Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. I am sick as a dog, but we're celebrating because we doubled, and it's a Dom episode. You know what that means. We have a tradition around here.
Jordi:Straight into it.
John:Every time we double, we pull out a bottle of Dom Perignon and enjoy it on the show. And
Jordi:the timing with this actually work well, given that it's Christmas Eve.
John:It is. Merry Christmas.
Jordi:It is, yeah. Merry Christmas, everyone. We're having we're having quite the morning. We got here. We woke up around 5, tried to get to the studio.
John:Jesus. So bad. Oh my god. I didn't realize you're so pumped up. Oh, that's great.
John:That's fantastic.
Jordi:Anyways, strong strong start to the episode.
John:Strong strong start. Jesus.
Jordi:Yeah. That that
John:Merry Christmas, everyone.
Jordi:Merry Christmas. Christmas. Anyway, so I'll just recap the morning briefly. So we got up around 5. Wanted to get to the studio early because, of course, it's Christmas Eve and we have family stuff going on, family in town, but we weren't gonna miss, an opportunity to record a And, so, anyways, we get here.
Jordi:John is deathly ill from some, from some disease that his, cousin picked up
John:at school. It's like a
Jordi:1000 times worse than some disease that his, cousin picked up at school.
John:It's like a 1000 times worse than COVID.
Jordi:It's yeah. So if you've ever had COVID, COVID is a 1000 times worse than that. He keeps horrifically coughing. We just shot another video, and, it it was tough to get through it. And then we had a huge, sort of printer malfunction, which was making this show difficult considering we rely on printed quite a lot of printed content to get through it.
Jordi:But we made it here.
John:The worst part is that I got goaded into one of the hardest workouts of my life yesterday. So I heard a rumor that, one of my buddies who's a founder of, I guess, Decacorn now, is like the fittest man in tech. And so I hit him up, and I was like, I hear I hear you're the fittest man in tech. Like, I'm gonna challenge you. Like, let's go.
John:Like, I wanna work out. Where do you work out? I wanna work out with you and see see see how jacked you really are. And he sent me his, his, like, just body
Jordi:fat skin. Location.
John:Yeah. He did, basically. He was like, meet here on the 23rd. He sent me his body fat percentage 9.9%. Last time I tested, I was at 14a half.
John:So I was
Jordi:like Which is good. We're just Healthy.
John:But 9.9 is low. Low.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so I was like, okay. No whammy. No whammy. I've been working out. Maybe I'll be down 9.8.
John:If I beat him by even 0.1, I win. So I get down there, get on the the body fat scanner, comes back 9.4. I'm like, let's go. I beat him.
Jordi:He gets Really? You came in at 9.4? Point 4.
John:Yeah. He gets on 9.1. He dropped. Something had happened, and so he just smoked me. But I I beat him on it gives you, like, this aggregate score for, like, muscle and fat, combines everything complete, like, you know, nonsense heuristic.
Jordi:Is this a DXA?
John:Yeah. Exactly. So it gives you, like, the score, and, and I beat him on that.
Jordi:So he
John:was like, this is what we were really focused on here. Of course. It's not the body fat percentage.
Jordi:Of course.
John:And then he proceeded to destroy me. He's been training for a Murph. You know, the Murph?
Jordi:Yeah.
John:The mile and then the 100 push ups, hun 200 a 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats or something, and I just got destroyed. Yeah. It was so bad. But it was a lot of fun. And, yeah, I was really close to bailing.
John:I said I'm I was like, I got this terrible cough. I can't make it, dude. And he was like, don't worry. There's a bunch of doctors you can go to that are nearby. And he sent me a screenshot just looking for gynecologists nearby.
John:And I was like, fuck. Like, literally got in my car and
Jordi:went Mocked. Mocked.
John:I was like, I can't not go. And I was just coughing him along dying the entire time, and it made me
Jordi:sore. Been invited back.
John:I I came back with a 103 degree fever. It was so bad.
Jordi:Amazing.
John:So bad. But I got through it, and that's what matters. So today, we are recapping the big moments of 2024. Hey.
Jordi:Before that, one one big moment of the year was, for us.
John:We doubled again. Cheers.
Jordi:Well, we doubled in in this podcast. Very grateful for it and the brothers.
John:Mhmm. It's been fantastic.
Jordi:It is an honor to record this. Yeah. I really I genuinely feel like it is a platform for the community
John:Yeah.
Jordi:For us to highlight, know, people doing great things, writing funny posts Yeah. And, changing the world big and small. Yeah. Yeah.
John:It's been it's been a lot of fun evolving it from that first first demo recording on Zoom that was just us, like, riffing about random stuff to a much more structured show Yep. Being able to highlight funding rounds, the size gong, and personnel news, and people hire job postings. We have a lot more planned for 2025. We're going 5 days a week. People
Jordi:Yeah. That's the big news.
John:Subscribe right now
Jordi:because it's gonna
John:be in your feed constantly. Daily.
Jordi:It's a daily show starting in
John:And just a little bit of reminder, we are 100% corporation supported. We never ask our listeners for a dime. We want to avoid audience capture. We ultimately don't care what the audience thinks. If the audience wants us to talk about some culture war thing or that'll go viral in the algorithm, that's not what matters.
John:What matters is what are the corporations want us to talk about. And so this Christmas, if you're looking for a Christmas gift for us, ask your boss. Maybe we could sponsor. Hit us up.
Jordi:Starting at, 6 figures. Yeah. So
John:Yeah. Just 6 figures a month, you can support Technology Brothers.
Jordi:It's less than what an average product manager makes Exactly. At a at a FAANG company. So it's not much.
John:Put us in the put us in the team.
Jordi:Awesome. Yeah. So so for context, we just recorded a whole bit on our on our annual awards, which would be going out via X, so you can look out for that. But, in going through that process, we spent the time to just kind of reflect on some of the bigger moments of the year. And it felt like a monumental year in tech for many reasons.
Jordi:I think the election played into that because, you know, tech was just so intertwined with the election this year, given the influence of X and Elon and big venture funds. And it was really more, you know, the election specifically was more of a that more of a cultural battle even within tech than we're now even remembering.
John:Yep.
Jordi:Like I saw, based Barron posted yesterday, screenshots of all the VCs that were VCs for Kamala. There's a website. The website since been scrubbed.
John:Yep.
Jordi:But there were probably a hundred names up there from many of the biggest firms in the Valley, people that were backing it. So I would you know, since we don't talk about politics on this show or social issues, I would just vote that we just try to forget about that list. We just all move forward together. We should just have a website called VCs. Yeah.
Jordi:And just any VC can can just, you know, put put your name on that site or, like, tech.com. And you just like, if you support tech, technology, if you're a VC put my
John:name in the hat, but I'm I'm a venture capitalist.
Jordi:VC and you support technology, go to technology.com. You can put your name on the dotted line, and you can support tech.
John:Yeah. Who's that guy with the NFL hat? Is that meme where he's like, he's at the NFL game. He just supports the NFL. That's what you want.
Jordi:Oh, yeah. Just just VCs Pro tech. Pro
John:business. Support both parties.
Jordi:Pro America.
John:Pro America.
Jordi:Yeah. I think, like, the reason we're able to have a nonpolitical show purely Yeah. Business is because we generally support everybody that is pro technology, pro business, pro America.
John:Yeah. That was one of my hot takes. Like, the what what do you agree what do you believe that very few people will agree with you on is that every American president is amazing. Yeah. I love them all, and I would get beers with all of them.
John:And I think they're all incredible. And I think that you don't rise to that station without having an incredible life story. And every time I've dug into someone, even someone who's been controversial or I did a whole hour long documentary about Trump and then an hour long documentary about, Biden, and they both have, like, incredible stories. And it's very easy to get lost in, like, what's going on this week with this particular policy, and is this policy good or bad? And there's certainly some politicians that benefited me or my worldview more, but I think we've never had a Stalin or Hitler in America.
John:And every American, president has been unique and interesting and someone that I would absolutely wanna get dinner with if they were alive or available.
Jordi:Yep. It's a great point.
John:Pro America.
Jordi:Pro America. Where do we even wanna start here? There's a bunch of big moments. Huge. You know, everything from OpenAI to True Social going public to an almost TikTok ban that didn't end up happening to software dying and being reborn to humanoid robots to OpenAI drama to The OpenAI
John:drama was mostly last year. This year was kind of a rebuilding
Jordi:game where we pivot to to product. This year was intense.
John:That was intense, but also
Jordi:They were kinda 2 separate things.
John:The cadence of product releases is really, really strong.
Jordi:Like,
John:product is really, really good.
