Tech Brew Ride Home - The 2,000th Episode Spectacular

Episode Date: February 21, 2025

Well, kinda... But we do talk about how the show started, get a bit into the process of what I do every day. But mostly we get deep into where AI is going, my fears for silicon valley if the M&A activity doesn't pick up, why I got into investing, what it means if Silicon Valley is bigger than the government (maybe?) what it's like when that weird dude you talk to at a tech meetup becomes a billionaire, and why this is still the greatest job I've ever had. Thank you all for listening. Here's to 2,000 more episodes. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the TechMeme Right Home podcast. I'm your host as always Brian McCullough. This is a special one.

This is the 2000th episode of this show. Yes. Air horn, sorry. No. Here's our usual co-host, Chris Messina, who has not been on the show for at least six months or so, right? So, hey, Chris. Yeah, hello, hello. Thanks for helping me do this.

I, you know, this is not the most elaborate thing in terms of celebrations. But for those of you in the audience, and I'll say this is the one time, you should have an option if you're on a desktop to request a question. Like Wesley is going to be the first one. We'll bring up you request. It'll sit on my screen and I'll bring you up. But Chris, 2000 episodes. Like I was thinking this morning, like if I sat here and counted to 2000, that would take forever. If you could even remember.

You know, past like 25. Like if we, if we assume that it takes me, let's call it six hours every time, times 2,000, that's 12,000 hours divided by 24. That's 500 days. That can't be right. I did the math wrong. Okay. So, by the way, also the seven-year anniversary is May 5th, so everything is coinciding. Okay, so the idea here is we are going to hopefully have questions about tech.

And in fact, the first one is coming right now from our good friend Wesley. Wesley. We're making a habit of this. So we meet again. Yes, we were on Twitter together this weekend. The great Wesley Falkner, Wes, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. My question is doing the show day after day, week after week.

what is autopilot for you? Like, what are the things that you can go through the whole show and not realize that you're doing? Because you just kind of get into this mode. When you can finish it, it's like, did I do X, Y, and Z? But you know you did because it's just automatic to you. I mean, all of the things like, you know, the editing. I feel like sometimes I make mistakes because it's so on autopilot with the editing. And I notice it usually when I've uploaded it.

But yeah, it's just, you know, seven years of always watching, paying attention to the news. Like, I know instantly when it's like, well, that's a story I'll do tomorrow. So like, I used to, early on, I used to really, you know, have to figure out like, okay, is this a story that's good to do? Like, now I know that instantaneously. The editing's instantaneous. But Wesley, I think the thing that I've said before is I have no idea what I'm. said on the show today. Like, like what stories we did or whatever, like as soon as I hit published within five minutes, if my wife or somebody says, what did you talk about today? I

can't remember. So it's just one of those. Severance, but podcast form. Yeah. So I guess it's all on autopilot now. It's actually relatively easy to do now, I suppose. And one, one thing that I said that I learned early on, and this is the key, if anybody's doing audio where you have to read something, I learned within the first three days that I have to perform it. Like, if I just read, it's no good. Like, I actually have to, like, put some sort of, it's not acting, but I have to put, like, some sort of, like, juice into it where it's, and so that's also why, like, I write the scripts in my voice, so, like, I'm saying things that, you know, feel like it's just me talking, so.

Listen, everyone in the chat, feel free to ask a question to come on stage. One of the questions that I want to throw out to the audience, if anybody's out there, and Wesley, maybe you could talk to this too. I've been thinking of trying to find a story or find an interview person to talk about the idea of whether or not people, software developers in the trenches, are you starting to feel AI breathing down your neck in the sense? that I've seen stories recently from a lot of tech platforms and a lot of just employers saying that they are now actively planning on hiring less or where there's new projects and they're like, we can lower our budget by 20% because we won't need as many hands. I'd be curious to know if anybody's seeing that where they work or Chris and Wesley, you know, have you been hearing that from people at all?

Most of what I've seen on my side is less hiring on the developer side, not directly because of AI, but because for the larger companies, because AI costs a lot of money to develop and is not bringing in the revenue. And so in order to save from one bucket, they steal from Peter to pay Paul. And the only way they do that is to reduce their staff. I know that Microsoft has, and I think Google specifically said that they've produced more code via AI than they have forever, but you still need skill reviewers. So there's the bottleneck of reviewing the code, not just creating the code. And that's the part that will take time, and you need to make sure that it works. And then there's tests on top of that. So it makes good coders better.

It makes great coders more efficient. but there's most of the buckets if you look at how much time someone who writes code does code it's usually what maybe max 30% of their time because it takes a lot of research it takes a lot of thought and there's also meetings on top of that there's other deliverables and reports so it is helping but there's still quality issues security issues and a lot of things that even if you are generating a code you still have to double check that that still takes the time and that's still the bottleneck right now. Wes, can you just provide a little bit of background on where your perspective is coming from?

I work in developer relations, and so my role is to work with developers directly for multiple organizations. My last role, that was the most prominent one, is I was working for developer relations for AWS. Cool. To be clear, I'm not saying, you know, AI is coming and everybody's going to get laid off. I'm more curious, is it affecting budgeting for projects where it's, like because maybe maybe it's not we don't need as many programmers it's that because you can use AI to produce code 50% faster or using 50% of your code is AI is it okay this this new project that we thought needed a team of 30 only needs a team of 15 and we can do it in three

weeks less if if people are starting to see that I haven't seen it I haven't seen yet I've got a Stuart, this might be related. So Stuart, come on up. Hi, guys. Yeah. I heard the term last night vibe coding. Yes. This is the new term.

I'd been doing, right? I'm coder. Let me put it more specifically. The last time I coded, I don't think any of you were alive. But due to AI, I'm now coding. And I'm building 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 line application. that's surprising for nobody more than me actually run. What does that mean?

In the days of what's it take to build a new startup, I was able to go from a concept to let me see if I could conceive of it to, wait, here's an actual application to, well, why couldn't we roll that out and make a production? Now, Wesley, I know it's not ready for production. I know it's on any of those things. But doesn't that change the dynamic where, you no longer need the $30,000, the friend of the developer, anything like that to bring something to market to get the test to go,

is this interesting? Is this worth me investing time, energy effort into? Doesn't that dynamic change? I know that's not the same as the 100 developer mega project for an AWS tweet or something like that, but at that other end of the margin, it feels like it starts to take technology-oriented people and turn them into somebody that can be a CEO and a CEO, even though they never studied programming.

Yes, but do you know how to scale regionally and geographically? Do you know all the different laws and regulations in the places where you want to roll out your applications? Absolutely not. Even though if you are able to be as a coder with moderate skills, know all the information to make a product you don't know everything there is to make a business. So it's great for a proof of concept, but I bet you if so went back to truckload of money into your backyard, you would hire some other coders, would you know? I would 100% hire some other coders.

So no question. I guess the related question is I look, and the only thing I see out there is Cloud 3.5 Sonet that everybody is anointed as that's the best one for coding. And yet Deepseek R1 comes out, right? V3 is supposedly good. Elon drops Grock 3, that's supposedly the answer. Sam drops 03, and that's supposedly the answer. And yet everybody I know who code says, the only thing that can code worth the dam has 3-5 sonnet.

What I don't know is why? And do you folks feel that or do you disagree? I ended up buying a large Mac because I figured this would be the year I'd be able to get Olamo running with something local and doing it, and nothing I've tried comes close. for a mere mortal. It may be fine for programmers who just needed to check stuff, but for somebody needs to develop via prompting, nothing else works. I'll just say, just really quick. I don't want to take over the show, but use all of them

because they're opinionated in the way that they develop, and especially if you're talking about parts of the code as opposed to other parts of the code, just say, review this code, what improvements would you make and just do that to every single one of them? And they'll make iterations that some will find and some won't find. So they all approach it differently. So even if you, there's no de facto answer on this front and you have to keep trying to figure out what problems it's good at solving. And even if it fixes the problems, another model might find some security patches or ways to make it more secure or hardened. Or even visual changes and layout changes, like the linting is different from some of them even. So just keep trying.

All right. So when you guys take a look at the AI wars out there, which you guys. live. Brian, I know you report on it frequently and everybody's trying to top everybody else and it's all benchmark soup and who knows what's great. How do you handicap the race these days? That's a good question because that has that changes. I mean, it's, it was less than a month ago that deep seat happened, right? And that came out of the blue. Yeah. And, you know, I do use Claude exclusively. I I don't do any programming, but yeah, it's, so Sonnet, and Sonnet 3.5 is what I use when I'm using AI.

So, um, I don't know because, and we're going to get to the varietals thing in a second here, because this is in the chat too. Um, I, I don't know that it, unless somebody, that's why people keep waiting for GPT5, unless somebody comes with that next step change. Right. Like it was from three to four. Um, I, I, don't know that it matters because like we're seeing, like different things are good for different

use cases and stuff like that. In the chat here, Johnny said, I am not a developer, but I am a macro creator. And 100% of my macro building has started with an AI query in the past six months, even as a non-developer that is telling to me. And then things like, didn't I do the story? See, this is me not remembering. Did I do the story about the TikTok, but for Wikipedia, I did? Yes. And think of it, that's an example of something that was production ready in two hours. Right. And all done on AI.

Yeah. I don't. People turning new ideas into reality quickly in letting it catch fire. I'm sure, as Wesley said, I'm sure that went crash and burned pretty quickly because nobody built it to scale, this, that, and anything else. But it proved there was interest. It was intriguing. It was relevant. And now it's probably worth building it correctly.

