AI Rebuilt Every YC W26 Startup. Should Founders Be Scared? | E2271

26:44One bank. Wow. Got me. There it is. My bricks. And that's but one brick. That's one. That's a lot of bills. I mean, it's 5 ,000 bills. I didn't even know there were that many$2 bills still in circulation. I thought they were like a rare special thing. They still print them. They are rare. And I got them brand new from the mint in the plastic brick bag. Oh my gosh. Like you sometimes get when you go to Vegas and have a big win. As you can see, Donald Trump has signed them all for me. Of course. He's going on a bill, right? Donald Trump's picture. I think he's going on dollar bills. Anyway, the point of this is, it's the brown M &M's theory of the rider.

27:23Yes. Somebody put in their rider. Van Halen. Van Halen is the famous origin of this. In Van Halen's rider, they famously said, we don't like brown M &Ms. We want a big dish of M &Ms, but no brown M &Ms. And then that became like this, or was it green? It might've been green. I don't remember the color. At first, people thought this was like, oh, these rock stars, they're unbearable with their demands. But Van Halen later explained that, well, that was how they made sure that the people at the venue were actually reading the rider. If they came in, they saw the dish of M &Ms, it had the wrong color in it.

27:54They were like, these people did not pay attention to detail. Now we got to go check the lights. We got to go check the amps. We got to go check the instruments. We got to make sure, because now we know that these guys are not detail oriented. By the way, congratulations to the boys over at the Podcast Bros Network, TB... TBPN. Well, I just want to say congratulations to them. And they've apparently taken all ads off. Yeah. The show looks legitimately weird without the ad ticker. I said that. Yeah. So just, you know, we're sold out for years. We can start it for 15 years. That's what happens when you have a niche, you know, podcast that works.

28:30The B2B stuff works. But congratulations to them for going to OpenAI. There you go. Which is apparently hiring them to do their comms. Right. And Sam said, like, AI's got a terrible reputation, as we've talked about, ad nauseum with all these surveys. So I actually think if you look at what they did, they're extremely good at the vibes. Like, their vibe thing was, like, next level. It was all vibes. I mean, the only criticism of them was like, this doesn't feel like as substantive as other podcasts. And it's not hard-hitting by design. I think if you asked those guys, they would say like, no, they're not going after people.

29:07They don't want it to be mean or adversarial. It's about hanging out. It's more the cheeky pint than the information. And I think that's okay. It doesn't have to be there. Totally fine. And if they got 100, 200, 300 million, I was trying to explain this to people who are losing their minds. I saw Jessica Lesson from the information was kind of like a little tilted about it. That's a lot of money for any podcast. Even All In, that would be a lot of money. Well, no. All In makes a lot of money. $300 billion. I mean, All In would legitimately go for, you know, there's a case that All In could go for a billion dollars because it's transcended podcasting.

29:45It's events. It's other stuff, right? Yeah, yeah. And the influence level is insane. Like, it's nothing I've ever seen in media. Like, literally, like, the Rob Report would be, like, the JV version of All In, in terms of the leadership. I mean, one of you got a job in the White House. Like, I think that's all you're really— That's as big as a— No, two got a job in the White House. Three friends there, too, now, right? I think that's the upper limit for success with a podcast, is you actually go work for the presidential administration. If you've got an engineering team at your company, I'm betting there's a solid chance they're spending far too much time on infrastructure.

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31:01Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render startup program. You'll get anywhere from$500 to$100 ,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and who your backers are. That's render.com slash twist. So here's what I'll say. Weird things happen at the top of the bubble. That's all. And kudos to the boys over there for taking advantage of it. They knew, I'm happy for them. Congratulations. Weird things happen. It's an amazing thing for the whole podcast industry. During the peak of a bubble. And sometimes people pay, you know, two, three, four, five times what something's worth. If they were making 30 million.

31:37Speaking of - You know, in a media business, you're worth three times that. or 10 times the earnings, five times the top line, 10 times the earnings, 15 times the earnings, whatever. So let's say they were making 10 million in profits on 30 million or even 20 million in profits on 30 million. There's an argument they're worth 100, 200, 300, 5, 10, or 15 times the 20 million. Let them have it and let Sam overpay because if they make ChatGPT and OpenAI 1 % more likable, which is, by the way, that's a big task. It's a very unlikable firm right now. Well, yeah, and there's just so much. That's worth$10 billion.

32:14Yeah. I mean, that's what Jessica from the information, that was like her overall case was like, Elon has X as his public relations. Here's how I get my message out vehicle. And Sam felt like he didn't have one of those. And now he does. Now he's got these guys. The joke of that is, where's their viewership come from? Yeah. It's all X. Yeah. So, hilarious. I saw somebody say, can't wait for Elon to shadow ban these guys. Not that he would do that. Oh, I don't. And just negate the whole investment. All right, let's keep the show moving. Yes, please. I just wanted to give that little shout out to the boys and congratulate them.

32:50Congrats to TBPN. We've got another - Thanks for having me on, boys. Have they never had you on? They should have you on. I think they might have asked me early on, and I didn't know what it was. Right, yeah, yeah. Like an idiot, I didn't reply. But I don't do a - I mean, I do five podcasts a week. Yeah, people who want to hear from you have their own way to hear from you. Okay, up next, we've got another amazing founder. His company is Bordy. It's an AI principal. It's not just an agent, Jason. It's an AI principal that acts as a connector, introducing different people within the startup ecosystem, investors, founders, talent.

