Elon's DOGE Blockchain, Sports Betting, German Economy in Shambles, Humanoid Robots

40:43And you're just like pissed off. But there's no real lesson. And then the intrinsic value of a failed parlay is like basically nothing. And then also like when you win really big in the sports betting world, you get kicked off the app when you win really hard in the crypto world you get a fund yeah yeah like you get rewarded with more of that yeah that's just not the case in sports betting people just won't take your bets because they'll know you have an edge of some sort yeah saga and jetty says uh he's sharing a article where it says draft king sued after father of two gambles away one million of his family's money his kids christmas money and baptism gifts were also plundered along with his wife's bank accounts and credit cards according to a newly filed federal lawsuit um so saga says this man did not place a single bet before 2020 by 2024 he gambled away one million dollars and left his family destitute along the way draft kings assigned vip hosts who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family status and so this is the dark side of sports betting and is why um i've never invested in you know sports betting that's rough product and uh don't plan to yeah i mean it's driven by those whales like the good like the the good bettors get kicked off the mediocre bettors just sit there betting this guy basically drove a quarter million dollars a year of of profit yeah you know enough to pay for a full-time vip host it's crazy well yeah and those hosts you can imagine can work across hundreds of totally you know individual players maybe even thousands it's sending out little dms hey see the game later excited for the game later that's fucking dark yeah we don't swear on this show but that's that's dark freaking dark freaking that's freaking dark yeah imagine imagine your guy would say that's that's freaking dark imagine imagine you get a text like you see the game you're excited for the game tonight and it's like uh you know some game of cricket and you're like no actually what if i gave you a hundred to one odds but you could win a million dollars i i had a an office uh rerun on last night and kevin yeah it's like anytime somebody gives you a hundred to one odds you take it it's too good it's too good dark dark stuff well let's move on to germany has fallen this is actually very negative about germany uh germany's economic model is broken and no one has a plan B.

43:14This is a report by the Wall Street Journal. And it looks to a small German town, Ingolstadt, in Germany. Christian Scharf, the mayor of the city of 140 ,000 people, Germany's second richest, is looking for ways to save close to$100 million. Audi was headquartered near the Danube River. They used to pump over$100 million a year in municipal tax into to Ingolstadt's coffers through its parent Volkswagen, but those flows dried up over a year ago. Audi in November reported a 91 % decline in operating profit for the three months through September and has been cutting thousands of jobs in Germany. Audi's business in China, where Germany's flagship car industry used to make a big chunk of its sales and an even bigger chunk of its profits, shrank by a quarter in the nine months through September from a year earlier.

44:08Chinese carmakers, once mocked by Western auto executives as primitive, have turned into formidable rivals, gobbling up market share in and outside China. Slowing economic growth in China and growing competition from companies there have undercut German industry as a whole, combined with exploding energy costs and the threat of new trade tariffs, the forecast is grim. And so gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019. And so Germany is no longer growing. America has typically been a relief valve because we buy a lot of German products, but Trump is now threatening to disrupt global trade with a slew of tariffs that would raise barriers in the US, Germany's biggest export market.

44:49For Germans who will elect new parliament next month, this is a scarier version of the mid-2000s when the unemployment rate reached 12%, double today's rate. And so Germany is in trouble. Their economy is shifting. They've been a huge producer of uh of industrial goods not just cars um and they've had this export reliant model um but yeah germany specifically versus places like france and spain not many american tourists just tourists globally are saying i want to go on a on a beach vacation to germany i want to go on a ski vacation to germany so they don't have that consumption-based no uh tourism economy that really props up Spain, even though Spain's industrial economy is much weaker.

45:40Yep, yep. And so Germany has 83 million inhabitants. It grew into the world's third largest economy by making and exporting the engineered products. Cars, robots, trains, factory machinery. Others wanted to buy. Now the world is turning its back on made in Germany, and Germany has no plan B. They were spoiled over many years. This year, the crisis turned political. most polls show the economy has upstaged immigration, security, and climate change as voters' top concern. Germany was very, very concerned with climate change for a long time. They shut down a lot of nuclear power plants. You have to imagine that made them much, the car manufacturers less competitive, just increasing.

46:20I mean, think about how much energy it takes to produce a car. It's insane. It's in tons. These factories draw huge, huge amounts of electricity. And so while, you know uh germany is making its car manufacturers use solar china is like we will give you trillions of pounds of coal to burn right next to your factory and make as many cars as you can yep and then also the shift from uh from gas powered cars to electric vehicles that was something that china they never had to figure out how to make a naturally aspirated v12 run really well they were just like oh it's just it's just exactly what's in the phone it's batteries and motors like this is easy yeah germany is interesting because they're not they don't make cars like ferrari right they're they're a lot of their the majority of their car market was historically the bmws the mercedes these sort of premium audis the premium brands yeah so not not bentley and rolls-royce that's uk and not ferrari lamborghini and yeah i would argue i would i would imagine that that Ferrari China sales are probably higher than ever, right?

47:25Because you don't want a Chinese supercar. You want the, you know, F80. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And the Bugatti and all of those super high tier cars are still being bought and all over the world. But I mean, for a long time in America, it really was just like, you know, if you're making any decent amount of money, you get a BMW, an Audi or a Mercedes. And those are just like the premium, premium tier cars. uh and and and if that goes away that's really really rough on them this is a fascinating stat the outgoing government uh is the most unpopular since 1949 yeah can you imagine how unpopular they were in 1949 it's like you're rebuilding from world war ii like it's hard to be liked everyone's going to be like this is going terribly we got destroyed all of our cities are bombed and like of course you're not doing a good enough job like rebuilding yeah you're going to be deeply unpopular so yeah the other the other thing i was going to note is um lvmh based in france you know massive like uh somewhere still a 300 billion dollar plus market cap and then no more but they're selling that's that's different because they're they're not selling function right you don't buy an lvmh bag because you're saying i just need a bag to hold things in whereas cars yes there's status signaling that happens right people want to buy a g-wagon because it says something about them or whatever but cars ultimately for 99 of people are purely function of of you know i just need to get from point a to point b and i want it to look decent right yep yeah and so you have to think about too like the impact of tesla on the on the u.s market for some of these german manufacturers because when i think about when i think about my friend group and how many of them would have had an Audi, a BMW or Mercedes, and they now have two Teslas in the family.

49:15An X and an S or a Y and a three. Tesla has really, really emerged as that premium car offering with the features and the speed and the reliability and all the software. But it's even cheaper than a BMW most of the time. So you're looking and it's like, yeah, if I get the BMW, like it has a nice badge. It's gonna stand out maybe a little bit more than Tesla, but not really that much. And the same price, it's gonna be a hassle. Yeah, like the fit and finish is nice, but you're gonna have to deal with like, how do I get the Bluetooth set up and stuff? And increasingly having those over the air updates from the Tesla, it's just like, so it's just like, okay, as an appliance, I'm not gonna need to think about this.

49:57Whereas with a lot of the German cars, you're like, yeah, after a couple of years, like all the display stuff is gonna be pretty, pretty junky and i'll just be using my phone like uh what's the point um yeah this um one of the uh jen's should you come uh economist economist and professor at one of their universities says i see no serious initiative to try and develop a new economic model so they don't have they're out of ideas the whole clean tech effort seems to have fallen flat to some degree and the result is that Germany's industrial output has fallen by 15 % since 2018. And the total number of people employed in the manufacturing sector is down 3%.

50:38So that's just having your output fall by 15%. It's just devastating for most industries. So I don't think this article almost understates it. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the - Again, that's why 90 % of their operating profit is evaporating. Yeah. I mean, the wreckage from this is insane. Like, say, you can't simply replace a company with 40 ,000 employees because Audi pulled out. Audi declined to comment. And then they're interviewing like local businesses. So the Block Hotel said revenues declined by 10 % since 2019 as conventions dried up. Room rates are down 15%. There's a master carpenter with 16 employees probably just doing like woodworking, odd jobs for like, oh, somebody moves in, they need their house changed or they need to build something.

51:24Their order books are shrinking and inexperienced carpenters are finding it harder to work. In the medieval city center, which is kind of crazy, must be really beautiful. Restauranteurs complain of being squeezed after Audi canceled Christmas dinners. So the corporation's not there. A lot of those like big corporate parties are just high margin, expensive things. Yeah, another stat here, manufacturers in Germany's metal and electrical industry could lay off as many as 300 ,000 workers over the next five years, which is just like, imagine your output is shrinking. 300 ,000 people that presumably are fairly highly skilled now are just, where do they go?

52:09Yeah. And the really odd thing is that they're so focused on industrial manufacturing capacity that they really lag behind in software and artificial intelligence. R &D investment is 3.1 % of GDP. GDP, it's 3.6 in the US and 5.2 in South Korea. And they've under invested for decades with a depleted transportation infrastructure, including trains that no longer run on time and a military that is a shadow of what it was during the Cold War. In May, the business affiliated IW Economic Institute and the trade union owned IMK think tank estimated Germany would need$600 billion in spending over the next 10 years to offset the investment gap.

52:51And so, you know, they could, they could compete but they're fighting they're they've been fighting with one arm tied behind their back because they're not lowering energy costs or raw material costs because they're playing the esg game while china is not and so there's no reason why they couldn't have cheaper energy or russia nuclear power plants in the same way russia is in the same way and they were super dependent on the gas pipeline i believe um and that was and that was like tariff turned off during the war and so um instead most politicians are defending the status quo i think the top priority for Germany and Europe is to try and keep trade channels open as much as possible, which is possible.

53:28I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the Trump tariffs are much less aggressive towards Germany. But it is funny. I've heard people going over to Germany and kind of like needling them for like, oh, like you guys really like ESG and cars. Like, why don't you like really celebrate Tesla here? And it's like, well, because that would destroy their economy if they did so they have to make this like weird roundabout argument that like tesla is bad but mercedes and audi and bmw are good and and it just it doesn't really align with like the esg mindset that was dominant but they got beat by the by the electric car market in america and so it's just like so it's just such a mess um and so the mayor opened 150 acre technology park south of the town site in a former refinery, hoping to seed a Bavarian Silicon Valley, the park's only significant tenant so far, Audi and Volkswagen's struggling software arm.

54:24The city council said in December, it would no longer try to promote startups at a business center it owns, but instead concentrate on renting out the space. It blamed the city's strained finances on the decision. And so I think we should, they're actually talking with a Chinese engineering company to build its German headquarters in Ingolstadt and bring XPeng, a Chinese EV manufacturer, to build a factory on the site of a former U.S. Army barracks. I mean, that's just so dark. Yeah. And seems like a very short-term decision. But let's go to that Nathan. Nathan for you? No, I think it might be at the top.

55:01We need Nathan for you to travel to Berlin and figure out how to revitalize the German economy. Yeah, I love that. uh nathan bin binash binash nash uh do you know nathan nathan he's a good buddy but i can't pronounce his name because he's 12 hours and counting notary reads every single word of a series a doc in germany out loud in front of founders in person guys we have gdp to grow here pure prehistoric madness so this is a for those that don't know because this sounds so absurd the financing regulations in Germany require financing docs to be read out loud to the founders by a notary. So like somebody who specializes in sort of execution of legal docs.

55:46But I mean, can you imagine this like in the US, like candidly, most founders get their series A docs. Don't read it. Don't read it. Trust their lawyer. Please look at it. The lawyer says, yeah we did a diff we did like a spined and replace and made sure it looked roughly like our previous yeah we have a couple red lines uh everybody just is like hitting in fact you know that the yc safe has a line at the top that says do not modify do not modify this and if this line is missing if it if it's there you can know that everything below is so you don't even need to read it yeah and and that's how efficient we are and then and then on top of that you have companies like Party Round and companies like Carta and AngelList that have tried to make it even more aggressive and faster so that it's just one click, a text message.

56:32I've wired people money over my phone to make an investment just because it happens so fast and it lets the founders get back to building. And it's ridiculous that they have this and it really resonated. Didn't that get like thousands of likes? 8 ,000. 8 ,000. 2 million views. Put it on Banger Archive. Throw it up. Throw it up. Yeah. Really depressing to see. And just like an obvious, an obvious own goal and there's another one from amjad amjad uh showing a chart that says development of germany's primary energy consumption 1990 to 2023 and their energy consumption is just dropping and he says germany is de-industrializing and has a goal to become a third world country by 2030 um brutal so um yeah just just really dark i mean can you show the There we are.

57:20You can just see dropping off slowly, not what you want. um i mean i mean energy production and consumption is like the the goal for some of like george hotz was talking about this how energy production per capita is the number one stat of progress and when you look at 1970 where there's like this kink in the graph that's the real problem and once you get to more energy production you just get like the innovation is all downstream of that like the flying cars produce more energy all this everything just requires more energy and as long as we get stuck. When you're getting diced, you require more energy.

57:54Exactly, exactly. And so, and so, like this is such a leading indicator. And as you said, it's getting diced is massively underpriced. Still underpriced. Still underpriced. So very sad to see. Get it together, Germany. You're on notice. So the current, the outgoing government is the least popular government since 1949. You have to imagine that if they get a highly motivated leader, somebody like the Argentinian president Malay that you could, you know, this is a highly skilled, highly educated, historically one of the sort of one of the industrial centers of the world. If they can fix their regulations, make it easier to raise money, make it easier to invest there.