Jordi:That's why I put it at the top is despite all the drama and the various Yeah. People, high profile people, cofounders leaving, the product velocity was still insane. Yep. And and they didn't. And and it's still throughout the year was this tug of war in terms of, you know, anthropic versus OpenAI versus, oh, what is Gemini doing?
Jordi:Like, there was
John:this doing?
Jordi:Yeah. There was this sort of tug of war for attention and users throughout the year, but it felt like OpenAI seemed to be stayed mission oriented even if their mission had changed year over year in some ways. Right? Shifting to for profit. Yeah.
John:I mean, it's a remarkable shift from a research organization with a very much more academic style of employee to product led. And, like, some of the earliest problems were, like, yeah. It was amazing magical, like, god box that you could talk to that defeated the Turing test, like, out of nowhere, but it couldn't keep you logged in. Do you remember that? Yeah.
John:You had to keep logging in. And then for a while, it's like, it's down or it would it would air out. And now they've gotten to a point where it's extremely reliable.
Jordi:Yep.
John:And, yeah, it still goes down every once in a while. There's still rough edges and there's weird things where, like, different models have different capabilities, what can generate images, what can but clearly, all of that product stuff is getting ironed out and they're gonna have ads in the free version all the way up to a $2,000 a month tier or $200 a month tier. Like, it's gonna be, like, really, really polished differentiated products. So I'm excited. I mean, it's on my home row, and then nothing has been just be able to displace it for me.
Jordi:Yeah. And we can't, understate how impactful it's been on this show. We, on average, have been putting out 10 hours a week of content, something like that. And some of it is actually more or less scripted, and then it's, like, heavily researched and we, you know, write some of it out beforehand. And so, you know, chat gbt is effectively replaced the need for full time writer analyst type person.
John:Yeah. And then AI has worked its way into so many other things just like transcripts or automated with AI, little captions that we put over Yeah. Videos, even just like some AI generated images and some of the short form stuff. Like, it it it's just like weaseled its way into all these, like, nooks and crannies. It's not it's very additive.
Jordi:Yeah. It's not it's not,
John:like, replacing anything that we're doing, but, it's been it's been hugely beneficial.
Jordi:Yeah. Another one on the list, obviously, in NVIDIA becoming the world's most valuable company. They were, Apple overtook them again
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Afterward, but can't be understated how memorable that will be Oh, yeah. To me even 20, 30 years from now, like, witnessing that. Me and
John:Mark Jensen signing that woman's jazz. That was, like, he's a rock star now
Jordi:Yeah.
John:After, what, 30 years of building that company. More Yeah. More.
Jordi:Yeah. And and and being, I would say, a very benevolent, you know, positive Yeah. Type of character within the tech world. Right? He's not doesn't have his ridiculous ego.
Jordi:He's generally very humble. The only, the only critique I would have, of him as he has gone on an interview to say, I wouldn't do this again. You know, if I, if I knew how hard it was going to be, cause we don't want to discourage any builders. But, but, yeah, it can't it really can't be. And it's so unclear right now.
Jordi:We're not in the business of making, you know, predictions, around market caps or anything like that. But, you know, looking back at the dotcom era
John:Yeah.
Jordi:Comparable companies, evaluations they achieved, it it'll just be so interesting if if, this time it's different.
John:Well, they've over 100% of the profits in AI right now. Yeah. Because all the other companies are losing money, and they're the one that's printing money. It's also fascinating to just compare them to their their their rivals, Intel, which is a Yeah. A complete mess.
John:And Pat Gelsinger was ousted, and they just haven't been able to take advantage of the Chips Act at all. And then AMD, there was, like, this bombshell report by SemiAnalysis, Dylan Patel this week, basically saying that, like, even though they're hitting the benchmarks on the actual, like, computing power, like, price per flop, the software is so broken. There's so many bugs that you cannot train models on it. And George Hotz is, like, chiming in and, Lisa Su, the CEO is, kinda scrambling. But she's done this before where she's, like, hopped on the phone with people and be like, okay.
John:Yeah. We're gonna fix it. And then nothing happens. And so, it's been a really crazy just kind of, like, AB test to see that NVIDIA just remains, like, so dominant even when someone else can beat them on, like, the core metrics. Yeah.
John:The that CUDA, you know, polish. Woah. Really matters.
Jordi:Here we go. John's John's the coughing is gonna begin. The other the other thing to highlight under here that was seemingly monumental, was TSMC actually starting to produce chips here in America. Yeah. I don't think that can be understated just given how important they are in in the in the value chain or supply chain.
Jordi:And, yeah, I'm excited to see where that goes in 2025. But in with the chaos of this year, it seemingly was not necessarily brushed under the rug, but it felt like it got, like, 5 hours of attention when maybe it was, you know, considering how dependent our entire way of life is on chips. It seems pretty cool that we're able to make those here.
John:Yeah. Huge. Did you use an Apple Vision Pro this year?
Jordi:Yeah. That was that was gonna be the next one. I, I'm gonna sound like a Luddite for this, but I did not.
John:You didn't even try it? Not once.
Jordi:I didn't even try it. 1, I had no interest in going to an Apple store and just like putting on something that hundreds of other people are putting on in a day. Just a personal preference. The other thing and the reason that I didn't actually buy it is I try to keep devices away from my head. So I use, you know, I use like wired headphones I have for years.
Jordi:I use my AirPods as like golf balls for practice in my backyard. They they no longer work, obviously. But, I didn't try it. I haven't been, I totally would. It's not that I wouldn't, but I just didn't happen to be in a situation.
Jordi:But it is it is fascinating that, how quickly the swing happened from people going on x in the first couple of weeks being like, this is the next computing platform.
John:Yeah. Amazing.
Jordi:I've never even FaceTimed a single friend that was like, oh, I'll call you from my Apple Vision Pro. And we have a bunch of friends that that have these.
John:Lot of people use them for 2 weeks and then return. That's exactly what I did.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:It was great for 2 weeks. I watched a movie on a plane, watched a movie at night, but there were just so
Jordi:many bugs that could be too expensive. I yeah. You were seeing that. Like, I remember I was at SoHo Beach House. Like,
John:somebody was
Jordi:just sitting there with it on. Wow. And it just looks, you know, it looks silly, but it's also I don't just because something looks silly doesn't mean that it's bad. It it was like it it it it I I gen generally think that the Apple Vision Pro is is very, I think it's cool. I wish it was, like, catching on more.
Jordi:I have a friend who's a super talented iOS developer. I was, like, hoping that this would be a computing platform that he would be able to build on. I did try one, the meta Ray Bans,
John:which I was pretty
Jordi:I was pretty impressed with. But again, I don't really want to wear. I don't need to. It's not quite, you know, significant enough to wanna wear them around all day. Yep.
Jordi:But, yeah, I think, there there had been some reporting that, Apple was gonna discontinue the VisionPRO entirely. I think they that would be such a, doing that like, there's almost seemingly some value to Apple in terms of maintaining their market cap to just continuing it because if they discontinue it, it's such a colossal defeat Yep. And sort of, like, verifiable proof that you are an iPhone company.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And, and I think
John:keep it going. I I I think they should do another version with the same screen because the screen really is fantastic.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:It's just Yeah.
Jordi:And it's it's Apple has the leverage to be able to say, let's spend $20,000,000,000 a year on this. They, you know, they legitimately could do that. If they can
John:do the same screen, get rid of the external screen, switch it to plastic instead of metal. So it's half the weight, like, and half the price. Like, they have a winning formula for sure.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Just in terms of, like, replacing a home movie theater. Yeah. Because you can just put it on and watch a movie. But even then the software was really bad. Like, I would wear it in the dark and my room is really dark and it would get lost and, like, put up an air saying, like, can't track.
John:And it's like, I don't care if you can track. I'm just trying to watch a movie right now. It's very frustrating. Yeah. Not not fully polished.
John:And and it felt like the people who are working on it weren't using it in the real way. They were, like, using it in a demo at work.
Jordi:Labs.
John:And, yeah, not actually daily driving it in the way that Steve Jobs daily drove the iPhone and realized, like, hey, like, it needs to be a glass screen because I put it in my pocket with my keys. And that was, like, a fundamental insight. That that hasn't happened with the Apple Vision Pro yet. It's been very much like, of course, you'd like a giant box and, like, take it out and, like, put it on for 10 minutes and do a demo and then put it back. And, like, it's like, no.
John:That's not how people use these devices.
Jordi:Yeah. But Yeah. People people went from being like, oh, what case should I get to my VisionPRO to the week the next week being like, I'm gonna return it now.
