Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 03/10/2025. We are live from the Temple Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today.
Speaker 1:We are under attack, folks. Hackers
Speaker 2:The time line is
Speaker 1:in turmoil. They've seen what we've been doing with this show. They know it's too powerful. They're coming for you. They're coming for us.
Speaker 2:They came to the whole platform.
Speaker 1:Be afraid. What is going on?
Speaker 2:Elon Elon says it's a cyberattack by a nation state.
Speaker 1:He does.
Speaker 2:We have we do have some We have
Speaker 1:a post. We already printed it. It went out and we printed it immediately. Elon says there was there was slash still is a massive cyber attack against x. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources.
Speaker 1:Either a large coordinated group or a country is involved, he's tracing it. And then someone in the comments says, they wanna silence you and this platform. And he says, yes. So we know the truth. This platform, we are part of this platform.
Speaker 1:They're trying to silence us. But we can't be stopped. We're still streaming. We're still live. We're still reading posts out loud.
Speaker 1:But first we gotta talk about this weekend. I went skiing in Lake Tahoe.
Speaker 2:It was fantastic.
Speaker 1:And we wanted to break down what's going on. If you haven't followed the markets in turmoil, it's in free fall. And we have a thesis for what's for what's going on. And we have a bunch of evidence to back this up.
Speaker 2:We do. We do. What are we
Speaker 1:calling it, folks?
Speaker 2:The yard sale.
Speaker 1:The yard sale. It's a yard sale. So for those
Speaker 2:that don't know, yard sale is when you're skiing and you have you have a a bad enough accident that all of your gear basically just gets rejected off of your body.
Speaker 1:Both poles and both skis.
Speaker 2:And and and oftentimes, the helmet, goggles, and gloves.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so they get spread out over the mountain. Yeah. And you got go
Speaker 1:And it looks like you're in the dumps. Everything's laid out.
Speaker 2:Today is, don't check your public account. Yep. Just don't even look at it.
Speaker 1:Don't even look at it. Just watch,
Speaker 2:stay stay with us. But it's an absolute
Speaker 1:good day to teach people about dollar cost averaging.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right. And not trying to time the markets. Yeah. Never works. So that's what we'll be talking about.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I actually have to when when, when NVIDIA after DeepSeek announcement and NVIDIA went down, tremendously, I was down 15%. I just, you know, instantly bought it. Yep. I'm I'm guessing I've wrapped it up.
Speaker 1:Probably. Yeah. For sure.
Speaker 2:But for a minute there, for about a month, I looked like a genius.
Speaker 1:You look genius.
Speaker 2:I looked like a genius. Okay. So we but but, anyway, so this is John's working theory.
Speaker 1:He was
Speaker 2:skiing this weekend. He sort of figured this out. But the the yard the yard sale thesis
Speaker 1:Yeah. The yard sale thesis.
Speaker 2:What is the what is the genesis of it?
Speaker 1:Okay. Talk to the audience about it. So the yard sale thesis is essentially, as everyone knows, during ski season, all the greatest capital allocators in the world head to the slopes. Yep. They're sitting on ski lifts.
Speaker 1:And what's unique about ski lifts? It's almost it's very much like a sauna, in that there are there's no one that's eavesdropping on you. There's not a lot of technology around. People can speak freely. And you also rent wind up with somewhat random people, but everyone's kind of in the same milieu because they're all paying 2,000 a day to ski at some ICON Pass or Epicast location.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:I don't know about 2,000. Are you talking about room and board and and everything?
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm pretty sure the lift tickets are, like, over 600 now a day for, like, a one day thing.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:yeah. So so so there's this filter that basically says, you know, there's this economic floor that basically is you have to be a capital allocator to get on the slopes these days. Yeah. With the prices where they are. But that creates a lot of of random chance interactions between folks who have different insights into different pieces of the market.
Speaker 2:But And they're moving size.
Speaker 1:They're moving size for sure. And they're speaking freely because they're just like, I'm up here. I'm cold. I'm trying to just bond with someone on this ski lift. And I'm not worried I'm being eavesdropped on because I'm not in an office.
Speaker 1:I'm not, I'm not at a crowded coffee shop. Yep. I'm on a I'm on a ski chair lift. And so, so the rumors start flying. The rumor mill happens on
Speaker 2:the on
Speaker 1:the ski lift. And if you'll see at the end of the ski lift, there's always a sign that says tips up.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's
Speaker 1:like it says, like, put the stock tips away, guys. Because you don't want the stock tips going out once you're once you're off the scale. If you wanna keep them on the You
Speaker 2:don't want them you don't wanna be getting a notification that says the market is down.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Tips up.
Speaker 2:Tips up.
Speaker 1:And so you so the other thing
Speaker 2:is other factors even on gondolas. Yeah. There's a big issue where, let's say, you're skiing with a buddy. Yeah. You get on a gondola.
Speaker 2:Maybe it's a six person gondola. Yeah. Everybody's got their goggles on, their helmets. Couple you know, two guys think they're just having a regular conversation. They don't know that somebody that has 10,000,000,000 of AUM Yep.
Speaker 2:Is two seats over picking that up and trading.
Speaker 1:This this happened to me, because I would get on. I was in full gear. You couldn't tell who I was, and and I would overhear people saying, oh, there's, like, TBPN. It's, like, the biggest thing. Like, it's the best thing ever.
Speaker 1:Like, it's taking over the world.
Speaker 2:I wish they did seven days a week. Yeah. A
Speaker 1:lot of people were saying, like, I used to be a podcaster. I'm actually shutting down because of what's going on with TBPN. So but they probably wouldn't have said that if if they knew that I was sitting right there. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that those types of conversations
Speaker 2:they don't know your six eight.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:There's not that many six eight people skiing if they Yeah. If they knew you were six eight Yeah. That you're sitting down all the time. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's hard to tell.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So, so there's a lot of there's a lot of stock tips flying around. And, you know, sometimes someone has a little tip. Hey.
Speaker 1:Maybe Silicon Valley Bank isn't so hot. You hear it on the ski chair. You go. You take on a short position. One thing leads to another, and the whole company collapses.
Speaker 1:But you think we're crazy. You think this is some weird thing that, oh, really? There should just be, like, the average amount of financial collapses and frauds are discovered during ski season. Right? It's only a couple months.
Speaker 1:But we have a list here for you of financial frauds that happen during ski season. And when you hear this list, you're gonna start believing in the yard sale the yard sale theory of finance. Yeah. You're gonna believe us. Because look, Black Monday, the global stock market crashed.
Speaker 2:Right when the mountains around
Speaker 1:the world started to open. 10/19/1987, the Dow Jones plunges 22.6% in a single day. Yep. Like, I mean, yeah, it was probably early early
Speaker 2:snow, but it was it was You're getting out there. You know, oftentimes Yeah. The mountain's not open to everyone. Yeah. You gotta have a special relationship, you know, be
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And, and and so the only people that would even be skiing then are the most important, the most alligators, the heaviest hitters. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The bearings bank collapsed February 16. I mean, back in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. There's no
Speaker 2:other way to explain this other than,
Speaker 1:and this was a 2233 year old UK based merchant bank. They failed after a rogue trader's unauthorized losses. Those those losses, 830,000,000 bankrupted firm, those could have been hidden for months more. But, of course, rumor mill comes out of the ski lift and boom, gone. Dead February 20
Speaker 2:We gotta figure out more about this because it's a two hundred and thirty three year old company and one dude goes rogue.
Speaker 1:Oh, there's a movie about it.
Speaker 2:It's great. Maybe because he wasn't invited on a ski trip.
Speaker 1:He was in Singapore. They don't ski there. Yeah. Yeah. That's probably what happened.
Speaker 1:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The rest of the firm back in The UK was going to Switzerland, and he he got a was it did they even have email in '90 I'm kidding. So he gets an email. He says it's
Speaker 1:an honor. I know. I think they might they might have faxes, but not many emails. 95? That's, like, right on the cusp of email.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, speaking of email, dot com crash, March tenth two thousand. That that's actually twenty five years ago today.
Speaker 2:It became by the February, it was ubiquitous. Yeah. Mid mid nineties, they were definitely using. So he probably sent an email to a client. Yep.
Speaker 2:Auto or not a client. His coworker auto response. Yep. Hey. I'm in Switzerland this weekend skiing with the firm, and he realized that.
Speaker 2:He just goes rogue.
Speaker 1:He just goes rogue. He's like, I I I I I I gotta make more money because I gotta be able to get on these ski trips.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. That's for sure what's happening. So bankrupts his 233 old company. It is
Speaker 1:the can you believe it's the twenty five year anniversary of the dot com crash, March tenth two thousand?
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 1:There was a 78% index drop by '20 by 02/2002. Just total total sell off. And everyone's like, oh, it's so telling. Like, there's a minor drop today. It's, you know, forecast.
Speaker 1:But it just feels like that. Feels crazy today. Anyway, Enron scandal, 12/02/2001, the Argentine economic crisis in February
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:The Parmalot bankruptcy, the Enron of Europe, December twenty fourth two thousand three, early season.
Speaker 2:Is it dairy
Speaker 1:giant? Dairy giant. Bear Stearns collapsed during ski season. Bernie Madoff was discovered during ski season. You know that that has to be a ski season tip.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? That that has chairlift tip all over.
Speaker 2:Somebody said, hey. I tried to, you know, pull my funds out. Yeah. He said, you know, give me give me a few years.
Speaker 1:Theranos was discovered March 14. Gosh. You know John Terry Roo was probably on the slopes picking something up from some investor who passed and saw the saw the data room. The COVID nineteen market crash. I mean, really, clearly, really the faulty ski season.
Speaker 1:Evergrande, FTX, SVB, and Credit Suisse all happened during
Speaker 2:ski season. That last one makes total sense. Yeah. Because I'm sure that deal this was a rescue, but I'm sure that deal was getting done in Switzerland on the slopes. Definitely.
Speaker 2:So it's one of those things. Definitely. The the catalyst for these crashes are are happening on the slopes, and then the fix is also happening on the slopes. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it's For sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Interesting scenario.
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:Anyways Do I stay sharp? Did you get any did you get any tips this weekend?
Speaker 1:Not not too many tips. Just the usual, like, rare fish, rare birds, you know.
Speaker 2:Perpetual alpha.
Speaker 1:Putting, buying mice in a five to one female to male ratio and releasing them in your competitors
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Office. That just the usual
Speaker 2:A lot of people on your trip were probably doing that years ago.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. It's kind of It's kind of an old at this point. Most competitors have have have nice defenses at this point.
Speaker 2:It's priced in.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I heard there's a rumor that there's a firm building a Godzilla sized humanoid robot and, sort of shaking up the market. It's part
Speaker 1:of why going Pacific Rim mode.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's part of why Tesla's down. Mhmm. Tesla this year, at least Tesla is down over 36% in the last month, and some people are saying it's because somebody came out and they're making a a humanoid a humanoid that's a hundred times bigger than Optimus. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And, so anyways, market obviously pricing that in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the real the real risk is the dripped out humanoid. Right? As soon as someone puts it in March Balenciaga. Balenciaga, then it's truly over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of it's over, I have a funny post here from David Holes, founder of Midjourney. He's quote tweeting intel that just tweeted AI, and then he quote tweets and says, it's over. It's so
Speaker 2:It really is. They they they didn't
Speaker 1:quite talk ticked it.
Speaker 2:It feels like it's But they they they they marked, like, the last sort of potentially the the dying breath of the bull market.
Speaker 1:It's it's pretty powerful. Like, if you're running that brand, like, and you're self aware and you understand that by by you're going to like, the read on you posting that is going to be top.
Speaker 2:Yep. Maybe
Speaker 1:you should move Intel's entire treasury into a short position and then tweet AI. Yep. That's a really powerful move.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You need
Speaker 1:to make a quick buck. You're not really making much of semiconductors anymore.
Speaker 2:Intel is saying chipset going away. We need a different source of capital for this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Become a hedge fund. Yeah. Just know that that by by being extremely cringe on the timeline, you can move the market intel.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They did it.
Speaker 1:They did
Speaker 2:it. They did it.
Speaker 1:They did.
Speaker 2:Anyway,
Speaker 1:should we move on to some of these, some of these more serious stories?
Speaker 2:It is it is interesting. Yeah. I'm sure somebody out there has a ridiculous conspiracy theory that requires a tinfoil hat that basically says that, if you were a hedge fund that was needing to unwind a lot of positions and you knew that, like, a lot of trading activity was catalyzed by, like, general, you know, the retail traders are on ax being, like, what is happening? Like, the market's down and you needed to unwind. Like, one if you needed, like, an to buy, you know, needed to unwind, like, one if you needed, like, an to buy, you know, Yeah.
Speaker 1:Cause cause
Speaker 2:turmoil. Just just take down x. You start, you know, unwinding those positions.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Totally, probably, you know, unrealistic, but, it's funny to think
Speaker 1:about. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I mean, my my experience on X today has not been that bad.
Speaker 1:I've been seeing most most things I feel like.
Speaker 2:It used to be
Speaker 1:really bad for you.
Speaker 2:Terrible. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, maybe they're targeting you because you're too powerful.
Speaker 2:But I think it could be their they they could be faking it, one, to elevate their brand. We're so important that a nation state would attack us. And two
Speaker 1:faking it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And two, to remind us how good the app is Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And to say, like, we can take this away at any time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Pony up an extra That makes sense. $10 a month.
Speaker 1:I still I still think the leading theory is they're coming after us. Yep. Anyway, China Autonomous Agent Manus changes everything article in Can we can we create a Forbes.
Speaker 2:Manus? I'm gonna call it Manus.
Speaker 1:Manus.
Speaker 2:I mean Manus Manus?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:You should probably I think you're right that it's
Speaker 1:Anyway, there's a profile in, in the Forbes about something Yeah.
Speaker 2:I was just shaking up the timeline. Yeah. Last week.
Speaker 1:Shake it out.
Speaker 2:Why don't we read through it, and then I have some other supporting posts.
Speaker 1:One recent evening in Shenzhen, a group of software engineers gathered in a dimly lit co working space. You know, you're in the journalistic trenches when you're writing about dimly lit co working spaces. Everyone, if something's dimly lit We
Speaker 2:need to get
Speaker 1:making it into the profile.
Speaker 2:Need to
Speaker 1:get some rats. Get some rats. Furiously typing as they monitor the performance of their new AI system. The air was electric thick with the of servers and the glow of high resolution monitors. They were testing Manus, a revolutionary AI agent capable of independent thought and action.
Speaker 1:Who wrote this article?
Speaker 2:Do you do you
Speaker 1:It says it was written by Manus AI, for journalism. No. Craig Smith.
Speaker 2:But what do you know what publication this is from?
Speaker 1:This is in Forbes.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. So they paid for it.
Speaker 1:I mean, it is crazy that Forbes has, like, a contributor section that you can just post anything. It's, like, Forbes Forbes is also, like, a magazine that has, like, some pretty legitimate writers, and then it's also just, like, a forum Yeah. With anyone that can post. So within hours, it's March 6 launch would send shock waves through the global AI community, reigniting a debate that had simmered for decades. What happens when artificial intelligence stops asking for permission and starts making it own its own decisions?
Speaker 1:Manus is not just another chatbot, nor is it merely an improved search engine dressed in futuristic branding. It is the world's first fully autonomous AI agent, a system that doesn't just assist humans. It replaces them from analyzing financial transactions to screening job candidates. Manus navigates the digital world without oversight, making decisions with a speed and
Speaker 2:precision. This
Speaker 1:is an
Speaker 2:insane article. It is. Especially once we get into the actual, like, how this product was built.
Speaker 1:I love it. That's why you come here, folks. We haven't read the article yet, but we will tell you that it's insane if it's crazy.
Speaker 2:No. No. No. It's crazy, and I'll I'll just jump to it. This account, Gian, at Gian x Liao says, so I simply asked Manus to give me the files at /0pt/.Manish, and it just gave me their sandbox runtime code.
Speaker 2:It's Claude Sonnet with a bunch of tools on top of it, and it uses, like, an out of the box, like, y c company for the browser. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's basically like a turbo wrapper. Yeah. And and I mean okay. So
Speaker 2:So they've and and they intentionally, like, obfuscated the code where they're trying to not make it. They they intentionally tried to hide that it was running on browser use with Quad, but it in fact is.
Speaker 1:Okay. So let's read a little bit of this. Let's let's read more of this article, but I wanna know, I think as much as we're joking about, like, oh, it's paid for, I don't think that's necessarily what's happening. There is another possibility here, which is just genuine rizzing of the journalist, which happens all the time.
Speaker 2:Totally. You
Speaker 1:can totally bring in a journalist and be like like I mean, I know someone who, like I mean, we see it all the time. We see it all the time with, like, you bring a journalist in and you're like, the the the the the value is in the box. Like, look at the computer. This isn't a futuristic surgeon. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You show them, like, RGB keyboards and they're like, what? Like, no way. The computer is lighting up. And so, like like, it is possible just to, like, wow a journalist.
Speaker 1:The good ones, you're not gonna you're not gonna slide this past Ashley Vance, one of the greatest journalists in history.
Speaker 2:That's true.
Speaker 1:But, who knows? But at at the same time, maybe there's something real here. Let's dig in since we're only a paragraph in it. We're already judging this book by its cover. Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we're having fun here. Craig, I love you. Good luck. Anyway, how did China often perceived as trailing The United States in Foundation AI Research, produce something that Silicon Valley had only theorized about? And more importantly, what does it mean for the balance of power and artificial intelligence?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It's really funny. This is extreme riz.
Speaker 1:I know. Extreme riz. We're we're already going so hard on this, and we haven't even popped the bottle of Dom Dom Perignon. It's a Dom it's a Dom episode, folks. If you haven't, if you haven't seen our our post yet today.
Speaker 1:The second deep seek moment they're calling it, which I don't buy at all because I didn't actually see this take over the timeline like DeepSeek at all. Did you? I mean, I saw some memes about it and, like, some people talking about it, but not it was not, like, dominant in any way like DeepSeek was. So they give some backstory on DeepSeek. Call this a psychic moment.
Speaker 2:By the way, so the this article is called China's autonomous agent, Manus changes everything, built, you know, entirely on on US, Technology? Technology. And then TechCrunch TechCrunch.
Speaker 1:Anthropics in The UK. Right? Aren't they? Wait. Why do I think they're why do I think they're a European company?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Anyway You were skiing. Maybe you banged your head. John John hit his head.
