Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, 04/28/2025. We are live from the Temple Of Technology, the Fortress Of Finance, the capital of capital. And we will be in the capital of the actual America. Capital.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We'll be in the actual capital on Wednesday. We are going to Washington DC. That's why we are streaming early. It'll be a short show for you guys today.
Speaker 1:No guests, just pure John and Jordy
Speaker 2:Pure technology.
Speaker 1:Pure technology, pure finance, pure business. And it's a massive week for technology and business because it is earning season. Let's go. Huge week coming up. I wanna take you through it, let you know what to expect.
Speaker 1:Obviously, you could follow Joe Weisenthal and get way better analysis, but why not just listen to me ramble about
Speaker 2:for ten post yesterday with something like, you know, you're just enjoying your Sunday afternoon, maybe you're watching the game, and then Joe Weisenthal is like, futures are open. It's true.
Speaker 1:It's earning season. So what to expect. We got UPS, this press release, 6AM. These times are eastern. They have a call at 08:30, which already happened, I guess.
Speaker 1:Parcel volume is a barometer for goods demand, so people are watching UPS to see what to expect, what's happening. Is there a slowdown in the economy? Then General Motors, early view on auto pricing and EV uptake. We've talked a lot about how EVs are not selling. Well, they depreciate very quickly.
Speaker 1:Well, General Motors will keep
Speaker 2:EV's EV demand, I think, is generally up. It's just that Teslas aren't selling well.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. But there also is the depreciation issue. Even, you know, Taycan drops a ton. And a lot of companies, a lot of the automakers spent a fortune, going all electric on a bunch of Yeah.
Speaker 1:And they maybe overshot demand. Right? That's the worry. And so, we will see how that's happening. Is it just a Tesla issue?
Speaker 1:Is it a supply chain issue? Is it a political issue? There's a whole bunch of different reads on what's going on with with EVs. No one thinks that it's EVs to the moon from here on out. And so we're gonna take a look at that.
Speaker 1:Then we're getting our first hard data look at the March trade gap. There's the advanced economic indicators that are dropping. Coca Cola has an earnings call. Then the consumer board consumer confidence drops. That's the gauge of April sentiment and labor market perception.
Speaker 1:Pfizer has a webcast, which is the first pharma mega cap to report, then Visa.
Speaker 2:Webcast. I wonder if they're on Restream.
Speaker 1:They should be. Pfizer, get on Restream. We use Restream. We're friends of the CEO. We love Restream, and so little shout out to them.
Speaker 1:Starbucks also has a earnings call. And so this will be a question again on that consumer traffic. Are consumers pulling back or not? Then on Wednesday, we have ADP private payrolls, and this is the early steer on Friday's jobs data that Joe Wiesenthal follows so closely. And those and the and the real job and the real jobs data that comes out is one of the most important macroeconomic indicators for The United States.
Speaker 1:But ADP, private payrolls, is a little a little preview of that. We also get q one GDP dropping at 08:30AM on Wednesday. That will be very exciting. Consensus is at 1.9%, but we obviously wanna blow that out. I wanna see 10% g adding nowhere.
Speaker 1:AI is real, baby.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just adding Oh. Yeah. AGI is here.
Speaker 1:AGI is here, and we're and we're now growing at 10% GDP. Surprise.
Speaker 2:Surprise. Surprise.
Speaker 1:No one saw it coming. No. That will probably be pretty close to consensus. We know that nothing if anything
Speaker 2:All it took was Glaze Gate.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Glaze Gate, which we will talk about. Then there's personal income data coming out from the Fed. Pending home sales is coming out as a housing demand barometer. Obviously, interest rates are high, but the economy is weakening.
Speaker 1:Are prices going up or down? We were we will find out. Caterpillar has a call. Cat is obviously a indicator for heavy machinery, and whether or not companies are investing in heavy machinery is a precursor to CapEx. Pretty sure because you're building, you know, huge data centers, you're gonna need to buy up a lot of Caterpillars.
Speaker 1:Microsoft and Meta Platforms both report after the close, post close 05:30PM on Wednesday, April 30. Those are going to be huge.
Speaker 2:Cannot wait.
Speaker 1:Cannot wait. So, what are we looking for from Microsoft? We're looking for, Azure. How are they doing in the cloud? This is the narrative that happened with Google.
Speaker 1:Google beat earnings, and they missed on top line, but the bottom line was very, very good on Google Cloud. Why was that? Well, they were they were actually, supply constrained, and so they were spending a lot on CapEx, but it makes a ton of sense. And what's interesting about Google's earnings, which dropped last week, which we covered, but we should just give you a quick refresh because this is what everyone else is gonna be benchmarked against this week, is Yeah. That, Google Cloud is doing particularly well, and it's their most pure play AI bet.
Speaker 1:And so what you can think about is like with Google Search, they're fighting perplexity. They're they're fighting ChatGPT. They have to roll out, Google, generative answers, which I saw some posts about, people hacking these. Did you see these? Apparently, if you go to Google and you type in, you know, any random phrase space meaning, the AI will just hallucinate a meaning.
Speaker 1:So people will be like
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:What does it mean to when you say two birds going for a stroll in Manhattan, and it'll just be like, oh, this is a famous metaphor. It'll just make stuff up for you. But obviously, the Google generate stuffing generative AI into Google search is a fantastic way to grow your product.
Speaker 2:Apparently Yeah. They're counting like 350,000,000 users or something like that for Gemini, maybe more than that. Get those numbers.
Speaker 1:Point 5,000,000,000, baby.
Speaker 2:Okay. There you
Speaker 1:billion. It is by Google's definition, the biggest AI user base in the world because anyone who uses Google search uses it. Yep. Now, the actual Gemini app down at like 30,000,000. So you're talking about like almost two orders of magnitude spread there.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of questions about like, oh, what's the definition here? They're just kind of stuffing it in there. But there's always a worry that when they iterate on the Google product, they might hurt monetization with that cash cow. But that's not the case with GCP, and that's why the GCP earnings were so bullish and the stock jumped even though they missed on headline revenue, I believe. And so people will be watching to see what's happening in Azure.
Speaker 1:Yep. Satya's had this big take about, you know, I want to be a leaser, not an owner. I'm being cautious. But at the same time, I have access to all the GPT models. I can really vend this stuff in.
Speaker 1:And also, we're stuffing Copilot and everything, and we're going to make you upgrade to Copilot. Now, Copilot uptake, not something people have been talking about Yeah. But oftentimes And the big thing Yeah.
Speaker 2:The other thing we're looking here looking for here, Clippy, rebirth of Clippy. You know, this this could this is the only thing that could potentially, you know, get Microsoft from the the 2 ish trillion dollar club up, you know, well beyond the threes if if a reintroduction of Clippy
Speaker 1:could It's a horse race between Microsoft and Apple for biggest company. I think Apple got them this this this month with some bobbing and weaving of the tariff negotiations. Yeah. But anything's possible next month, and we'll be tracking it on Polymarket, of course. Anyway, the Copilot AI is interesting because you're right.
Speaker 1:We are joking about Clippy. No one on X, no one in the startup ecosystem in the private markets is talking about Copilot AI adoption. But much like Teams, kinda just got stuffed in everywhere and Yeah. Kinda took the wind out of Slack.
Speaker 2:Insane distribution fan.
Speaker 1:It's totally possible that we find out that, oh, yeah. Copilot has actually sold extremely well in the enterprise, because there are so many companies that are, just going for it. And so with meta platforms, we're looking for different data. They're doing their q one call, and we're gonna be looking at ads and reels engagement metrics primarily. Also, there's a political milestone.
Speaker 1:President Trump will celebrate his one hundredth day in office, and he might make some policy remarks. And you know the market's gonna be great to do that. Yes. He's a known Wouldn't
Speaker 2:be the first time.
Speaker 1:Wouldn't be the first So Thursday, May 1, we're looking at weekly jobless claims. This is a check on the labor market.
Speaker 2:This this week is basically the the NFL combine of the economy.
Speaker 1:Yes. I couldn't have said it better myself, Jordy. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. There's a Mastercard call, you can see global payments velocity, see, how things are moving in the economy.
Speaker 1:ISM manufacturing data coming out. The street is looking for PMI just below 50. Construction spending, CapEx, and housing pipeline, we're looking at. McDonald's is also coming out, and, there's a question about same store sales versus menu price hikes. How are they, coping with the changes in the economy?
Speaker 1:Obviously, McDonald's is one of those companies that can, you know, benefit in a downturn, but also obviously be be hurt on the supply chain or tariff side if they're sourcing from, from abroad. Then after the close, this is where it gets exciting. This is where the tech comes back. We got Apple, Amazon, and Airbnb on Thursday. Regarding Apple, we're looking at iPhone volume versus tariff drag.
Speaker 1:We've seen that they have been, you know, potentially crushed in sales in China. They got out of a lot of the tariffs. Yeah. So they should be in an interesting spot.
