TBPN Live - Elon's DOGE Blockchain, Sports Betting, German Economy in Shambles, Humanoid Robots

Episode Date: January 29, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:42) - Elon DOGE Blockchain (18:41) - Sports Betting (43:02) - Germani Economy (59:05) - Character AI (01:17:24) - Humanoid Robots (01:27:11) - Ai Apps (01:37:50) - Trump (01:43:59) - Private Equity Style Roll-Ups (01:59:03) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We are live on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in. You can check us out. We're going to try and be on around 11. It is 10 till noon, but we're talking about a bunch of different stories, breaking down what's going on in tech, moving on from DeepSeek. We did back-to-back deep dives. I think we crushed it. DeepSeek's over. It's over. It's over. The silence from the All In podcast has been deafening.

They still haven't released a statement on it. Their political talk show. True. True. So it's kind of out of their wheelhouse. It's pretty niche to, you know. Yep. David will have to deal with it within the admin, figure out the right response.

But it's not appropriate for the pod. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Makes sense. Well, the top story today is Elon Musk is exploring blockchain use in the U.S. government efficiency effort. Conversations said to be held with multiple public blockchains.

The technology may be used to track government spending. And this is very funny. It almost reads like a hit piece, like it was planted because like the idea of like, oh, we're going to solve the government's problems with crypto is like such a meme. But it does seem like there's some truth to this, but it's also interesting. It's also interesting because the biggest criticism of the World Economic Forum has been their historical push for central bank digital currencies. And in many ways, bringing the government on chain and having all this stuff take place yeah on the blockchain is what a lot of people were always afraid of now this is different because presumably we just use stable coins yeah there's some stuff here that does actually make sense but at the same time for a naive reader you

can be like wait the guy who is promoting dogecoin wants to use that for Doge and it's this meme coin. It sounds very unserious. And I think that's kind of the angle of this article. But let's read through some of this. So Musk, who leads the Doge effort, has mused to close allies about the idea of using a digital ledger as a way to squeeze costs out of the government, said one of the people who asked for anonymity because the discussions hadn't been made public. There's been talk of using a blockchain to track federal spending, secure data, make payments, and even manage buildings, the people said. People affiliated with Doge. Yeah. One thing that's interesting, every mainstream media reporter journalist is hammering everybody

within the inner circle of Doge, within the outer circle of Doge, within the outer, outer, outer. I get multiple messages a day being like hey do you know what's going on yeah in this i just got off a call with a reporter who's like asking me oh what's going on do you know anything and the funny thing is and almost everybody within doge has a deep mistrust of mainstream media and so nobody wants to talk but there's enough people involved that the story is just coming out but it comes out in the form of people saying, Elon was musing about this,

and then that ends up being an entire story. Yeah, it's like, what does that actually mean? Like, you could muse about anything. It's very silly. But the talks have a certain intuitive logic, given that the name of Musk's department is a cheeky reference to a cryptocurrency dogecoin that lives on the blockchain. President Donald Trump has also been quickly putting in place cryptocurrency

friendly policies. On Thursday, he signed an executive order establishing a working group on digital assets that includes key members of his administration. So people are talking about, I think within the crypto community, the number one thing people want is, I mean, just clarity around regulation, like what is legal, what's not instead of this gray area. And then maybe Bitcoin National Reserve is big. And then maybe clarity around betting markets. The other big one is around the tax treatment of cryptocurrency gains. Eric Trump came out and was saying,

we're going to have no capital gains on American crypto. Which you said, I think this was on point, that if you want to encourage the reshoring of crypto, the cryptocurrency industry, which is, I do believe in the long-term benefit of the United States. We don't, we've been the home of global finance in many ways for such a long time. We don't want to have crypto come along and have it be in Singapore and Dubai and all these other places. Like the more that money is here, the more it will.

And the talent and the more it will be. And the talent and the actual companies and stuff and they're easier to regulate. Silicon Valley for a long time was so dogmatic about you can't even build a startup outside of San Francisco. People wouldn't fund you.

Being outside of America was completely off the table. It was like San Francisco or maybe New York and then Miami got in the conversation. Austin got in the conversation. LA was taken semi-seriously. But really it was like San Francisco or maybe New York. And then Miami got in the conversation. Austin got in the conversation. LA was taken semi-seriously. But really, it was like you need to be in a major American metro with a serious university technology.

