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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TBPN. Today's Friday, 11/21/2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultradome, the temple of technology
Speaker 2:The fortress of finance. The
Speaker 1:capital of capital. Gotta ring the size gong for Eli Lilly. Big pharma is getting bigger. Big pharma is getting bigger. $1,000,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:That's the new market cap for Eli Lilly. They're a $1,000,000,000,000 company. Normally, you gotta be selling ads. You gotta be a tech company, or you gotta be an oil company to get into the 1,000,000,000,000 club.
Speaker 2:But people did say back in the day, whoever creates a cure for obesity is gonna be a trillionaire.
Speaker 1:Yep. And They did the meme.
Speaker 2:They did the meme. They did the meme.
Speaker 1:Eli Lilly just became the first $1,000,000,000,000 pharma company in history. I wanna see the CEO, Dave Ricks. You know, he went on the Cheeky Pint podcast. I wanna see him post, you know, how to run a 13 figure business. Give me a thread.
Speaker 1:Give me a thread. Nobody's done that. 13 figure businessman. I'm a 13 figure businessman, and I'm on Instagram giving you some advice. Teach a course.
Speaker 1:Come on. Tell me how you
Speaker 2:do on that playbook yet.
Speaker 1:But it is a fascinating business. It's one that I'm not super familiar with, and so I wanted to understand exactly how the weight loss market's playing out earlier in the year, maybe a year ago. We looked into GLP ones. We talked about them. We read about Novo.
Speaker 1:Of course, We they're
Speaker 2:laughed a little. We laughed a little when Novo failed to renew one of their one of their patents.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was crazy.
Speaker 2:And I think it cost Yeah. I'm gonna look it up.
Speaker 1:But it
Speaker 2:was something like that
Speaker 1:Yeah. So what's been fascinating to me is the lack of importance of intellectual property here. Normally, when I think about developing drugs, all pharma, I think about it as, like, you get a bunch of scientists in a lab. They they discover something, and then they patent it, and you have a complete monopoly on that for years. It's like, you know, you have the you have the patent on the intellectual property.
Speaker 1:If I have Mickey Mouse, you can't use Mickey Mouse for decades until it enters the the the the public good, the public square. But that's not exactly how this is playing out. So Novo has been was originally the one getting all the attention for kicking off the GLP one boom. But over the past few years, Lilly has caught up. It's sort of a Google story.
Speaker 1:It's sort of like the Google narrative. Novo sort of raced to market. Basically, everyone was working on diabetes drugs, then they figured out that the these could be used for weight loss, and everyone rebranded, ran a few more studies, and then brought the drugs to market. So now the name of the game is, making American GLP ones. Eli Lilly is building a massive new plant in North Carolina to support what's now a $72,000,000,000 market.
Speaker 1:The the revenue numbers are really crazy. It feels like an AI story. But in this case, AI stands for appetite inhibitor, I guess. That's right. Long term forecasts get really massive.
Speaker 1:Eli Lilly's currently expected to generate $63,000,000,000 across their entire portfolio. But by 2034, they're expected to sell over a 100,000,000,000 just in weight loss. So this new business line is going bigger
Speaker 2:entire Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. It's gonna be it's gonna be basically twice as big as their existing as as as everything they are now. They're already a big company. So, I was I was surprised that there was not more of an exclusivity period here. I wanted to dig into it.
Speaker 1:We were wondering, like, is it some sort of deal? Are they working together? Novo and Eli Lilly. In fact, they
Speaker 2:are Historically, did.
Speaker 1:No. Really? They were accused of working together. Oh, interesting. And that would have been illegal, and they would have been con Yeah.
Speaker 1:Colluding. They are bitter rivals going back eighty years. Yeah. They've never worked together. They, they do not work together.
Speaker 1:They, in fact, are fighting over this market completely. And so what actually wound up happening was that, the first, you know, the the the first drug that kicked this all off was Novo Nordisk. They patented semaglutide, which was marketed as Ozempic and then Wegoovy. And
Speaker 2:And to my point earlier Yes. Referencing the Canadian market, this happened around five months ago. Novo Nordisk act actually lost Canadian patent protection on Ozempic and Wegovy in Canada because a few years ago, they didn't pay a a very nominal maintenance fee on their patent.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Which will ultimately, you know, cost them billions.
Speaker 1:Well, don't do that. Instead, get on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.
Speaker 1:So back to GLP-1s. No one can patent a biological mechanism. You can only patent a particular chemical, a particular structure. You can't just you can't patent the idea of inhibiting mimicking GLP-one, which is what all these drugs do. They mimic the GLP-one hormone, and that's what's important.
Speaker 1:So Novo patented semaglutide. Lilly had tirzepatide already in the works. Again, they were working on diabetes, not Something on weight else. But it was it was already kind of, predicted to be a big market. So they are both they both have products.
Speaker 1:And then as soon as, as soon as Novo is able to pivot to weight loss, Lilly's able to run the same, playbook very, very quickly. And accidental discoveries and quick rebrandings are nothing new in pharma. Viagra was initially created by Pfizer as a heart medication. Yep. They gave it to both men and women, I believe.
Speaker 1:And, but male subjects obviously had a particular side effect, and that unlocked an entirely new market. And then that discovery came out of left field completely. So they had a true Pfizer basically had a true monopoly for five years before Cialis came to the market. This is obviously different because both companies were working on the underlying structure. Yep.
Speaker 1:Adderall also had a a really odd path. Amphetamines have been around for over a hundred years. They were used by soldiers in World War two. So, obviously, you can't patent them. In the 1970s, they were sold as weight loss drugs.
Speaker 1:And so there was a drug an appetite suppressant? Yes. Yes. So it was called Obetrol, and Obetrol was sold as a weight loss pill. In the nineties, a company bought Obitrol, renamed It's meth.
Speaker 1:Adderall. Meth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's a great weight loss drug. Try it today.
Speaker 1:It's actually so crazy. I imagine that it didn't really take off as a weight loss drug because it had crazy side effects. I don't actually know. I I would imagine it was effective, but probably just very risky to use. Yep.
Speaker 1:But in the nineties, a company purchased Obetrol, rebranded it Adderall, and then marketed it for ADHD, and they didn't have the patent on the chemical. Remember, you can't patent the the chemical amphetamine because it's been around for so long. So what they were able to do is develop a brand, and Adderall is a product that, the brand name somehow it just completely broke through in a massive way. And it's just synonymous with
Speaker 2:Synonymous with Kleenex.
Speaker 1:ADHD. Yes. Yes. It's actually broken through in such a way that it's synonymous with ADHD. It's synonymous with, like, study medication, even.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so it's been wildly successful. They actually did wind up getting a patent later on for Adderall XR. So Adderall XR is a bunch of beads in a capsule, and they were able to patent the delivery. Form factor.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Form factor. Exactly. And so even even when you don't have the patent on the underlying tech, you can still patent things around it, patent the biosim the biosimilars. There's a bunch of different things you can do.
Speaker 1:And so It is
Speaker 2:a shame that the Gila monster, never is not really getting any upside Not getting a bag. Any of these weight loss drugs. Yeah. Because that really is the origin. Right?
Speaker 1:They really should do that. They should do 1% for the Gila monster. And just 1% off the top, they should donate it to Gila monster. Is it Of maybe
Speaker 2:a foundation of sorts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. A foundation.
Speaker 2:A nonprofit.
Speaker 1:A nonprofit that just makes the Gila Monster live an absolute luxury.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:As a thank you. So Eli Lilly will be fighting like this endless battle
Speaker 2:with everyone on To be clear for those who don't know, the the the it was was it it was Novo Nordisk that figured out what was happening in the Gila monster, which Is it Gila monster? I don't remember. Yeah. It is. It's the Gila monster.
Speaker 1:Because there's two yeah. There's there's there's the Komodo dragon too. Yeah. And I I often get those two creatures confused. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, it's the saliva Yeah. In the in the Gila monster
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:I believe, that that that uses the same pathway, the the GLP one hormone. So so basically, over the next couple of years, we're gonna see this interesting dynamic where Eli Lilly, Novo, and basically every pharmaceutical company wants, they have to get it on the action because it's such a big market. Obesity is a massive disease. It really is that trillion dollar opportunity. It's been that for a long time.
Speaker 1:There's hundreds of millions of obese people. Everyone who has that doesn't want that. There's the market is so broad. And so what's interesting is that the patents haven't resulted in a perfect monopoly, where it's not this winner take all situation where Novo is just going to run away with it or Eli Lilly is just going to run away with What's actually happening is that they it's a duopoly right now, but demand is so high that they still have high margins.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they're in, like, a price war, but the price
Speaker 2:And that's war even with the competitive dynamics of the compounders, companies like HIMSS, which are are creating Yep. A ton of different GLP one products Yep. You know, just in their own Yeah. In their own facilities.
Speaker 1:And so the price has fallen 3x. And normally, you know, if you if the price of your good is falling x, you're charging three if you're if you're selling a $50,000 car and
Speaker 2:then Yeah.
Speaker 1:A couple years later, you're selling it for 15 k. Like, that's not great.
Speaker 2:Cost something, like, in the same range to produce, and so you're just getting massive margin compression. But Yes. The growth is so insane that Yep. It hasn't really mattered.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So the the the market is growing so, so much. Margins have fallen from 80% to, like, 60%, but the mass adoption just completely offsets that. So they're making way, way more dollars in total.
Speaker 1:And so, the next race now, you know, Eli Lilly's a trillion dollar company, what do they have to do next? They have to go and, make a make it a pill. They're they're gonna try and, make these weight loss products in pill form, and there's a whole new battle duking it out between Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk again and some other players. Yeah. But it's it's a it's a fascinating time.
Speaker 1:And there's a lot of they have their own, like, little barnacle economy. There's a lot of analogies to the to the AI race, trillion dollar companies and high margins and all this. Of course. But at the end of the day, what matters in the GLP-one market is just the actual supply. Like, you have to go and build a massive facility.
Speaker 1:And then once you get that facility up, people will buy it because just the the demand is so high that if you can make it, you will be able to sell it, you'll be able sell it at a good good margin. Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you wanna multistream, go to restream.com.
Speaker 1:There was some interesting news in the SEO world. Adobe is buying SEMRush for $1,900,000,000. Should we do a size gong for SEMRush?
Speaker 2:Think so. Think so. I think Yeah. Fantastic outcome. It was notable to me because obviously, we've been tracking the generative engine Yeah.
Speaker 2:Optimization space. And there wasn't really a great comp for a lot of those. Yeah. Like, you know, I remember we were talking about it. And it's not like you hear a lot of SEO companies getting acquired in in in that range.
Speaker 2:And so anyways, the geo market is still highly, highly, highly competitive. Obviously, we work with ProFound, which has been the clear leader in the market to date. But I would expect this to drive even more companies to come in and compete. Ask any VC. They're they're getting pitched companies in this category multiple times a week still.
Speaker 2:So people are just piling in. And
Speaker 1:That's interesting. I I wouldn't think of SEMrush as a as a GEO No.
Speaker 2:It's not. It's an SEO. It it was the SEO leader. Yeah. That being said, I would expect them to also want to play in GEO.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Not like they're gonna completely ignore.
Speaker 1:It's I would almost be thinking about SEMRush having their own build versus buy conversation. Yeah. It's sort of unclear what it would take them, how much data they have, how they can how they can jump into the GEO market. Obviously, a lot of companies have been able to get something up and running very, very quickly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so
Speaker 2:And they they do already have a tool. It's called SEMrush AI Visibility. Mhmm. But but again, there's so much demand for this for this kind of new product because every single company is, you know, spending a lot of time thinking about how they're appearing in in different LLM queries. So Yeah.
Speaker 2:Still still up for grabs.
Speaker 1:Reportedly, Semrush did $250,000,000 in revenue back in 2022, probably grown a little bit since then. Founded in 2008, a true overnight success at Overnight success. Ten twenty years to to get on to the next thing with Adobe. Speaking of Adobe, I need to push their tools to the limit at this point. They were so behind in terms of generative AI and their models.
Speaker 1:They were training their own models. But eventually, I saw a demo where Nano Banana was in Photoshop. And I feel like that is really a potentially a really, really big unlock just for workflow. We've seen so many different examples of this in in AI where the models are incredible. But having the harness and having the wrapper, whether that's a product that was introduced five years ago, ten years ago, fifty years ago, like, they're all getting better.
Speaker 2:Adobe works with fall.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So they they're they can integrate pretty much any model Sure. In the world and inference it. So I expect them to it is funny that that whatever it was, two years ago, every single player felt like they needed their own own models. And now, I think the the the narrative has really flipped.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of Fall, build and deploy AI video and image models with Fall, trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. And also Gemini three Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep moly moly deep multimodal understanding. We've been having a fun a ton of fun with Gemini three Pro and Nano Banana Pro. We have generated an image of the OuraFarm, the world, trying to understand A barnyard.
Speaker 1:Map a barnyard. Sort of an AI market map, but through the lens of a a barnyard because that's really what, what is going on in AI these days. Let's see. I think we need to zoom this out just a little bit to get it to line up, but, we can show and we can take you on a tour of our our farm based market map to to explain what's happening in the state of AI in November 2025. Tyler, do you wanna take us through it?
Speaker 3:Sure. Yes. I mean, so so we like to use a lot of animal idioms on this show. Yeah. A lot of these you might recognize, but we've kind of expanded out to try to cover all the major players.
Speaker 3:And, you know, so yes. So this was made with Nano Banana Pro. Very extremely good model. Yep. But you will notice as you get more and more complex, it gets a little bit There's some slop in some places.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:But broadly, think it did a very good job. Had a lot of fun making this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Before Nana Banana Pro was released, we would have needed to hire a somebody that maybe illustrates children's books. And if they were an expert, maybe they could have whipped something together in a day. This took you far longer than that of, you know, prompting over and over and over. But I I'm very I'm very pleased with the outcome.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. So so I guess let's just kind of go through each of the animals. Maybe maybe let's just start with with some of the more obvious ones, the ones we've talked about a lot on the show. So so let's start over here with with the piggies.
Speaker 3:So here here here we see the pigs at the at the slop trough.
Speaker 2:Who's there?
Speaker 3:Who's there? So this is broadly, this is just labeled as meta. Yeah. You can imagine a lot of people here. Right?
Speaker 3:You could you could see Sora here.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Bill Peebles.
Speaker 3:Bill Peebles could be, you know, eating some slop.
Speaker 1:Yes. Meta vibes.
Speaker 3:Yep. That makes sense. I mean, just like broadly AI in general, some people think basically all AI is slop.
Speaker 1:They do. There's been a lot of criticism.
Speaker 3:Yeah. But I think that one's fairly clear.
Speaker 1:You don't wanna be at the you you don't wanna be the pig at the slop trough. Although sometimes, you know, maybe the the profitability of being a slop farmer is underrated. Obviously, America has a lot of pigs that live at the trough. They eat from the trough. They eventually the pigs go to slaughter.
Speaker 1:They become bacon. They are sold into the economy. You can make a good living as a farmer who
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Who maintains a
Speaker 2:there's the Jeremy Gaffan take, which is we hate slop now because we know that in a few years, it will no longer be slop.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Don't count out don't count out the piggies yet.
Speaker 3:This is the sloppiest slop we'll ever be.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's true. Okay. Who else is on this
Speaker 3:market map? Let's move up. Let's see. We have the hen house here.
Speaker 1:Yes. And
Speaker 3:so and who's in the hen house? It's the fox.
Speaker 1:The fox.
Speaker 3:Right? And so so this, you can say, is kind of Oracle. Yes. Same outline. Right?
Speaker 3:Oracle is the hen is the henhouse?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:They're letting the fox in. They're letting the fox in a little
Speaker 1:bit. Potentially.
Speaker 3:Yeah. We'll we'll see what what, you know, when what what ends up happening. But
Speaker 1:Again, now that I'm looking at this image, the fox isn't actually in the henhouse yet. He's
Speaker 2:on the Yeah.
Speaker 1:He's circling the henhouse. And there's a question of of how how how far into the henhouse has the fox gone.
Speaker 2:It's it's notable that the chickens don't seem too disturbed yet.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. They're getting along because the fox could just be browsing, could just be stopping by.
Speaker 1:It could be friendly
Speaker 2:friendly fox. Friendly fox.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But but, of course, it is if you have a if you have a lot of cash flow as a big company, if you have the ability to borrow billions or hundreds of billions in the debt market, you have to protect your henhouse
Speaker 3:because That's right.
Speaker 1:Foxes might come by and might want to might wanna use you to cosign a loan.
Speaker 3:Yep. Okay. So then we we see the cash cow.
Speaker 1:The cash cow.
Speaker 3:This is
Speaker 2:NVIDIA, the only profits in AI.
Speaker 1:For a long time, I don't know if anyone has really unseated them. They're certainly the most profitable by far. I think for a long time, they were making more than 100% of the profits across everything. Everyone else was losing money.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Now you're starting to see maybe some cracks with TPUs.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:But even then, I mean, they're they're still
Speaker 1:It's still a
Speaker 3:cash cow. We just saw they just beat
Speaker 1:yeah. They just beat earnings. I mean, we have we have a article here from the journal. NVIDIA results fail to quell AI worries. Not enough people are milking the cash cow.
Speaker 3:The perfect quarter.
Speaker 4:Maybe maybe the
Speaker 2:cash perfect quarter.
Speaker 1:I know.
Speaker 2:And you still sold off.
Speaker 1:60,000,000,000 or something in revenue. Yeah. I mean, maybe maybe the the cash cow has been over overly milked and is out of milk at this point. But
Speaker 3:I think it's still producing.
Speaker 1:I think it's it does seem like it's still producing. That looks like a healthy cow to me. Yeah. That looks like a the the crown on the cow in particular definitely helps out there.
Speaker 3:Alright. Moving over. What do we have going
Speaker 1:on here?
Speaker 3:So so here we have the bull in the China shop.
Speaker 1:The bull
Speaker 3:I think there's couple ways you could read into this. Yes. So, Elon, one is just kind of on the maybe the the data center infrastructure side Mhmm. Where he's he's kind of the bull. He's Imagine that you're a contractor and you're building data centers for for these companies, and then you see Elon come in and he does it in in eight months.
Speaker 3:What took you in a year and a half? Yep. He's kinda messing up your world. Right?
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 3:He's like, oh, man. This this bull, he's he's messing up my my business. I need to be working way harder, way faster
Speaker 1:because He's also shipping features so fast. Like Yeah. Like, before people could even have a discussion over adult content, it was like, boom, Annie. Here here it is. Valentine's.
Speaker 1:This is the so other fast.
Speaker 3:This is the other way you could say he's the bull because there's kind of this maybe unspoken unspoken rule between the model companies Yeah. Where it's like, okay, we don't wanna go too hard into the the companion Yeah. You know, space. There were companies doing that, but they weren't It wasn't the OpenAI's, wasn't the Anthropics, wasn't the the Gemini's. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then now you see now you see a frontier model actually moving into their Also,
Speaker 1:you know, Grok is, of course, the maximally truth seeking LLM. Just yesterday, I was asking Grok who is the strongest CEO in tech, and it told me that Elon Musk is the strongest by far. And it actually compared him to a bull. It said he was stronger than a bull and that he could beat a bull in a fight if he went head to head
Speaker 2:I believe it.
