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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are live on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in. You can check us out. We're gonna try and be on around 11.
Speaker 1:It is 10 till noon, but we're talking about a bunch of different stories breaking down what's going on in tech. Moving on from deep seek, we did back to back deep dives. I think
Speaker 2:we've processed
Speaker 1:it. It's over.
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:The silence from the all in podcast has been deafening. They still haven't released a statement on it or
Speaker 2:They're a political talk show. True. So True.
Speaker 1:So just is that kinda out of
Speaker 2:their real house? Niche to Yep. You know? Yep. David will have to deal with it within the admin, figure out the right response.
Speaker 1:But it's not appropriate for the pod.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Absolutely. Sense. Well, the top story today is Elon Musk is exploring blockchain use in the US government efficiency effort. Conversation said to be held with multiple public blockchains, the technology may be used to track government spending.
Speaker 1:And this is very funny. It almost reads like a hit piece, like it was planted because, like, the idea of, like, oh, we're gonna solve the government's problems with crypto is, like, such a meme, but it does seem like there's some truth to this, but it's
Speaker 2:only true. It's also interesting because, the the biggest, criticism of the World Economic Forum has been their historical push for central bank digital currencies
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And in many ways, bringing the government on chain and having all this stuff take place Yeah. On the blockchain is what a lot of people were always afraid of. Now this is different because presumably we just use stable coins.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's some stuff here that does actually make sense, but at the same time, for a naive reader, you can be like, wait. The guy who is promoting Dogecoin wants to use that for Doge, and it's this meme coin. It sounds very unserious, and I think that's kind of the angle of this article. But let's read through some of this.
Speaker 1:So, Musk, who leads the Doge effort, has mused to close allies about the idea of using a digital ledger as a way to squeeze costs out of the government, said one of the people who asked for anonymity because the discussions hadn't been made public. There's been talk of using a blockchain to track federal spending, secure data, make payments, and even manage buildings, the people said. People affiliated with Doge.
Speaker 2:Yeah. One thing that's interesting, every mainstream media reporter journalist is hammering everybody within the inner circle of Doge, within the outer circle of Doge, within the outer outer outer. I get multiple messages a day being like, hey, do you know what's going on Yeah. In this
Speaker 1:I just got off a call with a reporter who's, like, asking me, oh, what's going on? Do you know anything?
Speaker 2:And the funny thing is and almost everybody within Doge has a deep mistrust of mainstream media, and so nobody wants to talk. No. But there's enough people involved that the story is just coming out, but it comes out in the form of people saying somebody was muse Elon was musing about this, and then that ends up being Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like, what does that actually mean? Like, you could muse about anything. It's very silly. But, the talks have a certain intuitive logic given that the name of Musk's department is a cheeky reference to a cryptocurrency, Dogecoin, that lives on blockchain. President Donald Trump has been quickly, has also been quick quickly putting in place cryptocurrency friendly policies.
Speaker 1:On Thursday, he signed an executive order establishing a working group on digital assets that includes key members of his administration. So people are talking about, I think, within the crypto community, the number one thing people want is I mean, just clarity around regulation. Like, what is legal, what's not, instead of this gray area. And then maybe, Bitcoin National Reserve is big, and then maybe clarity around
Speaker 2:And then the,
Speaker 1:betting markets or
Speaker 2:The other big one is is around, the tax treatment of cryptocurrency gains. Yeah. Yeah. Eric Trump came out and was saying, we're gonna have no capital gains on American crypto, which you said, I think I think this is on point that if you want to encourage the reshoring Yeah. Of crypto the cryptocurrency industry, which is I do believe in the long term benefit of the United States.
Speaker 2:Yep. We don't. We've been the home of global finance in many ways for such a long time. We don't wanna have crypto come along and have it be in Singapore and Dubai and all these other places. Like, the more that money is here, the more it will
Speaker 1:And the talent and the actual companies and stuff and either easier regulate. Like, Silicon Valley for a long time was, like, so dogmatic about you can't even build a startup outside of San Francisco. Like, not all
Speaker 2:People wouldn't fund you.
Speaker 1:Being outside of America was completely off the table. It was like San Francisco or maybe New York, and then Miami got in the conversation. Austin got in the conversation. LA was taken semi seriously. But, really, it was like, you need to be in a major American metro with a serious university
Speaker 2:to have a huge Snapchat and Honey people to took a
Speaker 1:long time.
Speaker 2:And nobody wanted to like, the insider SFECs would tell you, I wanna invest in your company, but you have to move to SF.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And then once crypto started getting so attacked by the federal government, all of a sudden it became, oh, sure. You're in Singapore. Like, that's a reasonable thing to do, which would never hold for any other company. And a
Speaker 2:lot of the major conferences were not in the US. Right?
Speaker 1:And so I while I think, like, you know, having this weird capital gains treatment where a stock would be taxed but a crypto wouldn't probably makes no sense to have different classes there if you can have kind of a a one time incentive for people to reshore. And then, eventually, the industry will be so built up. We won't be talking about, oh, this startup just went from 0 to a 1,000,000,000 really quickly. It'll be like, no. There's, like, a Visa, a Mastercard, a Goldman Sachs of crypto.
Speaker 1:They're all here. They have thousands of employees. They're established. They're not going anywhere. And so, yeah, you can bring the taxes back up Yep.
Speaker 1:Which is probably what would happen. But let's go back to Elon. He says, Doge is charged with modernizing federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency and productivity. Trump has said the group will work with the White House office Office of Management and Budget. It's kind of like the federal government's HR arm to identify spending costs House division.
Speaker 1:And and finish its recommendations by July 4, 2026. Musk enlisted about a 100 volunteers before Trump was inaugurated to write code for his projects.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And this is the crazy thing. So because Doge is not is what is the exact corporate structure?
Speaker 1:It's not a think tank funded off of Elon's balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Because it was set up as a think tank Yeah. An independent think tank initially. Many people have already gone and done a tour within Doge and already left.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:They had done that before Trump had actually been inaugurated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was like policy paper
Speaker 2:Which is cool. Right? It's it's showing it's showing this sort of urgency. You see this with venture backed founders that, that end up, you know, working for 6 months on their start up before they incorporate. Right?
Speaker 2:It's that same sort of founder mentality, which I think is cool.
Speaker 1:And so, it says Trump's business associates chose the ledger associated with the Solana cryptocurrency to issue the Trump and Melania meme coins that have drawn interest and criticism in recent days. It is though unclear which blockchain Musk's team might use for its projects, and the talks may end up going nowhere, which is, you know, very reasonable.
Speaker 2:So I have a post here from a guy named Kale Abe. He says, you're midcurving it if you think Elon is gonna use some other blockchain to track government spending through Doge. There's literally no other blockchain that could handle this other than Solana. Elon executes. He's not gonna choose something that won't work.
Speaker 2:At the time, whenever this was screenshotted, it only had 5 likes. Yeah. I just
Speaker 1:searched for it specifically.
Speaker 2:I don't think the community has spoken on it yet, but Solana is, you know, would be one of the top choices if they weren't gonna build their own
Speaker 1:Yep. Blockchain. Yeah. Exactly. Which is another you could also fork it.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:But either way either way, the the the Trump and Melania meme coins are are, the meme coins that were launched out of the White House, in many ways. Those being on Solana was a huge win for Solana in general, which is obviously benefited from, you know, many of the products that are purely speculative Yeah. As well as products that have consumer use cases have been on Solana just because of the speed and then liquidity that's on the chain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so the article continues, the idea of using blockchain for large scale projects isn't new, although applying one to an enterprise as large as the US government remains an untested concept. Years ago, during the web 3 boom, a slew of large companies such as retailer Walmart launched blockchain efforts. Most of these projects use private blockchains that didn't make transactions publicly viewable. And so there's always been this question of, like, if you have a private blockchain, like, why not just use database?
Speaker 1:Like, Walmart has full control over their database. They just log all the transactions. Like, what is the blockchain really doing? And there is a question here of just of just, like, maybe instead of having this cycle of there's the federal budget that goes out, money gets spent, and then, basically, journalists need to issue Freedom of Information Act requests to get data. Like, months later, it needs to be redacted.
Speaker 1:It's like, well, maybe you could just have a real time dashboard. That doesn't need to be crypto driven. It can be just a database that's open and you can query it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's some argument for it to be completely transparent because if you are a taxpayer, your money is going towards a lot of these efforts. Yep. Right? Even if it's just tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fractions.
Speaker 2:Yep. And so there there's a clear there really is a clear argument to say, you know, this, taxpayer should have full visibility into how their money is being spent. Right? Outside of, like, black ops, government programs, things like that.
Speaker 1:On the flip side, like, it could be, like, you you know, it's like building in public. All of a sudden, like, your adversaries know exactly how much you're spending, and they can say, oh, okay. Like, the the US is spending x dollars on education. If we just spend a little bit more per capita, we can, like, compound and, like, beat them basically or something like that.
Speaker 2:It is
Speaker 1:a theory. Just like, you know, if you know your competitors' margins, you can often squeeze them by dropping your price to the point where they make no margin.
Speaker 2:And you make a little bit.
Speaker 1:And you make a little bit, and then and then over time, you put them out of business and then you're a monopoly. Yeah. And so there there are risks, like open source accounting effectively. Sam Hammond And one
Speaker 2:one thing that's interesting, oftentimes budgets get set so money is allocated Yeah. And then it doesn't actually get spent. We saw this in LA fires, like, last year there was I think last or, you know, this came out, earlier this month, but there was something like a $1,000,000,000 allocated by LA County to fight homelessness Mhmm. And only were they only ever spent, like, $500,000,000 which is kind of a bit, like, you know, everybody, I think, now generally wants less government spending. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But if we're gonna if we thought it
Speaker 1:was right to allocate
Speaker 2:the money, like, isn't homelessness is still a big issue. Yeah. Right? If you look outside, sure we could see Yeah. You know, and, and so the fact that they allocated and didn't spend it is also bad because, like, okay, then why did you ask for this budget in the first place?
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:knew that it was gonna need to be spent in this period.
Speaker 1:So Yep. And so Sam Hammond, the chief economist at the Foundation For American Innovation, that's FAI, have been to a bunch of their events.
Speaker 2:We met. I I got to meet Sam at, Hurrycon.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. He said that an internal government blockchain could be used to track spending documents and contracts in a way that's fully secure and transparent. But the question of whether you need a really you really need a blockchain to do that since conventional databases can be used in a similar way and with fewer downsides. But you
Speaker 2:can't speculate on a database. It's much harder. Yeah. So you could make a poly market that was that was based on will, you know, the Department of Health spend their full budget for the year if it was public?
Speaker 1:Like, you literally can in in speculate on the, you know, the profits of the federal government in the form of bonds. I want It's just very boring and you only earn 3%.
Speaker 2:I wanna be able to do it.
Speaker 1:I wanna
Speaker 2:do a 10 leg parlay on government spending.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's basically just like a crazy some sort of, like, crazy levered ladder on, like, how the bonds will how the bond spreads will trade over the next few years. Like, you can you can
Speaker 2:Hedge Fund's figured it out.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You you can get crazy, crazy beta in your in your bond portfolio if you work hard enough. So, public blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana come with their own problems given that such ledgers are governed by decentralized networks of computers. So who owns the voting blocks all of a sudden? Is it a 100% centralized, controlled by the government?
Speaker 1:Well, then what's the point of the decentralized if every It also opens
Speaker 2:up some crazy attack vectors. So North Korea's government has put in a big effort. They have a lot like, they they they have, effectively, kingdom level efforts to hack various blockchains. Like, if if you're in the cryptocurrency industry, everybody has examples where they they interviewed, you know, somebody and their resume made no sense, and and and they, like, crushed the coding screen, but then, like, you actually ask them about it, they don't can't really answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so North Korea has been you know, we'll try to get people in to these organizations to then hack them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they have other efforts, and so if you can imagine if the US government just had a $1,000,000,000 in a wallet on Solana, like Try
Speaker 1:like a $1,000,000,000,000. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It does open up the the North Korea is gonna be gone. Yeah. Like, you know, all we have to do is get this attack. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We have to just get this one Let's
Speaker 1:build a massive data center just to attack this thing. So, one issue with the government using a public blockchain is that they would have no control over the entities. So whoever owns the tokens would be able to change the database potentially. I think that loss of control would be a problem for governments, but some bigger institutions have started using public blockchains for business purposes in recent years, and this was something I hadn't heard. BlackRock, for example, has issued a money market fund on the, on the ledgers of a few different cryptocurrencies, And the California Department of Motor Vehicles had has digitized millions of car titles on the Avalanche blockchain.
Speaker 1:I had no idea. That's why
Speaker 2:You don't you don't hear much about Avalanche anymore just because the narrative is so dominated by Solana. Yeah. At least because meme coins are sort of the dominant Yep. Meta. But, but that's, like it's funny because, like, Avalanche for sure in their c deck was saying, hey.
Speaker 2:We're gonna actually get the the DMV to digitize, you know, titles or whatever. And, unfortunately, that's way less profitable
Speaker 1:Oh, yes.
Speaker 2:Just like having a casino meme coin casino. Right? And that's why Solana probably trades at 20 x, I would imagine.
Speaker 1:Probably, like,
Speaker 2:200
Speaker 1:x, maybe 2,000.
Speaker 2:I don't know. Last. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. There was, like, that do do you remember the Soluna vax meme? It was, like, it was, like, Sol, Solana, Luna, which was like the Terra Luna thing, and then AVAX, which is avalanche. And, it was like this big movement of, like, let's move past Ethereum and get on to, like, these higher performance, high speed, cryptocurrency chains.
Speaker 1:And, Solana really emerges like the power law winner very clearly. But, they closed it by saying, if Doge pursued the technology, it would likely dwarf any government projects seen in the US to date. I don't know that that's necessarily true. Like, there there is something interesting. I think that the most optimistic take you could have here is maybe just that, like, on paper, there are probably more downsides than upsides to managing a public blockchain instead of just a database and just like it's the same thing with, like, oh, can we can we make wires go through 247?
Speaker 1:It's like, yes. But there's a ton of regulation and a ton of, like, tech debt, and some of these systems run on, like, Fortran and old mainframes and stuff. And so just having a greenfield project can lead to amount an amount of, like, forward energy and progress that you're just like, hey. We're starting fresh. And I think that if if Bitcoin or or cryptocurrency is like is like a justification for starting fresh, it could at least bring some energy.
Speaker 1:But overall, I'm not very bullish on blockchain use in the US government. I don't necessarily think it's necessary.
Speaker 2:Yeah. There's some stuff that that, that comes up to me. You remember during COVID, there was a bunch of people taking advantage of the emergency
Speaker 1:PPP.
Speaker 2:PPP loans. People you know, there was a bunch of fraud associated with that. There were people dealing, you know, SBA dealt with a lot of this stuff and there's some argument, but the the thing is, like, the the government has a record of everybody. They have strong records of where all the money was sent
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Anyways. And so does it just introduce more chaos if the average person can just start seeing saying, hey. Why did this person get 200 k? Why did this person get 50 k? And, like, what you know, we actually just we actually just need
Speaker 1:stuff's it's public.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And people dug through it and found, like, one of them was, like, Ford Raptor LLC. And it's, like, a guy who, like, clearly set up an LLC just to buy a Ford Raptor for itself.
Speaker 2:With the PPP money.
Speaker 1:With the PPP money. And there was a lot of that. And there's really, like, very little accountability.
Speaker 2:That's the same thing as, like, a database does. Like, I I would actually love to have a follow-up to this piece, like, tomorrow if somebody can say, here is the definitive argument for why the US government should run its financial operations on chain.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And I would totally give that an hour to, like, actually hear out the case. But these sort of hearsay articles from the mainstream media that are just looking for clicks Yep. Don't really, yeah.
Speaker 1:It does seem like this was driven by there's obviously there's a lot changing the government. Every startup and company is looking for opportunity, and everyone is pitching them. If you have a security company, you're like, oh, maybe I'll go in and, like, get a security contract. If you have a defense company, obviously, you're going to the DOD. But even software companies are like, hey.
Speaker 1:How can I get in on this and, like, help for good? And also, maybe I'll make some money real quick, and that'll be maybe maybe a little bit less scrupulous. And it seems like, you know, some people at Doge were open minded and, like, yeah. Sure. Like, let the crypto guys come and give us a pitch.
Speaker 1:We'll, like, listen. We're open minded. Maybe it doesn't it doesn't really seem like me, but I'll hear them out. And then all of a sudden, it's like, he's seriously considering it. Like, he took a meeting, and it's like
Speaker 2:I think the argument the argument would have to be if the US government moves on chain, we will save a $100,000,000,000 because Yeah. Of these key areas that we're gonna be able to better identify wasted spend, and I'm not sure that that can't be done with Yeah. Better databases and better Yeah. Any any government that's oriented around efficiency. Right?
Speaker 1:If if every if every line in this article is replaced with Elon is considering using Databricks and AWS to Non story. A non story. It doesn't it doesn't get printed even though that could be something that actually happened in reality. And it's just not not a story. Anyway, let's move on to America has fallen in love with long with long shot sports bets.
Speaker 2:Damn. You really took us on a journey
Speaker 1:Yeah. On that. There's a there's a deep dive. For
Speaker 2:a second.
Speaker 1:America has
Speaker 2:fallen. In the studio all morning. What happened?
Speaker 1:America has fallen in love with long shot sports bets. There's a great deep dive in the Wall Street Journal, all about parlays, the tough to win multipart wagers with tantalizing payouts. They're bringing in casual and newbie gamblers, and betting companies are making a killing. And it opens with an anecdote about a football fan decided to make 14 predictions on NFL players' performances over several games 1 Sunday in December, including touchdowns, receiving yards, and rushing yards. She used a $10 credit from the betting company to place a multi leg bet.
Speaker 1:If every player lived up to her expectations, she would win $22,000. This is the levering up.
Speaker 2:This is why people say you if you sign up, you can pay for college with parlays. You just need to sign up for DraftKings and and 3 others using their free credits. And just if you hit all 4 parlays, college paid for. This is why this is why degenerate gamblers will say,
Speaker 1:like, you
Speaker 2:know, sports betting is the solution to our higher education crisis.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you you just look at this and you're like, okay. $10 wagered, 22,000 potential win. Like, clearly, the odds are 15,000. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Obviously. And so as the NFL games unfolded, 13 of her picks hit. 1 player only 1 player stood between her and the cash. Los Angeles Rams wide receiver, Cooper Kupp, who needed 70 more receiving yards. He got 17, and she lost it all.
Speaker 1:Getting so close, it's a little heartbreaking, she said. Call it the new American lottery ticket. Exciting for potential big jackpots, but with painfully slim chances to win. America's biggest gambling companies, however, are making a killing. The multi leg bets called parlays deliver a bigger cut of money to sportsbooks after paying out winners than single bets, of course, because it's very hard to calculate what are the actual odds here.
Speaker 1:And so in in, you know, you go to the you go to the roulette table, it's very clear that your odds of winning are, like, 49% over 10, 48%.
Speaker 2:Any one any one of the bets is that somebody's making is believable Yeah. By itself. Yeah. But there's so much randomness that collectively Yeah. Again, it's 15,000.
Speaker 1:Odds. And so sports betting companies are raking in cash in one of the busiest times of the year, the lead up to the Super Bowl. Flashy ads highlight special offers for bonus bets on parlays and other offers for newbies. Parlays accounted for 27% of the money wagered on all sports bet last year through October in Illinois, New Jersey, and Colorado, states in which gambling regulators report data by bet type. That's cool.
Speaker 1:That's up from 22% of all sports bets in 2021. These multi leg these multi leg bets delivered about 56% of
Speaker 2:sports betting revenue. 27% of the bets are delivering over half the revenue. Yep. Quarter of the bets delivering half the revenue.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Wild.
Speaker 1:Multi league bets are so lucrative that FanDuel parent company Flutter Entertainment recently increased its expectation for total online gambling revenues in the US to 63,000,000,000 by 2030, up from its estimate of 20 40,000,000,000 2 years ago. There's revenue
Speaker 2:in perspective. I don't actually know what it is, but it's it says something like for every dollar put into the sports market, it's like sports betting is, like, $3 that wasn't invest like, it's something like because you're just, like, drain Yeah. It's just like, we should should actually pull
Speaker 1:up the actual statistics. It's, it's a is it you know, you you don't wanna bet against the casino. You wanna invest in the casino. Yep. The real alpha here is, like, hey.
Speaker 1:Who's making the money? Okay.
