TBPN - Project Stargate, The T Word, Ramp Treasury, Audience Ad Reads, See You at Davos

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today we are giving you a breakdown of Stargate, the latest AI initiative, and really like a massive, just completely tech and AI-focused story to come out of the post-Trump inauguration. I think the mainstream news was like not on this. And I was very happy to see like, okay, there's a tech story here. Yeah, caught off guard. Yep. And opening out, like, what was interesting is it came out at like, I was in, I was on a layover.

off-brand. I was on a layover last night because I was flying into a small regional airport. Just routine maintenance on the G6.0. Yeah, yeah. It just was poorly planned. But I just remember it was 4 p.m. in Denver when the story came out, which just felt super random. Typically, you have a big announcement like this.

But it was because they were doing a press conference with Sam, with Masa, with. Masa with Trump. The photo is insane. The photo of them all together. And Trump's just standing on the side. just being like, nice guys. Like, yeah, do some American business. Yeah.

I like the vibe of this. Because I don't think for you, we'll get into this, but the, like, Trump is not committing money to this. He was just like, this is cool. Putting a stamp on it. Yeah, it's a stamp lot. It was great. Yeah.

And Masa had very much framed it as before he, you know, apparently the conversation went, if you get, if you win, I'll bring you $100 billion. Yep. And Masa was saying like, I came back with 500. I love that honest. And you can't keep a good man down. Yeah.

Like there's some really iconic Masa pictures throughout history. Go on our X or the TV account and my account. I tried to surface some yesterday. We got some bangers up. We got some bangers. We got an 8K banger. Yeah. As of this recording, might be a 10K now.

Well, let's go through the Wall Street Journal article to give some basic facts. and then we'll cover some Ben Thompson analysis with the information or the misinformation is saying about it. And then we'll take it through the timeline and get you some reactions to Stargate, the new AI initiative. So the Wall Street Journal writes,

some of the world's most prominent names and technology are pledging to pour as much as a half a trillion dollars into building. It's so much. Sounds bigger when you say half a trillion? Is it even so normalized the B word? Yep, yep. Now it's half a trillion.

now we're in the T-T land, artificial intelligence infrastructure in the U.S. and the latest high-profile initiative timed with the start of the Trump administration. And this is what's weird. It's really interesting. It's a joint venture. It's a new company.

And so Open AI is taking equity in Stargate and they're the leader of this joint venture. You wonder if the dilution you have to take is a new company raising that much money. And what they say here that intends to invest $500 billion. to be clear that they can obviously have a huge debt component to that, which would still count as this framing of an investment.

Yeah, and I mean, we'll get into this, but I mean, there's been a massive disconnect between like the announced, like in our day, back in our day, when you announced a $20 million round, it meant that $20 million to the cent came into your balance sheet as an equity investment. Yeah. And so the framing here is.

And the investors would even have to, You know, you get the wire instructions. It's like, oh, you're investing $5 million. Invest $4.999996 because you're buying this many shares. And now it's like, yeah, I threw some things you're dead on top of it and then some cloud credits. And then, oh, yeah, this government told me that they might throw some extra money in if I do one thing. So I'll throw that in there. And all of a sudden, I add a couple zeros to my fundraising around.

Yes. And back in my day, if you went out to raise $7 trillion, and he came back with $500 billion, that was not something to be sold. Oh, yeah, the start is at $7 trillion. That was the story. I forgot about that. That's wild. Those rounds typically don't even get announced. Yeah.

And so it's Open AI soft bank group, which we know well. They'll build data centers for Open AI. And then Open AI will be a customer of those data centers. So it's going to be this complicated, like, loopback. The database company and MGX, an investor backed by the United Arab Emirates, are also equity partners in the venture. The companies are committing $100 billion to the venture with plans to invest up to $500 billion over the next four years, which actually seems to. Put this into perspective in 2024, I believe there was $168 billion invested into U.S.-based Start-up.

Yeah. And so this is basically saying we are going to match, almost match that level of spend, but purely into the data center infrastructure side, the energy, you know, energy. Everything just gets so, it's essentially we're seeing like the vertical integration of AI. Yeah. where, you know, like, it used to be, oh, yeah, like, you want to build a startup. You're just like, you're essentially like an ABS rapper, then a chat GP rapper. Then it came to the training runs.

You're going to have a huge ADVS bill because you're going to be training on some infrastructure. Now it's like in order to really do what they want to do, they have to buy the land, the energy, the compute. Everyone was saying, oh, another one trillion to Nvidia because invidia is going to make. Well, that's what I was joking. I was, you know, obviously shit posting, be like, you know, showing Masa and. And, uh, and, uh, Jensen being like, 500 billion. Did I hear that right, Masa? And he's like, yes, brother.

It's all for you. It's all for you. And it's funny because Masa literally bottomed ticked NVIDIA. You remember? Like, he sold at the local bottom. Yeah, I sold at the bottom. And his, it would have like, you know, uh, so anyways, this is just, yeah, I mean, the whole story of Masa, I was, I tagged Ashley Vance and I was like,

you need to do a proper documentary on Masa because when, an incredible story. The guy has had some of the biggest wins and the biggest L's. It just like continues to like push forward, never loses, never lose his confidence seemingly. Yeah. Which we love to see. So the $100 billion sum includes projects that the companies already announced and initiated under the Biden administration. So they're kind of like rolling in their old progress as well. So like you knew they make this a thing. And then the total figure if realized would be large even by Silicon Valley standards and underscores the extent to which tech companies and government officials, are betting on AI as the future of the American economy.

It also shows how much tech executives want to broadcast their enthusiasm at the start of the new administration. And I love this photo of just Sam smiling while talking to the Paul brothers. It's like random photo. Yeah, it's like the Wall Street Journal knows what they're doing there. They're just like this is like, you know, unprecedented. And it's just like there's celebrities around. And they pick that photo very clearly.

Yeah, one thing you can tell as far back as Sam. positioning is I'm going to raise $7 trillion. Sam is under such an, I don't think there's somebody, Elon's under a lot of pressure and that he's got a lot of balls. He's juggling, right? He's got like seven balls in the air. He's got billions, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. But Sam is arguably under much more pressure, much more scrutiny. And so seemingly this project, they very clearly are 500 billion building new AI infrastructure for open AI in the United States. So Sam's strategy is his number one enemy is the most powerful, wealthiest man in the world that everybody's saying, oh, great, we're now an oligarchy

run by some guy from South Africa. Yeah. Right. But Sam's strategy is like, I'm going to become too big to fail. True. I also think this is an interesting narrative violation about that, that thesis that has been running wild, that Elon secretly the president and like has 100% control over Trump. Because if, if that really was the case, then this press conference never would have happened. Yeah. And so it actually is kind of refreshing in some ways to see that, no, the, like, the presidency is still clearly intact and Trump is just making deals one of the time. We talked about this right before the show.

Sam Altman was very against the Trump presidency. Oh, yeah. He praised Reid Hoffman in 2021 saying, you know, if it wasn't for Reed, Trump would be hours to Yeah. So, so, this is an example,

you know, you framed it as, uh, Trump is a deal guy. Yeah. He's, he's playing the specific moment. Yeah.

And so he, he clearly in this situation would have known that Sam had been a critic and oh yeah, wasn't for him, but still was like, this is, you know, good for America.

Yeah. Let's like to do this. Yeah. Yeah. He's come around on, on this. He's, he's donated.

He's come to the inauguration. He's effectively kissed. the ring and so I'm down to do a deal as long as the deal makes sense. And in this case, it's, it's just on deal terms, it's, it's, it's the federal government doesn't need to invest anything but gets a huge benefit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Dominance over. And it would actually do weird. It would be. And a lot of this is investment from other countries into America. I mean, that's what Nassah represents, right? And that's what the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, MDX, MGX, the UAE. So you're taking money from a foreign country and putting it in America. That's like,

that's a pretty easy. for Trump, I think. And yeah, for there's, there's a good argument for foreign investment here because I don't think the United States has 500 billion, you know, if they can pull the money together. It's not like we have an extra $500 billion that are just kind of, you'd really have to. I think we print that like every day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's true. That's true. Not every day, but I get what you're saying. But yeah. I mean, what the COVID stimulus was like a trillion and then another trillion or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we could. But if we did that, it would be very...

In fact... Yeah. Well, it would be correct for it to go all to O K.I. Yeah, we're doing a stimulus check for Sam Altman. It's one $500 billion check. Yeah. This is universal basic. The economy today...

Yeah, the economy today just functions as a wealth transfer between Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Base Baron. Base Baron picking up a very small amount of that. I was laughing at this because, you know, over the weekend, the Trump coin launched and then... Melania coin launched and everyone's like, it's so ridiculous that these like super powerful people have like coins attached to them. But then I was thinking back on it and I was like, wait, but like remember when Elon attached himself to Dogecoin and you could basically get exposure to Elon through Dogecoin and he essentially had a like a meme coin attached to him. And then even Sam has World Coin, which doesn't truly have like cash flows yet.

And although there's like more of a story there for how that's going to be a real crypto, it is. is in some ways a meme coin just about Sam. Like when I think about do I want to buy a world coin? It's do I think Sam is going to be a successful person? It's a way to go. It's a way to go along Sam. Same individually. Exactly.