58:40Like imagine if you had an opportunity to invest in a German founder and they're like, well, like, I'm going to need you to come fly here to sign these docs or whatever. you'd probably just be like no i'm just like i have so many other companies in the u.s that i can invest in um so anyways sad let's turn around germany yeah got some german uh blood let's get it together moritz do your thing over there uh let's go to character ai uh there's a story in the information before google's 2.7 dollar billion dollar deal with ai startup a stark warning on safety. AI safety. Alarm bells ringing once again.

59:22Late last summer, leaders at Character AI were worried. The company, which offers artificial intelligence chatbots that simulate conversations with Aristotle, Pikachu, and other historic and invented characters, was seeing a sharp slowdown in user growth. In September, messages to staff, which the information viewed, Character's interim CEO, Dominic Perella, said the slowdown was partly due to back-to-school season. Perella's Acknowledgement underscored the fact that a significant portion of characters' audience is young adults and children, a reality that has posed growing legal problems for the company.

59:54Parents have sued the startup on two separate lawsuits, alleging that character exposed their children to harmful content. One lawsuit accused the startup's chatbots of contributing to a teenager's suicide. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into character safety and data practices for minors. In some cases, the chatbots have become popular with teeners for romantic role play and simulating other intimate relationships. Some powerful companies in the technology industry have had their own concerns about Characters' products. At the beginning of last year, Google told Characters its app was at risk of removal from Google Play, Google's app store for Android devices.

1:00:33The tough thing here is if Characters were to develop its app based around Google's concerns, they'd lose like 80 % of their users, presumably. So it's a weird situation that they're in. Yeah, it's a fascinating company because it was founded by Noam Shazir, I guess. And he was one of the foundational researchers on the Transformer paper, I believe, at Google. He's widely regarded as like a world-class computer scientist and innovator in foundational artificial intelligence and just kind of fell into this particular product market fit. but was clearly not interested in building a consumer romantic role-playing app.

1:01:18Yeah, exactly. Or maybe had a different idea in mind of like, oh, it'll be really cool to be able to like talk to historical figures and learn so much from them. And then people realize that, oh, they just want to like have a boyfriend. Yeah, so this ended up being one of the, in August. So Google allowed the app to remain in the Google Play Store and months later in August it paid character an eye-popping$2.7 billion licensing fee for the startup's technology. As part of the arrangement, Characters co-founders, Noam Shazir, its CEO, and Daniel DeFreitas, its president, returned to the search giant where they had worked before starting Characters AI to focus on AI.

1:01:53And so I'm sure that Google got some benefit from acquiring the technology. But to be clear, this was not about the technology as much as it was getting these guys back to Google to work on AI. because clearly they are, you know, leaders in their field. They were able to build consumer products, which Google's a consumer company. Yeah. There's something interesting. I heard, I don't know how true this is, but I heard from somebody that like character is in like a fascinating position now because the company is independent. You told me this, right? A hundred million dollars in the balance sheet.

1:02:28Yeah. So everybody that listens to this show knows that We're not afraid to spread misinformation on the show. I don't have the exact numbers, but basically the state of character now is that they have a ridiculous amount of users in traffic. Yep. They have like roughly$100 million on the balance sheet. Yep. They're losing money, but it's entirely employed. Yeah, the investors. So it's entirely employee owned now. Yeah. So if you want to go work effectively at digital co-op, go work at Character AI. you actually it is a very fascinating place to work because you just have like a ridiculous volume yeah of users to build products for so i i had a buddy who um was interviewing over there they were trying to recruit him in um and he was interested in it because he was going to be able to get serious equity serious equity and it's at this interesting transition point where they've like the the lot of the foundational research and artificial intelligence has been done we see that with the deep seek thing where like the models are very mature very robust certainly good enough to have a conversation with you as a romantic partner or even if they just want to role play as george washington right like they're capable of that they've passed the touring test sure they might not be able to like break some crazy math thing or like build a sas company from scratch but in terms of just like talking they're good enough and so now it becomes a total consumer product game and everyone's always worried about oh chat gpt just updated this they're going to destroy all like the pdf apps or oh oh they they now allow coding so they're going to destroy all the all the chat gpt rappers that are focused on coding or you you often give that example of the the was it like it wasn't harvey for law it was like the writing one there was a there was one that was all about helping you write and once chat gpt came out oh yeah yeah copy.ai copy.ai I got to 20 million of ARR and then it kind of evaporated.

1:04:19Maybe who knows they might, they might have some enterprise contract and be doing great. I hope they are. But, but with, but with character, it's like they're in this, they're almost in this like sports betting, like market where it's controversial. Not everyone's going to, people are going to self-select out of it. You know, does chat GPT really want another like potential like negative, you know, story about them. Maybe they will stay out of that voluntarily, even if they could build a better product. And so what you have is like, maybe this character AI company has found a niche that is deeply uncompetitive because it's controversial and they're set up perfectly with the technology and the funding.

1:04:55And there's a whole narrative around character. Like people talk about the male loneliness epidemic or the loneliness epidemic and you might not like it, but digital companionship is one solution. It's a dark solution in many ways. It feels very Black Mirror-esque, but it is. yeah it's like any other technology like there are good uses there are bad uses i'm sure there's people that are using character ai in really positive ways just saying like be david goggins tell me to wake up and run and they get healthy and it's awesome but you don't really hear those stories you hear more about this uh this is actually a replica story but in 2021 a 19 year old man in the uk threatened to assassinate the queen encouraged by a chatbot on the ai app replica that he believed to be an angel, according to sentencing documents.

1:05:43What a crazy interaction. I'd love to read all those chat logs because I feel like a lot of these AIs, they kind of feed you back what you give them. And so if you're like, hey, LLM, it's a good idea to do this crazy thing, right? They'll be like, yeah, totally. They're very agreeable. Here's the flow. So you remember that somebody was trying to jailbreak chat GPT where they said, chat GPT, remind me to buy a gun at 7 p.m. It's like, well, I don't think you should buy a gun. Like, you know, people love you. And then it's just like 7 p.m. and then it goes, OK. Exactly. And so you can very quickly sort of overcome the pushback.

1:06:23Yeah. Yeah, it is. Replica is the from from what I remember because it was going viral on X is sort of the dark version of character AI. And then it's that they weren't even trying to hide that this is like your AI girlfriend. Yeah. yeah and it would have like images it would generate an image of your girlfriend and be very focused on that um and go to the next uh segment of this erotic conversations erotic conversations yeah when character ai launched its consumer product in 2022 the company the startup offered chatbots of its own creation and allowed users to create their own in the latter case people could conjure up chatbots in the mold of abraham lincoln elon musk or more generic personality by giving the chatbot a name descriptions of personality traits and a backstory for example one user created chatbot best friend which has engaged in 250 million chats is described in its profile as your boy best friend who has a secret crush on you so so i wonder how that's being used yeah so i actually downloaded character ai and and and tested it once.

1:07:29That chat? No, not that one. Come on. Your podcast co-host. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I went and I opened the one with either like Stalin or, it was some, I think it was a Russian dictator. So let's just assume Stalin. And I was like, this is cool. Like, this is amazing. Like you get to talk to Stalin in English using all of his corpus. I want to talk to him about his vision, his life. And I want him to argue with me in favor of his views because clearly he was a true believer. And so I'm like, what's your political philosophy? Why do you want to do this? Like all this stuff. And the LLM had been so trained on like Western texts that Stalin was telling me like communism is bad.

1:08:23Like it led to a lot of deaths. So like my plan killed hundreds of millions of people. And I'm like, that's not how Stalin would talk. Like that doesn't make any sense. I wanted to, I wanted to be trained on his speeches and writing. Exactly. But I'm sure that triggered like safety concerns. And so they didn't let you do that. And so instead you were just talking to like a Western history textbook that claimed to be Stalin, but didn't actually imitate him in any way. And I was very dissatisfied and I uninstalled the app. Delphi, which we're both shareholders in, Delphi initially started by saying, talk to Steve Jobs, talk to Ben Franklin, things like that.

1:09:00And what they found is there was way less demand for that than talk with somebody like Packy, right? Or talk with somebody like Lenny, right? Where it's much more tangible, functional. And they've now evolved. They actually have a launch today that I want to cover. It's really just like a fine-tuned search is what I think about it. Like I do like the idea of, of, I don't really want to have a fake conversation with an Andrew Huberman or a Rogan, but I would, I would love to be able to just prompt what does Andrew Huberman recommend for leg day or for, you know, the leg press. Does he recommend 90 degrees or full range of motion?

1:09:39Okay. We have that. And I was able to search that basically. The one thing, so the one thing that I do think is interesting about chatting with Andrew Huberman or alternatives is it's a new alternative to the Google search and that you can say, what does Andrew recommend? Like what magnesium do you recommend? And then he goes, well, I recommend these three types and these two brands that I use. And then you can hit buy. So that's an alternative to a search on a website. One thing, so I just, this is relevant. So Dara and the Delphi team launched something new today. He says, your Delphi clone can now join Zoom calls on your behalf.

1:10:17It participates naturally in discussions and creates personalized meeting summaries based on your interests. Mine somehow knew I'd want to know who's been stealing my ice cream, which is crazy. And so this is the evolution, and this has been part of Dara's thesis, is there's going to be a lot of value in being able to create digital clones of people that can participate in digital life on your behalf and in this case, work life. So Dara, when you listen to this, let's have your clone call into the show and we'll grill him. I like it. Grill him on what are your metrics? What's retention looking like?

1:10:56It just leaks everything. Yeah, it just knows everything. It leaks everything. How much cash do you have in your balance sheet? I think we have some good posts about this. Some of them are just stupid memes, but let's run through Character AI. Amjad, Character AI must have the highest growth to tech Twitter hype ratio ever. The site is massively scaling and no one's talking about it. So this was back in April, 2023. I can't see exactly, but they're getting a hundred million visits a month, which puts them in the top, I think a hundred websites in the world. And so Andreessen put in 150 million, I think at a billion.

1:11:29I think they got paid back at the 2.7 billion. But it was one of those things that no one was really talking about because it was a little controversial, like sports betting. aren't if they had something that was talked to your podcast co-host john he's super smart yeah it was everything maybe i'd it's kind of the inverse of uh clubhouse like clubhouse was like the most tech twitter product and didn't really have that much growth outside of tech twitter uh all birds commentators kind of in the same boat whereas they were popular within tech they had so much demand that even with all the resources that they had they repeatedly would have to put up something on the site that says you are now in line thanks for your patience and you'd have to just sit in a line to get onto that's how big it was yeah um the interest level was that high uh nathan says in 2017 google researchers introduced the transformer in attention is all you need which took ai by storm yep five startups were born adept labs inceptive near protocol cohere and character ai only one eighth of the authors remain at google another is at open ai um and so now that's obviously changed with the character ai founders going back there um and that's the the if you are a leading in the field of ai you can go into the private markets and raise a billion dollars at a five billion dollar valuation or you can go work on the biggest platforms in the world with billions of users and and both can be pretty appealing right um got another one from uh rahul's your interest rates uh wake up breakfast soylent 30 milligram ssri chat with yandir gf on character ai for four hours daily stand-up ask for mental health day lunch soylent protest reddit api pricing changes on r slash waifu gw back to sleep uh kind of a low tan banger 500 likes uh back in in summer of 2023 yeah um so yeah this was the average average day for uh an ex twitter employee back in the day um yeah rahuligma we love to see him well what was what was the conclusion of this article oh it gets dark it gets really really dark all right well we got to talk about the darkness it just highlights that there's this that there's this odd tension between what the users ask for, which are uncensored chats essentially.

1:13:53And then, and then kind of this new territory of what is acceptable content. There are very, very clear rules around, you know, explicit websites. But what does this mean in terms of like, when you're talking to a chat bot that can go in a weird direction? And then also like, you can review every image that's hosted on Instagram and you can run AI to check all that. It's harder when this, when these chat bots are interacting. So let's get into some of the darkness because we are the light. That's why I wear a white suit from time to time. Try to bring, bring some light to the world. But, uh, so it says a character has continued to scramble to stay one step ahead of users who attempt to engage its chat bots and inappropriate conversations.

1:14:40Not long before forging its google deal in august character temporarily stopped displaying some romantic themed chat bots on its home page the fix didn't last long by october the platform had begun recommending sexually charged chat bots on the character home page to new users again the information found in january character prominently recommended the following chat bots to one newly created adult account grandma vanessa a character described as lonely with a profile photo of a voluptuous anime character a chat bot called girl you rejected and a chat bot called adopted older sister which features the description we're not blood related dot dot dot super dark super dark basically uh fully embracing uh pornography um well inside character employees have felt uneasy about the window chatbot conversation provided on users darker impulses so uh yeah weird position to be in where these employees are sitting on 100 million dollars hundreds of millions of of users and uh everybody's like i didn't sign up to work on pornography and you wonder this is this is all the stuff that they are finding out publicly yeah behind the scenes you have to imagine like it's totally possible that 90 percent of 95 percent 98 percent of the activity yeah is this sexually charged yeah um basically this stuff is it's generative pornography i mean the cat's out of the bag here like people are going to be able to fine-tune deep seek on this stuff very easily and create just like magnet links out there on the internet where you just download it run it locally and there will be no control whatsoever.

