want it live, and I want it just sitting there. We have, there there was a fan of the show who wrote in and said, I'll do your your, your title ideas and send in some, some chapters. We get a lot of people asking for chapters on YouTube, and that's a great thing that AI should do.

John:

Eventually, YouTube will do it automatically. They have some automatic chapters functionality, but, we'd love more fine tune control over it. So an AI agent would be fantastic there. AI interfaces. Let's go to altimeter.

John:

Jameen Ball says I'm on the second page here. And on AI interfaces, Jameen Ball says the next big thing in 2025 will be a Cambrian explosion of voice AI applications, latency on inference, latency on networking, and more advanced turn detection background background noise detection will lead to truly human like experiences with software.

Jordi:

As we have the training Yeah. Just to make it relevant to some stuff we talked about before, this is the bull case for a friend is that if the underlying technology gets dramatically better Yep. And then you have this device that's with you 247, it could turn into the craziest relationship you've ever had. Yeah. Right?

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

It's also interesting, like like, what are you looking for in a relationship? Like, if it's capable of being, like, a friend, then, you know, it's also capable of just being, like, an assistant and just bouncing ideas off your secretary. Yeah.

Jordi:

Nothing will ever replace a world class secretary.

John:

Let's talk through Eric Newcomer. He on on AI applications, he says the next big thing in 2025 will be in the world of artificial intelligence where it's going to be cool to be a GPT wrapper again. Consumers and businesses both need help figuring out how best to use already very powerful language models. So we're going to see a bunch of applications crop up that help people get the most out of these models. Startups will build sales motions, integrations, customer know how, etcetera, and won't need some huge technological moat to justify their existence.

John:

Of course, no one will want to call their company a wrapper. Think more GPT refiner. These companies will get data particular to their use case, do some human reinforcement learning, and deliver an easy to use product that leads the horse to water instead of intimidating

Jordi:

Yeah. You're building you're basically building the interface for the model.

John:

Yep. That makes sense. AI generated content. Let's go to Damir at index. He says, the next big thing will be video generation models.

John:

Video is the ultimate form of creative expression. How we produce it will fundamentally be transformed as a result of next generation models. Yep. I agree. Have you played with Soar yet?

John:

I think I think I have access

Jordi:

to this Chupity

John:

Pro, but I haven't actually done it. I think it should be useful for our editors to pull b roll and stuff. But I think the most

Jordi:

unhinged slop b roll.

John:

Some of the some of the slop b rolls, like, it's the question is, like, when is it helpful to illustrate something? And usually, I feel like you want a very specific shot, but it can

Jordi:

be fully I'm ready for somebody to make the the, somebody just needs to fully lean in. I don't endorse this, but it'd be funny. The the Ayahuasca visualization engine with Sora where it just takes you through the gigasloff, like, mental journey of Ayahuasca. Yeah.

John:

Let's just keep moving.

Jordi:

Scott Belsky, always sharp. He says the next big thing in 2025 will be top AI talent shifting from working in companies pioneering the latest and greatest AI to taking leadership roles in the industry that benefit most from AI. I won't go in further, but that's interesting. It's basically, you know, right now, the top AI talent is working at AI companies. But then eventually it's like, hey, could you have a bigger impact if you went and worked at a company like Flexport, right, and, like, became a leader in the at the intersection of AI and logistics.

Jordi:

Right?

John:

Oh, let's go to Dara, in the not AI category. The next big thing in 2025 will be a counter movement to AI content overload, bringing bringing focus back to human curation and authenticity. Infinite AI generated content is still in its wow and novelty phase. But anytime there's abundance of an asset, the pendulum swings to the other side where people appreciate the scarce assets that come with quality, which in information's case is trust. As trust becomes scarce, influence will concentrate among select curators and experts that, who who who can use AI to scale their validated perspectives while maintaining credibility.

John:

These curators will have unprecedented reach and impact as they'll be able to maintain personal connections at scale through AI enhanced interactions while preserving the authenticity that made people trust them in the first place. Interesting.