Exactly. Because the coin should like live and die by him. The same way that Trump coin lives and dies by Trump. Yeah. It's very odd framing. So Stargate's first data center will be in Texas. The site which started construction last year will be operated by Oracle and used by OpenAI. The companies didn't do.

disclose how much each partner would contribute. Open AI raised billions of dollars but still loses money. Oracle has about $11 billion in cash and marketable securities, but more in debt. And SoftBank has roughly 30 billion of cash on hand. Open AI said it would operate the venture while SoftBank will finance it. Stargate will have a separate board of directors and hire a new CEO, which sounds like just like after all the war drama at opening I'm like, just I have PTSD about AI boards generally. But SoftBanks, uh, Mushayosu, who's, uh, own will be chairman. Stargate plans to bring on additional equity investors. So I think Ben Thompson framed it as like this is almost more of like a prospectus or a road show for Stargate. It's like kicking

it's a marketing event. It's a marketing event. It's like kicking off the general solicitation at the White House to the to the to the sovereigns basically. Basically. Basically. But and it's and to be honest like it's very smart to be like go and get a photo opportunity with Donald Trump being like yes, we want 500 billion invested in American AI infrastructure. And then if you're the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, you're like, oh, we'll toss like $5 billion in. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, I mean, it's going to be a party round.

Yeah. It's very clearly a party round. Seriously. I mean, the other way to think about this is like, it is this huge number, but how do you comp it just to general tech capax? And so Goldman Sachs has estimated that all the American tech giants collectively will spend an estimated $1 trillion on capital expenditures in the next few years. And so that will include large outlays on data centers, chips, and power, and the power grid.

And so there's already kind of a trillion dollars flowing around. There's just a question of like, if you're, if you're Jeff Bezos, do you want to be a part of this party around and like kind of count your cap action? Or do your own. Or yeah, yeah. And later we'll maybe get to this or maybe now the right time is. So Elon obviously quickly came out and said. Yeah, pull up that post. Yeah.

So Elon came out and he goes, they don't actually have the money. and then had had a number of other posts. And it's clear to everyone involved that they certainly don't have 20% of the 500 billion just sitting in an account. That money has clearly not been committed, you know, wired. Right. It seems like there's a lot of soft commits. There's people around the table saying, yeah, we want to be involved. Yep.

But it's so clearly like a DAC and a render. Yes, exactly. Nobody's going to be like, and then it will be a bunch of sub entities and complicated structures of like, okay, we're setting up this data center. We're going to tie this much debt to it. Yeah. We need $10 billion specifically here. It's just wild to see fake it to make it at this level.

Yeah, fake it until you make it. And so Sam's strategy, which was interesting, he says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are one of the most, the most inspiring entrepreneur of our time. And I don't think that that response. I think he's trying to win out. Like, you can, I, I do believe he genuinely believes that, right? Yeah, totally. How can, I mean, you can go back and watch the interview between him and, you know, like,

fighting, fighting fire with a hug, I don't think is how you win against. You're not going to, you're not going to, you're not going to, yeah, you're not going to win the war with Elon by being nice to him. I mean, he doesn't have so many different ways by Elon. It's kind of just like, why not just try a new strategy, I guess. But, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. interesting because it's like the initial open AI announcement. I think it's it is this fake it so you make it energy. Most people understood that. But I think Elon realizes that many people don't and many people will think, oh, wow. XAI has five million, five billion. And they have 500 billion. I should bet on this has 60, almost 60,000, definitely over 60,000 likes by now.

Yep. And I guarantee you that open AI has people seeing this post messaging them and being like, hey, will you promote my crypto coin? You know? So like it's so like the average person seeing this is like, wow, this is real. Oh yeah, totally. Because you don't understand all the nuances of Silicon Valley. Normally when you see an announcement like this, it was done historically. Yeah.

And this being done in the present. Yeah. And so Elon, Elon is he's not, I mean, he's, he's almost like theatrically just trying to educate people on like the nature of this fake it to you make it stuff, which sometimes he does too. And then Sam's like the optimist demo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And so there's a little bit of like everyone's doing the fake to make it. But there's a lot of alpha and like calling somebody else out for doing it. And getting that, dialing in the level of fake it to you make it is like the most important thing in Silicon Valley. Because you go too far and you're in jail. And every, every, every, you don't go far enough.

Founders do this with product demos, right? Totally. They'll put out a cool video, launch video showing it. And then you sign up for the product and it's got not not really feature. Oh, it's sped out. I mean, even Google. Yeah. Google, when they launched their AI stuff, people were saying, oh, yeah, they sped up the, like, the AI was actually thinking for three minutes.

They sped that up and they didn't say they sped it up and, like, all these different things. Like a million companies have gotten caught with doing stuff like this, faking stuff. But it's different when Tesla fakes a demo and it's like, oh, like, they, you know, they delivered that product like three years late. And Tesla is very expensive versus like the Nikola guy who like straight up had a fake truck that was rolling down. Exactly. And that was fraud. So the line of like what is fraud and something about doing that to get to like sustain their aggressive you know market cap. Yeah.

They're marketing. Yep. So Janik, our buddy Janik from public.com sent us sent us this post, which was clearly Satya running cover for Sam after all this. And on CNBC he gets asked, you know, Elon Musk says like Project Stargate doesn't have the money. Now, obviously, Satya is conflicted here. As any, you know, you, ideally, you be over your career, you become so conflicted that, you know, you just can't say anything at all. But, and so Satya gets asked this question very directly. Satya owns half of Open AI and, like, is made a huge, huge bet on Open AI.

And Satya is very sort of, like, specific with his words. He's getting pressed on. How much you're putting in? they do they actually have the money? And Satya goes, you know, we've committed to investing, you know, $80 billion a year in Azure. And, you know, and the guy goes, asked like a follow-up question. And he goes, Satya goes again, all I know is I'm good for my $80 billion. And like Satya is not saying, I'm investing $80 billion just through Stargate. He's saying I'm investing $80 billion in my data centers and infrastructure and all this stuff. And so, I mean, again, this is one of those things.

that Normies, not our audience, but Normies will look at this and be like, oh, Microsoft is investing 80 billion in this. Like, they're 80% of the way there. Like, it's real. I mean, if that was the case, that would be extremely, if their balance sheet just went down by 80 billion into some high risk. Yeah, I mean, they have, they have, they have committed. I mean, to be honest, the other thing here is it's not high risk in the way that investing in a startup is, right? You're investing in physical infrastructure. that has somewhat predictable demand. Everybody's expecting exponential growth in that demand,

but every indicator says that that's correct. And again, Microsoft is using a bunch of debt. Everybody involved will be like levering up, which we love to see. We love to see. It'll be interesting actually to see if there ends up being, if AI creates so much demand that we are just constantly trying to catch up to that demand. or we create a like a new housing crisis because like trillions of dollars are invested in data centers.

Yeah. You know, who knows? Yeah, I mean, the crazy thing is like it feels like so much money. But at the same time when you talk to the AI folks and they're like every order of magnitude is what gets us, you know, breakthroughs in AI. We went from GPT4, which was a $500 million run to a $5 billion project to the 50 billion's coming and the 500 billion. Like four years is actually slow on the, on some people's. AGI timelines.

Like some people want to do an order of magnitude basically every single year. Yeah. And so like this has been talked about for a long time. To be honest, like I basically it's like I don't exactly know

how the capital formation will happen. But if you just ask me like will humanity invest half a trillion dollars in AI over the next four years, I'd be like absolutely. Yeah. Let's go to Ben Thompson.

One last thing I would say. Open AI I think is the best in the world at, at disseminating their story and the things that they want people to believe through a complicated network of terminally online and on accounts, internal employees, leaks,

you know, stuff like that, memes even being like, oh, we're going to name it Stargate, which is like a very charged name for Stargate was a CIA project. Oh, is that? Yeah, ground mind control. One reference.

There's also... Siphy reference. There's a sci-fi reference. There's a movie called Stargate. Like, there's all these different things. It's a new name. It's a very cool name. Yeah, knowing.

Whoever held that yet a couple days ago, they printed. They probably sell it for $50 million. Yeah. So, yeah, Ben Thompson frames this as a bit of a prospectus. As Masayoshi Sown sets out to raise the funds, a project of this size and magnitude does seem to be up his alley. What is amusing is opening eyes propensity to get itself once again into a weird financial arrangement. It seems as if the company will get equity in Stargate, a separate

company for operating the data centers, and it will also be its primary customer, which is to say it will be paying itself in some respects. Still, it makes sense. Open AI is a software company with different long-term cost structure than that of an infrastructure company. That's fine if you're at Microsoft scale and profitability, but for entities that are losing money and looking to raise more, it makes sense to be different investment vehicles. So, Steve, like in one way the market can look at Open AI as a software company and then Stargate as an infrastructure and hardware company, which does make sense. The new Manhattan Project, the Manhattan Project of AI.

Yeah. It's cool because you're getting some of that credit of it being this government thing when all Trump did was say, yeah, this is a cool vibe. I'll join your press conference. Yeah. We should go to the. Gavin Baker. Yeah, Gavin Baker.

Yeah. Okay. So Gavin Baker, crossover fund manager and a great poster says, Stargate is a great name, but the 500 billion is a ridiculous number and no one should take it seriously unless SoftBank is going to sell all of their Baba an arm. Softbank has 38 billion in cash, 148 billion in debt and generates $3 billion in free cash flow per BBG. What is the? I don't know. Oh, probably Bloomberg. Oh, per Bloomberg. Okay, I thought they were saying like per, yeah. So three billion in free cash flow. They own 143 billion in Arm and 18 billion in Baba. If they start selling Arm, their stake will be worth much less very quickly. So if you basically just start, if you sell off 143 billion in stock, a lot of selling pressure, it's going to, you know, create a supply demand issue. Oracle has 11 billion in cash, 88 billion in debt and generates 10 billion in free cash flow. It's a lot of money. It's, it's, you know, it's funny to put out of the hell.