John:Return it. And, yeah, super bullish for Meta because they're clearly gonna release, like, something that's equivalent. They just need to figure out the media. Like, you should be able to just buy any movie on any Yeah. Meta headset.
John:And I don't know that they have a partnership yet, but they need, like, a iTunes store. Yeah. Because that's the first thing I did was I went in and I bought, like, Avatar, all the Christopher Nolan films, all the movies that I would wanna see in
Jordi:the theater.
John:I bought all those, like, 3 d movies and stuff. And it was amazing. All those were great, but it was just too heavy and too expensive and too too janky. But if if Meta comes out with something that's the same resolution at half the price and has that feature, just the movies are good. I also do think that there's a big opportunity for, starting to create content in 3 d right now and then just waiting, waiting, waiting, and then eventually, it'll catch up.
John:I was thinking about doing that when when it launched. If it was gonna be big, I was gonna do the history of VR, and I was gonna do an interview series in in spatial video in 3 d so you could watch it in the Apple Vision Pro. And it would be like you were sitting right here and you could look to your right and see me. You'd look to your left and see, like, Palmer or
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Carmack or whoever whoever I would get to interview Yeah. About the history of VR. And it would just be, like, these really chill, unedited interviews. And it would just be, like, oh, I'm sitting at a table with these guys having a conversation, learning a little bit. No edits, but nothing's very natural.
John:Anytime you're cutting, it gets really jarring. Anytime you're flying around, you don't wanna move the camera at all. You just wanna put the camera there and then let people look where they wanna look. And that's really cool. But there's just no they don't have a YouTube yet
Jordi:Yeah.
John:For Apple Vision.
Jordi:Yeah. It's in problems. One thing that was interesting, they had that app that was native to the device that was you could see dinosaurs. Yeah.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:And it reminded me of the original, like, iPhone, iPod touch apps when I was probably I I forget exactly how old I was. Maybe, like, 10 years old, 11 years old using these things where there was, like, the app where you could, like, play guitar or, like, drink, you know, you could pour a beer or whatever.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:It was just like these sort of I I don't remember anything outside of the dinosaur app that kind of broke through the noise, which is really proof that there's no organic developer activity, which is kind of a
John:People are lazy when it comes to VR. Like, you wanna just, like, lay down. Like, one of the best VR games I played on the meta quest was a shooter, but the whole conceit is that you're in a kayak and your sniper, like, sneaking through waters and, like, assassinating dudes on, like, oil rigs basically. And, like so so you're seated the whole time. Yeah.
John:And you're just using your VR paddles to go like this and then you reach down, pull out your sniper rifle, and then shoot. And it's really,
Jordi:really cool.
John:It's awesome because you don't need to be, like, running around and it's not very far. And it's good
Jordi:training for everyday life.
John:Exactly. Yeah. It's great. And so, it's, like, the the figuring out how to break the like, people just want like, video games, I feel like, had a breakout moment during, like, Final Fantasy 7, where it was, like, a 100 hour game. You could just sit there and it would be, like, lots of dialogue, very chill, sit on the couch, middle gear solid, like these long games.
John:And no one's figured out how to do that in VR because they're also they're also preoccupied with, like, well, you could run around and you could throw fireballs. But then it's like, okay. I'm just working out now. I'm, like, exhausted. Like, I don't actually wanna, like, climb a mountain to live, like, Mission Impossible 2.
John:Yeah. I wanna watch it Yeah. On my couch lazily.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so Palmer was actually talking about this one company that was building a VR headset that was meant to be used laying down. And so it had, like, a special pillow with, like, knobs on it so you could, like, move your head very easily. So you can move your head, but then you'd lay down. It's, like, very kinda matrixy and, like, creepy. Like, you could easily get, like, wire head and spend, like, 8 hours in it.
John:Yeah. But if you look at, like
Jordi:Imagine the brain rot.
John:Oh, it's so brain rotty, but at the same time, it's, like, how do people play Madden on Xbox when it comes out or Call of Duty when that one comes out? They play for 8 hours straight.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:And so you you're not going to displace the PS 5 until you can give someone an experience that they can go and chill with for 8 hours straight.
Jordi:Yep. And
John:so you have to lean into that design that design, like, elements essentially.
Jordi:And you're competing with the phone, which is so good at capturing attention. Oh, yeah. Right? And every single that's that's that's one of the big issues with VR is VR headsets aren't competing with each other. They're competing with every other screen, everyday life.
John:Exactly.
Jordi:So the competition is just intense
John:Yep.
Jordi:Especially when they're this expensive. Polymarket is worth bringing up. Like, prediction markets finally breaking through, seeing the picture of, of Shane working in 2020 or 2021, like, in his bathroom on, like, a wicker basket. No one really cared. Very low volumes slogging through the next few years and getting to this year.
Jordi:And I just thought that was cool because we've talked about this on the show before, but it had been this sort of thesis that every so many smart investors had for so long that prediction markets would eventually go mainstream. And it kind of took this election cycle. It took probably markets product getting to where it is. It took, it took probably like sports betting, like blowing up and like becoming a lot more mainstream, to be honest, like kind of predated, I would say, like the the the Venn diagram of people that sports bet and people that, like, use prediction markets is, like, probably almost a circle, you know? But just a breakout year and, yeah, it was it was very, I would say, vindicating for believers in prediction markets based on how the election unfolded.
John:Yeah. It's been tricky figuring out, like, what the next major poly market segment will be because, Chad Byers was in our replies talking about, like, oh, we should do a Poly Market for when these guys double the next time or, like, 6 4 k.
Jordi:4 k.
John:Yeah. And Mike over at Poly Market was, like, the bots have entered the chat because Yeah. If there's money online, we will just do
Jordi:more of that. And then
John:50 k bots and just follow us, and Yeah. It'll just destroy everything. And so it's very, very tricky to figure out how to how to, you know, price that.
Jordi:Yeah. The whole insider trading element is interesting too because people were betting on Brian Johnson's erections Yeah. Like nighttime erection length. I saw that. But then I saw one of his employees was like, I just made x y z money from, like, insider training on my bosses, like, you know, which is like, how do you really like, these are financial markets.
John:Yep. Yep.
Jordi:Yep. Maybe they do need some, you know, element of regulation or you just need to go into them and treat it more as an entertainment product. Yeah. Say, like, this is not a, you know, perfect security. Like, it's sort
John:of Yeah. You're almost you're almost trading on, like, how much insider trading will there be? Like, what what type of insider trading will there be? Like, what are all the incentives that buy?
Jordi:Or you could say, like, oh, it's it's all priced in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything's priced in.
John:Yeah. It's like it's like if if we did the 64 k thing, would there be another army that's that's buying no shares and then actively reporting every bot that follows us to not hit that.
Jordi:Yeah. You know? That that Exactly. The levels.
John:Bot. Like, bot war, essentially.
Jordi:It's all priced in. Yeah. Anyway, what's next? SpaceX. Fantastic.
John:Yeah. The Landing You know? With the chopsticks.
Jordi:Landing with the chopsticks.
John:So crazy.
Jordi:Crazy moment. Very, very well time for Elon's brand. If if if that had not worked, it was there was so much attention on on him given the election cycle and everything. But it was just a very, it should be a really uniting, you know, moment. Right?
Jordi:Like, hey. You know, America, you know, has is home to a company that can achieve some a feat that is so unprecedented and feels, you know, like it's out of a science fiction movie. The other thing that I thought was funny here was you had for years the meme has been, oh, you're an investor in SpaceX, but you're an investor in this SPV that invested in this SPV that invested in like this fund that bought secondary at like 2x the pref value or whatever. But I would imagine that most of those people are actually making money still,
John:for sure.
Jordi:You know, even if they overpaid or there was like, you know, a lot of fees bolted on to these different vehicles. But it's it's been a good year to be a SpaceX investor. Last it was, I guess, getting priced at 350,000,000,000 most recently. And, yeah, I'm interested to see I'm sure there's there's must be an IPO on the on the horizon. Don't have any insight info there.
Jordi:But, you know, I think the narrative been they go and start up the Texas Stock Exchange and and can potentially, you know, bring a lot of
John:I don't know. Like, Elon ran the AB test with Tesla, and it was so brutal being a public company with Tesla.
Jordi:Yeah. Like,
John:why take it public if he can keep it private as long as possible?
Jordi:Good point. He'll probably just
John:keep it private as long as possible.
Jordi:Especially, yeah, as long as there continues to be exceptional demand Yeah. Then nobody can complain. Oh, we need liquidity. It's like, well, you.