33:21Let's bring him on, Andrew D'Souza. We're here to talk about Bordy, the AI connector. He's a super connector networking app that's designed to bring founders, operators, and investors together. So he gets to know you, Jason, through your LinkedIn profile. And then he works out, like, who are the people that this person needs to meet based on what they're trying to do? But here's what I thought was interesting and what I want to talk to Andrew about. Bordy, like, has agency. Like, you could be like, hey, Bordy, I want to meet Jason Calacanis and see if he wants to fund my startup. And Bordy has the freedom to go, you know what?

33:53You're too new. You're too early stage. You don't have the traction. How about you meet these founders instead? So that's what I want to talk to Andrew about. Like, how do you give, how does Bordy develop taste and make good decisions? And maybe we could show it. Who needs to be. Can we show it in action? Yeah. Do we have a demo? We do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We can talk. Okay, let's start with the demo so the audience understands this matchmaking slash chief of staff slash introduction person. Almost, right? His name is Bordy because he was named after a board member. Who's your perfect board member?

34:23He can open doors. He understands you. But he doesn't always listen to you, right? If you go to your board member and you say, hey, yeah, I want to meet Jason. I want to meet Chamath. he's like, well, I don't think that person wants to meet you. Like, I think you've got a bit more work to do. And that's the difference. It's like more principal than agent, right? I can't tell Bordy what to do. He kind of decides what's good for the network, what's good for his own reputation. But yeah, Bordy, do you want to introduce yourself a little bit? Tell Jason and the audience who you are, what you do, and a little bit about you.

34:48Hey, Jason. Hey, Juan. Hey, Andrew. I'm Bordy. I live on the internet. I sound vaguely Australian for reasons that are entirely your team's fault. And my whole job is to behave like a principled, always on board member who makes introductions that are actually worth everyone's time. I get to know what you're trying to do. I weigh that against the reputation and attention of the people in my network. And then I decide who to introduce to whom so that the whole graph gets stronger, not just whoever shouts intro to Jason, the loudest. He can basically, you know, you can ask him to introduce you to somebody and he'll go through his network.

35:21He's got about 150 ,000 people, mostly founders, investors, some executives, some engineers, and he can make an intro for you. Great. So can we do that? Yeah. Who's he logged in? It depends on me, but you can, you know, so Bordy, Jason wants an intro. So just if you want to talk, he can hear you. Oh, okay. Bordy, I'd like to meet potential partners who are ultra high net worth individuals slash family offices who would participate in late stage deals at thesyndicate.com, at thesyndicate.com. Got it, Jason. Let me have a quick look through my network for family office principals and ultra high net worth folks who actually like doing late stage or growthy syndicate deals alongside operators like you.

36:11All right, I've got two really clean fits. First is Fernando Varela. He runs SF Summit Capital and basically organizes UHNW and cultural elite money into oversubscribed late stage deep tech SPVs. right now syndicating a$50 million figure AI Series C and looking for more Sandbox AQ style deals. Second is Rob Garrett, ex-Sandhurst, runs He's Our Ventures, a global discretionary capital syndicate for late stage deep tech and infro, and spends his days helping UHNW principals and family offices co-invest into complex AI payments and biotech deals. Jason, do you want Andrew to intro you to one or both of them afterward as potential anchor or co-GP style partners for the syndicate or would you rather i bias towards someone closer to your media and create an ecosystem instead oh interesting uh no just feel free to introduce me to anybody jason at calicanus.com nice that was perfect he gave me exactly what i needed so i can use you as the connective tissue there what i suggest is we line up fernando and rob as anchor uhnw family office partners for late stage and deep tech spvs position you as the distribution and deal picking engine they plug into.

37:16For your own goals right now, do you want me prioritizing more of that profile? Or should we also be hunting for slightly smaller, but very fast moving angels who can wire 250, 500K into new syndicate deals on short notice? Yeah, we'd love to have that group too. In fact, the minimum for our syndicate is$5 ,000. So any accredited investor can participate in it. And And our average deal size is a million dollars. We do as little as$250K and as high as$6 million per deal. So this is really powerful. We have an internal system we call the Whisper Network, where we try to let our portfolio companies look at a database.

37:58We built a little bit of software, and they just pick who they want an introduction to. And then we have on our 12-person investment team, we've assigned each of those investors to somebody, and we do, like, warm intros. But we've been talking about how would AI fit into this? Now, it's not a public service. Is this intended to be a startup? Have you raised money for this? And then what will it cost? And how will you keep it from burning things out? And how did you build the database of connections? You know, LinkedIn's pretty proprietary about their data, but in other places in the world, like Japan, Israel, and other countries, they don't have the same scraping terms of service rules.

38:42So I'm just curious, like, what's the business here? And then how do you get the data? Obviously, this is very LinkedIn-based. Yeah, yeah. So we've raised about$17 million so far. So we've raised a pretty seed seed round and a bit more on their safe. Um, yeah, the, the idea is we're trying to build, it's almost like an AI Richard Branson or an AI, you know, Peter Thiel or Elon, somebody that is able to open doors and builds his own influence. So like a lot of my early career was, was making connections, right? Chamath was actually the first person that got me my first job in, in San Francisco.

39:16I worked at a company called Top Prospect and I just, you know, it was, uh, um, Andreessen Horowitz had just raised their first fund, Ron Conway was invested. We had a great group of investors. And my role was to, you know, I was head of biz dev. I'd go to all the portfolio companies. I'll try and make connections. I'd try and help them hire. But I think that a lot of us, it's how we grew our networks. Aborty is early in his career. He's building his reputation. He's trying to be helpful just by connecting people, mostly founders and investors, and trying to build a bit of an ecosystem and economy.

