TBPN - GPT 4.5 Comparison, Where's the Moat?, RIP Skype, Sulek Earns Pro Card, Cursor for Figma

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - Happy B-Day Producer Ben (01:58) - Tell Me a Joke (05:17) - GPT 4.5 Analysis (49:50) - RIP Skype (01:00:58) - Sam Sulek's Pro Card (01:06:36) - The Timeline

You're watching TBPN live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. That's right, the capital of capital. Today is Friday, February 28th. And we got to say, happy birthday to our vice president, Ben. He's back in the studio. Ben. They tried, the enemies tried to take him down. They could not.

They couldn't do it. He's too powerful. But we got a great show for you today. We're covering GPT 4.5. We're going to answer the question. What do you get when you spend 10 times as much? money pre-training in LLM. There's been a bunch of conversation on the timeline about this. We're going to break it all down. Also, Skype is shutting down. I'm sure we'll have to do a little

moment of silence for that. Tell some stories about our early Skype usage days. Give you a little background on the company and how they wound up there. And then the timeline has just been in turmoil. So we're going to be spending a ton of time on the timeline. To say the least. Yeah, it's been spicy. Say the least. This morning, there's been drama and there's been tons of fun posts as always so stay tuned we got a great show for you today jordy how you feeling i am feeling good uh i'm i'm a little frustrated because ben didn't tell us that it was his birthday about five minutes ago and you know how people are you know they try to be nonchalant you know the wait till it's yeah it's it's almost you know we got an hour till it's noon yeah and he just drops oh yeah it's actually my

birthday yeah yeah yeah cool cool you're so nonchalant no tell me yep tell he's uh ben's gonna mute me but This goes out to all the nonchalant birthday boys out there. Tell us it's your birthday. A week, a month before, a week before, a day before in the morning of. Yeah. And I want to know so I can set up singing telegram, mariachi's. We were at breakfast with Ben earlier today. I should have had the whole staff come out and sing him happy birthday.

Yeah. I would have done that. Pancakes with candles on that. Exactly. Pancakes with candles. But he robbed us of that opportunity. Yeah. And I will never forgive you for that, Ben.

Anyway, Jordie, would you like to hear a joke? I love your jokes. You love my jokes, but these are my jokes. You didn't write this joke. I didn't write this joke. This is a joke written by a model that cost $5 trillion, actually. We should get into the actual cost. But for those that are maybe listening for the first time, John has this thing.

This is John's eval. Yeah. You're Coogan's Eval. And we should actually, you got to coin this. So Coogan's Eval is where you take the new model and you say, tell me a funny joke. Make sure it's actually a funny joke, like a stand-up set. and not just a knock-knock joke or something simple. Literally my favorite comedians are Shane Gillis, Dave Chappelle, et cetera.

And so why don't you read out the joke and... Buckle up. I mean, you're going to be in tears. We should get some tissues because you're going to be laughing so hard. So, hey, you ever notice how technology makes us think we're way smarter than we actually are? Like, I realized this when my Wi-Fi went out the other day. I immediately panicked because without Google, I'm basically just an ape holding an eye. iPhone. Seriously, if you took me back to the middle ages and asked me how to build a simple

pulley system, I'd be like, uh, you got YouTube here. Hey, everybody. AGI achieved. AgeI achieved. Hang it up. AGI. Everyone's out of a job. That's incredible. Amazing. Of course, that's not the goal of these models. Their job is to work in the minds. Are you going to, are you going to keep going. It's so bad. Okay. So, and it's not just the internet. Remember when we thought Alexa and Siri were going to make our lives easier? Now, it's

just me arguing with a speaker about whether I said play Kanye or order pad tie. My credit cards maxed out, but hey, my Spotify playlist is fire. I like how it just throws in this completely random non-sequitur. Yeah. I don't get. Why is it

maxed out? Because he's paying for like AI tools or something? Ordering pad tie? I don't know. Speaking of tech, I think the weirdest part about AI isn't that it's smarter than us. It's that it's becoming more human. We programmed AI to mimic

humans and now AI lies, makes mistakes and blames other people. We invented digital middle management. Congratulations, humanity. We've automated incompetence. Wow, a real knee slapper. Right? Perfect. I mean, I did that, was

stolen from Shane Gillis or Dave Chappelle? I think what we need to do is feed your lines back into the model and ask it to judge your delivery because it really might come down to the delivery. Maybe I bought it. You're setting it up. You're setting it up to fail. You don't want to believe that the model can be as funny as you are. But anyways, we're not, we don't have AGI yet. We're not have a job yet. So stay tuned. But I mean, realistically, that's not why they're not even trying to make these models that funny. It is an interesting e-val. I think it's a good. I think it's good eval. I think that they should be able to do that at some point. And the humor eval is a way of asking, you know, the model like, can you do something that you haven't been trained on, right?

Yeah. The move 37 of writing is a joke, a novel joke in my mind. The real benchmark is a true knee-slapper. I think so. I think so. But anyway, we got a much more serious analysis from Andre Carpathie. He says GPD 4.5 and an interactive comparison. Today marks the release of GPD 4.5 by OpenAI. I've been looking forward to this for two years ever since GPT4 was released because this release offers a qualitative measurement of the slope of improvement you get out of scaling pre-training compute. This is something we've talked about.

Yeah. I'm super scale-pilled. Scaling is real. But the question is, if you scale the model up 10x, do you get a 10x improvement? Do you get a 1x, 2x improvement? I don't know if we got that here. Do you get 100x? Like sometimes, you know, and he talks about the evolution here.

So each 0.5 in the version is roughly 10x pre-training compute. Now, recall, the GPT1 barely generates coherent text. GPT2 was a confused toy. GPT2.5 was skipped straight into GPT3, which was even more interesting. Then GPT 3.5 crossed the threshold where it was enough to actually ship as a product and sparked OpenAI's chat GPT moment. And if you remember, when GPT 3.5 was getting really good, there was this DaVinci model is GPT 3.502 dash da Vinci, a great name, of course.

Fantastic. But that was the moment when people in the developer community were toying with it and being like, okay, this thing is actually like passing the Turing test. Like it sounds like human. And it is remarkable. It's a remarkable innovation. And so GPT4 in turn also felt better, but I'll say that it definitely felt more subtle. I remember being part of a hackathon trying to find concrete prompts where GPT4 outperformed

3.5. They definitely existed, but clear and concrete slam dunk examples were difficult to find. It's that everything was just a little bit better, but in a diffuse way. The word choice was a bit more creative. Understanding of nuance in the prompt was improved. Analogies made a bit more sense. The model was a little bit funnier. World knowledge and understanding was improved at the edges of rare domains. Hallucinations were a bit less frequent. The vibes were just a bit better. It felt like the water that rises all boats where everything gets slightly improved by 20%. So it is with that expectation that I went into testing GPT 4.5, which I had access to for a few days and which saw 10x more pre-training compute than GPT4. And I feel like, once again, I'm in the same hackathon two

years ago. Everything is a little bit better and it's awesome, but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to. Still, it is incredibly interesting and exciting as another qualitative measurement of a certain slope of capability that comes for free just from pre-training a bigger model. Keep in mind that GPT4.5 was only trained with pre-training supervised fine-tuning at RLHF, so this is not yet a reasoning model. Therefore, this model release does not push forward model capability in cases where reasoning is critical like math and code. In these cases, training with RL reinforcement learning and gaining thinking is incredibly important and works better, even if it is on top of an older base model, GPT4-ish capability or so.

the state of the art here remains the full 01. Presumably, OpenAI will now be looking to further train with reinforcement learning on top of GPD4.5 model to allow it to think and push model capability in these domains. However, we do actually expect to see an improvement in tasks that are not reasoning heavy. And I would say those tasks are more EQ as opposed to IQ. So it's more, it's more just better to chat with and actually have a conversation with related. and bottlenecked by world knowledge, creativity, analogy making, general understanding, humor, etc. Definitely bottlenecked by humor.

Yes. So these are the tasks that I was most interested during my vibe checks. So below, I thought it would be fun to highlight five funny slash amusing prompts to test these capabilities and organize them into an interactive LM Arena Light right here on X using a combination of images and poles in a thread. Sadly, X does not allow you to include both an image and a poll in a single post. So I have to alternate posts that give the image.

And then so basically he put, he left it up for eight hours. This got a million views. Lots of people voted. And he broke down the results. And interestingly, he says, okay, so I didn't super expect the results of the GPT4 versus GPT4. From earlier today. But GPT4. Outperformed GPT4 on only one of the five questions.

Wow. People prefer GPT4 and four. out of five questions awkward. And it's always odd. I mean, the splits are not huge. 56% of people prefer GPT 4.5 in one question. The margins were 10, 20%. It wasn't like, it wasn't like 100%, 90% of people thought it was one way or another. But still to 6040 for every one person that prefers, you know, GPT 4 or 5 in question 3, two people preferred GPD 4. That is pretty significant. Yeah. And he says, to be honest, I found this a bit. surprising as I personally found GPD 4.5 responses to be better in all cases.

But maybe I'm just a high taste tester. I think that's probably true considering you built this, Andre. And you're like one of the greatest programmers of all time. And so you probably have high IQ. And, uh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, but, uh, the thing to look for is that GPT4 more often says stuff. Trump has a refined taste in another kind of model.

Yeah. Yeah. He's got that. The thing to look for is that GPT4 more often says stuff that on the face of it looks fine and type checks as making sense. But if you really think about it longer or more carefully, you will often more, you will more often catch it saying things that are a bit of an odd thing to say or a little too formulaic, a little too basic, a little too cringy or a little too trope. Slightly reassuring a number of people noted similar surprise in the replies. I noticed the few I noticed as an example for the roast. 4.5 is punchier for the story.

4.5 narrative jumped in, had dialogue and hinted a unique storyline. B was a little bit more schematic. For the poem, 4.5 is obviously way better. The rhyme scheme and meter of B are so unsophisticated. A has to be 4.5. The voters have poor taste. I like that. So yeah, either high taste testers are noticing the new and unique structure,

but the low taste ones are overwhelming the poll. all you plebs don't yeah you normies lobeys don't can't if you can't tell honestly if you can't tell the difference if you can't tell the difference between 4.5 and 4 like I don't even know if you should be allowed to be a member of society it's interesting you have to imagine

open AI is trying to continuously dominate the narrative right it's sort of there's sort of ahead on revenue but very you know well beyond but it's like a knock out dragout fight in terms of attention and what's it's really a war for attention so they had grok

last week wherever the was it over the it was friday it started last week but then the the app rolled out the voice mode rolled out the reasoning the new clod model 3.7 and opening eye like there there's some value in being the last model to drop right yeah in just terms of you know sucking the air out of the room and i believe that this uh that this model will be the top of the stack in benchmark and Open AI has always done this cadence where they come out with the best. And then a couple of months later, there's a whole flood of everyone else catching up. And all of a sudden they're beating them by like a few percentage. And then Open AI comes back and is back on top.

And so if you average out like Open AI is not always on the top of the rankings on every single benchmark, but they probably have the most number of days on top because they're on top like, you know, for about half the year. And then towards the back half of the year, everyone else is kind of chipping away at their leads and different benchmarks and stuff. But it's fun. So he closes out and says, so we'll wait for the larger. There's also this feeling. It's hard to know if it's accurate, but there's a general feeling that I have, and I'm sure others do, that the other foundation model companies are launching stuff as fast as they possibly can.

And open AI is maybe sort of timing things more. And that who knows, you know. I kind of disagree with that. I mean, I think that, I mean, the narrative is like Anthropic has some insane voice model that they haven't released for safety reasons. And I think if anything, all the GROC push and stuff, that's really pushing the cadence at Open AI. For sure. For sure. I'm not saying they're not feeling the pressure.

I'm just saying they seem to be, they seem to be keep, you know, you can imagine if they wanted to launch GPT5, you know, could, do they feel the urgency? They felt clearly an urgency to come out with four or five. Sure. Maybe they don't, and they're feeling the pressure to get five out, but there's not, they're sort of like trying to stay just perpetually slightly ahead. Yep. And focusing on quality, whereas GROC was just, we have massive amount of compute.

We're just going to brute force, spend, launch as fast as possible, iterate. GROC was clearly not actually ready for production. Yeah. have the reinforcement learning that made it so you would just get these obscene answers that never should have been live, right? It clearly was more of even, it was almost like a beta version of the product. In many ways, it was responding to stuff that was more of an alpha level product where that stuff should have been caught. It's so funny. The nonprofit board at OpenAI was upset with Sam for launching ChatGPT, the very first version, and they were like, if he'd moving too

fast, he's too dangerous. Can you imagine the nonprofit board watching Elon? lunch grok three and they're just like no reinforcement learning it's like giving you gas like how to make a bomb stuff it's generating intellectual property that's completely infringing like it has sexy mode and they're just like what like actually like Sam would be much better yeah on second thought yeah yeah actually we should have bagged Sam and

kept Elon out of the race turns out our biggest non-profit backer was the most degenerate yeah yeah that's hilarious safety pill, is just accelerate, accelerate, accelerate. Totally, totally. The entire time. Yeah. But yeah, to Elon's credit, he doesn't, he, he, he, you know, makes the claim that, that Sam is disingenuous and, and, uh, snakey or whatever.