John:But really, like, every single founder should buy Starlink. Like, you should never be without solid Internet. You should always travel with the Rome once it's $50 a month because I was in Yosemite, and the Internet was terrible. And it was a big hassle.
Jordi:We recorded a video, and John was like, okay. I'm uploading my Like, 20 days
John:of video took, like, 4 hours. It was miserable. Yeah. I actually don't know what the upload speeds are on SpaceX and Starlink. I think it's probably similar as download, but, either way, like, anything was better than what we had.
John:It was brutal.
Jordi:Yep. Another one, I I thought the Figma Adobe breakup was pretty monumental.
John:Yeah. It Nina Khan's last gambit, her
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Custer stand.
Jordi:That was the most child. What is it? The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it. Will burn it down to feel its warmth. Yep.
Jordi:That's a good. Yeah, I could have been. So I felt this one. I felt this one personally because almost immediately after it got announced, I used Figma quite a bit and the Figma product, they just rolled out these, like, absolutely horrific billing practices. Figma was always a very multiplayer product.
Jordi:You could make something, share it with somebody easily. They could edit it, comment, whatever. And they immediately rolled out these, like, billing approaches that were one extremely confusing and basically meant that you if you wanted to share a file with anybody, you were just going to get started. You would start to get billed.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:For, for them. And it's so such a toxic way to do billing because if I'm creating something and I want to share it with you and you're not logged in right at that moment, it's just very, very annoying. But they the $20,000,000,000 acquisition was off. They realized they probably needed a 2 or 3 x, you know, ARR, like immediately if they wanted to maintain this sort of narrative that they were a 10 to $20,000,000,000 company. And so, I get it from their side.
Jordi:And, but it was just very just like extremely unfortunate. I think a lot of those billing changes would have probably been rolled out with Adobe Cloud, but it was just, like, such, you know Dylan, I think, I don't know.
John:I'm like the nature of becoming a big company. Like, I don't know if there's any way to avoid that.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:I think it's just, like, you gotta charge for you gotta capture all the value.
Jordi:Yep.
John:I don't know. I think, I think it would have been it would have been jankier with Adobe, which is probably the worst thing.
Jordi:Yep.
John:But I don't know.
Jordi:But yeah. And and, again, there should be, like, an entire documentary on miss, miss Khan's era because I don't know exact we I don't think it's clear exactly why it happened.
John:I wrote out a script once and everybody.
Jordi:But the fact that, but the fact that 2 companies that like that can't just, you know, make love is is tragic.
John:It's good defense.
Jordi:Defense tech. Yeah, we I mean, this was the year of American dynamism credit credit. You know, as much as AI was a dominant part of the narrative, American dynamism felt like it had an equal amount of attention from a meme standpoint. Kugan's law. Kugan's law And credit to Andreessen for for not necessarily being the 1st and biggest investors in that category, but they certainly coined it.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And they get a lot of credit for the coinage. Yep. That's part of Kugan's Law.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And so, yeah, I think
John:When you look at that deal, and he cofounded here. They did the SpaceX series a and then incubated Anduril, and it's like they didn't come up with the phrase, though.
Jordi:Mogged.
John:Genius.
Jordi:Mogged by coinage. Genius. Yeah. I think I think important. Yeah.
Jordi:So so the 3 the 3 major players, Andrew Palantir, SpaceX Yeah. All start all all started, you know, long before American dynamism Totally. Was, a part of the vernacular. Yep. I I I thought this was funny.
Jordi:You know, this has been talked about before. A lot of the valuations over the last year have been like pretty, pretty insane. You know, I have portfolio companies that are getting, you know, multi $100,000,000 valuations with no revenue yet. Right. It's like very it's a little frothy.
Jordi:And can you imagine how how much, defense tech companies would have loved 0% interest rates? So, like, Zirp meets hard tech meets American dynamism would have been iconic. I hope we get that opportunity in the future. Yep. It'll be great.
Jordi:But, yeah, this is this is a good example. Like, I think, Trey, I remember Trey went on a podcast and was basically talking about how, you know, the founders fund thesis is a sort of monopoly driven power law. There's one company that captures a majority of, the returns, and that's presumably in defense.
John:Yep.
Jordi:You know, hard tech defense that presumably is Andrew.
John:Yep.
Jordi:I look at a lot of the defense tech happen investing happening now. And, I think I've talked about this before, but the government actually wants vendor diversity. So there is some argument to say, hey, we actually need more Andral. There should be maybe 1 or 2 more. Maybe they maybe there's a power law dynamic there where if Andral is like $100,000,000,000 company, we have another $10,000,000,000 company.
Jordi:So I think we do need this, Andrew, I think benefits dramatically from a lot of this because there's so many smart teams that are building cool tech that just won't figure out distribution and and actually get contracts. And we'll we'll acquire them, and they've already proven that they can be in a m and a led product development org. Right? Where they're like, we have the best distribution engine into the into the, government. Now we're gonna just bolt on other products to get in there.
John:And then there's also, just like the the adjacencies that Anduril doesn't, you know, wanna touch, like, flock safety.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Great company doing fantastically well, kind of like Anduril for police forces.
Jordi:Yeah. Or Deterrence, the company that that Yeah. I help get off the ground. You know, Deterrence is doing something that, you know, doing high volume, energetics manufacturing is not a sexy program of record type opportunity.
John:Yeah. Yeah.
Jordi:It's not even necessarily
John:supply chain.
Jordi:Yeah. It's deeper in the supply chain. It's a critical, you know, critical part of our defense, overall. But, you know, ultimately not not there there are still categories that that Anduril is not going to go after, you know, immediately. Maybe they will long term.
Jordi:Who knows? But, Maybe they will long term. Who knows? But, plenty of opportunities and and lots of great, you know, companies like Aon, Out Control Systems. Yep.
Jordi:Not to, just talk my own book, but going on, meme of the year, we covered this a little bit, in in our awards, trend of the year, meme of the year. They're basically the same thing. I think I think PG had this one in the bag. Guys still got it. And, founder mode founder mode coinage, he took something that was kinda obvious.
John:Knew this idea. Yeah. But no one had ever put a phrase around it.
Jordi:Yep.
John:What is the difference between a founder led company and a non founder led company? Yeah. Founder mode. And it's a very vague post. It it faced a lot of criticism when it was dropped because it it didn't define it very precisely.
Jordi:And that's because it's different for every founder.
John:Exactly. It's very vague, but it's still useful. It's still a useful term.
Jordi:Yep. One of my favorite moments, listeners will correct me if I'm wrong here, but, Frank Slootman, I don't believe, was the actual founder of Snowflake, was he? He joined later as CEO, but very much amp it up. Like, he is, like, brings that founder mode
John:Yep.
Jordi:Approach. And, I just thought this was a crazy moment, when when he announced he was retiring from Snowflake, they lost 20% of their market cap in a day. They've been previously been a $76,000,000,000 company. And a month, roughly a month after the announcement, they were a $50,000,000,000 company. So that's that's founder mode in effect.
Jordi:Yeah. And, yeah, it was cool to see people like Ryan Peterson, I think. Was it earlier this year or maybe more than a year ago? But Ryan Peterson going back into Flexport, now he's doing founder mode meets going direct.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And that strategy is just like Killer. Killer. Right? That's what Alex Karp is doing.
John:Yep.
Jordi:That's what Palmer is doing. Trey are doing in many ways. So the winning formula is founder mode and going direct. And that's why, if you try to make fun of a founder for posting a lot on x, just check yourself because some of the best ever, are are doing that. And, yeah, other otherwise, like, the the big one, and, we we're gonna cover this later in the show was, just the foundation model wars.
Jordi:Like, if this was this, like, constant, game of of tug tug of war where literally felt like every other week it was, oh, and throughout everybody loves anthropic. Next week, everybody's back. And and and what that kind of exposed and and you have to go back and and look. There was at one point this year that everybody said the found all the value is gonna accrue to the foundation models, like, ignore everything else. Apps don't matter.
Jordi:And then people realize that people were just switching back and forth from models all the time, and then everybody started to think, okay. Well, now the app layer is, like, what matters? And you should focus on the app layer. And then then it went back to, oh, like, don't launch an app because OpenAI is just gonna launch that as, like, part of chat gbt in the next, you know, keynote search. And so, yeah, search is a good example.
Jordi:Right? And all of this just got so spicy with with, you know, the perplexity CEO just, like, constantly shitposting against Sam Yep. OpenAI, and, you know, Elon feuding the whole time in this, like, very public legal battle. And, that's still ongoing. But, but, but, yeah, we'll probably cover like the 3 pro launch later in the show.
