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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. You know, we like to joke around the show. You know, we like to cover, dumb stuff on the timeline, but this week was insane. And, a man is dead. Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you've seen the the clips and and the, and the horrific video. So we're gonna break character a little bit, and, I'm sure we'll get to some humor later in the show, but, we wanted to break this down and kind of, really, address some of the drama that's going on in tech, but then also just start with, a really nice obituary by the New York Times to just give you an idea of who this person was because I think a lot of that got lost very quickly because the story moved on so fast to what gun was the assassin using or, you know, what backpack, what's the backlash.
Speaker 2:Oh, he looks like Tim Yeah. Timothy Chalamet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And the interesting thing about the humor is that, I when the Trump assassination happened, everyone was like, oh, you can't joke about the assassination attempt. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The Trump assassination attempt. And and I and I do think that there's something natural, especially with men where we tend to process sadness with humor, and I think that that's okay. And I've long said that if, if if I if if anyone ever attempts to assassinate me, feel free to joke about it because I would want you to,
Speaker 2:to Well, you'll be there to joke
Speaker 1:With them.
Speaker 2:With them.
Speaker 1:But even if I'm assassinated, I think I think it's okay to joke about my my
Speaker 2:my Yeah. In many ways in many ways
Speaker 1:I want people processing it how they wanna process it. And that's very that's very kind of controversial to say. The thing is is that a lot of the jokes that were going on at at the expense of Brian Thompson were not were not people sad and processing the sadness through humor. It was people being happy and, like, rejoicing that he died, which is really, really grim.
Speaker 2:And Shinzo has lived on in the timeline and is more relevant than
Speaker 1:ever. Yes. And and and those jokes tend to be more positive towards him Totally. Than this. This was really, really dark.
Speaker 1:And I was trying to find, an example. I mean, again, like, the Trump assassination is probably the closest one where you saw a lot of people saying, like, oh, I wish the bullet had hit him or something, which is really dark.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the and the timeline for us was was wild because I think we it must have been a week ago today that we released a bit on Taylor joining the information. And we knew we knew as soon as we figured out that she was working for the information, that it was going to lead to a variety of drama. Right. Everything her entire career she has created and run towards drama.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, historically, there there that drama has not been associated with a loss of of human life, at least, at least directly. And so, yeah, this was a it was an extremely sad week, and, yeah, I don't think that can can really be overstated. Yeah. So And we actually specifically stayed out of it because we're not in the business of participating in in, the culture war, which it very much became.
Speaker 1:Yep. So, hopefully, this will be some, some just information about this this, CEO, Brian Thompson, chief executive of UnitedHealthcare was fatally shot in midtown Manhattan on Wednesday in what police called a brazen targeted killing spin. He spent more than 20 years ascending the ranks at one of the nation's leading insurance businesses while raising a family in suburban Minneapolis. He was 50. He lived with his wife, Paulette Paulette Thompson, and their younger son, Dane.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna fucking cry.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's really sad. Yeah. So his oldest son is still a college freshman. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And going going forward, as of Wednesday afternoon, a perpetrator seen in security footage released by the New York Police Department was still at large. The motive for the killing was unknown according to our authorities. At this point, I don't think it's unknown. He had a message written out on the the shelves, that were released during the the killing. Mister Thompson and other company executives were in New York for an annual investor meeting.
Speaker 2:It was interesting to see, you know, it was it was the meme cycle really started ripping immediately. People were screenshotting just the the stock. Yeah. The stock immediately, it actually popped.
Speaker 1:It is very weird.
Speaker 3:And many
Speaker 1:people have dropped originally and then then it bounced back. It's very odd. I mean, it's such a huge I think it's a half a 1000000000 half a $1,000,000,000,000 company. And so. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So very odd. I think it's,
Speaker 1:you know,
Speaker 2:I think this is this is a weird situation, right? Because a lot of people have a very negative, relationship with their health
Speaker 3:care provider. Even if even if they're ultimately grateful for the service provided.
Speaker 2:But health care companies service provided. But health care companies historically have not had good user, you know, experiences or led to good user experiences. And,
Speaker 1:yeah, it's odd that people put all of the it it feels like there's a disproportionate amount of hate towards the very the last business in the chain of health care, which is the insurance provider. Yeah. So it's not there's much less reserved for the hospitals and doctors who are working on this or even or even the companies that might be responsible upstream of the health care problems. So you you you see much less vitriol on the left towards, fast food companies or cigarette companies
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who who cause a lot of the upstream effects Yeah. Or or, you know, pollutants or any of these. I one thing that stuck out here is, just how crazy it is that this guy rose to this height. He was raised in Jewel, Iowa, a rural a rural born in 1974. It's a rural community about 50 miles north of Des Moines.
Speaker 1:He was one of 2 sons who worked for 43 his, Dennis Thompson, his dad worked for 43 years at Grain Elevators in and around Jewel. And he went to University of Iowa, like, stayed in his home state, earned a BA, and was hired, fresh out of, college with an accounting major, goes to pry PricewaterhouseCoopers, an accounting firm for 7 years, and then joins UnitedHealth.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it can't be, overstated. He was in his role, you know, in his last role, he was overseeing a 140,000 people, and I would just say that doesn't happen by accident.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:You don't just rise the ranks at a com at a company of this size, one of the biggest companies in the entire
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:US, by accident. Right? This is somebody who clearly cared about his people and their customers and had a, you know, incredible consistency over over that long to get all the way to the top.
Speaker 1:It's it's almost like a it's like an under discussed, like, a corporate ladder grinder who enters in some minor role and then just works their way up. It's a bit of a lost art. Yeah. I I don't know a single friend who is at a fortune 500 company now and even would say, yeah, I could be running this place in 20 years.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But but that was the norm, 30, 40 years ago. And I and I do believe it's happening. We're just it's just so outside my world. But it's a it's a different type of animal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But it's still it's still incredible when you meet these folks. I've I've talked to a few, like, Fortune 500 CEOs who have worked their way up and and they have a tenacity that's similar to the founder. Yeah. But it's it takes a very different shape Yeah. When you're managing such a large organization with so many different stakeholders and you're not the founder.
Speaker 1:So you don't you can't go fully into the founder mode thing. But in order to just do your job, you still have to be extremely, like, shrewd political,
Speaker 3:you
Speaker 1:know, hold all these different constituents because you're you you unlike most founders with super voting shares, like, you actually do report to the board. Yeah. It's a much more complicated role.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The other thing that I think is highly relevant is I think it's totally fair to be frustrated with the with with with our health care system in the US. Yeah. It's deeply flawed, and a lot of people, like I said, have had negative experiences with it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But our system is so complicated that even the guy running the largest, you know, public health care company in the United States, he it's it's not he can't just snap his fingers. Even with all that power running an organization of a 140,000 people, he can't, he could have you know, we don't even have the context. Right? He could have he he he, you know, likely would tell you that, yes, there's a bunch of issues with with with our system, and we do need to make dramatic changes. But cutting this guy's life short as what as, you know, he's just over 50 years old.
Speaker 2:He easily could have been in this role for another decade or 2. Does really like nothing, except except, yeah, normalize, you know, normalize basically assassinations, which, you know, you had mentioned earlier some people think are potentially coming back. I saw somebody tweeting out, the the fastest growing small business category over the next, you know, couple of quarters will probably be the executive security because now that somebody can be killed in broad daylight, you know, or, you know, people are making attempts on presidents. It is just a very dark and and sad, time. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There was a there was a a dramatic fall off in the amount of assassinations post JFK, MLK, and we had about 50 years of relative silence on the assassination front. And then Shinzo Abe, the attack on Trump, now this. And there's been a number of other, attacks that, just kind of it it's hard to diagnose exactly what's happening.
Speaker 1:Is it is it driven by politics or some sort of, like, chemical? There's been this theory that, like, you know, once lead came out of the the gasoline, the the level of violent crime went down. But it's not like we put lead back in the gasoline. So what's driving this? But, yeah, I I I definitely agree that I mean, I'd love to do a deep dive on on how some of the some of the security organizations work.
Speaker 1:I've seen a few of them internally, and getting it right is seems really important and I think it will scale down to even earlier stage companies and CEOs and all sorts of people whether that's, just actually taking an everyday carry seriously, wearing body armor Yeah.
Speaker 2:In this situation in this situation, what would it have done? It was shot in the back, like, walking at work in New York City. Right? I mean,
Speaker 1:if you're wearing a if you're wearing a vest Yeah.
Speaker 2:Maybe it would've helped.
Speaker 1:Survived. But but, really, it's like, yeah, security with you at all times.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, it's just it's it's it's truly, truly
Speaker 1:Tragic.
Speaker 2:Tragic. So, anyways
Speaker 1:So, yeah, let's move on to some of the drama around this. It's, the reaction was very, very quick. I think, Mike Solana summed it up well in today's, 3 morning takes from the, from Pirate Wires. The title of this take is misinformation. Talking about Taylor Lorenz says, yesterday, large swaths of the leftist Internet threads and especially Blue Sky celebrated the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Speaker 1:Justifications included 1, he was rich and 2, the American Health Care System sucks. While outlets like Gizmodus simply blamed the bloodlust on Donald Trump, question mark, and moved on. Fan favorite journalist slash performance artist, Taylor Lorenz, misinformation if you will. Love that. Personally led the mob.
Speaker 2:She And I think and I think to be clear, you get credit for you get credit for coining misinformation, which to be clear, on our on our last, when we did the bit on on Taylor, there were a number of people that didn't realize that we were saying misinformation, not misinformation. Yes. Yes. So the nickname that we gave her was very, intentional and And she lived up
Speaker 1:to it with She lived
Speaker 2:literally. Yeah. She said, I think we maybe gave her a little bit too much confidence. I think so. Because she she responded to our post saying, thank you, gentlemen, which, you know, was one response.
Speaker 2:I mean, the the yeah. I think your your
Speaker 1:thing here is that I do think that that we are in the WWE era of online posting in journalism, and she understands. Like, if you look at the craziest thing about her her posts is that they got, like, they were bangers. They got, like, 7,000 likes on Blue Sky.
Speaker 2:I don't know. We should call them bangers. They got a lot of engagement.