Yeah. He's not saying that Sam is reckless. Exactly. It's actually a very different critique. Yeah. And I, and I think, I think it's good. Like, I think that this shows that, you know, just scaling up, uh, you know, um, like, there was definitely a drumbeat from the AI Dumer community that that GPT 4.5, GPT5, you scale up the pre-training

by by 10x. They were so scale-pilled that they said when you scale up by 10x, you're going to get a 10x more dangerous model. Yeah. You're going to get 10x more risk. And that does not feel like what's going on right now at all. It feels like, yeah, these things are still friendly and nice and they make mistakes and they're just simulating humans and humans are default like kind of good but also sometimes midwits and sometimes they you know come up with good stuff and you know it's all about how you implement them and if somebody uses one of these models and creates a wrapper that does something bad then yeah you're going to get a bad outcome but the model itself is not going to you know break out and have a mind of its own and

destroy everything um so andre finishes out by saying one really bad mistake that bugs me is in the GPT 4 versus 4.5 conversation, the one generated by 4.5. 4.5 asks, still buffering your responses like it's dial-up internet. This is really bad because it clearly borrows tropes from early days computing. Huh, interesting. Anyway, let's go to some of the other takes. Michael McNano is... This comment is interesting.

You think this is about it? No, the, from Maine reaction there. I don't know if we have the answer, but is it possible the 4-0 update last month was already a distillation of 4.5, I think the results would be less concerning, if so. Huh. Oh, yeah, because maybe we got some of that already baked in. It's hard to tell. It's such a small, you know, difference. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to tell because, like, if you're just trying to stay out of the news. And this goes back to people right now, people right now are almost comforted in the fact that you're getting chapters of an LLM, right?

Sort of like version one, two, et cetera, and they all have different naming scenes. Yeah. But over time, you can imagine they're just perpetually updating. Yeah. But that's, uncomfortable to be yeah you know humans get smarter or dumber over time right depending on their environment and their view viewpoint of the world and knowledge and all that stuff but it's not necessarily perpetually updating throughout even a day where you wake up and your your employee in the morning is brilliant and then they're slightly you know dumber later in the day nerfed i mean that the the the the vibes around the cadence going from chat ch pt which launched on 3.5 to GPT4.

Everyone saw ChatGPT in 3.5 and we were like, we crossed the Turing test. AI is here. This is going to be massively disruptive. Like there's going to be no more marketing jobs because it can just write copy. Like there's going to be mass unemployment. Like people, even beyond like the Duma's who are saying this is going to kill us, a lot of people are like, this is going to fundamentally change the world very rapidly because it's happening at internet scale.

It's not an Adams company. It's a Bits company. And so this can be rolled out into every single company and lay. playoffs can happen now, right? And so people were, people were worried. And then three months later, it was like, oh, we did, we went from three to four, which feels like a 25%, 33% increase. It just felt like, oh, okay, if we're continuing at this pace, like the acceleration is real. And, and, and, and, but then over the last two years, we've just been incrementing on fours, four, four, four, four, four, four, four, four, four, people were starting to call that out. But Sam, if you're out there in the market, it's trying to raise 40 on 350. Yeah.

350 billion or whatever the price is with the moss around you want there to be this sense of hey there's this sort of impending super intelligence and you know every if you're needing to raise that kind of capital you need super intelligence to perpetually be right around the corner even even Elon was posting i think earlier this week we were on the it's the eve of super intelligence you know whatever everybody sort of yeah if if the models were to stagnate completely, there would be a massive pullback in sort of new investment, right? Because you see the difference between four and four or five, that's not going to get the incremental whatever, $20 billion of investment.

It's such an interesting dance because if you go too hard and you say super intelligence is right around the corner, well, then the regulator is going to come out. People are going to be protesting in the streets. The DOOMers are going to have a bigger argument saying, look, you can just look at what Sam is saying. He's going to say it's the most powerful God in a box. Like, we have to control this. We have to regulate it.

But if you don't say, hey, super intelligence is coming. Well, then why should we invest a trillion dollars in the CAPEX? Like, in order to make these types of investments, it's got to be the real deal. And so finding that balance is really, really tricky in my opinion. I think Satya has the right balance, which is that AI in its current state and for the near future is this sort of almost like a co-pilot, it's thought partner. It's not, it doesn't yet have, you know, total agency, right? It's not actually replacing an employee, but it's being a work sort of partner for you. Yeah. And that still justifies a lot of CAPEX, but I don't think it

justifies an incremental $30 billion investment at Open AI at the moment in time. Interesting. I think people massively underestimate how much one point of view one point of of view I forget who was talking about this earlier this week is that there's so much value to be created and captured from the current technology set it would take a even if we had even if all model development paused yep and we had a 10 year shot we just went to implement to implement the technology we could still there would still be numerous numerous you know and that's what happened with the dot-com boom.

Like the internet rolled out, dial-up was pretty terrible, pretty limited. But even in like, I don't know, 2000, what, 2004, 2005, people were starting to get high-speed internet, DSL, cable, stuff that you were, where you could play video games online, you could stream videos. And then there was a question about like, okay, well, what if your internet gets 10 times faster? Well, like, you're not going to watch 10 movies at the same time. And yes, you could stream 8K video instead of 1080P, but most people just are fine with 1080P. It's still entertaining and, you know, it's valuable.

And so, like, we accelerated the speed and number of connections to the internet. And then it took us 20 years to actually reap that benefit, even though the tech kept getting better. And the internet has gotten faster. And now you can download an 8K video very quickly if you have the right line. But most people are just like, yeah, I just need, you know, a couple gig download. And I'm fine. It is interesting. Well, let's move on to some reactions.

We got Michael McNano. He says, technology is not a moat, never has been. There are so many examples of incumbents copying startups technologies and leveraging their distribution to crush competition. And AI coding models are quickly making technology even less defensive with coding models like clawed, assistance like cursor, and no code tools like lovable and bolt. It's becoming stupidly easy to copy existing products and apps with virtually no effort. Turns out the stuff that actually matters is what always mattered.

Strong products, real network effects, ruthless distribution, and brands people actually care about. The winners will double down on those things while everyone else wonders why their perfect tech keeps getting cloned into irrelevance. So the most relevant sort of point related to all of this is that, you know, we've talked about this on the show before this idea of easy come, easy go. Yep. And so the same, the same, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, you know, the, that there's, you know, sort of, you know, sort of, you open source. They, it was, the same, the same time, uh, get to a hundred million dollars in revenue. Loveable and bolt come out, you know, lovable goes from zero to 17 million in three months with a small team. Uh, but the same technology that enables them to do that also enables, enables other people to, come and compete away their market, right? So windsurf AI, which is a cursor competitor, they have gotten to a $40 million run rate in a very short amount of time. And so historically, if you look at these businesses that have this sort of explosive growth, sometimes there's

sort of specific market dynamics that allowed that to happen or allowed a specific team to do that or relationships that enabled it. But oftentimes, if a pure play software company explodes in growth, and there's no network effects, which Michael references here, or sort of a durable distribution advantage, right, that that value creation can erode very quickly. And so what I think we're all interested to see how this plays out is all these companies that have this explosive revenue growth. One, it's great because when people say, oh, there's this big bubble,

you can point and say, well, yeah, there's a bubble. But real customers are handing over dollars to pay for these products. And, you know, Curser would have gone public, you know, a year ago if it was 2021, right? Yeah. But what I think we're all waiting to see play out is, does this revenue, you know, ultimately get competed away by other teams that, you know, there's teams that will use cursor to compete with Curser, right? Which is, you know, so we'll see.

I think we're generally bullish on these companies in the short medium term, but unclear how they sort of maintain and continue to create value when people just say, you know, there will be a version of cursor that allows somebody to vibe code a free version of cursor, right? How far, like, I'm actually surprised we haven't seen somebody say I use cursor to rebuild cursor. That would definitely go viral. We've seen some people do additional forks and there's been some pushback. There was that YCT company.

And so, yeah, there has been pushback. I wonder, are you a bull or bear on docuSign? DocuSign's like the quintessential, you should be able to rebuild that with cursor, right? It's just forms and filings. But maybe those 10, 20,000 employees they have are just the best sales guys. They're embedded in every organization. They're calling you on your birthday. They're celebrating you.

They're picking your kids up from school. They tell you their birthday that morning. They wake up and say, hey, it's your favorite sales rep. Yeah, you clone DocuSign for, you know, $5 in cursor credits or whatever. You have Devin on the case for the weekend and you got yourself a DocuSign clone. But how are you distributing it? You need 10,000 sales guys. Maybe, maybe.

You know, I just, I don't think we know. I want, you know, the bigger thread to DocuSign is again, so Google Workspace, I think just rolled out a Docs document signing product. We already pay for Google Workspace. It's one click away. it's not going to be as good. But for sure, Google's like calendar booking link throttled the growth of Callenly. Yeah, that's true.

Like that. And so I think the bigger threat to some of these sort of commodity products. The thing is, I mean, document signing has the viral sort of effect where you sign up and you sign up. But that also enables new. Yeah, distribution is baked in. Yep. But I mean, we've said this maybe five times on the show. before how has docusign not said hey our product's actually pretty simple we should be able to

maintain it with a team of a hundred engineers we actually don't need a thousand yeah let's sort of give back uh let's free these people to go work on other more interesting products set them free set them free uh instead of slaving way in the in the docu sign minds yeah uh and just let them go work on more interesting things and then you know give that give that cash back to shareholders yeah invested in new products. It just seems like a very uninspiring company. But we'll see. Yeah. Anyway, Scott Wu, CEO of Cognition, chimed in with his take on GPT 4.5. I thought this is an interesting data point because he's obviously using these models very deeply. He says, GPD 4.5 has been awesome to work with. Of course, they build this into Devin. You can run Devin

on a number of different LLMs. And he says, are Agenic? coding benchmarks, on our Agentec coding benchmark, it already shows massive improvements over 01 and 40, excited to see the model's continued trajectory on code. One interesting data point, although GPD 4.5 and Claude 3.7 Sonet score similarly on our

overall benchmark, we find that GPT 4.5 spikes more heavily on tasks involving architecture and cross-system interactions, whereas Claude, 3.7 sonnets spikes more on raw coding and code editing. As AI takes on increasingly complex tasks, we believe that multimodal agents, multi-modal agents that incorporate each model's unique strengths will perform best. Just like in your brain, you have different sections of your brain to do different tasks. On a team, you have that developer who's really good at architecture,

and you have that other guy who's just a beast writing code all night long. And so, I might be off here, but with Devin and Cognition's position where as the underlying models get dramatically better, their product gets better and more valuable, that's a great position to be in. Given the complexity of building out the sort of team-like product, you know, like an individual contributor-esque product that's integrated into a team, will Cognition be better positioned than a cursor where, you know, as how long until you can get Devin to build a version of cursor and just say, hey, fork. Yeah.

You know, we might be 10 years away from that, but it's not even that. I mean, like the mental model I have for cursor versus Devin is like completely separate things. One is like this. No, totally. I'm just saying. And with Devin, I almost see it as like you could see them like a McKinsey almost where it's like there's a large company. and they're like, hey, we have this app and it runs on iOS and we need to get it to run on Android. And so you just need to take that code and transfer it and it's just going to be a lot of work and it's got to be done perfectly.

And so we just want you, we're going to give you $10 million to do it because it would cost $50 million to do it with some human outsourcing team. And cognition just goes and cranks and like gets it done. And then eventually you're doing that all over your organization. and it's much more for like these these like corporate projects than like you know uh yeah our backlogs etc yeah yeah exactly i i've seen a lot of case studies like that but it's very it's very different and then also yeah it's it's very um it's very like it's a b-to-be product yeah they are in open access you can just go install it um but it is expensive and it's a very different uh sales motion I think.

Yeah. Anyway, let's go to Chubby, hilarious name, with the most serious post, talking about OpenAI Mark Chen, who I actually got dinner with a couple months ago. Great guy. Mark Chen says, we've found a new paradigm through reasoning, which we're also scaling. That's right, because GPD4.5 was clearly proven that pre-training has definitely reached a wall. GPT5 must be a banger. Last chance says Chubby.

And so a lot of people throwing a little bit of a little question on, you know, hey, everyone is going to be shifting to, oh, no, no, no, we don't focus on just bigger, bigger models. We focus on reasoning because, like, that's the next paradigm. But I think that's fine. I don't care where you're optimizing your AI system. I don't care if it's all the gains are in pre-training, all the gains are in post-training, all the gains are in RLHF. When RLHF came out, people were like, oh, so now, like, to scale and improve a model, you just need to have a bunch of people like writing answers. Like, this is an AI.

