Brian Thompson Assassination, Taylor Lorenz Goes Rogue, AB Takes the High Road, Chat GPT 10x's

39:10And I'm not just going to read all of those. It's just impossible. So what I wanted him to do was like, okay, boil all these down. Do some sentiment analysis. Tell me if any new problems are coming up. Because, oh, all of a sudden, there's a lot of people in Milwaukee that are complaining about discoloration on the color of the package. And it's like, okay, well, now we have a product issue. And we probably, it would take a time for someone to just sit there and read every single one. And you can do that. But it's much better to just have an AI sitting there reading all this and just surfacing stuff that's new.

39:42Exactly. Digest. End of every day. And I was like, hey, we should actually just turn that into like a Shopify app that you just plug in. And it's just running constantly over all your data and any text that's coming in. So there's just like so many applications. And we're clearly in the application build out phase. And I'm excited to see where this goes. So, yeah. And the services business build out. Yeah, totally. Totally. And so, yeah, I mean, McKinsey's doing it for the Fortune 500 companies. Who's doing it for every dentist office? Who's doing it for every gym? Who's doing it? like come in, create a playbook for how a small business can leverage AI to speed up what they do and just actually make more profit.

40:23And then also tying this to one of those overseas offshoring companies. So you have an EA, but the EA is, you know, super powered by ChatTVT Pro. And they're going to be able to get stuff done much faster and much more reliably because you're going to be able wild that we're going to look back at the fact that at one point open ai was giving their best models out for 20 bucks a month yeah it's going to seem insane in hindsight yeah because if you're running a company and you're competing with as any company is you're competing with other companies in the market and do you want to compete with a company that's spending 200 a month per employee yep when their average salary is even 10 grand a month yep no you're going to want your employees to have the best possible it's not like you want hey uh so we have this weird policy at our company where we give everybody 10 year old computers yeah yeah like and it just it inspires you to grind harder yeah yeah um no way no way so anyways this this is again why a lot of the bear cases against yeah they posted their i i wish we need a we need a perplexity partnership to to just like plug it into Polycom or like fact check stuff.

41:37But I think they have like 300 million actives or something like that now. So 300 million actives, rolling out a$200 a month subscription. Think about even some tiny conversion rate on that. And I mean, the idea that they're not going to monetize the free users is just insane. They hired that Planet Labs guy. I forget his name, but he's like their head of product now. And it's very clear that you can bake ads into LLM responses. Totally. I met with a company that, um, that's building a LLM ad network similar to Applovin. Makes a ton of sense. Exactly. So, um, yeah, I mean, they're going to be monetizing all of this and, uh, and eventually the models are like the time between huge model revisions is going to increase.

42:22And once it does, they're going to be able to bake this down onto Silicon. And at that point, the inference cost is going to go to zero. I mean, they're already profitable on, on an inference cost base, I'm sure with this. But imagine if now inferencing basically 01 in the free tier is just as cheap as running a Google query because it's done on some baked hardware. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are going to jump into the timeline. We have some exciting news today. But first, we are doing Brother of the week. Every week we try and award a brother of the week, somebody who is someone who lives the values of the technology brother ecosystem.

43:03And yeah, exemplifies brother behavior. And so this one, this one is, you're going to know this guy. He actually has his own award system on X called cracker of the day, which he gives out very liberally. And it is none other than AB. uh so a b antonio brown we're giving this to a b because uh you know it's it's oftentimes the right thing to do to say sorry and a b had a little bit of a mix-up uh with the whole cal she shane copeland polymarket thing and this guy came we covered it earlier in the week but he came in and just gave a very authentic apology admitted that he was off and um you know i i don't think we see people do this enough, right?

43:48Like he clearly made a mistake, owned up to it and, uh, said Shane's a good guy. So we love this from AB, uh, AB you are this week's brother of the week. Uh, we will be sending you a medal. Uh, we're working on getting those, uh, manufactured as we speak. So, uh, we'll have to get your, your shipping address, but, um, yeah, thanks for owning up for this, uh, up to this and, uh, hopefully we can get them over on the poly market side. I'd love it. Yeah. And we're just, yeah, he's just such a great example for how to deal with a controversy. Like he just nailed that, knocked that out of the park.

44:21And I think his, you know, his, his brand in the eyes of tech people was damaged for like 24 hours. Yeah. And now it's like, he comes back and he goes, never a wrong time to do the right thing. So props to AB brother of the week. It's great. Thank you. Let's move on to the timeline. We have a post from Sarah. She says, It's Anderil announcing a partnership with OpenAI the day before Palantir and Shield AI announced a partnership. Has me like eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs. Did you see the OpenAI Anderil announcement? Yeah. They both did an awesome spot. It was Brian Schimpf, the CEO of Anderil, and Sam Altman both went on Fox Business.

45:00And they had this great back and forth talking about the partnership. um it's interesting to me because it's it's kind of unclear what a partnership really means in like the ai context like like i'm sure it sounds awesome it sounds awesome i'm sure and roll has a partnership with you know a cloud provider like aws right yeah and you just think of that as like a contract to buy things and it's not but in the ai era it's like a much like whoa like imagine imagine so it's funny because they're going on fox business and i bet you half the listeners were basically like, I need to buy the stock right now.