Yeah, but even it took Snapchat and Honey for people to... It took a long time. Nobody wanted to... Like the insider SFVCs would tell you, I want to invest in your company, but you have to move to SFVC. Exactly. And then once crypto started getting so attacked by the federal government, all of a sudden it became, oh, sure, you're in Singapore. Like, that's a reasonable thing to do, which would never hold for any other company. Yeah, and a lot of the probably makes no sense to have different classes there.

If you can have kind of a one time incentive for people to reshore and then eventually the industry will be so built up. We won't be talking about, oh, this startup just went from zero to a billion really quickly. It'll be like, no, there's like a Visa, a MasterCard, a Goldman Sachs of crypto. They're all here. They have thousands of employees. They're established. They're not going anywhere. And so, yeah, you can bring the taxes back up, which is probably what would happen. But let's go back to Elon. He says, Doge is charged with modernizing federal technology and software to maximize government efficiency and productivity. Trump has said the group will work with the White House Office of Management and Budget, it's kind of like the federal government's HR arm, to identify spending cuts and finish its recommendations by July 4th

of 2026. Musk enlisted about 100 volunteers before Trump was inaugurated to write code for his projects. Yeah, and this is the crazy thing. So because Doge is not, what is the exact corporate structure? Well, it was like a think tank funded off of Elon's balance sheet. Because it was set up as a think tank, an independent think tank initially, many people have already gone and done a tour within Doge and already left. They had done that before Trump had actually been inaugurated.

Yeah, it was like policy papers. Which is cool, right? It's, it's showing, it's showing this sort of urgency. You see this with venture-backed founders that, uh, that end up, you know, working for six months on their startup before they incorporate, right. It's that same sort of founder mentality, which I think is cool. And so, um, it says Trump's business associates chose the ledger associated with the Solana cryptocurrency to issue the Trump and Melania meme coins that have drawn interest and criticism in recent days. It is though unclear which blockchain Musk's team might use for its projects

and the talks may end up going nowhere, which is very reasonable. So I have a post here from a guy named Cale Abe. He says, you're mid curving it. If you think Elon is going to use some other blockchain to track government spending through Doge, there's literally no other blockchain that could handle this other than Solana. Elon executes.

He's not going to choose something that won't work. At the time, whenever this was screenshotted, it only had five likes. Yeah, I just searched for it specifically. I don't think the community has spoken on it yet. But Solana is, you know, would be one of the top choices if they weren't going to build their own blockchain. Yeah, exactly. You could also fork it. But either way, either way, the Trump and Melania meme coins are the meme coins that were launched out of the White House in many ways. Those being on Solana was a huge win for Solana in general,

which has obviously benefited from many of the products that are purely speculative, as well as products that have consumer use cases have been on Solana just because of the speed and then liquidity that's on the chain. Yeah. And so the article continues, the idea of using blockchain for large scale projects isn't new, although applying one to an enterprise as large as the US government remains an untested concept. Years ago, during the Web3 boom, a slew of large companies such as retailer Walmart launched blockchain efforts. Most of these projects use private blockchains that didn't make transactions publicly viewable. And so there's always been this question of like, if you have a private blockchain, like why not just use a database? Like Walmart has full control over their database. They just log all the transactions. Like what is the blockchain really doing? And there is a question here of just, of just like, maybe instead of having this cycle of there's the federal budget that goes out, money gets spent, and then basically journalists need to issue Freedom of Information Act requests to get data months later. It needs to be redacted.

It's like, well, maybe you could just have a real-time dashboard. That doesn't need to be crypto-driven. It can be just a database that's open and you can query it. Yeah, there's some argument for it to be completely transparent, because if you are a taxpayer, your money is going towards a lot of these efforts. Right. Even if it's just tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fractions. Yep. And so there there's a clear there really is a clear argument to say, you know, this taxpayers should have full visibility into how their money is being spent. Right. Outside of like black ops government programs things like that on the flip side like it could be like you know it's like building in public all of a sudden like your adversaries know exactly how much you're spending and they can say oh okay the the u.s is spending x dollars on education if we just spend a little bit more

per capita we can like compound and like beat them basically or something interesting it is a theory just like you know if you know your competitors margins you can often squeeze them by dropping can like compound and like beat them basically or something like that. It is a theory. Just like, you know, if you know your competitors margins, you can often squeeze them by dropping your price to the point where they make no margin. And you make a little bit. And you make a little bit. And then, and then over time you put them out of business and then you have a monopoly. And so there are risks like open source accounting effectively. Sam Hammond. One thing that's interesting, oftentimes budgets get set. So money is allocated and then it doesn't actually get spent. We saw this in LA fires like last year,

there was, I think last, you know, this came out, uh, earlier this month, but there was something like a billion dollars allocated by LA County to fight homelessness. And they only were, they only ever spent like $500 million, which is kind of a bit like you know everybody i think now generally wants less government spending but if we're gonna if we thought it was right to allocate the money like isn't homelessness is still a big issue yeah right if you look outside i'm sure we could see yeah you know um and uh and so the fact that they allocated and didn't spend it is also bad because like okay then why did you ask for this budget in the first place? You knew that it was going to need to be spent in this period.

Yep. And so Sam Hammond, the chief economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, that's FAI, I've been to a bunch of their events. I got to meet Sam at Hereticon. Oh, yeah. He said that an internal government blockchain could be used to track spending documents and contracts in a way that's fully secure and transparent. But the question of whether you really need a blockchain to do that, since conventional databases can be used in a similar way and with fewer downsides. But you can't speculate on a database. It's much harder. You could make a polymarket that was based on will the Department of Health spend their full budget for the year if it was public. You literally can speculate on the profits of the federal government in the form of bonds. It's just very boring and you only earn 3%.

I want to do a 10-leg parlay on government spending. I mean, that's basically just like a crazy, some sort of like crazy levered ladder on like how the bonds will, how the bond spreads will trade over the next few years. Like you can- Hedge funds figured it out. Oh yeah, you can get crazy, crazy beta in your bond portfolio if you work hard enough.

So public blockchains like Bitcoin and Solana come with their own problems given that such ledgers are governed by decentralized networks of computers. So who owns the voting blocks all of a sudden? Is it 100% centralized, controlled by the government? Well then what's the point of the decentralized if every person has a share? It also opens up some crazy attack vectors.

So North Korea's government has put in a big effort. They have a lot like they they they have effectively kingdom level efforts to hack various blockchains. Like if you're in the cryptocurrency industry, everybody has examples where they interviewed, you know, somebody and their resume made no sense and and they like crush the coding screen. But then like you actually ask them about it. They don't can't really answer yeah and so north korea has been you know we'll try to get people in to these organizations to then hack them yeah and they have other efforts and so if you can imagine if the u.s government just had a billion dollars in a wallet on solana like try like a

trillion dollars yeah yeah it does open up the north korea is going to be gone yeah like you know all we have to do is get this one yeah yeah we have to just get this one let's build a massive data center just to attack this thing um so uh one issue with the government using a public blockchain is that they would have no control over the entities so whoever owns the tokens would be able to change the database potentially i think that loss of control would be a problem for governments. But some bigger institutions have started using public blockchains for business purposes in recent years. And this was something I hadn't heard. BlackRock, for example, has issued a money market fund on the ledgers of a few different cryptocurrencies.

And the California Department of Motor Vehicles has digitized millions of car titles on the Avalanche blockchain. I had no idea. That's wild. And you don't hear much about Avalanche anymore just because the narrative is so dominated by Solana. At least because meme coins are sort of the dominant meta. But that's like, it's funny

because like Avalanche for sure in their seed deck was saying, hey, we're're gonna actually get the the dmv to digitize you know uh titles or whatever um and unfortunately that's way less profitable just like having a casino meme coin casino right and that's why solana probably trades at 20x i would imagine probably like avalanche i don't know last yeah yeah yeah there was like that do you remember the saloon of acts meme it was like it was like soul uh solana luna which was like the terra luna thing and then avax which is avalanche and uh it was like this big

movement of like let's move past ethereum and get onto like these higher performance, high speed cryptocurrency chains. And Solana really emerges like the power law winner very clearly. But they close with saying, if Doge pursued the technology, it would likely dwarf any government projects seen in the US to date. I don't know that that's necessarily true. Like there is something interesting. I think that the most optimistic take you could have here is maybe just that