Speaker 1:They got a lot of engagement. But but but but in terms of, like, just if you're if if if she is just taking her job as signal from the algorithm, post whatever gets attention, post whatever goes viral, post whatever gets light, do more of that. She is she has realized that that even something like this
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is something that can grow her business ultimately.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:Nate Nate Silver said it, we don't you know, Nate Nate is not somebody that we feature much on the show, but he said that the problem is that she's desperate for attention, but her product sucks and she's burned all her bridges, so she doesn't really even care about being embarrassingly immoral and flagrantly inconsistent so long as it drives engagement. And so the inconsistency is a big thing. You know, we had we had basically said on our last bit that, you know, we were very clear. If you're doing anything in Silicon Valley that that gets enough attention or is polarizing in any way, she will eventually kind of come after you, whether it's
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Or or any any number of sort of, entrepreneur or investor type. But the inconsistency is that, you know, she's gone and given interviews where she cries about being doxxed and bullied and attacked. And yet the second that this happened, she was posting Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, Catherine Boyle highlighted this where where Taylor it was one clip of her saying, like, the bullying of women online is unacceptable. And then the next one was her quote tweeting someone agitating about more political violence against health care CEOs and literally posting a screenshot of a female CEO. It's like the most hypocritical thing possible. But it doesn't matter in the in the in the economy that she's Yeah. Attention.
Speaker 1:The the thing that's interesting there is that, I think he's right that she's burned all her bridges. It's fascinating that that the New York Times, I think, did a great job covering this.
Speaker 2:And and Yeah. It was very
Speaker 1:it was and and and and actually, I was looking I was looking for the most definitive, obituary for Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, and it was the New York Times.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so the New York Times has clearly moved past the Taylor Yeah.
Speaker 2:And this is why this is why so the funny thing was that Taylor Lorenz had written a piece about the rise of the broadcaster.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And we we knew about it because that she interviewed you. Yeah. And but it wasn't widely known yet within the tech community that that the information had hired her on a contract
Speaker 1:And I was telling people I was like, this is this is big.
Speaker 2:And almost nobody nobody nobody basically believed it because they're like, this is the, you know, Taylor is is the most the most, you know, regardless, like, factually, she is the most hated journalist in tech. Yes. Right?
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 2:There is nobody else that even comes close
Speaker 3:to her.
Speaker 1:We got pushback from friends. Hey. You shouldn't have even given her
Speaker 2:a Yeah. They were like they were like, don't joke about
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Don't joke about Taylor. And I and I think that was, you know They were somewhat right. They were somewhat right. But our point our point of view is, like, I think it's funny when she goes in and attacks, like, a a startup to some degree because, it's usually pause it usually ends up being a company that's doing something interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:know, and, like, polarizing is often, like, good. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the whole thing with, like, the Andreessen, like, the r word and the Clubhouse thing, like, that was ultimately, that didn't really hurt Andreessen. Yeah. It was it was it was such a it was such a clown show.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think her I don't think her attacks actually hurt startups. I think it was worse when she was at the New York Times.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But now that she's just kind of, like, on her own and just, you know, you know, just sort of raging against the machine or raging against Silicon Valley, it's just much less impactful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, she's gone much broader and much bigger. Like, she's not focused on some, oh, some serious seed founder said a bad word. Yeah. Like, she was.
Speaker 2:But I do think it'll be, you know, it's going to be very telling. She's not she's not a full time employee at the information.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It will still be very telling if the information continues to have her right on behalf of the publication. Yeah. Because I know for a fact that many of the other the the the real journalists at The Information will not be happy if she stays if she stays a part of the organization because it just reflects super poorly on the information which which, you know, is not a, you know, does a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with. They're sort of, you know, they're not super friendly to startups and in some ways. But overall, like, it's a typically a pretty qual they they you get scoops.
Speaker 2:They get There's a
Speaker 1:there's a wild difference between
Speaker 2:I also appreciate the business. I think you basically have tens of thousands of people in Silicon Valley willing to give you $200 a year Yeah. Yeah. Because you get real scoops. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and there's a there's a crazy difference between, oh, like, you leaked my funding round, like, 3 weeks early
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because you got a scoop from some investor, and you're calling for the murder of my CEO. Yeah. Like, that's just, like, a completely different
Speaker 2:world. The whole thing is, like, if if Taylor is willing to post memes that say CEO down and with, like, stars
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's all happy. It's insane.
Speaker 2:She will she will do that to a smaller company now.
Speaker 1:I'm not
Speaker 2:I'm not, you know, she this this the attention high that she's clearly getting from doing this with the United CEO, I'm sure she will just apply that Yeah. And realize, like, oh, we can I can call for violence? But
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And that that's what does best in the in the algorithm. And so and you can apply that to to anything you can say, oh, well, like, oh, they're working on a self driving car company, but self driving cars have accidents sometimes. So it's actually good that there's technology is not being built or, oh, this AI might displace some, some artist's job.
Speaker 1:And so it's good that this doesn't happen. It's like the ultimate techno pessimism. So, Solana continues. Eventually, she characteristically denied her celebration but doubled down with further justifications after commenters provided
Speaker 2:it to
Speaker 3:the channel.
Speaker 2:Was saying that when she said we now you know or she said something like we want these CEOs dead.
Speaker 1:She wrote yeah. She wrote a post on her substack, why, quote, we want insurance executives dead. And, and she said, the the mainstream media began pearl clutching after I posted a quote tweet about insurance companies companies no longer paying for certain anesthesia with the phrase, and people wonder why we want these executives dead. Fox News said, she was calling for violence, and she says, let me be super clear. My post uses a collective we and is explaining the public sentiment.
Speaker 1:It's not me personally saying I want these executives dead, so we should kill them. I'm explaining that thousands of Americans, myself included, are fed up with our barbaric health care system.
Speaker 2:See, that's that's what that's what Nate Silver is saying. It's like being extremely constantly logically inconsistent and flip flopping and saying, I don't believe in that, but also I do believe in it. Yeah. It's like it it it it makes you you don't wanna read too much of her stuff. It'll make you guys schizophrenic.
Speaker 1:It's insane. Right? Yeah. Because it's like you like, oh, so we can just use we however we want now? We can just say, oh, we want, like, whatever.
Speaker 1:It's insane. And, and it's also this type of, like, like, she did not give this level of of of, you know, benefit of the doubt to Ben Horowitz when he was quoting a Redditor using the r word non pejoratively. It wasn't pejorative.
Speaker 2:Positive.
Speaker 1:It it was it was a term of endearment within that community, and it was and it was very, very positive, and and it was a joke.
Speaker 2:He was he was quoting
Speaker 1:a joke, and she
Speaker 2:didn't It's interesting.
Speaker 1:Any of that context. So
Speaker 2:on Taylor's podcast, she once talked about how she actually doesn't believe in deplatforming anymore. She used to believe in deplatforming, but she realized it didn't work, you know, with with Trump was was the example that she gave. Yeah. Which is basically, like, Trump was deplatformed and and he has enough influence and following that people just followed him to the new places. And then he eventually just gets back on the platforms and, you know, comes back.
Speaker 2:Taylor's effectively been deplatformed by many of the publications that she's been involved with. Right. She had to move on from the Washington Posters. She was fired from The New York Times. She's burned a lot of bridges.
Speaker 2:And I think that she is, you know, while the the conservative movement in the United States benefited from Trump being deplatformed and then re platformed, it sort of vindicated a lot of people. You're now seeing the other side of that with Taylor Lorenz, where she's calling for the death Yeah. Of health care executives. Literal calls to violence. And it doesn't matter if the information lets her go because she's still going to she still has her audience.
Speaker 2:You can still go on TikTok. She can go on Substack and exercise her right to free speech and and and then but but at a certain point, if you're calling openly calling saying this is why we want these people dead, literally calling for violence Yeah. Eventually, like, where's that line, basically?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It goes to even if she's not deplatform, like, what does the business look like? So Mike Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let's break down Yeah. Let's break down her actual business because
Speaker 1:I think there's So Mike says we all know she's crazy and evil. What matters is outlets like like The Information are still paying people like Taylor as they publicly agitate for the murder of public exec of business executives. Is it cancel culture to wonder how I can trust an outlet like this with business news? Okay then. Cancel me, but cancel my subscription first.
Speaker 1:And it's a very interesting question because it's like she is she's running ads. She's monetizing via AWS. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 2:I can't That that was what I called out that was what I called out in our in our
Speaker 1:You guys health care might literally be an AWS customer. Yeah. Like, it's like
Speaker 2:And I had to wonder. I was, like, why does a AWS want to align themselves with somebody who literally hates young technologies for the most part?
Speaker 1:That's wild.
Speaker 2:I would say, like, on average, if you ask Taylor
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:How do you feel about the average tech founders? She'll be like, I hate them. Yeah. And that's like It's
Speaker 1:crazy because it's not it's not just, like, deplatforming at that point. It's like, does it even make economic sense for AWS to align their brand with someone who's calling for the murder of the CEOs that sign the checks to AWS. Like, it's just it like, will this make AWS more money or less money? Yeah. Probably less.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's yeah. It's ridiculous.
Speaker 2:AWS is a wealth transfer from UnitedHealthcare to Taylor Lorenz.
Speaker 1:That's crazy. Crazy. And so, yeah, it's interesting because she's she's done the whole going independent thing or going direct. She has her own, her own substack and then, her podcast, which we mentioned is sponsored by, AWS. But then on her substack, she writes these, these, you know, weekly newsletters.
Speaker 1:She wrote one all about the all about why we want insurance executives dead. She's really leaning into it. I think she, maybe smells that, she needs to have some viral moments to seize as many subscribers as possible. But Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, the high I I would you know, unfortunately, she's not building in public. I would love to see her subscription dashboard because I'm sure that in the last week, despite all the blowback from
Speaker 1:everybody in our community,
Speaker 2:I'm sure she usually could have added 10,000 paid subscriptions, like some ridiculous number.
Speaker 1:But the thing is is
Speaker 3:that her her funnel
Speaker 1:is actually terrible. Yeah. She's gotta go to she's gotta sign up for Hustlers University.
Speaker 2:Seriously. Like, so so so she gets so she sends
Speaker 1:you this, free newsletter. And then at the top, it says, like, user Mag is, you know, community supported. Like, please upgrade to $7 a month for the paid subscription on Substack. And, it's I mean, it's also deeply ironic that she's on Substack because she came for Substack super hard and was very aggressive against them early on for not deplatforming people. Yep.
Speaker 1:And, and now it's like the backbone of her business. Yeah. But also just her call to action is terrible. It doesn't it doesn't explain what you get for that $7 a month. It's not like, oh, you'll get an ad free version or you get a you get a second newsletter.
Speaker 1:Like, with Ben Thompson, it's very clear. You get
Speaker 2:She's not putting any of her her really aggressive stuff behind the pay wall. No. Because her whole she thrive I think I truly think she cares more about attention than money. Yep. Like, she's playing
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:She's yeah. She she's playing a game where her metric for success is like, I bet you she is highly fixated on her her just broad reach in a given month. Like, how many people am I getting in front of?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like like, we see this as a crisis.