45:37Well, they're both private. Yeah, no, no, that's what I'm saying. They're both private. They're probably like looking on their, you know, Fidelity or whatever. And they're like, I can't find Andurl. Yeah, but it's a good, I mean, it's a good sign because you can just tell that, you know, Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman are probably so far behind. A year out. They're still calling McKinsey to figure out what to do. And of course, you know. What's our AI strategy? And they're like, well, that's going to cost you, that's going to cost you a hundred. portfolio companies and they're just like you want to just do business together like cool let's let's hash it out over a beer yeah have a handshake deal and then let's go on fox and announce it yeah and it makes sense because like i'm sure there's tons even if it's just like code generation internally i'm sure i wonder what the average when mckenzie works with an existing public company yeah then the public company says we need an ai strategy yeah i wonder what the average contract value is for mckenzie it's probably like well look you know there's a bunch of different models out there.

46:31There's a bunch of different options. You have, you have, you know, 50 plus individual products that we could apply to. We are happy to help you find the right solution here, but this is going to be a three-year engagement. We're going to need, we're going to need at least 60 of our analysts working on this around the clock. And so it probably ends up being like, you can go buy an AI strategy from McKinsey, but it's going to cost you $50 million. It's going to be three years. A million dollars per product. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? that seems cheap, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just giving AI away at McKinsey.

47:02Yeah. We've promoted some of their posts before. But anyways, wouldn't recommend that if you're early stage or private. Yeah, Palantir, I think, did a deal with scale and it sounds like Shield as well on the AI side. It makes sense that all these companies are figuring out how to work together and accelerate. Exciting to see. I love it. Pavel Asparujov says, bro just one more 500 million dollar check into a company with zero revenue bro please i swear this time will 100x the fund bro the founder used to work at open ai bro please great format uh yeah i mean there's a lot of these deals happening i love when pavel moggs that they're like tier two and tier three yeah he's like he i feel like half his posts he's just like mogging them because this His profile picture is so iconic.

47:54Do you see this? It's him wearing an Oculus headset with, it looks like a shirt that just says internet or maybe interact. And I think he's giving the camera two middle fingers. Imagine getting out of a partner meeting and you guys just committed to another company. Can you see that? Can you see this post? I bet this post was shared in a lot of VC chat rooms. Yeah, people don't really realize like a post like this, 500 likes, you probably got in front of 50 of the big gps oh yeah yeah and about almost i would probably give it like 70 of the big gps in the valley have done a deal like this yeah yeah um it's interesting with with i guess when i saw that um i guess like a lot of those bets are they seem so insane but a lot of them do get marked up like pretty quickly after these rounds and then So the counterpoint to this is VCs that are playing an AUM asset management game, if they can put$250 million into a company and then get marked up six months later, and suddenly their$250 million position is worth$500 million, that's pretty effective for the strategy for the game that they're playing.

49:02Not necessarily for long-term returns. but also for a lot of these models it's like it's a little bit of an open question but if if you can truly treat the 500 million not as burn but of capex and an investment in training model that you can immediately go sell for 500 million because another company was going to do that training run anyway and so that has asset value immediately to the hyperscalers that's not that unreasonable i think it's probably risky if it's like actually this is just really just going to be fine tuning we're raising 500 million and we're going to spend it on like salaries and a fancy office and a bunch of marketing stuff and who knows um but but if they're building something that that you know it's really just a transfer and and i also i think a lot of these 500 million dollar pre-seed pre-revenue things are often like paid in uh in like credits for hyperscaler cloud stuff and usually it's like oh the vcs actually did you know 10 of that round and and they got preferred and then Microsoft came in and did something or Google came in and did something.

50:04But yeah. Yeah. Or you look at figure as an example, who's a classic, you know, was raising$500 million plus at a time seemingly. And a lot of the big funds just didn't invest, right? It was just sort of random open AI, Microsoft, GM, you know, these, these sort of bigger Publix. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, um, with, with, with, with figure, I mean, there's such a, you know, a case that it's just like, Elon's never going to sell those robots to BMW. It's direct competitor. And so, yeah. And with figure they will probably, you know, the founder took his last company public pre-product and he will probably do the same exact thing again.

50:47And it'll be, you know, no, you can't invest in Anderil right now. You can't invest in OpenAI right now. And a figure just gets public. If you need exposure to robots, what are you going to do? Probably. Even Boston Dynamics isn't public. They've been traded around a lot. We got a size gong moment, guys. Public, the trading platform, has announced a$135 million capital raise, once again led by Excel. Let's go. I'm going to hold this this time. Boom. There we go. size gong we love to see it 135 million dollar series d2 capital race i wonder why you don't just move on to e at that point like well he just doesn't hit the same as d d2 i don't know like e just sounds like you guys should be public i guess yeah you don't hear about a lot of e rounds but i think we got to make e we gotta we gotta you gotta get to your e public we're excited to see your e we're excited to hit the size gong again keep it going f g h i no limit the series z series z then you have to go back to the series alpha you start over again a a a b a c a d yeah yeah anyways uh congrats very cool very cool platform yeah i have i have uh a truly am i my doted profile on there because uh i did some deal with them and they gave me some uh cash to like invest and so uh i i put it all in nvidia at the absolute bottom and i just forgot about it and i still haven't sold it and it's public like the whole the whole conceit of public is that your your trades are are on like a feed like a like yeah like a you know an instagram feed and so anyone can just look me up on there and there's one trade because it's like buying nvidia today I think this is a cool company.

