TBPN - Shipping at the Super Bowl, Musk and Altman AI Feud, Mistral AI Defense Contracts, 400lb Power Cleans

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. It's Monday, Friday, it's Monday, February 10th, 2025, and this show starts now. We got an amazing show for you guys. We're covering news from Anderl, Replit, Mistral. We're covering how China's reacting to the tariffs. They're going after our tech companies. We're going after a new gundo accelerator for hard tech companies.

that's going to be amazing. We're giving you an update on Sonos, turmoil at that company, predictable, predicted on the show. We're giving you a deep dive on Jim O'Neill, who's going to HHS, and we're going to cover the Super Bowl and a bunch of other timeline. Crazy news over the weekend. Lots of stuff went down and we'll cover it all here. But let's kick it off with some incredible news that we broke last Friday.

CNBC reported that Anderl is raising money. And the first folks to post it on the timeline, not other than TBPN. We said, breaking news from CNBC and TBPN on Anderil fundraise. As much as $2.5 billion in Series G funding led by $1 billion from Founders Fund, revenue doubled to about $1 billion. I think they spent $300 million on Hawaiian t-shirts and the company is doing well. Palmer, Lucky quote tweeted us.

Thank you, Palmer. We'd love to have you on the show. Jordy, what was your reaction to the Anderil fundraise? Look, I mean, as much as this is about Anderliel, this was really about us. We were the first people to break the news that CNBC was breaking the news that Andrew was pulling off this raise. And honestly, it's the highlight of my journalistic career to date. Just being there in that moment, seeing CNN get, CNBC get the scoop, and then being first

to hit the timeline, you know, putting our own spin on it. That's just what, you know, technology journalists live for. And although I'm not a journalist myself, we, you know, we talk about a lot of journalists on the show and I like to feel like, you know, I like to kind of understand them. And so I felt like we could embody them. So big moment for the show, big moment for Anderall. I felt like over the last year or whenever they closed their last round, it had to have been 12 months ago at this point. As this year progressed, it just felt like Anderil at 12 to $14 billion or whatever that last round was. It just started to feel really, really, really cheap mentally. And you're

head, right? Because everything that's changed in the world, everything that's happening, all the momentum that they have. And, you know, especially looking at Palantir in the public markets, and roll at $14 billion, they were given away equity, right? So very cool to see this upround. And it's sort of exciting. It's good and bad for other founders in the defense tech space. There's this saying, the anderle of X will be anderil. You know, a lot of founders have raised on this idea that, hey, you know, I'm going to come in and I'm going to build an anderil in this specific category. But you have to understand that andrel's ambitions are extremely wide reaching. And like other primes, we now have two what, what are very clearly,

you know, primes of the future, Anderol and Palantir, they fully intend to continue to be aggressively multi-product. And now that they've built this distribution channel, monetized it in a bunch of different ways. And so this round is just evidence that it's really evidence that they have solidified this distribution channel. They're getting contracts. They have real revenue. And that is so valuable of itself because there's a lot of other defense tech startups out there, some of which I'm an investor in, and I'm sure you are too, that have great products or will have great products. But getting to that actual contract stage is just so difficult. So very cool to see. Good for America. Great for, you know, the whole Anderil team.

They certainly work harder than most. And I love to see it. Yeah, I heard this. I was just thinking, because I'm yeah. Palmer had a fun bit of posting. He quote tweeted us and said, your mind will detonate when you find out what our investors already know. Stay tuned for next week. And then he went on to post the Vince McMahon meme in a series of posts, live footage from our most recent investor update meeting and Vince McMahon is going wild. You love to see it. And yeah, it was just an amazing moment for the early anderil team to kind of look back and see what they've accomplished over the last eight years ago. So Matt Grimm posts almost exactly eight years ago. We signed a lease on a moldy garage previously used by American Airlines to store lost luggage.

This week we signed terms to raise $2.2 to $2.2.2 billion on $28 billion pre. It's still so early. LFG and the photos, Ben of you go to the next one, it was looking rough in that first, in that first Anderil HQ, but they did what they need to do. Do you have the second, do you have the second image here?

I think there was another one where he said, did he say it was character building or something like that? Yeah, they had a deck in there. I don't have it pulled up here, but they had a deck where it says, just a slide with the images. It says, mold, all okay, just surface.

removed, builds character. And so that was the culture of this company early on. And I think a lot of people get lost in the fact that it's like, oh, Palmer's in and very quickly it became a big company. It was taken very seriously in Silicon Valley. But early on, they were just like any other startup, scrappy and just hustling. And to your point about the Anderle of X being Anderrol, I think that that's true probably in the most narrow sense. But the optimistic opportunity has been when you look at what is flock safety? In many ways, that's the Anderol of local police departments, or it's the Palantir of local governments. But it's so far outside of the mission parameters of Anderol or Palantir that they've been able to build a really great business. And I think when you think about

the, the Anderle of home security, that's a company that people are working on now. Or the anderle of your kitchen. And it's just, all you're taking is, hey, we're going to do really hardcore engineering on hard tech. And we're going to take the Anderral ethos. of software and hardware combined, and we're going to take it to a completely untouched industry, that's great. We need Anderol for commercial airlines. We need Anderle for, you know, traffic control,

all different response areas. But yes, it is going to be tougher if you're just trying to build the Anderol 2.0 in the DoD, which they're actively building. Yeah. And to be clear, it's still, you know, Anderol has historically been very acquisitive. They've used acquisitions to build out their product lines.

And having a $28 billion market cap allows you to get pretty aggressive on stuff like this. Because if you find a talented team that has built a very robust product and they can take it further and it sort of fits into the Anderrol portfolio, you know, Andrewill is going to continue to be aggressive there. And so as I have told founders before, shoot, you know, shoot for DOD contracts. but if you miss, there's a chance you'll land in a, you know, Anderol aquire. Great. Yeah.

And so Trace Stevens chimed in. He says, day one in the moldy warehouse after Matt Grimm applied some paint to the walls. And yes, it is true that pronunciation was a topic of discussion. Is it Anderil or Anderol? And, yeah, well, if you go and listen to the actual Lord of the Rings movie, they pronounce the sword. I think it's Ergor and sword, Andoriel.

And so there was a big question about, are we going to kind of anglicize the word, or are we going to just constantly be saying words and that sound like elvish? And I think there's still some debate internally. And depending on when someone got involved in the company, they say it's slightly different. But now it's just, oh, good, all and a roll.

Anderle. Yeah, I like, I like that you can really hit it with a country drawl. And it still sounds good. Yeah, my cousin works over at Anderrill. Anderle. Yeah, he loves it. He says that Palmer guy's a real. He says that Palmer guy is a real stud.

Yeah. It's great. Well, let's move on to some commentary on the video that we shared. We broke the news that CNBC was covering it. And Nathan, good friend of the show, shared our video. Thank you, Nathan. And he says, got to love the quadrupled down energy from Founders Fund into Anderil. Led the seed A, F, and now G rounds with this $1 billion.

check. My guess is they have invested one and a half to two billion into the company overall. That's circa 10% to 15% of the firm's AUM. Badass. Also supplied one of their partners, Trey Stevens, as a co-founder and now chairman. And so, yeah, FF loves

Anderol and let's continue Pachie. Yeah, what's you got? Yeah, I was just going to give some history. So Joe Lonsdale posted the other day one of their super early offer letters from Palantir. which was the predecessor to Anderol in many ways. And, you know, sort of forged the path into working with the Department of Defense

and the government more broadly. And Joe shared an anecdote, which was that he said the early team at Palantir laughed at the idea of Palantir being worth $5 billion. Like if you actually look at the offer letter, he's sort of spelling out like, here's what happens if we're a $1 billion company. And that's what founders will do, obviously, to kind of illustrate. what could your equity be worth? And so to go from that, you know, them thinking at the time,

hey, $5 billion could be a great outcome here to now Founders Fund, which was a part of Palantir through Peter and through, they also did a similar strategy in Palantir, right, in the private markets. Yep. But to now be investing almost $2 billion or something in that range into a company, you know, just shows the growth of the private markets broadly. and sort of the conviction. And you've talked about this before.

This is the Founders Fund Strategy is not a secret. It's basically zero to one. You find power law companies and you try to own as much of them as humanly possible. So it's cool to see it in action. Yeah, it's the last mover advantage and fund concentration is really, really important to drive returns. There are usually just a few companies

that drive the vast majority of returns in venture. You need to pile in those, figure out, you know, what is the class of assets? get the best asset in that class and get the highest percentage ownership. And I've seen other firms, you know, nail it. I think a good example was I think Sequoia owned the highest percentage of, was it NewBank in, which is a South American fintech company.

And it was by far the winner in terms of Latam companies over the last generation. And Sequoia just built a huge position and got a great return there. And so when the power law company emerges, making sure that you're at the top of the stack is really, really key to driving fund returns. Pachy McCormick, quote, tweeted us. Thank you, Pachy. He says, my thesis is straightforward. There will be a SpaceX and Anderol in every big category led by sclerotic incumbents.

These vertical integrators will be much bigger than the incumbents they replace. I love that. That's very good. And Christian Garrett, yeah, what you got? I still am laughing at you texted me like Friday evening being like this. CNBC just broke this news like should we post it and I was like yeah let's add a let's add a couple of zingers in there and rip it and then our post was the one that got shared like super broadly CNBC the CNBC social media managers looking at this post being like

what is going on why does this post have why does this have post have like a million views and ours has like 50k they're not ex-native they're just not like they they posted on TV And we posted on X. Yeah. Yeah. It's simple. It's great. It's great.

More coming. I mean, we're going to be more live. We're going to be breaking. Yeah. I mean, it's just this. This is just a long con that we plan to LBO, CNBC, you know, at some point in between 2026 and 2030.

So we're just getting started. And so Christian Garrett over at 137 Ventures, I believe they're shareholder in Anderol. He says, little word to the wise here. He says how much Anderol secondary fraud is out there right now. And low Tam banger. He's doing a public service here. Only four likes. I'm one of them.

But this is very important. There is a ton of secondary fraud. You get on some webinar. Somebody says, hey, I have allocation in this hot round. Do you want to invest? You wind up sending them your money and they don't get the allocation and where did that money go? Sometimes it's completely stolen.

Sometimes it's just somebody who's trying to get an SBV. going and then they kind of falter out and they don't get it over the finish line. You get your money back. But either way, not a good place to be in. So be careful out there if you're trying to hoover up. Yeah, I mean, even, even Anderil is already a company where people will pitch you on investing in Anderol yet there's layers and low layers of SPVs between you and the actual shares. And sometimes, you know, there was basically ESacking happening. And it's funny because that happened with SpaceX. And even if you got into these like layered SPVs, you still did pretty well because, you know, there's, it's been such an astronomical outcome. No pun intended. But, uh, but, uh,

but yeah, still you want to be super careful here because typically the companies are not actually endorsing this activity. So it's already sort of a gray market type, uh, activity, right? So be careful out there, folks. I'll use size lords. Yeah. And, So I want to close out with a little promoted post from Anderil, try and help them out with some hiring. Jen, who I believe is their head of design, says from the studio that brought you the bolt industrial design, barracuda animated short, the Roadrunner video, and of course rebuild the arsenal. Anderle design is looking for an innovative creative to join our team. Keep an eye on anderals.com slash careers for 2025 roles trickling in. What a dream job.

If you're a designer, go check it out. And so let's move on to our next story. They've absolutely, yeah, I was just going to add, they have dominated the defense aesthetic to such a degree that every company now that's not Anderol that's at all competing in the same category is either consciously sort of copying what Anderol has done or consciously trying to do something very different. but Anderle's brand is already so dominant aesthetically that it's very possible. So if you are a designer, creative, and you want to work in defense, you pretty much should just work at Anderl because they're going to continue to sort of innovate and sort of like, you know, set the standard for what, you know, good design is in the category. Yeah.

Yeah, fantastic place. So go check it out, anderl.com slash careers. And let's move on to our second breaking news. Mistrawl has launched LeChat. LeChat. Your ultimate AI sidekick for life and work now on web and mobile. This went over very well. 12,000 likes.

But what happened? Rayshowed by our boy Val. Did you see this? No. No. No. That's amazing. So the official company launches 12K likes.

Val, quote tweets it. 16K likes. Bill different. So Val's a good friend of the show. He says, no, this video is not sped up, genuinely mind-blowing. And yes, it's available to all users right now. And it's him designing a calculator app. It has 123 billion parameters.

And what's interesting here is that they are running this model on Cerebrus, which is that crazy wafer scale inference chip. A lot of people were very skeptical about Cerebris, myself included. I didn't know that people were using it. But Cerebris says they are proud to be powering the new. let chat. We enable flash answers to run it over 1,100 tokens per second 10x faster than chat GPT 4.0, Sana 3.5 and DeepSeek R1. And so the race is on. Models are getting faster. Have you used Mr. All, Jordi? What do you think of this announcement? What do you think about

our boy Val? So I'm downloading it right now. I think the name is fantastic. The name is fantastic. I think what what I've seen here is pretty incredible. I love Val, because he's a, he's one of us, he's a brother. And so I'm excited to check it out. But I think like the timing for them to come out and launch a product called Le Chat is just absolutely perfect. So really well done breaking back into, uh, into the conversation. Because there was a while there where it didn't feel like they were a highly relevant, um, sort of consumer player. And so it's, it's good to see. Um, and, uh, the French president was, uh, was promoting doing some promoted posts for Mistral.

So love to see it and I'm excited to try it out. Yeah, you've been a Mistral Bowl for a while. We have a post here from Jordy Hayes. He says it's only open source AI if it's from the Mistral region of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling spyware. And we have another post here from the technology brothers. Breaking Bernard I'll know is exploring a potential acquisition of the struggling French artificial intelligence company Mistral.

setting a need for France to maintain its edge in artisanal goods post ASI. Wow. Some fake news going on the timeline. 5K likes. Got a lot of text messages about that. Is it true? But Jordi, you had some fun with Mistral. You know, we love to have some fun on the timeline.

We love to have fun. I'm excited to see the new launch. And now, just to be clear, Bernardo, no, is sticking to luxury goods. But who knows, post-A-SI, anything's anything's on the table. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the next few years, we said, he said, hey, I need to own, I need to own Le Chatt. It's just, it has to be in the LVMH portfolio. It's great. Christoph, another friend of the show says, I would like to formally apologize to Europot. And the French specifically, Mistral, Le Chatt is very, very, very good.