Jordi:

Yeah. Dara, always sharp. Nicole Wishoff.

John:

You gotta know what questions to ask.

Jordi:

Yeah. Nicole Wishoff says the next big thing in 2025 will not be AI as the main character. Bets been made and there are many hard takes on commoditization and models. The physical infrastructure will be the really important conversation. Energy, data centers and the Trump admin coming in.

Jordi:

More thoughts will go into how we power AI and not the outcomes of AI, which has dominated all of 2024.

John:

That's a good thing. Let's just see here. Let's go to Gary Tan. The next big thing in 2025 will be startups of 10 people getting to 10,000,000 ARR in less than 18 months with less than 5,000,000 raised.

Jordi:

This is why, I mean, it's hard to imagine any company better positioned

John:

Than YC.

Jordi:

Than YC. Yeah. I could yeah. It's probably one of the greatest business models of all time. Time.

Jordi:

Fantastic. Product. So I like this one from from Michael. Lightspeed. Lightspeed.

Jordi:

He says the next big thing in 2025 will be the return of the product oriented founder. The magic of AI technology that led to instant PMF for so many companies is starting to wane. What's needed now is exceptional products that solve real problems and the teams that can natively build them. So, yeah, I think, I've seen that I think I think we've seen that in the last 6 months or so where founders that had been building something and maybe exited, like Jordan Jordan Singer, are now getting back in the game starting from scratch, thinking in a very AI native way.

John:

There's another one here on GLP ones. The next big thing will be a second win for GLP one drugs. It's from Nan Lee at Dimension. Already a blockbuster product in obesity and in diabetes headed toward 50,000,000,000 of annual sales. Remember the old prediction we saw there was a 100?

Jordi:

Size gone.

John:

2 x. This class of medicines will be further bolstered by new research findings. First off, there seems to be no limit to what diseases GLP 1 biology is linked to as label expansion. Studies continue to create strong signal in everything from sleep apnea, now FDA approved, to chronic heart failure.

Jordi:

I saw that so there's a a week ago

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

At the Aman. It's a very nice hotel. Yep. Saw, this individual who I spoke to at one point, very large.

John:

Mhmm.

Jordi:

And I just kept thinking, like, seemingly, like, uncomfortably large. And I was thinking, like, why like, there's still it seems like being overweight will become somewhat of a choice, but some people are still

John:

going to just choose to not be physically intimidate your opponents.

Jordi:

Yeah. Be a size lord.

John:

Exactly. Maybe that's a good prediction. Wilmauditus puts the weight

Jordi:

back. Arthur Arthur Rock got to mention in here. The next big thing in 2025 will be hemp based THC. The US market for delta 8 THC and other hemp derived cannabinoids has increased by a whopping 1200% in just 3 years, growing from 200,000,000 to 2,800,000,000. I think marijuana should be That's

John:

so much

Jordi:

banned. Banned. But, anyways,

John:

Delian

Jordi:

I like our fur.

John:

Cofounder at VARTA and partnered Founders Fund says the next big thing in 2025 will be regular landings on the moon of equipment to prepare for people shortly thereafter.

Jordi:

Love that.

John:

I love that. I mean, the

Jordi:

We said we should send some full podcast studio up there just to get Yeah. Just to get ready. The first podcast studio

John:

is on the moon. It's great. Let's see what else we got. IPOs. Gokul Rajaram at Marathon says the next big thing will be tech and IPO markets booming.

John:

Agree. Big tech earnings. Chad Beyer says the next big thing will be mainstream adoption of agents and large enterprise leading to increased earnings and quarterly beats resulting in continued stock alt We love quarterly beats. Among hyperscalers. I love it.

John:

Should close with our own predictions? We asked 24 billionaires for their 2025 tech predictions, and here they are. Mark Andreessen gets hair transplants. Artificial intelligence will get better.

Jordi:

That's the best the best prediction possible, artificial intelligence because because it seems like you just can't miss on that.

