Masa's Epic Rise, New AI Paradigm, The Drone Race, $MSFT Earnings, Evolution of the Tech Bro

29:14Yeah, exactly. He'll buy them all. NVIDIA is going to produce 6 million total this year. Yep. Right? So just one guy could potentially be a third of NVIDIA's. And he's not buying those all this year. It's going to be spread out over time. I need a steel hat to put on when I'm steel manning. Because again, the steel man here of why would Jensen not want to do that? Obviously, people have been very critical of him not putting America first. but the flip side is if you do say, okay, I'm only going to sell to these crazy American AI companies and then there's a bubble and it pops, you are more fragile than if you have a more diversified revenue base.

29:53It's not like the United States and China have declared war on each other. It's just this great power conflict that kind of moves along slowly and everybody tries to kind of - We're not allies, not enemies. We're also dependent on so much. Totally. And so this is an interesting stat. I didn't, I hadn't heard about this, but the bank of China announced a 1 trillion yuan, 140 billion US dollar AI subsidy. Let's ring the size gong for China. The one T. Hey. Size is size. Size is size. Size gong is nationalistic in any way. Size gong rings for everyone. Yeah. And if anything, we hope the ringing sound inspires one of our listeners to invest a trillion into something.

30:37Yes, exactly. And so$140 billion AI subsidy after meeting DeepSeek's founder. So the guy literally goes and pitches the government. This all seems very conveniently timed, right? It's their Stargate. You have Sam Altman gets Trump to do his press tour for him. Less than a week later, China meets with the DeepSeek founder and announces something very similar. Yep. But interestingly, this is the Bank of China putting up a subsidy of$140 billion. Trump hasn't put up anything for other than just his name and a couple minutes in the PR room. Sam Ora farmed him. He Ora farmed him. Whereas the DeepSeek founder gold farmed him, basically.

31:25So China has a goal of self-reliance in advanced technologies, obviously, and this aligns with that. And so despite large GPU stocks, scaling to serve millions of new users is tough. Future export controls may starve them of advanced chips. And there's a big question about, was this an aberration? Will they be able to keep up? A lot of that's predicated on, can they either get around the export controls reliably at an order of magnitude larger scale? Or can they get SMIC and SME, their version of TSMC and ASML? Can they get those chips up and running and start making competitive GPUs internally?

31:58Because if they can do that, it's game over. Like they can, they could make a billion chips and something like$140 billion of like world class at copying. Totally. And that's all they have to do. And I don't even say that in a way to slight them, but that is historically what they've done over and over and over and over. Yeah. And they have ASML machines. They have TSMC machines. This is what entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, you develop some hardware product or consumer product, you go to China, you see your factory. If you walk to the factory next door, they'd probably be producing your exact item.

32:30Totally. Almost a one for one within a year if you're actually really selling well. Yep. So it's just ruthless. They're good at it. I'm sure they're going to have their own NVIDIA, TSMC. Yeah. And so let's close with some of these conclusions. Efficiency does not mean reduced investment. This is Jevin's paradox. Cost savings from new architectures like mixture of experts spur more scaling, not less. Fast follower. DeepSeek lags top labs but closes gaps swiftly with new paradigm reasoning. Their open source stance accelerates industry-wide progress.

33:02Frontier capability commands premiums, but deep seeks low pricing disrupts incumbents, potentially forcing big labs like open AI to innovate even faster. And we're seeing that, you know, there's going to be more pressure. Hey, release 03, get it on the free tier, get an ad product in there, do something to bring this to the masses so you can cut stem the bleeding of people installing the deep seek app. Long-term outlook, hardware demand isn't going away quote more advanced ai more gpu spending more scaling export controls will likely tighten but we're going to need to see where this shakes out i think uh jacob hellberg might be on the team that's working on export controls and tech uh deals globally we actually need a rack of gpus on the set yeah i think we should get some h100s yeah just replace that cache with some A couple of GPUs.

33:47With a couple of GPUs, yeah. Yeah, great. And so we think the East versus West debate in AI models will continue. And the new paradigm is good for NVIDIA. Very interesting. So fantastic analysis from Dylan Patel. Highly recommend subscribing to Semi Analysis if you haven't already. It is a great resource. And we love to see deep dives on the timeline. A great poster too. Yeah, he's a great poster. Go give him a follow. Yeah. Follow him. DM him the technology brother sent me. Exactly, exactly. Comment on his post. So let's go to Drone Horizons, a great piece in Pirate Wires, another outlet that you should definitely be subscribed to.

34:30This one by GB Rango, fantastic name. Great name. Pirate Wires says, Drone Horizons, our deep dive on how drones will change the future, not just in war, but in everything from construction, infrastructure, and interplanetary space. the widespread adoption of UAV technology, piggybacked on the inexorable AI surge, could significantly retool both international power relations and the daily lives of regular people in a manner that few understand. Today in PirateWire's GB Rango systematically outlines the trajectory of inevitable drone developments that are going to permeate every pore of society, from agriculture to medicine to policing and national security.

35:09And here's the link. And firefighting, which is particularly relevant to the last month we had here in LA. And so let's kick it off with GB Rango's lead, which is a little anecdote here. The stadium is a roar with 80 ,000 raucous attendees and casts a short shadow in the midday sun. In the distance, peppered specks rise from nests unseen before gathering over the horizon like iron filings in a magnetic field. Small payload drones, hundreds of them, race balefully forward. The orchestrated swarm twists and folds in hive-like unison as it approaches its target. In response, nearer to the stadium, another group of drones ascends in concert and rushes to meet its hostile counterpart.

35:55The confrontation is swift and casually anticlimactic, with only a few citygoers caring to notice the whir of propellers or the hissing and buzzing of the interceptor's high-powered microwave pulses. The sky is clear once again, and the game goes on uninterrupted. The emergence and facile neutralization of drone threats is commonplace here in a potential future. This cross-section of a shocking and indeterminate future and those to follow are meant to demonstrate and warn of the transformational nature of an imminent drone age shift. Dargstein. Pretty crazy. But I think this is one of those things where you see one side of the technology development and you don't realize that there is the flip side that's countering it just as aggressively.

36:41Like in 2000 or the 2000s, the 2010s, if every day you were reading articles about email spam and you had no knowledge about spam filtering and the fact that that was possible, you would be like, wow, why would I ever sign up for email? It's just going to get worse and worse and worse. But of course, it's an arms race and there's anti-drone technology, which I think we'll talk about as well. And so I'm not quite as black-pilled as some people on this front. I also find it hard to imagine this future, if you put it in the context of how dissimilar would it be if somebody launches a hypersonic at a stadium of people and we launch some type of countermeasure and stop it, that would be national news.

37:25So I would hope we don't experience this future because, and in this illustration, the stadium doesn't even notice, right? But just very dark. But this is like the threat. So it's worth, you know, really paying attention to. And there are, so he breaks it into six or seven different sections. We'll give you a little tour of the article and you can go read the full post on Pirate Wires. It says, an infrastructure and agriculture infrastructure development will undergo drastic changes with the advent of advanced and ubiquitous drone technology. Construction sites strangely devoid of human laborers, instead populated by powerful heavy lift drones.

38:07Nimble inspector craft and bipedal robots will be more productive, efficient, and safer than ever before. gargantuan cranes with arms outstretched fresh metal glinting through measured pivots rotate powerfully over the earth he's such a good writer this is why i i love this style of writing it just takes you on like this this tour instead of just gonna really visualize it yeah it's like it's really like pleasurable to read it's already can you imagine the drones you know working this construction site they run into an issue they need some type of human intervention and you're the human that's on call and you get a call from this nice sounding robot voice and they're like hey bud you mind stopping by the site for a few we could really use a hand here it's like a human voice yeah and then uh you know hopefully after you finish as a human that the drones are nice enough to say hey thanks bud yeah uh probably won't need you anymore today but uh you know appreciate you stopping by yeah and um this is the flip right now we tell we you know we tell the models what to do.

39:06Eventually they'll, they'll tell us what to do. We are the APIs. But, uh, I mean, there is obviously there's like, there's the job displacement question, but the, the flip side is like, I think every, almost every single time a major skyscraper is built, there is a single digit death toll from workers just because it's so dangerous. And you put 10 ,000 people on a construction site for five years or something and like things are going to go wrong. And so there is a pretty significant opportunity. Even in oil and gas, right? On these fracking, every now and then a video will go super viral and it's an active fracking site.

39:44And there's just that kind of action that's going on where there's heavy machinery whipping around. Super dangerous. Yeah, it's just super dangerous. So he says in the agriculture world, in the coming age, farms will not sleep when the sun goes down. Drones will work around the clock to protect crop yields and monitor livestock rustic family barns sitting bare on flat plains will look like nocturnal beehives with luminous agents approaching for payloads before dutifully buzzing back into the dark these small flying machines will fit will flit non-stop through thousands of crop road acres addressing issues like pest treatment disease and water shortage on the individual plant level very cool and so we got to get him to describe us yeah what a great writer seriously John threw on his jacket.

40:28Yeah. And this next segment on emergency medical services was actually highlighted on Pirate Wires. Drone-delivered organs should be standard protocol for transplants. And he says, over 46 ,000 organ transplants were conducted in the United States in 2023. Quicker transport times are associated with better patient outcomes. And in the sort of major delay described above, it is not unheard of. In 2023, a pro-Gaza ceasefire protest on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge blocked all westbound traffic for four hours. Three UCSF organ transplant deliveries were significantly delayed, one of which had to be rerouted over the Golden Gate Bridge.

41:07But one transplant surgeon at UCSF noted that two other large transplant centers in the Bay Area, Stanford and CPMC, were probably suffering from the same issues as well. Now, while no known complications have been directly attributed to the protest, the proliferation of drone technology will completely eliminate the transport delay risk opposed. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this stuff happens via helicopter now. And there's even there's companies like Blade that actually have a really, I think at one point, Blade's organ transplant business was bigger than their consumer business. I had no idea. I think it was COVID.

41:41Wow. Might have that off. But yeah, this is actually a very big business already, but it's kind of funny to think about, you know, needing to fly in Oregon from one side of a city or county to another and you just put it in a helicopter. Like it's not the most efficient if you're just basically needing to transport the equivalent of like an ice chest. Yeah. Yep. He goes on to explain search and rescue maritime efforts, larger boats serving as bases of operation for small drone swarms that can expand radially outward and aid in the geographic process of elimination. larger unmanned aircraft systems with multi-day endurance will work in concert with these teams to survey vast areas of open sea for survivors and identify points of interest that just seems like a new capability yeah it doesn't seem like job replacement now you have a bunch of pilots that go up in their planes and they take turns just taking you know basically running yep there's some sort of like grid search they have to do but it's a funny path it's not and they have you have to be high up enough to get enough coverage but in a world where you can send a thousand drones you could almost instantly scan huge, huge surface area.

42:43And so this would have been useful during hurricanes Helene and Milton, both of which struck in the fall of 2024. And drones were pivotal in the preparation for and response to these disasters. He goes on to explain that drones will have an impact on firefighting, which I think we discussed previously. And in America, fire department use of drones is almost exclusively limited to the realms of surveillance and intelligence gathering in the wake of the recent Los Angeles fires, which have reportedly resulted in the deaths of at least 24 people and wreaked over$250 billion of economic damage. This lack of progress - What?

43:16Two weeks ago, it was at$150 billion. So it's still climbing. So it's climbing, yeah. Compounding this international delta is the fact that across all US public safety agencies, 90 % of drones in use are designed and manufactured by DJI, a company that was recently added to the Department of Defense list of Chinese military companies. While that number is from a 2020 survey and steps are being taken to limit Chinese drone usage, the status quo remains largely unchanged. So he goes into talk about foreign dominance and how drones will be effective in the military, talks about regulation of drones and drone deliveries, as well as policing in the state, and finally, national security and war.

44:01National security, of course, is of paramount relevance in the discussion of drones. The nature of war is changing faster than it has at any point since the post-World War II nuclear proliferation and drones are one of the major cruxes of this change. It is essential that America not rely on China for any segment of the defense supply chain, let alone UAS design and manufacturing. Yeah, and this goes back. I posted a while back and it resonated. we needed a Stargate for domestic drone production. Yep. And the reason for this is that if we were in a conflict with China, they could produce presumably millions of drones a month, and we can probably right now produce.

44:41I don't know if we needed to turn it on and produce locally, but however, it would be a fraction of what China could produce and the capability would not be there, which is just a terrible place to be in. A huge part of the reason that we were successful in World War II was because we were able to turn on this massive manufacturing capacity and just out-produce the competition. Yeah. This is interesting. He ends with space and visions of the future. Below the arcing of stars and spirited space adventuring of generations to come, the skies are clear, save the birds and an occasional transport drone passing silently overhead.

45:22towering bio-hybrid buildings draped with verdant ivory attended to by swaths of assiduous airborne robo-gardeners looks as if they might have emerged in search of sunlight from the earth itself. A period of peace less fraught with tension than its Dr. Strangelove type predecessor has settled upon the world. This is not for want of bad actors but for their inability to find secrecy. And he closes with now with all of this having come to pass there seems to be an almost palpable optimism a sense that things can change and that we have a significant say in how they change a weird coalition between humans and their hive-minded autonomous aircraft once an unnerving prospect now powers the world forward in ways that not even the most visionary among us could have seen in a crystal ball this or something else entirely lies ahead of us with courageous optimism we step into drone-filled horizons so clearly gb rango should write some science fiction yeah because we'll read it so uh one thing that's interesting too there's already technology that's been developed to make drones silent so it's some element of the propeller design yeah yeah the propeller design it's very crazy so right now it's actually nice that you can tell when a drone is i've had situations where a drone flies over my backyard yeah i got there and i i look up at it i'm like get out of here get out of here scram scram scram yeah get off how much you can do um but uh imagine when they're completely silent you're just you know somebody could fly it over your backyard uh on a on a battlefield it's pretty terrifying to think about you know this kind of uh assassin that can move it 100 plus miles an hour instantly take you out without you even hearing about it so very dark but uh good time to get it so one thing i would say kind of a call to action for the audience it's seen there are a lot of new american companies taking on this issue, developing drones for all these different use cases.

47:21If you look at Augustus and Rainmaker, they're developing drones for cloud seeding and agriculture. We could probably have 10 to 50x more drone companies attacking all these different areas, everything from the production down to the parts level, all the way up through these sort of app layer, product layer companies for organ transplants. Sorry, not transplants, transports. transports yeah and things like that yeah yeah that's right yeah um we'll go give it a read on pirate wires uh we love pirate wires and highly recommend that you subscribe it would be just crushingly embarrassing to get caught looking at a pirate wires paywall in front of someone in tech brutal you don't want that to happen to you yeah uh and if you ever run into solana he has the ability to just search your email in the database and he'll know yeah so you can't fake it guys can't fake it you got to be real real subscriber uh so let's go to stratechery uh breaking down more tech earnings from big tech the hyperscalers Microsoft and meta earnings went live and then Thompson broke it all down I don't know what day it was we already covered met a lot yeah so we can kind of rip through Microsoft and just give you a quick update from the Wall Street Journal Microsoft's flagship cloud computing business experience to slow down in growth last quarter as constraints on data center supply once again weighed down results revenue for tech for the tech giants as your cloud computing division, which is closely watched by investors, grew 31 % at the low end of the company's projections.

48:52Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said Azure growth would again be 31 % to 32 % this quarter, a projection that disappointed investors. Microsoft stock was down 4.5 % in after hours trading. Fortunately, on Public, you can get in on the after hours action now. They are allowing after hours trading. So first off, Ben says, Microsoft said the AI growth was capacity limited, but would be rectified by mid-year. It's nice to not have to be on the hook for that new open AI data center. But the bigger miss in Azure was somewhat obscure, but interesting in its own right. Basically, summarizing the Wall Street Journal, Ben says, Microsoft pivoted their scale motion.

49:34Think small and medium-sized businesses and second-tier geographies to be very focused on AI instead of boring old cloud migrations. And they didn't get many takers so they're going to second tier geographies outside the united states and they're going to small and medium businesses and instead of saying hey you have this data on this old server let's get it on the cloud they are now shifting to a model of saying hey can we get ai installed in your team's integration can we get ai installed in uh looking at all your data running streaming analytics looking at your enterprise and that's a harder sell for a lot of businesses that are just, hey, like I kind of have, I'm running on vibes.

50:12Like I'm the AI. I know if revenue's down, I kind of know why. I don't necessarily email them to dig through everything. I'd love to see an AI have a power launch. Exactly. It's a harder sell. Apparently. That's what we're seeing. Could turn around. We never know. So now they will go back to just selling actual cloud services and expect to see a revenue rebound. Count one for my thesis that bottoms up AI adoption will be a hard sell. And this is also why there's those private equity roll-ups, VC-backed roll-ups that are buying companies and then forcing them to use AI because it seems to be a hard sell from an outsider.

50:42And so you could always ask, hey, why is Long Lake rolling up HOAs and then dropping AI on top of it? Why don't they just build AI for HOAs and then sell into the existing HOAs? Well, maybe the sales motion is very difficult. Maybe they want a new model. And so if they own the company, they get to convert that. My HOA management company still runs on paper sent in the mail that has to be sent back to them and then processed. It's like the easiest software integration to just allow online surveys. And they haven't rolled that out. So imagine how many HOA software companies have pitched them. Look, you could be way more efficient.

51:15You could save money here, all this stuff. Don't care. Yeah, and they say, oh, you're trying to pitch me some e-signing software? How many employees you got? 50 ,000? I'm not interested. It'd be too expensive. Get those numbers up. Yeah. So on the flip side, Satya Nadella claimed good progress with co-pilot adoption. We are seeing accelerated customer adoption across all deal sizes as we win new Microsoft 365 co-pilot customers. Once again, however, Ben says there was no actual real numbers shared. I'd love to see them. Beyond that, I do want to express gratitude to Microsoft for introducing new terms of art.

51:49Database fungibility. I'm surprised they're not getting pressed harder on that, considering it's such a major element of their AI strategy. Wouldn't the analysts kind of push? No, you can totally push back. Until the SEC says you got to break out the revenues, you don't want to share anything. This is the classic Google, YouTube, AWS, Amazon thing. Amazon did not want to break out AWS data. Because even though you could hire someone from AWS and they could tell you, yeah, that thing was really profitable, that doesn't ring as true as every day seeing the stock price and every quarter seeing AWS just print profit.

52:26And that gets Google and Microsoft off the couch. and they say, well, I know for a fact that AWS is massively profitable. We got to build a competitor instead of just, oh, I've heard whispers that they're making lots of money. Yeah. Right, very different. Because Bezos that whole time was reinvesting all the profits so it wasn't showing up. It was hiding. It's just tough because on the Copilot side, they're selling into existing customers, right? So it's an upsell, which is different than, okay, if you want to go compete with them really on Copilot, in many ways you have to own the underlying company-wide people infrastructure to some degree, right?

53:04Like you need to own teams so that you can upsell, you know, the co-pilot for teams integration. Yeah. And so Satya continues to get hammered with questions about open AI and the relationship there. And he says, so Altman and Nadella, Altman and Nadella posted a selfie together. Yep. Trying to, you know, clear up. Hey, we're buddies. We're buddies. We're smiling. We're happy. It's not, it doesn't count unless there's the, the, the, the, the, the Della mogged alt man on TV. He said, yeah, the bar for like the, the CEO to CEO selfie has gotten so high. It's like, I want to see you doing jujitsu together.

53:39I want to see a Jersey swap. I want to see that leather jacket on you. I want to see, I want to see Seattle in the passenger seat of the Regera in the cone. Yeah. We need to see shots of them. Yeah. I want to see Sam together hitting 200 miles an hour in that thing and satya scared out of his mind yeah then i'll be like okay yeah these are boys they're boys they went to the track they did a track day together and satya trusted sam to put up five g's in the corner satya let sam ride his favorite thoroughbred exactly exactly uh yeah it's not you can't just take a picture in a boardroom it's boring it's boring step it up guys um so satya answering about open ai he says but to your overall point i the thing i would say is that we are building a pretty fungible fleet, right?

54:21Like, don't worry, we can move our fleet anywhere. We're making sure that there's the right balance between training and inference. It's geo-distributed. We are working super hard on all the software oppositions, right? I mean, it's not just the software optimizations that come because of what DeepSeek has done, but all the work we have done too, for example, reduced the price of GPT models over the years in partnership with OpenAI, which is true. They've done a lot of optimization to serve gpt we know exactly how much microsoft owns of open ai because there was that one weird investment where they basically bought seemingly i forget the exact structure but yeah it was like 10 on 20 years the way i think of it is like is like there's kind of three important parties around the table with the open ai for profit it's like the like the founders employees like the shareholders, the Microsoft, and then the nonprofit.

55:13And then the actual investors are like pretty small in that. But you can think about like those four things and they're like roughly balanced. There isn't one person or one organization that has like outsized control. I think the whole meme of like, it's entirely controlled by the nonprofit or it's entirely controlled by Sam or it's entirely controlled by Satya is maybe a little bit oversold. And it's a little bit more of a balance because when the nonprofit conversion happened, there was like a big debate and you get four people around the table. Oftentimes if everyone has like roughly equal leverage to kind of veto, you kind of wind up with roughly equal positions.

55:45Um, but I don't really know. Um, anyway, in fact, we did a lot more work in inference optimizations on it. And that's been key to driving, right? Uh, one of the key things to note in AI is you don't just launch the frontier model, but if it's too expensive to serve, it's no good, right? It won't generate any demand. So you've got to have that optimization so that inference costs are coming down specific communication strategy where you keep saying, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it makes you inclined to agree with him, right? Yeah, right. Yeah, 100%. I was watching some video of someone, who was it?

56:19Someone on, it was Vivek Ramaswamy on Mad Money, on Mad Money with Jim Cramer. And he's breaking down this biotech deal. And every sentence he starts with actually. he includes the word actually like 25 times in this interview and so kramer will be like oh like why are you taking this uh drug through uh through phase three trials like it already failed phase two and he's like well actually when we looked at the data like it actually outperformed and so he's like really enforcing that this is like true what he's saying is a fact it's actually true and he's just throwing that in and i just picked up on it as like a rhetorical technique gotta watch out for these things, folks.

56:59It's important. We would never do something like this to you. We would never use rhetoric against you. Never. To get you to buy one of our - To sign up for ramp. To sign up for ramp. Actually. Actually. Which is actually the greatest financial institution of all time. All time. Also, the fleet physics that we are managing. And also, remember, you don't want to buy too much of anything at one time because Moore's Law every year is going to give you 2x. Your optimization is going to give you 10x. You want to continuously upgrade the fleet, modernize the fleet, age of the fleet. And at the end of the day, you have the right ratio of monetization and demand driven monetization to what you think of as the right training expense.

57:37I like the use of fleet because it does, you can imagine that same language being used at Amazon where they're like, all right, Jeff, you have tens of thousands of these delivery vehicles. The depreciation is insane. You're putting hundreds of thousands of miles on them every a few years like they're clearly depreciating massively and so by positioning it as a fleet standpoint it makes it slightly less painful that a lot of these gpus will be worthless in three years yeah not worthless people are like yeah i i got a fleet of sports cars at home i'm used to this i've dealt with depreciation but you buy the right cars i got an sf90 yeah i'm down i got a bunch of tycons yeah in my fleet i'm sitting on losses yeah the only thing The only thing that depreciates faster than GPUs is Ticons.

58:24Ticons. Some people call them the GPUs of the car market. Yep. And so Ben summarizes this by saying, this is the exact opposite way in which Microsoft was talking about their data center investments in October 2023, where Nadella emphasized that Microsoft would have a durable cost advantage because they could build infrastructure for a specific model. So they were not talking about fleet fungibility at that point. They were talking about going all in on OpenAI. Ben doesn't forget. He's putting Satya in the truth zone. In the truth zone. And you know Satya's reading this being like, oh, he got me.

58:56He got me, yeah, yeah. I was trying to be a little sneaky. I didn't sneak past your techie. Oh, no. Ultimately, though, that's not a criticism. Models seem to be well on their way to commoditization, and Microsoft has changed its tune appropriately. And so, yeah, and they're hosting R1 for free. And so, you know, credit where credit's due. Microsoft is hosting R1? Everyone's hosting R1. No one is as much of a Djangoist as you. no one no one is that america first like the whole like the abstract concept of like it's bad to host the open source model just like that didn't take hold at all as a mean yeah just i you know imagine imagine sam you're you're posting this smiling picture with satya meanwhile he's but they host everything they host llama they do a whole press release i understand i understand yeah it's just and if you're an azure customer you're like i want all of them like give me all the flexibility all the time on cost and stuff like they're hosting it on azure on azure i thought i thought it was an integration in teams or like no no no no it's literally like if i go to azure i can get my sequel i can get postgres i can get other databases i thought they were like yeah loaded into copilot let's go sorry sam sam's got the you know the smiling face on he's just crying crying no no it's not that aggressive yet but um uh and one more point of note uh hood the the CFO said, we talked a little bit about what were the main drivers, which was one of the Azure commitments that OpenAI has made.