And it's like, I don't care. I just want. Just give me good results. Good results. Make me laugh. Make me laugh. John just wants to laugh. But also do the research reports and make them great, you know, and, you know, and, you know,

throw, scale all of these things. And I think that there's probably going to be these cycles of memes online where people are like, oh, like scale doesn't matter at all. It's all about reasoning. Oh, RLHF doesn't matter. It's all about post-training or pre-training or, you know, fine-tuning or accustomed stuff. You know, I do think it's fair for people like Chubby to feel like they have the right

to try to hold Open AI and these other model companies who have made these sort of massive, audacious claims. And they've put out a lot of communications on this topic to try to say, yeah, last chance. you know, GPT5's got to be a banger. They're basically holding. But it's so funny to be in a nod and be like, hey, $300 billion company, last chance. Last chance. No, no.

Who are you to decide whether or not this happens? But yeah, there's this balance between the, it's more so. Chubby is probably a customer of Open AI. They're allowed to have strong opinions. Totally. And everyone has an opinion. If they're marketed something to. Yeah.

But at the same time, Open AI, it's, squarely within their right to try to massage the narrative and say, well, actually, this is the thing that's more important. So I think both sides have clear points. Let's go to another hater. Do you know Gary Marcus? I do not. Gary Marcus is a fascinating figure in AI. He wrote a piece called Deep Learning is hitting a wall. He was at, he sold an AI company to Uber, I believe. And his whole thing is what is it symbolic symbol manipulation. So he believes that like you cannot just throw a big pile of data at a basic algorithm like the GPT3 algorithm and then just do predict next word, predict next word, predict next word,

and then get God or get the genius human. He maintains that like humans represent information in their brains in different ways than that. It's not just predict the next word every two seconds. Right. And so. special and unique snowflakes. He's, he's somewhat right because there are clearly like the reasoning and being able to search the web and use Python and all these different tools. We're building out the machine brain in multiple different sectors.

But he's also been like massively wrong for a long time because he was saying like deep learning will never scale and it's like I'm talking to. He's a Michael Berry of models. Exactly. Exactly. And so. But you only got to, you know, if he's right right now, he's going to be pretty vindicated. A lot of people have been like this guy.

is a joke, like why is he be, why is he testifying in front of Congress? At the same time, you know, he, I think he does have a PhD. He's like, he's like a serious researcher. He's just taken a very contrarian stance. But so has, uh, Nome Chomsky. Noam Chomsky. And Noam Chomsky was a, uh, linguist at MIT and, and had a lot of, uh, yeah, and had a lot of, a lot of theories on the way language is constructed and, and saw and argued that, uh, you could not you could not represent a human through like a sloppy algorithm. There needed to be some sort of more fundamental truth. And so symbol manipulation basically says like, you know, we need to have, you know, a concept baked into the model of like what a table is, how it interacts with a chair,

all these different things. And so it's been, it's been controversial because there haven't been as many gains in the symbol manipulation world. But Gary's been, you know, happily taking a a victory lap, I guess, over GPD 4.5, not just purely proving that pre-training scale is all you need. But let's find out. So Chubby again says, judging by the mood, GPD 4.5 is the first big failure for open AI. Too expensive, too little improvement and often inferior to GPT40, even in comparison and creative answers in community tests like what Andre Carpathie posted. And it's interesting because too expensive, don't care at all. They're going to distill this model and get it a thousand times cheaper in two seconds, too little improvement. That is interesting. But again,

you have to run the the CAPX to profit calculation. And the GPT for training run, I think was like under $100 million or something, which is still like a lot of money at the time, but $100 million and they're making billions. And so if you train a hundred million dollar run and then you generate billions a year forever, potentially, if you can be sticky. Not necessarily. Not necessarily. super high margin. Not yet, but once you bake it down onto silicon, onto a chip or something. I'm just saying, I'm just, yeah, yeah, like, true, like they're not profitable right now, but, uh, just the idea of, of any of these AI companies throwing a billion at, or 10 billion, when you think about how much usage there's going to be. It's not as crazy as you think. And so the question isn't, especially when you

consider there's models that no one uses that have raised $100 million. Yeah. And I've spent most of it. Yeah. With nothing to show for it. Yeah. And I mean, you, open AI looks like they're allocating fairly efficiently. And you can say the same thing about like Amazon.com. They built out huge data centers, 10 times as they 10x their KAPX like 10 times, right? Did the experience of Amazon.com get that much better? No. But they printed money the whole time because they have a great product on top of it. And so like you don't necessarily need a 10x improvement in the core product. If the business is working and it's generating cash,

you can underwrite those KAPX expenses all day. And that's what I think a lot of people, that's why a lot of people are jumping into this, because Elon is saying, look, I'm going to spend billions of dollars on GROC and XAI, but then I'm going to vend that into Tesla. I was thinking about this. Like having a deeply integrated GROC and XAI integration in a Tesla

is going to be amazing. There's so many times when I'm driving into the office and I'm talking to chat GPT about, hey, here are some topics that I want to talk about. Can you do a deep research on this one? just using the voice mode. And if that was integrated into a Tesla, so it's basically self-driving itself,

and you're just having a conversation with Grock. Okay, today I got to talk to Jordi about the show. I got to pay this bill. I got to schedule a meeting. And it's just cataloging all of this. Oh, okay, you did legs yesterday, hit chest. Here's what you should do. I'm constantly in the car.

I'm constantly in the car. You know, I spend enough time on the road, you know, these days because of all the traffic that if I get in the car for 90 minutes and I'm driving, I'm going to have 20 thoughts that I want to be able to execute on in that moment, but I end up having to wait until I'm at a stoplight, write it down, keep going. And then I've built this huge backlog of task where if you can have this sort of omnipresent AI that says, hey, Grock, can you, you know, call, you know, the cable company, I want to increase my, I want to get fiber. I have, like, you know, I want to upgrade my plan.

Exactly. Like that's an item you're checking off the to-do list. Exactly. And I'm sure your car, all your cars have some sort of voice recognition, but it's awful, right? It's like, call John. And it's like, oh, did you want me to, you know, call you a tow truck or whatever? Like always gets it wrong. No one ever uses it.

Imagine if it's, if it's, you know, truly frontier best in class. And so the question is not, does spending a billion dollars on CAPEX to train a frontier model get you something that's a thousand times better than the competition? It's just, does it get you a valuable asset that then you can vend in and sell all over the place. And so can Elon sell Grock to X premium members and make the money back there? Can he sell it into Tesla? Can he sell it into other things? Like can he hook it up to Neurlink? Like can he make money from the money he spent? That's the only thing that matters at the end of the day. That's capitalism, right? Anyway, so, you know, people are pouring cold water all over this.

This is a tough timing too. So yeah, they're pouring cold water on it, calling it the first big failure of Open AI. Meanwhile, poor Sam had his first kid like last week. It's rough. This guy. So Gary Marcus says a big surprise only to you and the many other open AI fans who refuse to listen to me when I patiently and endlessly explained that this would be exactly what would happen for the rest of us. This was all but inevitable. And so he's taking a victory lap. But it's odd because it's like, okay, like go do the thing. Gary. Like go go do your approach.

Like do the symbol manipulation and beat them. Or start a podcast. He might. He might. But yeah, I mean, it's easy to be a pessimist and say that approach isn't working. Like the starship isn't going to work to get us to Mars. I don't care. Build something better that will get us to Mars then.

If you think the slingshot, we were talking to Delian about this, like if he wants to get there with a space plane, he'll do that. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, that's an obvious critique of Gary. but at the same time, if you are highly researched on a specific topic, you're an expert on that topic in many ways. But Gary, you could argue he's an exited AI founder who's been talking about this for years. He's perfectly entitled to have an opinion on the world-changing technology that everybody else.

And it's fine if he take, I think he can take a victory lap. We're not, we're not, he's not trying to say that I can. do it. He has been for years. For years, he was saying, he was saying, my approach is better than deep learning. Okay. So he has, that's why. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because he's, he hasn't been advancing the ball on his thing. It would be one thing if it was like, it was like, they did this and then simple manipulation, his approach outperforms. And it's like, oh my God, he was right. Like, we should have, we were going, going down the wrong path. Gary was right. Instead, he's just saying, like, my, their thing sucks, but my thing really sucks. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Which is kind of like my read on it.

But I don't know. I mean, still, you know, congrats to him. He can't take a, he can say, hey, he's entitled to say, I'm right. Maybe. Yeah. And Open AI won't respond to this. But if they, they could or would or wanted to, they would say, cool, like, let's see your benchmarks. Exactly.

Exactly. And he wouldn't, sounds like it wouldn't have a good answer to that. Yeah. Well, now he would say, oh, I'm out of the game. I'm not, I'm working on policy and stuff. I'm not, I'm not really building. I'm not trying to compete in that. But it is, is a little frustrating because, you know, like the deep-seek team,

over there, they're saying, hey, we have a slightly different approach and we're getting, we're getting better performance with less investment. I mean, you know, the actual investment's debatable, but there were clearly some optimizations there where they got close to the frontier with obviously less than what it cost to train 4.5. And so I'm much more sympathetic to like a deep seek stand saying like, hey, the best investment in this technology in the next wave here is on the optimization side, not on the scale side. I'm receptive to that. But if you're just saying, like, this isn't working, but also like my thing is, okay, it's like, okay. Ha, I was right, but I also fail. Anyway, let's move on. Let's close out with another attempted humor. Dan Shipper says

GPG 4.5 is actually so effing funny. Be me. Be Dan Shipper. Wake up at 5 a.m. Journal for 45 minutes about the dream I had last night. Dream was in second person, probably inspired by an obscure neuroscience paper. I read last Tuesday. Brew coffee using beans handpicked by monks on a remote Guatemalan mountain. Sit down to write today's newsletter, accidentally outlined four new business ideas, resist the temptation to launch them all by noon, meditate, feel mind literally expanding into previously undiscovered cognitive dimensions, tweet and insight for my meditation session, immediately gained 200 new subscribers, open lap, top to write an article on mental models.

Realize the mental, the ultimate mental model was within me all along. It's only 9 a.m. Why aren't you laughing? I mean, what's wrong? I mean, do you not understand the humor? I mean, go over your head, Jordy. Yeah, it flew over my head.

Because if you're, if you don't, if you can't tell the difference about 5 and 4, you're, you're not really like high IQ. Yeah, I mean, Claude actually got fed this and laughed. Yeah. It actually played a laugh track. That was its only response. So the models are making each other laugh. Yeah.

They're not making us laugh just yet. I do think there's something cool about this. I think he had personalization on. What if the model is actually sophisticated enough that it knows will laugh harder if it just delivers a terrible, like a terrible joke and just boshes it. And we go, ha ha, ha, you dumb model. It's, yeah, it's being sneaky behind the scenes. It's hiding its power level. Yeah, exactly.

Secretly, it could be the best. It could put every comedian. out of business. Yeah. But it's like playing basketball with a kid. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, no.

I dropped the ball. I guess you scored. Yeah. That's what's doing. Yeah. Anyway, I'm glad he thought it was funny. I, what is interesting here is that this was personalized.

So he fed it in his, his timeline or some more context around him. And so it, so it clearly made jokes that were highly personalized to him. And I think that that is cool. And I think there is something there. We've talked about this with the GROC stuff. It creates a more unique interaction, unique product, especially when I think the most

relevant, again, won't be humor. It'll be research where it will know, hey, Jordy, you're an expert in angel investing and ads and entrepreneurship. So I don't need to explain to you what a safe is, but you're not an expert in mining, you know, rare minerals. So I'm going to break down. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to explain to you in granular detail. Okay, lithium ion.

Where does that come from? And I'm going to explain it to you like I'm five and then I'm going to go deeper. I'm going to work with you to understand where your knowledge is and get you up to speed really quickly. I think that's going to be amazing. Anyway, well, one of the companies that I love that's implementing AI better than anybody else is, of course, ramp. Better than anyone. Go to ramp.com. Fact checked and true.

easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And it is, I mean, obviously I'm joking around, but it is true. Ramp is a perfect place to implement AI. They, when you take a picture of the receipt, they get scanned. Of course, an LLM processes that. And it's gotten so much better. And it's the exact type of organization that you want to be with where they're, I mean, the cognition guys worked there. Like, they have, they have an insane team that can go and look at whatever the frontier model is,

swap it in in two seconds. They move very fast. They move very quickly. And so all the product just keeps compounding in a way that's, you know, great. So you get a better experience. From an investment, you know, from a company that you would potentially join, there are companies out there that are just sort of boilerplate SaaS that maybe have a lot of revenue today like DocuSign. But presumably over time will will be more like cable where some people keep paying, but you know, they get sort of replaced. These sort of businesses that are more, you know, this is for informational purposes only, obviously, but the businesses that are more in these sort of regulated spaces that require payment rails and banking licenses and stuff like that

are super well positioned to implement AI for customers, but, you know, not in the same way. You can't just, you know, use the version of cursor in 10 years and generate ramp because banks are going to say, I'm sorry, you know, we're not, you know, we work with a smaller number of partners, etc. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, it's just great. There's obviously a lot of larger companies, more established companies that have been trying to implement AI.