So, Dave. I would just jump in on that one. Because it seems like what I've been observing, and this vibes coding thing is one way to describe this phenomenon where non-developers, such as myself, suddenly have access to coding fingers or fingertips that previously, like, I used to have to cajole people to look at my stupid code that would never compile or run or whatever.

And now I have, you know, a wing person or, as Microsoft calls it, a copilot, to kind of like walk me through and get me through the dumb shit that's like just based on some vernacular or jargon that's, you know, code speak. And, you know, you miss a semicolon or whatever here or there. And, you know, it screws you all up. So what I've been thinking about, because it starts out with developers and technical people, I think being able to imagine what's possible and therefore having less fear and being willing to try things. And then seeing where there is either friction or pushback or where the software just can't, you know, build a thing.

and then they'll find their way around it. So they don't get stopped as often. However, to your point about you building 5,000 lines of code that does stuff, this to me suggests that over this year and into the next year, we'll probably start to think of generative AI as more of a medium. And the reason why I'm starting to think this way is just like what happened 20 years ago, as social networks became social media, the network was the tool. The tool was a way to network and connect everyone together.

And what's happening now is that there's a, generational willingness to sort of just throw stuff out, build a little app, throw it up on Vursell or some other hosting context, let it live for five minutes, ten minutes, two days, two weeks. You know, maybe they make some money, maybe they do a meme coin sort of thing, and then they scrap it and move on. And it doesn't need to become production scale. It doesn't need to become something that they stand up an entire apparatus around to support. So I think it raises this question as to what is the half-life of software going forward? And how long do we need to persist software if you develop an awareness of what is possible to be created on the fly

conversational to solve your immediate need which might be a week long might be two weeks long and it's simpler to just recreate it every time you need it as opposed to build the software that has to be maintained you have to fix the bugs you have to do security things it's just a completely different mindset in terms of what problem you're solving if both use once that's right then treating it as a medium like paper where you know you generate something it's good, solve your problem, and then you ditch it. And I find that that's kind of what's been happening in my world. Okay. And Chris and West, just to finish up with I'd have Brian, how do you guys look at the AI race right now when you look at everybody going after everybody and what does the world

look like? I have a lot of, I guess I would push back on Brian's thought that GPT5 is some mythical unicorn that's going to kind of like end the race, you know, in all races to come. Well, no, I feel like people are, I feel like people were waiting and worrying that that was something that was going to happen. And now since it's not happening, I do think it's this world where it's all kind of even. It's like an even playing field. Well, I guess, so maybe I would look at it differently, which is that we're leapfrogging or a lot of what's happened in other industries that are atom-based is happening in the digital world. So I think cars are kind of like the best representation of this, where it took 100 years for us to get to like the, you know, electric vehicle.

And now, you know, with the combustion engine, essentially you have a lot of fashion and style that determines which car you might buy. But under the hood, a lot of the components, the chassis, like all that stuff is, is more or less commoditized. In a similar way, you know, if these models run out of new data to train on, I mean, obviously there's always kind of like new information that's happening. There's the reality. So I'll give you an example. I've been using windsurf to code a raycast extension. And I keep getting stuck in OAuth, which just boils my blood

because as a co-author of Oath, it's sort of like I screwed myself and I should go back in the past and kill myself. And we should just stick with passwords everywhere. Anyways, so I'm dealing with this problem because Claude seems to not be trained

on the latest Raycast AI documentation. And so while I can use RAG or bring in the current docs to get me further along, I'm dealing with three to four different components in different libraries and different systems, and I'm not quite sure which version of the docs the LM is using to get to that final outcome.

So point being, when it comes to thinking about the experience that these products are providing, it is a little bit like the car and like the console. And like whenever I get into a rented car now and I try to use the console and it's like it doesn't have Apple car play or something. Like I just don't like, what is this terrible thing? And that feels like using LM Studio or a Lama or some local, LLM that doesn't have the niceties that a product person has layered on to Claude or

onto chat GPT. So that's where if you're asking for the horse race, there was a big, as usual, long-winded way to say, that the models themselves commoditize. Inference and speed becomes a differentiator. And so that requires compute. And then there's the experience on top in terms of anticipating what people are trying to do and to make that transparent and obvious and easy. And the deep secret was valuable because it showed sort of like the view source moment for

LLMs, it showed the thinking and the reasoning. And so that becomes a real competitive advantage in terms of how well it's able to show you what it's thinking. So you can model its thoughts and then speak to it more effectively. Chris, is that your idea for births, varieties? Yeah, okay. And in the chat, David said, or somebody said, do you wish you had trademarked it? You know, that's the question that I had about the hashtag and about Barcamp and all the

and typically, like, I win when these ideas become commoditized and they become part the mainstream conversation. And I would say that vertical AI has won out over AI varietals, but I feel like directionally we were in the right direction. Right. So you and I have talked about this offline. We called it AI varietals, but in the last literally six weeks, it seems like everyone has come out of the woodwork and are like, you know, all the value is going to be at the application layer. And we're like, exactly. And that was that was our thesis from day one. Because I, like, yeah. Let's speak to that though, just for a little bit. If that's the case, then, you know, when you're thinking of horse races, really it depends on what you're thinking about because then you're really only talking about the large models.

And, okay, then Open AI is the only one winning. What did they just announce this week that they're like 300 million monthly active users or something like that? So from a perspective of who's using somebody's product the most, they're winning, and then you've got the other, you know, perplexities and all those folks. But the question would be, have we seen an application layer winner yet? And Chris, you and I have seen, you know, there's 15 different players in, say, AI for legal, you know. And we've invested in specific AI players for medical environments and things like that. But have we, does anybody, can anybody think of like a real winner? At the application layer where it's like, I know there are unicorns, but it's like, oh, yeah, this is transforming an industry or, you know, blowing up.

Not yet. But it's coming. And Brian, I just want to tell you, it's not a week without at least five of your podcasts. Well, thank you. As a daily show, that's pretty good. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. The, uh, have I ever told the story of how the show got started?

No. So the book was coming out in 2008 and then the I was talking to. Which book for the listeners who have joined this recently? History of the Internet? How the Internet happened. Yeah. Thank you. Which, by the way, I've done this before too, but there's the box right here where I stick my head in.

Oh, right. There's a microphone. Yeah, there's a microphone in there. It's like a microwave for his head, basically. It's just like. Yeah. It's just this. It's got sound foam inside it.

And so instead of having to make my whole room... He kind of puts his head through like a doggie door that's like all foam-incrusted. It is. That's exactly what it is. So, right, but I didn't want to have to foam up this whole room. For anybody who wants to compete with Brian, now you know the secret. So, right, I sit here. I type up the script every day. I put it on my phone, put my head in the box.

And that's how I... So everything that I do is right here. Although I do have a separate studio in my office in Dumbo, but it's still the same sort of setup. Anyway, I'll do this real quick because we got another question. Thank you, Matt. So hold on. We'll get to you. And by the way, if anybody wants to dip off, especially you, Wesley, you're being very kind. Yes, I appreciate it. So the story of the show is I was talking to a bunch of media entities about doing a tech podcast because the book was coming out and was getting attention. And I mentioned to Gabe Rivera. who's the owner of TechMeme that I said, you know, if I do, it was going to be like a talking heads thing like this, where every week you get a circle of people. And I was like, everybody's doing that, which that was seven years ago. So everybody was doing that seven years ago. Like we couldn't even imagine. But I said to Gabe, you know, all I'll be doing is just reading tech meme every day and then just regurgitating it on the show. Have you ever thought of doing a podcast? And he's like, yeah, I have, but I wouldn't know how to do that.

Gabe and I have been friends for years, et cetera. So I was just like, hey, let's, let me just do what TechMeme does, which is, you know, I always call it TLDR as a service. Let me just do a 15-minute show where I pick the best stories, read the tweets, read the stories, etc. Bing, bang, boom, and that's it. And he's like, sure, great. And we cut a deal where I technically own the show. I have editorial control, but I kick back some of the revenue to him. And then I, I have access to the tech meme back end, so I can see the editors. That's the biggest advantage that working with tech meme gives me is I can see about 20 to 15 minutes before a story pops what they're about to post because they have a whole automated system for seeing when things pop and then seeing the chatter around it. So I can know quickly what the big stories are going to be.

And then also, like, because tech meme is well known, like, we get embargoed stories and things like that. So I'll know, like, I knew that that Microsoft stuff was coming at the same time as the iPhone stuff the other day. But I was like, screw it. I got to do the iPhone now. I'll save it for tomorrow. But I knew two hours ahead of time that that was coming. So anyway, the bottom line was I said, Gabe, let's give this a try. and he said, sure, and then the rest is history.

And we kind of just made it up in a 20-minute phone conversation. And here we go. How many listeners now? At our height, I believe we had 75,000. I would call it 40-ish thousand now. And, yeah, there's natural audience attrition, but then I don't, this is too inside baseball. But the changes that Apple made to have,

they count downloads killed, killed daily shows because long story short, if you listen to a weekly show, you only have to, you can miss five episodes before they stop downloading. But a daily show, if you miss five episodes, that means you just missed one week, right? And so, listen, I have heard things like the Daily by the New York Times lost like 50% downloads. And I believe it because I saw what happened to my downloads too. But anyway, so still a great audience. I love you all. And even though it's down from what maybe its height was, I mean, we still churn in new people all the time. So I want to bring Matt up and I will let him ask his question. Hi, Matt. Hello, all. Nice to be on with you. Congratulations, 2,000 shows, Brian. Thank you so much. Absolutely awesome.

But I did put in the comment, I was also going to shower you with praise and you have been warned. So I missed that. I might not have brought you up. Okay, go ahead. I started listening, I think episode one, because I have been listening to Mac OS Ken for 17 years. Every day I still do. And you put something on his show. He mentioned it for you went live.