1:00:24And I do want to say that obviously this is a big commitment. You'll continue to see OpenAI make commitment. So I want to separate the concept that this is one time versus an ongoing relationship that will grow as they grow, which it absolutely will. And Ben says that right of first refusal to OpenAI's AI build-out figures to be a pretty handy tool for Microsoft. They can build capacity for their customers. And if they overbuild, well, guess they'll grab a bit more of open AI capacity to fill in the gaps. And so Satya, you know, getting a little tricky with the words, but an absolute dog. He's nice with it.

1:01:00He's nice with it. He's nice with it. You know, he was the first hyperscaler big tech CEO to mention the metaverse before Zuck. No way. He got to it before Zuck. He was like, yeah, we're really into this metaverse concept. Like it's going to be a big deal. We're going to like. It's called team. It's called team. Yeah. It was like, you're going to be, if you're like an industrial company, you'll be able to create a, what do they call it? Like a clone of your industrial systems. So you'll be able to like walk around in virtual reality and see, okay, this machine is green. This machine's red. What let's diagnose it.

1:01:30And we're out. We're running out of Lucy. Digital twin. Yeah. Let's fire up the packaging machine, print more labels. Yeah. All, all digital. And I think they have some products for it. I don't think the adoption's been great, but it is just funny that he was early to the trend. He was reading Matt Ball. Yep. Another absolute dog. Okay, let's move on. What is Matt Ball up to these days? Oh, he just put out a fantastic report on the state of video games, which we should dig into. We should dig into that. It's like a massive slide deck, and he just did an interview with none other than Ben Thompson, the absolute man.

1:01:59Another absolute dog. Absolute dog. Dog on dog action. It's a dog fight. It's a dog fight. Those two guys get in the ring. Yeah, yeah. Yeah? Hot takes flying. Yep. It's great. Okay. Let's move on to Masayoshi Son. Hey, crack. I specifically ordered these this morning. This is my favorite little Japanese soda. It's called the Kimono Sparkling Yuzu Soda. It's made in Japan. It actually still has all of the... It has some westernized labeling in order to sell here, but they left the Japanese characters on the side too. So if you can read Japanese, you can dive in there. but these things are delightful.

1:02:41I thought it was a great way to kind of sort of kick off this. Overview of Masa Son's, Masayoshi Son's absolutely incredible career and that we are blessed is still raging and roaring on. The ultimate size Lord. The gambling man. The gambling man. The gambling man. So there's, John had covered Masa on his YouTube channel in the past, but in diving into this, so we looked at some of his research from that. And then I went back and started listening to the audio book, Gambling Man, which is an incredible overview of Masa's life and gets you really into really into who this guy is. everything like deep family history going back to his dad his dad's family his grandpa their entire trajectory going from Korea to Japan back to Korea back to Japan you know going through a very tumultuous oh yeah series of decades leading up to Masa being born well let's start with some context of why he's in the news and then just kick it off with the proper intro uh so jeff lewis has a great post here that we'll put up on the screen uh he says you only have to be really right once masa has been really right twice third time tends to be a charm and so jeff's going long masa and uh hero onoda capital says 25 at 340 post this is the rumored open ai round and it's a quote he says, there are one business guys.

1:04:23Bill Gates just started Microsoft and Mark Zuckerberg just started Facebook. I am involved in a hundred businesses and I control the entire tech ecosystem. Masa continued, these are not my peers. The right comparison for me is Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Emperor Qin, builder of the Great Wall of China. I am not a CEO. I am building an empire. And that's the type of energy we love to see on the timeline. And so we got some photos of Masa, but let's kick it off with why you should care about this guy. He's back. He's in on Stargate. He's ripping huge checks. He lost a ton of money. It was embarrassed by WeWork, but he made a ton back on Arm.

1:05:04He's rich, he's powerful, and he's firmly back in the game. And so why don't you kick it off with his humble beginnings in early life? humble beginning is an early life so he was born uh on the 11th of august in 1957 in tosu which is the southeastern part of japan's kyushu island he is a third generation korean zainichi korean zainichi korean which which are ethnic koreans that were at some point or another granted permanent residency or citizenship in japan so before going into that uh he actually so going back to his grandpa, I'll pull up some notes here. His grandpa and his, I guess, his great grandpa were a part of this sort of agricultural class in Korea.

1:05:50And so they were not seen as businessmen, but they were seen as people that sort of, they were sort of aristocratic, aristocrat adjacent. Their responsibility was sort of overseeing agriculture in Korea. and what's interesting about this is that his grandpa really internalized this and so even though that aristocratic sort of agricultural class was disbanded in Korea and they eventually moved to Japan he always saw himself as above business like had a very negative view of business he had a negative view of entrepreneurs which is fascinating because Masa's dad his grandpa's son the grandpa's son was very much an entrepreneur and he went on to very much influence um masa uh in you know in a big way it's a real catalyze just do things the real you can just do things guys so rules build whatever you can so yeah so going going back uh masa's dad was born in 1936 uh their their um masa uh he was just 21 when he had also yes has a kid very young masa's one of seven um so his his his yeah very very much um and so So Mas' dad is living through World War, you know, the sort of the end of World War II, right?

1:07:10Sort of this Japanese reconstruction era. The Japanese were deeply embarrassed by World War II, right? They went from this sort of dominant empire that stretched all over Asia to being forced back onto the four islands. And they went through this reconstruction period. And so as the Japanese were in a bad spot, they badly, badly mistreated Koreans. Even during the war, the Koreans were, the men were forced to work in like coal mines and do these sort of tasks that were basically slave labor. And the women were like concubines, sort of sexual slaves. So very, very dark history. And so this is what Masa's grandpa is like going through as like an adult, basically.

1:07:54So he has a son. He has seven kids. And Moss's dad even has memories of American B-29 bombers flying and bombing the nearby cities that they were in. And Moss's dad has this memory of walking up and touching the glass of a B-29 bomber that crashed. But Moss's dad at the time is a kid. He decided that America was awesome. he says like there's a quote he says um they uh he's like at that point from that point on i i thought america rocked that was like the summary you know not not word for word that's hilarious um and so uh after after the war koreans are being treated terribly there was there was a lot of pushback many of them were asked to leave yep if you didn't leave you were forced into these sort of shanty uh you know ghettos japan's always been kind of a like light ethno state like they've never been big on immigration yeah they're still you can like go live there but you yeah it's hard the population is collapsing so things might change but and so it's been rough even even being korean not even being like an american who would really stick out yeah and so um they lived in this illegally built shack on the railroad yeah so and so at one point they go so masa's dad goes back to Korea.

1:09:16They realize it's even worse there. There's no economy. Then they decide they're going to come back to Japan. They get on a boat. It's a multi-day crossing typically. It's like a couple days. The boat sinks, and they spend two days at sea just drifting around and eventually get picked up, taken back to Korea, and then they finally make it back to Japan. Wow. And so jumping forward a little bit, But Japan at this point is still like a completely shattered economy. They're rebuilding. They've lost so much ground. Masa's dad leaves school at 14 and is selling alcohol to basically support his family.

1:10:00He's one of seven. He's trying to put some food on the table. He's an illegal sake business. Masa's dad starts a moonshine business. And at this point, his dad is a drunk, is beating him like frequently, very dark. And it has at one point badly beats him because he was bragging. Masa's dad was bragging to his friends about his business success. Right. He's like, I'm making moonshine and making some bucks. His dad overhears it, ends up beating him for it. So Masa's born 10 years after the family gets back to Japan. They're completely at the bottom of society. So it's very much like Masa. By the time he's a teenager, his dad is kind of on top, not on top of the world, but they have a very flashy lifestyle.

1:10:46But he's born while his dad is living with their family in the slums. And they are pig farmers. And they chose pigs for a few specific reasons that I thought were interesting. So they, one, his dad had free labor because they have a big family and everybody's participating. They have free land because they're just living in this sort of like railroad ghetto. and the pigs just kind of roam around chilling yeah the masa's uh grandma who's a big part of raising him because his mom was very absent takes masa around in a wheelbarrow picking up scraps of food to feed the pigs so this is just like it's it's hard to even illustrate how rough of a situation they're in um but anyways they pick he his dad picks pigs because they reproduce super quickly yeah the pigs are just it's like very hustle mindset but very limited opportunities and like low low class yeah um and so eventually through this sort of raising pigs selling them off to be you know butchered for food um moss's dad starts saving up some money at one point he has the equivalent of a hundred thousand usd a lot of money back then um and uh masa this this really gets into kind of understanding who he is his dad starts to get into this thing called pachinko which is this new form of gambling which is effectively via slot machines but it still is very much around um in japan so his dad just starts getting getting into the game a little bit he's gone from pig farming to gambling yep an absolute dog he's on the casino side but he's on the casino side he's on the house gambling money away this is important but he still has to take some pretty big gambles so um anyways these are picture like casinos and is not that dissimilar to what vegas looks like today where it's just rows and rows of these machines and people just sit there.

1:12:31And over time, he's sort of levering up. He's launching different parlors here and there. At one point, he takes a huge bet and spends$4 million on a new club, they called it. And it's called Lions. And so this was like the vast majority of the capital that he had available. So huge bet. And for the bet to pay off, he needed to get five to 10 ,000 people per day gaming in this facility, which is an order of magnitude more than his best performing club. So it's literally the most giga-chad long move that a lot of people are like, you are absolutely crazy. And his dad is on record saying, I don't care if I go bust.

1:13:14And he even had contingency plans. He's like, if I go bankrupt, we'll go on the run. He's like, I'll run it all back. And so this is the environment that Maz is growing up in as like sub 10 years old, which is just crazy, crazy environment. And so he launches this club first two weeks, absolutely flop. And he's like, obviously freaking out, but wants to, you know, wants to really make a play. So he's takes like a$350 ,000 loss in the first month. He's like, I got to turn this around. He decides to, he works with his engineers to make it so that the machines like pay out a lot more and people start winning a lot.

1:13:52And he starts attracting this flood of people and so the next month he changes it and he makes 350k of profit and then he the next month you know they're they're kind of messing with the machines he loses it back again so he's no the the sons are just like not afraid to like make it all lose it all make it all lose it all um and uh and eventually he sort of slowly dials it dials it in um and so by the time masa's uh i believe it's 14 the family's now living this sort of dual lifestyle where some they have 20 uh members of the family that are that are working on the family business but then there's also the sort of older generation and so it's this weird dichotomy where the people that are working in the business are like driving like flashy cars and like really like living it up right they have all these sort of casinos um and then the grandparents are like kind of still um around but like very much still living in the past in some way.

1:14:47And so we can get more into Masa's, you know, life and career. But I think that's very important context because this sort of gambler's mindset and entrepreneur, like high, high risk entrepreneurship is 100 % in his DNA. It's all he knows. So when people are like, oh, how could Masa put$10 billion into, you know, WeWork and lose it all? It's like, well, he's lost more money than any other man in history, in the entire history of the world, in our sort of modern economy. He was 70 billion during the dot-com crash. Yeah. The highest number ever lost. He was also the rich. So he went from being the richest man in the world to losing like 90.

1:15:28The person who lost more than anyone in history. Yeah. Crazy. So, absolutely insane. through the gambling business and through kind of their family growing. He meets this guy, Den Fujita, who is an entrepreneur who brought McDonald's to Japan. And this guy is a psycho. He has this quote. He says, if the Japanese eat McDonald's for a thousand years, they'll grow taller, have white skin and blonde hair. Like, it's like they'll basically turn into Donald Trump. I think it's so funny that the dude's just like, Oh yeah, this is like Trump code. This is Trump maxing, basically. Trump maxing. And so Fujita acts as like a mentor to Masa and tells him, go study English, learn about the computer industry, and you gotta go to America.

1:16:16And so Masa has this outsider complex. He's like, yes, I'm like the lowest rung of society. Yeah, my family's from this destitute shack. And we're still looked down on as kind of like gamblers and like lower class. But I'm keeping the name. I'm not changing my name and I'm gonna prove that I can do it. No and the cool thing so Masa's dad had a you know I don't know the exact dynamic but very rough relationship with an abusive father who's an alcoholic. Masa's dad is awesome though and like from a young age is training Masa and saying you are the best you are number one anything you want you can achieve like it's honestly like I went from being I was you know listening to this being like very emotional because it was so dark and it flips and masa's dad is you can just do things yeah anything you can see in your mind you can achieve and masa really carries that into the rest of his career oh yeah totally so he goes to california at age 16 joins this college before entering high school and he and he advances from sophomore to junior to senior in two weeks by just testing out of everything and he spent two full years at the college then transferred to uc berkeley to study economics while also taking some computer sciences some computer science classes and he has this idea where he needs to generate business ideas and so he generates one new business idea every single day he would have loved my first million oh yeah my first million or just like you know your your path of just like building a deck spinning up an idea tweeting something out and then being like actually this is a business yeah that idea sucks or but he was just throwing stuff at the wall i remember in my first startup, we were destitute and we had a wall of sticky notes of just all the different business ideas.