Speaker 1:They just have, like, they just have, like, a European aesthetic to them, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They do have a state of mind. But I
Speaker 1:think they might literally be in San Francisco.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a But then TechCrunch publishes an article that says Manus probably isn't China's Second deep seek moment.
Speaker 1:Okay. Wait. Oh, TechCrunch did? Yeah. Oh, TechCrunch.
Speaker 1:And Axios Put them in the truth.
Speaker 2:Axios, who's always sort of very bearish on tech says new Chinese a AI agent draws deep sea comparison. Maybe they were
Speaker 1:referencing Well, that that's true. Like, that's Yeah. That's, like, literally what happened. But Manus represents something entirely different. It's not just another model.
Speaker 1:It's an autonomous agent, an AI system that thinks, plans, executes tasks independently, capable of navigating the real world as seamlessly as a human intern with an unlimited attention span. And so, I mean, I guess if you're a Forbes reader and you've never heard of an AI agent, this is, like, informative. Manus is unique in its ability to deliver end to end results across diverse domains without human prompts. While most other AI systems require some level of human input or operate within narrower scopes, Manus acts independently, offering a seamless to self directed experience. I mean, there is something real about autonomous agents and stuff, like, it just depends on, you know, how far are we going with this.
Speaker 1:Because they're like, it doesn't require any input, and they're like, if you tell it to do this, it will do it. It's like, well, that's an input. Right? Autonomous agents already exist in narrow domains. Think trading wow.
Speaker 1:Typo. Trading BTOs, clearly trading bots. This was hammered out.
Speaker 2:I guess they didn't But you
Speaker 1:know it's not AI. You know it's not AI. Yeah. That's the beauty of this. You know it knows.
Speaker 2:The maybe this entire article My respect to this article just went through the roof.
Speaker 1:But Manus multi agent architecture enhances its ability to manage complex workflows by deploying specialized sub agents for various tasks. That's pretty cool. A feature not yet standard in most autonomous AI systems. I don't know if that's if that's actually true. I think there are sub agents in in some systems.
Speaker 1:But anyway
Speaker 2:Well, this entire article is written, like, they they took all the talking points from a PR team Yeah. And just wrote it out right where
Speaker 1:This is an open secret that, like, companies write Forbes articles sometimes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's not as open as it should be.
Speaker 1:I guess. Yeah. This is what sets Manus apart from its Western counterparts. While ChatGPT four and Google Gemini rely on human prompts to guide them, Manus doesn't wait for instructions. Instead, it is designed to initiate tasks on its own, assess new information, and dynamically adjust its approach.
Speaker 1:For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn't just rank candidates. It reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision.
Speaker 2:It's funny because OpenAI could have come out with operator and done exactly that.
Speaker 1:100%. But they know
Speaker 2:it would
Speaker 1:be, like, over the
Speaker 2:top. It would just wouldn't work.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Everyone would be like, oh my god. And so
Speaker 2:I will actually be highly impressed with Manus and give them credit if we can see evidence of American users being, like, this is super valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Totally. I'm using this for the x y z task. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, maybe maybe operator needs a puff piece like this, like, to actually break through. That'd be that'd be good.
Speaker 2:Just yeah. The only thing standing between operator and world dominance is a Forbes puppet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Let let let's call Sam. Hey. You know, quit the going direct stuff.
Speaker 1:Quit quit the quit the beef. You just need puff pieces from here on out.
Speaker 2:Time to puff. Time to puff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We need the inverse Lulu. Don't go direct. Yeah. Just just puff.
Speaker 1:Pure puff. Anyway, Manus operates like an executive overseeing a team of specialized sub agents. Probably cool and good. This is called the multi agent architecture. I think this is going to be a real trend.
Speaker 1:It's cloud based asynchronous operation is another game changer. Game changer. I love it. Traditional AI assistants need a user's active engagement. Manus does not.
Speaker 1:It runs its tasks in the background, pinging users only when results are ready, much like a hyper efficient employee who never requires micromanagement. I want I want Scott Wu from Cognition on the show so badly right now because he's been building have him on this week? Yeah. Yeah. I'll I'll I'll I'll text him and and see if he can come on because, like, he's probably reading this being, like
Speaker 2:He's not reading this.
Speaker 1:He's not reading this. Let's be honest.
Speaker 2:The only article you should be reading in Forbes this week is Justin Mares, the Roth King
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Who will be coming on the show on Thursday.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's great. So we love Forbes.
Speaker 2:But that's like an actual Forbes article. It was like a profile Yeah. With a real writer Yeah. That was
Speaker 1:We went and hung out with him
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Instead of just, like, took the took the talking points and kind of You
Speaker 2:just managed you just managed to make this
Speaker 1:argument. Okay. Here. Let's go to Rowan Rowan Chung, a tech writer who tested Manus by asking him to write a biography of himself and build a personal website. Within minutes, the agent had scrapes social media, extracted professional highlights, generated a neatly formula formatted biography, coded a functional website, and deployed it online.
Speaker 1:It even troubleshot hosting issues without ever asking for additional input. That's a pretty cool use case if that's if that's doable.
Speaker 2:No. That that is the real potential Yeah. Of this technology, and it's amazing, and people are gonna do it. Yeah. I I only have issues with how it's being framed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. A shock to Silicon Valley system. For years, the dominant AI narrative has centered around large US tech firms, OpenAI, Google, Meta, developing more powerful versions of their language models. The assumption was that whoever built the most sophisticated chatbot would control the future of AI. Manus disrupts that assumption.
Speaker 1:It is not just an improvement over existing AI. It's a new category of intelligence shifting the focus from passive assistance to self directed action, and it is entirely Chinese built. It has triggered a new wave of unease in Silicon Valley where AI leaders have quietly acknowledged that China's aggressive push into autonomous systems could give it a first mover advantage in critical sectors. Like
Speaker 2:Break out the I I was gonna say break out the Dom because because I just wanna distract myself in this terrible article.
Speaker 1:But, Ridiculous.
Speaker 2:Anyways, continue.
Speaker 1:Yet madness raises profound ethical and regulatory questions. What happens when an AI agent makes financial decisions that cost a company millions or when it executes a command incorrectly leading to real world consequences? Who is responsible when an autonomous system trained to act without oversight makes the wrong call? Well, it's the person that initiated the, the system very clearly. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of legal court cases around that.
Speaker 1:Chinese regulators historically are more willing to experiment with AI deployment yet have out yeah. Yeah. But have yet to outline clear guardrails for AI autonomy. Meanwhile, Western regulators say
Speaker 2:they can do
Speaker 1:greater shit.
Speaker 2:You want. Just don't mention the Uighurs. Yep. Or It's pretty simple guardrails.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The era of autonomous AI agents has begun and China is leading the charge. The rest of us need to rethink what it means to work, create, and compete in a world where intelligence is no longer a uniquely human asset. Last line is
Speaker 2:What you got? Last line's fair. Yeah. I think that's that's the only Yeah. My only sentence that I didn't have to put in the future.
Speaker 1:Fair lines. There's all it's all junk.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's another there's another
Speaker 1:reaction to
Speaker 2:the, guy Philip Schmidt from the a he's at, Google DeepMind. So he's conflicted. So he said hype versus reality. It's built on anthropic Claude's sonnet, not their own foundation model, has access to 29 tools, and uses browser, browser use, which is a browser control product. The user communicates with the executor agent and not the planner and other agent.
Speaker 2:Each user gets an isolated sandbox environment, and it outperforms OpenAI deep research on the GAIA benchmark. And his his take is building AI products doesn't require training your own foundation model. We're probably just scratching the surface of what existing models can do with the right tooling and integration. And this is the big point. I I think it was Sarah Guo who was saying this, where, like, even if all the models just, like, ceased to get smarter and
Speaker 1:and There's still so much low hanging fruit. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's still all this low hanging fruit.
Speaker 1:The Aschenbrenner, like, the unhobblings.
Speaker 2:Like, you need to give it access
Speaker 1:to Python, you need to give it access to the web browser, and you give it access to databases. And once it has that, it's gonna perform so much better. It is funny that, I mean, this whole narrative would be so much so much stronger if they were using DeepSeek. Then it would really feel like, oh, wow. Like, you know, like like the like the yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like it might be two different Chinese companies and they might be built on they might be a DeepSeek wrapper. But it's like there's something serious going on over there in China. This is like kind of silly that they built it on on Claude but I guess they gotta go with the best. I mean it's kind of a bear signal for deep sea too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Odd.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, should we pop this bottle of Dom Perignon?
Speaker 2:Let's do it. If you if you if you're
Speaker 1:not following along, we open a bottle of Dom Perignon every time we double the show.
Speaker 2:You don't even cut away from me.
Speaker 1:Loud. We open a bottle of Dom Perignon every time we double the show's audience and size. We've been on an absolute tear lately. If you haven't been following, we crossed, 16,000, followers.
Speaker 2:This was a this was a while ago at this point. This was a
Speaker 1:while ago. We we there was a lot
Speaker 2:going on. We were doing guests, so we didn't have a lot
Speaker 1:of time to actually, do a proper Dom episode. But those who have been with us from the start have seen, four or five at this point.
Speaker 2:To the next one the next one is gonna be at thirty two k, and we just made a new hire, which we haven't formally announced yet. But I think we're gonna hit that 32 k mark, fairly quickly with where things are going. Thank you, sir.
Speaker 1:And every time I open the Dom, it goes everywhere.
Speaker 2:That's part of life. It is. It's part of champagne. It is. John, cheers to you.
Speaker 2:Cheers to the show.
Speaker 1:Cheers to Ben. It really is going fantastically. We like to say that, exponential growth is the most powerful force in the world. Cheers. And,
Speaker 2:Delicious.
Speaker 1:And also,
Speaker 2:Ben, do you want some?
Speaker 1:I'm good. The only
Speaker 2:Right answer.
Speaker 1:Thing you should,
Speaker 2:Stay locked.
Speaker 1:Stay locked in.
Speaker 2:Staying locked in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and the only alcohol you should drink is Dom Perignon.
Speaker 2:Correct. I stand by that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, let's move on to another AI story. Sam Altman's other startup is building an app to compete with Elon Musk's x. Talk about they are competing in every possible realm now. This is yeah.
Speaker 2:This is just
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. This is Hubio of OpenAI imagines a future where you'll where you'll constantly demonstrate that you're not a robot. His everything app is the answer, but first he needs to look deep into your eyes. From Christopher Mims, an actually great journalist.
Speaker 1:Love Christopher Mims.
Speaker 2:Mims.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. This is obviously built on top of Worldcoin, the eyeball scanner. Very controversial. But at the same time, there's a ton of bots. I don't know if you saw Nikita Bier talking about
Speaker 2:this,
Speaker 1:over the weekend Yep. Saying, like, you know, anytime you get some weird reply, just Google a
Speaker 2:person's name. See if No. Not even
Speaker 1:weird. Just any
Speaker 2:reply. Any reply. Yeah. See if they're a real person. Oh, the the the interesting, Yep.
Speaker 2:Relevant example to this was there was a woman that just was hyping Manus just over and over and over super aggressively, this woman named Jen Xu. And I she says she's an investor. She has a TED talk
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which which is real. Yep. But then you go to her fund.
Speaker 1:To be fair, Sam Hyde also has a TED talk.
Speaker 2:So That's true. It's not the bar is pretty low. Anybody can have a TED talk these days. Yeah. Everybody gets a a universal basic basic TED talk and Forbes article.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, anyways, I I look, I look up her fund, and on LinkedIn, there's there's nobody that works for the fund, not even her. Weird. So and it's an AI generated image. She's got a bunch of followers.
Speaker 2:It's, like, clearly, you know, you know, if she's a real person, Jen Zu, come on the show. Yeah. You're welcome. What's up? Talk to you about Manus.
Speaker 1:It's like, there's clearly a real person behind the bots. So, like, why don't they just use their
Speaker 2:own photo and name?
Speaker 1:Like, it's very odd. Anyway, let's read a little bit of this and and give you some backstory on, on what Sam's thinking with a social network that is bot free. Mims writes, these ubiquitous orbs would allow us to do anything requiring identification online or in real life from buying bread to paying taxes. Very interesting example there. It's a vision reminiscent to other efforts.
Speaker 1:It's like the most dystopian. It's dystopian. You're gonna use your orb You're gonna use your orbit when you're in the bread line.
Speaker 2:When you're in the bread line? When you're saying When you're paying uncle Sam.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Paying taxes and the future is just buying bread and paying taxes. It's not like It's joy. It it could be so much more options.
Speaker 1:It could
Speaker 2:be You could be sports betting. You're gonna need this to Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're gonna need this to go. It could easily be like, yeah. You you need this to log in to your flying car, like, you know, when when when you get through customs on the moon, like, you could be so much more optimistic instead of just buying bread and paying taxes. That's the future.
Speaker 1:What do they say? Death and taxes? Bread and taxes. That's the future. It's a vision Yeah.
Speaker 1:Reminiscent bread and circuses. Yeah. No. Bread and circuses. It's a vision reminiscent of other recent efforts, including Amazon's attempt to replace credit cards with our palms and Ant Group's efforts in China to make it possible to pay with your face.
Speaker 1:The big difference? The builders of an app called World, including chief executive Alex Blania, and his co founder Sam Altman of OpenAI fame, envision a time in the not too distant future when you can't do much without an ocular check-in. AI agents will be so prevalent and so human like that we'll need to repeatedly prove we're human to prevent those AI's from masquerading as humans on everything from payment platforms to social networks. I think that there is something legitimate here. Rune had a good post about like, the the the the variations in understanding how much AI is between you and the person that you're interacting with.
Speaker 1:And it's like it's like because there will be you're you're interfacing with like a humanoid robot, but there's there's a human teleoperating it and you're hearing a real voice versus the opposite which is, like, you're talking to an actor, but everything all the lines they're saying are chatty b t generated or something. So there's, like, all these weird edge cases.
Speaker 2:Or or the humanoid that you're talking to in English is a AI agent Yeah. That is just generating Totally. You know. And I mean, we're
Speaker 1:like, clearly, this is coming. Clearly, there needs to be some sort of counterweight to this, whether it's regulatory or technology. And I like the idea of a tech based solution here as opposed to something like, oh, we're scared of bots online. Let's ban them. Or, like, let's make it illegal to to use, you know, AI generated text.
Speaker 2:I mean, everybody that's traveled at all, it's now the facial recognition is technically not required Yeah. But it is so aggressively pushed Yeah. That people don't realize it's not required when you're at when you're in the Yeah. TSA Yeah. Security.
Speaker 2:You can just say, I don't wanna do a facial recognition scan today. And they go, okay. And they just look at your ID and you can go through. Yeah. So it's still opt in.
Speaker 2:But they've been sort of training, the citizenry on, you know, this technology. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And yeah. I always opt in. I wanna prove my loyalty to America.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and and the deep state, specifically. I want them to know. I'm on their side.
Speaker 2:I'm on your team.
Speaker 1:These are my guys.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. John's guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. AI agents will be so You're a
Speaker 2:future member.
Speaker 1:Yeah. To accelerate adoption
Speaker 2:state hall of fame.
Speaker 1:To refute let's just make sure we keep politics out of the deep state, folks. Yeah. To accelerate adoption of what the world calls its autonomous proof of human system, The company recently launched a mini app inside of its app, which is available for iPhones and Android devices. There's world's mini app is part of a broader strategy to create an everything app. These apps, so called super apps, are common throughout Asia.
Speaker 1:World's mini app store which currently includes services to send and receive cryptocurrency, chat with verified humans, and access microloans is a first step towards creating what Altman, Blania, and their team hope will be a vast ecosystem reaching more than a billion people. As and as the company's identification system expands, they anticipate their main competitor will be Elon Musk's own attempt at an everything app X. I think it will take a while until we seriously collide. Blania told me on Tuesday, given that x is now primarily a social network, the app formerly known as Twitter has yet to launch a payment service.
Speaker 2:So here's the crazy thing.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:I do believe that OpenAI will have significantly more monthly actives than x by the end of the year. Yep. Which is a wild situation where so Elon is competing with OpenAI by, you know, forcing you to use Grok in these various ways, which is smart. Yep. But then Sam Altman could catalyze his own competitive product to x by funneling people from chat g p t into the world everything app or whatever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's an interesting dynamic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So so the orbs have not launched in The United States. There but there are pictures of them all over in, like, foreign countries, which is kind of an interesting strategy. I mean, most of the time, like, you wanna launch in The US First, and then kind of broaden out, but they're kinda doing the opposite. Within about twelve months, however, Blandinga believes the two services will start to compete in earnest.
Speaker 1:If so, it would be notable development in part because making everything apps work in the West has proved exif extremely difficult. The bottom line is that for most people with Android phone or iPhone who haven't grown up in the tech ecosystems of Asia, Those app stores already offer the versatility and flexibility that everything apps do. Sam Altman's involvement in World might also encourage competition between World and x by virtue of
Speaker 2:their hard to
Speaker 1:publicistic nature.
Speaker 2:It's so hard to kick start on everything app because imagine if you go and you get Uber, DoorDash Yep. You build your own messaging. You know, you need some sort of like, WeChat, for example, has some core, like, calling
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Browser, chat, etcetera. And And if you go to an American user now and you say, hey, I'm gonna give you messaging, a browser, chat, and I'm gonna give you, like, Uber and all these other and games and all these things. They're gonna say, okay, I have all of that. So potentially, the only way to actually get somebody to switch over is to be like, I'm gonna pay you to switch. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:Other because, like, the value trade
Speaker 1:is not there. Right? Because if you get on World Coin, they give you some World Coin, then they can move in. It's like
Speaker 2:the same. So it's
Speaker 1:So it's possible. Same economics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So it's just yeah. Unless you're literally just like your users.
Speaker 1:It's like you could you could very easily imagine this working if Apple somehow I don't know, like, acquired it or like built it in. Because when you think about like like, you know, you need to be scanning all the time. You need very deep access to the camera APIs to make sure that you're getting like real images instead of like, images that have been passed through some sort of extra layer or something, all the different biometrics in the face in the face ID system. But I I don't think, like, face ID is just a world you can plug into.