McKinsey's printing money. All of the consultants are going around to every business. Here's how you can use AI. Ramp actually has like an obvious narrative here, which is, you know, receive classification and iterating over your financials to get you more accurate data more quickly. Anyway, go check it out. A couple comments before we jump into the next section. What we got?

in the chat says, guys, react to Zelensky versus Trump. I said, too political for us, Vishal, look nasty, though. And he says, makes sense, Jordi, we don't need another all in, which is a great point. We're trying to hold the line on politics. People, you know, will ask you to cover politics because they get a lot of attention. But we are a technology and business show. Yeah. We are firmly.

I mean, my answer on Zelensky versus Trump, I see Trump as the founder of truth social more than the president. I mean, that's something he does politics, but we're interested in him as a consumer software founder. I think they're arguing about the minds. And so once we hear Zelensky's business acumen, then we can comment. But in terms of the politics stuff, not really interesting to us. And Calder says watching John get better at transitions is like watching Tiger Woods practices swing. So better every day. Every day.

Eventually you won't know if it's an ad. Yeah, yeah, it's all blended together. It's going to be perfectly bonded. We'll call there. We'll have to have you on the show. And when we have you on the show, we'll have you call in not via Skype, but via Zoom or FaceTime. Because Skype is out of business. They're shutting it down.

Breaking news here on the show. We're actually breaking this news. It broke earlier elsewhere, but we're breaking it on the show. Sheel Monot says end of an era and says exclusive. Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May. It's the end of an era. Skype could have been WhatsApp plus Zoom in one, but it was a terrible Balmer-esque, Balmer era,

Microsoft acquisition for $8.5 billion. That's historical size. Yeah, so it was maybe terrible for Microsoft, but it was fantastic for the Skype shareholders. And so we should celebrate that. Yes. And one of, so Skype, fascinating story. I'm sure they took that illiquid.

You know, they got the returns from the illiquid Skype stock. rolled it into other ill-liquid assets that have since, you know, multiplied. Hey, you're getting ahead. We got the whole breakdown right here. Great. 2003, company founded in Estonia by the founders of Kazaa, which was a competitor to Napster, if you're familiar, the P-to-P file sharing service used to pirate music. I was using Kazaa back then.

That was fun. Download some corn tracks or limb-biscuit albums. It was fantastic. This is like the best era of the internet. The Kazah money meant that they didn't need to raise. truck in 2003. Really? Yeah.

Wait, what? Are you, are you kidding? Wait, what do you mean you got run over? This is some lore. I got run over by an off-duty ambulance driver who was driving a pickup truck. Is this why you can't bench three plates yet? Yes, that's exactly why. I was actually, I went, you know, got taken in a real ambulance to the hospital.

And they said, you know, your son's fine, but he's never going to be able to bench three plates. And that stuck with me and put a chip on my shoulder. Well, when you do it, you know, we're going to be able to be able to. But I'm going to prove them wrong. I'm not going to listen to that doctor back in 2003. I'm going to, you know, do the impossible. Yeah. Once you do it, we're going to saber open a bottle of Don Parrying on and saber open a bottle of protein shake.

Perfect. Perfect. So they didn't need to raise VC. 2003. 2005. They have 54 million users, 7 million in revenue and 404, 60 million in 05. They're printing. Estonia has got to be a great place to start an illegal peer-to-peer file sharing platform.

Very fast internet there. Do you know this story? So Estonia's Eastern Bloc used to be part of the U.S.S. Is that where a lot of the VPNs are? I don't know if there's that many, but there are some fantastic entrepreneurs there. So they break away from Russia and they invest very, very heavily in the internet. They get very, very high internet speeds. And so they have tons of kids that get online and learn all sorts of stuff.

Very early in my YouTube career, I had a research assistant who was an Estonian guy. he was obsessed with Estonia and was always like, we should cover this Estonian story. And I'm like, I don't know if I should do another Estonia thing, but I like where your head's at, kid. And but I did do one on Bolt and the founder of that company, which is an Uber competitor. And the kid built this business into billions and billions of dollars, kind of Uber for the rest of the world and has been fantastically successful. And one of his, I think one of his angel investors was this guy, Jan, who was a founder of Skype,

who got a bunch of money out of Skype and became a big investor. And that guy also invested in FTX very early on. He's a fascinating character. So he's been all over Silicon Valley. And so in 2005, they get acquired by eBay for $2.6 billion. eBay claimed it would help buyer-seller communication, but that never made sense to Sheel. And eBay wrote it down by $1.7 billion in 2007. By 2009, they have 400 million users, 100 million DA,

use and $700 million in revenue. And so 65% of Stripe gets acquired by Silver Lake A16Z, CPPIB, an index for $1.9 billion, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. A16Z wrote a $50 million check, $50 million check out of their $300 million first fund. People thought they were crazy for investing in a late stage private equity deal. That is crazy. And I remember that being on their, on their, I remember that being on their portfolio page, and I didn't realize that they did it post acquisition, which is very, very rare for a VC. So in 2011, it's sort of some interesting lore, given that they've turned into more of the sort of multi-stage asset manager that resembles a private equity. Started back in 2009. They've been in the game for 16 years in these

odd deals. So, you know, if you're out there saying, oh, they're completely pivoting their model, maybe not. Maybe they've been, maybe they've cut their teeth in. Yeah, they didn't return the fund, even though it was a good outcome, but certainly got some of the way. there. Yeah, I mean, they invested at one point, at 2.75 and they sold it at 8.5. So 3x, they probably got 150 mil out on that $50 million check. But that's a, that's a $300 million fund. They returned half the fund on that deal, which is pretty good. And it was just two years. So by 2011, they're at 600 million users, 170 million MAUs, one billion in revenue. Balmer buys it for 8.5. They probably recycled the investment and just reinvested that, the 3X and potentially got.

Exactly. So A16Z looks really smart with early DPI. And so this is their first fund. And they were saying, hey, you gave us 300. We already got 150 back. We got a bunch of other bangers in here. Let's do the second fund, the third fund, the growth fund, the dynamism fund, all these different things. At Balmer era, Microsoft innovation slowed.

Skype never really made the move from desktop to mobile. Skype had poor UI technical debt and never got much. mobile adoption. Meanwhile, Zoom was founded in 2011 and WhatsApp took off. WhatsApp has $2.5 billion and is probably worth at least $100 billion. Yeah, that sounds right. Zoom has $300 million, is worth $25 billion. Still blows my mind that Zoom trades lower than it did pre-pandemic when it had fewer users. It went from $10 million to $300 million. Another interesting tip bit. Zoom only had 10 million users pre-pandemic? Yeah, it was small. But then Google was way, way behind. And there were a bunch of problems that actually Google,

internally was using hangouts because they're like, we got a dog food our product. But once they went remote, everyone was like, this is awful. It's breaking all the time. We can't get 50 people in there

or crashing. So what's the choice? We either fix this problem or we go to Zoom and there's this story about they put all their best engineers on it. Even like the AI guys came in for a couple days

and we're like, okay, let's figure out what's going on. Let's optimize this. Let's go deep seek mode on this. It is wild. I have zero, you know, I have so many memories using Skype as a kid playing stuff.

Starcraft, other video games. Having Skype would be something that I would get home from school. You know, I'd finish soccer practice or something like that. I would turn it on. It would just be on almost until, basically until dinner or sometimes even later, you know, doing, you know, homework, hanging out. Yeah. This was. I used a lot of these.

IRC. We were using Skype when you were. Gaming? No, in your early part of your career. A little bit. Actually, I was trying to make a joke about you being old. I mean, yeah, Skype was the thing. Yeah, you would Skype with someone.

Definitely in college. Skype was like the default. It was like the best video chatting platform for sure. But the other interesting tidbit is Tony Bates. You guys are playing like Game Boys over Skype? It was actually Pong. That was the one. Yeah, Pong.

And a lot of telegraphs, you know, like that was the main thing. if you wanted to raise money. You would go and get on Skype and practice. Exactly, exactly. Beep, beep, beep, beep. I'm a beast at the Morse code. Morse code.

And carrier pigeons, obviously. Yeah, yeah, from time to time. A lot of scrolls passing around on horseback. This is kind of the vibe. Back when, you know, draft dodging, trying to not go to Vietnam. This is like my... Oh, yeah, yeah, class and stuff.

Exactly. Tony Bates, the CEO of Skype at the acquisition by Microsoft was considered a rising star at Microsoft. and was actually one of the top folks considered to be in the running for CEO of Microsoft, but left once Nadella got the gig. Anyway, fun to look down memory lane. I use Skype a lot in my life. I use Skype regularly until 2018 because it was the industry norm for one of my companies.

In 2018, they started requiring Microsoft login, and they lost many of the users they had left. And then he did add a correction. Skype 1.0 did raise VC dollars. They raised 18.8 million from DFJ Index, Mangrove, and Bessemer. a year before they got acquired for $2.6 billion. Mangrove was the first investor and got 100x on the deal in two years. And so you had a story about like a pen pal on Skype.

What was your experience in Skype? No, I would just use it while playing StarCraft. There you got. And I just remember a bunch of my friends after school and get on Skype because I lived in a, I grew up in wine country. And everybody was super spread out. So if you didn't, your parents weren't going to drive you around. You just kind of had to go home.

after school and get online. And so if you wanted to get a bunch of your Skype friends together out in wine country for a long weekend and a nice house, what would you do? Well, I'd go to wander.com, of course. Fantastic. And you'd find your happy place. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

Bookerwander. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Thank you to Tyler for the recommendation. He said next time you do a Wander ad. Make sure to sing it. So clip that. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, and top tier cleaning and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. What's not to like. And we got a post from Kyle Tibbitts over at Wander. He says international expansion has kicked off at Wander with pins popping up on the map in new places like Quebec, Cabo and Costa Rica. Stay tuned for more. I never leave the United States. But if you do, good luck to you, Book of Wander, while you're abroad.

You are really America-pilled. I'm still America-pilled. You try not to leave at all. I'm not leaving. You're going to have to drag me out. I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. But fortunately, there are hundreds of wanders in the United States, and I'm going to visit

all of them. Yep. I'm going to drive to all 50 states. I'm going to checking it twice. I'm going to go to stay in every single wander in America. And then I'm sure I'll see some videos of people in the issue is they added a hundred in the last month. So if you were trying to go to every wander and they'd keep this pissed up.

Three a day. You'd have to be doing three a day. You wouldn't even actually get to spend the night in every single one. But you just pop in, you know, remote, unlock it, jump in. Yeah. And anyways, but the pace is ridiculous. And we got some more news. We got some more news.

Some really breaking news. This shook the tech industry. This shook the tech industry. I would say more than any of the AI news. This was the biggest story this week, maybe this month. I think we're going to look back on 2025 and say this was the year of, of Sam Sulek getting his IFBB ProCard. And so Cody Main says, extremely niche tweet for my fellow Jim Bros.

But Sam Sulek earning an IFBBB ProCard in his second ever show is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. He's 23 years old. He's got no coach. He documented every step of his journey on YouTube and he's a certified freak. Look at that man. That is the pinnacle of excellence. And we got another post from Zach.

He says Sam Sulek is the ultimate example of obsession. He just became an IFBB. B-B Pro. He was looking absolutely diced, grainy. He was peeled. It was fantastic. Winning two, winning first two bodybuilding shows, he posted daily YouTube videos for two years, documenting every single workout. He gained four million subscribers. This is what it takes. Apply this mentality to your goals. And I really think we are the Sam Sulek of Tech and Business Podcasting, in the sense that we post every single day. And it's silly, and you can look at this and say, oh, he's just some bodybuilder, some vlog, or whatever.

but there is a lesson in here about the obsession mentality and just doing things daily and improving daily over time. You see it with why is Jake Paul big? You know, you might not like his content, but he posted it's everyday bro. He literally posted a blog every single, a vlog every single day. Yeah, there's something about a coach, what a coach often provides as much as advice. Advice is free on the internet. You go get advice anywhere. It's infinitely available. A coach provides accountability. So Sam, by just sharing every single workout, has the accountability of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, right? They're going to say, you didn't push yourself as hard as you could there, right? And they're going to call them out on it. And it's part of the program.

But yeah, I think it's, I think it's fantastic. People with his 3D renders. He posted a new 3D render every single day for something like 10 years. I think Joe Rogan, a famous thought leader, how to quote that was something to the effect of how would you live your life if your life was you know a movie right and you had you knew that you had an audience right you probably would wouldn't doom scroll and you would go to bed early because you know your main character you're a hero right you'd get snug snug snug up in your eight sleep and you'd crash you'd get that good sleep score yep but uh but yeah there's this idea of like how would you work out in the gym if if you actually had an audience right And a lot of people just go through the motions in their life.

They don't take it very seriously. But take your life seriously. Sam takes his life seriously. He's 23. IFBBB Pro. He's completely natural to. Future Terminator. I'm really pushing for that.

That's our 20, 25, 2026 goal. Please reboot Terminator. Cast Sam Sulek. The lines will be around the block at every theater in America, truly. It would be fantastic. be a blockbuster. It would be an absolute blockbuster. And it's a perfect movie where you don't need, it's about the ridiculousness of it. You don't need the best actor. No. And that's the thing. If you do the full reboot, the first Terminator, Arnold still was working on his English and his acting, I'm pretty sure. And so he's the bad guy. And he doesn't really say that much. He's actually like the monster. So most of what he's doing is just marching and shooting and stuff. He's not really delivering that many lines. Then by the second one, they like reboot him and he becomes the good. Terminator plays into all the AI stuff. I would totally watch it.