1:17:57And some days we would just pull one out and be like, can we build an MVP for this? And eventually it started working, which is great. So he sells a patent for a translation device to Sharp Electronics. So it seems like he does have some sort of technical background, even though later on he becomes deeply vibe-based investor. He's just not an engineer and he never identified as an engineer. he he he is the jap yeah in the grand scheme he's the the japanese warren buffett yeah you should look at him as like a deal maker yep somebody that's seeing opportunities putting people capital and ideas together yeah and doing it on a on a global scale and so sharp pays him 1.7 million dollars for that patent which is crazy considering how young he is at the time it's a huge windfall back for this was uh before 1980 so this is in the 70s he gets two million bucks basically and so So he immediately invested all in importing Space Invaders arcade machines, modifying the software and installing them on campus.

1:18:52And that makes him another million dollars. And then he founds a game software company and he sells that for$2 million. So he has a bunch of like back-to-back hits really, really quickly. And so then he returns to Japan in the early 80s and he starts doing extensive research. So he's just kind of monk mode. He's made his money in America enough to like, you know, buy some time. and he's just spending 18 months doing extensive research. All of his relatives are like, this guy's doing nothing. But secretly, he was building a massive knowledge base. So he developed 20 metrics to measure potential business ideas.

1:19:27And the highest scoring idea for him was personal software distribution. And this goes into his deal-making philosophy. He's not building the software. That's complicated. That's risky. He's just taking software that already works and just buying it for cheap and selling it to someone else. distribution businesses have existed for years they're great businesses you usually don't have to take on you don't have to take on too much inventory risk totally you get this sort of toll booth style yeah not r &d heavy very bootstrappable i know some people that own food and bev distribution companies and like they just print money and they don't and they never raised any money it's like this amazing family-owned business yeah and so um this uh uh and and this also like just it's super aligns with his skill set at this point like He understands what good software is, obviously, because he's built a game company, ran the Space Invaders thing.

1:20:16But if you think about, you get a call from somebody who's in their early 20s. They've already sold three companies. They have money. They're really this crazy hustler with this interesting backstory. You're going to take that meeting even though they're young. And so that's the ultimate alpha. He's such a hustler, has enough of a track record to get the meeting. And then it's like, oh, yeah, you're providing me a service. I need software to distribute through my stores anyway. So why don't I go with you? Yeah, and that's why when, you know, because today the younger generation of entrepreneurs really know Masa for going giga long on WeWork.

1:20:53But that's not the story. So 50 years earlier, he had his 20 metrics to measure business ideas. And so he takes massive risk. And oftentimes there is a sort of vibes based analysis, which some of his employees talk about, right? Um, but in general, he's one of the most well-studied, well-researched, most experienced deal makers in history. Totally. Totally. And so there's not like he does get some really lucky breaks, but it's not necessarily luck, right? Because he's taking so many crazy shots on goal. Yeah. And so he chooses the name SoftBank. Think about it as like a bank of software. It's not, it's not actually a financial institution, but it kind of turns into one or a huge fund.

1:21:37It's a certain point. And so he hires two part-time people in a small office. He's not afraid to hustle. And then famously, he would get an Apple box because he's short and stand on them and declare, in five years, we'll have$75 million in sales supplying a thousand outlets and we'll be number one in PC software distribution. And the two employees were like, this guy's crazy. We quit immediately. Imagine giving a speech to your only two employees. Imagine we're like, Ben, this is going to be the most profitable podcast. We're going to crush it. We're going to be number one this year. And Ben just is like, I'm good.

1:22:11I'm out. I'm out. On that note, I'm out. Yeah, I mean, if he saw a stand on Apple Box, maybe that would be the trigger for that. Hilarious. But he doesn't mind. He grinds through it. And so he books a giant booth the size of Sony Toshiba's at a Tokyo trade show. Even though he's like this small company, he's just sending it. So smart. It's so smart. He's standing out. this is this is the friend.com alvy thing like he's doing the thing where everyone's like no one would take that amount of risk and then it got gets him a bunch of attention and so he invited vendors to exhibit for free and so he's like i got this booth i'll let you do it for free i'm going to advertise you for free and he's just creating pulling forward value basically and so it feels like a flop there's no immediate leads but weeks later joshin denki from osaka contacted him.

1:22:59And originally, this is hilarious because he's made millions of dollars at this point. And they're like, hey, we're the software firm. Why don't you come and pitch us and we'll see if we can do a deal? And he's like, I don't have enough money to afford a train ticket. I literally can't go. Yeah. So I would love to know how he probably did the most degenerate thing with all that cash. He's probably going long Russian corn futures. He just uses it all. Yeah. I mean, he literally spent a ton of it on that trade show booth and just spending it on like you know all these all these crazy long shots oh yeah they don't imagine in an era when when tokyo's biggest software trade show to actually get a booth the size of sony or toshiba you might have had to spend a million bucks or something or yeah a ton and so um the the president of joshin denki uh calls him and says we need a dedicated software supplier we want you to be the one to do it And he says - And this is such an interesting time, right?

1:23:56Because this is at a time where companies were R &D product companies, but they wouldn't do their own distribution. So to sell, they would just find a distributor that would be the primary sales channel for them. I mean, this was up until the internet. We're in 1981 or something. And all the way up to 2000, you would have to go to, what was it? Comp USA or Best Buy or Fry's Electronics. And I remember buying video games on discs in like boxes and you'd take that home. That's why GameStop was a great business. Yeah. It's because the manufacturers or the game makers didn't actually have direct distribution.

1:24:35And if you just think about it, like there's, I mean, there's obviously some sort of power law where Best Buy is probably the biggest one. GameStop's big, like you mentioned. But there are hundreds or thousands of individual small software box retail stores. And then there's also thousands of game companies and software companies and somebody making spreadsheets. You forget that before Microsoft condensed all of Office, like PowerPoint was its own company. I'm pretty sure Excel was its own company. And they like put all these together. Yeah, almost all of that was through M &A. And so at a certain point, if you're the guys who are like, we're making presentation software, we're going to call it PowerPoint or whatever.

1:25:10You're like, okay, we have some cracked engineers. We built it. It works. It's good. But like now we got to sell it into a thousand different retail stores. Like we have to have a massive sales force. It makes perfect sense to disaggregate that and work with a distributor. And so that's what they do. But Masa gets this phone call and they're saying, we need a dedicated software supplier for Josh and Denki. And Masa says, I have no product, no money and little experience, but I have the greatest desire to succeed and I will pour my entire spirit into PCs. Let's go. Let's go. Full set. So one thing you'll know about Masa that's important to know is from a very young age, he intensely practiced manifestation and visualization.

1:25:52So he would have loved LA in the 2000s because this guy, uh, I'm sure he's a big feng shui, you know, uh, you know, uh, enthusiast as well, but he, he would, in his view from, from early in his career, if he could visualize it, he could make it real. Yep. And so that has kind of bit him in a little bit throughout, you know, the last few years where he'll just announce a huge deal before it's done. And in his mind, he's like, I can see it in my mind. It's done. We're going to do it. Right. And that bit him a little bit with WeWork because I'm sure when he was investing at WeWork at a$44 billion valuation, he just imagined a world where WeWork had office buildings, hotels, apartments, all these campuses.

1:26:35And so he's like, of course, he was not analyzing it based on their EBITDA at the time. It was entirely based on what he visualized. And he believed in Adam Neumann. In many ways, Adam Neumann was an amazing CEO from a storytelling, narrative, brand building standpoint. Yeah, yeah. And so in his mind, WeWork was already a$100 billion company. So it seemed like he's buying it for cheap. He's like, you're the idiots, right? Because he can see it in his mind. Even WeWork, it's not like WeWork. People like to put WeWork in the same bucket as Theranos, but it's just not true at all. This is a benchmark company.

1:27:09They were very much a serious contender in Silicon Valley, whereas Theranos is like this weird zombie. The other thing with WeWork is the fundamental consumer product was amazing. Do you remember walking into early WeWorks? I remember being in college, probably going to my first WeWork. I'm like, the coffee's free and good. That's amazing. It was a fun vibe. Everyone was friendly. Maybe it's not the highest productivity space in the world. It was on a mega trend of more remote work, more distributed teams, more small teams, more startups. It felt like the pricing, part of why the product was so good is because they were not selling it for what it costs to deliver.

1:27:50Totally. But it still was like, okay, at 400 bucks a month, it'd be stupid not to get this because I'm getting so much value. Totally, totally. And so Masa, the dealmaker, comes out in full force with the Joshin Denki deal. He says, first off, you got to break off other vendor relationships. You got to go exclusive if you want to be with me, but I will work extra hard for you. And then he also really pitches them on this idea that the software is key to them winning in hardware. So the idea is like if Josh and Denki wants to sell a lot of hardware, they're going to need the best software in their stores.

1:28:19And people will come for the software and then they'll buy a new computer. And that virtuous cycle will drive value for Josh and Denki. He's not wrong there. Like that is a good pitch. And so he secures the deal. And he also importantly gets Josh and Denki to pay for product inventory covering Moss's shortfall. So all of a sudden he doesn't have a working capital problem. And so even though he's very small and doesn't have a lot of funding raised or anything, he can basically bootstrap. Joshin deserves, hopefully Masa went back after all of this and was just like, got some warrants. Here's a boat.

1:28:52Here's a boat or something. Something to pay him back. Because it seems like Joshin just made it a really risky bet. I mean, look at this growth. He was always a force. Always a force. And so Masa takes SoftBank from$10 ,000 in monthly revenue to$2.3 million in monthly revenue. And remember, there's no inventory cost here. So it's all like, respectively, software margins. He doesn't have the working capital or the debt issue that normally comes up. He's printing. And so he IPOs in 1994 at a valuation of$3 billion. And by the early 1990s, SoftBank was Japan's largest distributor of PC software.

1:29:30He manifested this. And he was extremely wealthy, but far from done. Should we move on to the dot-com boom and bust? This is like, we're just getting started. We're just getting started. Buckle in, folks. We got another hour, at least on this, baby. So he moves to Silicon Valley in 1995. He sets up offices in Mountain View, seeing the internet's enormous potential. And 1995, this is still early on the dot-com boom. It's not like he YOLO'd in at the top in 2000. He did that also. He also did that. But he also got in early and that was very valuable. And so the dot-com boom was in full swing. Companies were rushing to harness the web's explosive growth.

1:30:07But this was still pre-IPO craze, oh, raise, you know, go public with just a slide deck and a domain name. And so in 1996, he meets the Yahoo co-founders, Jerry Yang and David Filo. He offers them$100 million for 30 % of Yahoo. It's a big stake. typical VC funds at the time rarely wrote hundred million dollar checks because that could alone be 40 % of the fund. Yeah, this is so normalized now, but the biggest funds back in the day were like a hundred million dollars. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it just, yeah, just like you would just raise from VCs for a seed round or a series A, series B, and then IPO.

1:30:48Google IPO'd very early. Obviously it was a different thing because they were cashflow positive, but even And even the money losers would IPO and use the capital markets in the public capital markets to raise money. Nowadays, when companies IPO, they're oftentimes not even about the money. It's about the liquidity for the shareholders. It's like, well, I raised a couple million dollars just from angels. Then there were a bunch of huge venture capital firms that could write a$20 million series A check. No problem. Then there were growth funds. Then there were crossover hedge funds. Then I started just going to the direct LPs and being like, can I raise a couple billion from a sovereign wealth fund just directly in the private market?

1:31:21All before IPO. and that's why you see companies IPO-ing at 60 or 100 billion. So listen to this quote. Masa gave the, after he made this offer, he gave the Yahoo founders an ultimatum. He says, if you don't take my money, I'll invest in Excite or Lycos, which were competitors, and kill you. He's just making death threats. The funniest thing about this quote is that he didn't even know who their competitors were. In the meeting, he asks, who do you think your biggest competitors are? And they say, probably Excite or Lycos. He's like, okay, well then, And if you don't take the money, I'm investing in them.

1:31:54Thanks for doing my DD for me. Ultimate deal maker. Didn't do any research, still wins the deal. And so it's just interesting because he breaks all the trends. He's exactly the opposite of Warren Buffett. Totally, totally. Right. Warren Buffett is heavily researched, sort of slow moving, builds these positions over time, takes a position, then starts marketing and things like that. he's the opposite where where he's coming in and he's clearly brilliant and gifted and a brilliant entrepreneur but from an investment standpoint he breaks all the rules right he's not even doing market research before offering to do a hundred million dollar investment crazy to not know the competitors yeah and just be like yeah like you guys but also i will kill you if you don't invest and so uh yahoo accepts the hundred million dollar offer they ipo in 1996 like very shortly after this deal goes through and the share price soared on day one, Masa made$150 million immediately.