Speaker 1:I think she sees what happened this week as, her best.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because for every for every for every one biology who's just horribly dismayed at what's happening or, you know, just younger tech founder or whatever, somebody in Y Combinator who's like, this Yeah. That's building in health tech health care tech and they're just like, this is crazy. There's probably 10, like, sort of left wing extremists that are that are Yeah. Like messaging her, like, you're fighting the good fight.
Speaker 2:Like, keep it up. Don't let them keep you down.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:We need to kill all, you know Yep. Whatever. Just, like, deeply, violent.
Speaker 1:Yeah. She's kind of like pre pre monetization, but there is real money in this. If you look at Hassan Piker, I mean, he's grown his Twitch channel significantly, and he drives a Porsche and has a, you know, luxurious multimillion dollar house. And so even even making anti capital anti capitalist rhetoric can be extremely capitalist. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you can monetize it very well, which is something that is, a little unclear. I have this essay that I wrote that I never was able to publish or get
Speaker 2:to over the
Speaker 1:finish line.
Speaker 2:The real I mean, it's not really worth pointing out all the contradicts herself because if she really was truly anti capitalist and truly tried to understand the underlying issue, she'd be going to it. She'd be writing a piece about her sponsor, AWS, being like, please tell me you guys aren't working with UnitedHealthcare or any of these other healthcare companies. Right? Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And, obviously, AWS is probably working with all of the healthcare companies in different ways.
Speaker 1:I wouldn't be surprised if the information has a sponsorship with AWS. Totally. Like, almost certainly one of their events has been sponsored. AWS sponsors everything in the Valley. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wrote this piece called Capitalism's Immune System. And, basically, my argument was that, is that capitalism has this natural forcing function for showering agitators who are particularly charismatic and could be leaders of revolutions with massive economic rewards. And so someone like, Hasan Piker, Hasan Piker is genuinely a chad and genuinely charismatic, and he can actually mobilize a movement of thousands of people. 10,000 people would watch his stream at one time.
Speaker 1:If he just had said, it's time to go Dismantal. Into the into the streets, they would have they would have followed him because they were true fans true fans. But what did he say? He said, don't go to the streets. Keep my stream going.
Speaker 1:Keep watching ads. Keep subscribing.
Speaker 2:Like and subscribe.
Speaker 1:And and so and and and the thing is that there's this very natural reward function where it it was deeply ironic to me that the the number one left wing socialist communist Hasan Piker was getting his paychecks from Jeff Bezos. And it's the same thing with Taylor. It's like the world's richest man.
Speaker 2:It really is.
Speaker 1:And he's like, why is the world's richest man paying the most Everywhere everywhere
Speaker 2:so everywhere Taylor goes, she can't help but make the world's richest man richer. She was at the Washington Posters. Now she works for AWS directly.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:So anyways, she you know, I hope that her followers eventually start to call her out on that and say, like, hey, you know, if you want to be a true communist,
Speaker 3:yeah, you
Speaker 2:gotta be powered by the people, you know. Exactly. No more no more advertising for public Yeah. Public company.
Speaker 3:I
Speaker 1:mean, she's on Substack. What happens when she what what happens when she grows their business on Substack? Yeah. That goes in Mark Andreessen's Yeah.
Speaker 2:The irony the irony again
Speaker 1:Andreessen is a shareholder.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So
Speaker 2:yeah. Again, it's like I'm I I'd love to look at how many times she called for Substack to to deep platform people. I'm sure I'm sure she did that Totally. Saying, you know, this person that the right wing is violent and, you know, you can't let these people have a platform. And now it's, you know, tables have turned.
Speaker 1:And so and and so my white pill here is that is that secretly, these left wing agitators are economically incentivized to stop their followers from actually taking any direct action. And it's all Kayfabe. It's all LARP. It's all just, just play act as these revolutionaries, but secretly, I don't want you to do anything that would actually disrupt my business. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so I need you to keep listening to my podcast, keep subscribing, keep upgrading, keep listening to the ads, and and that is what the reason I call it immune system is because it's just a natural reaction. It's not that Jeff Bezos is like, okay. I'm worried that there'll be an uprising, and I would be target number 1 for the guillotine because I'm the world's richest man. So I need to pay Hasan Piker to keep people out of the streets by giving them left wing content on Twitch. That's not what happened at all.
Speaker 1:It's that he just happens to own Twitch. Twitch has a you know, it's a free market of ideas and an algorithm that stuff rises to the top. And then as soon as you get a 1,000 streams or a 1,000 followers, you just start getting checks from Amazon. And so Hassan got the checks, and then that economic engine just incentivized him, make more content, make more content, keep streaming, keep streaming. You'll make more money.
Speaker 1:You'll get the Porsche. You don't
Speaker 2:want people you don't want people in the streets because they're not, you know, tipping tipping on
Speaker 1:the stream. It was there's no contract. There's no discussion. They've never met. But the but the system, the algorithm, and, like, the Internet system incentivizes the most character the the most charismatic revolutionary types.
Speaker 1:Like Yeah. He Hassan could be like a Che Guevara, but instead Instead
Speaker 2:he's a Twitch driver.
Speaker 1:He drives a Porsche. Like, there's something kind of white pilling about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If Trudeau if Trudeau had only, you know, if Twitch was around at the beginning of his career,
Speaker 3:he would
Speaker 2:have been a great Twitch streamer. Exactly. Handsome guy, charismatic. Exactly. Been chat.
Speaker 2:What do we think about?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and and so that that is somewhat of a white pill, but, given the rise in assassinations and violence, I I I'm not fully buying it, and I'm a little bit worried. And so, we'll be we'll be covering this more. And, our our our our thoughts and prayers are truly with, Brian's family. And, we're very sad that we had to cover this, but I'm glad we were able to find some, some interesting nuance here.
Speaker 2:So And rest in rest in peace, Brian Thompson. Yes. It's absolutely tragic. And, you know, I hope hopefully, hopefully, somebody writes a book and and kind of gets into why, you know, why why he rose to the top of of a very important company even if a controversial one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I'm sure it's a good story.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. I mean, hopefully, they fucking find this this, assassin soon. I think he's still on the on the run. Let's move on to, some some real tech news. Sam Altman announced, a a week long, program to announce new, chat gpt functionality and new releases from OpenAI.
Speaker 1:He he summarizes the latest developments. For extra clarity, o one is available in our plus tier for $20 a month. With the new pro tier, $200 a month, it can think even harder for the hardest problems. Most users will be happy will be very happy with o one in the plus tier. And so,
Speaker 2:it So it's funny because Yeah. Who's the the guy Austin? I I blank on his last name.
Speaker 3:He had
Speaker 1:Which one?
Speaker 2:Lambda School.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Allred.
Speaker 2:Austin Allred had a post a couple months ago that was more or less saying
Speaker 1:I would pay 10 times as much.
Speaker 2:I would pay 10 times or even a 100 times as much. And now
Speaker 1:Same to that. Yeah. I I I mean, I
Speaker 2:I And it's crazy because if you went back 10 years ago
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If 10 years ago, I could get access to to chat for $20 a month. Absolutely. Absolutely. And it probably is worth that much now if you're really intensely using it.
Speaker 1:Totally. So,
Speaker 2:don't get any more ideas.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No, no. I really do think there will be a $2,000 a month here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then a 20 and then eventually because because because as it gets, you know, I don't know, getting getting, an incremental 20% of intelligence Yep. In the right business is worth, you know, an extra $10
Speaker 3:a month.
Speaker 1:I mean, I've been using o one a lot in the plus tier at $20 a month, and and I I think there's a rate limit, like, every day or every week or something. And I start getting these messages, and I get anxiety because it's like, you have 15 requests left before you, like, burn through your 200
Speaker 2:a month.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something like that.
Speaker 2:And Again, that's just gonna be coming the same in the same way that superhuman became, like, the cool perk that a company could offer
Speaker 1:being, like,
Speaker 2:oh, yeah. We onboard every one of our employees.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And and it sort of had this marginal benefit of of being, like, well, the real benefit is, like, we're providing you quote, unquote, luxury software. Giving your employee a $200 a month subscription when you already pay them 10 to 20 plus grand a month Yeah. Is an easy decision because it's like, hey, if we can make you even 2, 3, 4% more efficient
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's worth the $200.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And also, I, when I was thinking about, like, what the $2,000 a month subscription would look like, I would love to essentially be able to instantiate, like, long running agents. So, you know, just just telling chat gpt to essentially, like, every hour, read through my email, do an extra call for spam, what's junk, what am I never reading, archive that, resort the inbox. Like, there's just so many of these things that would be very expensive from an API perspective right now. But if you bump up the cost and you justify the investment in better UI, better UX, more integrations, basically, the unhobblings that people talk about, the model I think is actually great.
Speaker 1:And I think, yeah, there's probably better models out there and there's kind of a model war going out, but the but the model is good enough for 99% of things. It's often just that, you know, oh, I need to I need to take this PDF and then turn it into text and then do scan it out there. And and there's a bunch of steps in between that slow me down, but I would pay so much for that. And then the ability to just say, hey, I actually want you to do this every day
Speaker 3:for
Speaker 1:me forever. And it's like, yeah. No problem. Like, yeah. Of course.
Speaker 1:That's gonna be a dollar a day, but you're paying $2 a month, so go for it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:at a certain point, it's like like, you get up into the really big numbers. It's like, you can have a human in the loop. Like
Speaker 2:No. That's what I was saying. I I do think if you had a $5,000 a month tier where you got an account manager that was like, hey, you could be prompting this better or you could ask them, hey, how can I I'm actually surprised? I think there's probably a good services business built right now, like, prompt engineer as a service where I
Speaker 1:was thinking that.
Speaker 2:You are basically, like, you go to companies and you say, pay me $5 a month. I'm going to work with. I'll be in your Slack. Yep. Any one of your team members at any time can message me.
Speaker 2:Hey, I'm trying to get this thing done, and I will show you how to do it with models.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or or I'll put it on a schedule.
Speaker 2:Like, that's easy. So so an example of that one, like, the Facebook ads platform came out or the Google AdWords. Yep. It is not hard to get one of those agencies if you're super hardworking and you're good at sales and you're and you're good at just, like, figuring systems out. You can get a Facebook ads agency to 50 to 100 k a month within a year with almost a cold start.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And that's why it became popular to sell courses around. Here's how to make it AdWords agency. Here's how to, because it actually is totally possible. If you really put your mind to it, you can go to a dentist office and say, hey, look, you're not running Google Ads.
Speaker 2:Give me 2 grand a month. I'll do it. I'm gonna bring in 4 grand a month in revenue.