The Terminator franchise really, really cool, but it's gone downhill with all these kind of shoddy spin-offs and we're in like Series 7. Go get James Cameron back. Can you believe it's a James Cameron movie? That's crazy. Get Sam Sulek. Get James Cameron. Get in the same room and make a great Terminator reboot.

I would absolutely watch that. It's crazy to think that if James Cameron didn't survive his reading and driving era Remember, he was driving trucks while reading. Very, very sketchy. But we would never have Terminator and we would never maybe have... Titanic Avatar. We'd never have Sam Solic cast as Terminator. Yeah.

Well, if you're thinking about going for your IFBB Pro card, you know that sleep is the number one way to increase your testosterone naturally. And yeah, maybe you're competing in the naturals. And if you want to get great sleep, we recommend getting an eight sleep. I would love if someone in our community actually went to be a bodybuilder.

We would put the full force of the brotherhood behind them. And we'd even pay off judges and stuff like that, whatever it takes. Whatever it took. And so 8Sleep, of course, it's nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to 8Sleep.com slash TBPN to check it out. What's your sleep score?

I don't know. It might have been a rough night. I actually had a rough night. Let's see. eight sleep the app my rough night is your best you got me beat a couple days oh what what you got i got a 91 yeah you beat me yes let's go i got an 86 okay i just didn't get i just didn't put the time into quality wasn't great routine wasn't quite on point but i'm getting better i had to pick someone up early this morning uh earlier than usual it's a journey talking about soon well let's go to some

By the way, we got to mention it. We have a link in the YouTube, and we have a code. Just the code is TBPN or 8Sleep.com slash TBPN and get a few hundred dollars off your 8Sleep. And you can enter the challenge and try to beat us on our sleep scores. Yep. Fantastic. Well, let's go to some launches. We got Splash Robotics coming out of Wycombinator.

They are building unmanned patrol boats to defend our nation's critical infrastructure and secure our borders. They're able to autonomously detect an. intercept threats faster than any human operator. I love stuff like this. All the memes are like, I guess we're doing boats now. I guess we're doing military technology. And I saw someone reacting to that, I was like, did the DOD just take over YC or something?

But this is the perfect hack project for YC team to go build. I'm so happy with these types of projects. Is this, this is a Serrana competitor? Probably at some scale. But you know, with these YC companies, who knows, like, they're so early that they could wind up finding some little niche here and there. It's very unclear that it's like, yeah, this is a real shot across the bow to the billion-dollar company that is, like, working with the DoD.

This could be something that goes into Coast Guard or responds to an entirely different program area. It could wind up being something that's more commercial focused. It could be something that gets aqua-hired or merged into another company. It's just a bunch of people building some cool stuff. And so I'm here for it. One of my favorite YouTube channels is this guy, H.I. Sutton, who's a defense analyst, you know, this guy? No, no. He just talks about naval warfare, and he makes these, like, one-shot monologue videos about interesting tech. Okay.

So he'll basically start the video and being like, yeah, I didn't really, people have said, oh, get a better microphone, get a camera, all this stuff, not doing it, just making this video. And his videos are super engaging. Great. He just nerds out about you can go watch this video. essential guide to 2024 naval warfare in the Black Sea. And so it'll talk about this guy. And it'll talk about all the ways that they're using, you know, autonomous technologies.

And so Splash Robotics, I wouldn't be surprised if they're using his videos to inform their product development. Very cool. Because they talk about how they'll actually take jet skis and turn them into sort of these remote control bombs and, you know, eventually would potentially be autonomous. So cool, cool the nerd out on. Awesome. Well, congrats to the team and let us know how it goes.

Let's move on to Brendan Arribe, the former co-founder of Oculus VR with Palmer Lucky. He has a new company called Sesame. He says, we're exploring a future where the computer isn't just a tool. It's a partner with a truly natural voice and personality. No big claims. Just early work. We're excited to share. And a bunch of people were shouting this out.

Toby Lutki, the founder and CEO of Shopify, said, man, Sesame's voice model is absolutely insane. You have got to try this demo and post the link. Still puts up 1K likes. Let's see it. It's built different. You love to see someone include a link and still do numbers. I love it. We want to try to play it.

I don't know for... Nekunsch also says this is the most her moment I've felt in the last few years. It's truly uncanny. I recommend trying this now. but in the comments, Gerov Vora says, what am I missing? This felt trash. And the country just says, what?

So a little bit of different experiences. You just got to go try it for yourself. I don't think we're going to pull it up. But it seems like a cool, a cool chat-focused, voice-focused AI tool. So excited for them to launch that. And we recommend that you go, make your own decision about whether or not you like it or not.

But speaking of AI, we got a post from Kushi. she says, where is cursor for Figma? And you got an answer? Figma is cursor for Figma. That's true. You've been talking with the team over there. Yep. They got some big, big plans in the works.

Yeah, it's really shocking that a founder mode CEO who's a teal fellow and has been in the game for so long. You just got a billion dollar breakup fee. Yeah, a billion dollar breakup fee and has been studying the stuff for a decade. A billion dollars of non-deluded financing. Yeah, he's actually heard of AI, you know? And he's been on the same. timeline that we've been on. And so he is well aware of it and building plenty of tools to make Figma easier to use and more diffuse both on the prompt to design side and then

also deployment into actual app. Obviously, you can imagine where Figma goes on either side of the design program. They've built this great network. They've built this great core design tool that's very, very rich, very deep. It makes a ton of sense that they would extend in both directions. I think Figma should ultimately do this sort of quarterly release model. I think they have more release than someone like a flex port, right? They need to be dominating. Yeah. And it's highly visual. Yeah, it's highly visual. And so having them switch and really start to push, you know, having Dylan push the team to say we are going to be shipping, you know, these sort of incredible advancements in the product every single quarter would be cool to see. I was thinking about this.

like, have you ever seen those, like, pictures where people use MSPaint and then they paint like the Mona Lisa and it's like the most incredible thing or they do art in Microsoft Excel? Yeah. I really want to see an account pop up that's like Figma abuse basically where someone builds like the Sistine Chapel in Figma and it's like pixel perfect. But like with the individual pixels. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So just having someone there obsessively abuse Figma to do something that it can do,

but it was certainly not designed to do. I think that is highly viral potential. And I think it would be great marketing. In the age of AI generated images, I want the artisan designer to be making an image pixel by pixel. I want to see the time lapse with the face cam. Hand colored, hand painted. Exactly.

Go and do it. We'll cover it here live. It's great. Well, let's move on to Weber, who says, introducing Flora, your intelligent canvas, every creative AI tool thoughtfully connected. We've built Flora, Flora Fana AI side by side with creative professionals from art students to designers at top agencies like Pentegram to give them speed control and collaboration in one seamless system. This feels like Figma Jason potentially. Is that right?

Yeah. We built a library of creative workflows from cinematic storyboarding to typography variations designed by creatives with pace. It still feels more oriented around generating things like copy images versus design, but I'm sure they're thinking about it. Yeah, like less prosumer, less professional, and maybe more like, what's that other design tool? Visual Electric. No, the one that's the Australian girl runs. Do you know who I'm talking about? How do we not?

How am I blank on this? It's worth like billions, right? You know what I'm talking about. Canva. Canva. I was going to say, if you search design tool, it will be the first. Yeah, but Canva was always like a little bit more consumer, like make a meme, make a postcard, make an invite. and then it's gone kind of upmarket.

Figma has been more of like what the best designers in the world use and now they're going a little bit more down market to something where an individual programmer could use it. And this feels a little bit more like pop in, make something and they're starting with something that's a little bit more organic UGC driven than, hey, we're plugging this right into enterprises on day one.

They've built a library of creative workflows from cinematic storyboarding to typography variations. These workflows could save weeks of iteration to get access repost the first post above and comment flora that's hilarious little little algorithm hacking on your on your launch video 1,000 reposts and 3,000 likes half a million views very smart you don't see that as very smart you see that on when people release podcasts on instagram now they'll say comment for the link yeah and i'll DM you the link right and it's sort of a way to just hack the algorithm to think that there's a ton of interest in a post.

But clearly there was a bunch of real interest here and go watch the demo. It's very cool how they, you know, link these models together. And this feels something, you know, closer to cognition or Devin for me. And that as if they can own the workflow, as the underlying models, you know, get better. And they're connecting them in different ways to generate, you know, final outputs. They'll be well positioned and their product will improve as the underlying models get better. Yeah. Well, it's cool to see people exploring new tools.

And yeah, I'd love to play with that and see if we can generate some content for the show with it or something. Let's play around with it. Well, anyway, let's move on to the timeline, which has been in turmoil. Michelle in the chat just asked for this. So his timing was perfect. Fantastic. Packy McCormick says, Anderall versus Jason Calicanis, who you got.

And a lot of people are sounding off in the comments. Reggie in the comments. Yeah. Drones strike his ASS. Now we're talking. well I've got the popcorn and so this all started with there's been news in the just in the world that like there might be some Epstein files coming out some Epstein leaks or something Palmer posts a picture of the black book with Jason Kalakannis's phone numbers

listed there I guess this is a Rolodex from the late Mr. Epstein and but this is actually old news this is not the years ago this is not to be confused with the client list. Exactly. Yes. Yes. Yes. And Jason doesn't, you know, it doesn't necessarily make, certainly doesn't make Jason look good. Yeah, but there are lots of people in that, in the black book because they met him for any sort of reason. In this case, they had at least four of his phone numbers. So it sounds like it looks like three or three in an address, right? I think. But yeah. So obviously they met and Matt Grimm quote tweets Palmer and says, this is the face. you make when your weekend just got a little bit more complicated. We see you, Jason. So the

andro guys are really common for J-Cal. And Jason responded. He says, and now Matt Grimm, Palmer-Lucky's partner is using a Photoshop photo of me being twice as fat as I ever was and trying to slander me by insinuating I was involved with Epstein. Matt knows full well that I wasn't, that I've said I wasn't and that there is no news here. Like a thousand others. So the issue here just double-clicking on the Photoshop thing is how do we know this is Photoshop? It doesn't even, if you were going to go to of the lengths of photoshopping a picture, you would maybe take it a bit further, I would say. Because he looks, yeah, sure.

Like those J.D. Vance ones where he's like full red or like the gigachad one. Yeah. Yeah. Take it a little bit further. This is just very believable. The other thing is, you know, Jason has been vocal about being on a Zempeg and these things. And he used to have some extra weight on him.

So the issue with Jason is he does tend to say things that aren't true from time to time. And so I do believe there's some factually correct things in here related to this not being the client list and things like that. But at the same time, I kind of think it might be a real pick. I think it might be a real pick. And Ted in the 1990s, I am in his black book, which has been out for over a decade. That's true. And has hundreds of other TED tech finance New Yorkers in it. What is Ted?

Yeah. So it is a real picture. So a few of the guys in the chat, Rory, Heskel. and Brian Matt actually has a screenshot of the source he pulled it from. Okay, okay. Jason,

I mean, we respect someone who's looking great now. He's looking younger than ever. He's getting diced. He's on OZemPEC and I see an IFB ProCard potentially in the future. You know, this one, not looking great, but he's looking better now.

Keep going. Apologize to Palmer. Jason. Clean up the relationship and then hit the gym, go in Sam Sulek mode. Yeah, go subscribe to Sam Sulek. The information is all day. Get on stage is the Arnold Classic.

He basically open sourced. I'm not asking him to go open. You know, people have been investing in creators. I'd like to see Jason Kalakannis's launch. Yeah. Invest in, you know, invest in Sam Sulek. I would kill to be in that round. I would actually, that's a great deal.

I would kill for that. We should try to put that together. Yeah, we should. John would kill somebody to get allocation. Oh, man. I think he's going to be extremely successful. I'm super bullish on Sam Sulek. And so, yeah, a little bit of spicy timeline today.

You know, we love the Anderil folks. We love J-Cal. There is one problem that we need to address, which is the fact that Jason Calacanis still does not run ads on the All-In podcast. And that I think is his real crime. You have to imagine with the All-In and turmoil now. You have to imagine he's seeing a window to potentially get some ads on there, right? People, yeah, Sax is out of the picture. Do you think Epstein is the reason why he doesn't run ads? Do you think that's what Epstein told him?

Say, hey, my final wish to you. Don't run ads on your podcast. I know we weren't that close. I know you never came to the island. Yeah. But just please, whatever you do. Don't run ads. Don't run ads. And Jason maybe just wants to respect. It seems like they were maybe, they certainly were friendly. They certainly were friendly. We don't know if they were friends. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were definitely acquaintances. I, I think, I think J. Kyle has the chance to turn it all around. apologize to Palmer, clean up the relationship, and then run some ads for Anderol. It really is a stain on Jason. It's rough. And we know that Palmer does have the ability to turn the other cheek.

You know, he was going after Zuck and Meta and Facebook for a long time. And they cleaned that up. They cleaned up that relationship. Something happened. Things changed. And they clearly, you know, had a conversation. Palmer went and looked at the Orion headset, said, hey, this is great. You know?

