Merry Christmas, Hit The Dom Button, Yearly Tech Recap, 2025 and Beyond

0:00Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. I am sick as a dog but we're celebrating because we doubled and it's a Dom episode you know what that means we have a tradition around here straight into it every time we double we pull out a bottle of Dom Perignon and enjoy it on the show live and the timing with this actually worked well given that it's Christmas Eve it is Merry Christmas everyone it is yeah Merry Christmas everyone we're having quite the morning we got here we woke up around five tried to get to the studio

0:37oh my god i didn't realize i'm so pumped up oh that's great um anyway strong strong start to the episode strong start uh jesus yeah that merry christmas everyone merry christmas um anyway so i'll just recap the morning briefly so we got up around five wanted to get to the studio early because of course it's christmas eve and we have family stuff going on family in town but we weren't going to miss uh an opportunity to record a podcast it just would not be on brand for us um and uh so anyways we get here john is deathly ill from some uh from some disease that his uh cousin picked up at school It's like a thousand times worse than COVID.

1:26It's yeah. So if you've ever had COVID, COVID is a thousand times worse than that. He keeps horrifically coughing. We just shot another video and it was tough to get through it. And then we had a huge sort of printer malfunction, which was making this show difficult considering we rely on printed, quite a lot of printed content to get through it. But we made it here. The worst part is that I got goaded into one of the hardest workouts of my life yesterday. So I heard a rumor that one of my buddies who's a founder of, I guess, Decacorn now, is like the fittest man in tech. And so I hit him up and I was like, I hear you're the fittest man in tech.

2:07Like, I'm going to challenge you. Like, let's go. Like, I want to work out. Where do you work out? I want to work out with you and see how jacked you really are. And he sent me his body fat scam. Sent location. Yeah, he did, basically. He was like, meet here on the 23rd. He sent me his body fat percentage 9.9%. Last time I tested, I was at 14 and a half. Which is good. Which is healthy. But 9.9 is low. And so I was like, okay, no whammy, no whammy. I've been working out. Maybe I'll be down 9.8. If I beat him by even 0.1, I win. So I get down there, get on the body fat scanner, comes back 9.4. I'm like, let's go.

2:49I beat him. he really you came in at 9.4 yeah he gets on 9.1 he dropped something had happened and so he just smoked me but i i beat him on it gives you like this aggregate score for like muscle and fat combines everything complete like you know nonsense heuristic is this a dexa yeah exactly so it gives you like the score and uh and i beat him on that so i was like this is what we were really focused on here of course not the body fat percentage and then he proceeded to destroy me he's been training for a murph you know the murph yeah the mile and then the 100 push-ups 200 100 pull-ups 200 push-ups 300 squats or something and i just got destroyed yeah it was so bad but it was a lot of fun and uh yeah i was really close to bailing i said i was like i got this terrible cough i can't make it dude and he was like don't worry there's a bunch of doctors you can go to that are nearby and he sent me a screenshot just looking for gynecologists and i was like fuck I literally got in my car I was like I can't not go and I was just coughing up along dying the entire time you wouldn't have been invited back I came back with a 103 degree fever it was so bad but I got through it and that's what matters so today we are recapping the big moments of 2024 before that one big moment of the year was for us we doubled in this podcast very grateful for it and the brothers it's been fantastic it is an honor to record this yeah i really i genuinely feel like it is a platform for the community yeah for us to highlight you know people doing great things writing funny posts yeah um and uh changing the world big and small yeah yeah it's been it's been a lot of fun evolving it from that first first demo recording on zoom that was just us like riffing about random stuff to a much more structured show.

4:43Being able to highlight funding rounds, the size gong and personnel news and people hire job postings. We have a lot more planned for 2025. We're going five days a week. People subscribe right now. Five days in your feed constantly. Daily. It's a daily show starting in. And just a little bit of a reminder. We are 100 % corporation supported. We never ask our listeners for a dime. We want to avoid audience capture. We ultimately don't care what the audience thinks. If the audience wants us to talk about some culture war thing, or that'll go viral in the algorithm, that's not what matters. What matters is what are the corporations want us to talk about.

5:20And so this Christmas, if you're looking for a Christmas gift for us, ask your boss, maybe we could sponsor, hit us up. Starting at a six figures. Yeah. So yeah, just six figures a month. You can support technology brothers. It's less than what an average product manager makes at a fan company so it's not much put us in the put us in the team um awesome yeah so so for context we just recorded a whole bit on our on our annual awards which will be going out via x uh so you can look out for that but um in going through that process we spent the time to just kind of reflect on some of the bigger moments of the year and it felt like a monumental year in tech for many reasons i think the election played into that because uh you know tech was just so intertwined with the election this year given the influence of x and elon and big venture funds um and it was really more you know the election specifically was more of a that more of a cultural battle even within tech than we're now even remembering yeah like i I saw Based Baron posted yesterday screenshots of all the VCs that were VCs for Kamala as a website.

6:34The website's since been scrubbed. But there were probably 100 names up there from many of the biggest firms in the Valley, people that were backing it. So I would, you know, since we don't talk about politics on this show or social issues, I would just vote that we just try to forget about that list and we just all move forward together. We should just have a website called VCs. yeah and just any vc can can just you know put your name on that site or like tech.com and you just like if you support tech i'm just technology if you're a vc my name in the hat that i'm a if you're a vc and you support technology go to technology.com you can put your name on the dotted line and you can support tech yeah who's that guy with the nfl hat is that meme where he's like he's at the nfl game he just supports the nfl that's what you want oh yeah just just vcs pro tech pro business support both parties pro america pro america yeah i think like the reason we're able to have a non-political show purely business is because we generally support everybody that is pro technology pro business pro america yeah that was one of my hot takes like though what what do you agree what do you believe that very few people will agree with you on is that every american president is amazing yeah i love them all and i would get beers with all of and I think they're all incredible.

7:52And I think that you don't rise to that station without having an incredible life story. And every time I've dug into someone, even someone who's been controversial or I did a whole hour-long documentary about Trump and then an hour-long documentary about Biden and they both have like incredible stories and it's very easy to get lost in like, what's going on this week with this particular policy and is this policy good or bad? And there's certainly some politicians that benefited me or my worldview more, but I think we've never had a Stalin or Hitler in America. And every American president has been unique and interesting and someone that I would absolutely want to get dinner with if they were alive or available.

8:33Yep. That's a great point. Pro-America. Pro-America. Where do we even want to start here? There's a bunch of big moments. Huge. You know, everything from OpenAI to TrueSocial going public to an almost TikTok ban that didn't end up happening to software dying and being reborn to humanoid robots to OpenAI drama to hard tech. The OpenAI drama was mostly last year. This year was kind of a rebuilding year. Yeah, but the talent exodus this year was intense. That was intense, but also... They were kind of two separate things. The cadence of product releases is really, really strong. Yeah. That is really, really good.

9:12That's why I put it at the top is despite all the drama and the various people, high profile people, co-founders leaving, the product velocity was still insane. And it didn't. And it's still throughout the year was this tug of war in terms of, you know, Anthropic versus OpenAI versus, oh, what is Gemini doing? Like there was this. What's Ilya doing? Yeah, there was this sort of tug of war for attention and users throughout the year, but it felt like OpenAI seemed to be, stay mission oriented, even if their mission had changed year over year in some ways, shifting to for profit. it yeah i mean it's a remarkable shift from a research organization with a very much more academic style of employee to product led and like some of the earliest problems were like yeah it was an amazing magical like god box that you could talk to that defeated the touring test like out of nowhere but it couldn't keep you logged in do you remember that yeah you have to keep logging in and then for a while it's like it's down or it would it would air out and now they've gotten to a point where it's extremely reliable yeah and yeah it still goes down every once in a while there's still rough edges and there's weird things where like different models have different capabilities what can generate images what can but clearly all of that product stuff is getting ironed out and they're going to have ads in the free version all the way up to a two thousand dollar a month tier or two hundred dollar a month here like it's going to be like really really polished differentiated product so i'm excited i mean it's on my home row and nothing has been able to displace it for me yeah and we can't um understate how impactful it's been on this show we on average have been putting out 10 hours a week of content something like that and some of it is actually more or less scripted and then it's like heavily researched and we you know write some of it out beforehand and so you know chat gpt has effectively replaced the need for a full-time writer analyst type person yeah and then ai's worked its way into so many other things just like transcripts or automated with ai little captions that we put over videos even just like some ai generated images and some of the short form stuff like it's just like weaseled its way into all these like nooks and crannies it's not it's very additive yeah it's not like replacing anything that we're doing but uh it's been it's been hugely beneficial yeah another one on the list obviously nvidia becoming the world's most valuable company they were um uh apple overtook them again uh afterward but can't be understated how memorable that will be to me even 20 30 years from now like witnessing that remember jensen signing that woman's chest that was like he's a rock star now yeah after what 30 years of building that company more yeah more yeah and and and being i would say a very benevolent you know positive yeah uh type of character within the tech world right he's not doesn't have a ridiculous ego he's generally very humble uh the only the only critique i would have of him is he has gone on an interview to say i wouldn't do this again you know if i if i knew how hard it was going to be because we don't want to discourage any builders.