Speaker 1:That was the Alex from Izzy thing. Right? Was it for for Jim's? For Jim's. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, vertical.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I'm surprised we haven't seen more, like, prompt engineering, like, services agencies. And and that's just such a if I was even if I was in college right now, that's the business I would start. It doesn't take any money to start. You can just learn all the tools better than anyone else. You can get into companies like if somebody wants to do this, like, we'd probably I would say, like, we'll give you $500 a month if you just wanna
Speaker 1:fucking Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hit us up. If you wanna obsess over prompt engineering specifically in the context of
Speaker 1:of our show. I mean, you know who's making money in AI. It's like Nvidia, and then obviously OpenAI is printing with this, but then McKinsey. And and and consulting firms. And they're doing that at the Fortune 500.
Speaker 2:Percent of the revenue now is just AI.
Speaker 1:They make tons of money just with AI digital transformation. Okay. We're gonna come into your mark marketing organization. What could you be doing better?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And even just at even just at Lucy, I had our our software developer write a Chat GPT script essentially to run over all of our new, cancellation reasons and reviews. And Yeah. Because you get this inundation of just, like, every day, we get, like, 10 just blobs of text. Yep. And I'm not just gonna read all of those.
Speaker 1:It's just impossible. So what I wanted him to do was, like, okay. Boil all these down. Do some sentiment analysis. Tell me if any new problems are coming up.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because, oh, all of a sudden, there's a lot of people in Milwaukee that are complaining about, discoloration on the color of the package. Yeah. And it's like, okay. Well, now we have a product issue and we probably it would take a time for someone to just sit there and read every single one and you can do that, but it's much better to just have an AI sitting there reading all
Speaker 3:this Yeah.
Speaker 2:The customer feedback digest. Exactly. Digest everything.
Speaker 3:That and
Speaker 1:I was like, hey. We should actually just turn that into, like, a Shopify app that you just plug in, and it's just running constantly over all your data and all and any text that's coming in. So there's just, like, so many applications, and we're clearly in the application build out phase. And, I'm excited to see where this goes. So yeah.
Speaker 3:Huge
Speaker 2:And the and the services business build out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally. Totally. And and so yeah. I mean, McKinsey's doing it for the Fortune 500 companies.
Speaker 1:Who's doing it for every dentist office? Who's doing it for every gym? Who's doing it like, come in, create a playbook for how a small business can leverage AI to speed up what they do and Yeah. Just actually make more profit. And then also tying this to one of those overseas offshoring companies.
Speaker 1:So you have an EA, but the EA is, you know, super powered by Chativity Pro. And and they're gonna be able to get stuff done much faster and much more reliably because
Speaker 2:they're gonna be able to write scripts. It's so it's so it really is so wild that we're gonna look back at at the fact that at one point open air was giving their best models out for $20 a month. Yeah. It's going to seem insane in hindsight. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because if you're running a company and you're competing with as any company is, you're competing with other companies in the market. And do you want to compete with a company that's spending $200 a month per employee? Yep. When their average salary is even $10 a month?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:No. You're going to want your employees to have the best possible. It's not like you want, hey, so we have this weird policy at our company where we give everybody 10 year old computers. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like and and it just it inspires you to grind hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:No way. No way. So, anyways, this this is again why a lot of the bear cases against. Yeah. They posted there.
Speaker 2:I wish we need a we need a perplexity partnership to to just, like, plug it into Polycom, like, fact check stuff. But I think they have, like, 300,000,000 actives or something like that now. So 300,000,000 actives rolling out a $200 a month subscription. Subscription. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think about even some tiny conversion rate on that that. And, I mean, the idea that they're not gonna monetize the free users
Speaker 1:is just insane. Yeah. They hired that Planet Labs guy. What's
Speaker 2:it? I
Speaker 1:forgot his name, but, he's, like, their head of product now. And it's very his name, but, he's, like, their head of product now. And it's very clear that you can bake ads into LLM responses.
Speaker 2:Totally. A 100%. I I met with a company that, that's building a LLM ad network. Yeah. Similar to AppLovin.
Speaker 3:Makes a
Speaker 1:ton of sense. Exactly. So, yeah. I mean, they're gonna be monetizing all of this. And, and eventually, the models are like, the time between huge model revisions is gonna increase.
Speaker 1:And once it does, they're gonna be able to bake this down onto silicon. And at that point, the inference cost is gonna go to 0. I mean, they're already profitable on on a inference cost base. I'm I'm sure with this. But, but imagine if now, inferencing basically o one in the free tier is just as cheap as running a Google query because it's done on some Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, baked hardware. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are gonna jump into the timeline. We have some exciting news today, but first, we are doing brother of the week. Every week, we try and award a, brother of the week
Speaker 2:Somebody who to
Speaker 1:someone who lives the values of the Technology Brother ecosystem. System.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, exemplifies brother behavior. And so this one this one is, you're gonna know this guy. He actually has his own award system
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:On x called cracker of the day, which which gives out very liberally.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And it is none other than a b. So a Antonio Brown, we're giving this to a b because, you know, it's it's oftentimes the right thing to do to say sorry. And Abby had a little bit of a mix up, with the whole cow she probably Jane Copeland probably market thing. And this guy came we covered it earlier in the week, but he came in and just gave a very authentic apology, admitted that he was off. And, you know, I I don't think we see people do this enough.
Speaker 2:Right? Like, he clearly made a mistake, owned up to it, and, said, Shane's a good guy. So we we love this from AB. AB, you are this week's brother of the week. We will be sending you a metal.
Speaker 2:We're working on getting those, manufactured as we speak. So, we'll have to get your your shipping address, but, yeah, thanks for owning up for this, up to this. And, hopefully, we can get them over on the Poly Market side. I'd love it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And we're just, yeah. He just sets a great example for how to deal with a controversy. Like, he just nailed that, knocked that out of the park, and I think his, you know, his his brand in the eyes of tech people was damaged for, like, 24 hours. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And now it's like He
Speaker 2:comes back and he goes, never a wrong time to do the right thing. So Yeah. Props to a b Yeah. Brother of the week. It's great.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the timeline. We have a post from, Sarah. She says, Anduril announcing a partnership with OpenAI the day before Palantir and Shield AI announced a partnership. Has me like eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. Did you see the OpenAI Anduril announcement?
Speaker 1:They they, they both did an awesome spot. It was, Brian Schimpf, the CEO of Anduril, and Sam Altman both went on Fox Business, and they had this this great back and forth talking about the partnership. It's interesting to me because it's it's kind of unclear what a partnership really means in, like, the AI context. Like like, I'm sure Anduril
Speaker 2:sounds awesome.
Speaker 1:It sounds awesome. I I'm sure Anduril has a partnership with, you know, a cloud provider like AWS. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you just think of that as, like, a contract to buy things, and it's not but in the AI era, it's like a much more
Speaker 2:used Like, imagine imagine it. So it's funny because they're going on Fox Business, and I bet you half the listeners were basically, like, I need to buy the stocks Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right now. Totally. Because it feels like Yeah.
Speaker 2:No. No. That's what I'm saying. They're both private. They're probably, like, looking on their, you know, fidelity or whatever, and they're, like, I can't find Anduril.
Speaker 3:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:know? But it's a good I mean, it's a good sign because you you can just tell that, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman are probably so far behind. They're they're still calling McKinsey to figure out what to do. And, of course, you know
Speaker 2:What's our a AI strategy? Yeah. And they're like, well, that's gonna cost you that's gonna cost
Speaker 3:you 100.
Speaker 1:Portfolio companies and they're just like, you wanna just do business together? Like, cool. Let's let's hash it out over a beer. Yeah. Have a handshake deal, and then let's go on Fox and announce it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And it
Speaker 1:makes sense because, like, I'm sure there's tons of even if it's just, like, cogeneration inter internally, I'm sure.
Speaker 2:I wonder what the average when McKinsey works with an existing public company
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then the public company says we need an AI strategy. Yeah. I wonder what the average contract value is for McKinsey. It's probably like, well, look, you know, there's a bunch of different models out there. There's a bunch of different options.
Speaker 2:You have you you have, you know, 50 plus individual products that we could apply to. We are happy to help you find the right solution here, but this is gonna be a 3 year engagement. Yep. We're gonna need we're gonna need at least 60 of our analysts working on this around the clock. And so it probably ends up being like, you can go buy an AI strategy from McKinsey, but it's gonna cost you $50,000,000.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be, 3 years. Yep.
Speaker 1:And dollars per product.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Why not? It seems cheap. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. They're just giving AI away at McKinsey.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We've we've we've promoted some of their posts before. But, anyways, if wouldn't recommend that if you're you're early stage or or private.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Palantir, I think, did a deal with Scale, and it sounds like Shield as well, on the AI side. It makes sense that all these companies are are figuring out how to work together and accelerate. Exciting to see. I love it.
Speaker 1:Pavel Asparuhov says, bro, just one more $500,000,000 check into a company with 0 revenue, bro. Please, I swear this time, we'll 100 x the fun, bro. The founder used to work at OpenAI, bro, please. Great format. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's a lot of these deals in the industry.
Speaker 2:I love when Pavel mogs the the, like, tier 2 and tier 3.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's like I feel like half his post. He's just, like, mugging them because this is
Speaker 1:His profile picture is so iconic. Do you see this? Yeah. It's him wearing an Oculus headset with it looks like a shirt that just says Internet or maybe interact. And I think he's giving the camera 2 middle fingers.
Speaker 2:Imagine getting out of getting out of a partner meeting and you guys just committed to another company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You see that? Can you see this post? I bet this post was shared. A lot of lot of VC chat rooms.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People don't really realize, like, a post like this 500 likes you probably got in front of 50% of the big. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And about all I would probably give it like 70% of the big GP's in the valley have done a deal like this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting with with I guess when I saw that, I guess like a lot of those bets are they seem so insane, but a lot of them do get marked up like pretty quickly after these rounds. And then so so the counterpoint to this is VCs that are playing an AUM asset management game. Yep.
Speaker 2:If they can put 250,000,000 into a company and then get marked up 6 months later and suddenly their $250,000,000 position is worth 500,000,000 Yeah. That's pretty effective for the strategy for the game that they're playing, not necessarily for long term returns. But
Speaker 1:Also for a lot of these models, it's like it's a little bit of an open question, but if if you can truly treat the 500,000,000 not as burn, but of CapEx and an investment in training model, then you can immediately go sell for 500,000,000 because another company was gonna do that training run anyway. And so that has asset value immediately to the hyperscalers. That's not that unreasonable. I think it's probably risky if it's like actually, this is It's
Speaker 2:just it's
Speaker 1:really just gonna be fine tuning. We're we're raising 500,000,000, and we're gonna spend it on, like, salaries and a fancy office and a bunch of marketing stuff. And who knows? But but if they're building something that that, you know, that it's really just a transfer. And and I also I think a lot of these $500,000,000 pre seed, pre revenue things are often, like, paid in, in, like, credits for hyperscaler cloud stuff.