And you have been my ride home. I'm on the West Coast. So you've been my ride home for all those years. And I will say it is a masterclass and understanding technology in business. I'm not in technology. I'm an operations leader. I've been running contact centers for 30 years, but I've always been a step ahead of understanding technology

because I listen to it every day. And I always tell people, you can't just listen to a couple days and get it. But you listen to every day, every week, every month, and you start to connect the dots of what this organization is doing and how people are raising funds for new companies. So thank you, absolutely. I understand way more about technology than I ever did in my life. My question now that I have showered you at first.

raised. Yes, thank you. I have been in the contact center space my entire career, and that with every new technology, we think, how do we make things automated so we don't have to hire people? And contact center leaders are not salivating at the idea of AI, but CEOs are salivating at how do we deploy this. Contact centers, and you said this on your show tons of times, that's going to be, should be one of the first proving grounds. But as AI started to get more popular or smaller organizations realize they can't they can't afford to get a bespoke model for their organization to make it cost um cost effective so my question is from your perspective when does that start to scale down to where smaller organizations because that's in my and i'm i have my

my my blinders on because i've been a contact center geek for 30 years but that's going to be where we stop hiring people people are going to we're going to maybe not have mass layoffs but we'll organizations will figure out pretty quickly how to not have to hire people with AI, but the cost of that has to come down and curious your thoughts on that. Is your question, as opposed to say there's 10 different startups that are, hey, this is AI, but for law firms, you're saying the ability for a law firm or a smaller organization to, in the same way that they would maybe run their own server locally or have their own database running locally, you're saying create an AI specifically bespoke for whatever it is we're doing, our team of 30,

people. Is that essentially what you're asking? Yeah, absolutely. Like, when does the bespoke size get small enough and affordable enough for companies to take it? It's getting there, especially because, you know, you can run these open source models on laptops right now. Chris and I have been talking to a really interesting startup that's literally doing that. So I guess that's coming now because, obviously you can run things on small machines, right? The question is, is the technical ability to spin something like that up? Is that dispersed enough that people would know how to do it? But then again, I guess you could have AI do it for you. I don't know. Chris, what are your thoughts on if we're there at that bespoke level yet? Yeah, I think I guess I've been thinking about this from a slightly

the different vantage point maybe for a couple years, and it could be that eventually more companies need to behave in some ways like software companies in order for that revolution to ultimately occur. It also depends on what type of organizations and businesses and the types of businesses and the types of problems that customers have when talking about customer service and customer support. To sort of put a wrap around this, I sort of think of customer service as being part and parcel to the product experience currently. And the example that I like to use lately is with Sunbasket, which is the sort of Blue Apron competitor, meal service that I subscribe to.

And, you know, they essentially trade in commodities like, you know, produce, organic vegetables and things like that. And every now and then, you know, some avocado shows up that's, you know, bruised or I've got some crushed, you know, onion or something, whatever it is. And I go to their website and I go through their customer service agent, which is available both as SMS and as a chatbot on their website. And I go through sort of like the issue tree. And by the end of that tree, I've reported my issue.

They issue me a credit, which is oftentimes a multiple of whatever the thing would cost in the grocery store. And I go on my very way. And so that self-service action is paid for by my membership in the cost of the good itself. And so one, the business is set up around this sort of almost expose its inner working as an API such that they can build customer service experiences on the front end of that. And then secondly, they've built it into their business model so that they can absorb the

cost that come from those service moments. And so for me, that's the totality of the product experience, whereas when I've tried to get in touch with other delivery services in the past, it's like a wall of just kind of like, oh, you've got to talk to this person or this person, or there's like this specialized agent that handles that one. And it's a horrible experience. So it seems like AI does a couple things. One, it sort of allows for block and tackling of those initial, let's say, annoyances that are going to come up a lot.

That's just part of doing business. And they can be dealt with. And it's just part of your business model. Then for those more complex issues, for example, I was one of the earliest users of fellow products makes a bunch of coffee products. And one of them that they came out with recently is called the Aiden. And so I was one of their first people to buy the thing. And of course, I got one of the early units, which was not fully functional. And so I ended up kind of like going back and forth and got escalated through their support queue and like all these things.

And obviously building hardware is different. But nonetheless, I was able to get a level of support because they'd automated a lot of the front end defense that would, you know, take up a lot of their time. So it seems like that's maybe the pathway forward where you get an off the shelf model to handle a lot of basic stuff. You hook it up to your internal docs. You actually expose more of your internal working so that customers become more aware of. of what you can actually do and what remediations are possible. And then for those higher order things, maybe for more loyal customers, which, of course, also requires you to know your customer,

then you can provide them with a level of like White Club service or VIP service that really differentiates you and builds longer-term loyalty over time. So how far away are we from organizations at a scale starting to do this? So I think some are doing it. So I'll give you another place to look. Shopify has an app called Shop. It's a purple little app in the app store, and you can download it. And what's amazing is that Shopify is taking all of the sellers that use Shopify as their

backend, and they're basically building sort of an Amazon competitor. So they have all these shops that are out there pushing and selling through their own social media marketing and other direct-to-consumer types of things. But then in the shop app itself, you can search across all these different entities. And a lot of those entities, I would say, are doing what I'm describing and are building their organizations from the ground up to be almost like an API-first, organization. There's a lot of older organizations like Sears or, I don't know if Sears is still

around, like, Best Buy. Like, you know, you can barely like kind of talk to anybody who maybe Best Buy is a little different, but like for the most part, a lot of those organizations are mired in a type of bureaucracy that's very top down and less responsive, I think, to using these tools and deploying them and to giving a lot more agency to people at the edges. And so I think organizations that are set up that way are probably more likely to be able to, you know, meet the moment, be more responsive to social media. and they understand that being as close to the customer as possible in all interactions is the thing that's going to drive their business.

In the chat, David says that he was at an event lately, and HP were pushing their solution to his group, literally for what we're talking about. I mean, if you've been selling, like, printer cartridges for all this time, you better damn well have, like, you know, they don't have to anymore. They have an AI hardware product, an AI wearable that they can now start. You mean? Yes. So yeah, they'll rebrand it as inhumane. Yes.

Thank you. Thanks for your comments. Yes, yes, yes. Thanks, Matt. I'm going to bring Mike up because this is an interesting one that also Chris, I think, you can do too. How do you out if need be, right? Oh, if you want to go, you can just leave. Oh, okay.

Or just mute. Like, I can turn off your, I can turn you off. No one can see you now. But I don't know if that means you're gone, gone. Actually, I can't get them back. So I just kicked him off. Anyway, maybe if you can, if you want to come back, you can. Okay.

Oh, wait. I tried to bring somebody in. Oh, crap. Oh, Mike. There you are. Yeah, Mike says. Hi, Mike. How are you?

How's going? Yeah, Brian, I know you're like a big history fan. And so I was just curious about like how you think about AI. I mean, I'm, I feel like agents are really going to change our lives once they actually work. And I don't know. Like, I keep coming back to like the Azte. Like, is this the Spanish finding the Aztecs and being like, yeah, you guys thought you needed to like, you know, sacrifice people every day to make the sun go up.

And it's like the equivalent would be, yeah, you guys like have to work 40 hours a day and have billionaires own like a ton of the wealth. Like, is life going to change that fast for us where we're going to look back and wonder like how we live this way? So do you guys remember at the end of one show I had insomnia one night and I had that analogy of the ships, which by the way, this book, The Sea and Civilization, I was not reading it for AI analogies, by the way. Literally, I was reading about the history of humankind on the oceans. But this is an example of how doing this job for seven years, I can be doing anything and I can find analogies. for stuff that's going on in tech. How do I think about it? I keep going back and forth on that,

and I'm coming back to the idea that this is just a different type of compute. Like, again, and I keep using this as like the maximalist thing where, okay, if we do get AGI, fine, God only knows what's going to happen, including possibly, you know, blowing up the planet, and or none of us have to work again because everything is solved and all the answers are given to us. But it's in the long interregnum between getting there.

And I do think it's a long interreg. I don't actually believe AGI will come in the next 20 years. And I don't know, Chris, I'd be curious to see what you think about that. But in the meantime, this is just a new type of compute, like the introduction of databases, like anything. thing. It's just, it's a new way to tackle problems using software. And so while I do think that there will be this Cambrian explosion of new solutions and new companies to provide those solutions, I'm coming back to thinking that this is just the next stage. It's not a phase change as much as it's the next evolution of what compute is. Now, I, like I said, I wax and way in

on that and sometimes I think, you know, we're going to cure cancer. And again, I'm not saying that in a pessimistic way because I'm still investing because I still see great ideas and great companies coming up. So for me, I'm maximalist on like there's a lot of stuff coming here. But your question specifically being, are we going to look back five years from now and be like, I can't believe we lived without this. I'm not feeling that way. But Chris, where are you these days. The hardest part, I feel like in this whole era, I mean, at least for like the last two to three years, is, it comes down to definitions and what is like what. And the pace of evolution of creating new techniques for taking advantage of these technologies requires that we are

also able to name them and then from those names be able to then talk about them and reason about them. So an agent, you know, simply is software that kind of runs itself and can somewhat introspect. And when it runs up against a roadblock, you know, like whether it needs a user to complete a task or whether it needs authorization or whether it's stuck because it gets confused, you know, it's able to deal with that error in a way where as opposed to just dumping out to like the log, it can sort of like be like, okay, here's what we might do next. Because now we have enough training data that we've captured where there's enough patterns and pattern matching to say here's how this has been solved in the past.