12:27But yeah, it really can't be. And it's so unclear right now. We're not in the business of making predictions around market caps or anything like that. But looking back at the dot-com era, comparable companies, evaluations they achieved, it'll just be so interesting if this time it's different. Well, they have over 100 % of the profits in AI right now. Yeah. Because all the other companies are losing money, and they're the one that's printing money. It's also fascinating to just compare them to their rivals, Intel, which is a complete mess. And Pat Gelsinger was ousted, and they just haven't been able to take advantage of the Chips Act at all.

13:10And then AMD, there was this bombshell report by Semi Analysis, Dylan Patel, this week, basically saying that even though they're hitting the benchmarks on the actual computing power, like price per flop the software is so broken there's so many bugs that you cannot train models on it and george hots is like chiming in and uh lisa sue the ceo is uh kind of scrambling but she's done this before where she's like hopped on the phone with people and be like okay yeah we're gonna fix it and then nothing happens and so uh it's been a really crazy just kind of like a b test to see that nvidia just remains like so dominant even when someone else can beat them on like the core metrics yeah the that cuda you know polish oh really matters here we go john's john's the coughing is going to begin uh the other the other thing to highlight under here that was seemingly monumental uh was tsmc actually starting to produce chips here in america yeah um i don't think that can be understated just given how important they are in in the in the value chain or supply chain.

14:18And yeah, I'm excited to see where that goes in 2025. But with the chaos of this year, it seemingly was not necessarily brushed under the rug, but it felt like it got like five hours of attention when maybe it was, you know, considering how dependent our entire way of life is on chips, it seems pretty cool that we were able to make those here. Yeah, huge. Did you use an Apple Vision Pro this year? yeah that was that was gonna be the next one uh i uh i'm gonna sound like a luddite for this but i did not you didn't even try it not once i didn't even try it one um i had no interest in going to an apple store and just like putting on something that hundreds of other people are putting on in a day um just a personal preference uh the other thing and the reason that i didn't actually buy it is I try to keep uh devices away from my head so I use um you know I use like wired headphones I have for years I use my airpods as like a golf balls for practice in my backyard um uh they no longer work obviously um but uh I didn't try it I haven't been um uh I I totally would it's not that I wouldn't but I just didn't happen to be in a situation um but it is it is fascinating that how quickly the swing happened from people going on x in the first couple weeks being like this is the next computing platform amazing too i've never even facetimed a single friend that was like oh i'll call you from my apple vision pro and we have a bunch of friends that have these a lot of people use them for two weeks and then return that's exactly what i did yeah it was great for two weeks i watched a movie on a plane watched a movie at night but there were just too many I was seeing, yeah, you were seeing that.

16:05Like I remember I was at Soho Beach House, like somebody was just sitting there with it on. Wow. And it just looks, you know, it looks silly, but it's also, I don't, just because something looks silly doesn't mean that it's bad. It was like, I generally think that the Apple Vision Pro is very, I think it's cool. I wish it was like catching on more. I have a friend who's a super talented iOS developer. I was like hoping that this would be a computing platform that he would be able to build on. I did try one of the meta Ray-Bans, which I was pretty impressed with. But again, I don't really want to wear.

16:42I don't need to. It's not quite, you know, significant enough to want to wear them around all day. But yeah, I think there had been some reporting that Apple was going to discontinue the Vision Pro entirely. I think they, that would be such a, um, doing that, like there's almost seemingly some value to Apple in terms of maintaining their market cap to just continuing it because if they discontinue it, it's such a colossal defeat and sort of like verifiable proof that you are an iPhone company. Yeah. And, um, and I think keep it going. I think they should do another version with the same screen because the screen really is fantastic yeah it's just yeah and it's it's apple has the leverage to be able to say let's spend 20 billion dollars a year on this you know they legitimately could do that if they can keep the same screen get rid of the external screen switch it to plastic instead of metal so it's half the weight like and half the price like they have a winning formula for sure yeah just in terms of like replacing a home movie theater yeah because you can just put it on and watch a movie but even then the software was really bad like i would wear it in the dark and my room is really dark and it would get lost and like put up an air saying like can't track it's like i don't care if you can track i'm just trying to watch a movie right now it's very frustrating yeah uh not not fully polished and it felt like the people who are working on it weren't using it in a real way they were like using it in a demo at work lab setting yeah not actually daily driving it in the way that steve jobs daily drove the iphone and realized like hey like it needs to be a glass screen because i put it in my pocket with my keys and that was like a fundamental insight that that hasn't happened with the apple vision pro yet it's been very much like of course you'd like a giant box and like take it out and like put it on for 10 minutes and do a demo and then put it back and like it's like no that's not how people use these devices yeah but yeah people people went from being like oh what case should i get to my vision pro to the next week being like, I'm going to return it now.