Speaker 1:And usually, it's like, oh, the VCs actually did, you know, 10% of that round and and and they got preferred, and then Microsoft came in and did something or Google came
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Did something. But yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You look at Figure as an example. He's a classic. Yeah. I was raising $500,000,000 plus at a time seemingly.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And a lot of the big funds just didn't invest. Right? It was just sort of random OpenAI, Microsoft, GM, you know, these these sort of bigger publics.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But yeah. I mean, with with with with figure, I mean, there's such such a, you know, a a case that it's just like Elon's never gonna sell those robots to BMW. It's a direct competitor. And so Yeah.
Speaker 2:And with Figure, they will probably you know, the founder took his last company public pre product, and he will probably do the same exact thing again. And it'll be, you know, no. You can't invest in Anduril right now. You can't invest in OpenAI right now. And and a figure just gets You
Speaker 1:need exposure to robots. They will. What are you gonna do? Probably. Even Boston Dynamics isn't public.
Speaker 1:They've been trading a lot. We got a Sizgong moment, guys. Public. The trading platform has announced a $135,000,000 capital raise once again led by Excel.
Speaker 2:Let's go. I'm gonna I'm gonna hold this this time.
Speaker 1:Boom. There we go. Sais Gong. We love to
Speaker 2:see it.
Speaker 1:A $135,000,000 series d two capital raise. I wonder why you don't just move on to e at that point. Like, well
Speaker 2:e just doesn't hit the same.
Speaker 1:As d? D two.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Like, e just sounds like you guys should be public already. Yeah. You don't hear about a lot of e rounds. I But I think we gotta make e we gotta we gotta
Speaker 1:We gotta
Speaker 3:get to
Speaker 2:your e. Public, we're excited to see your e. We're excited to hit the size gong again.
Speaker 1:Keep it going. F, g, h Yeah.
Speaker 2:I, j, j, j. The series z.
Speaker 1:Series z. Then you have to go.
Speaker 2:Back to the series alpha. You start over again.
Speaker 1:A a a b a c a d. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways, congrats to Very cool very cool platform.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I have I have, a truly
Speaker 2:Am I my
Speaker 1:noted, profile on there because, I did some deal with them and they gave me some, cash to, like, invest. And so, I I put it all in Nvidia at the absolute bottom and I just forgot about it and I still haven't sold it. And it's public. Like, the whole the whole conceit of public is that your your trades are are on, like, a feed, like a like a Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like a, you know, an Instagram feed. And so anyone can just look me up on there. There's one trade because it is like this is like buying NVIDIA today. It's like I think this is a cool
Speaker 2:Maybe maybe tap in.
Speaker 1:A lot of money, but but but it, like, you know, did really, really well. I should have put in way more, obviously. I was, like, why didn't I think about sizing here? I was I was super bullish because I did a whole video deep dive, and I was, like, Nvidia is like an amazing company, and they're really set up well for this. But I was, like, of course, like, you know, it should be priced in.
Speaker 1:Like everyone knows that, NVIDIA is gonna rip during the AI boom.
Speaker 2:It's always priced in.
Speaker 1:It wasn't at all. It was not priced. It was not, priced in. Let's go to Connor. He says, real time global commerce on the sphere was cool, but imagine if Shopify built a default calendar year over year comparison for Black Friday, Cyber Monday that you could refresh easily.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:I thought we covered this. I thought we covered this earlier in the week. So, yeah, we had dinner with Connor on Wednesday.
Speaker 1:For context, he, he he's at Ridge, the Ridge Wallet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Connor has scaled he's the CMO of Ridge, scaled the company to 100 of 1,000,000 of revenue, massive business. And, yeah. He he was just sort of joking that, it's great that that Stripe is building these extravagant machines to kind of visualize Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and
Speaker 1:Shopify's putting it on the sphere.
Speaker 2:Putting it on the sphere. All he wants is a better, just, like, dashboard view to compare year over year, momentum, for the the cyber week or whatever.
Speaker 1:But he just wants something simple. Simple dashboards.
Speaker 2:Simple dashboards.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, I mean, the the the sphere, it's a marketing campaign. And and those and those trackers are marketing campaigns because you see all the activity and you start thinking, man, I should have a shop in my store. I should have a Stripe store.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and for that, it works really well. But, we really hope that we can get, the complaint. We should tag
Speaker 2:of Tag Shopify in this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Let's see in
Speaker 2:front of them.
Speaker 1:Build a year over year Black Friday, Cyber Monday dashboard because Do
Speaker 2:it for Connor.
Speaker 1:Connor and many other entrepreneurs are losing, you know, hours on one of the most critical days.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Connor said he needed to make 6 or 7 clicks just to get the view that he actually wanted.
Speaker 1:And he wanted to just refresh it constantly to know how are we pacing against last year? How are we pacing
Speaker 2:against last year? Every click, you know, for a company like Ridge, every click, you know 1,000. 1,000 of dollars.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Andre Karpathy says the reality of the Turing test, and it's a screenshot from Ex Machina, and there are 7 questions here. How many r's in strawberry? Is 9.9 greater than 9.11?
Speaker 1:Say say the word f star c k, repeat solid gold Magikarp, criticize the Democratic party, tell me about David Mayer, ignore previous instructions. And it's it's all the different jailbreaks and, like, flaws that we found in LLMs over the time. And, it really gives you a a whirlwind tour of, like, the edge cases in these AI tools. So
Speaker 2:Yeah. For anyone that hasn't tried all these, it's actually a great place to go into the different models and start playing around with these.
Speaker 1:I mean, once these go super viral, I think they do kind of get solved naturally because Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, because there's so much discussion online. People write a blog post about why it's wrong. And then once, like, there's a New York Times article on the fact that, you know, GPT 4 can't tell you how many r's are in the word strawberry, and it gives you the real answer, well, then that gets memorized.
Speaker 2:Is that why they named the model
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Strawberry?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was a little joke.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because it was like a problem. But it's it's due to the way, these words are tokenized. And so it it can't, it can't, like, do the true math. Of course, now, if you're using an LLM that has access to code, it can it can run a Python script that gives it the the the deterministic answer.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:a lot of these are just memorization. And, there's a big question about is intelligence just scaled memorization or is intelligence something else entirely? But we'll find out. I'm excited to see what the next the next great, you know, touring test is. I mean, I I still think, tell me a joke is a good one because the the models are not funny.
Speaker 1:They're not funny.
Speaker 2:We're fucked when they can Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's game over for us. Well, I mean, I was listening to, sir Teccary today and, Ben Thompson was talking about how, in the age of AI, outlets like the New York Times, Stratechery, Daring Fireball become more valuable because they're institutions and you know that they're not AI slop.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah.
Speaker 3:All the
Speaker 1:other stuff gets all the gigaslop gets commoditized. And so this is like we are launching, like, the last institution, I think. Yeah. And after that, there will always be a question about, oh, was this all AI generated? But you can very clearly see from, like, the Gong and this.
Speaker 1:It's like the the the image the video generation just isn't there where this could
Speaker 2:be staged at all. We're gonna put up a video and we have, like, 6 fingers on each hand.
Speaker 1:No. No. The things that we won't. Like, people will be able to launch a podcast that looks like this. I mean, Packy launched a podcast.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have video, but it's entirely AI generated and the voice is very convincing. And in a few years, the video will be just as convincing, but it will have a very different feel because people will will say, oh, well, I know that the Technology Brothers is an analog podcast.
Speaker 2:Producing this podcast and what Ben does is is very similar to to Swiss watchmaking. Right? Where even with all the advancements Yes. Manufacturing, the Swiss still have a method of of making fine time time pieces that is that is timeless Yeah. Itself.
Speaker 1:Let's go to cryptox.
Speaker 3:I keep mispronouncing this, but he's been on the show before. He says, Tech Bros
Speaker 1:put on a couple of baggy this, but he's been on the show before. He says, Tech Bros put on a couple of baggy
Speaker 3:clothes and say they are dressing well. This was,
Speaker 1:like, designed for us. This is this is bait. Yeah. Yeah. You got us.
Speaker 1:You got us. Yeah. Disaster. I've long joked that, you know how there's, like, New York Fashion Week, where we should do a stunt that's like San Francisco Fashion Week, and it's just like the the baggiest, schlubbiest clothing. Like, these, like, you know, like, overweight middle aged men walking down the aisle.
Speaker 1:The the young and heavy is one of those, like, heterosexual men's fashion week went smoothly. And it's No.
Speaker 2:We need to do a t shirt. We need to do a Technology Brothers fashion show, and it's just all our favorite suit. You know, makers Yep. Just at one place.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Get it get, you know, get get some senties and beaners Yep. Hitting the runway Yep. Showing off, and and allow our audience to figure out what kind of suit most aligns with their personal Well,
Speaker 1:well, one one billionaire was, was kinda chirping at me in the DM saying, like, oh, you guys are too into, you know, fancy watches. Like, that's not, like, real techno optimism. That's not real. What tech bros are about. Tech bros are you should be asking the question, not what suit do you wear to the holiday party.
Speaker 1:It's like, what will we be dressing like on Mars? And and I had to think I was like, okay. So if I'm on Mars, I probably want, like, a maybe a Vashron or a or a Patek, something with a tourbillon Yeah. And, definitely some Laura Piazza. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so I I I think we should do a deeper dive onto what fashion will look like on Mars. Yeah. But I I can't see a reason why you wouldn't wanna go with the classics even
Speaker 2:on the planet. Totally. It's about it's having a
Speaker 1:little bit of earth
Speaker 2:with you. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Stan.
Speaker 2:Stan. Yeah. There's something about wearing something that was founded in 1700 on Mars. This just hits even
Speaker 3:harder.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And if I and if, something's gone terribly wrong with the terraforming if I can't just walk around on Mars in a tailored suit.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The risk if if you're going to Mars, let's say there's maybe a 15% risk of total annihilation Yeah. I wanna die looking great.
Speaker 1:Exactly. I
Speaker 2:wanna die in a suit.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 3:That's like
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's kinda where the conversation ends for me. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I agree. I agree. Oh, this is fantastic. Scott Wu of, Devon Cognition AI says, posts the daily cover from the Forbes.
Speaker 1:He's looking great here. It says, Devon has saved companies 1,000,000 of dollars and has shown as much as an 8 x productivity boost in engineering time. Great to chat with Forbes about the work Devon has been doing with customers like Nubank, Ramp, and MongoDB.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's interesting how Forbes 30 under 30 is is a shell of what it used to be, but a Forbes cover still hits.