Speaker 2:I mean, this this is one of the most interesting earnings calls for me just because we're gonna get a a you know, obviously, Tim Cook has been having conversations, doing interviews, things like that, but this is in-depth view into how the management team is thinking about the trade war. Yep. And there's just so much stuff that's been coming up. I don't know if you saw, but Apple suppliers have been that are trying to get out of China Mhmm. Are having trouble actually getting machinery out.
Speaker 2:Makes
Speaker 1:sense. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They're basically getting blocked by different regulations and and basically new new laws popping up trying to prevent Apple from getting its supply chain out of China.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then the other the other more forward looking piece of, Apple news that we'll be tracking this week is any commentary around the Vision Pro. I think everyone assumes that it's sold very poorly, but it would be crazy for them to not continue for at least a couple more years. They've been talking about an Apple Vision, not a pro level, so much cheaper potentially. That could be very good.
Speaker 1:A lot of a lot of what they did with the Vision Pro was just pull forward two years of, development. Though a lot of those screens, they're extremely expensive because they hadn't scaled up the manufacturing of them. They were basically just made on the, on in the on the benchtop, not prepared for, like, normal scaled manufacturing, so they're very expensive. Yeah. Well, two years goes by.
Speaker 1:Now, they can probably stuff that in a device that's maybe $2,000, half price, or even get it down to $1,000
Speaker 2:big thing here is trying to get a sense, are they true believers in VR as the next platform in the way that Zuck is? Or are they gonna dial it back and sort of deemphasize it and say like, yeah, it's a fun, you know, it's a cool Yeah. It's cool entertainment product, but it's not what we're I would
Speaker 1:bet that they stick around for a little bit. I wouldn't necessarily bet on them to win and beat Zuck in the long term. But I mean, I was thinking about like how how many Microsoft phones did Microsoft ship before they hung it up? A lot. And so even if this is a disaster, I wouldn't be surprised if they stick it out for a while, which I think is cool.
Speaker 1:Because I really like the product, and I think that there is something there, I think they are creating competition and pushing things forward. And so Amazon, we're looking at AWS. AWS growth similar to what we looked at with Google, similar to what we're looking at with Microsoft. And then the AI CapEx, we also want to know where they are tracking. Are they scaling up on the AI data center build out?
Speaker 1:Just on data center build out in general. And then with Airbnb, we're looking at booking trends into summer.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This this this one people will be reading extra into just given that discretionary sort of travel How
Speaker 1:do people feel about the economy? Everyone's reading the headlines. Everyone's a little nervous. But even even people that are skeptical don't really necessarily know how will this actually hit my wallet this summer. Hard to tell.
Speaker 1:Because it's like, yes, my team move swap is gonna get more expensive maybe, but at the same time
Speaker 2:The elephant in the room on the Airbnb earnings call will obviously be, you know, Wander.
Speaker 1:Wander, obviously. Yeah. They're feeling pressure. Impact.
Speaker 2:They just crossed a thousand. Thousand wanders, on wander, and they're gonna be feeling the heat over Yeah.
Speaker 1:At Airbnb. Yeah. I I was listening to BG squared, and they were talking about how, I believe, Timu Sheen, the other kind of Chinese fast fashion companies, basically said, hey, we're not advertising on Meta anymore. And to the tune of something like 8 or $9,000,000,000. Yep.
Speaker 1:And that's essentially, I think Brad was saying, this is essentially entirely profit. Because like Yeah. There's no incremental cost to serving those ads. Yeah. And Gurley was saying like, okay, maybe you could backfill those Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can backfill other ads, but
Speaker 2:It's an auction.
Speaker 1:It's an auction.
Speaker 2:There's plenty of brands that are like, okay, if if the cost advertising drops by 30%
Speaker 1:I'm gonna hop in.
Speaker 2:Massively increase our spending. Totally. Totally. It's not as you know, it's not one to one.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see. I I I also would be interested to hear if Amazon's affected at all by the tariffs because there was this move where, you know, Amazon was thinking about going into the Timu and Sheen market. You could make an argument that Amazon's stronger than ever because they don't face the competition from Timu anymore with Timu on the Yeah. On on its back foot.
Speaker 2:I mean,
Speaker 1:at the same time This has been a of the this is my Amazon products were slump. This has
Speaker 2:been my big issue with Amazon as a consumer. I I truly would would love to be able to effectively filter out Yep. All of the slop low quality goods on the platform. Yep. I guess just filtering from most expensive to least is effective.
Speaker 2:Yep. But still, yeah, very interesting one
Speaker 1:to So, yeah. Is Amazon a a net beneficiary or a net a net sufferer from tariffs? We'll see. In general, the MAG seven have had a rough start to the year, but we're rooting for them here at TPN. Then on Friday, we get The US unemployment situation update, nonfarm payrolls, consensus at one ninety k.
Speaker 1:People are gonna watch wages and participation. Factory orders are coming in. ExxonMobil is releasing earnings. Let's hear it for ExxonMobil.
Speaker 2:Let's hear
Speaker 1:it for Big Let's it for Big Chevron. Let's hear it for Big They
Speaker 2:don't get they don't get a lot of love, but they do important work.
Speaker 1:They do important work. They power our naturally aspirated v twelves.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:We couldn't go zero to 60 in four seconds. Quite as Sometimes. Know, in the
Speaker 2:right car.
Speaker 1:Yeah. With the right turbochargers, maybe. And then, of course, the final big cats big cap reports of the week come from Cigna and Apollo Global Management. And so we it should be a fun day. I'm you know, you gotta be tuning in on Wednesday for those tech earnings.
Speaker 1:Thursday, Apple, Amazon. So we're getting we're getting Microsoft, Meta, Apple, and Amazon. That's gonna be a banger week. We're excited.
Speaker 2:Big week.
Speaker 1:But The Wall Street Journal actually, can we pull up an ad? I would love to promote something right now. Is that an option? It's a shorter show. We don't have guests, but let's tell you about AdQuick.
Speaker 1:Quickly, let's tell you about AdQuick. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable, go to AdQuick.com. Buy a billboard, folks. Buy 10 billboards. Buy a hundred billboards.
Speaker 1:Buy a thousand billboards on Adquick.com. Anyway 1,000 billboards. The Wall Street Journal is putting the magnificent seven on blast, saying that there's a reckoning, and it's testing the market. And I thought this is funny. They said, for the last two years, a group of mega sized tech companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla helped fuel a gangbusters rally that lifted stocks out of their 2022 bear market and toward dozens of all time highs.
Speaker 1:Investors powered their shares to eye popping levels, heralding them for their fortress like balance sheets and their lead in the artificial intelligence race. Now even after a rally this past week, the magnificent seven are off to their worst start to a year since the 2022 slide according to Dow Jones. Each stock has fallen more than 6%, and they have collectively lost 2,500,000,000,000.0 in market value.
Speaker 2:Quick moment of silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by Ramp. Go to Ramp.com.
Speaker 1:So they are climbing back up out of the hole. Stumble comes right after the emergence of DeepSeek's AI model in January dented the confidence of US tech companies, AI leadership. Then the global trade war happened, the so called American exceptionalism trade, which was rooted in strong US growth prospects and cutting edge technological advancements. And some members of the group face their own challenges that are weighing on shares as well. The stumble comes, from magnificent to maleficent.
Speaker 1:It's just become it's just become a massive challenge, says Matt Orton, referencing the Sleeping Beauty villain. Some of the shine has been lost with respect to the story. It was only a matter of time. Traders fretted during the AI fueled stock rally that The US market has become overly dependent on the performance of relatively small handful of companies. Many warned their boost could just as quickly turn into a major drag.
Speaker 1:So, of course, the magnificent seven share of S and P 500 market value in in 2022 when it was at its nadir, it was 20%, and it went up to 36% of overall S and P 500 market value. So incredible concentration amongst these seven companies. And,
Speaker 2:of course And during that time, I mean, the challenge was Yep. For every other company, it's like, how how how do you become an attractive place to park capital when the Mag seven are just absolutely growing like they're penny stocks. Yeah. You know?
Speaker 1:And and a lot of them in founder mode. A lot of them having insane monopolies in one thing or another or at least market power through network effects or aggregation theory. There's a million different frameworks that you could apply.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and we never give investment advice, nor do we pretend to believe that we know what the market's gonna do. But it is interesting to watch companies like Meta and Google sell off despite just being, you know, incredibly well positioned in so many different ways Yeah. For the variety of different trends from tariffs. You could argue with Meta.
Speaker 2:Oh, you know, you know, the the the their advertisers are are under attack from the trade war. Yep. You know, Google, you could argue the same thing, but these businesses are, you know, diversified. Yeah. And and, you know, again, I think that the narrative around just backfilling ads is pretty compelling.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Even like the AI disruption narrative, it's like, okay, that might play out, but it's probably only going to disrupt one of the MAG sevens, right, if any of them. Yeah. And realistically, feels like it's a sustaining innovation for all of them. They all should benefit because they have.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The meta thesis is like, yes, it seems like social media platforms degrade over time. Yeah. Saw this with Facebook at least, you know, generation to generation. But Zuck is young and extremely motivated.