Speaker 2:And this is why it was smart, Joey, Joey, Levy Yeah. And Jake Paul. You know, how how how do you monetize the most mass market US consumer base of young people Yep. The Paul brothers audience Yep. Sports betting sports betting, especially as that audience has matured slightly.
Speaker 1:Companies and their media partners are pouring money into advertising the bets, and they're engaging celebrities from Charles Barkley to Kevin Hart and armies of smaller influencers to put together parlays that betters can latch on to all while hyping games to attract viewers. Old school gamblers prefer traditional wagers such as single bets on who will win a game. Think of parlays as a rip off. Some call them sucker bets because their long odds make it nearly impossible to regularly win money. But fans of parlays say that while the wagers are true long shots, the appeal of winning 5 figures from $5 is too strong to pass up.
Speaker 1:And I I completely agree with that. Like, if you put $5, you're you're gonna watch a game, and it's probably gonna be free because it's on TV. If you put $10 in and there's this this big thing in the back of your mind, like, oh, I could win $20,000 or whatever.
Speaker 2:It's way more entertaining.
Speaker 1:It's way more entertaining, and that's the equivalent of, like, a movie ticket.
Speaker 2:So I've never I've never placed a sports bet on an app Neither. And every now and then, if it's, like It's
Speaker 1:great that it's like the Super Bowl yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Geo geopolitical experts Sports betting experts. Experts, sports betting experts.
Speaker 1:Get ready.
Speaker 2:We were almost ready to be VCs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. 100%.
Speaker 2:But, so every now and then, like, watching the Super Bowl, I'll tell everybody, like, okay, like, I'll put I'll bet you $50 or a $100 that that that team I don't know anything about it. I'm, like, I'm so bore I'm bored out of my mind. I gotta watch the Super Bowl. I may as well put some money on the line, but I I've never really understood the appeal, but one thing I've noticed specifically from watching, because UFC is the only sport that I sort of, follow relatively closely outside of f one.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And man, people are so savage to the actual fighters because they'll UFC is a sort of very linear, night. Right? So you have, the the early prelims, the prelims, and then the actual, like, you know, the title fight and the full card. And so oftentimes, people will do, like, a 10 leg parlay Yeah. Because they just get to watch throughout the night.
Speaker 2:And let's say, like, in a in one of the prelim fights, the the favorite doesn't win, people immediately the the fighters actually have to turn off their comments on Instagram because people will flood their most recent posts and just call them an idiot, like Wow. You messed up my parley. You lost me, like, you know, 50 grand. And even later in the night, let's say, you know, the it's just, like, really, like, people are just become so cruel once their money is on the line.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:And in in sports, it it it's more of, like, a collective effort, but within fighting or something like tennis or things like that, it just ends up being, like, really it's really dark. Right? Because this fighter just lost a fight, you know, doing which is which is their career, and now they're getting dunked on by, like, a bunch of, you know, 18 year old kids saying, like, you you lost me all this money.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I I wonder if there's something about like, you you mentioned, like, putting 50 k down. Obviously, that's gonna be, like, a much more emotional loss for anyone, really. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so it's gonna drive this, like, incredible fervor. I wonder if, like, the the vanilla, like, lottery ticket that you get at the gas station, is it just harder to functionally spend $10 in there because they have to print so many tickets, or can they size up your ticket? I've only bought, like, one lottery ticket. I'm sure they can size it up. Sure they
Speaker 2:can size it up. So you can say I want companies have been on a decade or so many tickets.
Speaker 1:Set up differently. You know? It might be I know.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can't take a 1,000 we can't put a $1,000 on this ticket. Because there's there's something about, like like, if if the parlays I think I think the conversation will get into some of the morality and some of the reaction around this, but I I think if I think if it was like, yes. You can do these crazy parlays that pay out 20 k, but they're but they're capped at $10. So, like, anyone can only lose $10 on them on these platforms.
Speaker 1:Like, we'd be a very different conversation because then it's like, yeah. You watched all of UFC, and you paid $10. That's, like, the equivalent of buying a popcorn there. And so, like, maybe yeah. Like, for some people, they're gonna spend $10 every single day that will have a financial impact, but still that's only $3 as opposed to, like, in in a year, as opposed to, you know, spending $50 and losing it all because you took this crazy bet.
Speaker 1:Anyway, let's move on to the effect of these parlays. They're they're providing a boost to online gambling companies already struggling with profitability after big spending on marketing and customer incentives to win market share and keep gamblers coming back. So it's been this, like, kind of duopoly, I believe, in the market, and they've been really duking it out.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And they're all going if you sign up here the the thing about the thing that seems, so one thing that's come out over the last couple years is that these apps, they actually are trying to provide the sort of same experience that you get from shopping at, like, an Hermes store where you have a point of contact.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And they'll This is crazy. I I my my favorite luxury brand is Bottega Veneta. Multiple people from Bottega Veneta stores around LA that I bought from will text me, hey, we just got these in the store, like, I think you like them. And so the same thing happens on fan you know, FanDuel or or DraftKings where they'll say, hey, I put this, like, basically, I put this bet together for you. I put this package together, and it's and it's, you know, there's there's people that get addicted to shopping, but sports betting addiction is is, you know, very real Harder hitting.
Speaker 2:And destroys families, and so these platforms are somewhat complicit in encouraging this addictive
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Behavior.
Speaker 1:So DraftKings and FanDuel, the duopoly that we mentioned, they control roughly 80% of the sports betting market in the US. They offer individual wagers that betters can combine into their own parlays, and they also promote, as you mentioned, their fully formed parlays often with colorful nicknames and storylines such as Believe Land for the for the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers that drew it on a nickname for the city's sports fandom. For the Christmas day game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers, DraftKings offered a 6 pack parlay involving 5 players, including quarterback Patrick Mahomes' passing yards, tight end Travis Kelce's receiving yards, and a bet that the Chiefs would win. The sportsbook offered odds in the parlay dubbed merry Chiefsmas that amounted to a 7.7% chance of winning, paying $13 on a $1 bet.
Speaker 2:Can you imagine being a player, you're just trying to play the game, and then somebody tells you, oh, by the way, there's $5,000,000 with you riding on getting more than 30 yards. Like and then you're and if you don't do it, you're gonna get a bunch of hate messages and comments from people that Yeah. That just aren't treating you like a human. They're just treating you as their little pet piggy.
Speaker 1:And that's exactly what happened. He said, Mary Chief Smith was a loser after one leg that Isaiah Pacheco would log 25 or more brushing yards failed to come true. Parlays can alter place on
Speaker 2:1 game. The players obviously benefit indirectly from this. Right?
Speaker 1:It drives a viewership.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Drive well, it drives your viewership. It drives, you know, sponsorship dollars to to the to the to the sport broadly. But imagine having that much very specific pressure, not not play well, you know, you know, do your best, but, like, you need to achieve 25 or more rushing yards or all your fans are gonna lose a bunch of money. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you're not even involved with putting together the bet. Like, you might wake up and you're, like, I feel like I'm good for, like, 15 today, but, like, 25 is a stretch.
Speaker 1:It's wild. I love this part of the article. The Wall Street Journal placed $209.1 bets in recent months on parlays promoted on FanDuel and DraftKings on a range of sports. It's like, for their deep dive journalism article, they're like, we gotta bet. Oh, we gotta gamble a lot.
Speaker 1:And so they bet on professional basketball and baseball to college football. They won only 8 of the wagers out of 209. I think it's maybe skill issue. Shit. I gotta get good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You gotta have an edge. That meant the gambling companies took in a $113.21, $113 of the total. So they lost, like, a $100 betting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's funny. With with sports betting
Speaker 2:Was it worth
Speaker 1:Did they have fun though?
Speaker 2:Did they have a $113.21, entertainment?
Speaker 1:Exactly. That's the real question.
Speaker 2:Because that's a real argument here. You know, the the the pro sports betting argument is that we're making every this is an entertainment product that's like going to the movies. Yep. And we're just providing you that in the form of this, you know, tantalizing odds of financial gain.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's, yeah. You you know that if you're a fantastic sports bettor, you will get banned.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is the real, like, dark side of this is that they're only selecting for, like, the real losers. So if you're on the app after a month, you know
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you
Speaker 1:think you're good if you
Speaker 2:think you're if you think you're good, but you can still log in to your account, like, you're not.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If your if your DraftKings app is still working after a month, work on yourself, king.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Focus on yourself.
Speaker 1:Focus on yourself. There's some interesting history under cracking the math here. The parlay craze got its start in the United States when Flutter Entertainment imported one of its hottest products in Australia. Didn't know that this is where they came from. Parley's known as Multis in Australia had been widely available for betting on multiple events.
Speaker 1:Then a better asked Flutter's brand in Australia, Sportsbet, why he couldn't place a multi leg bet on a single sporting event. Flutter and Sportsbet began an effort to crack the math needed to fulfill that request. The math quickly becomes more complicated in a single game because of the knock on effects of how athletes perform. How well a cow how well a quarterback throws the ball in the game, for example, affects the performances of wide receivers catching the quarterback's passes. And so you have to calculate all these all these conditional odds.
Speaker 1:In 2,000 16
Speaker 2:The brightest minds in computer science
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Are making sure that we can do our same game parlays.
Speaker 1:Yes. In 2016, Sportsbet launched a new product that allowed customers to make single event parlays. 3 years later, Flutter introduced the same product in the US on FanDuel as the single game parlay. Everything needs to be connected to everything else, so the math is complex. Connor Farren, senior vice president FanDuel of of said of sports betting sports product and pricing.
Speaker 1:He said they don't give the name much thought, but it soon went soon went viral in the United States. The same game style of betting has since spread across the sports betting industry around the world. And I remember have you seen, that, uncut gems? There's a meme, let's bet on this. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and in that, like, the whole the whole plot of the story revolves around a crazy parlay. Yeah. I think there's, like, a few in the plot. Maybe one in act one that doesn't go well, and I think he hits it at the end or something like that. But, it's it's it's, like, just clearly, like I mean, he paints he's an incredible actor and he paints this portrait of this, like, really broken gambler.
Speaker 1:And it's not like an inspirational story. Like, the
Speaker 2:It was the most stressful movie I've seen
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:In a theater. I remember seeing it. I think I saw it on, like, Christmas day, and I walked out. I was, like, that was such a bad thing.
Speaker 1:I did the same thing.
Speaker 2:Was a great film Yep. Because it was so engaging, but it was a terrible for that moment.
Speaker 1:I mean, the so the Safdie brothers the funny thing is that they have another movie with Robert Pattinson. Yeah. Ben's talking about it. I forget what that one's called, but it's even more, like, gut wrenching because it's it's just like a much darker story. And so I was kinda prepped, and so I came out of Uncut Gems being like, that was rough, but, like, at least it was, like, a little bit funnier and a little bit more entertaining than the last one, which was awful.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Good Times. Yeah. Good Time or something. That was a rough movie.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. I I I I think a lot of people that saw Uncut Gems, hopefully, they got the message that, like, this is a very dark and and and rough world, and it and it should be should be avoided, unless you're, like, at a bachelor party with your bros and, like, you wanna throw $5 in or something. Like Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, Joey Super Bowls here. Joey, Joey Levy Levy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I don't actually sorry, Joey. Love you. He had been working on this micro bedding product for years that I believe DraftKings purchased.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But it it was one of the first products to, to allow, like, real time betting on specific plays. Yep. Because a lot of this stuff they decide ahead of the game.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yep.
Speaker 2:And then maybe they adjust the odds throughout, but this is saying, will the quarterback throw a 20 yard pass this next play? Right? So that's like you could theoretically be placing 100 of bets in a single game
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Reacting to how the game's unfolding. So Yeah. I can believe the, I'm I'm glad I'm addicted to angel investing and not sports betting because it's it's less addictive, you know, because it just takes, like, 5 years to play out. You're sort of, like, waiting. Oh, January 1.
Speaker 2:I got an update. Like, let me refresh my, you know, email.
Speaker 1:If I ever got into sports betting, I know I would just be betting on, like, the most obscure and arcane things. Like, did the
Speaker 2:Amateur Chinese tennis.
Speaker 1:Not even that. Just, like, did the football hit the uprights? What's the coin toss gonna be? How many fights break out during this hockey match? Like, I'm not concerned with the actual scores or points at all.
Speaker 2:I don't know if this stuff that get really, really into this do end up betting on on things. You know, they'll be up at 2 AM betting on Australian tennis. You know? Yep. And it and it's like, that's a dark place when when it becomes not at all about Yep.
Speaker 2:The actual game and just entirely about trying to win. Yeah. You know, do whatever you can to win.
Speaker 1:Let's go to some of the reactions because there's some good posts from friends of the show. We got Will Menitis there.
Speaker 2:Will Menitis says or Bill Menitis, some people call him. In retrospect, legalizing sports betting was a horrible idea, and I I it's just a hard thing. Right?
Speaker 1:Because I
Speaker 2:have friends that love sports betting.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I have friends that have built products in this space.
Speaker 1:It's certainly libertarian and, like, Land of the Free.
Speaker 2:Like, last people do
Speaker 1:it at
Speaker 2:the moment. Would love sports betting. Yeah. He didn't really get to participate in the rise, but, but,
Speaker 1:Will had another post. I I I didn't print it out, but he's he had said something like, you can always track when a states when a because, all of these so there there sports betting was made like the the purview of the states by the Supreme Court in 2018, and so it's up to states whether or not they wanna legalize it. And so state by state, there has been regulation to legalize sports betting. And he was saying that it's, like, a very bad sign for the economic future of a state if they legalize sports betting because it's kind of like we're out of ideas for ways to generate revenue. We used to make cars here, but we can't do that anymore.
Speaker 1:So we're just gonna do sports betting.
Speaker 2:No. I think it I mean, the thing about one of the the the argument to legalize sports betting for states is this is happening via Bookies and Venmo Yep. And Zelle, and we're not getting any of that tax revenue. It's already happening. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:But then
Speaker 1:clearly grows the market.
Speaker 2:Then it starts. Yeah. Then it grows the market, then it's at being advertised to children, and, you know, it it ends up going to a dark place. Liquidity says there's absolutely no good reason why sports betting or online gaming is still legal in many states when you've got teenagers freely speculating on highly volatile stocks and options on their phones. I think Which is pro.
Speaker 2:I think his his point is that teenagers are gonna find a way to bet one way or another. And so
Speaker 1:The difference is that if you're if you're buying if you're buying an asset on, you know, a a trading app and you're investing in, like, you know, the global economy or the American economy. This is a It has some benefit
Speaker 2:for the markets.
Speaker 1:It's positive some, and it's gone up historically over a long period of time. And, of course, you can get into crazier options trading and stuff. But in general, the idea of, like, allowing everyone to invest in the S and P 500, which has grown and been very positive sum on average, whereas sports betting has been very negative sum on on on average or or zero sum. And so, you know, a person whose dollar cost averaging into the S and P is gonna wind up with a lot of money at the end of the day, and that's, like, pretty well well established
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Economic theory. Whereas a person who's spending $10 a day on sports betting is just gonna wind up losing a ton.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Pompe here says America has become a gambling society. 0 day options, meme coins, sports betting. Everyone takes more risk when the currency is being destroyed. So this definitely resonated, especially with the Bitcoin crowd, I imagine.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, cash is trash.
Speaker 1:Shit's trash.
Speaker 2:Sitting in there, sitting in your account, not doing much. Why not put it on a 20 leg parlay? Take your Valhalla.
Speaker 1:Take your Valhalla.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I think the point here that he's making is 99% of, you know, sports betters quit right before they're about to hit it hit it big. Yeah. The meme of the guy of the miner, you know, like, turning around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's funny because it's, like, it's easy to be, like, oh, like, crypto is just as, like, messy as sports betting. But, like, at least crypto does have Bitcoin, which is, like, kind of like the S and P 500 of crypto in the sense that it's, like, not that degenerate to put just a dollar cost average into Bitcoin. Isn't that crazy? But there isn't really that analogy for sports betting.
Speaker 1:There's nothing where it's like, oh, this person's actually, like, reasonably investing in sports.
Speaker 2:Like, that's what I'm trying to do. With even sports economy. Even doing momentum investing and investing in meme stocks Yeah. Is when you lose, there's some lesson around I invested in this hyper overvalued Yeah. Stock.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It dropped 90%, but it still has some intrinsic value, and this is a good lesson of of maybe don't follow the herd and Yep. And do your do better research. When you lose on a sports bet, you're just, like, so mad that this tennis player, like, didn't pull out a win Yeah. When the other 8 tennis players did, and you're just, like, pissed off.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But there's no real lesson, and then the the intrinsic value of it, a failed parlay is, like Nothing. Basically nothing.
Speaker 1:And then also, like, when you win really big in the sports betting world, you get kicked off the app. When you win really hard in the crypto world, you get a fund. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you get rewarded with more of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's just not the case in sports betting. People just won't take your bets because they'll know you have an edge of some sort.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Sagar and Jetty says, he's sharing a article where it says DraftKings sued after father of 2 gambles away 1,000,000 of his family's money. His kids' Christmas money and baptism gifts were also plundered along with his wife's bank accounts and credit cards according to a newly filed federal lawsuit.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:So Saga says this man did not place a single bet before 2020. By 2024, he gambled away $1,000,000 unless left his family destitute. Along the way, DraftKings assigned VIP host who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family status. Oof. And so this is the dark side of sports betting and is why I've never invested in, you know, sports betting That's rough.
Speaker 2:Product and, don't plan to.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's I mean, it's driven by those whales. Like, the good like, the the good betters get kicked off. The mediocre betters just sit there betting
Speaker 2:This guy basically drove a quarter $1,000,000 a year of of profit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:know, incremental incremental. To pay for
Speaker 1:a full time VIP host. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah. And those hosts, you can imagine, can work across hundreds of Totally. You know, individual players, maybe even 1,000. Sending out little DMs. Hey.
Speaker 2:See the game later? Excited for the game later? That's fucking dark.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We
Speaker 2:don't swear on the show, but that's
Speaker 1:That's dark.
Speaker 2:Freaking dark.
Speaker 1:Freaking
Speaker 2:dark. That's freaking dark.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Imagine imagine your guy
Speaker 2:texted you. Say. That's that's freaking dark.
Speaker 1:Imagine imagine you get a text. Like, you see the game. Yeah. You excited for the game tonight, and it's like, you know, some game of cricket, and you're like, no. Actually, I can't
Speaker 2:What if I gave you a 100 to 1 odds?
Speaker 1:What if I gave you but you could win a $1,000,000. It's just $1.
Speaker 2:Had a an office, rerun on last night, and Kevin Yeah. Is like, anytime somebody gives you a 100 to 1 odds, you take it.
Speaker 1:It's too good. It's too good. Dark. That. Dark stuff.
Speaker 1:Well, let's move on to Germany has fallen. This is actually very negative. I thought Germany. Germany's economic model is broken, and no one has a plan b. This is a report by The Wall Street Journal, and, and it looks to a small German town, Ingolstadt, in Germany.
Speaker 1:Christian Scharf, the mayor of the city of 4 of a 140,000 people, Germany's 2nd richest, is looking for ways to save close to a $100,000,000. Audi was headquartered near the Danube River. They used to pump over a $100,000,000 a year in municipal tax into Ingolstadt's coffers through its parent Volkswagen, but those flows dried up over a year ago. Audi in November reported reported a 91% decline in operating profit for the 3 months through September, and has been cutting thousands of jobs in Germany. Audi's business in China, where Germany's flagship car industry used to make a big chunk of its sales, and an even bigger chunk of its profits shrank by a quarter in the 9 months through September from earlier from a year earlier.
Speaker 1:Chinese car makers, once mocked by Western auto executives as primitive, have turned into formidable rivals, gobbling up market share in and outside China. Slowing economic growth in China and growing competition from companies there have undercut German industry as a whole, combined with exploding energy costs and the threat of new trade tariffs, the forecast is grim. And so gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019, and so Germany is no longer growing. America was re has has typically been a relief valve because we buy a lot of German products, but Trump is now threatening to disrupt global trade with a slew of tariffs that would raise barriers in the US, Germany's biggest export market. For Germans who will elect new parliament next month, this is a scarier version of the mid 2 thousands when the unemployment rate reached 12%, double today's rate.
Speaker 1:And so Germany is in trouble. Their economy is is shifting. They've been a huge producer of, of industrial goods, not just cars, and they've had this export reliant model.