1:32:53Which again, at this point in time, doesn't really make a dent in his net worth, right? Like he had taken SoftBank public at a$3 billion market cap. Sure, 150 extra bones is not a bad thing. Yahoo continued to rip post IPO all the way. I'm just saying, I think you'll realize through looking at Moss is the reason that later in his life, he starts to make these crazy size Lord, giga chad, mega long bets is because he's had instances like later when he invests in Alibaba and prints tens and tens of billions of dollars, you know that he wished he just massively sized up that position. Totally. Totally.

1:33:34And so that, that leads to sort of 10, you know, he understands concentration right now. There's too many VCs who are like, yeah, I'm in this amazing company I got a quarter percent yeah because I got I got diluted logo at that and I and I got crammed down on this one round I couldn't get to the ownership percentage and and the founders only wanted to do a 10 % round and I only took 2 % of it all this stuff but I mean Yahoo like the wealth creation at Yahoo was really underrated in the Silicon Valley story like when I got to Silicon Valley you'd meet a lot of Gen Xers and a lot of them were like oh yeah I was early at Yahoo and then you're like okay this person's like cool and like kind of smart, but not like generational talent.

1:34:11You go to their house, like a$40 million mansion in like metal park, because there was just so much wealth created from that IPO and a lot of liquidity. And so it was, it was a huge, huge thing that led to, you know, a rarefied air around anyone associated with Yahoo. And then also just like kind of a Yahoo mafia that spawned and built a bunch of companies. Um, and it was kind of like the Facebook of the day, but it didn't, didn't have staying power whatsoever. And so it eventually unwound. Um, but, uh, so once he gets liquidity from that, he's, he's hooked on deal-making. And so from 1996 to 2000, he invests in 250 internet startups, doing a deal a week.

1:34:49Yeah. And he emphasizes, you know, there were some, you know, some weeks he probably did five and other weeks he was back in his Tokyo pad. He's making calls. Okay. Yeah. What is it? Oh, who are your competitors? Okay. I'll invest in them. Okay. Yeah. One thing that's interesting, a lot of his career you know he he had his time in the valley but a lot of his career he spent working and living in in tokyo and just sporadically traveling to places like davos you know or california things like that and so he's basically just making a uh he's not trying to pick winners he's just trying to ride the internet wave so he's not not doing a lot of due diligence enormous volume and it's a good bet he created the tiger global tiger model was the same thing.

1:35:30Tiger just timed it terribly. But Tiger actually did way more due diligence because they would hire like Bain consulting. It was still pretty quick. Still like they were doing market research. Totally. Totally. Masa is just vibes based ripping checks. And I mean, we should do the Tiger story at some point, but they were very active in Asia around this time shortly after this too. Made a ton of money there. Masa is not just scaling the investments, he's scaling the firm so he launches basically teams in south korea japan hong kong australia india mexico brazil argentina so all all you know over the last you know decade you've had vcs being like oh yeah we're doing a lot in latim we're doing you know we're doing stuff in india we got bets in pakistan and uh and uh meanwhile moss has already been in all those places just spamming checks.

1:36:21It's like you on the, you know, with the machine, you know, spam them. And so he makes $15 billion in just a few years. And he starts to double down once he meets Jack Ma of Alibaba. And so Alibaba is scaling. They need additional capital. Goldman Sachs, who is Alibaba's previous investor, was reluctant to keep funding it. Didn't really see the massive potential there and was looking at more on a spreadsheet basis. And so Masa meets Chinese. First mistake. Yeah. Ignore spreadsheets. For sure. And so he meets Chinese tech entrepreneurs and he sees a glint in Ma's eyes. And one thing about Masa is like, you need to understand this run as he is a degenerate gambler because like he grew up in casinos, like, you know, these pachinko clubs.

1:37:08And he had so many wins. And his dad was fully comfortable with making, you know, going up one month and losing it all the next month. Exactly. Keeping it rolling. Yeah. Beta. Beta. Yeah. Beta. And so they shake on a deal, 20 million on a$100 million valuation, but he winds up getting 34 % of Alibaba through as the deal progresses. And so the critically advantage here is that Masa sat on Cisco's board and saw router sales to China exploding, indicating massive internet expansion. So he got some insider intel, understood the market was growing, and went in, found a targeted bet, and ripped a check.

1:37:45What's probably missing from this story is that he probably wrote 100 other$20 million checks, and none of them went anywhere. But it doesn't matter, because he got the elephant. He bagged the elephant. And so the dot-com crash was rough for him. Wait, let's talk about the Alibaba investment real quickly. So he turned$20 million into a$72 billion position, which I think is actually the greatest venture bet of all time. Yep. It's hard to measure because I think it sold off a ton during the dot-com crash, but at the current valuation. And I think he still owns a huge chunk of Alibaba, right? Because that was one of the positions that they were thinking about unwinding to do the Stargate deal.

1:38:29Yeah. So interest rates rise in 2000. The stock market plummets and many dot coms with shaky business models went bankrupt. SoftBank's market cap plunged at 99%. Classic. Yeah, so to be clear, so this was in March of 2000. In January, he was giving a talk in Tokyo at this very kind of cool underground sort of disco type club to all these and and the japanese culture at the time was very much salary men you know you worked a good income and it was sort of seen as boring and so masa got all these guys in a room and it's been described as being almost like a get rich quick scheme because he was pointing around the room being like you're going to be worth 50 million dollars you're going to be worth 100 million dollars you're going to be worth 100 million dollars and just like going around the room like that and it really seemed like that and he genuinely believed it totally and um i'm sure many of those people went on to start, you know, important companies, but, uh, he was, he, I do believe that at every market top, he still believes, which is why he gets smoked, right?

1:39:37He's not the guy. He doesn't really, I don't know. He never sells early. Yeah. Which is, which is a drawback for a lot of big investors who have the ability to find a fantastic entrepreneur, see trends, but then they get pessimistic at the last second and say, ah, this must be capping out. I've made so much money. I mean, the whole benchmark Uber story, people are like, you know, maybe that was like, they were like looking at, well, you know, we're each going to take home a billion dollars individually. Like this is retirement money. Maybe we got to get out something like that. And there's a little bit of internal, you know, devil on the shoulder telling you, Hey, uh, this is, this, this is too good to pass up.

1:40:12Uh, but even though he's losing so much money, uh, he personally lost$70 billion, which is a record at the time um alibaba is surviving do we hit the size i think we take a moment of silence moment of silence but it's almost like losing 70 million 70 billion dollars means you made that much yeah which should gone forgotten let's hit the size going just a little bit boom there we go for the run up and the run down and so uh he he makes it through with the alibaba stake and then he starts launching more companies uh yahoo broadband japan telecom vodafone japan rebranded soft bank mobile and this was smart because he found the area of tech that had durable revenues totally people would pay for an internet connection they would pay for cell service you know things like and uh disaggregated from the application layer yeah so it doesn't matter if yahoo wins or google wins or excite wins if you own the broadband broadband demand is going to increase today he still has a huge position in t-mobile so there's certain positions that he just merge you know, kept, kept writing.

1:41:16But so the, the chaos of the post 2000, um, you know, the, the, the actual like.com crash was because there were all these businesses that Masa was hugely invested in that were like dogs.com and be like basically a service where you could buy dogs online. And it turned out that people were still just buying dogs from like, you know, uh, regular kennels and stuff like that. And so you can think about the early two thousands is kind of like back to the basics, rebuilding with like the less frothy companies, riding the Alibaba stock, rebuilding SoftBank back up. And then in 2010, he releases this 30-year vision presentation.

1:41:55And this thing is a bombshell. In June of 2010, it's 133 slide deck with outsized predictions like advancements in artificial intelligence will surpass the human brain. Life expectancy in Japan will reach 200 years and a new era of hyper-connected communication will be upon us and so he his central philosophy is in from the information revolution will bring happiness for everyone so I love that even today he does similar things well he his his he's a master marketer salesman right he's a deal maker so he's got to sell these deals and he would even despite his limited English, he would know the simple words to say information revolution to bring happiness for everyone.

1:42:40Right. It's very sort of simple, intelligible. It's not, it's not techie mumbo jumbo about scaling curves and H one hundreds and all this other stuff. It's like, yeah. And even even his more recent decks have these very simplified people. They're, they're so simple. People make fun of them. People make fun of them, but then they end up being correct. Yep. They do. in many ways. And so the Vision Fund is born in 2017. He conceptualizes it in 2016 during a flight to the Middle East. He wrote down a target of$30 billion, then crossed it out in favor of$100 billion. What did he say? He said, life's too short to think small.

1:43:16Yeah. And so - Just tripling the size of your raise. Just, yeah, let's go big. One of the greatest, probably the greatest fundraiser of all time, Sam Altman's very good at fundraising, yet he still has to go to Maza to really get the job done. Yeah. Elon's great too, but it's a very different style of pitch, more driven by the science and the technology. So he has this famous 45 minute pitch where he's meeting with the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. In Moss's words, he says, I want to give you a trillion dollar gift. If you invest a hundred billion, I'll turn it into one trillion.

1:43:55So MBS ultimately invested$45 billion on the spot, catapulting the Vision Fund into existence. They also add a bunch of other investors, Apple's in the Vision Fund, Qualcomm, UAE's Mubadala, you know, sort of Sovereign Wealth Fund. SoftBank puts in 28 billion. The funny thing about this is that he goes to MBS and is like, you got to invest 100 billion to I'll turn it into a trillion and MBS is like that's crazy but I'm still going to give you 45 yeah it's like a total shoot for my 45 I'm good for my 45 and it's funny because his original target was 30 he sized it up and still exceeded that with the first check yeah and and there's been this uh idea in tech that Middle Eastern money is is easy to get yeah and that perception is only because there's a lot of capital out there these relationships take a lot of time yeah i know i know a ton of of allocators that have had to go visit the middle east 10 plus times before getting anything done and so it's not like this was easy you know masa made it look easy because he just rolled over there he was thinking about doing 30 crossed it out he liked the the a hundred to a trillion.

1:45:09But this was, again, a very credible feat by itself. And then SoftBank commits$28 billion of the fund. What Masa has done historically, I don't know exactly, but he also makes venture investments using leverage, which is kind of a tricky situation to get in because one, venture investments can go down all the way to zero, right? And yet he still owes that money to someone. And so he would use, he would use, uh, soft banks, you know, actual earnings to, to help, uh, back that up, but then also would lever up other positions. So he would raise debt against, you know, some of his specific positions.

1:45:49And so all throughout this, even from, you know, from the early 1990s to now, he's gone almost bust in like smaller ways that don't even make it into the story because he's just levering up, just going long. Like he doesn't, you know, I don't think this man has ever been short. He doesn't have any middle of the road outcomes. It's all 10 baggers or zeros, which is great. Well, in the case of Alibaba, you know, a 10 ,000 bagger. Yeah. So he focuses on AI, robotics, IoT, and consumer tech. He makes bets on Uber, WeWork, ByteDance, DD, DoorDash, Grab, and then quirkier startups like Zoom for robot pizza and WAG for dog walking.

1:46:27And it's funny because three of those are companies that have been like, Like, oh, this is such a silly idea. It never was going to work. He was so stupid for doing it. And then Uber, ByteDance, Didi, DoorDash, Grab, all banger companies. Yeah. All very, very good. Yeah. And one thing you'll notice here, he does not, he has no issues investing cross-border. So he has big presence in the US. He has a big presence in China. And so he's one of the few that's actually threading. Of course, some American venture capital firms have gone and raised Chinese money or invest in China, but he's getting into the best Chinese companies, you know, ByteDance, Didi, the Uber of China.

1:47:08And so really, he's a truly global dealmaker. He can go into any room and make stuff happen. And he's really good at being the capital that bridges these huge deals. Like I'm pretty sure the Uber and Didi deal, like having SoftBank bridge those two companies and put money into both in like this interesting way is like what kind of facilitated that um and and that's just like a wild card it's kind of the same thing that's happening with stargate where he comes in and all of a sudden like larry ellison is with sam altman and it's like more of this like avenger style team coming together because there's so much capital on the table everyone's like okay yeah i'm i'm marching to the same beat of this drum because and he's oftentimes has the conviction to make stuff happen that otherwise would have never been a part of history totally yeah um i i recently invested in a founder uh who will go unnamed that took a couple hundred million dollars from from a vision fund during 2021 and the pressure that he faced immediate you know immediately after investment to deploy it because in hindsight he's like how did i spend that much money in such a short period of time.