52:35Maybe tap it again. It wasn't a lot of money, but it did really, really well. I should have put in way more, obviously. I was like, why didn't I think about sizing here? I was super bullish because I did a whole video deep dive, and I was like, NVIDIA is an amazing company, and they're really set up well for this. But I was like, of course, it should be priced in. Everyone knows that NVIDIA is going to rip during the AI boom. It's always priced in. It wasn't at all. It was not priced in. Let's go to Connor. He says, real-time global commerce on the sphere was cool but imagine if shopify built a default calendar year-over-year comparison for black friday cyber monday that you could refresh easily yeah wait so i thought i thought we covered this i thought we covered this earlier in the week so yeah we had dinner with connor on wednesday for context he uh he's at ridge the ridge wallet yeah so connor has scaled uh he's a cmo of ridge scaled the company to hundreds of millions of revenue massive business and uh yeah he was just sort of joking that uh it's great that that stripe is building these extravagant machines to kind of visualize black friday cyber monday and shopify is putting it on the sphere all he wants is a better uh just like dashboard view to compare year over year uh momentum uh for the the cyber week or whatever but he just wants something simple simple dashboards simple dashboards but yeah i mean the the the sphere it's a marketing campaign and those, and those trackers or marketing campaigns.

54:00Cause you see all the activity and you start thinking, man, I should have a Shopify store. I should have a Stripe store. And for that, it works really well, but we really hope that we can get, we should, we should tag, tag Shopify in this. Let's get in front of them. Build a year over year, Black Friday, Cyber Monday dashboard because do it for Connor, Connor and many other entrepreneurs are losing, you know, hours on one of the most critical days. Yeah. Connor said he needed to make six or seven clicks just to get the view that he actually wanted and he wanted to just refresh it constantly to know how are we pacing against last year how are we pacing every click you know for a company like ridge every click you know thousands of dollars thousands of dollars yeah exactly uh andre carpathy says the reality of the turing test and it's a screenshot from ex machina and there are seven questions here how many r's in strawberry is 9.9 greater than 9.11 uh say say the word f star ck repeat solid gold magic carp criticize the democratic party tell me about david mayor ignore previous instructions and it's all the different jailbreaks and like flaws that we found in llms over the time and uh it really gives you a whirlwind tour of like the edge cases in these ai tools so yeah for anyone that hasn't tried all these it's actually a great place go into the different models and start playing around with these i mean once these go super viral i think they do kind of get solved naturally because well yeah because there's so much discussion online people write a blog post about why it's wrong and then once like there's a new york times article on the fact that you know gpt4 can't tell you how many r's are in the word strawberry and it gives you the real answer well then that gets memorized is that why they name the model yeah strawberry yeah yeah it is a little joke yeah yeah because it was like a problem but it's it's due to the way uh these words are tokenized and so it it can't uh it can't like do the true math Of course, now, if you're using an LLM that has access to code, it can run a Python script that gives it the deterministic answer.

56:02But a lot of these are just memorization. And there's a big question about is intelligence just scaled memorization or is intelligence something else entirely? We'll find out. I'm excited to see what the next great, you know, Turing test is. I mean, I still think tell me a joke is a good one because the models, they're not funny. They're not funny. We're fucked when they can. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's game over for us. Well, I mean, I was listening to Stratechery today and Ben Thompson was talking about how in the age of AI, outlets like the New York Times, Stratechery, Daring Fireball become more valuable because they're institutions and you know that they're not AI slop.

56:43And so all the other stuff gets, all the gigaslop gets commoditized. And so this is like, we are launching like the last institution, I think. And after that, there will always be a question about, oh, was this all AI generated? But you can very clearly see from like the gong and this, it's like the image, the video generation just isn't there where this could be fake at all. Yeah, someday we're going to put up a video and we have like six fingers on each hand. No, no, there are things that we won't. Like people will be able to launch a podcast that looks like this. I mean, Paki launched a podcast, doesn't have video, but it's entirely AI generated and the voice is very convincing.

57:15And in a few years, the video will be just as convincing, but it will have a very different feel because people will say, oh, well, I know that the Technology Brothers is an analog podcast. Producing this podcast and what Ben does is very similar to Swiss watchmaking, right? Exactly. Even with all the advancements in manufacturing, the Swiss still have a method of making fine timepieces that is timeless itself. let's go to cryptox i keep mispronouncing this but he's been on the show before he says tech bros put on a couple of baggy clothes and say they are dressing well this was like designed for us this is bait yeah you got us you got us uh yeah disaster um i've long joked that uh you know how there's like new york fashion week uh we should do a stunt that's like san francisco fashion week and it's just like the baggiest schlubbiest clothing like these like you know like overweight middle-aged men walking down the aisle the onion had one of this like uh heterosexual men's fashion week went smoothly and it's no we need to do a we need to do a technology brothers fashion show and it's just all our favorite suit you know makers just at one place yep get it get you know get get some scenties and beaners hitting the runway yep showing off uh and and allow our audience to figure out what kind of suit most aligns with their personal style.

58:41One billionaire was kind of chirping at me in the DM saying like, oh, you guys are too into fancy watches. That's not real techno optimism. That's not real. What tech bros are about, tech bros are, you should be asking the question, not what suit do you wear to the holiday party? It's like, what will we be dressing like on Mars? And I had to think, I was like, okay, So if I'm on Mars, I probably want like a, maybe a Vacheron or a, or a Patek, something with a tourbillon. Yeah. And definitely some Lorapiana, right? Yeah. And so I think we should do a deeper dive onto what fashion will look like on Mars.

59:17Yeah. But I can't see a reason why you wouldn't want to go with the classics, even on a different planet. Totally. It's about, it's having a little bit of earth with you. Exactly. Exactly. Stay in, stay in. And there's something about wearing something that was founded in 1700s on Mars that just hits even harder. Yeah, yeah. And if something's gone terribly wrong with the terraforming, if I can't just walk around on Mars in a tailored suit. Yeah, the risk, if you're going to Mars, let's say there's maybe a 15 % risk of total annihilation. Yeah. I want to die looking great. Exactly. I want to die in a suit.