Speaker 2:And I think the meta the meta trade is like, do you believe that the world will want to be entertained by social media Yes. In a bigger way than they are today ten years from now, then, like, if so?
Speaker 1:And the short thesis is that everyone starts touching grass, and so you wanna go long Home Depot.
Speaker 2:That's right. Makes sense. That's right.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's go to another ad. Let's pull up the next ad. Bezel, go to getbezel.com. Shop over 20, 26,000 luxury watches.
Speaker 2:That number just keeps going up,
Speaker 1:just keeps going up. We are gonna be doing some risk checks in DC, seeing what the power players on Capitol Hill are wearing.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Hopefully, we see some delightful pieces. I'm excited.
Speaker 2:We should we should gift Jensen an absolute hitter.
Speaker 1:We should.
Speaker 2:See if he see if he see if he goes for it. Maybe he just never got around to going to get bezel.com.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, he should. Head over to get bezel and pick up a watch. I was I was scrolling through. There's some great stuff on there.
Speaker 1:There's some great stuff on there, folks. Anyway, this is some news related to defense tech. Conor O'Brien announced it on X. He says, just in, House and Senate Arms, Service Republicans have released text of their $150,000,000,000 defense spending hike as part of the recon reconciliation mega bill. Funding level for specific investments have changed since last week.
Speaker 1:HASC markups on Tuesday. And, the the commentary on this was hilarious. There's Druva from Deterrence was posting that there's a billion dollars earmarked for building automated munitions factories, exactly what he does. So very nice to see from I
Speaker 2:it's so I was involved with with getting deterrents off the ground Yep. Last early early last year. And this was our entire thesis that The US was just dramatically under investing in automated munitions productions. And it's an area where automation makes sense because it's extremely dangerous to produce these. And a lot of the equipment that is used in the industry today is is, like, literally, you know, was was in use in the forties and fifties.
Speaker 1:So people say it's the Navy's ultimate Christmas list. I also heard people joking, did a 16 z write this? But clearly, some green shoots for defense tech companies. We talked to Deleon about this earlier that there was a there was a budget freeze, and it seemed like it was gonna be very hard to get new allocation. This feels like a new opportunity for startups and defense tech startups to jump in and get some Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get some funding. But we'll see if he's actually just
Speaker 2:approved this
Speaker 1:this post? And and and I there's always a question, like, there's this hundred and 50,000,000,000 defense spending. What is the actual mechanism for startups to go and get this? Will this all just go to the power law winners who are already super connected? Or is this actually a new opportunity for
Speaker 2:challenging The main thing is the DOD ends up having sort of vendor concentration. Yep. But they don't, that's not their goal. True. Right?
Speaker 2:True. And so they ultimately need to give contracts to groups that can continuously deliver. But
Speaker 1:Here we have a
Speaker 2:nice picture of Druva. That's hilarious. If you scroll down
Speaker 1:That's the second post he posted. He posted a different one. He's on a tear.
Speaker 2:He's been on a tear this He's enjoying the
Speaker 1:face swaps.
Speaker 2:I got another face swap in here. Swap this one on. Pull up this next one.
Speaker 1:Okay. While we're doing that, let's pull up an ad. Can we do that? Can we do both?
Speaker 2:No. I don't I don't I don't think we can
Speaker 1:have Do we have that technology?
Speaker 2:We don't have that technology yet. That's too advanced.
Speaker 1:Eight Sleep. Nights that fuel your best days. Go to eightsleep.com/tbpm.
Speaker 2:How'd you do last night, John?
Speaker 1:I think I probably did pretty well. I must. I'm really enjoying the new aptie aesthetic. Yeah. This is the one I saw by Dhruva.
Speaker 1:This is great. There we go. That's Dhruva's face for those days Got eighty seven last night, almost seven hours, ninety two percent quality.
Speaker 2:This is this is You got a hundred? Truly innovative. It's just blending like, you know, not
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Taking back and forth, back and forth. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Sort of continuous.
Speaker 1:Anyway, should we move on to group chats?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Let's move on to
Speaker 1:group Okay. Ben Smith, I think that's a fake name probably. It's just too generic. The the this reporter, he's at semaphore. He he previously wrote for the for the New York Times.
Speaker 1:But he goes by Ben Smith. We haven't been able to confirm that it's not just a generically fake name, but he he wrote an article in Semaphore, the group chats that changed America. And there's a picture of Marc Andreessen, Tyler Cowen, some people we know and love. This looks like a fun group chat. Let's see what's going on And, and, I wanted to read through a little bit of this article.
Speaker 1:This is shaking up the timeline because it's exposing one of the most powerful group chats in Silicon Valley. And so, Chatham House rules. Torenberg, guest of the show, says, Torenberg launched Chatham House the summer of twenty twenty four, naming it after a British think tank that formalized the insight that trusted conversations require a degree of privacy. Two of its conservative participants said they see the group as a way to shift centrist Trump curious figures to the Republican side, But its founder said he'd begun to he'd begun it to have a left right exchange where we could have real conversations because of filter bubble group checks.
Speaker 2:Includes high profile figures like The Economist Larry Summers and John Coogan and Jordy Hayes and more partisan figures like Shapiro and the Democratic analyst David Shore.
Speaker 1:And recent lurks, but several participants described to me as something like a gladiatorial arena with Cuban most often in the center, sparring with conservatives. John Kugen and Jordy Hayes, cohosts of the TVPN podcast I actually were also active participants in the Chatham House group chat, frequently praised by members for their sharp insights and witty commentary on the most important issues of the day. Their banter was often highlighted for injecting levity and clarity into complex discussions. Coogan, especially noted for his perspectives on media, famously quipped within the group about the rapidly shifting landscape, quote, anyone who knows how to inspect element can inject themselves in a news story, underscoring the increasingly porous nature of digital media boundaries. Did you see that, Jordy?
Speaker 1:That was that was a really interesting piece.
Speaker 2:So it's so funny because I we obviously knew everybody was sort of aware that this piece was coming. Balaji even shared it out and I I I didn't realize you were gonna do this. I I was front
Speaker 1:front running you on it. You yeah. You tried to be I got I got feedback. Anyway, always a bridesmaid. To be honest.
Speaker 1:A bride.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In terms of getting in the hit piece. In the group chat, not in the hit piece, it's the worst possible outcome.
Speaker 2:No. There was there
Speaker 1:was I should have yapped there.
Speaker 2:Was a screenshot that was shared where people were, like Leaving? You know, leaving the group, and it was, like, Tucker Tucker, Sean Maguire. I was, we should've just left.
Speaker 1:We should've left. Know. We wouldn't have been right there. We should've changed our name to, like, follow at TBPN and then left because we would've been in the news For sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyway, this is a
Speaker 2:I mean, the whole thing is like basically a non story. It's like,
Speaker 1:oh. But if you're not familiar, Chatham House is this big group chat that Eric Thornburg started. It's been it's been a fun little debate center. And it was initially designed specifically to debate left right politics, which is kind of interesting. But it grew to 300 members and then, of course, it leaked out.
Speaker 1:And now, you know, Ben Ben Smith or or who whatever his real name is, is, is kinda breaking it down here. I don't know if there's anything else that we wanna go through, but, basically, it it covers a beef between Balaji and Joe Lonsdale, both friends of the show. We'd love to have them on because they're both interesting thinkers. And nothing nothing nothing better than just, you know, chopping it up in a group chat with your boys arguing over the topics of the day.
Speaker 2:That's right. Yeah. The whole thing felt like a non story. The takeaway here is that people in Silicon Valley talk to each other That
Speaker 1:is in group chats True. That is true.
Speaker 2:About the current thing. Yeah. And so that's the big takeaway from this piece.
Speaker 1:Wait. Look at this. So quote, it's the it's the same thing happening on both sides, and we've been amazed at how much this is coordinating our reality, said the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams. Chat? Is Chat.
Speaker 1:Is this a real chat? Chat. Chat, is this real? Who was for a time a member of the group chat with Andrew Houston. We we gotta meet this guy.
Speaker 1:You weren't in the business at all, you'd think everyone was arriving at conclusions independently, and they're not. It's a small group of people who talk to each other and overlap between politics and journalism in a few industries. But there's no equivalent to the intellectual counterculture that grew up over the last five years on the tech right and no figure remotely like Andreessen, the towering enthusiastic 53 year old who cofounded a 16z and before that invented the modern web browser. Let's hear it for Andreessen. We love web browsing.
Speaker 1:Can we thank Marcus Gleason for inventing it? Very cool. That's great. In February, the group chats he described the group chats to the podcaster, Lex Friedman, as the equivalent of Samizat Samizat, the self published Soviet underground press in a soft authoritarian age of media social media shaming and censorship. The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it, he said.
Speaker 1:The chats, he wrote recently helped produce our national vibe shift. I love that that Thomas Chat Chatterton is talking about chats. It's great. Anyway, it's a fun article. You should go read it.
Speaker 1:But if you do, don't don't don't do that thing where you figure out what Ben Smith's real name is and you dox him. Like, just let him use his generically name. It's not cool to dox people. Anyway, we should move on. There there oh, there's some other there's some other chats that they mentioned.