Founder at the helm and he's looking good. Everybody's wondering what's his stack, HGH test, you know, facelifts. He's looking good. He's looking good. Open AI is burning cash. MGX did not commit to a number and is a $100 billion fund. Maybe 10% of the fund goes into the best case. In the best case, and Vidaia will limit how much they invest in any one model company, maybe $5 billion, barring the aforementioned stuff.

Yeah, this isn't a model company, so. And it is like the most virtuous cycle or whatever money they put in is going to get that to in. So I could actually see the NVIDIA investment being higher. Yeah. But yeah. Barring the aforementioned soft bank. Oh, and they can also structure it as like trading in in kind trade of equity for for GPs. And then also that 10% of that fund, I think that that's a little weird. It might be a little low. I think some funds could go up to 20 or 30%. A private equity fund will do. Yep. Highly concentrated. It's possible. And then also if they if this deal goes well and they're, you know, they're raising the next fund, like, like, the, the commitment is over four years.

Yeah. So, you know, so, potentially. Like, that one fund is MGX or MDX? MGX. MGX. MGX. So, Barr. They could wind up getting 50 billion of experience.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, this doesn't take into account positioning this as a road, a road show. Yeah. Preset. And, and Massa is known to make ridiculous commitments and then walk him back a little bit. So he could be like, I will sell all my arm to, like, make this happen. Exactly. I've got the cash.

Yeah. Let's run it. Yeah. And so anyways, barring the aforementioned soft bank arm sale might be able to put together $50 billion in equity funding over several years. Can obviously finance the GPUs and put debt on the JV. In this case, you could probably, if you're going to put up $50 billion of equity, I don't know how much debt you could slap onto this bad boy.

But Gavin's point is nowhere close to $500 billion. Everyone should just start issuing press releases for $1 trillion. our AI projects. And then apparently some biotech company with the ticker MGX like popped. Oh, really? After this like 30%. Yeah. But anyways.

And so the people buying the wrong ticker thing and actually moving the market always blows my mind. Yeah. So how do you like you like you're enough of a you're enough of a trader to read this news. And think that it's bullish for the fund. Go in there. But not check. But what are two seconds that you're invested in the right thing.

Okay, but what if it's just that There's this understanding that It will pop. It will pop. It's the meme stuff. It's the meme pop. It's the Trump coin of this deal. And so Jeff Lewis referencing Sam's response to Elon.

He says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring crossover fund manager involved in a lawsuit against Open AI of all time. And then they just go into this like back and forth. Chad on Chad violence. But anyway, so Gavin is conflicted. Jeff's a huge investor in Open AI. He's conflicted.

Everybody involved in this public conversation is deeply conflicted. But that's why we're here to try to figure out what's actually happening. So there's an interesting to go back to the Satchanedella and Microsoft thing. Like obviously Microsoft and Open AI have been really, really closely aligned for a long time. And then there's been reports of that relationship fraying a little bit. and Ben Thompson has a good breakdown of kind of like how this wound up happening. And so he previously wrote in an update saying, so Microsoft will spend money on training,

but at a pace dictated by inference usage, leaving aside the fact that inference usage only comes after training, this is a viewpoint that is fundamentally at odds with open AIs still stated goal of pursuing AGI, which is in some respects just doing training for training's sake to see what you can develop. I guess you could square these circles if you tried, but it sure seems like Open AI and Microsoft are really, dare I say, misaligned. He's joking about the alignment problem.

But it is interesting. There's evidence that evidence of this misalignment continued to emerge. The information wrote about Open AI's frustration with Microsoft's GPU availability and the role that played in OpenAI's last fundraise in October. The Financial Times reported in December that Microsoft was negotiating to remove the AGI clause that restricted their future access to Open AI models in exchange for further investment. Then over Christmas break, the information reported. that the companies were having difficulty

coming to a new agreement. The two companies were having difficulties. You reported? You said the information. Misinformation. The misinformation. Although Microsoft was more insulated from the AGI clause than believed as opening I needed to first generate $100 billion in profits.

To that end, it is notable that this new deal does not appear to have more investment from Microsoft, as you noted, and does not appear to address the AGI clause. And so there, so, a little bit of this is like maybe a way to get back into like the crazy scaled up training runs that just have been maybe a little bit stalled because you kind of max out Azure and it becomes this question of like hey we have this belief that scaling laws will hold and that if we invest 10 times the money we will get a higher IQ model out and there and it's it's pretty clear from the we looked at the data and it's pretty clear that uh, when you 10x the energy and tokens and data and all the all the work on the training, you do get a smarter model, but the increases have been diminishing.

So as you spend 10 times more, you don't get the same increase from GPT3 to GPT4. So you could see this diminishing curve. And at some point, you know, if it doesn't become just super intelligence, you're going to wind up doing the training around that costs 500 billion. and only getting like, oh, cool, it's like, it went from like an okay PhD student to like a pretty good one. And it's like, was that really worth it? And so I think that Open AI clearly believes that, yes, it's worth it. We're going to get something really special out of it.

It's going to drive an immense amount of value on the inference side financially and also potentially like solve all of human, humanities problems and all that stuff. But making that case to Microsoft, which have shareholders and tons of other businesses to say, hey, you need to, take every penny you have and start building data centers for us probably wasn't going on one one thing that um it seems very clear it's impossible to predict the future right it's a it's a skill issue usually but yeah skill issue there's some people skill issue not not the thing i can predict is that humanity a hundred years from now will study this power struggle over over the creation of nonhuman intelligence. Right.

And the funny thing I saw somebody post and they said, everybody's now calling it ASI because it's clear we have artificial general intelligence already. Totally. Yeah. And so even opening eyes like everybody's like, hey, we got to kind of unwind this like AGI clause in this partnership because like kind of already have it. Yeah. It's not printing like $100 billion a year in free cash for this.

Yeah. Like maybe it will someday. Yeah. Maybe a bunch of companies eat up that pie. So there's just so much money on the line. It's like actually incredible. Because you can just do everything. Like it's every single industry.

Tim Cook's punching the air because he's like barely scraping a year, 78 million in total comp. Meanwhile, the average baseball player is making like half that. And he's sitting watching, he's like, he's sitting watching around. He's watching, you know,

these size lords huck around billion, tens of billions of dollars checks. And he's like, I can't even, I can barely get a bite, a crumb. It's funny, like, where is Apple in all of this? It is crazy. They partner with opening eye and they're sitting on all this cash and they're just like, yeah, let's rip another buyback. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I, I, I think that like we're, we're so stuck in all the nuances of this story because it's so big and so interesting. But I think it's going to be incredibly interesting to see what Elon's reaction is going to be. because he's definitely going to have to out raise. He's going to have to do something. Even if it's just PR or like narrative spinning or storytelling, like there's going to be something that comes from Elon World and XAI that is compelling and fascinating. And then Google too.

Think of the other sovereigns that are not in this announcement. Yeah. Cutter, Saudi. There's plenty of other big sovereigns, right, that can write $20 billion checks. Yep. And so behind the scenes, you have to imagine. And then Malaysia. Malaysia does train.

Yeah, you talked about that. You have to imagine that there's this battle between Elon and Sam and Masa out behind the scenes, taking these meetings, trying to get people to pick aside. And those people don't actually want to pick aside, right? Like even VCs don't want to pick aside. But we want to be able to be like, well, we're invested in this foundation model. But, you know, they've got like sort of different paths and we're also going to do this one. because people just want to deploy and they're playing you everyone wants to own a piece of ASI right? Yep.

They got their piece of AGI. Yep. They're kind of a little bit underwhelmed. Yep. It's cool. It's cool. But like, you know, it's not solving all of our problems just yet. We still have to solve our own problems.

Yeah. You still got to prompt it. Yeah. I do really wonder. I mean, the pattern has certainly been, or like, at least the financial, story that we've been hearing is that as a product LLMs

are sticky and drive high revenue subscriptions essentially. Perplexity, $20 a month, like tons of people just pay for it. I pay for it's great. But I also pay for chat GPT. And then I also just got the Google They use them interchangeably. Yeah. Interchangeably

to some degree, certain ones are better for other ones. Like the Google one has a really huge context window so you can dump an entire book in there. And then and then get it to summarize that. But chat UPT has the better reasoning models with 01 and soon, O3. And so the latest news from OpenAI is that they're launching the O3 model. It might be $200 a month. There's a version that might be $2,000 a month or something like that.

There's been people talking about it. And then kind of quietly behind the scenes, people have been saying, well, you know, for a long time, people saw this as existential for Google because how are you going to put ads in LLM responses? If you read ad big block a text, like it's less natural. natural to put ads in, but perplexity to solve that and figured out how to put ads in there. And I think it actually makes a ton of sense to put ads in LLM responses. And it'll work just fine. And it's actually very easy. You're not only.