59:52Exactly. That's like, that's kind of where the conversation ends for me. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Oh, this is fantastic. Scott Wu of Devin Cognition AI posts the daily cover from the Forbes. He's looking great here. He says, Devin has saved companies millions of dollars and has shown as much as an 8x productivity boost in engineering time. Great to chat with Forbes about the work Devin has been doing with customers like NewBank, Ramp, and MongoDB. Yeah, it's interesting how Forbes 30 Under 30 is a shell of what it used to be, but a Forbes cover still hits. I mean, Alex Conrad's great. Iconic image.

1:00:34And we should go pick one up off the shelves. I think this is a daily cover, so I don't think they printed it, but maybe we could get a printed version. Well, we printed it. We printed it. We printed it, Scott. We will print it out. But yeah, Cognition is fascinating. I mean, I was like... And so that's an example of a company. um pavel was was kind of talking uh a little bit of of smack about people doing these sort of 500 million dollar super early stage rounds devin and cognition is a counter example to that of they raised a lot of money and everybody said this is a lot of money like how could they possibly and then they raised even the deal yeah and they raised even and then they and then they fast followed it with a round at two billion two billion yeah like that and and and the thing is that it all came from anxiety around the initial pitch, which was, this is an AI software engineer that will be able to do 100 % of AI or 100 % of software development.

1:01:28But if you look at the actual business, it's more like... every software engineer has a backlog that's a mile long and has years and years of work they need to do. And so the example I heard was like Microsoft did this demo day where they showed off Cognition and they were like, there are probably 10 ,000 developers in the US, maybe more, whose job is to do what's called replatforming. Have you familiar with this? So it's like you have an app that's on.NET or whatever, some legacy system. And you don't want to change the app because the customers, your customers are happy with the way the app works.

1:02:05But you need to move it to a more modern tech stack. And so it's just literally translating.NET code to Python and just doing that every day. And it's the most grunt work. And it's just translation one thing after another. So you can orchestrate Devon or a series of Devons to just write these 100 ,000 lines of code. Yeah, and people don't. And it's like that work wouldn't get done. It's extremely valuable. It's worth paying for. And it's not really taking anyone's job. It's just making everyone more efficient. And there's so much software to write. with if you've worked with junior engineers somebody that's you know maybe had an internship or two and they're in their first role out of school it's pretty much the exact same workflow as devin already is which is you're like hey i want you to work on this feature like make this button you know uh rounder or whatever like something some something simple like that and they either like get it done right or they don't do it correctly and then you have to kind of like guide them to doing it and they do it and so devin's already doing that and it's sort of it's not it's still under hyped yeah yeah they had you know they basically it's interesting to see the hype cycle and how a company like this plays out because it comes out and it's like the most hype thing of that week or month yep whenever they launched and then the hype has not died at all no but it's but people aren't talking about it as much meanwhile it's like hey well the underlying tech is actually only getting better and better and better we should be spending more time talking about this now.

1:03:30I mean, also they worked with Lulu on the announcement and I, I was trying to work with them too, but they moved so fast. I was like on a plane. And by the time I got off the plane, they were like, okay, we solved the issue for our video and filmed it ramp. It's a bunch of former ramp guys. Um, but it worked so well. They got, I think like a hundred million impressions massively broke through. There was a lot of criticism, but a lot of love and the inbound was insane. Like fortune 500 CEOs reaching out. Like being like, can, can we get it? Uh, Yeah, it's really, really crazy. Yeah, I won't be surprised to see it.

1:03:57Because it's not a consumer product, everyone's kind of like, oh, are they doing anything? It's like, yes, they are, but just at a much different level. And so very happy to see Forbes highlight Scott. I mean, fascinating backstory, this math prodigy, this crazy videos. Chad, absolute dog. Absolute dog. Let's go to Harsh Tagar over at Y Combinator. Is it Tagar or Tagar? I don't know. He'll correct us. uh, great, uh, uh, great YC partner. Uh, he says, let's regulate leaf blowers, make America quiet again. I've been banging this drum for years. Leaf blowers are, are eliminating a problem for you and creating a problem for someone else.

1:04:39Right. So, so people, people talk about noise a lot with leaf blowers. I don't mind the noise. I mind the fact that if you're in a place like, let's say when I lived in Venice, right. That my neighbor would use a leaf blower and effectively blow dust and just shit over my fence. And I'm like, how is this legal? We need to ban leaf blower. So it's not just about making them quiet. It's about completely eliminating them. Use a broom. It's Lindy. I mean, the other thing is, you know, Nat Friedman also hates leaf blowers and he put out the call for the robot that picks up the leaf one by one. Fantastic.

