X Under Attack, Dom Day, Yardsale Thesis, Manus, Bread and Taxes, DeepSeek

32:29Totally. And I mean, clearly this is coming. Clearly there needs to be some sort of counterweight to this, whether it's regulatory or technology. And I like the idea of a tech-based solution here as opposed to something like, oh, we're scared of bots online. Let's ban them or like, let's make it illegal to use AI-generated text. I mean, everybody that's traveled at all, it's now the facial recognition is technically not required, but it is so aggressively pushed that people don't realize it's not required when you're in the TSA. security, you can just say, I don't want to do a facial recognition scan today.

33:11And they go, okay. And they just look at your ID and you can go through. So it's still opt-in, but they've been sort of training the citizenry on this technology. And yeah. I always opt-in. I want to prove my loyalty to America. Yeah. And the deep state specifically. I want them to know. I'm on their side. I'm on your team. These are my guys. Yeah. Yeah. John's guys. Yeah. um ai agents will be so prevalent future member yeah uh to accelerate adoption hall of fame let's just make sure we keep politics out of the deep state folks uh to accelerate adoption of what the world calls its autonomous proof of human system the company recently launched a mini app inside of its app which is available for iphones and android devices nice um world's mini app is part of a broader strategy to create an everything app.

34:00These apps, so-called super apps, are common throughout Asia. World's mini app store, which currently includes services to send and receive cryptocurrency, chat with verified humans, and access microloans, is a first step towards creating what Altman, Blania, and their team hope will be a vast ecosystem reaching more than a billion people. And as the company's identification system expands, they anticipate their main competitor will be Elon Musk's own attempt at an everything app X. I think it will take a while until we seriously collide. Blania told me on Tuesday, given that X is now primarily a social network, the app formerly known as Twitter has yet to launch a payment service.

34:39So here's the crazy thing. I do believe that OpenAI will have significantly more monthly actives than X by the end of the year, which is a wild situation where, so Elon is competing with OpenAI by forcing you to use Grok in these various ways, which is smart. But then Sam Altman could catalyze his own competitive product to X by funneling people from ChatGPT into the world, everything app, whatever. It's an interesting dynamic. Yeah. So the Orbs have not launched in the United States, but there are pictures of them all over in foreign countries, which is kind of an interesting strategy. I mean, most of the time, like you want to launch in the US first and then kind of broaden out, but they're kind of doing the opposite.

35:27Within about 12 months, however, Blania believes the two services will start to compete in earnest. If so, it would be notable development in part because making everything apps work in the West has proved extremely difficult. The bottom line is that for most people with an Android phone or iPhone who haven't grown up in the tech ecosystems of Asia, those app stores already offer the versatility and flexibility that everything apps do. Sam Altman's involvement in World might also encourage competition between world and X by virtue of their pugliistic nature. It's so hard to kickstart an everything app because imagine if you go and you get Uber, DoorDash, you build your own messaging, you need some sort of like WeChat, for example, has some core like calling, browser, chat, et cetera.

36:12And if you go to an American user now and you say, hey, I'm going to give you messaging, a browser, chat, and I'm going to give you like Uber and all these other and games and all these things, they're going to say, okay, I have all of that. So potentially the only way to actually get somebody to switch over is to be like, I'm going to pay you to switch like other, because like the value trade is just not there. That's kind of what's happening, right? Because if you get on WorldCoin, they give you some WorldCoin, then they can moon and it's like the same. So it's always the same economics. Yeah.

36:41Yeah. So it's just, yeah. Unless you're literally paying your users. You could very easily imagine this working if Apple somehow, I don't know, like acquired it or like built it in. Because when you think about like, you know, you need to be scanning all the time. You need very deep access to the camera APIs to make sure that you're getting like real images instead of like images that have been passed through some sort of extra layer or something. All the different biometrics in the face ID system. But I don't think like face ID is just a... we need an orb to figure out if these are real images of jd vans or not yeah um so uh few people in the u.s have heard of world formerly known as world coin uh if they have it's probably on account of the company's unique biometric identification system the orb so far or being millions of people hasn't proved popular with governments around the world as more than a dozen have either suspended its operation in their countries or else examined its handling of personal data.

37:42World investor and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on a recent episode of his podcast with Mark Andreessen that the loosening restrictions on crypto companies in the U.S., he anticipates world will become legal in the U.S. this year. At present, the company doesn't scan eyeballs in the U.S. or allow Americans to hold its world coin token for fear of regulators, Altman has said. when asked how long it will be until world sets up locations in the U.S. where people can walk in, present their irises, and become part of the network, Blania declined to say, but he adds the effort is top of mind for him.

38:16In general, Blania brushes aside concerns about regulators both in the U.S. and abroad. Okay, so this is a crazy statistic. World and its orb eyeball scanner have verified 11 million people. They've scanned the irises of 11 million people. That is very impressive just from a logistical standpoint totally to get that done yeah um and i i wish we had more footage on the ground of how this is happening because i'm imagining they show up in a small town yeah and they basically and it's just one dude with an orb and he's like okay like you're come get your eye scan we're gonna you might get money in the future it seems like probably the trade yeah yeah basically you get a token drop yeah and maybe those tokens are liquid you can sell them immediately.

39:00No, but I don't think anybody's getting airdropped the token yet. No, not if you scan? I thought that was one way to get access. I thought you could also just buy the token right now, but I don't know. You can just buy it. It's at a$7.5 billion valuation. Not bad. Fully diluted with a market cap of$800 million if you just look at the circulating. So significantly lower than Trumpcoin. Well, I haven't looked at Trumpcoin. Is Trumpcoin going to offer a eyeball scanning official Trump they really should uh Trump is down to a two billion dollar two billion it's funny so Trump coin is down less than the S &P it's a better store value than Apple Microsoft Google and Amazon yeah yeah yeah yeah I think it's doing better than mag seven uh this is fantastic uh other systems that rely on biometrics have unnerved users and governments in the past.

39:56It's easy to forget the hue and cry once raised about face ID on the iPhone, the face scanning technology most people now use to unlock their Apple devices. When it was introduced, there were concerns about it both as a potential security liability and because of the way it evoked mass surveillance systems in China that rely on facial recognition. World says its network is anonymous and secure and only proves you're a person, but it could be made part of a broader identity system. One of world's distinguishing features is that it is an anonymous proof of human system. That is, its eyeball scan can verify that you're a human being and not an AI, but without additional software and systems, it can't identify who you are.

40:35What could drive people to adopt a system like that? Worlds will be the rise of ever more sophisticated AIs that will make doing business on the internet almost impossible. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, if the content's good. Sign me up, scan my eyeball. I want to, I want to see a good posts. And if there's no bots and the posts are better, I, I'm a, I'm a slop pig for the content. I'm willing to share my biometric data. Uh, if it, if it gets me, uh, you know, a couple of funny bangers in the, in the feed, the real question is, is will, will the slop app be John, by the way, has already finished his first, his first glass here.

41:10Cheers. Cheers. Um, yeah, I mean the real question is like is like revealed preferences the stated preference is like oh i don't want to i don't want to interact with any bots online but the revealed preference might be oh i love when 100 bots show up and like my post yeah you know so we'll see we'll see which one people go with there's been there's been a few of these yeah the challenge here is that they're mixing they're trying to do multiple things at once yeah right they're they're trying to build this in their words autonomous proof of human system yep which to me says it's more like this developer product that other applications and services and things in the real world could leverage as a tool to verify identity and prevent bots yeah simultaneously they now have this token which is its own product in itself right we've talked about this before the the sort of the the product of the token is its price yeah and so the incentive is just to just sort of like drive up uh drive up the price and and do sort of you know manipulate the market in that way and then now they're also saying we're going to also do consumer apps and we're also going to do an everything app and it's starting to be like a lot of things have to go right right sam lesson talked about this last week and i think this is a good framework yeah which is like if you're investing in something how many individual things need to go right what was this phrase like no bank shots or something like that yeah yeah and so here like you know these some of these are experiments yeah but and but and it's clear they have sort of like user traction on the supply side they got they got eyeballs right uh yeah eyeballs mary meeker would be proud mary meeker would be very proud 11 million eyeballs during the dot-com that's 10 billion or easily market cap for sure easily.

42:58She'll take that public all day. And so they got a lot of things seemingly, they're trying to do a lot at once. And it seems unclear that any of these things are, again, what users want. I mean, MIMS is, you were impressed by 11 million. MIMS here says world has only or verified 11 million people worldwide, despite the fact that it literally pays them. Okay. So they are paying them in real time. 25 tokens per scan, roughly$25 at today's prices now offers 16 tokens per scan at the launch date for x's money account service is unclear the company has said that it will count visa as its first partner for x x did not respond to request for comment um and so yeah i mean i wonder i wonder if they can keep the the token price high enough keep raising money he says here x has vastly more users than world does but it's unclear how many people will be eager to entrust an Elon Musk owned company with their financial lives.

43:58I mean, they trust him to drive them around. So anyways, that seems like a stretch. But overall, X has more users than world. But I believe by the end of the year, OpenAI will have more users than X. Yeah. And so are you proposing some sort of like theory of like, you know, Elon companies? and we should be thinking about like the same companies. I'm more so saying you can imagine a collaboration between OpenAI and World where they drive WorldCoin usage through the OpenAI app. In the same way that X is partnered with XAI and they're two separate companies, but they're obviously deeply integrated.

44:37You can see the same thing happening with WorldCoin and the ChatGPT app. Yeah. That'd be pretty crazy, but I think that makes sense. Yeah, you can imagine. So here's something I've thought about before. So a lot of people have said, give me the best open AI models, unlimited access. One of the challenges there is that you could sort of do that, but then people would build software on top of them where they would just be like querying it and using it for other apps. And so Sam could come out and say, okay, you can use unlimited open AI as long as you are periodically doing the sort of like eyeball recognition through the orb or something to that effect, right?

45:12So it's like, you're actually using the product. You're not just like software, a bot that's just sort of like using up inference on behalf of other applications. I want to see the pen testers and the hackers try and beat this thing. I want to see George Hotz jailbreak an orb because when Face ID came out, people were like, well, if I 3D print my face and then I put it up and I have this mask, like I can still get through and it's not that big of a deal. People were trying to break it, but obviously like it is a huge vulnerability if it's like, you know, the FBI sees the phone and they're not supposed to be able to get in, but then they can just like 3D print a picture of your face and then hold it up and it verifies.

45:53Yeah, it seems like Apple's gotten pretty good at that. Yeah, it does seem like you don't hear about, oh, the FBI hacked this person's phone by, you know, holding it up. Holding it up. Wasn't there some story about that where they hold it up to someone's face like while they're sleeping or something like that? I feel like that's happened. I think the safety mechanism is that your eyes have to be open. Oh, for face ID? I think so. Okay. Interesting. Let me confirm. Yeah. Well, it'll be a knockout drag out fight. Yeah, your eyes do have - I'm sure it continues. I'm sure there'll be more entertainment.

46:24Never a dull moment when Sam Altman and Elon Musk are - I would like to have - I would like to get - I'd like to have the WorldCoin CEO on the show. Yeah, I'd love that. And just have him give the full pitch because it's clearly compelling. Yeah. At a high level. It does feel weird, but it also feels like something that like we could look back on and been like, yeah, that was like, that was a novel enough idea that it broke out because, because it's weird and different. And so I've been, yeah. And if I'm ever, if I'm traveling in any exotic lands, maybe I'll get scanned. 25 bucks is 25 bucks. It's 25 bucks.

47:01That's, that's a, uh, uh, that's a shish kebab somewhere, you know, uh, Erwan, uh, it's an Erwan burrito. Yeah. Yeah. With almost, you could almost get it delivered off. Almost. Not overseas. Almost. Not overseas. Almost. Okay, well, should we move on to Palmer Luckey in the Wall Street Journal? Yeah, who is this guy again? Palmer Luckey or Tim Higgins, the guy who wrote the show? Tim Higgins, of course. Tim Higgins. No, I'm just joking around. Palmer Luckey, they're calling him Donald Trump's original tech bro. He gets his moment in this article. Hit him with a slur in the title. Yeah. Technology brother, please.

47:39Trump's original technology brother. Once an outcast, the Anderle founder's vision for modernizing the government seems possible. Okay. Opening line of this article. Generally, tech bros tend to overestimate their ability to change the world. It's, I was talking to Salon about this. We're going to have Salon on the show and talk about like the etymology of the tech bro thing. Yeah. It's a tough thing because we love the journal. Yeah. It's overall fantastic. but to take such a clear and aggressive shot against our culture in the opening line exactly you know what i'm sure got to mention on the front page yeah i i mean i think we've i think we've kind of like retooled and reclaimed this term enough but it's just very silly because it's such a meaningless term that it really just meant like anyone who's a male in tech yeah was a bro.

48:31Also, if you think about anybody who ever invented anything, a lot of them could be described as like, oh, he was a guy that was into technology. And yeah, there's many more people that sort of overestimated their abilities and came up short and didn't invent this important thing. But we need a hundred people to try and only one to be successful in order to sort of move the world forward. Yeah. Like when, when this came out, I thought the bar for bro should be way, way higher. Like, what do you mean? What I mean is that like, like, so there's, there's everyone in tech and then there's everyone in tech who's male, but though not everyone in tech who's a male is a tech bro.

49:13In order to be a tech bro, you have to be actively running a technology company. That's like building software or hardware, but then also doing keg stands, chugging Miller light, like crushing nooners lots of tattoos lots of days on the lake like lots of tank tops lots of push-ups yeah like you have to be jacked yeah like alexis joined with a tank top you could kind of say and he lives in south florida yep yep yeah i i i would forgive the journal for for calling him a tech bro but uh as a term i mean this this picture is he's wearing a hawaiian shirt he looks like he's he's potentially the social chair at the top fraternity at his college i think it's really just like up to up to palmer if he if he's if he wants to be a tech bro and and use that that's fine but but for many years it was it was it was used as pejorative it was it was used as a slur it was used to discredit someone uh and and the reason was because uh the idea of doing science and doing engineering was antithetical to crushing beers with your absolute boys in the frat house.

50:19And so by saying, oh, this person's a bro, it meant that they can't be a serious technologist when that was clearly proven false. Yeah. By Zuck. The Winklevoss brothers. Yeah. All these different folks. Running a top crypto exchange. Yes, yes, yes. So he goes on to write, Palmer's support of Donald Trump in 2016 got him, according to his recounting, booted from liberal Silicon Valley, pushed out of his job at Facebook and made into a pariah. All that, despite the fact that he had sold his virtual reality company, Oculus VR, to Mark Zuckerberg's social media company for billions and was seen as the OG of VR.

50:54I kind of like this writing, actually. It's pretty good. Dejected, he went on to build the next thing, Killer AI. It's a hell of an origin story for Andoril Industries, whose initials spell AI. Lucky named the company after the Hero Sword and the Lord of the Rings, a weapon also known as the Flame of the West. In many ways, Lucky wants his weapons company. And that's just... What? It's just one of the best names and stories behind the name in Silicon Valley history. The flame of the West. Flame of the West. Incredible. In doing so, Lucky has become one of the brightest examples of a new wave of ascendant entrepreneurs.

51:33They eschew what has made Silicon Valley so powerful, personal gadgets and ad tech, and pour themselves into super hard and sometimes controversial sciences and engineering, as they say, and they say can make America better. Supersonic airplanes, nuclear energy, space travel. These days, Lucky likes to tell his origin story. Because those examples shouldn't really be controversial. Like, why are they controversial? We should have controversial airplanes that can go supersonic speed. I mean, I guess nuclear is a little controversial, but space travel isn't controversial, is it? I guess it is. There's people that say we shouldn't go to space.

52:05Because the firmament stuff? No, no, no. we have problems on because they're challenging god yeah yeah it's in front of god to try and leave god's green earth uh they say why are you spending all this money blowing up your rockets in space sure we have enough problems on earth all those hundreds of millions of dollars also very controversial of your flat earther the space travel stuff so they might be talking about that they might be highlighting the fact that flat earthers don't like tech people oh we're gonna go to space and they're like doing it over and over yeah making movies about exactly exactly Exactly.

52:35These days, Lucky likes to tell his origin story, especially when it became become cool for Zuckerberg and other tech leaders to be seen as cozying up to President Trump. Zuckerberg told Congress that Lucky's Facebook departure had nothing to do with politics. Speaking of Zuckerberg cozying up to the American right wing, he was at the UFC Saturday night and the stream was really not functioning well. really so dana uh like the pay-per-view yeah so dana white was streaming from his phone really and you could hear he was just yeah it was round one he just had it it's all playing okay and you could hear zuckerberg talking being like oh where are you streaming from right now what account are you streaming from like he i could i think he wanted to go look and like test like see the quality yeah so even even during the ufc event he was founder mode yeah i wanted to make sure it was during the main event that's great it's cool i love that uh all these people have tidied up all of their inconvenient beliefs, Lucky says, which I love.

53:32I'm not going to throw it back in their faces and say, oh yeah, but what about this thing that you did eight years ago? It's just not productive. Yeah. Except for one man. That's a little bit different. That's not really an inconvenient belief. That's like a personal interaction. But yeah, we don't talk about politics on the show. Better position now. Lucky is clearly trying to take advantage of the moment that Trump's ascent has created, especially with the Elon Musk led government efficiency effort, Anderle and other high-tech companies are trying to convince the Pentagon that their technologies are part of the solution for a more efficient and modern government than what's offered by the lumbering giants in defense.

54:09The core thesis of Anderle is that we are not a defense contractor, Lucky said. We are a defense product company. We put our own money into building things, and we show up not with a PowerPoint but with a working product. And so the taxpayer isn't taking on the development risk for these products. It's great. The flipped model. which venture capitalists are. Makes a lot of sense. Exactly. And we're grateful for them. Yep. Lucky was dismissed by tech peers as crude and out of touch. Even now, some in Washington remain unimpressed, but for different reasons. What does this guy know about virtual reality?

54:41What does this guy known for virtual reality know about the battlefield arrival last year called Anderle, the Theranos of Defense? I think I know who they're talking about and it's like, it's like not, not a rival at all. It's not like another entrepreneur or business person. It's like a random poster. Yeah. It's like, it's not like. An online rival. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but giving them too much credit to say they're a rival. Yeah, yeah. Also, Theranos, yeah, you could give it blood, but it would just sort of not, you know, couldn't really do much with it. Yeah. They've shown that they can actually create products that do, you know, they can blow up a truck.

55:17Yeah. Which by nature means that Theranos is not the right comparison at all. It's very silly. Lucky responded on the social media platform Axe with a photo of his own head superimposed on Elizabeth Holmes' body a former journalism major before dropping out to work on Oculus in a camper parked in his parents' home Lucky understands the power of narrative even his name sounds like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel like he should be a loan shark busting heads in Miami rather than an arms dealer holding court in Mar-a-Lago he's known for his Hawaiian t-shirts, flip-flops and goatee and a willingness to talk about whatever's on his mind conspiracy theories video games management theories etc the first time i met lucky a few years ago he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm it's also so i mean this article is funny because it's making him sound really cool yeah but at the same time like clearly is like has a negative bend to it yeah calling him an arms dealer versus a technologist focused on defense exactly exactly comparing him to a loan shark busting heads because his name based on his name yeah i i don't get that this person clearly hasn't studied uh nominative determinism because there's nothing in palmer freeman lucky that says loan shark to me yeah anyway uh the first time this writer met palmer lucky a few years ago he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm about an idea for why people should raise hippos in the swamplands of louisiana for food it was something he read about from the 1950s.

56:47He said, I've read this book, The American Hippopotamus. It's a fantastic plan. It actually got all the way to Congress. There was a bill proposed to bring hippos to Louisiana, raise them for food. And Palmer's here arguing kind of the same thesis. It was better for land management than grazing cattle on prime real estate elsewhere. You're not going to build a bunch of housing on the bayou. So put the hippos there. They're a little dangerous, but you can like you know fence them in and then it's fine uh and he says uh lucky assured me that hippo meat was tasty it's red meat though after some prodding he admitted that he had never tried it yeah because it's hard to get a hand on andrew was originally backed by peter teal's founders fund and co-founded with palantir technology alums we should democrats we should give some background on on founders fund for anybody that oh yeah for sure maybe joined a second ago yeah Yeah, yeah.

57:37Anyone who's living under a rock. It started out as building sensor towers during the first Trump administration to spot people crossing the border illegally. The company evolved to produce robot drones and then robot submarines called GoSharks. The gist is to keep U.S. soldiers out of harm's way if they all operate with AI, running on a central operating system and all developed to run across its hardware. That's called Lattice, which we've talked about before. This show actually runs on Lattice.

58:05Just the most. That should be our new nickname for Ben. Hey, Lattice. Pull up this post right now. The entrepreneur has proven AI has a place in war and the Ukraine, Russia, and Israel, Hamas war show that futuristic ideas are becoming commonplace, changing the face of war and how it will be fought in the years ahead. In January, Anderle announced plans to invest almost a billion dollars into a factory in Ohio to build autonomous jet fighters in the U.S. for the Air Force. a contract it won last year and in february and roll said it was taking over microsoft's 22 billion dollar contract with the u.s army to develop augmented reality headsets for the battlefield a project that marries lucky's past and present and i i love that a lot of people are like oh what's going to happen there it's like he is the perfect person for this he's like the most qualified person in the world to do this is this line so he made this announcement he says whatever you are imagining however crazy you imagine i am multiply it by 10 and then do it again And Bucky wrote, I am back and I'm only getting started.

59:07It is over. We're so back. It's great. I love it. Yeah. It's a lot of fun. Anyway. Yeah. It's so funny when people come for Palmer is like, oh, he, he, he's unqualified for this. It's like, he's, I think he's now like in his thirties and he spent his entire career in, in like the most powerful rooms in America, in like high growth companies doing real work in every industry. he's met every industry player like a consensus view of the future of warfare is sort of swarms of autonomous often small yeah uh hardware devices yeah so maybe you want to you want the guy who built like this super complicated vr product and scaled it to millions of sales yeah maybe that would be a good guy to to he's like he's like one of the only hardware founders to be successful out of that 2010s batch.

1:00:01There were a few others that did okay. Smartwatches, scales and stuff. But yeah, obviously, Oculus, fantastic. So we'll have to have him on the show. Dig in more. A little bit of a puff piece. A little bit of a little tour of who Palmer is. I wouldn't call it a puff piece. It had a very negative. It had some negativity, some positivity, but it didn't go too deep. We didn't have to put it too hard in the truth. No, no, no. It was a mild, mild truth zone. Anyway, I'm going to use the restroom. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We're moving over to Deep Seek. This is an interesting story. So, obviously Deep Seek blew up and did have an impact on the timeline.

1:00:40A lot of people are following it. and now investors want a piece of DeepSeek, but the founder of DeepSeek says not now. This is from the Wall Street Journal, March 10th. The founder of Chinese artificial intelligence star DeepSeek, which of course spun out of that hedge fund we talked about, has rejected proposals to make quick money from his programs, telling prospective investors that he wants to keep the science project ethos that brought him to global renown. Overwhelmed by millions of users, DeepSeek's chatbot has frequent service hiccups and authorities around the world are restricting its use over data security concerns.

1:01:15The U.S. is weighing measures, including banning DeepSeek from government devices, which of course makes sense because if you're using DeepSeek as an open source LLM that you're self-hosting, you're not sending data there. There's still the question of, is there some sort of Manchurian candidate deep inside the weights? But that's kind of, you know, science fiction right now. But if you're using the DeepSeek app, literally every query, everything that you put into that chat box is going to DeepSeek, which of course is a Chinese company and ultimately responsible to the CCP potentially. And so he is also cautious about government-linked investors, they said, because he believes the connection to Beijing could make it harder to win global adoption of DeepSeek's AI models.

1:01:57Liang Wenfang has told associates that he isn't in a hurry to get investment. The Chinese company made a global splash earlier this year with its free-to-use open-source AI models. It was the moment DeepSeek had aimed for since Liang's band of AI researchers began their quest two years ago with words they attributed to French director Francois Truffaut. Be insanely ambitious and insanely sincere. Interesting. He's it's interesting so i'm just pulling this up yeah it was my first thought was uh deep seek is number 20 in productivity right now yeah grok is 31 31 so john's doing uh jimmy john's i don't believe is in the productivity category uh jimmy john's app so if you if you weren't following the app store last last week the top three apps were chat gpt jimmy johns and hallow yeah a big app big week so you really get to choose your god you get to choose your ai god your christian god or your sandwich god so jimmy johns is taking an absolute tumble they're 46 and food and drinks and nowhere near that's terrible yeah not even in the game anymore uh they're gonna come out with a new sandwich yeah get some get some refer a friend going on there or they could say hey if you can prove you're human you can get a 25 gift card to jimmy john should do what nikita does where where you go to you go to get your sandwich you check out and then afterwards it says like hey do you want to know what the sandwich artist that made your sandwich thinks about you and then you click five dollars and it unlocks it's like yeah they thought you were kind of rude or like yeah oh they actually thought you were really nice and you tipped really well thought you were dripped out.

1:03:43They thought you were dripped out. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Pay to unlock a compliment. Secure male loneliness. This, this might actually be a good idea. I think we got to get Nikita on the line and pitch it to him and then pitch it to Jimmy John himself, who also should come on the show. Um, Leong was invited to a who's who list of Chinese executives who met leader Xi Jinping on February 17th and his success has prompted a gushing of patriotism in China. You know, this is something we should copy i feel like if you if you invent if you invent a viral app or a cool foundation model get let's get you in the white house shake the president's hand the whole tour you know yeah they do the same if you if you are an athlete and you do something yeah yeah they always invite the winning super bowl team presidential medal of freedom you know if you build a chat gpt rapper that yeah we need the medal of innovation yes exactly exactly and the medal of slop yeah yeah yeah the worker 17 guys from yc get him in the white house shaking hands yeah how you doing with that dom perignon over there why don't you polish that off i'll refill the state-owned bank of china has offered to grant that was just john not wanting to to just double down had one uh the state-owned bank of china has offered to grant a low interest loan to the company people familiar with discussion said in interest in recent weeks uh executives from chinese technology companies including tencent and Alibaba have met Leong to discuss potential cooperation.

1:05:12I'm sure they want a stake of this company. I said for people familiar with the companies, those people said Leong didn't want to charge for DeepSeek's core AI models, which are currently free. If your model's so good, why don't you charge for it? Why are you afraid to charge money for it? The startup published techniques it's used to train its AI models using downgraded chip NVIDIA designed for China. It aims to release its next using model designed for solving complex problems as early as April. So stay tuned for DeepSeek V4, probably. We'll see if that's a bigger model. Be interesting to follow.

1:05:45Rise of the High Flyer, Liang, born in 1985. We already did a deep dive on this guy. You can go find it on the channel. But founded a hedge fund known in English as High Flyer in 2015. Its Chinese name alludes to an ancient Han dynasty diagram with a magic square, A mathematical peculiarity in which the rows, columns, and diagonals of the square all add up to the same number, going Sudoku mode. Sudoku vibes. I like it. Liang was proud that Chinese sages discovered the concept long before the West said people who know him. In its hiring advertisements, High Flyer sounded more like a technology firm than a hedge fund.

1:06:24This is pretty common with what's going on with Jane Street and Citadel. It even tried to put the word technologies in its name before regulators said no. I mean, that's cool. It looked for people who had won math contests. We've seen this happen in America before with the IMO gold medalists all going to work for Ramp. The fund promised as much as$270 ,000 a year for AI engineers at a campus event in 2020. To support their AI ambitions, Liang and his team used the profits from the hedge fund, which charged the same type of hefty fees as US hedge funds do, so probably$220 ,000 or more. um leong's quant fund significantly outperformed the market between 2015 and 2020 sometimes scoring returns that were 20 to 50 percentage points more than stock market benchmarks in 2021 high flyer that's your quant you're doing pretty well yeah had 14 billion you want to keep reading i'll keep reading um where do you end off uh in 2021 high flyer assets under in 2021 high flyer technologies assets under management reached around 14 billion according to people familiar with the matter but the fund's performance soon faded by late 2021 when dozens of high flyers products were down by more than 10 from their recent peak the company apologized to its investors for its performance one of its flagship funds lost money in both 2022 and 2023 although it beat the benchmark index it was supposed to track two years ago high flyer largely closed itself to new investors and started in mid 24 2024 to encourage some investors to redeem their investments they're like we have such a good short position that we're building we would like you to just sort of uh take out your money and just let us just like reap the uh um by the end of last year like but but it's such a funny thing a lot of hedge funds have done this like no no i know jane street doesn't have any outside capital i believe and a lot of other funds have kind of moved towards less and less lps if they can by the end of last year high flyers assets under management had shrunk significantly uh to me this looks like you know one reason is that you just don't want sort of outsized uh outside scrutiny into what you're doing yeah yeah saying i don't want more leaks newcomers going to get your returns as soon as you get an lp who has a subscription yeah that's right and you can't have that happening uh and and also just regulation because there's just more people that can sue you for saying hey you know what what you did was was not meeting your fiduciary responsibilities.

1:08:46Yeah. And then, of course, once you have so many investors, of course, you might need to go public or something. Yeah. There's a lot of different things like that. So in mid-2023, the fund announced a strategic shift and created DeepSeek as an independent organization. Highflyer put almost all its revenue from the quant fund business into AI development, according to the company's posts on Chinese social media. Highflyer said it would devote itself fully to AI technology that serves the common good of all mankind. Sounds like it was written by the CCP.

1:09:18deep seeks ai models are generally free although it does offer so yeah they just they just care about the good of humanity purely purely purely uh its problem is handling the traffic surge so they're struggling to handle the traffic but they don't want investment they'll just take the ultra low interest rate loan from the bank of china not conflicted at all they're just in it okay like it's just about yeah humanity they want to keep the models free yep just free models just working with the government we're gonna lever up yep from we're gonna take uh low interest rates from uh from from the bank of the ccp yep just one board member Xi Jinping that's it yeah yeah yeah uh to lessen the overload on its servers deep seek has been offering deep discounts to paying customers who use its services in the early morning so you can get timu deep seek credits if you're using it at the right hours so some chinese tech giants such as tencent are testing deep seek to power features including a search engine of tencent's messaging and payment app they don't have to pay deep seek to do so tencent users can opt for a chatbot that is powered by deep seek deep seek but uses tencent's own more stable computer network yeah um so since late 2023 deep seek pitched itself to several venture capital firms including some foreign firms this is a great strategy by the way say you're not raising say you don't want money but then go raise it creates this dynamic that uh you know can really get people to fomo and um uh apparently the foreign firms declined to invest because they couldn't see a clear path to recouping their money it's never stopped a western capital alligator from investing before to be clear opening eyes like we're gonna we're gonna you didn't they come out with some like prospectus that was like at a certain point when you're raising, you know, tens of billions of dollars, you basically have to tell people like we see no path to, we see no realistic path to like recouping this investment.

1:11:17Oh, just like safe harbor stuff. Yeah. Safe harbor stuff. Yeah. Maybe, maybe. I mean, I think the projections are pretty, pretty aggressive, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's, it's, we're going to lose money and then we will be the only profit center in the entire world. Basically, yeah. Good strategy. Yeah, so anyways, he says for now, yeah, yeah, that's it. He says for now, Leong appears to be sticking to the vision he expressed in a rare interview in 2023. We don't do applications. We just do research and exploration, he said then. Yeah, I mean, I think the real way to kind of understand what's actually going on with DeepSeek is that you have to benchmark its app store performance as you just did.

1:12:00They're at 47, 42, something like that. No, 21. 21. You have to benchmark that against what happened with TikTok. I'm sure TikTok was number one in the app store for a little bit and then dropped down. But the question is like, will it regain momentum and will it continue to become dominant? And will there be some sort of economy or durable growth engine? Like we saw with TikTok, there were, there were a series of strategy, growth strategies that really drove it into the significant penetration of the Western market. And that was first and foremost, um, you know, a unique feature. You could not make a lip sync video with, with, uh, like IP protected music very easily on Instagram or Snapchat.

1:12:48And so you would download just like you downloaded Instagram to do photo filters. And then it happened every photo that you filtered, it would happen to post. And then you would share that photo elsewhere. Maybe you'd save your camera roll and share it elsewhere, maybe upload it on Facebook, but it was shared to the social network. Same thing happened with, with TikTok. Then it became, okay, well now they're advertising on Facebook and Snapchat, very aggressively bringing in new users. And then finally they created the creator fund. And so all of a sudden the power law creators on tick tock had jobs, had like businesses.

1:13:21And so you had people like Charlie D 'Amelio and, uh, there were a whole ton of these creators that would get a slice based on how much traffic and how much, how many views they were getting. They were getting tons of views. They weren't getting paid a ton, but they were making enough to justify quitting their jobs and going all in on content and making sure that, and then also just creating the dream of this new American dream of like, if you have an idea or you're good at dancing or you're hot or you have anything going on you can get on tiktok if you go viral enough times you will start getting corporate athlete you remember that guy yes that's one of the first probably creators that we sort of like really resonated we thought it was more funny than i think anyone else what's the guy's name i have no idea i i i never remember the name of a short form creator ever yeah it's just weird podcaster if the only thing you remember you remember their bit yep it's this guy who would he would wake up and he'd be like running and he'd be like yeah lock in another day today no i i know exactly who you're talking about i don't remember his name because it was just like so ethereal uh it's it's very much like like tiktok in the short form stuff is very much like uh bathroom graffiti it's like everyone sees it no one remembers it yeah it's just like high high traffic but it doesn't like make a statement as opposed to you know a two-hour christopher nolan film like leaves an impression on people even if less people see it it has like a profound effect or a really good TED talk.

1:14:40A really good TED talk. We talked to the experts. The Sam High TED talk is very memorable. It's one of the greatest comedy bits of all time. It's very, very funny. Anyway, should we do car technology driving people crazy? Should we move on to the timeline? What do you think, Jordy? I'm down to hit this and then let's get into the timeline. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, we're car people here. We like talking cars. We like talking trends in cars. We're big advocates for the next Tesla Roadster having a naturally aspirated V8 with a gated manual shifter. We're willing it. We're going to make it happen.

1:15:16We're going to have Elon on the show eventually and we're going to confront him about that, recommend it to him. And I think we have a winner on our hands if you can get that across the line. We do. There's been a lot of talk about, oh, Tesla's down 36 % last month. How do you get back? Gated manual. V12. Exactly. Anyway, door handles used to be simple. Now they are another piece of technology that can fail. Drivers are finding that they wish the smart technology in their cars was just a bit dumber. Automakers have added new features in 2020s that go beyond touchscreens, assisted driving systems, and companion phone apps.

1:15:46Some vehicles come with infrared night vision, seasonal ambient light lighting, and interior fan cams that show rear passengers. That's obviously for kids, but many drivers say it's too much. The share that had positive feelings about intuitiveness of their car controls fell from 79 % in 2015 to 56 % in 2024. The perfect car was the Porsche 911, the 997 generation manual. Sit inside. It's a relatively high performance vehicle. It's not a track star or anything like that, but it's sporty, it's fun. There's nothing over the top or anything like that. Everything is just like ultra utilitarian. Everything's super solid.

1:16:30you can leave it in the sun forever nothing's going to happen to the seats it's a perfect car um and today you have a situation where um i uh i actually have a funny story about that i i bought the car on bring a trailer uh during in 2021 sold it at a profit like a couple years later but took eth for it really i had a buddy who was like would you like can i like buy it like with I was like, yeah, sure. Fine. ETH dropped like 20 % to 20%. So I basically round trip back to the original purchase price. But to compare that to today, the, one of the most annoying, like the most annoying thing about my cars are the smart features.

1:17:16So the G63, there's this feature where when I turn it on, it automatically has the lane keeping assist, they call it, which you have to manually turn off every single time, which is like a small. It's so weird. Normally you turn it on. No, it's default on. And it is a truly terrible feature. You're driving and I drive, I'm in Malibu. So to get out of Malibu, I have to take these sort of like one or two lane, you know, canyon roads. And so if you go slightly off of the road, it breaks like one of the wheels. Like it's this very weird experience where it just sort of like has this breaking effect.

1:17:54that just slams you back onto the road. And it's the most jarring experience. It's never when you actually would want it. And then the other thing is you have to turn off the thing that shuts the engine off when you're at a stoplight. And that's like, you know about this. This is like the EPA rules where new cars have to have this feature. Also, if you put your car in sport mode, now the EPA requires that when you start the car, it starts in eco mode or like comfort mode. It can't start in the most aggressive mode. Yeah, it used to be able to start a 911. in sport mode and just leave it at that dial.

1:18:27We used to be a proper country. We used to be a proper country. Um, I think the real, the, the real, the real sad thing here is that, you know, a lot of the premium features have trickled down. You know, you get like heated and cooled seats and like a Hyundai these days, but, uh, some of the really important features have not trickled down. I'm talking about, you know, doors that go up, doors that go up. That should be standard. also the champagne fridge in the back of the rolls royce with with the champagne flute thing that grabs them so yeah so that as you're going around a corner your champagne flute doesn't fall over yeah this should be available in a honda for some reason it hasn't made it uh but yeah they're just totally ignoring customer demands i agree yeah i agree uh anyway uh people are having problems with battery electric vehicles uh owners of evs reported their door handles being difficult to open at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles up from 0.2 it's like your door should always open unless you have a g-wagon well then it's hard to close right it's not hard to open yeah that's the real tell the real the real tell is if anybody has spent time in la is if they know how to close a g-wagon door for those who have yeah yeah guys really slam it you have guys out there uh you know if she knows how to close a g-wagon door just focus on yourself focus on yourself uh we've changed door handles from being a problem-free experience to now they pop out whenever the owner approaches and we're seeing all these problems yeah uh all all good yeah this is super annoying i i walk out of my garage yeah and my uh like my 9-11 just like completely like turns on like it throws the lights on it throws like the the handle open i'm like i'm just grabbing in the mail yeah relax it just knows you're there yeah yeah anyway um you know this is the same thing with smart homes today where i have yesterday yeah uh i hit the remote for my blinds in my kitchen and it didn't didn't move yeah i'm like oh great i'm pressing it again i'm like playing around with the remote yeah uh i finally like walked like close to it and it worked but i was just not my blinds were just going to be down until I could find somebody that like specializes in smart homes to just come over and like figure out what's broken and I'm like that's so annoying versus just like going like I think I'm very bullish on the sort of analog home experience of like you know you flip a switch yeah you have a you know something that doesn't need batteries that you can like change the heater you know I don't need a remote for my fireplace it's not like I'm not in my bedroom being like I really want to like you know turn on my fireplace like there's something beautiful about analog products yeah this is somewhat of a boomer take but i think that i think that there is something real about like technology introducing more friction over time and it's been captured in some sci-fi like i don't know if you've seen or you probably haven't seen fifth element uh or uh demolition man but they both paint a picture of the future where basically like all the smart features are like very inconvenient and so yeah sylvester stallone is like in demolition man getting like fined every time he swears and there's like he can't get like we should implement that yeah we should be bullish on that um and then except it would get boring quickly and then fifth element he lives in this like pod and it like deploys like like you have been you have three points left it's like a super connected world and like uh he's like trying to quit smoking and it gives him like one cigarette out of this like disposer and stuff uh it's very funny anyway great movies you should see a film sometime jordy i'll watch one you should watch a movie for your first movie that would be big for you i have been enjoying uh the new white lotus oh yeah i i'm caught up very cliche to watch but it's just watching the first everybody was like okay the first few episodes were boring yeah and then last night's really got deranged it was it you know the dad is developing this sort of like drug addiction and yep the mom is also you know and it's just all like you can tell it's just like starting to fully unwind yeah i find that like i like somebody was asking me like oh like was a good episode and i was kind of like just starting in the middle oh no you're saying like you're no no no no like so yeah the really deranged way to watch white letters watch random episodes uh no no like like because i i hadn't watched any and then i was in tahoe and had some free time away from kids so i catch up i watch the first three then episode four premieres i watch it and a friend asked me how is episode four and i say like oh i thought it was great like it's the same as all of them like does it but does anything happen because people are saying like it's a little slow and i It kind of happens at the same rate in every episode.

1:23:07But more importantly, it's just such a lovely place to hang out. It's beautiful. It's intriguing. It's chaotic. There's all these little vignettes. I don't need there to be some really major plot point. That's why Succession was such a hit. It was allowing people to be immersed in your everyday lifestyle. Exactly. I mean, White Lotus is basically about the Amman, right? Yeah. yeah like it's like the emmon hasn't actually yeah they haven't actually done it at an emmon yeah they've done it at four seasons i think it's that level of but but that's like the vibe and so it's a very funny like way to poke fun the the guy who wrote white lotus actually went to my high school mike white very cool yeah we should have him on talk about that'd be cool business of white lotus did you guys overlap no come on he's like 50 now or something like this guy's like a hollywood legend like he's not like yeah young okay okay and you think i'm anything i'm old but i'm not that old come on i mean all right he he directed school of rock which i'm sure you haven't seen but came out in like mid 2000s you know i've seen school of you see school that's a that's a okay yeah the the teacher in there based on my latin i actually so really yeah that's cool i would go to rock band camp every summer yeah and it was basically that what'd you play i would uh guitar and and i would sing oh really yeah that's cool yeah yeah can you can you blast like a lick on the guitar if you had like an electric guitar yes yes because we've been talking about soundboard maybe we just get you a guitar and like whenever we want a sound effect i could actually have it just strapped up yeah yeah just like when a founder comes on and they're they were interviewing them and you just want to play the you know i have a size gong i play the gong on this show you play the guitar i had one one moment that i'll always remember we do this rock band camp and there's all this prep and then at the end of the summer you play this like live performance for all of your extended you know all the other kids in camp and all this stuff with your band of five people and our lead singer i was a backup singer our lead singer didn't show up yeah for the perform like got cold feet because it was this big group and i had to like go founder mode for the band I had to sing it, but it was like, it was like a foreign person singing like Western karaoke.

1:25:24It was just like the right sounds, but like, I just like, didn't, I didn't, you know, it was like five minutes beforehand that I was picking it up. Oh, well, yeah. I think we need a guitar on set. No, I've been playing a lot of, uh, I've been playing a lot of, uh, uh, like dinosaur themed renditions of like picture, like John Mayer meets dinosaurs playing it for my son. Yeah, that's great. Uh, they've been hits. Do you know enough power chords just to jam and it sounds vaguely like Blink-182 or something like that? Yeah, yeah. You know how you know the basic and then you can just work it together?

1:25:53That's great. Like the Suzuki method, more or less. Yeah. Yeah. I play piano, but I only learned how to play the sheet music, so I need to see exact notes. You got too into the symphony, so for you it was more euphoric to just be immersed in it versus to even play the notes yourself. Exactly. You could have been a conductor. I mean, great. I mean, I named my dog after a conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. really yeah that's great his instagram handle is real gustavo dudamel it's great yeah and people get confused often john's dog had more followers than me and the conductor of the he used to be the conductor of the lfl gustavo dudamel is aware of the dog because people will see the dog because the dog has like almost as many followers as the actual conductor because i grinded up the account to like 20k and and and the conductor has like had like a hundred at the time and so like people would like let him know and we were all in la so we'd run into people and be like oh yeah like that's the dog i'm friends with the conductor yeah what do you ever say what do you ever say i'd love to have your i'd love to have your dog gustavo in attendance yes we considered we considered bringing him we had season tickets for a while we got to go back it's right down the street from the capital of capital the forces of finance disney hall i think i think we both came to the conclusion that this uh this next boy's trip this article is not that interesting it's not that interesting i agree anyway let's move on to some posts some timeline and some ads of course i know that's what you've really been waiting for the advertisements just because it's a dom episode means doesn't mean we're not gonna do some ads come on people uh tyler says this is a really deep understanding how vc works tweet the headline is cursor raises hundreds of millions at 10 billion.

1:27:38Are these investors visionary or crazy? That is because we intuitively assume that those investors lose money if cursor is ultimately worth less than 10 billion. But that's not true. They just don't make money. To get to the point where investors actually lose money, the company's valuation needs to fall below the amount raised. So if you're investing in this round, here are your outcomes. Cursor exits at greater than 10 billion, you make money. Cursor exits at greater than 300 million to 10 billion, you get your money back. Cursor exits at under 300 million, you lose your money. From a decision-making perspective, that changes the discussion from is this worth 10 billion to what is the likelihood that this is worth 20 to 50 billion in a few years?

1:28:23And to be clear, that's good. I think it's a very good thing for us to have risk capital that is both clear-eyed and focused on the potential for growth. And then there's some there's some assumptions here. What'd you think, Jordy? Why'd you like this? It's a good breakdown of the cursor deal. I mean, I'm not sure a lot of people know about press, but you can break it down. Founders understand this because they've run the calculus where they're like, if I, I mean, Jeremy was on last week and was talking about this. They don't usually run the calculus until series A or B. Yeah. I find. No, but I mean, they intuitively understand, okay, you raise $10 million.

1:28:56You got to return that for$10 million. You're going to make$0. Yep. and jeremy talked about this last week talking about founders that have 10 million of arr but they raised 200 million dollars and they're growing at 30 which means that they could grow for another five years sell the company and still make zero dollars right unless you get really creative like there are plenty of stories with aqua hires where the the investors get hosed and the founders get really like egregious pay packages yeah at big companies and a lot of found a lot of funds are really upset by that depending on their structure some funds don't care because they're like yeah yeah like oh okay yeah we wrote down 10 million whatever yeah like we're we're just happy for you to go on to the next thing call us when you leave and get your earn out and do the next thing yeah um but but it's all back on one trip but it's delicate it is it is risky and yeah and and usually usually i would say it's it's the employees that are most frustrated by that because they're like structure they're not well sure but i'm just saying uh i know a situation of a very high profile company that sold in 2021 and the the price of the acquisition was like way too low for the traction of the company yep but the ceo got this like ridiculously large like incentive package at the new company and all the ceos like didn't even get all the employees most of the employees didn't get the opportunity to join the inquirer and so they were frustrated because they're like we worked all this time for this equity and then yeah you you are the only one that got the everyone just has to feel like it's fair yeah and and there but i thought this was worth i thought this was worth highlighting of people like everybody's trying to pick apart oh is cursors revenue durable it's it's so easy to switch off yeah you've got yc partners like promoting windsurf sure all this stuff and this is the right framework to be you know it sounds like thrive and kushner yep are doing this new round hasn't been formally announced yet but it's not so crazy to price it that way and it's possible that cursor i would imagine cursor's in a position where they don't need money so they saying if you want to own a piece of this company you got to pay this is the case and if you're investing in this company and you think you could get a two or three x on this if you're putting in 300 million dollars it's a great it's a great it's not necessarily a slam dunk grand slam venture return but you're going to return potentially hundreds of millions of dollars off of a single investment and it's and and your downside is is relatively protected if you think that cursor in a bare case scenario could sell for 300 million dollars and i would and i would argue that i would argue that there's a lot of companies on earth that even if cursors revenue dropped dramatically they would say we'll pay 300 million dollars because you have great tech and we can integrate it you want a new github copilot yeah 2.0 basically yeah yep there's a bunch of scenarios where it could work out you know if they're just printing money and they just keep growing the business and they get to high ebitda like they can't trade it you know i don't know 10x ebitda and get up to yeah you know a couple hundred million in ebitda and be good yeah right it's not that crazy uh and then yeah also all like every hyperscaler might need something that looks like this if they're doing a lot of development or running a, you know, you think like this could fit into AWS and the AWS tech stack.

1:32:17It could replace GitHub and be GitHub 2.0 or Copilot 2.0. I don't know. It's certainly a high valuation, but exciting for the team that built it. Very cool. We won't know the truth. I mean, it feels like a size going moment. Size going moment. Let's give a cheers for the cursor team. Let's down this, Jordy. Come on. Down it? I don't know. I'm going to keep nursing it here. The brother. Well, let's go to Flo. Okay. Peer pressure. Do it. Great. Flo Crevelio says, just bought 50 ,000 flower seeds on Amazon and going to throw them all over the place in San Francisco. Just a heads up, in case you're wondering why everything is suddenly so fragrant and beautiful, it'll be me.

1:32:59It'll be all me. Amazing. I put this in for you, John. This is very Coogan coded. Totally. This is what you live for. Yes. We want to elevate people that are making the world a more beautiful place, whether you are making, putting flowers everywhere or putting up swings everywhere. Yes. You know, go repave the road. Yeah. If you're upset with the road in front of your house, just hire private contractors. Do it yourself. Do it yourself. Get some cement out there. Do it. No, I think smell is underrated in terms of the evaluation of a particular neighborhood. could uh i've noticed that beverly hills smells very nice but deafening noise pollution from all the lamborghinis and yeah and uh m5 competitions you might have something to do with that yeah uh no it's a lot of it's a lot of kids clearly driving like exorbitant sports cars yeah it's their daily driver to school the gt3 rs and i do think yeah i mean we were talking about the epa earlier maybe we do need uh you know some some quiet modes yeah but if you can put up enough flowers on either side of the road and and deafen that do gmo flowers to get them yes that'd be great they could really dampen yeah yeah yeah or uh or or maybe just you know upgrade from the the event doors and the huracans to 19 spiders because it's a hybrid you can drive in electric only mode that's that's great a lot of the new hypercars supercars they have an electric drive chain so they're hybrids so you can drive them quietly until you get up into the canyons nobody cares yeah then you can rip uh thank you flo for your for your work thank you flo i'm excited to see how that pans out visit sf and see the flowers uh let's go to kyle harrison with some news uh service titan is at a 7.95 billion market cap uh this is an eight billion dollar company that started as software for garage door repair people.

1:34:49Tam is almost always a terrible reason to pass. So a little lore for you. In college, I wanted to move to LA. I was working on what became my first company. And I was barely making money at the time. I was making like a couple grand a month. And it was like senior year. I was like, I don't know if I can actually sort of scale this to the point where I can like pay for rent and food and all this stuff. So I interviewed at Service Titan. First interview went well. Second interview thought it went well. They rejected me. And I'm sure I would have done actually very well if I'd, I mean, obviously I wouldn't have stayed.

1:35:26In the wage cage? In the wage cage. No, just financially. Just financially if I just stayed there. But I won in the end because that turned, you know, what I was working on turned into a business that, you know, does millions of dollars in revenue to this day. So, um, you're lost service Titan. Uh, but I'm glad though I'm glad they are building, you know, great software for garage door repair. And I believe they're in LA here. Uh, they are in Glendale. So right around the corner and great name, like really aggressive name. I love it. Anyway, let's move on to an ad. We get an ad from ad quick out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

1:36:03Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go. Get yourself a billboard on AdQuick. Okay, so speaking of ads, Ted Turner, founder of CNN, started by running his father's out-of-home ad business. It was basically like AdQuick, but they owned. Easy there, John. But instead of AdQuick, doesn't own the underlying inventory. There's sort of software layer on top of it. but Ted Turner's dad had started an out-of-home advertising network that Ted Turner took over.

1:36:42And the reason I know that is because I was listening to the Founders Podcast episode this morning because Reggie posted about Ted Turner on Friday. And Reggie had said, and this post analysis is brought to you by AdQuick, obviously. He says, I've been researching the 80s a bit as a comparison for viewing the world today. I feel like Ted Turner is such an interesting character. founder of CNN, which was the start of the 24-7 news cycle. We restarted it for tech. Genuinely a futurist in many ways. My favorite quote from him, we won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on and we will cover the end of the world live.

1:37:21And that will be our last event. But the thing is, he actually made a video made for the last broadcast ever known as the Turner Doomsday video. It was leaked by an intern and posted on that's amazing we gotta watch that we should make our own doomsday video we should and it's just us popping hundreds of bottles not even drinking them just saying hey we had the stockpile it's the doomsday we don't need it anymore yeah what an interesting thinker to do that i wonder if there's anyone else who's filmed a doomsday video in tech that hasn't leaked like is there a zuck doomsday video or elon doomsday video or sam altman doomsday video it's out there brothers if you're an intern go find it and leak it put it on youtube please yeah we'll we'll cover your cost of living until you can get rehired by you know uh the next bean air that you're going to leak their doomsday video that's great uh let's move on to antonio garcia martinez the hardest to acquire and most exclusive watch in the collection almost three years in the making and says thank you for being a part of the base team this custom seiko watch designed by our creative team honors precision reliability and motion qualities that define base and drive us forward it's automatic movement winds with every step a symbol of the momentum we're building together here's to the work we've done and to 2025 it's time to bring the world on chain that's great i love it inspired by do we still have oh the xl watch that said it's time to oh it's time to create shareholder value yeah yeah it's time to bring the world on chain yeah yeah Yeah, a timepiece is great.

1:38:51No, I was wondering. Underrated merch for sure. We got to ask Quaid at Bezel. Was this factory or is this they just bought it and then they just redid? I don't know. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you can swap out the dial and just kind of upgrade that. But of course, go to getbezel.com. Get a luxury watch. Get a Seiko. Get a Grand Seiko. Get anything. Get an FP joint. we've been looking at we've been looking at uh pot tech uh chronograph stopwatches oh yeah because we want something time the show we want to top time the show and just looking at your computer clock over 20 000 luxury watches fully authenticated by bezel's in-house team highly recommend installing the app surfing finding something great to add to your collection in Tahoe this weekend saw a lot of Apple watches.

1:39:40It really, really harshed the mood, I would say. Yeah. It would be much better to see something more fitting of that echelon of society. Yeah, if you're skiing too, where are your nicest watches? What do you need an Apple watch for? When I was in Switzerland just before New Year's, I saw a guy that just got back from skiing and he took off his gloves and he had this like, I think it was the orange aquanaut that Alex Carp rocks. And I was like, that's great. You know, go out skiing. I love it. You know, with a six figure watch on. Shows confidence in your abilities. It's great. Where is this second post?

1:40:29We got a lot of posts in here. We got to go through. Let's just do this one. Mount Rushmore at sunset. Let's go. I just wanted to celebrate Mount Rushmore at sunset. Here we go. I got it. Is this, is this a real picture? It almost looks. Oh yeah. Yeah. Generated. It is. Do you have this one, Ben? But we got it. We, we, we, we got to make a new Mount Rushmore. We got to need more monuments. A lot. We got to do. We, where's your Rushmore? We got to do a statue of Liberty on the East coast. What was it? Statue of justice on the West coast. replace uh alcatraz with a massive statue i love mount rushmore you've been i haven't been we should go we should we should set up so i'd really like to get a a mobile studio but like set up more like one of those phone phone booths where the truck like drops it off and then leaves so we're just sitting there right in front of mount rushmore recording with a nice view of it be great um and uh if the police come we'll just lock the doors and just keep podcasting as long as we have an internet connection yeah i mean yeah just so cool to go blow up some mountains and make some make some faces so much fun anyway uh the story that i want to talk about was orca orca is an energy water uh launched by this guy michael moriati 13 months ago he put up this idea and it's now live and available 150 milligrams of caffeine zero calories zero sugar uh and he posted 13 months four failed production runs and more stress than we ever imagined all for the clear can worth it question mark and uh gift of trees to be clear we covered this last week uh oh last week this remember this is launch video of the guy from high school musical that was just reading out the signs.

1:42:21Very creative. Very creative. Very fun. But he's getting dunked on here by gift of trees of draught of barrel. Doesn't sound like that person has a LinkedIn, but we'll read it anyway. The clear plastic PET beverage can patent was granted in 2015 to a Polish packaging manufacturing company. This dude did nothing but pay a beverage contract packer to license the patent and fill it with liquid designed in the co-packers lab. And yes, that is exactly true. that that's how you uh launch a new consumer package goods product these days you go to a co-packer have them uh make it he made the interesting choice of using the clear plastic can which i want to talk to you about because um on the one hand it really this really does stand out on the shelf and you could imagine seeing this and and it would just look different than celsius red bull uh you know monster where they're all aluminum cans but at the same time plastic could not be less cool right now so yeah what's your take so i've seen michael working on this for a long time yeah i think he's got good instinct and taste i think the marketing's been great i think the packaging looks cool i think the concept of just a clear ish energy water like energy water like conceptually yeah it's just cool as opposed to like this like and i do believe i do believe looking red bull yeah green and like it's like what am i drinking so energy water is super cool yep i do believe the actual formulation is difficult to get to the point where it's zero calorie and it tastes good and it's not filled with a bunch of exactly insane additives yep i looked at this entire thread gift of trees of draught of barrel by intractable lion yes uh and he's he's a massive hater against people that are not so so i actually looked at the backstory so he's a run cideries.

1:44:11Oh, yeah. Yes. So he restores these sort of legacy. Yep. uh, orchards. Yeah. That have been run down. And he and his wife. So it's like the most craft process, not even making the liquid, but making the barrel, making the trees, making the trees, sustaining the orchard. So, so he's a gift of trees and draw a barrel. Of course. The gift of trees. So I'd like to have this guy on the show to talk about the business of, of, uh, bespoke cidery. that sounds interesting but he's a huge hater on this guy michael for no reason yes i agree it's michael didn't say i invented the clear plastic no he said yeah if you're making a a caffeinated caffeine has a super bitter taste totally yeah you have to iterate on stuff you've got to iterate on it yeah it's a good thing that they didn't just use the first version yeah that they produced and so this this is actually a much longer thread where where gift of trees have drawn a barrel is just hating on this guy super hard.

1:45:10And I don't - It's like, just don't buy it. Yeah, yeah, just don't buy it. It's fine. You don't have to buy it. That's the beauty of capitalism. I think that Michael will be dramatically more commercially successful and Gift of Trees of Drought of Barrel is upset. I don't know about that. Is this really a long short trade right now? Who knows? Maybe they both are successful. I'm going long. Orca. Orca. I would not invest in Gift of Trees of Drought of Barrel. I don't know, man. I think there might be something to this. He scales this up. Maybe he starts putting the cider in plastic bottles. Yeah, maybe.

1:45:44Honestly, here's what I'd like to see. Collab. Work it out. Both come on the show. Yep. We'll negotiate. A JV. A joint venture. Yeah. And you guys can collab. You guys can collab. Maybe you can find success. Put the cider in plastic bottles. Exactly what the world needs. Bring the science project with the trad-based stuff together. It's a match made in heaven. Everyone can be happy. uh but michael does respond and he says i wish it had been that easy we didn't invent the can we spent 13 months figuring out how and who could actually fill them at scale at every step we were told just to switch to a normal can every canning line in the country is built for aluminum nothing was plug and play and so yeah like it is hard at work even to just put something in a can that exists or is patented because the manufacturing supply might not be there and and and this is the you know the the unfortunate like struggle and the schlep of getting a consumer product to market.

1:46:37I mean, I'm sure you went through it with Aurora where you're like, okay, there's like a million different manufacturing decisions to make and we want to maintain our brand values and what we're doing. And there's a bunch of trade-offs and stuff. I distinctly remember when my co-founders, Brian and Charlie, we got the visual that looked almost identical to this. And then there were still like 10 ,000 decisions to be made and both Brian and Charlie were just like, you know, incredibly in the weeds on every single one. Totally. They're all very high stakes and you know, there's so many small setbacks and things like that.

1:47:13So that's the beauty of the reason that beverage attracts so many sort of new entrepreneurs is that it's a super tangible idea of, I can see it in my head, I can put the right ingredients in the can and then I'm gonna sell it. And it's just so much harder. It's a widgets business. Yeah. But at the same time, for a long time, software was super high status because it was so complicated to understand C++ or Java or Python and deployment and AWS and servers and all this stuff. And now it's been like, oh, well, you can vibe code a flight simulator in a day, but it takes 13 months to put caffeine in a can.

1:47:50It's kind of weird, but we're kind of flipping, and this is like the bits and atoms thing. Bits just move faster. So good luck, Michael. send us send us some product you see this but i actually there's a um uh my wife invested in a company yeah uh that at like a like a five cap yep that put olive oil in a plastic bottle yep and it's up 50x uh in in like two something years great um and so just something as simple as you know as sort of in this case yeah novel product energy water in a new form in a new bottle it's very possible this is wildly successful it's funny seeing him gripe about production because wait until you try and go into retail buddy it's gonna be okay because you have to change everything no no no you're just saying retail generally oh yeah yeah yeah just like actually getting retail distribution on this is going to be a thousand times more frustrating not not that can't do it and it won't be difficult but it's going to be a lot more just unreasonable basically you have to pay us to put this on our oh totally like every deal is bespoke and you're competing with alani new and celsius and red bull and uh they all have monopolies and they all want hey we want to keep our yerba mate on the on the shelf and you're competing against every other company and and that's really where the game is won like graza the olive oil company has won because they're in every store now um it i'm sure they're doing great on e-commerce but uh That company is not a 50x return.

1:49:22They don't figure out retail and retail is hard and a schlep. And it's something that is probably going to be make these four failed production runs look like the easy mode. Anyway, good luck to you, Michael. And send us some. We'd love to. We'd love to try it. Should we go to Max Meyer? Before that, I'd like to do a promoted ad. Let's do it. So we have from Jose, high class and tasteful. and he doesn't even do any type of review he just does the headline which is high class and tasteful five stars and he jumps right into the ad which is very aggressive yeah what is this but potentially a smart move because most people have been putting it so he says variable and early stage company hq'd in dallas helps manufacturers scale efficiently with a flexible on-demand labor model this gives u.s manufacturers a competitive edge over china without relying on ai sweatshops or bloatware staffing platforms like traba hey taking shots mike's a friend of the show but um uh you know sometimes attack ads are are uh are effective uh variable optimize your labor eliminates low uh or ot work boost productivity and tracks key metrics visit variable ops.com and tell them to give jose a raise so he's just taking the initiative he's he's not the founder but he's getting out there.

1:50:42So, uh, I'm going to go there and just tell them to give Jose a raise, even though I don't think we're qualified unless we need to get, unless we need to get Ben. Yeah. We got to test drive that product. Ben, where are you? Um, oh, he's there. Um, and one more review while we're at it. This is hard power, soft beliefs in my review of technology brothers. TBPN is the seminal technology podcast of our day. John and Jordy exemplify the human desire to create and contribute to a product that is bigger than the self a devotion to the aesthetic and for that i'm grateful to the brotherhood this five-star review is brought to you by techno republic on x a new project that shares the best quotes and ideas from alexander carp's book the technological republic follow techno repub uh on x today to join your fellow brothers building the future of the west uh very cool i'm gonna go i'm gonna go follow this right now.

1:51:33Fantastic. And thank you for the review. While you're doing that, we'll move over to Max Meyer, also another publisher similar to Alex Garp, actually works with another Palantir co-founder over at ABC. Max Meyer says, airports these days are the perfect picture of American affluenza. The US upper-ish class has too much money, but never enough. Lots of suspicious pre-borders, teens in designer clothes,$500 headphones muttering what to flight staff. There are like 50 people in boarding group one now as well. You can see the confusion on people's faces who've clearly been boarding first for a while, who now wait 20 minutes standing just to have their spot in line.

1:52:18The lounges are overrun. And again, you can see the exasperation on the faces of people waiting for them, thinking they'd paid for a service and realizing that now it's like Disneyland. and prices across the board have gone up and demand keeps up. This is one of the main effects of mass affluence, I guess. Airline taxes are as high as ever. And as a result, actual budget flights, a la Ryanair, are not allowed. At this point, a budget flight is anything under$300. People are amazingly unforgiving. They get violent looks in their eyes when staff announce that overhead bin space will run out. For many flyers, being asked to check a bag is like being asked for one of their kidneys.

1:52:59So many people look at children like they're rodents that have infiltrated the house rather than our treasures and our futures. He's such a good writer. Parents are the scapegoat of every flight. Funny enough, the TSA feels like the one thing that has gotten better. Maybe I choose my airports and flying times well, but I don't remember the last time I waited more than 15 minutes to get through. Sometimes the clear line is comically longer than the regular line next to it. And for whatever reason, people will just not move over to the shorter line. It's pretty rare to see actual balling brawling, but you do hear about those things as a writer and chronicle of America.

1:53:36This entropy interests me. Uh, yeah. Interesting. Basically an ad for private jets. Uh, I completely agree with you, Max. Uh, everyone should be flying in a G650 ER ideally. Um, maybe, uh, we're going to have that. We're going to have that. Yeah. Super intelligence. Yes. That's one of the things Sam Altman's gone on record. He said. Exactly. If Mase is able to do this round. Post AGI. Everyone has a private jet, obviously. Yeah. So problem solved soon. Max, don't worry. Figure allegedly is training their robots to build PJs. Oh, that'd be great. Actually, you won't even need to. Yeah. And mine the ore needed to create the jet.

1:54:12Fantastic. So you buy your figure for 20 grand. Yeah. It'll actually build you a Gulf Stream. And that's coming in 12 to 18 months, right? right? Yes. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Great. Just, just after the IPO. Yeah. Just, just after the next fundraise. Yeah. It'll be here. Great. Yeah. Uh, well, that's fantastic. Um, let's move on. Avi Schiffman back on the show. We got to have him on live soon. He says companies should shut down when the founder leaves. Pretty good take. Uh, yeah. I mean, Ben Thompson has an interesting take on this. And they should, if the founder passes away, they should just, it should shut down in solidarity.

1:54:51In solidarity? Yeah. Dead man switch. If I die, my company goes with me. No, I mean, Ben Thompson has a take on this, which is basically like, companies do not need to go on forever. So it's actually okay for a company to be in kind of its late stage and just dividend all the profits until it's done. This is kind of what's happening with the cigarette companies. Literally, new smokers are not emerging. The market is shrinking. They just increase the price on the reducing customer base. And over time, they make the same amount of revenue, but their cash flows are steady. And so they're just going to like whittle down basically.

1:55:23And they all have plans of like, oh, we'll get into the new markets. But none of them are doing that well in the new alternative market. And so a lot of people are just like, well, they dividend a lot. They pay out. And so, you know, if you have, you know, Altra is a$100 billion company. if you invest right now and you get 150 billion dollars in cash returned to you over the next five years or something like that could be a good that could that could be a good deal even if it's even if the value of the stock is zero at the end like it's fine yeah so i i think i think i think avi dropping these uh they're thought provoking totally and i think there's some value to that Yeah, it's fun.

1:56:04Good poster. Tim Sussman says, we invested in a YC startup a week ago. Their revenue growth was so high, it would have been crazy to ignore it. Just saw them in alumni demo day. They doubled their revenue in the past week. Let's go. That's exciting. Hit it. Oh, yeah. And a cheers. Let's size gong that. Let's cheers the Dom Perignon. And we have some YC news that we'll be sharing. We will be at demo day in just a few days. I was going to say we're going to share it tomorrow. we'll be there. We're going to announce what we're going to be doing there tomorrow, I guess. But let's move on to windsurf sharing a video from YC from their light cone podcast, Jason.

1:56:49So windsurf says not every day you wake up to a shout out from Y Combinator. Jared Freeman explains why founders are switching to windsurf. Is windsurf a YC company or are they just like loved by YC? I don't know. What's the figure? The fact that the partner was coming out and taking such a strong stand. Makes you think. Anyway, Jason Lemkin says, Brutal competition always comes to software. Partners become competitors. Collaborators compete. Usually it takes a few years, though, to get real. AI is accelerating at the pace an order of magnitude in coding and contact center already. Huh. I can't really understand that.

1:57:29Will it do the same to your category? Interesting. So we have, I mean, I don't even understand why I'm saying that - I mean, there's just like layers and layers to this fight right now. There's like the cursor versus windsurf debate, but then there's also the cursor versus Claude Code debate that's happening. Yeah. Will it all commoditize? Who knows? Yeah. Anyway, a lot of gills in the gundo wondering if he should get some curls and zen in. He also really wants a mustache. This place may have changed me forever. I like, I love when a new size Lord capital allocator takes the gundo tour. You know, Augustus took them around.

1:58:17I'm sure. Yeah. Introduce him to everyone else. Uh, little bit of a controversial post because he spells Zinn wrong. It's Z Y N. He said, and also in the gundo man, I mean, this is like, you know, highest penetration place in the world for Lucy. So Zinn's kind of out there. Got to get on the next generation of products when it comes to nicotine. But, um, you should do some curls and some bench press and you should, uh, you know, basically just wind down your podcast, become a size Lord, become a mass monster and go for your IFBB pro card. Uh, I've met you once and I think you have it. It's got what it takes.

1:58:54I think you get diced, get big and do the, the, the Mount Rushmore or the West. Yes. Next topic. Uh, my, uh, dear friend, my oldest friend, um, called me last night, like long after I went to bed, I go to bed very early. So I saw it this morning and he just joined the chat on YouTube and said, Hey, Jordy, he just called me and I told him I'm, I'm live right now. I can't talk. And he said, uh, in the chat, uh, I wanted to let you know, I got engaged. So congratulations. Let's cheers to Cody and his lovely fiance, uh, Emily. And, um, uh, congratulations, Cody. I love you. And, uh, if we ever need a financial model, he is the guy to go to right now we're just sort of vibe coding our finance but um absolute finance chad and uh congratulations well speaking of your early bedtime we are sponsored by aid sleep nights that fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience go to aid sleep.com slash tbpn and upgrade your sleeping experience i was miserable the last two nights honestly at the Ritz Carlton, which not a bad hotel.

2:00:07They don't have eight sleeps and it was miserable. It was not a fun experience. It really does ruin every other bed. So get one, never travel ever again and just stay in your eight sleep forever. It truly is unbelievably good. It's so good. We highly recommend it. Check it out. Anyway. This morning, it was, so I woke up. Yeah. 4.45. Yeah. It's effectively 345, according to my brain. Yeah. It's completely, it's the dead of night. Yeah. And you know what I thought to myself? What? I thought, thank God for 8sleep.com slash tbpn. Yes. Where anybody can get$400 off at 8sleep. Yes. And get to experience the sort of warm, warming effect in the morning.

2:00:56It really makes waking up so easy. It's crazy. And the vibration alarm clock. I don't do that one. you gotta try it you gotta try it yeah it's subtle i've tried it i i just the warm works for me it's subtle um and uh it is a good option it's fantastic it's great well anyway go check it out uh let's move on to the optify kids this is the uh yc company that was canceled briefly but they're back uh they created uh sweatshop software essentially uh that was the critique of them but they leaned in they went direct and they printed t-shirts that say justice for worker 17 and spore says the optify kids are going to be all right they're having fun with it they clearly realized that their first message didn't resonate they turned it around and i cannot wait to talk to these guys because i think they're having fun and i love it yeah we're going to talk to them wednesday yep it was great so uh love love justice for worker 17 uh creating a lot of fun on the timeline a lot of a great meme and uh still just so funny that that happened all the back and forth yeah but they had a good time and i think they i think this is the right way to handle it they they didn't put out some groveling post saying like we're sorry oh they just like they they kind of took a breather i think if anything it will be helpful because every investor at the very least will want to talk to them i'm listening novelty at this point for the novelty of talking to the yeah the legends that made that video.

2:02:25Yeah, the legends. And I mean, we talked about this before. Like, there's so many things that you could tweak in that presentation and that software that would be beneficial. And I mean, they created such a meme that someone built an Optify clone for PMF or die, which is fully functional, fully functional. You can go to PMF or die dot XYZ and see the productivity of the two guys that are in the cage right now, Blake and Patty. And so you can check it out. And it's hilarious that somebody built that so fast. but I mean it helps when they're live streaming constantly. Anyway let's move on to another YC founder and alum one of the legends Emmett Shear.

2:03:03He says when I was CEOing at Twitch one of the things I do every batch of interns was a very short presentation on the origins of the company and then a Q &A. One of the questions is always where should I work and what job should I get or should I start a company and he goes on to say it's an interesting question to try and answer for an intern, I didn't really know because of course the actual answer is dependent on that person and their life. So I decided, so I had to figure out how to articulate the framework I used. First, there's money. Obviously you want money, but money is well known for diminishing returns, debatable.

2:03:37After you have enough for rent and food and so on, then, so you don't want to optimize for cash. It's more of a constraint. Then there's prestige. How much will getting this job impress people? Prestige is mostly a trap for the same reason, designer clothing brands are bad deals. Also debatable. Brand might make something less discerning. People think better of you, but it won't actually make you better or better off. Power is also on offer, usually called impact and the chance to make a difference or mission. We like power because it feels good to wield the pure joy of throwing a stone in the lake and watching it splash.

2:04:11And we need Evan to write a book. Yeah. I mean, he's a great writer and really great points. What is your framework when someone asks you, where should I work or should I start a company? So general advice, generalized advice is probably one of the most dangerous things in the entire world. Yep. There's nothing. Yes, you can get advice and try to kind of general advice from somebody that you don't know. The exception is everyone should have an eight sleep. Everyone should buy a watch on bezel. Everyone should be on public. Yeah. Everyone should be on ramp. But I hear your point. Yes. and obviously advertise on that quick.

2:04:46But obviously. No, this is the thing. To me, the most important thing you can do in your 20s is develop a meaningful enough relationship with smart enough people whose lives you admire and only get advice from them. Like David Senra and Sean Frank are like two of the only people on earth that aren't immediate family or you that, or Ben, our lovely producer, Ben. but in general like I only take sort of professional advice from a couple people in the world because they understand my values they know the things that I care about they know what I want to optimize for they know all these things and they are have a unique and earned perspective and so it's much better to have you know one or two people and and only get sort of professional advice from them and that is the thing that has served me the best in life the best career decisions that I've made were in response to people like Sean Frank's advice, people like, you know, David Center's advice, and I can kind of pinpoint even the conversation.

2:05:48So start a podcast. Yeah. Like, like, um, I think if you had a strong personal relationship with Naval, I'm sure he could give you really, really, really good advice, but just blanket, you know, taking his advice, like you should work like a lion. And then somebody like works hard for two days, two days off. Like, don't do that. You know, like you need to sort of like take it and process it. And then ideally get the same advice from somebody that actually knows. Well, I threw this post in here randomly, but it seems like an answer to Emmett Shear's post from Guillermo Rao over at Vercel. He says, in a world of infinite possibility, the alpha is in focus, quality and depth.

2:06:28And that feels like the right level of like meta advice that that is almost safe to apply to everyone. It's not go work at this specific company. Except if you're an investor and you're like, oh, I'm really into games. And then somebody pitches you a CRM and then it becomes Salesforce. Yeah. It's like you took the advice of like, I'm just going to fall. So again, you can always apply these things. Focus quality and depth. Does that keep you from investing in Salesforce? Yeah, because you're saying I'm going to be the best. I'm going to be the best investor. You're too focused. But like, I'm going to deliver the best returns and I'm just going to focus on, Well, it depends on what you're focusing on.

2:07:03You could be focusing on founders, right? Quality of businesses. Like it doesn't necessarily need to be something as narrow as, I mean, focusing on a specific company or specific niche. Yeah. You could be focusing on an axiom of investing. But yes, I hear your point. Interesting. Well, let's go to another post about being young and doing great things. Gabriel says, the only thing stopping me from doing great things when I was young was that I thought I was a moron and there were too many people smarter than me. I still do. The only difference is that I realized everyone else is a moron as well.

2:07:37It's kind of a midwit meme. Yes. It was actually a huge unlock when I... Yes. When I realized the bell curve of people is not that wide and being economically productive seems to come from what thoughts and insight about the world rather than genes. Interesting. Not a good one. Did we talk about ServiceNow at all? I don't think we have. ServiceNow is buying moveworks the ai platform for almost three billion dollars they were backed by bane size gong kleiner for the shareholders and bane and light speed and kleiner and their lps yeah great moment great moment great exit uh service now is a company that i just don't know anything about i mean honestly when we put this in the stack i was like i kind of got them confused with service titan yeah yeah service titan like we're doing two stories on the same thing and this is 160 60 billion dollar company.

2:08:27But this one's much bigger than Service Titan. Service Titan's what? 8 billion? It's a cloud computing platform for the creation and management of automated business workflows. Let's go. Buying a platform called Moveworks. Gundo bros hate this. Hate this one weird trick. Yeah. Make$100 billion building B2B SaaS. Augustus. The haters. Somebody needs to do a wellness check on Augustus Dorico right now. Yeah. Because. Honestly, somebody should go and do like a content warning, like tell Augustus, hey, don't listen to this episode. Minute, hour, two and a half. Trigger warning, Augustus. Trigger warning, yeah, that's it.

2:09:02They're talking about service now. Be careful. You're going to be super depressed when you hear how much money people are making automating business processes. Yeah, well, that's the thing. Some people wake up and from a young age, they know they want to live a life that allows them to deliver value through automating business processes using AI. yeah that's just beautiful yeah that's their icky guy yeah it's their life's work they're live players my icky guy is automating business processes you're laughing but it's true it's real some people love this and bill for it it's great anyway um if you want to get on on service now on the action head over to public.com investing for those who take it seriously they have multi-asset investing industry leading yields they're trusted by millions of course this is not financial advice but it is the preferred platform of the technology brothers so go check it out uh anyway let's move on to former brother of the week justin mayors profiled in none other than forbes our favorite publication that we never say anything negative about we love forbes here uh that's right eight years of hard work and justin and kettle and fire have been featured in forbes congratulations to be clear this this was not a contributor piece that you know you can basically get for 20 bucks this was a cover story cover story daily cover story let's go um beautiful picture of justin it shows uh yeah looking looking fantastic and a bunch of the brothers in the community quoted this and said nice things about him.

2:10:46But I just liked The Boy Who Sold Soup. The Boy Who Sold Soup. That is so good from John Fiel. Oh, my God. The Boy Who Sold Soup. Incredible read. So good. Here's the thing, though. Justin is incredibly hardworking and kind. Yeah. It's fantastic. There's a reason he's a former brother of the week. Yes. And I, you know, some people have said to me, they don't know when I'm being sarcastic or when I'm being serious, not being sarcastic right now. Incredible human. And I'm lucky to call him a friend. Yeah. And I can't wait for our episode on Thursday when Justin joins. We're going to be talking about the hot topics in consumer health.

2:11:28We'll talk about who's making money on Maha. Yeah. I'm excited about. Yeah. What what the vibes are like at Mar-a-Lago where he's been spending time. It's great. um uh of course the of course the bone broth empire yeah he's built he made his money he's basically built a um almost like i don't even say this ironically he almost has a monopoly on the bone broth market he really does because it's actually how much money is he making jordy a hundred a year let's go a hundred million dollars that's their run rate i think they're probably well uh that was when whenever you know i think they're probably well beyond that now it's a fantastic business he's a fantastic entrepreneur um we got a fantastic post from bucko capital bloke and i'm going to read this dude it's jevin's paradox it's literally bemal's cost disease a classic example of gal man's amnesia effect oh that's the monty hall problem it's orthogonal to dutch disease it's a prisoner's dilemma you're a prisoner you're in prison you're in prison you're in prison you're in prison it's great mental models trapped in the a mental model, trapped in a framework.

2:12:35I can't get out. Absolute banger. He's had some great posts today. While we're at it, I'm going to pull. He was talking about the Redfin acquisition, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that's the bottom of the stack. The bloke was... Says Redfin got acquired today. Shout out to their CEO for one of the wildest things I've ever heard on an earnings call. The analyst on this earnings call for Redfin says, what if mortgage rates don't come down? Of course, this would be harmful to Redfin's business because they buy and sell homes. And when mortgage rates go down, people buy a lot of homes. And Glenn, the CEO says - Which is a public company CEO.

2:13:15Do we need to censor any of this? I don't think so. Glenn says, will drink our own urine or our competitor's blood stay in the foxhole? No, he says, great question. Plan B is drink our own urine or our competitor's blood stay in the foxhole. I don't know if you remember but our last earnings call ended with a single line from a who song won't get fooled again where I said we're not banking on low rates when other people had thought they might come down I don't know weird go Glenn he got out he sold the company congrats to Glenn congrats size gong for Glenn and yeah I love a I love a I love a CEO dropping a hot take on an earnings call real you know don't have a lot of time to post when you're running a public company you got to get those bangers out in the earnings call than the analyst asks that's crazy they were they were trading yeah what was worth uh zillow competitor right oh wow they were trading at like a quarter of their revenue rough yeah yeah tough tough go um anyway but they got out yeah they got out uh let's move on to blake anderson he's locked in the cage right now but he says 10x will be a hundred million dollar company within one year.

2:14:27He's manifesting. What's their ARR right now? They haven't launched yet, so they're still at zero, but they haven't spent much money. They're only a couple weeks into the cage, and their goal, of course, is to hit$1 million in ARR in 90 days, and he's very confident about that, and he's confident that he will take it further, take it all the way to$100 million. All the way. So good luck to Blake. If you want to go check out what he's doing, go to pmfradie.com. anyway let's move on to uh oh josh wolf he says uh incredible leadership in the united arab emirates as a husband to a super successful feminist in a male-dominated world and father to two bold daughters raised by my sacrifice at all single mom and grandma women have more rights in the uae than some u.s states he's clearly fundraising but i just want to take a second to say.

2:15:16The UAE is one of the greatest innovations in human rights in the world. And I think that everyone needs to acknowledge that at this point, everything in the Middle East is fantastic. And I can't say enough good things. And I really hope that everyone in the Middle East can come together and support American financial markets more aggressively than ever before. What do you think, Jordy? I agree, John. Fantastic. Absolutely. Let's move on to Gary. You're not beating the fundraising allegations. Will started a rumor mill last week when he said he was leading around in TBPN. There had been rumors that we had been in the Middle East.

2:15:56And so you're not really helping the rumor mill, John. But anyways, back to the show. We do what we have to do. Did you hear about the Simpsons producer who was forced to demolish his 24-year-old Simpsons inspired tree house after the city of LA demanded he permit it like a single family dwelling. Gary Tan says deregulate housing. Yes, in my backyard. And yeah, I couldn't agree. It is post fires. It's more important than ever to reconsider how permitting is done. It's a tree house and they wanted it to be ADA compliant. So they wanted a wheelchair ramp into the tree house, which I think was probably impossible.

2:16:38So they made him tear it down. Very sad. And my problem with this is like, I am okay with housing regulations and rules around how you build things. Because you don't want someone building some massive structure that just falls over and destroys your house next to you. But you need high throughput approvals. And what I was kind of pitching was like, there should be a CAD plugin where you design your structure and at every moment it's running the algorithm to say is this approved or is this denied and then you can just see okay everything's green click print the plans go build it you're good yeah instead of a good point instead of oh we designed the blueprints and then we send them in and then month later it comes back and they have one tweak and then another month and just goes on back and forth and back and forth um and and it's very annoying and now is the time um to to fix housing and gary tan has been a very vocal voice for that so we love it we actually have a whole bunch of uh of gary tan posts here let's go to the next one um uh he's quote tweeting someone who says i uh so i just simply asked manis to give me the files oh we already talked about this um and uh and gary yeah he he this but he came to a similar conclusion which is all the alpha is in prompting custom prompting tool use and clever workflow and evals yeah um i can't wait for demo day i'm sure we're going to see a lot of people adopting similar approaches to Manus.

2:18:03Some people call it Manus. Some people call it Manus. Manus. The nominative determinism is that you will be hung by it. Yes. It's not great. Anyway, things got a little spicy with the Acquired podcast. They flew out to Taiwan. They interviewed TSMC founder Morris Chang. Legend. I've been calling for Morris Chang to go on Joe Rogan for years now. And it hasn't happened. We saw Zuck go on. We saw Peter Thiel go on. We saw Naval Ravikant go on. Marc Andreessen's been on. I wanted Morris Chang to go on Rogan. Didn't happen. But fortunately, the good folks over at Acquired Podcast got it done. They flew out there.

2:18:39They interviewed him. But Bunny Exchange, Gilbert says, TSMC is essentially the only trillion-dollar company in the world, not on the west coast of the United States. It is this incredibly important thing in the world. It's this unlikely success of grand scale. And Morris Chang cuts him off and says, unlikely in your opinion and gilbert says i mean you started when you were 56 there are many things and chang shines in again and says i'm not going to argue with you i merely asked it i merely asked as a point of curiosity i didn't think that it was unlikely bob i love it that's great go over to meet with a what 80 year old founder and he just tells you i never had a doubt in my mind not for a second not for a second so but i mean the the the acquired guys are doing fantastic interviews and they are i mean i hope this soundbite goes viral or like there's more soundbites from the morris chang uh interview that go viral because uh there's that famous uh jensen wong uh interview that they did where there's that clip that goes viral where they're like if you had to go back and you had to do it all again would you do it and he's just like no i wouldn't do it it's been too hard it's been too miserable i don't like it it's bad like but i'm here and check out my leather jacket yeah yeah it's a it's a very very very funny interaction and they're and they obviously do a ton of research on these companies so they show up extremely prepared and get great sound bites and so go check it out you can listen to the tsmc founder morris jang on the acquired podcast you can go to their youtube it's probably in their rss feed as well okay um one more post yep and then um and before we do that last post i wanted to share that's what you got to do before that next post i'm gonna stop myself at two because uh i haven't finished the bottle yeah there's no rule about a dom there's no rule about a dom episode uh let's go in the chat what do you think should yeah yeah let us in the chat um no but i wanted to uh give a quick shout out to wander okay number one place to book vacation rentals in the world they are more than vacation homes they are simply uh find Find your happy place.

2:20:50Start over. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views. We need the guitar for that. Yeah, we do. We do need the guitar. Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Jordy, do you have a link or a code? Yeah, you just have to go to wander.com slash TBPN. If you just create an account, they're going to give away a, I think it's like a four-ish night trip to someone in our audience. That's a long trip. That's nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Longer than I was in Tahoe. So go do it. It takes a second.

2:21:24You can use Google or any other login, and you'd be silly not to. And invite us. Maybe we'll come. That sounds great. We rarely leave the house except to do the show. But if you book one that has a podcasting room, we'll be there. Yeah. Fantastic. Let's go to Gabe. Tech guys take up a creative hobby because they want to prove they are insold, unlike all other tech guys and then they end up taking uh and then they end up with the exact same hobbies as all other tech guys which are making electronic music and photography bodied i do know some tech guys that have taken up electronic music and photography yep but that's why we advocate for nurburgring bodybuilding mma mma long distance rifle shooting watch making most dangerous game uh car collecting even even if you don't want to drive the cars fast just collect sailing alone across the pacific ocean that's right these are hobbies that will differentiate you if you're looking for something you're not going to become glorious and remembered in the trenches of edm and photography carve your own mount rushmore yes in the marin uh highlands uh highlands yes i agree just do it someone says want to go bouldering and gabe says I will not do this.

2:22:42Very popular hobby. But yeah, get out there. Get deep in some rabbit holes on YouTube. Find an obscure hobby. And that's right. Really, really deep. Watch collecting. Go to bezel. Start collecting watches. It's much better than photography.

2:22:58Anyway, Lancier Angus says, you think cursor's growth is crazy. There's a company in this YC batch that hit$50 million in annualized profit in two months. What do you think, Jordy? Annualized profit. It's a weird, weird stat, right? Yeah. Because if you're making that much money, you should probably hire and scale the team and sort of spend, you know, like, I don't know. Yeah. Annualized profit. It's like, did you make, is that like one good day? It'd also be hilarious if it was, yeah, it was one good day. One hour. No payroll expenses hit. It was just pure play. Pure profit that day. I mean, it's still impressive.

2:23:37It's still impressive. I'm sure it's a great company, but it is funny that we're now talking about annualized profit, which is not like really a thing. Cash balance over time is what matters. But if you're making so much profit and you need to manage your expenses, you got to go to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I really hope that YC company signs up for ramp. And if we meet them, we will definitely be pitching them ramp. Anyway, We should have an iPad where anybody that comes that we run into, we just sign them up for ramp.

2:24:12Yeah. Oh, that'd be great. It's more of a public service than a sales activity. It's sales motion. Yes. Yes. Let's go to Richard Crabe. Very fascinating poster. Doesn't post very often. Do you know this guy? John has insane podcasters high right now because you're like, this is the last post. Oh, what were you talking about? I never agreed to that. you still have the champagne you haven't finished let's keep going what do you do the rest of the day nothing you're posting you're podcasting let's keep going we literally only have six posts left we can get through this we're good we're good i'll skip some of these some of these are repeats too we'll skip stick with us folks we'll skip save john save the best for last okay um we'll skip this one we'll skip this is a duplicate uh yeah let's just let's just let's his clothes out of richard crape very interesting poster he only pops up when something big is happening in the market he runs a a hedge fund uh numeri and he said he woke up today wondering how leopold oschenbrenner situational way situa situational awareness hedge fund is doing and so uh do you know the story of leopold oschenbrenner is that the open ai he was an open ai he left he did a great podcast with dorkesh patel talked about uh scaling laws and basically predicted that if you scale out the AGI systems, it's going to get really, really crazy.

2:25:36Made a bunch of pivots away from the traditional AI safety arguments towards geopolitical relevance. The idea that these will be akin to nuclear weapons, very controlled. But I think what Richard here is saying that Leopold's bet was that situational awareness hedge fund, like go turbo long NVIDIA, basically. like like ai is the future and then of course like things are selling off right now and if you're levered long nvidia even if it's a good bet over the very long term you'd be in a rough spot timing and sizing exactly exactly um and so richard craves throw in some throwing some questions up on the timeline i thought i thought were interesting but good luck to leopold uh i'm a big fan of his podcast i thought it was very interesting anyway anything else you want to cover i don't know if this is somebody messing around okay it's not this is breaking news we got some personnel news what is this uh somebody on uh the chat oh you're talking big game about me going to okay we got breaking news jordy's oh we gotta do one more okay okay yeah did you finish you you didn't quite finish the bottle but that's all that's all you john so under the number not less than 10 minutes ago, he says, when's the next some personnel news should be a regular segment.

2:26:55And the answer is right now. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google is the new leader of relativity space. He's joining his CEO. This is 50 minutes ago. Um, that's incredible. And, uh, it says, I got an article here from ours. Technica, another Silicon Valley investor is getting into the rocket business. Everybody's getting into the rocket business. We've, we've, you know sketched out some designs we're exploring it but just to get some of our own low earth orbit satellites just to stream the show down um uh but uh apparently he's been quite involved over the past few months um and that he's been largely been bankrolling the company since the end of october dangerous position to get in when you are the lifeline of the company and the burn becomes your own personal expenses but if anybody uh can afford it it's schmidt um and it's not immediately clear why schmidt is taking a hands-on approach at relativity um and uh but but this article says it's one of the few u.s based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of spacex and its falcon 9 rocket so pretty wild.

2:28:10Anybody that wanted the Google founders to go back to Google. He's not a founder. He's a CEO. Crazy. CEO for a long time, but he was never founder of Google. That's wild. Exposed. But granted, I was a small child in that area. I mean, clearly, he grew the company. He's a fantastic executive, but uh technically not a founder but maybe that's a bull case because relativity has already been founded he comes in and if he can do what he did for google to relativity it's very bullish true i don't know uh and uh google is down five percent on the news after hours obviously not no no it is it is it is but it's because of the market yeah yeah this guy who hasn't been involved in the company in a decade.

2:29:04Former CEO. But that's the nature of some personnel news. Anything can happen in the market. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there's an argument. It's like, okay, Eric, such is so insane for Eric to join Relativity Space. Yep. And Eric's thinking is still embedded in this company. Yeah, yeah. Maybe the company's worth less. The fact that he's choosing to go back into the CEO role and he's not going back to Google, bear case, maybe. That's what you come here for. The worst financial advice you've ever heard. No, it's our job to give the worst advice so that nobody could ever say as a joke so nobody could ever say you guys are giving financial advice which we never do never have um anyways fun show today fun show i will make sure john finishes the dom i will make sure jordy finishes his dom i refilled it to the top to the top ridiculous for cheers to you john cheers to the great show This is our life's work.

2:29:59It is. Ikigai. Ikigai. And thank you everyone for watching. We will see you tomorrow. We have a big... We have a big week. Big announcement tomorrow morning. Big announcement tomorrow morning. If you follow us on X, get ready to repost, engage. Please, you'll know it when you see it. That is for sure. We'll see you tomorrow. See you tomorrow. Bye.