Jordi:Another one, acquisition of the year for me had to be, bridge.
John:Oh, yeah.
Jordi:So I think that was we, you know, we talked about this, but a non token $1,000,000,000 outcome in crypto. Yep.
John:You know, if you
Jordi:had you had Coinbase IPO Yep. Obviously significant, but, to show that there is a second, you know, sort of regulated
John:Yep.
Jordi:Crypto business that could be, you know, acquired by,
John:you know, tier 1 company.
Jordi:Non crypto company, a tier 1 company
John:Yep.
Jordi:And bridge showing that, you know, bridge being it doesn't even feel like they were that early to stable coins, but they were on time and very right. Yep. Right? And they built the right product, developer tooling that that Stripe clearly saw a lot of value in. So anyways, the last thing I would say is we we kind of forgot about this, but in in the q one of this year, TikTok was getting banned.
Jordi:Yeah. And
John:There is a law that's passed that should ban TikTok. Yeah. I'd say it's just happening
Jordi:unless Trump overrides it. And, I thought this Trey post from February 21 was great. He said concerned about losing our edge to China. Ban TikTok concerned about AI safety, ban TikTok concerned about child mental health, ban TikTok concerned about trade imbalance with China, ban TikTok. It's really not complicated.
Jordi:That was very unfortunate that that wave kind of died down. I had bought bandtalk.com at the time, which,
John:you're going to do with that. But it's funny.
Jordi:Well, the idea at one point was either to make like sort of a like actually just build like a like an organization to more. And and there had already been like internal stuff in Washington pushing this stuff forward. But the funnier idea to use it that domain, which I did sell it, somebody ended up paying, you know, buying it for something close to what I got it for. But if you did like a vampire attack on TikTok, which was like sign in with your TikTok account, pull all of your followers and your following, and then we'll, like, rebuild the app.
John:Sure.
Jordi:Somebody could probably pull that off. Yeah. Maybe Nikita or something like that. And it's just interesting that the after that movement died down, True Social went public
John:Oh, yeah.
Jordi:And soared, which, you know, maybe that was foreshadowing.
John:It certainly was foreshadowing the election. It's crazy how much money flowed into that company just supporting Trump. It it's wild. The Yeah. Greatest wealth transfer.
Jordi:Yeah. I I think it's time to probably get into some DMs in the timeline. But,
John:but,
Jordi:yeah, overall, felt like I I think this is a year that we're gonna remember very Totally. Long from now.
John:Huge comeback year.
Jordi:Comeback year.
John:Crypto is back. Defense is ripping. AI is, you know, completely new paradigm.
Jordi:And if you're a GP at a major, venture fund, you join the government.
John:That's true.
Jordi:We'll be covering over the next year.
John:Let's do a signal.
Jordi:Should we jump into some DMs?
John:Sure. Do you have them over there?
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Okay. Let's do it.
Jordi:Okay. So first, before we get into that, we got some reply, guys. Let's do it. And this is the first ever double, reply guy of the week award, and it's going to none other than Chris Amidon and Will god. I'm gonna butcher his
John:name. Stomber?
Jordi:Stomber. Stomber. Stomber.
John:Is there an R in there?
Jordi:Will Stomber and Chris Amidon. Yep. And these 2 brothers, you know, not only exemplify brother behavior, but, have managed to find the perfect balance between being highly active in the comments section and highly active building their business. They're building a maritime defense startup. Chris is the founder and Will recently joined to run ops.
Jordi:And these guys are, absolute dogs. I will say that. Very, very patient, very focused. I can tell they don't have post notifications on, so it's not always immediate. But they're getting into the comment sections that matter.
Jordi:They're they're engaging with other other reply guys, other brothers. They are exemplifying the spirit of what it means to be a reply guy. And, they outwork the competition and and patience. You know, we've seen we've seen reply guy comes in, you know, potential reply guy that we come in, get super active for 5 days, not when taper off. And Chris and Will have just been at it honestly for, like, months now.
Jordi:It's great.
John:I love
Jordi:to see it. So that's exactly what it takes to build a great company. And they have just proven time and time again that they, they are very deserving of this award. So, gentlemen,
John:congratulations.
Jordi:Probably not the first time you guys win this award. I could see either of you winning brother of the week at some point and potentially brother of the year. Who knows? We'll be doing the show for a long time. And, you know, don't stop.
Jordi:We've talked about this before. You can you can win this award twice. It's great.
John:What else do we have?
Jordi:Okay. Funny, meme. This wasn't in the DMs, but, Andrea, posted this and said stimmies over demons. She said that, psychedelic psychosis is out and cocaine induced opulence, is in, and we don't support, hard drugs, but we do support stimulants and we do endorse and live a loud, opulent, lifestyle. And so loud, opulence was loud.
Jordi:Opulence, I would say, is going to be the trend of next year.
John:Right.
Jordi:So if if, you know, going direct or or founder mode was 2024
John:Yep.
Jordi:Loud Opulence is the year 2025. Yep. America's back. And, thank you, Andrea, future brother of the week. I've reached out, and, thank you for meeting us.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:We're we really appreciate it.
John:Let's go to Sar. He says, started listening to Tech Bros Pod in a sea of podcast. It has really nailed the vibes, a great blend of Twitch slash Discord style talk show, very online Discord discourse and podcast format. Thanks for giving us the shout out. We really appreciate this.
Jordi:I think Sar Sar had to be one of the first 100 accounts I ever followed on x. Yeah.
John:He was
Jordi:very For sure. Very not as active as he as he was, you know, maybe 6 years ago. But when he posts, it breaks through. Thank you, Sar.
John:Yeah. And I I like that. Talk show is definitely what we go for. I don't know what he means by Discord style talk show. I I I haven't actually seen anything that's, like, Discord driven.
John:I've seen a lot of Twitch content. And and a lot of Twitch streamers will pull up tweets and, there's a couple like, Ludwig is a YouTuber who is also a Twitch streamer or live streamer. And a lot of times what he'll do is he'll make a 10 minute video about something, and he'll just have 10 tabs or 20 tabs open and just flip through them. And it's a great format because Yeah. He just it it drives, like, okay.
John:He's on to the next thing. He's on the next thing. And he can just do a one take or he does, like, a couple takes, and it turns out to be a really polished product that feels like a scripted YouTube video, but it's really
Jordi:natural. Maybe that's how we're we're gonna do we're gonna have to do a remote episode
John:this week.
Jordi:Yep. So maybe that's how we do it.
John:You just open. You should just share them with me. Screen and then just go through and just be like, this is the story we wanna we wanna tell. I really think that, doing some more organization around our content would be great and being like Yeah. Okay.
John:We're breaking down the chat gbt, like, OpenAI launch, and here are 20 tweets that we're gonna go through 1 at a time and take you through, like, a narrative on these Yeah. As opposed to kind of what we're doing right now. It's a little more random, but we're always learning. We're always getting better. So thank you
Jordi:for that. Yeah. It's funny. We're we're firm believers against building in public. Do not show your revenue online.
Jordi:Let people clock it by the car you drive and the watch you wear.
John:Yes.
Jordi:But content you're kind of forced to build in public because you're just sort of iterating live and and everything is very public. So
John:Okay. Megan Neivold says, what wine pairing if you're in a warmer climate outside of Palo Alto? Screaming eagle seems a bit heavy for 75 in Miami. Thanks. What would you recommend?
John:I mean, you can't go wrong with a refreshing glass of Dom Perignon. Cheers to that, Meghan. Enjoy some Dom. You can never go wrong.
Jordi:No. It's great. Almost every time I I see, brother Megan's, post, she's just somewhere, like, somewhere, like, you know, Aspen, you know, Miami. Just really, like, indulging loud the loud opulence lifestyle. So I think this is one of those questions where she already knows the answer, and she's just kinda testing us.
John:Sure.
Jordi:So, Megan, why don't you DM us, tell us
John:What you settled on.
Jordi:What you settled on because we know you already know the right answer.
John:Let's go to base Baron. He's been on the show before. We say, if my second mistress is going to my second mistress is going to be so mad at me if I don't get at tech bros pod reply guy of the week. That's a good point. Well, you missed it this week, but maybe next week.
John:Keep up the replies, base Baron. We love you.
Jordi:Yeah. Reply guy of the week is a it's it's a it's a duration meets quality. Yep. And we value we value persistence quite a bit. So Yeah.
Jordi:For sure. There's other people, you know, Brody has been very consistent. Right? Tripp Tripp has been, phenomenal.
John:Like, you
Jordi:know, and so it doesn't go unnoticed. Yep. But, it does take some some sort of concerted long term effort.