And it's very easy to actually just have a second LLM that rewrites their response and says insert an ad in this text response. They should consult with us on that. But I think the third financial story that hasn't really been told yet is how are they going to drive cost down on the inference? side because you saw this with Bitcoin where there were originally it was extremely expensive to mine Bitcoin. You had to do it on CPUs. It was so huge server racks. Then they figured out how to do it on GPUs. Then they moved to something called FPGAs, which are kind of field programmable gate arrays, which are like it's almost like baked in silicon. And then they went to A6, which are, which are chips that are specifically designed just reminding Bitcoin. That's the only

algorithm that the chip can run. And so it mines Bitcoin very, very efficiently. And that to my knowledge, no one has baked, you know, mid-jurney down to silicon or GPT4 down to silicon. And when you do, the cost to actually inference the model should be nothing. And if there's some sort of curve where, yes, the true AI power users are going to pay $200 a month for the really expensive model. And Sam recently said that 01 users are actually losing the money because they prompted so much. And I noticed this. I use 01 Pro and I get messages all the time like, you have five prompts left

and I'm like, oh God, like I'm probably like really squeezing you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm probably like one of the people that they're losing money on. But for like the average user who just wants something that's decent and is used as a free model. Why haven't they made truly the all you can eat buffet? If they, one one reason would be

if they actually made an infinite one, then it started would hack it so that they're like basically like leveraging one account to run special software applications and just like piping it back important maybe yeah um but yeah i mean if there's people that that basically whatever their workload is maybe just like you know recipe shopping list just like daily life stuff just oh spell check this thing they're not really trying to do reasoning or advanced computation or math or code yeah then if they're if they're just happy with gbt4 you bake that down on the silicon and then that's just pure profit

it. And I think that could drive like pretty great financials for some of these firms, but I just haven't seen anyone talk about that or actually build that model. Yeah. But I'm excited for that because I think that'll justify underwriting larger models, like much easier because you'll be able to say, hey, all that revenue, that people are saying like, oh, yeah, because the inference cost, it's actually low margin revenue. All of a sudden people will be like, no, it's actually 99.99% profit when you break you down to the silicon. Yeah, which would be the thing that really unlocks like, yeah, of course invest $500, $500 billion.

Because once you get the model, that's perfect, you make it down. The prints. It, uh, there's so many levels to the game. There's the hardware side. There's the model layer. Energy. There's the energy. Lamb.

There's the time it takes Elon to get from the West Coast. The private jet industry. The Riyadh. Yeah. A lot of private jet flights. But there should be an account that just tries to track. Yeah, I don't, you know, some of these players don't have their own jet, but like Elon is typically flying. You can't track that jet.

That's bad. Remember? Well, there's a whole subculture of driving jets. And you probably piece together who's actually making more fundraising traction with you by figuring out. I mean, that just happened with the Intel thing, where Qualcomm and a bunch of the, in. But I feel like that could. Global Foundries. We don't really know.

We don't really know it's in Marilago. Well, the announcement hasn't happened. It's probably, it's probably Elon's. Imagine if Elon's Stargate is, we're buying Intel. Yeah. And Intel is going to manufacture it again. Yeah, manufacture GPUs in America. And they're going to be exclusively sold to XAI or something like that.

Yeah. And we're raising $500,000 billion. All we got to say to the audience, find your Stargate. Like, just find your. Stargate. Yeah. I'm going the YC request for startups. Like, you know, we've seen some success out there in startup world for people, you know,

assembling, you know, half a trillion dollars to build AI infrastructure. We'd love to see some of these. Yeah, we'd like to see some more of these. Yeah, we'd like to see some more. Yeah, it's a growing trend. Yeah, I'd like to see that too. So, yeah, let's close out with Ben Thompson here. He says, Oracle and SoftBank are there to serve Open AI, which isn't a business that Microsoft

is particularly interested in. sure Microsoft will provide inference to open AI for a fee and they like having exclusive access to the API but Microsoft is ultimately a product and service of the company. Is it the API? Yeah, but also the IP. Yeah, you're correct. If they can get away with running a highly efficient distilled model like DeepSeek demonstrated, this is what I was just mentioning, deep seek distilled the model down so it's higher margin

with a lower price to serve, then that's fine with Microsoft as long as their customers are happy. So Microsoft is going to figure out how to slot the OpenAI API and the models into Excel, Word, Outlook, all their products. And then it's going to be co-pilot on the desktop software. Everywhere there's a Microsoft product, there will be an OpenAI trained LLM running, improving that user experience. And it will be compressed. Yeah, Clippy. Yeah. They should bring back Clippy and make it like great, actually.

It's like the smartest AI. It would be great. And so they're going to distill the model down and then just still have their normal margins. And so it won't be, it won't be upheaval to their financial model because they're such a large corporation. They can just be like, hey, actually we're in, we're in the nuclear power business now. Like, sorry, investors, like the entire model is completely different now. I don't think, I think what Ben Thompson's saying is that like Microsoft just isn't ready to completely pivot their model. They want their investors to know, okay, this is the profile.

Yes, we're benefiting off of AI, but at the right, like, scale and margin. So Open AI, meanwhile, remains not only committed to AGI and beyond, but is also in a fight to have the best model, which undergirds their status as a consumer tech company. They need trainings GPUs. They need GPUs to build products around inference time scaling. And most importantly, they need investors who are in it for the upside, not to serve enterprise customers who will take years to adapt. This new agreement and new announcement reflects this new reality. And at the end, at least in terms of relevance of one of the most fascinating partnerships in tech history. They're really going to write books about all this.

It's insane. Yeah. So do you think that, do you think they did this because they were excited about Ashley Vance's new media company, core memory? Yeah, we're like, we need to give them a good first story, throw him a bone. Yeah. Yeah. Because they clearly rushed it, rush the announcement. Yeah.

It's funny because it's a very dangerous time to be trying to launch anything in tech. Yeah. Because if you were. Well, you might just get run over. You could get run over by a Stargate. Or just Trump saying the wrong thing. Yeah, yeah. Think of, yeah, or a video where Baron Trump just gets increasingly larger and larger.

Anything like that. There was a good, like, SNL's cold open actually had like a pretty hilarious take on how Trump is able to just completely derail like the mainstream media because they're like, we really need to talk about this executive order. But we have some breaking news. Donald Trump just said he's going to, you know, melt all of Greenland and turn it into a farm. And then so like they just get completely distracted consistently. And that's like extremely true. Like yeah, like no one can stay focused on anything. And so I getting the launch right and timing the date correctly is like enormous.

If you go on a date, I remember when we launched the trailer for the show. I think it was a quiet news day and we ripped and it just destroyed everyone's timeline, which is great. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tough day. Do I remember? I forget who it was. Some other startup. that I know did a launch when we launched the trailer

and I actually felt bad because I mean during the fires like it was hard for us to break through because I just started posting about politics you just went full day I just went on a war pad against I was like our whole our whole plan to not talk about politics

lasted like two months but to be fair at this point we if you track not based on the number of months but the number of episodes I bet you if you what are we on episode 3 something, 36. I bet you episode 36 of All In is where they start getting political too.

So, you know, we're actually just speaking right. But it's not political if you're just speaking to facts. That's policy. Yeah, exactly. We only talk about, yeah, the truth. We talk about policy, personalities. Exactly. But never politics. Never politics. Definitely. Let's just close out with Ben Thompson's final line. He says one additional point. If it's true that SoftBank is looking to raise debt for these data centers, then that's notable for a few reasons on the positive side. It speaks to a great deal of confidence that Open AI is really on the verge of a meaningful breakthrough, something like AI training AI all the way to AGI. That will consume $500 billion worth of data centers. On the more negative side, funding these data centers with debt as opposed to

Microsoft funding data centers with profit is definitely a bubble indicator. Open AI is right to go for it. DeepSeek is evidence of the danger of standing still. But it will be interesting to see who wants to be in the business of loaning against rapidly depreciating GPUs. Very interesting. Venture debtor. Venture debtors. The loan sharks always come out on top, I guess. They do.

Did we get through all the posts related to this one? Yeah, we did. Okay, cool. Let's move on to the timeline. Oh, we got a whole bunch of, we got a whole bunch of DMs and reviews. Thank you so much to everyone who's been leaving reviews. If it's your first time hearing this call to action, We want to remind you to go leave us a five-star review, but specifically leave a promoted post in your review.

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Well, so Peter, the CEO, sent us a few boxes. John powered through... I heard so many of these. He's averaging five a day. You want to take this one next? What we'll trade after you're reading these? Thank you for upgrading my information diet from Nick DeWild. He says, five stars. Very cool. He says, if my podcast listening time was a luxury high rise, the technology brothers just swept in, took over the top 10 floors, and evicted all the dead beats, sorry, all in. And if you're the kind of captain of industry who listens to this show, you know what lands you a luxury penthouse is a sales team that can close when big deals are on the line. Unfortunately, most CEOs only find out that their sellers, I just love that like anybody, anybody discovering the show, discovering the show and like looking at the reviews.

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Thanks to the technology brothers for the ad read and for upgrading our information diet. We really haven't set a word limit and someone is just going to drop like a 5,000 word pitch for their company and we're going to get stuff. I feel like Nick. I think we're going to cut it off. One screenshot from now I. Okay. Tighten it up. I mean, insane domain.

Insane domain. Insane domain. I'm ready to start, like, I'm ready to start running these ads. They sold me. They sold me. And it's funny too because you have to imagine that exec.com is just generating the training data to replace the sales leaders that are using it. So it's like it's just kind of wild.

Well, hopefully they'll be duking it out on the 101 against all the other AISDR as soon as they, is the yeah they're gonna have to be with jeremy guffon for for trombard states yeah the one ad quick we'll get you sorted yeah uh a must a must listen for any brother john and jordy put the brothers in tech bros they appreciate the finer things in life profits don paringian and skiing their show is a must listen for any technology brother this ad brought to you by this review brought to you by carrot ai carrot is a whiteboard for researching brainstorming and thinking and it's the best way to visually collaborate with i carrot just move into an open beta, sign up now at carrota.i.com. I haven't heard of this,

carrot AI. But I mean, we do a lot of research brainstorm. Great name. We're actually like, we might want to give me. We should try it. Ben, install that and get a get a carrot AI whiteboard going. We can we can map out all our, all our machinations there. You want to read this one? Perfect. Oh, my God. Sir, Sir, Surgord says yapping done right, five stars. Great podcast, but even better vehicles for ads. I've already bought David Protein Bases's old plane. Now I want my fellow technology brothers out there to hire me to make your pitch decks.