John:

Exactly. And

Jordi:

if you predictions are all about it's not about being saying cool things. It's about being right.

John:

Exactly. Speaking of being right, Bitcoin hits 25,000,000 per coin. I think we got that one in the bag.

Jordi:

Yep.

John:

Keith Raboy becomes a mass monster and gets his IFBB pro

Jordi:

card. Big.

John:

Most of the major cities will be replaced with vast pleasure domes used exclusively by the Excelsiorites who are the neo upper class while the displaced hordes of lower class depth groddlers will live underground in tiered cities endlessly toiling away for nugget for nuggets of neoplasmid. Do you know where that's from? Okay. Yeah. Look at that one there.

John:

Yeah. Venture capitalist formally becomes a slur in the Oxford English Dictionary. I love that. Databricks IPO prices above a $147 a share. You gotta

Jordi:

have to pull the number out of the hat on that one.

John:

Yeah. But, 50% premium to last price, I think.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Underperformance of European VCs results in mass famine and chaos on the continent. Most EU countries backslide into feudalism.

Jordi:

Love it.

John:

I think that's

Jordi:

As long as it remains a great vacation destination for hardworking Americans.

John:

Yes. Yeah. It's like our Disneyland. Elizabeth Holmes is a stunning come comeback. I think that's in the bag.

John:

Venture back defense tech companies collectively rack up over a 100,000 confirmed kills. Well on our way. Mark Zuckerberg gets really into lawn care. I think the bro arc of Zuckerberg is like

Jordi:

Lawn care is he got into grilling. He got into watches. Watches, cars. Cars, minivans. Thing.

Jordi:

You know? Minivans. Stake. He got big in a stake.

John:

Yeah. He's I think he's gonna go precision rifle series, PRS, long range, long distance, custom rifle builds. That's in that that's definitely happening.

Jordi:

To buy an f one team. That would be a good like, why does Meta not have, like, Meta Yeah. Racing? Like, that would

John:

just be fantastic. Leagues.

Jordi:

Meta has the best Meta has the best advertising network of all time.

John:

He should buy the NFL, the NBA, the WWE, the UFC, and f 1. All of it. Not just a team. The whole thing. Yeah.

John:

These 2 GPs, a tier one funds will go to jail. I think we know what we're talking about there. Virtual reality will have a major moment. That's exciting.

Jordi:

That's exciting.

John:

That's exciting. After years of financial mismanagement, the all in podcast will declare bankruptcy and

Jordi:

be acquired by private equity. That one is sad. That hurts. That we hate to see a good podcast go down, but The numbers are what they lost.

John:

The numbers are what they

Jordi:

They lost their they lost their top dog.

John:

They lost their star.

Jordi:

Their absolute dog.

John:

And the revenue has just been too low. Yeah. That's the problem.

Jordi:

They're not gonna be the most profitable podcast without Yeah. With relying in on events for revenue.

John:

Yeah. A major investigative journalist will write an expose on humiliation rituals at venture capital firms. We've we've heard a lot about those. Ramp will continue to offer a seamless corporate card experience to the best private and public companies on earth. Big game hunting replaces skiing as the go to VC offset activity.

John:

You know, we posted this before the, before all the chaos had failed. You know, you're not hearing a lot of chaos on the Serengeti. There aren't a lot of line lift lines to go hunt a tiger or a lion. So Yeah. Seems like an obvious trip.

Jordi:

Game hunting. We we're gonna do a brother's big game hunting trip at some point.

John:

For sure. Another VC will be fired for not being able to hold his liquor. I think we know who we're talking about there.

Jordi:

Yep. But there is the blackout to fund manager pipeline that still exists.

John:

Yep. The new Tesla Roadster will finally ship, and it will have a naturally aspirated v 12 and a gated manual. Let's go. I'm excited for that. I'm I'm seriously considering putting a reservation down on the new Roadster.

John:

I think it's gonna be awesome.

Jordi:

It's a good buy.