And what may come to be the real realization from this era is that like 95% of problems are repetitive and therefore if they're solved once, then we just need to socialize the understanding and awareness of how to solve those things. And the real interesting things will happen in that 5%. Now, that isn't to say that there won't be trillions and trillions of things to do in that 5%. It's simply to say that the way in which we've captured, information, knowledge, and then distilled it into wisdom, has been predicated on a type of education system that takes 20 years to produce a human that can operate in the modern world. And what may be

the case is that we're able to get to a human that can operate within six to seven years, but it requires a much deeper moralistic framework to help them make sense of what they should and shouldn't do that is harmful to them or harmful to people around them. Now, that's maybe not a very interesting direction to go in for technologists and people who like to deal with like, you know, ones and zeros. But realistically, I guess I look at this from a behavioral perspective, from a cultural perspective, and the divide between, for example, like the generation that's in the White House now and is making decisions about how government should be structured or destructured versus the generation that's coming up now and lives as Gen.A.I. Natives is going to be so

vastly different in terms of what they expect of their environment that I think that that's like if anything they're the Mayans and you know we're the Spanish and you know like they've they've already had their alien intelligence conversation this brings me back real this brings me back real quick I almost did a story this week about I didn't do it because you always hear things like this but people complaining that oh the kids the programmers coming up today that are AI natives can't really functionally code you know like Yeah, but like I feel like that's, again, it's such a boomer comment. That's why I didn't do it.

That's why I didn't do it. But I'm like, go ahead, Mike. I just want to make one point like, yeah. So transactions costs, if you think about those, like so much of what we do our activity is limited by transaction costs. Like it's, it has to like go through our head to decide what to do. And like, I just feel like with agents like, if we're able to get a model where they can, you have something online, like representing you, like everybody's

represented and it can make decisions with other things in a way that's controlled and that we understand. That's a whole different level. And like I don't want to like go crazy with it, but I started thinking about that recently. And I don't know, I'm more optimistic now. So are you building, building space you're observing just using economics and yeah, curious about where things will go. So it's all pure armchair speculation and I'm in our chair. So it works. I mean, I think like what you're raising, I mean, it's funny because like Sacha was actually talking about this in his Dorcas, like, podcast, like, conversation, right? So I've, I mean, and this stuff we've been working on for a very long time, there was a thought that your email inbox is

kind of like a personal API. And essentially, there are a set of tasks or work or whatever it is that are dumped into this box. And then you get to have agents that are all collaborating to kind of make sense of whatever's in your inbox. Now, of course, this is very subjective based on your personal inbox and what goes into your inbox. But you could just imagine that there might be bids for you to do things, which are oftentimes offers, you know, buy this thing, buy that thing. And especially if these are time-limited things, and say we want to buy tickets to, like, the weekend, and they're going to sell out. Well, then if you have an agent that's moderning your inbox, they can go buy those tickets,

like, right away, and ideally at the lowest cost. And so your agent and your interests are aligned, and you may have deputized your agent to take that action without prior authorization. In other cases, where there's no, you know, Command Z undo, the risk to having your agent just do stuff, like book stuff on your calendar with like your arch nemesis, like you don't want that to happen. So there is this question of kind of path escalations and creating systems that are somewhat sensitive to the cultural context of the decisions that we make every day, you know, that are kind of like background operations and they're so fast for us.

But that's because we are social creatures, whereas like agents and LMs are not social creatures. they're programmed to act like them, but they have no sense. They have no reason. They are not aware of how this might affect your marriage or your partnership or your child's life or whatever in a way that's like meaningful. And so I think that's an important thing to take into consideration. I like the idea of eBay snipe bots for everyone. I'm bringing up Dan because Dan is going to take us off AI,

which is probably a good thing to give us another topic, which actually this is a good question Dan so thanks for coming on uh yeah for sure thank thank you for taking a question a long time fan of the show i think i've started listening back in i want to say like maybe like 2017 2017 2018 something like that and yeah have it have you as my my ride home after some some good days in the office after like fixing whatever problems i had to and yeah i just thought of this because um i feel like with with one of the shows that i listen to um they have a second So they sometimes have a segment where they talk about, well, mainly about the Appalvision Pro,

but about other things related to AR, VR, VR, and everything. And I feel like, I think the thing that we're dealing with right now is, I feel like it has so much potential with what's out there right now, like, like, whether it comes to, like, spatial computing or gaming or anything like that. And part of me has always just been wondering, like, with as much between, potential as it has right now, like, like, what could be that next, like, killer, that next killer feature or, or what have you, that could really put it into the limelight to make it more accessible to, um, other not there. For, for AR and VR. Um, he's, AR, VR, VR, the Vision Pro. Yeah. I, you know, I, I, I think I've telegraphed this on the show, but I think that, um, we're going to see, you know, spectacles are. are going to be the big thing for the next three years.

But what you need to think about is it's not going to be the full jump to AR like they tried to do with Google Glass all those years ago. It's going to be coming feature by feature. They're going to be adding cameras to your ear pods. There will be some glasses that will just like, maybe it won't overlay maps and stuff, but it'll just overlay the text messages that you're getting tab. on your watch. I think it's going to be coming incrementally so that five, 10 years from now, you will have, you will be walking down the street with full AR experience and not just overlay

on vision. It'll also be sensing around you with your watch, with your wearables. And things like Humane, we're trying to get to this. But again, I feel like it'll come incrementally feature by feature and it won't so it won't just be these glasses do everything these glasses do one thing and then a second thing and a third thing and a fourth thing and then it interacts with your earbuds and then you maybe do have a pin somewhere on your body that then does additional other features i think that the mistake that some people made right now we're trying to do too much in this uh first phase yeah exactly and i i feel like yeah way back when i feel like yeah france at google they were they were a little too soon when it came to on google less and perhaps um it in more recent years

humane too soon with their with their um with their with their with their pin and everything and yeah i think maybe perhaps like some in the future they could look look back on what was tried back then and like like basically use the use that as inspiration to make things better it's it's really hard uh when it comes to designing products that people will adopt and integrate into their lives. Like the step change in terms of like functionality and an ecosystem, both in terms of like integrations with things that you might already have, but also like, let's say like the Apple Watch has all these bands and all these other

like fashion accessories and items is necessary for people to move or migrate to a different watch factor because you have to be as good as whatever is there, which as a fashion piece. I mean like the idea of like telling time is quite a commodity. And so for the Apple Watch to come out and to succeed, as it did, meant that it had to be both better than the existing technology enablement and also had to fit into a fashion context. And so from a similar perspective, I think one of the headwinds for a lot of these products, and I think the meta-ray bands are the ones that are kind of right on the edge where they're providing utility in a way that's very subtle and it doesn't feel like technology. whereas a lot of people who work in the tech world want to bring more technology into the lived experience, whether it's like the Vision Pro,

and it's like an amazing piece of technology, but you have to go there. It's a destination. And so if you don't already have that destination, that destination currently is like flying on an airplane, international long distance, or watching a movie at home, it's hard to imagine replacing your current set of behaviors

with the current sort of offering. Now maybe generationally, a younger generation comes up and they're in schools, and instead of a Macintosh, they're getting a Vision Pro, and that trains them to be in these isolated spaces, and then socially, it's normal for them. But I feel like trying to gain adoption of these technologies within the same generation that's grown up on desktop computers and on tablet screens is a hard sell, just because of the convenience, the ability to leave it behind, like there's all this charging apparatus. There's just so many things that make it easy that's

taken 10 to 15 years to build up in the environment that replacing it is going to require like a leap above. Chris, since we haven't had you on for a while, so I haven't been able to pick your brain on stuff like this. Two quick questions. Number one, have you used the meta raybans? Have you played with them at all? A friend of mine had them the other night. And I was kind of surprised, although his summary and experience matches a lot of what I've heard about it, where basically they'll use it for like Spotify. They'll use it for basic video and camera recording. They'll have it out in the world and they kind of forget that, again,

they're like, you know, technology glasses. They're first and foremost a fashion object. And then they happen to have these additional features that make it valuable. And so that reinforces my intuition. Right. Whereas like the pin, you know, the humane pin, if you just look at trying to use it on your hand, like that doesn't seem better than just swiping on a phone

where you know exactly what's happening. You know, even though there's this like, I mean, like humane, ironically enough, like, you know, the humane center for technology or whatever, like Tristan Harris's thing, had this like momentary blip where it was like, oh my God, technology is bad. It's like rotting our children's brains.

Like we need to like fight back and like take back our notifications and like the attention economy is like borked and all this stuff. You're like, yeah, but actually the replacements are terrible and no one wants them. They took that TED talk and ran with it and it's sort of crashed. I mean, it's kind of amazing what they were able to get out of that TED talk, but it kind of amounted to nothing, you know?

Yeah. The second question is, are you surprised at how wrong Apple got the Vision Pro? Oh, excellent question. No, I don't know that I am. I think there's a number of factors that I would look at in terms of thinking through why they missed the mark. And I should also give them some, I don't know if it's credit or just kind of contextual awareness that the Apple Playbook is to start out with like a high end device, right? Just like Tesla. So same sort of thing. Start at the high end. Make it like super exclusive. You know, work out the edge cases and problems with users that are highly interested and willing to pay. And so that kind of made sense. And it was superior technology relative to what meta was building. But in terms of who meta was targeting, I feel like that's where Apple kind of, has lost the script when it comes to social products. Apple has never been good at social products. They're starting to build in a social network into their operating systems now, but because of all the

context in which Apple operates, you know, from governments to countries to other places where privacy is super important, they can't do a lot of the things that Meta can do. And so Meta has been focused on this like multi-presence, you know, metaverse sort of context, trying to go after the Roblox generation because they're aware just as, Snapchat with stories was going to disrupt their business. They need to disrupt the next generation of Minecraft and Roblox kids. And so that's what I think the Metaverse stuff was all predicated on. Apple, meanwhile, is like, we have this cool technology and we guess we can do some 3D stuff

and maybe some augmented reality things because we've invested in this differentiation from meta. But it doesn't feel like they're, that they have conviction that it's a better place or a better direction or a better world. I mean, I feel like it's hard to imagine Steve Jobs coming out with the vision and being like, this is what people are going to wear on their faces. And I've said before that you can convince a lot of people to buy a $3,000 device if it's a fully fledged computer.