John:Turner Novak?
Jordi:Turner Novak.
John:Right. It's great. Yeah. Let's go to Julia Black. She says, fascinating logic from Tech Bros Pod.
John:I described the guys of El Segundo in a way they would gladly describe themselves, and that made it a hit piece. Humbled that John Coogan and Jordi Hayes would devote so much time to discussing such an untimely, uninteresting story. Well Got us dead to right. We we criticized it. Hypocrites.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She got us. I spoke with Julia after this.
Jordi:You know, she's she's great. We, you know, we squashed we squashed the beef.
John:She was one of the nominees for She was journalist of the year.
Jordi:Technology Brothers journalist of the year award nominee. She's close. Not by, you know, not by accidents.
John:Yeah. She's
Jordi:also She's gonna be so she's gonna be shifting to covering Doge
John:Okay.
Jordi:Starting, you know, basically now Yep. Through next year. And so I'm actually very excited to see some of the articles that
John:Yes. So Century is.
Jordi:Search trading. So if you're, if you're, you know, exposed to those and you have stuff that's that's sort of, able to be shared, it's not gonna be damaging to the movement. Go talk to Julia. Yeah.
John:Let's go to my tech CEO, Jason. He says LA based founder, I backed, has totally lost it. And he replies, every angel's worst nightmare. Tech Bros Pod would appreciate advice on this topic. Was this the Jeff Wu video?
Jordi:I don't think that was a Jeff Wu video, but but, I think it was a founder, that he was, you know, founder in his portfolio, moved to LA, set up shop, started taking acting classes, and that is just a huge red flag. You'd almost rather a founder, you know, it's it's it's basically as bad as a founder saying that they're gonna go to Peru and have a psychedelic experience. So acting classes, terrible sign. Ayahuasca, terrible sign. I don't know.
Jordi:You might wanna just write that one off, Jason.
John:Good luck. Let's go to Signal. He says the eternal technological pursuit has always been about the commoditization of every single thing that includes the human body, mind, and soul.
Jordi:I mean, Signal after the o three launch Yeah. Just went on a generational run. This is why he was one of the breakout posters of the year.
John:Yep.
Jordi:The guy went on an absolute terror. So this was in response to that.
John:Yep.
Jordi:I think that, yeah, it was just, like, very, you know, well put. I think that commoditization of the human mind. I don't know if we have the human soul yet, but it feels like, you know, talking with Chad gbt doesn't feel far off from talking to a a smart friend. Right? It's not perfect.
Jordi:It's not right on everything. You can make mistakes, but, so do so do all of us.
John:Yeah. Pretty wild. Here, let's go to Antonio Garcia Martinez. He says, I find the AGI alarmism amusing. We've been a post scarcity society for decades.
John:95% of the work we do is invented, I. E. Needless add ons to food and shelter. We will always invent new forms of work, making new products and services to occupy ourselves and compete for status. It's a good take.
John:I mean, AI solved chess 2 decades ago, and chess.com is a massive business. And also chess masters, like, people like watching human chess players even though they are not the best compared to AI. And and I and I do think that there's, something that will be, you know, around for a very long time around. What can a human do in the ring or or in this podcast or in this debate format even if an AI could win Yeah.
Jordi:A times out of 10. Yeah. Another another take here that was interesting, Sean Frank was posting that, like, 60, 60,000,000 interesting, Sean Frank was posting that, like, 60, 60,000,000 people still subscribe to cable. So even though we have streaming Since
John:AI is gonna replace everyone, brother, 60,000,000 people pay for cable. We got time. Yeah. It's gonna take a long time to roll all this stuff out. It's it takes time to implement AI into your organization.
John:There's a lot of risk, a lot of legal risks. Like, where does
Jordi:this sit? I think the one thing that's obvious if you look at the cell phone, you know, to to compare it to something like cell phone adoption, which was dramatic, everybody have suddenly having a smart, you know, computer and, like, a personal computer in their pocket. It took maybe 15 years to to get to the point where everybody Yep. That was participating in modern society had this personal computer in their pocket. I don't think it's gonna take that long at all now that everybody has that personal computer, which is a distribution device for these AI products.
John:Yep.
Jordi:I basically think that I don't even know. It might people are kind of already interacting with these generative AI products Yeah. Whether they know it or not. And so, I think the adoption is is is already basically happened. Yep.
Jordi:And, but the impact is gonna take decades.
John:Yep. Let's go to Marc Andreessen. He says overheard in Silicon Valley, my biggest lesson from the last year is just it's all going to happen. All my childhood dreams of space colonies and brain interfaces and AI and robots, everything is just going to happen. And Yacine says, not only is it gonna happen, you'll get to play with it in your basement, 3 d printers soldering the future rocks.
John:I like that. Very optimistic.
Jordi:Yeah. So I think we we were were were able to were able to say that now Yeah. That it's, quote, unquote, just going to happen. Like, I think it's a great quote, but we're able to say that because many, many years ago, really smart, hardworking, visionary people decided to make it happen. Yep.
Jordi:Like, you know, Elon Musk's, keynote, the future should look like the future. Yep. That was the culmination of of, you know, 2 decades of work to say what, you know, autonomous cars, humanoid robots, all these things. So our dreams are going to happen, but it's because a small number of people decided to make them happen. And so if you have a dream, don't just expect it to happen.
John:Yeah. It's gonna take 20 years.
Jordi:It's gonna take 20 years and and be persistent.
John:But the best data starts today. Let's go signal again. He says, it feels like instead of all of us stepping into the future together, a few of us are watching our world change on a daily basis while the remaining masses will one day have a startling realization that the world is radically different. This is true. I mean, there's a lot of people who are, like, I talk to people who are outside of tech and they straight up say, oh, yeah.
John:That AI stuff. I gotta I gotta look into that. It's, like, wow. It's been, like,
Jordi:a couple years since
John:Jet GP dropped. And you're, like, I'm that's on my to do list is, like, figure out
Jordi:if I should use
John:that instead of Google.
Jordi:And they don't realize that that for almost everything that you do in life, you you could be benefiting from the copilot that is Yep. You know, Chachibiti or whatever your preferred model is. Yep. It's it's, you know, my wife will be like, oh, I have these 4 ingredients. What should I make?
Jordi:Yeah. It's like instantly, like, cool recipe that that just, like, takes no real effort to find. It just comes out of it's just purely magic. So, magic is here. It's just not evenly distributed.
John:This is a great take by Pavel. He says nontechnical folks saying software engineers are cooked. It's you guys who are cooked. You're gonna have x software engineers competing with everything you're doing now, and they're gonna be AI turbocharged 7,000 likes. And then he follows it up and says, engineers were simply doing coding because it's it was the highest leverage use of mental power.
John:When that shifts, it's not going to all of the to all of a sudden shift the hierarchy. Couldn't agree more.
Jordi:Yeah. What's funny is I think he would also agree I got to I got to hang out, with Pavel for a bit bit at, holiday party. And, he's got his takes are as good in person as they are Yep. Online. But, I would say that he's not necessarily speaking about the low agency software engineer and big tech company.
Jordi:He's speaking about the high agency, you know, individual contributor engineer who's able to, you know, imagine something and then create it with code.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:And, yeah, it does feel like right now, you know, somebody this guy, is it Nat Eliason? Do you know that guy? Yeah.
John:I know.
Jordi:So he was talking and he was like he he made some post about how think about how incredible the tools are that are public publicly available for $30 a month. And you have to imagine that there's thousands of tools out there that have been created by software engineers that are an order of magnitude more impactful and powerful than what's publicly available. Mhmm. And nobody knows about them yet. Mhmm.
Jordi:So if you're getting, like, a robocall and it sounds like a regular salesperson, you know, and then it's actually, you know, like, some, like, you know, model. Yeah. That person, the highest and best use of that tool might not be to sell it as a SaaS product. It might just be to use it for their business.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For, I mean, for a long time, coding was just a proxy for, like, intelligence. And there's a level abstraction.
John:They hire software engineers and someone who's just like, oh, I could never even fathom figuring out how to code. That's a very, very different type of person. It's a very different level. So Vittoria says, serious question, what should a CS student or any knowledge worker for that matter do at this point? Even if the model is $2,000 a month, it's still cheaper than a graduate employee.
John:What's the plan now? And so this is everyone freaking out about o 3 and AI displacing software engineering. And yeah. I mean, we just discussed it. It's like, you know, operate at a higher level of abstraction.