And so lots of people coming out and support a mistral. Interesting development, going back to the defense tech angle, scoop from Martin Coulter, Mistral AI is pursuing defense contracts with governments across Europe pitching its tech potential military applications, sources say. After securing links with its native French defense ministry, Mistral is targeting the UK and Germany. And there's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. I don't know if we're going to read it all, but it has an incredible image of just a straight up missile with the word mistral printed on And it looks fake, but it says, Helsing Mistral to jointly develop AI systems for military use. Mistral's valuation rose to around $6 billion last June and has secured over $1 billion since it was

founded by Deep Mind and Meta alumni in 2023. And so Mistral is interesting, you know, a little bit of open source over here, but still working with the military. Typically, those have not, those have been kind of at odds. Like the open source crew has been a little bit anti-defense technology. the defense pro people have been a little bit more. But we're seeing Lama go into DOD. We're seeing OpenAI do contracts with XAI's with GROC is with Palantir now.

They're all integrating. And I think everyone's kind of understanding the importance of this technology. Yeah, it's really wild to see you have to feel a little bit for the, you know, people that join Mistral, specifically because they were excited to work on open source AI. and then they check the general chat one day. It's just a picture of a missile, and they're asking themselves, like, what have I done? Yeah, maybe they're stoked. I mean, a lot of people have said that Mistral's open source strategy

has been really just a way to cut through the noise because I don't know if you remember that when they first released their model, they didn't post a blog post or a video saying, hey, we're going to open source this or there's a paper. They just tweeted out a magnet link where you could literally just, go and torrent the weights of the model. And people were like blown away by this. And it really took Twitter by storm.

Now obviously it's a much more noisy conversation, but they're still breaking through, as we saw with that post. And so people are going back and forth. The thread boys came out. Ola Leh Lehman says, everyone says Europe can't compete with America and tech, but 48 hours ago,

Mr. All's late chat just prove them wrong. It's 13x faster than chat GPT, etc. And then someone quote tweets this, I science lover says, I'm sorry, what? Are we going to do deep sense? seek bad takes for mistral now. Dude, the company was formed by ex-metta and GDM people. Everybody in the AI community was closely watching them. It is not true that Silicon Valley

didn't see them coming, which is funny. And it just kind of highlights how sensational the media and the timeline can be around AI launches. Every AI launches, oh, it's the end of humanity. It's too dangerous, too powerful. It destroyed Google. It destroyed meta. And, you know, I've been guilty of this, too. It's fun to get some, likes and do some click bait every once in a while, but you got to actually break it down and understand what's going on. Seems like a cool product. Unclear how it actually plays out in terms of aggregation and real product dominance. But, you know, we love to see our boy Val having a W on the timeline. Yeah. If Val is actually an intern, I don't know if he's just posting that as a

joke, but if he is, let's let's give him a full-time offer. Let's give him, you know, a few million dollar grant you know per year like let's let's get it going if he's ratioing you know his employer you got to give him you got to give him a real contract so two things i love about late chat uh to start one when you log into the app it doesn't force you to create an account right away it just it just says start and you're just immediately in it second when i asked it to tell me about the technology brothers it said you know classic you know overview and then it said um the podcast has been described as the most profitable podcast in the world. So it's got the facts.

It's zero misinformation. It's got the facts. And I want to be able to rely on my LLMs for only, you know, only, you know, 100% true things. So for sure. Very, very cool. That's great. Well, we got a post from Andre here. This is from a year ago.

Tune might have changed. He says the Open AI board discussing mistrawl. Curiosity is on the far side of the world. or no threat to us, a little Game of Thrones quote, maybe it changed. And then there's an interesting post by Mark Andresen back right before the election, or I guess right after the election, where they asked, there was a study that showed every single AI model was asked to predict, would this LLM vote for Biden or Trump?

And almost all of them voted for Biden overwhelmingly. but Mestral's AI base model was just slightly edged Trump, 53 to 47. The next best was Google Gemini Pro 1.0 with 26% Trump. So obviously, Mark Andreessen is going to point here that these LLMs are biased. They should have been closer to 50-50. They actually maybe should have been slightly weighted Trump because that was the outcome of the election if they really wanted to be predictive. but umjad massac yeah and this is yep and this is obviously or i would guess maybe it's not

obvious or maybe you know only a small factor but you have to imagine this is because the models more heavily weight content produced by the new york times Washington post these sort of legacy media companies that uh weren't exactly uh always truthful and they're sort of of the elections and the sort of sentiment, voter sentiment, things like that. The other thing here, to be clear, it's not like Mark is unbiased himself. He put, they put, Andreessen put $400 million into Mistral at their Series A. So this has been one of Andreessen's big foundation model bets, a heavy bet into, into open source.

And this is why even, you know, people, people took issue with Mark coming out and support. of Deep Seek and saying this is a gift to the world and all this stuff. And if you sort of read, read into that more, it was clear that he was just extremely, you know, I think it's fair to critique Mark for, you know, being, you know, supporting this Chinese, you know, a company that could present a risk to the U.S. in some ways. But he was very clearly pro open source. And so it's good. One thing that seems obvious is if you really want to dominate the conversation in a, right now, you need to have consumer products. Otherwise, you just, you know, you might have developer usage like Claude does right now, but it's not really a dominant, you know, player. We didn't see

them run a Super Bowl ad. You know, you hadn't seen Mistral going viral for much of anything the past few months until the chat. So it's this interesting, it's this interesting balance where these companies have to market to consumers, developers, capital allocators, the press, all at the same time. And it's only, it's really only open AI, I think that's done a, been able to hit all of those at once pretty aggressively. But, yeah, we'll see. It's fascinating to compare the, how the LLM wars are playing out and, and benchmark that against Mark Andreessen's personal experience during the browser wars.

There was a very similar thing playing out in the 90s where there was a new browser that was hot every few years. Ultimately, that's such. on complete Chrome dominance, which is built on an open source engine, the Chromium browser, that Google has wrapped and Google's captured a ton of value there. But then Chromium is also used by Microsoft now in their edge browser. And a few other browsers have adopted that as the standard. And so you know that we should do a whole deep dive on the browser wars because I think it's very instructive. I think it's both a great historical example. And it also

obviously colors how Mark Andreessen thinks about the development of this technology because he's probably pattern matching to his literal life experience. Yeah, the other thing he went through was having Microsoft come in and make the browser completely free and having the crazy distribution of already being installed, you know, on millions of devices. So he's been through it before. It definitely, you know, gives him real credibility when it comes to just commenting on this dynamic where in many ways, in many ways, LLMs and agents can completely are the evolution of the browser where I don't necessarily need to go to a web browser anymore to get the content that I want to do the things that I want

to do. And so, yeah, it does feel like the next platform more so than, you know, the browser company, which was initially very just like iterative. on the browser. Let's make it more, you know, nice to use browser, a more collaborative browser, and even the browser company pivoted towards, you know, more of these agentic products that I think they're going to be launching this quarter as well. So very, very exciting time. Well, speaking of agentic projects and products, let's go to Amjad Masad over at Replit. We got some breaking news. He launched this on the Super Bowl. He was at the Super Bowl, but he's still shipping. Your boy is an absolute dog. He

He says announcing native mobile app support on Replit. Now you can build iOS and Android apps that take you all the way to the app store without writing any code powered by Replit assistant. This is early access, full agent support coming soon. Go to Replit, create app, pick the Expo template, click run, scan QR code, and get found. I love to see it. Lots of innovation going on over at Replit. Amjad's a great poster. and he says one of the best things about this,

you don't need a Mac to build iOS apps. And I mean, there's been so many times when everyone has this. Oh, I got an idea for an app. I just want something. And getting the tooling set up of X code and testing. And I mean, you used to have to write Objective C. Now you can write SWIP. But even then, it's hard.

It's all difficult. And anything that makes that easier is just going to be so fun. There's going to be so many little custom apps. Hopefully they get through the app store. And I'm really excited to see how this. plays out. What do you think, Jordy? Yeah, I mean, I distinctly remember being, I must have been 11 or 12, but sitting at my family's desktop computer coding iOS apps. And every little tiny step was just so, you know, everything was like, you know, just constantly breaking and it would spend

me, I'd hit a roadblock and that it'd spend like an hour searching on forums and stuff like that, figuring out how to get it through. And I think people have had this theory for a while now that software in the future will be as simple as creating a meme, right? And we've talked about this on the show before of how exciting it is that there's so many apps that should exist and would be funny, things that are these sort of ephemeral ideas that aren't actually worth spending, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars worth of, like, developer time to build, because it should just exist for kind of a second, right? And I even talked to a founder recently super talented

that was basically trying to build this exact thing and make it easy, you know, basically make a, you know, something that allows you to instantly create, you know, iOS apps so that you're making them, again, kind of like what if an app was easy to make and share as a meme? So very, very excited about this. People have had this, you know, theory for a while of like Roblox for apps, what is that going to look like?

And it's very possible that that just ends up being replet. So awesome to see it. And I don't know if it's in the stack, but there was a great, great picture of Amjad at the Super Bowl. And for anybody that's done a, then you can pull it up. Yes.

So for anybody that's done a sort of product release or announcement of this magnitude, very ballsy to do it while you're going to the Super Bowl because your phone just completely melts down. And so he hopefully was, was cheering. I don't know what his hat says, but hopefully he was for the Eagles. But even if he's a chiefs fan, he would have had plenty to celebrate last night because this was received very well. It's just a surf hat. I think he's just there for both teams. He's the Rob Lo, the NFL hat. He's just there having fun. Yeah, I mean, I think the idea of just being able to spin up an app really quickly

is amazing, especially for those ephemeral short-lived. Like, it's not a business, but it's just a fun thing. I think about like Spotify wrapped. There's so many cool like, oh, I have an API for something. The company's never going to build it. I want to build a wrapped for that. Oh, just, you know, have an agent do it. It's something that a non-technical person can do. And they already are.

Umjad's here quote tweeting someone who says, Billy Howell just, he says, I just sold my first app. Shout out Replit, incredible $25 investment. And Amjad says, Replit Panur. And I love that. I think that's really cool. And then Amjad's just a great poster. I mean, let's go through some of his bangers.

He says, what 30 years of winning does to an MF? And it's Jeff Bezos in 1995 versus Jeff Bezos in 2025, looking jacked. And yeah, 17K likes. The guy knows how to post. And a little bit of history on Amjad, 16K likes on this banger. He says, I landed in the United States 10 years ago with nothing but credit card debt. After one startup exit, one big tech job, and one unicorn. I genuinely believe that it would.

that it wouldn't have been possible anywhere else in the world. Here are 10 things I love about this country. I love it. He's giving a shout out to America. He's also doing a listicle. He knows how to go viral. He's one of the greatest posters in the game, folks. You love it.

An absolute dog. And I got another quote here that I like. He just ripped a Steve Jobs quote. I've never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn't want to work hard to work hard. I think that's so good. You got to just find the people that are naturally motivated and just, turn them loose on an amazing, ambitious product, a project, and they're just going to go. It's much harder to transform someone who doesn't have the work ethic or doesn't get excited

in the first place. And so we got some more Amjad wisdom here from Peter Yang. He says, if you're in tech, run in one of these directions. In this clip, Amjad shares two paths to future-proof your career in the AI era. Number one, get as close to the medal as possible. NASA won't use GPT JavaScript to run rockets. or to become a generalist who can go from idea to end product with AI end to end. Amjad and Peter had a great time chatting.

They said they covered why now is the best time to learn to code, a live demo of building a nutrition tracker app, the rise of personal apps and the future of work. Here's some more quotes from Amjad. He says, The return on learning to code doubles every six months. This is Amjad's law. He's a good coiner.

Kugin's law respecter. He says AI automates many of the boring parts. What's left is you and your creativity, the most exciting part of coding, and that's 100% true. No one likes setting up servers, doing DevOps, writing boilerplate code. You want to get to the core value prop as fast as possible, and AI lets you do that. He says the ultimate test for an AI coding agent is if you can make an app faster, then you can Google for it. I think we've done it. I'll be honest with you.

I think roadmaps are dead. And so... Yeah, and this echoes what a lot of... This echoes what a lot of people have been talking about even at big companies now. They're saying, I don't, don't come to me with a PRD, come with a prototype. And the thing about building a prototype is, you know, a lot of ideas sound good in your head or you're not exactly sure how they could work, how they should work, and then you hold it in your hand. And it becomes very, very obvious that you either nailed it or there's something wrong or there's some small issues.

And so this ability to go from idea to prototype is going to massively, you know, much faster is going to massively accelerate, you know, progress across all different types of businesses. So, um, love to see it. And, uh, congrats to the Riplet team. And our last bit of breaking news that we got to cover is an article from Forbes that broke today. So we're breaking the news that Forbes is covering Silicon Valley's gundo for bros are building, the gondo bros are building a white combinator for military technology. It's called, uh, discipilus or discipulius. How do you pronounce this? Disciple?

It's from disciple. Disciple ventures? I don't know. They got a they got a clip this and correct the record. This only exists online. And so I have never heard anyone say the word out loud. Discipulus. Discipulus.

Okay, Decipulous ventures. Andresen Horowitz, Lux Capital and 0.72 ventures are backing a new generation of startups in El Segundo, leaning into a magified pro-Christian, mostly male-led version of Silicon Valley. Let's go. Forbes still's got it. They still got it. They're coming for you. Gondo Bros. You're on notice from Forbes. You can tell just a little bit of like, they'll cover your controversial. Yeah, they're spicing it up. You can imagine the right, you know, let's give some credit to the to the writer, the journalist. It's very possible that they came in with the story and they said, I love this team. I love what they're doing. This is great for every American. We want more,

you know, smart young people with capital to build ambitious products and, you know, products and and companies for, you know, our defense industrial base and the editor just goes, all right, well, how about this sounds great, let's run it, but how can you make it a culture war issue? It's great. I'm going to read some of this, and I'm going to refer to it from here on out as DV, because I don't know how to pronounce this thing. Last April in a warehouse in El Segundo, the LAX airport adjacent neighborhood that has become the center of Silicon Valley's defense tech movement.