John:

I think I think this is the year he's gonna deliver it. It's been forever delayed, but now, like, everything's clear. Stocks at all time highs. Like, he's got all the approvals and and stuff. Like, he needs a new halo car.

John:

Like, it would just be so

Jordi:

sick.

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Why is he letting the Cybertruck kind of hype Yeah.

John:

Play out. Yeah. It's gonna look so good. The Cyberacon look like a Cybertruck Huracan. That'd be awesome.

Jordi:

That'd That'd be wild.

John:

I hope I hope he I really hope he takes the cyber truck aesthetics into the Roadster. I don't want the roadster to look like the old Roadster at all. That's true. Or the model. If he if he makes like a very Tron s all look exactly the same, and they look super boring to me.

John:

The Cybertruck, I think, looks sick. So take that Tron

Jordi:

esque steal.

John:

Yeah. That'd be so good. Yeah. It'd be

Jordi:

That would honestly be if it if it felt more like a Lamborghini than a like, a futuristic Lamborghini.

John:

Yeah. It shouldn't look like an Elise. Like

Jordi:

Yeah. That makes me wanna what what what's the actual

John:

I think you put down, like, 10 k or something.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But the whole thing is, like, you could just put money in, in Tesla stock. YC will fund a company that makes humanoid robots with guns for arms. I like that. YC has been getting more into the military industrial complex. We love to see it.

John:

LPs finally start refusing to back GPs that wear shorts in a business setting. Good to see. Every tech podcast not releasing daily episodes will fade into obscurity in the face of relentless competition from the Technology Brothers.

Jordi:

Fact check. True. Yeah. It's not even as much of a prediction

John:

as a fact. Yeah. AI agents will cause homelessness in San Francisco to fall to 0%, but their methods will be harshly criticized by the public.

Jordi:

Oh, nice. What happened there? Deadly.

John:

Brian Johnson will die in a hail of gunfire during a raid on a top secret government bio lab that contains a fountain of youth elixir. What did we miss? Let us know. DM us if you have predictions. And that concludes our We never miss.

John:

Predictions for 2025. We have to dive into something.

Jordi:

We gotta take let's take a quick, Okay.

John:

Let's take a quick break. Welcome back to the Technology Brothers. Still the most profitable podcast in the world.

Jordi:

LA is still burning down. We're still podcasting.

John:

We have some breaking news, though. Mark Zuckerberg has announced that Meta will be relaxing the what do you call it? Censorship, I guess.

Jordi:

Censorship. Hey, guys. He's po we're not We're dialing back the censorship, and we got kinda out of control.

John:

The announcement video was so funny because Zuck has this style where he's just like a direct to camera. He's just like, hey, guys. I just wanna give you an update. And normally, it's like, you know, we're really excited to announce, like, creator monetization. But with this one, it was just like, oh my god.

John:

It's getting so much more extreme. And it's just like, we're not gonna penalize people for, you know, talking about politics anymore. And it's like, okay. That's pretty reasonable. And he's like, we're gonna have this community notes feature, and we're gonna let that do a lot of the work.

John:

So it's community policed and, you know, we're we're we're not good like like, the the the automated systems make a lot of mistakes. It's like, oh, that's reasonable. He's like, oh, and by the way, we're moving our trust and safety organization from San Francisco to Texas.

Jordi:

To to the great state of Texas.

John:

It's like, oh my god. That's like a bomb going off. It's like cultural change.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Wild. But all of that is just a sideshow to the real the real reason why we need to talk about this story.

Jordi:

It's clearly the real reason why he made the video.

John:

Yes. 100%. It's because he needed to show off his beautiful $1,000,000 gay Grobel 4 c handmade one watch. And so we have a post here from Didi. He says Zuck was wearing a $1,000,000 watch in his community notes announcement video.

John:

Nothing says I understand the culture shift of the community more than a watch that costs more than most people houses. That's true. I don't know if he's joking, but, like, that's true. It's like the era. This is authentic.

Jordi:

Not messing around.