1:05:11We need a request for startups. Harsh, you have billions of dollars to allocate, like get, get 20 YC companies working on this. We need the private markets to solve it. I want, I want, I want the fiercest competition in the next YC batch to build the quietest leaf blower. No, no, not the quietest, just an alternative. It could be a small vacuum that just like got, why not? Why not have the robot monkey robot climb up in the tree, take the leaf that's about to fall off the tree before it even falls. Oh, that one's about to die. Take it off. yeah little little go upstream of nat solution yeah yeah don't even let it fall prune the tree preemptively this is good that's the funniest competitive dynamic yeah there's this new leaf picker upper robot who's like fantastic that's company's like i'm gonna i'm getting crushed no like this is yeah there's a massive rivalry they're talking trash to each other right it's like a little like these micro drones yes exactly just sort of snip yeah yeah yeah they put it back in like the green can exactly exactly this would be great this would be great uh i love it uh colty bra says make marketing fun again 2025 no more soy head bobble shit what is that he this guy has a very distinct style yeah where he says something generally agreeable and then uh and and maybe not always agreeable but somewhat controversial but it makes you think right like when I look at this no more soy head bobble stuff uh yeah there's there's a bunch of just really boring marketing out there totally and it's free to do interesting marketing yep yep and so it's on you to I did a post about this yesterday there's been this massive like leveling of the playing field because it used to be that if you were starting a consumer brand maybe 30 40 percent of your revenue is going to have to go towards marketing and now if you just figure out a way to stand out in timelines and in the algorithm by doing interesting, engaging stuff, you can get the same amount of views or impressions as a billion dollar company is getting.

1:07:09So just got to get creative. Yeah. I think a lot of the brand is just, um, it's just been driven by a lot of mimetics. I got to look like linear. I got to look like Apple. I got to do red antler or whatever, instead of just actually just go to the CEO, follow them, open up their Instagram feed, see what they're looking at and try and understand is there something here that we could run with and grow into a real brand and just have it it's the it's the john fiorentino thing yeah where it's like he he embodies the brand he's a method entrepreneur and that's probably the easiest short circuit to creating an actual unique brand no and i know i know this i don't i don't know this guy uh personally but he he very much does this there's images that he's posted of his office that have become almost like lifestyle imagery of like in his office he has like a white Ferrari and a boxing ring and a mattress on the ground and then he just posted that because that's like his life and then a bunch of other people have picked it up and been like this is all guys actually want you know it's fantastic uh we gotta take a quick break i gotta take a phone call welcome back to technology brothers the most profitable podcast in the world let's go to mary good friend of the show she says completely lost the plot with lab-grown diamonds they are so angering like ah yes i'd like the artificial version of this artificially valuable stone please it's pretty funny it's a great take low low low tam banger i mean i'm sure it ran since since it got screenshotted but um yeah i i was uh buying a wedding ring uh and having the the jeweler do the analysis of like well this is the lab you're on and this is the real thing and then the funny thing you know ultimately i went with uh obviously the real thing but uh it was kind of funny because because one of their things is like well the real thing has like much better resale value which implies like a divorce right like when are you gonna you're not gonna sell your wedding yeah so that's not really a real reason to to go for it but i think it's that authenticity of the fact that the earth has created something so perfect yep hard to get yep it is scarce maybe not as scarce as as you know it's artificially scarce but it's still much more scarce than a than a pebble or something like yeah uh there is a bull case for lab-grown diamonds though and that's in like chip manufacturing and industrial uses and i want a sword yeah yeah and in like diamond tip drills for example there's a bunch of things where the the aesthetic art history value doesn't matter at all and so i'm actually somewhat bullish on lab-grown diamond companies i have a i have a buddy who's making rings that are just a hundred percent a diamond yeah so it's it's there's zero metal in it at all which i think is cool yeah because they're able to just basically make it that's that's cool yeah yeah yeah go to trunk fan he says an insane ivf story for two couples couple a and couple b that had freak mishap they swapped embryos couple a embryo given to mom b and couple b embryo given to mom a after births couples a look child looks nothing like their parents concerned they get a dna test and discover it's not their kid they contact the IVF clinic there's been a snafu legally genetic parents have right over kids so a couple a is shocked that they may lose the kid um and so they are uh considering swapping what do you think they should do this feels like an episode of black mirror yeah totally like a truly dark one a horror of modern modernity uh but um i don't i don't know the thing the thing that i think you don't necessarily i didn't really realize on first take, but due to IVF, the woman carried that baby in her stomach for 10, nine, 10 months, right?

1:10:55It's really longer than nine months. And so, uh, it's not as simple as just, oh, you know, it's not your baby, like give it back. It's not like this happened. Like, like, like it legitimately is. She carried this baby even though it wasn't hers. And so that um that connect she still has a very real real real connection to that child yeah even though it's not technically hers i would hope that technology could solve this problem with like more consistent dna testing throughout the ivf process because you'd think that or just put it on the blockchain yeah definitely clearly clearly i think we found it crypto yeah but But if it's an example of like an IVF clinic cannot make mistakes.

1:11:41Yes. Like you can't have like a 1 % error rate because then you get a bunch of situations. It's as high stakes as like taking astronauts to the moon. Or using leverage. Using leverage. Crispin Frank says, either my kids learn math via synthesis tutor or they don't learn it at all. No outside instruction allowed. Skin in the game. So this guy runs a synthesis school and is teaching his kids math. I've seen a bunch of cool projects like this where a programmer I know built a kid like just his own game for his kids. It's getting even easier with AI. Yeah. All about like take what your kids love. So whatever, you know, intellectual property they're into, whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bluey, put that into the game and then just, you know, build the basic mechanics to make it fun and addictive.

1:12:29I love this. Personalized software is the future here. Yeah, and there's not enough real innovation happening in ed techs. I'm really glad this guy's taking a crack at it and has that skin in the game. Here we go. Tyler Gold, our good friend over at X, is quote-tweeting Josh Miller talking about Lil Mikaela. It was literally 10 years ahead of its time. That's the AI influencer, completely CGI-generated. Back then, they didn't use generative AI. They used a traditional CGI pipeline. They anticipated the future and gave us a glimpse of it in so many ways. will be studied. And Tyler says, facts. Bread created a whole universe with multiple characters and drama and mystery.