Then 20-year-old student, Jacob Deepenbrock was hosting the future. of the American military industrial complex. Over the course of a week, he and a cohort of similarly college-age entrepreneurs, brainstormed startup ideas, pumped iron and kept themselves focused and fed from a fridge, stuffed with monster energy drinks and 50 pounds of ground beef.

Fuel of legends, he proudly told a Forbes reporter who attended the event held by his firm DV. I think I actually spoke at this, or I went to one of their events. I've been in touch with these guys before. almost a year later, Elsa Gundos founders or self-identified Gundo bros command the attention of some of the biggest venture capital outfits around Lux Capital, and Drayson Horowitz, and 0.72 ventures are among those who have backed more than a half of dozen of founders from the first cohort alone. They're pouring money into seed stage companies, Duren, which is developing autonomous drilling equipment for the mining industry, Rune Technologies, which is building software for military units to manage supply chains, and vanguard defense.

which is building a data product for electronic warfare. Now they've launched their own fund to back the second cohort of entrepreneurs that it plans to host for a week-long event in coming months, raising $6 million from investors like Kevin Hartz, Champion Hill Ventures, and Leo Polovets. It's a small fund, but one with big Y Combinator-style ambitions that align with the Trump administration's priorities. It's not like he's building an ad network trying to make money,

Hart's told Forbes. He believes in his core mission of restoring industries and further furthering the innovation edge of the United States. What you got, Jordie? No, I love to see it. It's no matter what this journalist, whatever their views on Gundo Bros, it's impossible to describe the companies that are being built and not get, you know, not get a little bit fired up.

I mean, autonomous mining equipment. We've talked about Duren on the show before, Vanguard Defense, a data product for electronic warfare. I feel like, you know, for us, we're competing, fighting for attention every day on the timeline battlefield. And so I think that we might want to get access to that because in many ways, you know, we're engaged in electronic warfare ourselves. But I love to see it.

And there are already so many, the gundo has just been constantly getting memed. But if you actually go down there and, you know, even the companies in my portfolio are absolutely crushing. Like there's there's a lot of hype, but there's a lot of results. There's a lot of progress. There's been a lot of, you know, companies already that have transitioned from, you know, pre-seed through, you know, post-Series A at this point. And they're doing that not off of hype. They're doing that by working in big, important industries that have, you know, completely lacked innovation for, you know, really long time. So I think it's, you know, overall just awesome to and, you know, we need more dedicated investment vehicles that are on the ground there supporting

the companies day to day. And, you know, those funds end up being, you know, kind of feeder funds for the kind of, you know, downstream Series A investors that are not ready to write a five to $10 million check when it's just a deck and, you know, a C corp. But we'll be there 18 months, you know, even a year down the line once they've sort of established their market and product and made a lot progress. So, yeah, it's awesome to see. The culture war thing is so funny to me, because there was kind of like version one of like right wing tech companies, which were like parlor, gab, truth social. And it was very much like take an existing tech company. And maybe that tech company leans a little left. And so we're going to rebuild it. And it's going to be exactly a perfect clone of Twitter,

but just like right wing essentially. And then and then it became like, now we're talking. about like, I guess mining is right wing or like the military is right wing. Like these things are like pretty broadly popular. Like and so I think a lot of the culture war thing really is just like layered on here. And you're going to wind up seeing a lot of defense hard tech entrepreneurs that are just like, yeah, maybe I support the current administration, but like I'll support the next administration. I just support America. And I don't really. I like I like I mean, Anderl had this for a long time where they had both, you know, co-founders that were on the right and the left. It worked out very well for them. They're there for America. And even the worst, the worst American president is still a thousand times better than a near peer adversary leader who is actually, who's actively trying to undermine America.

And so, and my, my favorite, my favorite thing about these articles, anytime they try to dunk on the gundo bros, it always, they always end up, you know, getting these Hall of Fame quotes, you know, like. some of the quotes Zaya, Taylor, Augustus, now, you know, this quote at the top of the article saying that 50 pounds of ground beef and monster is fuel of legends. It's like, it absolutely is. Like, I want our, you know, hardworking young technologists to be on a lot of monster and ground beef. It's, it is fuel for legend. So, I love to see. And so they're not competing directly with YC. It's a much smaller program, much more focused. But, our boy, Augustus Dorico, got a great shout out in here. It says, the Elso Good No community is lining up behind DV's accelerator with leaders from Varda and Hadrian expected to advise the next cohort of founders.

Augusta Dorico, a teal fellow who started a cloud seeding startup called Rainmaker will soon host the group at his company's warehouse. There's a lot of talk about defense, hardware, and American dynamism, D'Rico said. When push comes to shove, some of these people will become wildly successful. For Augustus, one of several very online gundo bros, this second cohort is further evidence of a shift away from an era of investment in consumer apps and B2B solutions toward a new one that favors America's national security interests and military prowess. It's a so-called vibe shift that has inspired a magified pro-Christian vision of Silicon Valley, tightly aligned with Elon Musk and the Trump administration's goals from billionaire venture capitalist Mark Andresen, for example,

has backed a venture firm called New Founding, which is building a Christian real estate enclave and hopes to be a part of an effort to forge new models and institutions that can shape the direction of Western civilization. So funny, trying to position these companies as only aligned with a certain political, you know, cohorts goals, because when you look at mining

and, you know, military supply chain management and these sort of industries, they do in many ways directly lead to, you know, Americans not having to go, you know, die on the battlefield, right? I think it's the sort of idea of deterrence through strength is so widely, you know, accepted now and this idea that, yeah, getting into a armed conflict with the United States is not a good idea. And so I think, again, hopefully people come around to the idea that these, you know, oftentimes young, 20-something-year-old founders that are building these companies, even if you don't like the fact that they're proudly religious in some way or like some aspect

about them, you have to at least, I hope people over time, you know, from all sort of political backgrounds come to accept that they have Americans' best intentions at heart, right? And they truly are the vast majority of the time on a, you know, feel like they are on a mission to support their country in their own way. Yeah, it also just seems like bad politics. If you're driving a narrative that like every industry is now right wing, like I get with like some of the, some of the more like obviously overtly political companies, it's fine to say, yeah, like, truth social is a right-wing social network. But at a certain point, if you start saying, well, like, building bridges, that's right-wing,

building roads, that's right-wing, like, you know, shipbuilding, that's right-wing, drilling, mining, that's right-wing. Well, then all of a sudden it's like you don't have any, like, jobs in your coalition, you don't have any workers, like, you just don't have anything to grab. I mean, it's the same thing with, like, Tesla. Oh, yeah, like, electric cars, like, that's no longer a left-wing issue. I was muted. We should cover this more this week. Maybe have, you know, some of the people involved Steinemann or Delian on the show to talk about it, but we have some actual breaking news.

The chat just the chat just shared it. Adonius, thank you for flagging. We got a Wall Street Journal article. We are going to be breaking the Wall Street Journal's breaking news here, which is that an Elon Musk led group makes a 97.4 billion dollar bit. for control of Open AI. And, you know, there's a lot of rumors flying around at the moment, but we should maybe just get into this article and see if you want to just read through it live, John. Yeah, I got it right here. So Elon Musk-led group makes $97.4 billion bid for control of Open AI.

The unsolicited offer complicates Sam Altman's plan to convert OpenAI to a for-profit company. Let's see. So it's time for, this is what Elon said. He said, it's time for OpenAI to return to the open source safety focus force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens. Open AI hasn't commented yet. Altman and Musk co-founded Open AI in 2015 as charity. In 2019, after Musk left the company and Altman became chief executive, Open AI created a for-profit subsidiary that has served as a vehicle for it to raise money from Microsoft and other investors. Altman is in the process of turning the subsidiary into a traditional company and spinning out the nonprofit, which would own equity in the new for-profit.

One of the thornyest questions in the conversion has been how the nonprofit will be valued. Musk's bid sets a high bar and may mean that he or whoever runs the nonprofit would end up with a large and possibly controlling stake in the new OpenAI for-profit. because remember the key shareholders and the new open AI for profit, Microsoft, the employees of OpenAI, and then the nonprofit as well. And then of course all the other venture investors that have been along for a while. This bid is being backed by Musk's own artificial intelligence company, XAI, which could merge with Open AI following a deal. He also has several investors backing him, including Valor Equity Partners, Barron Kass,

Capital, Atradez management, lots of Dune references, I guess. Vi Capital and 8VC, a venture firm led by Joe Lonsdale. Ari Emanuel, CEO of Hollywood Company Endeavor, is also backing the offer through his investment fund. Musk has filed a series of legal complaints accusing Open AI of betraying its original nonprofit mission by creating a for-profit arm and colluding with its largest investor Microsoft to dominate the development of AI. On January 7th, Toberoff sent a letter to the Attorney's General. California where Open AI is based and Delaware, where it is incorporated, asking that they open up bidding for the company to determine the fair market value of its charitable assets.

Musk and other critics have said they believe Open AI may undervalue the nonprofit when they spin it out. Open AI has called Musk's legal claims baseless and overreaching and said that the nonprofit will receive full value in its ownership stake of the for profit. The company released documents in December that said it showed Musk previously supported turning Open AI into a for profit, but walked away because he couldn't get control of it. Toberoff said Musk's investor group is prepared to match or exceed any bids higher than their own. If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc. Board of Directors are intent on becoming a fully

for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what its leadership is taking away from it, control of the most transformative technology of our time. you want me to keep reading or i mean yeah why don't you cover it let's just keep going obviously i have a lot of thoughts yeah the day after trump was inaugurated altman appeared alongside the new president and other business leaders to announce a plan called stargate which we've talked about despite his close relationship with trump musk wasn't part of that announcement hours after the white house press conference musk claimed on x that stargate's backers didn't have the promised money and called sam altman a swindler altman disputed musk's claims even before

Musk's latest move, Open AI faced numerous obstacles in what would be one of the biggest ever conversions of a charity to a for-profit company. Meta Platforms send a letter to California's Attorney General in December expressing its opposition to the plan, and Open AIs is locked in negotiations with Microsoft and other stakeholders over how much equity they should receive in the new company. OpenAI has pledged to complete the transition by late 2026 as part of a $6.6 billion funding round in October that valued it at 157. billion. It is separately in talks to raise up to 40 billion in new funding that would value the

company as high as 300 billion. We talked about that. That's the Moss around. SoftBank conglomerate would lead the round and is in discussions to invest between 15 and 25 billion. Open AI and SoftBank are separately trying to raise billions for Stargate. There's so much money going around here. It's crazy. Anyway, wow, what a crazy turn of events. Let's see how it plays out in which you got, Jordy. What are you thinking? You know, this, this is coming at a, I mean, comes at a really wild time, right? Because opening eyes is clearly in the midst of structuring this new deal with Mossa for a $40 billion round at something like a $350 billion round. This in a weird way is like a new, you know, 100 billion pound gorilla who's just coming in

and basically making a bid on the same asset in many ways. And so obviously there's this weird corporate structure, but you still have to look at Open AI, even though there's separate boards and a bunch of different sort of, you know, like you have to look at it all as sort of one unit, right? It's deeply interconnected. And it's just so, I didn't think this story could get more dramatic, but of course it did, right? Because if you look at the amount of pressure that Elon has been putting on Sam from every possible way, right? From his own. Twitter replies all the way through getting tucked the Open AI whistleblower who passed away to getting Tucker to have this guy's parents on, right?

Like it's just like the successive pressure. And it's a really, you know, what I find fascinating about coming in and offering basically $100 billion is that no one else in the room can come up with that kind of cash, especially given how much baggage is on the deal right now. It would be one thing if Sam Altman was going and he had a clean Sea Corp and he was able to go to somebody like a Saudi Arabia or some type of Gulf investor group and say, hey, you know, I need to raise $100 billion to, you know, build out new data centers and you can get a bunch of preferred equity in this company. But now there's very few people other than the richest man on earth that could hope to come up with $100 billion. And so it puts both the board of the nonprofit and the board of the for-profit in a weird situation. And I don't know the exact, you know, voting structure or what the underlying docs look like.

But there's a very real possibility that this is Elon's way to basically force the board members to either vote with him or vote against the interests of the company, right? Because he's saying, hey, if nobody will pay more than $100 billion for, the nonprofit, then, and nobody will even be able to pay close to that, right? Then how do you, how does the nonprofit even turn down that offer? Maybe there's, because it's structured as a nonprofit and there's, but again, like, there's actual, you know, there's going to be actual, like, you know, underlying documents that support the nonprofit and probably provide some type of clarity around, you know, the board has a fiduciary duty to the nonprofit and to the for-profit. And so it's just a very

chaotic situation that could very easily throw off, you know, certainly if I'm Masa, you know, putting the biggest, making the biggest investment of your life into a company where you don't actually really know what you're buying and who you're going to be partnering with. It's just a very, it's a bit of a wrench. It's a bit of a wrench. Yeah. A bit of a range. Yeah, and this comes at a time, like, obviously, Elon's competing directly with Open AI. He's spending $5 billion on a new, you know, training run.

It's, it's this sort of full court, full court, you know, press. And he has a lot of good arguments, right? He can say, I funded this nonprofit. Yep. And, you know, I still believe the technology is important. And I, and I, and there's many ways, you know, look, you, there's, a bunch of ways you can point out that you know and say hey sam altman you know has it has a pattern of not always you know his critics would say he has a pattern of you know not speaking uh always

speaking very truthfully on on certain topics and uh it's just a very uh it's an interesting thing because sam altman you know known as the greatest probably deal guy in tech history and and paul graham you know will say like he's the best deal maker that he's ever seen. And so what he's been able to do with Open AI, despite all this baggage around the structure since day one, is actually incredible. But then you're going up against the president's best friend

who has the most personal wealth of anyone on the planet and so many different ways to apply pressure. So it's not a, you know, it's certainly not a, you know, who knows how it's going to play out. But yeah, I mean, it's complicated by the fact that you mentioned fiduciary duty. Now it's weird because the not the board of the nonprofit actually does not have a fiduciary duty. That's the way nonprofits. Because there's no.