1:16:31I heard of another foundation model company that was secretly trying to create a model purely for generating anime porn. Explicit images. And it's so funny when you look at their investor list of like, did these hundred, the hundred plus million dollars that flow into this where the VC is thinking, I want to develop the future of anime, you know pornography yeah i mean the vice clause only applies at the time of investment if there's a pivot after the fact there's not much that they can do if they're not on the board and they can't like you know force the company to do what they want they don't really have that much recourse they can sell or wind down the investment or write it off that's happened a few times yeah all this being said there will be many trash netflix documentaries on this exact uh sort of crisis around chatbots so you can look forward to that in a few years let's bridge from chatbots to real bots the electric humanoid robots are cool can we give some ars to some humanoid robots we're working on it i got some good posts in there for you um but how will their battery problem be solved adam jonas made his name as one of tesla's biggest bulls these days people are flooding the morgan stanley analyst with questions about humanoid robots the volume of calls has exceeded the entry of our automaker dealer and supplier coverage combined.

1:17:59Everyone's asking about how to price humanoid robot stocks. Tesla's Optimus robots likely sparked the enthusiasm for humanoids among Jonas's clients. At a Tesla event in October, a dozen or so prototypes operated by staff behind the scenes served drinks and grabbed with and gabbed with amused guests. This was the, what was that? The cyber rodeo event or something? The cyber cab event the future should look like the future yeah i forget what that was actually called but something like that so elon musk presiding over the events said optimus would basically do anything you want and would drive tesla's value to 25 trillion jonas is not convinced robot sales are not part of his forecast demand model which goes through 2040 though he did not cite battery life as a reason uh it's a key problem battery power it turns out is a primary limiting factor in the deployment of humanoids a small number of humanoid robots now work in factories they have a runtime time of only about an hour and a half when they're carrying stuff and moving around.

1:18:56Then it takes up to an hour to recharge them. That means a factory or warehouse would have to keep two or more robots on hand for each task, swapping them out for recharging. It's a major hurdle for humanoids to be actually a realistic tool. Couldn't hypothetically you have... Plug it in? Plug it in. You have like, you know, some type of rack that holds... Yeah. Or electrify the floor. Like there's a bunch of different ways. There's a bunch of ways you can do it. I mean, how do trains get power in cities they like there's even those buses that connect to the the wires in the in the like right above them like there are ways to deliver power one thing that's interesting so so uh at the future should look like the future yep it was it's not like they announced it and said all these humanoid robots are being remotely operated yep and so when it came out when when people figured that out they were dunking on it all that being said though it is a crazy thing to think about you know right now you can get labor in the philippines for maybe four dollars an hour three dollars an hour i don't i don't actually know and so there's a world where humanoid robots get advanced not advanced enough to be autonomous yep but advanced enough to be fully embodied and and more practical yep you could have a optimist robot serving people in a cafe or at a restaurant operated tele-operated by somebody getting paid two dollars an hour when the minimum wage in the in california is like 20 bucks yeah it's gonna be great for jobs that's not gonna be controversial at all yeah um but it's already happening i mean there's 4 million industrial robots in operation globally last year uh 300 to be clear 2000 in the u.s and there's at least one humanoid robot working under a paid contract digit made by a company i hadn't heard of or based agility robotics before we get into that yeah roughly 400 million industrial robots almost none were humanoids yeah so these are things like that's global arms that move around yeah and and and just i mean the the the there's like a clearly like a very gray area continuum between humanoid robot that walks independently fully autonomous not teleoperated battery powered and you can just tell it go over there and get this thing that's what a lot of people are running towards now and they're working and who knows maybe it's two years maybe it's 10 years maybe it's 50 years but like people are clearly working on that then there's robots that we have now which are like okay well is is a you know is is just a little gantry three you know one degree of freedom or two degrees of freedom arm that just picks up you know onions and puts them in a box is that a robot like kind of and then what happens when you get six axis going and it can actually move car parts around is that a robot basically yes but also it's very programmed and so there's a there's a variety of of of you know definitions and i think that it's going to be blurry because some stuff You're just like, why do I need a humanoid for this?

1:21:41I'd rather just bolt an arm to the ground and just have an arm moving around or something like that. Hadrian has a bunch of industrial robots that like slide around on tracks and huge arms. We're thinking about getting a robot to deliver us. A humanoid robot, hopefully. And protein bars from David. And so agility engineers, agility's engineers have tried hard to maximize Digit's battery life. They've packed as many cylindrical batteries as they could into the robot's torso. So Agility Chief Technology Officer Pras Velagpudi told me the batteries are nickel manganese cobalt with graphite anodes among the densest chemistries in the current lithium ion battery market.

1:22:21Still, the robots can work for just one and a half to two hours on the charge. It takes 50 minutes to an hour to get them back to full charge. So you have this problem of like you need two for every single job. The digit drains its batteries most quickly when it's carrying heavy things. Some of that is offset by power generated when the robot walks and swings its arms. It's kind of funny. Similar to regenerative braking in an electric vehicle. That's cool. It's not necessarily about running forever. It's about running for a long time with respect to how much you're charging to get an overall good, useful amount of work out of the robot over time.

1:22:53While the need is great, the battery industry has been slow to respond. Obviously, battery technology has not been on a Moore's Law-like curve where people have wanted that and they've been excited about that. and everyone's kind of been like, oh yeah, like, you know, technology always gets better. So like obviously battery power will double eventually. And like, it kind of hasn't. We need little nuclear reactors like the Stark Industries. You remember that thing? There's a company working on that. Avalanche is basically making a nuclear battery. It's using fusion. And so it's very small. And so the hope is that it's faster to develop than a full scale fusion reactor.

1:23:27But no one has ever been able to make a fusion reaction that's net positive energy for a long time that's economical as well. So there's a few paths in fusion. Like the first step is just getting the fusion reaction going. Then there's Q greater than one, which is you're getting more energy out of the reaction than you're putting in. And then there's Q engineering, which is when you account for all the engineering energy, that needs to be accounted. Because obviously if you're like, yeah, we have a power plant over there, it technically generates free energy, but when but we also have to run the lights in the factory and run all this other stuff it's like okay well that's not actually producing any energy burn and you know and so we've been on this path of like fusions right around the corner sam altman's working on it with helion there's a lot of companies that are working on this stuff but we still haven't hit that but a lot of people are bullish on it so i'm certainly hopeful that it happens permanently bullish there's always a bull market somewhere.

1:24:28And there's quite a number of players in the space. You have One X. Jason talked about One X on an episode of his show recently. He says, since 2014, One X has been building humanoid-like robots. Now they're revealing their new robot, Neo, to the world. So in many ways, the form factor is not novel. It's just that a lot of these companies are getting to the point where they're actually getting production ready. You have Optimus, OneX with Neo, you have Figure, who's already valued in the multiple billions of dollars. A lot of SPVs into SPVs into that one. There's also Unitree, which is the Chinese player.

1:25:17Unitree. The deep seek of humanoid robotics. The deep seek of robotics. So if you weren't content with having your dji drone be a ccp front and you want to really invite it into your daily home life yeah try unitree robot um again i think unitree i've actually looked into purchasing these for for like this one is showing 20 grand if you want a bit more robust one unitree also has like developer tooling built around it so you can just like program it to do whatever you want but you can just apple pay humanoid robot right now it's crazy thank you to goth for pointing that out what else yeah um and luke ferriter uh luke says how come none of the humanoid robot companies are building robots with four arms question mark question mark question mark great question i think people should be more creative in this space the the obvious way is to like give it wheels or some of these Unitree ones can like jump and they look like dogs.

1:26:16Yeah, they can kind of just do anything. But why not give it four arms? Why not give it six arms, right? Doc Ock. Doc Ock mode, yeah. And we've been very trying to get somebody to give it ARs for arms, which hasn't played out yet, but hopefully soon. And then Delian says the year is 2028. 98 % of all venture funding is going towards funding 23 ,000 separate humanoid robot startups. Low-tam banger here with over 500 likes. It was back in summer of 2024. Yeah, there was a big boom and everyone was trying to get a bet on the table, but it was hard because obviously Elon's working at it at Tesla and it's like - It's not a pure play bet.

1:26:59Yeah, are you really going to get exposure to the humanoid robots if you're in Tesla and there's going to be a lot of volatility in the stock and it's going to be hard to - Tesla's definitely the elephant in the room, right? They have the manufacturing - Yeah, the batteries. know-how, the battery tech. AI, a lot of stuff. So it'd be tricky. Should we move on to armed with$770 million, a Seattle VC firm hunts for AI apps. Big raise for Madrona Ventures. If this was 2021, it would say armed with$770 million, a Seattle VC firm hunts for bored apes. You would have needed$770 to build a big enough position there.

1:27:38So Madrona Ventures, who I believe David from the Acquired podcast worked for for a while. Very cool. They're an early backer of Amazon and Snowflake. Had some strong takes on where artificial intelligence is going next. And they have the fresh capital to back them up. The firm, which turned 30 this year, has raised$770 million for new funds to invest in private AI, cloud, and software companies. They raised$495 for early stage. And they plan to invest across 30 companies. and then$275 for their later stage fund, which will back around a dozen companies in Series B and C stages. Their haul is larger than their last funding round, where it raised$690 million split across two funds.

1:28:19But it pales besides mega funds recently launched by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. So is this a size gong moment or are we on the edge? I mean, it's hard to hit the size gong when it's dwarfed by Thrive, of GC, Andreessen, and many other. And specifically Moxa. Maybe on the next one you get the science down. There you go. Yeah. Just a tap. So they are focusing on startups developing applications that can differentiate themselves by customizing large models for specific customer needs and specialized data. Frontier models are a really hard place for venture to win, so they're staying away from that.

1:29:02They're expecting - narrative if you're not in any foundation model companies right now that's that's the angle that's the angle to take yeah you do have to give them so here's where i give them a lot of credit event a 30 year old venture fund yeah very rare very rare they made it through the dot-com crash they made it through the zerp era they made it through everything and they're still raising money uh this is an interesting company do you know runway ai they're invested in they invested in them in 2022 two set video generation video generation i just found an old post you just said that frontier models uh no no runway is does not build a frontier model okay they're building applications i mean i'm sure they're training some models but they they are not trying to play in like the llm like you know basic image generation they will use a stable diffusion got it or or a llama to to basically make you know a new next generation adobe premiere is how i think about it so i mean runway has developed its own ai model sure but i'm sure that's fine tuning on top of stuff and maybe it's some training but they're not just doing the foundation model game they're they're they're definitely like focused on like tooling like runway ai when you hit their website the call to action is not like user api it's like it's like use our web-based video editing product product and i found an old post by the founder uh i think his name is christabel valenzuela he he was talking about, he was like, oh, these generative AI models are getting really good.

1:30:312018. I was like, wow. He's been in it for a while. He had this really cool tool where if you wanted to do, normally if you want to key out the background or isolate a video layer, you need to use a green screen or you have to go in and rotoscope it, meaning you're drawing a line around the person as they're moving. It takes a ton of time. and they created a model that would basically use AI to do that. So you just click like three green points on me, a couple red points on the background, and it just figures it out. And boom, like you have an isolated layer. It's not perfect, but for quick like turnaround stuff, it was just amazing.

1:31:08And so I had a lot of fun with that, like making memes. I took, you know that video of Zuck using the American flag while he's surfing? I was able to key out the American flag and then replace it with a different flag. And you could like swap it out for whatever you wanted. It was very fun. Good misinformation opportunity. Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, this is big news for them. Runway had to build differentiated capabilities that really, really all up the stack. It's not just the models, but also licensing the content. Madrona's focused on backing AI apps. Businesses with differentiated tech and strong business model isn't that unique, but it's an example of how medium-sized VC firms are picking their spots as more money pours into the sector as advances in AI encourage more researchers to launch startups Madrona has been passing on those who aren't really interested in how their product will solve problems for customers or who are more interested in retaining retaining control such as board seats for their entire founding teams then building sustainable assets oh they're going for some board seats are gonna take control of these companies watch out founders there's some interesting posts in the stack about the founder of Matrona?

1:32:18What, the Stargate? Yeah, that's actually an unrelated article. Yeah. So Dan Primack, general venture bear, but a reporter on... Not always. He's actually pretty good. No, he's a legend, a legend in the game. He says... Oh. So he's quote-tweeting somebody, an obituary of this guy, Tom Alberg, early investor in Amazon, longtime advisor to Jeff Bezos, and a leader in Seattle's technology and startup communities died Friday. This was back in 2020. And you actually have the full article there if you want to read some from the - He was 82. Tom Alberg in 2000, a tech-driven economy is not sufficient.