Like, that's where I think they miss the mark. If I could, again, I'm looking at a two screens here. I don't know how many inches I've got here between these two screens. Like if it was a lighterweight device that I could wear all the time. Yeah, but I don't even, it's not like, it's not a one for one substitution. I think that's up for the fact that if I could do all. all of my computing on it, like, that would be enough to sell people. Now, that's not what they want.

They want the next thing beyond the iPhone. So I get why they did what they did. But I don't know. They're going to have to come down in price, obviously, really rapidly. I don't know. I mean, maybe. I mean, who are they going to sell it to? Who, like, maybe schools?

But if they don't, all they're going to do is just sit there and watch as, essentially meta and lower cost people like... I think so what's interesting about like Dan's question, I think is, you know, where are there a number of like maybe big next hits that can occur? You know, it's like Eminem, like, how are you going to top what my name is? You know, you got the iPhone. Like, how are you going to top that? And like, they can kind of go down in price.

They can go up in agents. They can go up in services if we're talking about Apple still. I don't know that there's going to be like another massive like compute like paradigm in the hardware sense that's going to replace the phone because of how dexterous it is, how many assumptions it takes care of. What I mean by that is, like, I'm using, you know, same, a bunch of screens right now, just as you are, Brian, but like, you know, your wife can come in and have a conversation with you. Right. It doesn't take you five minutes to, like, dislodge yourself from, from the metaverse. That is the, seeing the notification on my hand versus swiping. Like, it doesn't

really, yeah. And so, like, that in and of itself, I feel like is, a, uh, an order of magnitude of friction that generationally is going to be hard to overcome. And it may be overcome by, again, a younger generation that's where it's normal to be disembodied and to live in the internet as a normal thing. And to not be annoyed when their friends are off in la la la land and they are playing Ready Player 1 all day. But I don't know that this generation with our social cues is quite ready for that transition. By the way, I was just checking, not only can I not type in the chat, but we were supposed to be streaming live to YouTube and Twitter, and neither of those are happening.

And it did happen on our test run. Like if you see on the YouTube, it was streaming live. So I don't know what happened with this recording, but, you know, that would have been more fun if people would have seen it on as they were scrolling around Twitter. Anyway, Chris, do you want to ask the question from Mo? And then we can wrap up soon, but I'll ask you a couple things if you want to bring up stuff that you wanted to talk about. Yeah, so the question is, and I guess I'm kind of interested in this as well, but I think I might have been around when this was happening. You sure were. And this is specifically, there was an escalation from you starting out with the rolling fund.

and then moving into the fund that we did together. And so the question was, how did you go from being someone who was like covering the news to then wanting to invest in it? You know, had you been doing any sort of background investing up into that point? And then the rolling fund sort of became an obvious thing to engage your, you know, podcast listenership. Or just like, what was sort of like the origin story for that? The origin story literally was Pachie McCormick said, if I can do it, you should do it. So he literally said this to you. we had the same audience, same size audience, you know, and so the story of the rolling fund is

I saw people like Packy, like who's that guy from Ann Arbor, just a bunch of people that we kind of know parisocially and socially that we're raising rolling funds. And so I announced it at the end of a show one day. And I remember actually, I didn't check to see for a couple days if anybody actually went for it. So then when I went and opened my angelist, like a couple days later, I was like, oh, crap, there's 130 people that say they would go in. So the question, the answer literally is I just realized that it was possible. I had been angel investing like you have been for years, but not in a serious way. I feel like you've done it more than I have. But then doing the rolling fund, the reason that I did it was because it was like a three-legged stool

where I could get content for the show and I could source investments from the show and then obviously provide a platform. So this is a reason why the companies would take a check for me. And then the escalation is, and this is where this is maybe the wrong thing to say, but I don't think that there is a ton of sophistication for doing the investing at the stage that you and I do it. Like, if we were investing at Series A or Series B stuff, it's like there is a lot of like, you know, running deep financial analysis, you know, thinking of markets, you know, all sorts of stuff where like, you know, people that have gone to, you know, business school and finance school and stuff like that would do it.

Neither of us are qualified to do that. But you and I invest at pre-seed, seed, and occasionally A's. And so what those are, is this a good idea? It's vibe investing. Is it a good idea? Are these good people? Do I think that these people can actually execute on this good idea? Because when you're that early, that's all it is.

But the difference is that you can invest. that way with a shotgun approach, which is just like, oh, I'll just throw checks at everything because that won't work. But so the thing that's probably not the right thing to say is I didn't think that I was underqualified to do it. Because, you know, if you've been in the industry for 20, 25 years, if you've known enough people, if you've, like, you have worked at enough companies, you know, I founded four different companies. Like, you kind of have the skill set. And so then, it's just a matter of the network and the platform. Has your investment activities changed the way that you cover the news?

Yes, because I have a deeper understanding of that side of the table. I had only been on the side of pitching VCs. I had not been on the side of being pitched. And when you and I made angel investments, to speak for you, which I probably can't. But it's just like somebody that you know, that you're like, yeah, I worked with them. They're good people. And yeah, sure, I've got this spare change.

Let's throw it at them and see what happens. So I have a, I feel like it's definitely helped the show that I can cover what's happening from the investment side of Silicon Valley much better because I understand all of the motivations. Whereas the first 10, 15 years of my career being on the side of the table where you're is asking for money. It seems like, you know, the wizard behind the curtain, you don't really know why they make the decisions they make. You don't really understand where they get this money from and why they make the decisions they do. I feel like I deeply understand that now.

How does it change your perspective, given that you're coming from the East Coast? I mean, the fact that you're in New York, like, obviously, on the one hand, you're saying that you understand like the Silicon Valley, you know, kind of like VC thing. And yet, you know, that's not where you are. Yeah, I've never, I've never pitched on Sand Hill Road. That's, that's true. You don't do that anymore. That was literally, uh, no, I know.

You don't really need to anymore. But I guess what I'm saying that was like, how, like, I feel like the, the, the New York scene, you know, tends to be more media-centric or more, just the types of businesses that exist there are different. That's not true anymore. You know, there's so much AI stuff here. You know, like Hugging Face is here. And so much crypto was in Brooklyn. And like we're doing the AI. I'm going to show Swix's AI summit tomorrow.

I'm curious to see what the makeup is of the people attending that. Yeah, I don't. The culture is different. The culture is different. Yeah, I feel like the VCs here are friendlier. I mean, that's probably true. And I'm talking even about the, you know, the Fred Wilson. and folks like that.

And even like, you know, Josh Wolfe at Lux, I, the, I'll tell you what, you're asking me how it's different in New York. And I'm going to tell you that I feel like it's friendlier and I wouldn't want to do it on the West Coast. There's more sharks and sharper elbows out there. Yeah, I think that that's one thing that maybe doesn't come through enough, especially in the reporting. I think it's interesting to think, you know, now that you.

you and I are, you know, kind of on this, you know, side of things, like the coverage that you get or the things that show up in tech crunch or the things that do go live on productant or not can very much be determined by an investor's priorities, not necessarily just the best company gets to get their news out there. And so there is like, it's not exactly like shadow banning, but there is a hierarchy and there are political movements behind the scenes that will, that work in interesting ways that I, think we're both surprising and somewhat disappointing to me. And yet, you know, as you mature and get older, you kind of realize that there are ways of the world and that this is what people get upset about. And so I think it's interesting, you know, to hear that perspective that the sharp elbows that you're describing are some of the things that cut people as they're trying to like, you know, get their embargoed information out there. But depending on how savvy your investor is, that might actually come to support you and your success. Well, and it's also, to the degree that this generation of VC, the A16 Zs of the world made it into this multi-channel,

you know, they said they built it on the model of a Hollywood talent agency where we will be a full service, everything to you. So that is, to a degree, the professionalization of something that was very much a boys club, literally, but also like just people that knew each other and handshakes and, you know, um, you do deals because you know people and stuff like that. I acknowledge that it's more professional now, but Chris, I would argue that it's still person based because, you know, again, we're talking about A16 Z, one of the biggest, um, uh, firms out there, obviously with the biggest firepower. They're willing to throw elbows.

But you and I are friendly with them because there's, there are people there that we like and like us and we like to work with. And so that's, that's, I, what I'm arguing is, is that to the degree that VC is this huge monolithic thing now, um, at the level we're operating at, it's still, um, it's person to person. And I mean, I think that's true in general about a lot of VC for sure. And I think that there's, there's still a requirement of, you know, warm intros and strong context, you know, because the whole value chain of introducing one person to, you know, a VC or to an investor, you know, requires, you know, as you say, like taking a flyer on someone. And that requires

that you are willing to dedicate some of your social capital in order to give someone a shot. Because ultimately, if you're investing other people's money, then you're responsible for that relationship that you have. And so you can't just sort of like throw the money around irresponsibly. So I think that's another part of it where like that's why these social relationships are so important. It'll be interesting to see how things change. I mean, like if you, I guess like if you see were to be disrupted, you kind of look at like what's going on in like the meme coin market. And I know like diverge too much there. But it's crazy to see what's happening.