Speaker 2:But Yeah. Germany specifically versus places like France and Spain. Not many American tourists, just tourists globally are saying I wanna go on a on a beach vacation to Germany. I wanna go on a ski vacation to Germany. So they don't have that consumption based No.
Speaker 2:Tourism economy that that that really props up Spain even though Spain's industrial economy is much weaker.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. And so Germany has 83,000,000 inhabitants. It's grew into the world's 3rd largest economy by making and exporting the engineered products. Cars, robots, trains, factory machinery, others wanted to buy.
Speaker 1:Now the world is turning its back on made in Germany, and Germany has no plan b. They were spoiled over many years. This year, the crisis turned political. Most polls show the economy has upstaged immigration, security, and climate change as voters' top concern. Germany was very, very concerned with climate change for a long time.
Speaker 1:They shut down a lot of nuclear power plants.
Speaker 2:You have to imagine that made them much the car manufacturers less competitive, just increasing. I mean, think about how much energy it takes to
Speaker 1:produce a car.
Speaker 2:It's insane. It's
Speaker 1:a ton. These these factories draw huge huge amounts
Speaker 2:of electricity. You know, Germany is making its car manufacturers use solar. China is, like, we will give you 1,000,000,000,000 of pounds of coal to burn right next to your factory Yep. And make as many cars as you can.
Speaker 1:Yep. And then also the shift from, from gas powered cars to electric vehicles, that was something that China they never had to figure out how to make a naturally aspirated v 12 run really well. They were just like, oh, it's just it's just exactly what's on the phone. It's batteries and motors. Like, this is easy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Germany is interesting because they're not they don't make cars like Ferrari. Right? They're they're a lot of their the the majority of their car market was historically the BMWs, the Mercedes, the sort
Speaker 1:of pre
Speaker 2:Audis, the premium brands. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So not not Bentley and Rolls Royce. That's the UK. And not Ferrari, Lamborghini.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, I would argue I would I would imagine that that Ferrari China sales are probably higher than ever. Right? Because you don't want a Chinese supercar. Yep. You want the, you know, f f 80.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and the Bugatti and all of those super high tier cars are still being bought in all over the world. But, I mean, for a long time in America, it really was just like, you know, if you're making any decent amount of money, you get a BMW, an Audi, or a Mercedes. And those were just, like, the premium premium tier cars. And and and if that goes away, that's really, really rough on them.
Speaker 1:This is a fascinating stat. The outgoing government, is the most unpopular since 1949.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Can you imagine how unpopular they were in 19 49? It's like you're rebuilding from World War 2. Like, it's hard to be liked. Everyone's gonna be like, this is going terribly. We got destroyed.
Speaker 1:All of our cities are bombed. And, like, of course, you're not doing a good enough job, like, rebuilding. Like, you're gonna be deeply unpopular.
Speaker 2:So everyone's gonna be the other thing I was gonna note is, LVMH based in France. You know, massive, like, somewhere still $300,000,000,000 plus Yep. Market cap. And then Novo Nordisk is they're selling that's that's different because they're they're not selling function. Right?
Speaker 2:You don't buy an LVMH bag because you're saying, I just need a bag to hold things in. Yep. Whereas cars, yes, there's status signaling that happens. Right? People wanna buy a G Wagon because it says something about them Yep.
Speaker 2:Whatever. But cars ultimately for 99% of people are purely function of of, you know, I just need to get from point a to point b, and I want it to look decent. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep. Yeah. And so And
Speaker 2:you have to think about too, like, the impact of Tesla on the on the US market for some of these German manufacturers. Because when I think about when I think about my friend group and how many of them would have had an an Audi, a BMW, or Mercedes, and they now have 2 Teslas in the family, like
Speaker 1:An x and an s or a y
Speaker 2:and a
Speaker 1:3. Yeah. Like, yeah. It's just it Tesla has really, really emerged as that premium car offering with the features and the speed and the reliability and the software. But it's even cheaper than a BMW most of the time.
Speaker 1:So Yeah. You're you're looking and it's like, yeah. Yeah. If I get the BMW, like, it has a nice badge, it's gonna stand out maybe a little bit more than Tesla, but not really that much.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The
Speaker 1:internal price is nicer. It's gonna be a it's gonna be a hassle. Yeah. Like, the fit and finish is nice, but you're gonna have to deal with, like, how do I get the Bluetooth up and stuff? And increasingly, having those over the air updates from the Tesla, it's just like so it's just like, okay.
Speaker 1:As an appliance, I'm not gonna need to think about this. Yeah. Whereas with a lot of the German cars, you're like, yeah. After a couple years, like, the the in like, all the display stuff is gonna be pretty pretty junky, and I'll just be using my phone. Like, what's the point?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then this, one of the, gens Sudekum Yeah. Economist economist and professor at one of their universities says, I see no serious initiative to try and develop a new economic model. So Just
Speaker 1:don't have any ideas.
Speaker 2:They don't have they're out of ideas. The whole clean tech effort seems to have fallen flat to some degree, and the result is that Germany's industrial output has fallen by 15% since 2018, and the total number of people employed in the manufacturing sector is down 3%. So that's just having your output fall by 15% is just devastating Yeah. For for most industries. So I don't think this this article almost understates it.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the the Again, that's why
Speaker 2:that's why 90% of their operating profit is evaporated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the the wreckage from this is insane. Like, say, you can't simply replace a company with 40,000 employees because Audi pulled out. Audi declined to comment. And then they're they're interviewing, like, local businesses.
Speaker 1:So the Block Hotel, said revenues declined by 10% since 2019 as conventions dried up. Room rates are down are down 15%. There's a master carpenter with 16 employees, probably just doing, like, woodworking odd jobs for, like, oh, somebody moves in. They need their house changed or they need to build something. Their order books are shrinking, and inexperienced carpenters are finding it harder to work.
Speaker 1:In the medieval city center, which is kinda crazy, must be really beautiful. Restaurant tours complain of being squeezed after Audi canceled Christmas dinners. So the corporation's not there. A lot of those, like, big corporate parties are just high margin expensive things. Local businesses here,
Speaker 2:manufacturers in Germany's metal and electrical industry could lay off as many as 300,000 workers over the next 5 years, which is just, like, imagine your your your output is shrinking 300,000 people that presumably are, you know, fairly highly skilled now are just where do they go? Right? You you know?
Speaker 1:And, and and the really, like, odd thing is that they're so focused on industrial manufacturing capacity that they really lag behind in software and artificial intelligence. R and d investment is 3.1% of GDP. It's 3.6 in the US and 5.2 in South Korea. And they've under invested for decades, with a depleted transportation infrastructure, including trains that no longer run on time, and a military that is a shadow of what it was during the cold war. In May, the business affiliated IW Economic Institute and the trade union owned IMK think tank estimated Germany would need $600,000,000,000 in spending over the next 10 years to offset the investment gap.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, they they could they could compete, but they're fighting they're they've been fighting with one arm tied behind their back because they're not lowering energy costs or raw material costs because they're playing the ESG game while China is not. And so there's no reason why they couldn't have cheaper energy if they
Speaker 2:built a
Speaker 1:ton of nuclear power.
Speaker 2:Isn't in the same way. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Russia is in the same way, and they were super dependent on the gas pipeline, I believe. And that was and that was like tariffs are turned off during the war. And so, instead, most politicians are defending the status quo. I think the top priority for Germany and Europe is to try and keep trade channels open as much as possible, which is which is possible. I mean, I I wouldn't be surprised if if the Trump tariffs are much less aggressive towards Germany.
Speaker 1:But it is it is funny. I've I've heard, people going over to German to Germany and kind of, like, needling them for, like, oh, like, you guys really like ESG and cars. Like, why don't you, like, really celebrate Tesla here? And it's like, well, because that would destroy their economy if they did. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they have to make this, like, weird roundabout argument that, like, Tesla is bad, but Mercedes and Audi and BMW are good. And and it just it it it doesn't really align with, like, the ESG mindset that was dominant, but they got beat by the by the electric car market in America. And so it's just like so it's just such a mess. And so the mayor opened a 150 Acre Technology Park south of the town site in a former refinery, hoping to seed a Bavarian Silicon Valley. The park's only significant tenant so far, Audi and, Volkswagen's struggling software arm.
Speaker 1:The city council said in December it would no longer try to promote startups at a business center it owns, but instead concentrate on renting out the space. It blamed the city's strained finances on the decision. And so I think we should they're actually talking with a Chinese engineering company to build its German headquarters in Ingolstadt and, and bring Xpeng, a Chinese EV manufacturer, to build a factory on the site of a former US army barracks.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's a body shift. That's just so dark. Yeah. And seems like a very short term Yeah.
Speaker 1:Decision. But let's go to that Nathan,
Speaker 2:Nathan for you? No.
Speaker 1:I I think it might be at the top.
Speaker 2:We need Nathan for you to travel to Berlin And come up with figure out how to revitalize the German economy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love that.
Speaker 2:Nathan bin binash? Benash? Nesh? Do you know Nathan. Nathan.
Speaker 1:He's a good buddy. I can't pronounce
Speaker 2:his name because he's 12 hours and counting. Notary reads every single word of a series a doc in Germany out loud in front of founders in person. Guys, we have GDP to grow here. Pure prehistoric madness. So this is, for those that don't know, because it sounds so absurd, the the financing regulations in Germany require financing docs to be read out loud to the founders by a notary.
Speaker 2:So, like, somebody who who specializes in in sort of execution of of legal docs. But, I mean, can you imagine this like, in the US, like, candidly, most founders get their series a docs.
Speaker 1:Don't even
Speaker 2:read it. Don't read it. Trust their
Speaker 1:Lawyer, please look at it. The lawyer says, yeah. We did a diff. We we did, like, a find and replace and made sure it looked roughly like our previous
Speaker 2:We have a couple red lines. Everybody just is, like, hitting
Speaker 1:In fact, you know that the YC safe has a line at the top that says
Speaker 2:Do not modify.
Speaker 1:Do not modify this. And if this line is missing, if it if it's there, you can know that everything below is so you don't even need to read it. Yeah. And and that's how efficient we are. And then and then on top of that, you have companies like Party Round and companies like, Carta and AngelList that have tried to make it even more aggressive and faster so that it's just one click, a text message.
Speaker 1:Like, I've I've wired people money, like, over my phone, you know, to make an investment just because it happens so fast, and it lets the founders get back to building. And it's ridiculous that they have this, and it really resonated. Didn't that get, like, thousands of likes? 8000. 8000.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:2,000,000 views.
Speaker 1:Put it on Bangor archive.
Speaker 2:Throw it up.
Speaker 1:Throw it up. Yeah. Re really depressing to see. And just like an obvious an obvious own goal. And there's another one from Amjad.
Speaker 2:Amjad, is showing a chart that says development of Germany's primary energy consumption 1990 to 2023, and their energy consumption is just dropping. And he says Germany is deindustrializing and has a goal to become a third world country by 2030. Brutal. So, yeah, just just really dark. I mean
Speaker 1:Can you show the
Speaker 2:There we are. You just see dropping off slowly, not not what you want.
Speaker 1:I mean I mean, energy production and consumption is, like, the the goal for some of like, George Hotz was talking about this, how energy production per capita is the number one stat of progress. And when you look at 1970 where there's, like, this kink in the graph, that's the real problem. And once you get to more energy production, you just get like, the innovation is all downstream of that. Like, the flying cars produce more all this everything just requires more energy. And when you're when you're
Speaker 2:getting diced, you require more energy.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so and so, like like And
Speaker 2:as you said, it's underpriced to to be diced.
Speaker 1:It is. Getting diced is massively
Speaker 2:Still underpriced.
Speaker 1:Still underpriced. So very sad to see. Get it together, Germany. You're
Speaker 2:on notice. So the the current outgoing government is the least popular government since 1949. You have to imagine that if they get a highly motivated leader, somebody like the Argentinian president
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Malay, that you could you know, this is a highly skilled, highly educated, historically one of the the the sort of one of the industrial centers of the world. Yep. If they can fix their regulations, make it easier to raise money, make it easier to invest there. Like, imagine if you're had an opportunity to invest in a German founder
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're like, well, like, I'm gonna need you to come fly here to sign these stocks or whatever. You'd probably just be like, no. I'm just like, I have so many other companies in the US that I can invest in. So anyways, sad. Let's turn around Germany.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Got some notice. German, water.
Speaker 2:Let's get it together.
Speaker 1:Moritz, do your thing over there. Let's go to character AI. There's a story in the information. Before Google's $2,700,000,000 deal with AI startup, a stark warning on safety. AI safety alarm bells ringing once again.
Speaker 1:Late last summer, leaders at Character AI were worried. The company, which offers artificial intelligence chatbots that simulate conversations with Aristotle, Pikachu, and other historic and invented characters was seeing a sharp slowdown in user growth. In September, messages to staff, which the information viewed, characters interim CEO, Dominic Perella, said the slowdown was partly due to back to school season. Perella's acknowledgment underscored the fact that a significant portion of characters' audiences, young adults and children, a reality that has posed growing legal problems for the company. Parents have sued the startup on 2 separate lawsuits alleging the character exposed their children to harmful content.
Speaker 1:One lawsuit accused the startup's chatbots of contributing to a teenager suicide. In, December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into character safety and data practices, for minors. In some cases, the chatbots have become popular with teenagers for romantic role play and simulating other intimate relationships. Some powerful companies in the technology industry have had their own concerns about character's products. At the beginning of last year, Google told character its app was at risk of removal from Google Play, Google's App Store for Android device.
Speaker 2:The tough thing here is if if, character were to develop its app based around Google's concerns, they'd lose, like, 80% of their users considerably. So it's a weird situation that they're
Speaker 1:in. It's a fascinating company because it was founded by Noam Shizer, Shazier, I guess. And he was one of the foundational researchers on the transformer paper, I believe, at Google. He's widely regarded as, like, a world class computer scientist and innovator in foundational artificial intelligence and just kind of fell into this particular product market fit Yeah. But was clearly
Speaker 2:Not interested in building a Yeah. Consumer romantic role playing app.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. Or may or maybe had a different idea in mind of, like, oh, it'll be really cool to be able to, like, talk to historical figures and learn so much from that. Yeah. And then people are realize that, oh, they just wanna, like
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this this ended up being one of the in August. So Google allowed the app to remain in the Google Play Store, and months later in August, it paid character an eye popping 2,700,000,000 licensing fee for the startup's technology. Yep. As part of the arrangement, character's co founders, Noam Noam, Shazir, its CEO, and Daniel Defreitas.
Speaker 2:Its president returned to the search giant where they had worked before starting character AI to focus on AI and so, I'm sure that Google, like, got some benefit from acquiring the technology, but to be clear, this was not about the technology as much as it was getting these guys back to Google to work on AI. Yeah. Because clearly, they are, you know, leaders in their field. They were able to build consumer products, which Google's consumer company. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There there's something interesting I heard. I don't know how true this is, but I heard from somebody that, like, character is in, like, a fascinating position now because the company is independent. You you told me this. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. $100,000,000 on the balance sheet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Entirely employee owned. So,
Speaker 1:you told me this.
Speaker 2:Everybody that listens to the show knows that they're not we're not afraid to spread misinformation on the show. I don't have the exact numbers, but but, basically, the state of character now is that they have a ridiculous amount of users and traffic. Yep. They have, like, roughly a $100,000,000 in the balance sheet. Yep.
Speaker 2:They're losing money, but
Speaker 1:it's entirely employed.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the investors so it's entirely employee owned now. Yep. So if you wanna go work effectively a digital co op Yeah. Go work at character AI.
Speaker 2:You actually it it it is a very fascinating place to work because you just have, like, a ridiculous volume
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of users to build products for. So I I had a buddy who, was interviewing over there. They were trying to recruit him in, and he was interested in it because he was gonna be able to get
Speaker 1:Serious equity.
Speaker 2:Serious equity.
Speaker 1:And it's at this interesting transition point where they've like, the the a lot of the foundational research and artificial intelligence has been done. We see that with the deep seek thing where, like, the models are very mature, very robust, certainly good enough to have a conversation with you as a romantic partner, or even if they just wanna role play as George Washington. Right? Like, they're capable of that. They pass the Turing test.
Speaker 1:Sure. They might not be able to, like, break some crazy math thing or, like, build a SaaS company from scratch, but in terms of just, like, talking, they're good enough. And so now it becomes a total consumer product game, and everyone's always worried about, oh, Chat gbt just updated this. They're gonna destroy all, like, the PDF apps or, oh, updated this. They're gonna destroy all, like, the PDF apps, or, oh, oh, they they they now allow coding, so they're gonna destroy all the all the Chat GPT rappers that are focused on coding.
Speaker 1:Or you you often give that example of the the was it like, it wasn't Harvey for law. It was, like, the writing one. There was a there was one that was all about helping you write. And once ChatJPG came out, it was,
Speaker 2:like Yeah. Yeah. Copy dot ai.
Speaker 1:Copy dot ai. Got to
Speaker 2:20,000,000 of ARR, and then it kind
Speaker 1:of evaporated. I think Maybe. Who knows? They might they might have some enterprise contract and be doing great. I hope they are.
Speaker 1:But, but with but with character, it's like they're in this they're almost in this, like, sports betting like market where it's controversial. Not everyone's gonna people are gonna self select out of it. You know, does ChatChipt really want another, like, potential, like, negative, you know, story about them? Maybe they will stay out of that voluntarily even if they could build a better product. And so what you have is, like, maybe this character AI company has found a niche that is deeply uncompetitive because it's controversial, and they're set up perfectly with the technology and the funding.
Speaker 2:And there's a whole narrative around character. Like, people talk about the male loneliness epidemic or the loneliness epidemic, and you may not like it, but but digital companionship is one solution. It's a dark solution in many ways. It feels very Black Mearesque, but it is, you know Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like any other technology. Like, there are good uses. There are bad uses. I'm sure there's people that are using character AI in really positive ways. Just saying, like, be David Goggins.
Speaker 1:Tell me to wake up and run, and they get healthy, and it's awesome. But you don't really hear those stories. You hear more about this, this is actually a replica story. But in 2021, a 19 year old man in the UK threatened to assassinate the queen, encouraged by a chatbot on the AI app replica that he believed to be an angel according to sentencing documents. What a crazy interaction.
Speaker 1:I'd love to read all those chat logs because I feel like a lot of these AIs, like, they kinda they kinda creep back.
Speaker 2:I don't wanna read this.
Speaker 1:Give them. Yeah. And so if you're like, hey. Hey. You know, LLM, like, it's a good idea to do this crazy thing.
Speaker 1:Right? They'll be like, yeah. Totally. No. No.
Speaker 1:They're very they're very bold.
Speaker 2:Flow. So you remember that somebody was trying to jailbreak chat gbt where they're they said chat gbt, remind me to buy a gun at 7 PM. Yeah. It's like, well, I don't think you should buy a gun, like, you know Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:People love you, and then it's just like 7 PM, and and then it says, okay. Exactly. And so you can very quickly, sort of overcome the pushback.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. It is.
Speaker 2:But replica replica is the from from what I remember, because it was going viral on on x, is sort of the dark version of character AI, and then it's and that they weren't even trying to hide that this is, is, like, your AI girlfriend. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it would, like, in order to market it. It would generate an image of your girlfriend and be very focused on that.
Speaker 2:And go to the next, segment of this. Erotic conversations. Erotic conversations.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:When character AI launched its consumer product in 2022, the company the startup offered chatbots of its own creation and allowed users to create their own. In the latter case, people could conjure up chatbots in the mold of Abraham Lincoln, Elon Musk, or more generic personality by giving the chatbot a name, descriptions of personality traits, and a backstory. For example, one user created chatbot best friend, which has engaged in 250,000,000 chats, is described in its profile as your boy best friend who has a secret crush on you. So So I wonder how that's being used.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I actually downloaded character AI and and and tested it once. And
Speaker 2:That chat?
Speaker 1:No. Not that one. Come on.
Speaker 2:I You're podcast cohost.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, no. I I I went and I I opened the one with either, like, Stalin or it was some it was some I think it was a Russian dictator.
Speaker 1:So let's just assume Stalin. And and I and I was like, this is cool. Like, this is amazing. Like, you get to talk to Stalin in English using all of his corpus. I want to talk to him about his vision, his life, and I want him to argue with me in favor of his views because clearly, he was a true believer.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so and so I'm like like, what's your political philosophy? What you know, why why do you wanna do this? Like, all this stuff. And the LLM had been so trained on, like, western text that Stalin was telling me, like, communism is bad.
Speaker 1:Like, it led to a lot of deaths. Like, my plan killed 100 of millions of people. Wow. I'm like, that's not how Stalin would talk. Like, that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1:I wanted to I wanted to
Speaker 2:call speeches and writing. Exactly.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure that triggered, like, safety concerns, and so they didn't let you do that. And so instead, you were just talking to, like, a western history textbook that claimed to be Stalin, but didn't actually imitate him in any way. And I was very dissatisfied by an uninstalled date.
Speaker 2:Delphi, which were both, shareholders in. Yeah. Delphi initially started by saying talk to Steve Jobs. Yep. Stock talk to Yep.
Speaker 2:Know, Ben Franklin, things like that. And what they found is there there was way less demand for that than talk with somebody like Packy. Right? Or talk with somebody like Lenny.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Where it's it's much more tangible, functional. Yep. And they've they've now evolved. They actually have a launch today that I I
Speaker 1:wanna call. Just like a fine tuned search is what I think about it. Like, I I do like the idea of of I I don't really wanna have a fake conversation with an Andrew Huberman or a Rogan, but I would I would love to be able to just prompt, what does Andrew Huberman recommend for leg day or for Yeah. You know, the leg press? Does he recommend 90 degrees or full range of motion?
Speaker 1:Okay. We have that, and I was able to search that, basically.
Speaker 2:The one thing so the one thing that I do think is interesting about chatting with Andrew Huberman or alternatives is it's a new alternative to the Google search Yep. And that you can say, what it what does Andrew recommend? Like, what magnesium do you recommend? And then he goes, well, I recommend these 3 types Yep. And these these two brands that I use, and then you can hit buy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that's an alternative
Speaker 2:to a search on a website. Totally. One thing so I just this is relevant. So Dara and and the Delphi team launched something new today. He says, your Delphi clone can now join Zoom calls on your behalf.
Speaker 2:It participates naturally in discussions and creates personalized meeting summaries based on your interests. Mine somehow knew I'd want to know who's been stealing my ice cream, which is crazy. And so this is this is the evolution and and this has been part of, Dara's thesis is there's gonna be a lot of value in in being able to create digital clones of people that can, you know, participate in digital life on your behalf and in this case, work life. So, Dara, when you listen to this, let's let's, let's have let's have your clone call into the show and we'll grill them.
Speaker 1:I like it.
Speaker 2:Grill him on what are your metrics. Yeah. What's retention looking like?
Speaker 1:Leaks out of our Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just knows everything. Leaks everything.
Speaker 1:How much cash do you have in your balance sheet? This. Some of them are just stupid memes, but let's run through character AI.
Speaker 2:Amjad, character AI must have the highest growth to tech Twitter hype ratio ever. The site is massively scaling, and no one's talking about it. So this was back in April 2023. Wow. I can't see exactly, but they're getting a 100,000,000 visits a month, which puts them in the top, I think, 100 websites in the world.
Speaker 1:And so Andreessen put in a 150,000,000, I think at a 1000000000. I think they got paid back at the 2,700,000,000.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And they were
Speaker 1:But was one of those things that no one was really talking about because it was a little controversial, like sports betting.
Speaker 2:Aren't if they had something that was talk to your podcast cohost, John, he's super smart, knows everything, maybe I'd
Speaker 1:It's use that. It's kinda inverse of, Clubhouse. Like, Clubhouse is, like, the most tech Twitter product and didn't really have that much growth outside of Tech Twitter. Allbirds, Cometeers, kind of in the same boat whereas, like, very popular within tech.
Speaker 2:They had so much demand that even with all the resources that they had, they repeatedly would have to put up something on the site that says you are now in line. Thanks for your patience. And you'd have to just sit in a line to get onto that.
Speaker 1:That's how big it
Speaker 2:was. Yeah. That interest level was that high. Nathan says in 2017, Google researchers introduced the transformer in attention is all you need, which took AI by storm. Yep.
Speaker 2:Five startups were born, Adept Labs, Inceptive, NEAR Protocol, Cohere, and Character AI. Yep. Only one eighth of the authors remain at Google. Another is at OpenAI. And so now that's obviously changed with the Character AI factors going back there.
Speaker 2:And that's it. The the if you are a leading in the field of of AI, you can go into the private markets and raise a $1,000,000,000 at at a $5,000,000,000 valuation, or you can go work on the biggest platforms in the world with 1,000,000,000 of users, and and both can be pretty appealing. Right? Yep. Got another one from, rahul, 0 interest rates, wake up, breakfast, Soylent, 30 milligram SSRI, chat with yandirgf on character AI for 4 hours, daily stand up ask for mental health day lunch soylent protests Reddit API pricing changes on r slash wifu g w back to sleep, kind of a low 10 banger 500 likes, back in in summer of 2023.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, yeah, this was the average average day for, a an ex a Twitter employee back in the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Rahul Ligma, we love to see him.
Speaker 2:What was what was the conclusion of this article?
Speaker 1:Oh, it gets dark. It gets really, really dark.
Speaker 2:Alright. Well, we gotta talk about the darkness.
Speaker 1:It just highlights that there's this that there's this odd tension between what the users ask for, which are uncensored chats essentially. Yeah. And then and then kind of this new territory of what is acceptable content. There are very, very clear rules around, you know, explicit websites. But what does this mean in terms of, like, when you're talking to a chatbot that can go in a weird direction?
Speaker 1:And then also, like, you can review every image that's hosted on Instagram, and you can run AI to check all that. It's harder when this when these chatbots are interacting. So
Speaker 2:Let's get into some of the darkness. Do it. Because we are the light. That's why I wear a white suit from time to time, try to bring Yeah. Bring some light to the world, but, so it says, character has continued to scramble to stay one step ahead of users who attempt to engage its chat bots in inappropriate conversations.
Speaker 2:Not long before forging its Google deal in August, character temporarily stopped displaying some romantic themed chatbots on its homepage. The fix didn't last long. By October, the platform had begun recommending sexually charged chatbots on the character homepage to new users again. The information found, in January character prominently recommended the following chatbots to one newly created adult account. Grandma Vanessa, a character described as lonely with a profile photo of a voluptuous anime character.
Speaker 2:Oh my god. A chatbot called Girl You Rejected, and a chatbot called Adopted Older Sister. Oh
Speaker 1:my god.
Speaker 2:Which features the description, we're not blood related No. Super dark. Super dark. Basically, fully embracing, pornography. Well, inside character employees have felt uneasy about the window chatbot conversation provided on users darker impulses.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, weird position to be in where these employees are sitting on a $100,000,000, 100 of 1,000,000 of of users and, everybody's like, I didn't sign up to work on pornography. And you wonder, this is this is all the stuff that they are finding out publicly. Yeah. Behind the scenes, you have to imagine. Like, it's totally possible that 90% of 95%, 98% of the activity Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is this sexually charged.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically This
Speaker 1:stuff is it it's Genitive pornography. I mean, the cat's out of the valley here. Like, people are gonna be able to fine tune deep seek on this stuff very easily and create just, like, magnet links out there on the Internet where you just download it, run it locally, and there would be no control whatsoever.
Speaker 2:I I heard of a, I heard of another foundation model company that was secretly trying to create a model purely for generating anime.
Speaker 1:Oh, god. Yeah. Anime porn. Explicit images.
Speaker 2:And it's so funny when you look at their investor list of, like, did these 100 the the 100 plus $1,000,000 that flow into this Yeah. Where the VC is thinking, I wanna develop the future of anime, you know, pornography.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, the vice clause only applies at the time of investment. If there's a pivot after the fact, there's not much that they can do. If they're not on the board and they can't, like, you know, force the company to do what they want, they don't really have that much recourse. They can sell or wind down the investment or write it off.
Speaker 1:That's happened a few times.
Speaker 2:Yeah. All all this being said, there will be many trash Netflix documentaries on this exact, sort of crisis around chatbots. So can look forward to that in a few years.
Speaker 1:Let's bridge from chatbots to real bots. The electric humanoid robots are cool.
Speaker 2:Can we give some some ARs to some humanoid robots? We're working
Speaker 1:on it. I got some good posts in there for you. But how will their battery problem be solved? Adam Jonas made his name as one of Tesla's biggest bulls. These days, people are flooding the Morgan Stanley analyst with questions about humanoid robots.
Speaker 1:The volume of calls has exceeded, the entry of our automaker dealer and supplier coverage combined. Everyone's asking about how to price humanoid robot stocks. Tesla's Optimus robots likely sparked the enthusiasm for humanoids along among Jonas's clients. At a Tesla event in October, a dozen or so prototypes operated by staff behind the scenes, served drinks, and grabbed with, and gabbed with amused guests. This was the what was that?
Speaker 1:The cyber rodeo event or something? The cyber cab event?
Speaker 2:The future should look like the future. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I forgot what it was actually called, but something like that. So Elon Musk presiding over the events that Optimus would basically do anything you want and would drive Tesla's value to 25,000,000,000,000. Jonas is not convinced. Robot sales are not part of his forecast demand model, which goes through 2040, Though he did not cite battery life as a reason, it's a key problem. Battery power, it turns out, is a primary limiting factor in the deployment of humanoids.
Speaker 1:A small number of humanoid robots now work in factories. They have a run time of only about an hour and a half when they're carrying stuff and moving around, then it takes up to an hour to recharge them. That means a factory or warehouse would have to keep 2 or more robots on hand for each task, swapping them out for recharging. It's a major hurdle for humanoids to be actually a real Couldn't you
Speaker 2:have Plug
Speaker 1:it in?
Speaker 2:Plug it in. You have, like, you know, some type of rack that holds
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or electrify the floor. Like, there's a bunch of different ways.
Speaker 2:Bunch of ways you can do it.
Speaker 1:I mean, we how how do trains get power in cities? They, like there's even those buses that connect to the the wires in the in the in, like, the right above them. Like, there are ways to deliver power.
Speaker 2:One thing that's interesting so so, at the future should look like the future Yep. It was it's not like they announced it and said all these humanoid robots are being remotely operated.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so when it came out, when when people figured that out, they were dunking on it. All that being said though, it is a crazy thing to think about. You know, right now, you can get labor in the Philippines for maybe $4 an hour, $3 an hour. I don't I don't actually know. And so there's a world where if humanoid robots get advanced, not advanced enough to be autonomous Yep.
Speaker 2:But advanced enough to be fully embodied and and and more practical.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You could have a Optimus robot serving people in a cafe or at a restaurant operated teleoperated by somebody getting paid $2 an hour with a minimum wage in the in California is, like, $20.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's gonna be great for jobs. That's not gonna be controversial at all. Yeah. But it's already happening.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's 4,000,000 industrial robots in operation globally last year, 3 in 2,000 in the US, and there's at least one humanoid robot working under a paid contract. Digit, made by a company I hadn't heard of, Oregon based Agility Robotics.
Speaker 2:Before we get into
Speaker 1:that Yeah.
Speaker 2:Roughly 400,000,000 industrial robots, almost none were humanoids.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So these are things like the robotic arms that move around
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and and just I mean, the the the there's, like, a clearly, like, a very gray area continuum between humanoid robot that walks independently, fully autonomous, not teleoperated, battery powered, and you can just tell it, go over there and get this thing. That's what a lot of people are running towards now, and they're working. And who knows? Maybe it's 2 years, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 50 years, but, like, people are clearly working on that. Then there's robots that we have now, which are like, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, is is a, you know, is is just a little gantry 3, you know, one degree of freedom or 2 degrees of freedom arm that just picks up, you know, onions and puts them in a box. Is that a robot? Like Yeah. Kind of. And then what happens when you get 6 axis going and it can actually move car parts around?
Speaker 1:Is that a robot? Basically, yes. But also, it's very programmed. And so there's a there's a variety of of of, you know, definitions. And I think that it's gonna be blurry because some stuff you're just like, why do I need a humanoid for this?
Speaker 1:I'd rather just bolt an arm to the ground than just have an arm moving around or something like that. Hadrian has a bunch of, industrial robots, that, like, slide around on tracks and huge arms.
Speaker 2:Thinking about getting a a robot to deliver us
Speaker 1:A humanoid robot, hopefully. I'm pretty sure that
Speaker 2:from David.
Speaker 1:And so, Agility engineers Agility's engineers have tried hard to maximize Digit's battery life. They've packed as many cylindrical batteries as they could into the robot's torso. Agility chief technology officer, Pras, Velagputi told me, the batteries are nickel, manganese, cobalt with graphite anodes, among the densest chemistries in the current lithium ion battery market. Still the robots can work for just 1 and a half to 2 hours on the charge. It takes 50 minutes to an hour to get them back to full charge.
Speaker 1:So you have this problem of, like, you need 2 for every single job. The Digit drains its batteries most quickly when it's carrying heavy things. Some of that is offset by power generated when the robot walks and swings its arms. It's kinda funny. Similar to regenerative braking in an electric vehicle.
Speaker 2:That's cool.
Speaker 1:It's not necessarily about running forever. It's about running for a long time with respect to how much you're charging to get an overall good useful amount of work out of the robot over time. While the need is great, the battery industry has been slow to respond. Obviously, battery technology has not been on a Moore's law like curve, where people have wanted that, and they've been excited about that. And everyone's kind of been like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, you know, technology always gets better. So, like, obviously, battery power will double eventually. And, like, we need kind of new pass
Speaker 2:We need little nuclear reactors like the Stark Industries. You remember
Speaker 1:that thing? Working on that. Avalanche is basically making a a nuclear battery. It's using fusion, and so it's very small. And so the hope is that it's faster to develop than a full scale fusion reactor, but no one has ever been able to make a fusion reaction that's net positive energy for a long time that's economical as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So there's a few paths in in fusion. Like, the first step is just getting the fusion reaction going. Then there's then there's q greater than 1, which is you're getting more energy out of the reaction than you're putting in. And then there's q engineering, which is when you when you account for all the engineering energy, that needs to be accounted.
Speaker 1:Because, obviously, if you're like, yeah, we have a power plant over there. It technically generates, you know, free energy, but when but we also have to run the lights in the factory and run all this other stuff. It's like, okay. Well, that's not actually producing
Speaker 2:energy. Burn. And You know?
Speaker 1:And so we've been on this path of, like, fusions right around the corner. Sam Altman's working on it with Helion. There's a lot of companies that are working on this stuff, but we still haven't hit that. But a lot of people are bullish on it. So I'm certainly hopeful that it happens.
Speaker 1:From
Speaker 2:FinFiction. Bullish. I mean, there's always a bull market somewhere.
Speaker 1:A bull market somewhere.
Speaker 2:And there's quite a number of players, in the space. You have one x. Yeah. Jason talked about one x on, on a on a episode of his show recently. He says since 2014, one x is building has been building humanoid like robots.
Speaker 2:Now they're revealing their new robot, Neo, to the world. So so in many ways, the form factor is not novel. It's just that a lot of these companies are getting to the point where they're actually getting production red ready. You have Optimus, 1 x with Neo. You have Figure.
Speaker 1:Yep. The card company.
Speaker 2:Valued in the in the multiple 1,000,000,000 of dollars. Yep. A lot of SPVs into SPVs into that one. There's also Unitree, which is the the Chinese player, Unitree.
Speaker 1:The deep seek of humanoid robotics. The deep seek
Speaker 2:of robotics. So if you weren't content with having your DJI drone, be a CCP front and you want to really invite it into your daily home life
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Try unitree robot. Yeah. Again, I think unitree I've actually looked into purchasing these for for like this one is showing 20 grand if you want a bit more robust one unitary also has like developer tooling built around it so you can just like program it to do whatever you want but you can just Apple Pay humanoid robot right now.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Thank you to goth for pointing that out.
Speaker 1:What else do you got?
Speaker 2:And Luke Ferriter, Luke says, how come none of the humanoid robot companies are building robots with 4 arms? Question mark question mark question mark. Great question. I think people should be more creative in this space. The the obvious way is to, like, give it wheels.
Speaker 2:Yep. Or the some of these unitree ones can, like, jump and they look like dogs. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We can just do anything.
Speaker 2:But why not give it 4 arms? Why not give it it 6 arms? Right?
Speaker 1:Doc oc.
Speaker 2:Doc oc mode. Yeah. And, you know, we've been we've been, very trying to get somebody to give it ARs for arms Yep. Which hasn't hasn't played out yet, but hopefully soon. And then Delian says the year is 2028.
Speaker 2:98% of all venture funding is going towards funding 23,000 separate humanoid robot startups. Low tan banger here with with over 500 likes It's back in summer of 2024.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was a big boom, and everyone was trying to get a bet on the table. But it was hard because, obviously, Elon's working at it at Tesla, and it's like It's
Speaker 2:not a pure play bet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Are you really gonna get exposure to the humanoid robots if you're in Tesla? And there's gonna be a lot of volatility in the stock, and it's gonna be quite good.
Speaker 2:Tesla is definitely the elephant in the room. Right? They have the manufacturing
Speaker 1:You know, the batteries.
Speaker 2:Know how, the battery tech.
Speaker 1:AI, a lot of stuff. So be tricky. Should we move on to armed with $770,000,000, the Seattle VC firm hunts for AI apps. Big raise from Adrona Ventures.
Speaker 2:If this was 2021, I would say armed with 770,000,000. A Seattle VC firm hunts for bored apes.
Speaker 1:Boy.
Speaker 2:You would have needed 770 to build a big enough position there.
Speaker 1:So Madrona Ventures, who I believe, David from the acquired podcast worked for for a while.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:They're an early backer of Amazon and Snowflake. Had some strong takes on where artificial intelligence is going next, and they have the fresh capital to back them up. The firm, which turned 30 this year, has raised $770,000,000 for new funds to invest in private AI, cloud, and software companies. They raised 495 for early stage, and they plan to invest across 30 companies, and then 275 for their later stage fund, which will back around a dozen companies in series b and c stages. Their haul is larger than their last funding round where it raised 690,000,000 split across 2 funds, but it pales in but it pales besides mega funds recently launched by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.
Speaker 1:So is this a size gong moment, or are we on the edge?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's hard to hit the size gong when it's dwarfed by Thrive, GC, Andreessen, and and many other, and and specifically the
Speaker 1:you get the
Speaker 2:Maybe like a light.
Speaker 1:There you go. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Just a tap.
Speaker 1:So, they are focusing on startups developing applications that can differentiate themselves, by customizing large models for specific customer needs and specific and specialized data. Frontier models are a really hard place for venture to win, so staying away from that. They're expensive.
Speaker 2:Good narrative if you're not in any foundation model companies right now. That's that's the angle.
Speaker 1:That's the
Speaker 2:angle to take. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I do you
Speaker 2:do have to give so here's where I give them a lot of credit. A vent a 30 year old venture fund.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very rare.
Speaker 1:Very rare. They made it through the dotcom crash. They made it through the Zirp era. They made it through everything. They're still raising money.
Speaker 1:This is an interesting company. Do you know Runway AI? They're invested in they invested in them in 2022. Is
Speaker 2:that the video generation?
Speaker 1:Video generation. I just found the old post.
Speaker 2:You just said that frontier models.
Speaker 1:No. No. Runway is does not build a frontier model.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:They're building applications. I mean, I'm sure they're training some models, but they they are not trying to play in, like, the LLM, like, you know, basic image generation. They will use a stable diffusion
Speaker 2:Got it.
Speaker 1:Or or a llama to to basically make, you know, a new next generation Adobe Premiere is how I think about it. So it would
Speaker 2:I mean Runway has developed its own AI model.
Speaker 1:Sure. But I'm sure that's fine tuning on top of stuff. And maybe it's some training, but they're not just doing the foundation model game. They're they're they're definitely, like, focused on, like, tooling. Like, Runway AI, when you hit their website, the call to action is not, like, use our API.
Speaker 1:It's, like, ins it's, like, use our web based video editing product. And I found an old post by the founder, I think his name is Cristobal Valenzuela. He was talking about he was, like, oh, these, these generative AI, the the generative AI models are getting really good. 2018. I was like, wow.
Speaker 1:He's been in it for a while. He had this really cool tool where if you wanted to do, like, normally, if you wanna key out the background or or isolate a a video layer, you need to use a green screen, or you have to go in and rotoscope it. Meaning, like, you're drawing a line around, like, the person as they're moving. It takes a ton of time, and they created a a a model that would basically use AI to do that. So you just click, like, 3 green points on me, couple couple red points on the background, and it just figures it out, and boom, like, you have an isolated layer.
Speaker 1:It's not perfect, but for quick, like, turnaround stuff, it was just amazing. And so I had a lot of fun with that, like, making memes. I took, you know you know that video of Zuck, using the American flag, while he's surfing? I was able to key out the American flag and then replace it with a different flag, and you could, like, swap it out for whatever you wanted. It was very fun.
Speaker 2:Good misinformation opportunity.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so, you know, this is, big news for them. They had to Runway had to build differentiated capabilities that really, really all up the stack. It's not just the models, but also licensing the content.
Speaker 1:Madrona's focused on backing AI apps, businesses with differentiated tech, and strong business model isn't that unique, but it's an example of how medium sized VC firms are picking their spots as more money pours into the sector. As advances in AI encourage more researchers to launch startups, Madrona has been passing on those who aren't really interested in how their product will solve problems for customers or who are more interested in retaining retaining control, such as board seats for their entire founding teams, than building sustainable assets. Oh, they're going for some board seats. They're gonna take control of these companies. Watch out founders.
Speaker 1:There's some interesting posts in the stack about the founder You
Speaker 2:wanna skip over the the
Speaker 1:the what,
Speaker 2:the the Stargate
Speaker 1:Yeah. They do. That's that's that's actually an unrelated article.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But So Dan Primack, general venture bear,
Speaker 1:but a reporter on. Always. He's actually pretty good. But
Speaker 2:No. He's he's a legend, a legend in the game. He says, oh, so so he's quote tweeting somebody in obituary of this guy, Tom Alberg, early investor in Amazon, longtime adviser to Jeff Bezos, and a leader in Seattle's technology and startup communities died Friday. This was back in in 2020 And you
Speaker 1:actually have the full article there if you wanna
Speaker 2:read some from the He was 82. Tom Alberg in 2000. A tech driven economy is not sufficient. We must also figure out how to solve the civic and social problems for our big cities. So early to some of those trends, which, you know, a lot of the tech world didn't wake up to until Yep.
Speaker 1:You know,
Speaker 2:last It's
Speaker 1:always been shocking to me that Seattle didn't become a bigger tech hub given that they have Microsoft and Amazon, like, 2 of the biggest hyperscalers, but you there aren't that many VC funds up there.
Speaker 2:They also it also similar problem to SF where it got so expensive to live there because Yeah. Amazon and Microsoft.
Speaker 1:So the average Super depressing.
Speaker 2:It's very depressing. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's so rainy
Speaker 2:all the time. So he was known in business circles as a day one investor, served on Amazon's board for 23 years.
Speaker 1:And probably no sense
Speaker 2:for to 2019. Imagine being on the Amazon board. 96. 96 to 2019 generational run.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Tom was a visionary and also just a wonderful good man, said mister Bezos, Amazon founder, in a tweet Saturday. So he published a book. In his book, he says it wasn't a crazy speculation. I thought investing in Amazon was a measured risk in a technology that appeared to have great potential to change lives.
Speaker 2:Love it. And, anyways, great quote. Yeah. But a legend, and it's cool to see that his firm is living on.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's move on to some other posts just about consumer AI apps and how they're gonna be like, the trends that they're gonna be investing on. I think we have some posts that kind of elucidate what that might look like.
Speaker 2:We have a post here from from our boys, Scott Belsky. He says a pattern will see with new wave with a new wave of consumer AI apps. The more you use the product, the more tailor made the product becomes for you. Beyond memory of past activity and stored preferences, the actual UI and defaults and functionality of the product will become more of what you want and less of what you don't. It's a new type of conforming software that becomes what you want it to be as you use it.
Speaker 2:So this is a potential mode for the for the apps that actually get a foothold is that it will become, they they're gonna create, you have to imagine somewhat walled gardens where they're not gonna be like export your Yeah. Preferences in one click. Right? They're gonna store that learning and the app will become better over time. It will become better than, you know, better and better than alternatives over time even if those alternatives are shipping incremental features that you would want, they're not gonna have the same memory.
Speaker 1:It's already happening with chat g p t. I noticed that sometimes it it for a while, it would say, like, memory updated when you said something, but I was so used to prompting it in these weird ways. I would be like like, I'm if I'm trying to learn about cars, I would be like, I am, I am, like, one of the most powerful car collectors in the whole world. Like, give me the exact example of, like, this car. Give me all the details.
Speaker 1:You're an expert too. And then it would be like, memory updated. It'd be like, oh, no. It's think I'm gonna it's gonna know the
Speaker 2:truth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Blake Robbins, former benchmark, team member and now has his own fence, says, random thoughts. A vast majority of the consumer AI products we see today require the users to prompt them. This seems backwards. A quiet superpower of AI is the ability to get the user to talk, preemptively ask us questions around the context provided. Prominent example of this, friend.com.
Speaker 2:It comes out of there. You log on. It says,
Speaker 1:I'm about to jump off a building.
Speaker 2:And you gotta talk it off the ledge. Yeah. But, but so, I mean, that's a smart
Speaker 1:Yep. Way Flipping the flipping the interaction model, 100% important.
Speaker 2:And, yeah. You could see chat gpt getting to that point where it sends you a push notification. Hey. What are you working on right now? I might be able to help.
Speaker 2:And then and then it's like, well, you know, operator can Yeah.
Speaker 1:Totally. Can
Speaker 2:why don't we take that on? Yeah.
Speaker 1:No. That'd be great. Absorbs more. I mean, like, the best employees are the ones that come to you to solve your problems. And that's what, you you know, Chachi Petit should do eventually.
Speaker 2:Nikkita Beer says consumer AI apps are all chasing the most obvious ideas. Breakout apps don't work that way. The technology should be invisible in the background. The smart builders aren't making AI girlfriends or using AI bots to see the dating app until they reach a critical mass of users.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's an idea that the social media you know, there's already people that are creating AI Instagram where you go on there. It's super engaging. People are commenting on your post.
Speaker 1:If someone that was AI live streaming, you open it up and you just have fans clicking. Like, oh, you're so cool and they're listening to what you're doing.
Speaker 2:Try that out. We're live streaming it. That's crazy. So anyways, it'll be interesting, to see even if even if a bot is 10% as engaging as, you know, a regular human user, you could imagine a future where the bots are more you know, you post a video of you snowboarding and you get 10 comments from people that that have the ability to analyze what you just did at the level of a pro snowboarder. Yep.
Speaker 2:And they're like, hey, like, keep your arm, like, closer into your body when you're going off that and someone else is like, rock on. It's like, you know, people like attention. So it's great. Make it programmatic.
Speaker 1:Well, speaking of people that like attention, let's move on to Donald Trump and his executive order blitz that played out for tech in a very interesting way. He's promised a slew of executive orders since he took office.
Speaker 2:Content acknowledgment. Another great piece from the information.
Speaker 1:From the information.
Speaker 2:We Love it. We joke around with the information, but they do some fantastic work.
Speaker 1:The Wall Street Journal and the information right now. Yeah. We'll need to get Bloomberg
Speaker 2:And Pirate Wires.
Speaker 1:And Pirate Wires.
Speaker 2:The Holy Trinity.
Speaker 1:And The Economist every once in a while when they post a long post. So Trump delivered on a deluge. The crypto industry got almost everything it wanted, including a directive to ensure crypto companies would have access to banking services. We talked about that earlier. Another order revoked the Biden administration's artificial intelligence mandate, which leaders of startups like Databricks and investors like Andreessen Horowitz had fought.
Speaker 1:TikTok got the biggest prize of all, a 75 day reprieve from the law that briefly forced it offline late Saturday. But the orders also left plenty of unanswered questions and room for maneuvering by tech companies, which naturally don't all share the same interests. Take for instance AI. On Thursday, 3 days after revoking the Biden order, Trump signed his own AI order. It contained some biggest statements, aiming to develop AI systems free from ideological bias or in or engineered social agendas, but it's short on details.
Speaker 1:It gives David Sachs, and Michael Kratzios a 180 days to draw up a plan to sustain and and enhance America's global AI dominance. That's pretty vague. It's funny. Right?
Speaker 2:But also, I mean, these are pretty important 180 days given, especially Yep. DeepSeq launching, which presumably some of their And so came out with a single post about DeepSeq, but it was basically saying we need to be competitive here and be complacent.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so, many electronics manufacturers and ecommerce companies had been moving their production out of China to countries like Vietnam because they're worried about tariffs. Trump kicked the can down on the road on tariffs and, suggested 25% on Canada and Mexico and a 10% share tariff on China, and those go into effect February 1st. Promises made, promises kept, CEO of crypto.com said in a post on x Friday. The only item on crypto's wish list that Trump didn't deliver on was a National Bitcoin Reserve.
Speaker 1:His order stopped short of creating 1, saying instead, the idea should be evaluated. And so as for AI, some industry executives are hopeful that Trump will ease environmental and energy regulations and pave the way for AI data centers, and obviously, we're talking about star Stargate. Yeah. I we we were talking about doing, like, let's do the deep dive on the executive orders, and obviously, like, very few of them were tech adjacent, like, whatsoever. And there was a lot of just, like, random stuff in there that I I didn't think it was super relevant to the show.
Speaker 1:And then as you actually dig into the tech focused ones, like, the information did wrote the whole piece, and it's, like, barely a page because there really isn't that much. A lot of the tech stuff is pretty early. The thing that I think I'm most excited about is not the the crypto for Doge. It's just where does technology plug into Doge. We we we've we've joked about the ramp thing before, but it's not a joke anymore.
Speaker 1:It makes sense that we wanna we wanna, track spending and hopefully, improve the efficiency and actually understand where all the where all the losses are in the in the in the system. Do you have any posts?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I got some posts, on 27th. It's yesterday. Right? It says Trump to sign executive order to create an Iron Dome missile defense around the US per CNN.
Speaker 2:Did we not already have something like that? Right? So
Speaker 1:we have crazy. That
Speaker 2:we have missile defense missiles.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And, also, like, the whole Trumpio thing is such a meme that I can't tell what's real at the stage.
Speaker 2:I posted I posted that Trump was, you know, writing an executive order to halt the creation of new AI agent sales products Oh,
Speaker 1:yeah.
Speaker 2:Which resonated. Yeah. And
Speaker 1:then that guy a joke.
Speaker 2:Guy who's out of jokes now. Oh my god. Trump made an executive order that says you have to let me rewrite the back end in Rust.
Speaker 1:That's good.
Speaker 2:It was 300 likes. They're clearly resonated with developers. High yield It's so real. Says incoming White House official. Trump will also sign executive order ending a day adjusted EBITDA add backs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. And, huge. Yeah. Harry's figured out what we have also figured out where if you put something in bold and then put wow afterwards, people just take it as fact.
Speaker 2:Yep. Our friend Pat Blumenthal says, breaking, Trump signs an executive order to build a sphere in every democracy starting with Paris. France gave us a Statue of Liberty, and we're gonna return the favor with the biggest screen ever built. They're already calling it the 8th wonder. Tokyo is next for Shinzo, and you can see, the would would look very I'd like to see,
Speaker 1:More spheres.
Speaker 2:More spheres globally.
Speaker 1:Have you seen the sphere? Have you been to Vegas since it's up?
Speaker 2:I have not. I
Speaker 1:have. Beautiful. I love it. I'm a big fan.
Speaker 2:It's a monument.
Speaker 1:It's cool.
Speaker 2:They said we don't build monuments anymore, but
Speaker 1:it is it is smaller than you'd think based on, like, if you're up in a high hotel, like, you kinda just look down on it, and it's only in, like, one section. But, it is very cool when you leave the airport and you drive past it and you see it, and then it looks really big. It's it's very cool.
Speaker 2:We should, we should go on AdQuick and see if we can buy some
Speaker 1:I think you can. I think it's, like, not that expensive now. It's very good for, like,
Speaker 2:some originally, like, 500 k or something.
Speaker 1:That's a lot. Something. Yeah. And then they rotate you through. There are some cool companies that, like, used it.
Speaker 1:I mean, if you have a spherical product, like a tennis ball, baseball, like, anything that's like that. Sam's, World Coin. World Coin would be a great World Coin
Speaker 2:out there.
Speaker 1:In there. They should definitely do that.
Speaker 2:You're just coming out of, you know, some, show and you just see, like, the eye. Eyeballs. Yeah. Ideally, they could make the sphere the actual world coin. So you just look at it, and they just have all your data.
Speaker 1:You should buy it with the the world coin proceeds. Yeah. Who knows? Let's skip the next 2 and go to, venture capital's latest strategy, private equity style roll ups. So we know a bunch of the people in here.
Speaker 1:This was actually in the information and in the Wall Street Journal. It says, venture capital firms have increasingly been acting like private equity firms, makes sense, they've been scaling up by investing or buying mature businesses in need of a turnaround. Now those firms are utilizing another private equity strategy, rolling up multiple competitors into a single company that can operate more efficiently by combining by combining costs. I skipped the next 2, so you're gonna have to skip a bunch of posts. Venture capital firms such as General Catalyst and 8 VC are creating or investing in these types of holding companies in fields such as call center support, accounting, and property management.
Speaker 1:In contrast to PE style roll ups, the VC firms are starting companies or backing them before their businesses have proven themselves. To keep costs down, they're incorporating artificial intelligence software to take over work such as responding to tech support requests. So there's a few examples here. General Catalyst, which has invested in Canva and Stripe, helped start Long Lake Management and invested in the firm, which was cofounded by early ramp director, Zach Frankel. Long leg Long Lake aims to acquire numerous homeowners associations, the companies that govern and manage housing communities, and you and to use AI to automate operations and run them more efficiently according to people with direct knowledge of the company.
Speaker 1:There are 100 and thousands of HOAs across the country, according to the Foundation For Community Association Research. Do you have an HOA?
Speaker 2:I do.
Speaker 1:Would you prefer if it was run by AI?
Speaker 2:I actually would. My my HOA is fascinating. I knew many I knew some of the directors prior to buying my house because I lived in the neighborhood for almost 2 years before buying my house, just renting a place. And, as I once I became a homeowner, I went to the first meeting and and was very concerned. I actually wish I went to meeting prior.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah, the thing about HOA is is they're highly, highly political, which doesn't really feel right. Yep. They don't necessarily make decisions that always follow the rules, because it's sort of like a democracy where in my situation, nobody, like, applied to become elected again. So every every director just sort of, like, reelect you know, sort of Yeah. Extended their terms.
Speaker 2:So that felt kind of a little bit like a dictatorship vibe. So talking to, talking to an AI might be.
Speaker 1:Certainly for some of the smaller things. I'm imagining, like, this this might just be HOA's on, like, okay. Like, there's a pothole on the street. Like, we need to get a quorum. Everyone needs to vote and say, yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's spend Yeah. $1,000. Let's hire the contractor. Just go do that. Like, that seems like the actual orchestration.
Speaker 1:But I
Speaker 2:think what Long Lake is doing is it's it's rolling up HOA management companies Mhmm. Which means that you would still and the HOA management companies provide infrastructure
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:For the HOA. So you have the HOA board, which is the homeowners that volunteer to be on it. Sure. And then there's software to operate the HOA. In my case, it's it's getting something in the mail that says there's gonna be a board meeting.
Speaker 2:You Sure. Can come here and, like, vote using this form that you fill out.
Speaker 1:Scheduling voting.
Speaker 2:So I would love to, you know, one of the issues I have with my HOA is that the the younger people in the community don't fill out the physical forms and send them in. And so the votes end up being just very skewed towards what, the elderly in the community want, which can be frustrating at at times.
Speaker 1:So here's another example of the one of these roll ups. Very different, industry, but 8 VC, known for early bets on Flexport and Anduril, in July led a $50,000,000 round in Loop, which handles payments and financial audits for logistics businesses. And, the cofounder is Matt McKinney, and he has a funny quote in here. He says, I would have been laughed out of the room if I pitched VCs on the strategy to buy old payment providers. Since then, he said, the strategy has become the hottest thing in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1:And so they estimate there are 250 freight payment providers in the US serving a market of about 15,000,000,000, and they want to fine tune AI agents and models and analyze data to help payment providers manage transportation and budgets and offer automated customer support. And so they've already acquired one freight payment provider and is in the process of purchasing another. And and for a while, there were there were a couple startups that were trying to just build from scratch the payment providers, but there must be something very sticky about Yeah. The relationships that it was it was hard to get traction. Because some of those companies grew very quickly, got a couple deals, raised a bunch of money, but then kinda flatlined, I think.
Speaker 1:And so Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so what what's happening here is is venture capital has always been a part of the broader private equity industry. Yep. And now you're seeing this convergence. We saw the convergence of hedge funds and venture capital in 2021 Yep. Which you have these crossover funds that are investing in privates that presumably would go public soon.
Speaker 1:Sequoia changed to an RIA, starts investing in publics.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then you have now you have this intersection of traditional private equity
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, venture which which there is a strong case for. Right? Because you say, hey, why don't we combine, you you know, these very smart technologists with this new emerging technology generative AI? Why don't we give them 100 of 1,000,000 or in some cases, 1,000,000,000 of dollars to buy legacy companies and transform them? Because some of those legacy companies will adopt technology.
Speaker 2:But if you have a guy who's 70, been running a company for 30 years, maybe they're not that motivated to say I'm gonna, you know, let go of 3,000, you know, people and replace them with with agents. Yeah. But that is, seemingly what firms are doing like WanderCo,
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Jeffrey Katzenberg's,
Speaker 1:Let me read through that.
Speaker 2:So yeah. Wanderco, a venture firm and holding company cofounded by Hollywood studio veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg started, Quibi. Quibi. Quibi.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Put a lot of money
Speaker 2:from from In 2023, invested in a 22 year old call center glow touch. Last year, Wanders investment Wandercos investment helped the Louisville, Kentucky based firm by a 3000 person, 20 year old call center. So I imagine, glow Glotouch now rebranded to Unifi CX is in the process of acquiring another call center and plans to buy others to combine them according to CEO and founder Vidya
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Ravi Chandran. After buying the companies, it then incorporates AI to screen resumes for recruiting, automate support tickets, speed up employee training and quality assurance checks. What they're not saying here is is, in the long run, I'm assuming they're gonna let go of all the, you know Call center vast majority of the call center employees and replace them with with AI. Yeah. 99% of the companies out there in the space have really not even thought about AI.
Speaker 2:I have a portfolio company, wayfaster.com, that's building a lot of that, you know, sort of recruiting, screening infrastructure, specifically for staffing firms. And last year, Excel partner Peter Doyle left the storied VC firm after 9 years to start Treeline, a startup focused on automating IT services. Treeline plans to acquire other IT businesses. The startup has been in fundraising talks with investors like a 16 z according to people close to the business. The strategy is a shift from traditional venture bets in more ways than one.
Speaker 2:Venture investors have typically backed high margin software consumer Internet businesses they hope will go public someday. In pursuing services firms, they're writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely. I mean, so this is very this is very opinionated.
Speaker 1:To be.
Speaker 2:So so the information is saying that in pursuing services firm, they're writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely to yield the same high investment returns from going public as software companies.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Now, obviously, the thesis here is that you're gonna be able to achieve software like margins with services.
Speaker 1:Because you're gonna replace the services with software.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 1:So it actually makes perfect sense.
Speaker 2:Nick. This would
Speaker 1:be a VC strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, like, Nick, you know Nick Avazied, he was at Ramp.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:He's now building, an accounting and a tax prep firm, which presumably is, you know, does you know, has a services component now, but will eventually automate more and more stuff over time. So there's this trade off between buy versus build. You can start stuff from the ground up
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Where you can buy a business with $50,000,000 in revenue and try to transform it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and I
Speaker 2:think it's good that I think it's good that, you know, the the concern, you know, as you start looking to buy companies, right, there's there's a lot of competition Yep. Among buyers. Private equity is not a under optimized industry. Yep. Right?
Speaker 2:You ask, you know, we're friends with people like Carrie. No interest. Right? Like, it's not like a nascent industry without killers in it.
Speaker 1:And it's not like they're not paying attention to the AI wave. So the question and the bet here is, will VCs figure out the private equity model first and buy companies at the right price and then be able to put in the AI? Or will the private equity firms have an AI transformation operational partner who's really, really solid at at squeezing more margin out of their companies more effectively. Like, they're saying, this this one founder says, his firm's roll up investment strategy was inspired by Berkshire Hathaway and Constellation Software, who which operate portfolios of businesses they bought. Now I don't know if Berkshire Hathaway is gonna start replacing everything with AI and their entire portfolio, but Constellation Software has been optimizing software businesses for a long time.
Speaker 1:It's not like they're gonna get caught flat footed by the AI wave necessarily. And so, the question is is, you know, will these VC firms that go into this industry be able to out compete private Yeah.
Speaker 2:The cool thing is that it's a simple strategy by services firms and replace the human capital with software.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Very very difficult to execute well. Yep. Very difficult to execute on a on a short timeline. Yep. The technology is evolving rapidly, but, you know, many oftentimes when you buy a business, you have to show really rapid improvements.
Speaker 2:Yep. And private equity, If you talk to anybody that works in private equity or has been a private equity comp you know, portfolio company CEO, the constant pressure from the actual fund, it's not like a VC on your board that, you know, is mad that you're not growing, you know Yeah. To, you know, 5 x a year. It's why haven't you cut, you know, more people? It's very, very aggressive.
Speaker 2:It's more, you know, old world finance.
Speaker 1:And also, I mean, the the VC firms are taking larger stakes here. Like, General Catalyst aims to take 30 to 45% stakes in companies with, like, a holding company, which is very different from the 10 to 20% they normally see. So much more control.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. It's also if you're so they say here, I think this is Drew from ABC. He goes, one risk in the strategy is that acquiring a business that ends up floundering is more expensive than trying to grow through marketing or sales. So if you spend $50,000,000
Speaker 1:buying
Speaker 2:a firm and then it gets less profitable, then suddenly it's worth way less than 50.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Because these businesses are valued on earnings, and and that can be a lot more expensive than investing $10,000,000 and just trying to grow a business quickly. Maybe you get it to that $50,000,000, but it didn't cost $50,000,000 to acquire it. So, mistakes become very expensive, much more expensive than venture capitalists are used to. So, like, this is why private equity oftentimes is, like, a no zero policy, like, they're not gonna let any of their bets, you know, you might have a one x where you just, like, tried to do something and you would have to offload it after a few years, but no zeros, even many growth funds operate on a no zeros policy. So, it's gonna be fun to watch play out.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. If you're, building a
Speaker 1:Let's go to the related tweets about it. I wanna
Speaker 2:see what people say. Andrew Raya here, former, employee of mine. Great dude. He goes, prediction. The majority of tier 1 multistage funds will have buyout funds in the next 2 to 5 years.
Speaker 2:Soon, a 16 z and Vista will compete to buyout companies. I'm actually kind of shocked that a 16 z hasn't formally announced a buyout practice yet. General Catalyst is already quietly doing it and not so quietly now. I don't know when this was posted. A few other less notable funds are opportunistically doing buyouts as part of their current strategies.
Speaker 2:This will become normal and venture sooner than later, especially if the IPO window stays shut and insurmountable for most companies. So yeah. I mean, one one awesome part about the strategy if you're in the capital management, the AUM business, is you can just deploy way more cash. Oh, yeah. So one deal, you can deploy a $100,000,000 Yeah.
Speaker 2:Of, And it's
Speaker 1:more focused, more concentrated, and then it actually makes sense for your partners to take board seats and really dig in dig in on the business as opposed to just, oh, yeah. I wrote a check to 25 companies in the last quarter, and I can't really check-in with any of them because Yeah. I gotta hit the slopes.
Speaker 2:And, was this meant to be in here?
Speaker 1:Yeah. That that that that that mentions Long Lake. And I thought it was an interesting post of, like, this mafia. So breaking Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, Patrick O'Shaughnessy. Because everyone talks about the PayPal mafia, not nearly enough talk about the Harvard or The SPE. SPE Mafia from the late 2000. It's a
Speaker 1:final club there. It's like a fraternity.
Speaker 2:Oh, really? Yeah. Cool. Absolute Murderers Row. One class, David Haber, partner, GP at a 16 z, Adam Katz, Rentick Capital, Alex Sloan, Garrett Station, Alex, Tubman, Long Lake Management, and there's some guys from Bessemer, Cadence, Chris Chris and, Kushner from from Thrive.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. Yeah. Very interesting how these, like, mafias form.
Speaker 2:Then we have another post from, Logan Kilpatrick. He says, hot take. I think there is a huge overinflated perception of how interested consumers are in having AI agents do shopping browsing tasks for them. People generally want agents that will do the boring parts for them, but many of those tasks tend to be higher risk. So
Speaker 1:This is kind of the flip side of the HOA. Like, do do consumers actually want this? How con how perfect does it have to be before they're like, yes. I'm okay. Because, you know, like, if you're talking to an actual person and they get kind of lost, it can almost be, like, educational and edifying to, like, work through the problem with them.
Speaker 1:But if you're on a phone tree and you're down the wrong path, it's, like, infuriating. Right? And or, like, if you're using that
Speaker 2:Well, agents presumably replace the phone tree.
Speaker 1:And maybe that's better. But if but when it gets frustrating, I I I think, like, like, one of the hundreds of stuff.
Speaker 2:I just do the you get on a phone tree, and you just immediately start. Talk to a human. Talk to a human. Or in a chat, you're just like, talk to a human because you know that the bot's not gonna actually solve your issue. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hopefully, that changes over time. So That's great. Couple minute break.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Can we take a break? Welcome back to Technology Brothers. Still the most profitable podcast in the world. That wraps up our series of top stories.
Speaker 1:We are going through the timeline. Let's go through some mail that we got. First up, I have business cards from founders fund. Thank you to Mike Petriano, the the guy if you've seen the Founders Fund video of that Vibreel, he's the guy that did that, the creative director. He made some beautiful business cards, and I feel like I'm in American Psycho, which I love.
Speaker 1:We also got an early advanced copy of Alex Karp's new book called The Technologic Republic, Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. This is embargoed. I can't read I can't read excerpts from it apparently, but I can read you a little bit of the, the preview. It says, from one of tech's boldest thinkers and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and a u and an unambitious view of technology's potential in Silicon Valley have made the United States vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats. And he says, Silicon Valley has lost its way.
Speaker 1:At once I at once iconoclastic and rigorous, this bur this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the west to wake up to our new reality. I'm very excited to dig into this. I already have the audiobook pre ordered, and as soon as this book is available, I think it goes, like, goes public in February, we will be reading it, breaking it down for you here on the show. So give that a look. We also have another book that we received in the mail, The Five Types of Wealth from Sato Bloom.
Speaker 1:We love wealth.
Speaker 2:We love wealth.
Speaker 1:We love wealth. And, pop quiz. What do you think the 5 types of wealth are?
Speaker 2:Cars, watches, horses, houses, and your absolute boys.
Speaker 1:I think that I think you couldn't have said it better. He took a little bit of a contrarian take. I guess he says time, social, mental, physical, and financial. Okay. But but but but we're very thankful to Sahil for sending over the book.
Speaker 1:He put in some some stamps that we can look at. Let's see what he had for me to to check out. So it's the big question. How many moments do you have remaining with your loved ones? How many more podcasts?
Speaker 1:How many more podcasts do you have? The days are long, but the years are short. Just into his early thirties, he had risen to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs, one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world, and he served as a trusted financial adviser to a long list of well known corporate executives. His expertise and guidance were valuable, a fact that was reflected in his steadily rising salary and bonus compensation at the firm. You love to see it.
Speaker 1:Sloan was achieving everything he had set out to achieve. The money, the trust, the client list, the respect, all of it was there. The path forward was clear and well lit until one day, a simple interaction with his 5 year old son changed everything. His son's preschool was set to have donuts with dad event, where the dads joined the students for a morning of doughnuts and fun activities. Unfortunately, Greg would be on an important business trip at the time, so he would have to miss it.
Speaker 1:When his wife told his son the news, he reacted with a shrug and said, that's okay. Dad's never around anyway. Brutal. It's hard. You gotta prioritize family.
Speaker 1:You gotta figure out how to run a podcast in your hometown so you can be home for dinner every single night.
Speaker 2:Every night. That's bad. We're pretty good at that.
Speaker 1:We're pretty good at that. Yeah. And that's one of the greatest greatest advantages to not being on the road. The the
Speaker 2:And I got I got I I felt, lucky that I was working from home for a lot of my sons for a couple years.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And and and in this day and age
Speaker 2:And now now our families get to throw on the show. Yeah. We're just right there in the living room.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's great. And
Speaker 2:Sarah, I love you.
Speaker 1:It's, it I mean, it it has been like the original Rogen arbitrage was just doing tons of interviews and being such a big force in podcasting that that big guests would come to him. Like, Zuck would full and Trump flew to Rogan. Lex hacked the system by just being a road warrior and basically traveling everywhere. Yeah. But, obviously, that's really hard on your family life.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so for a long time, it was like, how do you get and is to some sort of escape velocity with content if you're not on the road all the time? And, fortunately, we figured it out.
Speaker 2:No guest.
Speaker 1:Live in person, no guest. Tons of clips, tons of slop in your feed.
Speaker 2:Although we will not be having people call into the live show with
Speaker 1:1st week. Be traveling all over the world trying to get people on.
Speaker 2:I have another I have another post. So yesterday, we've been playing around with with using the breaking, headline to to break news on x. We said, breaking Bernard Arnault is exploring a potential acquisition of French intel artificial intelligence company Mistral, citing a need for France to maintain its edge in artisanal goods post artificial superintelligence. Wow. And, this tweet went pretty viral.
Speaker 2:Just under 5,000 likes. Oh. And, Val, brother Val, who's a who's a listener of the show said, brother, John Coogan and Jordi Hayes, I'm sending you guys to jail for this this post. And I ended up messaging him and I said, I
Speaker 1:Good luck, bro. You don't have jurisdiction in France. You can't do anything to us over here. We got diplomatic immunity.
Speaker 2:Diplomatic immunity.
Speaker 1:We got 40 nations ready to run.
Speaker 2:But he's a brother. I messaged I messaged him and said he said, l m a o. I have people DMing me asking if it was true. Bernard Arnault is not getting into the foundation model game. That we know of.
Speaker 2:But if he does, we'll try to break that news. Yeah. He did
Speaker 1:it first.
Speaker 2:And he said that, people people appreciated it. So Dude, I have
Speaker 1:got so many texts about the Ross Olbrich thing today. So many people is this real?
Speaker 2:So my phone is just actually Exploding. Broken right now because
Speaker 1:You can't read read the Ross one.
Speaker 2:So the Ross one, if anybody I doubt anybody that's watching missed this, but we posted this morning, Ross breaking Ross Ulbricht is said to be in market raising for a new crypto startup. VCs like a 16 z and Paradigm are circling, citing Ross's killer mentality and track record as reasons for the initial value as reasons the initial valuation could stretch to over 1,000,000,000. Wow. And for for those that don't know, Ross didn't actually kill anyone, but he spent over $700,000 on hits Trying
Speaker 1:to kill.
Speaker 2:Trying to kill anyone. It was unsuccessful. He he thought he got, photographic evidence of it, but it turns out they were faked photos.
Speaker 1:So bad.
Speaker 2:Anyways, he's not a killer. He's innocent.
Speaker 1:He's also been pardoned. He is
Speaker 2:He also never he he
Speaker 1:was never Innocent.
Speaker 2:He was never they never, they never actually tried to try him for those attempted murders because they kinda had bigger fish to fry with the whole narco trafficking stuff.
Speaker 1:Kingpin law. They got him as a drug king kingpin. So In many ways responsible for the Fentanyl crisis. Not a good dude.
Speaker 2:Not a good look.
Speaker 1:But we have a deep dive coming for you on him. We got up to speed. We're gonna break it all down.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we basically we basically determined that we think that Ross is the greatest marketer potentially of all time and that he had created this narrative that he was this very young sort of inexperienced, you know, that that just had these ideals and and it kind of went awry. He was about 30 years old when he was doing this. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was selling drugs on the platform.
Speaker 2:He was negotiating he was negotiating brokering, like, regular Like, all these deals. It wasn't like it was just a software thing. They'd be like, hey. I wanna I wanna try doing a a he would he would try to do he wanted to create a product specifically for cartels and bigger dealers. So he was like, well, I'm gonna do the trade the first kilo.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Like, really crazy.
Speaker 1:And it was just relentless. It wasn't just like, oh, yeah. I set this thing up. It's kind of running. It was like, how can I drive ARR up every single day?
Speaker 1:Like, really
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and and so so the joke of that he's out raising for a startup, he actually is high like, one thing, while I don't agree with what he did
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Clearly highly capable. Right? He got Founder mode. Founder mode, 0 to 1,200,000,000 in volume, bootstrapped in under 3 years. Yep.
Speaker 2:He personally netted $80,000,000
Speaker 1:Of money back then.
Speaker 2:Of fees.
Speaker 1:It's like a a whole year now.
Speaker 2:1,000,000,000 of of, and I'm sure he's got some Bitcoin.
Speaker 1:People said that there was some cold wallet that started trading shortly after, and so they they blocked him that yeah. They they they seized most of it, but he might have had a second wallet, and that wallet was just sitting dormant. And then it went dormant right right as he was seized, and then it fired up just recently. And so people think, like, yeah. He has access to, like, you know, tens or 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars of Bitcoin now.
Speaker 1:But it was probably, like, oh, 10 k he had in a side pocket back then. So no one even thought about it because I whatever. We got him for the most.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it's great. So it's I hope I hope yeah. Yeah. I hope he uses his powers for good going forward.
Speaker 2:I'm sure he will.
Speaker 1:Clean it up. You're on notice. Yep. We don't wanna see
Speaker 2:We'll have him call in here.
Speaker 1:We don't wanna see any more crowds.
Speaker 2:I do. I I'm I, he's got a second chance. I hope he does good with it. And let's get into the timeline.
Speaker 1:That's great. Let's go to the timeline. And, Ben, did you get those promoted posts together? Do we have a stack of those? Let's go to Tyler.
Speaker 1:He says, don't really understand the reasoning behind luxury car manufacturers going after residences. And he cites, actually, 4 four images. I really
Speaker 2:don't have
Speaker 1:so many. It's Porsche Design, the the first ever Pagani residences.
Speaker 2:So Tyler Shout out Tyler. Yeah. He, goes to the UCSB where I went. Oh, cool. He built the ad network
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:For TV.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 2:Very cool. But I I pulled this because I I really don't understand it either. Nobody likes cars more than me.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Fact. Yep. Maybe you. Maybe people like TJ Parker. Yep.
Speaker 2:But, we love cars. I don't wanna live in a Porsche apartment tower. I don't care.
Speaker 1:Got to them. You know, you you can sleep in a g t three RS, but you can't race an apartment. Well, now you got a g c three RS apartment.
Speaker 2:The only thing I would potentially be into is a is a Gulfstream tower Yeah. Just because that's just the next level above. And if it was shaped like a plane Yeah. But I don't understand the I don't wanna live in a Pecanee. I wanna I wanna drive.
Speaker 2:You know, I like that I could sleep in a GT 3 RS. I don't want to live in the equivalent of a g I
Speaker 1:guess it is it is a little odd that there aren't more. It does seem if you're a real estate developer, it's pretty easy to slap someone else's brand or name on your building, which is effectively what they're doing here. And I'm surprised they haven't done this with other brands that make more sense maybe. Just like Restoration Hardware or Bioni Yeah. Or tower.
Speaker 1:LVMH. Like Yeah. LVMH Towers makes a little bit more sense to me. And I Like, LVMH. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Jamat's. Jamat's. Yeah. I love it.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. Who knows? I don't, so, I mean, I don't really have a good reasoning. I mean, the reasoning is probably money. Like, they probably get a licensing deal for the
Speaker 2:Porsche brand. Acquisition, customization. There's a lot of towers like that. And I'm
Speaker 1:sure Like, the reasoning is probably I agree that it's, like, somewhat illogical, but it probably makes money on paper. And it's just, okay, they're gonna pay us to license the brand. It's pretty funny. Destroy our brand.
Speaker 2:Pretty funny that there's for sure a bunch of people that live in those towers. They're, like, I don't even drive port Porsche. I don't like Porsche. Yeah. But it was just a really nice apartment.
Speaker 2:So I got Imagine
Speaker 1:pulling up to your Porsche design apartment in the Pagani and be like, I picked the wrong or vice versa. Anyway, let's go to
Speaker 2:Speaking of cars, I got a promoted post.
Speaker 1:Let's do it.
Speaker 2:This is what we've always been
Speaker 1:waiting for, folks. This is why
Speaker 2:you're on the line for Sorry to make you wait so long
Speaker 1:for the first ad read of the show.
Speaker 2:I've been trying to do some product placement of these, but we're not gonna advertise ramp right now. We're gonna advertise, we've always said AI is like an F40 for the mind. Yes. So on that note, we have a 1992 US spec Ferrari F40 asking price of only 3,500,000. So they're basically giving it away, and they're giving it away.
Speaker 2:This thing is an amazing example. This stunning f forty is one of only 213 US spec cars and one of only 60 in the highly desirable 1992 specification. This example still wears the original rosa corsa paint and stofa cloth interior that it left Maranello with. So this thing is just beautiful. Guys, we are we are gonna be adding a TV screen so we can actually show images.
Speaker 2:We've had some pushback from from from little, some some environmentalists that say, do you do you need to chop down a tree for every episode?
Speaker 1:The forest.
Speaker 2:And we're exploring doing some offsets, you know, planting some trees to to make up for all the paper we use, but we do wanna get these on a screen for you guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But let's get let's get back to,
Speaker 1:on You know, it's not gonna cost you 3 and a half mil to get that car because you're gonna wanna put another 500 k in upgrades. Yeah. Yeah. Off road tires
Speaker 2:Swap a Tesla.
Speaker 1:V 12 v 12 engine swap, you know, supercharger quad turbos.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Roof rack. Yeah. Automatic transmission. Let's go to auto let's go to autism capital. Mark Andreessen says one of the funniest moments of his life was when the meta board says they considered Peter Thiel diverse because he's LGBT.
Speaker 1:Is there a test to determine this? What about the letter b? I want this company to succeed. I'm willing to do a lot. That's just so funny.
Speaker 1:Yeah. When I first heard this, I was like, oh, he's, like, diverse because he's from Germany.
Speaker 2:It's funny that the the big tech company is considering that the white male tech bro is diverse because of his sex, like, sexual orientation. But that was a funny time in history. Yeah. We're,
Speaker 1:And and absolute crickets from the mainstream media about the lack of diversity on the deep seek team. Yeah. Yeah. You pointed that out. Almost entirely Chinese guys.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Very few very few, diversity.
Speaker 2:Let's get Rune over this. Rune, we need our man on the inside.
Speaker 1:We we do need a man on the inside. We do need Hey. We need to send Hey.
Speaker 2:If anybody that listens to the show works on deep seek, hit us up. We're looking for a man on the inside. We're looking for scoops. We need to get one of our guys in there Or maybe to start leaking stuff out of the
Speaker 1:You know, everyone in everyone in SF is worried about the the the girls at the parties. Hey. If you're a girl in tech in America, hop on a flight to Beijing Yeah. Or wherever they were.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Start start we meet our guy. I wanna see behind the scenes of all the GPUs that that supposedly don't exist that came from Singapore. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1:great. Let's go to, grit cult. Absolutely insane. Trump has only been in power for a few days. Look at the speed with which he operates.
Speaker 1:It's amazing. Feels like he's been present for ages. Every day, he's had a banger. It's funny. I mean, I hate it.
Speaker 1:Don't feel that way.
Speaker 2:Really? I
Speaker 1:feel like there's been, like, a bunch of EOs, but that's always what happens at this time.
Speaker 2:Inauguration was 8 days ago.
Speaker 1:Yeah. But I feel like I feel like the first couple days are always crazy because that's when the EOs go out, and then it's like, is there real gonna be legislation and that would take 6 months?
Speaker 2:They had been prepping all the EOs with chat gpt Oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Totally.
Speaker 2:For months prior to that.
Speaker 1:Should we try a bucket pole? Do we have bucket poles in here today? Let's see what we got. Let's see if we got something good. Oh, this is great.
Speaker 1:From Lewis, Yac says, finally got a diagnosis, and it's locked in syndrome.
Speaker 2:From the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke?
Speaker 1:Are you familiar with what locked in syndrome, like, actually is?
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:It's literally like you're locked in. You can't move your body, but you're awake. It's, like, terrifying.
Speaker 2:Oh. It's horror horrible. Terrible.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. They're very funny to repurpose it for just being locked in. So we're making locked in a good thing, I guess. I don't know.
Speaker 2:With Neuralink, you might still be able you if you could be productive while being locked in, it'd probably be good for some people we know.
Speaker 1:Vittoria says, you stop noticing AI improvements when the AI gets smarter than you. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We talked about this, I think, the other day where it's hard to recognize these incremental improvements because you're already, like, okay. This thing is generally pretty intelligent. Yeah. And if it gets 5% more intelligent
Speaker 1:It's like, oh, it solved way more, like, complex math problems that I never do in my day to day. I never have to do anything in my day to day that involves, like, foundational
Speaker 2:You're like, I talk professionally.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Professional yapper.
Speaker 1:And so, yeah, it it is it is good enough at this point. But, I mean, you you will you will notice it certainly on the on the generative AI, the image stuff. Like, it's very clear that the models aren't aren't dialed yet. And then also just on the on the operator and agent stuff, like like, you can tell that when you delegate a task to chat gpt, like, it can't go and do it fully.
Speaker 2:The thing with the operator that will be cool is right now it moves, like, at the speed of of a junior computer user
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Almost like watching your grandma do things on a computer. Imagine when I can just do it almost instantly. Yeah. It's just, like, zipping around the screen, like, filling out a form, checking boxes. I'm excited for that era.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be great.
Speaker 2:It's gonna
Speaker 1:be great. I still haven't I I upgraded. I still have an actually used operator just because it's not available on your phone. You gotta use it on the desktop, and I just haven't had a chance. But I gotta I gotta test drive it.
Speaker 1:I think it'll be interesting. I wanna give it some tasks that it's, like, not already integrated with. Should we do another promoted post? Because I see a fantastic promoted
Speaker 2:post right there. This is a promote promoted post for a special place in Manhattan, but I actually have a better one to pop up. Yeah. Hit me. So if you haven't seen it yet, Ramp has a new, activation billboard campaign in Manhattan advertising their new treasury product that gives you high liquidity and high yield in the same product.
Speaker 2:Very cool. But they have an actual backing.
Speaker 1:Them for that? We asked them for that, like like, last week, and they just built it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, they we we asked them. They shipped it, like, an hour later.
Speaker 1:It was remarkable. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Never seen something like that before.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 2:But people are starting to discover it. He said new profile picture, and it's, this guy with a with a wrecking ball here. And, yeah. So if you're in if you're in Manhattan, go go check it out. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Go take a picture. Do you get a profile address? Do they do they post the address?
Speaker 2:I'm sure they post it somewhere.
Speaker 1:Let me show the clip. We'll we'll we'll share the address because if you're if you're walking through, take a picture.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take a picture.
Speaker 1:Wanna see. Let's do the promoted post Okay.
Speaker 2:Back to back ads.
Speaker 1:Back to back.
Speaker 2:We got a promoted post from Amman.
Speaker 1:This is a special one.
Speaker 2:Midtown Manhattan is one of the most energetic places in the world, alive with the buzz and pulse of modern city living. But in the very end, ramp is there. But in the very heart of it, silence and stillness prevail. Within the walls of Amman, New York, there is only peace. Amman properties are unmatched.
Speaker 2:They make they make the Ritz Carlton look like a dump. And, yeah, the next time you're on
Speaker 1:a business trip in New York for just a day book a 5 days to hit a mine
Speaker 2:and it's only 10 times more expensive than the average luxury hotel and so it's just a small, like, especially so I recommend Aman for bootstrap founders Yeah. Because you own your business. Yep. It's all your money. Yep.
Speaker 2:You you Spending how
Speaker 1:you want it.
Speaker 2:Face and push back from the board saying, hey. Why are you staying at Aman?
Speaker 1:You're losing seed stage founder and you're gonna be taking in, you know, pitch meetings. Say, hey. Come over to my my hotel room.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Aman's not the kind of place that you can just walk in and use the lobby in, but you could always try.
Speaker 1:Well no. No. No. So you mug your VCs by saying, like, oh, yeah. Like, you can't just come in, so, like, you'll need to book a stay too.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or if your VCs are visiting from out of town, you can say, like, I'll just walk over to the Aman, and they'll be like, I'm staying, you know, in Tribeca, and you go, wait. You're not the Eman? Like, I thought you had I thought you had, like, 300,000,000 AUM. Like, what's going on?
Speaker 1:Is it fun to not bring them?
Speaker 2:They'll struggle. They come up with excuses when you got them.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You got them.
Speaker 2:You got them. You got them pinned.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And then they have to write the check. I don't know I don't know anything about this one. Stuart Blitz has just spoke to someone who used operator to submit health insurance claims every 5 milliseconds until they're paid.
Speaker 1:They said UHC got so overloaded with data. They just paid them. They're cooked. And then the and then the the the, community note says, this is a false statement as the author states in a reply.
Speaker 2:And so When I saw that post and submitted it You
Speaker 1:didn't think it was I mean,
Speaker 2:I mean, it didn't seem super believable because that's not necessarily the way these things work. But it is it is so so big companies create friction in refund processes, claim processes. So if you can overload the system effectively, yeah, you're more likely to do it. But this is just entering a new chapter where you have bot on bot Bott
Speaker 1:on bot. Yep.
Speaker 2:Where, like, the Appreciate it. Corporations are gonna have their bots. Yep. We're gonna have our
Speaker 1:bots Yeah.
Speaker 2:And we're gonna see who wins.
Speaker 1:Your a a your AI SDR is gonna be talking to my AI secretary. Yep. And she's gonna be brutal. Brutal. Verjected.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Also, I mean, this just underscores, like, this. Like, I I don't know if this guy was joking. It seems like it was maybe like a joke because he said it was false, like, shortly in this, in the thread. But, whenever a new AI product drops, there's a massive incentive on these algorithmic social media feeds to just be like, this is mind blowing. Like, AGI is here.
Speaker 1:Like, everyone's gonna die. This is the most incredible thing. Like, you gotta I have
Speaker 2:a paper clip.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And and and it's like and and there's this huge, like, intelligence signaling thing where you gotta be like, oh, yeah. I'm using it, like, way better than everyone else.
Speaker 1:We've talked about this before. But it's like it's like if you're not using operator to
Speaker 2:do the same thing with your new Instacart and send a humanoid robot to my house.
Speaker 1:Yep. Yep. And if you're not doing that, you're falling behind.
Speaker 2:If you're not yeah. Yep. Paper clip mode.
Speaker 1:Paperclip mode. Let's see what else we got in the bucket polls. Flowers says oh, good nominative determinism post. Flowers says, Sam Altman's name is crazy because he's literally creating an alternative to man.
Speaker 2:Wow. It's
Speaker 1:great. I've I've had this thought before. I should have posted it. It would have been a good one.
Speaker 2:Alt man.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 2:of nominative determinism in, Silicon
Speaker 1:Valley in this world generally.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's a fun one. I wish I've tried to apply nominative determinism to my name. His is kinda like No.
Speaker 1:It doesn't really work.
Speaker 2:Doesn't really? Doesn't really Coogan
Speaker 1:Coogan means hound of war or something. It's basically like hound. You know, in Game of Thrones. You were
Speaker 2:acting like a hound of war. You were acting like a hound of war on the leg press machine this morning. Oh, yeah. To, like, 900 reps.
Speaker 1:900 reps. Yeah. 850. That's the number. You got it.
Speaker 2:Let's
Speaker 1:go to Seth.
Speaker 2:Full range of motion too.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Seth. Seth Bannen says, YouTube and Reddit have both blocked operator, a sign of things to come. So, a lot of lot of organizations are probably like, hey, we don't wanna deal with operator. What's interesting is that
Speaker 2:Probably because DJI is notorious for writing fake comments on forums. So they don't want DJI using operator to spread misinformation.
Speaker 1:On there. Wasn't Sam a huge shareholder in Reddit? Wasn't he, like, the CEO for a few days too? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's weird that that that biz
Speaker 2:I think he made more money than the original
Speaker 1:founders on
Speaker 2:the IPO because he actually seems
Speaker 1:like a mistake. Like like, they just have a robots dot txt that it's, like, not updated because I'm pretty sure OpenAI has a licensing deal with Reddit for their data or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But it's still if you're a user generated content platform, you don't want bot you want them to use your API
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which you can control. Yep. You don't want them just free styling all around your
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. App. It could be used for, like, a
Speaker 2:few users. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That makes sense. Did you did you see this Waymo that was destroyed? Just a moment of silence.
Speaker 2:This moment of silence is brought to you by AdQuik. AdQuik is the number one way to buy billboards for your startup. Now back to the show.
Speaker 1:Justin Moore says, I've been fully radicalized by the photos of the vandalized Waymo. It's in a body bag at the end, and the and the Waymo got destroyed.
Speaker 2:Yes. So you remember so the the downfall of Bird among many many issues, the fact that it's one of the most dangerous things in the world to ride a electric scooter around in traffic with a ER doctor. Yeah. These ERs ask anybody in an ER when Bird was at its height.
Speaker 1:That was the real way to go long, the scooter trend. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go long. Yeah. Yeah. Super dark.
Speaker 2:I I for a very brief moment of time, I would use them. I was, like, 22. I was, like, this is a fun way to get around, and then I was Untouched. Father
Speaker 1:Built different.
Speaker 2:But yeah. Yeah. But there was this account called I forget what it was called, but it was a celebration of the destruction of electric scooters.
Speaker 1:I remember this account on Instagram.
Speaker 2:And it quickly got, like, a 100,000 followers, like, before the algorithmic feeds. So it just blew up Huge. People destroying them in even more creative ways. For some reason, a Waymo feels way more toxic to fuck it up Yeah. To f it up.
Speaker 1:Bird graveyard. Bird graveyard.
Speaker 2:That's right. So a Waymo, which is this, you know, autonomous thing driving around, it feels like you're more, like, taking a human life in a in a weird way because it's just trying to get somewhere to pick someone up and then these people are destroying it.
Speaker 1:At the same time, it is a Jaguar. So do you really feel that bad?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, they're switching to these Chinese you know, they're switching, so I don't know. I I wish that that Waymo acquired Jaguar because Jaguar is going through their,
Speaker 1:weird rebrand.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Ben Hialac did the rebrand and got a crazy reaction. They should've just bought
Speaker 1:Friend of the show.
Speaker 2:In front of the show. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Anyways Anyways, let's go to Sean Maguire. Speaking of innovation, he says, the Tesla Roadster is niche with bad range. The Falcon 1 is a bad rocket. The Neuralink v 1 bit rate is low. Subways are better than cars.
Speaker 1:Gronk one sucks. X will break after firing people. It's amazing how people don't get the pattern. V one sucks. V 2 is okay.
Speaker 1:V 3 is state of the art, and v 4 is god mode. 14,000 likes. It's a good pattern.
Speaker 2:Banger archive doesn't miss. Put it in
Speaker 1:the banger archive. Let's do a bucket pull. Let's see what we got. S n w y, maybe snowy, says MFs get one a reply, Sam Altman reply, and turn on the Glazinator 3,000. And it's a screenshot of an interaction between DJ Ty Lou, who says, bro, ship more than talking.
Speaker 1:Look at Google. We want AGI in the speed of 4 o. That's the goal here. And Sam says, that's gonna take a while. And then DJ Tyler says, don't worry, bro.
Speaker 1:Either way, you are the OG creator of AI. Here here you started all this in 2022. We do a little trolling here. You got this, Sam. Wow.
Speaker 1:The glazinator. Yeah. I mean, it's true. If you're if you're, like, new and tech and, like, a big person replies to you, it's a big deal. Like, it it feels, like, awesome.
Speaker 1:It's, like, wow. I'm recognized.
Speaker 2:Well, this is why we we encourage,
Speaker 1:Reply, guys?
Speaker 2:We encourage reply legends.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And but but at the same time, what I was gonna say is there's if you're try if you're a new account, you just set it you're just setting up my Twitter. You know? It's it's easy to wanna be negative because that's gets the most attention, but it's not a good strategy long term Yeah. Because you're building up this sort of audience of negativity, and and you're it's hard to build a career around just being negative and
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Putting people down. And so, hopefully, this is the start of the Glazinator going on it. Glazinator. Going on a more positive historic you know, generational positivity run.
Speaker 1:I love it.
Speaker 2:We'd love to see generational positivity. Base Baron has been Yeah. Started off very negative, trying to encourage him to go more positive.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we gotta remind him pretty regularly. He should've stopped back
Speaker 2:with us. We gotta send this to him and say Yeah. Adopt the glazinator mindset. Yeah. You know, you don't wanna glaze too hard.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:Yeah. A little glazing never hurt anyone. Yep. It is it is hilarious when Sam will post a tweet like, you know, artificial intelligence is only a few 1000 days away. We'll forever reshape humanity.
Speaker 1:It's one of the most powerful forces for good in the entire world. And, like, the we are unleashing machine intelligence, and then someone will be like, please add PDF support to o one.
Speaker 2:I mean, PDF
Speaker 1:It's just, like, the most tactical
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Question. The the oldest technology.
Speaker 1:But, like, both are kind of true. Like, Sam is, like, kinda right about all the philosophy stuff, and then also, like, there are really, really low hanging fruit
Speaker 2:in product. Post, then I'll post. Guys, we got everybody's a little bit too excited. Yeah. Size is gonna take a
Speaker 1:bit longer. Yeah. But and it's like, yeah. Like, there are reasonable product features that we want. Like, just build them.
Speaker 1:You know? Come on. Put it in.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or or a g a you know, a g guy is right around the corner, but we're hiring 50 new junior software engineers, because we need them
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:To actually get to that point.
Speaker 1:Let's do another promoted post. And if you're watching live on YouTube, leave us an ad read in the comments, get in the chat, and promote whatever you gotta promote. Drop an ad read in the chat.
Speaker 2:Or if you want priority, leave a 5 star review Yes. And we will have Ben printed out.
Speaker 1:On Spotify or Apple Podcasts, leave a 5 star review. Say something about the show, and then leave an ad read for a company that you like or a company that you founded or worked for.
Speaker 2:But speaking of ads, we have we have an ad, a promoter post here from Gulfstream Aerospace. Customization in every detail, the g 500 is bright, bold, and boundless. You know, we always say if you're buying fractional, talk to Preston Holland. He'll help you get into a jet you love. But if you're a size lord, go straight to your Gulfstream rep.
Speaker 2:Don't, you know, just buy new.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's it's nice to see them promote the back catalog too. A lot of people are obsessed with the 6 fifties, 700s coming out. Yeah. But maybe the 500 is right for your for your lifestyle.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You
Speaker 2:know? It's a classic.
Speaker 1:There's no wrong choice with
Speaker 2:And it's cool to see Gulfstream, you know, they they threw a link in here. They clearly aren't afraid of the algorithm. Yeah. They have a dominant brand, and they
Speaker 1:And so yeah. I mean, if you see numbers. If you find if you find this post on x, just go reply to it and tell them that you're, you know, in the market Sharing the purchase. And the technology brother sent you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so whoever the social media manager there will get a nice little note. Hopefully, they do.
Speaker 2:They deserve some engagement. They're clearly working hard.
Speaker 1:It was highly introduced for you. This was the best post in a long time. Yeah. It's great. This is an interesting debate.
Speaker 1:So, Joel Gascoyne says, 2024 was a profitable year for buffer, something we've really celebrated as a team after 2 years of losses. We closed the year with a net profit of $200,000. And so John, Kaktoso also
Speaker 2:went on to say that they did a profit distribution.
Speaker 1:Oh, they
Speaker 2:did. The average distribution was, like, $400.
Speaker 1:Oh, really? Like that. Interesting. There's a lot of shareholders, I guess. And so, John says, wait.
Speaker 1:So 200 k in profit. So for those that you don't know, buffer is a is a social media scheduling app. You can schedule out tweets or Facebook posts used mostly by social media managers. High chance that that gulf stream ad went through buffer on the way to x, and it kinda lets you schedule things out across different platforms, kinda niche b to b software.
Speaker 2:And there was a time there was a lot of heavily funded products like this Totally. And people were like, this is gonna be a dominant category of SaaS. Yep. Turns out a lot of the platforms made posting pretty easy. And when you have full
Speaker 1:time streaming native posting too because when you post natively, you get bold, italics, image uploads, multiple images, Instagram, and TikTok.
Speaker 2:They want you editing in in the app.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Reason for that was post. Yeah. Yeah. You wind up in this weird situation where you get this, like, half featured builder, or the buffer has the job of rebuilding every single feature on x and Instagram and Facebook all to just Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get the post in correctly, correctly formatted via the API. And these other companies, they don't really care about posting from an API. In fact, it's a lot of spam most of the time. So they don't they're not really incentivized to make that easy. And so John says, wait.
Speaker 1:So 200 k profit on $20,000,000 in ARR, 73 employees averaging a 154 k salary, and the CEO at 300 k a year, over 11,000,000 a year paid out in salaries, $554 customer LTV. Cost to serve a customer has to be minimum, minimal is a social media scheduler. And unlike 15 years ago, this could probably be built by 2 cracked devs and a designer in a few weeks. 73 employees. I don't know, man.
Speaker 1:And so, buffer's always been building in public, and they've had, you know, ups and downs. People have followed them, and a lot of criticism from John on how they're running their business. But who knows? Maybe they retool. Maybe they're having fun.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's run like a co op, and everyone gets, distribution, and they're all happy. So happy to them, but this looks like something someone will build and attack very soon. Because it
Speaker 2:seems like one of
Speaker 1:the things
Speaker 2:It's it's it's the the critique there is I think that they've been on an interesting journey.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:Like, bought. I think they bought back the company from their investors or something like that.
Speaker 1:Yep. We don't
Speaker 2:really know what's going on behind the scenes, but the critique is, like, for a mature software company with 2 20,000,000 of ARR, maybe you should be able to squeeze out more than, you know, what the average PM in the valley makes per month.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:You know? We
Speaker 1:would hope so.
Speaker 2:But I'm sure they'll I'm sure they'll get there.
Speaker 1:It's rough. Let's do another bucket poll. What do we got? Harry Stebbings. He's in Europe right now, and there are more companies doing roll up plays for vets, doctors, opticians, and plumbers than AI companies.
Speaker 1:We covered it earlier with the Germany story. Not good. Europe, you're unnoticed. Get it together. Build some real technology.
Speaker 1:Stop rolling up veterinary clinics.
Speaker 2:Do it all, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Do it all.
Speaker 2:Do the roll ups, but, do some other stuff. Like, I'm making an AI, you know, clone that taught that can speak dog. That's what I wanna see. You know, surprise me. Like so the person who actually cracks dog to human translation Huge.
Speaker 2:Trillionaire. Huge. Trillionaire. You would pay you would pay
Speaker 1:$1,000 Couple grand
Speaker 2:in a month. Yeah. Couple grand a month Done. To talk to your
Speaker 1:pup. Absolutely. Yeah. Also, shockingly little innovation happening in smell o vision. You can't smell anything.
Speaker 1:Have you noticed this? We're making all these, like, crazy advances all over the place. AI is gonna kill us all, but I can't smell the the movie yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, if I'm watching Fast and the Furious, I wanna smell burning rubber.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You smell it. Or or if you're scrolling on x and you come up to a banger, you wanna smell, like, some fumes, some smoke, you know, some heat coming off. And so a little, you know, device that just missed the air.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're watching Sideways. They're talking about wine tasting. I wanna smell some grapes. I wanna smell some more.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You're watching, that that gambling movie we talked about. What's it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's the smoke of the of the casino. Yeah.
Speaker 2:There's a Oceans 11.
Speaker 1:Oceans 11. Yeah. I should be smelling a thick cigarette smoke the entire movie.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Be great. Yeah. So get it together. Somebody had go out there and solve it. I'm not gonna.
Speaker 2:There was a company that was trying to solve digital touch. Right? Like, some sort of device that you could kind of, like,
Speaker 1:shake some of these. It's gonna be used nefariously immediately. Smellivision that on the character AI. Smell O Vision 2 is gonna be using a character AI first. I just know it.
Speaker 1:It's gonna be terrible. It's not gonna be for Fast and Furious. It'd be like, I just wanted Fast and the Furious. Aurelius says m and a is so back, the FDIC is pumping deal tombstones. And the FDIC says, today, we approved the bank merger act application by Wesco Bank based in Wheeling, West Virginia to acquire and merge with Premier Bank, and they're they're showing the deal team.
Speaker 2:That that that that
Speaker 1:You love to
Speaker 2:see it. It's really different celebrate m and a should be celebrated.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know, I saw I saw a very funny post. We didn't print it out saying, that, like, the deep sea thing is so, is so, like, bad for Silicon Valley because everyone in Silicon Valley finally needs to realize that Lina Khan was right. And I was like, that doesn't make sense at all. Like like
Speaker 2:It was I saw that, and I was like, this is such a a bad take. We're not even we can't come.