Speaker 2:We need a orb to figure out if these are real images of JD Vance or
Speaker 1:not. Yeah. So, few people in The US have heard of World, formerly known as Worldcoin. If they have, it's probably on account of the company's unique biometric identification system, the Orb. So far, Orb ing millions of people hasn't proved popular with governments around the world as more than a dozen have either suspended its operation in their countries or else examined its handling of personal data.
Speaker 1:World investor and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on a recent episode of his podcast with Marc Andreessen that the loosening restrictions on crypto companies in The US, he anticipates world will become legal in The US this year. At present, the company doesn't scan eyeballs in The US or allow Americans to hold its world coin token for fear of regulators, Altman has said. When asked how long it will be until world sets up locations in The US where people can walk in, present their irises, and become part of the network, Blandia declined to say, but he adds the effort is top of mind for him. In general, Blania brushes aside concerns about regulators both in The US and abroad.
Speaker 2:So this is a crazy statistic. World and its orb eyeball scanner have verified 11,000,000 people. They scanned the irises of 11,000,000 people. Yeah. That is very impressive just from a logistical standpoint Totally.
Speaker 2:To get that done.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I I wish we had more footage on the ground of how this is happening because I'm imagining they show up in a small town Yeah. And they basically and it's just one dude with an orb, and he's like, okay. Like, you're come get your eye scanned. We're gonna you might get money in the future. It seems like probably the the trade.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Basically, you you get a token drop. Yeah. And maybe those tokens are liquid.
Speaker 1:You can sell them immediately.
Speaker 2:No. But I don't think there anybody's getting airdrop the token yet.
Speaker 1:No? Not if you scan? I thought there was one way to get access. I thought you could also just buy the token right now, but I don't know.
Speaker 2:You can just buy it.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:It's at a 7 and a half billion dollar valuation. Not bad. Fully diluted with a market cap of, 800,000,000 if you just look at the circulating.
Speaker 1:So significantly lower than than Trump coin.
Speaker 2:Well, I haven't looked at Trump coin.
Speaker 1:Is Trump coin gonna offer, eyeball scanning? Official Trump. They really should.
Speaker 2:Trump is down to a $2,000,000,000 mark.
Speaker 1:2,000,000,000?
Speaker 2:It's funny. So TrumpCoin is down less than the S and P. It's a better store of value than than store of value.
Speaker 1:Than than Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think it's doing that in Mag seven. This is fantastic.
Speaker 1:Other systems that rely on biometrics have unnerved users and governments in the past. It's easy to forget the hue and cry. Once raised about face ID on the iPhone, the face scanning technology most people now use to unlock their Apple devices. When it was introduced, there were concerns about it both as a potential security liability and because of the way it evoked mass surveillance systems in China that rely on facial recognition. World says its network is a ton is anonymous and secure, and only proves you're a person, but it could be made part of a broader identity system.
Speaker 1:One of World's distinguishing features is that is an an anonymous proof of human system. That is, its eyeball scan can verify that you're a human being and not an AI, but without additional software and systems. It can't identify who you are. What could drive people to adopt adopt a system like that worlds will be, the rise of ever more sophisticated AIs that will make doing business on the internet almost impossible. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, if the content's good, sign me up, scan my eyeball. I wanna I wanna see, good posts. And if there's no bots and the post's redder, I I I'm a I'm a slop pig for the content. I I'm willing to share my biometric data, if it if it gets me, you know, a couple funny bangers in the in the feed.
Speaker 1:The real question is is will will the slop app be
Speaker 2:more John, by the way, has already finished his first his first glass here.
Speaker 1:Cheers.
Speaker 2:Cheers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the the real question is, like, is, like, revealed preferences. The stated preference is, like, oh, I don't wanna I don't wanna interact with any bots online. But the revealed preference might be oh, I love when a hundred bots show up and like my post. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know? So we'll see. We'll see which one people go with. There's been there's been a few of these where
Speaker 2:The challenge here is that they're mixing they're trying to do multiple things at once. Yeah. Right? They're they're trying to build this, in their words, autonomous proof of human system. Yep.
Speaker 2:Which to me says it's more like this developer product that other applications and services and things in the real world could leverage as a tool to verify identity and prevent bots. Yeah. Simultaneously, they now have this token, which is its own product in itself. Right? We've talked about this before.
Speaker 2:The the the sort of the the product of the token is its price. Yeah. And so the incentive is just to to just sort of, like, drive up, drive up the price and and do sort of, you know, manipulate the market in that way. And then now they're also saying we're gonna also do consumer apps, and we're also gonna do an everything app. And it's starting to be, like, a lot of things have to go right.
Speaker 2:Right? Sam Lesson talked about this last week, and I think this is a good framework Yeah. Which is, like, if you're investing in something, how many individual things need to go right?
Speaker 1:And what was this phrase, like, no bank shots or something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And so here, like, you know, these some of these are experiments
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But and but and it's clear they have sort of, like, user traction on the supply side. They got they got eyeballs. Right?
Speaker 1:They got eyeballs. Mary Meeker would be proud. Mary Meeker would be very proud. 11,000,000 eyeballs during the .com. That's 10,000,000,000 in
Speaker 2:08/00. Or
Speaker 1:Easily. In market cap for sure. Easily. She'll she'll take that public all day.
Speaker 2:And so they got a a lot of things seemingly they're trying to do a lot at once. Yeah. And it seems unclear that any of these things are, again, what what users want.
Speaker 1:I mean, MIMS is you you were you were impressed by 11,000,000. MIMS here says world has only or verified 11,000,000 people worldwide despite the fact that it literally pays them Okay.
Speaker 2:So they are paying them in real time.
Speaker 1:25 tokens per scan, roughly $25 at today's prices, now offers 16 tokens per scan At the launch date for X's money account service is unclear. The company has said that it will count Visa as its first partner for X. X did not respond to a request for comment. And so, yeah. I mean, I wonder I wonder if they can keep the the token price high enough, keep
Speaker 2:raising money. He says here keep deploying. X has vastly more users than world does, but it's unclear how many people will be eager to entrust an Elon Musk come owned company with their financial lives. Yeah. I mean, they trust him to drive them Yeah.
Speaker 2:Around. So anyways, that seems like a stretch. But but overall, x has more users than world. Yeah. But I believe by the end of the year, OpenAI will have more users than x.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so we are are you proposing some sort of, like like, theory of, like, you know, Elon companies, and we should be thinking about, like, the No. I I'm more
Speaker 2:I'm more so saying I'm I'm more so saying you can imagine a collaboration between OpenAI and World Sure. Where they drive Worldcoin usage through
Speaker 1:the OpenAI. The same way that x is partnered with x a I. And they're two separate companies, but they're obviously integrated. You can see the same thing happening with with Worldcoin and the chat g p t app. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That'd be pretty crazy. But I but I think that makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You could imagine. So here's something
Speaker 1:I thought about before.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people have said, give me the best OpenAI models, unlimited access. Yep. One of the challenges there is that you could sort of do that, but then people would build software on top of them where they would just be, like, querying it and using it for other apps. Yep. And so Sam could come out and say, okay.
Speaker 2:You can use unlimited OpenAI as long as you are periodically doing this sort of, like, eyeball recognition through through the orb or some something to that effect. Right? So it's like you're actually using the product. You're not just, like, software, a bot that's just sort of, like, using up inference, on behalf of other applications. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:I wanna see I wanna see the the the the pen testers and the hackers try and beat this thing. I wanna see George Hoss jailbreak a an orb, because when when face ID came out, people were like, well, if I three d print my face and then I put it up and I have this mask, like, I can still get through, and it's not that big of a deal. People were trying to break it. But obviously, like, it is a huge vulnerability if it's like, you know, the FBI sees the
Speaker 2:phone and they're not supposed to be able to get in, but then
Speaker 1:they can just, like, three d print a picture of your face and then put hold it up and it verifies.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It seems like Apple's gotten pretty good at that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It does seem like it's you don't hear about, oh, the FBI hacked this person's phone by, you know, holding it up. Holding it up. I what was there some story about that where they they hold it up to someone's face, like, while they're sleeping or something like that? I feel
Speaker 2:like that
Speaker 1:that's happened.
Speaker 2:The the the safety mechanism is that you got your eyes have to be open.
Speaker 1:Oh, for for face ID?
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 1:Okay. Interesting. Let me confirm. Yeah. Well, it'll be a, a knockout drag on your eyes.
Speaker 1:Do have continues. I'm sure there'll be more entertainment. Never a dull moment when Sam Altman and Elon Musk are
Speaker 2:I would like to have out. I I I would like to get, I'd like to have the Worldcoin CEO on the show Yeah.
Speaker 1:I'd love that.
Speaker 2:And just have him give the the full pitch because it's clearly compelling
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:At a
Speaker 1:at a high level. Feel weird, but it also feels like something that, like, we could look back on and been like, yeah. That was, like, that was a novel enough idea that it broke out because because it's weird and different. And so
Speaker 2:I've been Yeah. And if I'm ever if I'm traveling in any exotic lands,
Speaker 1:you'd be all scanned? $25 is $25.
Speaker 2:Bucks is $25. That's that's a,
Speaker 1:It's a shish kebab somewhere.
Speaker 2:You know, Erewhon, you know It's an Erewhon burrito. Burrito. Yeah. Yeah. With with almost you could almost get it delivered off.
Speaker 1:Almost. Not overseas. Almost. Okay. Well, should we move on to to Palmer Luckey in the Wall Street Journal?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Who is this guy again?
Speaker 1:Palmer Luckey or Tim Higgins, the guy who wrote
Speaker 2:the shot? Tim Higgins of course.
Speaker 1:Tim Higgins.
Speaker 2:No. I'm just joking.
Speaker 1:Palmer Luckey, they're calling him Donald Trump's original tech bro. He gets his moment in this article.
Speaker 2:In the title.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Technology brother, please.
Speaker 2:Original technology brother.
Speaker 1:Once an outcast, the Anduril founder's vision for modernizing the government seems possible.
Speaker 2:Okay. Opening line of this article, generally, tech bros tend to overestimate their ability to change the world.
Speaker 1:It's the the I was talking to someone about this. We're we're gonna have salon on the show and and talk about, like, the the etymology of the tech bro thing. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is a tough thing because we love the journal. Yeah. It's overall fantastic. But to take such a clear and aggressive shot against our culture and the opening line
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Of, you know, what I'm sure gotta mention on the front page.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I mean, I think we've I think we've kind of, like, retooled and reclaimed this term enough, but it's just very silly because it's such a meaningless term that it really just meant, like, anyone who's a male intact
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Was a brow.
Speaker 2:Also, if you think about anybody who ever invented anything Yeah. A lot of them could be described as, like, oh, he was a guy that was into technology. Yeah. And, yeah, there's many more people that that sort of overestimated their abilities and came up short and didn't invent this important thing. But we need the we need a hundred people to try and only one to be successful in order to sort of move the world forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, when when this came out, I thought the bar for bro should be way, way higher. Like What do you mean? What I mean is that, like like so there's there's everyone in tech, and then there's everyone in tech who's male. But though not everyone in tech who's a male is a tech bro.
Speaker 1:In order to be a tech bro, you have to be actively running a technology company that's, like, building software or hardware. But then also doing keg stands, chugging Miller Lite, like, crushing nooners, lots of tattoos, lots of days on the lake, like, lots of tank tops, lots of push ups. Yep. Like, you have to be jacked.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, Alexis joined with a tank top.
Speaker 1:You could kind of say And
Speaker 2:he lives in South Florida.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yeah. I I I I I would I would forgive the journal for for calling him a tech bro. But,
Speaker 2:as a termite internment This this picture is he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like he's he's potentially the social chair at the top for term b at his college. I think it's
Speaker 1:really just, like, up to up to Palmer. If he if he's if he wants to be a tech bro and and use that, that's fine. But it, but for many years, it was, it was, it was used as pejorative. It was, it was used as a slur. It was used to discredit someone.
Speaker 1:And, and the reason was because, the idea of doing science and doing engineering was antithetical to crushing beers with your absolute boys in the frat house. And so by saying, oh, this person's a bro, it meant that they can't be a serious technologist when that was clearly proven false. Yeah. By Zuck The
Speaker 2:Winklevoss brothers. Yeah. All all these different folks. Running a top crypto exchanges.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. So, he goes on to write, Palmer's support of Donald Trump in 2016 got him according to his recounting booted from liberal Silicon Valley, pushed out of his job at Facebook, and made into a pariah. All that despite the fact that he had sold his virtual reality company, Oculus VR, to Mark Zuckerberg's social media company for billions and was seen as the OG of VR.
Speaker 1:I kinda like this writing, actually. It's pretty good. Dejected, he went on to build the next thing, killer AI. It's a hell of an origin story for Anduril Industries whose initials spell AI. Lucky named the company after the hero's sword in the Lord of the Rings, a weapon also known as the flame of the West.
Speaker 1:In many ways, Lucky wants his weapons company.
Speaker 2:And that's just
Speaker 1:What?
Speaker 2:It's just one of the best Yeah. Names and stories behind the name Yep. In Silicon Valley history. It's great. The flame of the West.
Speaker 1:Flame of the West. Incredible. In doing so, Lucky has become one of the brightest examples of a new wave of ascendant entrepreneurs. They eschew what has made Silicon Valley so powerful, personal gadgets and ad tech, and pour themselves into super hard and sometimes controversial sciences and engineering, as they say, and they they say can make America better. Supersonic airplanes, nuclear energy, space travel.
Speaker 1:These days, lucky It's funny to tell
Speaker 2:you a
Speaker 1:origin story.
Speaker 2:Because those examples shouldn't really be contra like, why are they controversial? We should have
Speaker 1:Yeah. Controversial. Airplanes that can
Speaker 2:go I
Speaker 1:mean, I guess nuclear is a little controversial, but space travel isn't controversial, is it?
Speaker 2:I guess it is. There's people that say we shouldn't go to space. Because the problem No. No. No.
Speaker 2:We have problems on
Speaker 1:because they're because they're challenging God?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it's an affronting God to try and be God's greener.
Speaker 2:Say, why are you spending all this money blowing up your rockets in space?
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure.
Speaker 2:We have enough problems on Earth with all those hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 1:Also very controversial if you're flat earther, the space travel stuff. So they they might be talking about that. They might be highlighting the fact that flat earthers don't like tech people. Oh, we're gonna go to space and they're like
Speaker 2:Doing it over and over. Yeah. Making movies about it. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 1:These days, Lucky likes to tell his origin story especially when it became, become cool for Zuckerberg and other tech leaders to be seen as cozying up to president Trump. Zuckerberg told Congress that Lucky's Facebook departure had nothing to do with politics.
Speaker 2:Speaking of Zuckerberg cozying up to, the American right wing Yeah. He was at the UFC Saturday night, and the stream was really not functioning well. Really? So Dana, like, the pay per view. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So Dana White was streaming from his phone.
Speaker 1:Really?
Speaker 2:And you could hear he was just yeah. It was round one. He just had it It's awesome. Playing. K.
Speaker 2:And you could hear Zuckerberg talking being like, oh, where are you streaming from right now? What account are you streaming from? Like, he he I could I think he wanted to go look and, like, test like, see the quality. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So even in even during the UFC event, he was founder mode. I wanted to make sure it was during the main event. That's great.
Speaker 1:It's cool. I love that. All these people have tidied up all of their inconvenient beliefs, Lucky says, which I love. I'm not going to throw it back in their faces and say, oh, yeah. But what about this thing that you did eight years ago?
Speaker 1:It's just not productive. Yeah. He said for one one man. That's a little bit different. That's not really an inconvenient belief.
Speaker 1:That's, like, a personal interaction. Yeah. But, yeah. We don't talk about politics on this show. Better positioned now, Lucky is clearly trying to take advantage of the moment that Trump's ascent has created, especially with the Elon Musk led government efficiency effort.
Speaker 1:Anduril and other high-tech companies are trying to convince the Pentagon that their technologies are part of the solution to for a more efficient modern government than what's offered by the lumbering giants in defense. The core thesis of Anduril is that we are not a defense contractor, Lucky said. We are a defense product company. We put our own money into building things, and we show up not with a PowerPoint, but with a working product. And so the taxpayer isn't taking on the development risk for these products.
Speaker 1:It's great. The flipped model
Speaker 2:Venture capitalists are.
Speaker 1:Makes a lot of sense. Exactly.
Speaker 2:We're grateful for them. Yep.
Speaker 1:Lucky was dismissed by tech peers as crude and out of touch. Even now, some in Washington remain unimpressed, but for different reasons. What does this guy know about virtual reality? What what does this guy known for virtual reality know about the battlefield? A rival last year called Andral the Theranos of Defense.
Speaker 1:I I I I think I know who they're talking about, and it's like it's like not not a rival at all. It's not like a another entrepreneur versus person. It's like a random poster. Yeah. Right?
Speaker 1:It's like it's not like
Speaker 2:An online rival.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But giving him too much credit to say they're a rival. Yeah. Yeah. Also, Theranos yeah.
Speaker 2:You could give it blood, but it would just sort of not you know, couldn't really do much with it. Yeah. They've shown that they can actually create products that do you know, they can blow up a truck Yeah. Which by nature means that Theranos is not the right comparison Yeah. At all.
Speaker 1:It's very silly. Lucky responded on the social media platform, acts with a photo of his own head superimposed on Elizabeth Holmes' body, a former journalist, a major, before dropping out to work on Oculus in a camper parked in his, parents home. Lucky understands the power of narrative. Even his name sounds like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Like, he should be a loan shark busting heads in Miami rather than an arms dealer court in Mar A Lago.
Speaker 1:He's known for his Hawaiian t shirts, flip flops, and goatee, and a willingness to talk about whatever's on his mind, conspiracy theories, video games, management theories, etcetera. The first time I met Lucky a few years ago, he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm.
Speaker 2:He's also so, I mean, this article is funny because it's making him sound really cool Yeah. Yeah. But at the same time, like, clearly is, like, has a negative bend to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Calling him an arms dealer versus a technologist focused on
Speaker 1:defense. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Comparing him to a loan shark busting heads because his name based on his name?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I don't get that. This person clearly hasn't studied, nominative determinism because there's nothing in Palmer Freeman lucky that says loan shark to me. Yeah. Anyway, the first time this writer met Palmer Lucky a few years ago, he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm about an idea for why people should raise hippos in the swamp lands of Louisiana for food.
Speaker 1:It was something he read about from the nineteen fifties. He said, I've read this book, The American Hippopotamus. It's a fantastic plan. It actually got all the way to Congress. There was a bill proposed to bring hippos to Louisiana, raise them for food, and it and, you know, Palmer's here arguing, and kind of the same thesis.