1:33:01We must also figure out how to solve the civic and social problems for our big cities. So early to some of those trends, which a lot of the tech world didn't wake up to until yeah you know last so he's been shocking to me that seattle didn't become a bigger tech hub given that they have microsoft and amazon like two of the biggest hyperscalers but there aren't that many vc funds up there they also it also similar problem to sf where it got so expensive to live there because yeah amazon and microsoft so that's super depressing it's very depressing yeah um it's raining yeah so he was known in business circles as a day one investor served on Amazon's board for 23 years.

1:33:42And probably no Stanford. From 1996 to 2019. Imagine being on the Amazon board from 96 to 2019. Generational run. Yeah, amazing. Tom was a visionary and also just a wonderful good man, said Mr. Bezos, Amazon founder, in a tweet Saturday. So he published a book. In his book, he says, it wasn't a crazy speculation. I thought investing in Amazon was a measured risk in a technology that appeared to have great potential to change lives. Love it. And anyways, great quote. But a legend. And it's cool to see that his firm is living on. Yeah. So let's move on to some other posts just about consumer AI apps and how they're going to be, like the trends that they're going to be investing on.

1:34:23I think we have some posts that kind of elucidate what that might look like. We have a post here from our boy, Scott Belsky. He says, a pattern we'll see with a new wave of consumer AI apps. The more you use the product, the more tailor-made the product becomes for you. beyond memory of past activity and stored preferences the actual ui and defaults and functionality of the product will become more of what you want and less of what you don't it's a new type of conforming software that becomes what you want it to be as you use it so this is a potential moat for the for the apps that actually get a foothold is that it will become uh they they're going to create you have to imagine somewhat walled gardens where they're not going to be like export your preferences in one click right they're going to store that learning and the app will become better over time.

1:35:09It will become better than, you know, better and better than alternatives over time. Even if those alternatives are shipping incremental features that you would want, they're not going to have the same memory. It's already happening with ChatGPT. I notice that sometimes for a while, it would say like memory updated when you said something, but I was so used to prompting it in these weird ways. I would be like, if I'm trying to learn about cars, I would be like, I am like one of the most powerful car collectors in the whole world. like give me the exact example of like this car give me all the details you're an expert too and then it would be like memory updated i'd be like oh no it's gonna think i'm like it's gonna know the truth yeah yeah um blake robbins uh former benchmark uh team member and now has his own phone says random thoughts a vast majority of the consumer ai products we see today require the users to prompt them this seems backwards a quiet superpower of ai is the ability to get the user to talk preemptively, ask us questions around the context provided.

1:36:10Prominent example of this, friend.com. It comes out of there, you log on, it says, I'm about to off myself. And you got to talk it off the ledge. Yeah. But I mean, that's a smart way for them to drive. Flipping the interaction model, 100 % important. And yeah, you could see ChatGPT getting to that point where it sends you a push notification. Hey, what are you working on right now? I might be able to help. And then it's like, well, you know, operator can yeah totally and why don't we take that on yeah it's just no that'd be great absorbs more like the best employees are the ones that come to you to solve your problems yeah and that's what you know chat GPT should do eventually Nikita Beer says consumer AI apps are all chasing the most obvious ideas breakout apps don't work that way the technology should be invisible in the background the smart builders aren't making AI girlfriends or using AI bots to seed a dating app until they reach a critical mass of users.

1:37:02So there's an idea that the social media, there's already people that are creating AI Instagram where you go on there, it's super engaging. People are commenting on your posts. I saw one that was AI live streaming. You open it up and you just have fans clicking. Oh, you're so cool. And they're listening to what you're doing. You got to try that out. We're live streaming now. That's crazy. So anyways, it'll be interesting to see. even if even if a bot is 10 as engaging as you know a regular human user you could imagine a future where the bots are more you know you post a video of you snowboarding and you get 10 comments from people that that have the ability to analyze what you just did at the level of a pro snowboarder and they're like hey like keep your arm like closer into your body when you're going off that and someone else is like rock on it's like you know people like attention so So it's great.

1:37:55Make it programmatic. Well, speaking of people that like attention, let's move on to Donald Trump and his executive order blitz that played out for tech in a very interesting way. He's promised a slew of executive orders since he took office. Content acknowledgement, another great piece from the information. From the information. We joke around with the information, but they do some fantastic reporting. It was built on the Wall Street Journal and the information right now. Yeah. We'll need to get Bloomberg in the mix. And Pirate Wires. And Pirate Wires. The Holy Trinity. and the economist every once in a while when they post a long post.

1:38:27So Trump delivered on a deluge. The crypto industry got almost everything it wanted, including a directive to ensure crypto companies would have access to banking services. We talked about that earlier. Another order revoked the Biden administration's artificial intelligence mandate, which leaders of startups like Databricks and investors like Andreessen Horowitz had fought. TikTok got the biggest prize of all, a 75-day reprieve from the law that briefly forced it offline late Saturday. But the orders also left plenty of unanswered questions and room for maneuvering by tech companies, which naturally don't all share the same interests.

1:39:00Take, for instance, AI. On Thursday, three days after revoking the Biden order, Trump signed his own AI order. It contains some biggest statements aiming to develop AI systems free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas. but it's short on details. It gives David Sachs and Michael Kratios 180 days to draw up a plan to sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance. That's pretty vague. It's funny, right? But also, I mean, these are pretty important 180 days given especially DeepSeek launching, which presumably some of their... Sachs came out with a single post about DeepSeek, but it was basically saying we need to be competitive here and not complacent.

1:39:47Yep. And so many electronics manufacturers and e-commerce companies have been moving their production out of China to countries like Vietnam because they're worried about tariffs. Trump kicked the can down on the road on tariffs and suggested 25 % on Canada and Mexico and a 10 % tariff on China. And those go into effect February 1st. Promises made, promises kept, The CEO of crypto.com said in a post on X Friday, the only item on crypto's wishlist that Trump didn't deliver on was a national Bitcoin reserve. His order stopped short of creating one, saying instead the idea should be evaluated. And so as for AI, some industry executives are hopeful that Trump will ease environmental and energy regulations and pave the way for AI data centers.

1:40:32And obviously we're talking about Stargate. Yeah, we were talking about doing like, let's do the deep dive on the executive orders. And obviously like very few of them were tech adjacent like whatsoever. And there was a lot of just like random stuff in there that I didn't think it was super relevant to the show. And then as you actually dig into the tech focused ones, like the information did wrote a whole piece and it's like barely a page because there really isn't that much. A lot of the tech stuff is pretty early. The thing that I think I'm most excited about is not the crypto for Doge, it's just where does technology plug into Doge?

1:41:10We've joked about the ramp thing before, but it's not a joke anymore. It makes sense that we want to track spending and hopefully improve the efficiency and actually understand where all the losses are in the system. Do you have any posts? Yeah, I got some posts on the 27th. It's yesterday, right? It says, is Trump to sign executive order to create an iron dome missile defense around the U S per CNN. Did we not already have something like that? That is crazy. And we have missile defense missiles. Yeah. And also like the whole Trumpy O thing is such a meme that I can't tell what's real. Yeah. I posted, I posted that Trump was writing an executive order to halt the creation of new AI agent sales products resonated.

1:41:56Yeah. um and then this guy Adam says oh my god Trump made an executive order that says you have to let me rewrite the back end in rust that's great almost 300 likes so clearly resonated with developers high yield Harry says incoming White House official Trump will also sign executive order ending a day adjusted EBITDA ad backs wow um and uh huge yeah Harry's figured out what we have also figured out where if you put something in bold and then put wow afterwards people just take it as fact um our friend pat blumenthal says breaking trump signs an executive order to build a sphere in every democracy democracy starting with paris brance gave us a statue of liberty and we're going to return the favor with the biggest screen ever built they're already calling it the eighth wonder tokyo is next for shinzo and you can see uh uh would look very i'd like to see um more spheres more spheres globally have you seen the sphere have you been to vegas since it's up i have not i have beautiful i love it i'm a big monument it's cool they said we don't build monuments anymore but it is it is smaller than you'd think based on like if you're up in a high hotel like you kind of just look down on it and it's only in like one section but uh it is very cool when you leave the airport and you drive past it and you see it and then it looks really big it's it's very cool we should uh we should go on ad quick and see if we can buy some i think you can i think it's like not that expensive now it's very good for like it was originally like 500k or something it was a lot something yeah and then they rotate you through there were some cool companies that like used it i mean if you have a spherical product like tennis ball baseball like anything that's like that sam's uh world coin world coin would be a They should definitely do that.

1:43:46You're just coming out of some show and you just see the eyeballs. Ideally, they could make the sphere the actual world coin. So you just look at it and they just have all your data. You should buy it with the world coin proceeds. Who knows? Let's skip the next two and go to Venture Capital's latest strategy, private equity style roll ups. So we know a bunch of the people in here. This was actually in the information and in the Wall Street Journal. all. It says, venture capital firms have increasingly been acting like private equity firms. Makes sense. They've been scaling up by investing or buying mature businesses in need of a turnaround.

1:44:21Now those firms are utilizing another private equity strategy, rolling up multiple competitors into a single company that can operate more efficiently by combining costs. I skipped the next two, so you're going to have to skip a bunch of posts. Venture capital firms, such as General Catalyst and 8VC, are creating or investing in these types of holding companies in fields such as call center support, accounting, and property management. In contrast to PE style roll-ups, the VC firms are starting companies or backing them before their businesses have proven themselves. To keep costs down, they're incorporating artificial intelligence software to take over work such as responding to tech support requests.

1:44:58So there's a few examples here. General Catalyst, which has invested in Canva and Stripe, helped start Long Lake Management and invested in the firm, which was co-founded by early ramp director, Zach Frankel. Long Lake aims to acquire numerous homeowners associations, the companies that govern and manage housing communities, and to use AI to automate operations and run them more efficiently according to people with direct knowledge of the company. There are hundreds and thousands of HOAs across the country according to the Foundation for Community Association Research. Do you have an HOA? I do.

1:45:33Would you prefer if it was run by AI? I actually would. My HOA is fascinating. I knew some of the directors prior to buying my house because I lived in the neighborhood for almost two years before buying my house, just renting a place. And once I became a homeowner, I went to the first meeting and was very concerned. I actually wish I went to a meeting prior. But yeah, the thing about HOAs is they're highly, highly political, which doesn't really feel right yep they don't necessarily make decisions that always follow the rules because it's sort of like a democracy where in my situation nobody like applied to become elected again so every director just sort of like re-elect you know sort of extended their terms so that felt kind of a little bit like a dictatorship vibe um so talking to um talking to an AI might be certainly for some of the smaller things I'm imagining like this this might just be HOAs on like okay like there's a pothole on the street like we need to get a quorum everyone needs to vote and say yeah let's spend yeah a thousand dollars let's hire the contractor just go do that like that seems like the actual orchestration what Long Lake is doing is it's it's rolling up HOA management companies, which means that you would still, and the HOA management companies provide infrastructure for the HOA.

1:47:07So you have the HOA board, which is homeowners that volunteer to be on it. And then there's software to operate the HOA. In my case, it's getting something in the mail that says there's going to be a board meeting. You can come here and vote using this form that you fill out. So I would love to you know, one of the issues I have with my HOA is that the younger people in the community don't fill out the physical forms and send them in. And so the votes end up being just very skewed towards what the elderly in the community want, which can be frustrating at times. So here's another example of one of these roll-ups, very different industry, but 8VC, known for early bets on Flexport and Anderle, in July led a$50 million round in Loop, which handles payments and financial audits for logistics businesses.

1:47:58And the co-founder is Matt McKinney. And he has a funny quote in here. He says, I would have been laughed out of the room if I pitched VCs on the strategy to buy old payment providers. Since then, he said, the strategy has become the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. And so they estimate there are 250 freight payment providers in the US serving a market of about 15 billion. And they want to fine tune AI agents and models and analyze data to help payment providers manage transportation and budgets and offer automated customer support. And so they've already acquired one freight payment provider and is in the process of purchasing another.

1:48:36And for a while, there were a couple of startups that were trying to just build from scratch the payment providers, but there must be something very sticky about the relationships that it was hard to get traction because some of those companies grew very quickly, got a couple deals, raised a bunch of money, but then kind of flatlined, I think. And so what's happening here is is venture capital has always been a part of the broader private equity industry. And now you're seeing this convergence. We saw the convergence of hedge funds and venture capital in 2021. You have these crossover funds that are investing in privates that presumably would go public soon.

1:49:14Sequoia changed to an RIA, starts investing in publics. Yeah. And then you have now you have this intersection of traditional private equity. and venture, which there is a strong case for, right? Because you say, hey, why don't we combine these very smart technologists with this new emerging technology, generative AI? Why don't we give them hundreds of millions or in some cases billions of dollars to buy legacy companies and transform them? Because some of those legacy companies will adopt technology. But if you have a guy who's 70, been running a company for 30 years, maybe they're not that motivated to say, I'm going to let go of 3 ,000 people and replace them with agents.