John:

Billionaire. Yeah. He should have a $1,000,000 watch. Why not? And it's a cool story, and we're gonna take you through what makes this watch so special and why it's actually fine and cool and great, and it's awesome that

Jordi:

he's celebration of his success

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

Meta success Yep. And watchmaking.

John:

The numbers he's put up, Not just a 1,000,000,000. 1.5 trillion. 1.5 trillion. Big t. That's how much value that's needed.

Jordi:

Capital t.

John:

I was I was trying to run the numbers, and I was

Jordi:

like Anybody that creates a $1,000,000,000 company should wear at least $1,000,000,000 watch as their daily driver, period. Arguably She should just

John:

just for his wealth. I don't know if you can find a watch maybe on Timu. If you're if you make a $100,000, the equivalent watch as percentage of income is, like, a 5ยข watch. Yeah. Like, he spent

Jordi:

Zuck is at a point where I would actually like to see him utilizing the real estate on actually both

John:

Good watches. Yeah. And, also, you gotta ice this out.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah.

John:

He should definitely be icing this out. Flood it with

Jordi:

Ice out

John:

the handmade. With, the top tier diamonds. Flood it. Flood that

Jordi:

No lab grown diamonds.

John:

No. No. No. No.

Jordi:

Straight from the earth.

John:

Exactly. The most expensive

Jordi:

take out Farm to table diamond.

John:

It's gotta be in the 10, 50, get into a 100,000,000. Make make the, make the the what what what's the watch where it's the the hallucination? The Granite Diamonds. That look like a Cassia.

Jordi:

Yeah. Yeah. Make it look like a Casio.

John:

Okay. So the Grubel 4 c Handmade 1. It's a 43.5 millimeter in white gold. It represents the pinnacle of old world watchmaking techniques in a modern era, priced well into the 100 of 1,000 of dollars, often cited around or above 800,000. I saw one for sale for 906,000.

John:

Interestingly, there was a news article that said it was $900,000 watch. I found it for 906. Let's put them in the truth zone. I wanna communicate that. Sound.

Jordi:

Community. Yeah. I wanna communicate a

John:

note on it. There are only 2 or 3 produced each year within the realm of hot horology or high horology. It occupies a level of craftsmanship, exclusivity, and finish that sets it apart from either from even from other superlative luxury watches. There's incredible rarity. Only 2 to 3 pieces made per year.

John:

Each requires 6000 hours of handiwork.

Jordi:

It's crazy too because now every product manager in the valley is gonna be trying to get this watch. Yes. And the question will become, are they gonna increase their allocations? Because,

John:

you

Jordi:

know, there's gonna be people banging down the door saying, please make this watch. I work at I work at Uber. I'm a product manager. I make a couple of $100,000 a month. I want, you know, a nice piece that I can wear to work.

Jordi:

And yeah. So Have you seen

John:

the other forces? They're incredible.

Jordi:

The the non the non handmade.

John:

So no. No. No. They the I think they're all handmade.

Jordi:

Well, they're all handmade, but handmade one is is the specific model.

John:

Look at this one, dude. It has a it has a physical model of the world. It's like 3 dimension. You you gotta look this up.

Jordi:

We'll put

John:

a picture up on the video. But, it it has a picture of the world that rotates to show you, like, what time it is across the world. That's wild. So amazing. Incredible.

John:

It's incredible.

Jordi:

But the traditional method, over 95% of the parts are fabricated using centuries old fully manual techniques, making it distinct from even most hand finished pieces.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

Time intensive components, the escapement lever alone can take one and a half months to create.

John:

Yep. 3 the 3 years of full time work go into producing each watch, an incredible investment in time. So these are very rare, fewer than 3 pieces per year. One of the rarest series produced watches in the world, typically quoted around 800k, 95% handmade aside from the sapphire crystals, pivot jewels, gaskets, strap spring, bars, and the mainspring. Every single part is executed by hand.

John:

And have you ever seen any of these videos breaking down like how these individual independent watchmakers work? It's like they actually have every single tool. Like, they need to, like, file down. Oh oh, we need a gear. Yeah.