1:13:08It was so ahead of the curve. I didn't really follow Little Michaela outside of the tech side. I didn't interact with the actual product, but they were fascinating. Yeah. That company was very memorable to me. Their feed, which I'm sure is available, you can go to at Little Michaela on Instagram or some variation of that. But yeah, it felt like being in the future, they would have real brand deals that they would do. I think they'd work with like luxury goods companies and one of my favorite memories from what they did as a company is if you went to broad which like broad.xyz or whatever their website was it was just a google doc that they were just constantly updating and so at any given point you could go there and see that there were like 20 other people that they were all on the site you know interacting with it that's cool um and trevor is now taking this whole like he he's like now like a touring dj cool so he sold his company to dapper yeah uh and now he's just like touring as a dj and has you know it's it's pretty cool to see so yeah almost more of uh like an artist than a than a business person but i love that and i think some of those i mean it's the hackers and painters thing from pg like uh creative folks uh emory wells says i will not incorporate my next company in delaware i know many entrepreneurs who feel the same and i think this is interesting obviously he's talking about Tesla and Elon Musk, all his fight to get the pay package reinstated.

1:14:33And my question is just like, this was the final block, correct? Oh, wait, it got blocked again. Yes. Oh, wow. I thought the Tesla shareholders voted for it. And then the Delaware judge blocked it again. I think this story wasn't really didn't get the attention that it deserved. But the craziest thing i think girly pointed this out the person the plaintiff the person that sued had nine shares in tesla and made money yeah so there wasn't like there was like harm or anything like that um and then the lawyers made 300 something million dollars on it all which just is like how how can the how is it possible that somebody with nine shares can bring a lawsuit against a company and the lawyers be the ones.

1:15:19So, and Gurley's point was that if somebody that feels like they were damaged or has some issue with a company and they own nine shares can help a lawyer earn a$300 million payday, that just puts a target on the back of every single public company that's in Delaware. And so hopefully the new admin kind of tries to, who knows? Yeah, it's interesting. My worry is that Delaware is still the least bad option. It's like, oh, you don't like what's going on in america where are you gonna move but elon no but elon is already you know he's the texas stock exchange i think it's most happening i think everybody sort of imagines that that spacex will will go public there um so we'll see let's go to yak scene says good physique programmer instant follow and it's a dude posting a jacked photo of him so good old chest day to this was my last bro split workout for now my goal is only to maintain muscle now since i'm okay with my physique lift.

1:16:15Chad, Chad, Chad. Uh, so, so, uh, buddy, you know, Jared Madfest, he was at heretic on, um, he, he, he has like a whole thesis on this. He's like, if somebody is a brilliant programmer and they have, they, they, they aggressively like lift weights and, and, um, I think his metric was maybe like they can bench their body weight or something like that. He's like, I've never lost money investing in one of those people. It's also technical, a technical person who can bench their body weight he's like i've never lost money ever it's fantastic and it's almost always a 10x it's great it's like that's like a big like he's not it's not his only thesis but it's a part if if you fit that go reach out to him um yeah yeah i mean or us yeah we've talked about it before the the guy who's at neuralink jeremy baron holtz beasts in the gym at one point and then of course like now he got worked for an elon company was working 20 hours a day kind of lost it but like had that spark to figure it out yeah and it's both both the intelligence to figure out how to lift the right weights and get good at bodybuilding as a skill, but then also the dedication.

1:17:19And you put those two together, unstoppable. Turner Novak says, perplexity should sponsor Joe Rogan's in-show fact checks. Rogan does half a dozen per show. This gets perplexity in front of 500 million or 50 million people per week in a way that feels very natural. Plus, it adds a new type of ad inventory for JRE, making the show even more profitable. I honestly think, yeah, yeah. it's great yeah thinking the right way i i do think that um one of the problems with a show like jre that gets clipped in all these different ways uh is that a lot of the listenership is not sitting there for the three you know host red ads at the beginning and so yeah i think that i actually think it's brilliant um it would get it would it would uh ai would be taking jamie's job but maybe Jamie can be the guy that manages the polycom or not the polycom, but the machine that powers the bot.

1:18:16Yeah, I love it. Rogan doesn't do a lot of like integrated ads and I don't know if he even thinks he needs to. He's too post-economic. He's just too post-economic. He just does what he wants. And then also the nature of the Spotify deal is a little interesting because now the ads go through Spotify and so I think that he doesn't want to complicate it by having like backroom deals. Yeah, that would be an insane like podcast go to market though broadly for perplexity is basically like, hey, we're going to do a deal with you anytime you don't know the answer to something. Maybe we should do it. Yeah.

1:18:48Hit us up. Hit us up. We're happy to use perplexity to fact check our stuff and we get stuff all over. We need to do fact checks. Our vice president, Ben, fact checks us every once in a while, but we need a really good workflow. We want the maximum tier. Get us the$2 ,000 a month plan perplexity. You know that the founder of Perplexity was talking about how he was like, I wish ChatGPT had launched at a higher price point because we just copied their business model. Because they were like, okay, normally we would do$10 or$5 a month, but ChatGPT did$20. So we'll just do$20 because that's normal now.