John:Everyone kinda moves up the stack. This has this has been the story of of programming for for decades going from machine code and writing, like, binary to compilers to, you know, higher level abstraction languages to, you know, autofill and autocomplete on things to now being able to just, talk to Devin and figure out what you wanna do.
Jordi:Well, yeah. So all the AI coding startups are still hiring engineers.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And so there's clearly plenty of value in what you do. The key is if I was, you know, if I was 21, 22, graduating with a computer science degree, I would be figuring out how do I use AI better than any of my peers and how do I do 20 times the work that a typical college grad would do? Yep. Because you now have no excuse not to write better code
John:Yep.
Jordi:More code Yep. Faster you know, do it all faster. Yep. And so if you can come in if you can do the job today using these AI tools that that a previous new grad engineer would have been able you know, if you can do the job of 20 new grad engineers for you plus $2,000 a month Yep. Then you're gonna be in a great spot.
John:Let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle. He says, really worried about the amount of x software engineers turned DJs we're gonna get out of this tasteless beep boop music too cheap to meter. So funny.
Jordi:Atlas, Atlas has been on a tear as well. He he said he's been bored, staying, you know, with family for the holidays, and he's just posting through it.
John:Love it.
Jordi:And, yeah, we love to see it. There was already a big pipeline of people that were post economic becoming DJs, like Justin Conn. Yep. There's plenty of other examples. And so, yeah, I think we're gonna see a lot of a lot of software engineers turn DJs, but, maybe it's beautiful things.
Jordi:Yeah. Yeah.
John:Maybe it's more parties, more human interaction, less time online, more excuse to go and I
Jordi:don't know about that.
John:Be together. But, yeah, I'd stick to the Metropolitan Opera and the LA Philharmonic instead.
Jordi:Good call.
John:You know, learn to I
Jordi:think Atlas would as well. Know.
John:Yeah. The violin. Learn a concerto. Lulu says building things will become easier and easier. Getting people to care will become harder and harder.
John:And that makes sense. That was an entire thesis for OpenAI was that in a very crowded Internet, a very noisy Internet, they broke through and created a new consumer Internet brand. Yep. And and to this day, you can stop someone on the street and say, where do you go to solve AI problems? And those tell you chatgbt.com.
John:Even though it's a ridiculous name with, like, all these acronyms, it's not like the sexy name. People still, you know, identify it. Sexy name. People still, you know, identify it, and it became, you know, just baked into the zeitgeist.
Jordi:And it's interesting. There's, like, this entirely new behavior where I'm not necessarily wanting to search the Internet for something, but I'm wanting to understand something which people historically would use Google to say, I want to understand intermittent fasting.
John:Yep.
Jordi:And now you can just go. I still I I oftentimes know I'm gonna get a better answer by going to chatgpt.com. So I'll just go there, type that what I'm looking for into the search bar. Yep. And so just the value of a new consumer behavior that I don't think people use, like, I'm gonna GPT it.
Jordi:Yeah. But they kinda like, you kinda hear that.
John:Yeah. I mean, it's just a very different, like, pathway of, like, exploring things and asking follow-up questions and creating tables and ontologies. And it's just so nice to be able to say, hey, break down this new concept in, like, different levels of abstraction, create a taxonomy for me. Like, what what is Yeah. The topology of this idea?
John:Like, what what are the what are the supercategories or subcategories? And you could get some of that on Wikipedia sometimes, but you can just do that for anything.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:It's been isn't really, really fun to learn about all the new things. And I find myself just, like, dropping, like, weird arcane knowledge and getting up to speed, like, way faster on things. Like, there was somebody who, was the first person, like, months ago to ever say the word Vacheron Constantin to me. And and within, like, 3 months, I'm, like, clocking, like, oh, that's a Cardiacentas. Yeah.
John:Because I've, like, literally gone from 0 to 60 on that and just, like, become a watch through YouTube and also through chat gbt, but, like, understanding, like, okay, breakdown all the watch brands, breakdown all the expensive ones, all the oldest ones. Like, just all of that. It's just so much faster to learn and become an expert in some random category, which is, like,
Jordi:crack from Yeah. And you can be like, what do AP enthusiasts think about Vacheron?
John:Exactly.
Jordi:And then they you can get that summarized really quickly in a way that
John:It's way harder than Google.
Jordi:Yeah. Hey, John.
John:Promoted post.
Jordi:I love ads. We got a promoted post from our friend Austin Reef, CEO of Morning Brew. He says, my favorite growth hack, find business influencers and turn them into your biggest customers and advocate advocates. It's awesome to see mister Sharma genuinely loving the talent we source for him at Ocean's Talent. So Austin's one of the owners of Ocean's Talent.
Jordi:They help you find great offshore employees. And he just screenshots HubSpot here, which was clearly like a, you know, style survey. And, Nick says, x y z employee is a beast. He's taken on so much and has kept everything running so smooth. I'm never not going to not work with him in my life.
Jordi:He not only goes above and beyond what he's asked to do, but comes up with new ways to do those things better many times. Also, just coming to me with these ideas in the first place before being asked. So, if you need to hire remote, employees, check out Ocean's Talent. Shoot Austin a DM. He's a pretty responsive guy.
Jordi:And, yeah. Cool. Cool example of the product in action.
John:It's great. Let's go to 03. Mike Noop, who runs Arc Prize, says, 03 is really special, and everyone will need to update their intuition about what AI can slash cannot do. While these are still early days, the system shows a genuine increase in intelligence canary by Arc AGI, semi private scores. And there's a fantastic chart here by Riley Goodside that shows the progress of the GPT models, on on ArcScore which are these, like, color based block puzzles, that any human can do.
John:No problem. But AGI or AI has struggled with for a long time. Yep. 03 is a reasoning model. The the high version costs $2,000 per solve.
John:So it really thinks and it really puts tons and tons of cycles, and it's also been fine tuned on these. And so some people were saying, oh, well, if it's fine tuned, it's not that that good. But in
Jordi:course was supposed to have the thing. Like, they trained on the training set.
John:Yeah. Yeah. It is ridiculous. But at the same time, like, there is a difference between a model being able to one shot an eval and actually needing the training set. Like like, a human does not even need a training set to do arc.
John:You don't even need to study for it. And so there is something there, although Rune is, like like, basically correct. Yeah. And that and that this is remarkable. And Dylan says, if you look at this graph and don't feel any existential concern for humanity, you might need to revisit your priors.
John:And, Yeah.
Jordi:So I I was texting, thing. I think it was Friday night with, brother Madfest, Jefferson Madfest, who coined, too big to fail. Yeah. This is that, entrepreneur, you know, highly technical entrepreneurs second that are in the £1,000, club and weightlifting just are too big to fail. So he says, Jared says basically tech used to be this great equalizing force, but now this is a thing.
Jordi:And so he's showing me, the what what we just discussed. He says paying more doesn't lead to, quote, unquote, more tokens. It now leads to, quote, unquote, higher quality tokens with costs being exponential, but value generated per task also potentially being the same. So if you're a billionaire with a device running 10,010,000 times the inference costs, now it gives you a god compared to the average guy. Yep.
Jordi:And so right now, $1,000 per task gets you basic human capabilities for most things and world class capabilities for a lot more. Within 3 years, that will be sub $0.10 per task. And what is the $1,000 per test model look like then? And, he says inference time compute means money, energy, and labor all converge on each other. So, and then, he says, today feels monumental to me.
Jordi:Go long. Feudalism or fascism. AL AI smells the end of democracy. So, anyways, bold bold take from, brother brother Madfez. But, I think that there's a lot there.
John:Interesting. Let's go to Aaron Levy. He says, here's a way to think about the market size of AI. US labor costs are 11,000,000,000,000. If a company pays 2% of headcount expense to get a 10 to 50% productivity gain with AI, that's $200,000,000,000 The US enterprise software market today is around a 150 to 2,000,000,000.
John:So AI doubles that just in the base case. Wow.
Jordi:Yeah. This is why this is why it's a good time to be bullish. The end of software was, you know, a meme in many ways. Yeah. A lot of the best AI products or software meets Gen AI.
Jordi:Yeah. So don't be afraid to go build.
John:And here's a related post from Adam D'Angelo, founder of Quora, and, cofounder of Facebook, I believe. Wild that the 03 results are public and yet the market still isn't pricing in AGI. And then Elon says, the markets claim to look ahead but mostly look behind. AI will ultimately render money meaningless. Bold.
John:By the way, I look forward to your deposition on, quote, unquote, open AI. Wow.
Jordi:That's a heavy reply from
John:Heavy reply.
Jordi:From the from the the biggest I just want most popular reply guy.
John:I want them to be friendly.