Speaker 1:It was better for land management than grazing cattle on prime real estate elsewhere. Like, you're not gonna build a bunch of housing on the bayou, so put the hippos there. They're a little dangerous, but you can, like, you know, fence them in, and then it's fine. And he says, lucky assured me that hippo meat was tasty. It's red meat.
Speaker 1:Though after some prodding, he admitted that he had never tried it. Yeah. Because Got to
Speaker 2:try it.
Speaker 1:It's it's hard to get a a hand on. Andrew was originally backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and cofounded with Palantir Technology alums. We should Democrats.
Speaker 2:We should give some background on on Founders Fund for anybody that
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Maybe. For sure. Maybe he
Speaker 2:joined a second ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyone who's living under a rock. It started out as building sensor towers during the first Trump administration to spot people crossing the border illegally.
Speaker 1:The company evolved to produce robot drones and then robot submarines called ghost sharks. The gist is to keep US Soldiers out of harm's way if they all operate with AI running on a central operating system Anuril developed, to run across its hardware. That's called Lattice, which we've talked about before.
Speaker 2:This show actually runs on Lattice.
Speaker 1:Just the most Alright. That's our nickname.
Speaker 2:That should be our new nickname for Ben. Hey, Lattice. Lattice.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Jar Pull up this
Speaker 2:this, post right now.
Speaker 1:The entrepreneur has proven AI has a place in war, and the Ukraine, Russia, and Israel, Hamas War show that futuristic ideas are becoming commonplace, changing the face of war and how it will be fought in the years ahead. In general in in January, Anduril announced plans to invest almost a billion dollars into a factory in Ohio to build autonomous jet fighters in The US for the air force, a contract it won last year. And in February, Anduril said it was taking over Microsoft's twenty two billion dollar contract with the US army to develop augmented reality headsets for the battlefield, a project that marries Lucky's past and present. And I I love that. A lot of people are like, what's gonna happen there?
Speaker 1:It's like, he is the perfect person for this. He's like the most qualified person in the world to do Let's see. VR for the military.
Speaker 2:Line. So So he made this announcement. He says, whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10 and then do it again. Like he wrote, I am back and I'm only getting started.
Speaker 1:It is over. We're so back. It's great. I love it. Yeah, it's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1:Anyway, yeah, it's so funny when people come for Palmer as like, oh, he he he's unqualified for this. It's like, he's, I think he's now like in his thirties, and he spent his entire career in in, like, the most powerful rooms in America in, like, high growth companies doing real work in every industry. He's met every industry player.
Speaker 2:Like The consensus view of the future of warfare is sort of it swarms of autonomous, often small Yeah. Hardware devices. Yeah. So maybe you wanna you want the guy who built, like, this super complicated VR product and scaled it to millions of sales. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe that would be a good guy to to to Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's like he's like One of the only hardware founders to be successful out of that twenty tens batch. Like, there were a few others that did okay. Smart watches, scales, and stuff. But, like, yeah, obviously, Oculus, fantastic. So we'll have to have him on the show, dig in more.
Speaker 1:A little bit of a little bit of a puff piece, a little bit of a just just like, you know, little tour of I mean of who Palmer is, really.
Speaker 2:A puff piece. Yeah. It's a little bit negative
Speaker 1:We had some negativity, some positivity, but, you know, didn't go too deep.
Speaker 2:We didn't have to put it too hard in the truth. So
Speaker 1:No. No. No. It was a mild, mild truth zone.
Speaker 2:Anyway I'm gonna use the restroom.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The founder of DeepSeek says not now. This is from the Wall Street Journal, March 10. The founder of try Chinese artificial intelligence star, DeepSeek, which of course spun out of that hedge fund we talked about, has rejected proposals to make quick money from his programs, telling prospective investors that he wants to keep the science project ethos that brought him to global renowned. Overwhelmed by millions of users, DeepSeek's chatbot has frequent service hiccups, and authorities around the world are restricting its use over data data security concerns.
Speaker 1:The US is weighing measures including banning DeepSeq from government devices, which of course makes sense because if you're using DeepSeq as an open source LLM that you're self hosting, you're not sending data there. There's still the question of, is there some sort of Manchurian candidate deep inside the weights? But that's kind of, you know, science fiction right now. But if you're using the DeepSeq app, literally every query, everything that you put into that, that chat, that that chat box is going to DeepSeq, which of course, is a Chinese company, and and ultimately responsible to the CCP, potentially. And so, he is also cautious about government linked investors, they said, because he believes the connection to Beijing could make it harder to win global adoption of Deep Sea AI models.
Speaker 1:Liang is at the Liang Wenbang has told associates that he isn't in a hurry to get investment. The Chinese company made a global splash earlier this year with its free to use open source AI models. It was the moment DeepSeek had aimed for since Liang's band of AI researchers began their quest two years ago with words they attributed to French director, Francois Truffaut. Be insanely ambitious, and and insanely sincere. Interesting.
Speaker 1:He's
Speaker 2:Interesting. So, I'm just pulling this up. Yeah. It was my first thought was, DeepSeek is number 20 in productivity right now.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Grok is 31.
Speaker 1:30 one.
Speaker 2:So Grok is one. Jimmy John's, I don't believe, is in the productivity category. Jimmy John's apps.
Speaker 1:If you if you weren't following the App Store last last week, the top three apps were ChatGPT, Jimmy John's, and Hallow Yeah. A a prayer app.
Speaker 2:Big week.
Speaker 1:So you really get to choose your God. You get to choose your AI God, your Christian God, or your sandwich God.
Speaker 2:So Jimmy John's is taking an absolute tumble. There there's 46 of food and drinks, and nowhere near. That's terrible. Yeah. Not even in the game anymore.
Speaker 2:They're gonna come out with a new sandwich.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get some get get some referral going on there.
Speaker 2:Or they could say, hey. If you can prove you're human, you can get a $25 gift card to Jimmy Fallon.
Speaker 1:Should do what Nikkita does where where you go to you go to get your sandwich, you check out, and then afterwards, it says, like, hey, do you wanna know what the sandwich artist that made your sandwich thinks about you? And then you click $5 and it unlocks. It's like, yeah. They thought you were kinda rude.
Speaker 2:Or like
Speaker 1:They thought
Speaker 2:you were kinda rude.
Speaker 1:Oh, they actually thought you were really nice and you tipped really well.
Speaker 2:They thought you were dripped out.
Speaker 1:They thought you were dripped out. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Pay to unlock a compliment.
Speaker 2:Secure male loneliness.
Speaker 1:This this might actually be a good idea. I I I think we gotta get Nikkita on the line and and and pitch it to him and then pitch it to Jimmy John himself. Jimmy. Who also should come on the show. Leong was invited to a who's who list of Chinese executives who met leader Xi Jinping on February 17, and his success has prompted a gushing of patriotism in China.
Speaker 1:You know, this is something we should copy. I feel like if you if you if you invent a a viral app or a cool foundation model, get let's get you in the White House, shake the president's hand, the whole tour, you know, both of us.
Speaker 2:Same if you if you are an athlete and you do something Yeah. Remotely. Yeah. Yeah. They always invite the winning Super
Speaker 1:Bowl team, presidential medal of freedom. You know? If you build a chat GPT wrapper that's
Speaker 2:Yeah. We need the medal of innovation.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And the medal of slop.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The worker seventeen guys from YC
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get him in the White House shaking hands.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:How you doing with that Dom Perignon over there? Why don't you polish it off? I'll refill. The state owned Bank of China has offered to grant That
Speaker 2:was that was just John not wanting to to cut
Speaker 1:To just do Double down.
Speaker 2:Had once. The
Speaker 1:state owned Bank of China has offered to grant a low interest loan to the company. People familiar with discussion said, in interest in recent weeks, executives from Chinese technology companies including Tencent and Alibaba have met Liang to discuss potential cooperation. I'm sure they want a stake at this company. Said people familiar with the companies, those people said Liang didn't want to charge for DeepSeek's core AI models which are currently free.
Speaker 2:If your model's if your model's so good, why don't you
Speaker 1:But you charge for it.
Speaker 2:To charge money for it.
Speaker 1:The startup published techniques that's used to train its AI models using downgraded chip NVIDIA design for China. It aims to release its next Allegedly upgraded. Designed for solving complex problems as early as April. So stay tuned for DeepSeek v four probably. We'll see if that's a bigger model.
Speaker 1:Be interesting to follow. Rise of the high flyer, Liang, born in 1985. We already did a deep dive on this guy. You can go find it on the channel. But founded a hedge fund known in English as High Flyer in 2015.
Speaker 1:Its Chinese name alludes to an ancient Han dynasty diagram with a magic square. A mathematical peculiarity in which the rows, columns, and diagonals of the square all add up to the same number going Sudoku mode. Sudoku vibes. I like it. Liang was proud that Chinese sages discovered the concept long before the West said people who know him.
Speaker 1:In its hiring advertisements, High Flyer sounded more like a technology firm than a hedge fund. This is pretty common with what's going on with Jane Street and Citadel. It even tried to put the word technologies in its name before regulators said no.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's cool.
Speaker 1:It looked for people who had won math contests. We've seen this happen in America before with the I m IMO gold medalists all going to work for Ramp. The fund promised as much as $270,000 a year for AI engineers at a campus event in 2020 to support their AI ambitions. Liang and his team used the profits from from the hedge fund, which charged the same type of hefty fees as US hedge funds do, so probably two and twenty or more. Liang's quant fund significantly outperformed the market between 2015 and 2020, sometimes scoring returns that were 20 to 50 percentage points more than stock market benchmarks.
Speaker 1:In 2021, Highflyer That's at Quant.
Speaker 2:Fourteen You're doing pretty well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Had 14,000,000,000. You wanna keep reading?
Speaker 2:I'll keep reading. Where do you end off?
Speaker 1:In 2021, Highfly's assets under
Speaker 2:In 2021, Highflyer Technologies assets under management reached around 14,000,000,000 according to people familiar with the matter. But the fund's performance soon faded by late twenty twenty one when dozens of Highflyer's products were down by more than 10% from their recent peak. The company apologized to its investors for its performance. One of its flagship funds lost money in both 2022 and 2023, although it beat the benchmark index it was supposed to track. Two years ago, High Flyer largely closed itself to new investors and started in mid twenty four 2024 to encourage some investors to redeem their investments.
Speaker 2:They're like, we have such a good short position that we're building. We would like to just sort of, take out your money and just let us just, like, reap the
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:By the end of last like
Speaker 1:But but it's such a very funny thing. A lot of hedge funds have done this.
Speaker 2:Like No. I know. I know.
Speaker 1:James Street doesn't have any outside capital, I believe, and a lot of other funds have have kind of moved towards less and less LPs if they can.
Speaker 2:By the end of last year, High Flyers assets under management had shrunk significantly. To me, this looks like, you know, one reason is that you just don't want sort of outsized, outside scrutiny into what you're doing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. More leaks. Newcomer's gonna get your returns as soon as you get an LP Yeah.
Speaker 2:Who has a subscription. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's right. And you can't have that happening. And and also just regulation because there's just more people that can sue you for saying, hey, you know, what what what you did was was not meeting your fiduciary responsibilities. Yeah. And then, of course, once you have so many investors, of course, you you might need to go public or something.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a lot of different
Speaker 2:So in mid twenty twenty three, the fund announced a strategic shift and created DeepSeek as an independent organization. Highflyer put almost all its revenue from the quant fund business into AI development, according to the company's posts on Chinese social media. Highflyer said it would devote itself fully to AI technology that serves the common good of all man mankind. Sounds like it was, written by the CCP. DeepSeek's AI models are generally free, although it does offer so yeah.
Speaker 2:They just they they just care about the good of humanity.
Speaker 1:Purely.
Speaker 2:Purely.
Speaker 1:Purely.
Speaker 2:Its problem is handling the traffic surge. So they're struggling to handle the traffic, but they don't want investment. They'll just take the ultra low interest rate loan from the Bank of China. Not conflicted at all. They're just in it for humanity.
Speaker 2:Okay? Like, it's just about Yeah. Humanity. They wanna keep the models free.
Speaker 1:Yep. Just free models. Just work with the government. That's it.
Speaker 2:We're gonna lever up Yep. From we're gonna take, low interest rates from,
Speaker 1:From from the bank of the bank
Speaker 2:of the CCP.
Speaker 1:Yep. Just one board member. Xi Jinping. That's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To lessen the overload on its servers, DeepSeek has been offering deep discounts to paying customers who use its services in the early morning. So you can get Timur DeepSeek credits if you're using it at the right hours. Great. So some Chinese tech giants such as Tencent are testing DeepSeek Seek to power features including a search engine of Tencent's messaging and payment app. They don't have to pay Deep Seek to do so.
Speaker 2:Tencent users can opt for a chatbot that is powered by Deep Seek Deep Seek but uses Tencent's own more stable computer network. Yeah. So since late twenty twenty three, DeepSeek pitched itself to several venture capital firms, including some foreign firms.
Speaker 1:This is
Speaker 2:a great strategy, by the way. Say you're not raising, say you don't want money, but then go raise. It creates this dynamic that, you know, can really get people to FOMO in. Apparently, the foreign firms declined to invest because they couldn't see a clear path to recouping their money. It's never stopped a western capital allocator from investing before, to be clear.
Speaker 2:Opening eyes, like, we're gonna we're gonna you you didn't they come out with some, like, prospectus that was, like, at a certain point when you're raising
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, tens of billions of dollars, you basically have to tell people, like, we see no path to Yeah. We see no realistic path to, like, recouping this investment.
Speaker 1:Oh, just like safe harbor stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Safe harbor stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I I think the projections are pretty pretty aggressive, but yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. It's it's we're gonna lose money, and then Yeah. We will be the only, you know, profit center in the entire world.
Speaker 1:Basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Good strategy. Yeah. So, anyways, he says for now yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:That's it. He says for now, Leong appears to be sticking to the vision he expressed in a rare interview in 2023. We don't do applications. We just do research and exploration, he said then.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I I think the real way to, like, kind of understand what's actually going on with DeepSeek is that you have to benchmark its, App Store performance as you just did. Were there at 47, 40 two, something like that?
Speaker 2:No. 21.
Speaker 1:20 one. You have to benchmark that against what happened with TikTok. I'm sure TikTok was number one in the App Store for a little bit and then dropped out and then but the question is, like, will it regain momentum and will it continue to become dominant? And will there be some sort of economy or or durable growth engine? Like, we saw with TikTok, there were there were a series of growth strategies that really drove it into the significant penetration of the Western market.
Speaker 1:And that was first and foremost, you know, a unique feature. You could not make a lip sync video with with, like IP protected music very easily on Instagram or Snapchat. Yeah. And so you would download just like you downloaded Instagram to do photo filters, and then it happened every photo that you filtered, it would happen to post, and And then you would share that photo elsewhere maybe. You'd save it to camera roll and share it elsewhere.
Speaker 1:Maybe upload it on Facebook, but it was shared to the social network. Same thing happened with with TikTok. Then it became, okay, well, now they're advertising on Facebook and Snapchat are very aggressively bringing in new users. Yeah. And then finally they created the creator fund.
Speaker 1:And so all of a sudden the power law creators on TikTok had jobs, had like businesses. And so you had people like Charlie de Melio and, there were a whole ton of these creators that would get a slice based on how much traffic and how much how many views they were getting. They were getting tons of views. They weren't get they weren't getting paid a ton, but they were making enough to justify quitting their jobs and going all in on content, and making sure that and then also just creating the dream of this new American dream of, like, if you have an idea or you're gonna dancing or you're hot or you have anything going on, you can get on TikTok. If you go viral enough times, you will start getting a chance.
Speaker 2:Corporate athlete. You remember that guy?
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. First probably, creators that we sort of, like
Speaker 1:Really resonated with.
Speaker 2:Thought it was more funny than I think anyone else. I know. What's the guy's name?
Speaker 1:I have no idea. I I I never remember the name of a short form creator ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's this weird Podcaster? If I The only thing you remember, you remember their bit.
Speaker 1:Yep. This guy
Speaker 2:who would Yeah. Yeah. He would wake up and he'd be, like, running, and he'd be, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Lock in. Another day today. No. I I I know exactly who you're talking about. I don't remember his name because it was just, like, so ethereal.
Speaker 1:It's it's very much like like TikTok in the short form stuff is very much like, bathroom graffiti. It's like everyone sees it. No one remembers it. Yeah. It's just like high high traffic, but it doesn't, like, make a statement as opposed to, you know, a two hour Christopher Nolan film, like, leaves an impression on people.
Speaker 1:Even if less people see it, it has, like, a profound effect.
Speaker 2:Or a really good TED talk.
Speaker 1:Or a really good TED talk. We talked to the we looked
Speaker 2:at the data. We talked to the experts.
Speaker 1:The Santa Hut TED talk is is very memorable. Well, I was wondering, it's one of the greatest comedy bits of all time. Like, it's it's very, very funny. Anyway, should we do, car technology driving people crazy? Or should we move on to the timeline?
Speaker 1:What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I'm down to hit this, and then let's get into the timeline.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yeah. So, you know, we're car people here. We like talking cars. We like talking trends in cars.
Speaker 1:We're big advocates for the next Tesla Roadster having a naturally aspirated v eight with a gated manual shifter. We're we're willing it. We're gonna make it happen. We're gonna have Elon on the show eventually, and we're gonna confront him about that, recommend it to him. And I think we have a winner on our hands if he can get that across the line.
Speaker 2:We do. We do. There's
Speaker 1:been a lot of talk about, oh, Tesla's
Speaker 2:down 36% last month.
Speaker 1:How do you get back?
Speaker 2:Gated, man.
Speaker 1:B 12. Exactly. Anyway, door handles used to be simple. Now they are another piece of technology that can fail. Drivers are finding that they wish the smart technology in their cars was just a bit dumber.
Speaker 1:Automakers have added new features, in twenty twenties that go beyond touch screens, assisted driving systems, and companion phone apps. Some vehicles come with infrared night vision, some seasonal ambient light lighting at interior fan cams that show rear passengers. That's obviously for kids, but, many drivers say it's too much. The share that had positive feelings about intuitiveness of their car controls fell from 79% in 2015 to 56%
Speaker 2:in
Speaker 1:2024.