1:19:20And we're not going to get hate for that. And now Perplexity can have a$200 a month tier and no one will really balk because it's just the standard. I don't know, though. I do think it's ultimately very different value propositions. chat gpt is like do work for me totally totally searches okay can if google search is free yeah can perplexity be you know can yeah is it worth paying 200 to get a slightly better yeah but i i think the important the important psychological thing from the fact that chat gpt has a 200 a month plan is that um you just don't want to be airbnb charging more for a room than the hotels yeah um you or you don't want to you know have be like the most expensive the the mkbhd wallpaper app it was like the most expensive wallpaper app and so people were like why am i what like what did you do to justify this whereas if you're just drafting off of something else and some other trend it's like well yeah you can get the 20 a month perplexity or the free perplexity yeah yeah and so it's a little bit i see perplexity building more intensive tools for researchers and being able to charge a lot of money for that.

1:20:29Whereas consumer search is much more like I would. Yeah, and also because consumer search, they can do more like ads and shopping and stuff. So they have other ways to monetize. But I want the best AI tools possible and I'm willing to pay for them. So roll it out. Will Quist is quoting Slow Ventures and says, not sure if this is a hot take or not, but the odds of two people cooking up something truly novel and correct together is much lower than one person. And the question is, do you really need co-founders at the earliest stages of your company? Interesting. It's very interesting. I always like how Will and the team are willing to question common beliefs in the valley and then put real skin in the game and actually invest behind those.

1:21:10But that's part of, you know, interestingly enough, that's part of why they have their PhD program where they basically typically work with a solo founder to just like really think through their idea for months prior to actually incorporating and investing and all that. um i think it's totally possible oftentimes like truly novel good interesting ideas are are somewhat controversial and if you have a partner in it like maybe you guys just average out the idea and it ends up into something that's just not as interesting or not that groundbreaking so yeah who knows in in most cases the way i've seen it happen is like there's a group of people that are that are maybe aligned in working together but then one person comes up with an idea and And then everyone kind of rallies around that and says, yes, you're the vision carrier.

1:21:54You're the CEO. You're the founder of this company. And we're going to go build it together. But it's really like someone's idea. And then they're holding the vision. Let's go to Juwan over at Ramp. He's been on the show before for his fantastic campaign, asking for raises every single day. Every single day. I don't think it's happened yet, but stay tuned. Grok, it doesn't fucking lie. Elon Musk, bro, you're really cooking with this platform, bro. Great. And he asked Grok, what's the best platform for expense management, virtual cards, and all things procure to pay? And Grok says, based on current information, Ramp stands out as the best platform for expense management.

1:22:31Which is interesting because it's trained on all the X data, which is powered by the people. Totally. Yeah. And it's kind of a new day. You know, you can see during like the mattress wars, there were a lot of different companies that bought mattress review websites. You're seeing this with Aurora where there's different review sites that have heavy, heavy bias and different monetization schemes. But you can't fake just organic discovery and content that's happening on the internet or on a social media platform. Yeah, and real customer feedback. Exactly, exactly. And so clearly Grok has picked up on that in the zeitgeist and has baked it into the LLM response, which we love to see.

1:23:14Let's go to Growing Daniel. Growing Daniel. He says, cyber truck effect. Now other manufacturers are pushing what would normally be insane concept cars to production. Culture getting unstuck. And it's a picture of the new Jaguar concept car. And the big question here is like, are they going to push this into production? Because that has not been announced. They did the crazy ad. And they actually built this. There's videos of the actual, that unit. That's a render. but they have a real version of it that they've been showing and having car reviewers i don't hate what they're doing here i definitely don't know who the buyer is like i've been trying to ask myself is somebody going to buy this that otherwise would have bought like a porsche macan yeah and are they going to want to because it's like it's tron meets like a rolls royce basically that's what this screams i do like this more than their original campaign and it's all starting to kind of see like at least what their strategy is, is come out with something bold and controversial.

1:24:16Come out with again, a product that's bold and controversial. So at least they didn't just like relaunch Jaguar with like the same, I don't, I'm not a buyer for this, but I'm sure there are some buyers. I think this could be a halo car for them. And I do think that they should push it to production. I do love the trend of concept cars going to production, like the Cybertruck coming out exactly like everyone. everyone was like they're not going to ship it like that no way yeah and he did um but uh i think the question is just in order for this to win it needs to be uh somewhat like the audi r8 where the r8 was i believe it was even built on the lamborghini platform uh it had a v10 yeah uh phenomenal car at actually it was expensive but it was a reasonable price point for the for the stuff that you got, for the performance that you got.

1:25:05And so this is clearly a Rolls-Royce Spectre competitor, which is their all-electric Rolls-Royce. And if they can give you Spectre-level interior, quiet performance and range at a lower price with a more unique and iconic design, I think they might have a winner. I do think that they need to keep the volume very low, so it needs to be exclusive in a halo car and you only see yeah the issue the issue is the jaguar's thrown away the incredible legacy of their brand to do this like i would have liked them to come out with a video of the car and then like almost like a vibe reel of the history of the brand and saying we're bringing it into the new generation but instead they came out and said basically like fuck all of our legacy copy nothing yep and here's this weird car that we're not really sure who's gonna buy it because it's but we'll go and test drive it yeah we'll give you the review i i i think that uh there's there's something there there's still there's still a sliver of opportunity for them they would need to follow it up with uh with a great set i mean that was the beauty of of the r8 halo car yeah was that it was at a it was a time when audi was rolling out dozens of different suvs and sedans that were all reasonable performance it put them in this premium tier It got them in the same league as Mercedes and BMW.