Speaker 1:With his bare hands.
Speaker 3:Absolutely right.
Speaker 1:Yes. Absolutely. Right. Exactly right. What else is going on here?
Speaker 3:So I bet Claude I bet Claude would agree.
Speaker 2:If you really press Claude on it. They'd say, yeah, I I I You're absolutely right.
Speaker 1:You're absolutely right. Else is going on?
Speaker 3:So let's move down. Here we we have the the lipstick on a pig. And I think I like
Speaker 1:the pig.
Speaker 3:You could say is Lipstick on a Apple intelligence.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Right? I mean, although, I feel like this is actually almost flipped a little bit. Right? Because the the pig is usually like the ugly thing and then you add the makeup to make it look nicer. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But Well, I think that's what
Speaker 2:they did here. Right? They took a bad model and they dressed it up and they'd said it was great and they said you should buy a new iPhone because of it and the model was bad. And That's true. And there's no amount of marketing Yeah.
Speaker 2:That is gonna, like, change public perception once the product, hit the market.
Speaker 1:You could also run the the the pig is the privacy focused iPhone ecosystem that is, pretty difficult to just run-in and throw AI on top of. Like, Apple has been building a brand around, we don't access your data. We don't store your data. We would never train on your data. And and that put them in an awkward position where they couldn't just snap their fingers and deliver a great AI experience, whereas Google has been, hey.
Speaker 1:You know, we'll give you Gmail for free, but we'll also, you know, probably train on wherever you go on the web and try and understand and and route ads to you appropriately. Meta was in a similar position. And so those two companies were a little bit more equipped to just, on day one, go and go and deliver AI features. Apple had to put lipstick on their pig, which is their privacy focus.
Speaker 3:Was definitely more of, like, an afterthought. It was more of a kind of shallow integration per se. And then, hopefully, we'll see with demand.
Speaker 1:The marketing for Apple Intelligence felt like they were it it felt like a lot of makeup on top of something. It was not a lot of it was not a foundational rewrite of iOS in any
Speaker 3:way. Was not a lot of substance.
Speaker 1:It didn't it didn't feel like an entirely new thing. It just felt like little lipstick all over the place.
Speaker 3:Yeah. And then before we go over there, let's let's go up here. We have the rooster.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's Jordy. Is crocodoodle doo.
Speaker 3:This is Jordy calling the top.
Speaker 1:Every morning. Every morning. Every morning, he wakes up and he comes on the show. 11AM, Sharvey calls the top. He says, this is it's actually over now.
Speaker 1:It's so over. It's never before.
Speaker 2:Top every day. Eventually, you'll get it.
Speaker 1:Eventually, you'll be correct.
Speaker 3:That's true.
Speaker 1:Eventually, you'll be correct.
Speaker 3:Okay. What else do we ask? Then we have the dark horse.
Speaker 1:The dark horse.
Speaker 3:And this is SSI.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:Of course. We're still yet to see anything really from SSI.
Speaker 2:Just charging around in the background.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Kind of the Still hanging out there.
Speaker 3:It's kind of I mean, like So so the big kind of departures from OpenAI, it was Miramaradi and and Elia, you could say? Yes. And Miramaradi's company, Thing Machines, I mean, they're they're
Speaker 1:She's raising up rounds.
Speaker 3:They have they have blog posts.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They do actually have a product.
Speaker 1:They do
Speaker 3:have a product.
Speaker 1:Let's hear it for a while.
Speaker 3:I didn't why didn't you tell me earlier? Why why would why'd you bury
Speaker 1:the lead? They have blog posts?
Speaker 3:They've they are good blog posts. I like them.
Speaker 1:So in a couple years, we could be seeing Vibriels. Is that what you're saying? We could be seeing So they
Speaker 3:do have a product. Right? It's like RL fine tuning.
Speaker 2:Watch your head. There's a hoof.
Speaker 1:The horse is really, really about to hit you. Okay.
Speaker 3:So but, I mean, they're not really dark horse. Like, you can they're a bright horse.
Speaker 1:Okay. Don't know if that's
Speaker 3:a a phrase, but, like, you can see what they're doing.
Speaker 1:They're a clad stale or or a beautiful stale. They're a unicorn 50 times over. 50 times over. Yeah. We didn't put a unicorn on here.
Speaker 1:That's an animal. Well, may maybe for the next visit I'm sure
Speaker 3:some couldn't add anymore. It would just it would get too sloppy.
Speaker 1:Okay. What else do we have?
Speaker 3:What else
Speaker 1:is going on in the orafar?
Speaker 3:So so here here we see another horse. Yes. And there's two ways you could look into this horse. Yes. One is is this phrase, look a gift horse in the mouth.
Speaker 3:Yes. Right? Do you wanna explain this, John?
Speaker 1:Yes. So do you know this phrase?
Speaker 2:I've never
Speaker 1:You don't know this phrase, looking a gift horse in the mouth? Crazy. Okay. So looking a gift horse in the mouth is, if someone gives
Speaker 2:you like a term that was thrown around in the eighties?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. This is this is back in my day. Back in my day. So, obviously, just giving someone a horse, a horse is a valuable asset today, but also hundreds of years ago.
Speaker 1:It's always been a valuable tool on the on the farm. And the way that you assess the quality of a horse, one way to assess whether it's been taken care of, whether it's healthy, is to look in its mouth All
Speaker 2:the way to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Speaker 1:Never looked a never looked a gift horse
Speaker 3:in the
Speaker 2:because it would be offensive.
Speaker 1:It's offensive. If I show
Speaker 3:up gift after you get the gift
Speaker 1:later Imagine After they leave. Imagine if I got you a GT three RS, and you're, like, popping the hood, you're like, oh,
Speaker 3:okay. Track this.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. You track it. Yeah. You're you're you're feeling the tide.
Speaker 3:Giving me Oh, I don't know about this. It's not that good. Instead Oh, it only has it
Speaker 2:only has 2,000 miles on it, but they're around the Nurburgring.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. That would be looking at GT three RS in the in the tread. You don't look in the tread because, you know, yes. If I gave you a horse, just be happy that I gave you a horse.
Speaker 1:You know? Don't look don't look in the mouth. Don't assess it. And so what's happening with that?
Speaker 3:So, yeah, it's like you're not expressing gratitude. Yes. So I think this these are just
Speaker 1:the public market investors. Right? We've been given this
Speaker 3:gift of AI.
Speaker 1:Why are they selling their stocks right now?
Speaker 3:Why are they selling? They've been giving they they need to be buying. They just don't want it. Yeah. They're selling down.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:They beat earnings, guys.
Speaker 1:They need not be paying full. Dip. They need to be buying more. They need to be levering up. They need to be going further into the public markets Yeah.
Speaker 1:With every dollar they have.
Speaker 2:Not financial advice Not
Speaker 3:at all. Yeah. At all. Yep.
Speaker 1:But instead, are looking at gift horse in the mouth saying,
Speaker 3:oh, can can the can OpenAI afford the all the different Oh. 1.4 charts the guy for the job.
Speaker 1:Is is the Google you know, is Google set up to to, you know, actually take advantage of AI? They're they're digging in a little bit too much. Yeah. They should just be happy that they've been given AI
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:The next megatrend.
Speaker 3:Exactly. So also the horse Yes. Could be a workhorse.
Speaker 1:A workhorse.
Speaker 3:Right? And so I think you could say this is Amazon. Yeah. It's it's hard to define Amazon's AI strategy. Has been.
Speaker 3:Part of it is they're building data centers for anthropic, but they're definitely not getting overly ambitious. They're not like, you know, getting over their skis. Mhmm. But they're just doing the hard work. They're building the data centers.
Speaker 3:Yep. They're serving Yeah. Serving models.
Speaker 1:Maybe not fast enough. They might not be building the data centers fast enough. Yeah. They might not be super aggressive. They're not they're they're not they're not show jumping.
Speaker 1:They're just they're just dragging the plow. But they are consistently dragging the plow. All reliable Amazons cooking along. They're they're they're they're staying out of the they're staying out of the slop trough. They're not doing a deal.
Speaker 1:Amazon has not done a deal yet with OpenAI for the agent to commerce thing. Maybe that changes. But for now, they're just plotting along. Who else we
Speaker 3:got Let's go to the black sheep.
Speaker 1:The black sheep.
Speaker 3:So black sheep, there's also a lot of people that can fit in this.
Speaker 1:Yes. Of course.
Speaker 3:But I think maybe Carpathi is one of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Andre Carpathi.
Speaker 3:Some of these contrarian to contrarian takes about maybe just a decade of agents.
Speaker 1:To be
Speaker 3:clear, we're not calling him
Speaker 1:a sheep. He's not the the the It
Speaker 3:should be more of a black wolf.
Speaker 1:Black wolf. But the idea is that he's standing out. Lot of people in his in his class of of ultra respected, you know, technologists, some of the, you know, most experienced he's really been at Tesla. He's seen the AI wave. He's been working in it for decades.
Speaker 1:He's really worked on this.
Speaker 2:He's printed all of it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. He's done so much.
Speaker 2:He's not sitting with the rest of them saying, bah.
Speaker 1:He broke, but he broke rank. Even though he's worked at OpenAI, even though he's worked at Tesla, he broke rank. He went on the Dwarkash Patel show and said, you know what? I think we're more in a decade of agents. I think AGI might not be right around the corner.
Speaker 1:He took a contrarian stance at a very controversial time, and he it was not. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he popped the bubble
Speaker 3:with it.
Speaker 1:He basically popped the bubble with it. Maybe. We'll see. Of course, the elephant in
Speaker 2:the room the elephant in the room is is was, in my view, really more of the 1,400,000,000,000.0. Right? That was the questions. That was the big question. That was what everybody wanted to talk about or or at least understand better.
Speaker 2:Brad asked question, and it's been Yes. Downhill ever since.
Speaker 1:Yes. And it is yeah. The elephant in the room is is in every conversation. Every every financing round at this point
Speaker 3:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Is is this is this deal predicated on a continuation of exponential growth in investment, in everything? Like, how much more how how risky is this relative to the amount of froth
Speaker 3:in the market?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Never never ask a a woman her age, a man, his salary, or a a a lab founder how they're gonna spend 1,400,000,000,000.0.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or how they're gonna pay for it.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yep. What else we got
Speaker 1:on here?
Speaker 3:So then in the top right, we have the bird's eye view.
Speaker 2:Yes. I Situation awareness.
Speaker 3:Yeah. This is situation awareness. This is Leopold. It's the perfect name. Right.
Speaker 1:He has the situational awareness.
Speaker 3:He's seeing everything. Yes. He's kind of the master of the board. Yes. Master of board.
Speaker 3:And he's been doing pretty well off them.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. That one's pretty self explanatory.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I
Speaker 3:so so then we go down. We have lion's share.
Speaker 1:The lion's share.
Speaker 3:Right. This is Satya. Satya taken great position the a third company Yeah. And you can give me 250,000,000,000
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I'll take 20% off the top.
Speaker 3:Yep. And I'll take all the IP As well. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Everything.
Speaker 3:I'll also take your chip, and I'll make it my chip. Your chip is my chip.
Speaker 1:The entire contract not your chip.
Speaker 3:The the
Speaker 2:Your chip as me.
Speaker 1:The entire OpenAI Microsoft deal is basically could just be summarized in one line. I get the lion's share. I get the lion's share. Yeah. And that's what he did.
Speaker 1:It's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Incredible incredible deal maker. So let's go down here and we see And we can zoom out a
Speaker 2:little bit.
Speaker 3:Yep. What do we have? Monkey Business. These are the podcast
Speaker 1:That's us.
Speaker 2:We're having fun.
Speaker 1:Yep. We got props. We got all sorts of stuff, sound effects. We need we need some we need some monkey sound effects on there. We have a bunch of of animal themed sound effects we need to have more fun with.
Speaker 1:Anyway then
Speaker 3:maybe let's go into the pond. We have the sitting duck.
Speaker 1:Yes. The sitting duck is incredibly cute.
Speaker 3:So so Reddit Why
Speaker 1:were they why were why was Reddit a sitting duck?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I think they brought
Speaker 2:It's because whether or not you have a permit, you're getting you're getting, like, the the hunters are gonna get you.
Speaker 1:I think I I think Alexis Ohanian sort of laid this out saying that, that when when Reddit did the deal to give the data to OpenAI, they didn't realize how valuable that data was gonna be, and that relationship has grown, grown, grown. And so they were kind of a sitting duck just sitting there. They didn't really they kinda got caught off guard. Maybe could have trained their own model on their data internally. Maybe could have, you know, maybe had something that was more, more of a valuable resource where they they would have had more life leverage if they'd waited a little bit.
Speaker 2:But It is crazy that CoreWeave and Reddit are sitting at roughly the same market cap now.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. Yeah. Which one is more valuable over the next couple years? I don't know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean, I I feel like Reddit has mostly been you know, they've kind of already gone out to the slaughter in in a sense, like, every model company has trained
Speaker 1:on that. So. But look at the market cap. It just keeps going up. Like, I Reddit's been I mean, Reddit was sold for $5,000,000 or something when it launched.
Speaker 1:Like, it's been
Speaker 2:It was 10 it was 10
Speaker 1:It was 10.
Speaker 2:To Conde Nast.
Speaker 1:10 to Conde Nast. That's a crazy, crazy low valuation. And then eventually spun out. And then for a long time, it was in the hundreds of millions, and no one was thinking this is a tens of billions. Like, for a long time, like, people the narrative was not, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:This will be orders of magnitude more than snap.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:No way. No way. And then and then it just sort of finally came together.
Speaker 3:So then Who's the headless chicken? Yeah. Let's go down a little bit, and we have the headless chicken. This is Perplexity.
Speaker 1:Perplexity.
Speaker 3:So I think Perplexity, you know, they have a lot of different strategies.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:Some of them kind of seem opposed to each other. Right? Maybe they're doing a browser. Maybe they're doing a Bloomberg terminal.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Maybe they're rebuilding Yahoo Finance.
Speaker 3:Maybe they're building The
Speaker 2:browser phone. The browser, to their credit, I do see more positive reviews of their browser than any of the other AI browsers.
Speaker 1:From independent folks or from
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Independent independent people.
Speaker 1:We've had a lot of investors come on the show and say, like, I love the browser, but it's hard to take that seriously.
Speaker 2:Every investor that's invested in a browser says their browser is the best browser.
Speaker 3:John, don't listen I don't listen to
Speaker 2:what they say, but I I've I've just repeatedly seen people saying like Yeah. The Perplexity browser is great. Mhmm. So Yeah. Whether or not that means a win.
Speaker 2:But but the headless chicken thing going over and giving, you know, $400,000,000 to Snapchat kind of, you know I don't know. I think a lot of people good good for Snapchat, maybe.
Speaker 1:There's just a lot of stuff going on. It's the the the Snapchat deal, the trying to buy TikTok, trying to buy Chrome, launching a venture fund, Bloomberg terminal. It's like, are you competing with all of these? Really? You're gonna beat TikTok and Chrome and Bloomberg and the next thing and see the next great company?
Speaker 1:It is just a lot. It's a lot to process.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Like, headless chicken is kind of like a fun thing to watch and then people, you know, love to talk about perplexity. They love to say like, oh, we're all short perplexity.
Speaker 1:That's true. Yeah. It's become consensus. Yeah. But let them cook.
Speaker 1:We'll see what happens.
Speaker 3:Yep. Be fun. So then if we go down a little bit, we have the snake Do in the
Speaker 2:you guys ever witnessed a a headless chicken?
Speaker 1:No. No. I haven't.
Speaker 2:Growing up in the country, I have. You grew up in the country? What are talking about?
Speaker 1:I thought you I thought you grew up with the East Bay Rationalists.
Speaker 2:I was born in Berkeley, but I grew up in wine country.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay.
Speaker 2:And I have fortunately, unfortunately watched my father take one of the chickens, you know, every now and again. A chicken needs to be to move on to the next
Speaker 3:chapter and and as
Speaker 2:a child.
Speaker 1:You sound like you're firing the chicken. Like, we're in a very amicable split.
Speaker 3:I mean
Speaker 1:We're wishing we're wishing the chicken the best.
Speaker 2:Yes. It's it happens.
Speaker 1:It's the next chapter.
Speaker 2:I will say that that it is a real thing. They run for, you know, at least twenty seconds or so. Yeah. And I'll never forget it.
Speaker 1:Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Cognition. The makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Okay. Let's continue.
Speaker 3:Okay. So next we have the snake in the grass.
Speaker 1:Snake in the grass.
Speaker 3:This is the Chinese open source models. Right? Yes. These are kind of lurking. I still don't really see that much coverage of Chinese open source models
Speaker 2:wants nobody wants to talk about
Speaker 1:it. Well, no one has bags so they can't pump them. Yeah. So it's kind
Speaker 3:of it's almost an it's
Speaker 2:a it's a elephant in the room to some degree.
Speaker 1:Just so so this is where I sort of disagree with you because, snake in the grass feels like it's going to attack. Elephant in the room means we got to address it. It's like, it's totally possible that the entire open source LLM ecosystem is just like, yeah. There's, like, a $10,000,000,000 business there. It's sort of like, you know, a a a stalking horse, another another animal based analogy.
Speaker 1:But it's sort of a stalking horse for like, hey, Gemini and and Anthropic. Like, if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of what Linux how Linux works. It's like that that you can kind of bid the closed source models against the open source models. But for all, like, the doomer takes around, like, oh, Chinese open source.
Speaker 1:Like, one day, they're just gonna snap their fingers and all the Manchurian candidates are gonna activate in America.
Speaker 3:I think everyone's gonna like,
Speaker 1:I didn't realize I was using Quan, and now I
Speaker 3:believe that nothing happened on Tiananmen Square.
Speaker 1:It's like, I don't believe that's
Speaker 2:It's more of a threat to the it's it's it's a it's a very real threat
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:To the the business models of some of the closed closed source models.
Speaker 1:Maybe. I don't know.
Speaker 2:It I I I I again, it's putting a it's certainly a pressure. Yeah. It's it's Kimi is hot on everyone's tails.
Speaker 3:Yep. I mean, Brian Chesky, he was talking about Yeah. Brian Chesky the other thing
Speaker 2:is a soft power thing. Yep. Right? Ask ask a Chinese open source model about Tiananmen Square.
Speaker 1:I just don't think that's gonna be that big of a deal. Like, I I I don't I don't I don't I don't see those are two very different things. Like, one is like Brian Chesky inside of opening inside of Airbnb
Speaker 3:It becomes a big deal if
Speaker 2:they proliferate all over the world, and it's and and I'm not saying it's the end of
Speaker 1:the world. No. No. No. What what I'm saying is that is
Speaker 2:that TikTok.
Speaker 1:If you're a business owner, like Airbnb, and you're, like, Brian Chesky at Airbnb, if and you're deciding between Kimi, you know, some open source model, like, deeper in the stack, like, you're not you're not surfacing something that has, like, cultural relevancy or, like, or, like, some sort of, like, you know, where American values come through. Like, you're using it for, like, fraud detection, or you're using it to, like, transform every Airbnb listing into, like, grammar check every listing that comes through. Like, spell check it all. Like, you're doing something that's very commoditized, and it's not it's not this weird thing where you're gonna inject the the, like, the the values of the Chinese people. I I I I just see that as two separate things.