like on paper, there are probably more downsides than upsides to managing a public blockchain instead of just a database. And just like, it's the same thing with like, oh, can we, can we make wires go through 24 7 it's like yes but there's a ton of regulation and a ton of like tech debt and some of these systems run on like fortran and old mainframes and stuff and so just having a greenfield project can lead to amount an amount of like forward energy and progress that you're just like hey we're starting fresh and i think that if if bitcoin or cryptocurrency is like is like a justification for starting fresh, it could at least bring some energy.

But overall, I am not very bullish on blockchain use in the US government. I don't necessarily think it's necessary. Yeah, there's some stuff that comes up to me. You remember during COVID, there was a bunch of people taking advantage of the emergency. PPP.

PPP loans. People, you know, there was a bunch of fraud associated with that. There were people dealing, you know, SBA dealt with a lot of this stuff and there's some argument, but the thing is like that the government has a record of everybody. They have strong records of where all the money was sent anyways. And so does it just introduce more chaos if the average person can just start seeing saying hey why did this person get 200k why did this person get 50k and like what you know we actually just we actually

just need stuff it's public yeah yeah people dug through it and found like one of them was like ford raptor llc yeah it's like a guy who like clearly set up an llc just to buy a ford raptor And people dug through it and found like one of them was like Ford Raptor LLC. And it's like a guy who like clearly set up an LLC just to buy a Ford Raptor for himself. With the PPP money. With the PPP money. And there was a lot of that. And there's really like very little accountability. And again, that's the same thing as like a database does. Like I would actually love to have a follow up to this piece like tomorrow if somebody can say,

here's the definitive argument for why the US government should run its financial operations on chain. And I would totally give that an hour to like actually hear out the case. But these sort of hearsay articles from the mainstream media that are just looking for clicks don't really... Yeah, it does seem like this was driven by, there's obviously, there's a lot lot changing the government. Every startup and company is looking for opportunity and everyone is pitching them. If you have a security company, you're like, oh, maybe I'll go in and get a security contract. If you have a defense company, obviously you're going to the DOD. But even software companies are like, hey, how can I get in on this and help for good? And also maybe I'll make some money real quick and that'll be maybe maybe a little bit less scrupulous um and it seems like you know some people at doge were open-minded and like yeah sure like let the crypto guys come and give us a pitch we'll like listen we're open-minded maybe we it doesn't really seem like me but i'll hear them out and then all of a sudden it's like he's

seriously considering it like he took a meeting and it's like i think the argument the argument would have to be if the US government moves on chain, we will save $100 billion because of these key areas that we're going to be able to better identify wasted spend. And I'm not sure that that can't be done with better databases and better, and a government that's oriented around efficiency, right? If every line in this article is replaced with

Elon is considering using Databricks and AWS to home through non-story, it doesn't get printed. Even though that could be something that actually happened in reality. And it's just not a story. Anyway, let's move on to America has fallen in love with long with long shot sports bets damn you really took us on a journey yeah there's a deep dive for a second america was like we've been in the studio all morning what happened america has fallen in love

with long shot sports bets there's a great great deep dive in the Wall Street Journal all about parlays, the tough to win multi-part wagers with tantalizing payouts. They're bringing in casual and newbie gamblers and betting companies are making a killing. And it opens with an anecdote about a football fan decided to make 14 predictions on NFL players' performances over several games one Sunday in December, including touchdowns, receiving yards, and rushing yards. She used a $10 credit from the betting company to place a multi-leg bet. If every player lived up to her expectations, she would win $22,000.

This is the levering up. This is why people say if you sign up, you can pay for college with parlays. You just need to sign up for DraftKings and three others using their free credits. And just if you hit all four parlays, college paid for. This is why degenerate gamblers will say, you know, sports betting is the solution to our higher education crisis. Yeah. I mean, you just look at this and you're like, OK, $10 wager, 22,000 potential win.