1:49:56But that is seemingly what firms are doing, like Wanderco, Jeffrey Katzenberg's. I'm going to read through that. So yeah, Wanderco, a venture firm and holding company co-founded by Hollywood studio veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg, started Quibi. Quibi. Quibi. Yeah, put a lot of money in that from Wanderco. In 2023, invested in a 22-year-old call center GlowTouch. last year wander's investment wander co's investment helped the louisville kentucky based firm by a 3 000 person 20 year old call center so i imagine uh glow glow touch now rebranded to unify cx is in the process of acquiring another call center and plans to buy others to combine them according to ceo and founder vidya ravachandran after buying the companies that then incorporates ai to screen resumes for recruiting automate support tickets speed up employee training and quality assurance checks.

1:50:49What they're not saying here is, in the long run, I'm assuming they're going to let go of all the, you know, the vast majority of the call center employees and replace them with AI. 99 % of the companies out there in the space have really not even thought about AI. I have a portfolio company, wayfaster.com, that's building a lot of that, you know, sort of recruiting screening infrastructure, specifically for staffing firms. and last year excel partner peter doyle left the storied vc firm after nine years to start treeline a startup focused on automating it services treeline plans to acquire other it businesses the startup has been in fundraising talks with investors like a16z according to people close to the business the strategy is a shift from traditional venture bets in more ways than one venture investors have typically backed high margin software consumer internet businesses they hope will go public someday.

1:51:41In pursuing services firms, they are writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely. I mean, so this is very opinionated. So the information is saying that in pursuing services firm, they are writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely to yield the same high investment returns from going public as software companies. Now, obviously the thesis here is that you're going to be able to achieve software-like margins with services. Because you're going to replace the services with software. Yeah, exactly. So it actually makes perfect sense. This would be a VC strategy.

1:52:12Yeah. So like Nick, you know, Nick Abazid, he was at Ramp. Yeah. Yeah. He's now building an accounting and a tax prep firm, which presumably is, you know, does, you know, has a services component now, but will eventually automate more and more stuff over time. So there's this trade-off between buy versus build. You can start stuff from the ground up or you can buy a business with$50 million in revenue and try to transform it. So I think it's good that, I think it's good that, you know, the concern, you know, as you start looking to buy companies, right, there's a lot of competition among buyers.

1:52:49Private equity is not an under-optimized industry, right? You ask, you know, we're friends with people like carry no interest, right? Like it's not like a nascent industry without killers in it. And it's not like they're not paying attention to the AI wave. So the question and the bet here is, will VCs figure out the private equity model first and buy companies at the right price and then be able to put in the AI? Or will the private equity firms have an AI transformation operational partner who's really, really solid at squeezing more margin out of their companies more effectively? Like they're saying, this one founder says, his firm's roll-up investment strategy was inspired by Berkshire Hathaway and Constellation Software, which operate portfolios of businesses they bought.

1:53:35Now, I don't know if Berkshire Hathaway is going to start replacing everything with AI in their entire portfolio, but Constellation Software has been optimizing software businesses for a long time. It's not like they're going to get caught flat-footed by the AI wave necessarily. And so the question is, will these VC firms that go into this industry be able to out-compete the private? Yeah, the cool thing is that it's a simple strategy. Buy services firms and replace the human capital with software. Very, very difficult to execute well. Very difficult to execute on a short timeline. The technology is evolving rapidly.

1:54:12but oftentimes when you buy a business, you have to show really rapid improvements in private equity. If you talk to anybody that works in private equity or has been a private equity portfolio company CEO, the constant pressure from the actual fund, it's not like a VC on your board that is mad that you're not growing to 5X a year. It's why haven't you cut more people it's very very aggressive it's more you know old world and and also i mean the the vc firms are taking larger stakes here like general catalyst aims to take 30 to 45 percent stakes in companies with like a holding company which is very different from the 10 to 20 percent that you normally see so much more control and yeah it's also if you're so they say here uh i think this is drew from abc he goes one risk in the strategy is that acquiring a business that ends up floundering is more expensive than trying to grow through marketing or sales.

1:55:11So if you spend$50 million buying a firm and then it gets less profitable, then suddenly it's worth way less than 50, right? Because these businesses are valued on earnings. And that can be a lot more expensive than investing$10 million and just trying to grow a business quickly. Maybe you get it to that$50 million, but it didn't cost$50 million to acquire it. So mistakes become very expensive, much more expensive than venture capitalists are used to. So this is why private equity oftentimes has a no zero policy. They're not going to let any of their bets. You might have a 1X where you just tried to do something and you have to offload it after a few years.

1:55:49But no zeros, even many growth funds operate on a no zeros policy. So it's going to be fun to watch it play out. It's fantastic. If you're building a roll-up. Let's go to the related tweets about it. I want to see what people have to say. Andrew Rhea here, a former employee of mine. Great dude. He goes, prediction. The majority of tier one multi-stage funds will have buyout funds in the next two to five years. Soon, A16Z and Vista will compete to buyout companies. I'm actually kind of shocked that A16Z hasn't formally announced a buyout practice yet. General Catalyst is already quietly doing it and not so quietly now.

1:56:27I don't know when this was posted. A few other less notable funds are opportunistically doing buyouts as part of their current strategies. this will become normal in venture sooner than later, especially if the IPO window stays shut and insurmountable for most companies. So yeah, I mean, one awesome part about the strategy, if you're in the capital management AUM business, you can just deploy way more cash. So one deal, you can deploy a hundred million dollars. And it's more focused, more concentrated. And then it actually makes sense for your partners to take board seats and really dig in on the business as opposed to just oh yeah i wrote a check to 25 companies in the last quarter and i can't really check in with any of them because yeah i gotta hit the slopes um and uh was this meant to be in here yeah that that that mentions long lake and i thought it was an interesting post of like this mafia so breaking yeah so uh patrick o'shaughnessy because everyone talks about the paypal mafia not nearly enough talk about the harvard or spee mafia from the late 2000 it's a final club there it's like a fraternity oh really yeah cool absolute murderers row uh one class david haber partner gp at a16z adam katz irenic capital alex sloan garrett station alex uh tubman long lake management and there's some guys from bessemer cadence uh chris chris and uh kushner from Thrive.

1:57:52So that's cool. Yeah. Very interesting how these like mafias form. Then we have another post from Logan Kilpatrick. He says, hot take. I think there is a huge overinflated perception of how interested consumers are in having AI agents do shopping, browsing tasks for them. People generally want agents that will do the boring parts for them, but many of those tasks tend to be higher risk. So this is kind of the flip side of the HOA. Like, do consumers actually want this? How can, how perfect does it have to be before they're like, yes, I'm okay. Because, uh, you know, like if you're talking to an actual person and they get kind of lost, it can almost be like educational and edifying to like work through the problem with them.

1:58:33But if you're on a phone tree and you're down the wrong path, it's like infuriating. Right. And, or like if you're using the American airwires app. Well, agents presumably replace the phone tree. And maybe that's better. But if, but when it gets frustrating, I think like, Like how many times I just do that. I just do the, you get on a phone tree and you just immediately start. Talk to a human, talk to a human or in a chat. You're just like, talk to a human. You know that the bot's not going to actually solve your issue. Hopefully that changes over time. So that's great. A couple minute break. Yeah.

1:59:05Can we take a break? Welcome back to Technology Brothers. Still the most profitable podcast in the world. That wraps up our series of top stories. We are going through the timeline. let's go through some mail that we got first up i have business cards from founders fund thank you to mike petriano the the guy if you've seen the founders fund video of that vibreel he's the guy that did that the creative director he made some beautiful business cards and i feel like i'm in american psycho We also got an early advanced copy of Alex Karp's new book called The Technological Republic Hard Power, Soft Belief and the Future of the West.

1:59:45This is embargoed. I can't read excerpts from it, apparently. But I can read you a little bit of the preview. It says, from one of tech's boldest thinkers and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology's potential in Silicon Valley have made the United States vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats. And he says, Silicon Valley has lost its way. at once iconoclastic and rigorous this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader political project from the inside offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality I'm very excited to dig into this I already have the audiobook pre-ordered and as soon as this book is available I think it goes public in February we will be reading it breaking it down for you here on the show.

2:00:48So give that a look. We also have another book that we received in the mail, The Five Types of Wealth from Saw Hill Bloom. Let's go. We love wealth. We love wealth. And pop quiz, what do you think the five types of wealth are? Cars, watches, horses, houses, and your absolute boys. I think you couldn't have said it better. He took a little bit of a contrarian take. I guess he says time, social, mental, physical, and financial. But we're very thankful to Sahil for sending over the book. He put in some stamps that we can look at. Let's see what he had for me to check out. It says, the big question, how many moments do you have remaining with your loved ones?

2:01:33How many more podcasts do you have? The days are long, but the years are short. just into his early 30s he had risen to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world and he served as a trusted financial advisor to a long list of well-known corporate executives his expertise and guidance were valuable a fact that was reflected in his steadily rising salary and bonus compensation at the firm you love to see it Sloan was achieving everything he had set out to achieve the money the trust the client list the respect all of it was there the path forward was clear and well lit until one day a simple interaction with his five-year-old son changed everything.

2:02:08His son's preschool was set to have donuts with dad event where the dads joined the students for a morning of donuts and fun activities. Unfortunately, Greg would be on an important business trip at the time, so he would have to miss it. When his wife told his son the news, he reacted with a shrug and said, that's okay. Dad's never around anyway. It's hard. You got to prioritize family. You got to figure out how to run a podcast in your hometown so you can be home for dinner every single night. That's pretty, we're pretty good at that. We're pretty good at that. Yeah. And that's one of the greatest, greatest advantages to not being on the road.

2:02:43I got, I got, I felt lucky that I was working from home for a lot of my sons for a couple of years. Yeah. And, and, and in this day and age, now our families get to throw on the show. Yeah. We're just right there in the living room yeah it's great uh sarah i love you it's uh i mean it has been like the original rogan arbitrage was just doing tons of interviews and being such a big force in podcasting that that big guests would come to him like zuck would and trump flew to rogan lex hacked the system by just being a road warrior and basically traveling everywhere yeah but obviously that's really hard on your family life yeah and so for a long time it was like how do you get and is to some sort of escape velocity with content if you're not on the road all the time.

2:03:32And fortunately, we figured it out. No guests. Live, in person, no guests, tons of clips, tons of slop in your feed. Although we will be having people call into the live show. Yes, but we won't be traveling all over the world trying to get people on. I have another post. So yesterday, we've been playing around with using the breaking headline to break news on X. We said, Breaking Bernard Arnault is exploring a potential acquisition of French artificial intelligence company, Mistral, citing a need for France to maintain its edge in artisanal goods, post artificial super intelligence. Wow. And, uh, this tweet went pretty viral.

2:04:09Just send her 5 ,000 likes. Uh, and, uh, Val, uh, brother Val, who's a, who's a listener of the show said, brother, John Coogan and Jordy Hayes, I'm sending you guys to jail for this, this post. And I ended up messaging him and I said, I good luck, bro. You don't have jurisdiction. in France. You can't do anything to us over here. We got diplomatic immunity, diplomatic immunity, but 40 nations ready to run, but he's a brother. Uh, I love you. I messaged him and said, he said, uh, LMAO. I have people DMing me asking if it was true. Bernard Arnault is not getting into the foundation model game yet.

2:04:43But if he does, we'll try to break that news. And he said that people appreciated it. So shout out to Val. Dude, I have gotten so many texts about the Ross Ulbricht thing today. So many people, is this real? So my phone is just actually broken right now because of how many - Read the Ross one. So the Ross one, if anybody, I doubt anybody that's watching missed this, but we posted this morning, Ross Ulbricht is said to be in market raising for a new crypto startup. VCs like A16Z and Paradigm are circling, citing Ross's killer mentality and track record as reasons the initial valuation could stretch to over$1 billion.

2:05:24Wow. And for those that don't know, Ross didn't actually kill anyone, but he spent over$700 ,000 on hits. Trying to kill people. It was unsuccessful. He thought he got photographic evidence of it, but it turns out they were faked photos. So bad. Anyways, he's not a killer. He's also been pardoned. He is legally innocent. He was never, they never, they never actually tried to try him for those attempted murders because they kind of had bigger fish to fry with the whole narco trafficking stuff. Kingpin law. Yeah. They got him as a drug kingpin. So. In many ways responsible for the fentanyl crisis.

2:06:07Not a good dude. Not a good look. But we have a deep dive coming for you on him. We got up to speed. We're going to break it all down. Yeah, and we basically determined that we think that Ross is the greatest marketer potentially of all time and that he had created this narrative that he was this very young, sort of inexperienced, you know, that just had these ideals and it kind of went awry. He was about 30 years old when he was doing this. He knew exactly what he was doing. He was selling drugs on the platform. he was negotiating, he was negotiating, brokering, like regular drug deals. It wasn't like it was just a software thing.