Speaker 1:Now now, if you had a whole
Speaker 2:bunch people using using will be the new or effectively, globally, gonna be history books. And if you have some control
Speaker 1:So that's true as the application layer.
Speaker 2:At the
Speaker 1:application I think at the application layer that matters. So I would be maybe more worried if it was like, oh, it turns out that OpenAI is going to just use DeepSeek now under the hood.
Speaker 2:Sure. I'm even talking globally. A bunch of different application Mhmm. Layer companies
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Use these models because they're they're cheap and good. Yeah. And then they have, like, a a very specific point of view that's not necessarily aligned to the West.
Speaker 1:I just think that point of view is irrelevant in many, many automation use cases for
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 3:Like, business models. I'm worried about I'm not
Speaker 2:worried about Airbnb using Chinese models Mhmm. For for, like, business process automation.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I also think you can I think you can probably kind of fine tune a lot of that stuff out? Totally. Because, like, the the, you know
Speaker 1:Back to perplexity. They did it. They did they do deep seq 1776 or something
Speaker 3:like that? I also did that.
Speaker 1:You did that.
Speaker 3:I I did that actually before that, but so it's whatever. But
Speaker 1:It's whatever. Oh, okay. Now, like, see, it's personal. That's why you put Perplexity there because you you got a you got an axe to grind. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I did it before they did.
Speaker 3:But but, like, the Tiananmen Square stuff is probably just a fine tune that they, like, made it more Chinese.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3:So you can just undo that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 3:I agree. One would assume. Anyway.
Speaker 1:But we agree it's a snake in the grass, but unclear how poisonous the snake is, unclear the size of that snake. Yeah. Anyway, let's move on.
Speaker 3:Let's move
Speaker 1:the early bird that got the worm?
Speaker 3:The early bird that got the worm. There's no sign here. That's kind of an artifact of of the of the Nano Banana Pro. But early bird that got the worm, this is Josh Kushner?
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 3:Right?
Speaker 1:I like that.
Speaker 3:He got the worm. The worm is open AI. Yes.
Speaker 2:He was very early with size.
Speaker 1:Early with Double down many times.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:He got the worm. He's the
Speaker 3:early bird. Incredible. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay. Unbelievable. Why is Anthropic donkey work?
Speaker 3:Donkey work? I does donkey work mean? 100% sure that this is like a real phrase. Apparently, I was asking
Speaker 2:Tyler coinage.
Speaker 3:I asked Gemini 4.5 and I asked Gemini three Pro.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:And they both said it was real thing.
Speaker 1:Okay. It's boring or laborious part of a job. It's drudgery. Donkey work.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So I I think Why? There's a lot of ways you could do Anthropic.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anthropic's all over the place.
Speaker 3:So so in this case, I I think it's kind of that Anthropic has gone very hard on coding Mhmm. And API and enterprise.
Speaker 1:Oh, Okay. Yeah. The laborious work.
Speaker 3:It's kind of laborious.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. They're not doing like the the really hot, sexy, like
Speaker 2:They're not doing a browser.
Speaker 1:They're not doing Yeah. They're doing consumer Yeah. Science stuff. Yeah. They're doing the donkey work.
Speaker 3:This is good. Okay. I think it's some of the more laborious But there's lot ways you can Daria's sitting there being like, who's gonna take all the jobs? Who's gonna take
Speaker 1:all the jobs?
Speaker 3:He's gonna But but you could do Anthropic Yeah. As the scapegoat. Yeah. Right? David Sachs really does not like anthropic.
Speaker 1:That's true. A little bit. They never get invited to the the White House.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right? They're the the lame duck. Lame duck? Is that a No.
Speaker 1:Lame duck is when the president
Speaker 3:Oh, wait.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's the second term. Forget about it.
Speaker 3:Ugly duckling.
Speaker 1:Ugly duckling a little bit. That's the one I'm thinking. There's a little bit of chicken little. The sky is falling.
Speaker 3:Scary cats. Scary cats. Scary cats. They're worried about safety.
Speaker 1:There's a few of these.
Speaker 3:But Yeah.
Speaker 1:I like donkey work. That that feels the most accurate for what they're doing. They're going after the entry level white collar workers. They're they're they're doing the donkey work. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Google. I just love this image.
Speaker 3:I need do Google is the fat cat. Google is the
Speaker 1:fat cat.
Speaker 3:Before we had Google snail's pace, I think this would have been true maybe a year ago.
Speaker 1:Fat cat's so much funnier. Look at that cat. It's so fat.
Speaker 3:I love it.
Speaker 2:All the cash flow. All the TPUs.
Speaker 1:All the TPUs. They're GPU They're they're they're rich in every in every sense. They have a ton of researchers.
Speaker 3:They're releasing Tons now time. They have the best image model Yep. Best text model depending on Yeah. What what benchmark you
Speaker 2:look at. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're on top of the world.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:They're on top of
Speaker 3:the Slightly concerned we have a sign for Golden Goose, but there's no Golden Goose
Speaker 1:was removed, but the Who sign
Speaker 3:stole the Golden Goose?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Who killed the golden
Speaker 3:Or is there just no gold if there's no golden goose on the a in the AI barnyard, is
Speaker 2:that is that So is that bearish?
Speaker 3:I think one take, maybe the golden goose
Speaker 1:Wait. Wait. So so first, establish what the golden goose is. The golden goose is a goose that lays a golden egg one every day. And in the parable, in the story, the farmer kills the golden goose to get all of the gold inside, but it is revealed that by killing the goose, you no longer get the the the passive income from the golden eggs.
Speaker 1:So it's
Speaker 2:Jack from the Beanstalk
Speaker 1:studied it. It's being it's being a little bit too greedy, but we couldn't land on who the golden goose
Speaker 3:Maybe one take is the golden goose, they were the neo clouds and then the market is hurting hurting is taking the goose away.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Right? Core we
Speaker 3:have not in the past past what
Speaker 1:month Yeah.
Speaker 3:They've been selling off
Speaker 1:Core we've continues to lay golden eggs, but the market got overheated. And so that that that sort of killed the the gains or something.
Speaker 3:And the gold is the GPUs, subsidized GPUs I don't know. In the data center.
Speaker 1:It's not quite I mean, there's
Speaker 2:there's something with with the the Bitcoin miners that just had a lot of energy that they had effectively prepaid for that they're unlocking some value from.
Speaker 1:Oh, well. Oh, well. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But I think that's all then.
Speaker 1:I think this is a pretty now it's pretty clear. This helps you understand how AI is playing out.
Speaker 2:There's no more questions.
Speaker 1:No more questions. If you if you can if you can see this infographic, it really makes, everything crystal clear crystal clear. That's great. Well, thank you for taking us through that. Great work, Tyler.
Speaker 1:And let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level and get started. One company that didn't make the cut for our infographic, was, of course, AMD. And, fortunately, there is a great profile in The Wall Street Journal of Lisa Hsu, the CEO of AMD.
Speaker 2:And let's pull this up because this is a fantastic picture minus
Speaker 1:A very weird reflection going
Speaker 2:on in the glass.
Speaker 1:So if you zoom in on this, it it there's something that is right in her nose that looks like a bugger or something. It's a very odd choice of image. Of course, it's just a reflection on the glass. The the photo, otherwise, the the like like, her the way she's positioning herself It's powerful. She did her job.
Speaker 1:Everything else everything looks great from her perspective. She looks great. The the but the photographer just, like, didn't quite catch that one reflection, and so it it just gives a very odd look. But, anyway, let's dig into the article. The chip CEO staring down NVIDIA and talk of an AI bubble.
Speaker 1:At a board meeting in late twenty twenty two, Lisa Hsu, chief executive of chip designer AMD, announced that she was radically changing course. Quote, I'm going to pivot the entire company, she told the directors gathered around a boardroom table at the company's Austin campus. The rise of AI was a once in a lifetime opportunity, she said, and the company had to put AI at the center of its entire product line. Three years later, the Santa Clara, California based company has nearly quadrupled in size, its market value rising from 90,000,000,000 to more than $335,000,000,000 despite a recent pullback. AMD's strategy of positioning itself at the center of the global AI race has paid off handsomely, making Sue into a billionaire and her company into one of the only viable designers of powerful chips needed to power advanced AI models.
Speaker 1:In a market that has recently been complete completely dominated by NVIDIA, Sue is showing that there may be a place for a strong number two that can compete on
Speaker 2:insane flow, by the way. Check this out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Look at that. She's 56 years old. She has a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and a deep understanding of the physics behind her company's products. She developed a reputation as a giant slayer by out competing market leader Intel a decade ago to take the lead in producing central processing units or CPUs.
Speaker 1:Now, she's staring down the ultimate goliath in NVIDIA, the world's most valuable company and the foremost maker of the chips that power AI data centers. AMD will have to deliver on its promise to produce chips that are comparable to NVIDIA's. Most of the Staring down her own cousin. It is. Of course.
Speaker 1:True. Investors bid up AMD's stock price in October after the company announced a marquee deal with Oracle and OpenAI, which have both agreed to buy tens of thousands of AMD's newest generation of chips known as the m I four fifty.
Speaker 2:Mikas says the Jensen Sue Thanksgivings. Must be wild.
Speaker 1:I I I wonder if they're if close enough to actually have Thanksgiving.
Speaker 2:Their first cousins once removed. Yeah. That feels like at
Speaker 1:that point It just depends on how hard you go for Thanksgiving. Some people have, you know but how big is your Thanksgiving? Do you I go
Speaker 2:have a I have a pretty small
Speaker 4:family.
Speaker 1:Pretty small family too. My my in laws but we're still doing we're talk we're talking 20 people maybe is, like, a typical Thanksgiving. But I know so there are some people that are like, yeah. Let's get let's get a 100 people together. Let's turn it into let's turn it into Woodstock, which which I'm down for, honestly.
Speaker 1:It's fun. Maybe you need you know what you need to do this Thanksgiving? You need to get everyone who's cooking for your Thanksgiving dinner on linear. It's the it's the system for modern software development. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products.
Speaker 1:The product you're building this Thanksgiving is a beautiful, bountiful feast. It's a feast, folks, and you need linear to help you plan who's doing what, who's making the pumpkin pie, who's making the cranberry sauce. Can you assign tickets? Can you close those tickets?
Speaker 2:Are you using AI agents?
Speaker 1:Are you I think that there's something here.
Speaker 2:Wants to build coding agents. Nobody wants to build beast agents. Beast agents. Wrong.
Speaker 1:Get on linear. I love it. The OpenAI deal turbocharged the road map, said Sue. It represents a huge vote of confidence in the MI four fifty, which, of course, we've seen from semi analysis is is performing very well. And AMD has caught up a ton this year.
Speaker 1:They've just been on a tear, taking feedback from all over the tech industry, integrating it very quickly, and actually outperforming NVIDIA on with certain models. And all of that's been chronicled by the folks over at Semi Analysis in their inference max model. So the growing AI market is a huge opportunity, and we wanna make sure that we have deep partnerships that enable to get us a big piece of that. The rest will handle itself. The deal making was on display again this week when the company said it would work with Cisco and Saudi Arabian AI venture firm and a Saudi Arabian AI venture firm to build a large cluster of data centers in the kingdom.
Speaker 1:Sue attended a
Speaker 2:black that with tie you, Maine?
Speaker 1:I think so. Sue attended a black tie dinner for Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman alongside other executives at the White House Tuesday, and AMD sent a representative to a U. S.-Saudi Arabia investment forum on Wednesday. Until now, data centers have mostly been entirely NVIDIA's market. One tech analyst said AMD is in a position to take a more meaningful piece of that.
Speaker 1:So $1,000,000,000,000 a year. Here, let's get into it. At the heart of Sue's strategy is her belief that there is insatiable demand for computing power and that as the a as the market for AI grows, the companies offering the best and most reliable AI infrastructure will thrive. She said she believes AI is a is not a zero sum game and that recent concerns of about an overheated market for chips and data centers are exaggerated. In recent weeks, the massive spending on data centers have intensified concerns that an AI bubble is building AMD's stock, which had jumped nearly 60% in October, has fallen about 20% this month.
Speaker 1:I'm not concerned about an AI bubble, Sue said in in the interview. I do think that those who are thinking that way are a bit too shortsighted. They don't really
Speaker 2:see the
Speaker 1:power of the technology.
Speaker 2:It's actually only only down I I don't know exactly when this article was released, but thirteen and three quarters, in the last month. Yeah. So better than better than, some others.
Speaker 1:This is not the time to stay on the sidelines and worry, hey. Am I overinvesting? She said. It's much more dangerous if
Speaker 3:you underinvest than if you overinvest in my opinion.
Speaker 1:Let's go. I love that. A year ago, she predicted that the market for AI chips would hit 500,000,000,000 in sales annually by 2028. At investor presentation last week in New York, she was even more optimistic. The market for AI and data center computing, she said, will reach 1,000,000,000,000 a year
Speaker 2:by 2020 It's in '30. Interesting that that she under predicted or seemingly under predicted because Jensen, by himself, is saying that he's that NVIDIA has a line of sight to 500 in by in 2026.
Speaker 3:Half a trillion.
Speaker 1:And that's just for them revenue full year.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:That is a lot of money. Well, very exciting. Well, speaking of NVIDIA, Sue is also helping to capitalize on an inflection point in AI. Many executives in the chips industry, including NVIDIA chief Jensen Huang, expect demand to shift from clusters designed to assist in large training runs, to inference. And they, inference doesn't require chips with as much computing muscle as training does according to The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 1:As AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini become increasingly integrated into daily life and as companies design thousands of enterprise software tools that rely on AI models, demand for inference functions is about to go up by a billion times, Wong said last month, Swang. And Sue and Wong are distant cousins, but they didn't meet until both were established executives. That's interesting. So I don't think they'll be hanging out at Thanksgiving together if they're if they're if they just met recently. But maybe maybe
Speaker 2:Unless that's just a story and they've their entire family They're actually their family lines have been colluding to corner the the AI chip market for generations.
Speaker 1:It it does feel like a a a storyline from Dune or something. AMD has a strong line of inferencing inference computing chips but has struggled to design chips powerful enough to compete with NVIDIA in training. Let's see. They're they're they're gore they go into a little bit of her backstory. She was, Taiwan born, queens raised.
Speaker 1:She worked for IBM where she focused on designing products according to the needs of big customers. When she took over as CEO of AMD in 2014, the company had a market value of less than 3,000,000,000. It's up a 100 x since then. She did deals with Chinese partners that helped stabilize the company's finances and move the chip designer deeper into the processors that powered PCs and data centers, capitalizing on Intel's weakness. Today, AMD sells an estimated 41% of data center CPUs, up from essentially zero percent five years ago.
Speaker 1:What a run. It was that success that allowed AMD's board of directors to trust Sue when she proposed in that fateful board meeting in 2022 to pivot the company to go head to head with NVIDIA. One of the board members attended said, told this story. She had a vision around our ability to be AI from endpoint to data center and everything in between, said Tal Walker, one of the board members who attended the meeting. She had the conviction of the need and the need to move fast.
Speaker 1:What do you think about vision, Geordie? Is it good that she had vision?
Speaker 2:I think vision is still underrated.
Speaker 1:You're provision. Provision. It's a hot take. People some people don't like vision. Some people are anti vision these days.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I think I land on the side of provision. I think it's important.
Speaker 2:Sue was able to dispense with Intel as a competitor because Intel had self inflicted wounds Mhmm. At Daniel Newman, CEO of research firm Futurium Group. That's in sharp contrast to NVIDIA, a company that's expected more than $200,000,000,000 in revenue next year that has gotten thousands of AI developers hooked on the proprietary software that NVIDIA chips rely on.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But NVIDIA can't make enough chips to keep up with demand, the OpenAI deal proved that large AI companies are eager to diversify their supplier base.
Speaker 1:We got some we got some major major update here on Lisa Hsu as a celebrity. As AMD's become a bigger player, she's begun to embrace the spotlight. Earlier this year at an industry summit in Paris, Hsu was treated like a celebrity with many young women asking her to take selfies and sign autographs. That's that's amazing. We Huang was signing autographs couple couple months ago.
Speaker 1:That was this year maybe?
Speaker 2:It was, like, five, six months ago. Yeah. That that one year.
Speaker 1:Now she's now she's also signing also signing autographs. As as the as the industry grows, more and more celebrities are minted. Well, in July, Sue attended an AI summit where Trump rolled out his AI strategy. When she addressed the audience, Sue pulled out one of the company's chips out of her pocket and said it had a 185,000,000,000 transistors and took nine months to make. Such chip can can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Speaker 1:Trump later mentioned her in his speech as one of the notable executives in attendance. She was still in the shadow of Wong, however, who Trump asked to stand while the crowd applauded. What a job you've done, the president said to the NVIDIA CEO. So he's like he's like, thanks for the Lisa Suit for being here, but let's give it up for Jensen. Well, again, he's given it up too much for Jensen.
Speaker 1:He's not having, you know, a balanced approach. Think well,
Speaker 2:I don't think it's it's necessarily his job to
Speaker 1:Well, 10 times the market cap, 10 times the applause per perhaps.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Applause. Market cap weighted by applause. Let's see. Over the next decade, AI will transform every industry, every business, every product, every interaction. Our chips are enabling this massive new revolution.
Speaker 1:Well, very, very interesting. I'd like I would like to learn more about Lisa Sue as a celebrity. I want to see more more deep dives, more page six style writing is what I'm looking for.
Speaker 2:Maybe a New York Post cover.
Speaker 1:Exactly. A lot of a lot of caught on the street. A lot of, like, you know, like, what what type of coffee does she like? That's what we need to know. We need to get we need to get her in the mansion section.
Speaker 1:Should we do some mansion section?
Speaker 2:We do. We should.
Speaker 1:There's a big question in the mansion section today. First, let me tell you about graphite dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The question I know everyone has been asking is, is 200,000,000 the new 100,000,000 in luxury real estate? What do you think?
Speaker 2:Many people have been asking that.
Speaker 1:So there's a $200,000,000 house in Indian Creek, a $250,000,000 house in Bel Air, a $300,000,000 house in Aspen, and a $205,000,000 house in Palm Beach. And this is funny because I we have we've reviewed, like, almost all of these houses. We've actually
Speaker 2:Gold Rock says Lisa Sue on Hot Ones.
Speaker 1:That would be great. Maybe on Theo Vaughn as well. A surge of ultra rich buyers has pushed asking prices to new extremes, yet many headline grabbing mega mansions languish on the market or trade for a fraction of their debut numbers just a decade ago. The 100,000,000 price tag was still considered a new frontier for luxury real estate. The first 9 figure home sale occurred in 2011.
Speaker 1:Wow. By 2019, there had been about 20 sales recorded at that price point. Now real estate insiders say a new price pricing benchmark is setting the tone for the high end market, 200,000,000. Since 2025, at least five major US properties have listed for 200,000,000 or more, mostly concentrated in South Florida. On Indian Creek, a private island near Miami Beach, Florida, often called the billionaire bunker, cosmetic surgeon, doctor Erin Rollins, and his wife, Maureen Rollins, listed their unfinished waterfront estate for $200,000,000 earlier this month, about 70 miles north in Palm Beach, a circa 2005 mansion, once owned by the late Frank and Maureen Wilkins, asking $2.00 5.