Speaker 2:The perfect car the perfect car was the Porsche nine eleven, the nine nine seven generation manual. Sit inside. It's it's, you know, relatively high performance vehicles. It's not a track star or anything like that, but it's it's, you know, it's sporty. It's fun.
Speaker 2:It's not there's nothing over the top or anything like that. Every you know, everything is just, like, ultra utilitarian. Everything's super solid. Yep. You leave it in the sun forever.
Speaker 2:Nothing's gonna happen to the seats. It's a perfect car. And today, you have a situation where, I, actually have a funny story about that. I I bought the car on Bring a Trailer, during in 2021. Sold it at a profit, like, a couple years later, but took ETH for it.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Because I had a buddy who was like, would you, like can I, like, buy it, like, with ETH? I was like, yeah. Sure. Fine. ETH dropped, like, 25 to 20%.
Speaker 2:So I basically round that round trip back
Speaker 1:to the
Speaker 2:original purchase price. But, to compare that to today, the, one of the most annoying like, the the most annoying thing about my cars are are the smart features. So the g 63
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:There's this feature where, when I turn it on, it automatically has the lane keeping assist, they call it Sure. Which you have to manually turn off every single time, which is like a small
Speaker 1:It's so weird. Normally, you turn it on.
Speaker 2:No. It's it's default on. Okay. And it's and it is a truly terrible feature. You're driving and if and and I drive Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I'm I'm in Malibu. So to get out of Malibu, I have to take take these sort of, like Yeah. Canyons. One or two lane, you know, canyon roads. And so if you go slightly off of the road Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it breaks like one of the like, it's this very weird experience where it just sort of, like, has this braking effect that just slams you back onto the road, and it's the most jarring experience. It's never when you actually would want it. And then the other thing is you have to turn on the you have to turn off the thing that shuts the engine off when you're at a stoplight. And that's like, you know about this. This is like the Yeah.
Speaker 2:EPA Yeah. Rules where new cars have to have this feature.
Speaker 1:Also, if you put your car in sport mode, you now the EPA requires that when you start the car, it starts in eco mode or, like, comfort mode. It can't start in
Speaker 2:the most Yeah. You used to be able to start a nine eleven in sport mode.
Speaker 1:In sport mode and just leave it at that dial. Well, you used to be a proper country. It used to be a proper country. Yeah. I think the real the the the real the real sad thing here is that, you know, a lot of the premium features have trickled down.
Speaker 1:You know, you get, like, heated and cooled seats in, like, a Hyundai these days, but, some of the really important features have not trickled down. I'm talking about, you know
Speaker 2:Doors that go up.
Speaker 1:Doors that go up. That should be standard.
Speaker 2:That should be standard in
Speaker 1:the back of the Rolls Royce with with the champagne flute thing that grabs them so
Speaker 2:that Yeah.
Speaker 1:So that as you're going around a corner, your champagne flute doesn't fall over. Yeah. I'm gonna be able to hunt us back.
Speaker 2:Balance it on the back. And for
Speaker 1:some reason, it hasn't made it. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Just totally ignoring customer demands.
Speaker 1:I agree. Yeah. I agree. Anyway, people are having problems with battery electric vehicles. Owners of EVs reported their door handles being difficult to open at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles up from point two.
Speaker 1:Bad. It's like your door should always open unless you have a g wagon. Well, then it's hard to close. Right? It's not hard to open.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's the real tell.
Speaker 2:The real real real tell is if anybody has spent time in LA Yeah. Is if they know how to close
Speaker 1:the g wagon door. For for those who have Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Gotcha. Slam it.
Speaker 1:You have to
Speaker 2:really there, you know, if she knows how to close a g wagon door, just focus
Speaker 1:on yourself. We've changed door handles from being a problem free experience to now they pop out whenever the owner approaches, and we're seeing all these problems. Yeah. All all good. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is super annoying. I I walk out of my garage
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And my, like, my nine eleven just, like, completely, like, turns on. Like, it throws the lights on. It throws, like, the the the handle open. I'm like, I'm just grabbing the mail. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Relax. Just knows you're there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 2:Yeah. And this is the same thing with smart homes today Yeah. Where I have yesterday
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I hit the remote for my blinds Yeah. In my kitchen, and it didn't didn't move. Yeah. I'm like, oh, great. I'm pressing it again.
Speaker 2:I'm, like, playing around with the remote.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:I finally, like, walked, like, close to it Yeah. And it worked. But I was, like, I was just not my blinds were just gonna be down until I could find somebody that, like, specializes in smart homes to just come over and, like, figure out what's broken. And I'm like, that's so annoying versus just, like, go like, I I I think I'm very bullish on the sort of analog home experience of, like, you know, you flip a switch. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You have, you know, something that doesn't need batteries that you can, like, change the heater. You know? I don't need a remote for my fireplace. Oh, you're exactly. I'm not in my bedroom being, like, I really wanna, like, you know, turn on the my fireplace.
Speaker 2:Like, there's something beautiful about analog products. Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is somewhat of a boomer take, but I think that I think that there is something real about, like, technology introducing more friction over time. And it's been captured in some sci fi, like, I don't know if you've seen or you probably haven't seen Fifth Element, or, demolition man, but they both paint a picture of the future where basically, like, all those smart features are, like, very inconvenient. And so Yeah. Sylvester Stallone is, like, in demolition man getting, like, fined every time he swears and there's, like, he can't get, like, sexual
Speaker 2:or anything like that. Yeah. We should have done that.
Speaker 1:Be bullish on that. And then Except
Speaker 2:it would get boring quickly.
Speaker 1:And then Fifth Element, he lives in this, like, pod and it, like, deploys, like like, you you have been yeah. You have three points left. It's like a super connected world and, like, he's, like, trying to quit smoking and then gives him, like, one cigarette out of this, like, disposer and stuff. It's very funny. Anyway, great movies.
Speaker 1:You should see a film sometime, Jordy.
Speaker 2:I'll watch one.
Speaker 1:You should watch a movie for your your first movie. That would be great too.
Speaker 2:I have been enjoying, the new White Lotus.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. I I'm caught
Speaker 2:up. Very cliche to watch, but
Speaker 1:It's just watching
Speaker 2:Enjoy the watch. Everybody was like, okay. The first few episodes are boring.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then last night's really got deranged. It it it you know, the dad is developing this sort of, like, drug addiction and Yep. The mom is also, you know, and it's just all, like, you can tell it's just, like, starting to fully unwind. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I find that, like, I like, somebody was asking me, like, oh, like, was a good episode?
Speaker 2:And I was kinda like just starting in the middle? Oh, no. No. Saying, like, you're No.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No. Like like
Speaker 2:so Yeah. The really deranged way to watch right away.
Speaker 1:Is to just watch a random episodes. No. No. Like like like because I I hadn't watched any, and then I was in Tahoe and had some free time away from kids, so I catch up. I watched the first three.
Speaker 1:Then episode four premiers. I watch it and a friend asked me, how is episode four? And I say, like, oh, I thought it was great. Like, it's the same as all of them. Like, does it but does anything happen?
Speaker 1:Because people are saying, like, it's a little slow. And I was like, it kinda happens at the same rate in every episode. But more importantly, it's just such a lovely place to, like, hang out. It's, like, beautiful. It's intriguing.
Speaker 1:It's chaotic. There's, like, all these little vignettes. Like, I don't need there to be, like, some really major plot point. Like, I just lost it for a while.
Speaker 2:Why succession was such a hit is because it was allowing people to be immersed Yeah. In your everyday lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's what White Lotus is, like, basically about the Amman. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, it's like the the space
Speaker 2:or the Amman hasn't actually yeah. They haven't actually done it at an Aman.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They've done it at Four Seasons, I think.
Speaker 2:It's that level of
Speaker 1:But but that that's, like, the vibe. And so it's a very funny, like, way to poke fun. The the guy who wrote White Lotus actually went to my high school, Mike White.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We
Speaker 2:should have him on.
Speaker 1:Talk about it.
Speaker 2:That'd be cool.
Speaker 1:Business of White Lotus.
Speaker 2:Did you guys overlap?
Speaker 1:No. Come on. He's, like, 50 now or
Speaker 2:something. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:Like, this guy's, like, a Hollywood legend. Like, he's not,
Speaker 2:like, yeah, young. Okay.
Speaker 1:Okay. And you think I'm and you think I'm old, but I'm not that old. Come on.
Speaker 2:I mean
Speaker 1:Alright. He he he directed School of Rock, which, I admit, fell, I'm sure you haven't seen. But came out in, like, mid two thousands. You know?
Speaker 2:I've seen School of Rock.
Speaker 1:You see School of
Speaker 2:Rock? That's a that's a Okay. Yeah. It's a class.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the teacher in there based on my Latin teacher.
Speaker 2:Actually, so really?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's cool. We used to rock
Speaker 2:a legend. I would go to rock band camp every summer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it was basically that.
Speaker 1:What'd you play?
Speaker 2:I would, guitar and and I would sing.
Speaker 1:Oh, really?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Can you can you blast, like, a lick on the guitar if you had, like, an electric guitar here? Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because
Speaker 1:we've been talking about soundboard. Maybe we just get you a guitar and, like, whenever we wanna set you moment.
Speaker 2:I could actually have it just strapped up always here and
Speaker 1:Just like when when a founder comes on and they're they were interviewing them and you just wanna play the, you know, I have the size gong. I play the gong on the show. You play the guitar.
Speaker 2:I had one one moment that I always remember. We do this rock band camp, and there's all this prep. And then at the end of the summer, you play this, like, rock band camp Yeah. And there's all this prep. And then at the end of the summer, you play this, like, live performance for all of your extended you know, all the other kids in camp and all this stuff with your band of five people.
Speaker 2:And our lead singer I was a backup singer. Our lead singer didn't show up Yeah. For for the perform like, got cold feet. So you
Speaker 1:just had to This
Speaker 2:is a big group. And I I had to, like, go founder mode for the band. Nice. I had to sing it, but it was like it was like a foreign person singing, like, western karaoke. Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 1:It was
Speaker 2:just, like, the right sounds, but, like, didn't quite I just, like, didn't I didn't you know, it was, like, five minutes beforehand that I Yeah. Just pick it up. But Oh, well. Yeah. I think we need a guitar on some I've been playing a lot of, like, dinosaur themed renditions Cool.
Speaker 2:Of, like, picture, like, John Mayer meets dinosaurs playing
Speaker 1:it for my son. Yeah. That's great.
Speaker 2:They've been kids.
Speaker 1:Do do you do you know enough, like, power chords just to, like, jam and it sounds, like, vaguely, like, blink one a two or something like that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know how you know, like, the basic and then you
Speaker 2:just work
Speaker 1:it together. That's great. Like, the Suzuki method more or less. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I play piano, but I only learned, like, how to play, like, the sheet music. So I need to see exactly
Speaker 2:how into the symphony. So for you, it was more euphoric to just be immersed in it.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Just to even play the notes yourself.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You could have been a conductor. Another great
Speaker 1:I mean, great. I mean, I named my dog after a conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.
Speaker 2:Really? Yeah. That's great, Lauren.
Speaker 1:His Instagram handle is real Gustavo Dudamel. It's great. Yeah. And people get confused
Speaker 2:often. John's dog had more
Speaker 1:followers than And the conductor
Speaker 2:of the he used to be
Speaker 1:the conductor of the LFL Gustavo Dudamel is aware of the dog because people will see the dog because the dog has, like, almost as many followers as the actual conductor because I grinded up the account to, like, 20 k. And and and the conductor has, like, had, like, a hundred at the time. And so, like, people would, like, let him know. And we were all in LA, so we'd run into people and be like, oh, yeah. Like, that's the dog.
Speaker 1:Do you
Speaker 2:ever say I love
Speaker 1:that dog? The conductor.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What do you ever say? What do you ever say? I'd love to have your I'd love to have your dog, Gustavo, in attendance
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:At at
Speaker 1:We considered we considered bringing him. We we we had season tickets for a while. We gotta go back. It's right down the street from the capital of capital, the forces of finance, Disney Hall.
Speaker 2:We are going I think I think we both came to the conclusion that this, What's the next boys' trip? This article is not that interesting.
Speaker 1:It's not that interesting. I agree. Anyway, let's move on to some posts.
Speaker 2:Let's hit some timeline.
Speaker 1:Timeline and some ads, of course. I know that's what you've really been waiting for, the advertisements. Just because it's a Dom episode means doesn't mean we're not gonna do some ads. Come on, people. Tyler says, this is a really deep understanding how VC works tweet.
Speaker 1:The headline is, Cursor raises hundreds of millions at 10,000,000,000. Are these investors visionary or crazy? That is because we intuitively assume that those investors lose money if Cursor is ultimately worth less than 10,000,000,000, but that's not true. They just don't make money. To get the point to get to the point where investors actually lose money, the comp the company's valuation needs to fall below the amount raised.
Speaker 1:So if you're investing in this round, here are your outcomes. Cursor exits at greater than 10,000,000,000, you make money. Cursor exits at greater than 300,000,000 to 10,000,000,000, you get your money back. Cursor exits, at under 300,000,000, you lose your money. From a decision making perspective, that changes the discussion from, is this worth 10,000,000,000 to, what is the likelihood that this is worth 20 to 50,000,000,000 in a few years?
Speaker 1:And to be clear, that's good. I think it's a very good thing for us to have risk capital that is both clear eyed and focused on the potential for growth. And then there's some, there there's some assumptions here. What do you think, Jordy? Why'd you like this?
Speaker 1:It's a good breakdown of the Cursor deal. I mean,
Speaker 2:I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1:of people know that
Speaker 2:crap, but
Speaker 1:you can write
Speaker 2:it down. Founders understand this Yeah. Because they've run the calculus for the like, if I I mean, Jeremy was on last week and was talking about this.
Speaker 1:They don't usually run the calculus until series a or b. Yeah. I find.
Speaker 2:No. But, I mean, you they they intuitively understand, okay. You raised $10,000,000.
Speaker 1:You gotta return that to
Speaker 2:for $10,000,000, you're gonna make $0. Yep. And Jeremy talked about this last week, talking about founders that have 10,000,000 of ARR, but they raised $200,000,000 Yeah. And they're growing at 30%, which means that they could grow for another five years, sell the company, and still make $0.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Unless you get really creative. Like, there are plenty of stories with acquihires where the the investors get host and the founders get really, like, egregious pay packages Yeah. At big companies. And
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot
Speaker 1:of found a a lot of funds are really upset by that depending on their structure. Some funds don't care because they're like
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. We wrote down 10,000,000 whatever. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, we're we're we're just happy for you to go on to the next thing. Call us when you leave and get your earn out and do the next thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But but but it all back on one track.
Speaker 1:Delicate. It it is it is risky and Yeah. And and you can't step on.
Speaker 2:I would say it's
Speaker 1:it's the
Speaker 2:employees that are most frustrated by that because they're like structure of the earnout. Well, sure. But I'm just saying, I know a situation of a very high profile company that sold in 2021. Mhmm. And the the price of the acquisition was, like, way too low for the traction of the company.
Speaker 2:Yep. But the CEO got this, like, ridiculously large Yep. Like, incentive package at the new company and all the CEOs, like, didn't even get All all the employees. Most of the employees didn't get the opportunity to join the acquire. And so they were frustrated because they're like, we worked all this time for this equity and then Yeah.
Speaker 2:You you are the only one that got the
Speaker 1:Everyone just has to feel like it's fair. Yeah. And and there
Speaker 2:are ways to keep I thought this was worth highlighting of people. Like, everybody's trying to pick apart, oh, is Cursor's revenue durable? Yeah. It's it's so easy to switch off. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You've got y c partners, like, promoting Wind Surf. Sure. All this stuff. And this is the right framework to be you know, it sounds like Thrive and and Kushner
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Are doing this new round. Hasn't been formally announced yet, but it's not so crazy to price it that way. And it's possible that cursor I would imagine cursor is in a position where they don't need money. So they're saying if you want to own a piece of this company,
Speaker 1:you've got to
Speaker 2:pass the case. Yep. And if you're investing in this company and you think you could get a two or three x on this, if you're putting in $300,000,000, it's a great it's a great it's not necessarily a slam dunk grand slam venture return Yeah. But you're gonna return potentially hundreds of millions of dollars off of a single investment. And it's and and your downside is is relatively protected if you think that Cursor in a better case scenario could sell for $300,000,000.
Speaker 2:And I would and I would argue that I would argue that there's a lot of companies on Earth that even if Cursor's revenue dropped dramatically, they would say, we'll pay $300,000,000 because you have great tech and we can integrate it.
Speaker 1:You wanna do the top copilot Yeah. Two point
Speaker 2:o, basically. Yep. Yep. Yep. Is there anything I mean, there
Speaker 1:there there's a bunch of scenarios where where it could work out, you know, if they're just printing money and they just keep growing the business and they get to high EBITDA. Like, they can't trade it, you know, I don't know, 10 x EBITDA and get up to Yeah. You know, a couple hundred million in EBITDA. It'd be good. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right? It's not that crazy. And then, yeah. Also, all like, every hyperscaler might need something that looks like this if they're doing a lot of development or or or running a, you know, you you think, like, this could fit into AWS and the AWS tech stack. It could replace GitHub and be GitHub two point o or Copilot two point o.
Speaker 1:I don't know. It's certainly a a high valuation, but, exciting for the team that built
Speaker 2:it and very cool. We won't know the truth. And I mean, unless
Speaker 1:we have the full size
Speaker 2:going moment. Size going moment. Let's just give a cheers for the cursor team.
Speaker 1:Cheers. Let's down this, Jordy. Come on.
Speaker 2:Down it? I don't know.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna
Speaker 2:keep nursing it here.
Speaker 1:The brother. Well, let's go to Flo.
Speaker 2:Peer pressure. Do it. Great.
Speaker 1:Flo Crivello says, just bought 50,000 flower seeds on Amazon and going to throw them all over the place in San Francisco. Just a heads up, in case you're wondering why everything is suddenly so flight fragrant and beautiful, it'll be me. It'll it'll be all me.
Speaker 2:Amazing. I put this in for you, John. This is very Coogan coded. Totally. This is this is what you live for.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:We wanna elevate people that are making the world a more beautiful place, whether you are making putting flowers everywhere or putting up swings everywhere.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:You know, go repave the road. Yeah. If you're upset with the road in front of your house, just hire private contractors to save it. Do it yourself.