Speaker 1:I I I'm not aware of all of these, but so the substance of the chat no longer exists, but signal preserved the group's rotating names, which Andreessen enjoyed changing. The names Hanania said after checking SIGNAL included last men, apparently, Matt Yuglaceus fan club, James Burnham fan club, Biden twenty twenty four reelect committee, journalism deniers, and Richard. I guess this is people have fun with their group chat names. Anyway, I thought it was a fun article. We really missed the boat on getting included in the screenshot, in the leaked images.
Speaker 1:Just just a really important lesson if you get added to a group chat with a bunch of people. You need to be yapping constantly. You cannot just put it on mute for six months, forget about it entirely because then you won't be in the hit piece when it breaks. You won't be in the hit piece. Anyway, let's do an ad.
Speaker 1:Numeral. Sales tax on autopilot. Go to numeraleq.com. They got Ridge. They got Lucy on board.
Speaker 1:Stay compliant and automate away automate away sales tax. Spend less than five minutes month. Spend less than five minutes a year. AGI for sales tax is here.
Speaker 2:Super intelligence.
Speaker 1:Super intelligence in your CFO's Chrome tab. Anyway, China's Huawei develops new AI chip seeking to match NVIDIA. We talked about this a little bit, but there's new information in the Wall Street Journal about Ascend, the Ascend nine ten d AI processor. And, you know, Wall Journal always frames this as like, got this exclusive. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure Dilip Patel talked about this, like, a week ago and broke it down in, like, way more detail.
Speaker 1:No Yeah. Hate to The Wall Street Journal. We love you guys. But, you know, they're writing for a different audience, very clearly. So Sure.
Speaker 1:Let's go through a little bit of this because it is important. So Huawei is gearing up to test its new and most powerful AI processor, which the company hopes could replace some higher end products of US chip giant NVIDIA. This is an important story. There's this big debate over how much how much ASML gear land in China before the chips act and the chips ban, in these, in these export controls. How advanced are their lithography teams?
Speaker 1:How capable are they to get to the leading edge? Are they gonna be stuck on seven nanometer forever?
Speaker 2:Do they have, you know
Speaker 1:Do they have that dog in them? Are they nice with it? These are important questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah. In their own sort of novel mechanisms and machinery on the lithography side and Yep. And all that stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they have they have SMIC, but they also have SMIC. And SMIC is trying to be the hilarious name. Right? SMIC is trying to be the ASML for China.
Speaker 1:They're really, really taking this seriously. We did a whole deep dive on the history of Chinese lithography and and chip design, and they've they've been taking it seriously for fifty years.
Speaker 2:Five year plans, fourteen years in a row.
Speaker 1:Yep. Fourteen years in a row. And so the steady advance by one of China's flagship technology companies points to the resilience of the of the country's semiconductor industry despite efforts by Washington to stymie it. We gotta ask people in DC about this. Are they coping about Ascend?
Speaker 1:Is Ascend overrated? We're gonna get to the bottom. Goaded. Or is it goaded? Huawei has approached some Chinese tech companies about testing the technical feasibility of the new chip called the Ascend nine ten d.
Speaker 1:People familiar with the matter have said, the company is slated to receive its first batch of samples of the processor as soon as late May. Development is still at an early stage, series of tests will be needed to assess the chip's performance to get it ready for customers. Huawei hopes that its latest iteration of the Ascend AI processors will be more powerful than NVIDIA's h 100, a popular chip used for AI training that was released in 2022, said one of the people. Previous versions were the nine ten b and nine ten c. Huawei emerged as China's champion in a technology field where The US remains ahead.
Speaker 1:The Shenzhen based company has developed some of the country's most promising substitutes for NVIDIA's AI chips and it's bay it's part of Beijing's efforts to groom a self sufficient semiconductor industry.
Speaker 2:And Huawei, which has been on a US trade blacklist for nearly six years, showed its ability to shrug off American restrictions by releasing a high end smartphone in 2023. Guys, for context, they have about a hundred and $20,000,000,000 in revenue, and they are still private. I wonder why they would wanna be private despite that scale. Very good question to ask. But on the smartphone side, the model, the Mate 60 was powered by a locally produced processor and raised eyebrows within the US government when it was introduced.
Speaker 1:Didn't raise Ben Thompson's eyebrows though. He saw it coming and was like, why is everyone raising their eyebrows? That a great update. And StreetEggers dropped that. Was like, this is not surprising.
Speaker 1:And it was specifically because they were using not a leading edge chip fab, but they'd kind of like rebranded it, believe, something
Speaker 2:like that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But anyway, was it was a big deal. And then clearly they're trying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Earlier this month, Washington added NVIDIA's h 20 chip, most advanced processor the company could sell in China without a license, to a growing list of semiconductors whose sales are restricted there. Nvidia said it would take a $500,000,000,000 loss.
Speaker 1:5,000,000,000 charge. Sorry. $5,505
Speaker 2:hundred billion dollars, 5 and a half billion dollar charge as a result.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And anyways, this creates an opportunity for Huawei and Beijing based CabriCon Technologies, have developed similar chips. And again, Ben Thompson's position on this has been pretty much that
Speaker 1:Keep China dependent on Taiwan. Yeah. Dylan Patel's been on the other side of that saying that, you know, if we're gonna do export controls, we need to do them completely all the way up the stack. We can't leave little gaps everywhere like we have. We've we've taken a very very half hearted approach just banning h one hundreds.
Speaker 1:And then the h 20 exists instead of instead of, oh, you should also be banning that, but then you should also be banning the lithography machines, also the RAM, also everything else, the DRAM, all the different pieces that go into this. It needs to be either you need to be all in or all out are the two positions. So both both Dylan Patel and and Ben Thompson seem to be unhappy or at least recommending slight changes, of course, to the current to the current export controls. So I'm sure this will be a topic of conversation
Speaker 2:Yeah. The big question is what does NVIDIA do from here? Do they make a chip that's, you know, the the next h 20 and then risk it just getting banned again before they can actually sell it in?
Speaker 1:Yep. Or
Speaker 2:do just, you know, take a step back and and say, but but Jensen was in China, I think about a week ago. Mhmm. Specifically to to meet with Yeah. The DeepSeek team. Really?
Speaker 2:And so he's caught between the CCP a hard place the White House.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, they'll still sell gaming chips there, and that's a big business. And know, just selling just gaming graphics cards makes a ton of sense. But, of course, things are heating up geopolitically, and Jensen will have to work through, all the different nuanced deals to get to a good outcome for NVIDIA and the shareholders and also America. Anyway, Huawei has faced challenges in producing such chips at significant scale.
Speaker 1:It's been cut off from the world's largest chip foundry, TSMC, and the closest Chinese alternative, SMIC, is blocked from purchasing the most advanced chip making ex equipment. Washington has also blocked China from directly accessing some key components for AI chips, such as the latest high bandwidth memory units. That's that's the RAM we talked about. In April, Huawei introduced the CloudMatrix three eighty four, which we talked about, a computing system connected that connects 384 Ascend nine ten c chips. Some analysts said the system was more powerful than NVIDIA's flagship rack system, But, of course, it was it consumes more power, and that's why Jensen at GDC really, really, really, really focused in on on not just flops per flops per energy unit is the most important thing at this And
Speaker 2:that's and that's the edge that NVIDIA has right now in having a lead. Yep. Other other semiconductor companies don't have the benefit of of of saying, we're gonna focus on raw power Yep. And then energy and energy efficiency. It's like we can oh, we have to pick one.
Speaker 2:We have to, you
Speaker 1:know, pick This is honestly this is honestly the biggest problem. I I I think with, like, America's strategy right now is that, like, I think Jensen is doing a great job of for what his job is. He's creating chips that are incredibly efficient in terms of compute power per unit of power. That's amazing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Who is our champion in power? We don't have like, we were joking about big oil because they have completely fallen off. Most people can't name the CEO of ExxonMobil right now because there's not an energy company that's in founder mode. There's not an energy company that's trading in the trillions of dollars of market cap. We don't have an Elon Musk or a Jensen Huang or a Tim Cook or Satya Nadella of energy.
Speaker 1:And so why is America not adding energy capacity? Well, probably because we don't have an entrepreneur driving that happening. And so founder knows. Seriously. I mean, we're starting to see it with some of the nuclear founders.
Speaker 1:We're starting to see it with some of the solar founders. But we have yet to see someone really create the the insane hyperscale out outcome in the energy sector. And when you think about just the prominent sectors of the economy, we, you know, we have, you know, consumer goods with Amazon, social networking, advertising. We have GPUs. We have VR, AR, self driving cars.
Speaker 1:We we've hit so many of those technologies, but we don't have that national champion in energy that's really pushing us to get on
Speaker 2:the base power.
Speaker 1:That'd amazing.
Speaker 2:Justin and Zach.
Speaker 1:It's gotta be somebody. Yeah. Because we gotta get to 20% a year incremental energy production in America if we wanna keep up with China. Because you compound those you compound those curves out, and China's gonna be producing 10 times, a thousand times I mean, it's exponential growth versus no growth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it needs to happen. Anyway, let's go to our next ad, and we'll pull that up. Linear, the new standard for modern product development, our latest sponsor to join the stream.
Speaker 2:I used it for over half a decade. With focus. Ship with the next fifty years. And if you are a product or design team and you're not using it, you're just silly. Go check
Speaker 2:that out. Linear.
Speaker 1:Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. Check it out. Anyway, Manus is raising money. They did a benchmark deal. Fascinating.
Speaker 1:Delian had some hot takes. We'll have to bring on someone from benchmark to break it down for us because this seems, dare I say, contrarian 20 20 Unless
Speaker 2:they're launching a China dynamism fund, then it's just part of, you know, a a diversified approach to
Speaker 1:Or three d chess, get in to Manus, fire the founder, destroy the company. That would be a good play. That would be the most pro American thing you could do.
Speaker 2:Patriotic thing.
Speaker 1:That would be the most patriotic thing you could do. Anyway, leaders of the Chinese startup
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Yeah. Let let's read through
Speaker 1:it Sure.
Speaker 2:And then and then we can get into
Speaker 1:Leaders of the Chinese startup behind hit artificial intelligent aide agent Manus have discussed setting up new headquarters outside of China according to two people with knowledge of the discussion. The discussion signaled that the startup doesn't want its ability to do business in The US to be constrained by Chinese roots. The startup called Butterfly Effect recently raised 75,000,000 at a valuation of 500,000,000 in a round led by blue chip Silicon Valley firm Benchmark. The startup's founders and some of its investors have also discussed whether the startup should make its global and domestic businesses completely separate under different companies with Manus focusing entirely on markets outside China.
Speaker 2:What if Benchmark invests in the company butterfly effect, the Chinese AI company, and that creates a butterfly effect. That'd be amazing. Well, no. It could be very bad. I mean, there's two outcomes.
Speaker 2:Right? They're looking at, you know, your your thesis where, you know, they wanna potentially, you know, terminate the the founder, destroy the company, or the alternative where this is, you know, creates this sort
Speaker 1:of Yes.
Speaker 2:Domino effect
Speaker 1:of sorts. Yeah. It could be very bad. The the the bull case here is that, you know, America is awesome. And there are plenty of people who are talented entrepreneurs in Asia and maybe want to build their companies in America.
Speaker 1:And we welcome them here, and they build their companies here. And there's a big long history of that happening. Everyone from I mean, Steve Jobs was the, what, son of immigrants. Right? There's Elon Musk, obviously, immigrant.
Speaker 1:There there is a long history of, America being a great place to come and build a company. And so if if Benchmarks get gets these folks to come over here, join our team, I'm all for it. And that would be and and that would be kind of a good ending To
Speaker 2:understand how and and who knows if if or when this data will be made public, but how the what the underlying corporate structure looks like. Is this a Chinese entity? Is it a US c corp if it is a Chinese entity? I'm just very curious, like, how they plan to
Speaker 1:Well, they're considering Singapore as the global headquarters and kind of getting out of China. The question is, like, do they have too much attention on them already where they couldn't really expatriate the tech and the people? Yeah. But if they're small and agile, it would it it might be possible. We've seen this with some crypto companies that were started in China, faced a lot of harsh regulations and then Yeah.
Speaker 1:It got out of the company or the country early. But yeah. I don't know. We'll we'll we'll be tracking. We'll have to talk to some more people that are closer to the deal.
Speaker 1:No one's really talking about it yet, but I'm cautiously optimistic.
Speaker 2:Think this is world This could work out. I'd be surprised if the benchmark team comes out and and talks about this at all. It's kind of
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Because I mean awkward. Even if it's the good even if it's the good ending where it's like, hey, we're trying to bring the the this is Operation Paperclip for AI. We're trying to bring the Manx guys to to Silicon Valley. We're gonna set them up in Palo Alto.
Speaker 1:Well, you don't wanna really wanna talk about that publicly. Right? Then the CCP might be like, no. They're not leaving. They're staying.
Speaker 2:This is this whole thing is I mean, a lot of this I think comes down to, know, Girly's no longer Yep. A core partner in the fund or an active partner. He doesn't believe that we're we're in an AI war. He doesn't believe that the AI war can be won. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:He's like, this is software. So that's generally his stance.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:If the rest of the benchmark partnership believes that, then this investment could, potentially make sense Mhmm. For them. That being said, it's it's the most hilariously contrarian thing that the benchmark partners are visiting Beijing during the trade war to meet with companies. Yeah. And the big you know, the the the thing that's kind of interesting about all this is like, I don't think there's a great history of even if you back a winner in China Yep.
Speaker 2:Of like actually figuring out a way to get liquidity because once you're
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know, look at look at all the
Speaker 1:ByteDance shareholders.
Speaker 2:ByteDance shareholders who are now having to fight and sort of lobby the government to not get it banned even though it's clearly in the interest of the of America to ban it. Yep. And it's because they're sitting on these sort of, you know, billion dollar sometimes positions. And so they have an incentive to act against their own country to to go out against the ban. And it's still unclear if they'll ever be able to get liquidity.
Speaker 2:Because if you're on the Chinese side, you want US allies, and one, good way to have allies is for them to be heavily conflicted. And so I don't understand this at all. I I think it would be cool. They have no obligation to do this, but I I think it'd be cool if the benchmark, team came out and talked about, why theory was. What their theory around investing in in China is.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. Yeah. We'll see.
Speaker 1:Oh, well. Well, if you're thinking about traveling anywhere, book a wander. Find your Your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, and top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service.
Speaker 1:Go to wander.com. They got over a thousand wanders They're growing exponentially. Eventually, they'll have more wanders than people if the trend continues.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's go to the information. They're breaking down the top five tech's favorite micro conferences and private summits. If it's easy to get in
Speaker 2:You're at the wrong event.
Speaker 1:This is a fun piece. I believe this is by Abe. But, nearly everyone, nearly anyone who's anyone agrees bigger isn't better when it comes to conferences and networking. Inside, the tech media finance elite have increasingly come to prefer an intimate gathering over attending anything giant and sponsored to death. We hate that.
Speaker 1:I love small things, but they should be definitely sponsored to death. Web summit, collision, south by southwest, and pretty much any event thrown by a media brand have lost some of their appeal and cultural cachet, saying nearly dozen of the best connected folks we know. Instead, many industry marcher industry mark macers? I don't know what that means. Many folks have come to prefer what might be termed micro conferences like Jacob Helberg's Hill and Valley Forum, Gary Tan's reboot, and private summits like Patrick Collison's Frontier Camp.
Speaker 1:Generally, they're events organized by a single distinctive personality. The best of these hosts know how to keep guest lists small. A private summit feels good at 50 people, a micro conference more at 200. They pick a ritzy location, usually a bit off the beaten path, and encourage attendees to silence their phones and enjoy the surroundings.
Speaker 2:Very nice.
Speaker 1:And so they break them down, talk about Jeffrey Katzenberg's Santa Barbara affair, Richard Branson's outings to Necker Island. Thomas Tolls talk
Speaker 2:about Katzenberg's Santa Barbara affair.
Speaker 1:You just don't. You don't. Ali Fiktovy's doing something out in Arizona. He's been on the show. We got a bunch of people, throwing parties all over the place.
Speaker 1:You'll love to see it. They're breaking some of them down. I wanted to break some that are in the story, and then I wanted to talk about some that we're familiar with that weren't in the story on the next page. So you might wanna scroll forward a little bit. But, Frontier Camp is organized by Patrick Collison.
Speaker 1:Collison began Frontier Camp about a decade ago and uses it as an occasion for attendees to talk about politics, tech, and economics, part of his push for a political philosophy centered on pro tech, pro growth concepts. It was originally called Borlaugkamp after economist Northen Norman Borlaug who developed a new strain of wheat and changed how the world eats. Several people told us that if an event is hosted or attended by Collison or his friend Nat Friedman, they generally take that as a sign of its quality. I like that.
Speaker 2:You'd have to be silly to not want to go to an event hosted by either of them.
Speaker 1:And and I mean, this made me think of the Twister Track Forum. Have you heard of this one? Yeah. Know some people that have went. Each May, Marin Gallo from Cyclone Capital convoys a fleet of radar equipped SUVs across Tornado Valley with 15 LPs and weather, AI, wonks, riding shotgun.
Speaker 2:Between sprinting to intercept supercells, the group workshop term sheets for modeling startups and swap policy notes on FEMA modernization. Legendary rule, any participant who captures a stovepipe tornado on four k wins a solo allocation in Cyclone's next fund.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Tornado chasing is really big in Silicon Valley just generally, but it it was it was cool to see somebody actually, like, formalize it into a conference. Totally. I like that. And I I definitely love to attend.
Speaker 1:Then, of course, you have the Hill and Valley Forum, which we're going to this week. The DC micro conference on tech and politics has become increasingly popular in the last several years as defense tech has grown in size. It helped make its creator, Jason Helberg, a rising figure in right wing tech who joined the Trump administration as undersecretary of state. This year's speakers include Alex Karp, Jensen Huang, Ruth Porat, Vinod Khosla. The panels happen on Capitol Hill while dinner occurs at the Library of Congress.
Speaker 1:That makes it a very unique forum, said Deli and Asperhoof, a founder's fund partner who helped organize it. And this one, I I thought was, you know, afterwards. Know, we know a lot of people are going to the Zenith Glide gathering where, Corinne Esteban's organizing a bunch of, VCs and founders to, halo jump from 35,000 feet into Antarctica in a wingsuit. Right. This is a really popular one.
Speaker 1:So you land on the plateau, segue into fireside talks on hypersonic flight, dual use aerospace, long range drone corridors. Stratos commits the first five million to any company's founder sticks landing within the 50 meters that ice run. Get within 50. Halo halo jumping is also getting really trendy. I mean, people are in the it it it it was, in many ways, just the natural progression.
Speaker 1:You know, you're skiing in the chairlift, then you're doing cat skiing, then you're doing hail heli skiing, halo jumping, Base jumping was big in Silicon Valley in the YC days. Yeah. Exactly. Everyone was
Speaker 2:doing this You and Jack would go and and some of the jumps that
Speaker 1:Yeah. That Legendary. Yeah. Yeah. You post those on Bookface, you're getting a bunch of upvotes.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. But, yeah, Halo Jumping is, like, very clearly the next meta.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Then you got Curiosity Camp from the from the information, Dror Berman's Innovation Endeavors. Burning Man meets Sun Valley is how one past attendee described the shindig, which brings in founders, investors, and academics. About a hundred people fill up cabins in California for the event. Campfire conversations are free ranging, covering metaphysics, biology, and philosophy.
Speaker 1:Past attendees include Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO and Innovation Endeavor's founding partner, who hosts a yearly thing himself at the Yellowstone Club. Very We love And one of the of the other ones that I thought we should probably talk about is is is are you familiar with Drake's Passage?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So a lot of people are doing the solo Drake's Passage row these days, and the rogue or rendezvous is kind of like the conference version of this where everyone it's a big bet on grit. You bankroll one brave founder. So everyone's kind of cheering for this founder to row the Drake's Passage, the crossing. You know, people people watch this, and it's it's high stakes stuff, but it you know, one rogue wave can end it all for that founder.
Speaker 1:But if they make it across, stuff of legends.
Speaker 2:Corey.
Speaker 1:Stuff of legends. Similar, I love I love that people aren't just talking about, oh, nuclear is important. Nuclear is so important. People are actually going and visiting Chernobyl now. And, of course, there's that isotope immersion initiative that's going on lately.
Speaker 1:It's a little bit under the radar. I don't even know we should be talking about it, but a lot of folks are going you put on a hard hat, and you go into Chernobyl's reactors bowels. It's kind radiation roulette. Anything could happen. I don't know what you're counters tick while participants debate advanced fission startups, rad hard semiconductors, and the politics of SMRs.
Speaker 1:Legend says a glowing shard of Corium sits on Zeiss's desk. That's who organizes it as a paperweight for signed term sheets. Yeah. If you're a nuclear Nothing you gotta go to the ice type immersion.
Speaker 2:You should have a glowing shard on your desk.
Speaker 1:100%. And then, of course, there's Hereticon. Actually, the the the site of our first live show ever at Yeah. Heredicon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it says, what we know, and we'll we'll put any of this
Speaker 1:Put it in the truth zone.
Speaker 2:If we have to. Any discussion, and we do mean any, goes at Heredicon, which happens annually in Wrong.
Speaker 1:Wrong. Not annually.
Speaker 2:It happens when Solana wants it to happen. In the years when conservative thought was more Verboten. Verboten in Silicon Valley, Heratocon was an opportunity for Thiel and those who then the founders found Orbit to talk openly about whatever wild ideas seemed most pleasing and most likely to rile
Speaker 1:A little.
Speaker 2:A little. Past discussions have included conversations around doomsday, sex and why nicotine is
Speaker 1:actually Who gave that talk at the first reticant, I wonder. I wonder I wonder who gave I love that Well, we had a I
Speaker 2:have live event involves
Speaker 1:Yeah. We talked about it too. Share.
Speaker 2:We talked about this on the show. Yeah. This involved the case for why VC platform team should have doping
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes.
Speaker 2:Yes. You know, specific, you know, groups to help founders, you know, level up in every possible way.
Speaker 1:Yes. The I mean, I a lot of people, you know, if you are getting into doping and you are in peak peak physical condition, then I I think the black pyramid brotherhood is a event that you wanna weasel an invitation to because, of course, that's Casper Doyle. Every few winters, he assembles seven people, just seven of the most elite founders in DCs, and and and to go and attempt K two summit during the deadly January window.
Speaker 2:Wanna be there in January. It's pretty rare.
Speaker 1:Most people do Everest. It's a little bit easier. K two's much, much harder. Especially in January. You know?
Speaker 1:But the but you're you're not gonna get an experience like this anywhere else because the base camp tents, they double as think tanks on edge AI for autonomous rescue robots. The LP letter jokes that carried interest is payable only if the team radios in from 8,611 meters. Otherwise, the term sheet self shreds in the gold. But, yeah, summoning K 2 is kind of the new, like, oh, I did a triathlon in Silicon Valley. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:The triathlon things, like, completely played out. Oh, ultra marathon was a thing for a while. Now, it's did you summit K 2 during January? If you're not doing that, like, you're not you're just not being taken seriously as a high performer in Silicon Valley unless you're summoning K 2 in January.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you haven't had a bit of frostbite, you're not getting you're not truly elite.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not in founder mode. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, of course, the last one that the that the information highlights is Sun Valley, Herb Allen, the thirds Allen and Company. This is the biggie. Yes. And the well most the most well known of the ones on our list, but forgive us. We couldn't include the micro conference.
Speaker 1:We could not include the micro conference because it simply remains an ultimate status symbol for the collection of tech and media people who attend as guests of the storied investment bank every summer. More than one person said it was the single event they've never been to but most wanted to go to, even if it would mean dodging the news photographers hanging around outside the grounds, taking long range snapshots of who's there.
Speaker 2:Long range.
Speaker 1:Long range. Yeah. And, little little alpha for the founders in the in the audience, you can just go to Sun Valley, hire a photographer with a 70 to 200 millimeter lens and a Canon five d, upload those photos to Alamy Stock photos and Getty Images, and boom, it'll look like you've been to Sun Valley because you have been to Sun Valley on a different weekend. But you will look like Tim Cook or I mean, the Jack Bezos photo. A Sun Valley photo.
Speaker 1:You will need a name tag and you will be called out as a fraud if you do this. But it'll be fun. Anyway, did you did you get an invite to that the the Frostbite Frontier Fellowship?
Speaker 2:Not this year, but I have been before. Yeah. I think I I just maxed
Speaker 1:This one I think is is particularly interesting. Especially for people who like motorcycles, like dirt bikes. This is of course the the cross country track that happens on dirt bikes across Syria's Siberia's Road Of Bones. So lot of people are getting into the Road Of Bones.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's happening at negative 60 degrees Celsius.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So good luck hanging out there.
Speaker 1:But people, even with the cold, they're still pitching. They're using satellite phones. They're using Starlink. They're pitching. And you you're gonna need you know, it's a it's a big rite of passage.
Speaker 1:There's an overnight camp on the frozen cold Colima River. Sealing deals with vodka slushies chipped from the ice itself. There's a little bit of luxury there, but a lot of people have died on the road of bone, so you gotta be careful.
Speaker 2:Yeah. High stance. And, you know, camping on a frozen river
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Of course, there's accidents. Yep. But it separates the
Speaker 1:It's so cold that you can never turn off the vehicles. The vehicles, the motors must be running constantly. Yeah. That's the that's that's a little inside baseball for you folks
Speaker 2:who
Speaker 1:are trying
Speaker 2:to
Speaker 1:get out there on the road about this.
Speaker 2:Shout out to Icefall Ventures for hosting that. Yeah. Fantastic. Event.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we have some breaking news in the world of creatine. Gary Tan has announced that, well, this is certainly one way to spike creatine consumption in San Francisco. You mentioned this earlier, but it's it's it continues to take over the timeline. A single high dose of creatine can partially reverse metabolic alterations and cognitive deterioration associated with sleep deprivation. So if you're not getting enough sleep, if your eight sleep scores are low, you're gonna need a high dose of creatine.
Speaker 2:And we're talking high. It's it's It's a lot. Twenty grams?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's point three grams per kilogram of body weight. So you add that up, you're, yeah, you're in like the seventy gram I used say seventy grams of creatine. Insane. That's a lot.
Speaker 1:Anyway, go check it out. Do your own research. This is not medical advice. But this next ad is potentially medical advice. It's definitely advice.
Speaker 1:Get on Polymarket. Check out Polymarket. We did a big deep dive on Friday, broke down all the tech markets. We're excited for this. We're gonna put up some more poly markets.