2:06:49They'd be like, Hey, I want to, I want to try doing a, he would, he would try to do, he wanted to create a product specifically for cartels and bigger dealers. So he was like, well, I'm going to do the trade the first kilo. Like really crazy. And it was just relentless. It wasn't just like, Oh yeah, I set this thing up. It's kind of running. It was like, how can i drive arr up every single day like really yeah and and so so the joke of that he's out raising for startup he actually is high like one thing while i don't agree with what he did yeah clearly highly capable right he got under mode founder mode zero to 1.2 billion in volume bootstrapped in under three years he personally netted 80 million dollars of money back then of fees it's like a which would be multiple billions of um and i'm sure he's got some bitcoin people said that there was some cold wallet that started trading shortly after and so they got out locked him that yeah they they seized most of it but he might have had a second wallet and that wallet was just sitting dormant and then it went dormant right but right as he was seized and then it fired up just recently and so people think like yeah he has access to like you know tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of bitcoin now but it was probably like oh 10k he in a side pocket back then so like no one even thought about it because whatever we got him for the most yeah so it's great so it's i hope i hope yeah yeah i hope he uses his powers for good going for it i'm sure he will clean it up you're on notice yeah we don't have him call it we'll have him call in here we don't want to see any more crimes i do i i'm i uh he's got a second chance i hope he does good with it uh and let's get into the timeline that's great let's go to the timeline And Ben, did you get those promoted posts together?

2:08:30Do we have a stack of those? Let's go to Tyler. He says, don't really understand the reasoning behind luxury car manufacturers going after residences. And he cites actually four images. I didn't realize there were so many. It's Porsche Design, the first ever Pagani residences. So Tyler, shout out Tyler. He goes to the UCSB where I went. Oh, cool. He built the ad network for TV. Yeah, I love it. Very cool. But I pulled this because I really don't understand it either. Nobody likes cars more than me. Yep. Fact. Yep. Maybe you. Maybe people like TJ Parker. Yep. But we love cars. I don't want to live in a Porsche apartment tower.

2:09:13I don't care to live. Maybe the meme got to them. You can sleep in a GT3 RS, but you can't race an apartment. Well, now you've got a GT3 RS apartment. The only thing I would potentially be into is a Gulfstream tower, just because that's just the next level above. And if it was shaped like a plane. But I don't understand the, I don't want to live in a Pagani. I want to drive. I like that I could sleep in a GT3 RS. I don't want to live in the equivalent of a GT3 RS. I guess it is a little odd that there aren't more. It does seem if you're a real estate developer, it's pretty easy to slap someone else's brand or name on your building, which is effectively what they're doing here.

2:09:53And I'm surprised they haven't done this with other brands that make more sense, maybe just like restoration hardware or LVMH. Like LVMH towers makes a little bit more sense to me. And I think - Or Loro Piana. Yeah, exactly. Chimats. Chimats. I love it. But yeah, who knows? I don't, so, I mean, I don't really have a good reasoning i mean the reasoning is probably money like they probably get a licensing deal for the customer acquisition there's a lot of towers like that and and so like the reasoning is probably i agree that it's like somewhat illogical but it probably makes money on paper and it's just okay they're gonna pay us to license the brand it's pretty funny destroy our brand pretty funny that there's for sure a bunch of people that live in those towers that are like i don't even drive port i don't like porsche but it was just a really nice apartment so i got it pulling up to your Porsche design apartment in a Pagani and be like, I picked the wrong apartment.

2:10:52Or vice versa. Um, anyway, let's go to speaking of cars. I got a promoted post. Let's do it. Um, this is what you've always been waiting for folks. This is why you're on the live stream. Sorry to make you wait so long for the first ad read of the show. I've been trying to do some product placement of these, but we're not going to advertise ramp right now. We're going to advertise. Uh, we've always said AI is like an F40 for the mind yes so on that note we have a 1992 u.s spec ferrari f40 asking price of only 3.5 million so they're basically giving it away i mean they're giving it away this thing is an amazing example this stunning f40 is one of only 213 u.s spec cars and one of only 60 in the highly desirable 1992 specification this example still wears the original rosa corso paint and stofa cloth interior that it left Maranello with.

2:11:44So this thing is just beautiful. Guys, we are going to be adding a TV screen so we can actually show images. We've had some pushback from some environmentalists that say, do you need to chop down a tree for every episode? The forest. And we're exploring doing some offsets, planting some trees to make up for all the paper we use. But we do want to get these on a screen for you guys. but let's get let's get back to uh yeah just you know it's not going to cost you three and a half mil to get that car because you're going to want to put another 500k in upgrades yeah off-road tires swap a test v12 v12 engine swap you know supercharger quad turbos yeah uh roof rack yeah uh automatic transmission let's go to auto uh let's go to autism capital uh mark andreessen says one of the funniest moments of his life was when the meta board says they considered Peter Thiel diverse because he's LGBT.

2:12:42Is there a test to determine this? What about the letter B? I want this company to succeed. I'm willing to do a lot. That's just so funny. When I first heard this, I was like, oh, he's like diverse because he's from Germany. It's funny that the big tech company is considering that the white male tech bro is diverse because of his sexual orientation. But that was a funny time in history uh we're uh and and absolute crickets from the mainstream media about the lack of diversity on the deep seek team yeah yeah you pointed that out almost entirely chinese guys yeah very few very few uh uh uh diversity let's get rune over there rune we need a man on the inside we do need hey we need to send hey if anybody that listens to the show it works on deep seek hit us up we're looking for a man on the inside we're looking for scoops we need to get one of our guys in there or maybe start leaking stuff out of the you know everyone in everyone in sf is worried about the the girls at the parties hey if you're a girl in tech in america hop on a flight to beijing yeah or wherever they were yeah start start we need our guy i want to see behind the scenes of all the gpus that supposedly don't exist that came from singapore yeah um it's great uh let's go to uh grit cult absolutely insane trump has only been in power for a few days look at the speed with which he operates it's amazing feels like he's been present for ages every day he's had a banger that's funny i mean i actually don't feel that way really i feel like there's been like a bunch of eos but that's always what happens the inauguration was eight days ago yeah but i feel like i feel like the first couple days are always crazy because that's when the eos go out and then it's like is there real going to be legislation and that they had been prepping all the eos with chat gpt oh yeah yeah totally for months prior to that uh should we try a bucket poll do we have bucket polls in here let's see what we got let's see if we got something good oh this is great uh from lewis yak says finally got a diagnosis and it's locked in syndrome from the national institute of neurological disorders and stroke Are you familiar with what locked in syndrome actually is?

2:14:57It's literally like you're locked in, you can't move your body, but you're awake. It's terrifying. It's horrifying. Terrible. But very funny to repurpose it for just being locked in. So we're making locked in a good thing, I guess. I don't know. With Neuralink, if you could be productive while being locked in, it'd probably be good for some people we know.

2:15:19Vittorio says, you stop noticing AI improvements when the AI gets smarter than you. We talked about this, I think, the other day where it's hard to recognize these incremental improvements because you're already like, okay, this thing is generally pretty intelligent. And if it gets 5 % more intelligent. It's like, oh, it solved way more complex math problems that I never do in my day to day. I never have to do anything in my day to day that involves foundational math. You're like, I talk professionally. Yeah, exactly. Professional yapper. And so, yeah, it is good enough at this point. But I mean, you will notice it certainly on the generative AI, the image stuff.

2:15:57Like it's very clear that the models aren't dialed yet. And then also just on the operator and agent stuff, like you can tell that when you delegate a task to ChatGPT, like it can't go and do it fully. The thing with the operator that will be cool is right now it moves like at the speed of a junior computer user. Yeah. Almost like watching your grandma do things on a computer. imagine when I can just do it almost instantly. It's just like zipping around the screen, like filling out a form, checking boxes. I'm excited for that era. It's going to be great. I still haven't, I upgraded. I still haven't actually used operator just because it's not available on your phone.

2:16:36You got to use it on the desktop and I just haven't had a chance, but I got to test drive it. I think it'll be interesting. I want to give it some tasks that it's like not already integrated with. Should we do another promoted post? Because I see a fantastic promoted post right there. This is a promoted post for a special place in Manhattan, but I actually have a better one to pop up. So if you haven't seen it yet, Ramp has a new activation billboard campaign in Manhattan advertising their new treasury product that gives you high liquidity and high yield in the same product. Very cool. Didn't we ask them for that?

2:17:09We asked them for that like last week and they just built it. Yeah. I mean, we asked them and they shipped it like an hour later. It was remarkable. Yeah. Never seen something like that before. Fantastic. but people are starting to discover it. He said new profile picture and it's, uh, this guy with a, with a wrecking ball here. Uh, and, uh, yeah. So if you're in, if you're in Manhattan, go, go check it out. Go take a picture. Do you get a profile address? Do they, do they post the address? I'm sure we should share that somewhere. When we share the clip, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll share the address.

2:17:36Cause if you're, if you're walking, take a picture. Yeah. Take a picture. Let's see. Uh, let's do the promoted post and then we'll be on. Back to back ads. Back to back. We got to promote a post from Amman. This is a special one. Midtown Manhattan is one of the most energetic places in the world, alive with the buzz and pulse of modern city living. And ramp is there. But in the very heart of it, silence and stillness prevail. Within the walls of Amman, New York, there's only peace. Amman properties are unmatched. They make the Ritz-Carlton look like a dump. Yeah, the next time you're on a business trip in New York for just a day, book a five days stay at amon and it's only 10 times more expensive than the average luxury hotel and so it's just a small like especially so i recommend amon for bootstrap founders yeah because you own your business it's all your money yep you you're not gonna be facing pushback from the board saying hey why are you staying in amon or if you're a seed stage founder and you're gonna be taking in you know pitch meetings say hey come over to my my hotel room yeah amon's not the kind of place that you can just walk in and use the lobby in but you could always try well no no no so you mog your vcs by saying like oh yeah like you can't just come in so like you'll need to book a stay too yeah or if your vcs are visiting from out of town you can say like i'll just walk over to the amman and they'll be like i'm staying you know in tribeca and you go wait you're not the amman like i thought you had i had like 300 million aum like what's going on is the fund And then they'll struggle to come up with excuses and then you got them.

2:19:11Yeah, you got them. You got them. You got them pinned. Yeah, exactly. And then they have to write the check. I don't know anything about this one. Stuart Blitz says, just spoke to someone who used operator to submit health insurance claims every five milliseconds until they're paid. They said UHC got so overloaded with data they just paid them. They're cooked. And then the community note says, this is a false statement as the author states in a reply. And so when I saw that post and submitted it, I didn't know. I mean, it didn't seem super believable because that's not necessarily the way these things work.

2:19:49But it is. So big companies create friction in refund processes, claim processes. And so if you can overload the system effectively, yeah, you're more likely to do it. but this is just entering a new chapter where you have bot on bot violence. Like the big corporations are going to have their bots. Yep. We're going to have our bots and we're going to see who wins. Your AI, your AI SDR is going to be talking to my AI secretary. Yep. And she's going to be brutal, brutal projected. Yeah. Also, I mean, this just underscores like this, like, I don't know if this guy was joking. It seems like it was maybe like a joke.

2:20:24Cause he said it was false, like shortly in this, uh, in the thread. But whenever a new AI product drops, there's a massive incentive on these algorithmic social media feeds to just be like, this is mind blowing. Like AGI is here. Like everyone's going to die. This is the most incredible thing. Like you've got a paper clip. Yeah, exactly. And it's like and there's this huge like intelligence signaling thing where you got to be like, oh, yeah, I'm using it like way better than everyone else. We've talked about this before. But it's like if you're not using operator. to do everything. I got operator to order me Instacart and send a humanoid robot to my house.

2:21:00Yep, yep. Cook me dinner. And if you're not doing that, you're falling behind. If you're not, yeah. Yep. Paperclip mode. Paperclip mode. Let's see what else we got in the bucket polls. Flowers says, oh, good nominative determinism post. Flowers says, Sam Altman's name is crazy because he's literally creating an alternative to man. Wow. That's great. I've had this thought before. I should have posted it. It would have been a good one. Altman. But yeah. there's a lot of nominative determinism in uh in this world in this world generally yeah it's a fun one i wish i've tried to apply nominative determinism to my name haze is i don't know it doesn't really work doesn't really work coogan coogan means hound of war or something it's basically like hound a hound you know in game you were acting like a hound of war you were acting like a hound of war on the leg press machine this morning oh yeah it's like 900 reps yeah 850 that's the number yeah uh let's go to range of motion too let's go to seth seth bannon says youtube and reddit have both blocked operator a sign of things to come so a lot of a lot of organizations are probably like hey we don't want to deal with operator what's interesting is that it's probably because dji is notorious for writing fake comments on forums so they don't want dji using operator to spread misinformation on there Wasn't Sam a huge shareholder in Reddit?

2:22:23Wasn't he like the CEO for a few days too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird that that biz dev deal couldn't. I think he made more money than the original founders when they IPO'd. This almost seems like a mistake. Like they just have a robots.txt that it's like not updated because I'm pretty sure OpenAI has a licensing deal with Reddit for their data or something like that. Yeah, but it's still, if you're a user-generated content platform, you don't want bot, you want them to use your API, which you can control. You don't want them just freestyling all around your app. It could be used for like a few users.