John:

Let's make it from scratch. Make it.

Jordi:

Yeah. It's

John:

crazy. The escapement lever

Jordi:

That's like with us

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

Podcasting, we need a new microphone. Make it from scratch.

John:

We really should get some, like, extremely rare, handmade. There are some actually, one of my friends from high school, his dad, that was their business. They made, handmade microphones for record recording artists.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And and when you listen to, like, you know, oh, like, yeah, like, the Rolling Stones use this microphone.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

And it's just, like, actually, like, the top tier. That was, like, his, high school job. It was, like, helping assemble stuff.

Jordi:

Very cool.

John:

It has a tourbillon and train wheels that take 600 times longer to produce. I don't know what to say in the watch.

Jordi:

Era of just AI slot products. It's, like, ultra, ultra handmade. Like, it will become cool again for somebody to say Yep. I'm gonna hand make wine bottles.

John:

Yes. Right? And and this is why you can't write this off as just, like, oh, it's just rich guy shit because Zuck is a technologist and Yeah. Watchmaking is in some way a pinnacle of technology. Like, we didn't have the ability to make this.

John:

It's just mechanical. It's not computer science.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

But there's something that's when you look at a really fine handmade watch, you're you're realizing, like, an expertise in craftsmanship that you want to bring to, yes, even the ad platform software. Yeah. Like, that that's the same same concept. The dial and finishing, the minute track and seconds subdial are executed in true fired enamel enamel requiring multiple firings at 800 degrees Celsius. The silver bridges known as malicourt in French, they feature a frosted finish achieved by repetitive dabbing with a stiff wire brush.

John:

The copper content gives these bridges their soft golden hue. Mirror polishing every bridge and wheel includes expertly polished bevels. Many feature sharp inward angles, which are extremely challenging to master. Each screw grow goes through 12 different manual steps and can require about 8 hours to produce. Finishes vary between black polish and fired blue steel, all color match meticulously.

John:

Incredible. A 1 minute tourbillon made of 69 parts. The tourbillon I gotta get a tourbillon watch for sure. It's so sick. It it it originally, I I believe the tourbillon was designed to offset the, I think it was in pocket watches, maybe wristwatches too.

John:

But, if your watch is sitting there at an angle, there's gravity on it in one direction Yeah. And so that would throw off the timekeeping. And so the tourbillon was, spinning to offset that a little bit. Now there's other ways to to build a watch that keeps time more accurately even in the mechanical realm. But the tourbillon is still just like a fascinating thing to look at.

John:

And Yeah. With this watch, the tourbillon is actually exposed so you can look at it from the from the face, from the, from the dial.

Jordi:

Incredible.

John:

Yeah. You gotta have screws that take at least 8 hours to produce in your watch. Also, what are you doing? The large balance is free sprung and adjusted in 6 positions beating at 3 hertz. The hairspring is shaped by hand to include an overcoil, minimizing positional air.

John:

Has a 60 hour manual wind, which is quite robust given the large tourbillon assembly. Golden Chattons, traditional pocket watch style Chattons, hold each pivot jewel an homage to 19th century techniques while also aiding in serviceability. And the base plate on the reverse side features a grata main or hand scraped finish. No two plates are identical. There's a ratchet wheel, a year plate, name plate.

John:

Oh, yeah. That's a really fun thing.

Jordi:

So

John:

It says the year that it was made on the face of the watch. And so 1 in rose gold, 1 in white gold showcasing multi metal accents. Each watch was also inscribed with the year and number denoting its place among the 2 or 3 made that year. So you can instantly look at your watch and know exactly it's kind of like, with those, like, the super rare sports cars limited allocation. They will say, okay.

John:

This is number

Jordi:

Describe on the engine.

John:

Well yeah. I mean, even even for, like, you know, like, a somewhat limited run, like a Murcielago or something, people will look at the VIN and they'll track all the VINs. Are you familiar with, like, VIN Wiki? Have you

Jordi:

seen this?