Yeah. And you know, like I know Chris Dixon has been talking a long time about, you know, one, like who owns the internet. And then two, if you fractionalize or tokenize things, then there is. more of a direct participation in what can succeed and what doesn't have to succeed as opposed to going to aggrators like VCs or like us to deploy capital to give people a shot. And so that may be over time more of the way in which a lot of these resources get deployed. But I don't know how you deal with like the grift and the exploitation. I mean like if like what's his name? Javier down in.

That was the story you did. Yeah. Right. I mean like if he can do a pump and down. don't, you know, as the president of a country and, like, sink, you know, his, his own citizens. You're kind of like, okay, like, clearly this is still not a place where the way in which these, uh, token Ponzi schemes are developed, uh, are safe enough for normal, like, utility, uh, when it comes to sponsoring or funding projects. Um, I'm going to bring up something that's

related so that you can think of, uh, sure, a couple of questions you want to bring up. Um, one of the things that I've been looking for, I haven't seen a story to talk about this yet. And since I don't generally do editorial, I haven't brought it up yet. I'm starting to get a little nervous. I know that we're not even two months into this new administration. But one of the things that Silicon Valley has been sort of assuming and depending on is that the markets would unfreeze that we'd be able to get IPOs. But more importantly than IPOs, the M&A would and people would be able to start acquiring Because, again, to explain people that don't know what VCs are, like, if you have to wait for an IPO, like such a small fraction of them get there and you've got to wait 10 years, really what you want in a healthy market is you want people getting taken out three years into their lives by acquired by Microsoft for $600 million or whatever. And all that froze so much. So the thing that I'm starting to worry about, because I didn't do this story, but supposedly the new administration is keeping the same M&A guidelines as Lena Conhead. Yeah.

If we reach summer and there's not a thawing, if we don't see M&A start to ramp up, you're going to see VC freeze all over again. And as I said on the show, VC's already kind of up a creek, especially with the hangover from 2021 and whatever. So just something that put on people's radar, if that doesn't happen, then we could see another sort of mini recession. There are two like sort of complimentary thoughts about that. One is like I guess the question is what would cause it to freeze or unfreeze rather. Like what structural differences do we want to see? And the problem is that if you have the mag seven, then they're the only ones who will be acquiring. And, you know, one of like J.D. Vance's things is like these things either need to be broken up or they need to be made smaller because we need to have smaller organizations that are competing, you know, for the same dollars or whatever.

to be more diversity in the system. The second way, which is adjacent, is to think about the aggravation of power and that more than ever in, I think, the tech world, I mean, certainly going back to the Cold War and what gave us the internet, et cetera, is that we are in a moment where AI and the information wars that relate to the training of these large language models determines global power. And so this administration seems very different with regards to both expressing power, aggregating power, shrinking the size of the government to be more AI-centric. So I guess where that leads to me is to say that the VC game of the last 15 to 20 years, and I don't want to speak out of turn, but it's just my intuition, feels like it may never quite be the same as it was,

because the market structure is evolving in a way that is unknown. And maybe we haven't seen since marries. What can come back is the mania, you know, the manias that I've seen just in my life where, you know, the late 90s. Yeah, but it's not the same because you can't invest in the same small, like people to take over, to do like a land grab, right? Like the land grabs have kind of been done. Okay. But I'll tell you how that can happen. Okay.

And what I've almost thought of doing is some sort of editorial, like who's going to be the first one to prove who's going to take the leap that'll signal to people that maybe the good times are back. And here's two ways that it could happen. You said the Mag 7 buying, if the Mag 7 are able to acquire some of these AI startups legitimately in the old school way, then that'll be a single. But really what you should look for is some of these super capitalized AI startups starting to acquire smaller ones. Like if perplexity starts to. They have been. Right. If you see that starting to happen a.

Like for example, if like Claude were to acquire browser company of New York, right? Exactly. Exactly. So if you start to see... Because that would be Anthropic, not Claude, but nonetheless. Agglomerations like that, where the new players coming up start to build their snowballs. The problem with that, though, is that still the Mag 7 own those guys, right? So who is Anthropic?

Anthropic is Amazon. But the idea would be that if Anthropic were to start to put together their own utility belt, then that would be the way that they would signal that they can be independent. They can build their own sort of war chest. I mean, but it's like what happened with, oh my God, what did Microsoft did like the acquisition or the aquil hire of the company that made Pye. Was it was it a C word? Anyways, they basically like, whoever that person is now runs a bunch of like Microsoft's AI initiatives.

And there wasn't an acquisition. There was like the investors got paid out. But it was sort of just like they acquired the staff. All right. Let me give you. Like, is that the pattern that we're going to see going forward? No. No, what I'm saying would be healthy is you imagine Anthropic acquiring 11 labs or something similar and then a video player.

And so putting together, okay, we are now, we want to be the mag seven of this AI stuff. We have all of the different pieces. Or you just have straight up sort of, you know, an industry consolidates at certain times. If you start to see consolidation where it's like you get a, next week we get a bombshell that anthropic and mistral decide that they're going to combine forces, you know, stuff like that. So we're speaking only of AI. The other thing that I think we need to see is we need to see some of the acquisition of some of those unicorns, the 1,200 unicorns I talked about recently that are basically just zombie corns. Right. we need to see those people be acquired.

They're not going to be, I'm not saying they would be acquired at the $10 billion valuation, but they get acquired at a $4 billion valuation. That's still a home run for the original investors. That would really, like, you know, say the logjam is breaking. I mean, maybe. It also just seems like both these companies are saying private, longer, and there's now a secondaries market thanks to Hive and some other ones. Yeah.

They're essentially giving or offering liquidity to early employees. that were, yeah, inflection, thank you, Nanda. That takes the place of the public market. And so that's what I'm saying is that there is this tokenization that's happening, that maybe the IPO, because of what it symbolizes to a population, and this is the thing that I was going to then bring up, maybe as our closing chat, is around how Silicon Valley has become kind of like the death star relative to the culture.

And so not only do you have resistance to these big tech companies getting bigger and acquiring everything, but anything that looks like consolidation or removing competition from the marketplace also causes the market to, you know, to barf at that. We need a test case. We need somebody to be the acquisition that. Who's like good enough? You know, in a way? I don't know.

Like, who do people like enough to be like, yes? Oh, thank God. Like they've now consolidated into like one Uber org. And now everything's going to be better. And now I can feel my costs are going down. my eggs are cheaper, you know, like, I get free cars. Like, if like, because like, you can't do Waymo. Like, Waymo is already inside of like Alphabet.

You know what I mean? Like, maybe Uber, Uber and, but like Uber and Tesla is not going to come together. So, like, who, who acquires who in that configuration? Well, this is why I haven't done that segment because when I sat down to try to come up with a list of who's going to be the test case, the canary and the coal mine, I couldn't think of logical cases for, I mean. aside from dumb things like maybe Apple's going to buy Sonos or something like that, you know. But yeah, I don't know about that. But like that also feels like an unnecessary thing. I think Apple would just, you know, assume Amazon's die off.

Amazon should buy Sonos. Yeah, okay. So Silicon Valley is the Death Star. And you mean that in like literally people, you know, throwing eggs at, well, throwing eggs at Tesla cars might be for a slightly different. But just being in general, like, um, But yeah, it's true, actually. Instead of throwing them at the Google Bus, so the Google Shuttle, you know, which is like the 2017-2018 thing, now they're throwing eggs at the Tesla vehicles. Well, what I'm asking is, do you mean it on that level or do you mean it on the level of, oh, it's 30% of the value of the stock market now?

Or it's both. Yeah, all of the economy, yeah. Like essentially, like the issue seems to be that tech has taken up, like, they've lodged themselves or many, many of the tech companies, obviously Elon is the most visible, into the white. House, which is a change in terms of, you know, the world order and the perception of the tech world, which used to be kind of against the institutionalization of these companies. You know, Chris Dixon's famous phrase, like the next big thing, I'll always think a startup as thought of as a toy at the beginning. Sure. I, like, Chris, even six months ago, I think that the powers that be in Washington still on a certain level thought of Silicon Valley as this.

Kind of cute little industry over here. Oh, no, they're very rich and they're, you know, a huge part of the stock market and make a lot of jobs, but still an ancillary thing as opposed to what you're saying is like the, the gorilla in every aspect now. Like, it's power. It is. That's what I'm saying.

Silicon Valley has power in a different way. What other industry has power? And, okay, I'm not even talking about the level of, okay, Elon is inside the White House. He's got a desk there now. Sure. I'm saying on the level of Europe thinking about over reliance on U.S.-based social media, or the U.S. being afraid of China's social media, or the chips. Like, the fact that tech is, it involves politics and the decisions of nation states.

This is what I'm saying. This is the growing up thing that I'm not sure. sure enough of us have come to grips with, you know, which is that it used to be that we were the underdogs fighting against those in power and these, you know, ossified institutions that set these rules, but, you know, we could do our own thing as like, you know, the pirate founders and the frontiers people, you know, out on the West Coast. But I, Chris, that's how you and I thought of it. And that's how.