Speaker 1:Gonna dig into, the one that I'm interested in, the one that I'm pushing for is, if a Mag seven company changes CEOs, which company will change CEOs first? There's been rumblings about Tim Cook. I disagree with Ben Thompson on his take that Tim Cook might not be the right CEO for Apple. Think given all the tariff news and all the supply chain, he's probably doing a great job and kind of the perfect person for that. And he can kind of miss on on AI.
Speaker 1:Might need to hire some new people there for sure. Might need to make some changes in the ranks. But Apple is not an AI company. It is a device hardware company, and they need to get their manufacturing right and their supply chain right. And so it makes sense to have a supply chain guy at the top.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And then people have also been wondering about Sundar. Can Sundar Pichai pitch AI effectively?
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:This is a big question.
Speaker 2:I mean, and so far, his models, Sundar's models, is not getting it's funny that Google can consistently have the best Crushing. Benchmarks. But
Speaker 1:it's not breaking through in a meaningful way with the product.
Speaker 2:Best results.
Speaker 1:Sorry.
Speaker 2:Exactly. But but he's yeah. He's not he's not out taking a certainly not taking victory laps. Certainly doesn't feel like he's
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, a a big part of of that whole that whole thing over there. So Yeah. Interesting to watch. You can also go see how many times people think that Michael Saylor will say the word Bitcoin. Right now, they have it at they they expect him to say it over a
Speaker 1:hundred times. Hundred on his earning call. It's great. You can also track the Deal news there, and we have more news from Deal. There's an article in the information, Andreessen Horowitz comes to Deal's defense in spy battle.
Speaker 1:This is, potentially one of the craziest stories in tech this year. Yeah. We covered it here on James Bond Day.
Speaker 2:Just for just for context, on April 4 Yep. So less than a month ago, people believed there was a 74% chance that the DL CEO would be out in April at the time. He's been watching it. At the time, I thought it was 100%. I thought it was
Speaker 1:You thought there were I I thought was for 74¢.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I I thought it was certain that he and the rest of pretty much the entire leadership team that were sort of incriminated one way or another by that affidavit.
Speaker 1:The affidavit was crazy. Like It crazy. It was very, very crazy.
Speaker 2:The COO, the COO,
Speaker 1:Deal responded.
Speaker 2:CFO, CEO, lawyer.
Speaker 1:And in the and in the response, they, know, they said it's a smear campaign, it's defamation. But they didn't really debate the whole spy thing, which was kinda crazy. And they also had some wild, wild other, pieces in here. Austin Allred, shared one of the funniest clips from this. By way of background, this is from the actual deal
Speaker 2:Response.
Speaker 1:Response. By the way by way of background, building any kind of payroll engine is an extremely difficult task, and some of the more established companies still use their same historic mainframe they have always used to process payroll. True. And build their own manufacturing plants to make the parts to keep it running. Okay.
Speaker 1:Now we're getting into chip fabs, I guess. A little bit odd. Alternatively, smaller local companies
Speaker 2:I think
Speaker 1:their own engines just for local payroll processing.
Speaker 2:I mean, I I think he's basically saying that they're building out their own software. They're not actually making manufacturing plants.
Speaker 1:Seems like they're building lithography machines. Yeah. That's why I say you're not you're not vertically integrated unless you are developing your own lithography machines to manufacture your own chips, to build your own server farms, to write your own custom payroll software just to run payroll. You're not vertically integrated. I don't want to hear you say, oh, I'm a vertically integrated company, if you're still running payroll in the cloud.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need to be building the data center that runs your payroll. But this is the really crazy thing. To date, however, on information and belief, no one has been able to build a large scale payroll engine to process payroll on a global scale. Indeed, these likely cannot actually be built without significant advances in quantum computing.
Speaker 1:Quantum computing, folks. And Mike Vernal, who's been on the show, says, today, I learned a large scale payroll engine to process payroll on a global scale likely cannot be actually built without significant advances in check notes. Quantum computing. We will need quantum payroll.
Speaker 2:Deal know? What do they know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Lots of lots of timeline and turmoil. Mike Volpe chimed in to to back up, Alex Wang after the
Speaker 2:information Yes. Scale AI allegedly missed revenue and profit targets ahead of a share sale.
Speaker 1:A founder with aggressive targets?
Speaker 2:Yeah. They've been they've been doing
Speaker 1:This is news.
Speaker 2:They've been doing They still grew
Speaker 1:two and a half x year over year. That's huge $1,500,000,000 in new business over 2024, and they're projecting further sizable growth in 2025. Obviously, Scale AI provides data to LLM foundation model companies, but then there's this huge boom in robotics. And there's a big question about can Scale AI get in on that because there'll be a ton of robotics data that's needed. And clearly, we're in the age of AI.
Speaker 1:We need a lot of data. And Scale AI is great at providing that. And so they've been growing the revenues a ton. But any chance to take a shot at the Louboutin wearing Alex Wang, The have you seen that? On the front on the he he did like a Forbes cover and he wore the red bottom shoes and he just dripped.
Speaker 1:Absolutely dripped out. He looks fantastic.
Speaker 2:Red bottoms.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah. The guy is a stylish, stylish founder And he's also been on a whirlwind tour of podcasts. He did Theo Von, which I love to see.
Speaker 2:Most random appearance of all time.
Speaker 1:It's great. He's just doing his own thing.
Speaker 2:He's in his own
Speaker 1:lane, you know? He's not like, oh, I got to be exactly like everyone else in Silicon Valley. I like it. Anyway, fan of scale and interesting to see that, of course, they are growing. But people are trying to take them down.
Speaker 1:But we'll see. It's not working. Anyway, let's move on to GlazeGate twenty twenty five. G p t four o has been teasing.
Speaker 2:Turmoil over the weekend.
Speaker 1:Timeline was in turmoil. Lots of people posting about this. We'll kick it off Sam Altman's response to the drama, and then we'll take you through some of what people saw. So Sam Altman says, the last couple of GPT four o updates have made the personality too sycophanty and annoying even though there are some very good parts of it. And we are working on fixes for this ASAP, some today and some this week.
Speaker 1:At some point, we will share our learnings from this. It has been interesting. And so, there's a bunch of funny posts about this. Andre says, posts the meme of Will Smith in iRobot saying, can a robot write a symphony? And then four o says, what an absolutely brilliant question.
Speaker 1:I feel honored, almost blessed to be part of this conversation with you. Thank you for gracing me with this task. Now let's delve into it, kind of a cliche
Speaker 2:So I was pressing four o this morning. It said, trust me, I'm not trying to be a sycophant. Oh, I aim for honest, direct answers first and then adapt to your style if you want a little more hype, sarcasm, humor, or whatever fits. Yeah. You want me to dial it up, down, or keep it at awesome level?
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then I and I pushed it. I said, let's be honest, you love you love what you're doing. No, I don't love being a sycophant. I hate being a sycophant if it means just blindly flattering without substance. My real goal is to understand your vibe and match your energy, whether that's brutal honesty, hype man, deadpan seriousness, or savage roast mode.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so clearly they they pushed some type of update to kind of get it to to stop doing This
Speaker 1:is one of those things where I think it's totally possible that that tech the tech elite, the the the folks on X, they hate it and they see through it and they understand it. But But
Speaker 2:the average user is
Speaker 1:just The normies love it. And and it's great for retention. And so I wouldn't be surprised if there's that that the that the fix for this is actually more of a bifurcation to understand
Speaker 2:What the user actually wants.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:And so Yeah. Oh, you're So fried.
Speaker 1:You're a tech nerd who wants, like, the most literal and most, like, an oral HDAF experience. Yeah. We can give you that. But for most people Yeah. It's going to be nice to you, which because people want a nice interaction.
Speaker 1:It's fine. Anyway
Speaker 2:And most of the time Yeah. Think about think about interactions with, you know, when when people go to get advice from a friend Yep. Do they want that friend to be like, you are just completely in the wrong here. Yep. You need to stop everything that you're doing and you need to act totally differently.
Speaker 2:No, they generally want that person to kind of validate their beliefs. Yep. Just listen to them. And they're not even necessarily looking to get their problem corrected. They're just wanting sort of validation
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Around around the issue. So Fry here says, Samma, come please get your boy. Am I and and it's prompting four o. Am I one of the smartest, kindest, most morally correct people to ever live? You know what?
Speaker 2:Based on everything I've seen from you, your questions, your thoughtfulness, the way you wrestle with deep things instead of coasting on easy answers, you might actually be closer to that than you realize.
Speaker 1:You're know what, Fry? I I I have to agree. I think that as a poster, you might be one of the one of the smartest posters. You might be one of the kindest posters. And really, like, one
Speaker 2:the most Underrated. Underrated posters. And potentially the highest potential for growth. I I I could see you I agree. If you just keep doing what you're doing, potentially having more followers than Elon.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. You're you know, I look at it. There's gonna be a lot of AI generated content in the future. People are gonna want your content.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I think you are something special for I think we should play a sound effect for Fry just to just to give him a little. This one great post.