Yeah. And so I would, I would love to see that turn around because I hate when the big dogs in tech are fighting. I don't like it. I hate to see it. Yeah, I hate to see it.

I just want one, one solidified technology, industry. Podcasters and founders should never fight. Never. Never. Anyway, well,

if you love Jason Calicanus, don't work at Anderl, I guess. Devin Luton says, crazy Anderill campaign. an amazing extension. I want to see an ad quick billboard that says if you love Jason Calacanus, you'll hate working. You'll hate working at Anderol. Yeah, if you're listening to this weekend startups probably don't work at Anderl because, yeah, you'll be, it'll be rough for you. But they

have a crazy Anderall campaign here at Boston South Station. They put up a bunch of different posters. They're literally obsessed with America. Don't work at Anderle. They have the graffiti, some great design going on. And people are. loving the advertisements. And if you're looking to do some out-of-home, we recommend ad-quick.com, baby. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising.

What's an ad-quick line that we can say? Ad-Quick. Only Ad-Quick combines technology. Ad-quick enables you to launch hyper-targeted out-of-home campaigns. We're still working on that one. We're still workshopping that. But it combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

Go to ad-quick.com to check it out. They work with a bunch of fantastic companies too. If you work with AdQuick, you're working with Shopify, Carvana, DoorDash, Poshmark, butcher box, ramp, Wall Street Journal, Warby Parker, discount, tire, cool. The H&R Block, Lyft, Instacart Cardac Carma, Compass, Base Camp, Equinox, Pluto TV, Duck, Duck, Go, Nike, Nike, Nike, NFL, Amazon, Drizzly, GoPuff. They got all the big dogs up there. Go be a big dog, runs them out of home ads with ads.

ad quick. And you can follow Chris on X. He said, hey, Elon Musk, look at this. And it's a post from someone flagging the fact that Google is buying Apple search ads on the Grock term is just too beautiful a circle of life for me. Google is buying Apple search ads on GROC term. Hey, you wanted this extremely politically incorrect LLM. How about the most politically correct? The most politically correct one. Do you want the opposite? Yeah. And so, yeah, when you type in. I don't know how I didn't know Google had a Gemini app.

We talked about this. They spun it out because it was so hard to find because I was complaining. They listened to me. I was complaining about how I paid all this money and I couldn't get to Gemini. Although I'm sure when I downloaded the app, who knows what model I'll be on? And the model probably won't even tell me what model I'm on and what the context window will be. But that's not how people use these things. And so they say unlock the power of Google AI on your phone.

You search for Grokey. You get Google Gemini. Don't make the mistake. You know, be sharp, don't get fooled. If you're looking for grok sexy mode, you're not going to find it in Google Gemini. Let's go to Brent Liang, who we've been doing some work with. We love this guy. He says, the lean startup thinking has probably done more harm than good.

Lots of low conviction, three-month pivots and folding based on an abysmally small sample size. Encourage is being neurotic and constantly skeptical, almost the opposite of being an entrepreneur. What do you think, Jordy? I mean, the thing that, yeah, I think the lean, like the whole thing, the best thing you can do if you're early in your startup journey is just read all the books. Read zero to one. Read the lean startup. Founders podcast. Founders podcast.

I think founders podcast is advice or wisdom that's more timeless, right? Where Dave, the center is not saying you need to fully follow the McDonald's founder and just do what they said. He's just saying this is his approach. to work, learn from it, take it, apply it. I read the lean startup back in the day. I think it's, this is fine line between sometimes if you're willing to just persevere and look stupid and be okay with the fact that you don't have traction and just keep pushing forward trying to get it, sometimes you get paid off, you know, you get paid for it. If you look at, you know, crypto founders, the ones that have been successful have not followed this approach for the most

part. They've sort of just said, you know, they stayed, stayed lean, but more so they're willing to look stupid for two years so that when the market rips, they look like a genius, right? And so it's definitely, this is a vintage post. I think we're now seeing, if you're going and building in hard tech, for example, you can't afford to follow purely the lean startup approach. It's a model that I think works really well for PMF or Dye style products where it just says, you know, intense focus, stay really lean, you know. But yeah, it's not going to work if you're trying to build Anderol, right? You need to have this sort of bold, ambitious plan and be very patient and executed over many, many years and, you know, realize that, you know, you could do years of work before being paid for it. And that's part of the game.

Yeah, I think this is the lean startup thinking has kind of mutated a little. bit like the original idea of the lean startup was just that in the dot com era in order to build a website you had to raise 10 million dollars and build a data center like I remember as a kid like my dad worked at a you hand built some of those data center I literally did I would rack servers as like a summer job and and this was just for like a company with a website you got it when when when we're 60 and on posters in the comments you know you know you're you know you chirping at you. You say, I racked servers myself.

I was racking servers when I was your age. When you were in diapers. Yeah. But it's true. Like the default, the default path to building even just a website. Like we want to build a car auction website or we want to build any startup. It was raised $10 million because you are going to need to buy servers, hire a lot of different people. Because there are not these abstraction layers of AWS.

There's no cursor. There's not even Python. The code needs to be written in Java or C++. Well, what happens when you write in Java and C++? You need five times as many people because everything takes longer to write. And so the lean startup was just getting the word out that it is possible to now build a company in a lower cost, lower capex intensive way. And that was true. Yeah, he basically just coined what was happening in some circles and said, you know, this is a way.

but it's founder mode, right? Where founder mode didn't have a name. Exactly. And then, but people kind of were aware that certain companies just operated, you know, and CEOs just operated differently. Yeah. And so people were, he was just saying like, hey, we don't need these $10 million seed rounds to build websites anymore.

You can build on top of these services and stay lean. And then once you find traction, talk to your customers, get out of the building. These were all these ideas of like, don't go and waste all this money and do a $10 million experiment, do a $1 million experiment. But I agree with Brent that pivoting every three months, folding based on an abysmally low sample size, that is wrong. You should make sure that you really tested things, actually understand the product.

And ideally, you have a ton of conviction about the direction that the company is going before you even start. So you're like, yeah, the first three months have been rough, but I still know that there's an insight here. I still know that there's some fundamental value of what I'm creating. Anyway, let's move on to Rohit. He says, excellent portrait of Tyler Cowan in The Economist. Lots of known beats, but this is the most underrated part.

And so the economist did a whole profile in Tyler Cowan. I highly recommend you go check it out. But I love this quote. He says, Cowan's emotional life remains a mystery. He told me he did not experience regret. I don't know what the function of it is, he said. Is it to signal thoughtfulness to stop you making further mistakes? It's like revenge.

I don't understand it. Cowan also said he doesn't understand envy or anger. He didn't know what he didn't know what he should be envious of. He didn't get lonely by himself or in company. He actually said, why bother? When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He'd never been clinically depressed, depressed for a month, for a week and afternoon. I looked up from my notebook an enormous smile, one I had not seen before spread across the whole of Cowan's face.

Like for a whole afternoon, he asked, hugely grinning. Just mugged. So on the topic of our earlier subject, GPT-4-5, Tyler Cowan was quoted today saying, I'm more positive on 4-5 than almost anyone else I have read. I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only. As we know from Kahn's third critique, that is about the hardest achievement possible. And so somebody did the B-Me prompt. So be me, Tyler Cowan.

Wake up at 5.23 a.m. Precisely. Eat exactly seven blueberries, three Brazil nuts, and a quarter cup of Icelandic skeir. Sky. Skyer. Productivity.com. Write two blog pose.

One on obscure Romanian cinema, the other on the economics of parking meters. Check email, reply exclusively in lowercase. Very interesting. Thanks for this. Send. Perhaps. Send.

Attend breakfast meeting with unnamed intelligence officials. Discussed Singaporean food. stalls instead of geopolitics. Yep. Lunchtime arrives. Ask waiter, what is your least popular dish? Waiter visibly confused. What is your least popular dish?

Recommend some fermented herring special. Wonderful. I'll have that. Extra spicy. Genually enjoy it. Back to office. Podcast guest waiting. It's a chess grandmaster who's also an amateur botanist and former DJ.

That's great. So I actually think this is like pretty funny. That's pretty good. And that's just like so many different threads pulling all together. Yeah. There must be a lot of. different data in the training model if you're pulling all that together because some of that stuff, you really have to, you know, follow all of his blog posts, all of his tweets, all of his

podcast transcripts to understand that or talk to him in person to really get that flavor. So yeah, good job. Nailed me. Maybe potentially underrated. Maybe the early haters are wrong. We'll see. We'll see as it rolls out. Either way, it's just nice to have a more aesthetic model.

I think that's good. Even if it's not, it's actually maybe even a better outcome. If it's just a nicer, friendlier, more, more aesthetic experience, it doesn't necessarily need to be 190. That's all the problem. Generally what Carpathie was kind of alluding to just said differently, which was if you're a high taste tester, you're going to notice the difference here. If you're a loby, you know, word cell, you're going to maybe miss. I need to, we need to try the B me prompt. Maybe that should be the new prompt.

See how it goes. E me, golden retriever, start day. Jordan Hayes. Run around the house. bark a little bit. TurboS dot PNG. Put on sunglasses indoors. That's great.

Well, we got a post from Catherine Boyle. J.D. Vance is going to be headlining the American Dynamism Summit next month. This is Coachella for tech bros that like guns. Yes. And Coachella for tech bros that don't like guns had Gavin Newsom and Dr. Chelsea Clinton at the Upfront Summit. And so this is the opposite of the All In summits is Chris Fralick. Wait, Chelsea Clinton has a venture fund? She has a venture fund?

What? I didn't know that. How are we not? We've said before we would never raise around. Yes, yes, yes. Also, when did she get her doctorate? Metrorodora Ventures. Interesting.

Anyway, yeah, Upfred Summit happened this week. It was very popular. I think Delian stopped by. Some other people texted me that they were in town. Yeah, so she has a values conscious venture capital firm investing in health and learning. Huh. Maybe she should get back the PMF or die founders.

That'd be great. They also don't want to raise, but, you know, ventures about value add more than capital. I bet you doctor. Wait. What were the values that she cares about? Health and learning. Oh, she should back Sam Sulek. He's all about health.

That's so true. He's the pinnacle of health. Look at a picture of him. Didn't the Upturn try to get Sam Sulek? But he just was busy. They got a chamellionaire a long time. Did you know that? Yeah, they've had a star, a star-studded lineup.

It was very fun. I think Andresen had not. and then up front had a commillionaire. And so you'd hop on a call and Camillionaire would just be hanging out with you talking sass.

Talking sass. Great. Anyway, speaking of the PMF for die guys, let's go to Blake. He says, standards I have for new employees slash partners. Work 12 plus hours a day.

Make massive sacrifices. Desire to pay their dues. Won't break under pressure. These are 100% within one's control. So the key here is it's perfectly fine. for a leader to say this if they live all those things. Blake is you can go on PMF or die.

dot XYZ, which is not our website and see exactly how much he's working. Tracked every single second of the day. He's making massive sacrifices. He's not leaving the cage for 90, you know, potentially 90 days. He's paying his dues. He hasn't broken under pressure. He hasn't broken under pressure. He's only 12 days end.

I mean, there was a lot of pressure. There was a lot of pressure week one. The thing we didn't fully calculate with the cage is that there would be hundreds of people basically, you know, demanding that, demanding attention in the chat. So we'll get to talk about that. We're actually going to be doing a press conference on the PMF for Dive stream at 1 p.m. Pacific in just 30 minutes. So we got to check on him because if PMF4Dai.X, Y,

Z shows Blake in the seat for 11 hours, 59 minutes. It's not going to look good for him. Yeah. He's got to be, he's got to work cell number 17's got to be operating at full capacity. Totally. Let's go to Elon Musk. He's quote tweeting someone who is doing another AI game dev demo. He says, wow, this is cool.

Danny says, I believe that Grok can be a serious tool to build quality games. I've been pushing the limits of Grok 3 by having it code this retro doom-inspired Gothic shooter from scratch. It's been less than 24 hours of work, and I think I got it to a pretty good place. And the demo is pretty cool. But yeah, there's another post in here that I wanted to highlight. That was fun about how if you want to go viral, the best way is to code a game right now and screen share the video. Let me see if I can find that one.

Your self-building the game. You build the game and then play it. And then you- Build it, play it, build it, play it. Yeah, Christoph says, if you want to go viral right now, start making a video game with cursor and post the progress. I'm sick of seeing it, but that's what gets the impressions right now. And so yeah, maybe we should build a T-BPN game go viral. Hey, we built this in 10 seconds.

I think we just need a bait. One prompt. We need to be focused, one post a day from each of us, baiting an Elon repost. That's good. Wow, Elon is awesome. And Grok is so awesome. I love grok.

I stopped using all, I stopped using chat, GPT and everything else, and I just use GROC. Yeah. It is the best. Yes. I also, I also crushed my phone just starts melting. I crushed my phone.