1:48:20Company ended up selling. It wasn't a good outcome. But he just said the relentless pressure of like, we gave you this money, 100x your business this year. There's also this interesting dynamic with SoftBank. I've heard from some folks that have had SoftBank on their board that even though Masa might come in, there's this example with WeWork, he gave Adam Neumann, the founder of WeWork,$3 billion on the first meeting and told him to be crazier. So the CEO and Masa, they get together, they have a short meeting and it's like the deal's done. But then SoftBank actually comes in and puts in like crazy infrastructure in the board.

1:48:55And so if you sit on a board with a SoftBank board member, there will be audit committees, compensation committees, like they run it like a public company basically. And so a lot of investors like hate that because they're like, I'm used to having like a one hour strategy meeting with my boys. And now I'm like doing like paperwork, which I'm not down with. I just want to let the CEO cook and just do it. Yeah. And in many ways, but it's interesting in many ways, uh, early on, I think investors would say, this is amazing vision fund, you know, very early just gave a company that I invested in at an$8 million valuation.

1:49:29They just gave them a hundred million dollars, right? It's a crazy valuation to the markups. Great company super capitalized, but then over time, uh, it ends up being seen as more of a kiss of death because a lot of these companies unless you were this generational outcome like uber uh or doordash you're really ready to deploy that money yeah and you're legitimately a phenomenal business that's that's already has some maturity versus something like you know zoom like the robot pizza company where there's tons of competition there's clearly no real network effect it's called the suicide round i like that i like that terminology it's great and there's been a few of them uh they lost money on we work obviously which we've talked about they lost money on wirecard the german payments processor which collapsed after accounting fraud green still capital melted down and many vision funds don't even know green profitability green cell was it green cell I don't remember I thought it was like housing or energy or something like that and it was a big blow up and so there's been a lot of those but he's still in the game yeah and it's tough like the reason you know the reason why these rounds ended up being the kiss of death is if you're not profitable and you raise 300 million dollars and you spend it all yeah then you're sitting on this massive preference stack nobody else wants to back the company because yep it's going to be tough to get any money out unless like everything goes perfectly and and the number is so big you think like oh wow he gave adam newman three billion dollars and like it basically went to zero like that's so embarrassing and then you realize that in 2021 softbank posted an annual net profit of 46 billion dollars yeah it's like enough to cover what 10 of those investments 15 of those investments without blinking and so you look at the gp commit on the south on the on the vision fund they put in what 26 or 28 billion on 100 uh yeah they can do that all day they could do that all day and it's just like he's just the numbers are so big you can't get you can't analyze them like it's a traditional fund because it's backed by this organization that's just printing cash printing cash from all of their holdings.

1:51:32Yeah, but now I think their actual net income is in the single digit billions. So that was a specific moment in time where they had a lot of things go right, which was just due to COVID and interest rates. But he doesn't quit. You only need one. You only need a couple wins to make it all back. Yeah, that's basically what he does every single time. And so in 2022, 2023. And this history, going back again to his childhood, he was conscious when his dad was willing to bankrupt the family to go when they were already super successful, right? So a lot of people look at this and it's like, Masa, you've made all these amazing investments.

1:52:09You built one of the biggest companies in Japan. You've been the world's richest man. Why are you still taking on all this risk? And the answer is he's playing the greatest, biggest game that he can play, right? And so, I mean, you were right that a year later in 2022, they announced a$27 billion loss. And so they lose money on Klarna. There's a Chinese tech crackdown. And so Alibaba and Didi get hammered by PRC regulations. Very hard to make money as a private investor in China, especially if you're Japanese instead of Chinese. And then it emerges in 2022 to 2023 that he personally owes SoftBank$5 billion due to side deals gone to ride he's just ripping he's so he's got his main deals and he's just like he's got his side deals and i'm like oh yeah i'm good for it like i'll write i'll put this on the ramp card yeah yeah uh yeah just just uh just hit up soft bank they'll take care of this billion dollar loss yeah uh and so masa says yeah this is this is evident of the way that he operates which is he is such a force that he's traveling all over the world doing deals committing to things announcing things that haven't been actually finalized yet and then telling his team all right just make it happen um so it's not shouldn't be that surprising to anyone that after the chaos of 2020 to 2023 he just happened to like owe his own company five billion dollars because of like some other stuff that probably didn't even make it into the news it's remarkable and so he shook it off he says when it rains you open an umbrella and he's repeatedly insisted that he's embarrassed by the fund's performance but remains an unshakable optimist and we saw that come back and we didn't even get to arm you know he he turned uh something like 20 billion into an 80 billion gain he's back in the game and he is making ai deals now ripping checks into open ai working on stargate it's just he's just not going anywhere he's so he's he's the deal maker tech mogul that has the he clearly has a very powerful uh very well known in our center you know corner of the internet yep but if you actually go ask people that maybe even are in tech but don't really follow the game closely they won't know him yep and the story is just truly incredible grows up in not just poor but like abject poverty living with pigs yeah like he has he he said he has a consistent nightmare around waking up you know having these nightmares that he's smelling that the pig sort of fumes right and he wakes up like yep you know in in um in shock right and so to go from that abject poverty to the richest man in the world made his was born in poverty made his first million in america before he turned 20 yeah runs it down to zero again runs it back up back down to 99 percent down runs it back up it's so funny man uh doesn't quit he can't be broke no he's like that he should launch a course yeah you know like at this point like if he ever got down bad enough he just could launch a course well yeah it's so funny because this week that uh hacker news comment went viral that's like uh entrepreneurship is like uh throwing darts at the dartboard at a carnival uh if you're middle class you get one throw if the rich kids get as unlimited throws and the poor kids are working the carnival and this guy has gotten so many throws and he came from nothing just complete yeah he makes his own throws yeah he just figures it out and uh it's funny because that always goes viral and people like oh this is so true like this hits so hard i looked up the dude who posted it he's never launched a startup he's never even tried yeah and so it's it's clearly just cope just being like yeah you know oh yeah like i can't do it because like i'm too poor or something and like clearly there's a million ways to start the flywheel and then once you're on the flywheel you get extra shots because it's like yeah oh well like your last company didn't do well but yeah you probably learned a lot and you were a ceo yeah he went in that when he was in that uh nightclub talking to all the japanese at that time it was not normal you know venture capital didn't really exist in Japan in the same way it does in America.

1:56:24And he gave the stories like in America, an entrepreneur can start four companies, they all fail. And on the fifth one, they become a billionaire. Yep. There's so many stories like that. And so the thing that's the criticisms of the risky governments and the just crazy risk tolerance are real. We're not, you know, this shows obviously for entertainment purposes only. But the thing that I think everybody should to take away from Masa is that extreme radical optimism. And he's shown that - And the ability to be a deal maker. Yeah. It's really just a story of deal making in my opinion. Like it's so underrated.

1:57:01Tech mogul without seemingly ever written, writing a line of code. Maybe in the very early days. Yeah, like when he was - But very quickly moved to just, how do I assemble capital effectively? How do I put the puzzle pieces together? And this is Sam Altman too. This is probably why they - Yeah, a lot of people. Elon hired Gwen Shotwell to run SpaceX. It's fantastic. It doesn't take away. It actually adds to their abilities. It's leverage. It's leverage for the team, for the mind. It's fantastic. Well, that wraps up our deep dive on Masayoshi Son and SoftBank. Let's go to a promoted post from your buddy Steve.

1:57:34Oh, also, small note. Yeah. He's got two daughters. I don't know their relationship status, but brothers. why don't you if you send it send masa dm on linkedin and say hello uh i you know if you review my profile and you find me compelling i would love a warm intro to your daughter there you go um he's still he's married to his wife that he actually met at berkeley still wow masa always gets the last laugh he does he does let's get a promoted post from steve i got a promoted post for my buddy Steve Simone. So yesterday you sent me this, which was a Chinese drone light show. And can you actually play it?

1:58:15No, you can't. No, we can't play the video. We're working on tech here at Technology Brothers. We want to get to the point where we can play videos, but I will just share. So Ben Benjamin Craker, Cracker, who knows? Who knows? The Cracker says, how do you defend against this? Not a rhetorical question. And it's a video of these drone, crazy drone light shows. Steve says you don't, you have a robot do it for you. And so what ACS is developing, I'd love one of these to put on top of my, my G wagon. Uh, but, uh, he's developing this sort of autonomous, uh, counter drone, uh, gun that can, uh, I've seen, you know, a bunch of at this point, but it can take out.

1:58:53People have just described it as ACS gun on truck gun on truck. Yeah. Yeah. They should really buy gun on truck. Gun on a truck. Gun on a truck. But anyways, Anyways, go check out Ad Steve Simone and check out their turret. It's pretty awesome. The bullfrog. Fantastic. We have another promoted post from Ryan McIntosh promoting our show. And promoting an ad in Arena Magazine. And this is also a promoted post for Arena Magazine. And there's an ad for Ramp in the ad for Technology Brothers in the ad for Arena Magazine posted by Ryan McIntosh. There's levels to this. And so we whipped up an advertisement, full page, full bleed, beautiful, full color, printed in the latest Arena magazine.

1:59:37Why don't you read the whole thing top to bottom? Sure. So I said, technology needed a podcast. Last year, we noticed a problem. While we were listening to the All In podcast on vinyl, we realized something shocking. It doesn't have ads. No ads for watches. No ads for private jets. Not even a plug for ramp. It's hurting the tech community, but the madness ends today. What if instead of focusing on audience size, a podcast focused purely on profit? What if instead of big political questions, it answered the ones entrepreneurs really care about? Should I get a Ferrari F40 or a Lamborghini Miura?

2:00:11Should I upgrade from a Gulfstream to a BBJ? What's the best Amman property? Technology Brothers is that podcast focused, profitable capitalist. list visit techbrospod.com today and add it to your uh rss feed uh we before we dive into the rest of the timeline we got some questions let's read through some questions tyler ron gioni with a phenomenal suggestion he says get a medieval knight helmet for steel man arguments oh that's fantastic so much better that's so good so much better than steel hat yeah than just a steel hat I mean, we have our tinfoil hat, but the medieval knight helmet is a good opposite.

2:00:51Yeah, we need both of these clearly. And anyways, just J, the letter J says, which one is the Technology Brothers favorite, YOLO seed round or guac A round? I think it's the mango seed round or the suicide A round. Suicide. No, it's more of a suicide B. Suicide B is typically what happens. Yeah, take 300 million and just die. i love i love a yolo i love a yolo i actually like when the first round is just 20 yeah you know kind of like that incorporation round 20 on 100 those ones always work out great for sure um next question venturi says i think he's responding to masa on his deal making i don't know exactly he says sales is massively more valuable than engineering so venturi is clearly mogging uh the engineers listening.

2:01:39So feel free to duke it out in the comments. But in Moss's case, he probably had way more impact on the world by being a dealmaker. He might have been a top 10 % engineer. He's a top 0.01%. Yeah, I think it's clear that he did the 80-20 on the computer science thing, took the classes, got really pilled on technology, and understood how exponential curves will affect the future of the world and humanity. And he can still think like a technologist while not actually needing to lead a tech company, be a CTO, be a programmer, do any of that. But he understands the science at a deep enough level, which is important.

2:02:16But yeah, he's still not using that knowledge for diligence. Yeah. I mean, we have friends that buy small companies where people say, oh, did you do like technical due diligence, look at all the code? And they're like, no, I looked at the Stripe account because if the customers are paying, that's evidence that the code is working. Yeah. Or just use the product yourself. Exactly. Is it a good product? Is it a I know this has been happening with... with really smart sort of AI ML trained engineers that are now building products at the app layer oftentimes they know so much about the actual technology but can't translate it into products totally like oh cool like your training and inference cost is so low that's amazing but like what's your product sense like are people actually using it did you get your market entry exactly exactly um as r says should companies stop paying dividends to reinvest their dollars into custom letterheads yes obviously uh you need to have custom letterheads we're working on it here we're actually you know behind i guess we need our we need like our own actual stacks of paper even though we're sort of evolving i got the business cards we need tb business cards i got some personal stationery i need some tb stationery for sure hanil patel says i'm planning to do my master's at berkeley in civil engineering should i should i do it should i do it he's an international student he says he wants to go become a founder or break into founders fund both good options uh hopefully uh you get both well you definitely have the first option founders fund um it's tough tough to get in but um we have at least 50 of this podcast uh works for founders fund so if you're listening to it that's a good start um i you know if you want to be a founder doing a master's in civil engineering might be awesome it depends on what you want to build it could be a huge distraction it could be a huge distraction so if you want to you know go into that field and i'm sure there's a bunch of really crazy cool opportunities to apply like modern technology within that so i don't think it's a bad idea especially if you're in you know not a u.s citizen and you want to spend time in berkeley i mean so many yeah berkeley's doing a bunch of cool stuff in ai i don't know if it's in the timeline but they i mentioned it earlier they were able to create a reasoning model for like 450 bucks so just being in the bay yep i was born in Berkeley.