Oh, this is Matt Gore. More than $2 billion raised from Syslords like Andreson Horowitz and the Saudi Royals. Hit me up on Ax. Gorical of Delphi. That's G-O-R-A-C-L-E of Delphi or check the company at opio.io. Yeah, he's awesome. He made a whole pitch deck for us when we launched our trailer. And it looked so much like our actual debt. Yeah, I had many people. Being like, did you just send it to him? Yeah. Yeah, many people were like, how did this leak or whatever?

And so he, and that was without, we hadn't talked to him at all. Yeah. He just spun it out of nowhere. And it was super on. So Matt, if you're listening, please make a deck for Stargate. I want to see that. Yes. I want to see that deck.

You said, that's actually amazing. Super viral, super viral potential. But he says he's raised more than $2 billion. So if you make, if he makes the deck for, for Stargate and, you know, sends it to Mossa and he starts shooting it around. Yeah. You can 10x that or 100x that number. Like, absolutely like a thousand X that number and be like, $502 billion raised.

Yeah. The only thing is that Mossa is one of the greatest deck makers behind. Oh, yeah. Yeah, he does give Matt Gore a run for his money. Yeah. Matt Gorman. Some insane graphics. I'm like, yeah.

Did you custom design this duck laying eggs, golden eggs? Yeah. Imagine being a designer itself. bank and just being like, because it has a very like PowerPoint aesthetic. It's not a Figma project. Yeah. It's not refined. Okay.

So five out of five, great to listen while shining shoes. I'm a professional shoe shiner and Coogan has been my client for over a decade. I love listening to their podcast while shining shoes of celebrities and billionaires. Better than an MBA at HBS or GUSB. For my son's birthday, he gifted him a Potech Felipe, truly an exceptional mensch. This review is brought to you by Lucy, pack a lip and lock in. Thank you. Dude, you kind of need a, you kind of need a shoe shine there.

I do need it. I've been on the road. Even on the road. I love it. Road warrior. Let's see. Technology Brothers is my enlightenment. The Technology Brothers podcast isn't just another podcast.

It's my enlightenment. I fall asleep to their voices. And by the time I wake up, their wisdom has already recalibrated my mindset. Prime for greatness before my feet touch my Brooks Brothers Loafers. Custom, by the way. The writing is so on point. It's so good. The world turns, but my orbit revolves around their tank.

Hakes. Technology Brothers is my gospel, my alarm clock, my North Star Enlightenment. Okay, wait, you wrote this because... Take a wild guess. Baldo! You absolute legend. I was literally about to say, Baldo, we got to hire whoever wrote this, but we're already talking with Baldo about opportunities at the firm, so... That's great. Let's go to this post, but I think... So we printed this in black and white, and it's Chris saying, no brown in town, and he's circling some shoes. that I think they're renting.

Can you say this? Sam Altman had a story here. So Sam Altman, he has incredible tasting cars. He's got the Regera. Yep. He's got the P1. F1. McLaren F1.

McClaren F1. But he had, and I'd say this to his face, he had a horrific fit on. I mean, it's just not on the level that it's not on the level that it should be. It doesn't scream half a trillionaire. Yeah, yeah, there's no, there's no excuses. I mean, there's, I have stylists that we- Fashion is back in tech. Yeah, yeah.

And standing out is- And loud opulence was really back this weekend. Oh yeah, the inauguration. Yeah, you saw Lauren, Lauren Sanchez with some very interesting. I know if that. So it wouldn't bucket that in loud opulence. I'd put that in, yeah, very loud. But I was disappointed that Bezos didn't match her energy

and just rock the tightest tuxie-e-es-eux-e t-shirt with his biceps just popping out and just been like we're both like just going insane. Instead, he was just wearing a normal sister and missus. But I feel like if your if your fiance comes out dressed like that, you got to be like, what am I doing in this normal clothing? I got to match the energy. Yeah. Come with something crazy.

Speaking of fashion choices, we have some breaking news from Paul Baum. Trump assigns mandatory pocket protectors for engineers executive order. I've never been a pocket protector. It's completely before my time. Yeah, we should take some first. then just to see what it's yeah yeah do a little throwback episode where we dress up as NASA engineers that be great you need there needs to be uh almost needs to be watch protectors with what's going on in seriously oh yeah do you want to tell that story this is crazy one somewhat yeah not actually relevant

to Paul's post yeah yesterday uh somebody uh held my brother-in-law uh with up with a knife in the middle of the Upper East side and stole his uh protect Philippe and uh like Like walked up to him, asked him for directions. Yeah. The guy was with his wife and children. That's crazy. While committing this heinous crime. That's, like, the, the criminal was with his, his wife, not the victim.

Yeah, yeah. The victim was alone. Well, yeah, yeah. That is crazy. Victim is alone. Just be like, hold on, son. I'm going to go steal something. Yeah, yeah.

That's wild. So it's super dark. He was super shaken up and he's like, yeah, I'm never wearing a watch out in public again. unless I'm like getting in a car or getting a dinner. I, I mean, it's like a super dark story

and it sounds like, and it's funny, because we're talking about like Tat. We talk about Pat, and we talk about Paton very light terms all the time, but yeah, we talked with,

we reached out to a friendly journalist. Oh yeah. And she was basically like, I talked to our crime scene. This is like such a common story. It's, it's not even a story. It's not even read it. Oh, and the other crazy thing,

the cop said, the cop, so my brother-in-law runs, like, finds a cop immediately after this happened, explains like what happened. He had a cut on his hand. And a cop said,

sounds like your problem, not mine to his face. And so now he's like trying to figure out how to get footage. Yeah. I really hope there's like a pirate wires article

or something deep dive on like what's going on the police because it feels like, like is this like the cops are bad or is this like, they've been like hated on for years? Did you tell me the story

of somebody who's, who's baggage was stolen from LAS. So I think that cops in some way have been so demoralized because the people that get caught for crimes are not prosecuted. That there's almost like this nationwide sense of

I'm not going to go through the hassle of doing this that they're going to be back on the street and it. And then also just like for the whole defund the police movement was like actually it's more noble to not do your job if you're a police officer. Like that was the message like

the world was sending to police officers. It was like, you're not wanted. And that's really rough. Whereas, you know, like, the whole point with, like, you read like a children's story about, like, the police. I'm sure you see this to your son. Like, it's like the police, firefighters, like, these are like heroes. Yeah.

In the, in the kid's story. Like, Paw Patrol. Like the main dog is a police officer. And it's like a good thing. It's not like some bad thing. But like that was just lost from our culture for like a few years. And I hope there's like a recalibration. And then there's probably.

something going on politically with funding, and then there's probably something else going on with like training and like the judicial system and all these other things. There's probably a million problems that are going on that need to be addressed. But speaking of some good news on watches, do we already talk about this in the show?

I think we might have. But congrats again to Tyler for getting a Seiko. We love it. He's locked in. He got a sandwich. Yeah, and to be clear, this week is a little chaotic for us. We were in New York from Monday morning

to, yesterday afternoon. We're back in Santa Barbara. There's now a new fire that's sent a ridiculous amount of smoke over here. So we'll see where we are tomorrow. Do you want to do this one, Base Baron? Base Barron earlier, but I think you were talking about the real Barron?

So, and to be clear, base Barron, it was like less than a month ago that I said investing in Base Barron at sub 250 followers is like buying Bitcoin in the 90s. and he's now at like almost three. And so this guy, Lewis goes, Rune got acquired by Open AI. Beth got acquired by the blob.

I don't know. What is that? What's the blob? I don't know. Yeah. Yosin got acquired by X. Yeah. Ain an honest man left standing and beyond blah, blah, blah.

And then and then base baron quotes this and he says, base baron got acquired by Tech Bros. Pod. And Balda goes, outsourcing political commentary since the podcast. out avoids it smart. Base Baron loves to rip a political post. You know, great, great poster.

Bright future. Bright future. Let's go to Aida Pi, says, quoteuring Kermew, who I saw this weekend, great guy. He says, okay, just to be clear, most of the EOs were written partially with chat GPT, and a lot of them were written with copy pasting between them. And then Real says, Rune says real, and Kramu says, yes. and Aetopi says, Daddy, how did the AI take over?

Did they send big, scary Cylon robots? No, my child. Like, they, like, we just use Chachypte by default to, like, write all of our laws, which is kind of funny. But it makes sense, like, you need to write all these, like, papers. Like, of course AI's got to be used. Giving some pretty big, you know, a lot of ammo to the high school kids that are writing every single essay.

If he say, well, the president's using it to write his executive orders, why can I, you know, write, use it to write about the founding fathers? Yeah. How is it, you know, this is even less significant. Yeah. I mean, it's still just like the instantiation of the ideas. And so, you know, I don't know.

It's, it seems fine. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I'd be surprised if there's anything. I'd be surprised if we wind up learning that the executive order is being written with the help of chat GPT wind up causing an unattended effect, right? Where it's like, oh, they didn't proofread it. It hallucinated. And now it's illegal to drink.