Speaker 1:Put some cement out there. Do it. No. I I I think smell is underrated in terms of the evaluation of a particular neighborhood. I've noticed that Beverly Hills smells very nice, but deafening noise pollution from all the Lamborghinis
Speaker 2:and Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, m five competitions.
Speaker 2:You're you might have something to do with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. It's a lot of it's a lot of kids clearly driving, like, exorbitant sports cars.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's They're they're daily driver to school with g d three r s.
Speaker 1:And I do think yeah. I I mean, we were talking about the EPA earlier. Maybe we do need, you know, some some quiet modes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But if you can put up enough flowers on either side of the road and
Speaker 1:and and Doth in that.
Speaker 2:Do GMO flowers to get them Yes.
Speaker 1:Superb. That'd be great.
Speaker 2:They could really dampen.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or, or or maybe just, you know, upgrade from the the Aventadors and the Huracons to 19 spiders because it's hybrid. You can drive in electric only mode.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's great.
Speaker 1:A lot of the new hypercars, supercars, they have an electric drive train. So they're they're hybrids. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They do.
Speaker 1:You can drive them quietly until you get up into the canyons. Nobody cares. Yeah. Then you can rip.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Flo, for your for your work.
Speaker 1:Thank you, Flo. I'm excited to see how that pans out. Visit SF and see the flowers. Let's go to Kyle Harrison with some news. Service titan is at a 7,950,000,000.00 market cap.
Speaker 1:This is an $8,000,000,000 company that started as software for garage door repair people. TAM is almost always a terrible reason to pass.
Speaker 2:So little more for you. Yeah. In college, I wanted to move to LA.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:I was working on what became my first, you know, company, and I was barely making money at the time. I was making, like, a couple grand a month, and it was like Yeah. Like senior year. I was like, I don't know if I can actually sort of scale this to the point where I can, like, pay for rent and food and all this stuff. So I interviewed at ServiceTitan.
Speaker 2:First interview went well. Second interview, thought it went well. They rejected me.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And I'm sure I would have done actually very well if I'd I mean, obviously, I wouldn't have stayed
Speaker 1:The wage cage? In the wage cage?
Speaker 2:No. Just financially just financially if I just stayed there. Yeah. But I won in the end because that turned you know, what I was working on turned into business that, you know, does millions of dollars in revenue to this day. So, you're lost service titan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I'm glad though. I'm glad they are building, you know, great software for garage door repair power.
Speaker 1:And I believe they're in LA here.
Speaker 2:They're in LA. They're in Glendale.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So right around corner from here.
Speaker 1:And and great name. Like, really aggressive name. I love it. Anyway, let's move on to an ad. We got an ad from AdQuik.
Speaker 1:Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only AdQuik combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go. Get yourself a billboard on AdQuick.
Speaker 2:Okay. So speaking speaking of ads Company. Yeah. Ted Turner, founder of CNN Oh, yeah. Started by running his father's out of home ad business.
Speaker 2:It was basically like AdQuick, but they owned easy there, John. But, instead of AdQuick, doesn't own the underlying inventory. There's sort of software layer on top of it, but Ted Turner's dad had started an out of home advertising network that, Ted Turner took over. And the reason I know that is because I was listening to the founder's podcast episode this morning because Reggie, posted about Ted Turner on Friday.
Speaker 1:Oh, great.
Speaker 2:Reggie Reggie had said, and this this post analysis is brought to you by AdQuic,
Speaker 1:obviously.
Speaker 2:He said, I've been re he says, I've been researching the eighties a bit as a comparison for viewing the world today. I feel like Ted Turner is such an interesting character, founder of CNN, which was the start of the twenty four seven news cycle. We restarted it for tech.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Genuinely a futurist in many ways. My favorite quote from him. We won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world live. And that will be our very, will be our last event.
Speaker 2:But the thing is, he actually made a video made for the last broadcast ever known as the Turner doomsday video. It was leaked by an intern and posted on YouTube.
Speaker 1:Amazing. We gotta watch that
Speaker 2:on stream. We should make our own doomsday video.
Speaker 1:We should.
Speaker 2:And it's just us popping hundreds of bottles. I don't Not even shrinking them. Just saying, hey, we have the stock file.
Speaker 1:It's a doomsday.
Speaker 2:We don't need it anymore.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What an interesting thinker to do that. I wonder if there's anyone else who's filmed a doomsday video intact that hasn't leaked. Like, is there a Zuck doomsday video or Elon doomsday video or Sam Altman doomsday video that's out there?
Speaker 2:Brothers?
Speaker 1:You're an intern leak it. Go find it and leak it. Put it on YouTube, please. Yeah. We'd love it.
Speaker 2:We'll cover your cost of living until you can get rehired by, you know, the next being air that you're gonna leak their doomsday video.
Speaker 1:That's great. Let's move on to Antonio Garcia Martinez. The hardest to acquire and most exclusive watch in the collection, almost three years in the making. And it says, thank you for being a part of the base team. This custom Seiko watch designed by our creative team honors precision, reliability, and motion, qualities that define base and drive us forward.
Speaker 1:Its automatic movement winds with every step, a symbol of the momentum we're building together. Here's to the work we've done. And to 2025, it's time to bring the world on chain.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:Inspired by do we still have
Speaker 1:Oh, the XL watch?
Speaker 2:That said it's time to
Speaker 1:Oh, it's time to create shareholder value. Yeah. Yeah. It's time to bring the world on chain. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A timepiece is great.
Speaker 1:No.
Speaker 2:I was wondering if I might for sure. I I gotta we gotta ask Quaid at Bezel. Was this factory or is this they just bought it and then they just redid?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah. You I mean, sometimes you can swap out the dial, and just kind of upgrade that. But, of course, go to bezeldot, go to getbezel.com. Get a luxury watch.
Speaker 1:Get a Seiko. Get a Grand Seiko. Get anything.
Speaker 2:Get an FP joint. We've been looking at we've been looking at, Patek, chronograph stopwatches. Oh, yeah. Because we want
Speaker 1:something time the show.
Speaker 2:We wanna top time the show and just looking at your computer clock. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Over 20,000 luxury watches fully authenticated by Bezel's in house team. Highly recommend installing the app, surfing, finding something great to add to your collection. In Tahoe this weekend, saw a lot of Apple watches. It really, really, harsh the mood, I would say. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It would be much better to see something, more more more fitting of that of that
Speaker 2:echelon of design. If you're and it yeah. If you're skiing to wear wear your nicest watch.
Speaker 1:What do you mean Apple Watch for?
Speaker 2:I, when I was in Switzerland Yeah. Just before New Year's, I saw a guy, that was just got back from skiing, and he took off his gloves, and he had, like, this, like, I think it was the orange the orange Aquanaut
Speaker 1:Oh, nice.
Speaker 2:That that Alex Karp rocks.
Speaker 1:And I
Speaker 2:was like, that's that's great. You know, go out skiing
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:You know, with a 6 figure watch on. Shows confidence in your abilities.
Speaker 1:It's great. Where is this second post? We got a lot of posts in here. We gotta go through. Let's just do this one.
Speaker 1:Mount Rushmore at sunset. Let's go. I just wanna just celebrate
Speaker 2:Mount Rushmore at sunset. Here
Speaker 1:we go.
Speaker 2:I got it. Is this is this a real picture? It almost looks
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It generated.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:Do Do you have this one, Ben?
Speaker 1:But, we gotta we we we gotta make a new Mount Rushmore. We gotta need more monuments.
Speaker 2:A lot of gills. We gotta do Where is your Rushmore?
Speaker 1:We gotta do, Statue Of Liberty on the East Coast. What was it? Statue Of Justice on the West Coast. Replace, Alcatraz with a massive statue. I love Mount Rushmore.
Speaker 1:You've been? Beautiful. I haven't been.
Speaker 2:We should go.
Speaker 1:We should.
Speaker 2:We should set up so I'd really like to get a a mobile studio Yeah. But, like, set up more like one of those phone phone booths where the truck, like, drops it off and then leaves. Yeah. So we're just sitting there right in front of Mount Rushmore recording with a nice view of it. Be great.
Speaker 2:And, if the police come, we'll just lock the doors and just keep podcasting as long as we have an Internet connection.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, yeah, just so cool to go blow up some mountains and make some make some faces. So much fun. Anyway, the story that I wanna talk about was Orca. Orca is an energy water, launched by this guy, Michael Moriarty.
Speaker 1:Thirteen months ago, he put up this idea, and it's now live and available. A hundred and fifty milligrams of caffeine, zero calories, zero sugar. And he posted thirteen months, four failed production runs, and more stress than we ever imagined all for the clear can worth it? Question mark. And, gift of trees.
Speaker 2:So to be clear, we covered this last week.
Speaker 1:Yep. Last week we did?
Speaker 2:This remember this is launch video of the guy from high school musical that was just reading out the signs.
Speaker 1:Very creative. Very creative.
Speaker 2:It's very fun.
Speaker 1:But but he's getting dunked on here by gift of trees of draw of barrel. Doesn't sound like that person has a, LinkedIn, but, we'll read it anyway. The clear plastic PET beverage can patent was granted in 2015 to a Polish packaging manufacturing company. This dude did nothing but pay a beverage contract packer to license the patent and fill it with liquid designed in the co packers lab. And yes, that is exactly true.
Speaker 1:That that's how you, launch a new consumer package goods product these days. You go to a co packer, have them, make it. He made the interesting choice of using the clear plastic can, which I wanna talk to you about because, on the one hand, it really, this really does stand out on the shelf, and you could imagine seeing this, and and and it would just look different than Celsius, Red Bull, you know, monster where they're all aluminum cans. But at the same time, plastic could not be less cool right now. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:What's your take?
Speaker 2:So I've seen Michael working on this for a long time. Yeah. I think he's got good instinct and taste. Yeah. I think the marketing's been great.
Speaker 2:I think the packaging looks cool. I think the concept of just a clear ish energy water, like, energy water, like, conceptually Yeah. Is just cool.
Speaker 1:As opposed to, like, this, like,
Speaker 2:And I do believe I do believe that
Speaker 1:Red Bull.
Speaker 2:It's a green and, like,
Speaker 1:it's, like, what am I drinking?
Speaker 2:So energy water is super cool.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I do believe the actual formulation is difficult to get to the point where it's zero calorie and it tastes good and it's not full with filled with a bunch of Exactly. You know, insane additives. Yep. I looked at this entire thread, gift of trees of draught of barrel by intractable lion.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And he's he's a massive hater Yeah. Against people that are not So so I actually looked at the back story. So he's a runs cideries.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So he restores these sort of legacy Yep. Orchards
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That have been rundown. Six two or three. So it's like the most craft process. Not even making the liquid, but Making the barrels.
Speaker 1:Making the trees. Making the trees.
Speaker 2:They're extending the orchard. So so he's
Speaker 1:The gift of trees and draw the barrel. Of course. The gift of trees and
Speaker 2:draw the barrel. So I'd like to have this guy on the show to talk about the business of of, bespoke cidery. That sounds interesting. But he's a huge hater on this guy, Michael, for no reason.
Speaker 1:Yes. I agree.
Speaker 2:It's Michael didn't say I invented the clear plastic. He said, yeah. If you're making a a caffeinated caffeine has a super bitter taste.
Speaker 1:Totally. Yeah. You have to iterate on stuff.
Speaker 2:You've gotta iterate on it. Yeah. It's a good thing that they didn't just use the first version Yeah. That they produced. And so this this is actually a much longer thread where where gift of trees have drawn off barrel.
Speaker 2:It's just hating on this guy super hard. And, I don't It's
Speaker 1:like, just don't buy it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Just don't buy it.
Speaker 1:It's fine. You don't have to buy it.
Speaker 2:I think capitalism. I think that Michael that. Michael will be dramatically more commercially successful, and gift of trees of drought of barrel is upset.
Speaker 1:I don't know about that. Is this really a long short trade right now? Who knows? Maybe they both have some
Speaker 2:I'm going long I'm going long Orca? Orca. I would not invest in gifts of trees of drought and barrel.
Speaker 1:I don't know, man. I think there might be something to this. If he scales this up, maybe he starts putting the cider in plastic bottles.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe honestly, here's what I'd like to see. Collab. Work it out. Both come on the show.
Speaker 2:Yep. We'll negotiate,
Speaker 1:a joint venture.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And you guys can collab. Maybe.
Speaker 1:You guys can collab.
Speaker 2:Maybe you can find success.
Speaker 1:In plastic bottles. Exactly what the world needs. Bring Yeah. Bring the science project with the trad based stuff together. It's a match made in heaven.
Speaker 1:Everyone can be happy. But Michael does respond and he says, I wish it had been that easy. We didn't invent the can. We spent thirteen months figuring out how and who could actually fill them at scale. At every step we were told just to switch to a normal can.
Speaker 1:Every canning line in the country is built for aluminum. Nothing was plug and play. And so, yeah, like, it is hard at work even to just put something in a can that exists or is patented because the manufacturing supply might not be there. And and and and this is the, you know, the the unfortunate, like, struggle and the schlep of getting a consumer product to, to to market. I mean, you you I'm sure you went through with Aurora where you're like, okay.
Speaker 1:There's like a million different manufacturing decisions to make. Yeah. And we wanna maintain our brand values and what we're doing.
Speaker 2:No. There's there's
Speaker 1:And there's a bunch
Speaker 2:of trade
Speaker 1:off stuff.
Speaker 2:I distinctly remember when, my cofounders, Brian and Charlie, we got the visual that looked almost identical to this, and then there were still, like, 10,000 decisions to be made. And and both Brian and Charlie were just, like, you know, incredibly in the weeds on every single one. Totally. They're all very high stakes and, you know, there's so many small setbacks and things like that. So, that that's the beauty of, the reason that beverage attracts so many sort of new entrepreneurs is that it's a super tangible idea of Totally.
Speaker 2:I can see it in my head. Yeah. I can put the right ingredients in the can, and then I'm gonna sell it.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it's just so much harder.
Speaker 1:It's a widgets business.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But at the same time, it for a long time software was super, like, high status because it was so complicated. You had to understand c plus plus or Java or Python and deployment and AWS and servers and all this stuff. And now it's been like, oh, well, you can vibe code a flight simulator in a day, but it takes thirteen months to put caffeine in a can.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, kind of kind of weird, but we're kinda flipping, and this is, like, the bits and atoms thing. Bits just move faster. Yep. So good luck, Michael. Send us send us some product.
Speaker 1:You see this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But I
Speaker 1:actually I looked at
Speaker 2:this stuff. There's a, my wife invested in a company Yeah. That at at, like, a at, like, a five cap
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That put olive oil in a plastic bottle Yep. And it's up 50 x, in in, like, two something years. Great. And so just something as simple as, you know, as sort of, in this case Yeah. Novel product energy water in a new form Yeah.
Speaker 2:In a new bottle. It's very possible this is wildly successful.
Speaker 1:It's funny seeing him gripe about production because wait until you try and go into retail, buddy. It's gonna be a
Speaker 2:big time. Change everything.
Speaker 1:No. No. No. No.
Speaker 2:No. Saying retail generally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just, like, actually getting retail distribution on this is gonna be a thousand times more frustrating. Not not that he can't do it and it won't be difficult, but it's gonna be a lot more just unreasonable.
Speaker 2:Basically, you have to pay us to put this on our own.
Speaker 1:Oh, totally. Like, every deal is bespoke and you're competing with Alani Nu and Celsius and Red Bull and, they all have monopolies and they all want, hey. We wanna keep our yerba mate on the on on the shelf and you're competing against every other company. And and that's really where the game is won. Like, Graza, the olive oil company has won because they're in every store now.
Speaker 1:It it it I'm sure they're doing great on e commerce, but, that company is not a 50 x return.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They don't figure out retail, and retail is hard and a schlep, and it's something that is probably gonna be make these four failed production runs look like the easy mode. Anyway, good luck to you, Michael, and send us some. We'd love to we'd love to try it. Should we go to Max Meyer?
Speaker 2:Before that, I'd like to do a promoted ad. Let's do it. So we have, from Jose, high class and tasteful. And he doesn't even do any type of review. He just does the headline, which is high class and tasteful, five stars, and he jumps right into the ad, which is very aggressive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What is this? But potentially a smart move because most people have been putting it. So he says, variable, an early stage company HQ in Dallas, helps manufacturers scale efficiently with a flexible on demand labor model. This gives US manufacturers a competitive edge over China without relying on AI sweatshops or bloatware staffing prop platforms like Trauba.
Speaker 2:Hey. He's taking shots. Mike's a friend of the show, but, you know, sometimes attack ads are are, are effective. Variable optimize your labor, eliminates low, or OT work, boost productivity and tracks key metrics. Visit variableops.com, and tell them to give Jose a raise.
Speaker 2:So he's just taking the initiative. He's he's just not the founder, but he's
Speaker 1:He's just
Speaker 2:getting out there. So, I'm gonna go there and just tell them to give Jose a raise
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Even though I don't think we're qualified unless we need to get
Speaker 1:No way. Unless we need
Speaker 2:to get unless we need to get Ben.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We yeah. We're gonna test drive that product.
Speaker 2:Ben, where are you? Oh, he's there. And one more review while we're at it. Okay. This is hard power soft beliefs in my review of Technology Brothers.
Speaker 2:TBPN is the seminal technology podcast of our day. John and Jordy exemplify the human desire to create and contribute to a product that is bigger than the self, a devotion to the aesthetic. And for that, I'm grateful to the brotherhood. This five star review is brought to you by TechnoRepublic on x, a new project that shares the best quotes and ideas from Alexander Karp's book, The Technological Republic. Follow Techno Repub, on x today to join your fellow brothers building the future of the West.
Speaker 2:Very cool. I'm gonna go I'm gonna go follow this right now. Fantastic. And, thank you for the review, Technically.
Speaker 1:Doing that, we'll move over to Max Meyer, also another publisher similar to Alex Karp. Actually works with a another Palantir cofounder, over at ABC. Max Meyer says, airports these days are the perfect picture of American affluenza. The US upper ish class has too much money, but never enough. Lots of suspicious pre borders.
Speaker 1:Teens in designer clothes. $500 headphones muttering what to flight staff. There are, like, 50 people in boarding group one now as well. You can see the confusion on people's faces who've clearly been boarding first for a while, who now wait twenty minutes standing just to have their spot in line. The lounges are overrun.