John:

Yeah. So people track down all the VINs and then they'll know, okay. There's 2,000 of these cars made. And then a lot of times, people will track down the VINs and realize that there's actually a lot less of them than people thought because of the crash or they were sent overseas or something. Yeah.

John:

That can drive the the value up. But something like this, you you know, you look at the, you look at the, the number right on the watch to remind you how exclusive it is. I love it.

Jordi:

And the the thing for me is he he he clearly was very particular about choosing this watch for this announcement.

John:

You don't

Jordi:

you don't throw this on by chance. You don't wake up in the morning and say, oh, I'm gonna you know, you don't you're you're really it's a very intentional decision. But with Zuck, it's thinking about all the watches that he could've that he brushed over

John:

Yeah.

Jordi:

And chose not to put on this morning. And I and I wanna know about that.

John:

Could've worn a cubitist.

Jordi:

Completely different stuff. Cubitist would've been as quite the statement.

John:

Would've been quite the statement. Would've would've hung a lot of people. Yep. A A lot of people wanted to see him throw on an F. P.

John:

Journe Yeah. Which he has, and it's beautiful.

Jordi:

But PC Braggs, you know, was talking about this. To throw off.

John:

The F. P. Journe. But the F. P.

John:

Journe is it's still an independent watchmaker. Francois Paul Journe is obviously a fantastic watchmaker, but it's a little bit more well known

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

Than something like this.

Jordi:

And this should just be a wake up call for tech executives broadly

John:

I agree.

Jordi:

That you need to be taking clocks more seriously.

John:

Yes.

Jordi:

Yes. Take time more seriously.

John:

Yeah. This is the thing about a watch. People say Even

Jordi:

even Elon in many ways talking about, you know, unregretted user seconds. Yep. He's really making a statement around clocks Time. Watches and time. Yeah.

Jordi:

And, a watch arch

John:

of tell you the time of day. It tells you the time in your life. And so for him, what is this moment? Where is he in his life? He's at a point in

Jordi:

the signed Dana White.

John:

Where he can can wear something like this, and this and this symbolizes where he's at in his life. Yep. And that's

Jordi:

an incredible place.

John:

That's me.

Jordi:

Making incredible signings.

John:

It's comparable only to itself. I love it. Epitomizes the devotion to genuine handmade craftsmanship. Nearly everything is done by traditional techniques Okay. Seldom seen in modern watchmaking.

John:

Are you okay?

Jordi:

Yeah. I think we just got an evacuation order, so probably gotta hit the road. Okay.

John:

Will it be a short episode?

Jordi:

I mean We

John:

will be

Jordi:

on tomorrow. Not exactly the shortest. I think we still clocked Subscribe. Clocked a couple hours.

John:

Us on x. Follow us on YouTube. Follow us on Spotify.

Jordi:

Brothers, I'm sorry to cut the timeline out of this episode, but we will be back tomorrow. And in my defense, there is an evacuation order at my house Yeah. And I can't in good conscience,

John:

continue to record. Polished pieces going out on acts. These are the the brother of the week award, the reply guy of the week award, the size gong, the personality news.

Jordi:

Yeah.

John:

We've stopped doing those within the episodes. We record them before. We edit them down, and they go out exclusively on acts. They're exclusive clips on acts. And so make sure you follow us there.

John:

Turn the notifications on, and make sure you reply.

Jordi:

There's a big there's gonna be about 50 reply guys of the week Yep. This year.

John:

Yep.

Jordi:

And many of those people will go on to join the Forbes list Yep. To start $1,000,000,000,000 companies Yep. To raise mango seed rounds and do many great things.

John:

Yeah. It is. You know, to

Jordi:

to win the Kentucky Derby. Right?

John:

To win the UFC championship. We we we The last one. This one is encouraging to you. You might be worried about your house burning down, but we're

Jordi:

going to

John:

Josh Steinman, and he's saying, good morning. We are going to win. And that's a great place to close it.

Jordi:

Thank you, brothers. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye.