AI Sweatshops, Anthropic $3.5B Round, Tesla Takes Hit, Rivals Help Bybit, Mars Mission

36:26It's like, oh, Tesla makes a fart sound. If you hit the right button, we can do that, but we'll play your favorite song when you come in. Exactly. That ability to sort of spark joy or have some fun with the user is just so much easier to copy and not a durable moat. Yeah, a big driver here is that a lot of the Chinese population is buying cars for the first time. And so they're not like, oh, well, I had a poster of a Carrera GT on my wall. And then, yeah, I rented a Cayman and I know what a flat six sounds like. And so I really want a naturally aspirated V8, my next car. They're just like, one car, please.

37:10And what is a car? Oh, it's electric now? Great. That's fine. Like this is the best car. Great. And so the other thing that happens is that they're working is as Chinese consumer products and brands like started to work internationally. I do think that the Chinese consumer started to say Chinese products are cool now. It's a small thing of like, Oh, you're using Tik TOK overseas. Cool. Oh, you're using DGI overseas. Yep. Okay. Why aren't we just buying our own brands? Like these are, I'm sure some of these brands are coveted and cool in the Chinese market, even though as American consumers, it means nothing.

37:48The Su7 or whatever, to me, that sounds like I don't want to knock off Macan. But to them, that might be a super desirable vehicle. Yeah. So the Su7 sold 100 ,000 cars last year. And Porsche has been one of the hardest hit. They reported that last month, its deliveries in China plunged 28 % in 2024. Although Porsche's sales were up in every other region around the world, the decline in China was significant enough to pull down global deliveries for the year. For years, German automakers relied on the Chinese market to make up for weaker demand elsewhere, leading them to ignore deeper structural issues at home.

38:29Chief among them was the reluctance to adopt the technology that has come to define driving in China, electric vehicles equipped with sophisticated software and increasingly artificial intelligence. The German, but also the American and Japanese-Korean established Western manufacturers have greatly underestimated the development dynamics of the Chinese manufacturers, namely the importance of electromobility and software-defined vehicles. And so, yeah, China is building their grid from scratch. They're building their roads from scratch, so they're going to have a fresh start, greenfield opportunity.

39:01They can build their cities and roads for electric vehicles to put less stress on the grid and actually they can probably they can probably uh get more access to transformers to actually yep totally because they're they're making a lot of them yep yep and uh yeah and and and fundamentally people uh are are just fine with these electric cars the trains are also doing something interesting where there's a few electric cars that they're kind of a reverse hybrid so instead of it being a a gas powered engine with an electric motor that gives it a little extra boost or makes the range a little bit further or just improves the gas mileage.

39:40It's actually essentially an electric car, but with a really small petrol engine or gasoline engine that can then just charge the battery. And that's all it does. And so you'll see these cars where it's a 300 mile battery charged, but then you get another 300 miles if you fill the gas tank. And so all of a sudden your range is like 600 miles and you can stop at a gas station if you have range anxiety so they've completely solved that problem of uh like oh if i get an electric car i can't go on the road trip um but now you can because you just fill back up uh but you're still getting all the benefits of the electric powertrain and all that and all the reliability and stuff so yeah it's interesting to see that it hasn't happened in america because people have either been all in on ev it's got to be ev tesla doesn't touch internal combustion engines or, you know, oh, we, we wouldn't put any electrical components in this hybrids are bad.

40:33We need to be naturally aspirated V8s all the way. Uh, China has not been as dogmatic about that. Yeah. Yeah. The, uh, it's interesting to see, uh, just Chinese, they're not being, uh, they're, they're not being necessarily super targeted with the international products that they're slowing down on purchasing. Right. We saw caring groups, uh, sales were down 30 % year over year. Uh, and And we're seeing that broadly in luxury goods. And then the same thing. And the iPhone sales too, right? So it's more utilitarian products like phones and cars and then also luxury goods. And this is probably, you know, there's probably a lot under the surface in terms of the CCP and the Chinese government broadly saying, hey, we need to switch from an export.

41:18if the world's sort of going through this period of deglobalization, we need to switch from an export-based economy, which they'll continue to be to some degree, but we also need to be consuming the products that we produce internally and having more of this sort of consumption-based economy because they can't be reliant on growing foreign exports to the same degree or having people move into cities, which also drives that consumption. So all of this will be interesting to play out. I hate, I've been, I went, the last time I was at a mall, I went by, there was one of these Chinese EV manufacturers that was like set up there.

41:54They had like two cars in a box and they were sort of marking them. And I hope these products don't catch on, one, for our sort of local manufacturers. And then two, they're just like ugly and like cheap, in my opinion. And I just don't want to see them on the road. I mean, there's already crazy tariffs. So most of these cars are not viable to sell in the United States. And I think there's tons of pressure. And then, of course, Elon being so close with Trump, like there's going to be tons of pressure against this trend. So I wouldn't I wouldn't count on any of these products really going, you know.

42:29Yeah. But one thing that's interesting is so as our in the chat mentioned, he says the U.S. will probably cut EV subsidies soon, which is scaring investors, which which we can see in this in the stock price. But the interesting thing with the Elon Trump dynamic is that you can imagine Trump would would ignoring the Elon relationship would just say, why are these EV companies getting all these subsidies? Like, why are we paying? You know, why are we subsidizing the cost of these for, you know, let them compete on the free market? Right. But then he's boys with Trump and or sorry, he's boys with Elon.

43:02And like that would be super damaging to Tesla. And so it's an interesting I'm interested to see how that dynamic. There's another interesting cultural thing, kind of going back to like the different factory worker, you know, philosophies. There's the Han. I forget what company this is, but it's a Chinese sedan, electric sedan called the Han. And they have different trim levels. And in America, you want a bigger number. Everything's bigger is better in America. Everything's bigger in Texas. You want a bigger engine. So, you know, something like a BMW, you might get a 328i, 335i. same thing with a Mercedes E350 or, you know, what are the 6.3 liter V8s and the AMGs?

43:45And so you want a higher number, you want a bigger number, pretty much always. But they don't have that culture in China. And so the trim levels are just the zero to 60 time. And so you can buy like the Han 3.6, the Han 2.8. That's actually better. I love that system. Yeah, and so you're driving behind a car and you're just like, oh, The 2.5, that goes zero to 60 in 2.5 seconds, which is hilarious. Yeah, when we're driving in the morning and wondering who we should drag race, now it's a much easier way to figure that out. Yeah, exactly. I just thought it was hilarious culturally. But it really goes to the fact that there are no priors.

44:21There's no standards. So it's just like, yeah, do whatever. Sort of adjacent to this, in the UAE, the license plates, you have to buy them, and there's a secondary market for them. And so the most coveted license plates are these like, like the king will have like one. And then if you see somebody with like seven, like, you know, they're a big dog. And so like, they're probably a part of the royal family or, or, you know, you know, Everyone has a million dollar car. Like that's not special. You need to add a couple million dollars in like license plate. Yeah. And they'll trade, they'll trade for$20 million just for the plate.

45:00Because if you have more money than you know what to do with, you might as well find out one more way to signal uh to the other people on the road well if you're going to dubai or you're going to spend some time doing laps at the nurberg ring where are you staying jordy i'm staying at a wander let's go find your happy place book a wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better and i didn't know this we we have a post here wander has 10 minute home tour videos on all the different properties and you can see this one's 13 minutes it has a full introduction drone tours cinematic shots and so before you make the decision to click purchase you can really get to know the property and it's a lot harder in the classic fake it with a couple wide angle photos when you're moving around with a with a video camera yeah the classic i when we were evacuating from the fires I was dealing with like Airbnb drama.

46:00I wanted to stay at a wander, but, you know, some of these homes are so coveted. They get booked out for too long. And I ended up booking two places that just were completely disingenuous with how they represented the property. And so that's like a pretty common experience with Airbnb. You see these amazing, you know, pictures and then you show up, but you can't fake a 13 minute video around the around the property. So highly recommend it. Let's stay on China. Go to Bridget Harris, my colleague over at Founders Fund. She says, by the way, China is lending money to African nations for infrastructure projects like ports and energy, et cetera, via this infrastructure, making them more dependent so they can ship in Chinese goods more easily.

46:46And then if the loans are defaulted, they take on the land. Very rough. And so she says, yes, guys, it's not new, but still an interesting dynamic slash relevant. And yeah, this is the Belt and Road policy. And it is crazy and very controversial and has cost them a lot of money, but has earned them a lot of allies across the world. It's interesting. I was working - Sort of reluctant allies. Yeah, I was working at a different venture fund in college and was looking through the cable gate leaks to hear what the embassies in different countries were saying about doing business there if you're an American.

47:25And overwhelmingly in some of these African countries, the sentiment was that you basically had two choices. You could do business with American companies or Chinese companies. But if you did business with the Chinese companies, they had the full backing of the CCP. And so if something happened where that company kind of stiffed you, you could go to the Chinese government and say, Hey, make me whole. But you couldn't do that in American country and our American company. And that was, uh, there's, there were a few oil spills that happened and American companies that there was, you know, they sued the company and they try and get the money from the company.

47:58But if the company is like bankrupt or something, there's really no more money to, you know, pay. Uh, whereas, uh, China was kind of like, Hey, we're backing up everything that we do in these countries. Uh, So yeah, lots of pressure. It'll be interesting. I don't think we're going to see an American Belt and Road initiative anytime soon. It'll be very expensive. But some of the stuff that's happening in Panama, Greenland, like this is all related, right? Yeah. I mean, the history of the U.S. empire is basically one long Belt and Road initiative. It just wasn't branded in the same way. But this is one of those things where we like it when our team does it.

48:35but uh when when our adversary goes and does it and boo like boo yuck why how could they yeah meanwhile america we have military bases you know everywhere and we're sending money all over the globe for all sorts of reasons yeah so but some of that money higher or why people people like to say oh we should yeah we're a dime abroad with ukraine i don't know about that yeah with ukraine we're saying uh you're giving us your mineral rights for uh you're basically like our loans were backed by your mineral rights sometimes you gotta put your buddies on full scholarship and just help scully full scully when they're when they're down you you spot them a couple bucks and then maybe they help you out in the future it's uh one hand washes the other this is geofolitics uh anyway uh if you don't know bridget she's a fantastic crypto investor at um at founder's fund And let's move on to another crypto story, Bybit, which we mentioned earlier.

49:28They were hacked and they are now taking loans from rivals after a record crypto hack. Rival crypto exchanges are stepping in to shore up the finances of the world's third biggest exchange, Bybit. I had no idea it was this big. It must be Coinbase, then Binance, then Bybit. After hackers stole$1.4 billion from the firm last week, in doing so, the crypto industry is hoping to calm investor worries that the hack could lead to another FTX like implosion. Several exchanges, including BitGet and MEXC, have made emergency loans to Bybit to replenish tokens lost in the hack so Bybit's customers can withdraw funds without a problem.

50:09The loans are unusual given how quickly and easily they were arranged without prolonged due diligence and with few strings attached. And I think it actually makes sense because, you know this was not mis I mean obviously they shouldn't have gotten hacked but it's not by bit was stealing the money right it wasn't fraud uh it it seems like it was like a mistake and so you know the company management is probably more respected by other people in the industry and they're able to uh just they're able to do they're able to say like what would what would we want uh our competitors to do in this situation and this is one of those things if a if a 1.4 billion dollar hole emerges in a crypto exchange um it is terrible for the industry i mean people were talking about this uh people were talking about this last week they were like oh this is actually bullish because bybit has to buy back all the eth which would create you know uh you know pressure upward pressure on the price but cope in such many ways yeah anyways so bit get a smaller rival lent Bybit for 40 ,000 Ether worth more than$105 million, roughly five hours after the Friday hack.

51:16According to the CEO, Gracie Chen, the loan has unusually borrower-friendly terms since it charges no interest, doesn't require Bybit to post any collateral, and doesn't have a set timeline to pay it back. It's more pure trust. So I think everyone in crypto knows that if there's a fracture, it can go very badly for everyone in the ecosystem. So it's worth it to just step in, unplug the hole and reassure the entire market and then sort things out. I mean, it's just moving quickly to stop a liquidity crisis. A lot of the FTX stuff was triggered by Luna. And then what was Three Arrows Capital? Those two major implosions, you catalyze this sort of downstream effect.

51:54But I mean, you could play out a different scenario where all of those firms, Three Arrows and Luna, they all shored up the capital immediately and coasted on. Although Luna, it does seem like it was like a ticking time bomb and so the pure had some serious problems but the pure irony here and i'm and i'm glad that big gut is doing this uh you know i'm sure i'm sure they'll they'll it'll come back in other ways for them but the irony here saying the loan has unusually friendly borrowing bar terms since it charges no interest doesn't require them to pay back the collateral and doesn't have a set timeline it's more of pure trust the irony is that crypto is created to deliver trustless finance, right?

52:35You didn't have to rely on trust. You could just trust the software and the code. So it's kind of interesting that they didn't do this. Reinventing everything, including bailouts and backroom deals between bank CEOs, basically. This would have been a really interesting way to flex the potential of crypto to be like, we raised a billion dollars on chain in this sort of trustless way in order to, you know, make our customers whole. But, you know, I'm sure they had reasons not to do that. So Bybit said, we know each other well. We had common investors. Together, we want to drive the industry forward and we want to fight our common enemy who are hackers, not each other.

53:20BitGet will not get any equity stake in Bybit as part of the loan. i'm sure all that stuff takes long time to paper to how much equity you're going to get what are the terms and so instead it's just hey i'm going to front you and we'll figure it out later because otherwise it's going to bring us all down it's so it's also just so crypto to to be like here here's 100 mil quick you know the cool thing is that they were able to i'm sure they were able to get that the 40 000 ether over there yep in minutes in the same way that it took minutes to steal the 1.4 billion. Well, if you're looking for a little bit more of a normal finance app, why don't you check out public.com investing for those who take it seriously, multi asset investing, they have industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

54:04And we got a post from leaf Abraham here, scrappiness matters, their team, the public.com team produced a new TV ad entirely in house, no ad agency, no production company, just sweat and hustle from the team. and a few grand of licensing fees start to finish 12 days and i love this i mean you can go see the ad but uh it's cool because like like people forget that like it can go you can deliver just an mp4 to the super bowl if you want to like you don't have to hire a team for that yeah if you're gonna post it on twitter x like you can just take that video and run it on tv uh and of course they had a team internally that clearly knows their way around production and so they were able to make something that looks very cinematic and looks great and you should go check it out but it it is cool to see a company that's as big as public, like, uh, being still scrappy and, and, and they probably had more fun and it was probably more aligned with their brand and they just had less back and forth, move faster.

54:55Uh, and it's great to see. And, uh, I think that's an important lesson for, for founders is like, don't lose that scrappiness as you scale, just because you can afford an ad agency doesn't mean you actually need one necessarily. You need to make sure that it's the right person, right? Align. Yeah. I'd like to see somebody do a, uh, a company like public do a an ad that's just like a recording of a facetime call so it's like ringing the ceo picks up gives a quick spiel and like hangs up and like that's the entire ad unit and it's just shot in one take screen recorded on their phone yeah because you could imagine even just something novel like having that having that the you might have to license the sound from apple yeah but but it would be a cool uh viewer experience yeah well let's move on to an interesting post from casey I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.

55:46He was involved in the scrolls decoding project. Friedman did. He runs a very cool company here in LA out of a castle in Burbank. It's amazing called Terraform Labs, Terraform Industries. And they're using solar panels to suck carbon and hydrogen out of the atmosphere and convert it into natural gas. And then they can sell that onto the grid as energy. Very cool company. Very cool. And he worked at JPL for a long time. He's brilliant. And he is asking the question of what should go on the first starship mission to Mars. And so the next window. So you can't just go to Mars anytime. It's not like the moon.

56:27You actually have to. The two planets have to be really close, basically. And it only happens every couple of years. And so we really got to hit that if we want to get on a cadence. and we want there to be at least one mission during the next launch window and then we want like a hundred ready to go for the next window because you can't just you can't just wait four years and be sitting on your hands you got to test a lot and so yeah there are 601 days until october 7th 2026 which is the mass optimal launch window to mars and when that opens so he says he doesn't have any privileged information but it's fun to speculate about what spacex could choose to send on its first starship flights to Mars.

57:06Spoiler alert, he thinks it's rods from God, which is fun. So over the second - By the way, Calder in the chat says, having to plan around the optimal launch issue window is a skill issue. Skill issue, yeah, that's great. And so over the next 600 days, SpaceX has a number of key technologies to demonstrate orbit, reuse, refill, and chill. So orbit, this Friday we're due for flight 8 of Starship, which will be very cool to watch. And this one may finally achieve orbit. Earlier flights technically had the performance necessary, but deliberately targeted the ocean to prevent the possibility of a Starship being stranded in orbit without propulsion capability, and then undergoing an uncontrolled re-entry and crashing.

57:54Reuse, this is the holy grail of rocketry. SpaceX has indicated that they may attempt to refly Booster 14 on Flight 9, which would establish booster reuse. Flight 9 may also see the first attempt to catch the Starship upper stage. But in any case, the successful reuse of both stages of Starship is necessary to fly to Mars. We got to be reusing these things if we're going to make it economical to get there and get back continually. Refilling, we can load Starship up with cargo for Mars. but it's not going to leave low earth orbit unless starship can be refilled with fresh fuel and oxidizer spacex has been working on orbital refilling for some time but we need to see it actually working so you got to get a bunch of fuel up to space and then refill once you're in space which is crazy uh because we're not sending something can we also talk about how uncontrolled uncontrolled re-entry oh yeah the best that's just like crashing anywhere like crashing for just slamming back into the atmosphere.

58:53Yeah. So it's a, it's high stakes stuff. They might have to shoot it out of the world. If it's a shootout out of the sky, if it's coming down over a populated area, uh, and then chill by far the easiest of the four tasks tasks, but long-term stability of starships, cryogenic fuel will require that it'd be actively refrigerated, particularly in the challenging thermal environment of Leo or deep space. It's hard to make predictions particularly about the future, but he's optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled starships ready to go in October of next year, followed by a 10-month cruise and then either Mars orbital insertion.

59:28And so he broke this down in another article. He has a couple different things that he thinks that they should work on, but we'll just skip right to the spoiler alert. He says rods from God. We know there's a high likelihood that mostly pure water exists within 10 to 20 meters of the surface across large swaths of the various perspective landing sites. Why not drop off a few dozen long steel or tungsten spears, guide them in while tracking them on radar, and then survey their impact craters with high rise as soon as the dust has cleared. These rods will impact the surface at about eight kilometers per second.

1:00:08That's extremely fast. Penetrating many times their length and exposing the subsurface to our existing orbital instruments for the first time. The main attraction of this approach is that it requires essentially zero additional effort on top of the existing program, whereas the others require either a crash instrument development program or building and flying multiple intricate surface operations robots and landing them with an extremely untested EDL system. Rods from the gods merely requires dropping a few tons of steel in roughly the same area and then surveying the damage. It's also the only method that can deliver enough energy to actually directly access the deep subsurface at scale.

1:00:48And so JPL actually considered doing this. Of course, they went with robots. But I like that he's thinking outside the box. Well, this is the kind of citizen science that you've been asking Elizabeth Holmes to do, right? Yes, yes, yes. Like, hey, you're in prison, but like prove that you're legit by being at the cutting edge, making recommendations. You know, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes, you know, writing an open letter to Pfizer and saying, hey, you're doing it all wrong. Johnson and Johnson. Yeah, this is how you're making this mistake. Yeah. Yeah. We actually had this figured out. Yeah. We'll get to this later in the show.

1:01:24But H5N1, the bird flu is going around. What is Elizabeth Holmes take if she doesn't have one, you know, keep her locked up. But anyway, he closes out by saying, if all this goes well, the technology situation in 2028 could look like this. And that's, I think, the next transfer window. Easier technology. SpaceX will have expertise in space solar, photovoltaics, Mars air separation, minor water prospectors. And SpaceX will not be an expert in pressure structures. And then the harder technology is orbital refueling, which we mentioned, cryofuel heat rejection, Mars EDL, spacesuits, long duration life support, surface life support, and water minor.

1:02:08And then SpaceX is not a expert in fuel plant rock miners construction robots nuclear reactors uh and this is uh this is i mean there's a lot of other companies that are working on this tech now yeah yeah there's that uh what's the team that's spun out of spacex that's doing nuclear stuff now it's not not uh uh yeah it's the wife of the farcaster founder oh i don't know um but there there are a number of companies that have spun out of space to solve different problems that will come up as we colonize the moon and Mars. But what's really crazy is like, there's all this noise around Elon, all this noise around tech and stuff, but things do seem to be relatively on track for a private company to deliver something to Mars in just a few years, which is crazy and a huge milestone.

1:03:03And so I'm super excited for that. And I'm excited to see where it goes. And I'm sure there'll be lots of other opportunities that crop up for businesses that are built on top of that plan because SpaceX isn't going to do everything. Yeah. I got a pitch. I got a pitch last year. Maybe it was 2023 for a team building gas stations on the moon. Like they were like, we're Chevron for space. That was the thesis of like basically building, you know, fuel depots on the moon, which is a very cool thing to be thinking about. So Doug Bernauer, the founder of Radiant, another founder's fund, Andreessen portfolio company, he worked at SpaceX with Elon on special projects.

1:03:46Elon put him on a task. You know how the Falcon rocket has those legs that land and that's how it lands? They took those off when they created the chopsticks that catch it. But those legs come down and they land the Falcon. LaFerrari doors? Basically. Yeah. Yeah. The LaFerrari of the rocket world, I'm sure. And so he was working on that project. Then Elon was like, I like you keep going, work on tunnels and boring company stuff for a while. And then he tasked him with, hey, when we get to Mars, what are we going to do for energy? And he ran the numbers on photovoltaics. And this is a little bit controversial.

1:04:23Not everyone agrees with his conclusion, but basically because Mars is farther away, it gets less light. And so he was saying, if you need to set up solar panels to refuel a rocket to generate enough power, essentially, you'll need to bring tons and tons of like just so many solar panels. And the math doesn't quite work out in his mind. And so what he said was, you should bring a nuclear reactor, a smaller nuclear reactor, drop it down. It It generates a lot of waste heat, which can be used to melt ice, creating water. And then you have a nuclear reactor that can then create the fuel out of the natural resources and then refuel the rocket and then come back.

1:05:02And it's a perfect plot to a sci-fi movie now. And it could be a good catastrophe documentary. It's like, hey, we dropped this reactor and set off this chain of events that destroyed the universe. And now we have to save the universe. We've got to save them. And so, yeah, I mean, they've taken that. I mean, that's kind of like the long-term inspiration for Radiant. But in the short term, they're building basically a nuclear reactor in a shipping container. And you can drop it off in a military base. You can drop it off on an oil and gas extraction site. You can drop it off at a hospital if they need a one megawatt diesel generator.

1:05:41You can just replace that with a one megawatt nuclear reactor. And it lasts for five years or 10 years instead of, you know, like a couple days until you need to refuel it with diesel. So in the military, you have to deliver diesel through these convoys and these trucking like over and over and over again. Radiant kind of eliminates that need. And so they're going into testing now and we're working on that. But when we get to Mars and you get sleepy, what kind of bed are you going to be sleeping on on Mars? Eight sleep. Let's go. We're putting an eight. The first thing to go to Mars is an eight sleep.

1:06:12The first thing is a ramp corporate card. For sure. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. go to aidsleep.com use code tbpn and send us your receipt and we'll we'll get you a hat anyway let's stay on the topic wait i gotta look at my i gotta look at my sleep score last night before we jump in i i tried the warm-up thing i tried the warm-up thing and it's fantastic i woke up no problem at like 5 30 it was amazing uh yeah it's it's unbeatable all right i didn't do it so hot. I had an 84, but it was just because it was just because I, there you go. It took my son, uh, needing to go to the hospital for you to beat me.

1:06:54Jordy texted me last night and says like, I won't be out slapped. Yeah. No one, no one. I was serious about it. I just only got six and a half hours. I got six and a half hours too. Something, something happened. I think, I think I set my alarm a little bit too early. Uh, well let's stay on the topic of space exploration, space travel and NASA. NASA, you might have heard that there was an impact probability an asteroid was going to hit Earth. It was very risky. There was a poly market all about it. But good news, the impact probability of asteroid 2024 year four has dropped to 0.004%. It's expected to safely pass Earth in 2032.

1:07:32Let's go. Thank you to humanity undefeated. And we have a post from uh Sula here fell for it again award would you look at the time nothing ever happens uh so so anyways my my conspiracy I don't have the tinfoil hat here unfortunately but my my conspiracy theory just said last week was that NASA really didn't want to get doged and so as all the pressure you know they felt like the spotlight was going to shift to them they go oh oh it's an asteroid it's one percent the next day and they just were basically raising it like a point every couple of days. They just make us all afraid. It's like, well, we better keep them funded because we want to keep track of those.

1:08:11It's a fun conspiracy. I wonder if it worked. Maybe they got the email. What are you working on? And they said, we're working on saving humanity, guys. And Elon was like, keep up the good work. Joe was just like, we're not cutting a dime. I don't know. I mean, the NASA budget isn't that big. It seems reasonable and it's fun. They produce inspiring stuff for all sorts of Americans all over the world. It's fantastic. Anyway, let's move on to Stratechery. There's an article today about AI promise and chip precariousness. Anthropic released Claude's Sonnet 3.7. Dylan Patel had the joke of the day.

1:08:48He says Anthropic is also a Chinese AI company because of their aversion to the number four. And the point here is that Claude is just updating 3.5, 3.7. why don't they just do Claude 4? And it's because they see it as a GPT-4 level model in terms of total training size, that's the answer there. But it is funny that all of the different model companies are on slightly different numbering systems. And so GPT-4 is equivalent to Glock 3, which is equivalent to Claude 3 in terms of like total scale. And this is all - You kind of slipped there and you said Glock. Glock, Glock. which is a great name for a model grok has grok chocolate i want to say grok guac yeah uh yeah for sure uh after this piece was published i was contacted by anthropic who told me that sonnet 3.7 would not be considered an e26 flop model and cost a few tens of millions of dollars to train though future models will be bigger so that's why they're fundraising I updated the post with that information the only significant change is that Claude 3 is now referred to as an advanced model but not a Gen 3 model it's all very confusing I love Mollick's work but reject his neutral naming scheme whoever gets to a generation first deserves the honor of the name in other words if Gen 2 models are GPT 4 class then Gen 3 models are Grok 3 class and whereas Sonnet 3.7 is an evolution of Sonnet 3.5's fascinating mixture of personality and coding prowess, likely a result of some anthropic special sauce in post training.

1:10:26Grok 3 feels like a model that is the result of a step order increase in compute capacity with a much lighter layer of reinforcement learning with human feedback. Its answers are far more in-depth and detailed. Model good, but frequently becomes too verbose. RLHF lacking. it gets math problems right and that's and that's referencing yeah that's referencing uh grok you know saying that uh you know who should somebody asked uh uh if like one one what was the question who spreads the most information on accidents is elon or who should get the death penalty it says trump and it's like very controversial and not even aligned with like what elon believes obviously and so clearly just an aberration of the model and it gets math math problem's right, so the model's good, but its explanations are harder to follow because the RLHF is lacking.

1:11:16And that makes sense because it takes a long time to actually do RLHF, generate all the data, and buy new data. It's also much more willing to generate forbidden content from erotica to bomb recipes while having on the surface the political sensibilities of Tumblr with something more akin to 4chan under the surface. Grok3 is also a reminder of how much speed matters and by extension why base models are still important in a world of AIs that reason. Grok3 is tangibly faster than the competition, which is a better user experience more generally. Conversation is the realm of quick wits, not deep thinkers.

1:11:54The latter is who I want to be doing research or other agentic type tasks. The former makes for a better consumer experience in a chat bot or voice interface. And so a lot of people are having this kind of paradigm shift where if they just want to chat and talk through an issue, they'll use grog three. And then if they really want a research report, the fire off open AI's chat GPT deep research, let it cook for five, 10, 20 minutes, come back and have the full thing. Uh, and I found that there's this interesting, like collapsing process where deep research is great at pulling just every single possible source from the internet.

1:12:28And then, um, I don't know what's going on here, but HDMI is iffy today. um uh and and then and then so it'll generate 5 000 words 10 000 words and then i'll fire another prompt to say hey summarize this in 10 bullet points because i trust that you've done enough research at this point to have all the good data um but uh so he goes on to say chat gpt meanwhile still has the best product experience its mac app in particular is dramatically better than clods and it handles more consumer use cases like math homework in a much more user-friendly way deep research, meanwhile, is significantly better than all of its competitors, including Grok's deep search, and for me anyway, is the closest experience to AGI yet.

1:13:11OpenAI's biggest asset, however, is the ChatGPT brand and associated mindshare. COO Brad Lightcap just told CNBC that the service had surpassed 400 million weekly active users, a 33 % increase in less than three months. OpenAI is, as I declared four months ago after the release of ChatGPT, the accidental consumer company. Let me see if I take this out and put it back in. Let's see. Okay. Well, fun report from Ben Thompson over as techery as always. Let's move on to some fundraising news. We got Nico from Default today. I'm incredibly excited to announce Default's new inbound orchestration platform and an additional$4 million in funding led by 8VC.

1:13:57We started with default with the vision of building the best platform for revenue teams to orchestrate their inbound workflows. And so default, if you're not familiar, is a tool for helping B2B SaaS companies deal with inbound requests and pipeline, basically lead qualification, pipeline them into trials, get them to convert into real customers. And so he says, what's that? We good? It's still staticky. I don't know what's going on here. You think it's the cable? Okay, we'll see. We got a problem with you on the stream, Jordy. Good thing we're ironing this out. We're trying to figure out FaceTime today so that we can...

1:14:47Yep. That makes sense. let's see let me see if I can change this to audio video microphone okay can you hear me I can hear you okay we're good so he says the go-to-market landscape has changed more in the last five years than in the previous two decades teams can no longer afford bloated tech stacks inefficient workflows and fragmented data. Winning in this new era requires AI-driven automation, seamless data orchestration, and intelligent routing. What is default 2.0? Embedded website intent data and conversion tracking. One of our biggest learnings since launching 14 months ago is just how much data is siloed in the inbound marketing funnel, especially on the website.

1:15:35Almost every revenue team we've met with has told us that they're flying blind on what's happening at the top of their marketing funnel with no visibility or control into website activity from target accounts. So they want to see, hey, you're thinking about buying this product. What are you doing on our website? Are you a qualified lead or not? Are you worth the CEO getting on a call with you to pitch you? Or should it be some SDR? Or should we just have you fill out more forms until you're actually ready? And so very cool to see him building. He's been building for a number of years. And he's money and launched a new product.

1:16:06I mean, they've just been so focused. They came out a few years ago at this point with the core idea of what they were going to do, but they've just been in the trenches every single day iterating on like, actually, what is the product? Like, what does the product actually do? Because people oftentimes come out with like, defaults plan was always to be this sort of like, inbound lead processing, you know, sales enablement, you know, product. And, you know, it's been amazing to watch them just sort of, you know, iterate and hit these milestones and acquire some very meaningful customers at this point.

1:16:39And I think he's been smart about sort of staggering out his his capital raises uh he raised i think a seed round from craft adding more firepower from 8bc now uh awesome to see and uh bright bright future i mean i think uh i just appreciate how nico didn't leave anything to chance he's just been focused on making like actually making sure the product is meaningfully differentiated from the rest of the market and making it better every single day it doesn't feel like one of those hyper bloated rounds where it's like oh they got 50 million dollars out of nowhere and who knows yeah like now it's two billion dollar company it's like he's putting one foot in front of the other making sure the product's working iterating actually taking time to build this stuff and yeah i don't and going with tier ones instead of you know some frothy you know partnership i don't know how this was priced but i'm gonna guess that this was like a 10 dilution around or potentially even less yeah seems great well uh you know if he keeps going he's gonna take a shot at salesforce salesforce scott's matthew mcconaughey on board should he get a celebrity to endorse saquon saquon yeah uh well there's a there's a report jeb bush you know like it used to be that every founder wanted to raise from jeb now saquon's the the next target yeah the king he's the king maker well there's a there's a report in the information about investors souring on celebrity brands uh these days it seems like every celebrity wants to start their own brand.

1:18:06Just look at Robert Downey Jr., who just raised venture money. I love that. But investors say they're overwhelmed by pitches for undifferentiated or low quality goods and are quickly souring on the sector. Four early stage investors who previously backed celebrity brands said they are shifting focus to promising products as opposed to celebrity buzz, especially after high profile flops in once trendy categories like beauty. This could be a rude awakening. There's a funny quote in here. One investor was recently pitched on a protein puck, cookie-like snack, fronted by a rapper, but passed after the investor didn't like the taste.

1:18:44The firm was also reluctant to invest given the number of high-protein products already on the market, the investor said, and wasn't convinced the rapper's fan base was enough to make the snack a breakthrough right now. And that's true. It's like for celebrities, the ones that seem to do well in consumer have a, they're just like, they're posting all the time. And so there's this idea that it's like, if you're just a celebrity and once a year you're taking over the world with some Academy Award winning movie, that doesn't give you permission to tell your audience about some promoted product every single day, right?

1:19:23Like the Daniel Day Lewis energy drink isn't going to make its appearance in Lincoln or there will be blood. And so unless you're following Daniel Day Lewis's Instagram or podcast, which he doesn't have, you're just not going to hear about that outside of one press release. Now, there are other people you look at like the Mr. Beast case study or the Kim Kardashian where they are posting their life every single day. They have so much content going out that They can not only basically run a lot of actual direct response ads for their product on a very consistent basis, but they can also tell the story of building the company and building the product.

1:20:00And that's what makes it a little bit more. Yeah, there's a difference. Here's where I would separate it out. There's a difference between fame and attention, right? You can be famous and have very little owned attention, right? So owned attention to me is Jake Paul, you know, absolutely grinding on content. He's famous, but he's also delivering content every single day for years and years and years and years. Logan Paul is the same way. Another good example is Kim Kardashian. She's gone on these crazy television.

1:20:37And she has the sort of sustained attention of posting every single day. And I think that a lot of these celebrity brands have popped up. you know, Casamigos is a good example, right, of this sort of old style of celebrity brand where you just are relying on fame to drive to drive acquisition. And I think that works in a category like beverage where a lot of the sales is happening offline. But for these like online, more like sort of digitally native brands, like I think you need like actual distribution channels. And so some brands that I've seen that that actually work well is like product innovation of positioning a a like 200 milligram caffeine energy drink but positioning it as a sports drink and selling it to kids and then like combining that with massive attention better uh jake paul's betting uh and joey's uh betting company like that makes sense because jake paul's posting about boxing and sports and training all day long like it's just a great audience.

1:21:40But, but ultimately, you know, I got pitched a company like a year ago that was like that Snoop Dogg was doing. And I just didn't really have like, I was like, okay, your, the, your play here is to take a commodity CPG product, put Snoop Dogg's face on it. And, and that's going to drive more sell through in the grocery store. And, and I don't necessarily buy it, right. If it's truly a phenomenal product, but the other thing is like, you know, another brand that I think has done well is um uh Kendall Jenner has 818 tequila yep she's completely integrated that into her life so when she's hanging with her friends on the weekend they're drinking 818 when she's going to some show you know in Vegas like they're serving 818 at the bar so it's hyper integrated into her life yep these other celebrities that are like oh yeah I'm gonna have my tequila brand yep and you know just um hope that my face moves bottle like I'm just super bearish on that and i also get overextended like you think about like snoop dogg or shack like they have so many different partnerships at this point it gets really really difficult to know you know like cluny was kind of right and like casamigos was his thing and you didn't really see him everywhere uh with with some of these other celebrities they're doing so many things it's hard to track okay what are you selling this day today or tomorrow yeah it might be something different who knows do they actually care about this product do they actually use it yeah yeah yeah i also think like ryan gosling applied the more traditional style of celebrity brand building which was just i'm famous i'm going to take a commodity product and and use my fame to just like drive more acquisition but that doesn't necessarily work in some of these more differentiated categories where consumers are discerning right they're not going to eat the they're not going to eat the snoop dog pizza rolls every night unless it's actually like the best pizza roll at the best price and you know um yeah and uh was it was it Gosling or Reynolds Ryan Reynolds was the one with the tequila and the Sprint Mobile or the the yeah Ryan Reynolds he he seemed really deeply integrated with those companies where like he was you know almost directing ads and like really seemed integrated with like his his brand he would like come into a company that was already kind of working Mint Mobile and then yeah really make it all about him for a while and kind of but do it in like this almost self-aware way that kind of broke through.

1:24:02It didn't feel like he was just getting paid to endorse it. It felt like he really had a stake. And I think he did when we looked at the numbers, he was making a lot of money and had a big equity portion. Yeah. And the last thing I would say here, we've seen with Skims, Kim Kardashian's brand, is that extremely expensive to do building. In the example, you know, in the Skims situation, She has 5 % of the company now after raising$700 million and Skims is going to be a big company, but it required a huge amount of capital. So again, even if you have that attention, you need brilliant execution and in Skims case, brilliant product as well.

1:24:43So, um, well, John, I'm glad we're dealing with this technical issue while it's just me and not our guest tomorrow who, uh, is going to be, uh, you know, is a busy guy. Yeah. Yeah. We'll have to iron it out. I think we'll be on zoom on a different computer. Running it from this laptop is just a mess. Um, but, uh, let's do a quick promoted post for bezel. We love bezel here. shop over 22 ,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Jordy and I have been going back and forth on what the next watch should be. We're going to have to start doing some of these off the balance sheet.

1:25:23It's going to impact profitability, but it's sort of siloed away from our household finances, which get a little bit more scrutiny. And what do we got today? We got to start. Actually, the ad is just us bidding on auctions yes yes yes uh they're highlighting a uh uh presidential rolex gold day date champagne diamond set president fifteen thousand dollars available highly recommend it's the watch from glengarry glen ross look at this watch this watch costs more than your car it's great that's great uh yeah highly recommend bezel fantastic experience um anyway let's move on to the timeline we got sully saying uh you have approximately one year before the normies catch Sean, go build.

1:26:09What is he talking about? Talking about AI? He's just talking about AI. I think this is one of those things. You can tell the average person on the street that intelligence is free and they can create an army of robots to create wealth for them. And they'll be like, cool. Did you see the new Netflix show? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think this is one of those things. The internet was already... Personal computing was amazing. The internet was amazing. Mobile was amazing. All these major, you know, crypto was amazing. All these, you know, tech trends, even when the average person sort of starts to experience them in their daily life, the lack of agency is what makes life great for the entrepreneur is, yes, you know, millions of people, billions of people could use the same AI tools that everybody listening to this and the same tools that we use, but they're just not going to because they're fixated on the next TikTok video in their algorithm, the next Netflix special.

1:27:14And that's why there's never been a better time in history to be an entrepreneur. You can actually just lap everyone over and over and over. And you absolutely should. Yeah, for sure. Let's move on to Sam Byers. He says, in case you didn't have a sense of scale of Chinese overseas fishing fleets, It's strip mining the ocean life and leaving it bare for those who rely on it. Dozens of ships as far as the eye can see for months and years at a time. Argentinians, Argentina's military forces patrol Argentine waters to keep Chinese fishing fleets out. China is running rampant on the ocean, apparently.

1:27:54I had no idea about this. This video is absolutely insane. it looks like a scene out of dune where you have the uh what do you call those those harvester things i forget yeah yeah i know exactly yeah the sort of um you know america has gone back and forth sustainability is you know sustainability was i feel like when i was graduating uh like in like 2019 it was the hot thing it was anti-plastic it was like you're gonna bring your uh you're going to bring like glass to the grocery store and like put rice in it like it was like we sort of reached peak sustainability like pro planet there were consumer brands that said like their entire differentiation as a brand was you know we're eco we're green we're one percent for the planet that's why you should buy us and that's really faded in the mind of the consumer right i don't think that eco marketing even works anymore for a pretty broad and this was like like peak all birds in many ways.