18:45Yeah, I'm going to return it. And yeah, super bullish for Meta because they're clearly going to release something that's equivalent. They just need to figure out the media. You should be able to just buy any movie on any Meta headset. And I don't know that they have a partnership yet, but they need an iTunes store. Because that was the first thing I did was I went in and I bought Avatar, all the Christopher Nolan films, all the movies that I would want to see in the theater. I bought all those, like 3D movies and stuff and it was amazing. All those were great, but it was just too heavy and too expensive and too janky.

19:17But if Meta comes out with something that's the same resolution at half the price and has that feature, just the movies are good. I also do think that there's a big opportunity for starting to create content in 3D right now and then just waiting, waiting, waiting and then eventually it'll catch up. I was thinking about doing that when it launched. If it was going to be big, I was going to do the history of VR and I was going to do an interview series in spatial video in 3D so you could watch it in the Apple Vision Pro. And it would be like you were sitting right here and you could look to your right and see me.

19:48You could look to your left and see Palmer or Carmack or whoever I would get to interview about the history of VR. And it would just be these really chill, unedited interviews. And it would just be like, oh, I'm sitting at a table with these guys having a conversation, learning a little bit. No edits, nothing. It's very natural. Anytime you're cutting, it gets really jarring. Anytime you're flying around, you don't want to move the camera at all you just want to put the camera there and then let people look where they want to look and that's really cool but there's just no they don't have a youtube yet for apple vision yeah it's one thing that was interesting they had that app that was native to the device it was you could see dinosaurs yeah and it reminded me of the original like iphone ipod touch apps when i was probably i forget exactly how old i was maybe like 10 years old 11 years old using these things where there was like the app where you could like play guitar or like drink you know you can pour a beer or whatever and it was just like these sort of I don't remember anything outside of the Dinosaur app that kind of broke through the noise which is really proof that there's no organic developer activity which is kind of a people are lazy when it comes to VR like you want to just like lay down like one of the best VR games I played on the meta quest was a shooter but the whole conceit is that you're in a kayak and you're a sniper like sneaking through waters and like assassinating dudes on like oil rigs basically and like so so you're seated the whole time yeah and you're just using your vr paddles to go like this and then you reach down pull out your sniper rifle and then shoot and it's really that's a cool concept it's awesome because you don't need to be like running around and it's not And it's good training for everyday life.

21:35Exactly, yeah. It was great. And so it's like the figuring out how to break the, like people just want, like video games I feel like had a breakout moment during like Final Fantasy VII, where it was like a hundred hour game. You could just sit there and it would be like lots of dialogue, very chill, sit on the couch, Middle Gear Solid, like these long games. And no one's figured out how to do that in VR because they're all so preoccupied with like, well, you could run around and you could throw fireballs, but then it's like, okay, I'm just working out now. I'm like exhausted. Like I don't actually want to like climb a mountain to live like Mission Impossible 2.

22:13I want to watch it on my couch lazily. And so Palmer was actually talking about this one company that was building a VR headset that was meant to be used laying down. And so it had like a special pillow with like knobs on it. So you could like move your head very easily. So you can move your head. That's cool. but then you'd lay down it's like very kind of matrixy and like creepy like you could easily get like wirehead and spend like eight hours in it yeah but if you look at like imagine the brain rot oh it's so brain rotty but at the same time it's like how do people play madden on xbox when it comes out or call of duty when that one comes out they play for eight hours straight yeah and so you you're not going to displace the ps5 until you can give someone an experience that they can go and chill with for eight hours straight yeah and so you have to lean into that design that design like elements essentially and you're competing with the phone which is so good at capturing attention right and every single that's that's that's one of the big issues with vr is vr headsets aren't competing with each other they're competing with every other screen everyday life so the competition is just intense especially when they're this expensive yeah um polymarket is worth bringing up like prediction markets finally breaking through um seeing the picture of uh of shane working in 2020 or 2021 like in his bathroom on like a wicker basket no one really cared very low volumes slogging through the next few years and getting to this year um and i just thought that was cool because we've talked about this on the show before but it had been this sort of thesis that every so many smart investors had for so long that prediction markets would eventually go main mainstream and it kind of took this election cycle it took poly markets product getting to where it is it took um it took probably like sports betting like blowing up and like becoming a lot more mainstream to be honest like kind of predated i would say like the the the the venn diagram of people that sports bet and people that like use prediction markets is like probably almost a circle, you know?

24:18Um, but just a breakout year and, um, yeah, it was, it was very, I would say vindicating for believers in prediction markets based on how the election unfolded. Yeah. It's been tricky figuring out like what the next major poly market segment will be because, uh, Chad Byers was in our replies talking about like, oh we should do a polymarket for when these guys double the next time or like yeah 64k and mike over at polymarket was like the bots have entered the chat because yeah if there's money on the line somebody will just make a big bet and then 50k bots and just follow us and it'll just destroy everything and so it's very very tricky to figure out how to how to you know price that yeah the whole insider trading element is interesting too because people were betting on brian johnson's erections yeah like nighttime erection length but then i saw one of his employees was like i just made xyz money from like insider training on my bosses like you know which is like how do you really like these are financial markets maybe they do need some you know element of regulation or you just need to go into them and treat it more as an entertainment product and say like this is not a you know perfect security like it's sort of yeah you're almost you're almost trading on like how much insider trading will there be like what what type of insider trading will there be like what are all the incentives that yeah or you could say like oh it's it's all priced in yeah everything's priced in um yeah it's like it's like if if we did the 64k thing would there be another army that's buying no shares and then actively reporting every bot that follows us to not hit that.

26:06Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, the levels. Like bot war, essentially. It's all priced in. Yeah. Anyway, what's next? Another one, SpaceX. Fantastic. Yeah, the... Landing with the chopsticks. Landing with the chopsticks. So crazy. Crazy moment. Very, very well-timed for Elon's brand if that had not worked. There was so much attention on him given the election cycle and everything. But it was just a very, it should be a really uniting moment, right? Like, hey, America is home to a company that can achieve a feat that is so unprecedented and feels like it's out of a science fiction movie. The other thing that I thought was funny here was you had for years the meme has been oh you're an investor in spacex but you're an investor in this spv that invested in this spv that invested in like this fund that bought secondary at like 2x the pref value or whatever but i would imagine that most of those people are actually making money still um for sure you know even if they overpaid or there was like you know a lot of fees bolted onto these different vehicles um but it's it's been a good year to be a spacex investor last price it was i guess getting priced at 350 billion most recently um and uh yeah i i'm interested to see i'm sure there's there must be an ipo on the on the horizon don't have any insight info there but you know i think the narrative's been they go and start up the texas stock exchange and and can potentially you know bring a lot of i don't know like elon ran the ab test with tesla and it was so brutal being a public company with tesla yeah why take it public if you can keep it private as long as that's a good point he'll probably just keep it private as long as possible especially yeah as long as there continues to be exceptional demand yeah then nobody can complain oh we need liquidity it's like well you but really like every single founder should buy a starlink like you should never be without solid internet you should always travel with the rome once 50 bucks a month because i was in yosemite and the internet was terrible and it was a big hassle we recorded a video and john was like okay i'm uploading my like 20 minutes of video took like four hours it was miserable yeah i actually don't know what the upload speeds are on spacex and starlink i think it's probably similar as download but um either way like anything was better than what we had it was brutal yeah um another one i thought the figma adobe breakup was pretty monumental yeah um last gambit her yeah custer stand that was the most child what is it the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it will burn it down to feel its warmth yep that's the um uh yeah i could have been so so i felt this one i felt this one personally because almost immediately after it got announced i used figma quite a bit and the figma product uh they just rolled out these like absolutely horrific billing practices figma was always a very multiplayer product you could make something share it with somebody easily they could edit it comment whatever and they immediately rolled out these like billing approaches that were one extremely confusing and basically meant that you if you wanted to share a file with anybody you were just going to get started you would start to get billed yeah for uh for them and it's so such a toxic way to do billing because if i'm creating something and i want to share it with you and you're not like logged in right at that moment it's just very very annoying um but they the 20 billion dollar acquisition was off they realized they probably needed the two or three x you know arr like immediately if they wanted to maintain this sort of narrative that they were a 10 to 20 billion dollar company and so uh i get it from their side um and uh but it was just very just like extremely unfortunate um i think a lot of those billing changes would have probably been rolled out with adobe cloud but it was just like such you know dylan i think uh i don't know it's just the nature of becoming a big company like i don't know that there's any way to avoid that yeah i think it's just like you got to charge for you got to capture all the value yep i don't know i think uh i think it would have been it would have been jankier with adobe which is probably the worst thing yep but i don't know but yeah and and again there should be like an entire documentary on miss uh miss con's era because i don't know exactly i don't think it's clear exactly why it happened.

30:56I wrote out a script once. I never published it. But the fact that two companies like that can't just make love is tragic. Let's go on to defense tech. Defense tech. Yeah, we... I mean, this was the year of American dynamism. Credit, credit. As much as AI was a dominant part of the narrative, American dynamism felt like it had an equal amount of attention from a meme standpoint. coogan's law coogan's law and credit to andreessen for for not necessarily being the first and biggest investors in that category but they certainly coined it yep and they get a lot of credit for the coinage yep that's part of coogan's law yep um and so yeah i think you look at teal and he co-founded palantir they did the spacex series a and then incubated andurl and it's like they didn't come up with the phrase though mogged genius mogged by coinage um yeah I think, I think, yeah.

31:54So, so the three, the three major players, Andrew Palantir, SpaceX, all start, all, all started, you know, long before American dynamism was, um, a part of the vernacular. Um, uh, I, I, I thought this was funny. You know, this has been talked about before a lot of the valuations over the last year have been like pretty, pretty insane. You know, I have portfolio companies that are getting multi a hundred million dollar valuations with no revenue yet right it's like very it's a little frothy um and can you imagine how how much uh defense tech companies would have loved zero percent interest rates like zerp meets hard tech meets american dynamism would have been iconic i hope we get that opportunity in the future yeah uh it'll be great um but yeah this is this is a good example like i I think Trey, I remember Trey went on a podcast and was basically talking about how, you know, the founders fund thesis is this sort of monopoly driven power law.

32:55There's one company that captures a majority of the returns and that's presumably in defense. You know, hard tech defense that presumably is Andrel. I look at a lot of the defense tech investing happening now. and I think I've talked about this before, but the government actually wants vendor diversity. So there is some argument to say, hey, we actually need more Anderil's. There should be maybe one or two more. Maybe there's a power law dynamic there where if Anderil's like a$100 billion company, we have another$10 billion company. So I think we do need this. Anderil, I think, benefits dramatically from a lot of this because there's so many smart teams that are building cool tech that just won't figure out distribution and actually getting contracts.

33:37Anderil will acquire them and they've already proven that they can be an M &A-led product development org, right? Where they're like, we have the best distribution engine into the government. Now we're going to just bolt on other products to get in there. And then there's also just like the adjacencies that Anderil doesn't want to touch, like Flock Safety. Yeah. Great company doing fantastically well, kind of like Anderil for police forces. yeah or deterrence the company that that yeah i help get off the ground you know deterrence is doing something that you know doing high volume uh energetics manufacturing is not a sexy program of record type opportunity yeah it's not even necessarily supply chain yeah it's deeper in the supply chain it's a critical you know critical part of our defense uh overall but um you know ultimately not not there there are still categories that that andrel is not going to go after you know immediately maybe they will long term who knows um but uh plenty of opportunities and and lots of great you know companies like aon out control systems yep um not to uh just talk my own book um but um going on uh meme of the year we covered this a little bit um in in our awards uh trend of the year meme of the year they're basically the same thing i think i think pg had this one in the bag guys still got it um and uh founder mode founder mode coinage uh he took something that was kind of obvious this idea yeah but no one had ever put a phrase around it yep what is the difference between a founder-led company and a non-founder-led company yeah founder mode and it's a very vague post and a lot it faced a lot of criticism when it was dropped because it didn't define it very precisely.

35:30And that's because it's different for every founder. Exactly. It's very vague, but it's still useful. It's still a useful term. Yeah. One of my favorite moments, listeners will correct me if I'm wrong here, but Frank Slootman, I don't believe was the actual founder of Snowflake, was he? He joined later as CEO, but very much amped up. Like he is like brings that founder mode approach. And I just thought this was a crazy moment. when he announced he was retiring from Snowflake. They lost 20 % of their market cap in a day. They had previously been a$76 billion company. And roughly a month after the announcement, they were a$50 billion company.

36:13So that's founder mode in effect. And yeah, it was cool to see people like Ryan Peterson, I think, was it earlier this year or maybe more than a year ago, but Ryan Peterson going back into Flexport. now he's doing founder mode meets going direct yep and that strategy is just like killer killer right that's what alex carp is doing yep um that's what palmer is doing trey are doing in many ways so the winning formula is founder mode and going direct and that's why uh if you try to make fun of a founder for posting a lot on x uh just check yourself because some of the best ever uh are are doing that um and um yeah other otherwise like the the big one and um we we're gonna cover this later in the show was um just the foundation model wars like this was this like constant uh game of of tug and tug of war where it literally felt like every other week it was oh and everybody everybody loves anthropic next week everybody's back and and and what that kind of exposed and you have to go back and and look there was at one point this year that everybody said the foundation all the value is going to accrue to the foundation models like ignore everything else apps don't matter and then people realized that people were just switching back and forth from models all the time and then everybody started to think okay well now the app layer is like what matters and you should focus on the app layer and then then it went back to oh like don't launch an app because open ai is just going to launch that as like part of chat gbt and the next you know keynote search and so yeah search is a good example right um and all this just got so spicy with with um you know the perplexity ceo just like constantly ship posting against sam open ai uh and um you know elon feuding the whole time in this like very public legal battle um and That's still ongoing.

38:15But yeah, we'll probably cover the O3 Pro launch later in the show. Another one, acquisition of the year for me had to be Bridge. Oh, yeah. We talked about this, but a non-token$1 billion outcome in crypto. You had Coinbase IPO, obviously significant. but to show that there was a second sort of regulated crypto business that could be acquired by a non-crypto company, a tier one company, and Bridge showing that Bridge being, it doesn't even feel like they were that early to stable coins, but they were on time and very right. And they built the right product, developer tooling that Stripe clearly saw a lot of value in.

39:06um so anyways the last thing i would say is we we kind of forgot about this but in in the q1 of this year uh tiktok was getting banned yeah um and there is a law that's passed that should ban tiktok yeah it's happening unless trump overrides it and um i thought this trey post from february 21 was great he said concerned about losing our ai edge to china banned tiktok concerned about ai safety ban tick tock concerned about child mental health ban tick tock concerned about trade imbalance with china ban tick tock it's really not complicated so it was very unfortunate that that wave kind of died down i had bought bantock.com at the time which um you were going to do with that but it's funny well the idea at one point was either to make like sort of a like actually just build like a like an organization to more um and and there had already been like internal stuff in washington pushing this stuff forward but the funnier idea to use it that domain which i did sell it somebody ended up paying you know buying it for something close to what i got it for but if you did like a vampire attack on tiktok which was like sign in with your tiktok account we'll pull all of your followers and your following and then we'll like rebuild the app sure somebody could probably pull that off yeah maybe nikito something like that um and it's just interesting that the um after that movement died down uh true social went public oh yeah and soared which uh you know maybe that was foreshadowing it certainly was foreshadowing the election it's crazy how much money flowed into that company just supporting trump it's wild yeah greatest wealth transfer um yeah i i think it's time to probably get into some dms in the timeline but um but yeah overall felt like i i think this is a year that we're going to remember very long from now huge comeback year uh comeback year crypto is back defense is ripping ai is you know completely new paradigm and if you were a gp at a major uh venture fund you join the government that's true we'll be covering over the next year let's start signal should we jump into some dms sure do you have them over there yeah yeah okay so first um before we get into that uh we got some reply guys cover let's do it and this is the first ever double uh reply guy of the week award and it's going to none other than chris amadon and will god i'm gonna butcher his name Stomber?

41:43Stromber? Stromber. Is there an R in there? Will Stromber and Chris Amidon. Yep. And these two brothers, you know, not only exemplify brother behavior, but have managed to find the perfect balance between being highly active in the comments section and highly active building their business. They're building a maritime defense startup. Chris is the founder and Will recently joined to run Ops. And these guys are absolute dogs. I will say that. Very patient, very focused. I can tell they don't have post notifications on, so it's not always immediate. But they're getting into the comment sections that matter.

42:31They're engaging with other reply guys, other brothers. they are exemplifying the spirit of what it means to be a reply guy and uh they outwork the competition and and patience you know we've seen we've seen reply guy comes in you know potential reply guy the weeks come in get super active for five days not win and taper off and chris and will have just been at it honestly for like months now it's great um and so that's exactly what it takes to build a great company. And they have just proven time and time again that they are very deserving of this award. So gentlemen, congratulations. Probably not the first time you guys win this award.

43:14I could see either of you winning brother of the week at some point and potentially brother of the year. Who knows? We'll be doing this show for a long time. And don't stop. We've talked about this before. You can win this award twice. That's great. what else do we have uh okay funny uh meme this wasn't in the dms but uh andrea uh posted this and said stimmies over demons she said that uh psychedelic psychosis is out and cocaine induced opulence uh is in uh and we don't support uh hard drugs but we do support stimulants and we do endorse and live a loud opulent uh lifestyle and so loud opulence was loud opulence i would say is going to be the trend of next year i think so so if if um you know going direct or founder mode was 2024 loud opulence is the year of 2025 america's back um and uh thank you andrea uh future brother of the week.

44:23I have no doubt. And thank you for meeting us. Yeah, we really appreciate it. Let's go to Sar. He says, started listening to Tech Bros pod in a sea of podcast. It has really nailed the vibes. A great blend of Twitch slash discord style talk show, very online discord discourse and podcast format. Thanks for giving us the shout out. We really appreciate this. I think Sar had to be one of the first hundred accounts I ever followed on X. Yeah, for sure. Not as active as he was was maybe six years ago but when he posts it breaks through um thank you sar yeah and i i like that talk show is definitely what we go for um i don't know what he means by discord style talk show i i haven't actually seen anything that's like discord driven i've seen a lot of twitch content um and a lot of twitch streamers will pull up tweets and uh there's a couple like ludwig is a youtuber who is also a twitch streamer your live streamer and a lot of times what he'll do is he'll make a 10 minute video about something and he'll just have 10 tabs or 20 tabs open and just flip through them and it's a great format because yeah he just it drives like okay he's on to the next thing he's on the next thing and he can just do a one take or he does like a couple takes and it turns out to be a really polished product that feels like a scripted youtube video but it's really natural maybe that's how we're gonna do we're gonna have to do remote episode this week so maybe that's how we do it shared screen and then just go through and just be like this is the story we want to tell I really think that doing some more organization around our content would be great and being like okay we're breaking down the chat GPT like open AI launch and here are 20 tweets that we're going to go through one at a time and take you through like a narrative on these as opposed to kind of what we're doing right now which is a little more random but we're always learning we're always getting better so thank you for that.

46:11Yeah it's funny we're firm believers against building in public do not show your revenue online. Let people clock it by the car you drive and the watch you wear. But content you're kind of forced to build in public because you're just sort of iterating live and everything's very public. Okay, Megan Nivold says, what wine pairing if you're in a warmer climate outside of Palo Alto? Screaming Eagle seems a bit heavy for 75 in Miami. Thanks. What would you recommend? I mean, you can't go wrong with a refreshing glass of Dom pairing on. cheers to that Megan enjoy some Dom you can never go wrong no it's great almost every time I see brother Megan's post she's just somewhere like somewhere like you know Aspen you know Miami just really like indulging loud the loud opulence lifestyle so I think this is one of those questions where she already knows the answer and she's just kind of testing us sure so Megan why don't you DM us tell us what you settled on what you settled on because we know you already know the right answer.

47:13Let's go to based Baron. He's been on the show before we say, if my second mistress is going to, my second mistress is going to be so mad at me if I don't get at tech bros pod reply guy of the week. Oh, that's a good point. Well, you missed it this week, but maybe next week. Keep up the replies based Baron. We love you. Yeah. Reply guy of the week is it's, it's a, it's a duration meets quality. Yep. And we value, we value persistence quite a bit. So there's other people you know brody's been very consistent right trip trip has been um phenomenal like you know um and so it doesn't go unnoticed yep but um it does take some some sort of concerted long-term effort turner novak turner novak right it's great yeah let's go to julia black she says fascinating logic from tech bros pod i described the guys of el segundo in a way they would gladly describe themselves and that made it a hit piece humbled that john coogan and jordy hayes would devote so much time to discussing such an untimely uninteresting story well got us dead to rights we both we both enjoyed it and criticized it yeah yeah yeah she got us i spoke with julia after this uh you know she's she's great uh we you know we squashed we squashed the beef she was one of the nominees for she was journalist of the year technology brothers journalist of the year award nominee she's close uh not by uh you know not by accidents yeah she's gonna be so she's gonna be shifting to covering doge okay uh starting you know basically now through next year and so i'm actually very excited to see some of the articles that she starts writing so if you're um if you're you know uh exposed to doge and you have stuff that's that's sort of uh able to be shared it's not going to be damaging to the movement uh go talk to julia yeah let's go to my tech CEO, Jason, he says, LA based founder I backed has totally lost it.

49:07And he replies, every angel's worst nightmare tech bros pod would appreciate advice on this topic. Was this the Jeff Wu video? Uh, I don't think that was a Jeff Wu video, but, but, uh, I think it was a founder, uh, that he was, you know, founder in his portfolio, moved to LA, set up shop, started taking acting classes. And that is just a huge red flag. You'd almost rather a founder, you know it's it's it's basically as bad as a founder saying that they're going to go to peru and have a psychedelic experience so acting classes terrible sign very rough ayahuasca terrible sign i don't know you might want to just write that one off jason good luck let's go to signal he says the eternal technological pursuit has always been about the commoditization of every single thing that includes the human body mind and soul i mean signal after the 03 launch just went on a generational posting run oh yeah this is why he was one of the breakout posters of the year yep uh the guy went on an absolute terror so this was in response to that yep uh i think that um yeah it was just like very you know well put uh i think that um commoditization of the human mind I don't know if we have the human soul yet, but it feels like, you know, talking with chat GPT doesn't feel far off from talking to a smart friend.

50:32Right. It's not perfect. It's not right on everything can make mistakes. But so do so do all of us. Yeah. Here, let's get Antonio Garcia Martinez. He says, I find the AGI alarmism amusing. We've been a post scarcity society for decades. 95 % of the work we do is invented, i.e. needless add-ons to food and shelter. We will always invent new forms of work, making new products and services to occupy ourselves and compete for status. It's a good take. I mean, AI solved chess two decades ago. And chess.com is a massive business. And also chess masters, like people like watching human chess players, even though they are not the best compared to AI.

51:17and I do think that there's something that will be around for a very long time around what can a human do in the ring or in this podcast or in this debate format even if an AI could win yeah another take here that was interesting Sean Frank was posting that 60 million people still subscribe to cable so even though we have streaming AI is going to replace everyone brother 60 million people pay for cable we got time And yeah, it's going to take a long time to roll all this stuff out. It takes time to implement AI into your organization. There's a lot of risks, a lot of legal risks. Like where does it sit?