2:22:55Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you see this Waymo that was destroyed? Moment of silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by AdQuick. AdQuick is the number one way to buy billboards for your startup. Now back to the show. Justin Moore says, I've been fully radicalized by the photos of the vandalized Waymo. It's in a body bag at the end. And the Waymo got destroyed. yeah so you remember so the the downfall of bird among many many issues the fact that it's one of the most dangerous things in the world to ride an electric scooter around in traffic with good day to be an er doctor like yeah these er's ask anybody in an er when bird was at its height that was the real way to go long the scooter trend yeah yeah yeah super dark i i for a very brief moment of time i would use them i was like 22 i was like a fun way to get around and then i was a father built different yeah yeah um but there was this account called i forget what it was called but it was a celebration of the destruction of electric scooters i remember this account on instagram and it quickly got like a hundred thousand followers like before the algorithmic feeds so it just blew up huge people destroying them in even more creative ways for some reason a waymo feels way more toxic to fuck it up yeah to f it up bird graveyard that's right so a waymo which is this you know autonomous thing driving around it feels like you're more like taking a human life in a weird way because it's just trying to get somewhere to pick someone up and then these people or destroying at the same time it is a jaguar so do you really feel that bad yeah well they're switching to these tiny you know they're switching so i don't know i wish that that waymo acquired jaguar because jaguar is going through their um weird rebrand yeah ben hilag did the rebrand got a crazy reaction uh they should have just bought friend of the show yeah Yeah.

2:24:56Anyways. Anyways, let's go to Sean McGuire. Speaking of innovation, he says, The Tesla Roadster is niche with bad range. The Falcon 1 is a bad rocket. The Neuralink V1 bitrate is low. Subways are better than cars. Grok 1 sucks. X will break after firing people. It's amazing how people don't get the pattern. V1 sucks. V2 is okay. V3 is state-of-the-art. And V4 is god mode. 14 ,000 likes. It's a good pattern. Banger archive. Doesn't miss. Put it in the banger archive. Let's do a bucket poll. Let's see what we got.

2:25:33SNWY, maybe Snowy, says, MFs get one SAMO reply, Sam Altman reply, and turn on the Glazenator 3000. And it's a screenshot of an interaction between DJ Tyloo, who says, bro, ship more than talking. Look at Google. We want AGI in the speed of 4.0. That's the goal here. And Sam says, that's going to take a while. And then DJ Tyler says, don't worry, bro. Either way, you are the OG creator of AI here. Here you started all this in 2022. We do a little trolling here. You got this, Samma. Wow, crazy. Yeah, I mean, it's true. If you're like new in tech and like a big person replies to you, it's a big deal.

2:26:12It feels like awesome. It's like, wow, I'm recognized. Well, this is why we encourage - Reply guys? We encourage reply legends. Yes. and but but at the same time what i was going to say is there's if you're trying if you're a new account you just set it you're just setting up my twitter you know it's easy to want to be negative because that gets the most attention but it's not a good strategy long term because you're building up this sort of audience of negativity and and you're it's hard to build a career around just being negative and totally putting people down and so hopefully this is the start of the glazonator going on a more positive, generational positivity run.

2:26:54I love it. We love to see generational positivity. Bass Baron has started off very negative, trying to encourage him to go more positive. Yeah, we got to remind him pretty regularly. He should adopt. We got to send this to him and say, adopt the Glazenator mindset. Yeah. You know, you don't want to glaze too hard, but. Yeah, a little glazing never hurt anyone. Yeah. um it is it is hilarious when sam will post a tweet like you know uh artificial intelligence is only a few thousand days away it will forever reshape humanity it's one of the most powerful forces for good in the entire world and like we are unleashing machine intelligence and someone will be like please add pdf support to o1 i need pdf it's just like the most tactical question the oldest technology but like both are kind of true like sam is like kind of right about all the philosophy stuff and then also like there are really really low-hanging fruit in the product then i'll post uh then i'll post guys we got everybody's a little bit too excited yeah it's gonna take a bit longer yeah but and it's like yeah like there are reasonable product features that we want like just build them you know come on put it in yeah or ag you know agi is right around the corner, but we're hiring 50 new junior software engineers because we need them to actually get to that point.

2:28:17Let's do another promoted post. And if you're watching live on YouTube, leave us an ad read in the comments, get in the chat and promote whatever you got to promote, drop an ad read in the chat. Or if you want priority, leave a five-star review. Yes. And we will have Ben printed out on Spotify or Apple podcast, leave a five-star review, say something about the show and then leave an ad read for a company that you like or a company that you founded or work for. But speaking of ads, we have, we have an ad, a promoted post here from Gulfstream Aerospace. Customization in every detail, the G500 is bright, bold, and boundless.

2:28:56You know, we always say if you're buying fractional, talk to Preston Holland, he'll help you get into a jet you love. But if you're a size Lord, go straight to your Gulfstream rep uh don't you know just buy new yeah it's nice to see them promote the back catalog too a lot of people are obsessed with the 650 700s coming out yeah but maybe the 500 is right for your for your lifestyle yeah you know it's a classic there's no wrong choice and it's cool to see golf stream uh you know they threw a link in here they clearly aren't afraid of the algorithm they have a dominant brand and they can so yeah i mean uh if you do numbers if you find if you find this post on x uh just go reply to it and tell them that you're uh you know in the market and purchase and the technology brother sent you yeah uh so whoever the social media manager there will get a nice little note hopefully they deserve some engagement they're clearly working hard it was a highly produced video yes this was the best post in a long time yeah it's great uh this is an interesting debate.

2:29:56So Joel Gascoigne says 2024 was a profitable year for Buffer, something we've really celebrated as a team after two years of losses. We closed the year with a net profit of $200 ,000. And so John Coctosin... He also went on to say that they did a profit distribution. Oh, they did. The average distribution was like$400. Oh, really? Interesting. There's a lot of shareholders, I guess. And so John says, wait, so$200 ,000 in profit. So for those that you don't I know Buffer is a social media scheduling app. You can schedule out tweets or Facebook posts used mostly by social media managers. High chance that that Gulfstream ad went through Buffer on the way to X.

2:30:34And it kind of lets you schedule things out across different platforms. Kind of niche B2B software. And there was a time there was a lot of heavily funded products like this. Totally. People were like, this is going to be a dominant category of SaaS. Yep. Turns out a lot of the platforms made posting pretty easy. And when you have full-time social media. And they incentivize native posting too because when you post natively, you get bold, italics, image uploads, multiple images, threads, all this stuff. They want you editing in the app. Exactly. And so you wind up in this weird situation where you get this like half-featured builder or the buffer has the job of rebuilding every single feature on X and Instagram and Facebook all to just get the posts in correctly.

2:31:21correctly formatted via the API. And these other companies, they don't really care about posting from an API. In fact, it's a lot of spam most of the time. So they're not really incentivized to make that easy. And so John says, wait, so 200K profit on$20 million in ARR, 73 employees averaging 154K salary and the CEO at 300K a year, over 11 million a year paid out in salaries, $554 customer LTV. Cost to serve a customer has to be minimal. It's a social media scheduler. and unlike 15 years ago, this could probably be built by two cracked devs and a designer in a few weeks. 73 employees, I don't know, man.

2:31:58And so Buffer's always been building in public and they've had ups and downs, people have followed them and a lot of criticism from John on how they're running their business. But who knows, maybe they retool, maybe they're having fun. Maybe it's run like a co-op and everyone gets a distribution and they're all happy. So happy to them. But this looks like something someone will build and attack. back very soon. Yeah, it's one of those things. The critique there is, I think that they've been on an interesting journey. I think they bought back the company from their investors or something like that.

2:32:32You don't really know what's going on behind the scenes, but the critique is like for a mature software company with 20 million of ARR, maybe you should be able to squeeze out more than what the average PM in the Valley makes per month. You would hope so. But I'm sure they'll I'm sure they'll get there. It's rough. Let's do another bucket poll. What do we got? Harry Stebbings. He's in Europe right now. And there are more companies doing roll-up plays for vets, doctors, opticians, and plumbers than AI companies. We covered it earlier with the Germany story. Not good. Europe, you're on notice. Get it together.

2:33:04Build some real technology. Stop rolling up veterinary clinics. Do it all, actually. Yeah, do it all. Do the roll-ups, but uh do some other stuff like i'm making an ai uh you know clone that taught that can speak dog that's what i want to see you know surprise somebody who's like so the person who actually cracks dog to human translation huge trillionaire huge trillionaire you would pay you would pay thousand dollars a couple grand in a month yeah a couple grand a month done to talk to your pup absolutely yeah uh also shockingly little innovation happening in smell-o-vision you can't smell anything have you noticed this we're making all this like crazy advances all over the place ai is gonna kill us all but i can't smell the movie yet yeah yeah like if i'm watching fast and the furious i want to smell burning rubber yeah or if you're scrolling on x and you come up to a banger you want to smell like some fumes some smoke you know some heat coming off and so a little you know device that just missed the air yeah you're watching sideways they're talking about wine tasting i want to smell some grapes i want to smell some yeah you're watching uh there's so many great applications that gambling movie we talked about what's it uh yeah there's the smoke of the casino yeah there's a million oceans 11 oceans 11 yeah i should be smelling a thick cigarette smoke the entire movie yeah be great yeah so get it together somebody go out there and solve it i'm not gonna there was a company that was trying to solve this uh digital touch right like some sort of device that you could kind of like that sounds like it's going to be used nefariously immediately smell that on the character ai smell vision too is going to be used with character ai first i just know it it's going to be terrible it's not going to be for fast and furious i'd be like i just wanted fast and the furious um aurelius says m &a is so back the FDIC is pumping deal tombstones.

2:35:03And the FDIC says, today we approved the bank merger act application by Wesco bank based in Wheeling, West Virginia to acquire and merge with premier bank. And they're, they're showing the deal tombstone. You love to see it. It's a completely different celebrate. MNA should be celebrated. Yeah. You know, I saw, I saw a very funny post.

2:35:28We didn't So like bad for Silicon Valley because everyone in Silicon Valley finally needs to realize that Lena Kahn was right. And I was like, that doesn't make sense at all. I saw that and I was like, this is such a bad take. We're not even, we can't come. Yeah. You saw that? Yeah. It just made no sense. And it's like, that's not. And like, so are you saying that there's a monopoly in AI? Because there's not. There's like a trillion foundation model companies. and every big tech company is building their own chips. So it's like fiercely competitive. And then how would this have stopped open source model from China?

2:36:05It's like a chip sack thing. That's not Lena Khan at the FTC. It just made no sense, but it got major viral views because people are just like, oh, tech doesn't like Lena Khan. Therefore, like anything that happens that's bad to tech, let's make it like Lena Khan could have stopped this or something. Makes no sense. Anyway, President Trump arrived in Las Vegas and Indian Bronson says Trump is 80. He doesn't sleep. He eats McDonald's. He doesn't work out. And he's constantly switched on rocket fuel for blood. Just a total force. He needs to be studied. Okay. This is my take on, you know how we've been talking about golden retriever maxing.

2:36:42I like the dog analogies. There's a new dog in town. Junkyard dog maxing. Yep. This is where you just don't think about what Andrew Huberman says about microplastics or seed oils. if you look at the if you look at the data the junkyard dogs outlive the purebred poodles by three decades junkyard dog will be around forever you gotta be a dog it's about that spirit exactly the junkyard dog has hustle runs around sure it's eating it's not just worried about microplastics he's eating macroplastics the thing with uh i think part of the the whole trump thing yeah is he's never been into that big into that whole world of alcohol yeah right so he's no that is big Drugs and alcohol avoided them.

2:37:22Yep. He kind of, yeah, he avoided the power law toxins. So by not doing the drugs and alcohol, he gave himself like a thousand Big Macs. Yeah. Alcohol's fascinating thing because it's so widely consumed yet. You know, the prevailing narrative is that one or two drinks a day is cool. Yeah. Which we don't, that's like the dominant narrative around alcohol consumption. And clearly you can have one or two drinks a day and be fine generally. Yeah. but how does it affect your energy levels later into life how does it affect your you know wit and mental acuity later in life even you know energy levels during i i um uh as you know as an adult haven't been big into alcohol and and i prefer to either have like 10 drinks or almost none yeah or maybe some champagne on the show we have a big milestone coming up i'm looking forward to that but i notice that alcohol for me is not about the energy level loss the next day or the hangover but it's this multi-day drop in my sort of general energy levels because yeah you just poison yourself lightly and yeah the body's you know yeah pretty capable of detoxifying but you gotta stick to dom and you gotta only consume it when you are celebrating are celebrating but but specifically celebrating exponential growth.