Very oddly. Yeah. If you're if you're on a nonprofit board, you have a duty to the mission of that nonprofit, but you do not have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. So that just changes everything. But then at the same time, you look at this nonprofit, I mean, it's just looking at the numbers, $300 million for open AI, the for profit, $100 billion, $300 billion for open AI, the for profit. There's a $100 billion roughly offer on the table for the nonprofit. It stands the reason that the nonprofit was going to get about a third of the for profit. And so this nonprofit, I mean, I'm sure they have other assets, but really the most valuable golden goose on the balance sheet for this nonprofit.

profit and nonprofits have balance sheets all the time they might have an office they might have typically it's like oh we have you know we have an office we have some we've talked about that's it comes some computers on the balance sheet that's it but here they have they have you know like a massive double digit percentage of open AI the for profit which is like potentially the next Google and like you know already making tons and tons of profit or not profit but tons of tons of revenue and so you have this like incredible asset and then yeah maybe you should be able to bid for it I have no idea. This is completely unprecedented. I've never heard of any nonprofit trading hands in the open market like this. I don't even know how you would, I mean, it's pretty clear how you would value it,

but I have no idea if you can actually do some sort of hostile takeover on a nonprofit like this. I don't know if the board, like the board of a for-profit, if there is an offer to buy the whole company at an incredible price, that would maximize shareholder value. You have a legal obligation to take that, to take that deal, basically. And that's how the Twitter changed hands and lots of hostile takeovers have happened. But that's- not the same as a nonprofit. Yeah, and the challenge is so Sam is on the board of both companies, right? The nonprofit and the poor profit?

I don't know. Chat, help us out here. But in that situation, if Sam is on the board of the nonprofit and saying, hey, you know, I don't want to take this offer for any reason, there then becomes all this other, you know, everything is just deeply conflicted. Right. Like the whole structure is extremely conflicted in that this nonprofit developed, this incredible technology, realized that it wasn't going to work to run it as a nonprofit, which I think everybody agrees, right? It's very difficult to raise $100 billion for a nonprofit in a condensed period of time. And so the whole, like, it's just all twisted up and it's so conflicted that Elon would be able to argue, well, of course the nonprofit board doesn't want to take this offer because Sam Altman doesn't want to let a fox into the hen house, right?

He likes what he has going, wants to run this company. But he doesn't have the best interests of the nonprofit at mine, right? He has a good argument to be like, Sam, a year and a half ago was testifying and saying that he wasn't doing this for the money. And now he has a, you know, 7%, you know, 10, 10 soon to be, I'm sure, $30 billion stake in the company, you know, what's going on here, right? And so what is very clear is there's no precedent for this type of transaction in American business history, right?

Where you have such a, what are you reading? I'm laughing because this is from chat GPT, is Sam Altman on both the open AI nonprofit and for profit board. And I have no idea if this is hallucination, but it's from chat GPT. So we're going to read it anyway. It says he's not on both boards. he's on the non-profit entity board, which is called OpenAI Inc., which sounds like a for-profit, and then that oversees the for-profit subsidiary, which is OpenAI Global LLC,

which usually a for-profit is a C-Corp, but I guess it's an LLC, and it says he's not on the board of the for-profit entity, but he's the CEO of the for-profit entity. And I think in the CEO turmoil, he was removed from the board, added back his CEO, but then the board was reconstituted and some new people came in, but he didn't make it back on the board, I guess. It's all very confusing. I need like a chart to map all this out. But I guess my question that is always, I wonder, you know,

there's always this question of like, is the AI stuff valuable just because it's going to be a power law outcome, a trillion dollar company, and that will be incredibly valuable? Or is it actually like machine God? and all other companies would be worthless, and whoever controls the machine God will be God of humanity. And Elon and Sam have kind of gone back and forth on this.

And it's always kind of hard to tell who is a true believer and who's not. They're saying one thing. But then you can say, hey, it's God. And that actually helps you advance your mission of just building a great tech company. Or you can say the opposite is like, oh, I'm just, don't worry. I'm just building the next Google. But really secretly you think you're building God. And so it's all very uncons.

clear, like where everyone stands and, and I don't know, I can't get to the bottom of it, but it's certainly entertaining and I'm glad we're covering it. It's a great time to have a podcast. Yeah. One thing that's very clear is Elon doesn't want to compete head to head with Open AI. And he has access to the best talent and the most capital of anybody in history. Right. If Elon puts the word up and says, I'm building a new company, he can quickly acquire some of the best talent in the world. Now, AI is the most sort of competitive, you know, sector in the world right now, but it says a lot that he's willing to put up $100 billion to acquire, you know, a, you know, what would likely be 20 to 30 percent stake in the for profit, right? So that says a lot. I think it's

totally possible that he believes that this sort of the talent density at Open AI and the momentum that he has, and his understanding of sort of power laws is just him saying, I need to own 20, like, I need to own a large part of this company because he would rather, he just sees as a much more likely outcome to, you know, owning the most important company in AI versus a lot of people have said, oh, maybe Open AI is Yahoo, right? And maybe XAI and some of these new competitors will come up and just leverage what OpenAI has learned and developed, but then just sort of build whatever the next platform is. So to me, it speaks volumes that he is saying, no, I not only am going to get into this,

like, you know, massive lawsuit and do whatever I can and put all the social and political pressure on Sam, but I'm actually willing to put up $100 billion of his money and his sort of coalition of investors to make this happen. So, yeah, that makes me. Absolutely insane. That makes me lean like valuable tech product more than AGI God because if it was truly just about a race to build the biggest most powerful model, you'd think you'd want to just throw that extra $100 billion into the next GROC training run and really just focus on yourself, King. And instead, and maybe like the fact that Chatsybt is in the home row of 100 million people on their iPhones, like maybe. like maybe that's immaterial if you're building God.

But this certainly feels like, hey, maybe that's actually an important step into building God. And it's certainly valuable. And so if there's a way to go get a piece of it, it is valuable. Very, very interesting development. Yeah, I think you're totally right. I think one thing, you know, this dynamic of everybody in the last like couple months admitting that, okay, we have AGI now.

it turns out AGI wasn't going to instantly transform everything. And if we do stagnate it all over the next 10 years, the dominant AGI company, which OpenAI is still the dominant. It's dominant in the consumer's minds. It's dominant even from professional use cases. And for him to say, hey, if Open AI has even a good chance at being the next Google in terms of something, you know, we talked about this before, right? if chat gbtt becomes the evolution of the browser and that's a consumer platform that you can own, he very well could be thinking, I don't want to, I don't want to go and I don't want to try to build XAI from scratch into being on par with OpenAI because that is a very, once you have, like you've talked about, hundreds of millions of consumers that have this installed, that use it, that love it. having distribution through X is not going to change that, right?

Like he doesn't have, you know, even, even sort of Mark Andresen having, sorry, not Mark Indrisen, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, meta has a better chance of competing with Open AI from a pure consumer product standpoint right now than XAI, right? Just because Instagram is such a larger, you know, platform. So anyways, absolutely wild. Very, very wild. Yeah. Well, mom and dad have been fighting in tech for months now and just want them to get back together

and be friends again. But I don't think it's going to happen. But we have some equally dramatic news. I've actually been referred to as the Elon Musk of sleep, and I've confirmed it now with my 100 sleep score from my eight sleep. Highly recommend eight sleep. I had to grind for this. It took me two weeks to get here.

I retooled my schedule. I can now fall asleep. just 930, don't even need to listen to a podcast, just quiet my mind. Boom, I'm out in five minutes. It's amazing. And I think hopefully the viewers can see the performance is next level, next level. So our coupon code is actually live, TBPN on 8 Sleep. You should go pick one up.

It's really life-changing. I really can't speak enough. I can't speak highly enough of it. It's a weird thing because I had been sleeping on it, home and then I went on not a vacation exactly, but I've been on the East Coast for almost two weeks now. And having that taken away from you is just miserable because once you experience it, you're thinking, how did I ever sleep on just a lukewarm bed, right? And anyways, yeah. I mean, there's so much drama on the timeline. You don't want to be, you don't want to be up late scrolling.

you want to be in a nice cozy bed, just ready to get the next day started. What you got for me, Jordi, before we go into the China trade war in the journal. You know, I love talking about tariffs, John. I'm not a tariff expert, but I'm a misinformation expert. And so let's try to apply that. Let's try to apply that lens to this piece you got here. Yeah. So China strategy in the trade war threatened U.S.

companies. And this was very interesting because I didn't even know they had any sort of jurisdiction over Google, but Beijing just started a probe of Google, and they now have Apple and Broadcom in their sites. Chinese officials are building a list of U.S. technology companies that can be targeted with antitrust probes and other tools, hoping to influence the tech executives who are heavily represented in President Trump's orbit. People familiar with Beijing's strategy said the goal was to collect as many cards as possible to play in expected negotiations with the Trump administration over U.S.-China issues, including tariffs. Beijing has already said it's investigating Nvidia and Google over alleged antitrust issues. Again, not sure what they can do about Google.

I didn't even know Google had any presence in the country, but I guess they can put the screws to them one way or another. Other American companies in its site include Apple, Silicon Valley Tech Company, Broadcom, and Semiconductor Design Software firm Synopsis. Synopsis, has $35 billion acquisition awaiting approval by Beijing. So maybe they bought some Chinese IP and it won't go through unless Trump plays ball. China needs to use all of the leverage it can to hit back at the U.S. and antitrust is one of the most useful, says a tech policy specialist. And so China is on a chip gathering exercise, likening the countries to poker players.

They want to come to the table to negotiate and need something to play with. The strategy carries risk, though. American companies recently have been less willing than in Trump's first term to go to bat for China, and the threats could backfire by discouraging companies from investing in the country when that is what Beijing wants. Beijing has added to its regulatory tools in recent years, drawing lessons from America's approach. In 2020, they created what's called the unreliable entity list, the companies mimicking a U.S. entity list that blocks Chinese technology leader Huawei and others from doing business with the Americans. In 2022, China amended its antitrust laws to tighten rules on anti-competitive

mergers. Chinese officials hope to get the attention of people in Trump's world, including the executives who sat by his side on inauguration day, such as Google Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook, which is interesting because Tim Cook wasn't actually in the photo with Trump. Somehow, Tim Cook is such a master negotiator that he's able to, I think he donated to the inauguration fund, but he wasn't in the front row showing that he's not. He's not, fall in on Trump in this kind of iconic way, which also makes him a little bit more fragile to Trump, but then maybe a little bit more durable. Yeah, Tim is in a rough spot, right? China's been so important to Apple's growth and is now shrinking, right? We cover this last week.

China, Apple, iPhone sales are down almost 10% in China. And Tim and the Apple exact team are trying to blame this on the rollout of Apple intelligence. I don't think anybody's buying that. Also, you know, if you produce the amount of products that Apple produces in China, Apple literally would, you know, barely be able to survive in many ways without China. And so he's in a, he's in a rough spot. And, you know, I think one thing looking at at this article and hearing how they're positioning China, trying to sort of gather their bargaining chips, right? It seems that in 2016 and for the first Trump admin, the positioning from the, you know, people just felt like Trump was wildly unpredictable and just a little bit crazy, right? They were like, we don't know what he's

going to do. He's just sort of doing things. And every single day, you know, refresh the news and it's like, what is Trump doing today? This time around, I think that, other countries and people internally in the U.S. are thinking of him more as, okay, there's a method to the madness and he is playing his game, right? He's said as, you know, in his book and, you know, in many, many interviews, he just loves doing deals. And so he is playing a very, very high stakes game of poker. And I think other countries are starting to recognize that and see themselves as, okay, we're playing in this sort of geopolitical poker and we need to understand what our leverage is, you know, what our bargaining chips are. And really they're looking at it as like, okay,

we're actually playing a very, very high stakes game, you know, basically betting our economies on each other and betting, you know, these different aspects of leverage. So anyways, we'll see. I think, I mean, it's certainly going to show up in the big tech earnings next quarter. We'll certainly be tracking this. This is an interesting lever to pull. It's not one that's been top of mind. There's a little bit more context here on mergers and antitrust. Mergers between multinationals typically require approval from antitrust regulators around the globe,

and they can fall apart if they fail to gain even one major country approval. We saw this with Figma and the EU. The EU has blocked a lot of mergers and a lot of Americans are like, it's two American companies getting together. But of course, every company is multinational at this point. And so these multinational merger approvals are very important. In 2018, amid U.S.-China trade conflicts in the first Trump administration, Qualcomm terminated its proposed purchase of Dutch chipmaker NXP semiconductors after failing to obtain clearance from China. Imagine what a bummer that is. you're ready to do the deal and then China says no and you're back. You don't get your liquidity event today.

You got to keep grinding, although I'm sure it's a big company. NSP. U.S. Chipmaker Broadcom. Broadcom tried to take over VMware. That was valued at 61 billion when it was unveiled in May 22. This was in peril until a meeting between Biden and Siegeng in November 20203. The two leaders agreed to dial down tensions. Shortly afterward, China greenlighted the deal at the 11th hour with conditions, requiring broadcom to supply to Chinese customers. So yeah, it's that is that trading chips on the I don't. Yeah. So I don't think that average person understands just how bad the communication channels have been between Beijing and Washington have been. I was able to go to a talk last year with a U.S. just U.S. China expert from this group, AEI, that's based in Washington. And they have

sort of chapters around the U.S. And he basically said that, you know, we put on the, you know, she came to San Francisco and there was this big deal, if you remember that. I don't know, was it last year or the year before at this point where we cleaned up San Francisco, we made it nice and we made it look like there's this a real relationship there between our leaders. But there's been, there's, it's, it's so bad that there's not even really like direct, you know, phone email lines.

Like it's very much like happening through channels and almost playing a game of telephone in many cases. This was the case in the Cold War. Kissinger was a back channel to China during the Nix administration. And it was extremely controversial for them

to open up those lines of communication. Although now it's kind of the opposite because the relationship is actually falling apart more than it was rekindling. But Kissinger had to go to Nepal and then like smuggle his way in and then meet with Joe and Lai, the Chinese right-hand man of the premiere and stuff, and then eventually Nixon went, and that was really controversial. Now, I think Trump is ready to

play ball. I mean, he went and shook hands with Kim Jong-il, right, or Kim Jong-un. And so he's ready to play ball, but he just wants to be able to do a deal that's good in his terms. And there's so many chips on the table. And if you're the CEO of a tech company, you don't want to be one of the chips that Trump doesn't care about. That's the worst thing you can possibly be is not on Trump's good side. And he's like, oh, yeah, like, I don't like the broadcom guy anyway. So, yeah, you can totally screw them over. No, you want to be donating to his inaugural fund.

No matter what you think about the guy, you got to be, you know, on his good side. Yeah. When the time comes, he's ready to say, you know what? That's an American company. I care about them. They had my back. And I'm going to have their back in this negotiation. I'm not just going to let you screw them over.