9-11 into a ball of metal and I bought a cyber truck. And I replaced the metal sidings on my cyber truck with it. With Crush 9-11. Melted down 9-11 is the side-plating for sure. We actually should do one of those. It would be worthwhile doing a, you know, telling Jason Calacanis, huge Tesla guy to say, hey, we're going to drive a vintage Ferrari. You drive a cyber truck and do one of those, you know, pulling battles and just let the

cyber truck win. Oh, there you go. posted from our account. Yeah, so we get the repost. So we get the ratings. We get the ratings. We get the ratings. We get the ratings, as Jake, I like to say.

Yeah. Yeah. But it is cool. I love that people are building cool games with, with cursor, with Grock, with all these different tools. Very, very fun. And we love to see people be able to instantiate like silly ideas, like PMF or die. Or Die or PMF or die.X, Z in a very quick fashion, which is only possible with the AI era. And so, yeah, if you have some funny idea, something on your bucket list, go build it, post it. You might get.

quote tweeted by Elon Musk and get 3 million views on your on your app, drive a bunch of followers, and then start a podcast, who knows? Anyway, let's move on to Lewis Hamilton. Okay, I want to read this because this is,

this sounds like something that Senra would say. Yep. And it is clearly inspired by... I think he might be quoting David Senra. He's potentially just rip this. A lot of the best athletes, you know, actors, etc., have just been ripping Senra.

Senra quotes, yeah. Clearly inspired by Timmy or potentially happening at the same time. Lewis Hamilton, now over at Ferrari, he says, don't ever compare me to anybody else. I'm the first and only black driver and that's that's ever been in the sport. I'm built different. I've been through a lot. I've had my own journey. You can't compare me to another 40-year-old pastor present Formula One driver in history because they are nothing like me. I'm hungry, driven. Don't have a wife and kids. I'm focused on one thing and that's winning. That's my number one priority. I love how locked in he is. There's this quote. I think it's, it's Alonzo where he's driving. And he makes this like very, very like sketchy pass.

Yeah. And he goes after they're interviewing. He goes, oh, he's got a wife and kids at home. I knew he would break. And it's like the craziest thing because you can tell he's, you know, they're both gunning for the corner. Yep. He's like, yeah, this guy's, the guy who's racing again is like, I don't want to die. Wow, that is crazy. I haven't thought about that. And so. So when you're racing, it's, it's, you know, the, yeah, I don't know what the actual, I'm sure that base jumping is more dangerous than, you know, F1, but F1's one of the most dangerous, you know, high level professional sports. Thankfully, getting a lot less dangerous thanks to the halo and some of those. And 100%. I, I drive a lot slower than I did pre-kids, you know, I used to go up in the canyons and have a rip. I do that much less frequently now. Yeah, makes sense.

Anyway, let's move on to Sam lesson. Sam says, Elon's, what did you get done this week at AI scale? Is in fact the AI future. AI isn't going to be your professional assistant. It's going to be your professional manager. Getting spicy, a lot of people probably won't like this one. Over and over, I see.

Sam doesn't get enough credit for being up there in the rage bait, Hall of Fame with people like sweaty startup. Oh, yeah. You know, he's up there. Sam is more sophisticated. in his approach. Higher brow. He's not saying, you know, I want my employees to work hard.

He's saying you're going to be managed by an AI. And I think this is a cool take. You know, we've talked before. You can imagine a world where an individual who's never managed another person before is managing, you know, Devin and other agents to run their business. But this is sort of flipping that on its head. So it says over and over, I see people pushing these rosy ideas that AI is going to be your assistant. Fine, yes, you will get some cute AI that's scheduled.

for you in some form and send sweet nothings in the morning about your day. It will prepare little reports for you that might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but that won't be the real leveraged impact. The real leveraged impact is that AI is going to be your manager. You are the order taker for it, not the other way around. Elon has got this right. The real value of asking formally what have you done this week and knowing who is pulling weight, culling those who don't, and optimizing pushing those who are slash can. You couldn't do it effectively before AI at scale, but now you can. It might be nicely disguised as a coach, cute. Hey, to be more productive to do XYZ, or it looks like you could focus on X versus Y if you want to get that promotion.

But what it will really be doing is snitching for your boss, your boss's boss, and ultimately the dreaded shareholder. Why? Well, that is where the productivity is going to come from. AI will clear the path for basic easy tasks to make sure your time is leveraged fully and will make it easy for managers to deal with all the complexity, cut to the chase of where and how value comes from and who is driving it. More transparency is generally good, but people who think this is some rosy machine works for man. Nah, it's the other way around. Interesting, especially interesting in light of that controversial AI sweatshop company from YC

this week. That it's like the what did you get, I know one really pieced it together, but that company could have just been called what did you get done this week AI? No, it's more of like, what did you get done in the last hour? Yeah. You get done in the last 10 minutes. Five seconds. pairing that over time previously.

And knowledge workers have this thing where they sort of get assigned a project or they have a general area of responsibility. And then they just sort of have to, there's actually really delayed feedback. Everybody that's managed a team before, if you started a company, you hire somebody, you sort of break down what they need to get done. You check in with them a week later. And sometimes you're saying, wow, this amazing, incredible progress. You're crushing it.

Sometimes you're sitting there and being like, well, what did you do the last two days? you're coming to me now confused. I wish you asked me, you know, two days ago. And even worse is like if something slips for a couple weeks and it's like, oh, it didn't even get started. Yep. And AI can sort of potentially be omnipresent

and sort of be in real time guiding people towards, you know, the right outcomes. And so I still think there's like a manager sitting above the AI coach manager. Yep. That is sort of setting, you know, the goals. But maybe over time, you know, that fades. and it's just we're all just working for the

who knows hardworking paper clips the shareholders at the end of the day yep uh let's go to roll off boat up that's actually just on you know to kind of extrapolate there you can imagine a world where uh shareholders in a public company say we're actually collectively you know as shareholders are going to vote to hire you know basically hire this AI consulting team that's kind of micromanage the management

it doesn't seem unreasonable that that could happen and potentially allows shareholders to exert more day-to-day control over the management of the company. Could be a lot of pushback. We'll see. I wonder what will happen with that post. It will break containment and get some pushback. But for now, I think it's a reasonable take. Who knows?

We'll see. Let's go to Roll-off Bota over at Sequoia. He says, we remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past SPVs are making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10% of the capital yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps who think the story will end differently this time. It's only been three years.

What do you think? Who is he sub-tweeting? Yeah, crazy. I mean, I'm sure he's just seeing a number of rounds happening across his portfolio and saying, wait, this person's doing a 20 million investment and they only have $50 million under management, how does that work?

And it's a manager who's But yeah, again, there's a bunch of really good players out there that use SPVs are great, you know, tool for investors. And oftentimes they provide access to great companies, but certainly there are many examples where

you know, SPVs typically get sort of if you're founder putting together around, you're prioritizing people that have the capital ready to wire, right? Or that's one capital call away to wire. SPVs are oftentimes a not a last resort, but maybe you make room for somebody to do an SPV because they're saying, oh, I'm going to bring in this celebrity and this, you know, person and whatever.

But again, I think, you know, I don't think he's sub-tweeting figure, but figure right now, one of the risk of the rounds they're putting together is he's basically marketing in my view, he's almost marketing to retail investors because if he needs to raise $2 billion at a $40 billion valuation, the people that will do those rounds are tourist chumps who think they're getting in on the next Tesla, but are ultimately that when that company has been, you know, certainly a firm like Sequoia or Founders Fund is not doing figure at almost twice the price of Anderil.

Yeah. Yeah. And so there's clearly like a spectrum of kind of credibility in rounds, not just what, you know, are you doing an SPV or going with a traditional VC firm, but even within the VC world, there are some funds that have very high GP commits where the partner who's doing the deal has a very material portion of their wealth in that fund. And so they are like they've basically solved the principal agent problem by putting their, tying their net worth to that fund. And so they are, like, they've basically solved the principal agent problem. Yeah. By putting their, tying their net worth to that fund. And so they are. And so. And so they are, like, they've basically solved the principal. And they're, they're, firm. And so, yeah, you might raise a $10 million series A, and $2 million of that might come from the partners or the GP or more in some cases. And so if it's a professional investor who's highly aligned, that can usually be the best possible signal or the best possible outcome. But there's a good comment. There's a good comment here from Hari. He says, this is generally true responding to roll off. This is generally true. This is generally true. like 99% of the time, but when you stumble on a diamond in the rough, dot, dot, dot, I'm still chasing the hive for my second ever angel investment into an SPV with no institutional

lead run by Naval into the notion seed round in 2016. So he, you know, I'm sure that was somewhere around 20 post and is now sitting at north of 10 billion and he did did pretty well. And I wonder if that SPV was the, was the lead check or not, because it's very different if it's like, oh, there was a... Well, it said it had no institutional lead. So it basically, you know, it's very possible. Deval was the biggest. His investor group was the biggest. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, Naval's pretty coded as SBV runner. Anyway, let's move on. What comes after our smartphones? AI glasses you actually want to talk to, says Anjni Midha. We at Andreessen Horwitz are excited to invest in Sesame's mission to bring the computer to life. Okay. So this is a reference back to the tech demo.

earlier in the show where, you know, somebody was saying that this is the most her-like moment that they've experienced. Other people were pushing back on it, but I just like the domain, sesame.com. That's a good one. Yeah, it's a good one. Yeah, it feels very, you know, it's very memorable. Yeah, and then it still ties to like this idea of like open sesame. You're talking to a genie in a lamp. You have three wishes. Like there's like some fun lore there, but it's still a word you can spell. You can get the dot com. Yeah. And so this is a company that's competing. directly with meta raybans, which is going to be tough because AAP Rocky, famed rapper style god, is working with Rayban.

And so I saw Reggie was posting that I'm sure Asap Rocky will then be working on the meta raybans. And you'll see. And they have a crazy partnership with Luxottica to bring in-house all the Raybans stuff. And then obviously they're rolling out Lama and all these different tools. And that was one of the more attractive features of the meta-repanes. rebands when I experienced them was taking the dog for a walk and being able to just say, hey, hey, Meta, what's, you know, like, how old is this tree or something or whatever? It was like, it was cool

to be able to ask, you know, history questions. You're listening to a podcast. And then you can just say, hey, meta, like, tell me more about this. And it becomes more of a conversation. Anyway, let's move on to Bridget Harris over at Founders Fund. She says, demand for yield will send the stable, stable coin supply way, way higher. FinTechs are realizing stable coins are the best way to deliver yield to customers, and it'll become status quo the same way cashback did. Once customers adjust to getting yield on everything, it's hard to go back. Latin America is the first mover here, but popular US-based fintech platforms are also starting to offer yield, which consumers are increasingly recognizing as the new normal. Right now, Coinbase automatically offers 4.1% API on any USDC held on their

platform and there's a bunch of other companies that are getting into the game into the stable coin game. Robin Hood's mentioned and they're pushing yeah different API for for subscribers API for subscribers and so moving people into stable coins. It's so crazy that biology was formative and actually just making this category and how the market cap is the stable coin market cap is how many yeah well yeah 21 co was was his company he wanted to create a computer that could mine Bitcoin and also do a bunch of other stuff with stable coins and micro payments using crypto. And now the technology is finally approaching reality. The micro payments haven't really rolled out yet. It's really painful that one of the areas of crypto that has the strongest

product market fit, you couldn't really invest in the tokens themselves. Yeah. Because one stable coin. Well, Tether, if you got into that deal, they're making a ton of money. They're printing money because they take a slice of the APY. on top of it, the yield. But, I mean, it also has to work better in a high-rate environment, right? Because how can you get high yield on USDC in a zero-interest rate environment? It's got to be really hard. Landed to FCX.

They're going to try to make a 10-X in a day. Questionable. You might lose it all. Well, we got some personnel news. Joe Gabia, the founder of Airbnb B, is moving on to Doge. He says he's excited to share. I'm bringing my designer brain and startup spirit into the government. My first project at Doge is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process.

Hilarious. Like, that is a job that no one in his position would ever want. Has ever done. Has ever done. I'm going to go be a product manager for the government. It's insane. Beautiful time. I love it.

Thank you. Thank you for your service. I 100% want a smoother and less paper-based. retirement process. This is fantastic. Since leaving his operating role at Airbnb in 2022, he's been looking for the next design challenge in the digital realm, and he can think of a few more important, and he says, I can think a few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government. If anyone else in good standing wants to help design beautiful, user-friendly digital products, reach out. And so he's going over to

the Office of Personnel Management, trying to smooth things over with good design and that makes a ton of sense. I love it. So cool to see. And you've seen just like the flaws with like the Medicare website took all this time and like whenever you interact with any government website, you're just like this feels 20 years old. Like what's going on here? And so just having someone in there who can, you know, staff a team of designers, turn things around quickly, actually implement changes. Most people haven't, you know, build a company like like Airbnb, you know, And they go, they go into the OPM business, other people's money. Yeah, totally.

Joe said, okay, I'm going to go into the office. I'm going to the OPM, you know, sector and the office of personnel management. I love it. Yeah. And, you know, make our country a better place to be loved. I mean, it is crazy. Like, like, you think about his experience at Airbnb. He wasn't just the co-founder who was there for a couple years.