1:28:54Right. And this, this, when you see videos like this, it makes you know, all the sort of like ocean plastic brands, it makes them almost seem like, you know, what, what is even the point if, if there are groups internationally that are going to completely nuke this, you know, uh all life in certain areas and and it doesn't you know i'm not a uh i'm not a maritime uh uh you know uh life expert but one one year of these sort of chinese fleets you know fishing like that off of your shores and you could set back a local um you know the local um fishing uh you know sort of supply or life back decades and decades and decades, potentially 100 years.

1:29:50So what they're doing out there is certainly not sustainable. And we don't even know what the impacts are yet. Yeah. I mean, that's always been the tradeoff is like in America, we're putting away the plastic straw as well. Brazil's deciding whether or not they should burn down the entire or clear cut the amazon rainforest or china's like firing up the next major coal plant and if there's not some sort of global treaty uh you know you're just gonna fall behind yeah i had a crazy story from that era of like hardcore eco marketing i had a buddy who i was still in college and he came to me and he's like dude i'm gonna make this collapsible reusable straw that people are gonna put on their keychain okay and he went all in on it like took loans out from his parents and was like he basically you know for him at the time thirty thousand dollars was like a monstrous amount of money and he was like why don't you do this with me and i didn't i didn't see the vision at all to be honest like personally i wasn't i was like i'd rather not use a straw personally than just like bring mine around and be like putting it on my keychain and stuff so i didn't get it but he saw the vision and he went for it and this is the beauty of consumer products is that you don't really know if something oftentimes like you have a strong feeling that something's going to hit but you don't know until you start selling it and so he spent 30 grand you know making this cool video and he launched this thing on kickstarter and he did like just under two million dollars in 30 days wow and then he had a whole new setup and i was like blown away it was amazing but then he had a whole new set of problems he was like oh did we get our margins right like can we actually meet this demand right um absolutely insane roller coaster but i think that That was peak.

1:31:37Go on the chat right now.

1:31:42Bring back plastic straw. Something like. I'm completely losing you. Let's do a couple more posts. Jordy, you there? I'm there. I can hear you. I like this prompt. Save yourself$200 a month. ChatGPT 4.0. Think of yourself as the premium model. ChatGPT Pro Plan. Got it. I'll provide responses at the highest level of detail, accuracy, and relevance, optimized for your technical and business needs. Let me know how I can assist. I don't know if that actually works, but it's a funny joke. And never a dull day on AI. AIX, I guess, is what we're saying these days. Never a dull day. Yeah, never a dull day.

1:32:23Let's go to Jordan Singer. He's got some announcements. Say hello to Cobot Company. We're sharing an early preview of Cobot, an entirely new way for teams of people and AI agents to work together in a shared space. Jordan Singer says, we're so excited to share more about what we've been working on at Mainframe. We're fascinated by agents because they're capable of doing real work and producing outcomes that can accelerate teams. We don't think the experience around them has been cracked yet. Enter Cobot Co. What's your take on Cobot Co? So one, I love what Jordan's doing here, which is he's created this sort of like parent brand, which is mainframe.

1:32:59He like launched that. He raised money for that. And then now he's shipping what you can think of as, you know, products, but he's almost operating more as a product studio. And at least from the outside, I'm not I was involved with his last company, but but not in this one. and ultimately you can imagine him like shipping more and more of these things as all the technology evolves quickly this sort of mainstream mainframe allows him to just like continue to ship and iterate uh without the without the same level of risk as when you start like lucy and then you ship lucy's first product and if it doesn't work or it doesn't scale as fast as you want it to you're you're stuck with it not that you experience that uh quite the opposite but um anyways i think this fantastic.

1:33:45I really love the visuals here. It's so hard to actually stand out visually online anymore. You have to come up with something that's truly unique. And I think that, uh, Jordan and the mainframe team actually crushed it here. And, uh, I like the name cobot. Yeah. Uh, is, is fun. Well, speaking of, uh, robots, uh, let's go to Yaxin. He says prediction household robots are going to be the size of Dobby the elf. It needs to be small enough that you feel comfortable crushing it with your boots if it bugs out and starts attacking you and yeah we've seen a couple of things i think uh reggie was talking about this how you know you shouldn't have a computer that you can't throw out the window uh and and i agree with this this is like the original asimo and once the boston dynamics robots start getting bigger and bigger they start getting scarier and uh unless it's an industrial application a lot of things could be done with smaller robots cheaper and it's certainly more reassuring do you think that when robots like truly start to feel alive that at night people will want to just go and put them like in a closet like lock the door just this feeling of like if something feels sentient even if you know that at the end of the day you can just kind of unplug it does that give you this sense of do you want to go to sleep when you've got three or four little dobby size robots you know walking around uh dobby uh i don't know i mean if it's quiet i i know people put away the roombas uh there's been a lot of these features that have been built into these, like, you know, the Nest, the Smart Home, the Apple, the Alexas, we typically have like a hardware level kill switch to let you know that if the ring is red, it cannot listen to you at all.

1:35:23Facebook came out with a video conferencing product called The Portal. You'd attach it to your TV and it would have a very high quality the video signal that would come through. And that had a slider that you could slide over the camera because Facebook didn't want to be known. Well, that was the thing, wasn't it? Didn't Zuckerberg like have his, he always would have his laptop like taped. You remember that? That was a big thing in case they hacked me and want to be able to close the webcam entirely. Think about how many times Zuck has been mogged by Apple. like he tries to uh like eventually he's like that that whole portal device like should have been a hit but they launched it at the wrong time and then like the technology itself was amazing but then they were competing with facetime which like everybody has their uh you know computers ipads iphone facetime is like probably you know aside from the complications we're dealing with right now probably one of the best products apple's ever made yeah it's not a facetime issue.

1:36:25It's HDMI issue. We got this big, long HDMI cable and it keeps cutting out. You keep seeing the static on the stream. It's terrible. Uh, well, let's go to David holes. He says, crazy question. How many kids would you be willing to have in exchange for paying zero taxes? And, uh, 26 % of people said I wouldn't change my plans. Uh, only 13 % of people said I would have 10 kids. Um, I mean, I guess it's only 13. I mean, I don't know. That's kind of crazy. I mean, it goes to this idea of like, I feel like kids are a fixed cost and taxes are a variable expense because they scale with your wealth. So, yeah, if you're making like$10 million, like you're not going to wind up spending more on the incremental kid.

1:37:08There's actually a lot of economies of scale to having lots of kids. Yeah. But it's more of a reflection of just like how many kids do you want to have, I think. I love how you just said kids have economies of scale. Totally. That's a great post. And it's real. yeah I think that one thing I saw this earlier the you know how you can write I think it's like 6k a year you can write off for dependent support it's like child care basically and that number if you're a parent and you've like have to hire child care just feels like ridiculously low right I probably spend across like multiple nannies and babysitters stuff like that like around 100k a year on child care and so the fact that the government's like okay you can write off 6k i'm like okay thank you for nothing basically but you know why it's 6k is it was that number was set in the 70s and they haven't adjusted it for inflation inflation so in the 70s it would have made sense like some babysitters making 6k a year something like that to to take care of your kids now it's like that gets you one month of child care in california and in new york um and uh absolutely wild but um there are some countries that have done this type of stuff where they've they've put incentives in place to yes uh encourage more uh uh pronatalism and there's there's a bunch of other pronatalist uh features you should do like a whole deep dive on it yeah i mean the funny thing here is i do think the right answer is i wouldn't change my plans because you should be having kids based on your just broader ability to uh and commitment to parent and provide for them in any scenario.

1:38:50And so plan around that. Anyway, let's move on to crime junkie host. Ashley Flowers is building a$250 million podcasting empire. She hosts the second most popular show in the United States. Now she's brought on investors to take on YouTube, Hollywood, and her biggest live tour yet. Good afternoon from Los Angeles. It's warm, sunny, and great to be home. Thanks to those of you who attended our podcast business summit. This is from the New York Times. Let's break this down. This 36-year-old podcaster makes $45 million a year in profit. That's a lot of money. She's the creator of the popular Crime Junkie podcast, and she's still getting used to being on camera.

1:39:31I got into podcasting so no one would have to see my face, but now, of course, she has to be on video. She built Crime Junkie into the second most popular podcast in the United States. Joe Rogan is first. The weekly show reaches about six million people according to edison research over the last few months flowers has recorded started recording video episodes of crime junkie to expand the show's audience her video setup is a work in progress the studio is an old gym on the ground floor of a company's offices located in the broad ripple neighborhood of indianapolis soundproofing materials are scattered across the room and a couple of her producers oversee a makeshift video bay not much not much different than ours a couple of monitors on her table along one wall one employee sits on the floor with her laptop helping Flowers when she stumbles over a pronunciation.

1:40:16The person in charge of the makeshift teleprompter sits to the right, scrolling the script up and down manually. Flowers is now constructing a new studio devoted to video, part of an expansion that will triple her office space to 30 ,000 feet and double her staff to almost 130 people. That's big. And so she raised$40 million from the churning group. Yeah, it sounds so insane. But when you're making$45 million in profit a year, having 100 plus employees seems totally reasonable. Yeah, definitely. It's cool to see. So the Turner Group has been making, you know, it'll take the fullness of time to understand how these bets play out.

1:40:54But they were also in Doug DeMuro's. Doug DeMuro's, Cars and Bids. They did Cars and Bids. And as part of that, I believe the Doug DeMuro channel went into that holding company, essentially. Yeah. And they've also been in Barstool at various points and Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine production company. And so they've been doing a lot of stuff in this. Flowers could have funded the effort herself. Audio Chuck, named after her dog, turned a profit of about$45 million last year, according to people who asked not to be identified discussing confidential matters. They were, John, let's just put this into perspective for the audience.

1:41:31If they were getting figure AIs multiple, they would be worth$100 trillion. Probably. Probably. So just to give you some context there. And so she wants Chernin's help expanding her business from a podcast network built around her to a media company that spans audio, video, merchandise, and live events. AudioChuck's founder already wears many hats at the company. She is host of two primary podcasts, Crime Junkie and The Deck, and serves as chief executive officer. She gives feedback on stories, closes deals with distributors, sells advertising, and tours the country, taping live episodes. She's also the mother to a three-year-old daughter.

1:42:09So she's got a lot on her plate, and she wants help, and that's why she called the Churning Group. Crime Junkie began as a side project. She loved crime stories since she was a kid, reading Agatha Christie mysteries with her mom. After graduating from ASU, she got involved with a local organization called Crime Stoppers that helps people report crimes anonymously. To help promote the organization, she began hosting a weekly local radio segment called Murder Monday. Flowers could tell listeners wanted more. Inspired by the true crime podcast serial, she and her childhood friend, Britt Prawat, started taping a show before and after Flowers Daydrob at a software company.

1:42:44They released the first episode on December 18th, 2017. So, you know, seven year run, good run. I've never understood the, Well, I've never personally been interested in these crime podcasts. I listened to one on Ross from the Silk Road that actually was cool and helped us sort of craft the story of what was sort of the business story around the Silk Road. But I think the story is amazing. There's so many more of these that you don't hear about. Right. And this is why David Senra felt for a long time. he felt like a crazy person right being like why don't people understand that podcasts are basically have some of the best business models in history um why aren't more people like taking these seriously so and at the power law extreme it can look like a very very large business that's throwing off tons of this is a better business than cursor right like i mean right not not like Not that it can't scale to the same potential, but it's funny because we were messaging with Sandra about this and he's saying that it doesn't even make sense to look at these on an EBITDA basis because there's just profit.

1:44:02It's just every cost. There we go. Are you back? Okay, now you're back.

1:44:22I know it's been terrible today now we've been you know keeping the show going um back but anyways do you want to wrap up John yeah we should wrap up we'll we'll cover some of these tomorrow anything else um but did you see the sigma camera that launched i thought this was kind of cool i thought that was cool yeah so some people were saying this is what apple would launch if they built a photography camera so sigma just announced a brand new camera no sd card slot a single usb port 230 gigs of uh of storage that can support 2.5 hours of video or 4 300 raw images color modes 6K L-Log. And so it's really just designed to be something that you just pick up point and shoot, and it looks fantastic.

1:45:14And I thought that was an interesting device. We've been talking about like the desire for more gadgets, more things that you can gift someone at the holidays. We're definitely in a hardware renaissance. Yeah, yeah. It's awesome. But what I love about this is that it's not just beautiful, it's performant, right? So a lot of these new hardware products are sort of driving sales based on their sort of nostalgic side or super future facing, right? Like you saw with like the Rabbit R1. But seeing a product like this that's not only beautiful, but highly performant is fantastic. And I already want to pick one up.

1:45:54Yeah, it seems like a good gift. Let's close with Kristoff. He says, movie idea, saw, but it's all developers and they need to solve leak codes to survive. and we got of course tagged in this because we've been doing PMF or die and we highly recommend you head over there and watch that stream after you finish listening to this episode and so good luck to the boys in the cage they're making great progress and every day the streams are improving so thanks for listening love to see it please leave us reviews and stay tuned for the next one back in the studio we'll see you back in the studio tomorrow see you later thank you bye