Speaker 1:In Aspen, the longtime home of California billionaire Stuart Linda Resnick listed for 300. The listings raise the question, is this aspirational pricing, or as the ranks of the global billionaires expand at a rapid clip, is the possible that the market that the top of the market has actually doubled? I would say, yes. It's totally possible. Look at the run up in the stock price.
Speaker 1:The assets are, more valuable than ever. There's going to be a massive wave of wealth created from the AI boom. And
Speaker 2:I would not wanna be in the market for a single family home within 20 square miles of OpenAI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was some post. I don't know if it made it in the timeline, but there was some post about there's, like, 40 people that are looking for houses in the 5 to $7,000,000 range in in North San Francisco, and there's none for sale because
Speaker 2:All cash offers.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. Yeah. From the from the liquidity.
Speaker 2:Also, Porsche allocations are gonna be pretty rough out there.
Speaker 1:So?
Speaker 2:I I I expect it. Did you see the electric? In the chat says Lisa Sue is a car enthusiast No way. Drives a metallic blue graphite Porsche.
Speaker 1:Oh, I like that.
Speaker 2:She apparently names them after her after her chips. So she has cars Ryzen, Epic, and Radion.
Speaker 1:That's cool. That's very fun. Yeah. This Resnick, this Bel Air house, the February, I I from I remember digging into him, and he was, part of the telecom build out in 2001. And so, even though his company went bankrupt, he still wound up with a fortune that allowed him to buy a huge house.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You you could think about the same thing happening in the AI
Speaker 2:Well, here's another note. A AMD sponsors the Mercedes AMG f one team. Mhmm. Which has a new co owner, the CEO of CrowdStrike. So all eyes, on, George's team this weekend.
Speaker 2:We'll see how they do under with their new co owner.
Speaker 1:Before we move on to their next story, let me tell you about Fin dot ai, the number one AI agent. AI that handles your customer support, the number one AI agent for customer service. Silicon Valley estate sells to mystery buyer. I want you to guess who it is, Jordy. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Want you to make wild guesses. Wild guesses. In California Silicon Valley, a roughly 12 acre estate designed in classical Italian style has sold for more than, for sold for $56,000,000.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:There. Known as Via Del Plurato, the property is located in Portola Valley, one of the country's wealthiest towns. The sellers are venture capital investor, Bandel Carano, and his wife, Paula Carano, who built the estate after buying the land in 2013 for 13,625,000.000, property records show. Have you looked up Bandel Carano and what deals he did to be able to afford such a wonderful house? I would love to know the story of his venture capital work.
Speaker 1:The Carranas put the home on the market for $85,000,000 in February. The most recent that was asking price was 65. It went for 56. It's the priciest home to sell in Portola Valley to date. The prior record was 35,000,000 for a 13 acre estate.
Speaker 1:The buyer who currently lives in San Jose searched for several years before purchasing the Portola Valley property. The but they didn't wanna name the client. The Carranos didn't respond to request for comment. Massiveness. You gotta get this.
Speaker 2:And Del Carano was an investor in Polycom Inc.
Speaker 1:Who? Wait. The Polycom? No way. That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Well deserved. One of the one of the most iconic conference call phones.
Speaker 2:We used to have one.
Speaker 1:We used to have
Speaker 2:one on our On our desk.
Speaker 1:It's probably in the studio. It was a prop that we used for a long time. I think it's in the back.
Speaker 2:You gotta bring it back.
Speaker 1:We never actually used it. We wanted to have it How
Speaker 2:long until somebody creates, like, an AI Polycom?
Speaker 1:I don't know. Yeah. We, that's so crazy. He he he did the deal in Polycom and made a bag. I love it.
Speaker 1:Listing agent said, okay. They built, after raising an old home, completing the project in 2021. In addition, the roughly 23,000, 12,300 square foot main house. Property also has a pool, a pool house, and then another unfinished 5,000 square foot building has a ballroom and a wine cellar. Wow.
Speaker 2:There we go.
Speaker 1:They designed the property. He's a general partner at Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm with offices in Winton Wilton, Connecticut and Menlo Park. In 2024, the Coronas listed a nearly 2,000 acre ranch outside of Bozeman, Montana. Portola Valley had a median sale price of 5,500,000.0. Interesting.
Speaker 1:What else is in here that we wanted to look at? So there is there is some articles on San Francisco. What's going on there? San Francisco is back after pandemic related struggles and growing up. Affluent young families demanding space have elevated the 94127 ZIP code, which is anchored by the walkable West Portal Village Center, and encompasses desirable residential neighborhoods such as Saint Francis Wood.
Speaker 1:This West Side pocket reliably offers a rare San Francisco luxury. Detached single single family homes with yards, the suburbia in the city lifestyle has recently propelled the ZIP code to rival historically more expensive city enclaves. In October, its $2,500,000 median listing price was second only to the $2,700,000 median price in premier address Pacific Heights. Interesting. So there are a bunch of shops.
Speaker 1:People are moving in. The median price per square foot is $952, and the houses are moving. Thirty seven days on the market is all it takes for the median house to find a new buyer.
Speaker 2:Pretty good.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about ProFound. Get your brand mentioned in Chateaubiti. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Should we let AI ruin the Emdash? I think the game's over.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:I think AI has already ruined the Emdash. I think it's ruined. I think we have to move on from it entirely. But Joel Stein at The Wall Street Journal has another take. Joel says, don't let AI ruin the em dash, and writes a defense of the newly controversial punctuation mark.
Speaker 1:So
Speaker 2:It's so funny because I em dashes are not even the way that I first identify a lot of AI writing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, it it's often the it's not this. It's that Yeah. That hits way harder. Totally. Joel says, a few weeks ago, my 16 year old 16 year old son, Laszlo, a student journalist, received a tip for his school newspaper.
Speaker 2:A source had told him that the administration, which had banned all use of AI, had used it to write an email to parents. The email in question was certainly boring enough to be written by ChatGPT, but it was also boring enough to be written by a school administrator. We ran the text through two AI detection tools and both determined that there was a 0% chance a computer wrote it. I don't know how a computer figures out if it's dealing with another computer, but I'm guessing it asks which of of nine photos are motorcycles. So why did this source think AI had written it?
Speaker 2:Because the email contained em dashes. The em dash, a punctuation mark a bit longer than a hyphen that denotes a long pause, has become the black light on the hotel sheets for AI shamers. A sign that
Speaker 1:Black light of hotel sheets is a good turn of rays.
Speaker 2:A sign that an essay, a letter, or any kind of written work was written by a machine and not a human.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The m dash is now a GPT ism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is an output of an LLM. Yep. On Instagram, the beauty influencer Lux Jen warned that if people don't want to be accused of using AI, they should take out the gbt hyphen.
Speaker 1:They just call it the chat gbt hyphen.
Speaker 2:Last week, OpenAI CEO posted on X, the following brag. Small but happy win. If you tell chat gbt not to use Em dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do. It's it's interesting that they just didn't release an update that eliminates it. Like, they they seem to think it's a feature, not a bug.
Speaker 2:And they're asking people to kind of opt out of it by doing custom instructions, which I'm sure, like, 11% of the user base actually uses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's weird. It's weird that they couldn't just, have a custom instruction that goes over all of ChatGPT that just says, like, you don't need to not never use the Emdash. Just let's turn it down by 90%.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All this em dash shaming has been upsetting because I, a professional writer, love love love an em dash.
Speaker 1:And he uses a lot of em dashes.
Speaker 2:In my writing, the Chatchippy Chatchippy tells me I use 11 em dashes every thousand words. Wow. Other professional writers use them a lot too. 4.4 times more than the average person. These numbers upon investigation could be highly inaccurate since I got them from ChatGBT, which explains one reason why my son's school bans it.
Speaker 2:But the point is Em dashes are loved by professionals. This is starting to make a lot more sense. What is ChatGPT trained on? A lot of professional writing.
Speaker 1:They literally have a deal with The Wall Street Journal.
Speaker 2:And so if it's used 4.4 times more Totally. Than in everyday writing Yeah. It's just gonna come up a lot.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, if you if you tried to you have to give it some direction on, like, where
Speaker 2:This good writing.
Speaker 1:Sound like. Yeah. And if it just winds up being like, yeah, make it sound like a like a Reddit comment. It's like, okay. Well, that could go all over the place.
Speaker 1:That could be very, very weirdly worded. It just would not be very consistent.
Speaker 2:Yep. So the point is em dashes are loved by professionals. Why? Because more than any other punctuation mark, the em dash is deeply human. It's the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, or the self aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein.
Speaker 2:It's also the mark of discretion when Holden Caulfield tells his writer that he loves it when his classmates digress during a presentation. He says, I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. Mhmm. The boys that got the best marks in oral expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time. I admit it.
Speaker 2:And he admits it naturally with an em dash. Large language models consume a lot of the best writing out there, which is why they use em dashes. Unlike most people today who think a period is a rude way of screaming, AI believes in punctuation. If there's anything to take away from the Em dash scare, it's that we should use more of them. Because while most people can't find one on their keyboard and wouldn't know when to use it if they did, that's pretty funny.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:The Em dash requires more nuance than a thumbs up, a heart, or an eggplant.
Speaker 3:Oh. Okay.
Speaker 2:It's less jarring than parentheses, but a bigger interruption than commas. It's the length of an m Mhmm. Which sets it apart from the boring, shorter en dash. Oh. In the men's locker room for writers, we make fun of en dashes.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 2:Most of all, we should use em dashes because they are declaration of humanity in the face of AI's onslaught. If only ordinary people will learn how to use them.
Speaker 1:Do you do you see this link, shorter en dash? For some reason, it linked to end-.in, and that website just goes nowhere.
Speaker 2:End dash.
Speaker 1:I don't know why.
Speaker 2:On that Indian domain.
Speaker 1:I don't know. That's just like a a mistake or something. They they they should correct that because en -.in doesn't go anywhere. Yeah. I I I have never really used em dashes.
Speaker 1:I also I like this take. I I I mean, I agree with this. This makes sense. He should defend the defend the castle. The maybe the bigger tell to your earlier point is around that, contrastive parallelism, that it's not this, it's that.
Speaker 1:That's what that's called. And that contrasted parallelism, I was wondering about that. And I went through a bunch of the old scripts that I'd written for YouTube, and I couldn't find a single example of ever using that that style, that structure. I'd I would I've written a lot about a lot of different tech companies, and I'd never said, you know, I've made a whole video about NVIDIA. In my NVIDIA video, I never say NVIDIA isn't just a GPU company.
Speaker 2:It's Google isn't just a search company.
Speaker 3:I've never I've
Speaker 2:never said holding company of the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I don't know I don't know how that got baked in. I think that's maybe from marketing, from, like, marketing lingo because I was trying to run the benchmark of does this, contrastive parallelism creep in, more when you ask, when you ask the, let's see. What is it?
Speaker 1:It's, antithetical parallelism or contrastive construction or correlative conjunctive conjunction pairs. This is the term. I learned this from from them. But, that antithetical parallelism, it's not this. It's that.
Speaker 1:We're not writing a story.
Speaker 2:We're creating a legacy.
Speaker 1:And it just it has a sound that sounds like marketing. It sounds like it sounds like marketing. Like, feel like you could probably go through The New Yorker or The Wall Street Journal, and you'll see a lot of m dashes
Speaker 2:sound like marketing.
Speaker 1:But you won't see a lot of antithetical parallelism. And so I feel like the antithetical parallelism is an even bigger tell. And, Tyler, what do you think?
Speaker 3:I also think it's interesting. Like, you would imagine that a lot of these, like, GPT isms
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Would be they would only be, like, with one model. Right? It's like just four o does that Totally.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 3:But it's, like, not that at
Speaker 5:all. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. It's also not just, like, OpenAI models. Yep. Like, I yesterday, I I tried the Gemini three Pro, and I asked write an ad for a GT three RS. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And then so I'll I'll just read the the start.
Speaker 1:Listen to this.
Speaker 3:There's a moment at 9,000 RPM where the world stops. The noise isn't just sound, m dash, it's frequency. The vibration isn't just an engine, m dash, It's a heartbeat. Like, it's like the exact same
Speaker 1:It's very similar. It's very similar.
Speaker 3:Very strange. I I wonder, like, why this is? I like, there's a case you could say that models are just like training off each other but it seems that seems like not something that they're doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. It's just kind of landed in this zone where that is what is seen as good or something. I don't know. And and it's just like sort sort of decided that antithetical parallelism is the greatest thing.
Speaker 1:So thank you to Joel Stein at The Wall Street Journal for writing this article. I will support you in your fight to keep the em dash, but I want to hear your take
Speaker 2:on So you but actions actions speak louder than words, John. Are you gonna are you gonna just rip, like, 20 em dashes in your next essay?
Speaker 1:So the the problem is that I I have never I'm the guy I'm the one who doesn't know how to find it on my keyboard. I'm I'm who he's talking
Speaker 2:dash dash space.
Speaker 1:Find it on your keyboard and wouldn't know when to use one if they did. I don't know when to use it. I don't know where to find it. I wasn't it wasn't taught to me in in English class. Just I never learned.
Speaker 2:I'll teach it that. You know, I'm teaching it to you right now.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Go on your keyboard. Yes. Hit dash dash space on iMessage, and it will create it for you.
Speaker 1:Okay. But when do I use it?
Speaker 3:Shift option dash.
Speaker 1:Shift option dash. I don't know. I think you can't teach your
Speaker 2:old dogs to use I
Speaker 4:don't think you
Speaker 1:can teach an old dog new tricks. I don't know I don't know if it's possible to to teach me to use an em dash, like, reliably. I think I might just throw them in randomly. What if I what if I start using, like, two em dashes next to each other? Just throw people off.
Speaker 1:No one would expect that. Right? It's completely unexpected. So you'd be like, oh, well, like, this looks like AI, but
Speaker 2:it's something weird. It'd be a really bad model. Whatever model
Speaker 1:he used was terrible. The GPT two for this. Anyway, let's move on. Let's do some timeline, and then I think I think we can come back to this article on solvency if we have more time. But first, let me tell you about Turbo Puffer, serverless vector, and full text search, build from first principles on object storage.
Speaker 2:Used by cursor notes and linear anthropic.
Speaker 1:10 x cheaper. Extremely scalable. I like when we're talking over each other during the ad reads. That's really the flavor we wanna bring through. I love it.
Speaker 1:Okay. So there's a major shakeup going on at TBD Labs.
Speaker 2:My god.
Speaker 1:Augustus O'Dena is out, And I'm giving him a follow for this. He's going he's going independent. Free agency?
Speaker 2:Yesterday, I resigned from TB Labs, slash Meta AI. I wasn't there for very long, but I think I got a few useful things done.
Speaker 1:Nice.
Speaker 2:An impressive group of people. Here. And it's especially impressive that it got assembled as quickly as it did with such a high talent bar at a large company. Founder mode is real and good. I will certainly miss my coworkers there.
Speaker 2:I think now is an unusually high leverage time to pursue ambitious new projects at the intersection of AI and other technologies. Please reach out to me if you're interested in that sort of thing, and I expect I will have something more detailed to share in not too long.
Speaker 3:Is that the sound of a thousand venture
Speaker 1:capitalists writing term sheets with blank numbers on them?
Speaker 2:I I messaged him yesterday, and he said, man, the show would be honored to be on the show
Speaker 1:when he's
Speaker 2:ready to talk about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So looking forward to that. Bernie Sanders.
Speaker 1:Okay. What's happening with Bernie?
Speaker 2:Firing shots.
Speaker 1:He's taking shots of the AI oligarchs. He says, here are some of the most powerful AI oligarchs in the world enjoying a private dinner with a dictator who murders his own citizens with a bone saw. Woah. Does anyone really believe they wanna wipe out poverty or improve life for ordinary male Americans? I don't.
Speaker 1:And he's sort of mogging Greg Brockman here because he leaves Greg Brockman's net worth. He doesn't even try and estimate it. He just says question mark, question mark,
Speaker 2:question mark. Bernie Sanders' age.
Speaker 1:75.
Speaker 2:Guess again.
Speaker 1:78.
Speaker 2:Guess again.
Speaker 1:77.
Speaker 2:Guess again.
Speaker 1:80. Guess again. 82.
Speaker 2:Guess again.
Speaker 1:I have no idea. 84. 84. Oh, he's up there.
Speaker 2:He's up there.
Speaker 3:Oh, wow. Okay.
Speaker 2:So grandpa is is pissed.
Speaker 1:He's pissed. He's absolutely with him not not being able to look up Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe, do a back of the envelope, what's Stripe trading for in the private markets, call some secondary brokers, get if you're Bernie, you just need to call a bunch of secondary brokers, understand where Stripe is trading, then work backwards from what his what his, Stripe stake is, then call Satya Nadella. Ask him based
Speaker 2:on He could have used
Speaker 1:he could have marking OpenAI at 500, or do you think you should market more at, like, 400 or maybe 600? Are you bullish on that? All of that goes into the DCF.
Speaker 3:Really wants
Speaker 1:spreadsheet, and then you would have a fair market valuation for Greg Brockman's net worth. And you wouldn't need to use Check up
Speaker 2:pretty check up pretty close. 83 and
Speaker 3:85.
Speaker 2:Good work. But, you know, if he really wanted to stick it to these American AI oligarchs, he could have used, like, Kimmy Mhmm. To, yeah, do the kind of analysis that you were talking about. He would have gotten a lot closer. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think we need I think we probably need to do more to define oligarch in the AI era. Right? Yeah. Does does does a does a a billion dollar
Speaker 1:network use Plutarch. Plutarch. Plutarch. Plutarch is a a person.
Speaker 3:Well, what's Plutarch when lives.
Speaker 1:Plutocrat there's one that that just means Technocracy. Technocracy. There's one that specifically means wealth. That's like wealth. Or where the plutocrats.
Speaker 1:That's it. Right? Plutocracy is Plutocrat. Yeah. I think plutocracy is plutock.
Speaker 3:But also, I mean, does does Bernie not realize that Greg Bronkman
Speaker 1:Yeah. Government by the wealthy is plutocracy. Oligarchy is something else. Oligar.
Speaker 3:That's just ruled by a few, I think.
Speaker 1:Ruled by a few. Interesting. A small people a small group of people having control of a country, an organization, or institutions. Well, you know what you know what Bernie's gotta do? He's gotta start an a lab.
Speaker 1:Start a foundation model company and, compete in the free market.
Speaker 2:I like it. I like Thank you. I like that And then active retirement.
Speaker 1:Yes. And then start trading on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing. Trusted by millions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't I don't blame Bernie for being a little bit salty at this point because he's never on those charts of of the best political traders in history. Right? He's It's true. He's been having to sit there and watch Nancy Pelosi
Speaker 1:He's got it up.
Speaker 2:One of the most insane runs.
Speaker 1:And he's just missed out. The FOMO must be crazy. Every day is opening up, and Nancy's up another mill. And he's just sitting there like, oh, I missed it. I missed it.
Speaker 1:The trade of the century. Sam three d. Meta We we talked about this a little bit. What?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Atharva Yeah. Is hyped on Meta's new model Yeah. Sam three d.
Speaker 1:I've I've I forgot about this. So this was purposely released at the perfect time because we were just earlier accusing Meta of slopping it up at the slop trough with Meta vibes. And, you know, there's a little bit of a narrative that was emerging, which is like, okay. You know, Zuck did this whole talent war. He acquired a ton of talent, clearly invested crazy amounts, huge gigawatt, five gigawatt plan, Hyperion, Prometheus.
Speaker 1:He's going all in and on AI. And then the first thing that he came out with was, meta vibes, this sort of, like, sloppy TikTok AI clone that didn't really break through and just kind of frustrated everyone in the timeline. Did not appreciate it, did not like it. And so that point, I think everyone was was calling for, okay. You gotta you gotta deliver something that's actually solid.
Speaker 1:You gotta deliver something that's useful, that's valuable. Maybe it's a cont contribution to open source. Maybe it's, you know, even just an API for coding that's really good or a model that does something unique, you know, special.
Speaker 2:Or just free ASI for everyone.
Speaker 1:That would also be acceptable. Yes. That would definitely reset the narrative on is is Meta slopping it up at the trough. But this is an example of them not slopping up up at the trough. This feels elevated.
Speaker 1:This feels useful. I'm very excited for where this gets implemented all over the place. This feels like a very serious organization, like the work of a serious organization, the work of a group that's taking, their work seriously and not just trying to, you know, score points, go viral, just make a couple extra bucks. They're actually doing some real research. So I was excited about this.
Speaker 1:What was your take?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I I mean, this is really cool. I I think people have probably just over indexed too much on Vibes. Yep. Because, like, I don't even really think of Vibes as being, like, an Alexander Wang project.
Speaker 3:It's It's not like they trained a new model. That's not their model. It's just a Yeah. Bunch project managers create a new app. Yep.
Speaker 3:So I think there's still a ton of really good researchers. I'm very excited to see what they actually put out because I assume that it's going be super great.
Speaker 2:And it's hard to know without actually knowing the the usage of Meta AI. You can you can look into it a little bit by just looking at the app store charts and Yeah. Seeing the kind of traction they have. But I think in hindsight, they would have just been much better off not releasing that or not making it
Speaker 1:a moment. Dude, you're you're telling me you don't like meta vibes, dawg. What are you doing?
Speaker 2:That is Trump in an orange and rainbow suit dancing.
Speaker 1:I thought we had PTZ. I thought we could zoom in on this. Yeah. I mean, there's some there's some golden stuff. You know what I was actually thinking about was, they kind of it's kind of a do nothing win situation.
Speaker 1:Right? Because I feel like, at least this year, the vast majority of AI slop will be consumed on Instagram. Like, no matter even if it gets made in the Sora app, like, it's coming over to Instagram if it's gonna do well. Yeah. And it's gonna be distributed on the other platforms.
Speaker 1:And so I I would be very closely watching the the actual user minutes, the time on-site. But I would imagine that the amount of Sora generated content, the the user minutes is, like, a 100 times on Instagram than on than on the actual Sora app just because it's such a bigger bigger audience. And so even if even though it's made by Sora, it's distributed elsewhere. Anyway
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's check-in with the
Speaker 3:What's going on? Google chart.
Speaker 1:Genius.
Speaker 2:Sora is still number nine in the charts.
Speaker 3:Not
Speaker 2:bad. Capcut and Tmu shop like a billionaire are sitting just ahead alongside GoWish, your digital wish list.
Speaker 1:Well, let me tell you about numeral.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance clearing order. Compliance handled so you can fight focus on growth.
Speaker 2:Luxury watch guy is concerned Yes. About the Bitcoin sell off because he says there are gonna be so many effing APs on the market, facepalm.
Speaker 3:Oh, no.
Speaker 2:Flooding Ridiculous. Flooding the aftermarket. So we'll see how that nets out. But, the cryptocurrency industry certainly has been known to enjoy an AP.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Google's genius by not selling TPUs. Google allows NVIDIA to maintain high GPU pricing, which in turn props up price of inference. Google then captures that inference price premium by running TPUs for inference on GCP. This is a conspiracy theory by Dave three and thirty Tepper.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure how real that is.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's there's also
Speaker 1:They are gonna sell TPUs
Speaker 2:to because you have two players in the market, like, doesn't mean you can sort of have a you know, what happens in the soda industry. Right? But effectively, like,
Speaker 1:channel g l p one market.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's just a lot of demand. You don't need to cut prices. The price Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you also understand that you you can get in there there's can be reason not to get in a race to the bottom dynamic and effectively have a gentleman's agreement to keep prices in a certain range.
Speaker 1:Of course,
Speaker 2:that can go too far.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you mind doing some timeline while I
Speaker 2:Of course. Quick break. Peer from cal.com says, shower thought. Why is no one doing outbound for pizza? Hey, this is Gigi from Gigi's Pizza calling.
Speaker 2:You ordered last week. We have a pepperoni pizza ready and could deliver it in ten minutes. Are you hungry? Tech sales guys has trillion dollar idea and of course, it goes viral again. Some ideas and bangers are evergreen.
Speaker 2:Morgan Housel yesterday was saying, I think the majority of societal problems right now are all downstream of housing affordability. Austin asks, how would you fix housing affordability? The current admin has suggested fifty year mortgages. We'll much of we'll see if those go through and how much of an impact that they have. But Morgan Housel says, build more homes, plenty of demand, plenty of capital, mostly a local zoning issue.
Speaker 2:And that certainly certainly tracks living here in California. John Palmer, dear friend of the show and somebody that we are actually working on a little project with says, this might sound crazy, but they should pivot. He's talking about Sunday Robotics, which make the cute new robots with with fantastic little hats. He says, this might sound crazy, but Sunday should pivot to a consumer app where you just teleoperate your own memo, which is the name of the robot, and meet up with your buddies and do fun stuff as robots. I agree.
Speaker 2:I would love to meet up with the lads in the real world in robot form. I think you might be onto something. There was a story coming out earlier this week. An investigation from The Lever found that a PE firm is buying hockey rinks and banning parents from recording and taking photos of their kids' games. Faced.
Speaker 2:This story broke. I said faced. Because they tried enforcing the rule on the wrong person, US Senator Chris Murphy. So a little excerpt here. As the $40,000,000,000 youth sports industry comes under private equity control.
Speaker 2:Corporate owned facilities and leagues from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas have begun prohibiting parents from recording their own kids' sports games. Instead, parents are forced subscribe to these companies exclusive recordings and streaming service, which can cost many times more than the streaming costs for professional sporting events.
Speaker 1:That's so funny because I I think this is I was thinking about how how, like, I I'm such a gear nerd that oftentimes when I'm watching my four year old play soccer, I'm like, one of these days, I'm gonna bring out these, like, PTZ cameras out here and, like, get the most cinematic footage. And they're gonna have to go up against me. I'm gonna be fighting them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The every kid's sports team should have a a dad or a mom that's the CTO, and their job is just to rig the entire Yeah. Field Yeah. With cameras and then provide crazy edits for each kid after even if they lose, it's like the one
Speaker 1:Crazy vibe.
Speaker 2:The one moment that they had, you know, they they finessed something. You still think this is base, Tyler? You still saying hello, base department?
Speaker 3:I mean, I I don't my my mind's
Speaker 2:You appreciate value creation.
Speaker 1:Else how else do you expect private equity firms to make money? Yeah. How how else do you expect them to make money?
Speaker 2:Hardworking private equity firms to check, know, build, know, afford their interest payments. Yeah. In some instances, parents have been threatened that if they chose to defy the rules and record the game, they may end up on a blacklist that punishes their kids.
Speaker 1:Well, what they need to do is they need to form some sort of, like, union, basically, where they all say, we all are gonna film or none of us are gonna attend and we're gonna take our business elsewhere.
Speaker 2:Those threats were even reportedly made to a US sitting a sitting US senator. I was told this past weekend that if I livestream my child's hockey game, my kids' team will be penalized and lose a place in the standings, said Chris Murphy at a public event. Why is that? Because a private equity company has bought up the rinks. So this he was trying to livestream his himself?
Speaker 2:Like, was just trying to set up a camera and livestream like, how does that like, at some point at some point, I I I think the obvious solution here
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is parents can take as many pictures as they want. Yeah. If I'm a parent, I'm gonna take some pictures. Yeah. But I would probably still get the recording.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I would probably still subscribe so that family members could watch.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It it It doesn't have to be all
Speaker 1:or nothing. In a free market. Let us both film. Whoever gets the better vibe real, whoever gets the craziest edit out of it is gonna be able to sell And if I can out edit you and I bring better gear than your than your private equity backed, you know, videographer, you're I'm not I'm not paying. I'm not paying for it.
Speaker 1:Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design development teams build great products together. You can get started. Tricky.
Speaker 1:The every time OpenAI says anything, it gets turned into a headline these days. The latest one is that the the the keyword is headwinds.
Speaker 2:Start using sign language.
Speaker 1:But I
Speaker 2:guess even that even that would would still potentially get turned into a a headline.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's it's very tricky. To Very tricky.
Speaker 1:I feel like I feel like people use I feel like if you went through if you went through a variety of, like, earnings call transcripts from plenty of public companies, CEOs say the word headwinds all the time. They're like, oh, yes. Like, this particular thing, the the tariffs, that's a headwind. Oh, this is a headwind. Interest rates might be a headwind.
Speaker 1:That might be a headwind. Competition might be a headwind. Like, people throw this out all the time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. If you say
Speaker 2:as a business that we don't have headwinds, you're not gonna be taken seriously.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. But OpenAI has is somehow wound up in a situation where they're so priced to perfection that even just admitting that there might be more competition is like a massive news cycle now. It's pretty remarkable. But the the actual quote here is that Sam Altman warned of headwinds from resurging Google.
Speaker 1:This, of course, is a story that we've all been tracking through. Gemini three Sounds very good. Economic
Speaker 2:headwinds for our company.
Speaker 1:Economic headwinds is pretty wild.
Speaker 2:Didn't have to say it. Put that part in.
Speaker 1:I wonder how that's gonna manifest. Are people gonna be unsubscribing from ChatGPT, going over to Gemini as an app, or are they going to, is this on the API side? The API side seems a little bit more, like, easy to, like like, slide around from one to the other. It feels like OpenAI certainly caught up very quickly with, with Codex. They were behind for a while, and they caught up.
Speaker 1:But now, Google's, you know, sort of out in front, although Anthropic's doing very well. It's all just like a variety of horse races. Some of the revenue should be stickier than others. But when when the when the goal is a 100,000,000,000 in revenue so fast Yeah. With with this series of competition, it is it is very, very difficult.
Speaker 1:Difficult.
Speaker 2:He also said ChadGBT is AI to most people, and I expect that to continue. So brand That
Speaker 1:is 100% accurate.
Speaker 2:Powerful element, but not enough to eliminate all competitive threats.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:He added, I don't want this to be note to be a downer.
Speaker 3:We are doing remarkably well as a company, and I expect that to continue. Yes. Yes. Me tell
Speaker 1:you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions, get insights in seconds. What is this story of the FBI raising a bounty for a former Olympic snowboarder turned alleged drug kingpin?
Speaker 2:We love, we love these stories. We covered this guy on the show before.
Speaker 1:Okay. His name's Ryan Wedding. Ryan James Wedding.
Speaker 2:He's married to the game.
Speaker 1:Is he? What does that mean?
Speaker 2:No. What? Ryan Wedding.
Speaker 1:Oh, Ryan Wedding. Okay. Yes. He's married to the drug game, I suppose.
Speaker 2:A former Olympic snowboarder from Canada. He represented Canada at the two thousand and two Winter Olympics in men's parallel giant slalom.
Speaker 1:Woah.
Speaker 2:After the Olympics, it is alleged that he became a transnational drug trafficker and orchestrated the murders of various witnesses. Woah. And he's only 44. So Wow. He's kind of just kinda hitting his stride.
Speaker 2:He was added earlier this year, March 6, to the FBI 10 most wanted. So he's in the top ten Ten. From
Speaker 1:They have any idea where he is? I wonder how he'd hunt this guy.
Speaker 2:And they're saying he's running one of the largest drug trafficking operation and is believed to be the dominant cocaine distributor in Canada. So from the Canadian Olympic team to the Canadian trafficking MVP status.
Speaker 1:It's gonna
Speaker 2:be Bondi, every the hard thing the hard thing is when they talk about
Speaker 3:Yeah. Because
Speaker 2:drug kingpins have just been the stars of of of so many different great television show Mhmm. TV shows and movies. Pam Bondi said he's the modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar. It's like
Speaker 1:somebody was about to turn him in, but they hear that and they're like, oh, he's he's too cool to turn in. Can't do it. It's not worth it. I just gotta be friends with this guy. I'm living through history.
Speaker 2:Oh, wow. So after the two thousand and two Winter Olympics, he moved back to Vancouver and attended university. He got into bodybuilding and started working as a bouncer. After two years in university, he dropped out and began to speculate in real estate, which he financed by growing marijuana in a massive warehouse. He eventually expanded his operation and joined up with Iranian and Russian smugglers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, in 2010, he was convicted of attempting to buy drugs from a US government agent. Yeah. And he went to prison for it.
Speaker 1:There are so many startups these days that are going after Palantir's market, competing in enterprise software, enterprise AI, forward deployed engineers. It's all a bunch of memes. Everyone's everyone's keying off of the the Palantir strategy. I think if you're trying to play in that market, you gotta take down a most wanted fugitive.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You get the 15,000,000. That's your seed round. And you use this as marketing. The company that finds this guy, I'm gonna believe that your model's pretty good. Whatever you're whatever you're doing, if you if you can find this guy, I'm gonna be like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's a good that's enough of an eval for me. You pass the benchmarks. I don't care your MMLU. Tell me how many how many fugitives have you checked off the FBI top 10 most wanted list.
Speaker 1:That's what I wanna see.
Speaker 2:Well, there's a documentary series in the making titled Snow King from Olympian to Narco.
Speaker 1:Okay. Yes.
Speaker 3:Based on
Speaker 2:a on a Rolling Stone investigation.
Speaker 1:Okay. So Jack Altman says, I heard the term forward deployed VC, meaning investor who's helping a company. And now I'm logging off for the rest of the year. What's funny is, like, there used to actually be forward deployed VCs. What what what's that Genentech story?
Speaker 1:Right? Who is the VC in in Genentech? It was who was it? I don't remember. Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist, met with biochemist Herbert Boyer in 1976.
Speaker 1:There was I I think it was either Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins. But one of
Speaker 3:Bob Swanson, I I believe, was at Kleiner Perkins.
Speaker 1:Okay. Is that is that right? There there was there was one example of of a VC who basically was in the office of the company every Friday and was basically just like their financial back office the entire time because the the team was a bunch of scientists who understood the technology but did not really understand how to how to build the business, and the forward deployed VC did really go in. That's a lost art because we are in the era of, like, founder friendly, let the engineer figure out everything, let them hire, like, kind of hands off from the venture capital community. So I'm I'm actually okay with the term forward deployed VC if it's actually forward deploying.
Speaker 1:Like like, you can't just be, like, helpful. You need to be, like, actually in the
Speaker 2:office. The show who's, like, basically, like, probably doing, like, actually twenty hours a week for one of his portfolio companies and has been for years.
Speaker 1:I would I would give him the Ford deployed VC.
Speaker 2:Would never call himself
Speaker 3:Ford deployed VC.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'd be a very bad matter. Matters. How about Ford deployed Privy? Because Privy helps you build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on chain infrastructure all through one simple API.
Speaker 1:Peter Reinhart is in the news. This this article might be a little bit too long, so we might tell you to go read it. But Peter Reinhart says, my lobbyists are very nervous about me posting this, but overregulation is working against us. All the costs are astronomical to all to us all but hidden. Could you
Speaker 2:There's one excerpt that I'll read.
Speaker 1:Yes. This is the CEO of Charm Industrial, and he has been going viral with a new new article about Yeah. Overregulation.
Speaker 2:And so he's giving an example. So as one example, one state agency asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn't increase emissions of semi trucks, and that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs a $100,000 per certification, and there are more than 207 270 engine families for the nine engines that our initial partners use. That's 27,000,000 for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by 90%, and which is done so across nearly a 100,000 miles of testing and operations is not increasing the emissions of the truck.
Speaker 2:It is a complete waste of money for everyone. So
Speaker 1:So the Revoy system attaches to the truck and adds as an extra battery pack. It's a way to retrofit a a gas powered truck to, to, you know, in in in include an extra electric engine. There's something where, I guess, if your if your claim is that you're reducing emissions, I don't have that much of a problem of you trying to certify that you're not increasing emissions because that's the base level for your claim, like your marketing claim. You're claiming that you're reducing emissions. If you're increasing admissions, then you're doing the opposite of your claim.
Speaker 1:So there is something about, like, whatever claim you're making, you should be able to back it up. But, the main thing is that, 27,000,000
Speaker 2:system that requires you to spend $27,000,000 Yep. Just to get in the game
Speaker 1:Yeah. When you're at You would think that there'd be a better way to understand, the, the actual impact of this. I mean, there's so many maybe more efficient ways to deal with this, whether it's just like, okay. How how widely deployed are these if they're making a $100,000,000 a year? Take the taxes, do some independent analysis, pay for it yourself, and then decide.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Also, the question in this case is why does it cost a $100,000 per certification? Is there, like, a monopoly in the certification market?
Speaker 1:Absolutely. It's the government. The government's the one that does the certification. But
Speaker 2:Well oh oh, I I I thought it was an external I thought
Speaker 1:it was an external partner. Maybe.
Speaker 2:But even then, it's hard to imagine that there's, like, a $100,000 of sort of of services that goes into this. Yeah. You you should be able to cut that
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Know, cut
Speaker 2:that cost
Speaker 1:That's very odd.
Speaker 2:Pretty dramatically.
Speaker 1:Oh. Before we move on, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy measurable. Plan, buy, and measure out of home with precision. Casey Anmer has a big post here.
Speaker 1:Should we run through some of this? Or oh, you wanna skip down to this one. Okay. Here we go.
Speaker 2:Got another one off cockroach. The, private credit cockroaches have been scuttling
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Around. This time
Speaker 1:48
Speaker 2:Private lenders are swapping debt for equity. Yeah. In distressed forty eight forty. Mhmm. I am logging into Bloomberg so that I can actually read the article.
Speaker 1:Forty eight forty. Private credit lenders are poised to take control of pallet company, forty eight forty Solutions, about a year after providing $1,750,000,000 of debt to support Summit Partners acquisition of the business. A group of lenders, including Antares Capital, are set to take equity in forty eight forty under a proposed restructuring. Other lenders include KKR, BlackRock, Carlyle Group. The deal would shed 1,000,000,000 of liabilities from forty forty forty eight forty's balance sheet.
Speaker 1:In cases where borrowers were struggling with their liabilities, private credit firms are more frequently swapping their debt positions for equity stakes to try and prevent losses. While swaps can produce upside, they also offer more unpredictable returns than direct loans. Pretty crazy to be set up to to get a payment for the debt and then be like, yep. Well, actually, we're just riding with you on the equity side. But it's happening more and more because it's better than the alternative of watching the company go out of business.
Speaker 1:And so this is, this was originally, the cockroach phrase is, that this poster is riffing off of is, of course, from Jimmy Diamond, who, was, identifying First Brands as Yeah. The cockroach and was saying, usually, when you see one, you there's more there are more cockroaches. That was his whole point. And, and the Blue Owl, CEO, co CEO, executive team kinda fired back and said, like, yeah. Maybe at at JPMorgan, we're we're we're good.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so they've been kind of duking it out, going back and forth.
Speaker 2:I had a
Speaker 1:Here and here is highlighting
Speaker 2:another cockroach. Concerning conversation with a buddy who has a pretty scaled company in the consumer packaged goods manufacturing space. And he was saying that around a number of the people that he competes with in his category have taken on so much debt from various private credit players over the last, like, five, six years.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And a lot of that you know, at least a number of them, he thinks are just not gonna make it out of the next two years without without a restructuring.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:So we will see. I'll let you read through this post from Will, and then
Speaker 1:Sounds good.
Speaker 2:I'll be right back.
Speaker 1:Will Menaidis is on a generational run of long posts. He says, on becoming legible to capital, the most underrated factor in the success of firms is the degree to which they are legible to capital. Defining this precisely is hard. You know when you see it. But an idea, a firm, or a person is legible to capital, which he spells with a capital c, when by dint of their existence, capital forms behind them in excess.
Speaker 1:Think of an idea being legible to capital as being magnetically charged to the capital markets. Dollars are just attracted to you. Allocators discuss it at cocktail parties. Funds market it at their AGMs. And Twitter discusses novel financing schemes to get more dollars behind the idea.
Speaker 1:Becoming legible to capital is the single greatest superpower for a fledgling firm. Look at RAMP. Look at Cognition. Look at Leopold. Look at Tony and Dan Danny.
Speaker 1:They these are all superhumans at being legible to capital. It's worth noticing how ideas and people become legible to capital. First, there's no divide between the CEO management and the idea. The story is not that of an individual successfully and impressive of an of that of an individual individually successful and impressive individual bringing their talents to a new platform, you can see these kind of puff piece stories in many companies that are illegible to capital. The company is never about you.
Speaker 1:For a founder to be legible to capital, there can be no air between them and the expression of the idea. Their lives only matter insofar as they are building with intensity towards the pure form of the idea. Second, the company can be understood fundamentally as an equation slash trade. In the best case, the most legible companies grow as a super linear function of dollars in. The founders are highly verbal and can clearly articulate and understand the inputs to this growth equation, talent, capital, management, etcetera.
Speaker 1:The companies that are most legible to capital and the management that runs them at their best feel like clockwork toys in the hand because by looking at them, the levers of progress and output become immediately clear. They are immediate smack you in the face expressions of an idea that is both small enough that you can feel the thing click around in your hand, but cosmically large enough that the feel that the idea feels true in some sense beyond literal. When the trade is immensely clear, every capital provider across the stack can immediately understand their role today, but more more importantly, their ability to scale to putting 10, a 100, a thousand x the number of dollars into the thing as it reaches maturity. Finally, a company becomes legible to capital when it is clear the entire firm from capital to management to talent is singing from the same song sheet. They are all living their lives in expression of the same exact idea.
Speaker 1:An idea I've stolen shamelessly from is from Phineas Barnes, Finn Barnes, who's over at First Round, now he's at the GP, is the chocolate cake problem. Many firms have great inputs, eggs, chocolate, flour, some beautiful icing, but management thinks they're cooking a souffle. Investors think they're getting cupcakes, and talent thinks they're getting pound cake. The companies that are most legible to capital are obsessive about chasing the tolerances between competing ideas of the firm to zero. By becoming legible to capital, a firm not only can achieve singularity in the private capital markets, I e unlimited free capital forever, but more importantly, it can unify the secret that ignites it internally with the world outside.
Speaker 1:When that secret is shared, there is truly no limit. Jordy, what's your review?
Speaker 2:I think of this in the context of, like, when you think about El Segundo specifically
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And watching companies become more legible to capital Mhmm. Over time Mhmm. And the momentum that starts to build Mhmm. Where early on at the seed stage, there's just, like, excitement around an idea and a team. And then you watch as these companies, like, basically bifurcate into sometimes, you can have a incredibly talented founder that really stops accumulating capital because the the sort of potential still remains unclear and they're not building that momentum.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Whereas another one that has the same quality of founder starts to build that legibility.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think they're yeah. Tyler?
Speaker 3:I saw there's something kind of interesting. We've been talking about this a little bit where I think Jordy basically said this thing where it's like, maybe the the the role of the CEO is actually to to separate like the valuation from like what it like kind of really should be. So it's it's almost like it's less legible. Right? Where like if you have if you're in a sector like quantum or something and it's kind of very actually, it's quite hard to understand what the fundamentals are
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:That's actually where you get, like, higher multiples.
Speaker 1:Interesting.
Speaker 3:So maybe that's, like, kind of against what Will's saying. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Yes. How does the how does the how does the meme stock craze fit into that? The meme stock the meme stock craze is legible to a form of capital. It is legible to retail capital. It is legible in the sense that the the retail stock trader, the meme stock trader, understands how the stock will move on the basis of press releases, on the basis of viral moments, CEO comments, you know, enthusiasm.
Speaker 1:Like, if you are if you are in a meme stock army, the the legibility is derived from the power of the community. The apes strong together. Well, how many apes are there and how strong are they? If you notice that your apes are growing
Speaker 2:roaches strong together. Strong together.
Speaker 1:As you as you as you grow your ape army and you gets gets stronger and stronger, that's the nature of the legibility. When I think of the examples that he's using, I I think of it almost more like just, the the the checklist of questions about a business and the inputs and outputs with regard to the capital. But, also, you know, once the TAM is so well established, there's no more questions about it. It's it's like, well, of course, this is a trillion dollar industry if things execute well. Well, of course, the team is the best one in the market.
Speaker 1:We've we've we've tested every other team. We've tested this idea, and we've seen we have full coverage of the team. There's no incumbent that's coming behind them. We know we have the leading team, and we know the market's huge. And then, also, are we sure that the gross margins are great forever?
Speaker 1:Are we sure that this is monopolistic and or or not super competitive? Are we sure that Google won't copy this and and successfully compete in that space? Like so just getting super high confidence about, you know, however whatever framework you wanna use, whether it's all the questions in zero to one or five forces or whatever business, whatever whatever spreadsheet or slide deck you wanna see at your firm when you're making an investment, once you've checked that off with a company, it's so many times that everyone's like, yes. This is the winner. They're pulling away.
Speaker 1:They're doing great. They're a compounder. The legibility of capital thing is important because you don't have earnings. You don't you're not in the public markets yet. And so you need to become this, like, foregone conclusion and then run from 1,000,000,000 to 50,000,000,000 in the private markets.
Speaker 1:And if you're if you're illegible and there's still this question about, oh, well, like, when are you shipping, or what are you doing? Like, how does this how do I put my money in and get my money out? That, and it's more of like a moonshot. It gets a lot harder to just stack up
Speaker 2:and Even at the early stages, it's still underappreciated that people say, like, I have zero faith in this idea, but I'll still back the founder just because they're great. And There
Speaker 1:is one way to become more legible to capital. Go to getbezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in house by Bezel's team of experts. Get a hitter. Put it on your wrist when you walk into that asset management firm.
Speaker 1:They're gonna whip out their checkbook. You know you know that you know it's gonna work. You know it's a secret hack
Speaker 2:for Should we bring in our our first
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Guest of the show.
Speaker 1:We have Julius Steinberg. The legend.
Speaker 3:Welcome to the show
Speaker 1:from Arena Magazine.
Speaker 3:She's back.
Speaker 1:Are doing?
Speaker 3:Good to see Good
Speaker 1:to see you. Thank you so much for stopping by. Thanks so much for coming down.
Speaker 5:It's nice to see that the studio is real, that it's not AI generated.
Speaker 1:It is real. It is real. We are here in Hollywood bringing media back to Hollywood. We appreciate you.
Speaker 5:You're yeah. Are you the only ones left?
Speaker 3:We really are.
Speaker 1:We are.
Speaker 2:We're in a huge comp like complex. Yeah. And not as to our knowledge, not a single other firm actually shows up every I
Speaker 1:do have there is a there is a one benefit. There are many benefits to being in Hollywood. One is that it's in between where Jordy and I live, so it splits the commute. The other, benefit is that I think it should dramatically increase our chances of winning a, a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. Because if the if there it is a lifetime achievement award.
Speaker 1:You're truly in in in incredibly rarefied air. You know, Frank Sinatra is there. Leonardo DiCaprio is a star. You truly have to be at the pinnacle of your craft. But if there is some bonus point for actually being in in Hollywood, I think we yeah.
Speaker 1:It increases our chances dramatically.
Speaker 2:Lifetime achievement award of, animal analogies applied to Yeah. Artificial intelligence.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah. I wonder if they'll just start putting influencers influencers on there. Like, where is Alex Earle? Why is she not on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame?
Speaker 5:I guess that's what Hollywood is at this point.
Speaker 2:Portnoy made the most people angry of anyone ever.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Portnoy is I mean, as you walk down the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, like, yes, there are some absolute legends, but there are some other folks who are, you know Sort of mid. Mid tier. Yeah. I would say mid.
Speaker 1:And and so I would put influencers there. The weird thing is that the influencers aren't in Hollywood. So the question is, like, does the Hollywood Walk Of Fame just wind up reflecting what's happening in Hollywood?
Speaker 2:Is it geo facts? Are the stars
Speaker 1:geo facts? Like, when does mister beast become eligible? Because he's in North Carolina.
Speaker 5:Well, when are they gonna do a Saudi Arabia?
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 5:Hollywood Walk Of Fame. That's what I'm
Speaker 3:looking for.
Speaker 1:Don't give them the idea. They will definitely do one over there.
Speaker 5:They should hire an open
Speaker 1:I bet the I bet Hollywood as a is Hollywood the city? I don't know.
Speaker 3:But I don't think it's an independent city.
Speaker 5:Think West Hollywood
Speaker 1:is. Is. I think Hollywood there's obviously folks here that wanna raise money. They should franchise the name. They should sell the rights to the name Hollywood and put a Hollywood in
Speaker 2:Saudi Arabia Arabia should just recreate every city in the world Yeah. In the desert and then use it and then use it to incentivize movies to get made there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well
Speaker 2:Bring, bring culture to the desert.
Speaker 5:That's what LA did. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. We've been to we've been to New York on the Fox lot here in LA. They have basically a mini New
Speaker 1:Full re full, like, representation of of New York. You can go film whatever you want there. Anyway, give us a give us an update since you've been on the show a few months ago. What's latest in your world?
Speaker 5:I
Speaker 1:You're full time at Arena Max.
Speaker 5:I am full time at Arena Magazine. We're getting ready to launch our upcoming issue, Zero Zero Six
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 5:An Ode to Capitalism. And that's all I can say. More will be out next week. Okay. So keep your timelines open.
Speaker 5:I remember I was talking with Max. Was like, oh, it's like Thanksgiving week. Is that a good week to launch? Will more people be online or fewer people be online because they'll be with their families? And we had this whole debate about how online people were going to be during Thanksgiving week.
Speaker 5:And the answer that we came down to is actually people are going to be more online during Thanksgiving week.
Speaker 1:I think so.
Speaker 5:They don't want to be responsible for getting the turkey in or out of the oven. They don't want to argue with their family about Epstein files or whatever.
Speaker 3:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder I wonder what the online behavior is because, over Christmas, like, we noticed that that's when, like, that really crazy h one b dust up happened
Speaker 5:in Texas. Well, I I'm Jewish. I don't celebrate Christmas. So I was I had, you know, I had plans. I had to go get Chinese food
Speaker 1:Sure. Movies, Sure.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 5:was just totally offline with all my Christian friends or my friends who celebrate Christmas. They're hyper aware of the h one b discourse. Yeah. Or they could recite, you know, this person's business.
Speaker 1:Very odd timing because a lot of the tech podcasts were off be for the holidays and didn't need to comment on it even though it was this, like, hot political issue that you would have expected most tech podcasts to touch on. But then by the time everyone got back from New Year's, like, the whole the whole, like, you know, desktop had sort of moved on.
Speaker 5:So Well, that's good because the H1B issue is just you you shouldn't touch it. It's too controversial if
Speaker 3:you want to
Speaker 5:be monetized still, like
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 5:Yes. So maybe that was some, like, very clever, like, Jewish marketing gimmick by putting the H1B discourse on Christmas so only the Jews could participate.
Speaker 1:Maybe. No. I know. I so I I do think everyone participates in in the timeline over holidays. I think it's but maybe it's more phone time, less computer time.
Speaker 1:Like, people are milling about. They're stepping away from the turkey, but they're not necessarily sitting down and writing
Speaker 2:More good screen, less bad screen.
Speaker 1:Wait. Which one's the good screen?
Speaker 5:I actually No. I mean, that's
Speaker 2:the that's the joke. It's like, I close my bad screen.
Speaker 1:The bad
Speaker 2:screen is
Speaker 1:the computer?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Oh, I I have it. I think my my good screen is the computer. My bad screen is my phone.
Speaker 1:I would agree with this.
Speaker 5:On my phone actually I
Speaker 2:mean, you guys are not working an office job
Speaker 1:that Sure. You Sure.
Speaker 2:Sure. So Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I I think there will be people milling about, reading posts, but they won't have time to sit down and really we we were debating this over the stream. Like, will anyone have time to watch like a three hour stream on Thanksgiving? Of course, we're taking Thanksgiving off. But but
Speaker 2:Not Black Friday.
Speaker 3:But we are we are gonna be We're
Speaker 2:gonna be open for business. We're gonna be celebrating Tell
Speaker 5:me what deals. Tell me what to buy on Amazon.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We will. We have some good people lined up. So, yeah. What what what what did you write about last Magazine?
Speaker 1:And did the California Forever piece line up with it's going to publish in the next magazine?
Speaker 5:Yeah. So in the Last Magazine, I did the review of Dan Wong's breakneck.
Speaker 1:That's right. You talked to him too a little bit. Yeah. What was your takeaway?
Speaker 5:I think I really like Dan. I think he's a really smart guy. I've hung out with him a few times.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 5:He gave me a huge stack of the London Review of Books. He was like, this is just like the greatest thing ever.
Speaker 1:So it
Speaker 5:was nice bonding over print media with him.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 5:I do think that it's just like, I'm very skeptical that the United States government should get involved in these huge infrastructure projects in its current state. Like, I like the idea of engineering, but what makes American engineering so spectacular and so amazing is that we do it in the private market.
Speaker 1:It's distributed.
Speaker 5:It's distributed. And if we just said, okay, we're the United States government is gonna do this huge engineering project, it's like, do we do we trust the United States government to do this huge engineering project?
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:I, like, I I drove down to LA yesterday from San Francisco and it's like half the roads were terrible. And it's like, you know what? I sort of wish this whole thing was a toll road.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:I'm maybe I'm not like that, like, diehard libertarian where I'm like, government shouldn't do I want my private road. At least not yet. Give me like five years.
Speaker 2:I I joke that the g wagon is so popular in LA because you actually need a four by four to, like, get around some of the because the road is
Speaker 5:so yeah. I well, cold. It was raining like crazy yesterday on the freeway, I was driving down. I was like, thank God that my beautiful, beautiful RAV four has four wheel drive Yeah. Or else I would die because these roads are terrible and no one knows how to drive in the rain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I was I was reflecting on there there are so many interesting anecdotes about, like, is the government equipped to take on the project that you are interested in? Whatever your pet project is, whether it's health care or space exploration or Well whatever you want. And, yeah, I I I keep I keep coming back to this part of, like like, step one in any of that is, like, fix the productivity problem in government projects.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think for next issue of Arena six that's coming out December 1, I wrote about California Forever, which is the project to build a new city in Solana County, is about an hour Northeast of San Francisco. And it's it's it's sort of like an interesting concept to me because it's like, oh, it's this privately funded city, you know, all of the like, the Who's Who of Silicon Valley, Lorine Powell Jobs, Collison Brothers, Reed Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Marc Andreessen, these people put money into this. It's a privately funded city. Yeah.
Speaker 5:But so much of the struggle with getting California Forever off the ground is just because of government. And I remember I was fact checking the essay, and I was communicating with Julia Blystone who's the California forever head of comms and I was said like, okay. Well, the next step is there's this, like, 1,200 page environmental review. And she's like, no. It's actually 12,000 pages.
Speaker 5:I don't think I've read 12,000 pages in my life.
Speaker 3:I don't think anyone
Speaker 5:in this room has read 12,000. And I read a lot. Maybe I have in my life. But me at once and definitely not environmental review report.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Especially a report that somebody is just gonna drag into ChatGPT and say, turn this into five bullet points, please.
Speaker 1:Turn this into one image.
Speaker 5:My favorite memory from college actually is this is actually when Peter Thiel was co teaching a class Yeah. In my sophomore year, German two sixty six. And a class of 60 people, you have to fill out a form to get in. It's supposed to be a good class. It is a very good class.
Speaker 5:It's a fascinating topic. But of my favorite memories from the class is the kid next to me who had this startup that was worth that millions, if not tens of dollars, put in chat to PT, summarize Hegel in three bullet points.
Speaker 2:One shot it. Yes. Don't make mistakes.
Speaker 1:That would be
Speaker 2:yeah. That's that's I mean, Stanford whiz kid, his startup's only worth a couple million bucks. Maybe he's actually not that not that elite.
Speaker 1:Who knows? Yeah. What what is the what what is the mood in the the Stanford alumni world right now? There was this question. I was sending you this post from Delhi and this question about like the the old question of like, is this next generation cooked?
Speaker 1:Is there is is AI actually turning off folks' brains to the point where they can't sit down and read Hegel all the way through? That everyone is doing this? Is this a systemic problem? Or is this, you know, just cantankerous old millennials shaking their fist at the younger generation?
Speaker 5:Well, I will say this. At Stanford, there's a thing called co terming. It's like a fifth year master's. Sure. You apply.
Speaker 5:Most of the time, people get in and you just sort of stick around for another year, finish up a master's, you get two degrees at the end in five years. Apparently, a third of my class, the class of 2025 co termed whereas co terming right now. A third. 33%.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we've seen this a lot. We saw some data that more people are applying to law school.
Speaker 5:Oh, yeah. The law school thing is terrible. The law I have a few clients who are studying for LSAT right now, and I'm, like, hitting them in the head with their huge LSAT books.
Speaker 1:Is that because you think there won't be a won't be a career path?
Speaker 5:There aren't gonna be associates. Maybe there are gonna be like five associates Yeah. But there aren't gonna be 50 associates.
Speaker 3:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:Because the
Speaker 2:AI is It's interesting because if you genuinely are excited about devoting your life to understanding and finessing the legal system, it's probably as good of a time as ever because you're gonna be able to learn a lot faster, you're gonna be able to be more productive. Like, if you're super high agency, you'll find the right firm and attach your career to that and and probably be able to have a wonderful career. But deciding to do law school because you don't know what you wanna do and you're trying to buy time and you wanna do something that's sort of like high on high status track, and hopefully high earning without being necessarily high agency just feels like a train wreck, an inevitable train wreck.
Speaker 5:Well, how it seems to me my dad actually, he just retired from a legal career, and he was the first person to say, like, yeah, all the associates are sort of screwed because they're, like they just can't out can't outcompete the AI. And law, especially how it's structured, because there needs to be, like, a partner on the case as per, like, this weird agreement that was reached, I think, in the early two thousands, associates can't really be on cases anymore. So there's even less of a need for associates, and this is gonna be true in all fields. And I think, obviously, there like, these in law specifically, there are these, you know, hundred, two hundred year old firms that really care about legacy. They care about reputation.
Speaker 5:So they're like, okay. We need to have, like, some young people to carry the firm on, but it's just a question of, like, how are those people going to learn anything if Chad GBT is just doing all their work or Harvey or Yeah. Anything like that. I think how I like I I think for if you're like the top like 5% of like law students, you're probably gonna be fine. Yeah.
Speaker 5:We're still gonna have judges. Judges are one thing and then I'm like maybe AI should just replace judges. We have a lot of bad judges.
Speaker 1:That's a crazy idea. Before of of the courtroom, the thing to replace, you would think would be the stenographer. Like, have dictation. And yet and or Or
Speaker 3:the I know. I use
Speaker 5:Otter AI all the time. Is that great?
Speaker 1:Is that great? Okay. We can get into the bear the bear thesis for AI in a minute. But the the the the court the illustrator. What are they what are they called?
Speaker 1:Just court?
Speaker 5:Courtroom illustrators.
Speaker 1:Courtroom illustrator. We have cameras. Why don't you just take a picture?
Speaker 2:The the downside of if you actually use nana banana Yeah. Or any other image model Yeah. It would it would not it would just be, like, good enough to not produce a funny result. And I feel like
Speaker 5:like Studio Ghibli like murderer or murderer like defendant.
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 1:You can take that photo.
Speaker 2:Sometimes the illustrators like botch an illustration Sure. So badly that it's funny. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's what you're thinking about? Yeah. Yeah. I I I was shocked by how resilient that job was to automation since we do have the camera. And we've had the camera for a hundred years almost.
Speaker 1:And it's stuck around as a
Speaker 3:I think
Speaker 5:I don't like, a lot court or a lot of law is, like, ritual. Like Yeah. I think in The UK, the judges still have, like, the weird head things that they need to wear the wigs. Yep. Or even, like, the judge's robes.
Speaker 5:That makes me feel like had to wear a tie.
Speaker 1:For a really long time. Even if the AI can do so much, it just we will do it out of procedure. We will will have these conversations with humans for for whatever reason. I don't know.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Procedure is very inelastic. And also, I think, you know, lawyers, it's a very easy, like, cast of person to demonize. I think just as, you know, McKinsey will stick around so they can say, oh, sorry about the layoffs. McKinsey made us do it.
Speaker 5:It's gonna be the same with the evil lawyers.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. You want the buck to stop with someone and not necessarily an AI.
Speaker 1:No. Not necessarily
Speaker 5:an if you say, oh, sorry. The AI said this. Well, they'll say, like, well, you used Grock instead of ChadGBT. Can you ask ChadGBT? Because that's my preferred AI model.
Speaker 5:If it's just McKinsey
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's the I feel like I feel like there's still there's still probably some alpha in becoming a lawyer, you know, going down the legal path in 2025. If you are basically setting yourself up not to just be, you know, associate fodder for, you know, high margin billing, but in fact, are setting yourself up to gain control over an institution that would be harder to build independently?
Speaker 5:Well, I think with young people, especially law, it's because you have you you make good money in your late twenties and thirties, but you start to make really good money in your fifties and sixties.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 5:I think for
Speaker 2:Sort of like an MLM.
Speaker 5:Yeah, a little bit. But it's also for people my age who it's like, Oh, I could either, like, work really hard for, like, thirty years and maybe if I make partner and I'm one of the really good partners, I can make You're
Speaker 1:make a ton of money.
Speaker 5:Like, a good amount of money. It's like, why do that? When it's like, oh, if I learn how to code and after, like, 10, I can make this much money. Yep.
Speaker 1:Four years with vesting.
Speaker 5:Yeah. With vesting. All you need is the four years.
Speaker 1:Yes. At the right hot company at the right time.
Speaker 5:Yeah. So it's it's interesting to me because I feel like with the gen z financial incentives, it's so oriented around, like, make money now Yeah. Or even, like, the oh, you have x amount of years to make money before AGI hits and the economy is Permanent underclass. Yeah. Permanent underclass.
Speaker 2:I'm still waiting for the the gam gambling on your student loan debt, you know, double or not, like, double your debt or pay nothing, you know?
Speaker 1:I I've become I've become very skeptical of the permanency of the underclass phenomenon. I I feel like there will be the the like, the the the strength of the underclass is growing in number, but the permanency is decreasing. Because at any moment, someone can be plucked from the underclass into the global elite through just one right like parlay, or one right actually, like building a company joining a thing. Like distribution on the Internet is so so aggressive that you can be languishing in the underclass, and then go viral and launch a d to c line. And if you just have like a few things go your way, you become like the the the market just gives you $10,000,000, basically.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think it very rare.
Speaker 5:It's random too.
Speaker 1:It's random. Yes.
Speaker 5:Yes.
Speaker 1:It's Yeah. Yeah. It's like you were on that plane, and you screamed at that person, and then you went viral, and you became
Speaker 5:And then you
Speaker 3:started a podcast. A game coin. Exactly. Yeah. Don't give people ideas.
Speaker 3:I I think it usually goes the other way.
Speaker 1:Like, like, like, hockey game role, for example.
Speaker 3:I don't
Speaker 1:know exactly know how it all played out for her, but Hayley Welch, like, like Well,
Speaker 5:she she she was stupid with it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think she, like, she launched a coin and it did not execute well.
Speaker 3:But It was a that plugged into
Speaker 1:type of opportunity is entirely random. And every once in while, the market just comes around. It does not feel permanent to be in the underclass.
Speaker 5:So when I start yelling so one Wednesday when I fly to see my family Yes. For Thanksgiving Yes. When I start like really aggressively yelling at people on the plane, you know it's time to buy Giulia coin.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Yes. You gotta get in early on
Speaker 3:that Yeah.
Speaker 5:For sure. You gotta get in early before I have my like tantrum on the plane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. What else is has has anything updated you on the get your bag culture? Are people now self aware of it? We were talking to Jessica Livingston, she was referring to the concept being actually not very new.
Speaker 1:She was saying carpet baggers. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Well, Yeah. That was a good term for the civil war and it was like anti northerners. Like, are these people are just exploiting business opportunities?
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Which I don't know. It's like I I don't like the term like exploitative business opportunities. Like, I think we have enough regulations that it's like our like, how true is that in The United States at least? But I don't know. So the I've been thinking a lot about is so we're in LA right now.
Speaker 5:I went to high school a few miles from here. And I think like a very like core memory for me was the college
Speaker 1:Ashley Vance.
Speaker 5:Yes. The college admission schedule, varsity blues. I was a junior in high
Speaker 3:school when this happened. Okay.
Speaker 1:So you experienced it? Oh, wow.
Speaker 5:So my school actually, the whistleblower's daughter was a senior and she was gonna go to Yale for soccer. And we're all like, oh, it's sort of weird that this girl I'm gonna call her Susie. Susie is gonna go to Yale for soccer, but she's not on the soccer team at her school and there's not really evidence that she plays soccer. Interesting. But she's gonna go to play soccer at Yale.
Speaker 2:One of the most elite teams in women's soccer.
Speaker 5:Sure. I don't know anything about soccer. But this girl was gonna go to Yale, then, you know, my high school was very, like, elite. Everyone was concerned with if they got into Yale or not.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So it was all sort of like, oh, like, this is important. Like, everyone flagged that Susie's going to Yale. But we all sort of knew that she didn't play soccer. Yep. And I remember my my high school was very small and, you know, it was a college prep school.
Speaker 5:And the day before the news came out, I had a meeting with the head of school to talk about, like, where I should apply to college. I what my SAT scores was, blah blah blah, privilege, blah blah blah. I acknowledged that I had a very elite upbringing. But I remember I the principal was late and this never happened.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:There seemed to be something very wrong and I was like, I don't know what's happening. And she was late to the meeting and it was fine. I was told that my SAT scores were fine, blah, blah, blah. The next day, first period, I have a moral philosophy class. I'm the only engineer in the class.
Speaker 5:It's all seniors. I petitioned to say I can take this elective. We're talking about meritocracy and whether meritocracy is In
Speaker 1:the class.
Speaker 5:Yes. In the class. We have a reading about meritocracy. Is it meritocracy just? Is it something that we should optimize for?
Speaker 5:Is it a thing that's unjust because intelligence is heritable so it's not earned, blah blah blah blah blah. And we get to the class and, you know, at 7AM that morning or whenever we all woke up, we all saw that this girl's dad was, you know, he was arrested for securities fraud and part of his plea deal was that he was giving up his college admissions scandal where this guy, this college admissions coach was telling people to put that they were black on their college abs, that they were faking associations with various sports teams, all of these elite schools. So we go in and it's like, okay, like, we're talking about meritocracy. What about Susie? What about the college admissions scandal?
Speaker 5:Because we're all sort of fed up with the whole college admissions process. It's a dog and pony show. My little brother's going through it right now. And I'm like, why are they asking you what three words you are? What could this possibly have to do with how good of a student you will be or anything like this.
Speaker 5:But I remember going through the college admissions scandal firsthand, just seeing how corrupt it is, but also in a way it was sort of like an equalizing form of corruptness. Mhmm. Because if your family can donate $50,000,000 to Harvard Mhmm. You will get it. Yeah.
Speaker 5:Like you have to be like really, really, really, really bad to not get in if your family donates 50,000,000. Yeah. But if your family doesn't have 50,000,000 to donate to Harvard? What if they only have 500,000?
Speaker 1:Well, you have to make 50,000,000 before you apply.
Speaker 5:Or you can use the $5,000 to buy your spot on the sports team.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 5:So $5? 500.
Speaker 1:Oh, 500.
Speaker 5:But it's that's lot less than 50 Yeah. Yeah. So it's a sort of more equalized. And so it's for it wasn't like the like point 1%, but it's still like 1%.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure.
Speaker 5:Corruption. So I think that experience Isn't
Speaker 1:there a pro libertarian hot take that says, like, you should just auction off every slot?
Speaker 5:I I've said this before. Like, I well, my my sort of take on this is that college admissions office should just be sold to the highest bidder.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:It would be a lot more honest than what's done now because right now it's they sort of they give you the spiel about like, oh, we need to have a super diverse class where we have one cellist and one person who's really good at, like, studying molecular bio and, like Yeah.
Speaker 2:And a sailor. Yeah. We have to have a sailor.
Speaker 1:A Michael sailor.
Speaker 5:We actually don't have enough sailors. They're they're doing walk ons in the sailing team at Stanford. My best friend in undergrad did that. But, yeah. I think we should just auction off the college admissions office.
Speaker 1:Have enough sailors in this country anymore.
Speaker 5:No. We don't have enough sailors in this country.
Speaker 2:That's so bearish.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We gotta get back in the sailing. I It's it's hilarious.
Speaker 5:But, yeah, I think it's this is actually something I was talking about with my boyfriend. It's like, how much would it cost if you just auction off a spot? Maybe if you only auctioned off 10. If you limited
Speaker 1:I would think you would you would auction off literally every slot. All of them. Like, what is the market clearing price? Because, you know, in the luxury watch world, like, there will be a certain number of I mean, this happens with, like, the market what is the market clearing price for Taylor Swift tickets? But like there are if they if Porsche comes out with a new GT3 RS, there might be 5,000 made and they will try to find the market clearing price as close as possible to what the market will bear.
Speaker 1:Sometimes they overprice them, they don't sell them all. Sometimes they underprice them, and they immediately trade up on the secondary market. But you could even have a secondary market that, know, okay. Yes. I bought my slot at Harvard for $2,000,000 but they're going to $3,000,000 now, so I'm going to sell that, go to NYU instead.
Speaker 1:Like, you could have you could have an entire entire process just to maximize the price.
Speaker 5:I just don't know. It's like, if that happens, what percent of the Stanford class would be international, which is a good question.
Speaker 1:It'd be hugely international. Of course. I mean, it would be it'd be across the entire world. Everyone would just pay to go. And I mean, there's already a little bit of that.
Speaker 1:But it's it's definitely, like, there's more design to the system than that. There's certainly I I would imagine
Speaker 3:How how do you how do you
Speaker 2:do you defend that against, you know, just eliminating an entire track for young people that maybe have negative capital within their family systems? And even if you tell them even if you tell the family at birth, like, you know, expect to be able to purchase you know, if you wanna go to if you want your child to go to Stanford or the auction range at that point, counting in inflation, will probably be 70 to 80,000,000 to get into the school.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. But probably what we'll have
Speaker 2:is And then and then it ultimately actually destroys would would naturally just destroy, I think, some of the the would certainly be valuable for students from elite families to network with other students from elite families, but ultimately would would kill a lot of what makes universities great.
Speaker 5:Yes. I I I agree that it would kill a lot of that. But probably what would happen is, you know, now you have a lot of scholarships. When you apply for college, you know, the Coca Cola scholarship is a very big one. A lot of these are sort of mostly like full rides to college, like the very like prestigious scholarships.
Speaker 5:And so probably what will happen is that instead of having these scholarships to college, it's like, we young people of America whose family can't afford the like $50,000,000 sticker price of college admission apply and we will give you the $50,000,000 to pay your way
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 5:For this price. But yeah, it's obviously a very flawed system, but it's interesting. It's an interesting like mental model about how much we value college admission, especially because, you know, at a place like Stanford, there are like, what, like 1,700 to 2,000 graduates in a year. All of them do fascinating things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. What's where where what city are you living in these days?
Speaker 5:I live in San Francisco.
Speaker 1:What is the mood in San Francisco? Do you think it's getting better?
Speaker 5:I don't know. I've only lived there since August, so I can't really say.
Speaker 1:There was this narrative in the in the mansion section today about about it cleaning up its act.
Speaker 3:There's
Speaker 5:I more have a fun story.
Speaker 1:So There's more demand for West Portal Village Center.
Speaker 5:I have never heard of that area. That is. I
Speaker 1:It is now more expensive to live there than in Pack Heights, apparently. $2,500,000 median list price. There's also the the story about like the OpenAI secondaries driving up Yes. Real estate prices. But it's always it's always interesting to, feel what's actually happening on the ground.
Speaker 5:So I live, I live in Pack Heights. I live in Lower Pack Heights. Yeah. And a few weeks ago, there was a homeless guy who just really passed out on my doorstep. Mhmm.
Speaker 5:I you know, it was a Saturday morning. I woke up late. It was, like, nine or ten. I checked my phone in our apartment WhatsApp. It's like, hello.
Speaker 5:There is an unhoused person on our doorstep. Mhmm. Please don't disturb him. And then in this group chat, we had this huge debate over whether we should call the cops. And the the conclusion is just the cops won't come.
Speaker 5:Mhmm. You can't really do anything about it. He seems nonviolent. Maybe we should wait for him to leave. So I left my apartment at, like, you know, 10:30.
Speaker 5:I was back at three and he was gone.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But it's still, like, a weird thing to account for, like
Speaker 1:You sorta wanna call an ambulance for someone.
Speaker 5:Wanna call well, you just wanna call someone. Yeah. And have in in my building, you know, there probably like 30 people who live in the building.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:So it's like someone could have called someone or maybe if all 30 of us tried.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 5:But it it was very disconcerting because it's one of those things where it's like, oh, everything's better, everything
Speaker 1:noticeably cleaner during Salesforce this year? Salesforce's conference? Because a few years ago, Benioff, like Yeah. That's just completely cleaned up the entire city. And then the other time that they cleaned up the city was when Xi Jinping.
Speaker 1:Was there something you remember?
Speaker 5:Xi Jinping. I was in SF that week and it was Yeah. It felt like it was a different Really?
Speaker 3:Mhmm. That's funny.
Speaker 5:I think SF generally or urbanism generally, it's just it's so hard to justify living in one of these places Yeah. I think for most people.
Speaker 1:I I agree, but it's almost the flip side where it's so easy to justify living in a suburb. Because, yes, you're in the city and it feels like, oh, this is like like we gotta clean this place up. We gotta clean this place up. But then you you sort of work on that and then you also work on your life and your company and your business and whatever. Then as soon as you have money and a family, it's just so easy to go to a suburb and there's so many fantastic suburbs.
Speaker 1:And that's always that's it was always the thing that annoyed me about the discourse of like San Francisco has fallen or San Francisco is such a bad place to live is like, well, people live in Palo Alto. They live in Yes. Atherton. They live in, you know, up north in Wine Country. They live in Incline Village.
Speaker 1:They live all over the place and they live in these wonderful luxurious places that have no crime, no homelessness. Like, they they have they have like fantastically managed cities just a commute distance from San Francisco.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I think San Francisco, it's always sort of been like a young person's city.
Speaker 1:Totally. When I lived there, it was super rough. But I was like, I'm young. That's fine.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I saw a guy on Twitter who's gonna give me a taser.
Speaker 3:So thank you. But
Speaker 5:I think
Speaker 1:Weapons on the Internet.
Speaker 5:Yeah. You're giving away weapons on there.
Speaker 2:You can buy a taser on Amazon. It'll show up this afternoon.
Speaker 1:It's like
Speaker 5:a taser gun. So I think it'll be easier to use. I was gonna buy a taser Yeah. This
Speaker 1:Well, those are yeah. There's a legal you can also just buy those.
Speaker 5:Yeah. It's But someone's
Speaker 1:gonna give you a free one.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Someone's gonna give a free one. So SF is sort of it's it's you know, the duality of San Francisco is it's great because some random stranger on the Internet will give me a free taser gun Yeah. But the sort of negative part is that I need this taser gun to Yeah. Stay safe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's always been so fascinating. I mean, I wonder I wonder if the open eye wealth will meaningfully change the the budget of the city. I you know, you there's just so much and it's actually the company's actually in San Francisco. Yes.
Speaker 1:It's not a Mountain View company. It's not a Palo Alto company. It's not a, you know, Menlo Park company. It is a San Francisco company, and you have $500,000,000,000 of wealth loosely with, you know, tens of billions in the pockets of employees right there. Like, that should wind up doing something even if How it's just some renovations, some private
Speaker 5:good are OpenAI employees at spending money?
Speaker 4:I don't know.
Speaker 5:I How would
Speaker 1:they spend it? How how how would you recommend it?
Speaker 5:I have I have a friend who works at OpenAI and Yeah. You you just like, you know, I don't really know how to spend my money. And I was just like, do you want I can yacht?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yacht. Do you people get a yacht?
Speaker 5:I don't know. Yacht?
Speaker 1:There is a marina in San Francisco.
Speaker 5:Yeah. I It's beautiful. I like to go over and walk around there. Yeah. There are these, like, cool boats and yachts.
Speaker 5:It doesn't need to be, like, a super ostentatious one, but I don't know.
Speaker 1:Secondary to to cleaning up the streets, you know.
Speaker 5:Yes. But all of like, even buying a yacht would help clean up the streets because it is some simulation of the city's economy. Okay. I don't know. Suppose.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Boats, it's like waters high tides rise all boats.
Speaker 1:Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah.
Speaker 5:So I don't know. It's I guess it's sort of it's silly to say, like, rise or, like, raise the economic output of San Francisco because it's one of the most economically, like, intensive regions in the country. But I do very strongly believe that, you know, just let market forces do their thing, things will get better.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you so much for stopping by the UltraDome. This is fantastic.
Speaker 5:Yes. Thank you
Speaker 2:for having me. Great to get the update. Excited for double o six.
Speaker 1:Double o six.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Double o seven is next after Amazing.
Speaker 1:Where can people get it?
Speaker 3:People can
Speaker 1:arenamag.com?
Speaker 5:Arenamag.com. Okay. And at Barnes and Noble's near you.
Speaker 1:Yes. There's a Barnes and Noble deal now. Yes. We go. IRL.
Speaker 5:Well So if you want to buy any romanticy books, which I think is the new it is the new genre.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's romantic fantasy?
Speaker 3:Yes. Right? Okay.
Speaker 5:That's the new genre that women are It's supposed to
Speaker 1:not my type.
Speaker 3:I will stick Well, to thank you so much
Speaker 5:for popping up.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
Speaker 3:Great to
Speaker 2:see you.
Speaker 1:This is great. Great to see you. Cheers. Let me tell you about 8sleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception, fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.
Speaker 1:We have our next guest joining right now. We have Bobby Bobby. From Duke. This is a very fun company.
Speaker 2:What's happening? Doing? Welcome to the show.
Speaker 4:What's up? Thank you. We made it, guys. We made it.
Speaker 2:We made it. Finally. Great great setup here you got. Looks You're just daily driving that for Zoom?
Speaker 4:That's it. Yeah. I mean Fantastic. It's comfortable. It's cozy.
Speaker 1:Introduce the company. I remember when, you launched, I remember seeing a whole bunch of posts go viral, but, how are you describing the company today?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So so dupe is used by millions of people to find the products that they want or similar products for less.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:It's a search engine. It's a generative marketplace. I could throw a whole bunch of buzzwords. It's AI driven, this and that. But, ultimately, it's a shopping companion.
Speaker 4:It's a shopping app that helps give people a confidence pill, a little bit of a boost to know that what they're buying is at the best price and is the right product.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Agent to Commerce, OpenAI is talking a big game about it. Yeah. Is that a headwind for you? Yeah.
Speaker 4:You know, it it's first of all, nothing set in stone yet. Don't don't count us out. We're also talking to them.
Speaker 3:Sure.
Speaker 4:We're we're building we're building an app that would be native to ChatGPT. Okay. You know, it's like the the thing I like to say about ChatGPT, Google, all these tools is that they can do everything and that is the problem. Yeah. It's like you you can if you're a chef, you can use a Swiss army knife to to cut a tomato, but why would you?
Speaker 4:I think Yeah. Verticalized AI tools are are very powerful because they are single purpose Yeah. And they solve a problem in a in a in a in a more precise way.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I mean,
Speaker 1:I it's odd. I have, like, no doubt that there's people out there that are making tens of millions of dollars on, Studio Ghibli apps, right, or, you know, different animation apps, different different sub apps that maybe could be done in ChatGPT if you know the right prompt. But because it's lower tier on, like, the prompt ladder, you kinda gotta know to go there to get it. It's not coaching you through it. It's not actually giving you all the different harnesses and wrapping that you need to actually do it.
Speaker 2:How hard has it been to actually build the product experience? Because I'm assuming you're effectively browsing the web on behalf of if I upload a product or I paste in a link, and then you guys are browsing the web, or you already have, and you're sorting products to find products that look the same or maybe from a different manufacturer, the same end manufacturer or different brand. But how hard has that product experience been? Because I've been continuously disappointed by computer use and just web browsing from a lot of different LMs at this point.
Speaker 4:When you say computer use and you're you're talking about things like, the browser is doing the browsing on your behalf, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Go out and find this thing. The the example that he gives is
Speaker 2:I use it for cars. That's my
Speaker 1:Find me a GT three RS. It's a rarer car. It's a specific trim. It's a great car. Classic.
Speaker 1:But it's not it's not, like, find me someone who sells Diet Coke. Like, Diet Coke is a commodity. It's sold everywhere. Yeah. A GT three RS, there might not be one for sale right now.
Speaker 1:Like, it it's possible that there's just none for sale. And so
Speaker 2:Yeah. GT, there
Speaker 1:are Maybe a few of them.
Speaker 2:Quite a bit more common. But Yeah. There are certain cars you look for, and it'll say, guarantee this one, and it's like, sold two years ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so on that eval of, like, go hunt around on the Internet, find this particular thing that's not particularly fungible, not particularly commoditized, at least agent mode, these agent these these agentic commerce products have not been, up to Geordie's standards, at least.
Speaker 4:I take it you haven't bought the the GT three RS yet. Like Not yet.
Speaker 1:Not yet. And the only reason is just the AI is not good enough.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Of course. Of course. That's the only reason. Come on, guys.
Speaker 4:So so so first of all, I think it's I I too have been fairly disappointed with with these, like, browsers that that browse on your behalf. That is ultimately not what we're trying to do with dupe. AI has some flaws in, the shopping universe and maybe that, you know, it it it speaks to some of the pain points you're finding with, you know, finding your perfect car, which is they don't have, live inventory. They don't have live price. They don't have product catalogs.
Speaker 1:They don't
Speaker 4:have customer preferences. They don't have customer behavior. There's a lot of data that is missing in the shopping journey. So ultimately, what you're left with is the best guess.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:So to answer your question, how hard has it been? It's hard because the way you do it, the way you do it right is you got to do it the old school way. Alright? In the shopping world, you got to go press palms, kiss babies, hug people, take them out to, you know, to a drink, meet them at conferences. You got to know their names.
Speaker 4:You got to know their kids' names. It's like a lot of trust building in person. It's not as simple as just kinda plugging it in. Because when you build that trust, they then trust you with their product catalogs and they give you a commission for sales because, you know, you turn out to be a partner that drives a lot of sales for them. So it has been it has been pretty hard.
Speaker 4:But the the tech that we have is product ingestion from these partnerships, but also live scraping. So it's, you know, in in a sense, it is browsing
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And it's scraping this data for you. We have vectorized millions of products or tens of millions of products at this point. So we can do kind of a live assessment of what products look like each other
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:What products should go together
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Stuff like this. Ultimately, the way to solve it, you can't it's AI is not sort of a panacea. You have to pick your battles. So Duke, for example, for the last year and a half has been focused solely on furniture. Why furniture?
Speaker 4:Well, turns out unlike the GT three RS, a lot of furniture is made in the same few factories sold back to brands under different names. The brands then upload them to their website Sure. Under different names, different prices. But it's the same furniture. And I know this because I got scammed with buying furniture online and it really pissed me off because I found the same product I wanted for about 40% less.
Speaker 4:The exact same. Same specs, same color, everything. Exactly the same. And so that ultimately is like the lore of what spawned dupe. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I've seen these factories in person. I've visited China.
Speaker 1:How do you think about incorporating human feedback? That feels some that feels like something that would be a really valuable resource. I was thinking about, like, on Instagram, you see a lot of ads for a bunch of different stuff. Some of the stuff is is, like it really grabs your attention. People just buy it, but then it's really low quality.
Speaker 1:And if you could actually have some sort of, you know, okay, feedback, hey. We we we, you know, we we shipped you this dupe, this product. We think we got you the lowest price, but, like, tell us how the product actually performed because that better informs our our our our decision making. Are do you think that'll be, like, a compounding advantage? Do you think that's valuable over the long term?
Speaker 4:It's so it's so it's so valuable. Mhmm. And we don't even need to ask the customer. First of all, we have access to all these reviews. Sure.
Speaker 4:We also have access to the checkout data, and we have access to the return data. Because if this if someone returns something, we don't get paid.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Alright? So these brands pay us four months after the sales happens, three months after the sales happen, after that return window is set. So we know which products get returned the most. So absolutely, that's a compounding effect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes a ton of sense. Jordy?
Speaker 2:You get a lot of hate mail from from certain brands that
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:That that kind of rely like, you're providing a service that consumers love and then certain brands out there that that are sourcing products and setting whatever price they feel like is relevant. And then you're actually in
Speaker 1:Blowing up my spot. I had an I had 99% margin on this couch.
Speaker 4:Yeah. We basically, like, killed shop drop shippers.
Speaker 3:Like for sure.
Speaker 4:Like the drop shipping industry is a is a total scam and and they hate us. But ultimately, our brands, the part our partners love us. We drive millions of dollars in sales for them every every single month. And so why is that? Well, let's say, like, let let's take a partner like Walmart.
Speaker 4:So some people think Walmart has thousands of products. They don't. They have millions of products. Right? Millions of products.
Speaker 4:They're not always in store because a lot of those products are drop ship. So what we do is, you know, let's say you guys are looking for we'll take a piece of furniture, for example, that chair right there. I mean, that's that's not being sold at Walmart, but let's say you want something like that. And you upload an image to dupe or you tell dupe like, hey, that's a Herman Miller. Find me something like that for less.
Speaker 4:Walmart has 15 versions of that chair. You don't know that. You would probably never even think to look at Walmart for that chair. But Walmart has a great version of that chair and they love us because we merchandise their products at that exact high intent moment where the customer knows what they want. They just want a great deal on it.
Speaker 4:We surface the partners up. Now, are some brands, for example, we were sued last year and yeah. Yeah. We we we were sued. I'm not going to name the brand.
Speaker 4:It's very easy to find.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:The brand they are the largest largest furniture brand. Now, the the lawsuit essentially, like, it tried to kill our company. It was it was like a a pretty tough a pretty tough lawsuit that we that we had to fight. We settled it to both parties content. Like, it it it's fine now.
Speaker 4:But
Speaker 3:What was the what
Speaker 2:was the claim?
Speaker 4:The there are couple claims. So copyright infringement, they were pissed that we were using or letting our customers use images from their website to find similar products. They were they were pissed that like they were part of we went super viral when we came out. I did all of these, post post it note ad campaigns and stuff that went super they were pissed that they were in some of those some of those social kind of TikTok videos. They weren't even ads.
Speaker 4:They were literally just social content. Yeah. Talking about our our website. They were they were really really upset about that. And ultimately, were pissed that we were unfairly competing essentially.
Speaker 4:I obviously, you know, we we we have a a public statement on how we felt about all of these claims. And so they basically said we were falsely advertising, you know, that they were white labeling stuff, that we that we were unfairly competing and also infringing on their copyright. So ultimately, you know, cold water under the bridge. We're we're here. Dupe is alive.
Speaker 4:It's well. It's working exactly as we wanted to and it's crushing. And so there are some of those partners, but those are very few and far between and it tends to be like the almost the monopoly type partners, you know, that that are that are upset. Everyone else everyone else and most of the Fortune 500 that we work, they are thrilled that Duke exists.
Speaker 2:Makes How do you get the domain? It's absolutely fire. We
Speaker 4:so the company was called Carrot before it was called dupe. We had three months of runway before we pivoted the company to dupe. We worked with Nikita Beer on it. He was a total goat, helped us find spent your last
Speaker 2:your last $20 on intro.gov.
Speaker 4:Well, we had we had more than $20. We had about three months of runway. But yes, we definitely spent more than $20.
Speaker 2:Picking a number. Yes.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yes with Nikita. Probably the best money probably the best money I've ever spent. Saved our company. Let's be completely honest.
Speaker 1:That's actually crazy. I love it.
Speaker 4:It it it like total bananas moment for us. But the the domain was a very last minute decision. We we knew we needed a great name to stand out in the in the kind of shopping space. I did a bunch of Google research on keywords. One of the words was dupe and I saw dupe was on on Google Trends, a 100 rated Google Trends keyword and growing.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And I saw that no one used no one was using dupe.com. We reached out to a broker that was sitting on that name. They wanted just the most insane price. We then negotiated Mhmm. A a far lower price for dupes.com.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. Went back to the owner of dupe.com and said, if you don't sell this domain to us in like five minutes with this price, which I thought was a fair price. It was all of our money. And we gave them all of our money.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 4:And you know, that we're gonna pull the trigger on dupes.com and they sold it to us like on the spot. And they basically said, okay, fine. Go for it.
Speaker 2:Smart. It's great.
Speaker 4:So That's that's how we that's how we negotiated it.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's great. Thank you. That's a good story.
Speaker 2:Very cool. Yeah.
Speaker 3:But that
Speaker 4:that was like a bet the like a literal bet the company moment. And then Nikita did the most mensch thing ever. He put out a tweet about us and instantly blew us up.
Speaker 1:It was crazy. I remember that tweet. He he he framed it very very well. What? And then you can imagine this just works on social
Speaker 2:What other categories you think are most ripe other than furniture?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So we do fashion now. Handbags, shoes Mhmm. Clothes. A really big one that we don't do very well yet because AI doesn't have a sense of smell, you know, it's kind of vision.
Speaker 4:Perfumes. Perfumes are huge in the Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's basically I look at it as anything without a logo. So like furniture, like, there's iconic shapes and silhouettes and and, you know, materials that get used along that. But ultimately, people don't have, you know, you're not like, you don't have a couch that has, like, a restoration hardware, big logo printed on it. The challenge with fashion is that people want, like, the association with a specific, like, brand, and that can come through a logo or a or a silhouette that actually can't be implemented without getting, you know, kind
Speaker 4:you're right. You're right. Except we're going through this, like, bizarre moment in shopping where brandless is a thing and not showing logos is a thing. Like, this this kind of quiet luxury movement. Like, people people want something to feel good.
Speaker 4:And that buttresses like, even the brands that you love, they're white labeling guys. Like, they are they are like, none of this stuff is, like, custom made specifically for a single brand. Maybe if you're going into the couture world, of course, that stuff is is custom made. But ultimately, you know, when someone sees skims leggings, like, yeah, they they want the look. People shop Yeah.
Speaker 4:People shop the look.
Speaker 3:Like, that's what they're shopping ultimately.
Speaker 4:And it's it's less about like, you know, people often misconstrue what dupe.com is. Like, we're not trying to sell you replicas. We actually ban replicas across the board.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. And all those sites. We are trying to get you that look, that garment, you know, that furniture for less. And and most people shop for the look now, especially in this market.
Speaker 2:Yep. That makes sense. What how do you are you do you think you'll have enough leverage at some point to get to get the underlying brands to pay you at the time of sale? Is that
Speaker 1:even important?
Speaker 4:It's actually very important. I'll tell you why it's important. If we were growing a 100% month over month and we weren't seeing our cash flow Yeah. For three months, it stifles our marketing budget. We would have to then either raise credit or go raise a massive round just to
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Pay down the marketing. This is actually, like, the biggest risk, that I that I think about. So one of the things we're partnering with the largest payment network to do agentic checkout, global checkout. And, you know, we're we're not announcing the the name yet, but we are working through that tech and the idea being Mhmm. You you know, most of these brands are really upset with agentic checkout because they they don't get the customer information.
Speaker 4:But we do it in a way where the checkout would happen on dupe, but the brand retains the customer information and the customer relationship. And the the only reason we wanna do that is so that we can, you know, go from net 90 payments to net zero, net one, you know, instant payment
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 4:Back to to our company. So, yeah, this is this is very top of mind for us, and it's it's definitely a risk that I think a lot about.
Speaker 2:How how big how big do you want do you want Dupe to get?
Speaker 4:I think Dupe we we often talk about a road to a billion shoppers. Mhmm. The way that we're gonna do this is we have an MCP. So we any LLM can plug us in. You know, the the largest LLMs and the long tail LLMs, they can plug us in.
Speaker 4:Ultimately, we wanna be the canonical answer engine for how do I get this for less or find me something similar to this. We wanna be that answer engine for these websites. The beauty is because they don't have access to the behavioral data, the shopping data, the product catalogs, the product pricing, the moment they plug us in, it's basically zero effort. It's just, know, a few lines of code. The moment they plug us in, any click going out from our answers that gets monetized, we split that commission back with the LLM.
Speaker 4:So it's like instantly monetizing their user base in an entirely, entirely new way. Mhmm. So that's that's something that we're very excited about. When you think about how, like, the the growth potential of that and the tailwinds for any LLM to really consider partnering with us, for our links and for our expertise and the ability to monetize instantly, I think we can get to hundreds of millions of shoppers on our infra. They might not be on dupe.com, but they'll be But you're
Speaker 2:still monetizing them.
Speaker 4:Yeah. That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:That's very exciting. That's right.
Speaker 4:And in the last eighteen months, we, you know, we're right around sub 20,000,000 users between let's go. Oh my god. Do I get the con? Of course. No.
Speaker 4:I wasn't
Speaker 1:sure if you're gonna give us a number, but we got
Speaker 4:one. Yeah. Yeah. No. No.
Speaker 4:No. No. So so I'll I'll give you a few numbers. I mean, we're we're rounding a corner. We're gonna come up on a 100,000,000 in GMV sold through dupe.com.
Speaker 4:Woah. Eighteen eighteen million shoppers Fantastic. Between one and two monthly one and two million monthly shoppers, which we just launched our app last week. Went number one in the App Store, by the way. Super stoked about please, everyone listening, go download dupe, d u p e.
Speaker 4:Look for it in the App Store. Leave us leave us a review and rating. Gotta put in the plug. Went number one in the App Store and of course we had a lot of fun with that. We're putting a lot of fun content out
Speaker 2:How did you how did you go number one? Was it content or or some type of like viral incentive?
Speaker 3:We have a lot of we have a lot
Speaker 4:of users. Like these people, they want our app. Like, they, you know, they use our website to shop and have used our website to shop for for many months. Yeah. They want they wanted our app and, you know, the way the app store works is on a twenty four hour clock.
Speaker 4:So the the number of installs you get in a twenty four hour period, if it's more than any other app, you rock it up to the top. Didn't think it would happen on day one. I actually had a whole I was convinced that we were gonna go number one, first of all. I called this shot in August on Twitter. I said we are gonna un unseat, dethrone ChatGPT when we launch our app in November.
Speaker 4:So we we shot our shot and we we kind of netted it, but it happened within a couple hours of us going live. I didn't expect that. I expected it to be about forty eight hours. So it happened very very quickly.
Speaker 2:Wow. Very cool.
Speaker 1:I mean, super impressive.
Speaker 4:We still have a lot we still have a lot of work left. I mean, you know, obviously, we're at the beginning of our journey.
Speaker 2:Call your shot again. 100,000,000 in GMV. When are you gonna, or when when are you gonna hit it?
Speaker 4:We're a couple months away from that.
Speaker 2:Okay. Well, we got the gong ready for you. Amazing. You're in LA. Right?
Speaker 4:New York.
Speaker 2:Oh, okay. Okay. Well
Speaker 4:We we should we we should be able to get to that. I mean, this this shopping season. Let's see how Black Friday goes, make sure none of our systems go down, but that that would be pretty dope.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That'll be awesome.
Speaker 2:This is this is your Super Bowl.
Speaker 1:Very cool.
Speaker 3:We'll talk to you soon. Great hanging, dude.
Speaker 1:Congrats on all
Speaker 3:the progress.
Speaker 4:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Great story.
Speaker 1:We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about wander.com. Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and $24.07 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better. And that's our show for today.
Speaker 1:That's this week, in TVPN. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thanks for hanging out in the chat if you've been chatting this week. We love you, and we'll see you on Monday.
Speaker 1:Have a fantastic weekend. Have a great weekend. Goodbye.