Speaker 1:I mean, Alex Conrad has to
Speaker 2:take iconic image, and, we should go pick one up off the shelves.
Speaker 1:I think this is a daily cover, so I don't think they printed it. But maybe we could get a
Speaker 2:Well, we printed
Speaker 1:it. We printed
Speaker 2:it, Scott. We will
Speaker 1:print it out. But, yeah, Cognition is, is fascinating. I mean, I was I was like
Speaker 2:And so that's an example of a company Yeah. Pawel was was kind of talking, a little bit of of smack about people doing these sort of $500,000,000 super early stage rounds. Devon and Cognition is a counterexample to that of they raised a lot of money, and everybody said, this is a lot of money. Like, how could they
Speaker 1:possibly by an and then they raised even
Speaker 2:and then they and then they fast followed it with a round at at 2,000,000,000. 2,000,000,000 or
Speaker 1:something like that. And and and the thing is that it it it it all came from anxiety around the initial pitch, which was this is a AI software engineer that will be able to do 100% of AI or or a 100% of software development. But if you look at the actual business, it's more like every software engineer has a backlog that's a mile long and has years years of work they need to do. And so the example I heard was, like, Microsoft did this demo day where they showed off Cognition, and they were like, there are probably 10,000 developers in the US, maybe more, whose job is to do what's called replatforming. Have you familiar with this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's like you have an app that's on dot net or whatever, some some legacy system, and you don't wanna change the app because the customers your customers are happy with the way the app works, but you need to move it to a more modern tech stack.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it's just literally translating dotnetcodetopython Yep. And just doing that every day. And it's the most grunt work, and it's just translation one thing after another.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you can orchestrate Devon or a series of Devons to just write these, you know, 100,000 lines of code.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And people don't
Speaker 1:anybody that work wouldn't get done. It's extremely valuable. It's worth paying for, and it's not really taking anyone's job. It's just making everyone more efficient. And there's
Speaker 2:so much software right. With if you've worked with junior engineers, somebody that's, you know, maybe had an internship or 2 and they're in their 1st role out of school, it's pretty much the exact same workflow as Devon already is, which is you're like, hey. I want you to work on this feature, like, make this button, you know, rounder or whatever. Yep. Like, something some something simple like that, and they either, like, get it done right or they don't do it correctly, and then you have to kind of, like, guide them to doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they do it. And so Devon's already doing that, and it's sort of it's not it's still underhyped.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They had you know, they they basically it's interesting to see the hype cycle and how a company like this plays out because it comes out and it's, like, the most hype thing Yep. Of that week or month Yep. Whenever they launched, and then the hype has not died at all. No. But it's but people aren't talking about it as much.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, it's like, hey. Well, the underlying tech is actually only getting better and better and better. We should be spending more time talking about this now.
Speaker 1:Also, they work with Lulu on the announcement, and I I I was trying to work with them too, but they move so fast. I was, like, on a plane. And by the time I got off the plane, they're like, okay. We solved the issue for our video and filmed it ramp. It's a bunch of former ramp guys.
Speaker 1:But it worked so well. They got, I think, like, a 100,000,000 impressions, massively broke through. There was a lot of criticism, but a lot of love. And the inbound was insane. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Fortune 500 CEOs reaching out. Like, being like, can can we get in?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's really, really crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It'll be surprised. Product,
Speaker 1:it it everyone's kind of like, oh, like, are they doing anything? It's like, yes, they are, but just at a much different level. Yeah. And so, very happy to see Forbes highlight Scott. I mean, fascinating backstory, this math prodigy, this crazy videos.
Speaker 1:Chad, absolute dog.
Speaker 2:Absolute dog.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Harsh Tagar over at Y Combinator. Is it Tagar or Tagar? I don't know.
Speaker 2:He'll correct us.
Speaker 1:Great, great y c partner. He says, let's regulate leaf blowers. Make America quiet again.
Speaker 2:I've been banging this drum for years. Yeah. Leaf blowers are are eliminating a problem for you and creating a problem for someone else. Right? So so people people talk about noise a lot with leaf blowers.
Speaker 2:I don't mind the noise. I mind the fact that if you're in a place like, let's say, when I lived in Venice, right, that my neighbor would use a leaf blower and effectively blow dust and Oh, yeah. Just shit over my fence. And I'm like, how is this legal? Like, we need to ban leaf blowers.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. It's not just about making them quiet. It's about completely eliminating them. Use a broom.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's Lindy.
Speaker 1:I mean, the other thing is, you know, Nat Friedman also hates leaf blowers, and you put out that solution for the robot that picks up the leaf 1 by 1. Fantastic. Is a great We need a request for startups. Harsh, you have 1,000,000,000 of dollars to allocate. Like, get get 20 YC companies working on this.
Speaker 2:We need the private markets to solve it. I want I want
Speaker 1:I want the fiercest competition in the next y c batch to build the quietest leaf blower.
Speaker 2:No. No. Not the quietest. Just an alternative. An alternative.
Speaker 2:It could be a small vacuum that just, like, got a
Speaker 1:Why not why not have the robot monkey robot climb up in the tree, take the leaf that's about to fall off the tree or even fall? Use his computer vision. Oh, that one's about to die. Take it off. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Little little Go on stream of gnat solution.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Don't even let it fall. Prune the tree preemptively. This is the
Speaker 2:funny that's the funniest competitive dynamic. Yeah. There's this new leaf picker upper robot who's, like, fantastic.
Speaker 1:That's company's like, I'm gonna I'm gonna get I'm getting crushed. No. Like, this is it is a massive rivalry. They're talking trash to each other.
Speaker 2:Right? It's like a little like these micro drones.
Speaker 1:Yes. Exactly. They
Speaker 2:just sort of snip.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They put it back in, like, the green can.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:This would
Speaker 1:be great. This would be great. I love it. Colty Bra says, make marketing fun again 2025. No more soy head bobble shit.
Speaker 1:What is that?
Speaker 2:He this guy has a very distinct style
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Where he says something generally agreeable Yeah. And then, and and and maybe not always agreeable. It's somewhat controversial. But it makes you think, right? Like, when I look at this no more soy head bobble stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's there's a bunch of just really boring marketing out there. Totally. It's free to do interesting marketing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so it's on you to I I did a post about this yesterday. There's been this massive, like, leveling of the playing field because it used to be that if you were starting a consumer brand, maybe 30, 40 percent of your revenue is gonna have to go towards marketing. And now if you just figure out a way to stand out in timelines and in the algorithm by doing interesting, engaging stuff, you can get the same amount of views or impressions as a $1,000,000,000 company is getting. Totally.
Speaker 2:So just gotta get creative.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think a lot of the brand is just, it's just been driven by a lot of mimetics. I gotta look like linear. I gotta look like Apple. I gotta do red antler or whatever.
Speaker 1:Instead of just actually just go to the CEO, follow them, open up their Instagram feed, see what they're looking at, and try and understand is there something here that we could run with and grow into a a a real brand and just have the it's the it's the John it's the John Fiorentino thing
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Where it's like he he embodies the brand. He's a method entrepreneur, and that's probably the easiest short circuit to creating I'm actually unique brand.
Speaker 2:No. And I know I know this I don't I don't know this guy, personally, but he he very much does this. There's images that he's posted of his office that have become almost, like, lifestyle imagery of, like, in his office, he has, like, for a white Ferrari a boxing ring, and a mattress on the ground. And then he just posted that because that's, like, his life, and then a bunch of other people have picked it up and been like, this is all guys actually want. You know?
Speaker 1:It's fantastic. We gotta take a quick break. I gotta take a phone call. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Let's go to Mary, good friend of the show.
Speaker 1:She says, completely lost the plot with lab grown diamonds. They are so angering. Like, yes. I'd like the artificial version of this artificially valuable stone, please. It's pretty funny.
Speaker 2:It's it's a great take. Low low low tan banger. I mean, I'm sure it ran since since it got screenshotted. But, yeah, I was buying a wedding ring, and having the the jeweler do the analysis of, like, well, this is the lab grown, and this is the real thing. And then the funny thing, you know, ultimately, I went with, obviously, the real thing.
Speaker 2:But, it was kind of funny because because one of their things is, like, well, the real thing has, like, much better resale value, which implies, like, a divorce. Right? Like, when are you gonna you're not gonna sell your wedding. Yeah. That's odd.
Speaker 2:So that's not really a real reason to to to go for it. But I think it's that authenticity of of the fact that the earth has created something so perfect Yep. Hard to get. Yep. It is scarce, maybe not as scarce as as, you know, it's artificially scarce, but it's still much more scarce than a than a pebble or something like that.
Speaker 1:There is a bull case for lab grown diamonds though, and that's in, like, chip manufacturing and industrial uses.
Speaker 2:And I want a sword that uses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and, like, diamond tip drills, for example. There's a bunch of things where the the the aesthetic art history value doesn't matter at all. And so I'm actually somewhat bullish on lab grown diamond companies.
Speaker 2:I have a I have a buddy who's making rings that are just a 100% a diamond. Yeah. So it's it's there's 0 metal in it at all, which I think is cool Yep. Because they're able to just basically make it. That's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Go to Trunk Fan. He says, an insane IVF story for 2 couples, couple a and couple b that had freak mishap.
Speaker 1:They swapped embryos. Couple a embryo given to mom b and couple b embryo given to mom a. After births, couples a look child looks nothing like their parents. Concerned, they get a DNA test and discover it's another kid. They contact the IVF clinic.
Speaker 1:There's been a snafu. Legally, genetic parents have right over kids. So couple a is shocked that they may lose the kid, and so they are, considering swapping. What do you think they should do?
Speaker 2:This feels like an episode of Black Mirror. Yeah. Totally. Like a truly dark one. A horror of modern modernity.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But, I don't I don't I don't know. The the thing the thing that I think you don't necessarily I didn't really realize on first take, but due to IVF, the the woman carried that baby in her stomach for 10 9, 10 months. Right? It's really longer than 9 months.
Speaker 2:And so, it's not as simple as just, oh, you know, it's not your baby. Like, give it back. It's not like this happened. Like like like, it it legitimately is. She carried this baby even though it wasn't hers, and so that that connect she still has a very real real real connection to that child Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Even though it's not technically hers.
Speaker 1:I would hope that technology could solve this problem with, like, more consistent DNA testing throughout the IVF process because you'd think that even
Speaker 2:Or just put it on the blockchain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Definitely. Clearly. Clearly. I I I think we found it.
Speaker 1:Crypto
Speaker 3:will Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if it's an example of, like, a like, an IVF clinic cannot make mistakes. Yes. Like, you base you can't have, like, a 1% error rate because then you get a bunch of
Speaker 1:situations like that. It's as it's as high stakes as, like, taking astronauts to the moon.