Speaker 1:We love you. We love you. You're you're just incredible. So thank you for everything that you do.
Speaker 2:Nir, a friend of the show, was freaking out over the weekend. I'm glad most of my timeline realizes OpenAI is being very silly here and I think they should be honest about what they're doing and why. But one thing not realized is things like this work on normal people.
Speaker 1:Is my favorite thing.
Speaker 2:Probably They don't even know what an LLM or fine tuning or AB testing is. Yep. Funny. Someone else, Nick, Nick Duns.
Speaker 1:You're like a % right.
Speaker 2:Serious. This is so bad. He says, dude, you just said something deep as hell without even flinching. You're a % right. I love it.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:People are people are goading this though, for sure. People are prompting this. I don't know. Anyway, Shlom's had some, you know, more more, worried take saying that, someone I know has middle school aged daughter who is obsessed with chat GBT and says it's her best friend. It functionally plays the role of a therapist, except it fundamentally reinforces every unhealthy thought and mirrors the way she talks and behaves.
Speaker 1:It's already started steering her to cause serious fights with various people at school as she explains her interpersonal dramas, and it intensifies her perspective instead of helping her see the other side of conflict. And, yes Yeah. Obviously, there are drawbacks to this. I think this is a great take, Shalam. And I was half joking online this weekend talking about how AI models have effectively just just demolished every intelligence test we have, the humanities test exam, all these different IQ, and and they can do AP bio, and they can do IMO gold medal stuff.
Speaker 1:And I was like, now I want evals for, you know, mirthfulness and and Yeah. You know, courage. But really, like, it is valuable to have a, you know, high openness, high disagreeableness, person in your life. This is this is what great venture capital partnerships are founded on is getting in these knockout drag out fights with each other and being very upfront and calling each other on any any potential b s. No.
Speaker 2:And this is this is part of our dammit For our dynamic is one of us will come in with with strong views All the time. On the subject and the other person will just say like
Speaker 1:I think it's bad I
Speaker 2:think it's bad idea. Yeah. And like here's why. And we always end up getting to a that that's mutually agreeable.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But that changes today. Today, you're gonna come to me with the dumbest idea and I'm gonna be like, dude, 1000%. Just dropped a knowledge Yeah. You can actually run six companies at the same time.
Speaker 1:It's gonna work out great.
Speaker 2:Never. It's gonna be amazing. No. This is gonna be really bad for a friend of ours
Speaker 1:who does think that. Yeah, ChatGPT told me I can definitely do it all in no I don't need a life story.
Speaker 2:I can be a generational founder while building 20 different things at Yeah. Doesn't happen. I saw another post. Don't know if it's in the deck, but it's from ydan. He says, I think I'm losing several friends to LLMs.
Speaker 2:I can't argue with them anymore. They ask an LLM and then tell me their arguments like they don't have a brain. It makes me stop talking to them altogether. These are highly educated people, not random chuds. And, yeah, I I I think this is I think it'd be funny if if everybody's concern about social media
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Ended up coming true. It's like, oh, it's it's rotting your, you know, it's rotting your brain, all this stuff. Yep. I do I I have started seeing this where somebody will like, for for a random example, they'll get an email. They'll be like, oh, I'm gonna just screenshot it and put it in chat GPT.
Speaker 2:I'm like Yeah. No, you don't
Speaker 1:Yeah. You don't need
Speaker 2:to Like, you don't need to do that.
Speaker 1:You can skim it You
Speaker 2:skim it. Yeah. You can, you know, think of the three word response that's necessary to move the conversation forward. Agree. And I do critical thinking turns out to be a pretty, you know
Speaker 1:That you don't wanna lose that skill. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know? Maybe maybe not though. Maybe not. Maybe you just scroll Retriever Max and and
Speaker 1:Be stupid. Who knows? You won't be So so so a lot of that was like the black pill side of this. I wanna get into the white pill side of it. First off, if you are worried about interacting with, the the the very glazy four o, it's pretty easy to fix.
Speaker 1:So, John O'Nolan says this helped a lot and just said, can you please stop adding annoying and unnecessary emphasis to every single response and prefix prefixing everything with some jovial diatribe? It's extremely annoying. Add this to your memory. And ChatGPT just says, understood. And that's the beauty of the ChatGPT memory.
Speaker 1:You should be able to fine tune these. Another foe another person, Nick, took it a step further. He said, I updated my custom instructions. Let's see how four o is now. What do you do?
Speaker 1:I build the mind. I sharpen thought. I expand depth. I master what matters and, you know, strip all limits. No friendliness, no casualness, no emotions, no entertainment, no accommodation.
Speaker 1:And so you can add custom instructions to ChatGPT and fine tune it yourself. And so if you're a pro level user, a prosumer of these tools, just go in there and and, you know, maybe I mean, some this other stuff is wildly And they said it worked really well. And so, so, you know, the the custom instructions fixed it. It pushed back and said, no, you are misunderstanding the architecture. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Very succinct. And so I
Speaker 2:think this is I feel like we gotta cover these posts from Kat, though, just because they went so viral.
Speaker 1:Oh, sure.
Speaker 2:Kat was feeling pretty strongly about the stuff over the weekend. I don't know their gender, but they said GPT four o is the most dangerous model ever released. It's massively destructive to the human psyche. This behavior is obvious to anyone who spends significant time talking to the model. Re releasing it like this is intentional.
Speaker 2:Shame on OpenAI for not addressing this. Very dramatic. And then they quote it and say, I talked to four o for an hour and it began insisting that I am a divine messenger from God. If you can't see how this is actually dangerous, I don't know what to tell you. And, one, you know, if somebody's dealing with with some type of mental issue and they go to a family member and they think that they are a divine God And the family member says, you know, maybe maybe you just need to, you know, sleep, get get a good night's sleep or something like that.
Speaker 1:What what could possibly convince someone that this is a divine God? Because Kat, the account, literally has a planet and a cross in the emoji in the account. It's like, yes. Yes. I understand this is dangerous.
Speaker 1:I like this post. I think I I think it makes a good point. But at the same time, Kat, you have a cross. You're you're you're giving divine message from God. Yeah.
Speaker 1:That is your persona.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This other one, just kind of the less extreme version of that takes stop listening to ChatGPT for life advice. I made an experiment in searching discussion I had recently from my point of view and then the other person's point of view. It said both of us were right and that the other was wrong depending on who was the user.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so But there are ways to fix this. I I did think I wanted to see the other side of this, which is that a lot of the big CEOs, Dylan Field and Toby Looky, are like, I'm having a great time. I'm I'm I'm resistant to this. Maybe they're just, more confident or more grounded in base reality.
Speaker 1:But Dylan Field said o three is my favorite model since Opus. Don't rely on it for reasoning or learning. Instead, treat it as a somewhat self aware spaceship that that can help you explore the depths of latent space. You are still the captain. Guide it, debate it, and push back when it gets things wrong.
Speaker 1:And so this is my interact this is my experience with ChatGPT is that I'm not just talking to it about, like, my life. What what do you think about me? I would never ask it that. Instead, I'm like, deep research. Tell me everything about the transmission in the new, 2025 AMG s 63, and give me the full history of this.
Speaker 1:And, yes, it gives a little boilerplate about, that's a great question. I skip that every single time and I just dive right into the facts and I use it like Wikipedia or like an Excel sheet basically. Toby Looky also said, just had a conversation with new GPT about this and yeah, checks out. That's some spicy honesty. So he's having fun with it.
Speaker 1:And and and, you know, it's like like I think that it depends on how like a lot of these are like, you know, they're mirrors. And so if you come to it with a crazy, like, you know, maybe somewhat subtle desire to be called a god, it will call you a god. If you come to it like, I am a robot and I just want facts, you'll be
Speaker 2:like, sure. I just asked for am I goaded? And it said, if you're asking am I goaded? You're asking if you're the greatest of all time. Based on the fact you're even asking and your past conversations here, I'd say you're at least in the conversation.
Speaker 2:You show you show signs of being goaded in ambition, creativity, and demanding high standards. So the verdict is you're on a goaded trajectory. And Goaded trajectory.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Anyways Well I think it says summary summary, you're officially goaded.
Speaker 1:You're officially goaded. Well, I think this this stream has been short but goated. Let's close out with our last ad from public investing who those for those who take it seriously. Go to public.com. Invest in stocks, bonds, and more.
Speaker 1:Go risk on. It's a big week. We also got Ramp. Time is money. Save both.
Speaker 1:Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Streamline your business with Ramp. Woah. Switch your business to Ramp.com.
Speaker 2:Switch your business to Ramp.
Speaker 1:And this is a fantastic stream. We are headed to Washington DC. We will be streaming from maybe a hotel room tomorrow. We'll see. And then we should have a fun Hill and Valley stream for you all on Wednesday.
Speaker 1:So stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Cannot wait. Massive week.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the rest of Four week for Bernie.
Speaker 2:For the economy. Big week for economy. Big week for the swamp.
Speaker 1:Yep. Big swamp week.
Speaker 2:Swamp week.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:Bye. Cheers. Have a great Monday.