Is that not how? I just think about things? No, I would argue that there's a certain level of C-suite. at the big tech companies that in the last decade realized and realized that they had the power that we now realize they actually have. And for a time, certain people at that level tried to couch it. There was the backlash where, you know, they bring Zuckerberg and all the other CEOs in Congress sort of like as a lineup here. Six of you sit here and take our questions and take our iron. But I think at the time, even back then, there was a realization that,

that at that level that they knew that they had the power. Sorry, that who knew who had the power? The tech people? Yeah, the CEOs of Meta and Google and Apple and Amazon, they all knew. And I also think that that's to a certain degree. But I think that the difference, and this is more like maybe what I've just, you know, heard and observed or like the reporting has said, suggested that going through the Senate questioning, you know, that Zuckerberg endured and all the other tech execs

endured, you know, was, was humility. And it was like frustrating because it felt like maybe there had been some tacit level of, you know, alignment or collaboration between Silicon Valley and like D.C. and the White House. And suddenly now they're being, you know, brought out and, you know, yelled at for losing elections and basically scapegoated. And so it's. hurting our children and all of it.

That's what I mean, right? So you guys have done all the wrong things. And meanwhile, you know, like A16Z and others were asking for regulations around crypto. You know, Coinbase was out there. Like, tell us, like, regulate us, please. Like, give us something so that we can, like, run our businesses because your inability to come up with these guidelines means that we're making it up, which means that, you know, that's not really our job. So anyway, so what I'm saying is that after going through that humiliation, there's now, this cycling of saying, well, fine, then you guys are going to be stuck in your kind of,

you're going to play your reindeer games and be into politics. We're going to come in and move things forward because, as you said, we were just holding back and allowing you to be the legislatures. And you should be figuring these things out. But you're not figuring them out. And now we're the ones who are bearing the brunt of civilization's ire. Yeah. And therefore, screw you. I think I said at the time of the the congressional hearings that on some level that was people in government saying to the tech industry, hey, by the way, we're the government. Yeah.

They were, I think it was on a conscious level. It was tacit. It wasn't said out loud. But it was, hey, by the way, to quote the great Erling Holland, stay humble. Because remember, we're the ones that actually have the power. Sure. And so that's what I'm arguing is that. They were realizing that the C level and the VC level at the time were realizing, no, actually, you don't because.

Well, but it's both. Because it's, it's, you know, the government saying, yes, we have the power and we can regulate you. And we can basically make your lives very hard. And like, you know, if you don't like what we did to TikTok, you know, you better wait. Yeah. And at the same time, they're also arguing in bad faith about stolen elections and about election interference and these other things that, you know, may or may not have happened at the level that they did. but it was more like politicians were able to use technology and the people who built the technology to scapegoat all their problems

in a way that wasn't, I mean, whether it was fair or not, I mean, they're big boys, like it's fine, they made plenty of money. But it's sort of like in terms of where this goes next, like I guess what I find is, and I feel like I'm once again walking into, you know, challenging territory here. But when it comes to thinking about this moment and looking at what's happening to the government and the gutting of it And the way that Elon is basically twittering, like, the U.S. government, that method and approach may be a kind of like forest fire for the institutions that exist that wipe out everything to studs.

And then they build it back in their own image because playing nice was no longer working. And they've also grown up where they've spent 15, 20 years, being the underdog, being the shucks on the kid from college, you know, getting sweaty in my hoodie kind of. thing on stage with Kara Swisher to now where, you know, these are adults. Like these are full grown humans. And so they're taking up space because the people in D.C. didn't do their job to come up with the rules of the road to create the right way for the technology, you know, people building those, those powerful systems to do it in a way that was commensurate with society's interests.

Well, I mean, look, I'm not going to name a country because that would get me into trouble. But like, if you're the president of any. country, small to medium-sized country, even large country. And Mark Zuckerberg shows up in your capital and says, I would like to meet with the prime minister or the president. You take that meeting. If you are the senator from, I'm not going to name a state and you show up, you might not take that senator's meeting, right? Do you see what I'm saying? This is my point. If Mark Zuckerberg goes to China tomorrow, he'll meet with Xi Jinping and the entire Politburo of the...

I mean, Tim Cook and Elon Musk both have relationships with the world leaders, you know, based on where they sell their products. Well, let me, let me do my dumb history thing to give context to why Silicon Valley was kept at arm's length or treated as the stepchild for so long. Go all the way back to the Bush Gore election in 92. You're in a recession. They, their big move, Gore being the technology guy was like, this is how we're going to modernize this country. We're going to come out of this recession. So you had hands off no regulation of commerce on the internet, no sales tax on the internet. That happened all the way through the night.

Section 230 came from. So for that whole first decade, hands off. Let them do what they want because we don't know what this is. We don't want to strangle the baby in the grip, right? That's right. And then go to the next decade. And when you have the great financial crisis where the entire economy blows up, the only thing that didn't actually blow up, I know there was some rough six months.

there where maybe there were layoffs and people couldn't raise for it. But you immediately had Silicon Valley roaring back in the tech industry roaring back. So when the entire economy was broken, the only thing that was still working was tech. So again, hands off, leave them alone. They're the only thing that isn't working. So you have 20 years, an entire generation of founders, of CEOs, of investors that were given this hands-off treatment. And then when you moved into things like crypto, which was money, which touches the government and government's power. When you have things like, hey, wait a minute, social networks and social media are more powerful than-

newspapers. Or TV networks, which nominally the government has some sort of control over because of licensing and things like that. And so in that third decade in the 2010s, all of a sudden they were encroaching on things that were the natural power levers and centers of governments. and A, governments didn't respond well to that, didn't evolve with it. And like, so the question that I come to is like, what would have caused the government to modernize in a way that's meaningful that would have aligned with the pace of change that's come out of Silicon Valley. And I keep coming up with blanks relative to the approach that Elon is taking.

Because if like I have in so many ways like deep sympathy for the people that are experiencing these layoffs and going through this like, you know, horrific sort of like crisis. at a moment where they've pledged their career to the government. And now a person coming in with this new administration basically says, well, thank you very much. You know, you can see yourself out. But if you were to do it gently, then every person gets to justify their existence and their persistence in that system. And the idea is to basically like wipe it clean, you know, not defrag the hard drive, like

install the new operating system and go from that point forward. And so I don't, it's just like, I'm left with such a challenge between like the techno-optimist side of myself, thinking about 20 years in the future and like the humanist side being like so worried about the cultural scarring that's going on and not being able to reason between both of these in terms of which is the one that would be that that is necessary. Right? Because basically like Congress hasn't done shit for like 20 years. And so we have a system that was meant to be somewhat representative of the people. And the people said that they wanted a more efficient, less costly government. And yet, we made, it seems like, and again, maybe it's my ignorance, I don't know, very little progress towards that outcome. And in the last two months, there's been more change to cut government. It seems, it seems, I'm fully aware of my ignorance, that there's a wrecking ball that is coming through and at least people seem very scared in a way that they have not been before.

And is that better or worse? We don't know the answer yet. Like, when you say, when you say people are like afraid of Silicon Valley. It's when literally what's happening is move fast and break things is being brought to government. And there is a certain percentage of people for, they're like, oh, hell no. I did, I don't want move fast and break things in, in my government. I don't want a certain percentage of people that put out fires laid off. I don't want to, you know, when you lay off people in the Veterans Administration, those are mostly veterans, you know, like, so, but at the same time, I see, I see the argument that you're making is that, right, because,

there were so much, so many institutional sort of inertia and stuff, like, you're right, nothing got done in the last 20 years. I don't know. So, yeah, again, like, I want to be clear. Like, I'm not like, you know, saying anything negative about the individuals that you're describing. I'm talking about the systemic change. But what I'm saying is, is I don't know that we know that move fast and break things

actually will work for the government. So we don't. But the thing that I will add is that at least we have, you know, 20, like 15 to 20 years. of experience now, building infrastructure that we know scales to planetary, you know, effectiveness. And although, you know, I'm not going to say that like Elon has got that all in the bag, they're at least technologists that have built systems that do scale that while the federal government, yes, has some of those systems in place, the fact that we're still running most of our systems on cobalt means that there is a generational like loss of memory that is going to occur

that in 20 years, it's going to be very hard for us to maintain that system. And so the question is, you know, do we just have to wait until the whole thing falls over and then we rebuild it? Or is it better to be rebuilding it now while there's still some, you know, kind of like awareness, the cobalt cowboys that are around. Well, and also the, and this is as far as I'll go into this because you know I don't like to go into politics. But I know.

I'm not convinced. Listen, if this really is bringing Silicon Valley thinking to government, that's one thing. If this is actually a political thing where it's like we're bringing a certain way of thinking. Because ultimately what is politics? Politics is just conflict between people. And so it feels like with the USDS, GSDS, the digital service, you know, there was some of Silicon Valley kind of in a mop closet, you know, somewhere in the White House. And it just like, it did some things and it modernized some institutional stuff. It fixed some websites. But to have that way of thinking now in charge will require a different way of working with the resources that are available.

And I understand that that's very uncomfortable and maybe that's not the way people want their government to work. And at the same time, it seems like people are not satisfied with their government. So I just don't know what the pathway would be to get from point A to point B, where point B is a satisfying government that works effectively for as many people as possible and is cost efficient. and we've done it in four years and not 400. And maybe that's not the point. Maybe government needs to be slow and unsatisfying. I'm going to bring it back to the larger...

Which is the question... Silicon Valley and the tech industry in society. And I'm going to pull out an asshole history analogy here. But look, you know, Florence was a republic for a long time. It was run by one industry... The Medici's? Sorry? The Medici's?

Well, Florence was a republic for a long time before the Medici's essentially created an oligarchy. But it was a polity that had one major industry, which was the wool and cloth industry. Basically, they made clothes. Okay. But because... That's why fashion was there. Why it's still there? But the point actually is that everything else in the economy was basically subsistence growing of food, right?