It's not going to. Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably unlikely. Got a sign off. There was a follow-up on the Curtis Yarvin thing that we talked about. Dwar Keshe Patel chimes in and he says, Curtis Yarvin is mistaken when he says that Apple can produce iPhones because it's a monarchy. There are millions of firms, monarchies in the world,

that can't produce anything nearly as impressive as iPhones from the laundromat down the street to Boeing. Apple is the result of a decades-long evolutionary process facilitated by the which uplifts the very best culture, talent processes, and ideas in the entire world. And the moment Apple slips, it'll get replaced. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is 15 years. And I think Curtis would actually be like, awesome. Like I love the idea of like millions of little like micro, uh, techno monor editors or whatever.

Yeah. But, uh, this is still an interesting, uh, take. He says governments won't just, uh, don't just don't work this way. Xi Jinping isn't competing against a million counterfactual Chinese leaders who didn't do zero COVID avoided deflation, didn't kill the tech industry, and we're awake to AGI, he can he can fuck up as much as he wants. If a monarch happens to be competent, like Lee Kuan Yu, it is merely by chance not due to some intrinsic selection mechanism of monarchy that we can't, that we can replicate. You are just as likely to get brutal dictators like Mao and Stalin by

chance. This is not a reasonable gamble to take with the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens. Apple is indeed a wonderfully competent organization. If we want more, more of the world to be run competently. We should delegate more functions to the market, cool, which is constantly and ruthlessly sizing down incompetence. To be clear, a ton of incompetent businesses exist, but they lose access to capital, talent, and power rapidly, which is reallocated to those who can deliver. They don't drag down the fortunes of entire countries and kill millions of people, which has happened again and again in authoritarian systems. So I think it's a good, it's a good point. There was actually a rebuttal to this, which I don't know if we printed, but

there was a rebuttal that that said, that this that there is a difference between the Mao and Stalin outcome and the Lequan U outcome and it's and it's whether or not the dictator has control over not just the capital flows but the actual capital stock and so the idea is that if if the Yarvanite monarch owns you know 60% of the wealth then there is economic alignment between them and their people and it will be like a better outcome. I didn't really dig into it too much. But, but, but, but, but it did, it did take me down. I'm like, I'm like, only tangentially interested in this battle that I think it is interesting. I don't, I don't feel qualified to, um, but it did take me down a very interesting

rabbit hole, which was, uh, I was like, okay, so this guy's arguing that if, if the monarch, if the authoritarian leader, Lee Kuan Yew or Mao own a lot of the wealth in the country, you will get a good outcome. And so immediately that demands a fact. check, like how much money did Lee Kuan you have? And I tried to look it up and it's completely unknown. I found, I found like wildly different stats. Somebody was running the numbers and being like, well, he made a million dollars a year. So if he saved it all and invested it, he'd have like 60 million, but total wealth in the country was in like the tens of billions. And then another, another quote was like, no, like he changed some law so that you couldn't see his wealth and he actually died with like

five billion and it was actually like 10%. So like maybe. Maybe. is true. But it was one of these things where maybe a listener knows more here or something and can write in. But it was just one of these. And I see this a lot with when we dig into like Asian companies and and like Chinese companies. We're thinking about doing a whole deep dive on DJI.

And it's very hard because there aren't there aren't that many accounts. You don't know what you can trust. You don't know what you can trust. And then also stuff doesn't get translated that often. It doesn't make it out past the very far wall that often. And so it's just a great mystery. So if you have an idea of what Lee Kuan Yew is actually worth, that's more of an interesting story to me than this Yarvan debate. I more just want to know more about Lequan You because clearly something happened great in Singapore because it turned into a great country from basically nothing.

And whatever the seeds of success were, those are worth studying. And I thought that was interesting. We already talked about this breaking news. Oh, let's go to Ross Ulbrick. So Free Ross announced that Ross was just. granted a full and unconditional pardon by real Donald Trump. Words cannot express how grateful we are. I guess this account has been advocating for the pardon of Ross Oldbrick,

who was the dread pirate Robert, who ran the Silk Road in, what was that, 2008, 2013, I think he went to jail. But it was like that era. It's only really running the Silk Road for a few years. A few years. And so Luke Metro says, all crime is now legal, assuming you do it with crypto. Some truth to that. Yeah, I mean, the positioning of being like, okay, if somebody was operating effectively a doordash for drugs using Fiat rails, they would have been slammed for so many things in so many ways. But Ross having these more arm's length, you know, creating a platform to facilitate these transactions, but being able to say like, well, it's just a forum.

Exactly. I don't understand. I think there was just a lot going on behind the scenes here, libertarian movement. Totally. ...Movent movement support for Trump. Yep. That led to this. Yeah. This is a...

To Ross's family... By one person is like, this is an olive branch to the libertarians. Yeah. So you do this and then there's going to be a lot of tariffs and non-libertarian stuff that goes on, but they got their guy. Yeah. Yeah. And libertarians would argue that people are going to buy drugs all the time.

Yeah. And if you create a marketplace for it where sellers want to have trusted reputations, that will sell better drugs. and people will have less overdoses or things like that. But then there was also like murder for hire on the Silk Road. Yeah. You know, and, and so I don't, I know, I didn't understand this, but, but purely from a marketing standpoint, the Ross family led a phenomenal marketing campaign to reposition

this guy as somebody who wasn't the largest drug, like a drug trafficker. Yeah, basically. Like a digital drug drug. The other thing that was really big was like, you could, you could buy hitmen on the Silk Road. That's what I'm saying. Where's for hire. Yeah. So it's not like,

and even by libertarian standards, like the non-aggression principles kind of violated there. It's a little bit tricky, but. Yeah. It's almost like, and so going back to Luke's point, it's,

it's, Trump has set a precedent around, okay, he launched, like, what's effectively like, you know, it's not a security,

meme coins aren't securities, you know, he launched it here in America. Yes. It's kind of clear. I do hope the, We get to hear Ross, you know, plead his case on Rogan or something. Or somebody does a podcast, sir.

People were posting yesterday, like, wow, poor Ross, he's been sentenced to 40 years doing the libertarian podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, let's move on from, you know, a drug platform to, you know, instead of buying drugs, you should buy something much more, much more, much more of a drug, which is a fine watch. Let's do a promoted post. Let's do a promoted post. One of the greatest drugs in the world, consumption. Yeah, there's nothing that hits quite like it. So this is an amazing account, first of all.

It is at bot 3167-6934, sharing a bunch of Japanese and Mandarin, which I actually, you know, we don't have the translation here. But I can translate this for you. This is a picture of Brad Pitt wearing a 222, Vasheron, Constantine. and this watch, which they just reintroduce. Yes. And we're calling it now. We've been calling this in the group chats for months.

Vashron is about to go on a generational run. Yes. You've got Patech, which is just launching slop remixes of binautilus. You've got, you know, AP, which is going more of the Louis Vuitton, sort of hype, beastie route. And all those DJ partnerships, whatever. Vaseron coming in, third member of the Holy Trinity, dropping. You know, this, this, I, we each need this watch. We do.

We should Q4 Christmas gifts for each other so it seros out. Exactly. Engrave the back. And anyways. Yeah. So how do you recommend? Great campaign and a great watch. And you can get, these are, I think, going out through the boutiques now.

But if you want to get a vintage Vashron 222, you can go to get bezel.com. Yeah. Or maybe you want a, maybe you want an overseas or something else that fits. style because even though I highly written in this particular model, I always say that it depends on, you know, so many things to go and do it. What wears best for you? Shoot us a DM. We're happy to go back and forth on it. Yeah, yeah, happy to help with that. Let's go to Chad Byers. He says, Gen Z AI founders are insanely cracked, 10x more business savvy than young people a decade ago. And this is, this is an interesting dividend, I think from like the Wi-Fi money crowd and just all the chaos of COVID and being inside and

and watching meme stocks happen, watching crypto happen, and having so many opportunities. Like, I think, you know, in our generation, there were, you know, teenage, young teenagers who made money online. But it was, and Jeremy Gaffan has that, has that saying about high school transcript in a stripe account, and I'm investing, stripe account showing that you made money when you were still in high school.

But usually it was like, oh, yeah, somebody was like got a T-shirt business going. Or I know someone who had a stock photo site that did pretty well. Yeah, the sneaker flipping. But not millions of dollars. Like there's so many way. So many way to just make, like 10 grand, a hundred grand. But now it's a million.

So think about this. Think about in high school, like, let's say like middle school specifically, $200 in middle school was like I would get, my dad would pay me like $3 a lawn, something like that. Yeah, like 200 bucks is like literally like, oh yeah, I was doing like, mowing a lawn for like two years in a row or whatever. And now you can just go. And when Nike drops a sneaker,

go lever up, get $200 bucks to your parents, buy the sneaker. And immediately you can resell it on Stock X for double. And then you just made $200. I know a kid that did exactly that. And then he started writing a bot that did it. And then he sold that bot. And it's great. And those types of, I think there's basically the opportunity for really young people

to make more money, it's just bigger than ever. And what that means in terms of business savvy is specifically like you get to a certain point you're going to have to learn about taxes, lawyers like these things are going to come in and that's going to teach you more about business. Yeah. Let's do another promoted post and then we'll go to this Andrea post. Do you have the promoted post there? I've got a promoted post.

Okay. Yeah. So two brothers on the show, Chris, Amadon and Will, who doesn't put his last name in his handle. So I never remember what it is. But they are building a, let me scroll up here. So I just get it right. A young boy A-UV defense tech company

is how well described it, which sounds exciting to me. But they're basically building autonomous boats, boats, drones. And so they're hiring an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. So these are like founding team level roles.

Yeah. So basically, this is an opportunity if you're an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer to go join a founding team. that is building some, like, imagine like the, the, um, imagine like the lifestyle of like building like RC boats.

Yeah. But they have like guns on though. And like, they can blow up and stuff like that. Um, so anyways, you can go to, uh, they have a, they have a, uh, something listed on, on Ashby. Amidon heavy industries on Ashty. There's seven open roles. They are funded.

They're hiring some interns as well. So go check them out. Support the brothers. And these guys are avid listeners of the show, former reply guys of the week. So even if you're not the mechanical engineer, the electrical engineer that would join their company. Tell a friend, brothers, supporting brother. That's brother behavior. Back to you, John. Let's go to Andrea. Did you follow this story at all? She says, Meta isn't making anyone follow VP or POTUS accounts on Instagram. If you were following it, it just transitioned like it's done on Twitter. It's crazy that people can't even deduce that because we've stopped thinking and just react. So basically yesterday or during inauguration as soon as I think Trump's hand got off the Bible, the people at Meta changed the account over, just like they changed the White House website over. And so all of a sudden, if you were following the at VP account, it was Kamel Harris content and her profile picture. And then boom, it's JD Vance, his name, his pictures and his profile picture. And same thing for POTUS.

And so a bunch of people who look at it. loved Kamala, we're like, why am I following J.D. Vance now? And they, then they got confused. They got confused. But what's, so, so it became this whole meme about like, Zuck is pro-Trump. So he made everyone, he made my Instagram account follow Trump, but you're not following the Trump account. It's very easy to be on potus. But it gets more complicated. So because the changeover from Trump and Vance from Biden and Kamala was so contentious, like when you think about most, VPs it's like who really was like up in arms like oh yeah I'm a really like Mike Pence guy so I'm like super upset about Kamala like like the previous changeovers have not been as big and the accounts were probably way smaller because Instagram's is bigger and so what what happened at Meta was millions and millions of people saw this and were like oh I'm following the wrong person I'm going to unfollow and what happened was the unfollow demand was so high that the unfollow requests weren't going through. on the server side. So then it looked like I unfollowed it and then I was like, cool,

I unfollowed it because it updated on the front end. It didn't update on the back end. And then you're still following it and does look like it, but it's above. So if you were following Joe Biden because you love Joe Biden and then you start getting served. Trump's done. It's a terrible system. It makes no sense. They just shouldn't have at POTUS or at VP. It should just be Trump or Biden, right? Yeah. Yeah. Something like that. But they actually do some sort of archive where if you're following at VP when it's Kamala, you will get automatically follow, you do automatically follow at VP number 47 or 46. And then it's an archive of Kamala's content or something like that. But it's all this like weird technical infrastructure. And I think that there was also a bug going on because a lot of people click the unfollow button and then refollow them. And then they felt like it was being the team at any social media platform that's in charge of switching over presidential handles. So like a terrible. Yeah. yeah yeah yeah uh job all the war rooms uh let's do another promoted post uh caught me caught me lacking well here i'll do a bucket pull i don't talk about them you do a bucket pull up um i got one uh i got a couple

here uh this is funny from the technology brother clearly inspired by us uh just kidding i think they had that uh that handle going earlier uh it says george porros and he shows the the net worth of Elon Musk is $415 billion and the net worth of George Soros is $7 billion. What has been going on with George Soros in his business career? I feel like he's been hovering around a couple billion, like my entire life. I think he's got way more and he just... Oh, yeah. Okay, it just doesn't show up.

Whereas Elon's wealth, it's like getting marked to market constantly. So it's hard to tell. Interesting. Also, I mean, like the political donation stuff, it's always shocking me how, I mean, SBF actually, like brought this up, which was that, like everyone was praising Elon in from the Republican Party for donating a quarter of a billion dollars and they were like it's the biggest most insane donation like he did it for us and it is a lot of money but it's like less than one percent of his wealth it's less than 0.1 percent of his wealth yeah it's like very very small and so I think especially Soros has been I think focused on like local courts and local stuff and in some of those it's like it's like a $10,000 check will change the course of locally or something. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah.

I shouldn't get. I shouldn't talk about politics. Politics. If I guess I'm going to go on a rampage. But I do have a promoted post. Very exciting news. If you were following our account this morning, you would have seen us request a new feature from RAMP. Oh, we've got so much cash coming in that we wanted a place to actually earn some type of,

just sitting here, it's not earning anything at all other than adding to the general ambiance of the show. and just being close to cash is like there's some energy transfer. It's nice. But we requested a feature this morning at like 6 a.m., something like that. Ramp actually shipped it a couple hours later. Wow. And that feature was Treasury. Fantastic.

Eric, their wonderful CEO and friend of ours, says if you're reading this, your business is probably earning 0.07% on operating cash. Ramp is now offering 2.5%. That's 35 times national average. average and much more on investment accounts and you can switch in a minute. Yeah. So they're offering this functionality where you can have historically treasury products, you know, would offer a high rate, have low liquidity so it could take.

And it was sort of designed intentionally in a way where they were like, well, we want you to keep your money in this operating account that's earning nothing. Yep. But like, yeah, we have a high interest product and then they make it inconvenient enough to move between the two is the ramps coming in with a with a high yield, high liquidity. or, you know, quick liquidity product. And I love this copy. You guys legally, we can't call it free money, but you can.

So go check it out. Go get some free money. And go get some free money. So if you're on ramp or your company is on the ramp. I don't actually think we can. I don't think we can say. Probably not. We also can't call it free money. You can. You can.

So yeah, if your company is on ramp or you have a ramp card in your organization, tell them check this feature out because it's fantastic. Big week for ramp generally. Did you see all the promotions? Will Petrie's now the CFO? Yeah, we're not really set up to do the... Yeah. We got to do a whole personnel news. We should do a personnel news where we're on the beach.

Yeah, like some type of like all-weather gear, like yelling at the micro... Yeah, super bendy right now. We can be like, breaking news. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, fantastic team over there. And great to see the promotions go out. Let's go to Low-Yield Lucy. I love this post.

This is so good. Flirt with a guy at the bar. Ask for his phone to put your... number in open coin base place a large limit order for a illiquid meme coin you're holding now you have volume to sell into i just i just shows that i thought that's doing so much money i mean that that that that genuinely would work with with with a lot of s f guys guys guys so many sf guys new york guys definitely because the girl comes up to you and says they have like the next hot meme coin that's not what you see saying she's saying make the guy think that you're

putting your phone number in and instead buy you the meme coin. Yeah, that, that, I also think it would work to just be like, you have to buy this. Like, I probably see because they're going to want to, the guys are going to want to flex and be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, just through 25K. And then you go to the bathroom and you sell. Immediately. Buy me a drink?

No, buy drink coin. It's the lowest volume coin on pumped out fun right now. Yeah. Ridiculous. That's great. let's see if there's another good book bucket pull in here. This is a good one from Max Bo is sending Factoria to your competitors, engineers,

a cost-effective means of sabotage. And it's a screenshot of you've received a gift copy of the game Factorial on stream. So I don't know if you've played Factoria. I never have. I've seen a little clips of it. It's like, I mean, there's like a whole age of empires,

then there's civilization. I think StarCraft, which is, yeah, SarkCraft, you know, I think a game lasts like an hour. uh,

factorial, I think it's like days and days and days building this like insane, complicated factory and highly addictive and highly loved by engineers. It became a big meme like a while back. But, uh, I, I,

I, I can't get in that stuff anymore. It's, it's too, too much. Um, uh, we already did this one.

Let's see what else we got here. Uh, um, um, okay. Oh, this is an interesting one here. Uh,

do you know anything about Quest nutrition? So Tom Billy U posts, We turn $10,000 into a billion dollars in five years Here's where I learned from my journey to a billion dollar exit And Max is questioning this by quote tweeting it and says No idea what the non-arms length transaction was in the early days of Quest But no CPG company was started with $10,000. So he's kind of like, questioning that's not true though.

Yeah. It's just like there's just so much. to start a company with 10K. There's so many counter examples and ways. I mean, even at Soiland we had we had 170. And it's different. You can start a company with 10K. And then immediately raise more.

Exactly. Yeah. You can just do a pitch. I don't like positioning it as like, I don't know. It's impossible to start a company with 10. If you only have 10 grand to invest in a company, you know. PMF or die is going to be 25K. That's probably 10K by inflation.

Yeah. Based on when he started that company. So I don't know. I get the point that like when people do those threads of like I turn 10K into a billion. Probably there's a little bit of fuzzing and exaggeration on either side. But I think it's direction. You've never needed less money to start.

100%. 100%. Like you can use AI to generate product images. Offer it as a pre-order. If you sell it, use your money to manufacture. You're viral on TikTok or get one corporate deal. You've got like beverage, which is the most capital intensive thing.

If you're smart and you find the right copacker manufacturer, you could get them for 10 grand to manufacture like a pilot run for sure. Or amazing financing terms. And you can do some sort of crowdfunding campaign where you pre-sell the product. And then you're getting that cash up front because you're charging it on Stripe. So that reconciles in like three days. And then you don't have to pay your manufacturer for net 90 if they're cool. Like it's all just the art of the deal, baby.

The art of the deal. Always has them. Um, this is, uh, let's go to a Rune one. He says, uh, they're worried about ethnic nepotism when they should be worried about boys group chat nepotism. This is extremely real. Definitely. I mean, also I bet Rune is in like a million group chats. So he's like, yeah, people are adding him in just, just the shows.

And then just being like, hey, uh, could I get a repost? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. That's the real group chat nepotism. Yeah. application on the timeline. When you see something go out and it's like, wait, 25 people retweeted this in the first three

minutes. What's going on here? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the group chat nepotism going on. Yeah. The real alpha. Yeah. What you got for me on the promoted side, Jordy?