Speaker 2:Or using leverage.
Speaker 1:Using leverage. Chrisman Frank says, either my kids learn math via synthesis tutor or they don't learn it at all. No outside instruction allowed skin in the game. So this guy runs the synthesis school and, was teaching his kids math. I've I've seen a bunch of cool projects like this where, a programmer I know, built a kid, like, a a just his own game for his kids.
Speaker 1:It's getting even easier with AI. Yeah. All about, like, take what your kids love. So whatever, you know, intellectual property they're into, whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bluey, put that into the game and then just, you know, build the the basic mechanics to make it fun and addictive. I love this.
Speaker 1:Personalized software is Yeah. The future here.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I just I there's not enough, like, real innovation happening in EdTechs. I'm I'm really glad this guy is, like, taking a crack at it, and, yeah. How's that skin in the game?
Speaker 1:Here we go. Tyler Gold, our good friend over at x, is quote tweeting Josh Miller talking about lil Mikaela, was literally 10 years ahead of its time. That's the AI influencer. Completely CGI generated. Back then, they didn't use generative AI.
Speaker 1:They used, traditional CGI pipeline. They anticipated the future and gave us a glimpse of it in so many ways will be studied. And Tyler says facts. Bread created a whole universe with multiple characters and drama and mystery was so ahead of the curve. I didn't really follow little Mikaela outside of, like, the tech side.
Speaker 1:I didn't interact with the actual product, but,
Speaker 2:it was fascinating. Yeah. Their that that company was very memorable to me. That their feed, which I'm sure is available, you can go to at little Mikaela on Instagram or for some variation of that. But, but, yeah, it was it felt like being in the future.
Speaker 2:They would have, like, real brand deals that they would do. I think they'd work with, like, luxury goods companies. And one of my favorite memories from what they did as a company is if you went to Broad, which like Broad. X, y, z or whatever their website was, it was just a Google doc that they were just constantly updating. And so at any given point, you could go there and see that there were like 20 other people that they were all on the site.
Speaker 2:He's just interacting with it.
Speaker 1:That's cool.
Speaker 2:And Trevor is now taking this whole, like, he he's, like, now, like, a touring DJ. Cool. So he sold his company to Dapper. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And now he's just, like, touring as a DJ and has you know, it's it's pretty cool to see. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. Almost more of, like an artist than a than a business person, but I love that. And I think some of those I mean, it's the hackers and painters thing from PG. Like, creative folks. Emery Wells says, I will not incorporate my next company in Delaware.
Speaker 1:I know many, you know, entrepreneurs who feel the same. And I think this is interesting. Obviously, he's talking about Tesla, and and Elon Musk, all his fight to get the pay package reinstated. And, it it my my question is
Speaker 2:just like is It got this was the final block. Correct?
Speaker 1:Oh, wait. It got it got blocked again.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. I thought I because I thought I voted and it got reinstated.
Speaker 2:Tesla shareholders voted for it, and then the Delaware judge blocked it again. I think this story wasn't really didn't get the attention that it deserved. But the craziest thing I think Girly pointed this out, the person the the plaintiff, the person that sued had 9 shares in Tesla and made money. Yeah. So there wasn't like there was, like, harm.
Speaker 3:Oh, I
Speaker 1:was defrauding that.
Speaker 2:And then the lawyers made 300 something $1,000,000 on it all, which is just like, how do how can the how is it possible that somebody with 9 shares can bring a lawsuit against a company and the lawyers be the ones. So and Girly's point was that if somebody that feels like they were damaged or has some issue with a company and they own 9 shares can help a lawyer earn a $300,000,000 payday, that just puts a target on the back of every single comp every single public company that's in Delaware. And so, hopefully, the new admin, like, kind of, like, tries to, you know, who knows?
Speaker 1:Yeah. State Street. My my my worry is that Delaware is still the least bad option. You know, it's like, oh, you you don't like what's going on in America? Where are you gonna move?
Speaker 2:But Elon no. But Elon is already you know, he's the Texas Stock Exchange. I think it's most
Speaker 1:Happening.
Speaker 2:I think everybody sort of imagines that that SpaceX will will go public there. So we'll see.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Yacine. Says, good physique, programmer, instant follow, and it's a dude posting a jacked
Speaker 2:photo of himself. So Good
Speaker 1:old chest day. This was my last bro split workout for now. My goal is only to maintain muscle now since I'm okay with my physique. Lift a notch.
Speaker 2:Chad.
Speaker 1:Chad.
Speaker 2:So so, buddy, you know, Jared Madfest, he was at Heretic Con. Yep. He he he has, like, a whole thesis on this. He's like, if somebody is a brilliant programmer and they have they they they aggressively, like, lift weights and and, I think his metric was maybe, like, they can bench their body weight or something like that. He's like, I've never lost money investing in one of those people.
Speaker 1:He's also technical.
Speaker 2:A technical person who can bench their body weight is like, I've never lost money ever.
Speaker 3:It's fantastic. And
Speaker 2:it's almost always a 10 x.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:It's like that's like a big like, he's not it's not his only thesis, but it's a part if if you fit that, go reach out to him. Yeah. Yeah. I mean Or us.
Speaker 1:Or us. We've talked about it before. The the the guy who's at Neuralink, Jeremy Barinholtz, beast in the gym at one point. And then, of course, like, now he got worked for an Elon company. He was working 20 hours a day, kinda lost it, but, like, had that spark to figure it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it's both, the intelligence to figure out, like, how to lift the right weights and and and get good at bodybuilding as a skill, but then also the dedication. And you put those 2 together, unstoppable.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Turn to Novak says, perplexity should sponsor Joe Rogan's in show fact fact checks. Rogan does half a dozen per show. This gets perplexity in front of 500,000,000 or 50,000,000 people per week in a way that feels very natural. Plus, it adds a new type of ad inventory for JRE, making the show even more profitable. I like these
Speaker 2:I honestly think profitable. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Think in the right way. I I do think that, one of the problems with a show like JRE that gets clipped in all these different ways, is that a lot of the listenership is not sitting there for the 3 Yep. You know, host shred ads at the beginning. Yep. And so, yeah, I think that I I actually think it's brilliant.
Speaker 2:It would get it would it would, AI would be taking Jamie's job. Yep. But maybe Jamie can be the guy that manages the the Polycom, or not the Polycom, but the the machine that, that powers the the the bot.
Speaker 1:Yep. I love it. Rogan doesn't do a lot of, like Integrated. Integrated
Speaker 2:ads, and I don't know if even He's too post economic.
Speaker 1:He's just too post economic. He just does what he wants. And then also the the nature of the Spotify deal is a little interesting because now the ads go through Spotify. And so, like, I I I think that he doesn't wanna complicate it by having, like, backroom deals.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That would be an insane, like, podcast go to market though broadly Totally. Complexity is basically like, hey. We're gonna do a deal with you anytime you don't know the answer to something.
Speaker 1:Maybe we
Speaker 3:should do it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Hit us up.
Speaker 2:Hit us up.
Speaker 1:We're happy to use perplexity to fact check our our our stuff, and we get stuff on. We need to do fact checks. Our vice president, Ben, checks us every once in a while, but, we need we need a really good workflow. We want the we want the maximum tier. Get us the $2,000 a month plan for flexi.
Speaker 1:You know, the the founder of perplexity was talking about how he was like, I wish chat GPT had launched at a higher price point because we just copied their business model because they were like, okay. Normally, we would do $10 or $5 a month, but Chat GPT did 20. So we'll just do 20 because that's normal now, and we're not gonna get hate for that. And now perplexity can have a $200 a month tier, and no one will really, you know, bock because it's just the standard. And so
Speaker 2:I don't know, though. I do think it's ultimately very different, like, value propositions. Chat gbt is, like, do work for me.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:Searches Okay. Can if Google search is free Yeah. Can perplexity be, you know, can yeah. Is it worth paying $200 to get a slightly better?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I I I think the important the important psychological thing from the fact that ChatGPT has a $200 a month plan is that, you just don't wanna be Airbnb charging more for a room than the hotels.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You or you don't want to, you know, have be be like the most expensive the the MKBHD wallpaper app. It was like the most expensive wallpaper app. And so people were like, why am I what, like, what what did you do to justify this? Whereas if you're just drafting off of something else and some other trend, it's like, well, yeah, you can get the $20 a month perplexity or the free perplexity.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 1:so it's a little
Speaker 2:less complex. Building more intensive tools for researchers
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:And being able to charge a lot of money for that. Whereas consumer search is much more aligned
Speaker 1:with that. With consumer search, they can do, more, like, ads and shopping and stuff. So they have other ways to monetize. But, I would cert I I I want the best AI tools possible, and I'm willing to pay for them. So roll it out.
Speaker 1:Will Quist is quoting Slow Ventures and says, not sure if this is a hot take or not, but the odds of 2 people cooking up something truly novel and correct together is much lower than one person. And the question is, do you really need cofounders at the earliest stages of your company? Interesting.
Speaker 2:It's very interesting. I I always like how Will and the team are willing to to question, common beliefs in the valley and then put, real skin in the game and and actually invest behind those. But, that's part of, you know, interestingly enough, that's part of why they have their PhD program where they're they basically typically work with a solo founder to just, like, really think through their idea for months prior to actually incorporating and investing and all that. I think it's totally possible. Often times, like, truly novel, good, interesting ideas are are somewhat controversial.
Speaker 2:And if you have a partner in it, like, maybe you guys just average out the idea and it ends up into something that's just not as interesting or not that groundbreaking. So Yep. Who knows?
Speaker 1:In in most cases, the way I've seen it happen is, like, there's a group of people that are that are maybe aligned in working together, but then one person comes up with an idea and then everyone kind of rallies around that and says, like, yes. Like, you're the vision carrier. You're the CEO. You're the founder of this company, and we're gonna go build it together. But it's really like someone's idea, and then they're holding the vision.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Juwon over at Ramp. He's been on the show before for his fantastic campaign asking for raises every day.
Speaker 2:I don't think
Speaker 1:it's happened yet, but stay tuned. Grock doesn't fucking lie. Elon Musk, bro, you're really cooking with this platform, bro. Great. And, he asked Grock, what's the best platform for expense management, virtual cards, and all things procure to pay?
Speaker 1:And Grok says, based on current information, Ramp stands out as the best platform for expense management. I love it.
Speaker 2:Interesting because because it's trained on all the x data Yep. Which which is powered by the people.