Speaker 1:And again, you can see the exasperation on the faces of people waiting for them, thinking they paid for a service, and realizing that now it's like Disneyland. Prices across the board have gone up and demand keeps up. This is one of the main effects of mass affluence, I guess. Airline taxes are as high as ever and as a result, actual budget flights, all of Ryanair, are not allowed. At this point, a budget flight is anything under $300.
Speaker 1:People are amazingly unforgiving. They get violent looks in their eyes when staff announce that overhead bin space will run out. For many flyers, being asked to check a bag is like being asked for one of their kidneys. So many people look at children like they're rodents that have infiltrated the house rather than our treasures and our futures. He's such a good writer.
Speaker 1:Parents are the scapegoat of every flight. Funny enough, the TSA feels like the one thing that has gotten better. Maybe I choose my airports and flying times well, but I don't remember the last time I waited more than fifteen minutes to get through. Sometimes the clear line is comically longer than the regular line next to it. And for whatever reason, people will just not move over to the shorter line.
Speaker 1:It's pretty rare to see actual bawling, but you do hear about those things. As a writer and chronicler of America, this entropy interests me. Yeah. Interesting. Basically, an ad for private jets.
Speaker 1:I completely agree with you, Max. Everyone should be flying in a g six fifty e r ideally. Maybe a rare
Speaker 2:We're gonna have that. Yeah. Superintelligence. Yes. That's one of the things Sam Altman's gone on record.
Speaker 2:He says
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:If Moss is is able to do this round Yes.
Speaker 1:Post AGI
Speaker 2:Stargate. Everyone is a private jet, obviously.
Speaker 1:Yep. So, problem solved soon.
Speaker 2:Max don't worry. Figure allegedly is training their robots to build p j's.
Speaker 1:Oh, so
Speaker 2:alright. Actually, you won't even need to Yeah. And mine the ore needed to Oh. Create the jet. Fantastic.
Speaker 2:You buy your figure for $20. Yeah. It'll actually build you a Gulfstream.
Speaker 1:And that's coming in twelve to eighteen months. Right? Yes.
Speaker 2:Perfect.
Speaker 1:Perfect. Okay. Great.
Speaker 2:Just just after the IPO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Just just after the next fundraise. Yeah. It'll be here. Great.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Well, that's fantastic. Let's move on. Avi Shiffman, back on the show. We gotta have him on live soon. He says, companies should shut down when the founder leaves.
Speaker 1:Pretty good take.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I
Speaker 1:mean, Ben Thompson has an interesting
Speaker 2:take on this
Speaker 1:end up.
Speaker 2:They and they should, if a founder passes away, they should just like, it should shut down in solidarity.
Speaker 1:In solidarity? Yeah. Dead man switch. If I die, my company goes with me. No.
Speaker 1:I mean, Ben Thompson has a take on this, which is basically, like like, companies do not need to go on forever. So it's actually okay for a company to be in kind of its late stage, and just dividend all all the profits until it's, like, done. This is kind of what's happening with, like, the cigarette companies. Like like, literally, no one is no one like, new smokers are not emerging. The market is shrinking.
Speaker 1:They just increase the price on the on the reducing customer base. And over time, they they make the same amount of revenue, but their cash flows are steady. And so they're just gonna like whittle down, basically. And they all have plans of like, oh, we'll get into the new markets, but none of them are doing that well in the new alternative market. And so a lot of people are just like, well, they dividend a lot.
Speaker 1:They, they, they pay out. And so, you know, if you have, you know, a hundred ultra is a hundred billion dollar company. If you invest right now and you get a hundred and $50,000,000,000 in cash returned to you over the next five years or something like that could be a good, that could that could be a good deal even if Very true. Even if the value of the stock is zero at the end. Like, it's fine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I I I think I think I
Speaker 2:think I
Speaker 1:think
Speaker 2:Avi dropping these, they're thought provoking.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And I think there's some value to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's fun. Good poster. Tim Susman says, we invested in a y c startup a week ago. Their revenue growth was so high, it would have been crazy to ignore it.
Speaker 1:Just saw them in alumni demo day. They doubled their revenue in the past week. Let's go. That's exciting. We're we're very it.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And a cheers.
Speaker 1:Let's size Gong that. Let's cheers the Dom Perignon.
Speaker 2:And we have some YC news. Yeah. We will be we
Speaker 1:will be at Denno Day in just a few days.
Speaker 2:I was gonna say we're gonna share it tomorrow.
Speaker 1:We'll be there. What we're gonna announce what we're gonna be doing there tomorrow, I guess. But let's move on to, Windsurf sharing a, a video from YC, from their light cone podcast, Jason. So Windsurf says, not every day you wake up to a shout out from y Combinator. Jared Freeman explains why founders are switching to Windsurf.
Speaker 1:Is Windsurf a YC company? Or are they just, like, loved by YC? I don't know. What's figured
Speaker 2:out? The the the fact that the partner was coming out and taking such a strong stand
Speaker 1:Makes you think. Anyway, Jason Lemkin says brutal competition always comes to software. Partners become competitors. Collaborators compete. Usually, it takes a few years though to get real.
Speaker 1:AI is accelerating at the pace, an order of magnitude in coding and contact center already. I can't really understand that. Will it do the same to your category? Interesting. So we have I mean, I would, like, I don't even understand.
Speaker 2:A lot of people a lot of people are pushing back on this saying if you don't think that cursor indexes your code base
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You haven't used it. But
Speaker 1:Index your code base? Oh, like, pulls it in as, like, training data? I mean, there there's just, like, layers and layers to this fight right now. There's, like, the cursor versus windsurf debate, but then there's also the cursor versus Claude code debate that's happening. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Will it all commoditize? Who knows?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Anyway, a lot of Gil's in the Gundo wondering if he should get some curls and zen in. He also really wants a mustache. This place may have changed me forever. I like I love when a new, size lord capital allocator takes the Gundo tour. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Augustus took him around, I'm sure. Yeah. Introduced him to everyone else. Little bit of a controversial post because he spells Zyn wrong.
Speaker 1:It's z y n. He's in z I n. Hit him and also in the Gundo, man. I mean, this is, like, you know, highest penetration place in the world for Lucy. So Zynn's kinda out there.
Speaker 1:Gotta get on the next generation of products when it comes to nicotine. But, you should do some curls and some bench press, and you should, you know, basically just wind down your podcast, become a size lord, become a mass monster, and go for your IFBB pro card. I bet you
Speaker 2:That's what we wanna see.
Speaker 1:And I think you have it.
Speaker 2:It's got what it takes.
Speaker 1:I think you get diced. Get big.
Speaker 2:And do the the the Mount Rushmore or the West.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Next topic, my, dear friend, my oldest friend Yeah. Called me last night Okay. Like, long after I went to bed. I go to bed very early.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:So I saw it this morning, and, he just joined the chat on YouTube and said, hey, Jordy. He just called me, and I told him I'm I'm live right now. I can't talk. And he said, in the chat, I wanted to let you know I got engaged. So congratulations and cheers to to Cody and his lovely fiancee Cheers.
Speaker 2:Emily. And, congratulations, Cody. I love you. And, if we ever need a financial model, he is the guy to go to. Right now, we're just sort of vibe coding our finance, but, absolute finance, Chad.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be easy.
Speaker 2:And, congratulations.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of your early bedtime, we are sponsored by eight sleep nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8sleep.com/tbpn and upgrade your sleeping experience. I was miserable the last two nights honestly at the Ritz Carlton, which not a bad hotel. They don't have eight sleeps and it was miserable.
Speaker 1:It was it was not a fun experience. It really it really does ruin every other bed. So get one, never travel ever again, and just stay in your eight sleep forever.
Speaker 2:It truly is unbelievably good.
Speaker 1:It's it's it's so good. We highly recommend it. Check it out.
Speaker 2:Anyway This morning, I I was So I woke up. Yeah. 04:45. Yeah. It's effectively 03:45 according to my brain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was You gotta have some completely upset. You're dead.
Speaker 2:It's the dead of night. Yeah. And you know what I thought to myself? I thought, thank god for 8sleep.com/tbpn Yes. Where anybody can get $400 off Yes.
Speaker 2:Eight Sleep Yes. And, get to experience the the sort
Speaker 1:of The joy, the
Speaker 2:feeling warming effect, in the morning.
Speaker 1:It really makes waking up so easy. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:And the vibration alarm clock I
Speaker 1:don't do that one.
Speaker 2:You gotta try it. You gotta try it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's subtle.
Speaker 1:I I I've tried it. I I I just the warm works for me.
Speaker 2:It's subtle, and, it is It's
Speaker 1:a good option.
Speaker 2:It's fantastic.
Speaker 1:It's great. Well, anyway, go check it out. Let's move on to the Optify Kids. This is the, YC company that was canceled briefly, but they're back. They created, sweatshop software essentially.
Speaker 1:That was the critique of them. But they leaned in, they went direct, and they printed t shirts that say justice for workers seventeen. And Spore says, the Optify kids are gonna be alright. They're having fun with it. They clearly realized that their first message didn't resonate.
Speaker 1:They turned it around, and I cannot wait to talk to these guys because I think they're having fun, and I and I love it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We're gonna talk to them Wednesday.
Speaker 1:Yep. It was great. So, love love justice for worker seventeen, creating a lot of fun on the timeline, a lot of, a great meme and, still just so funny that that that happened all the back and forth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But they
Speaker 1:had a good time, and I think they I I think this is the right way to handle it. They they they didn't put out some groveling post saying, like, we're sorry. They there's just, like, they they kinda took a breather.
Speaker 2:I think if anything, it will be helpful because every investor at the very least will wanna talk to them for the novelty this point. For the novelty of talking to the Yeah. The legends that made that video.
Speaker 1:And, I mean, we we talked about this before. Like, there's so many things that you could tweak in that presentation and that software that would be beneficial. And, I mean, they created such a meme that someone built an optifine clone for PMF or dye.
Speaker 2:Which is fully functional.
Speaker 1:It's fully functional. You can go to PMF or dye.xyz and see the productivity of the two guys that are in the cage right now, Blake and Patty. And so you can check it out, and it's it's it's hilarious that somebody built that so fast. But I mean, it helps when they're live streaming constantly. Anyway, let's move on to another YC founder, an alum, one of the legends, Emmett Sheer.
Speaker 1:He says, when I was CEO ing at Twitch, one of the things I do every batch for of interns was a very short presentation on the origins of the company and then a q and a. One of the questions is always, where should I work, and what job should I get, or should I start a company? And he goes on to say, it's an interesting question to try and answer for an intern I didn't really know because, of course, the actual answer is dependent on that person and their life. So I decided so I had to figure out how to articulate the framework I used. First, there's money.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you want money, but money is well known for diminishing returns, debatable. After you have enough for rent and food and so on, then, so you don't wanna optimize for cash. It's more of a constraint. Then there's prestige. How much will getting this job impress people?
Speaker 1:Prestige is mostly a trap for the same reason designer clothing brands are bad deals. It's also debatable. Brand might make something less discerning. People think better of you, but it won't actually make you better or better off. Power is also on offer usually called impact and the chance to make a difference or mission.
Speaker 1:We like power because it feels good to wield the pure joy of throwing a stone in the lake and watching it splash.
Speaker 2:We need to have it to write a book.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, he's a great writer and and really great prince. What what is your framework when someone asks you, where should I work or should I start a company?
Speaker 2:So general advice Yeah. Generalized advice is probably one of the most dangerous things in the entire world. Yep. There's nothing yes. You can get advice and try to kind of general advice from somebody that you don't know
Speaker 1:and try
Speaker 2:to apply it
Speaker 1:to your life. Everyone should have an eight seat. Everyone should buy a watch on bezel. Everyone should be Run on ramp. Public.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everyone should be on ramp. But I hear your point. Yes.
Speaker 2:And, obviously, advertise on adequate.
Speaker 1:But Obviously.
Speaker 2:No. This this is the thing. To to me, the the the most important thing you can do in your twenties
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Is develop a meaningful enough relationship with smart enough people
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Whose lives you admire and only get advice from them. Yep. Like, David Senra and Sean Frank are, like, two of the only people on Earth that aren't immediate family or you that or Ben Yeah. Our lovely producer Ben. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But but in general, like, I I only take sort of professional advice from a couple people in the world Yep. Because they understand my values. They know the things that I care about. They know what I wanna optimize for. They know all these things.
Speaker 2:And they are have a unique and earned perspective. Yep. And so it's much better to have, you know, one or two people and and only get sort of professional advice from them. And, that is the thing that has served me, the best in life. The best career decisions that I've made were in response to people like Sean Frank's advice, people like, you know, David Senter's advice, and I can kinda pinpoint even the conversation.
Speaker 2:So Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get a real role. Start a podcast.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like like, I think if you had a strong personal relationship with Naval Yeah. I'm sure he could give you really retarded. Really, really good advice. Yep.
Speaker 2:But just blanket, you know, taking his advice, like, you should work like a lion, and then somebody, like, works hard for two days and takes, like, two days off. Like, don't do that. You know? Like like, you need to sort of, like, take it
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And process it, and then ideally get the same advice from somebody that actually knows.
Speaker 1:Well, I threw this post in here randomly, but it seems like an answer to Emmett Sheer's post, from Guillermo Rao over at Versal. He says, in a world of infinite possibility, the alpha is in focus, quality, and depth. And that feels like the right level of, like, meta advice that that is almost safe to apply to everyone. It's not it's not go work at this specific company.
Speaker 2:Except if you're an investor and you're like, oh, I'm really into games, and then somebody pitches you a CRM and then it becomes Salesforce. Yeah. And it's like you, like, you you took the advice of, like, I'm just gonna fall like, so so so, again, you can always apply these things.
Speaker 1:Focus, quality, and depth. Does that keep you from investing in in Salesforce?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because you're saying I'm gonna be the best I'm gonna be
Speaker 1:the best investor. You're too focused
Speaker 2:on deliver the best returns, and I'm just gonna focus on Well, it
Speaker 1:depends on what you're focusing on. You could be focusing on founders. Right? Quality of businesses. Like, it it doesn't necessarily need to be something as narrow as, I mean, focusing on a specific company or a specific niche.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You'll be focusing on a, on on a an axiom of investing. But, yes. Yeah. I I I hear your point.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Well, let's go to another post about being young and doing great things. Gabriel says, the only thing stopping me from doing great things when I was young was that I thought I was a moron, and there were too many people smarter than me. I still do. The only difference is that I realized everyone else is a moron as well.
Speaker 2:It's kind of midwitt meme.
Speaker 1:Yes. It was actually huge. Over maxing. Yes. When I when I realized the bell curve of people is not that wide and and being economically productive seems to come from what thoughts and insight about the world rather than genes.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:A good one.
Speaker 1:Did we talk about ServiceNow at all?
Speaker 2:I don't think we have. So ServiceNow
Speaker 1:is buying Moveworks, the AI platform for almost $3,000,000,000. They were backed by Bain Saigon. Kleiner.
Speaker 2:For the shareholders and Bain and Lightspeed and Kleiner and their LPs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Great moment. Great moment. Great exit.
Speaker 2:ServiceNow is a company that I just don't know anything about. I
Speaker 1:mean, honestly, when we put this in the stack, I was like I kinda got them confused with ServiceTitan. Yeah. Yeah. ServiceNow, ServiceTitan, they're, like, we're doing two stories of the same thing.
Speaker 2:And this is a 60,000,000,000 company.
Speaker 1:But this one's much bigger than ServiceTitan. ServiceTitan's what? 8,000,000,000?
Speaker 2:It's a cloud computing platform for the creation and management of automated business workflows.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:Buying a platform called Moveworks, which
Speaker 1:is bros hate this. Hate this one weird trick. Yeah. Make a hundred billion dollars building b to b SaaS. Augustus The haters.
Speaker 1:Somebody needs to do a a wellness check on Augustus, to Rico right now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because Honestly, somebody should go and and do, like, a content warning. Like, tell Augustus, like, hey. Don't listen to this episode. Minute, you know, or whatever
Speaker 1:you want. Trigger warning, Augustus.
Speaker 2:Trigger warning. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's talking about ServiceNow. Be careful. You're you're gonna be super depressed when you hear how much money people are making automating business processes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, that's the thing. Some people wake up, and from a young age, they know they want to live a life that allows them to deliver value through automating business processes using AI. Like, that's beautiful. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's very cool. Guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:their life's work. They're life's players.
Speaker 2:My icky guy is My icky guy. Automating business processes.
Speaker 1:You're laughing, but it's true. It's real. Some people love this and bill for it. It's great. Anyway, if you wanna get on on service now and the action, head over to public.com.
Speaker 1:Investing for those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions. Of course, this is not financial advice, but it is the preferred platform of The technology brothers. So go check it out.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to former brother of the week, Justin Mayers, profiled in none other than Forbes, our favorite publication that we never say anything negative about. We love Forbes here.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Eight years of hard work, and Justin and Kettle and Fire have been featured in Forbes. Congratulations.
Speaker 2:To be clear, this this was not a contributor piece that, you know, you can basically get for $20. Yep. This was a cover story. Cover story. Daily cover story.
Speaker 1:Let's go. Beautiful picture of Justin.
Speaker 2:It shows him, looking looking fantastic. And a bunch of the brothers Yeah. In the community, quoted this
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And, you know, said, said nice things about Yes. About him. But, I I just liked The Boy Who Sold Soup.
Speaker 1:The Boy Who Sold Soup.
Speaker 2:That's
Speaker 1:that is so good from John Feal. Oh my god.
Speaker 2:The boy who's also The boy who's so sick.
Speaker 1:Incredible read. So good.
Speaker 2:Here's the thing, though. Justin is is is incredibly, hardworking and kind. Yeah. And, It's fantastic. There's a reason he's a former brother of the week.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. And I'd you know, some people have said to me they don't know when I'm being sarcastic or when I'm being serious. Not being sarcastic right now. Incredible human.
Speaker 2:He's a great guy. And I'm lucky to call him a friend. Yeah. And, I can't wait for our episode. On, Thursday when Justin joins, we're gonna be talking about the hot topics in consumer health.
Speaker 2:We'll talk about who's making money on Maha Yeah. Which I'm excited about. Yeah. What, what the vibes are like at Mar A Lago where he's been spending time. It's great.
Speaker 1:And,
Speaker 2:of course, the of course, the bone broth empire Yeah.