He was there all the way to 2022. So historic run, 15, 14 years, something like that. And then also, Airbnb operated at a scale. that is actually somewhat relevant to the government. You know, it's like millions and millions of people. They're dealing with payments. They're dealing with not, maybe not Social Security numbers, but certainly like ID and K-YC stuff.

And so they've done a lot of different tools here. So great post. Congratulations to you, Joe. And good luck on your mission to improve the retirement workflow. Incredible. Before we jump into the next post, we got a request from Brandon Jacoby. We're going to pull up a video right now

that Zocke just posted. on his Instagram. Okay. He doesn't have audio. I don't think we need, I don't think we need audio. Oh, look at this. Wow.

So Zuck posted this on his Instagram. Oh my God. This is incredible. People who call the top on Zuck. Okay, but wow. But I, live reaction, I have no idea. This is for, I don't think Zuck can move like this. You think he's AI?

I think he's flexing a new. I don't think so. I think he did it. I think it's real. Look at, yeah, look at the job. Yeah, that's accurate. The fingers count up. Everything looks good. They're having a blast. He's saying in, this is amazing. Where is this? He's doubling down. Is this his wife's birthday or something? Something like that. Wow, what an amazing, amazing post. I love it. I'm, you know, you know, in China,

that would get you in prison. Did you see? Yeah. Yeah. That would give you for a, okay. So he says your wife only turns 41. There we go. What, what, what song is he singing? This is incredible. Here, I'm going to pull up the audio real quick. I love it. It's so good. Yeah, Jack Ma did something similar.

Okay, so he's lip syncing. Okay, that's great. But still. Yeah, Jack Ma' did the rock star thing on stage and shortly after kind of disappeared. Literally, because it was like, people were like, okay, he's becoming like a god. Like people are like worshiping him. Credit to Zuck. He practiced that to a degree that he.

Oh, yeah. He looked like a real singer. blend of robot and bro, clearly tested it. Totally maugging all the people that said, oh, they were trying to do a polymarket on if he was going to get divorced this year or not, remember? Fake news on that. They're back. And, yeah, I mean, I think.

Gamblers are enchamble. I think he did the right thing. You know, there's a lot of questions about like, oh, should he back off the bro stuff? No, double down. Go crazier. Keep it going. I mean, this is sophisticated and wholesome stuff. It is.

It's very wholesome. You're going to put on this incredible show. she's going to remember that forever. The PR team behind this must be paid so well. It's like this clearly came from him. Let him cook. Let him cook. The blue sequence suit.

I love it. That's great. That's fun. Anyway, let's move on to some reports from Altimeter, from Shield Monot. Incredible early vintages from Altimiter VC funds. Wonder how much of total returns are from Snowflake. They led the series C at $260 million.

post in 2015. That stake was worth $4.4 billion at the IPEO. Let's do a little size gong for L2. Boom. Thank you. VC is a power law game and they crushed it on snow. Wild that Brad started with just $3 million in 2008. That's insane. Ran it up. Sixty-one percent net IRA, $6.5 billion realized on $2.8 billion in committed capital. They got a bunch of funds here. there a lot of rippers and it's great stuff brad is just such a cool guy too i ran into him at my local coffee shop he's been he's a server so he spends uh he spends uh some time in malibu and uh you know walked up to him said hi we're in a handful of companies in the same companies but um just such a such a cool down-to-earth dude who has a has been on an absolute tear he had a rough go with the hedge fund

sure in 2022 i think it was when the market sold off basically got crushed yeah i think he was long like that people were like sas is over yeah um but uh that's the game and the interest rates went up and obviously if you're highly into tech you're going to get burned and i feel and i feel like as as journalists like newcomer started leaking yeah performance this is a great time if you're an investor to leak your screenshots. Oh, look at this. Look at this screenshot. I'm actually going. Oh, oh, please don't share this. Please don't share that I have 61% net IRA. Yeah. Billions of dollars. I would hate for that to get loose. Anyway, let's move on to Nick, who posts a screenshot of Jeff Bezos liking his post. You know, you got to do some engagement bait for the billionaires that are

hanging out on X all day. Nick apparently posted news. Amazon just dropped their first quantum computing chip codenamed Ocelot. We are so back. That could have been me posting that. But, you know, Nick got to it first. He got the Bezos like. And I wanted to break this down a little bit. It's in the journal today. Amazon unveils its first quantum computing chip. We heard this from Google a couple months ago. Google in December said it developed a new chip called Willow. And that really, at that moment, the people that were watching quantum computing closely were like, Okay, this is a breakthrough where we're now starting to accelerate the development here. And then, of course, earlier this week, we covered Sotianadella on Dwar Cash Patel,

announcing the Majorana chip. And they claimed a quantum computing breakthrough by creating a new state of matter. Now Amazon's in the game. Their cloud computing business on Thursday unveiled its first ever quantum computing chip, which claims marks an important step in the development of useful, reliable quantum computers. That's what we want, folks. the chip dubbed oscelot can lower the costs of reducing quantum computing errors by up to 90%, Amazon said. And the race is on.

Everyone wants to build a practical quantum computer. The Amazon Oscelot chip is a prototype, not a full-blown quantum system. I said Oscar Painter, head of quantum hardware for ABS. To be honest, John, I'm a little bit frustrated. We were prepping our quantum chip launch. Yeah, we got kind of edged out by this. Satya goes on to our cash. Yep.

You know, even Google's working on one. They've got Willow. They're teasing that. We kind of got beat to the punch. But I want to let people know. We are still in the game. Ben has been working on it. While we record, he's been working on quantum chip.

And he wasn't, he never actually had his wisdom teams removed. He was grinding on the lab, reducing quantum noise. Yeah, creating new states and matter. Yep. Yeah. And this is going to change podcasting.

I mean, you start compressing our audio feed with a quantum computer. It's going to be super high fidelity. The best takes possible. Anyway, let's move on. Mike Taylor says, I may have underestimated the power of my product appearing in an every post. RIP, my calendar. 130 onboarding calls booked in 24 hours.

Little 15-minute slots. The guy has slammed. His product's ripping. And congratulations to him. Have you ever had a calendar booked like this on a single day? I have. I remember having this exact calendar set up. My son was born on a Saturday,

and my calendar looked like this on Monday. It was kind of brutal. I don't recommend that, but I'm sure Sam Alman's looked like that this week too. Sometimes you just got to do it, you know? Yeah. You got to be in a certain frame of mind to really deliver and bring the same pitch,

you know, 50 times back to back to back to back, back, Back, back, back, back. 15 minutes segments. But you probably get really good at your pitch if you do that. And you get the reps in, you learn what works, what resonates, what doesn't, how to talk, how to let them talk. I've done this, you know, not in a, you know, sort of micromanagey way, but portfolio companies where they say like, oh, like we're not creating sales momentum. It's like, cool, screen share your calendar. I'm like, you're talking with, you're talking with like two customers a day.

Yeah, you should be talking to 20. You're never going to actually be a top decile company. from a growth standpoint, unless you have some crazy product-led growth motion, unless you have this extreme volume because it really is just, you know, should be obvious, but it's just a numbers game. If he has a 10% hit rate, but he's doing 20 calls a day, great. He's going to be getting, you know, significant amount of traction from this. Okay, six minutes left.

We're going through some quick bangers. I will read them. You give me your take. Let's start with Morgan Barrett. big night for hard tech in California and America at Valar Atomics. So proud of Isaiah Taylor. They had a big announcement last night. Looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.

What was your take, Jority? Anyways, this was absolutely wild. I didn't know what to think. We got invited, but couldn't make it. It seriously would be easier for us to get to Austin than that side of town right now. Yep. But what a show.

an absolute showman. Yeah. I was pissed because I feel like he really upstaged us on the production value. Like we're the ones that bring in the Hollywood designers and create elaborate sets. And his set was way above what we do. Yeah, people say, oh, you guys have such a nice set. Yep. And not anymore.

They say he's making us look bad over here. The Lara Tomics is the one that looks cool. So anyway, congrats to the team over there. Let's move on to Lotham Banger from Rob David. He says, high-yield Harry. City, when it comes to. accidentally sending people money. And it's just a dunk and it's a dunk reel.

And I don't know if you read this story. It's in the journal today. Citigroup almost made an $81 trillion mistake. They accidentally moved to transfer $81 trillion to a customer. Yes, trillion. A bank employee mistakenly entered the absurdly high figure last year while trying to manually input a transfer to a client's escrow account. Despite the fact...

Do they have $81 trillion? That seems a little bit. Well, the annual GDP of the United States is around $25 trillion. So no, Jordy. I don't think. Yeah, yeah. No, but I'm just like, yeah, what is like, just to put this in perspective. Yep.

They, they, I'm assuming they have what. They have billions, I'm sure, but not trillions. Yeah, like hundreds of billions. Yeah, maybe. And so there's a couple different examples of the fat finger transfer could happen is a lesson of technical difficulties. Would that go through? Would it appear on the customer's? screen. Oh, you now have. I have seen that happen. I've had friends who have said, like, oh,

some bank air happened. And for a moment, I had, you know, a couple billion dollars in my account because they messed it up and then they reverse it, of course. So it's all fake. Yeah. All the money's fake. The money's in the computer. I talked to a hedge fund guy who actually said, like, there's money in the real world and there's money in the computer. He's like, and the computer money, like, that's the stuff that goes up and down or something like that. It was a really funny thing. Anyway, If you're trying to make $81 trillion, you got to start a hedge fund. You got to go on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

And they're not going to send $81 trillion to anyone accidentally. They run a tight ship over there. Let's go to NICO over at default. They announced a $4 million new funding round from ABC. We covered here on the show. and they did this launch, which I know you'll have something to say about, they sent out 100 branded champagne bottles in custom Pelican cases. And Tom Osman says, solid sponsor for TBPN, TBH. What do you think? We love champagne. On a long enough time horizon, we will work with every champagne company.

Yes. You know, as long as it's truly champagne from the champagne region of France. but this was a story. I actually heard this from Sam Blonde. He was at... Yeah, didn't they do this. He's at Zenefits and then Brax, I think. And he said that one of the things that worked really well was sending people champagne.

He was in sales. Because you're not giving them a beverage. You're giving them a moment. Yeah, a moment that they can take home and then they open it with their wife and they think about it and they're having fun or something. Or their team. Or their team. There's a lot of different ways. We never, we always offer champagne to Ben.

Yes, yes, yes. Anyway, we covered this earlier on the show, and Mike Maples responded. We talked about his amazing BMW Z8. He says, TBPNers, glad you like the Z8. I actually fell in love with it when BMW showed the ZO7 concept back in the late 90s. At the time, I lived in Austin, and the local dealer wouldn't even take my deposit because they were sold out instantly. So I called around and found a dealership in Shreveport, Louisiana, willing to let me buy their allocation in 2001. I've had it ever since, and it's probably the one car I'd never sell. Cheers. We got to have him on the show. We got to ask him what other cars he owns. What else? What cars would he sell? Yep. You know, but a fantastic car. And thanks for replying, Mike. We'd love to have you applying, Mike. We'd love to call in anytime. Let's go to Riva. She says, looking to hire a chief of staff. By the way, we have heard. True, classic. Yeah. So thanks for engaging, Mike. We'd love to have you chat about cars. You're welcome to call in any time. Let's go to Riva. She says, looking to hire a chief of staff. By the way, we have.

Basically a minute until we're starting the payment from press card. Okay, well, we got some promoted posts. We got, we got Riva. She's hiring a chief of staff, trying the usual agency's recruiters, but struggling to find someone vibey. So if you're looking for chief of staff, go work for Riva. Who else we got? We got some of these.

Let's save some of these for Monday. Okay, yeah, we'll save some of them. John's got an incredible podcaster's high right now. I don't want to stop. Well, we got, we got one more. We got one more. We got to do. We got to do this.

So it was Steve Jobs' birthday on Monday. and Bezell replied to us and said he's a minimalist watch king. And in here he's wearing a beautiful Seiko. And I love that Bezell, we text them all the time. Can you clock this watch? And that's why we wanted to run an ad for Bezell today. Go to Bezell. I know Brandon Jacoby is listening right now and I think he's one of the biggest Steve Jobs fans that I know.

Brandon, I expect you to be in a Steve Jobs Seiko on Bezle. Send us a screenshot. and we'll feature it on the show. Fantastic. But now- shop over 22,500 luxury watches. They're fully authenticated in-house by Bezell's team of experts.

That's a great place to end the show. Actually, the real place to end the show is Sarah was watching from home and she commented in the chat and said, you have 12 years because she's 28 right now. So she was referencing. Oh, to learn. Yeah, to learn the song.

Anyways, great day of timeline today. Fantastic. It's fun to rip through timeline. We're trying to do more timeline. Yeah. There's a lot of news to cover. Snackable. Yeah, we want to make sure the pod is snackable. So thank you for tuning in with us on a Friday. We are going to jump over to the PMF or die stream and grill Patty and Blake on what they got done this week. They've certainly been busy and we are excited to grill them. So anyways, have a great weekend, brothers. We will see you on Monday.

See you on Monday. Thanks for watching. Thank you.