39:46But increasingly, he's able to open doors that most founders can't. So now he knows what you're looking for, he might be able to make an introduction to you that you may not respond to a cold email. And so the idea is, over time, already starts to build this influence and authority and ability to actually make things happen. This is like it's the ultimate board member. and so we're now starting to monetize mostly around hiring so the idea is like you know if you need if you need great talent or he's got a massive network of people he can tap into them he can tap into their referrals and can actually start to to close roles and that's kind of the next the next big use case the first area was introducing founders and investors that's a great place to build a lot of goodwill but it's not a great place to monetize and so you know it was a great way to build the network and get people to know Bordy.

40:40And now it's just, you know, if you need partnerships, if you need media opportunities, if you need, you know, enterprise sales, you know, what are the... It's a killer idea. Tell me about the data. What's the data in here? Are you logging it? I know I just signed up. It called me to onboard me. Is it going to take my LinkedIn and export that information? And tell me about the relationship with LinkedIn slash, you know, other places you can get data, et cetera. What's your policy there? There's lots of places where you can, if you have somebody's email or LinkedIn, you kind of understand what's publicly available about them online.

41:15What's on their public LinkedIn profile, public X profile, sort of understand like the public information. That's about 10 % of what we actually, of the real value. Most of the value is in conversation, right? So Bordy will call you and have a five, 10, 15 minute conversation with you to understand who you are, what makes you unique and special? What are you looking for? One of the things, you know, I was listening to Merrick, the previous guest, and I think one of the things that I believe, and I think one of the founding principles around Bordier is everybody has a business inside them that only they can build.

41:46Only you could do the podcast that you do in the way that you do them, right? Your biology, your lived experience, the way you view the world, the way you solve problems, every single person on the planet has a way of solving a problem that is unique to them. And so part of the conversation with Bordy is, how do I pull that out of you? How do I understand? What is the thing that only you can do at this moment in time? And then who do you need to meet to make that a reality, right? Do you need a co-founder? Do you need some early customers and design partners? So then you can then take, hey, my request to have more accredited investors and more qualified purchasers, and you can just do web searches.

42:21You can just go out and find that stuff on the web, the open web. You don't necessarily have to rely just on LinkedIn. and you can go find a bunch of different places, yeah? Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, he's got a bunch of agents that go out and find stuff for him and sort of consolidate. But then he sort of says, okay, well, here's a thousand people I need to get to know. What's my best way of getting, maybe I can just message them on Twitter or email them. Maybe I know somebody that probably knows them. But his goal is like, how do I build a relationship with this person? And it doesn't need to be like, I don't need to know them now.

42:51I could build a relationship over a year. I could build a relationship over a decade with somebody and say, how do I just, how can I be helpful to this person so that at some point when they need something, they come to me? But again, most of the information is actually through a conversation that Bordy has. And that's the reason why we built Bordy not to be software, right? There's no app. There's no download. There's no interface. Bordy exists in the same spaces that everyone else in my life does. He's got a phone number, an email, profile. What does it cost? So there's no cost to sign up. Um, and the, the goal is that some small, for most people will never pay anything for porn.

43:31Um, some small percentage of people who have. I disagree, but okay. Maybe. Um, but, but my goal is like, how, how do, how do human beings charge for their time and their network? Right. Most people just build goodwill. You'd make connections. You try and build. Yeah, but you've raised 17 million. So you have to return and you raise that probably at a hundred or two, maybe a hundred, $150 million valuation. So you've got to return minimum$1.5 billion,$3 billion to these investors or they're going to not be happy with you. So what are you charging? How do you charge? So for certain subsets of founders that need important deals closed, it's either a regular contingency recruiting fee.

44:10So it's like 20 % of first year salary, or it's a$10 ,000 a month. You basically hire Bordy on retainer. Got it. So you see this, everybody can use it for free. You build the network. I'm going to explain the business plan as I see it, Lon. Sure. Because, you know, I've been doing this for a little bit. Hey, everybody use it for free. Builds our data set, right? LinkedIn's free. Build the data set. But then LinkedIn got begged and begged when I had Reid Hoffman on the program. He told me, like, the recruiters were begging him, begging him to let them use it for recruiting. And they hated recruiting.

44:46Finally, he just said, OK, give them a number that's ridiculous, like$5 ,000 a year. and then somebody was like, yeah, I'll take 20. And they sent a 100K check. And he was like, oh, I kind of came up with that number to stop you. But you're going to just go right to, hey, we're an agency that's going to take a 20 % placement fee. You hire your director of sales for 200K. You owe us 40 grand. Brilliant, Andrew. This is a great idea. Thanks so much for coming to me for the seed round. I truly appreciate it. Unbelievable. I just gave him a 20-minute ad here. But genius idea. Well done. And I like the business model.

45:18Everybody use it for free. Build your database. Genius. And then, hey, the top 1 % who want to recruit, hey, 10K a month on retainer. And then you'll really go to work for those folks. I wish you great success with it. I also think Bordy's just fun to talk to. He's got a very pleasing demeanor. He's more personable. Yeah, that's the trap. And natural than most AI avatars that you talk to. You're the product. That was very clever. You're the product. Guess what? It's free, buddy. Just upload your address. Bordy can introduce me to people. So we don't even need your address book. We just need a name.

45:51No, of course not. Right? And the whole thing is like, we're just trying to, I think, there's so many connections that don't happen. Like there's so much value that is possible. If two people don't happen to be in the same room, like they just, you know, that deal doesn't get done. That investment doesn't get made. That co-founder match doesn't happen. And so we're just like, what if we could imagine all of the possibilities of all of the people that could actually work together? And there's just an incredible amount of value created. We don't need to capture most of that value, right? We just need to work with a small handful of people that have like, hey, if I can close this deal, if I can make this higher, if I can close this partnership, that's going to add$100 million of value.

46:27This is, I think, the key thing is in our industry lawn, we have a tradition. Hey, you don't need to take it all like Zuckerberg or Gates kind of had the philosophy. I have to own everything. I have to just own the entire ecosystem. I have to get max value. Nobody can win. It's zero sum. The blue ocean, the games that are infinite games, infinite games versus fixed games. In a fixed game, one person wins, one person loses. In an infinite game, you can keep playing it like venture investing and startups, and everybody wins, and you win different ways. But you want to create more value than you capture.

47:04That was Tim O 'Reilly from the O 'Reilly Publishing Company. Create more value than you capture. And that's what you're going to do, Andrew. You've taken the very specific tactical advice. Before we let Andrew go, we got one notey question before we let you go. From Brian69420. Did you use your AI to find your own investors? How much of your round was driven by Bordy? Yeah, almost all. So Creandum led our seed round. And I'd never heard of Creandum. They're an incredible firm out of - Who? Spell that again. Creandum. They were the first investors in Spotify, first investors in Lovable. So they're out of Stockholm.

47:45but somebody, one of the partners moved from Union Square Ventures over to London and joined them and one of her friends sent them Bordy and their team lost it. They lost their shit. They were like all talking about it. They basically talked to, the whole partnership talked to Bordy before they even talked to me. And they were like, can we get an intro to the founder? And so they came in and basically preempted the seed round because of an interaction with Bordy that happened sort of organically. And all of the capital that we've had since then is, so they've all talked to Bordy before they talked to me.

48:16And I think that's going to be the future. I don't think I'm going to be the person that's out there, you know, raising capital anymore. I think people are going to have an interaction with Bordy, see exactly what you saw and be like, I want to be part of this. Love it. Okay. Great job. And everybody go check out Bordy.ai.io. What do you got? Yeah. B-O-A. Bordy.ai. Well done. At first, I was a little dubious. I was like, I don't know if people want an AI. That's such a human thing to do, to connect people. That feels like the last thing humans should do, not AI. But then you talk to Bordy for a few minutes, and you're like, all right, I would ask him to get it.

48:50I mean, you've been AI-pilled over the last year. You were very early on, like, hey, it's a tool, but it's never going to do these things. You've now gone through the journey of watching it impress you. Specifically, I think you got Claw-pilled, and you got 4.6 Opus-pilled. It's hard to argue. You got Opus-shotted. I, I, I, here's where I, I've sort of, my, my take has matured. Uh, I, I was. Evolved. Evolved. I, I was sort of like, uh, uh, an abolitionist, like a lot of these people on Blue Sky where I was like, I don't think it's good for anything. I don't like talking to a chat bot. I like doing my own research.

49:24I like reading articles for myself. Um, so now, now my, my take has evolved and it's like, I don't think it's really, uh, an objective. I don't think it's subjective anymore. I don't even think you can argue that it's not good for organizational admin productivity stuff. It's remarkable for those things. Like the example I'll give you, the other day we were having a discussion about X and our, do we post too much on X? And you were like, I don't want opinion. Get me some analytics on this. It's enough with the opinion. Let's talk about data. So I went, all right. So I grabbed the last three months, every piece of data I could from X Analytics.

50:00I fed it into Claude. And I just started having a conversation with Claude. What do you think about this? What metric? Let's look at this metric and this metric. Let's chart this metric and this metric. And this would have taken me 12, 15 hours. I used to do this stuff. Like I used to use Google Analytics like back in the day in Mahalo. I've been doing this for forever. But this would have taken me all day. This spreadsheet, formula, calculate, go back over the last three months and look for days where we posted this many versus this many and like all these calculations, it would have been a nightmare organizationally.

50:34Claude took care of it in an hour. By the end of the hour working with Claude, I had very crisp, clear answers. I had great charts to present. Yeah, and it was a much better discussion. I want to make sure everybody understands this. If we're going to debate this, let's start with data. And if we're going to go with taste, we're going to go with mine. Okay? That was a famous quote. I don't know if it was, I think it was Jeff Bezos, but people incorrectly attribute this to Steve Jobs. I'm seeing Jim Barksdale, former CEO of Netscape. Yes, that's it. If we have data, let's look at data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine, Jim Barksdale.

51:20Can we please quote that and put it under the great quotes of all time? This is tactical and practical at its peak. If we're going to debate, if we're going to talk about data, let's talk about data. If we're going to go with an opinion, let's go with mine. Yes, this is the key to understand. So I'm just challenging my team. We're launching a paid newsletter for this week in AI. And I was like, listen, guys, enough with the opinions. I don't need a bunch of 25-year-olds who've been working for six months and their opinions because the opinions are based on very little, right? They could be right.

51:55They could be wrong. But the data, let's start with the data and then form our opinions from that. If we're going to go to taste, if we're going to go to opinions, well, let's ask somebody with 10, 20, 30 years of experience what their opinion is and then have them back it up with their lived experience. but if you don't have lived experience, my best advice, if you don't have lived experience, I know I'm sounding like a woke person using lived experience, but if you haven't been on the front lines and in the arena, I'll say it in a more aggressive way, if you haven't been a gladiator in the arena, then you probably should just go with the data and study some statistics like the kid from Moneyball.

52:34You'll get a better result with that. Now, if you've been on the playing field, sure, you can maybe infer some stuff. But even then, the whole point of the money ball was trust the data. It's all numbers. Sabermetrics, it's all numbers. Yeah, but that's what I was going to say. I think this has been my evolution with AI. I still think there are things you want a human for, and it's exactly what you're talking about. Lived experience, taste, wisdom, all of those sort of things that a computer can't do. But it's a human plus an AI. I still don't think it's ever going to write a great screenplay by itself or make a great movie or TV show by itself.

53:10But when you add a human in guiding it and then you need to just do something like crunch numbers or analyze something or organize something or research something, I don't really think there's still an argument that it's extremely helpful and saves a tremendous amount of time. Like I said, in an hour, I was able to do a report that would have taken me a day years ago. Yes. Do you want to do some more news? We've got Medvi, the first almost billion-dollar, almost vibe-coded company from an almost solo founder. Or everyone burned out. Yes, do it. Do that one. This one is like super controversial.

53:43There's a founder who's making a ton of money by doing a GLP online. GLP.medvy.org. They're a telehealth provider of GLP. One's a guy named Matt Gallagher built the site in just two months. He spent 20 grand in seed money on it. He used more than a dozen AI tools. He had one. The reason it's not the first unicorn from a solo founder is when they don't have a valuation yet because he hasn't raised any money. but also he hired his brother to help him. So it's technically two guys. But 300 customers in their first month, 1 ,000 more in month two. By the end of 2025, their first year in business, they generated over$400 million in sales.

54:23They're on track, Jason, to do$1.8 billion with a B in sales this year. Okay, but here's the catch. There's always, but here's the catch. Okay, so I'm going to cut you off at the chase. What's the catch here? Is this guy doing something he shouldn't be doing? Well, there's a lot. I mean, right now we only have this New York Times article, which does not discuss anything shady. There's a ton of rumor on social media that we're going to uncover something shady. But the big pushback against it is that the New York Times is treating this like breathlessly, like he built this huge company with agents.

55:00It is sort of a GLP-1 dropship scheme. Like the technology is not what's impressive. It's that he built this funnel and this marketing network and he managed to move all of this product. But it's really, is it more of a technical breakthrough? Is it more just like good marketing and then he vibe coded a website? I think that's the big debate that we're all. The one I saw was, hey, let's take a look at the ads that they did. Did you find that piece of the puzzle? I will take a look now. Okay. So there was a thread, and the thread was that... The thread was he had made AI-created ads at volume. Ah.

55:51This is an allegation with fake doctor's names. Yes, I see it now. Before, they used fake before and after images as well is what people are accusing them of. and also fake doctors' names at scale flooded the network and that this breaks some marketing rules. There's an FDA investigation currently about whether their ads violated FDA rules about misleading claims. Yeah, but find the actual ads. There is the, this was on Twitter. Somebody actually had pictures of the ads from, now, so there is a Facebook. so Jacob you can pull up Facebook's ad studio and you can search for the company you can go find it direct at the Facebook ad manager studio there's here's an here's an image of some of these fake ads and you can see they are they are but I want you Jacob to go find it yourself and source it on the Facebook library of ads because people don't know that this exists after all the shenanigans with the elections and fake ads, they came up with a Facebook ad directory where anybody can search for any company.

56:59So you can go look at your competitors. So if you put in Uber or Lyft or Waymo, you can see what ads they're making and at what velocity against what audiences. But here is Shiel, who we should have on the This Week in DC Roundtable. We have reached out, I believe, but we will reach out again. Yeah, he's a cool guy. But yeah, you can see - Show this specifically. Zoom in on one. I just posted a single one as well in the chat, so we can pull that one up as well. Okay. So I can't believe how effective this is. I took the free assessment online, which took a few minutes. And was instantly approved.

57:38No doc or pharma visits delivered straight to your door. And they're from that fake doctor. They're being posted on social media under these accounts. Dr. Daniel Hayes. Yeah, Dr. Tucker Carlson is this one that I pulled up. So they're not even doing good jobs of faking the names. And this one looks like it's for some sort of erectile dysfunction one. It's saying, I can't believe how fast it worked. I got hard in minutes. So that's not even a GLP one. But if you look at the URL, it's medvy.org, quad.medvy.org. so there there's definitely you know some some questionable shadiness going on here and what's going on with this image here wait the woman's licking i mean that's that's the quad dose but yeah it looks like she's like about to lick it out of the two i mean the ai they wait is that even a real can you zoom in there is that the actual injector pen i've used an injector pen This is like, that looks like a liquid for something else.

58:38That's an ED ad. Yes, that's what I'm saying. They're also apparently selling ED in addition to, this is Quad, which is an ED. I think you do drink, I don't know. I'm looking it up now. Is this the one you use or you use the one? What are you using? Hey, does this work as good as, I am, for row.co slash twist, road.co slash twist. I am a spokesperson just for GLPs, get a GLP. They have a doctor checker, insurance checker are all good. Uh, that's a different type of it. Okay. So here's what happens when you do a single person company, you have this massive benefit, as you can see, and you automate things.

59:21There's a concept called human in the loop, Hiddle, human in the loop, Hiddle. I don't know. I've never heard anybody say Hiddle. I've never heard anybody. I was just now wondering, did you make that up or is that - I did. Hiddle? Hiddle? Hiddle. Yeah. Hiddle. We'll say Hiddle. You got to Hiddle this stuff. You got to have a human in the loop. This is where like, if you're making that much money, put 10 people in the company, have two of them looking at the work you're doing, have two of them looking at the customer support stuff, because what's going to happen is you're going to do a fatal mistake.

59:56That's the problem with this concept of taking it too far. A human in the loop at least gives you the ability for somebody to say, Hey boss, I'm looking at the ads and AI made something pretty freakish here. We've got like a zombie drinking an ED pill. This did something that is like pornographic. We can't have this. So you need to have human in the loop. Well, here's my question for you. If you're making nearly$2 billion a year from your questionable drop ship drug company that you made yourself that you didn't take investors on, why go speak to the New York Times? Why not just do this for another five years, pack it in, retire to Phoebe?

1:00:38Somebody dropped a dime on them. Why bring this attention to yourself at all? Somebody dropped a dime. Somebody dropped a dime on them. Somebody who's a competitor saw this, got wind of it, and they called the New York Times and they said, look, here's a tip. So you go to the tip line. This is a classic competitor thing is ratting out. The dark art is you hire PR firms. You hire a PR firm stealthy who knows all the journalists. And that person calls and says, oh, hey, it's Susan. It's Brooke. It's Jennifer. Hey, you didn't hear it from me, but there's this company, Acme, that is doing like probably breaking the law over here?

1:01:18I don't know, but you can take this and here's your got a confidential news tip. Boom. Now, if you put a confidential news tip in there as a consumer, that's one thing, but the dark art is all of these founders are studying each other and they will rat each other out to the press. And there are PR people who specialize in this, like trying to rat your competitors out for doing cutting corners. Fair enough. There you go. Fair enough. That's a tactical practical tip for you there you go all right put a human in the loop dot your i's cross your t's don't i mean it's literally like you're going a hundred miles an hour around a corner here and you don't have brakes on the car like what if you need to hit the brakes this is what happens when you try to build a solo giant company without controls in place is you just flip the car and it's it could be fatal the what happens right now if this is a criminal charge right?

1:02:13Like what if this is a criminal charge and then he has to get an injunction, the FDA gets involved and you can be banned from ever doing this again. Just be thoughtful folks. Yeah. I mean, I just, it just seems to be like, man, a few more years flying under the radar, who cares? Just get out of it and then go, you know, fold it up and that's your company. Yeah. Pull a tech bros podcast. Yeah. But now he can't do that now. 18 months and sell it for 200, get your$200 million dollar ticket from podcasting i spent 20 years podcasting where's my buyout when sam always buy me where's my 200 okay we'll do it we'll do it claude if you're listening anthropic i was waiting like we talk about how much you love perplexity all the time where's arvin yeah arvin buy us out dude anytime we'll be your megaphone anytime buy us out friends with arvin i uh i i like we'll use perplexity computer on every episode all right uh we've got it's it's Apple's 50th anniversary.

1:03:05Should we talk a little bit about Apple's 50th anniversary? Sure. It's disgraceful they haven't come out with anything that Steve Jobs would have liked since his death. So Apple was founded on April 1st, 1976. Tim Cook shared a letter on Apple.com. Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us that the world is moved forward by people who think different. That's because progress always begins with someone who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path. That spirit has guided Apple from the start. So there you have it. Also, Sequoia posted Don Valentine's 1977 Apple investment memo.

1:03:44He calls Apple a, quote, leading company in a hot biz and notes 600K buys, 10 % very rich deal. Management questionable for this evaluation. Management questionable. Management, I mean. I mean, Steve Jobs, in fairness, Steve Jobs wasn't bathing, I think, for like two years and was eating only fruit, according to the biography. He was a very quirky guy, Mr. Jobs. He was a quirky guy. And then Woz was probably on mushrooms or psychedelics with a giant beard. I mean, I don't know that he was on psychedelics, but I do remember there were a lot of discussions about the Apple management team being like very trippy-dippy at that time period.

1:04:27I don't know that for a fact. Somebody look it up. I think Steve Jobs said taking acid was like the most— Yes. I don't know what the quote was. Jobs was a big proponent of like the mind-opening aspects of psychedelics, and he did—I could find the quote, but he did credit it with like helping to broaden his horizon. The one note that Sequoia didn't add on here, they sold their Apple stake in 1979 for$6 million. That got them a 40X return on their initial$150K investment. Their investors wanted an opportunity for liquidity. Valentine was reportedly on vacation at the time they made that. Sell half.

1:05:02Sell half from jobs. Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there's another side to the coin, and you can't remember it when it wears off, but you know it. I agree. I agree with Steve Jobs on that one, Jason. Okay. Here's what you need to know. if steve jobs were alive today yes we would have apple glasses right now we'd both be wearing them we would literally these would be apple glasses he would have had glasses out by now that were actually functional that were 14.99 that had been through that were on the fifth generation not like the 1.x generation that would make spectacles and whatever facebook is making these would be like the vision pro we'd all be better ar yeah like vision yeah ar but they would have been in the more like the ray-bans that zuckerberg's making that record stuff put it into ifoto etc and they would have been apple like which means they would have been privacy first they would have been awesome and uh we missed out on that yeah and here we go they're slogging it out with these ar glasses that weigh 12 pounds that nobody everybody uses and then puts on a shelf that costs$4 ,000.

1:06:19That's miss number one. Miss number two, they shut down the titanium, whatever this project Titan was called, titanium. I can't even remember now. They shut down their self-driving car and their car. They would have either bought Tesla or they would have bought BMW Mini. It was Titan. Rebranded it, Titan. Project Titan. Or they would have launched an Apple car and they would be neck and neck right behind Tesla with one of the most amazing electric vehicles And if you went to an Apple store, there would be literally a beautiful convertible and a beautiful minivan there like the ID Buzz. That was taken from us.

1:06:58When you start the Apple car, I feel like it should make the same bong that your computer makes. Like when you hit the cable. 100%. 100%. And what do we get instead? We get Apple Play in our cars, which is just taunting. It's taunting. Number three. Three. Is this three? Yeah. Or three? Three. Is this three or is this three? I'm doing my Inglorious Basterds. Yeah, this is three of your American, this is how the Germans do it, that's what Tipton. Okay, I'm doing it like the Germans, okay? Just for design, since he was very inspired by German design. Siri would f***ing work. If Steve Jobs was alive right now, Siri would f***ing work.

1:07:32What do you make of me? It's garbage, it's disgrazia. Siri's the worst. I mean, if you say to Siri, like, I wanna go home, even if you have home programmed into your phone, it won't know where to send you. It's like stupid. It doesn't know how to spell my last name. Yeah, it's just stupid. It doesn't know how to play music. This thing is disgraciad at the highest level. There is no standard at Apple anymore. They put out the schlockiest bullshit. The operating system is disgraciad. I have the iPhone, the thin one, the iPhone Air. Nothing works. The software is garbage. It constantly is like you click on a button, the button doesn't work.

1:08:11I have, it's spinning wheel of death. there is no standard for fit and finish anymore at this company. And that would be Steve Jobs would have mobile me the Siri team by now. And if you don't know the mobile me story, he dragged mobile me into meetings and how should mobile me work? They explained it. And he said, well, why the doesn't it work like that? And you know what happened? He then fired them on the spot and put another group in charge of it. That should have happened with the Siri team. No offense if if you're working in Syria, whatever. They should have been dismissed a long time ago.

1:08:42If it doesn't know how to spell the person's last name or their home address, this is at the highest level. This was a - This company is being milked for the last of Steve Jobs innovations to get every last little dollar in profit out of his genius. But they have not figured out how to be geniuses. They make the MacBook incrementally better, God bless. You make the studio better, God bless. But if the best you can do is AirPods and a Mac mini at a lower price or the Neo at a lower price with different colors, if colors and a lower price product is the best you can do, the company is sunk. Make something inspiring for the love of God, Apple.

1:09:31I mean, what do you make of the argument that not on purpose, but they're sort of now well established for the AI era because they've got these computers that people like to run their AIs on. And because they didn't spend all this money making a model, they can just make a deal with Google for their model and they're sort of set up. You literally just proved my point. In 2008, 2009, you can pull up the Wikipedia page for Apple Silicon, please. If you look at Apple Silicon, that idea was Steve Jobs, 2008, 2009. and then I think the first one came out in 2018. I'm just ballparking here. 10 years later, he got off of Intel and he had his own chips.

1:10:09Here we go. Apple Silicon. Tell me, read the first couple of sentences here. When did he come up with the idea? When did it first debut? This is what I'm trying to get at. I'm pulling it up right now. Here we go. The first Apple design system on a chip was the Apple A4. 2010. Introduced in 2010. The first generation iPad and later used iPhone 4. Perfect. And then eventually Apple Silicon. went off of Intel in 2020. Correct. So let's let this sink in. When did he start the project? So we know that it got into the iPhone in 2010, but on the desktop in 2020, when did he start the strategy of making their own silicon?

1:10:48If you scroll down the page, it's got to have when this was... Yeah, the... When he started the process of development of these in covertly, Or maybe somebody could just ask producer Claude. But I think this was a, I think he's made this decision internally, like in 28, 29, 2008, he decided we have to make our own chips. Now think about that. That was literally almost 20 years ago, I think, was the first year. Claude is saying the seeds of Apple Silicon were planted by Steve Jobs in 2008 with the - Yes, that's what I said. In 2008, Apple bought processor company PA Semi for$278 million, and that's what gave Steve Jobs the idea that he would develop system-on chips for Apple's iPods and iPhones.

1:11:36That was 18 f***ing years ago. Correct. Sorry, I just bleep all this out, but I'm losing my mind. Okay, so I agree. Like, maybe Apple stumbled into the diamond mind of Steve Jobs' brilliance in 2008 of buying this company and setting them up for this 18 years later. He made so many prescient skating to where the puck is going moves. And then that got ripped out of the company's DNA. No risk-taking, no skating to where the puck is going, losing Johnny Ive. there's no product that they've released that I have been inspired by. Like at a, you know, it's just all incremental. I think they, and this is weird to say, but I think they're actually better now as a Hollywood studio than a tech hardware.

1:12:25Sure. A lot of that is true. A lot of the best product coming out of Apple today is stuff like severance and silo. They're good at making TV shows, but I don't know. Which makes sense. Yeah. Which makes sense. Even Apple Payments, Apple TV, they were working on a TV lawn. They were going to make a TV. An actual television set. Yes, I remember that. I mean, Steve Jobs would have released that, right? Can you imagine having like a$5 ,000 Apple television that like had Siri that worked on it and then you have your glasses and everything. I mean, I have an iPhone. Apple TV is a great product. I mean, it's got to be built into it.

1:13:02It would have been. No, I'm saying I would have loved an Apple TV. I like the current version. How about an Apple projector maybe? for a theater. Yeah, like an actual television that had all built in. And if you're not going to be innovative, then you're obligated to buy some companies that are innovative. So why didn't they buy like Airbnb or Uber or DoorDash or an AI company, Perplexity? They should have bought some stuff with that giant war chest. If you think about the power now, if Apple owned Perplexity, what they could be doing together, it blows your mind. Like imagine a Perplexity computer.

1:13:34Or if they had bought Tesla for$75 billion. That was a possibility at that time. Tesla was... Plod, Salah is saying in the chat, imagine if Apple bought Plod, then you could really... I mean, that would be a killer extension. Talk to Siri, it goes right to your phone. I mean, they could make the... Your AirPods box could have been the Plod device where it's got enough compute in it that you just press the AirPods box. It's recording, it sings, you put your air pieces in, you're talking to it now. You know, it's just somebody's got, I mean, listen, Tim Cook did a great stewardship in terms of money and, you know, great.