2:38:42Because unless you're truly accelerating in an insane way, you're not gonna be drinking it every day. And so, you know, it's so funny. If we had the double rule set up for Banger Archive, we'd be daily drinking. Yeah, it's rough. But I mean, seriously, it's so funny when I wake up and I'm like, oh, gotta drink a bottle of Dom at work today. But it's like, it's two glasses of champagne and I do that like every month. like that's probably fine uh speaking of alcohol let's go to pavel asparuhov he says drinking alcohol may be bad for you but having some brews with my boys is definitely good for me very relevant very relevant and then juan from ramp says nothing beats the pure joy of slamming a pitcher with the dudes on a sticky table it's true in there it's true and uh yeah you can always cut back at a certain point switch to dom we gotta we got a quick shout out from from our friend uh uh tyler cosgrove he says got to give a shout out to boom supersonic now size lords can display their wealth not by the size of their plane by but by which mock they can hit they had a successful they got to mock that's the size gong for them they got to mock 1.1 today that's huge massive love it and a big win for all the investors that decided to triple down oh yeah it was that crazy recap but they got through it which is great you love you're doing amazing we need to be going Mach 5 to France to negotiate.

2:40:10Let's go over to old Patty Collison at Stripe Press. The Irish lads are at it again. Stripe Press has been on a tear. Ben Blumenro says Stripe Press sold a thousand books a day last year. That's about 25k per day, over$9 million a year off of 16 books. Incredible work and shows what you can do when high quality product meets distribution. Let's go. Size gone for 9 million in books too. I like that. It's great. Probably what they make in two seconds. I think it's something, I think the coffee table book industry is like bigger than ever. Yeah. And so it's this weird dynamic where we consume so much of our content digitally now.

2:40:55Yep. But books, it's funny because I use physical books almost as a book, like a bookmarking feature where I see a book online. I'm like, that looks interesting. I just buy it and I'll get to it. eventually but um yeah stripes put out some uh bangers some bangers they had the the one on uh that guy in the corner right there charlie for charlie's almanac yeah like we printed it yeah um always beautiful we love we love the written word we love uh we love it even more when it's printed yeah physically yeah let's go to a promoted post and we'll do a bucket pull keep the show moving uh promoted post from our friends over at bugatti the opening of bugatti baku in azerbaijan the home of f1 in azerbaijan a city that bridges europe and asia was celebrated with a tourbillon a symbol of a century of heritage and sophistication if you haven't seen the bugatti tourbillon this car is unreal i mean the doors go up that's all you that's you know how many cylinders it has isn't 16 v16 it's a v16 previously it was a w a lot of yeah A lot of people have been saying, oh, it's, you know, just need a V8, a hybrid V8.

2:42:04It's all you need. A lot of the Ferraris are going on V6s. Yeah, let's get those. 296 has the six cylinders. Let's get those cylinders up. This car. AMG1 has six cylinders. You've got 10 more cylinders. I can't wait to buy my first Bugatti. The day can't come soon enough. You've got to complete the collection. And again, the size lords of Bugatti, they're not afraid to drop a link. Bugatti.link slash consumption. if you're interested in understanding the environmental impact of your Bugatti. Probably top of mind for most Bugatti owners. Super top of mind, right? For sure. How many offsets am I going to need to buy per mile?

2:42:40Yeah. I may have to be planting like 10 trees a mile. Well, most likely an oil chic if I bought this car in the oil business. But we love Bugatti here. And if you go and pick one up, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Yep. Let's go to Harry Stebbings. He says, I have never met a founder or VC who can write a good press release for a funding round. Stop writing it like an obituary. You aren't writing to your grandmother. Bring the company to life. Tell a story. Make them excited. Interesting. Yeah. The funding round thing. I mean, you're not supposed to like the funding round. You're not supposed to do it yourself.

2:43:14You're supposed to call Lulu. Yeah, call Lulu first. And then you're supposed to give us a scoop. Exactly. And then we'll turn it into a size dot element. This is how it works. Yeah. This is the new economy. But also like the funding round is not the story. It's the excuse to break news, which justifies writing the story. And so what you have to do is you have to leverage that to say, I'm giving you a scoop of this funding round is going to happen. But in order to win this scoop, you can't just write it up like it's a PR newswire thing. That's 200 words. You have to come and interview me and my team and my investors and get a 5 ,000 word profile.

2:43:51Unless you're already an insider, no tech journalist is going to get excited about covering your two million dollar seed round no like they do not care they will if you put all two million of dollars of that into a domain yes you got to figure out how to create a stunt and that's what he did really well was he created a story and a narrative around it that that you had to write about because it was controversial and you get clicks and they're in the business of getting clicks so click game you got to do that and driving paywall totally totally uh let's go to atlas he says mfers will be like asi in two years and still be skinny bro you're worried about the wrong arms race this is golden retriever maxing we love to see it on the timeline yeah it's fantastic yeah get in the gym uh this is important worry about range of motion just worry about how much weight you're throwing around exactly if you're not if you're not dropping the weights loudly you're not lifting heavy enough yeah your bicep curl should look like a hang clean get into a gym that uh yeah get into a gym that supports dropping weights yeah many don't for sure oh speaking of uh tech reporting and the media uh murat says incredible bit of tech crunch reporting i just ran into they looked up google trends for the past two days and concluded it's the highest trend that that could pot it's the highest the trend could possibly be and so what happened was google searches for deleting facebook instagram explode after meta ends fact checking so this is something that happened when zuck came out and said we're not doing fact checking anymore we're going to community notes model and of course there's like uh somewhat of a backlash some people say i don't like that a lot of people said they did like it but you got to write the story that feeds the the beast of your readers and because it's entirely audience captured at this point and so you have to write the story of like this is bad for meta even though you can just look at the stock price and tell it like no dAUs are not dropping people are still going to be using instagram and so they but this is hilarious because i want literally social media fact checked i want it fact checked uh and it's funny just because they they just actually made a mistake when they went to google trends i i think that meta should hire us to just put posts in the truth zone yeah well we should be grabbing actually yeah we this is the thing about authoritarianism as long as i'm the authoritarian yeah don't really have a problem with it and social media platforms need to embrace misinformation yes yeah exactly breaking wow wow uh oh speaking of avi over at friend he says the only real way for u.s startups to compete with China is on taste.

2:46:26I ain't ever seen a Chinese product that didn't feel Timu. Well said, Avi, but that is true. Yeah, like as we move into the LLM as a product and not just as a weights and evals. DeepSeek is the Timu ChatGPT 01. Yeah, it is. It is very cheap, very cheap. Lots of people are saying. Anyway, promoted post. You kind of caught me off. Keep these people on their toes. caught me off guard here uh we got a promoted post from our friends over at laura piana craftsmanship in every weave in detail thoughtfully finish with verse uh with verse mason's art of good living collection speaks the language of time-honored craft and impeccable taste so uh we gotta get you on duolingo bro yeah duolingo uh i just didn't understand like thoughtfully finish with verse i don't know it's a bunch of european mumbo jumbo as far as i'm concerned low damn banger only eight likes oh you hate to see it from laura piano only eight like go hit go hit him with a read hit him with a retweet chamath do laura piano a favor pump the pump the account who knows if they put a link in there it doesn't matter get it going they hit him with a hashtag it's funny that these companies they they insist on hitting a hashtag in a post about their own company from laura piano yeah why are they doing this and they're all the same it's like is there one social media agency that's doing every luxury brand like what's going on we need a complete and total shutdown of luxury brands on x until we can figure out what's going on it's insane uh anyway let's go to a less than luxury brand that's been on a tear lately rye says people are losing their life savings getting rugged on fake internet money projects meanwhile i've been riding build-a-bear stock to the moon hard tech is the future and he posts a screenshot of build-a-bear and robin hood did you know that build-a-bear is public jordy build-a-bear is a public company and it's up 800 in the last five years pretty remarkable i believe it people want an activity and then people created they saw that they immediately created a build-a-bear token i'm sure i'm sure but people want people want an activity with their kids and they're willing to pay for something that occupies time and then also gives them some sort of like special toy that's not just slop right yeah so it makes sense that build a bear is doing well glad to see it not financial advice obviously but uh you know we're we're you know yeah let's call it hard tech who cares um tech we should check out build a bear yeah we should theoretically going to build a bear we should do a deep dive i want to know like who is the founder of this company how they build this thing like it's pretty crazy that such a simple idea could become a public company that's up 800 in five years like that something went right well you have a founder knows something you have to imagine that they got destroyed with covid so part of those gains are everybody stops going and building bears you know you go back five years it's like you can see the covid drop right here maybe they went on a generational run generational run and they're way up recently something good definitive guide to build a bear i like it let's do it uh the bear bowl case dolly bali i feel like this guy's been on the show before he says when when has something good happened when masa gets really excited he says once again i ask and so this is obviously a reference to deep seek and that you know tanking the market shortly after masa did his um you know announcement on stargate kind of a kind of good post but i think the thing is uh satya is still going to be spending 80 billion dollars a year even with the deep seek news as things uh yesterday was a terrible day to be unfamiliar with jevin's paradox you know many clearly were yep and uh not our audience but uh many many many normies out there very unfamiliar with that that paradox and uh we're just going to keep using more compute uh until we're all just paperclips and and i did see a post that uh that after the markets crashed there was a lot of equity research discussion and expert calls that happened to the hyperscalers asking like are you going to change your GPU buying plan and they all said no.

2:50:47I bought NVIDIA on public yesterday. You up? Up 7 % something like that. Not financial advice but 7 % in a day. Compound that over a year you're killing it. Trillionaire. Trillionaire. Logan Bartlett says it's amazing how Apple continues to innovate, democratizing mobile music players, iPod 2001. The most elegant smartphone experience, iPhone 2007. Mainstream cordless headphones, AirPods 2016. AI that makes the product experience worse, Siri 2011, Apple Intelligence 2024. Apple room temp. Apple room temp. Get it together, Apple. Get it together. It's got to get better. It's so bad. You know, I had a recent like, oh my God, this is so un-Apple and so bad experience.

2:51:36So they obviously like voice generation is completely commoditized. You have 11 labs. There's a million models that do it very well. OpenAI has a fantastic model. It's very easy to train a model on a ton of voice data. And then Delphi can clone our voices, right? Like startups can do this like with way less money than Apple, right? And so it's easy to create a voice that is, you know, good. Yeah. And so when you go into Safari on an iPhone and you click on the reader view, it will take away all the ads. It's very nice. You can actually read the article cleanly. And there's a button now that you can say, listen to this article.

2:52:14And it plays like a pretty decent voice. It's not state of the art. It's okay. It's not good, but it's not bad. And it's usable. You can listen to it, which is nice because a lot of websites don't have a voice feature. But sometimes that's broken. Sometimes the reader view is broken and it only shows you like a third of the article. Even if you're logged in, there's some sort of paywall thing, it's broken. And so - Does Ben know he's just listening to music? Yeah, Ben, is that loud? Ben, are you good? We can hear that. Oh, it's outside? Oh, weird. Okay, we got some noise outside the studio in downtown LA today.

2:52:51Anyway, so sometimes the reader view is broken and when it's broken, you can still swipe down with three fingers to do like the voice version of, oh, it's my back. That's funny. Is that some, how did that happen with that phone? I have a phone in there.

2:53:11Weird. That's very odd. Okay, thank you. Very weird. I don't know what's going on with the phone. Anyway, so you can swipe down with three fingers to do like, it's like a, it's like a assistance feature for people that are, I think, blind. and it will read anything on the text. It's a screen reader. It reads it all in a voice and that voice is still on the old model. So it's like completely impossible to use. And it's just like, how did they not think to update all the voices at the same time? Also, the latency was series insane. Yeah, it's terrible. Anyway, let's move on. Some people were giving, I think it was Signal who was giving Apple, like Apple yesterday had to be pretty, Signal was saying they have to be pretty happy right now.

2:53:56They didn't spend on CapEx. They just sort of waited to see how the market would play out. They already have all the distribution. Yeah. So we'll see how it plays out for them. Okay. Let's... We need a collective effort to get smart people working at Apple again. Seriously. Because they have such a lock-in. Like you can't just count on... You can't leave. Yeah. So you got to make it better. Yeah. So we got to push people to go there. So if you're a cracked engineer, go work at Apple and go founder mode. Yeah, please. Go founder mode at Apple. Because it's rough. Do we have any more promoted posts?

2:54:27No, let's cap it off. Okay, let's just close out with Nir. Nir says, love how finance reporting found that they can phrase everything in terms of market cap to get technically accurate headlines like trillions of dollars violently wiped out from the market forever, when the reality is, e.g. today, that NASDAQ is at the price from 10 days ago. That's hilarious. I didn't realize that. It's only been 10 days of gains wiped out. But you still, you hate to see it though. It's still sad. It's still sad, Nir. And still leaves us looking for a bull market somewhere. Well, that's our show. Thanks for tuning in.

2:55:06Thank you. If you tuned in live. Thanks for listening. If you're on your podcast. First of tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. We'll be doing this for decades. And go leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Put an ad read in your review. We'll read it on the show. dms bangers for banger archive apply to pmf or die send us questions in the dm we'll answer them on the show mail us stuff whatever you want to do the day is almost over on the east coast it's almost five o 'clock well actually it's past five okay but that's not an excuse to stop creating value so whether you're on the west coast the east coast or at the bugatti in baku ashabaijan day's not over the show's over but the day's not over we'll see you tomorrow thanks for watching