Jordi:Let's focus. Yeah. Let's focus on the task.
John:But yeah. I mean, it's it's real. Yeah. O 3, I think, is still underpriced. It's a big deal.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:Very, very big deal. Let's go to Aaron Slodov. He says, why do you, an adult technologist, believe that a nice programming benchmark score means AGI? Fascinating stuff. He's always been very anti the idea that AGI is here because he works in the physical world and, the AI has not been super useful to him in many ways, and there's still a lot of tasks that he can apply AI to.
John:But I feel like this this video went couple of videos started going viral that
Jordi:these four video went couple videos started going viral that these $4,000, you know, robots, like, you know, factory grade robots have have started to seemingly get Yep. Some amount of traction. So, yeah, I'm excited to see what the next year looks like for physical intelligence, which is this Lockheed Grooms company, who's building foundation models for the physical world Yep. Presumably robots. So
John:And also just like Devan esque, you know, technology for, cam programming and, like, CAD in design and just, like, what happens if you're if you have a factory that has some software and you're able to just speed up the development cycle time of every piece of software that you develop or every every stream of tokens that you write. Yep. Hopefully, they move a lot faster. Hopefully, the delivery times are faster.
Jordi:It should
John:be great.
Jordi:John, I gotta jump in here with an exciting promoted post from none other than Ben Hilack. Yeah. He has 2 exciting pieces of news that I wanna bring here. One is that his company, Don Analytics, is hiring again for a back end engineer. And this was posted I guess this was posted before 3 launched.
Jordi:So maybe double check to make sure they're still hiring that person. But, he also says they will pay $5,000 to anyone who refers someone that we hire. So brothers, if you're hearing this, go refer a back end engineer to go work at Don. Very cool company. And Ben is actually the designer that is responsible for the Jaguar rebrand.
Jordi:So that's true. Get to work with an iconic designer. Yeah. One of the best ever do it led the Jaguar rebrand was covered in, you know, the mainstream media for it. And, the opportunity to work with somebody that that can do that level of, that has that level of taste would just be, you know, a tree opportunity of a lifetime.
John:Yeah. Exactly. Let's go to Jeff Bezos's wedding. It was reported that he was spending $600,000,000 on his wedding, and it was he was buying out a sushi restaurant. And I was talking to somebody about this and they're like, $600,000,000 of sushi?
John:Like, that's all I got, sushi. And Bezos debunked it. He said, furthermore, this whole thing is completely false. None of this is happening. The old adage, don't believe everything you read is even more true today than it ever has been.
John:Fantastic.
Jordi:Yeah. I think everybody saw the headline and started running the napkin math. It was like
John:What would you say? Even if
Jordi:you were had an having 600 guests Yeah. A $1,000,000 a head. Like, impossible. Pretty difficult to I mean, if anybody could figure it out, we could.
John:Yeah.
Jordi:But it'd be like A car 1 of 1 watch a horse. You know, 1 of 1 3rd bread, you know, Kentucky Derby winning racehorse. Like, it would really be the the gift basket at the end. Exactly. Rack and ran it up.
John:Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah. Very hard to consume $600,000,000 of food in the weekend. They just don't make it.
Jordi:You can you can stay at a Mon for $50 a week
John:Yeah.
Jordi:You know, per room. Yeah. So you have 2 guests in a room, and that's, like, basically all inclusive.
John:Yeah. Yeah. Impossible.
Jordi:The the math's not mathing. And it's funny, you know, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, it was it wouldn't have even have been effective for him to publish an article from the Washington Post saying, hey. By the way, my wedding didn't cost this much. He had to go.
John:He had to go direct. Yeah. Let's
Jordi:go to Oliver. Classic Lulu win.
John:Yeah. Let's go to Oliver. He says US Department of M and A for Greenland, Panama Canal, and other strategic acquisitions. I love it. I'm I'm so bullish on the Greenland and Panama Canal and Moon stuff.
John:I really hope at least we get one of them. It'd be so good.
Jordi:I know. That's the best part of this is if if this just only leads to one more American, you know, sources, natural resources, economic, you know, dominance
John:I would love it.
Jordi:Vacation destination, there'd be, let's turn Greenland into the world's largest Disneyland.
John:Yeah. I can't wait. I mean, Ken Howrey is now the ambassador to Denmark, and, you know, I think he reads Power Wires. Maybe he'll work on Greenland.
Jordi:By the way, brother, Pat Blumenthal Mhmm. Made a made a post that went quite viral and, talking about how we were appointed as, ambassadors to Monaco. And all my least offline friends took it at completely Yep. Posted the screenshot on Instagram, took it totally at face value, Sending me congrats. Congrats.
Jordi:It's amazing. Like, I always believed in you.
John:I got a bunch of those.
Jordi:So funny. So anyways, Pat,
John:thank you for creating a lot of a
Jordi:lot of amazing fake news cycle. I got a bunch of messages to go through to my people that I won't be moving to Monaco
John:Yeah. Anytime soon. Maybe the next cycle.
Jordi:Once JD's in, that'd be a great slot for us. We could move the studio, the families out to Monaco. I think we could do it. I have a good story. I don't know if I ever told you this.
Jordi:I my, my parents, took us on like a 30 day road trip through Europe when I was 12 and, maybe I was 10, somewhere in that range. And we drove through Monaco. We couldn't afford to spend the night there. It was too expensive, but we spent, like, 3 hours driving through it. And my mom said at one point, I stood in the harbor and was like and I just said out loud, these are my people.
John:These are my people.
Jordi:And she's like, what are you fucking talking about? Our entire family's income wouldn't run one of these ships for an hour. That's hilarious. Annual income. So, anyways, our we have Monaco in our future definitely this summer Let's
John:do it.
Jordi:And, hopefully, the ambassadorship at some point.
John:Let's, do one more promoted post, and we'll close with Darkash.
Jordi:This was a toss-up, but I'm gonna go for, a post from Hermes. I don't know who it was, but one of our listeners sent us a saddle from her Hermes. Hermes, you know, started making, you know, very high end leather saddles. And, somebody sent this to us. If you sent it.
Jordi:Thank you. They said for the tech journalists listening to the show. So if you're a tech journalist, we know you love horses. If you're shopping for a tech journalist, today is Christmas Eve. You literally have 12 hours to buy a gift.
Jordi:Yeah. You don't have something. Go to your local Hermes store, get a saddle, pretty much, you know, get
John:Well, this was a this was like a a shot across the bow because we had publicly mentioned a YSL saddle. Yep. And Hermes has a much richer history in saddle making.
Jordi:Yeah. And so So maybe this was Sarah Hess?
John:I think so. And so this was, this is a bit of a mea culpa for us.
Jordi:Yeah.
John:I think we got it wrong. I think Hermes is the is the obvious choice here.
Jordi:Yep.
John:And, you know, YSL is great, but, if you're trying to convince a mainstream media journalist to stop writing a hippies on you, you really should spare no expense. You're gonna expense it anyway.
Jordi:Go straight to the top.
John:Just go straight to the top with the Airman's saddle. Let's close close with Dwarakesh Patel. He says, we're way more patient in training human employees than AI employees. We will spend weeks onboarding a human employee and giving slow detailed feedback, but we won't spend just a couple of hours playing around with the prompt that might enable the LLM to do the exact same job, but more reliably and quickly than any human. I wonder if this partly explains why AI's economic impact has been relatively minor so far.
John:So Dworkesh was spending hours tinkering with, Gemini 2, Google's LLM, to effectively take his rough transcripts and turn them into really highly polished transcripts. And he polished transcripts. And he finally needed to figure out that he needed to give it a sample of the input and the output and really write out. And so his prompt is big. It's really, really big.
John:But he nailed it and it just works super, super well. So he's super well. So anyone with a podcast out there, highly recommend adopting,
Jordi:Gorka's script. It's such a perfect example, though. Right? Because when you hire a new employee, you're committing to Hours
John:of training.
Jordi:Hours of training. Right. Mentorship. Weeks. Weekly meetings.
Jordi:Sometimes, you know, I I've had times where it's like, hey. Let's meet every single day for your 1st 2 weeks just to fully ramp you.
John:And then constantly just doesn't get that.
Jordi:And I would say most people have spent less than an hour prompt engineering. Yep. Or, like, totally trying to dial any of this stuff in. So this Christmas Eve, I don't know if this will go live today. It might go live tomorrow, might go live the next day.
Jordi:But, spend some time prompt engineering. Give give the gift of dialing in your models to yourself.
John:Highly recommend.
Jordi:And, I think that's a great place to end.
John:Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas. Listening. Bye.