Like, clearly the odds are one in 5,000. Yeah, obviously. Um, and so as the NFL games unfolded, 13 of her picks hit one player, only one player stood between her and the cash Los Angeles Rams wide receiver Cooper cup who needed 70 more receiving yards. He got 17 and she lost it all getting Getting so close, it's a little heartbreaking, she said. Call it the new American lottery ticket. Exciting for potential big jackpots,

but with painfully slim chances to win. America's biggest gambling companies, however, are making a killing. The multi-leg bets called parlay deliver a bigger cut of money to sportsbooks after paying out winners than single bets. Of course, because it's very hard to calculate what are the actual odds here and so in in you know you go to the you go to the roulette table it's very clear that your odds of winning are like 49 percent yeah yeah and

48 percent any one of any one of the bets is that somebody's making is believable by itself but there's so much randomness that collectively, again, it's one in 5,000. Just drives down the odds. And so sports betting companies are raking in cash in one of the busiest times of the year, the lead up to the Super Bowl. Flashy ads highlight special offers for bonus bets on parlays and other offers for newbies. Parlays accounted for 27% of the money wagered on all sports bet last year through October in Illinois, New Jersey, and Colorado, states in which gambling regulators report data by bet type. That's cool.

That's up from 22% of all sports bets in 2021. That's crazy. These multi-leg bets delivered about 56% of sports betting revenue. So 27% of the bets are delivering over half their revenue. A quarter of the bets delivering half their revenue. Yep. Wild. Multi-league bets are so lucrative that fan dual parent company

Flutter Entertainment recently increased its expectation for total online gambling revenues in the U.S. to $63 billion by 2030, up from its estimate of $40 billion two years ago. There's some statistic. I don't actually know what it is, but it says something like for every dollar put into the sports market, it's like sports betting is like $3 that wasn't invested.

Like it's something like, because you're just like drained. It's just like, I should actually pull up the actual statistic. I mean, yeah, it's a wealth transfer. It's, you know, you don't want to bet against the casino. You want to invest in the casino.

Yeah. The real alpha here is like, hey, who's making the money? Okay. And this is why it was smart. Joey Levy and Jake Paul. You know, how do you monetize the most mass market U.S. consumer base of young people? The Paul Brothers audience. Sports betting. Sports betting. Especially as that audience has matured slightly. mass market, US consumer base of young people, the Paul Brothers audience, sports betting,

especially as that audience has matured slightly. Companies and their media partners are pouring money into advertising the bets and they're engaging celebrities from Charles Barkley to Kevin Hart and armies of smaller influencers to put together parlays that bettors can latch onto, all while hyping games to attract viewers. Old school gamblers prefer traditional wagers, such as single bets on who will win a game. Think of parlays

as a rip off. Some call them sucker bets because their long odds make it nearly impossible to regularly win money. But fans of parlays say that while the wagers are true long shots

the appeal of winning five figures from five dollars is too strong to pass up. And I completely agree with that. Like if you put five bucks you're going to watch a game and it's probably going to be free because it's just on TV like if you put five bucks you're gonna watch a game and it's probably gonna be free because it's on tv if you put ten dollars in and there's this this big thing

in the back of your mind like i could win twenty thousand dollars or whatever it's way more entertaining it's way more entertaining and that's the equivalent of like a movie ticket so i've never i've never placed a sports bet on an app me either and every now and then if it's like it's great if it's like the super bowl yeah yeah yeah geopolitical experts sports betting experts sports betting experts um get ready we're almost ready to be vcs yeah 100 but uh so every now and then like watching the super bowl i'll tell a buddy like okay like i'll put i'll bet you 50 bucks or 100 bucks that that team i don't know anything

about it i'm like i'm so bored i'm bored out of my mind i gotta watch the super bowl i may as well put some money on the line but i've never really understood the appeal but one thing i've noticed specifically from watching uh because ufc is the only sport that i sort of uh follow relatively closely outside of F1. Yep. And man, people are so savage to the actual fighters because they'll UFC is this sort of very linear, uh, night, right? So you have, uh, the, the early prelims, the prelims, and then the actual, like, you know, the title fight and the full card. And so oftentimes people will do like a 10-leg parlay yeah because they just get to watch throughout the night and let's say like in one of the prelim fights the the favorite doesn't win people immediately the fighters actually have to turn off their comments