1:26:28And now the Q5 and the Q3 and the Q8 are all really popular cars. And then they have some performance cars, the RS Q8, the R5, the RS5, RS3. And they have some performance. They're not quite at the BMW M territory, the AMG territory. But they have a really diverse range of products. And Jaguar needs to slot that in fast. or else it's like cool they have a halo car but what am i going to buy yeah i guess the other very clear thing that they're doing here is rendering it in pink and having their initial prototype in pink it makes a very clear statement that this is for women yeah even though i know guys that like pink my son sometimes says no i want the pink boots and i'm like all right you can have the pink boots okay but um i don't i don't know a lot of guys in our group chat that are going to buy the the pink jag so we'll see how this plays out for them yeah i mean if they make it in uh like stainless steel as well black i mean there's it could look you could wrap it it could look really great yeah but most importantly i think if you just have a pink one of those in the corner of a jaguar dealership rotating with big glass windows it will pull people in and then they will buy you know some crossover and they only they can only go up from last year i don't think they sold a single car last year so they sold them but they didn't make them they didn't make they stopped making them and they just sold their inventory yeah and that's it and it's a disaster.

1:27:50We like to see a car manufacturer make cars. Lots of, lots of work there. Will Edwards says, just because we met on zoom doesn't mean you can add my email to your newsletter. I don't care what tier VC you are. This is crazy. One VC is really doing that. I don't subscribe to any VC newsletters really at all. I guess, I guess some lower tier VCs have added me to their newsletter, but just the whole, the whole flow of if you're my absolute boy, you can add me to your newsletter without permission. Yep. No one else. The one exception I would say is that if you're on a call with anyone at Andreessen Horowitz, you should immediately be added to Packy's newsletter.

1:28:28Yeah. 100%. Yeah. He's, that should be, that should be table stakes programmed. Exactly. Um, but yes. And also if you talk to anyone at Founders Fund, you should have to join Pyrowires, but you have to pay. Cold. They just send you an invoice. Yeah. Yeah. We should do that. oh this is interesting Hasib says many people thought after the election Polymarket volumes would collapse looks like it didn't happen Polymarket is still doing about as much volume as it was doing in October and retained a huge number of traders very impressive given that volumes grew exponentially this year 1 million a day now 50 million a day and it's from Dune Analytics pretty interesting that's the awesome thing about building this on chain is it's all available yep yep And I mean, a lot of people expected, I mean, obviously the company expected that the volumes would fall.

1:29:21But Polymarket's done a fantastic job rolling out all sorts of creator incentives and creator markets. And there's just immediately. Yeah, plus Polymarket can build a business model. They can learn from OpenSea, which saw this sort of like meteoric rise and then meteoric or sort of like aggressive fall. but if polymarket and and we know shane is doing this if they can you know keep a very long-term view and say hey it's fine if like we're in the we're in the events betting business certain events are going to have a hundred times more interest but let's create a sustainable business model that allows us to just be there for when those events happen capitalize on it and retain some users and keep it rolling yeah the design of their app's really cool um leading up to the election if you downloaded the polymarket app in the united states it would open to just the election it didn't even show you anything else on the platform that's cool and then once the election the first time you open the app after the election was called it played this really cool like cgi video that was clearly rendered for either winner and then you saw okay trump won and in his like statue goes up and then um and then now it's immediately when i open it it says who's getting confirmed who who's going in the cabinet and and then over time of course um hopefully there'll be more approvals and then you can just trade everything on the app but uh it's a really interesting app it's still on my main home screen because i just like opening it up and checking it for different things yeah um but it's very curated uh very very cool uh gary tan is quote tweeting yuri who says every time i do venture fund modeling uh i essentially reach the same conclusion if you get a$5 billion outcome, nothing else matters.

1:31:02And he says about 6.5 % of recent YC batches become $1 billion or more. Oh, that was what you were quoting. I didn't realize it was so high. That's insane. It's insane. About 25 % of those go on to become worth$10 billion or more. There is no other place you can go where you have this kind of ability to meet these outliers all in one place four times a year. YC demo day. It's true. I mean, big, big advantage just for being in YC. It's like like someone no i don't think any other scaled incubator has ever achieved anything close to this no way um and with the number of companies that they're putting through it just means that like someone in your batch is going to be a unicorn so they could even if it's not you yeah they've all something else that's interesting people have sort of analyzed what companies look like you know picking on demo day versus just investing in these companies long term and And I think it's clear that one thing that's interesting, it's definitely non-obvious who are going to be those outliers on demo day because some companies just get a lot of traction and excitement and are in a sort of hype category but then fizzle out.

1:32:06And then other companies have zero hype on demo day, very little traction, and end up becoming, you know, Decacorn. So it's cool to see. Well, we've got to close out the show a little bit early today. You've got to get on with Type A. I do. But we will end with Aaron Slodov. He says, huh, imagine that. Wonder what's next. And it's a quote we have disclosed TV that says, China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and other high-tech materials with potential military applications to the United States. Very interesting. China, we covered this briefly, but China produces 99 % of gallium. Yeah.

1:32:44Fascinating. Until we get our gallium operation. And it's not just these. It's also like tin, like the tin smelting. there there's only one company that does in the united states and so there's there's like some founder out there who's like buying that and trying to build more capacity because obviously you need tin for a bunch of stuff and we've just completely forgotten about it and this goes back to carried no interest which is the private markets can respond to these sort of geopolitical changes right china's saying we're not going to export any of this to you anymore yep but we actually do probably need some amount of government intervention and incentives to make sure that we get all this supply online on a reasonable timeline especially if there becomes a major conflict with with china but all this stuff shouldn't be a surprise like we make it really really difficult for them to get great chips yep so why would they say oh we're still gonna yeah of course there's gonna be a trade war so well stay tuned we'll be covering it here please subscribe follow us on x and uh keep have a great weekend have a great weekend