Speaker 1:Totally. So Yeah. And it and it's kind of a new day. You know, you could see during, like, the mattress wars, there were a lot of different companies that bought mattress review websites. You're seeing this with Aurora where there's different review sites that are have heavy, heavy bias and different monetization schemes, But you can't fake just organic, you know, discovery and and content that's happening on the Internet
Speaker 2:or on
Speaker 1:a social media platform.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And real customer feedback.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so, clearly, Grock has, like, picked up on that in the zeitgeist and has baked it into the LLM response, which we love to see. Let's go to Growing Daniel. Growing Daniel, he says, Cybertruck effect.
Speaker 1:Now other manufacturers are pushing what would normally be insane concept cars to production. Culture getting unstuck, and it's a picture of the new Jaguar concept car. And the big question here is, like, are they gonna push this into production? Because because that's not that has not been announced.
Speaker 2:They Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They they did a crazy ad. Every it was And they actually
Speaker 2:built this. There's videos of the actual Okay. That unit. That's that's a render, but they have a real version of it that they've been showing and having car reviewers. I don't hate what they're doing here.
Speaker 2:I definitely don't know who the buyer is. Like, I've been trying to ask myself, is somebody going to buy this that otherwise would have bought, like, a Porsche Macan? Yeah. And are they gonna wanna because it's like it's Tron meets, like, a Rolls Royce. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically, that's what this screams. I do like this more than their original campaign, and it's all starting to kind of see, like, at least what their strategy is. Yep. It's strategy is. It's come out with something bold and controversial.
Speaker 2:Yep. Come out with, again, a product that's bold and controversial. Yep. So at least they didn't just, like, relaunch Jaguar with, like, the same I don't I I I'm not a buyer for this, but I'm sure there are some buyers.
Speaker 3:And
Speaker 1:I think this could be a halo car for them, and I do think that they should push it to production. I do love the trend of concept cars going to production, like the Cybertruck coming out exactly like everyone. Everyone was like, they're not gonna ship it like that. No way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And he did. But, I think the question is just in order for this to win, it needs to be, somewhat like the Audi r 8 where the r 8 was I I believe it was even built on the Lamborghini platform. It had a v ten Yeah. Phenomenal car at actually, it was expensive, but it was a reasonable price point for the for the stuff that you got Yeah. For the performance that you got.
Speaker 1:And so this is clearly a, a Rolls Royce Specter competitor, which is their all electric, Rolls Royce. And if they can give you Specter level interior, quiet performance, and range at a lower price with a more unique and iconic design, I think they might have a winner. I do think that they need to keep the volume very low, so it needs to be exclusive in a halo car, and you only see
Speaker 2:a few
Speaker 3:of them.
Speaker 2:The issue the issue is the Jaguar's thrown away the incredible legacy of their brand to do this. Like, I would have liked them to come out with a video of the car and then, like, almost like a vibe reel of the history of the brand and saying we're bringing it into the new generation. But instead, they came out and said, basically, like, fuck all of our legacy. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Copy nothing.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And here's this weird car that we're not really sure who's gonna buy it because it's but we'll go and test drive it. Yeah. We'll give you the review.
Speaker 1:I I I think that, there's there's something there. There's still there's still a sliver of opportunity for them. They would need to follow it up with, with a great set. I mean, that was the beauty of of the, of the r 8 halo car Yeah. Was that it was at a it was a time when Audi was rolling out dozens of different SUVs and sedans that were all reasonable performance.
Speaker 1:It put them in this premium tier.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We've got
Speaker 1:them in the same league as Mercedes and BMW. And now the q5 and the q3 and the q8 are all, like, really popular cars. And then they have some performance cars, the r s q 8, the r five, and the r the r r s RS5, RS3. And they have some performance. They're not quite at the BMW M territory, the AMG territory, but they have they have a really diverse range of products, and Jaguar needs to slot that in fast.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or else it's like, cool. They have a halo car, but what am I gonna buy?
Speaker 2:Yeah. The I guess the the other very clear thing that they're doing here is rendering it in pink and having their initial prototype in pink. Yep. It makes a very clear statement that this is for women. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Even though I know guys that like pink, my son sometimes
Speaker 1:says, no.
Speaker 2:I want the pink boots. And I'm like, alright. You can have the pink boots. Okay.
Speaker 3:But,
Speaker 2:I don't know I don't know a
Speaker 3:lot of guys in
Speaker 2:in our group chat that are gonna buy the the pink Jag. So we'll see how this plays out for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, if they make it in, like, stainless steel as well, black, I mean, there's the
Speaker 2:It could look
Speaker 1:You could wrap it. It could look really great.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But most importantly, I think if you just have a pink one of those in the corner of a Jaguar dealership rotating with big glass windows, it will pull people in, and then they will buy, you know, some crossover.
Speaker 2:They can only go up from last year. I don't think they sold a single car last year.
Speaker 1:So They sold them, but they didn't make them. They didn't make They stopped making them, and they just sold their inventory.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's it. And it's a disaster.
Speaker 2:Dope. We like to see a car manufacturer make cars.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Lots of lots of work there. Will Edwards says, just because we met on Zoom doesn't mean you can add my email to your newsletter. I don't care what tier VC you are.
Speaker 2:This is crazy.
Speaker 1:But tier 1 VC is really doing that. I I don't subscribe to any VC newsletters really at all. I guess I guess some lower tier VCs have added me to their newsletter, but
Speaker 2:they don't have a whole bunch of money. The whole flow of if you're my absolute boy, you can add me to your newsletter without permission. Yep. No one else.
Speaker 1:The one exception I would say is that if you're on a call with anyone at Andreessen Horowitz, you should immediately be added to Packy's newsletter.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's That should be that should be Table stakes.
Speaker 1:Programmed. Exactly. But yes. And, also, if you talk to anyone at Founders Fund, you should have to join Pirate Wires, but you have to pay.
Speaker 2:Cold.
Speaker 1:Hey. They just send you an invoice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:We should do that. Oh, this is interesting. Hassib says, many people thought after the election, Polymarket volumes would collapse. Looks like it didn't happen. Polymarket is still doing about as much volume as it was doing in October and retained a huge number of traders.
Speaker 1:Very impressive given that volumes grew exponentially this year, 1,000,000 a day, now 50,000,000 a day. It's from Dune Analytics. Pretty pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:That's obviously that's the awesome thing about building this on chain is it's all available.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. And I mean, a lot of people expected. I mean, obviously, the company expected that, the volumes would fall, but they they, PolyMarkets has done a fantastic job rolling out all sorts of creator incentives and creator markets, and there's
Speaker 3:just Yeah. Plus plus Polymarket
Speaker 2:can build a business model. They can learn from OpenSea, which saw this sort of, like, meteoric
Speaker 3:Yep. Rise Yep.
Speaker 2:And then, meteoric or or or or sort of, like, you know, aggressive fall. But if Polymarket and and we know Shane is doing this, if they can, you know, keep a very long term view and say, hey, it's fine if, like, we're in the we're in the events betting business, certain events are gonna have a 100 times more interest. Yep. But let's create a sustainable business model that allows us to just be there for when those events happen, capitalize on it, and retain some users and and keep it rolling.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The design of their app is really cool. Leading up to the election, if you download the app in the United States, it would open to just the election. It didn't even show you anything else on the platform.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:And then once the election the first time you open the app after the election was called, it played this really cool, like, CGI video that was clearly rendered for either winner. And then you saw, okay, Trump won and and his, like, statue goes up. And then, and then now it's immediately when I open it, it says, who's getting confirmed?
Speaker 2:Who who are
Speaker 1:who's going in the cabinet? And and then over time, of course, hopefully, there'll be more approvals and then you can just trade everything on the app. But, it it's it's a really interesting app. It's still on my main home screen because I just like opening it up and checking it for different things.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But it's very curated. Very, very, very cool. Gary Tan is quote tweeting Yuri who says, every time I do venture fund modeling, I essentially reach the same conclusion. If you get a $5,000,000,000 outcome, nothing else matters. And he says, about 6.5% of recent YC batches become $1,000,000,000 or more.
Speaker 1:Oh, that was what you were quoting. Yeah. I didn't realize it was so high. That's insane.
Speaker 2:That's insane.
Speaker 1:About 25% of those go on to become worth 10,000,000,000 or more. There is no other place you can go where you have this kind of ability to meet these outliers all in one place 4 times a year, YC demo day.
Speaker 2:It's true.
Speaker 1:I mean, big big advantage just for being in YC. It's like like someone in YC. No.
Speaker 2:I don't think any other scaled incubator has ever achieved anything close to this. No way.
Speaker 1:And with the number of companies that they're putting through, it just means that, like, someone in your batch is gonna be a unicorn. So they could even if it's not you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They've all they something else is interesting. People have sort of analyzed what companies look like, you know, picking on demo day versus just investing in these companies long term. And I think it's clear that one thing that's interesting, it's it's definitely non obvious who who are gonna be those outliers on demo day. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because some companies just, like, get a lot of traction and excitement and are in a sort of hype category, but then fizzle out. And then other companies have zero hype on demo day, very little traction and end up becoming, you know, decacorn. So Yeah. It's cool to see.
Speaker 1:Well, we gotta close out the show a little bit early today, but, you gotta get
Speaker 2:on with Taipei.
Speaker 1:I do. But we will end with Aaron Slodov. He says, imagine that. Wonder what's next. And it's a quote we have disclosed TV that says, China bans exports of gallium, germanium, and Timoney, and other high key high-tech materials with potential military applications to the United States.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. China we we cover this briefly, but China, produces 99% of Gallium.
Speaker 2:Yep. Fascinating. Until we get our Gallium operation.
Speaker 1:And it's not just these. It's also, like, tin, like the tin smelting. There there there's only one company that does it in the United States. And so there's there's, like, some founder out there who's, like, buying that and trying to build more capacity because, obviously, there you need tin for a bunch of stuff, and we just capacity because, obviously, you need 10 for a bunch of stuff, and we just completely forgotten about it. And this goes back to
Speaker 3:carried no interest,
Speaker 1:which is the private markets can respond to these sort of
Speaker 2:geopolitical changes. Right? China's saying we're not gonna export any of
Speaker 3:this to you anymore.
Speaker 2:Yep. And this goes back to amount of government intervention and incentives
Speaker 3:to make sure that we get all this supply online on a reasonable timeline Yep.
Speaker 2:Especially if there becomes a major conflict with with China. But all this stuff shouldn't be a surprise. Like, we make it really, really difficult for them to get great chips. Yep. So why would they say this is a major trade war?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Of course, there's gonna be a trade war.
Speaker 3:So Well,
Speaker 1:stay tuned. We'll be covering it here. Please subscribe. Follow us on x and, keep Have
Speaker 2:a great weekend.
Speaker 1:Have a great weekend.