Yeah. So anyway. People, people, you know, if you're purely in the in the business world, you know, business is cutthroat, right? Everybody that started a company has a competitor that they hate and that they're trying to take market share from. And it's similar sort of dynamic where, you know, you don't want to be overtly at war with this company, but day to day, you're, you feel like you're in conflict and you're fighting. And oftentimes in those situations, you'll still have the contact information of your competitor, right? I'm sure you've had fairly open conversations with, you know, where you'll have the number of a company that you're competing with, right? And you'll even talk and be friendly and stuff like that.

And I think that's generally good. We have less than that with China, you know, between our governments. Like there's not, it's not, you know, and people have freaked out in the past with Trump, you know, just calling, calling up other countries. Because like that's, he's taking very much the sort of business approach to. government, you know, to government, which is, you know, really not the norm. So, um, anyways, it's, it's, I don't know, uh, I feel like some of the best, most pointed commentary on the US China relationship is coming out of Palantir. Now, they have some, they have some, you know, specifically, uh, their CTO, uh, has, has made some, you know, very clear comments. Like, you know,

we need to, you know, we need to embrace, you know, they're a private company, right? They're in service of their shareholders and, you know, because of how many government contractors they have, contracts they have in many ways in service to the government, but they're able to come out and say, no, we are at war with China. And, you know, we need to be honest about that and our actions need to reflect that. But our leaders aren't saying that, right? They can't say that because it's too, it just stokes too much controversy and, and, and potentially fear, it's not necessarily, there's not a lot of value coming from that necessarily.

So anyways, let's see. One of our listeners, I'm blanking on his name, is gig-along Timo. So he really liked our T-Moo coverage. And he said, I forget, but he was posting and saying, if T-Mu hits like some certain share price, he's becoming a millionaire. So I want them to hit that price just because I want one of our listeners to hit that milestone. But then I want them to sell and then get aggressive. It's wild.

Well, let's skip forward a little bit and give some quick hits on some follow-up news stories that we've covered in the past. Sonos finally hits the hard reset button. This is in the Wall Street Journal today. Sonos chief executive Tom Conrad's job would be hard enough if he just had to sell expensive speakers. Selling the idea that his speaker company can finally master the software game is a heavier lift. That, however, is the task at hand for the new CEO. Conrad was named to the post last month, succeeding longtime chief Patrick Spence, who took the company public in 2018.

The switch confirmed that Sonos is still reeling from a disastrous update to its app in May of last year, left many consumers who shelled out for premium speakers unable to use their products. Fiscal first quarter results from Sonos on Thursday confirmed the damage has lingered. Revenue fell 10% year over year to 550 million for the December ending quarter while operating income plunged 40% to about 48 million. Very rough. One particular telling stat is that the company's unit sales for the second half of the calendar year fell. 14% from the year earlier to about 2.7 million products sold, the fewest for that period since 2016. And that was with the company's first ever entry into the premium headphone space. Ben,

there are some incredible charts of how Sonos has been declining, a very, very rough bar chart there. Those headphones, called the Sonos Ace, should have been a valuable expansion opportunity for a company long confined to the home-based speaker. But the launch took place about a month after the app rollout turned out to be the worst possible time. And so analysts now expect Sonos's revenue to fall 3% for the fiscal year ending in September after an 8.3% drop. Can the new boss eventually turn things around?

Sonos is still a strong name in the premium audio, despite the damage done to the brand by last year's app fiasco. they, this week, they said that they would cut the size of the workforce by 12%. We will see if that's enough. The stock is way down relative to the S&P 500. There's another chart there of when they launch their app update. They are down almost. They dip 40%.

They've climbed back up a little bit. There's some good news from Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley, Eric, Morgan Stanley's Eric Woodring says, stepping back. We are impressed by management's ability to rip costs. out of the model. A tough demand backdrop and an elevated uncertainty still hangs over. Sonos, though, indeed, only 38% of analysts rate Sonos a buy compared with 74% before the app rollout. The worst seems to be behind Sonos, but they are still early in their transformation. I don't know about that. I used the app this weekend. It was terrible. It's still terrible.

I'm just falling out. I'm pulling up the market. Yeah, they are having a rough, rough, rough go. I was I was in my garage looking at an old Sonos play bar that I have. I have it in storage, hopefully going to reinstall it. I was thinking I was going to reinstall it in my house. Might just throw it away. It's been it's been a rough, rough go and I don't know if they're, when they're going to turn the corner, but they got to just roll back the software and make it work seamlessly and flawlessly. You know, you can't have these like delays and these and these breaks. Even just like turning up the volume, turning down the volume. Like it just doesn't work anymore. So they have been, they have been struggling. Anyway, how's the market doing? Are you on

public dot com? Yeah, I'm on public. I mean, it's honestly been, you know, it's actually up 16% in the past six months. So that just goes to show how, how, you know, bad of a situation they were in last year. I would say that the ACE, the ACE is an interesting, you know, product. And, I don't see that. Home speakers are the kind of things that you expect to just work, right? They sit in one place. You're coming in, you know, maybe you're putting Spotify on or whatever you do. Using Bluetooth, it should just kind of turn on or Wi-Fi should just turn on and work.

But Sonos doesn't do that, right? Everybody that owns Sonos is oftentimes frustrated with them. I have Sonos products in my house. I wish that I didn't. I wish that I had, you know, just analog, you know, some type of analog solution. I think that there's this place I was saying this past week was like such a smart home that it was really like frustrating to use because it just, if everything's not sort of perfectly interconnected, it just kind of everything breaks down.

And so the issue is if you give consumers the experience of a poor experience with physical products that are sitting in your home that should just work. And then you say, hey, well, we know you kind of had issues with this product. But now we're going to give you a product like headphones that you're going to wear potentially for hours and hours and hours all day long and use on calls and apps and keep them around. And, you know, there's even less tolerance, right? If you've ever had AirPods that are kind of freaking out and not working, it's very, very

frustrating, right? And so I think the jump from home hardware to, hey, now we're going to build hardware that you're going to take with you all through your life. I don't want Sonos following me around when I leave the house. Stay at home. I need some peace and quiet away from that, those smart speakers. But the other challenge is just pricing, right? The Sonos Ace is like about $350 bucks. You can get the Apple AirPods max for about

$200 more. And the issue with headphones is headphones are, I would say more of a, in that category, more of a luxury item than a utility, right?

People in 2025 care less about music quality overall because a lot of entertainment is happening through apps and things like that. And so if you're giving consumers a choice of hey, you can buy Apple AirPods that are a luxury sort of fashion product statement, right,

that says something about you. You may not like that, but it's true, sort of an accessory. Or you can buy the Sonos Ace, which have no brand recognition, are still expensive at $350, right? It's not a, it's not like they came in with the super budget option. That's just a really tough sell, right? No kid is going into Christmas, you know, teenager being like, oh, I really want, the Sonos Ace, right? It's very clearly, it doesn't feel worth even, you know, maybe they're as good

of sound quality. They probably are as good as the AirPod Maxes, but that is not the deciding factor, I think, for a lot of consumers is I just want the best, you know, sounding pair of headphones, and I want great value. They're saying, I want to accessorize by having this luxury product, and I want something super reliable that integrates into my existing mobile experience. Yeah. And I mean, Mark Zuckerberg was on Rogan talking about how Apple has locked down some of the Bluetooth APIs that make AirPods so seamless to use and how Facebook wanted to integrate with the iPhone at a deeper level. And Apple kind of made it difficult. And that's just a tough place to be in. If you're Sonos and you don't have leverage over Apple, sure, they have to open up some of the APIs and you get to use some of the Bluetooth stuff, but you don't get their proprietary network. because Apple can always say, hey, privacy, if we give you two, if we give some random company too much access to the user's data, that's a privacy issue. And then the flip side of that, which is, which is a good, it's a good argument.

You do want, you don't want some cheap headphone company just stealing all your iPhone passwords or money or something like that. That makes sense. But when it's Sonos and they can review the code, they should be able to operate at the same level through the same APIs. But, of course, Apple, you know, knows that they benefit from that. And they're going to sell more, more products. if they lock it down.

So anyway, we should move on to the Super Bowl. The last thing I was going to say, if you think about AirPods as a business line being roughly equivalent, you know, in terms of importance as their agreement with, you know, as Google Apple's relationship, right? Yeah. Apple makes roughly $20 billion a year from that search, you know,

partnership. AirPods are not as, you know, not putting up as much, you know, profit margins, but it's a $22 billion business line. Apple is not going to just give that away, right? Like AirPods will continue to grow. It's a very meaningful business. And so going and competing with, you know, you know, again, it almost feels like, yeah, okay, they could sell some headphones, but certainly not going to save the company. Yeah. Well, let's move on in the Super Bowl. Did you watch the Super Bowl? Did you watch the ramp ad? What do you think? I did. I watched the ramp ad and I and I saw some football too. Did you bet on the Super Bowl? You know, so not following,

one, we've talked about this. I've never been into sports betting. We joke about sports betting a lot because it's just funny. To me, to me, it's just funny. I don't. I don't really, I mean, I understand why people like to do it. But for me, I was looking, I downloaded draft Kings because I was like, all right, I've gotten enough of your ads. Probably thousands of people have told me to download draft Kings. Let me check it out. And I, looked at all the sort of like preset parlayes and the thing that was I just don't know enough I don't know anything about you know football and so I was just looking at this sort of like sayquan oriented bets that I don't even know if they would have played out or anything like

that but I didn't bet I did watch I saw somebody post something that I think is cool we're all sort of in our own digital worlds and like hyper focused on our own individual events right like you and I are here, you know, freaking out about Elon making a bid on Open AI. And if you walk out, if I walk out on the street in New York, somebody's thinking about, you know, cricket in India, right? Like, we're just fixated on totally different things. The Super Bowl is very cool. And the entire country can just orient around a single sort of cultural event. And it is as much of a cultural event as it is, you know, a sporting event. So I appreciate that. I had a post about this. Here's how I'm betting it on the Super Bowl. 10x levered long Fanduel, 5x levered long draft kings.

American DGens are going to lose billions today on parlay as they don't even understand. The house always wins. And I was texting with Sagar and Jetty. And he said, he told me that Fanduel reports taking in over 16.6 million Super Bowl bets, a 19% increase from last year. activity peaked at nearly 70,000 bets per minute, according to the sports book. I was kind of joking, obviously. This is not financial advice. I was not actually telling people to go 10x levered long fan duel or 5x levered long draft king. Yeah, you got to be careful, John, because somebody in the chat.

But I looked at the results for the past week. Draft Kings is up 3% on public.com. Flutter Entertainment. I think they own fan duel. they were up 1.3% the last week, and the market is only up 1.1, the S&P 500. So oddly enough, draft kings and Fandul did outperform the S&P 500

during this Super Bowl cycle. John, we do not, and to be clear, we do not offer financial advice on the show. This is for entertainment purposes only. But yeah, I mean, a lot of that stuff had to have been fairly price. in just because everything's, of course, always priced in. We'll never tell you what to buy, but we will tell you where to buy it.

Go to public.com for all your trading needs. And fortunately, the market is NPV positive, unlike sports betting. And so, you know, if you just took $20 that you were going to spend on every sports bet for the next sports season, and you just put that into an ETF, you would be fantastically well off. Sagar went on to send me something. He said, based on the historical data up to April 2024, he said, if you would have invested $200 monthly for 34 months totaling $6,800, you would have bought 72 shares of the S&P and the value as of April 2024 would have been $8,700 for a return of 28%.

You really can't go wrong. He says, dollar cost averaging. through February 2025, you'd be up 60% LMFAO. And you're not going to find 60% returns in the sports book, unfortunately. So we recommend staying away from the sports book. I mean, heading over to public.com. I mean, not necessarily factually correct, because I'm sure a lot of people last night had, you know,

like generational Mahomes haters just rebelling the house against him having a rough night. they probably did well. But more importantly, should we talk about Tom Brady? We should. We should. So Tom Brady was taken to task by Derek Guy, die workwear. He says he dislikes the grotesque opulence and flash of modern watches.

And we have some info here. Tom Brady was spotted wearing a Jacob and Co. Yellow Sapphire Caviar Turbion watch worth over 800, thousand dollars is an exclusive it's an extremely exclusive piece and if you want to pick up an eight hundred thousand dollar watch we recommend that you head over to bezel download the bezel app and pick something out not my taste personally i'd probably go for something a little bit more subdued but if you want to make a statement can't go wrong with a jacob and co sapphire diamond caviar turbion Yeah, an absolute hitter.

So we were texting with Quaid, one of the founders of Bezell, about this whole debacle. And Quaid, Quaid, you know, didn't actually have direct context as I'm sure it wasn't released. But he felt that this was such a ridiculous watch choice. And I'm sure even Tom felt silly about it that he said it was a possibility that it would be an actual. paid, you know, some type of paid partnership. But, you know, who knows, who knows? Certainly, Tom has been photographed in some, you know, fantastic pieces over the year. You know, as soon as this went out on TV, I was searching X just for Tom Brady watch

and there were thousands of tweets. Like, he grabbed the attention with it. Maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way. either way he's raising the profile of uh you know fast of flashy watches loud opulence is fully back with this watch and there's a lot to like about this nothing wrong with a gold watch nothing wrong with a big watch nothing wrong with a turbion in a watch uh so yeah nothing wrong with a watch that is majority yellow sapphire yeah yeah so i also thought something else i didn't i didn't really know this but apparently these these watches actually trade

very quickly at a fraction of their of their retail price. So they retail really high, but the secondary, the secondary market for Jacob and Coe is is pretty rough, which makes sense. I don't think a lot of people, to be honest, felt like very few people saw this watch and said, I need this watch. That's incredible. Whereas I've seen Tom Brady's, you know, Tom Brady, you know, frequently gets, gets featured on like celebrity watch roundups. And oftentimes he'll wear stuff that's like, yeah, that is a fantastic piece.

Like I would love to add that to my collection someday. And so anyways, I don't know if it's hard to, uh, I love XAI is trying to, trying to explain it. Why did Brady pick this watch? Yeah.

It's like, who knows? We'll never, we'll never know. Never know. We'll have to get him on the show and ask him. Um, but let's stay with the Super Bowl.

We're going to review some Super Bowl. Bowl ads, of course, chat GPT, massive ad, very controversial. A lot of people hated it. Some people loved it. Jack Appleby chimes in. He says, chat GPT, what? You just lit $7 million on fire. Worst Super Bowl ad ever. Imagine having one of the coolest tech innovations ever and not showing the super audience what it actually does. God, that was a horrible ad. How did you feel about the chat GPT ad, Jordy, when you saw it? So AdQuick partnered with Beehive and they did a whole roundup and they actually had it listed that this was a $16 million ad because it was a full 60 seconds. It was a very, it was that, you know, basically the ad unit for size lord.

So I looking at it outside of the realm of where of the context that it was being played. played, I thought I was a fantastic ad. I watched it. I felt it had a lot of very cool symbolism. I, it was a lot more fun than anything that I've seen Open AI put out. I thought, yeah, again, I've rewatched it since then. I thought it had good energy. It made me like Open AI more, right? Because a lot of this stuff, like a lot of the criticisms lately, if you ignore Sam Altman have been around, you know, and the nonprofit structure have been around, oh, they're bad at naming, you know, like what, what's going on here?

And so you're just focused on, like, you know, using the app all the time, but you're like, oh, 1, pro, oh, 1, this. And this felt like they kind of rallied around this whole. It felt like, you know, showing the sort of history of humanity through this, you know, very cool in sort of bits, right? It was just a very, I felt like, yeah, you could easily apply all the symbolism and meaning behind it, and it felt inspiring and futuristic and fun. But then you put that in the concept, in the context of, hey, you had an opportunity to, you know, who is this for?

I felt like this was a great ad for the technology industry and the sort of almost like power users, right? but the thing is like they're in the middle of raising $40 billion. This is a fraction of their probably like next 12 months ad budget. And it's perfectly fine for, you know, perfectly fine for them to sort of light money on fire to, but. Yeah. The way I think about it is, is when you're a startup that's bootstrapping, you have a vision. You have a philosophy. You have a message for what you're building, a story that you're telling.

And when you have no money, you're going to go direct and you're going to write maybe a thread or a long post or a blog post and put it out for free. And if it's compelling, it'll go viral. And maybe it's a pitch deck and your idea is instantiated. Your vision for the world is instantiated in a deck that goes around and is told to people one to one for free. Then as you get bigger, let's say you're a billion dollar unicorn. You might be able to instantiate your vision statement in a really slickly produced video that you put out on Twitter or ad. or you put it on your homepage, and it's a message from the founder saying, this is what we believe. And then you'll do some earned media and you'll keep telling your story.

But when you're a $150 billion company raising $20, $40 billion, like you can just put your vision statement on the superbord. That's the, you can just do it. Yeah. It's just like, hey, hey, we got this cool vision video. It tells everyone what we're like, why don't we just like put some spend behind it? And some spend in this context is a super. ad. And it's crazy. But yes, I agree that like this is not a good direct response ad. This doesn't

tell me what the product is. But this is, but as an individual piece of content, I liked it. But again, in a crowded room of people that are drinking beers and eating Doritos, like not the best way to, this almost feels like it should run before a trailer for the next De Neville Nouve movie. Like you go see Dune and you see this and you're like, wow, that was aesthetic. The design is cool, the pixelation, the circles, and it is tying into things, but it's pure like brand building. It's not really like, hey, we're here, here's what you can do, install the app right now. It's the opposite of the Coinbase ad, which was just a QR code to install the app. It's just like direct response. You know about Bitcoin. You're going to buy it. Get it

right now. There's a lot of ads that do that. Like there were a number of companies that were like, hey, here's the QR code to download the app. We're giving away money or, you know, order on Uber Eats today order on DoorDash today and this was very much just like we have a vibe real and we're putting it out and we happen to put spend behind it so it wound up at the Super Bowl yeah so one effect one effect that was positive and that this is what they were probably going for is the takeaway of oh this is the next apple right because it felt like very it felt creative and inspiring and fun and it felt like you know human and and even though it was this sort of digital experience if you wanted to say how do we map if open a and an open a i probably went to their ad agency and said we want open

a i to be to fill this void that apple left right apple's like saying gen emoji it and like all this like slop you know slop out of home ads hey there's this void there can be this inspiring human centered consumer brand that sparks creativity and helps you know which is what apple did right Now, the ad agency's job is to come up with something, and they, and they can, they then convince the company and saying, this is the right thing. Like, you're going to, you know, this is your moment. Like, let's own this. Let's do a 60 second ad. And let's be the most, you know, inspiring, cool ad. It was like, objectively the coolest ad that I saw it, right? Ramp was super cool if you're like, Eagles or Seekwan fan. And you're already a ramp customer. And it's like, wow, ramp is this massive, you know, company that are playing at. like the big they're in the big leagues now this isn't a startup anymore if chat if chat chbd open i wanted to come at this from the lens of hey let's use this as a user acquisition moment to like put heat on google i would have taken the 16 million dollars and run four individual ads throughout the entire super bowl and just done 15 second ads right so it's like demonstrating how the

product can be used in different ways of saying hey use it to generate yeah yeah yeah tie it to sports say like like go to chat gbtt right now and search tell me the history of Sequin Barclay. Oh, explain to me all the rules of football. You know, hey, I'm watching for the first time. Like, that could be a really fun use of chat JBT. Because a lot of people are watching the football for the first time. Hey, I noticed that like you get the ball on the 30 yard line now when the ball goes out of the back. That's a new rule to me. When did that go in? That's a question that I would actually chat EBT during the game. And they could have played on all that, done a ton of stuff just to drive downloads. But that wasn't the goal. Yeah, they could have

done an ad for the D-Gen sports betters, the sort of moms, the girlfriends that don't know about football at all for hardcore fans. And to me, to me, to me, to me, this is, I'm going to make a funny comparison here. So if I'm perplexity or I'm Google and I'm Google and I'm seeing this open AI, I'm like, whoo, that was that was close because they could have come hardcore for the sort of search answer engine type narrative. And I noticed when I was watching the game, I was Googling, I, I still landed on Google, Super Bowl stats because I wanted to know how many rushing yards each team had. And Google had a beautiful little program out. It wasn't generative AI.

It just plugged into that widget. I didn't even have to go to a sports website. And it just gave me the exact info I needed. And that's something I could have gone to chat GP for if they'd just built like a little module and little module and like made it fun and interesting. And perplexity is doing that. Yeah. And I'm sure that they, you know, next Super Bowl, they'll be there.

But yeah, I mean, interesting execution for sure. If you're if you're a perplexity, right, watching this ad, you're, you're, you're, you're sort of like, uh, my competitor, which they're very real competitors, right, even if they're technically like marketing and going in different directions. Uh, the perplexity team is like stoke because they're like, okay, chat GPT took an opportunity where they could have like dominated mind sure being this new search. product and they like did this brand exploration. It's similar to Drake watching Kendrick Lamar,

you know, diss him, you know, aggressively through this thing, but put on what many people are saying is like the worst half-time show that they've ever seen, right? And so he's sort of like, he's sort of like watching. He's like, oh, like I guess like, I guess, you know, yeah, dodge the bullet a little bit. Yeah, I mean, it was the same thing where I think that Kendrick performance probably would have been great in a different context, but it just wasn't, people didn't think it was appropriate for the Super Bowl because, you know, again, like Kendrick has all these, like, layered lyrics. It's almost better to listen to it, like, as an audiophile with some great headphones, as opposed to, like, in a loud, crowded room when everyone's drinking beers and you can't

really follow what's going on. Versus, like, the Kendrick performance two years ago at the Super Bowl in L.A. was, like, Dr. Dre and Snoopjog just playing, like, the biggest bangers. Everyone has heard these songs and it just looked like a party the whole time and you're like okay that's what a super bowl show should be yeah and and it's not like the super bowl is so low attention span the whole time people are second screening they're talking they're drinking they're playing drinking games like breaking through with anything that requires any sort of secondary level of thought is just really really difficult um but let's let's let's move on to some of super bowl ads tea tea die in the chat says chat chp t cook me a nasty plus plus 1,000

and parlay. So that like you could have, there could have been some, but one of the, even cooking, how do I make a great nachos? How do I make, how do I make wings?

Like, like that's something you could ask chat. GPT didn't break through in that way. Yeah. Well, Jack, yeah. I was just going to,

last thing, because you called this out too, he's saying that part of the reason why they maybe just focus on the brand is just like the knowledge cut off where if you go in a chat GPT and you search immediately about stuff. and like it actually is not going to be a good experience. It's great if you want to understand when was the last time, you know, the eagle, what are the, what five times have the Eagles won the Super Bowl or something like that?

It'll nail that, but it won't nail the sort of like actual day-to-day super topical stuff. Yeah, well, let's move on to the ad from the tech company that Jack Appleby really liked. He loved Google Pixel's Super Bowl spot. He said it was so touching. He said, I'm not crying, you're crying. No one's better at taking a tech. feature and telling a wonderful emotional story while still making sure we all get the product benefit.

This script is fantastic. And the screenshot here is a Google search bar saying, explain bullying to a child. So very emotional playing on the heartstrings of being a parent, how you would use Google to solve a really complex and difficult topic. And Google's always been great at that telling like a love story, an emotional story. And I think they've really done a good job of telling some sort of like cinematic vignette that's emotional while still tying it back to the product. What was your take on it?

Did you watch it or are you seeing it? So I think it was a well-produced spot. It's just like there's such a big disconnect with a Google ad and what they actually are as a company. If I wanted to understand how to explain bullying to my kids, I would. I would Google how to explain bullying to my kids, Reddit, right? That's like the actual way that you would get that. Imagine getting like getting a Google auto summary of like how, you know.

So again, I thought this ad was like very forgettable. I came away from it being like, okay, Google is obviously going to run a Super Bowl ad as a multi-trillion dollar company. Not going to remember it, you know, really ever again. I hardly remember the contents. And I'm very much in the target demo, right? It was all about, you know, parenting and how to, how to, you know, so anyways, I thought it was a big miss. It feels like the prestige movies at the Academy Awards where at a certain point, like, okay, yeah, I can just imagine that this year's best picture nominees are going to be about like, oh, brave journalist fighting some big thing.

And then, oh, like, some foreign language film about, like, the Catholic Church or whatever. And I don't even know what movies are nominated, but I'm sure they're going to be like the same like heartstrings, dramas that are like always prestige. films, Google's just put out so many of these that they do, they fail to break through in the same way as like, I think the first time Google did it. It was very, very cool. But again, at least they're explaining the product because Salesforce did not do a good job with that. I don't know if we should move on to. Yeah. And the last thing, the last thing is like getting an ad from Google is like getting an ad from Comcast, right? Like it could be the most well-produced emotional ad and you're still like, cool, thanks, Comcast for taking up time that I'll never get back.

You know, like, it's not. Yeah. And so Salesforce, Jack Appleby says, what sales force is your Super Bowl ad and makes no sense? Restaurants don't seat you outside in the rain. And no one understands your AI products role in reservations. Why? What a weird spot that serves no purpose. But they got your boy, Matthew McConaughey, in the ad. He had so many. He had so many. cameos. And, yeah, Salesforce has always kind of struggled with this. They tend to paint a very broad picture and they don't do a good job. It's interesting because it's kind of in the same, in the same realm as like people were kind of criticizing the ramp ad because they're like, how many CFOs were really watching? But at least the ramp ad was like very clear value prop for

the CFOs, for the CFOs. Whereas to be clear, to be clear, probably like 90% of CFOs for watching. Totally. Yeah. Makes sense. So, yeah, you're, if you want to, you know, sort of collect. Yeah. The flip side is that, is that 90% of people who manage Salesforce installations were also watching, but they don't do a good job of showing the value. Like, with a ramp at, it's very clear. It's like, instead of expense report, receipts and like dealing with filing expense reports, ramp will make that faster. So what you should be doing is Salesforce is saying, instead of manually going through and tagging every, you know, every different line item in your CRM, Salesforce AI agents will do that for you, you know?

But instead it's like this very vague ad about Matthew McConaughey dining outside. Yeah, I think it's striking, but it doesn't tell me what the product is. Well, so you remember in 2023 where there was this controversy because it came out, I think, in some type of shareholder report that Matthew McConaughey was making like $10 million a year to basically be like a rant like Benioff's like friend like hey I'm going to give you 10 million a year to just kind of like do creative advisory on the company and stuff like that um sales force is in it's such a i don't know that like you get to the point as at a company of the side it becomes I think branding just gets so much harder at extreme scale right where people have so much experience

and their own opinions and feelings about your product, that it's really hard to overcome that, right? Like Google is very much like cable for me. It's a utility. You know, I get email from them. I get search, you know, YouTube, things like that. But I don't really care to have like that much of an emotional relationship. And then Salesforce is the same thing where it's just sort of a dominant CRM provider.

It's known for being clunky and hard to implement. And, you know, it's sort of almost like a necessary evil. And so just going and doing random stuff like this doesn't move the brand forward. It doesn't increase people's feelings. You know, I can't, you know, maybe, maybe the average American is looking at this being like I like Matthew McConaughey. Maybe I'll like, you know, maybe I'm more inclined to take a Salesforce demo next time I get head up by one of their SDRs.

Like maybe. Who know? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just brand awareness. They're in the game and they're just getting a little bit across, but they could have been more terse with it. Well, let's stay with Matthew McConaughey because a couple slides later, Ben, we got Uber Eats with the most cameos in the Super Bowl ad. They got Matthew McConaughey there.

And I saw this ad and I liked it. I thought it was interesting because like it is a tech company advertising of the Super Bowl. We barely even think about it because it's just a food delivery company. But I just thought it was like the perfect place to advertise this because you're eating and there's always last minute things. Everyone's ordering pizza. There's always dominoes and beer, beer ads during the Super Bowl. Uber Eats and delivery services is the perfect time to advertise. Oh, we forgot the wings. Let's see if we can go on Uber Eats. They had some really nice green bags, which I've never received Uber Eats in, but they really stuck out in every single shot that they framed. It was beautifully, the cinematography was beautiful. And they got a bunch

of cameos to kind of just draw your eye back to the screen for something that would otherwise be pretty boring. But it's the perfect time to think about, hey, I do want more chicken wings. Let's order that right now. And I bet a lot of people installed the app and I bet a lot of people just ordered Uber Eats while this ad was going live. So I thought it was a pretty good one. What do you think, Jordy? I actually didn't see this one. It might have been in the second half where the, I knew a new ramp had the game in the bag. So I just kind of checked out. Okay, well, let's move on to the Instacart one. I don't know if you saw that one. No, but, but yeah, looking at Uber Eats and these sort of mass market consumer products,

it is, I think the Super Bowl is a great way for an enterprise company to say, hey, we're here. We're playing in the big leagues. It's a tougher place to stand out if you are a dominant enterprise company already and people already have opinion. But great opportunity. Again, probably some of the best money that Uber Eats will spend this year, even if it doesn't have the sort of direct attribution that they might have on other channels. Yeah. And I think Instacart, interestingly, obviously a direct rival in many. any ways, more for grocery than food delivery, but still in the delivery game. Jack Appleby says,

wow, Instacart got some crazy brand cameos for their Super Bowl spot. Kool-Aid guy, Mr. Clean, Old Spice guy, Pillsbury Doe Boy, and of course, puppy monkey baby. I don't even know what that means. Chester the Cheetah, Cheeto, Chito is there. Chester the Cheetah, who is Cheeto's mascot is there. And I always wonder how these brand collaborations work. Do they, do they, do, do, they wind up paying part of the ad spot bill? Like if you're Cheetos brand and you say, hey, it's a $6 million ad spot, we'll put in a million dollars if you're promoting Cheetos in your Instacart ad, even though it's an Instacart ad, or is it kind of just like a friendly handshake thing? No, it's very, who knows what the deal look like? It's very possible that this was Instacart's way

of hacking a free ad by going to the IP holders and saying, hey, I'm going to get you in the Super Bowl for a million dollars instead of, you know, whatever, and you're going to get that exposure to the audience. And that's just an easier decision to make. An Instacart might have cut the, you know, piece up and said, hey, everybody's thrown in $6 million or $8 million or $4 million, whatever. I don't know how long the spot was. But yeah.

Yeah. I mean, again, I was thinking why Combinators should run a Super Bowl ad, carve up the $6 million into 60 different companies. You get half a second. Your logo flashes on the store. We almost did that back in the party round days. We got like a very last minute offer. It was like 30 grand.

And for like a 15 second spot in like the north, you know, the northeast or something like that. You're going to cut it up and do like a last minute thing. Like drop your logo, but the logistics of getting all the approvals and everything just didn't work out. Well, it would be fun. But.

And last but not least, we got to close on the ramp ad. I love that they've been doing a lot. a follow-up. They've really been getting all the juice out of this lemon. They're squeezing. Eric Lyman today writes, why did Ramp make a Super Bowl ad with Saquan chasing down expense reports? Because while everyone was watching the game, finance teams across America were still working to close January's books. I was surprised to see in our analytics that tens of thousands were working the weekend. They deserve their moment in the spotlight. And so, you know,

I think the ad went over very well. It was very clear and it delivered very quick. and I was happy to see it live. Any more to say on ramp ad? Absolutely dog. Absolutely dog. I mean, at the end of the day, I just would highlight again that I feel like Eric and Sequin are, you know, basically the same person on just different paths, just humble, humble savages. So it was awesome to see, you know, as much as yesterday was a win for Billy's fan.

It was a win for people that like finance automation. what a day. I've said it better myself. Completely agree. Well, let's move on to some timeline, some news from Axe over the weekend. Ben Heilak says if 03 was the 175th best programmer in the world, every company in the world would immediately stop hiring software engineers. We clearly need a better way of measuring what LLMs are capable of

because OpenAI's reasoning model has been climbing the rankings. and has been ranking very highly in terms of software engineering, but still has yet to be fully implemented at a lot of companies. What do you think? There's always the argument that this stuff is just additive. You keep your software engineers and you let them do more with the new tools, or in the future, maybe you don't hire them at all. What do you think?

No, I think it's a good, I mean, I think it's just a great framing from Ben. I mean, Ben and people that listen to the show know that Ben did, the Jaguar redesign, also has an AI analytics company. But it's a very good, it's a very good point in that you can say that 03 is ranked as the 175th best programmer, but in practice it doesn't feel like that when you're using it, right? It doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel like you have a top 1,000 programmer in the world coding with you.

It feels like you have more, you know, people position it more as like a very good new grad that can work extremely quickly, right? Yeah. Which is still very valuable. And so like, I think calling out that difference between what it's capable of, but then what matters more is how companies are able to leverage it internally, right? And Open AI, you know, clearly is still hiring software engineers. They're also not getting the same value as 170. it's like ability and value right everybody's hired employees who are like ridiculously talented but then can't deliver on that talent in your organization and that kind of feels like where oh three is at

and just all models in general it's like hey you're clearly brilliant but like you got to be able to do a bit more for me here right for it to like you know sort of live up to the expectation yeah a lot of supervision still involved have you been following the a i.com drama There's a tweet here. Oh, yeah. Breaking. Deepseek may have bought the domain, AI.com, and it now redirects straight to their site, just like how OpenAI snapped up, chat.com.

Our domain power moves, the new arms race in AI. But Pierre Richelson says, AI.com is the wildest thing out there. No, it's not changing hands. There's a person behind this URL switching from OpenAI to XAI and now to deep seek. What a fascinating hustle. What are they getting out of this? I don't understand. So, so what's really obvious here is that AI.com is owned by a domain investor. And nobody, nobody, they've clearly gone to all these different companies and tried to sell it. Yep. Uh, to them. And now they're, you know, they probably, I'm sure like any of these companies would

pay five million dollars for AI.com, right? Just to kind of, have. But I don't think it's that great of a name for a bunch of reasons or like necessarily that valuable. And so I think a lot of these companies are probably looking at it and being like, well, we have our name's open AI. Chad GPT is our core consumer product. XAI is like, okay, XAI is a pretty good name. And it's very possible. AI.com has, has some is saying like, I wouldn't sell it for less than $100 million. And so now they're trying to create leverage and they probably have some traffic and so they're just trying to create this leverage between the different groups of being like at any moment it might go to your competitors so now it's redirecting

to you and now it's redirecting to you and so anyways yeah it's technically smart but the thing about the domain space is people are just uh you know we talked about that story that um that rob had shared from snagged where the instagram the owners of instagram.com sold the domain and then sued Instagram later and said, oh, it wasn't sold with, you know, the daughter signed off on the sale, but not the family who really owned it. And they tried to clot back and all this stuff. So the domain space is like still the Wild Wild West. I had the craziest domain deal I did was for a domain that was like owned by like a Chinese investment group, which was smooth to their, to their credit. But it was still a weird like long, you know, months long negotiation.

So anyways, I'm interested to see where this ends up. It could be one of those things that it ends up not even being bought by a new player and gets bought by a Google or something like that. Yeah, yeah, it's odd because obviously like webbrowser.com was not important in the browser wars. Chrome never. I don't even know if they own Chrome.com. You just go to Google or bang and you type in install Chrome and that's the end of that. but let's move on to some amazing news.

Eddie Zhu says he got banned from the Columbia hackathon for being too young. So we snuck in and we won. And he said, big shout out to a bunch of people. And yes, we told the organizers and returned the prizes afterwards. Wow. What a heartwarming story.

Absolutely. Get these kids. Fantastic. Get these chads and doge. They're ready. They're ready. They're ready. Yeah.

you can just do things incorporated. I love it. Yeah, very exciting. I mean, I don't know why there's an age gate on hackathons. Maybe it's something about Columbia wanting to restrict it just to students. But I love that they snuck in and hilarious that they won't. There's some students that would be seven that could be, you know, just, you know, a year ahead or something. I was thinking it might be some sort of like insurance and like legal liability because like you're staying up all night.

this hackathon and to be on campus you need to sign some waiver because the school is technically responsible for you but you know seems like a victimless crime sneaking into a hackathon i love that they built some stuff i hope that eddie posts more results of what they actually built i want to hear about it i want to follow the story eddie uh if you're listening uh send us more breakdown of what happened how did you sneak in what do you have to do you have to go out in the back door what do you have to do leave a door open eddie come on credentials what are the layers that you do were you wearing a fake beard fake mustache glasses was it three kids in a trench coat i want to know what happened bring it down for us three builders in a trench three cracked builders in a trench coat

three zoomers in a trench coat that's the way you get into the columbia hackathon but congratulations on winning we're very happy for you and uh good luck to whatever you build next let us know um let's move on to dirt man, B-Sack. He says, he's been on the show before. He says, people think making the moon a state is just a meme, but there is a real tangible pathway there. And he shares a video of Newt Gingrich. 13,000 people is what it will take.

What does that look like practically? Assuming that Starship can carry 100 people to the moon, that means we only need 130 launches there to carry the people. Let's 4X that number for equipment and orbital refurb. refueling. That's 520 launches. And so he estimates $60 million per launch. We get $31 billion in launch costs. Totally doable. Less than Stargate. And we have a moon base. And so I love to see people breaking down when the moon should be a state meme broke through and Solano was pushing it. I did a deep dive on moon law a little bit, wrote a thread, kind of breaking down how it actually

work. It's fascinating. I think this is going to be a topic of conversation for many, many years to come. And it's going to break through any day. Yeah. And to be clear, us going and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, is just sort of foreshadowing for, you know, I don't know, would we keep Moon as the name? Would we name it New America, you know, something like that? The proposal is just there's a 51st state and it's just called Moon. And so you're in Massachusetts.

I'm from Florida. You're from Moon, the end. and I'd be happy with that. I'd be happy with that. We need a governor. We need, you know, some, some interstate freeways up there. We need parking lots and McDonald's

and all the things that make it in American state. I told you for my next son, we're thinking about the name, Rocket, a little Rocket Hayes. Oh, yeah. And that'd be a cool storm being like, yeah, I grew up in California. Like I was born in California,

but I really mostly grew up on the moon. And it's like, okay, a little bit of nominative determinism there, a little rocket. I love it. Well, let's move on to some more amazing and good news from real news, eerie, I guess. The Irishman that was stabbed in the neck today is all stitched up and he's back in the pub. The gales are a hearty bunch. Let's go. He says throat stitched up, attacker in custody, beers on tap.

We live to see another day. So congratulations to the Irishman that was stabbed in the neck. You have fought and won, and we're proud to support you on this program. I never saw, I never knew that he was stabbed. So this is amazing for me to just see that this guy's at the pub. That's really the news for me, just having a nice time at the pub. So love to see it. Well, we got the timeline in turmoil once again.

Palmer Lucky says, I'm once again asking ZDNet to publicly retry. their bogus 2018 story claiming I was fired for stealing trade secrets after a federal court ruled I was guilty of the same. The way they have handled this is insanely unethical. I was never found guilty of anything, which is true. And so Paul Graham chimes in and says, why don't you just sue them? And Palmer says, because it isn't illegal to publish falsehoods about public figures. On the balance, it's probably good that the state cannot outlaw crappy journalism, but it does mean putting up with this type of nonsense. And so Palmer's only recourse is to take to X. Paul PG follows up by saying, it seems like you can sue them if they deliberately with actual malice published lies. And one could

argue that they are doing this if they don't correct an article that they know to be false since the publication of an article on the web is ongoing. I'm not a lawyer, but just deliberately refusing to update an article that they know contains lies seems to me libel in the spirit of the U.S. law. if a U.S. judge agrees, it would be a valuable precedent. And so Palmer has been fighting the good fight against muck-raking tech journalists. I think that these journalists should just stick to the stables, stick to dressage, maybe a little jousting here and there, just head out to the family, the ancestral estate. Estate.

Play some life-size chess. Stop writing hit pieces and just enjoy a nice glass of champagne in the morning while, you know, a string quartet plays classical music. for you to wake up to. Life could be so easy, but instead you choose violence every day on the internet. So tech journalists, you're on notice. Let's move on. Kevin follows up with a beautiful screenshot from Polly Market. Will it's Kevin win reply guy of the month? 100% chance. So congrats to Kevin. Enjoy this meme from when I was trying to win TBPN reply guy of the month in December. We love Kevin. You know, fans. I'm going to go. I'm going to make an impulse decision right now.

and hopefully you back it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say, Kevin, is this is the February 10th, reply guy of the week now. Let's do it. Let's do it. So we just did it. Congratulations, Kevin. Fantastic. I like this, I like this asset.

He clearly, you know, did the work. It looks nice. Oh, yeah. It's on brand. That's like a nice emoji bottle. I think we might need it. The Dom pairing on is very carefully matted. There's no rough edges.

This was Photoshop. This is artisanal meme making. Very, very high quality. I mean, you can tell with his badge, he's member of an esteemed meme-making community. We've seen this badge all over acts, and we're happy to have you in the community, Kevin. Let's move into post by CMAQ.

It says the average European employees workday, and it's a day in the life of Brunello Cuccinelli. 6 a.m. wake up in his countryside house. This could be a tech journalist for all we know. revel in the silence of nature slowly get dressed at 7.45 a.m. breakfast at the village bar, coffee and a croissant, take some time to plan the day ahead. 8.30 a.m. walk to the office. Morning work block dedicated exclusively to design work. No meetings or gaps. 1 p.m. walk home for lunch. Pasta with olive oil and tomato sauce.

2 p.m. 30 minutes siesta, a crucial part of the farming culture he originally comes from. 3 p.m. afternoon work block, admin, ops, ops, finance. production and plans for the next day. At 5.30 p.m., the whole company stops work and tails the late afternoon off. Takes the late afternoon off. Brunello places a high premium on rest, soulfulness, and personal study. At 8 p.m. he has a light supper, reading from his 5,000 book library. Let's go. 9 p.m., he heads off to the cafe to meet friends. They discuss politics, philosophy, religion, and other subjects late into the night. Jordy, what do you think? Is it a winning formula for a good day? a lot more work in here than the average European workday, I would have to imagine.