Speaker 1:That he's built. He made he made his money in
Speaker 2:Mar A Lago. He's basically built a, almost like, I don't even say this ironically. He almost has a monopoly on the bone broth money.
Speaker 1:He really does. He really does.
Speaker 2:Because it's actually How much
Speaker 1:money is he making, Jordy?
Speaker 2:A hundred a year.
Speaker 1:Let's go.
Speaker 2:A hundred
Speaker 1:million dollars
Speaker 2:a year. That's their run rate. I think they're probably well, that that was when whenever you know, I think they're probably well beyond that now.
Speaker 1:It's a fantastic business. He's a fantastic entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:We got a fantastic post from Bucko Capital Bloke, and I'm gonna read this.
Speaker 1:I'll read it.
Speaker 2:Dude, it's Jevon's paradox. It's literally Bamal's cost disease, a classic example of Gell Mann's amnesia effect. Oh, that's the Monty Hall problem. It's orthogonal to Dutch disease. It's a prisoner's dilemma.
Speaker 2:You're a prisoner. You're in prison. You're
Speaker 1:in prison. You're in prison. It's great. Mental models, frameworks.
Speaker 2:Trapped in a mental trapped in a mental model, trapped in a framework. Can't get out. Anyway, it's absolute banger. He's had some great posts today. I while we're at it, I'm gonna I'm gonna pull
Speaker 1:It's great. He he
Speaker 2:was talking about the Redfin acquisition. Right? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I I think that's the bottom of
Speaker 2:the stack. The bloke was,
Speaker 1:Says Redfin got acquired today. Shout out to their CEO for one of the wildest things I've ever heard on an earnings call. The analyst on this earnings call for Redfin says, what if mortgage rates don't come down? Of course, this would be harmful to Redfin's business because they buy and sell homes. And when mortgage rates go down, people buy a lot of homes.
Speaker 1:And Glenn, the CEO says, which
Speaker 2:is a public, this is a public company Do we have
Speaker 1:any of this? I don't think so. Glenn says, we'll drink our own urine or our competitor's blood stay in the foxhole.
Speaker 2:No. He says great question. Plan b. Plan b is drink our own urine or our competitors' butt blood stay in the foxhole.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you remember, but our last earnings call ended with a single line from a Who song, Won't Get Fooled Again, where I said, we're not banking on low rates when other people had thought they might come down. I don't know. Weird. Go Glenn. He got out.
Speaker 1:He sold the company. Congrats to Glenn. Congrats. Gong for Glenn. And, yeah.
Speaker 1:I love a, I love a, I love a CEO dropping a hot take on an earnings call. Real, you know, don't have a lot of time to post when you're running a public company. You gotta get those bangers out in the earnings call when the analyst asks.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. They were they were trading
Speaker 1:Yeah. What was revenue worth? It was a Zillow competitor. Right?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. They were trading at, like, a quarter of their revenue. Oof. Rock. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Tough tough go. Anyway But they got out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They got out. Let's move on to Blake Anderson. He's locked in the cage right now, but he says ten x will be a hundred million dollar company within one year. He's manifesting.
Speaker 1:What's their ARR right now? They haven't launched yet, so they're still at zero. But they haven't spent much money. They're only a couple weeks into the cage, and their goal, of course, is to hit $1,000,000 in ARR in ninety days. And he's very confident about that and he's confident that he will take it further.
Speaker 1:Take it all the way to a hundred million dollars.
Speaker 2:All the way.
Speaker 1:So good luck to Blake. If you wanna go check out what he's doing, go to pmfordie.com. Anyway, let's move on to, oh, Josh Wolf. He says, incredible leadership in The United Arab Emirates as a husband to a super successful feminist in a male dominated world, and father to two bold daughters, raised by my sacrifice at all single mom and grandma. Women have more rights in The UAE than some US states.
Speaker 1:He's clearly fundraising, but I just wanna take a second to say, The UAE is one of the greatest innovations in human rights in the world, and I think that everyone needs to acknowledge that at this point. Everything in The Middle East is fantastic, and, and I can't say enough good things. And, you know, I really hope that everyone in The Middle East can can can come together and support American financial markets, more aggressively than ever before.
Speaker 2:What do you
Speaker 1:think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:I agree, John. Fantastic. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to Gary. You're not,
Speaker 2:you're not beating the the fundraising allegations. Will Will started a a rumor mill last week when he said he was leading around in TBPN. It's you know, you know, there have been rumors that we had been in The Middle East. Yep. And so the the you're not really helping the rumor mill, John.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, back to the show.
Speaker 1:We do what we have to do. Did you hear about, the Simpsons producer who was forced to demolish his 24 year old Simpsons inspired treehouse after the city of LA demanded he permanent like a single family dwelling? Gary Tan says, deregulate housing? Yes.
Speaker 2:In my backyard. And, yeah.
Speaker 1:I I I couldn't agree. It it is post fires. It's more important than ever to reconsider, how permitting is is is done. It's a tree house, and they wanted it to be ADA compliant. So they wanted a wheelchair ramp into the tree house, which I think was probably impossible.
Speaker 1:So they made him tear it down. Very sad. And and and and my my problem with this is, like, I am okay with, I'm okay with with housing regulations and and and rules around how you build things, because, you know, you don't want someone building some massive structure that just falls over and destroys your house next to you. But you need high throughput approvals. And what I was what I was kinda pitching was, like, there should be a CAD plugin where you design your structure, and at every moment, it's running the algorithm to say, is this approved or is this denied?
Speaker 1:And then you can just see, okay, everything's green, click print the plans, go build it, you're good. Yep.
Speaker 2:That's a good point.
Speaker 1:Instead of, oh, we designed the blueprints, and then we send them in, and then month later it comes back, and they have one tweak, and then another month, and just goes up back and forth and back and forth, and and it's very annoying, and and now is the time, to, to fix housing, and Gary Tan has been a very vocal voice for that, so we love it. We actually have a whole bunch of, of Gary Tan posts here. Let's go to the next one, he's quote tweeting someone who says, I, so I just simply asked Manus to give me the files, oh we already talked about this, and, and Gary. Yeah. He he this, but
Speaker 2:He came to a similar conclusion, which is all the alpha is in prompting custom prompting tool using clever workflow and evals. So, I can't wait for demo day. I'm sure we're gonna see a lot of people adopting similar approaches to, Manus. Some some people call it Manus. Some people call it Manus.
Speaker 1:My noose. The nominative determinism is that you'll be hung by it. Yes. It's not great. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Dark. Things got a little spicy with the acquired podcast. They flew out to Taiwan. They interviewed TSMC founder, Morris Chang. Legend, I've been calling for Morris Chang to go on Joe Rogan for years now, and it hasn't happened.
Speaker 1:We saw Zuck go on. We saw Peter Thiel go on. We saw Naval, Rob Conte go on. Mark Andreessen's been on. I wanted Morris Chang to go on Rogan.
Speaker 1:Didn't happen, but fortunately, the good folks over at Acquired Podcast got it done. They flew out there. They interviewed him. But funny exchange, Gilbert says, TSMC is essentially the only trillion dollar company in the world, not on the West Coast Of The United States. It is incredibly it is this incredibly important thing in the world.
Speaker 1:It is it's this unlikely success of grand scale, and Morris Chang cuts him off and says unlikely in your opinion. And Gilbert says, I mean, you started it when you were 56. There are many things, and Chang chimes in again and says, I'm not gonna argue with you. I merely asked it. I merely asked as a point of curiosity.
Speaker 1:I didn't think that it was unlikely. Mod. I love it.
Speaker 2:That's great, though.
Speaker 1:Go over to meet with a, what, 80 year old founder, and he just tells you, I never had a doubt in my mind. Not for a second.
Speaker 2:Not for a second.
Speaker 1:But I mean, the the the acquired guys are doing fantastic interviews, and they are I I mean, I hope this sound bite goes viral or, like, there's more sound bites from the Morris Chang, interview that go viral because, there's that famous, Jensen Wong, interview that they did where there's that clip that goes viral where they're like, if you had to go back and you had to do it all again, would you do it? And he's just like, no. I wouldn't do it. It's been too hard. It's been too miserable.
Speaker 1:I don't like it. It's bad. Like, it's just But I'm here
Speaker 2:and check out my leather jacket.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's a very, very, very funny interaction. And they're and they're they obviously do a ton of research on these companies, so they show up extremely prepared and get great sound bites. And so go check it out.
Speaker 1:You can listen to the TSMC founder, Morris Chang, on the Acquired podcast. You can go to their YouTube. It's probably in their RSS feed as well.
Speaker 2:Okay. One more post. Yep. And then, and before we do that last post, I wanted to share
Speaker 1:That's what you gotta do before the next post.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna stop myself at two because, I You
Speaker 1:didn't finish the bottle.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's no rule about a there's no rule about a Dom episode.
Speaker 1:Listen to the chat. What do you think? Should join us in the bottle?
Speaker 2:No. But I wanted to, give a quick shout out to Wander.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Number one place to book vacation rentals in the world. They are more than vacation homes. They are simply,
Speaker 1:find your happy
Speaker 2:No. Okay. Start over. Find find your happy place. Find your happy place.
Speaker 1:Book a wander with inspiring views.
Speaker 2:We need the guitar for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We do. We do need the guitar. Hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and twenty four seven concierge service as a vacation home, but better. Jordy, do you have a link or a code?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You just have to go to wander.com/tbpn. Yes. If you just create an account, they're gonna give away a I think it's like a four ish night trip to someone in our audience.
Speaker 1:That's a long trip. That's nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Longer than I was in Tahoe.
Speaker 2:So go do it. It takes a second. You can use Google or any other login, and you'd be silly not to, and invite us. Maybe we'll come.
Speaker 1:That sounds great.
Speaker 2:Rarely leave the house Yeah. Except to to do the show.
Speaker 1:But if you book one that has a podcasting room, we'll be there. Yeah. Fantastic. Let's go to Gabe. Tech guys take up a creative hobby because they want to prove they are in sold, unlike all other tech guys.
Speaker 1:And then they'd end up taking, and then they end up with the exact same hobbies as all other tech guys, which are making electronic music and photography. Bodied.
Speaker 2:I do know some tech guys that have taken up electronic music and photography.
Speaker 1:Yep. But that's why we advocate for Nurburgring, bodybuilding.
Speaker 2:MMA.
Speaker 1:MMA. Long distance rifle shooting.
Speaker 2:Watchmaking.
Speaker 1:Most dangerous game.
Speaker 2:Car collecting even. Even if you don't wanna drive the cars fast, just collect the car.
Speaker 1:Sailing alone across the Pacific Ocean.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:These are hobbies that will differentiate you if you're looking for something. You're not gonna become glorious and remembered in Yeah. In the trenches of EDM and photography.
Speaker 2:Carve your own Mount Rushmore Yes. In the Marin,
Speaker 1:Highlands.
Speaker 2:Highlands. Yes. I agree. Just do it.
Speaker 1:Someone says, wanna go bouldering? And Gabe says, I will not do this. Very popular hobby. But, yeah, get, get out there, get deep in some rabbit holes on YouTube, find an obscure hobby That's right.
Speaker 2:And get
Speaker 1:really, really deep. Watch collecting. Go to Bezel. Start start collecting watches. It's much better than photography.
Speaker 1:Anyway, Landseer Enga says you think cursors growth is is crazy. There's a company in this YC batch that hit $50,000,000 in annualized profit in two months. What do you think, Jordy?
Speaker 2:Annualized profit.
Speaker 1:Like Weird weird stat. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because if you're
Speaker 1:just just CapEx.
Speaker 2:Because if you're making that much money, you should probably hire and scale the team and and sort of spend even you know, like, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Annualized profit, it's like, did you make is that, like, one good day?
Speaker 2:It'd also be hilarious if it was yeah.
Speaker 1:It was one good day.
Speaker 2:One hour. No payroll Yeah. Expenses hit. And we're just Exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Nothing play. Pure per profit that day.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's still impressive.
Speaker 1:It's still impressive. I'm sure I'm sure it's a great company, but, it is it is funny that we're now talking about annualized profit, which is not, like, really a thing. Cash balance over time is what matters. But
Speaker 2:That's right. If you're
Speaker 1:making so much profit and you need to manage your expenses, you gotta go to ramp.com. Time is money saved both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I really hope that YC company, signs up for Ramp. And if if we meet them That's right.
Speaker 1:We will definitely be pitching them Ramp. Anyway
Speaker 2:We should have an iPad where anybody that comes, that we run into, we just sign them up for Ramp. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Oh, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:It's a it's more of a public service than a sales activity. A sales motion. Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's go to Richard Craig. Very fascinating poster. It does poster often. Do you know his name?
Speaker 2:John John has an insane podcasters high right now because we were like, we're this is the last post, like, three posts I got.
Speaker 1:Talking about. I I never agreed to that. You still have the champagne you haven't finished. Let's keep going. What do you have to do?
Speaker 2:What do
Speaker 1:you do the rest of the day? Nothing. You're posting. You're you're podcasting. Let's keep going.
Speaker 1:She used to that. We we literally only have six posts left. We can get through this. We're good. We're good.
Speaker 1:I'll skip some of these. Some of these are are are repeats too.
Speaker 2:We'll skip this one. Stick with us, folks. We'll skip Save John, save the best for last. Okay.
Speaker 1:We'll skip this one. We'll skip this is a duplicate.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let let's just let's just, let's just close out
Speaker 1:of Richard Richard Craig. Very interesting poster. He only pops up when something big is happening in the market. He runs a, a hedge fund, numeri. And he said he woke up today wondering how Leopold Aschenbrenner situate situate situational awareness hedge fund is doing.
Speaker 1:And so, do you know the story of Leopold Aschenbrenner? Is
Speaker 2:that the ope OpenAI?
Speaker 1:He was at OpenAI. He left. He did a great podcast with Dworkesh Patel, talked about, scaling laws and basically predicted that, you know, if you fall if you scale out the AGI systems, like, it's gonna get really, really crazy. Made a bunch of, kind of pivots away from the the traditional AI safety arguments towards, kind of geopolitical relevance. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The effect the the idea that these will be, you know, akin to nuclear weapons, very controlled. But, I think what Richard here is saying that, you know, Leopold's bet was that situate situation awareness hedge fund, like like, go turbo long Nvidia, basically. Like like, AI is the future and then of course, like, things are selling off right now and if you're levered long Nvidia, even if it's a good bet over the very long term,
Speaker 2:you can
Speaker 1:be in a rough spot.
Speaker 2:Timing and sizing.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so Richard Krebs throw in some throw in some questions up on the timeline. I thought we're I thought we're interesting, but good luck to Leopold. I'm a big fan of this podcast.
Speaker 1:I thought it was very interesting. Anyway
Speaker 2:Wait. Anything else
Speaker 1:you wanna cover?
Speaker 2:I don't know if this is somebody messing around. Okay. It's not. This is breaking news. We got some personnel news.
Speaker 1:What is this?
Speaker 2:Somebody on, the chat.
Speaker 1:Oh, you're talking big game about me going to
Speaker 2:it. Okay.
Speaker 1:Now we got breaking news. Jordy's, oh, we gotta
Speaker 2:do one more. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Did you finish?
Speaker 2:You you didn't quite finish the bottle, but that's all that's all you, John. Bottle's done. So under the number, not less than ten minutes ago, he says, when's the next some personnel news should be a regular segment? And the answer is right now. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, is the new leader of Relativity Space.
Speaker 2:Wait. He's joining the CEO.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Fifty minutes ago.
Speaker 1:That's incredible.
Speaker 2:And, it says I got an article here from Ars Technica. Another Silicon Valley Investor is getting into the rocket business. Everybody's getting into the rocket business. We've we've, you know, sketched out some designs. We're exploring it.
Speaker 2:But just to get some, of our own low earth orbit satellites just to stream Yes. Showdown. But, apparently, he's been quite involved over the past few months, and that he's been largely been bankrolling the company since the October. Dangerous position to get in when you are the lifeline of the company, and the burn becomes your own personal expenses. But if anybody, can afford it, it's Schmidt.
Speaker 2:And it's not immediately clear why Schmidt is taking a hands on approach at Relativity. And, but but this article says it's one of the few US based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of SpaceX and its Falcon nine rocket. So, pretty wild. Anybody that wanted, the Google founders to go back to Google.
Speaker 1:He's not a founder.
Speaker 2:He's, oh.
Speaker 1:CEO. Crazy. CEO for a long time, but he was never a founder of Google.
Speaker 2:That's wild. Exposed. Exposed. But granted, I was but I was a but I was a small I was a small child in that area. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, clearly, like, you know, he grew the company. He he's, like, a fantastic executive, but, technically not a founder. But maybe that's a bull case because relativity has already been founded. He comes in, and if he can do what he did for Google to relativity, it's very bullish.
Speaker 2:True.
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:And, Google is down 5% on the news after hours. Obviously not. No. No. It is.
Speaker 2:It is. It is, but it's because of the market's sales.
Speaker 1:It's not because of this this guy who hasn't been Involved in the company. Decade. Former senior. Some personnel news. Anything can happen in the market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, there's an argument.
Speaker 2:It's like, okay. Eric, such so insane for Eric to join relativity space. Yep. And Eric's thinking is still embedded in this company. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. The company's worthless.
Speaker 1:The fact that he's that he's choosing to go back into the CEO role and he's not going back to Google, bear case
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe. That's what you come here for, the worst financial advice you've ever heard.
Speaker 2:No. It's our job to give the worst advice Break the list. So that nobody can ever say as a joke. So nobody could ever say, you guys are giving financial advice,
Speaker 1:which we
Speaker 2:never do. We never have. Anyways, fun show today.
Speaker 1:Fun show.
Speaker 2:I will make sure John finishes the dom.
Speaker 1:I will make sure Jordy finishes his dom. I I refill it to the top.
Speaker 2:This To the top. Ridiculous for. Cheers to you, John.
Speaker 1:Cheers to the great show.
Speaker 2:This is, our life's work. It is icky guy. Icky guy. And, thank you everyone for watching. We will see you, tomorrow.
Speaker 2:We have some Tomorrow. We have a big
Speaker 1:We have a big week.
Speaker 2:Big big announcement tomorrow morning.
Speaker 1:Big announcement tomorrow morning. And then If you follow us on x, get ready to repost, engage, please. You'll know it when you see it.
Speaker 2:That is for sure. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:See you tomorrow. Bye.