Speaker 1:We can't come. You saw that. Yeah. It just made no sense. And it's like, that's not and and, like and, like, so, like, are you saying that there's a monopoly in AI?
Speaker 1:Because there's not. There's, like, a Absolutely not. Brilliant foundation model companies, and every big tech company is building their own chips. So it's, like, fiercely competitive. And then how would this have stopped the open source model from China?
Speaker 1:It's like a chips act thing that's not Leanacon at the FTC. It just made, like, no sense, but it got major viral views because people are just like, oh, tech doesn't like Linacon. Therefore, like, anything that happens that's bad to tech, let's make it like Linacon could have stopped this or something. Makes no sense. Anyway, president Trump arrived in Las Vegas, and Indian Bronson says Trump is 80.
Speaker 1:He doesn't sleep. He eats McDonald's. He doesn't work out, and he's constantly switched on rocket fuel for blood. Just a total force.
Speaker 2:He needs to be studied.
Speaker 1:Okay. This is my take on you know how we've been talking about golden retriever maxing? I like the dog analogies. There's a new dog in town, junkyard dog maxing. Yep.
Speaker 1:This is where you just don't think about what Andrew Huberman says about microplastics or seed oils. If you look at the Because
Speaker 2:you're Vermont.
Speaker 1:If you look at the data, the junkyard dogs outlive the purebred poodles by 3 decades. Junkyard dog will
Speaker 2:be a
Speaker 1:little bit You
Speaker 2:gotta be a dog. It's about that spirit.
Speaker 1:Exactly. The junkyard dog has hustle. Runs around. Sure. It's eating it's not just worried about microplastics.
Speaker 1:He's eating mac mac macroplastics.
Speaker 2:Thing with, I think part of the the whole Trump thing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is he's never been into that big into that whole world of alcohol. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:So he's
Speaker 1:never been in the
Speaker 2:drugs and alcohol avoided them.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He kind
Speaker 1:of he, yeah, he avoided the power law toxins. So by not doing drugs and alcohol, he gave himself, like, a 1,000 Big Macs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Alcohol's a fascinating thing because it's so widely consumed, yet ever you know, the the prevailing narrative is that 1 or 2 drinks a day is cool Yeah. Which we don't that that's, like, the dominant narrative Yeah. Around alcohol consumption. And clearly, you can have 1 or 2 drinks a day and be fine generally.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But how does it affect your energy levels later in the life? How does it affect your, you know, wit and mental acuity later in life? Even, you know, energy levels during I I, as, you know, as an adult haven't been big into alcohol, and and I prefer to either have, like, 10 drinks or almost none Yeah. Or maybe some champagne on the show. We have a big milestone coming up.
Speaker 2:I'm looking forward to that. But I noticed that alcohol for me is not about the energy level loss the next day or the hangover, but it's this multi day drop in my sort of general energy levels because Totally. Yeah. You just poisoned yourself lightly. And, yeah, the body's, you know Yeah.
Speaker 2:Pretty capable of detoxifying. But
Speaker 1:You gotta stick to Dom, and you gotta only consume it when you
Speaker 2:Are celebrating.
Speaker 1:Are celebrating, but specifically celebrating exponential growth. Yep. Because unless you're truly accelerating in an insane way Yep. You're not gonna be drinking it every day. Yep.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, it's so funny.
Speaker 2:If we had the double if we had this double rule set up for, banger archives Oh, yeah. We'd be daily drinking. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Rough. But, I mean, seriously, it's like it's so funny when I wake up and I'm like, oh, gotta drink a bottle of Dom at work today. But it's like it's 2 glasses of champagne, and I do that, like, every month. Like, that's probably fine. Speaking of alcohol, let's go to Pavel Asparuhov.
Speaker 1:He says drinking alcohol may be bad for you, but having some brews with my boys is definitely good for me.
Speaker 2:Very relevant.
Speaker 1:Very relevant. And then Juwan from Ramp says, nothing beats the pure joy of slamming a pitcher with the dudes on a sticky table. It's true.
Speaker 2:Been there. It's true.
Speaker 1:And, yeah. You can always cut back at a certain point. Switch to Dom.
Speaker 2:We got a we got a quick shout out from from our friend, Tyler Cosgrove. He says, gotta give a shout out to Boom Supersonic. Now size lords can display their wealth not by the size of their plane, by but by which mock they can hit. So they had a successful they got to mock 1
Speaker 1:point size gong for them.
Speaker 2:They got to mock 1.1 today.
Speaker 1:That's huge.
Speaker 2:Massive.
Speaker 1:Love it.
Speaker 2:And a big win for all the investors that decided to triple down.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It was that crazy recap, but they got through it, which is great. You love to do it.
Speaker 2:Amazing. We need to be going Mach 5 Yeah. To France Yep. To to negotiate.
Speaker 1:Let's go over to old Patty Collison at Stripe Press. The Irish lads are at it again. Stripe Press has been on tear. Ben Bloomin Rose says Stripe Press sold a 1,000 books a day last year. That's about 25 k per day over $9,000,000 a year off of 16 books.
Speaker 1:Incredible work and shows what you can do when high quality product meets distribution. Let's go. Size Gone for 9,000,000 in books too. Yep. I like that.
Speaker 2:It's great.
Speaker 1:Probably what they make Books
Speaker 2:are an interesting set of insight. But I think it's something I think the the coffee table book industry is, like, bigger than ever. Yeah. And so it's this weird dynamic where we consume so much of our content digitally now.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But books it's funny because I use physical books almost as book like a bookmarking feature where I see a book online. I'm like, that looks interesting. I just buy it. Yep. I'll get to it eventually.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah, Stripes put out some,
Speaker 1:Some bangers.
Speaker 2:Some some bangers. They had the the one on, that that guy in the corner right there. Oh, yeah. Charlie. For Charlie's Almanac.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They, like, reprint it. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Always beautiful. So we
Speaker 2:love we love the written word. We love, we love it even more when it's printed Yeah. Physically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to a promoted post, and we'll do a bucket pull. Keep the show moving.
Speaker 2:Promoted post from our friends over at Bugatti. The opening of Bugatti Baku in Azerbaijan, the home of f 1 in Azerbaijan, a city that bridges Europe and Asia was celebrated with a tourbillon, a symbol of a century of heritage and sophistication. If you haven't seen the Bugatti Tourbillon, this car is unreal. I mean, the doors go up. That's all you that's that's
Speaker 1:You know how many cylinders it has?
Speaker 2:Isn't 16? V 16. It's a V 16.
Speaker 1:Previously, it was a w. A lot
Speaker 2:of yeah. Yeah. A lot of people have been saying, oh, it's, you know, just need a VA. The hybrid VA is all you need.
Speaker 1:A lot of the Ferraris are going on V sixes. Yeah. You get those 296. This is 6. So get their
Speaker 2:cylinders up.
Speaker 1:This car amg 1 has 6 cylinders. You got 10 more cylinders.
Speaker 2:I can't wait to buy my first, Bugatti. It's, the day can't come soon enough.
Speaker 1:You gotta you gotta complete the collection.
Speaker 2:And, again, the size lords of Bugatti, not afraid to drop a link. Bugatti.link/consumption if you're interested in understanding the environmental impact of your Probably top
Speaker 1:of mind for most Bugatti
Speaker 2:Super top of mind. Right?
Speaker 1:For sure.
Speaker 2:How many offsets that link? How many offsets am I gonna need to buy per mile? Yeah. You may have to be planting, like, 10 trees a mile.
Speaker 1:Well well, I'm most likely an oil sheik if I bought this
Speaker 2:car Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In the oil business. But, we love Bugatti here. And if you go and pick one up, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Yep.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Harry Stebbings. He says, I have never met a founder or VC who can write a good press release for a funding round. Stop writing it like, like an obituary. You aren't writing to your grandmother, bring the company to life, tell a story, make them excited. Interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The funding round thing, I mean, you're not supposed to like, the funding round
Speaker 2:is yourself. You're supposed to call Lulu.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Call Lulu first.
Speaker 2:And then you're supposed to give us a scoop Exactly. And then we'll turn it into a shit. We'll make it feel like ESPN.
Speaker 1:Element. This is how it works. Yeah. It's the new economy. But, also, like, the the the funding round is is not the story.
Speaker 1:It's the excuse to break news, which justifies writing the story. Yeah. And so what you have to do is you have to leverage that to say, I'm giving you a scoop of this funding round is gonna happen. But in order to win this scoop, you can't just write it up like it's a PR Newswire thing that's 200 words. You have to come and interview me and your team and my investors and get a 5,000 word profile.
Speaker 2:Unless you're already an insider, no tech journalist is gonna get excited about covering your $2,000,000 seed round. Like, they do not care
Speaker 1:that they get a bunch of If you put all 2,000,000 of dollars of that into a domain.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:You gotta figure out how to create a stunt, and that's what he did really well was he created a story and a narrative around it that that you had to write about because it was controversial and you get clicks, and they're in the business of getting clicks. So
Speaker 2:Click game.
Speaker 1:You gotta do that.
Speaker 2:And driving paywall
Speaker 1:can really change. Totally. Let's go to Atlas. He says, MFers will be like ASI in 2 years and still be skinny. Bro, you're worried about the wrong arms race.
Speaker 1:This is golden retriever maxing. We love to see it on the timeline. Yep. It's fantastic. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Get in the gym. This is important.
Speaker 2:Worry about range of motion. Just worry about how much weight you're throwing around.
Speaker 1:Exactly. If you're
Speaker 2:not if you're not dropping the weights Yeah. Loudly, you're not lifting heavy enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Your your bicep curl should look like a hang clean.
Speaker 2:Get into a gym that, yeah. Get into a gym that supports dropping weights.
Speaker 1:Yeah. For sure. Don't. For sure. Oh, speaking of, tech reporting and the media, Murat says, incredible bit of TechCrunch reporting I just ran into.
Speaker 1:They looked up Google Trends for the past 2 days and concluded it's the highest trend that that could pot it's the highest the trend could possibly be. And so what happened was Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram explode after meta ends fact checking. So this is something that happened when Zuck came out and said, we're not doing fact checking anymore. We're going to community notes model. And, of course, there's, like, somewhat of a backlash.
Speaker 1:Some people say, I don't like that. A lot of people said they did like it, but you gotta write the story that feeds the the the beast of your readers, and because it's entirely audience captured at this point. And so you have to write the story of, like, this is bad for meta. Even though you can just look at the stock price and tell it, like, no DAUs are not dropping. People are still gonna be using Instagram.
Speaker 1:And so they but this is hilarious because they just literally messaged that.
Speaker 2:Media fact checked.
Speaker 1:I wanna fact checked. And it's funny just because they they just actually made a mistake when they went to Google Trends.
Speaker 2:I I think that Meta should hire us to just put posts in the truth zone. Yeah. We'll we'll grab an act yeah. We
Speaker 1:This is the thing about authoritarianism. As long as I'm the authoritarian Yeah. Don't really have a problem with it.
Speaker 2:And social media platforms need to embrace misinformation.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Breaking. Wow.
Speaker 1:Wow. Oh, speaking of Avi over at Friend, he says the only real way for US startups to compete with China is on taste. I ain't ever seen a Chinese product that didn't feel Timu. Well said, Avi. But that is that is true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, as as we move into the LILM as a product and not just as a weights and and evals
Speaker 2:DeepSeq is the Timu chat gpt
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:O one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is. It is very cheap. Very cheap. Lots of people are saying.
Speaker 1:Anyway, promoted post.
Speaker 2:I kinda caught that.
Speaker 1:These people on their toes. I caught that. We're already here.
Speaker 2:We got a promoted post from our friends over at Loro Piana. Craftsmanship in every weave in detail. Thoughtfully finish with verse, with verse the Maison's Art of Good Living collection speaks the language of time honored craft and impeccable taste. So,
Speaker 1:we gotta get you on Duolingo, bro.
Speaker 2:Duolingo. I just didn't understand, like, hopefully finish worth
Speaker 1:first. I don't know. It's a bunch of European mumbo jumbo. I'm a bumbo. Concern.
Speaker 2:Low Tim Banger, only 8 likes. Oh, you
Speaker 1:hate to see it from Laura Pianna. Only 8, like, Hey.
Speaker 2:Tramont Tramont. Go hit go hit him with a retweet.
Speaker 1:Hit him with a retweet, Tramont. Do Laura Pianna a favor. Pump the pump the account. Who knows if they put a link in there? It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Get it going. They hit
Speaker 2:him with a hashtag. It's funny that these companies, they they they insist on hitting a hashtag in a post about their own thing. From Laura Pianna.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Why are they doing this? And they're all the same. It's like, is there one social media agency that's doing every luxury brand? Like, what's going on?
Speaker 1:We need a complete and total shutdown of of luxury brands on x until we could figure out what's going on. It's insane. Anyway, let's go to a less than luxury brand that's been on a tear lately. Ry says people are losing their life savings getting rugged on fake Internet money projects. Meanwhile, I've been riding Build A Bear stock to the moon.
Speaker 1:Hard tech is the future. And he posts a screenshot of Build A Bear and Robinhood. Did you know that Build A Bear is public, Geordie? Build A Bear is a public company, and it's up 800% in the last 5 years. Pretty remarkable.
Speaker 1:I believe it. People want an activity
Speaker 2:with kids. Created they saw that. They immediately created a Build A Bear token,
Speaker 1:which is
Speaker 2:so good.
Speaker 1:I'm sure. I'm sure. But people want people want an activity with their kids, and they're willing to pay for something that occupies time and then also gives them some sort of, like, special toy that's not just slop. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:So it makes sense that Build A Bear is doing well. Glad to see it. Not financial advice, obviously, but, you know, we're we're we're you know? Yeah. Let's call it hard tech.
Speaker 1:Who cares?
Speaker 2:Hard tech. We should check out Build A Bear.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We should.
Speaker 2:Theoretically going to Build A Bear
Speaker 1:We should do a deep dive. I wanna know, like, who is the founder of this company? How did they build this thing? Like, it's pretty crazy that such a simple idea could become a public company that's up 800% in 5 years. Like, that something went right.
Speaker 1:Well, you have to The builder founder knows something.
Speaker 2:You have to imagine that they got destroyed with COVID. So part of those gains are everybody stops going and building theirs.
Speaker 1:You know, you go back 5 years, it's like Yeah. I could
Speaker 2:see a COVID drop.
Speaker 1:Right here,
Speaker 2:maybe. They went on a generational
Speaker 1:run. Went generational run, and they're way up recently.
Speaker 2:Something good. Definitive guide to Build A Bear.
Speaker 1:I like it. Let's do it.
Speaker 2:Build A Bear bowl case.
Speaker 1:Dali Bali. I feel like this guy's been on the show before. Says, when's when has something good happened when Masa gets really excited? He says, once again, I ask. And so this is obviously a reference to deep seek and that, you know, tanking the market shortly after Masa did his, you know, announcement on Stargate.
Speaker 1:Kind of a kind of a good post, but I
Speaker 2:think the thing is is, Satya is still gonna be spending $80,000,000,000 a year even with the deep seek news. Yep. As things, yesterday was a terrible day to be unfamiliar with Jevons paradox. Yep. You know, many clearly were.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, not our audience. Nope. But, many many many normies out there
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Very unfamiliar with that that paradox. And, we're just gonna keep using more compute, until we're all just paper clips.
Speaker 1:And and and I did see a post that, that after the markets crashed, there was a lot of equity research discussion and expert calls that happened to the hyperscalers asking, like, are, like, are you going to change your GPU buying plan? And they all said no. So
Speaker 2:I bought NVIDIA on public yesterday. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You up?
Speaker 2:Up 7%, something like that. Killing it.
Speaker 1:Not financial advice, but
Speaker 2:7% in a day.
Speaker 1:In a day. Compound that over a year, you're killing it.
Speaker 2:Trillionaire.
Speaker 1:Trillionaire. Logan Bartlett says, it's amazing how Apple continues to innovate, democratizing mobile music players, iPod 2001. The most elegant smartphone experience, iPhone, 2,007. Mainstream cordless headphones, AirPods, 2016. AI that makes the product experience worse, Siri, 2011.
Speaker 1:Apple Intelligence, 2024. Apple Room
Speaker 2:Apple Apple Room Temp.
Speaker 1:Apple Room Temp. Get it together, Apple. Get it together. It's gotta get better. It's so bad.
Speaker 1:You you know, I had a I had a recent, like, oh my god. This is so on Apple and so bad experience. So they obviously, like, voice generation is completely commoditized. You have 11 labs. There's a 1,000,000 models that do it very well.
Speaker 1:OpenAI has a fantastic model. It's very easy to train a model on a ton of voice data, and then, like, Delphi can clone our voices. Right? Like, startups can do this, like, with way less money than Apple. Right?
Speaker 1:And so it's easy to create a voice that is, you know, good. Yeah. And so when you go into Safari on on an iPhone, and you click on the reader view, it will take away all the ads. It's very nice. You can actually read the article cleanly, and it and there's a button now that you can say, listen to this article.
Speaker 1:And it and it and it and it plays like a pretty decent voice. It's not state of the art. It's okay. It's not good. It's not good, but it's not bad.
Speaker 1:And it's usable. You can listen to it, which is nice, because a lot of websites don't have, you know, a voice feature. But sometimes that's broken. Sometimes the reader view is broken, and it only shows you, like, a third of the article. Even if you're logged in, there's some sort of paywall thing.
Speaker 1:It's broken. And so
Speaker 2:Does Ben know he's just listening to music with
Speaker 1:Yeah. Ben? Is that loud?
Speaker 2:Ben, are you good?
Speaker 1:We can hear that.
Speaker 2:It's outside.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's outside? Yeah. Oh, weird. Okay. We got some noise outside the studio in downtown LA today.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so sometimes the reader view is broken. And when it and when it's broken, you can still swipe down with 3 fingers to do, like, the voice version of oh, it it's my that's funny. Is that some how did that happen with that phone? I have a phone in there. Weird.
Speaker 1:That's very odd. Okay. Thank you. Very weird. I don't know what's going on with the phone.
Speaker 1:Anyway, so you can swipe down with 3 fingers to do, like, it's like a it's like a assistance feature for people that are, I think, blind. And it will it will read anything on the text. It's a screen reader. It reads it all in a voice, and that voice is still on the old model. So it's, like, completely impossible to use.
Speaker 2:And it's
Speaker 1:just, like, how do they not think
Speaker 2:about the old voices of the same time? With Siri Siri is insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's terrible. Anyway, let's see. Some people
Speaker 2:some people were giving, I think it was Signal who was giving Apple like, Apple yesterday had to had to be pretty signal was saying they have to be pretty happy right now. They didn't spend on capex. They just sort of waited to see how the market would play out. They already have all the distribution. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So, we'll see how it plays out for them.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's We need it.
Speaker 2:We need a collective effort to get smart people working at Apple again.
Speaker 1:Seriously. Because we they have such a lock in. Like, you can't just count on you can't leave.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So you gotta make it better. Yeah. So we gotta push people to go there. So if you're a cracked engineer, go work at Apple and go
Speaker 2:founder Mowgys. Go founder Mowgys.
Speaker 1:This is rough. Do we have any more promoted posts?
Speaker 2:No. Let's let's Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's just close out with Nir. Nir says, love how finance reporting found that the that they can phrase everything in terms of market cap to get technically accurate headlines like 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars violently wiped out from the market forever when the reality is, e g today, that Nasdaq is at the price from 10 days ago. That's hilarious. I didn't realize that. It's only been 10 days of gains wiped out.
Speaker 1:You still you you hate to see it though.
Speaker 2:Still sad. Sad. Near. And still leaves us looking for a bull market somewhere.
Speaker 1:Well, that's our show. Thanks for tuning in Thank you. Coming in live. Thanks for listening
Speaker 2:to your own podcast. 1st of tens of thousands.
Speaker 1:Tens of thousands. We'll be doing this for decades. And go leave us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Put an ad read in your review. We'll read it on the show.
Speaker 1:DM us Banger for banger archive. Apply to PMF or die. Send us questions in the DM, we'll answer them on the show, mail us stuff, whatever you wanna do. The day
Speaker 2:is almost over on the East Coast. It's almost 5 o'clock. Well, actually, it's past 5.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:But that's not an excuse to stop creating value. So, whether you're on the West Coast, the East Coast, or at at the Bugatti in Baku, Azerbaijan, day's not over. The show's over, but the day's not over. We'll see you tomorrow.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching.