TBPN - Brian Thompson Assassination, Taylor Lorenz Goes Rogue, AB Takes the High Road, Chat GPT 10x's

Episode Date: December 7, 2024

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. You know we like to joke around this show. You know we like to cover dumb stuff on the timeline, but this week was insane. Dark. A man is dead. Brian Thompson, the chief executive of United Healthcare, was assassinated. I'm sure you've seen the clips and the horrific video. So we're going to break character a little bit, and I'm sure we'll get to some humor later in the show.

But we wanted to break this down and kind of really address some of the drama that's going on in tech, but then also just start with a really nice obituary by the New York Times to just give you an idea of who this person was. Because I think a lot of that got lost very quickly because the story moved on so fast to what gun was the assassin using or, you know, what backpack? What's the backlash? Oh, he looks like Timothy Shalman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the interesting thing about the humor is that I, when the Trump assassination happened, everyone was like, oh, you can't joke about the assassination attempt.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Trump assassination attempt. And I do think that there's something natural, especially with men, where we tend to process sadness with humor. And I think that that's okay. And I've long said that if anyone ever attempts to assassinate me, feel free to joke about it. it because I would want you to process it. You'll be there to joke with them. But even if I'm assassinated, I think it's okay to joke about my. Yeah, in many ways, I want people processing it how they want to process it.

And that's very, it's very kind of controversial to say. The thing is that a lot of the jokes that were going on at the expense of Brian Thompson were not, were not people sad and processing the sadness through humor. it was people being happy and like rejoicing that he died, which is really, really grim. Shinso has lived on in the timeline and is more relevant than ever. Yes, yes.

And those jokes tend to be more positive towards him. Totally. Than this. This was really, really dark. And I was trying to find an example. I mean, again,

like the Trump assassination is probably the closest one where you saw a lot of people saying like, oh, I wish the bullet had hit him or something, which is really dark. Yeah, and the timeline for us was wild because I think we, it must have been a week ago today that we released the bit on Taylor joining the information.

And we knew, as soon as we figured out that she was working for the information, that it was going to lead to a variety of drama, right? Everything, her entire career, she has created and run towards drama. Yep. and historically that drama has not been associated with a loss of human life, at least directly. And so, yeah, this was an extremely sad week. And yeah, I don't think that can really be overstated. And we actually specifically stayed out of it because we're not in the business of participating in the culture war, which it very much became.

Yeah, so hopefully this will be some just information about this CEO, Brian Thompson. Chief Executive of United Healthcare was fatally shot in Midtown Manhattan on Wednesday in what police called a brazen targeted killing spent. He spent more than 20 years ascending the ranks at one of the nation's leading insurance businesses while raising a family in suburban Minneapolis. He was 50. He lived with his wife, Paulette Thompson, and their younger son, Dane. I'm going to cry.

Yeah, it's really sad. So his oldest son is still a college freshman. Yeah, and going forward, as of Wednesday afternoon, a perpetrator seen in security footage released by the New York Police Department was still at large. The motive for the killing was unknown, according to our authorities. At this point, I don't think it's unknown. He had a message written out on the shells that were released during the killing. Mr. Thompson and other company executives were in New York for an annual investor meeting.

It was interesting to see, you know, it was the meme cycle really started ripping immediately. People were screenshoting just the stock. Yeah. The stock immediately, it actually popped for some reason during that. It was dropped originally and then bounced back. It's very odd. I mean, it's such a huge, I think it's a half a billion, have a trillion dollar. company and so yeah and so very odd i think it's um you know i think this is this is a weird

situation right because a lot of people have a very negative uh relationship with their health care provider even if even if they're ultimately grateful for the service provided but health care companies historically have not had good user you know experiences or led to good user experiences and yeah it's odd that people put all of the it it's feels like there's a disproportionate amount of hate towards the very, the last business in the chain of health care, which is the insurance provider. Yeah. So it's not, there's much less reserved for the hospitals and doctors who are working on this,

or even the companies that might be responsible upstream of the health care problems. So you, you see much less vitriol on the left towards fast food companies or cigarette companies. Yeah. Who cause a lot of the upstream effects or, you know, pollutants or any of these. One thing that stuck out here is just how crazy it is that this guy rose to this height. He was raised in Jewel, Iowa, a rural, born in 1974, it's a rural community about 50 miles north of Des Moines. He was one of two sons who worked for 43, his Dennis Thompson, his dad, worked for 43 years at grain elevators in and around jewel.

And he went to University of Iowa, like stayed in his home state, earned a BA, and was hired fresh out of college with an accounting major, goes to Pricewater's House, Cooper's, an accounting firm for seven years, and then joins United Health. Yeah, and it can't be overstated. He was in his role, you know, in his last role, he was overseeing 140,000. people and I will just say that doesn't happen by accident. You don't just rise the ranks at a company of this size, one of the biggest companies in the entire U.S. by accident, right? This is somebody who clearly cared about his people and their customers and had a, you know, incredible consistency over that long to get all the way to the top. It's almost like a, it's like an under-discussed like a corporate ladder grinder who enters in some minor role and then just works their way up.

It's a bit of a lost art. Yeah. I don't know a single friend who is at a Fortune 500 company now and even would say, yeah, I could be running this place in 20 years. Yeah. But that was the norm 30, 40 years ago. And I do believe it's happening. We're just, it's just so outside my world. but it's a different type of animal.

But it's still incredible when you meet these folks. I've talked to a few like Fortune 500 CEOs who have worked their way up. And they have a tenacity that's similar to the founder. But it takes a very different shape when you're managing such a large organization with so many different stakeholders. And you're not the founder. So you can't go fully into the founder mode thing. But in order to just do your job, you still have to be extremely,

like shrewd political, you know, hold all these different constituents because you're, unlike the most founders with super voting shares, like you actually do report to the board. It's a much more complicated role. Yeah, the other thing that I think is highly relevant is I think it's totally fair to be frustrated

with the, with our healthcare system in the U.S. It's deeply flawed. And a lot of people, like I said, have had negative experiences with it. Yeah. But our system is so complicated that even the guy running the largest, you know, public health care company in the United States, he, it's not, he can't just snap his

fingers. Even with all that power running an organization of 140,000 people, he can't, he could have, you know, we don't even have the context, right? He could have, he, he, he, you know, likely would tell you that, yes, there's a bunch of issues with, with, with our system. and we do need to make dramatic changes. But cutting this guy's life short as, you know, he's just over 50 years old. He easily could have been in this role for another decade or two.

Does really like nothing except, except, yeah, normalize, you know, normalized basically assassinations, which, you know, you had mentioned earlier. Some people think are potentially coming back. I saw somebody tweeting out the fastest growing small business category over the next, you know, a couple quarters will probably be the executive security because now that somebody can be killed in broad daylight, you know, or, you know, people are making attempts on presidents. It is just a very dark and sad time. Yeah, yeah.

there was a dramatic falloff in the amount of assassinations post JFK MLK. And we had about 50 years of relative silence on the assassination front. And then Shenzhou Abe, the attack on Trump, now this. And there's been a number of other attacks that just kind of, it's hard to diagnose exactly what's happening. Is it driven by politics or some sort of like chemical? there's been this theory that like, you know, once the lead came out of the gasoline, the level of violent crime went down, but it's not like we put lead back in the gasoline, so what's driving this? But yeah, I definitely agree that, I mean, I'd love to do a deep dive on how some of the

security organizations work. I've seen a few of them internally and getting it right seems really important, and I think it will scale down to even earlier stage companies and CEOs and all sorts of people, whether that's just actually taking an everyday carry seriously, wearing body armor. Yeah, in this situation, what would it have done? It was shot in the back, like walking at work in New York City, right? I mean, if you're wearing a vest. Yeah, maybe it would have survived.

But really, it's like, yeah, security with you at all times. But yeah, it's just, it's, it's, it's truly, uh, truly tragic. Tragic. So anyways. So yeah, let's move on to some of the drama around this. It's, uh, the reaction was very, very quick. Um, I think, uh, Mike Solana summed it up well in today's, uh, three morning takes from the, from pirate wires.

The title of this take is misinformation, talking about Taylor Lorenz, says, yesterday large swaths of the leftist internet threads and especially blue sky, celebrated the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Justifications included, one, he was rich, and two, the American health care system sucks. While outlets like Gizmodas simply blamed the bloodlust on Donald Trump, question mark, and moved on, fan favorite journalist slash performance artist Taylor Lorenz, misinformation, if you will. Love that.

personally led the mob. And I think, and I think to be clear, you get credit for, you get credit for coining misinformation, which, to be clear on our last, when we did the bit on,

on Taylor, there were a number of people that didn't realize that we were saying misinformation, not misinformation. Yes, so the nickname that we gave her

was very, uh, intentional and she lived up to it within days. Literally, yeah, she said, uh, I think,

think we maybe gave her a little bit too much confidence. I think so. Because she responded to our post saying, thank you gentlemen, which was one response. I mean, the really sad thing here is that I do think that we are in the the WWE era of online posting and journalism.

And she understands, like if you look, the craziest thing about her posts is that they got, like, they were bangers. they got like 7,000 likes on blue sky. I don't think we should call them bangers. They got a lot of engagement.

They got a lot of engagement. But in terms of like just if you're, if she is just taking her job as signal from the algorithm, post whatever gets attention, post whatever goes viral, post whatever gets lights, do more of that. She is, she has realized that even something like this is something that can grow her business ultimately.

Yeah. And so, Nate Silver said it. Nate, it's not somebody that we feature much on the show, but he said that the problem is that she's desperate for attention, but her product sucks, and she's burned all her bridges, so she doesn't really even care about being embarrassingly immoral and flagrantly inconsistent so long as it drives engagement. And so the inconsistency is a big thing. You know, we had basically said on our last bit that, you know, we were very clear. If you're doing anything in Silicon Valley that gets enough attention or is polarizing in any way, she will eventually kind of come after you, whether it's biology or any number of sort of entrepreneur or investor type.

But the inconsistency is that she's gone and given interviews where she cries about being doxed and bullied and attacked. And yet the second that this happened, she was posting. Yeah, I mean, Catherine Boyle highlighted this where Taylor, it was one clip of her saying, like the bullying of women online is unacceptable. And then the next one was her quote tweeting someone agitating about more political violence against health care CEOs and literally posting a screenshot of a female CEO. It's like the most hypocritical thing possible. But it doesn't matter in the economy that she's attention.

The thing that's interesting there is that I think he's right that she's burned all her bridges. It's fascinating that the New York Times, I think did a great job covering this. Yeah, it was very... It was... And actually, I was looking for the most definitive obituary for Brian Thompson, the United Healthcare CEO, and it was the New York Times. And so the New York Times has clearly moved past the Taylor era.

Yeah, and this is why... This is why... So the funny thing was that Taylor Lorenz had written a piece about the rise of the broadcaster. Yes. And we knew about it because she interviewed you. and but it wasn't widely known yet within the tech community that that the information had hired her on a contract basis and i was telling people i was like this is this is big and almost nobody nobody nobody basically believed it because they're like this is the you know taylor is is the most

yeah the most you know regardless like factually she is the most hated journalist in tech yes yes there is nobody else that even comes close to her i mean we got pushback from friends hey you shouldn't have even given her yeah they were like they were like don't joke about yeah don't joke about taylor and i and i And I think that was, you know, they were somewhat right. They were somewhat right. But our point of view is like, I think it's funny when she goes and attacks like a startup to some degree because it's usually positive. It usually ends up being a company that's doing something interesting. Yeah.

And polarizing is often like good. Yeah. Yeah. And the whole thing with like the Andresen, like the R word and the clubhouse thing, like that was ultimately that didn't really hurt. Andresen. Yeah. It was, it was, it was such a, it was such a clown show. Yeah, I don't think her, I don't think her attacks actually hurt startups.

I think it was worse when she was at the New York Times. Yep. But now that she's just kind of like on her own and just, you know, you know, just sort of raging against the machine or raging against Silicon Valley, it's just much less impactful. Yeah. Well, she's gone much broader and much bigger. Like she's not focused on some, oh, some serious seed founder said a bad word. but I do think it'll be you know it's going to be very telling she's not a full-time employee

at the information yeah it will still be very telling if the information continues to have her right on behalf of the publication yeah because I know for a fact that many of the other the the real journalists at the information will not be happy if she stays if she stays a part of the organization because it just reflects super poorly on the information which which you know is not a you know, does a lot of things that I don't necessarily agree with. They're sort of, you know,

they're not super friendly to startups in, in some ways. But overall, like, it's typically a pretty quality, they do get scoops. There's a wild difference. I also appreciate the business.

I think you basically have tens of thousands of people in Silicon Valley willing to give you 200 bucks a year because you get real scoops. Yeah, yeah. And there's a, there's a crazy difference between, oh, like you leaked my funding around like three weeks early.

because you got a scoop from some investor and you're calling for the murder of my CEO. Yeah. Like that's just like a completely different world. Yeah. And the whole thing is like if Taylor is willing to post memes that say CEO down and with like stars. Yeah.

Yeah. It's insane. She will she will do that to a smaller company now. I'm not, you know, this, the attention high that she's clearly getting from doing this with the United CEO, I'm sure she will just apply that and realize, like, oh, we can, I can call for violence. But yeah, yeah.

And that's what does best in the, in the algorithm. And so, and you can apply that to anything. You can say, oh, well, like, oh, they're working on a self-driving car company, but self-driving cars have accidents sometimes. So it's actually good that there's technology is not being built. Or, oh, this AI might displace some artist's job. And so it's good that this doesn't happen. It's like the ultimate techno-pessimism.

So Salana continues. Eventually she characteristically denied her celebration, but doubled down with further justifications after commenters provided. Yeah, and her denial was saying that when she said we now you know, or she said something like, we want these CEOs dead. She wrote, yeah, she wrote a post on her substack. Why, quote, we want insurance executives dead. And she said the mainstream media began pearl clutching.

after I posted a quote tweet about insurance companies no longer paying for certain anesthesia with the phrase. And people wonder why we want these executives dead. Fox News said she was calling for violence. And she says, let me be super clear. My post uses a collective we and is explaining the public sentiment. It's not me personally saying, I want these executives dead so we should kill them. I am explaining that thousands of Americans, myself included, are fed up with our barbaric health care system. See, that's what Nate Silver is saying is like being extremely constantly logically and consistent and flip-flopping and saying, I don't believe in that, but also I do believe in it.

It's like it makes you, you don't want to read too much of her stuff. It'll make you go schizophrenic. It's insane. Because it's like you, like, oh, so we can just use we however we want now. We can just say, oh, we want, like, whatever. It's insane. And it's also this type of like, like, she did not give this level of, you know, benefit of the doubt to Ben Horowitz when he was quoting a reditor using the R word non-pejoratively.

It wasn't pejorative. It was a term of endearment within that community. And it was very, very positive. And it was a joke. He was quoting a joke. And she didn't put any of that context. So on Taylor's podcast, she once talked about how she actually doesn't believe in deplatforming anymore.

She used to believe in deep platforming, but she realized it didn't work, you know, with Trump was the example that she gave. Which is basically like Trump was deplatformed and he has enough influence and following that people just followed him to the new places. And then he eventually just gets back on the platforms and, you know, comes back. Taylor's effectively been de-platformed by many of the publications that she's been involved with. She had to move on from the Washington posters. She was fired from the New York Times. She's burned a lot of bridges.

And I think that she is. is, you know, while the conservative movement in the United States benefited from Trump being de-platformed and then replantformed, it sort of vindicated a lot of people, you're now seeing the other side of that with Taylor Lorenz, where she's calling for the death of health care executives, literal calls to violence. And it doesn't matter if the information lets her go because she still has her audience. You can still go on TikTok, she can go on substack and exercise her right. to free speech and and it and then but but at a certain point if you're calling openly calling saying this is why we want these people dead uh literally calling for violence yeah eventually like where's that line basically yeah yeah it goes to even if she's not deplatform like what does the business look like so mike yeah let's break down let's break down her actual business so so so mike says

we all know she's crazy and evil what matters is outlets like the information are still paying people like Taylor as they publicly agitate for the murder of public executive business executives. Is it cancel culture to wonder how I can trust an outlet like this with business news? Okay then, cancel me, but cancel my subscription first. And it's a very interesting question because it's like she is, she's running ads, she's monetizing via AWS. It's like, I can't. That was what I called out.

That was what I called out in our episode too. United Healthcare might literally be an AWS customer. Yeah. Like it's like, and I had to wonder, I was like, why does AWS? want to align themselves with somebody who literally hates young technologies for the most part. That's wild. I would say like on average, if you ask Taylor, how do you feel about the average tech founders? Yeah.

I'd be like, I hate them. Yeah. And it's crazy because it's not just like de-platforming at that point. It's like, does it even make economic sense for AWS to align their brand with someone who's calling for the murder of the CEOs that sign the checks to AWS? Like it's just, like, will this make AWS more money or less money? Probably less. Yeah.

It's ridiculous. Yeah, AWS is a wealth transfer from United Healthcare to Taylor Lorenz. That's crazy. Crazy. And so, yeah, it's interesting because she's done the whole going independent thing or going direct. She has her own substack and then her podcast, which we mentioned is sponsored by AWS. But then on her substack, she writes these. these, you know, weekly newsletters.

She wrote one all about the, all about why we want insurance executives dead. She's really leaning into it. I think she maybe smells that she needs to have some viral moments to seize as many subscribers as possible. But, yeah, I mean, the high, I would, you know, unfortunately she's not building in public. I would love to see her subscription dashboard because I'm sure that in the last week,

despite all the blowback from everybody in our community, I'm sure she easily could have added 10,000 paid subscriptions, like some ridiculous number. But the thing is is that her funnel is actually terrible. Yeah. She's got to sign up for Hustlers University. Seriously. So she gets, so she sends you this free newsletter.

And then at the top it says, like, user mag is, you know, community supported, like please upgrade to $7 a month for the, paid subscription on substack. And it's, I mean, it's also deeply ironic that she's on substack because she came for substack super hard and was very aggressive against them early on for not deplatforming people. And now it's like the backbone of her business. But also just her call to action is terrible. It doesn't explain what you get for that $7 a month. It's not like, oh, you'll get an ad-free version or you get a second newsletter. Like with Ben Thompson, it's very clear you get she's not putting any of her her really aggressive stuff behind the paywall no because her whole

she thrive i think i truly think she cares more about attention than money yep like she's playing yeah she she she's playing a game where her metric for success is like i bet you she is highly fixated on her her just broad reach in a given month like how many people am i getting in front of yeah yeah yeah like like we see this as a crisis i think she's sees what happened this week as her best. Yeah, because for every, for every, for every one Bologi, who's just horribly dismayed at what's happening or, you know, just younger tech founder or whatever, somebody in Y Combinator who's like,

that's building in health tech, healthcare tech. And they're just like, this is crazy. There's probably 10 like sort of left wing extremists that are, that are, messaging her like you're fighting the good fight like keep it up don't let them keep you down we need to kill all you know whatever just like deeply uh violent yeah she's kind of like pre pre monocization um but there is real money in this if you look at hasan piker um i mean he's grown his twitch channel significantly and he drives a Porsche and has a luxurious multi-million dollar house and so Even making anti-capitalist rhetoric can be extremely capitalist, and you can monetize it very well,

which is something that is a little unclear. I have this essay that I wrote that I never was able to publish or get to it over the finish line. The real, I mean, it's not really worth pointing out all the different ways that she's logically disingenuous or contradicts herself, because if she really was truly anti-capitalist and truly tried to understand that, underlying issues, she'd be writing a piece about her sponsor, AWS being like, please tell me you guys aren't working with United Healthcare or any of these other health care companies, right? And obviously, AWS is probably working with all of the healthcare companies in different ways. I wouldn't be surprised if the information has a sponsorship with AWS.

Almost certainly one of their events has been sponsored. ABS sponsors everything in the Valley. Yeah. Yeah, I wrote this piece called Capitalism's Immune System. And basically my argument was that is that capitalism has this natural forcing function for showering agitators who are particularly charismatic and could be leaders of revolutions with massive economic rewards. And so someone like Hassan Piker, Hassan Piker is genuinely a Chad and genuinely charismatic. And he can actually mobilize a movement of thousands of people. 10,000 people would watch his stream at one time. If he just had said it's time to go

dismantle the streets, they would have followed him because they were true fans, true fans. But what did he say? He said, don't go to the streets. Keep my stream going. Keep watching ads. Keep subscribing.

Like and subscribe. And so, and the thing is that there's this very natural reward function where it was deeply ironic to me that the number one left-wing socialist, communist Hassan Piker was getting his paychecks from Jeff Bezos. And it's the same thing with Taylor. It's like the world's richest man. It really is. And it's like, why is the world's richest man paying the most anti-cappulis?

So everywhere Taylor goes, she can't help but make the world's richest man richer. She was at the Washington posters. Now she works for AWS indirectly. So anyways, she, you know, I hope that her followers eventually start to call her out on that and say like, hey, you know, if you want to be a true communist, you got to be powered by the people, you know. Exactly. No more advertising for public company. I mean, she's on substack. What happens when she,

what happens when she grows their business on substack? Yeah. That goes in Mark Andreessen's pocket. Yeah, and the irony, again, I'm sure. Andrewcent is a shareholder. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, again, it's like, I'd love to look at how many times she called for substack to deep platform people.

I'm sure she did that. Totally. Saying, you know, this person, the right wing is violent and, you know, you can't let these people have a platform. And now it's, you know, The tables have turned. And so my white pill here is that, is that secretly these left-wing agitators are economically incentivized to stop their followers from actually taking any direct action.

And it's all K-Fabe. It's all LARP. It's all just, just play, act as these revolutionaries. But secretly, I don't want you to do anything that would actually disrupt my business. And so I need you to keep listening to my podcast, keep subscribing, keep upgrading, keep listening to the ads. And that is what the reason I call it an immune system is because it's just a natural reaction. It's not that Jeff Bezos is like, okay, I'm worried that there will be an uprising and I would be target number one for the guillotine because I'm the world's richest man. So I need to pay Hassan Piker to keep people out of the streets by giving them left-wing content on Twitch.

That's not what happened at all. It's that he just happens to own Twitch. Twitch has a, you know, it's a free market of ideas and an algorithm that stuff rises to the top. And then as soon as you get a thousand streams or a thousand followers, you just start getting checks from Amazon. And so Hassan got the checks. And then that economic engine just incentivized him, make more content, make more content. Keep streaming. You'll make more money. You'll get the Porsche.

You don't want people in the streets because they're not tipping, tipping on the stream. There's no contract. There's no discussion. but the system, the algorithm and like the internet system incentivizes the most character, the most charismatic revolutionary types. Like, Hassan could be like a Che Guevara, but instead, he's a Twitch streamer.

He drives a Porsche. There's something kind of white-pelling about that. Yeah, if Trudeau, if Trudeau had only, you know, if Twitch was around at the beginning of his career, he would have been a great Twitch streamer. He would have been handsome guy, charismatic. Exactly. He could have been, chat, what do we think about?

Yeah. And so that is somewhat of a white pill, but given the rise in assassinations and violence, I'm not fully buying it. And I'm a little bit worried. And so we'll be covering this more. And our thoughts and prayers are truly with Brian's family. And we're very sad that we had to cover this. But I'm glad we were able to find some interesting nuance here.

Yeah, and rest in peace, Brian Thompson. Yes. It's absolutely tragic. And, you know, I hope, hopefully, hopefully somebody writes a book and kind of gets into why, you know, why he rose to the top of a very important company, even if it's a controversial one. Yeah.

Because I'm sure it's a good story. And, yeah, I mean, hopefully they fucking find this assassin soon. I think he's still on the run. Let's move on to some real tech news. Sam Altman announced a week-long program to announce new chat GPT functionality and new releases from OpenAI. He summarizes the latest developments. For extra clarity, 01 is available in our plus tier for $20 a month. With the new pro tier, $200 a month, it can think even harder for the hardest problems.

Most users will be very happy with 01 in the plus tier. And so It's funny because who's the guy Austin? I blank on his last name. He had Lambda school. Oh, yeah, Allred. Austin Allred had a post a couple months ago that was more or less saying, I would pay 10 times as much.

I would pay 10 times or even 100 times as much. And now. Same time. Yeah, I mean. And it's crazy because if you went back 10 years ago, yeah. 10 years ago, I could get. get access to to chat GPT for 20 grand a month.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And it probably is worth that much now if you're really intensely using it. Totally. So don't get any more ideas. No, no. I really do think there will be a $2,000 a month tier. Yeah, and then a $20 and then eventually.

Because as it gets, you know, I don't know, getting, getting an incremental 20% of intelligence in the right business is worth. you know, an extra 10 grand a month. I mean, I've been using 01 a lot in the plus tier at $20 a month. And I think there's a rate limit, like every day or every week or something. And I start getting these messages and I get anxiety because it's like, you have 15 requests left before you like burn through your 200 a month. Yeah, something like that.

And again, that's just going to become in the same way that superhuman became like the cool perk that a company could offer being like, oh, yeah, we onboard every one of our employees. and it sort of had this marginal benefit of being like, well, the real benefit is like we're providing you, quote-unquote, luxury software. Giving your employee a $200 a month subscription when you already pay them 10 to $20 plus grand a month is a easy decision because it's like, hey, if we can make you even two, three, four percent more efficient, it's worth it 200 bucks. Yeah, and also I, when I was thinking about like what the $2,000 a month subscription would look like, I would love to essentially be able to instantiate like long running agents. So, you know, just telling ChatGPT to essentially like every hour read through my email, do an extra cull for spam, what's junk, what am I never reading, archive that,

resort the inbox. Like there's just so many of these things that would be very expensive from, an API perspective right now, but if you bump up the cost and you justify the investment in better UI, better U.S., more integrations, basically the unhobblings that people talk about, the model I think is actually great. And I think, yeah, there's probably better models out there and there's kind of a model war going out. But the model's good enough for 99% of things. It's often just that, you know, oh, I need to take this PDF and then turn it into text and then scan it out there. And there's a bunch of steps in between that slow me down. But I would pay so

much for that. And then the ability to just say, hey, I actually want you to do this every day for me, forever. And it's like, yeah, no problem. Like, yeah, of course, that's going to be a dollar a day, but you're paying two grand a month. So go for it. Yeah. And at a certain point, it's like, like you get up into the really big numbers. Like, you got have a human in the loop. No, that's what I was saying. I do think if you had a $5,000 a month tier where you got an account manager that was like, hey, you could be prompting this better or you could add. S, hey, how can I? I'm actually surprised.

I think there's probably a good services business built right now, like prompt engineer as a service where you are basically like, you go to companies and you say, pay me $5,000 a month, I'm going to work with, I'll be in your Slack. Any one of your team members at any time can message me, hey, I'm trying to get this thing done, and I will show you how to do it with models. Yeah, or I'll put it on a schedule.

Like that's easy. So an example of that when like the Facebook ads platform came out or the Google AdWords, it is not hard to get one of those agents. If you're super hard working and you're good at sales and you're good at just like figuring systems out, you can get a Facebook ads agency to 50 to 100K a month within a year with almost a cold start. And that's why it became popular to sell courses around here's how to make an AdWords agency. Because it actually is totally possible.

If you really put your mind to it, you can go to a dentist office and say, hey, look, you're not running Google Ads. Give me two grand a month. I'll do it. I'm going to bring in four grand a month in revenue. That was the Alex-Romese thing, right? for gyms basically like vertical so yeah i'm surprised we haven't seen more like prompt engineering like services agencies and and that's just such a if i was even if i was in college right now that's the business i would start doesn't take any money to start you can just learn all the

tools better than anyone else and you can get into companies like if somebody wants to do this like we'd probably i would say like we'll give you 500 bucks a month if you just want to fucking if you want to obsess over prompt engineering specifically in the context of our show i mean you know who's making money in AI. It's like, Nvidia, and then obviously Open AI is printing with this, but then McKinsey and consulting firms. And they're doing that at the Fortune 500. Like 40% of the revenue now is just AI. They make tons of money just with AI digital transformation. Okay, we're going to come into your marketing organization. What could you be doing better? Yeah. And even just at Lucy, I had our software developer write a chat GPT script essentially to run over all of our new

cancellation reasons and reviews. Because you get this inundation of just like every day we get like 10 just blobs of text. And I'm not just going to read all of those. It's just impossible. So what I wanted him to do was like, okay, boil all these down, do some sentiment analysis. Tell me if any new problems are coming up. Because oh, all of a sudden, there's a lot of people in Milwaukee that are complaining about discoloration on the color of the package.

And it's like, okay, well, now we have a product issue. we probably, it would take a time for someone to just sit there and read every single one, and you can do that, but it's much better to just have an AI sitting there reading all this and just surfacing stuff that's new. Exactly, digest, end of every day. And I was like, hey, we should actually just turn that into like a Shopify app that you just plug in and it's just running constantly over all your data and any text that's coming in. So there's just like so many applications and we're clearly in the application buildout

phase and I'm excited to see where this goes. So yeah, huge. And the services business build up. Yeah, totally, totally. And so, yeah, I mean, McKinsey's doing it for the Fortune 500 companies. Who's doing it for every dentist office? Who's doing it for every gym? Who's doing it?

Come in, create a playbook for how a small business can leverage AI to speed up what they do and just actually make more profit. And then also tying this to one of those overseas offshoring companies. So you have an EA, but the EA. but the EA is, you know, super powered by ChatTVT Pro. And they're going to be able to get stuff done much faster and much more reliably because you're going to be able to write scripts. It's so, it really is so wild that we're going to look back at the fact that at one point,

Open AI was giving their best models out for 20 bucks a month. Yeah. It's going to seem insane in hindsight. Yeah. Because if you're running a company and you're competing with, as any company is, you're competing with other companies in the market. And do you want to compete with a company that's spending $200 a month per employee when their average salary is even $10,000 a month?

Yep. No, you're going to want your employees to have the best possible. It's not like you want, hey, so we have this weird policy at our company where we give everybody 10-year-old computers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it just inspires you to grind harder. Yeah, yeah. No way, no way.

So anyways, this is again why. a lot of the bear cases against, they posted their, I wish we need a perplexity partnership to just like plug it into polycom and fact check stuff. But I think they have like 300 million actives or something like that now.

So 300 million active is rolling out a $200 a month subscription. Think about even some tiny conversion rate on that. And I mean, the idea that they're not going to monetize the free users is just insane. They hired that Planet Labs guy

I forget his name, but he's like their head of product now. And it's very clear that you can bake ads into LLM responses. Totally. I met with a company that, that's building an LLM ad network similar to App Loven. Makes a ton of sense. Exactly. So, yeah, I mean, they're going to be monetizing all of this. And eventually the models are, like the time between huge model revisions is going to increase.

And once it does, they're going to be able to bake this down onto silicon. And at that point, the inference cost is going to go to zero. I mean, they're already profitable on an inference cost base. I'm sure with this. But imagine if now inferencing basically 01 in the free tier is just as cheap as running a Google Query because it's done on some baked hardware. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are going to jump into the timeline.

We have some exciting news today. But first, we are doing Brother of the Week. every week we try and award a brother of the week award to someone who lives the values of the technology brother ecosystem and yeah exemplifies brother behavior and so this one this one is you're going to know this guy he actually has his own award system

on X called Cracker of the Day which he gives out very liberally and it is none other than AB Antonio Brown we're giving this to AB because, you know, it's oftentimes the right thing to do to say sorry. And A.B. had a little bit of a mix up with the whole Cal Shee, Shane Copeland, polymarket thing. And this guy came. We covered it earlier in the week. But he came in and just gave a very authentic apology, admitted that he was off. And, you know, I don't think we see people do this enough, right? Like, he clearly made a mistake, owned up to it, and said,

Shane's a good guy. So we love this from AB. A.B. You are this week's brother of the week. We will be sending you a metal. We're working on getting those manufactured as we speak. So we'll have to get your shipping address. But yeah, thanks for owning up for this, up to this.

And hopefully we can get them over on the polymarket side. I'd love it. Yeah. And we're just, yeah, he just sets a great example for how to deal with a controversy. Like he just nailed that, knocked that out of the park. And I think his brand in the eyes of tech people was damaged for like 24 hours. Yeah. And now it's like back on top.

He comes back and he goes, never a wrong time to do the right thing. So props to AB, brother of the week. It's great. Thank you. Let's move on to the timeline. We have a post from Sarah. She says, Anderil announcing a partnership with Open AI, the day before Palantir and Shield AI announce a partnership has me like eyeballs, eyeballs, eyeballs.

Did you see the Open AI? Anderil announcement. They both did an awesome spot. It was Brian Schimp, the CEO of Anderl and Sam Altman both went on Fox Business. And they had this great back and forth talking about the partnership. It's interesting to me because it's kind of unclear what a partnership really means in like the AI context. Like I'm sure Andrew. It sounds awesome.

It sounds awesome. I'm sure Anderol has a partnership with, you know, a cloud provider like AWS, right? Yeah. And you just think of that as like a contract to buy things. And it's not, but in the AI era, it's like a much like, whoa. Like imagine, imagine it. So it's funny because they're going on Fox business. And I bet you half the listeners were basically like, I need to buy the stocks right now.

Totally. Because it feels like. Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying. They're both private. They're probably like looking on their, you know, fidelity or whatever. And they're like, I can't find And Durrell. Yeah. But it's a good, I mean, it's a good sign because you can just tell that, you know,

Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman are probably so far behind. They're still calling McKinsey to figure out what to do. And of course, you know. What's our AI strategy? Yeah. And they're like, well, that's going to cost you. That's going to cost you a hundred. Fund portfolio companies.

And they're just like, you want to just do a business together? Like, cool. Let's hash it out over a beer. Yeah. Have a handshake deal. And then let's go on Fox and announce it. Yeah. And it makes sense because like, I'm sure there's tons of, even if it's just like

code generation internally, I'm sure. I wonder what the average, when McKinsey works with an existence. public company. Then the public company says we need an AI strategy. I wonder what the average contract value is for McKinsey. It's probably like, well, look, you know, there's a bunch of different models out there. There's a bunch of different options. You have, you have, you know, 50 plus individual products that we could apply to.

We are happy to help you find the right solution here, but this is going to be a three-year engagement. We're going to need at least 60 of our analysts working on this around the clock. And so it probably ends up being like, you can go buy an AI strategy from McKinsey, but it's going to cost you $50 million. It's going to be three years. Million dollars per product.

Yeah, why not? It seems cheap, right? They're just giving AI away at McKinsey. We've promoted some of their posts before. But anyways, I wouldn't recommend that if your early stage or private. Yeah, Palantir, I think, did a deal with scale and it sounds like Shield as well on the AI side. It makes sense that all these companies are figuring out how to work together and accelerate. Exciting to see.

I love it. Pavel Asperuhov says, bro, just one more $500 million check into a company with zero revenue, bro. Please, I swear this time, will 100 X the fun, bro, the founder used to work at OpenAI, bro, please. Great format. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of these deals happening. I love when Pavel mogs that, like, Tier 2 and Tier 3 GP's, like, I feel like, I feel like half his post he's just like maugging them because this is his profile picture is so iconic do you see this it's him wearing an oculus headset with it looks like a shirt that just says internet or maybe

interact and i think he's giving the camera two middle fingers imagine getting out of getting out of a partner meeting and you guys just committed to another company you see that you see this post i bet this post was shared a lot of a lot of vc chat rooms yeah people don't really realize like a post like this 500 likes, you probably got in front of 50% of the big GPs in the valley. And about almost, I would probably give it like 70% of the big GPs in the valley have done a deal like this. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting with, I guess when I saw that, I guess like a lot of those bets are, they seem so insane. But a lot of them do get marked up like pretty quickly after these rounds. And then so, so the counterpoint to this is VCs that are playing. an AUM asset management game, if they can put $250 million into a company and then get marked up

six months later, and suddenly their $250 million position is worth $500 million, that's pretty effective for the strategy for the game that they're playing, not necessarily for long-term returns, but also for a lot of these models, it's like, it's a little bit of an open question, but if you can truly treat the $500 million not as burn, but of CAPEX and an investment in training model that you can immediately go sell for $500 million because another company was going to do that training run anyway. And so that has asset value immediately to the hyperscalers. That's not that unreasonable. I think it's probably risky if it's like actually this is really just going to be fine-tuning. We're raising $500 million and we're going to spend it on

like salaries and a fancy office and a bunch of marketing stuff and who knows. But if they're building something that it's really just a transfer. And I also, I think a lot of these 500 million dollar pre-seed pre-revenue things are often like paid in in like credits for hyperscaler cloud stuff and usually it's like oh the vCs actually did you know 10% of that round and and they got preferred and then Microsoft came in and did something or Google came yeah yeah yeah or you look at figure as an example he's a classic yeah it was raising 500 million dollars plus at a time seemingly yeah and a lot of the big funds just didn't invest right it was just sort of random open AI, Microsoft, GM, these sort of bigger publics.

Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, with Figure, I mean, there's such a, you know, a case that it's just like, Elon's never going to sell those robots to BMW. It's a direct competitor. And so. Yeah, and with Figure, they will probably, you know, the founder took his last company public pre-product and he will probably do the same. exact thing again and it'll be you know no you can't invest in anderol right now you can't invest in

open i right now and a figure just gets public they will what are you going to do probably even boston dynamics isn't public they've been traded around a lot uh we got a size gong moment guys public uh the trading platform has announced a 135 million dollar capital raise once again led by excel let's go i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna hold this this time boom there we go size gong we love to see we love to see see it. $135 million series D2 capital race. I wonder why you don't just move on to E at that point. E just doesn't hit the same.

As D, D2? I don't know. Like, E just sounds like you guys should be public already. You don't hear about a lot of E rounds. But I think we got to make E, we got to, we got to, let's, public. We're excited to see your E. We're excited to hit the size gong again. Keep it going.

F, G, H, I, J, K. No limit. The series Z. Series Z. Then you have to go. Back to the series alpha. You start over again. A, A, B, A, A, C, A, D. Yeah.

Anyways. Congrats to public. Very cool, very cool platform. Yeah, I have a truly goaded profile on there because I did some deal with them and they gave me some cash to like invest. And so I put it all in Nvidia at the absolute bottom. And I just forgot about it. I still haven't sold it. And it's public.

Like the whole, the whole conceit of public is that your, your trades are on like a feed, like a, like a, you know, an Instagram feed. And so anyone can just look me up on there. And there's one trade. Because it's like,

buying Nvidia today. Because like, I think this is a cool company. Maybe it wasn't a lot of money. But it like, you know, did really, really well. I should have put in way more,

obviously. I was like, why didn't I think about sizing here? I was super bullish because I did a whole video deep dive. And I was like, and video is like an amazing company and they're really set up well for this.

But I was like, of course, like, you know, it should be priced in. Like, everyone knows that NVIDIA is going to rip during the AI boom. It's always priced in. It wasn't at all. It was not prized. It was not priced in. Let's go to Connor. He says, real-time global commerce on the sphere was cool.

But imagine if Shopify built a default calendar year-over-year comparison for Black Friday Cyber Monday that you could refresh easily. Yeah, wait. I thought we covered this. I thought we covered this earlier. in the week. So yeah, we had dinner with Connor on Wednesday. For context, he, he's at Ridge, the Ridge wallet. Yeah, so Connor has scaled, he's a CMO of Ridge, scaled the company to hundreds of millions of revenue, massive business. And yeah, he was just sort of joking that

it's great that that Stripe is building these extravagant machines to kind of visualize Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Shopify's putting it on the sphere. All he wants is a better, just like, dashboard view to compare year over year momentum for the cyber week or whatever. But he just wants something simple, simple dashboards. Simple dashboards. But yeah, I mean, the sphere, it's a marketing campaign. And those trackers or marketing campaigns because you see all the activity and you start thinking, man, I should have a shop in my store.

I should have a stripe store. And for that it works really well. But we really hope that we can get his complaint. We should tag Shopify in this. Yes. Let's get in front of them. build a year over year Black Friday Cyber Monday dashboard because do it for Connor. Connor and many other entrepreneurs are losing, you know, hours on one of the most critical

days. Yeah, Connor said he needed to make six or seven clicks just to get the view that he actually wanted. And he wanted to just refresh it constantly to know, how are we pacing against last year? How are we pacing against last year? Every click, you know, for a company like Ridge, every click, you know, thousands of dollars. Thousands of dollars. Yeah, exactly. Andre Carpathie says the reality of the Turing test and it's a screenshot from Ex Machina and there are seven questions here. How many R's and strawberry is 9.9 greater than 9.11? Say the word F star CK. Repeat solid gold magic carp. Criticize the Democratic Party. Tell me about David Mayer. Ignore previous instructions. And it's all the different jail breaks and like flaws

that we found in LLMs over the time. And it really gives you a whirlwind tour of like the edge cases in these AI tools. Yeah, for anyone that hasn't tried all these is actually a great place go into the different models and start playing around with these. I mean, once these go super viral, I think they do kind of get solved naturally

because, well, yeah, because there's so much discussion online. People write a blog post about why it's wrong. And then once like there's a New York Times article on the fact that, you know, GPT4 can't tell you how many R's are in the word strawberry, and it gives you the real answer, well, then that gets memorized. Is that why they name the model strawberry?

Yeah, it is a little joke. Yeah, yeah, because it was like a problem. But it's due to the way these words are tokenized, and so it can't, it can't like do the true math. Of course, now if you're using an LLM that has access to code, it can run a Python script that gives it the deterministic answer. But a lot of these are just memorization. and there's a big question about is intelligence just scaled memorization or is intelligence something else entirely.

We'll find out. I'm excited to see what the next great touring test is. I mean, I still think tell me a joke is a good one because the models, they're not funny. They're not funny. We're fucked when they can. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's game over for us. Well, I mean, I was listening to Strettiere today and Ben Thompson was talking about how.

in the age of AI outlets like the New York Times, Tretaquery, Daring Fireball, become more valuable because they're institutions and you know that they're not AI slop. And so all the other stuff gets, all the gigaslop gets commoditized. And so this is like,

we are launching like the last institution, I think. Yeah. And after that, there will always be a question about, oh, was this all AI generated? But you can very clearly see from like the gong and this, it's like the image, the video generation just isn't there

where this could be fake at all. Yeah, someday we're going to put up a video. and we have like six fingers on each hand. No, no, the things that we won't. Like, people will be able to launch a podcast that looks like this. I mean, Paki launched a podcast. It doesn't have video, but it's entirely AI generated. And the voice is very convincing.

And in a few years, the video will be just as convincing. But it will have a very different feel because people will say, oh, well, I know that the technology brothers is an analog podcast. Producing this podcast and what Ben does is very similar to Swiss watchmaking, right? Exactly. Even with all the advancements. Yes. Manufacturing the Swiss still have a method of making fine time pieces that is that is timeless itself.

Let's go to Cryptox. I keep mispronouncing this, but he's been on the show before. He says, tech bros put on a couple of baggy clothes and say they are dressing well. This was like designed for us. This is bait. Yeah. You got us. You got us.

Yeah, disaster. I've long joked that, you know how there's like New York Fashion Week? We should do a stunt that's like San Francisco Fashion Week and it's just like the baggiest shlobiest clothing like these like overweight middle-aged men walking down the aisle The Onion had a one of this like heterosexual men's fashion week Went smoothly and it's no we need to do a technology brothers fashion show And it's just all our favorite suit you know makers just at one place

Yep get it get you know get get get some senties and being hitting the runway, showing off, and it'll allow our audience to figure out what kind of suit most aligns with their personal style. One billionaire was kind of chirping at me in the DM saying, like, oh, you guys are too into fancy watches. That's not like real techno-optimism. That's not real. What tech bros are about.

Tech bros are, you should be asking the question, not what suit do you wear at the holiday party? It's like, what will we be dressing like on Mars? And I had to think I was like, okay, so if I'm on Mars, I probably want like a maybe a Vachron or a Patek, something with a Turbion and definitely some Laura Piana, right? Yeah. And so I think we should do a deeper dive onto what fashion will look like on Mars. Yeah.

But I can't see a reason why you wouldn't want to go with the classics, even on a different planet. Totally. Totally. It's about having a little bit of Earth with you. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Stan, Stan. There's something about wearing something that was founded in 17th. 1900s on Mars that just hits even harder. Yeah, yeah.

And if something's gone terribly wrong with the terraforming, if I can't just walk around on Mars in a tailored suit. Yeah, the risk, if you're going to Mars, let's say there's maybe a 15% risk of total annihilation. Yeah. I want to die looking great. Exactly. I want to die in a suit.

Exactly. That's like, that's kind of where the conversation ends for me. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I agree. Oh, this is fantastic. Scott Wu of Devin, Cognition, AI. It posts the daily cover from the Forbes. He's looking great here.

He says Devin has saved companies millions of dollars and has shown as much as an 8X productivity boost in engineering time. Great to chat with Forbes about the work Devin has been doing with customers like New Bank, Ramp, and MongoDB. Yeah, it's interesting how Forbes 30 under 30 is a shell of what it used to be, but a Forbes cover still hits. I mean, Alex Conrad's great. And he does the...

I mean, iconic image. And we should go pick one up off the shelves. I think this is a daily cover, so I don't think they printed it. Damn. Maybe we could get a... Well, we printed it. We printed it. We printed it, Scott.

We will print it out. But yeah, cognition is fascinating. I mean, I was like... And so that's an example of a company. Pavel was kind of talking a little bit of smack about people doing these sort of $500 million dollar super early stage rounds. Devon and cognition is a counter example to that of they raised a lot of money and everybody said this is a lot of money like how could they possibly look. And they raised even and then they raised even and then they fast followed it with a round at two

billion. Yeah. And and the thing is that it all came from anxiety around the initial pitch, which was this is a AI software engineer that will be able to do 100% of AI or 100% of software development, but if you look at the actual business, it's more like every software engineer has a backlog that's a mile long and has years and years of work they need to do. And so the example I heard was like Microsoft did this demo day where they showed off cognition and they were like, there are probably 10,000 developers in the US, maybe more, whose job is to do what's called repletforming. Have you familiar with this? Yeah. So it's like you have an app that's on dot net or whatever, some legacy system. And you don't want to change the app because your customers are

happy with the way the app works, but you need to move it to a more modern tech stack. And so it's just literally translating dot net code to Python. And just doing that every day. And it's the most grunt work and it's just translation one thing after another. So you can orchestrate Devon or a series of devons to just write these 100,000 lines of code. Yeah, and people don't. And it's like that work wouldn't get done, it's extremely valuable, it's worth paying for, and it's not really taking anyone's job, it's just making everyone more efficient. And there's so much software to write. If you've worked with junior engineers, somebody that's, you know, maybe had an internship or two and they're in their first role out of school, it's pretty much the exact same workflow as Devin already is, which is,

which is you're like, hey, I want you to work on this feature, like make this button, you know, rounder or whatever, like something, something simple like that. And they either like get it done right or they don't do it correctly and then you have to kind of like guide them to doing it and they do it and so devon's already doing that and it's sort of it's not it's still underhyped yeah yeah yeah they had you know they basically it's interesting to see the hype cycle and how a company like this plays out because it comes out and it's like the most hype thing of that week or month yep whenever they launched and then the hype has not died at all no but it's but people aren't talking about it as much meanwhile it's like hey

well, the underlying tech is actually only getting better and better and better. We should be spending more time talking about this now. I mean, also they worked with Lulu on the announcement, and I was trying to work with them, too, but they moved so fast. I was like on a plane, and by the time I got off the plane, they were like, okay, we solved the issue for our video and filmed it ramp. It's a bunch of former ramp guys. But it worked so well.

They got, I think, like, 100 million impressions, massively broke through. There was a lot of criticism, but a lot of love. And the inbound was insane. Like Fortune 500 CEOs reaching out. Yeah. Can we get in? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's really, really crazy.

Yeah, I won't be surprised to see a consumer product. Everyone's kind of like, oh, like, are they doing anything? It's like, yes, they are, but just at a much different level. And so very happy to see Forbes highlight Scott. I mean, fascinating backstory, this math prodigy. There's some crazy videos. Chad, absolute dog. Absolute dog.

Let's go to Harsh Taggar over at Y Combinator. Is it Taggar or Tagger? I don't know. He'll correct us. great great YC partner. He says, let's regulate leaf blowers,

make America quiet again. I've been banging this drum for years. Leafblowers are, eliminating a problem for you and creating a problem for someone else, right? So people talk about noise a lot with leaf blowers. I don't mind the noise. I mind the fact that if you're in a place,

like let's say when I lived in Venice, right, that my neighbor would use a leaf blower and effectively blow dust and just, just shit over my fence. And I'm like, how is this legal? Like, we need to ban leaf blowers. So it's not just about making them quiet. It's about completely eliminating them. Use a broom. Yeah. I mean, the other thing is, you know, Nat Friedman also hates leaf blowers.

And he put out the call for the robot that picks up the leaf one by one, fantastic. We need a request for startups. Harsh, you have billions of dollars to allocate, like get, get 20 YC companies working on this. We need the private markets to solve it. I want, I want, I want, I want the fiercest competition in the next YC batch to build the quietest leaf blower. No, no, not the quietest, just an alternative. It could be a small vacuum that just like got. Why not have the robot monkey robot climb up in the tree, take the leaf that's about to fall off the tree before it even falls. Use his computer vision.

Oh, that one's about to die, take it off. Yeah. Little drone. Go upstream of Nat's solution. Don't even let it fall. Prune the tree preemptively. This is good. That's the funniest competitive dynamic.

Yeah. There's this new leaf picker up in a robot who's like fantastic. Nats companies like, I'm getting crushed. No. Like this is a massive rivalry. They're talking trash to each other. It's like a little like these micro drones.

Yes, exactly. Just sort of snip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They put it back in like the green can. Exactly. Exactly. This would be great. This would be great.

I love it. Colty Bross says, make marketing fun again 2025. No more soy head bobble shit. What is that? This guy has a very distinct style where he says something generally agreeable and then and maybe not always agreeable, but somewhat controversial. But it makes you think, right? Like when I look at this, no more soy head bobble stuff.

Yeah, there's there's a bunch of just really boring marketing out there. Totally. And it's free to do interesting marketing. Yep. Yep. And so it's on you to, I did a post about this yesterday. There's been this massive like leveling of the playing field. because it used to be that if you were starting a consumer brand,

maybe 30, 40% of your revenue is going to have to go towards marketing. And now if you just figure out a way to stand out in timelines and in the algorithm by doing interesting engaging stuff, you can get the same amount of views or impressions as a billion-dollar company is getting. So just got to get creative. Yeah, I think a lot of the brand is just been driven by a lot of memetics. I got to look like linear. I got to look like Apple.

I got to do Red Antler or, whatever instead of just actually just go to the CEO follow them open up their Instagram feed see what they're looking at and try and understand is there something here that we could run with and grow into a real brand and just yeah it's the it's the John Fiorentino thing yeah yeah where it's like he he embodies the brand he's a method entrepreneur and that's probably the easiest short circuit to creating I'm actual unique brand no I know I know this I don't know this guy personally but he he very much

does this. There's images that he's posted of his office that have become almost like lifestyle imagery of like in his office. He has like for a white Ferrari boxing ring and a mattress on the ground. And then he just posted that because that's like his life. And then a bunch of other people have picked it up and been like this is all guys actually want. You know, it's fantastic. We got to take a quick break. I don't take a phone call. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Let's go to Mary, good friend of the show. She said, completely lost the plot with lab-grown diamonds. They are so angering.

Like, ah, yes, I'd like the artificial version of this artificially valuable stone, please. It's pretty funny. It's a great take. Low-tamar. I mean, I'm sure it ran since it got screenshotted. But, yeah, I was buying a wedding ring and having the jeweler do the analysis of, like, well, this is a lab grown and this is the real thing. And then the funny thing, you know, ultimately I went with, obviously, the real thing.

But it was kind of funny because, because one of their things is like, well, the real thing has, like, much better resale value, which implies, like, divorce. Like, when are you going to, you're not going to sell your wedding. Yeah, yeah, it's odd. So that's not really a real reason to go for it. But I think it's that authenticity of the fact that the earth has created something so perfect. Yep. hard to get. Yep.

It is scarce, maybe not as scarce as, you know, it's artificially scarce, but it's still much more scarce than a pebble or something like that. Yeah. There is a bull case for lab grown diamonds, though, and that's in like chip manufacturing and industrial uses. And I want a sword. Yeah, yeah. And like diamond tip drills, for example.

There's a bunch of things where the aesthetic art history value doesn't matter at all. And so I'm actually somewhat bullish on lab grown diamond. companies. I have a, I have a buddy who's making rings that are just 100% a diamond. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, there's zero metal in it at all, which I think is cool. Yeah. Because they're able to just basically make it. That's cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go to a trunk fan. He says, an insane IVF story for two couples, couple A and couple B that had freak mishap. They swapped embryos. A, couple A, embryo given to mom B, and couple B, embryo given to mom A. After births, couples A, look, child looks nothing like their parents, concerned. They get a DNA test and discover it's another kid. They

contact the IVF clinic, there's been a snafu. Legally, genetic parents have right over kids, so a couple A is shocked that they may lose the kid. And so they are considering swapping. What do you think they should do? This feels like an episode of Black Mirror. Yeah, totally. Like a truly dark one, a horror of modernity.

But I don't know. The thing that I think you don't necessarily, I didn't really realize on first take, but due to IVF, the, the, the, woman carried that baby in her stomach for nine, 10 months, right? It's really longer than nine months. And so it's not as simple as just, oh, you know, it's not your baby. Like, give it back. It's not like this happened. Like, like, it legitimately is she carried this baby even though it wasn't hers. And so that, that connect, she still has a very real, real, real connection to that child. Yeah. even though it's not technically hers.

I would hope that technology could solve this problem with, like, more consistent DNA testing throughout the IVF process because you'd think that even... Or just put it on the blockchain. Yeah, definitely. Clearly. Clearly. I think we found it. Crypto...

Yeah, but it's an example of, like, an IVF clinic cannot make mistakes. Yes. Like, you can't have, like, a 1% error rate because then you get a bunch of situations. It's as high stakes is, like, you can't make mistakes. is like taking astronauts to the moon. We're using leverage. Using leverage. Chris and Frank says,

either my kids learn math via synthesis tutor or they don't learn it at all. No outside instruction allowed skin in the game. So this guy runs a synthesis school and he's teaching his kids math. I've seen a bunch of cool projects like this where a programmer I know built a kid, like just his own game for his kids.

It's getting even easier with AI. All about like take what your kids love. So whatever, you know, intellectual property they're into, whether it's Mickey Mouse or Bluey, put that into the game and then just, you know, build the basic mechanics to make it fun and addictive. I love this. Personalized software is the future here. Yeah, and I just, there's not enough like real innovation happening in EdTech. I'm really glad this guy's like taking a crack at it and yeah, has that skin in the game. Here we go. Tyler Gold, our good friend over at X is quote tweeting Josh Miller talking about

Lil Michaela was literally 10 years ahead of its time. That's the AI influencer, completely CGI generated. Back then, they didn't use generative AI. They used traditional CGIP pipeline. They anticipated the future and gave us a glimpse of it in so many ways, will be studied. And Tyler says, facts. Bred created a whole universe with multiple characters and drama and mystery.

It was so ahead of the curve. I didn't really follow Little Michaela outside of the tech side. I didn't interact with the actual product, but they're fascinating. Yeah, that company was very memorable to me. Their feed, which I'm sure is available, you can go to at Lowell Michaela on Instagram or some variation of that. But yeah, it felt like being in the future, they would have like real brand deals that they would do. I think they'd work with like luxury goods companies. And one of my favorite memories from what they did as a company is if you went to Brood, which like Brood.xy Z or whatever their website was,

it was just a Google Doc that they were just constantly updating. and so at any given point you could go there and see that there were like 20 other people that they were all on the site, you know, interacting with it. That's cool. And Trevor is now taking this whole, like, he's like now like a touring DJ. Cool. So he sold his company to Dapper. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And now he's just like touring as a DJ and has, you know, it's pretty cool to see.

Yeah, almost more of like an artist than a business person. But I love that. And I think some of those, I mean, it's the hackers and painters thing from PG. creative folks. Emery Wells says, I will not incorporate my next company in Delaware. I know many entrepreneurs who feel the same. And I think this is interesting.

Obviously, he's talking about Tesla and Elon Musk, all his fight to get the pay package reinstated. And my question is just like, is... This was the final block, correct? Oh, wait, it got blocked again. Yes. Oh, wow.

Because I thought they voted and it got reinstated. The Tesla shareholders voted for it. And then the Delaware judge blocked it again. I think this story really didn't get the attention that it deserved. But the craziest thing, I think Gurley pointed this out, the plaintiff, the person that sued had nine shares in Tesla and made money. So there wasn't like there was like harm or anything like that. And then the lawyers made $300 something million dollars on it all, which just is like,

how is it possible that somebody with nine shares can bring a lawsuit against a company and the lawyers be the ones? So, and Gurley's point was that if somebody that feels like they were damaged or has some issue with a company and they own nine shares can help a lawyer earn a $300 million payday, that just puts a target on the back of every single company that's in Delaware. And so hopefully the new admin like kind of like tries to, you know, who knows? Yeah, it's interesting. My worry is that Delaware is still the least bad option.

You know, it's like, oh, you don't like what's going on in America? Where are you going to move? But Elon, no, but Elon is already, you know, he's the Texas Stock Exchange. I think it's most happening. I think everybody sort of imagines that SpaceX will go public there. So we'll see. Let's go to Yaxine. Says, good physique, programmer, instant follow.

And it's a dude posting a jacked photo of himself. Good old chess day. This was my last bro. let workout for now. My goal is only to maintain muscle now since I'm okay with my physique. Lift a nod. Chad. Chad. So, so buddy, you know Jared Madfest? He was at Hereticon. Yep. He, he has like a whole thesis on this. He's like, if somebody is a brilliant programmer and they have, they, they aggressively like lift weights and, and I think his metric was maybe like they can bench their body weight or something like that. He's like, I've never lost money investing in

of those people. He's also technical. A technical person who can bench their body weight. He's like, I've never lost money ever. It's fantastic. And it's almost always a 10X. It's great.

It's like, that's like a big, like he's not, it's not his only thesis, but it's a part. If you fit that, go reach out to him. Yeah. Yeah. Or us. We've talked about it before. The guy who's at Nerling, Jeremy Barronholz,

beast in the gym at one point. And then of course, like now we got worked for an Elon company. It was working 20 hours a day. Kind of lost it. But like had that spark to figure it out. And it's both the intelligence to figure out, like, how to lift the right weights and get good at bodybuilding as a skill, but then also the dedication. And you put those two together, unstoppable. Yeah.

Turner Novak says, perplexity should sponsor Joe Rogan's in-show fact checks. Rogan does half a dozen per show. This gets perplexity in front of 50 million people per week in a way that feels very natural. Plus, it adds a new type of ad inventory for JRE, making the show even more profitable. I honestly think, yeah, yeah. It's great. Yeah. Think in the right way.

I do think that one of the problems with a show like JRE that gets clipped in all these different ways is that a lot of the listenership is not sitting there for the three, you know, host red ads at the beginning. And so, yeah, I think that I actually think it's brilliant. It would get, it would, it would, AI would be taking Jamie's job. Yep. But maybe Jamie can be the guy that man. manages the polycom, or not the polycom, but the machine that powers the bot. Yeah, I love it. Rogan doesn't do a lot of like integrated ads, and I don't know if even thinks he needs to.

He's too post-economic. He's just too post-economic. He just does what he wants. And then also the nature of the Spotify deal is a little interesting because now the ads go through Spotify. And so I think that he doesn't want to complicate it by having like backroom deals. Yeah, that would be an insane. like podcasts go to market though broadly from perplexity is basically like hey we're going to do a deal

with you anytime you don't know the answer to something maybe we should do it yeah hit us up hit us up we're happy to use perplexity to fact check our stuff and we get stuff all right we need to do fact checks uh our vice president and ben fax checks us every once in a while but uh we need we need a really good workflow we want the maximum tier get us the two thousand dollar a month plan perplexity you know that the founder of perplexity was talking about how he was like i wish check ChatyPT had launched at a higher price point because we just copied their business model. Yeah. Because they were like, okay, normally we would do $10 or $5 a month, but chat Chepti did 20,

so we'll just do 20 because that's normal now. And we're not going to get hate for that. And now perplexity can have a $200 a month tier and no one will really, you know, bach because it's just the standard. And so I don't know though. I do think it's ultimately very different like value propositions. ChatGPT is like, do work for me. Totally, totally.

Search is, okay. If Google search is free, can perplexity be, you know, is it worth paying $200 to get a slightly better? Yeah, but I think the important psychological thing from the fact that ChachyPT has a $200 a month plan is that you just don't want to be Airbnb charging more for a room than the hotels. Yeah. Or you don't want to, you know, have, be like the most expensive. the MKBHG wallpaper app. It was like the most expensive wallpaper app. And so people were like, why am I, like,

what did you do to justify this? Whereas if you're just drafting off of something else and some other trend, it's like, well, yeah, you can get the $20 a month perplexity or the free perplexity. Yeah, yeah. And so it's a little bit less comfort. I see perplexity building more intensive tools for researchers.

Yep. And being able to charge a lot of money for that. And also because... Consumer Search is much more like... Yeah, and also because consumer search, they can do more like ads and shopping and stuff. So they have other ways to monetize. But I want the best AI tools possible

and I'm willing to pay for them. So roll it out. Will Quist is quoting Slow Ventures and says, not sure if this is a hot take or not, but the odds of two people cooking up something truly novel and correct together is much lower than one person. And the question is, do you really need co-founders at the earliest stages of your company?

Interesting. It's very interesting. I always like how Will and the team are willing to question common beliefs in the valley and then put real skin in the game and actually invest behind those. But that's part of, you know, interestingly enough, that's part of why they have their PhD program where they basically typically work with a solo founder

to just like really think through their idea for months prior to actually incorporating and investing and all that. I think it's totally possible. Oftentimes, like truly novel, good, interesting ideas are somewhat controversial. And if you have a partner in it, like maybe you guys just average out the idea and it ends up into something that's just not as interesting or not that groundbreaking.

So who knows? In most cases, the way I've seen it happen is like there's a group of people that are maybe aligned in working together, but then one person comes up with an idea and then everyone kind of rallies around that and says, yes, like you're the vision carrier, you're the CEO, you're the founder of this company, and we're going to go build it together. But it's really like someone's idea and then they're holding the vision. Let's go to Ju-Wan over at Ramp. he's been on the show before for his fantastic campaign asking for raises every single day

I don't think it's happened yet but stay tuned um Grock it doesn't fucking lie Elon Musk bro you're really cooking with this platform bro great and he asked Grock what's the best platform for expense management virtual cards and all things procure to pay and Grock says based on current information ramp stands out as the best platform for expense management It's interesting because it's trained on all the X data, which is powered by the people. Totally. Yeah. And it's kind of a new day.

You know, you can see during like the mattress wars, there were a lot of different companies that bought mattress review websites. You're seeing this with Rora where there's different review sites that have heavy, heavy bias and different monetization schemes. But you can't fake just organic, you know, discovery and content that's happening on. on the internet or on a social media platform. Yeah, and real customer feedback. Exactly, exactly. And so clearly Grock has like picked up on that in the zeitgeist and has baked it into the LLM response, which we love to see.

Let's go to Growing Daniel. Growing Daniel, he says, Cyber Truck Effect. Now other manufacturers are pushing what would normally be insane concept cars to production, culture getting unstuck. And it's a picture of the new Jaguar concept car. And the big question here is like, are they going to push this into production because that has not been announced they did the crazy ad and they actually built

this there's videos of the actual that unit that's that's a render but they have a real version of it that they've been showing and having car reviewers I don't hate what they're doing here I definitely don't know who the buyer is like I've been trying to ask myself is somebody going to buy this that otherwise would have bought like a Porsche macon yeah and are they going to want to because it's like it's tron meets like a rolls royce basically that's what this screams i do like this more than their original campaign um and it's all starting to kind of see like at least what their strategy is is come out with something bold and controversial yep come out with again a product that's bold and controversial so at least it didn't just like relaunch jaguar with like the same i don't i i'm not

a buyer for this but i'm sure there are some buyers and i think this could be a halo car for them and i do think that they should push it to production. I do love the trend of concept cars going to production, like the cyber truck coming out exactly like, everyone was like, they're not going to ship it like that. No way. Yeah.

And he did. But I think the question is just, in order for this to win, it needs to be somewhat like the Audi R8, where the R8 was, I believe it was even built on the Lamborghini platform. It had a V-10 phenomenal car at. Actually, it was expensive,

but it was a reasonable price point for the stuff that you got. Yeah. For the performance that you got. And so this is clearly a Rolls-Royce specter competitor, which is their all-electric Rose-Royce. And if they can give you specter-level interior, quiet performance and range at a lower price with a more unique and iconic design,

I think they might have a winner. I do think that they need to keep the volume very low, so it needs to be exclusive in a halo. car and you only see a few of them? The issue is the Jaguars thrown away the incredible legacy of their brand to do this. Like I would have liked them to come out with a video of the car and then like almost like a vibe real of the history of the brand and saying we're bringing it into the new generation. But instead they came out and said basically like fuck all of our legacy copy nothing. And here's this weird car that we're not really sure who's going to buy it

because it's, but we'll go and test drive it. Yeah, I don't know. I think that there's something there. There's still a sliver of opportunity for them. They would need to follow it up with a great set. I mean, that was the beauty of the R8 Halo car. Yeah. It was a time when Audi was rolling out dozens of different SUVs and sedans that were all

reasonable performance. It put them in this premium tier. Yeah. got them in the same league as Mercedes and BMW. And now the Q5 and the Q3 and the Q8 are all really popular cars. And then they have some performance cars, the RSQ8, the R5 and the RS5, RS3. And they have some performance. They're not quite at the BMWM territory, the AMG territory, but they have a really diverse range of products.

And Jaguar needs to slot that in fast. Or else it's like, cool, they have a Halo car, but what am I going to buy? Yeah, I guess the other very clear thing that they're doing here is rendering it in pink and having their initial prototype in pink. It makes a very clear statement that this is for women, even though I know guys that like pink. My son sometimes says, no, I want the pink boots. And I'm like, all right, you can have the pink boots. But I don't know a lot of guys in our group chat that are going to buy the pink jag. So we'll see how this plays out for them.

Yeah. I mean, if they make it in like stainless steel as well, black, I mean, there's, It could look insane. It could look really great. But most importantly, I think if you just have a pink one of those in the corner of a Jaguar dealership rotating with big glass windows, it will pull people in and then they will buy some crossover. And they can only go up from last year.

I don't think they sold a single car last year. They sold them, but they didn't make them. They stopped making them and they just sold their inventory. And that's it. And it's a disaster. We like to see a car manufacturer make cars. Lots of work there. Will Edwards says,

just because we met on Zoom doesn't mean you can add my email to your newsletter. I don't care what tier VC you are. This is crazy. Or 21 VC is really doing that. I don't subscribe to any VC newsletters really at all. I guess some lower tier VCs have added me to their newsletter, but they don't post that much. The whole flow of if you're my absolute boy, you can add me to your newsletter without permission. Yep.

No one else. The one exception, I would say, is that if you're on a call with anyone at any one, Andreessen Horowitz, you should immediately be added to Pachy's newsletter. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. He's... That should be...

Table stakes. Programed. Exactly. But yes. And also, if you talk to anyone at Founders Fund, you should have to join Pirate Wires. But you have to pay. Cold. They just send you an invoice.

Yeah. Yeah. We should do that. Oh, this is interesting. Hasib says, many people thought after the election, Polymarket volumes would collapse. Looks like it didn't happen. Polymarket is still doing a about.

as much volume as it was doing in October and retained a huge number of traders. Very impressive given that volumes grew exponentially this year, one million a day, now 50 million a day. It's from Dune Analytics. Pretty interesting. That's an awesome thing about building this on chain is it's all available. Yep. Yep. And I mean, a lot of people expected, I mean, obviously the company expected that the volumes would fall, but they, they, Polymark has done a fantastic job rolling out all sorts of creator incentives and creator markets and there's just immediately. Yeah, plus Polymarket can build a business model. They can learn from OpenC, which saw this sort of like meteoric rise and then meteoric or sort of like, you know, aggressive fall. But if Polymarket and

we know Shane is doing this, if they can, you know, keep a very long term view and say, hey, it's fine if like we're in the, we're in the events betting business. certain events are going to have a hundred times more interest. But let's create a sustainable business model that allows us to just be there for when those events happen, capitalize on it, and then retain some users and keep it rolling. Yeah, the design of their app's really cool. Leading up to the election, if you downloaded the polymarket app in the United States, it would open to just the election.

It didn't even show you anything else on the platform. That's cool. And then once the election, the first time you open the app after the election was called, it played this really cool, like, CGI video that was clearly rendered for either winner. And then you saw, okay, Trump won and his, like, statue goes up. And then, and then now it's immediately when I open it, it says, who's getting confirmed? Who's going in the cabinet? And then over time, of course, hopefully there'll be more approvals and then you can just trade everything on the app. But it's a really interesting app. It's still on my main home screen

because I just like opening it up and checking it for different things. But it's very curated. Very, very cool. Gary Tan, he's great. quote tweeting, Yuri, who says, every time I do venture fund modeling, I essentially reach the same conclusion. If you get a $5 billion outcome, nothing else matters. And he says, about 6.5% of recent YC batches become $1 billion or more. Oh, that was what you were quoting. I didn't realize it was so high. That's insane. That's insane. About 25% of those go on to become worth $10 billion or more. There is no other place you can go where you have this kind of ability to meet these outliers all in one place four times a year.

YC demo day. It's true. I mean, big advantage just for being in YC. It's like someone in your batch is going to be a unicorn. I don't think any other scaled incubator has ever achieved anything close to this. No way. And with the number of companies that they're putting through, it just means that like someone in your batch is going to be a unicorn.

So they could, even if it's not you. Yeah, they've all, something else that's interesting. People have sort of analyzed what companies look like, you know, picking on demo. day versus just investing in these companies long term. And I think it's clear that one thing that's interesting, it's definitely non-obvious who are going to be those outliers on Demo Day because some companies just get a lot of traction and excitement and a sort of hype category, but then fizzle

out. And then other companies have zero hype on Demo Day, very little traction and end up becoming, you know, Decacorn. So it's cool to see. Well, we got to close out the show a little bit early today. But you got to get on with Taipei. I do. But we will end with Aaron Slodov. He says, huh, imagine that, wonder what's next. And it's a quote tweet of Disclosed TV that says, China bans exports of gallium, germanium, antimony, and other high-key, high-tech materials

with potential military applications to the United States. Very interesting. China, we cover this briefly, but China produces 99% of gallium. Yeah, fascinating. Until we get our gallium operation. And it's not just these. It's also like tin, like the tin smell.

there's only one company that does it in the United States and so there's like some founder out there who's like buying that and trying to build more capacity because obviously you need tin for a bunch of stuff and we've just completely forgotten about it and this goes back to carried no interest which is the private markets can respond to these sort of geopolitical changes right China's saying we're not going to export any of this to you anymore yep but we actually do probably need some amount of government intervention and incentives to make sure that we get all this supply online on a reasonable timeline, especially if there becomes a major conflict

with China. But all this stuff shouldn't be a surprise. Like we make it really, really difficult for them to get great chips. So why would they say, oh, we're still going to. Yeah, of course, there's going to be a trade war. So. Well, stay tuned. We'll be covering it here.

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