2:04:28Um, it's a funny, uh, funky town, but you're right there next to San Francisco. Going to the Bay. Um, I guess the question is, will this pull forward finding a really, really valuable idea? And sometimes being in a master's program can be a conduit to industry where you might identify a big problem and identify customers. Sometimes you can bootstrap that without that, you know, on, on the resume, you could just go work straight at a company and realize, Oh, this stuff's way broken. I got to spin this out and build something. Yeah, you're probably going to have to go from your civil engineering masters to work at a company to truly just figure out.

2:05:04So the question is, can you just go straight to the company and get those learnings? But starting companies is not a race. There's just so many examples at this point of people that started their first company at 40 years old and they needed all that experience to get to the point where they had the knowledge. One, two more questions. Do the Technology Brothers have a favorite pen or pencil brand from Azar? again i actually don't my handwriting is terrible i'm using it on the show before i'm using a bowery hotel pen here um but also hire a calligrapher yeah for me it's just gotta go higher um full time sergio says do you guys publish anything in the paper form or do you have a website yeah we have uh techbrowspod.com and a new website that is already in the works with a new domain that We're excited to share soon.

2:05:54And then we don't do anything in paper yet. We're experimenting. We auction these off. They're valuable. Kids books we've talked about. Stack of random tweets. We talked about making a book that's just why you shouldn't use leverage. And then it's just a hundred empty pages. Love that. But yeah, we stick with Arena right now. That's our magazine of choice. And Colossus. Colossus, of course. So thank you guys for the questions. Fantastic. Well, let's go to Grant. He says, substituting three hours of daily scrolling through x.com with three hours of playing Factorio while listening to the Tech Bros pod gets me up to date on the news I care about, plus teapot bangers of the day while destroying biter nests and juicing mining productivity.

2:06:35I have a similar hack for work. Instead of writing code for eight hours like a pleb, I spend five minutes writing GitHub issues for Mentat, Alt-Tab, and spend 10 minutes expanding my green circuit board, then flip back to GitHub and review PRs. Mentat is the fastest, most capable AI agent for coding that plugs directly into your GitHub workflow. Log in at mentat.ai for$30 worth of credits free and redirect your engineering talents toward expanding your base. Brilliant, brilliant post. Talks about the show. Yep. Talks about the content. Yep. Puts an ad in it. I love it. I love it. This is peak technology.

2:07:12One post, you're gonna have a ton of different content in a post, including ads. Yeah. Love to see it. Well, we got another, We got another promoted post by none other than Lulu Maservi. We got a fantastic opportunity. She says, wanted a founding engineer to join Rostra to work with me on a novel tool for founders. Like Uwemo, you will be fully self-driving. Like the media's portrayal of Uwemo, you will go through walls if it's the shortest path. You will choose your own tools for the job, but experience with LLMs with tool use will help greatly, especially if it involves building long chains of structured and unstructured outputs.

2:07:44You are creative and tasteful with a strong sense of style and vibes. You have a finely tuned cringe detector and ability to read the room. If you believe you are the person to do it, apply at the link below. Fantastic job opportunity. If you're looking for your next thing, hit up Lulu. I mean, that's actually the craziest opportunity that I've seen in a while. Yep. And truly, if you're Omega cracked, go apply for that or DM us and we'll let you know if we think you'd be a good fit. Lulu's phenomenal. And the kind of companies you'd be building products for are legitimately some of the best founder mode companies in the entire world.

2:08:23So crazy opportunity. Well, we got some personnel news. We got some breaking news here. Scott Belsky, after seven years at Adobe, post-acquisition of Behance, he's shifting gears over the coming months and jumping into the fast-evolving world of filmmaking and storytelling, a longtime passion. He's joining A24, an independent studio he has long admired as a partner, and he will be kicking off a few special projects within. Fortunately, he'll remain in the extended family of Adobe and look forward to working with them as a future tech partner. You wanna break it down, Jordan? What else you got for me?

2:08:57This is absolutely massive. I can't, you know, if it's non-obvious, he's going to work on AI within A24. He doesn't necessarily say that explicitly, but A24 is one of the greatest film production media companies in the world. Josh Kushner also made a big investment in A24, Sizelord that we've talked about on the show before. And I'm just so excited to see what comes out of this. This is fantastic. For so long, we live here in LA. For so long, it feels like Hollywood has just been so behind the times in terms of actually innovating. They obviously there's, you know, a massive sort of CGI industry here, a cottage industry around L.A.

2:09:43But the opportunities of applying generative, generative A.I. to filmmaking are so obvious, yet we still need the best talent in the world to actually implement that and make that happen. So Scott going over to A24, I imagine he's going to build out a massive team of really bright technologists that are going to allow generative AI to actually compete with traditional filmmaking, which is going to be incredible for consumers. Yep. Period. An absolute dog. An absolute dog. Belsky on the move. Stay tuned for what's next. And yeah, this is massive. What a pickup by A24. You'll love to see it. Well, we have another massive announcement breaking here on the show.

2:10:28You definitely haven't seen the tweet before. Eleven Labs has raised$180 million Series C to give every AI agent a voice. Let's go. Oh, with authority. You'll love to see it. The past year has been about building the foundations of AI audio. Now they are focused on making speech the standard for how we interact with technology. Yep. And so if you haven't checked out 11 Labs, they have some fantastic abilities to turn text into audio that sounds perfectly human. Here's a homework assignment. Download a transcript of this show all three hours. Put it into 11 Labs. Generate it in some exotic sounding voices.

2:11:08Give us Irish accents. Irish accents. Make Jordy Scottish. Make me sound like old Patty Collison. Yeah, I want to sound like. It's interesting some of these models. Sean Connery. Put me in Sean Connery voice, please. Please. Please. Some of these voice generation tools have some limitations. They let you do Irish, Scottish voices. They don't always let you do Japanese. Japanese, which is unfortunate. We were trying to generate some Masa. But maybe 11 Labs can do a Masa adjacent voice that we could leverage because we have a lot of uses for that. For sure. And we would happily pay a few million bucks a year to get access to that voice.

2:11:45Fantastic. But congrats to the 11 Labs team. Congrats to the 11 Labs team and everyone involved in that deal. Hopefully there was some cheeky secondary in there. Hopefully. Let's go to an evolving story. This is heartbreaking. Yesterday, if you were watching the show, we gave Mass, brother of the week, for his amazing work putting up a swing in a public park in San Francisco. He says they took the swing down. Apparently, fun is illegal. That's insane. Isn't this crazy? That's insane. And the picture is of someone with the government saying no swings. It's like, hey, we know somebody is actively breaking into your car right now, just like 10 feet over there.

2:12:24This is the priority. We're going to take the swing down. This is the priority. How? It's just so bad. It's so bad. It is the perfect symbol of everything that is wrong with the government prioritization here. It's really just so ridiculous. Just the mass brought joy to the world, went viral, and it was immediately shut down by the long arm of the law. And so, Mass, please don't go full Ross Ulbricht mode. Keep things legal. Maybe there's a way to get through this. We'll get the swing back up. Maybe a petition. Maybe we'll go viral. Maybe we will upend the entire San Francisco government, but we'll do it entirely legally.

2:13:03And we won't need to create a massive illegal drug network to do it. Great. Let's go to Jason Yenowitz. He says, Tether, 13 billion net profits last year. every financial institution will read this and ask, why don't we have our own stable coin? So I don't know that much about Tether. I know there's been like rumors swirling, but the Tether organization seems to be on a tear. Yeah. So they've had a lot of people that sort of question their business, right? It's sort of this, they control tens of billions of dollars of assets. I don't know the market cap of USDT, but whatever it is, if they have a hundred billion dollars in market cap that is a hundred billion dollars of basically cash that they have on their balance sheet and so they invest that in treasuries so they earn some interest rate yeah give you some of that but they give you some of it that's generally the business model it's a good business model yep um and so yeah the flow of money it's easy to just take a little slice and so tether has been also pretty aggressive on the mna front um making you know if you're doing anything sort of adjacent to them and getting traction they'll probably make an offer and they make typically control offers.

2:14:13So they'll say, we want to buy your business, but we want 51%. And so they've been on a tear, very under the radar. They don't have as much hype because nobody's printing, you know, thousand X returns off of Tether. They did have some crisis points where if you remember after all the FTX stuff, there was a lot of questions. That USCT was trading at less than a dollar, which a lot of people were like, this is free money. yeah but people were worried that not chaotically it wasn't down at 10 cents it was down at like 99 cents or 97 cents or something i think it got even more than that at one point but um it's rough but but yeah still they were you know people were but for those people it was free but but the interesting thing is because it's an international organization there's not as much um there's not necessarily you know the fud around tether has been are they just sort of taking a dollar and printing$2 on chain or something like that.

2:15:08But they've weathered every storm to date and we'll see what happens. And absolutely meteoric numbers. You love to see it. Should we hit the size going for that? Little one? Little one. 13 billion in net profits. Pretty good. Let's go to Varanam Ganesh. He says, if you're not subscribed to Pirate Wires already, you really should. Missing out on bangers like these. From Riley Nork, he says, in the wake of Trump's recent executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico after its namesake, Superior Northern Neighbor. I said what I said. Google Maps announced it would indeed rechristen the Ocean Basin as the Gulf of America, but don't pop bottles on your boat just yet.

2:15:47Right after the change was announced, Google reclassified the US as a sensitive country, a label reserved for nations with strict governments and border disputes like China, Russia, and Iraq. In other words, they're virtue signaling. Google wants to pretend they're here for tech's vibe shift, but behind closed doors, they're rebranding Trump's America as an authoritarian dictatorship. Bold strategy for a company with an ongoing antitrust suit, a laundry list of foreign governments that want to rob them blind, and a president, their only real hope against those governments who famously, to borrow your phrase, sensitive to public ridicule.

2:16:17Good luck. And the reason I just like this ad copy is sharing this is because there's some fantastic ad copy, which we love to highlight sponsors. We love to pass through ads when we're reading content. If it has ads, you're going to hear the ads. Sponsor acknowledgement. It says, Warp fixes this. If I run the FBI, we're shutting down headquarters on day one and reopening it as the museum of the deep state. Cash Patel's words, not ours. Here's the thing. Your business has a deep state too. It's called the HR department. You know, the bureaucratic overlords who bury you in paperwork and pointless meetings.

2:16:48Warp shuts them down cash style by automating payroll, navigating state tax compliance, and making international contractor payments effortless so founders can focus on building, not busy work. One of my portfolio companies got kicked off of rippling with zero notice and Warp got them live again the same day. It's great. You love to see it. Love to see it. Let's go to Balogy. He's talking about our favorite topic, technology brotherhood. He says, we need the tech bro. Massachusetts equals tech. Virginia equals bro. The synthesis is greatness. Lift weights, yes, but train weights too. And I agree.

2:17:24He goes on to expand on the analogy, doing a little bit of Coogan's Law here. Coinages, Bology, fantastic coiner. He loves coining things. Big coiner. Big coiner, bit coiner, and big coiner. Worked at Coinbase. Coinbase, coinages, all of the above. To explain, Virginia's time ended long ago, and today is just another US state, but it was originally the home of the masculine, noble, and brave cavaliers. Massachusetts' time is now ending too, but for almost 400 years, it was a center of higher learning. That's why Harvard and MIT are there. These were two of the most important American colonies.

2:17:56In a sense, they compete and cooperate every 100 years. In the mid 1600s, they fought back in England itself. First, the Cavaliers vamoosed for Virginia. Then the Roundheads migrated to Massachusetts. Where does he learn this stuff? I've never heard those terms before. Roughly speaking, the Cavaliers were right and the Roundheads were left. And the English Civil War was over the same themes of hierarchy versus equality. In the 1700s, they worked together to beat Britain and found the United States. In the 1800s, their descendants fought in the Civil American War. And in the 1900s, they worked again together to win World War II and found the American Empire.

2:18:31Now in the 2000s, they are fighting once again over the same themes of hierarchy, red versus equality, blue. Even if the geographic center of red has been displaced somewhat to the south and the geographic center of the blue has been dispersed across the northeast. Others have written about this as well. see The Fourth Turning, Turchin, Yarvin, Walter Russell Mead, Albion Seed, and Scott Alexander's Review. My view is that red and blue will unfortunately smash each other to pieces over the next several years, and then the gray will have to pick up the pieces. Gray is tech in its modern incarnation of the tech bro.

2:19:04Tech is the intellectual successor to Massachusetts as the migration to the internet of Harvard's best proves. Bill Gates, Zuck, and Paul Graham all moved away from Harvard in the literal sense. And of course, Larry Page, Steve Jobs, Vitalik, and many other college dropouts moved away from Harvard in the metanomic sense. But in its more recent tech bro incarnation, tech is also becoming the virile successor to Virginia. Elon, Zuck, and Palmer Luckey are examples of tech bros respectively becoming leaders of men, packing on muscle and getting serious about the military. Amazingly, this synthesis, the tech bro, did not exist years ago, but it was memed into reality by blue attacks and has the balance that blue and red both lack.