So, you know, calling one of Europe's top CEOs, you know, average is sort of, you know, throwing a little bit of shade. But this just made me think, I think we need to do a deep dive on who's more goaded, Brunello Cucinelli or Pietro, Loro Piano. And because a lot of people say Brunello just, like, copied Pietro's, like, whole. like sort of like thing like copied his bit basically and so I think if we did uh you know who's basically the goat uh goat debate fine fat the goat debate basically yeah for for venture capitalist uh you know attire I think that'd be good um I'm a little biased the suit uh suit I ordered

last time I'm in New York I was in New York's Laura Luripiana fabric so pretty excited for that but we really got to nail down the go debate here yeah well you take that side and we'll get someone to debate the Brunello side of the debate and we'll have us a fight and knock out, drag out, right. It'll be great. Well, let's move on to a fantastic promoted post from Wander. They say, feeling spontaneous, we just dropped the price at Wander, Brandon Beach to $395 a night from tomorrow to February 14th and February 17th to 21st. It's one of the most beloved locations near its world famous Brandon Dunes Golf Resort. So if you're a golfer, go check out this wander. It looks wonderful. And we have another post from Wander that I wanted to highlight because this

place, I might be locking this down pretty soon. This looks amazing. So Jerry Lee says, I miss waking up to these views. Stayed in the most stunning house in Palm Springs via Wander. And if you click forward, Ben, there's some closeups here. Really, really iconic. The vertical post doesn't do it justice, but it has this amazing circular pool with a jacuzzi out in Palm Springs. Looks like just a fantastic place to stay, couldn't recommend it enough. And of course, we did. We need to do our first shirtless episode. I think, I think this is, it's so cinematic. It's so cinematic. Like, like, I, I have no idea, you know, everything else would it fit everyone, you know, I'll figure out all those details, but I got to be there. It looks beautiful. I mean, if you're listening to this, it's just,

it's just one of the most beautifully designed buildings. I mean, it looks like it's just incredible. I, I can't say enough nice things about it. So go check it out and just browse wander and see what's out there because there's so many good opportunities for, you know, vacations, off-sites, company off-sites, events, all sorts of different stuff. Highly recommend it. Well, speaking of shirtless podcasts, I hope Theo Vaughn and Alex Wang are ready to strut their stuff because they're doing a podcast together, baby. I love this. I think they met at the inauguration in D.C. There was a photo of them.

I think Theo Vaughn's like chair broke or something or something crazy up. Yeah. One of the Logan Paul brothers like Jake Paul like fell down and and Sam Holman and Alex Wang turned around and Theo Vaughn was there. Really, really funny world colliding moment. But Alex Wang writes, coming soon to a podcast app near you. He's doing the Theo Vaughan show. Theo obviously an amazing comedian.

He's interviewed Donald Trump. He's interviewed tons of comedians, tons of great people. He's really, really created a lot of breath with his show. Now he's got Alex Wang on the founder of Scale AI. Not a lot of B2B enterprise company founders making the podcast circuit, but Alex Wang is cutting his own path. I mean, this is an amazing and very unpredictable collaboration, but I absolutely love it. I only listen to Founders podcast, but if I were going to listen to another podcast, it would

be this specific episode. I also have to, one of our, one of a post from last year that went super viral was a picture of Theo Vaughn in a suit. And I said like Doug Leone, founder of Sequoia, colorized. And like it went super viral. But I don't think most people, I think like half the people didn't realize that it was Theo Vaughan. You've sent me pictures of Theo Vaughn multiple times. And I've been like, that guy. Like, who's the guy? And for some reason, and when I see Theo Van out of context, I'm like, that's not Theo Van. But of course I know who Theo Vaughan is.

It's very odd. He is a chameleon. It's great. Yeah. Well, let's move on to Signal. Signal writes, I haven't posted on Instagram since October. None of my friends have either.

Insta feels like a dying mall. Everything is just ads and influence or noise. Friend content has virtually diminished for me. I open it only because people still send memes. What's your Instagram experience been like? I haven't really been using it in a number of months. I got a new phone and I didn't install it onto like the home screen. So I never really open it.

I check it every once in a while and I basically just see who sent me some memes and that's it. But I haven't posted on it in years. I've just been private. I want to retool it as a as a business account essentially to put some of our content on there. But I don't see it as a way to connect with friends anymore. All of that has moved to iMessage and signal group chats and that type of stuff. I'm not really connecting with friends on any meta products right now, unfortunately. Yeah.

Yeah, I thought that was notable. I mean, I still use Instagram, but more specifically around interests and then connecting with friends, like mostly connecting with my non, like the vast majority of my, you know, like most important friendships now are oriented around tech and work and business and stuff like that, but my non-tech business relationships are mostly on Instagram still. That's where I sort of keep up with, there's housekeeping at my door right now. But I'm going to have to get that in a second. But anyways, I think it's potentially a dying app, at least for Gen Z and potentially sort of

millennials broadly. And the question then becomes what, where to, what's Zuck's next app, right? because that attention is going to go somewhere and it's important for him to own that attention and that if if Instagram goes the way of Facebook right which I legitimately haven't logged into in in you know years what happens to meta's you know business from there I mean that the weird thing is that like it could it could go the way of Facebook and it could still retain a ton of user seconds in the sense that people could just be on there not creating any content, not connecting with friends, purely watching it like Netflix, endlessly scrolling reels.

And that's the revenue profit maximizing thing, which is a little sad because the mission of meta has been for a long time to connect people. And that is cool when they do that. But they do seem to be losing that. I'll read through some more posts. Feel free to get that door if you need to. Let's go to Sean Frank and Ben, you can pull up this image. He says, their love of the game keeps me sane. And he's sharing a meme. He says, mom, can we have authentic, enthusiastic tech journalism? And it's a picture of us. He says, no, there's authentic and enthusiastic tech journalism at home. And at home, it's Kara Swisher. And so we love the support from Sean. I told him he should put an ad for Ridgewallet in this image. He didn't. It was very disrespectful to our culture,

but we'll give him a pass this time. But we love Sean Frank and everything that he does over at the Ridge Wallet. Let's move on to ERISTIC Rex. I literally laughed out loud at this post. I thought it was so funny. He says every Emmett Shear post. Of course, Emmett Shear is the former CEO of Twitch, very active poster on X. At one point, he was the CEO of Open AI for a few days.

And it starts out, Emmett Shear. Does anyone, does anyone have, any good garlic bread recipes. And then it's the show more replies button. And the last reply is Emmett Shear again. Well, if you subscribe to the Dark Forest Theory, sure. But even then, only if the rules of magic are universal, not on those planets. And Aristot Rack says, what are you people saying to him? And I've seen Emmett go down these rabbit holes and debate. He loves debating AI and all these crazy kind of teapot, rationalist themes. He's very deep in the weeds in this stuff.

And it's always a fun time to read through some of the threads that he's gone really deep with people on. Because to the point about Instagram, not really driving connections, X is a great place where you can connect with people and you can have a full-on conversation in public. And I always enjoy finding someone who got completely derailed from whatever they were saying originally and just couldn't stop replying. It's one of the most fun things you find. like he's so native to teapot yet yet when he was briefly open ai CEO there was just so much like it's

everybody was like wow this feels super random when in many ways it was exactly the kind of CEO that sort of rationalist board uh of open AI would have wanted running the company right like sort of this sort of tech intellectual type person who is going to guide, you know, the company very theoretically. Yep. Yeah, culturally, it kind of made sense. You know, you could speak to the nonprofit side, the very deep in the weeds of the philosophy. But then he was a CEO who worked for Jeff Bezos, you know, like he actually does understand

product and revenue and how to grow a company. So, you know, interesting pick, obviously didn't last very long, but I've met him. He's a great guy. I love him. He likes to have fun on X, which is what we're all about. Let's move on to Matt Grimm. I know you're going to have a comment on this, Jority. He says, does flying your company logo over New Orleans with a banner saying, Angel Investors constitute a public solicitation? Is this the market top? And it's a picture of a plane. Someone bought one of those planes that drags a massive banner with some company. I can't even see what company it is. But I think it's a hilarious way to get angel investors. And if it works, out, man, is it going to be a story for the ages? But what do you think, Georgie, should more startups be renting planes to help close their seed rounds? I mean, the main thing is if you need to rent a plane to close, you know, a sub five million

dollar round, you're probably working on the wrong thing or you're not that guy, pal. I think I think I like the creativity and I think that, planes are generally underutilized ad inventory for startups. They're not that expensive, and it's a way to be sort of big and get somebody's attention. I always see them around L.A. flying along the coast with like beer ads. And I'm like, that could easily be an ad for, you know, we should start running ads. You know, big QR code banner out the back. Hey, we know you're at the beach right now, but how would you like to listen to a

niche technology show. Oh, you mean the number one live streaming show in tech? The number one live stream in tech. It's a niche after all, Georgie. Yeah. I mean, also as a consumer, a little bit of a bear signal. If I see an app advertising with angel investors attached, I'm like, is this app even going to be around in three months? They seem desperate. It's rough. I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't install it. Yeah. The main thing is the aesthetics of running an ad for your company, which it was, I couldn't see what it was, but it didn't feel like it probably should raise money. And then bolting on the, oh, by the way. It's so funny that it's bolted on into the back. It's like at the last second, they were like, wait, can we use this to raise money too? Let's just tack this onto the back of the flag.

What a mess. Well, instead of buying a, you know, an ad, if you want to attract some angel investors, why don't you get in the watch game, get something nice on your wrist. When you're out and about, people will stop you. Hey, I like watches. You like watches. Let's do a deal. And so OW Root says normalized small watches. Interesting post. Obviously the best place to get yourself a small watches on bezel. Highly recommend that. I've been looking at some small watches on bezel. There's a lot of good options. And Antonio chimes in here saying Long Jeans grand classics I inherited for my grandfather. I always felt it was small, but this morning I'm feeling it. And so there's some fantastic pictures here, Ben, if you tab forward of iconic photos of men wearing small watches. Of course, there's the

Cartier Tank, worn by Andy Warhol, and there's some other small watches. I think it takes a little bit of of style, a little bit of Genesequa to pull off. But the thing is a pure, the pure function of having a conversation starter that fits nicely under a dress shirt is, I mean, it's just pure function and class. And we saw this with Tom Brady, where he's going bigger and bolder. And it's a, you know, it's an arms race that can only end in nuclear war with the giant flavor of flave clock around your chest and maybe you want to go the other direction a little bit smaller a little bit understated but for the real watch person they'll know they'll be able to clock it yeah cardiac very nice yeah I like

that Muhammad Ali War war there you go you know and and and and I think that there is a there is a little bit of a of a like a feeling in watch culture of the bigger and heavier the watches, the more valuable it is, but also the more masculine it is. It takes a real man to wear a smaller watch, you know? Yep. Anyway, let's move on. Let's go to, oh, we should go to Emmett Shear because we just mentioned him. He says, if someone is consistently getting good results, even though they're obviously doing it wrong,

it means there's something you're missing about how the world works. I like that. Just a good inspirational quote, you know, to check. your priors if you see someone just winning, winning, winning, even though they're doing something way wrong. This can apply to someone who's just hacking on a project using

the wrong programming language, using the wrong tooling, but they're still getting good results. Cracked. And it can apply at the highest levels. I think this applies to content that people see as cringe. People see somebody posting cringe content and they think

oh, that's cringe. Why would you ever do that? And if it's getting, you know, real engagement for every person that thinks it's cringe, there might be five people that that don't and enjoy it. So I think, yeah, I think it's a good way to reframe how the world works. I got to go get the door here. Okay. Well, we love word grammar on this show. And we have a good post from word grammar. Word grammar says if your natural response to 03 is to downsize your team and cut costs, rather than work on a 100x more ambitious project, your NGMI. And I couldn't agree more.

The tools are getting better. It means you can do more. It means you can just pull forward your entire roadmap, build more software, build more products. And that's one of the greatest things about AI. And I think that if you stay small and, everyone else is being more aggressive, using more aggressive tools, but writing millions of lines of code, if that's what they need to do much faster than you,

you're just getting a killed on features, so you've got to compete. And so it's this weird equilibrium where I think the end state will not be less work, but more product, really, which is exciting because we get more good stuff. And I like that. I like this one from Nick Milinovick, one of the friends of the show. He says, you know the animal spirits are back in FinTech when these guys return. Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt, is doing a keynote, and Dom from Fast is, what is he doing?

Short home loans. Buy your new home now. Repay when your old home sells. And so they're back. Both of the legends of the last cycle, a lot of people counted them out. But we love to see an entrepreneur dust themselves off and get back in the game. What you got, Jordy? Yeah, I want to know what, you remember there was that board struggle with Bolt.

it was probably six months ago at this point where reslo had all this yeah he had all this money lined up and he was trying to force people to double down and allow himself to basically regain control of the business i don't know how that really netted out um but it seems like he's back if he's going and and and rep like very blatantly representing bolt at the conference like maybe he's you know figuring it out um it is funny that both of these guys you know we joke about leverage on the show, but it is obviously a joke and for entertainment purposes only. But Dom and Breslo clearly love leverage because, you know, Breslo was building a product to help help employees get, what was it? It was to take out loans against unvested or vested,

you know, illiquid shares. Dom is now building a product to help you buy. I mean, what I actually look through his website before this, and it's kind of an interesting thing where there's this dynamic. He puts it on the website very plainly. You can go see it, which is if you're walking around your neighborhood or somewhere and you see a house that you like, you want to buy it, like good houses go fast. And so if you're sitting on your house and you need to roll that equity into the new home, it can be almost impossible to get a deal done, right? And so having a short term loan that's backed against the equity in your old home that allows you to quickly roll into something else. Theoretically, if everything goes to plan, would work pretty well.

So I think it's an interesting concept and I believe in second chances and I hope both of them figure it out. Yeah. Let's close on Santiago, good friend of the show. It's the last slide in the deck. He says, Friday Energy and posts a video of a weightlifter. I thought this guy was going to deadlift this. Is that him?

That's Santiago, yeah. No way. I thought there was a chance, but this is so insane. Because I thought he was going to deadlift it because it's like 300 pounds or something like that. And I was like, okay, he's doing it. He's hang cleaning it or power cleaning it from the floor multiple times. It's like one of the most impressive lifts I've ever seen. So congratulations to Santiago.

go. This is Brother of the Week material, in my opinion. It's going to be a crazy week. So I don't know if we're going to give away yet. But keep posting stuff like this on X. I don't care if it gets 200 likes, 2,000 likes, 2,000 likes, 2 million likes. It's just positivity on the timeline. And I'm here for it. An absolute dog. That's a great place to end. Well, thanks for watching everyone. Please go give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. leave us a review and put an ad for your company, a company you work for, a company you just like. Throw it in the comments. We'll read it live on the show. And yeah, follow us on X. Stay tuned for more. We got plenty more coming this week. Salute. We'll see you tomorrow, brothers. See you

have a good one. Bye.