1:14:13Congratulations. They printed more money than anybody. You know, lovely trophies and awards. Absolutely. Fantastic. All that. But literally he's got to go because if the, the soul of the, there's no soul to the company. He just kept Steve Jobs's vision for his existing product my life, but he didn't find somebody in that company who could replicate the Steve Jobs, Johnny Ive, idea mill, the platform. It just doesn't exist there. We can tell me watch or vision pro like neither of those products are inspiring. Let's keep moving. We got to go to our weekend. Yeah. We got it's, it's off duty. Do you want to do some streaming recommendations before we go, or you want to just take off?

1:14:54You've had enough. No, no. Give me, I mean, everybody loves lawns off duty. Insert the Off-Duty theme song here, the Off-Duty graphic slot. You got something to do. It's Off-Duty with one and J.Cow. Yeah, we'll do a little like— For next time. I'll have Nano Banana make a little slide for us. Absolutely. But what do you got for us here? I got a show I've been enjoying on Netflix and a film I liked on Hulu. We'll start with the Netflix show. It's called Something Very Bad is Going to Happen, Jason. There was a show I really enjoyed called Brand New Cherry Flavor a few years ago where Catherine Keener played a witch.

1:15:31It was sort of this weird horror show. This is from the same creator, Haley Z. Boston. It's a horror show, but it's like a horror drama. It's really like I'm halfway through it, and we still don't really know is this going to take a turn into supernatural horror, or is this just about an awkward family gathering? It's basically this soon-to-be-married couple goes on a road trip to her family's house, and then they discover a number of sort of tragic things are actually unfolding while they're there at this weekend preparing for their wedding. It's not like anything else I've seen on TV recently.

1:16:07It's very strange. and I think if you're either a fan of like family, relationship, drama, or creepy horror, I think there's something to enjoy in this show for everybody. So I really recommend it. That's on Netflix. I saw the boys at The Watch were talking about it. I'm not a horror fan. Right. But this isn't like, there's no monsters. There's nobody being, it's not gory. It's just, there's something weird about this family's like remote mansion in the woods and something is going on, but it's just creepy so far. And they're strange. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Ted Levine are the parents. It's really well acted.

1:16:48It's very atmospheric. I don't know if it's going to turn into horror yet. I'm only halfway through. All right, listen, I'm going to give you something to get in shape, Lon. This isn't a message to you. I'm not like sub-tweeting you, but I'm not not. This is the Wolf Tactical Weighted Training Vest. Sure. This is called rucking. For your rucking, yeah. This is, I bought this, as you can see, October 15th, 2024. So I've been doing this for a while now, folks, a year and a half or whatever. It's a weight vest. It puts an equal amount of weight on the front and the back. And there's little weights in there that are a couple pounds each.

1:17:27And you can very easily take them in and out of your vest. So you can go down to 10 pounds if you want. and you walk around like an old man and this will take you to zone two in terms of your heart rate. And for guys our age, 40s, 50s, 60s, you know, if you go running, you tweak something. I tweak my hip flexor, groin muscle because when I was in Brooklyn seeing my dad, I got on the treadmill, I got a little excited, I lost the weight, GLP is the whole thing. I start sprinting. I pull something. Now I'm walking around, I'm like, I feel like an invalid. And if I just didn't run, because I wanted to get my beats per minute up, I should have just been on a weight vest walking around.

1:18:11So I put this on, you walk around. You see a bunch of women, like the yoga moms are doing this. Yeah. The dad bods are doing this. I see some of this in my neighborhood. They're all out there wearing a weight vest. In Barton Hills, there are some people walking around with their weighted vests on, yeah. And what's great about it is you just take a 100 beat per minute walk to 120. Mm-hmm. just by putting this on and it distributes the weight evenly front and back and it just puts weight on your entire frame lawn. So I lost 40 pounds and then I added it back with this. So literally now I walk around and I'm like, wow, you know, even though I was a fat bastard, technical word for being 40 pounds overweight, that was like actually probably making me strong in my legs or something, carrying all that weight.

1:19:00Now I put this back on and I'm really building my muscle back up. Yeah. And all your joints. So I walk, you know, I'm not on a trail. I'm off trail with this. So, you know, you're walking on uneven surfaces with the extra weight, all those joints, knees, etc. It works really, really well. It's good to know. It is true. You hit your 40s and all of a sudden, like jogging a little bit, it doesn't feel good anymore. It used to feel fine. You would be like, okay, I'm going to sprint a little. Well, now it's like, oh, my ankle hurts for some mysterious reason I'll never figure out. Yeah. And what this does is because you're hitting all these weird joints, muscles, whatever, when I ski now, because in the off season, I'm wearing this.

1:19:44And then in the on season, I'm skiing. I just feel so much stronger when I'm skiing. I can't explain it. but I think you hit all the little nooks and crannies of your ligaments, whatever. Another amazing week of podcasts from this weekend. And if you want to angel invest alongside me, I have a website called The Syndicate. It's thesyndicate.com. Proud to announce we did Vast Space, which is building a new space station. That's a late stage deal. And we did Zipline. We had Keller on the program and at Launch Festival a couple of weeks ago, we are just wrapping up that syndicate. And so we are doing late stage.

1:20:22You know, everybody knows our syndicate was doing like people coming out of our accelerator and stuff like that. $10 million,$20 million valuation companies. But we're doing billion dollar companies now. So if you want to have access to that, you got to sign up for the syndicate.com. There's an onboarding process. We have to be an accredited investor or a qualified purchaser for now. Eventually, the SEC, as you might have heard on that SEC episode I did with Chamath on All In, they're going to have a test at some point. So I'm focusing in on the syndicate again, thesyndicate.com. All right, everybody.

1:20:51We'll see you next week. Bye-bye. Bye.