2:19:46Train weights, yes, but also lift weights. I think this synthesis, the Tech Bro, will be crucial to what follows. After all, the Tech Bro founded America. Let's see what they found next. What do you think? I don't want to say anything at all because I feel like it would take away from that dramatic, powerful prose. I think he nailed it. Yeah. If I had to fight in the culture war, I would want Balaji to be my Napoleon. Yeah, my Napoleon. I love it. It's great. I think, I mean, we literally worked out today. It was leg day. I'm super sore. And then we dove into semi-analysis and talked about training weights and AI semiconductors for an hour.

2:20:32And that is the fantastic dichotomy of the tech bro that is so enjoyable and wonderful. And I think value creative as well. And it's interesting because during the mid-2010s when Tech Bro was a slur, we could have just said, no, it's actually fine. It's fine to be a Brogrammer and lift weights and program. But there just wasn't enough like mimetic or social like power to actually have a post like this that everyone says, yes, I'm on board. It took Coinbase. it took and now you have people like word grammar who did one of the best analyses of uh the deep seek research paper yeah he's an amateur power lifter oh he's jacked and i would actually push him to say you know keep being a professional programmer yep but become also become a professional power lifter like that don't limit yourself he's diced he's he's diced he's diced jack that's fantastic we love to see it uh follow word grammar well let's go to this post by andre uh funny meme I like this meme format.

2:21:33It's Sydney Sweeney and Ana de Armas recently had a spontaneous exchange about which characteristics would constitute a sixth generation fighter aircraft. Sydney, no standing vertical tail surfaces, the ability to operate AI-enabled drone wingmen, Ana. But those will be first fielded in F-35s, so drones alone would not constitute a sixth generation fighter. Sydney, well, fifth gen, sixth gen, these are marketing terms, not technical classification. Northrop Grumman is calling the B-21 Raider. Ana says, a heavy payload strategic bomber. Sydney says, a heavy strategic payload bomber, the world's first six-gen aircraft.

2:22:09Also, China doesn't recognize the same designations at all. They recognize the J-20 and the F-35 only as fourth-generation fighters. Ana says, okay, so what else? Adaptive cycle turbofan engines, open system software architectures, sub-overit of flight. Sydney says, LMAO. I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. And just a great way to deliver a little bit of information. I definitely learned a little bit about fourth, fifth, and sixth generation fighters from this. Hadn't heard the terms vertical tail surfaces before, adaptive cycle turbofan engines, but now I know to go look them up. So thank you for turning into a meme.

2:22:45Yeah, I love when any new video just like emerges on the internet of a potential six-gen fighter and then everybody just like breaks it down in a million different ways and you can just get one thread and learn a lot about fighter jets and about 20 comments. And it's just, it's so fun. It's so fun to learn about this stuff. So we got a post from Kyle Somani, a huge investor in Solana. He says, polymarket parlays, who's building this? And the reason I wanted to highlight this was because six months ago on October 23rd, I said, does polymarket allow parlays? Because I want Lando Norris in Mexico City, four rate cuts, Trump Rogan over two hours, and US confirming aliens exist.

2:23:23I would have lost this parlay, but I could have made a lot of money if they had that product. I did talk to the Polymarket team about parlays. It's very hard from like the crypto perspective on the backend to actually implement it, but it would be very fun. And on the Pirate Wires podcast, I talked about the Coogan parlay, which was you bet whoever does, whatever presidential candidate does the longer episode of Joe Rogan will win the popular vote. and the national election. Because basically I was saying that, I was predicting that this would be the podcast election and that now that three-hour podcasts were on the table, it was really going to be a battle for attention.

2:24:02And whoever could be in the ears of more Americans for longer would draw more attention. And authenticity. Totally, totally. Which you cannot hide your true self, beliefs, et cetera, across three hours. An hour, you can hit talking points, you can have your notes. But by hour, we know this, by hour three, you're just that's when the real jordy comes out yeah that's when the real real dog comes out the real dog yeah yeah you got to put the by hour three your dogs are yeah your dogs are barking yeah and uh and so yeah there was a lot of debate over oh trump's too old he couldn't last two hours three hours on rogan there was a whole poly market for it and then obviously biden people were saying he couldn't do rogan but then kamala they were like well she's gonna go and call her daddy that'll be really big but her caller daddy experience was i think like uh her appearance was like maybe an hour, maybe slightly over.

2:24:48And it just wasn't as viral because it wasn't as long. It wasn't as deep. And I think that really hurt. I really, I do think that really changed the election. Let's skip this next one. Did you see this, the Derek Dye Workwear, the watch guy getting in a fight? This is pretty fun. Yeah, I think I share this. Alex, Alex broke it down. So basically uh derek uh derek guy at dye workwear posted a handful of watches that he was uh thought were for were interesting as as well as a belt um somebody quote quote quote uh quote tweeted it and said if you ever need a reminder that this society deserves to be destroyed it should come from the fact that absolutely anyone cares in the slightest about any of this nonetheless are willing to pay many years salaries for some something you can get for five bucks so this guy's basically saying society should be destroyed because people like nice things.

2:25:43They go back and forth a little bit. Derek immediately responds with a bunch of evidence that the guy that quote posted him, who actually has a lot of followers, is a pedophile, convicted sex offender. And this guy is astronomical. And so this guy, five thousand likes to just zero likes. Yeah. So this guy actually has the audacity to respond and tell Derek, one of us will be remembered for trying to save millions of innocent lives this is the same guy who said society should be destroyed yeah and the other will be remembered for embodying why this society doesn't well your only god is luxury you're emblematic of absolutely everything wrong with the society and says and derek says i like watches you're on a watch list it's such a good time ratio it again you know we So anyways, I think this guy is a fantastic poster.

2:26:34He's a fantastic poster. Anyways, the guy he's going back and forth with should delete his account. Generated a bunch of regretted user seconds. Oh, totally. But at least Dye Workwear managed to turn it into entertainment for the rest of us. That's fantastic. Anyways, absolutely brutal. Brutal mogging. Thanks for highlighting that, Alex Cohen. We appreciate you. Let's go to Andrew McCallup, friend of the show. He's been on before. He says, how embarrassing must it have been for all these car manufacturer dynasties, such as Ferrari to get completely dominated by a caffeine wrapper company in F1.

2:27:04Talking about Red Bull. Red Bull is just a wrapper on caffeine. And they've crushed it. Max Verstappen's an absolute beast. The car is beautifully designed. Obviously, it's not Red Bull manufacturing the engine, but it's a lot of the energy and the brand of Red Bull definitely comes through with the team. And the budget and stuff. Yeah, did you see Lewis Hamilton just crashed in the Ferrari for the first time? I mean, he's fine, but it was a practice run. Okay. Crashed. We might have to start. We might have to start live streaming F1. I think that's the real failure mode for the show. You know, people always criticize.

2:27:38Oh, all in. They used to talk about tech. Now they just talk about politics. I think if this show goes down the drain, it's going to be because it just becomes an F1 show. And we're just talking about sports all the time. Yeah. Just sports all the time. And everyone's like, didn't they used to be talking about tech? Like, why are they covering the NBA finals? somebody somebody a uh a friend a friend's company told us uh very recently that they were uh it'll all go on a name but they're like we're working on this you know partnership with this athlete turns out to be a very famous athlete neither of us knew who they were you're like i was like is that like an actor or something this is part of golden retriever maxing i'm getting into sports because the politics stuff is too much it just rots my brain and i want to be able to just chill out and just rip about the game yeah rip parlays exactly i've never ripped a parlay the first one's gonna be electric when it hits what if you hit it on the first try you're gonna be addicted for life masa mode yeah let's do it uh speaking of ripping parlays we got ross ulbrecht update from our deep dive most recently uh he lost 12 million dollars on pump.fun hilarious that he has 12 million dollars to lose no no further evidence that he has hundreds story so you can read the post i don't know the full story but that's never stopped us from talking about anything on the show uh so it says ross olbrich or someone with access to his wallets just accidentally nuked the price of a pump fund coin sent to him while trying to provide liquidity to said coin and so what happened is somebody basically made a coin like a free ross coin or some type of coin that that ripped because obviously the vast majority of ross's biggest his fans are heavily involved in crypto.

2:29:17And so anyways, they then sent him a lot of the token because they're like, hey, this is your token. And then he made a sort of technical error in terms of trying to actually he was from what I can tell, he was trying to support the project basically by adding liquidity to it, which presumably would have made the price go up. but uh he ended up blowing um more yeah 12 million 12 million dollars um uh which was which was effectively uh i don't know exactly how it works but some type of bot that's entire job is to find coins no no just find a trader like whales yeah if you're if you're a super talented software engineer you can write code that just sort of it's the same similar to high frequency trading right And so anyways, basically wealth transfer of$12 million from him or the wallet that he controls to this bot.

2:30:17So the bot did well. Everybody else got smoked. Good day to be a bot. Good day to be a bot. Yeah, maybe consider going digital. But I saw people in the comments saying he's a little rusty. But even in the era, even during the height of the Silk Road, there were coins flying around everywhere. This is part of the course. He would lose 10 ,000 Bitcoin in a day and just shrug it off. He'd be annoyed. He'd be like, I'm going to fix the code. I'm going to kill the person that did it. Just a little bit. Or try. He's going to order the hit. You're not necessarily going to. Or try to do it. Let's go to Luke Metro.

2:30:50He says, AWS GovCloud is safe, y 'all, because breaking news, in a major reversal, Amazon is ramping up ad spending on X after pulling much of its advertising spend more than a year ago. And this is, I want to cover this because this is a major narrative violation. like after elon bought x all the all the advertisers pulled out he told them to f off it was very dramatic and there was this question about like okay are they going to be able to get the premium side running like is the business model going to change completely but advertisers are coming back we're saying i'm setting up uh an advertising uh program with them uh for lucy and they've and they brought a ton more advertisers on they just did a deal with visa and just in general the vibe shift is is perfectly timed because people realize that yeah there's a lot of valuable people on X and it's worth reaching.

2:31:32Do you remember after the whole ad crisis, all the advertisers were things like buy these Donald Trump socks, you know, it became like the bottom of the bottom of just like people that will like pay for any type of, but then quickly I upgraded to X premium plus pro plan or whatever. And I never see any ads now and it's actually a lovely, it's totally worth it. I don't know. I kind of miss, kind of miss the ads, seeing an ad here there well if you see a good ad screenshot it send it to us and we'll read it on the show yeah as long as it's in a five-star review yeah so uh peak journalism uh this is this is just hilarious uh everything i say leaks zuckerberg says in leaked meeting audio you'll love to see it absolutely banger get it on the banger archive uh very funny it is it is interesting like there's there's some sort of shift that happens as companies scale and get more media attention and it obviously matters a lot more if it's consumer and it gets clicks i'm sure this is the case that all the elon companies no matter how small they are um a reporter will be dedicated to like the the elon musk beat or the spacex beat or you know the the meta beat and they'll be like yeah i was at the wall street journal for four years i was covering meta and so i cover their earnings but i also cover any press release and i'd be talking to employees all the time just trying to get information on what's going on oh it's telling a story trying to get clicks also just doing good journalism sometimes occasionally it happens um and uh and it's funny that this leaked it's almost like he baited this out yeah like he knew it was gonna leak and so he just said that because it's hilarious but it really it really must be so weird to be zuck and that's something i'd never seen an interview hit on is like what is your life like you're this like they made a movie about you when you were in your 20s like yeah very few people get a biopic by andrew ross or andrew sorkin yeah no andrew ross sorkin is the aaron sorkin aaron ross sorkin is the is the journalist um yeah and so just just a bizarre life uh but he's living it to the max getting jacked wakeboarding and doing ufc you'll love to see it he's he's grinding on and to end on some really positive awesome news we got a post from adam singer i thought this was amazing when people talk about the roaring 20s i feel like it's so often about the markets yeah just looking at charts but this is the roaring 20s folks we can go on a carnival that's a mini disneyland on the water we got we got the sphere it's a we got planes going mach one we're catching rockets with chopsticks and it's all out there in the open we should celebrate it uh we're also working on some very cool stuff with adam which we'll announce soon and the ad quick team um but look we have uh seven minutes until the markets close okay let's do it just got the notification from public so So that's our time to call it for today.

2:34:14And I cannot wait for Monday. Yeah. So thanks for watching. Go leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Please do both. Leave an ad in your review. Leave us five stars. We have two ads that way. And stay tuned for the next one. We'll see you Monday. Thank you, folks. Bye.