I got a promoted post from none other than Kohiba cigars. Fantastic. A shade above the rest. Coheba, Connecticut's story is one of breaking expectations where most people think of Connecticut cigars as smooth but simple. We've gone above and beyond to craft a cigar that breaks the mold. So anyways, a great looking picture here. Fantastic.

Go grab, if you're celebrating something, go grab a cohaba. Don't inhale. Just a couple of us. And don't do it often. But it's a great, it's a great excuse to get together with the men of your family. I have this family tradition. Have a beautiful moment. I have this family tradition of any time any man in the family has a birthday or Christmas

or Thanksgiving, all the men in the family smoke cigars. Getting up there. But it's a great excuse to just like get all the guys together and just hang out and talk. And sometimes people don't even smoke them, but it's fine. And it's just like it's an excuse to just go and do something with like all the guys in the family. Yeah. It's just, yeah, it's great. But yeah, I'm a big believer in like the barbell strategy when it comes to nicotine consumption.

It's like the cleanest tobacco-free products most of the time. And then every once a while, once a quarter, the pure tobacco, everyone that you don't want to be doing daily. Yeah. But it's good. Should we go to another post? Yeah. Let's talk about Davos. Let's talk about Davos.

We turned it down this year. Yeah. Many. But I think that next year we could make Davos cool again. I think that we have what it dates. It's too iconic. Yeah. It's too charged.

It's a great opportunity. Yeah. So let's go to Wasteland Capital. He says, Davos is absolutely dead this year. No one gives an F. I'm not swearing anymore. We got some feedback from a very important

listener that this needs to be family friendly. You need to be able to listen to technology brothers with your kids in the car. This is a pro-natalism podcast. And so the kids must be able to listen to the hot takes. Supposedly like imagine if you listen to 10 hours a week of this show with your kids, you know, in the car and the kitchen, you know, around the house, they will be trained on some of the hottest takes in tech from such a young age that they will be earning potentially more money than you just from X payouts by the time they're 10 years old. Give them an iPad.

There's only one app on it. Connect a Stripe account to their X and they will be, you know, putting bread. But they shouldn't need to develop a potty mouth for that. Yeah, exactly. Supposedly luxury call girl, I immediately go into something. Router, but it's not a bad word and it's a real thing.

And I think, you know, we got to talk about it here. So supposedly luxury call girl business. Promoting cigars. promoting cigars. Fulma cursing. Coghiva cigars talking about call call girls but we promise we will never swear again. Because he of us cigars, those are

age gated. You're going to be 21 plus to buy tobacco products in America. Anyone can start swearing, but not if you listen to this show. Yeah. Clean it up out there. Swearing is at a timeline. Swearing is out it's dead. We even killed it. RIP. The last episode was the date that it died. Supposedly,

the electrooid car girl business is down 60% on last year, vibes similar to the last meeting of the Soviets in 1991. German Chancellor Olaf Schultz addresses in half-empty Congress Hall at the World Economic Forum 25 in Davos. My colleague even managed to secure a seat in the front row. Kind of threw his colleague under the bus there. His colleague wasn't already going to be in the front row. Oh, with that or. My colleague was placing a front row up.

My colleague was dumb enough to go to Davos. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What, that's, that's, I think we got to take it over. I think we had to go and just make it ours. But we're on a barn burner speech. Yeah, we have actually a major,

we're speaking on the main stage of a major technology conference. I mean, Davos is the next one in the Sun Valley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got to manifest this. So if your dad runs Davos, tell them to hire us. Or if you're, you know, who's the guy behind it? Is it, Olaf Schultz?

if you're listening, give us a call. Yeah, we need to do a hot-out takeover of the World Economic Forum. Yeah. Let's go to Flo Crivalio. Cruveo, I don't know how to pronounce that. Altimore says, I wouldn't be surprised if law firms had started seeing the impact of AI on their bottom lines, especially those serving startups. I probably send 40% of the tasks I used to send to our lawyers to Claude now, and I only

escalate the most important matters. I have no idea. We should talk to a lawyer and see this is true. I think part of it is like law firms are cyclical, but there's such a ridiculous number of new company formation right now. Sure. And massive investment that they're probably not seeing it yet, right? Yep. Because a lot of these law firms too have these big staffing issues where in 2023, they were like letting go, you know, cutting 10%.

10% they had way too many people. Yep. And then this last year, presumably, like, they've had the opposite problem. They're being understaffed. So I don't know. I don't know that there's that many big law firms that cater to startup specifically. It's usually like they have a huge corporate practice and then they have their startup arm on the side, like their division.

And sometimes it can be very illustrious and very cool. And it can be a profit center if they're taking equity in warrants and stuff. But in general, it seems like, I don't think any of them are fully pegged to start on. Yeah. And the interesting thing is, is this, I'm sure this will, like, I'm waiting for somebody, like, I haven't seen a, a rapper that is saying we are this, we are a consumer product specifically to generate like corporate legal docs. I'm sure there's a bunch out there.

Yeah, Harvey sells into law firms. They sell in the law. So while you capture and a profit optimization, it's probably on the law firms. Yeah. So you can't think of the. the consumer version, Harvey, B, B, S&B version, but I'm sure they're out there. Yeah, there is a world where the law firm's getting 40% less inbound inquiries, but of the 60% that they're still getting, those are higher margin now because they're able to leverage AI.

And so that balance of where the value accrues is still. And there was always the YC's had a bunch of different, you know, they have financing docs on their website. I'm sure they have other docs. And there's always been that's templates available. but now it's just it feels different when you totally generate it totally i'm i'm itching for another promoted post i see you got some good stuff there let's do we got a promoted pose out with us one because it's great uh our friends at r m sotheby's say for sale 2006 mercedes bens sLR mclaren edition this thing uh the golden age of amg yeah um this thing just looks uh incredible that

Just like the entire front of this car is just so iconic. And it's funny because these cars, these cars, they pop. They do fly under the radar still. And so it's kind of a cool car for like a first date where you don't want your date to know that you're just, you know, a deck of a millionaire. And you just want to, you want them to be like, oh, this is just a normal guy. Let's take the Benz. He just, yeah, he's super nice guy, like, drives an old Mercedes, but like, you know, seems to have a good job, good head on his shoulders. The doors were weird.

His car. Reck and his car. If he goes, the ventador SVJ. If it goes, the first one goes well, bring out the SVJ. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But a great first date car right here. Yeah. That's fantastic.

Didn't do well, I think, because, isn't it, isn't it an automatic? I'm pretty sure there's, like, the purest. The purest. So it didn't pop like the car of GT. I think it came out around the same time. and the career GT and the F40 both went wild, but this one kind of got left behind. I mean, Mercedes, they have the...

I mean, now the AMG one's going to be a big one. But, yeah, they never really had the Halo car dialed. It will never be that culturally impactful because they're not making enough of them. Hmm. Like, I think to have, like, for Mercedes to be relevant in the sports car market. Totally, yeah.

They need a 9-11. Yeah, and the G2. G2 is not really that. Like it costs. I would, when I was like getting my last car, I seriously considered the GTE. Yeah.

I, they denied my request for metallic brown at the factory in Germany. I like really wanted metallic brown, black wheels, red, red calipers. Okay. And they don't do any custom colors. Interesting. Even though I had a buying history with the dealership. they were just like we're not doing colors and I was like okay I'm going to get a turbo yeah interesting

um well we have a great post to end on Michael says I'd rather get bucket pulled on the pod than get into y C and I really want to get into YC well Michael we got some good news for you did you didn't even get bucket pulled it's a certified banger certified bangor certified bang it on eight and a half quiet Canadian himself eight and a half by 11 inch paper for you you're officially on the show you're getting the follow back from the official TB account. Thank you for writing in. And a fantastic profile picture from office space. Classic movie. Good reference. Anyway, the only word of advice, Michael, use your full name, use a real picture, build the brand. Or if you're going to go full and on, just make it quiet Canadian up top, quiet Canadian below. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

easy. All or nothing. Yeah. And we'll, and we should dictate the aesthetics of X. I don't like the feeling of knowing someone's first name, but not their last name. I'd rather just have it be like... One foot in, one foot out. Are you in none or not? Yeah. Pick aside.

Because if I go on the LinkedIn, if I go to LinkedIn right now, I'm like, this guy wants to get into YC, maybe he's a fit for PMF or die. Yep. Oh, I'm going to just search Michael. I feel like there's a few other people up there named Michael. But thanks for coming on the show. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for watching.

And please go and leave us five-star reviews. And don't forget to put a really long ad read. If you put a review for the show and don't include an ad, we're going to report it to. Oh, and there's a new, for the people that made it this far, there's a new challenge for you. We're thinking about retooling the reply guy of the week program to be the sales development reply guy of the week award. Yep. And in order to win the SDR of the week award, in your replies, we're going to encourage you to sell some ad space. Yeah.

So, you know, whatever you think, if you just like the post, oh, this is good or you have something else to chime in with. Crying emoji. Fortunately, X has no limit on characters now. So you can say what you want. You know, we'll laugh, we'll like it. We might retweet it if it's good stuff, good reply. But then tab, tab, tab, enter, enter, enter. Boom.

This reply is brought to you by my company. We are the best AI, SDR company. Here, go here. Throw the link in there. Do whatever you want. Go wild with it. Go wild. ads everywhere. Yes, ads everywhere. So give it a try. We look forward to seeing you on the timeline.

Have a great day. Have a good evening. The end.