Yeah. Clothing was the only thing that was. was a good that was transportable that was also you it wore out you needed more of it and and because of that like it accumulated capital because of the all right you have to be able to get paid later on or whatever okay the point i'm making is that society the the industry and the banking that grew up around that grew to be so much bigger than the government so much bigger than the state that it existed in, that it was basically an impossibility for the state to exist the way it did when the real power was in this industry and among these people. Now, I have not qualified to make an

argument of a republic in Florence. It was better than the Medici's running things in Florence or whatever. I'm just pointing out that it is a thing historically where if an industry or what your country does or how it operates is bigger than what the governmental system that was set up, like it outgrows it, then if the government doesn't evolve, then it gets swallowed by that. I'm not arguing that it would be a good thing for our republic to go away. No, I think neither of us is arguing one way or the other. I think I'm just saying that we're trying to, and the reason why I'm asking you this is because, again, this is your 2000th episode.

So you've been documenting. Yeah. in audio form. Yeah. This path, the last seven and a half years or so. Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting.

Of this rise into power and this march into the White House. I remember very clearly, someone can look up my internet history podcast episode with M.G. Siegler. I think it was in 2016, but someone can look up to date. I remember that was the first time I asked somebody, hey, you do realize that people are kind of starting to hate you. In 2016. Yeah. That was the era of like the throwing rocks to the Google shuttles.

Yeah. And that was the first time that I remember starting to parse that. And then, right, it was, since the show's been on, I had to cover, like, you know, the congressional hearings and Cambridge Analytica and all that stuff. Yeah. I don't know, man. Remember when we were just kids that were tinkering around with blogs and, and. I do. You know, so actually, it's funny. This is your 2000 episode. This year is also. the 20th anniversary of Barcamp, which was 2005. And that was my real start. Yeah. Yeah. Explain what Barcamp is or was. Yeah. I mean, so Bar Camp was an event that was kind of a fork of Tim O'Reilly's Foo Camp.

Foo Camp stood for Friends of O'Reilly. And it was an event that drew together, you know, 300 of the luminaries who built a lot of these tech companies. You know, Larry and Sergey were there. And I'm sure Elon came through up in Sebastopol in California. And, you know, I was relatively new. to San Francisco in the Bay Area and thought, well, if Tim O'Reilly's going to have this event, why don't we have our own? He's a big fan of open source. I'm just going to fork his event and run my own. Right. You know, I'll have like 20 of my friends show up. And lo and behold,

you know, we had 300 people show up down in Palo Alto. And we got covered in wired and actually TechCrunch launched there and Pandora launched. And we had a bunch of like just kind of like seminal things coming together where up until that point, so many of us had been on the internet, but hadn't met in person. And so it was the. galvanizing moment, I think, that kind of brought together a lot of the people that then became kind of like the forebears of Web 2.0. And so we're 20 years on now. That's making me think, and this is, I hope this doesn't come off as like Aryan or something like that. But you and I have experienced what we're talking about about Silicon Valley becoming bigger than it was, personally,

because that guy with the nose ring at your bar camp. Jack Dorsey. That was in the corner that was sort of, you know, completely awkward and didn't know how to talk to people. I mean, Matt Mollinweg was a co-organizer of the event, you know. Ends up being Jack Dorsey. So you and I have experienced personally people that we know that were just the dork in the corner end up becoming Jack Dorsey, end up becoming billionaires, end up because, like, so on some level in any industry or anything that you do, any scene, any whatever, the people that are nobodies, if you stick around long enough, certain people become somebody.

reason why I'm having a hard time on this moment is because of that point and that perspective. Having seen a lot of these people early on when they were just dorky nerds and no one would talk to them or whatever to the point where they have power now and to see their internecine period where they were trying to kind of like do the right thing and do what society asked of them and to, you know, be good kids that would wear the right clothes and, you know, fit in. None of it seemed to like pay off. I mean, like, you know, Jack Dorsey is, you know, exiled, you know, he's doing whatever. Larry and Sergei. Yeah, like they're off. Yeah, I mean. And that's an interesting, like, again, that's an interesting arc where there was a time when

Larry and Sergey were like, you know what, hey, we're kids in a candy store. We can do self-driving cars. We can do this and that. And the other thing, none of it really paid off in the way that they want. They sort of drifted. Sometimes they came back and they got their juice back. But then, you know, certain people have left. I mean, Bezos leaving when he left, that was.

That kind of feels early to me. You know, I mean, he's also like a, like a grandpa, like in terms of like the younger generation that came up, right? Because he was there in the 90s. So.

Yeah, he's a decade older than us. So it feels like we're in this moment of transition. And again, you've got two thousand. So if we were to wrap this up, you know, you've got 2,000 episodes on your belt.

You know, not that I think you like to give a lot of advice, but, you know, if you were to give yourself to go back to that first episode, any advice on, and how to approach or think about and talk about these issues and these matters. Is there anything that you would change or do differently?

Not change anything because, like I've said before, the thing that I always think about is I am, I'd like to think that what I'm doing is you work in this industry and I'm telling you day by day how it's evolving. Good and bad, whatever, whether you like the way it's evolving or not. My job is to tell you why I think it's going this way. And so I'm kind of proud of the fact that that was the mission statement that Gabe and I came up with. And that's kind of still what I think I'm doing and what I think people get value out of it. I don't know that I do anything differently.

But I do think if I had launched five years earlier, think of how different the show would have been where it was more, like, what if I had been able to cover the early iPhone stuff? And like, I do wish I was covering the era when everything seemed to be, oh, my God, this is G-Wiz great. I kind of regret that I'm here for this part. It's like almost like that blows my mind because at the same time, like all the stuff that's happening in AI is almost as important. And it would not be possible if those prior technologies hadn't been adopted and used as broadly to create the training data for what's happening now. And so in a way, and, you know, obviously I'm not going to steal your thunder. But like, you had to start when you did in order to be able to cover this moment the way that you're able to. Yeah.

Yeah. But then that's just us getting old. Like, you know, the music was better back in the day or whatever. Like, so it wasn't that everything was great. But I just do remember the era when when I, the reason I started to write that book is I was like, I want to explain to my parents who are the people and what were the idea. that transformed your life. And then by the time the book came out, I was being asked by interviewers,

like, is this explaining how the internet ruined our lives? And I was like, well, no, I actually started out. And still, that book is an optimistic book. And, you know, I love the tech industry. I still do. It's hard for me to cover fighting. And I like the fighting between Elon and Sam. But I don't like the fighting

between society and idea yeah I'm with whatever I still like I still like this job a lot and I intend to keep doing it and you know I'm going to ask this question and I kind of feel like I already have the answer and so you don't have to like invent anything but you know if you were to imagine let's just make the next 1,000 episodes is there anything that you're looking forward to or anything that you want to try that you haven't yet done oh format wise whatever yeah I don't know I will say, I mean, part of the benefit of the show is just the consistency, you know, and it's the trustworthiness. And it's not changing things up. And again, I'm not, even as a technologist, it's sort of like once you arrive at the right thing.

I mean, like the fact that I'm still fighting for and defending the hashtag, it's sort of like, that is the thing and it's going to stay the way it is. And you can like try to like mess with it. But it's like, you know, just like your show, you've got the format. Like this is what people want to listen to. And so there's a great deal of value. and you providing that filtering and then, you know, offering the audio commentary of the play-by-play. Yeah.

I just, it's just, I feel like if you listen to me for three months, you could essentially, you could be, you could go work at a VC firm. You could, uh, become a journalist and cover tech yourself. Like that,

I, I, that's what I want it to be. What I could do more of is more interview stuff, but then everybody's doing interview stuff. Yeah. You know, when I started the internet history podcast,

people were not doing, business history and business analysis. And now that's a whole friggin' industry. I was on like the fifth episode of the Acquired podcast because like the fact that that is, so I would like to do more interview stuff. I just don't know where my lane is because I also don't want to be the guy that has opinions necessarily. I have opinions, but I don't like, I feel like the way to do that, to be successful doing that is to have hard opinions. Yeah, but I also feel like, again, like the value that you provide is more or less providing the unfiltered view or lens that you know you are the physical embodiment of the tech meme you know aggregation service right right so it's like

here's all the stuff that's going on here's what everyone's writing about i'm going to deliver to you in this format you know through a trusted you know voice i am your intermediary i'm choosing the clusters that i think are going to be relevant to you and i'm not going to provide a lens i'm not going to like tell you what to think and so i think because it's a daily show you're providing that information as it's happening and people are making sense of it in real time, just as you are. And for you to come in with these hot takes, I mean, I feel like I'm way out of my league, like, talking about the government and stuff. And yet I've been listening to like hours and hours of like podcasts to like try to like understand what's going on. You know what I mean? And

I would not want you to be doing what I just did on your show. And you and I know people that have found lanes recently about, say, going anti- AI or Hart Pro Elon. You can take lanes, right, and get great success

with that. And like that, I just, I don't know, I don't want to do that. But so that's what I'm saying. I would love to do more interviews, but I don't know what my lane is other than just.

So tell me about your latest thing, you know? That's what I'm searching for. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's a good place to, to cut it,

actually. Hey, listen, everybody, I've said this a million times. I am deeply, deeply honored that all of you listen. That blows my mind. And I forget about it on a daily basis because I just do this. I sit in this room and put my head in a box.

But, you know, I'm going to meet people at the, at Swix's event tomorrow. I'm, I'm on, I'm deeply touched and honored that all of you listen. This is my favorite job that I've ever had. and I hope to do 2,000 more episodes, unless AI has no need for me, which is probably the case. Thank you, Chris. And thanks everybody that called in.

And how do we, anything you want to tell people before we go, Chris? No, but you know, you've got to do your sign-off line. Right. I love everybody. There you go. Great. Bye-bye.

Talk soon, everyone. Bye. Thanks, Chris. Yeah.