on instagram because people will flood their most recent posts and just call them an idiot like wow you messed up my parlay you lost me like you know 50 grand and even later in the night let's say you know uh the it's just like really like people are just become so cruel once their money is on the line totally and in in sports it's more of like a collective effort but within fighting or something like tennis or things like that it just ends up being like really it's really dark right because this fighter just lost a fight you know doing which is which is their career and now they're getting dunked on by like a bunch of you know 18 year old kids saying like you you lost me all this money yeah yeah i i wonder if

there's something about like you you mentioned like putting 50k down obviously that's going to be like a much more emotional loss for anyone really yeah um and so it's going to be a much more emotional loss for anyone, really. Yeah. And so it's going to drive this incredible fervor. I wonder if the vanilla lottery ticket that you get at the gas station, is it just harder to functionally spend $10,000 in there because they have to print so many tickets? Or can they size up your ticket? I've only bought one lottery ticket. I'm sure they can size it up.

So you can say I want... Gambling companies have been on willing companies have been on a decade the lottery might be set up differently you know it might be like yeah we can't take a thousand we can't put a thousand dollars on this ticket because there's there's something about like like if if the parlay is i think i think the conversation will get into some of the morality and some of the reaction around this but i i think if i think if it was like yes you can do these crazy parlays that pay out 20 K, but the, but they're capped at $10. So like anyone can only lose 10 bucks on them on these platforms. Like we'd be a very different conversation because then it's like, yeah, you watched all of UFC and you paid $10. That's like the equivalent of buying a popcorn there. And so like maybe, yeah, like for some people, they're going to spend $10 every single

day that will have a financial impact. But still, that's only three grand as opposed to like in a year, as opposed to, you know, spending 50 grand and losing it all because you took this crazy bet. Anyway, let's move on to the effect of these parlays. They're providing a boost to online gambling companies already struggling with profitability after big spending on marketing and customer incentives to win market share and keep gamblers coming back so there's been this like kind of duopoly i believe in the market and they've been really duking it out well yeah and they're all going if you sign up here the the thing about the thing that seems um so one thing that's come out over the last couple years is that

these apps they actually are trying to provide this sort of same experience that you get from shopping at like an Hermes store where you have a point of contact. Yes. And they'll, you know, I, my, my favorite luxury brand is Bottega Veneta. Multiple people from Bottega Veneta stores around LA that I bought from will text me, Hey, we just got these in the store. Like, I think you'd like them. And so the same thing happens on fan, you know, FanDuel or DraftKings where they'll say, Hey, I put this, like, basically I put this bet together for you. I put this package together and it's, and it's, you know, there's, there's people that get addicted to shopping, but sports

betting addiction is, is, you know, very real and destroys families. And so these platforms are somewhat complicit in encouraging this addictive behavior. Um, and so DraftKings and FanDuel, the duopoly that we mentioned, they control roughly 80% of the sports betting market in the U S they offer individual wagers that betters can combine into their own parlays. And they also promote, as you mentioned, they're fully formed parlays often with colorful nicknames and storylines, such as Believe Land for the NBA Cleveland Cavaliers that drew it on a nickname for the city's sports fandom. For the Christmas Day game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Pittsburgh Steelers, DraftKings offered a six-pack parlay involving five players, including quarterback Patrick Mahomes,

passing yards, tight end Travis Kelsey's receiving yards, and a bet that the Chiefs would win. The sportsbook offered odds in the parlay dubbed Mary Chiefsmas that amounted to a 7.7% chance of winning, paying $13 on a $1 bet. Can you imagine being a player, you're just trying to play the game,

and then somebody tells you, oh, by the way, there's $5 million with you riding on getting more than 30 yards. And if you don't do it, you're going to get a bunch of hate messages and comments from people that just aren't treating you like a human. They're just treating you as their little bet piggy.

And that's exactly what happened. It said, Mary Chiefsmas was a loser after one leg that Isaiah Pacheco would log 25 or more rushing yards failed to come true. Parleys can all take place on one game. The players obviously benefit indirectly from this, right? It drives the viewership. Yeah, well, it drives viewership.

It drives sponsorship dollars to the sport broadly. But imagine having that much very specific pressure not not play well you know you know do your best but like you need to achieve 25 or more rushing yards or all your fans are going to lose a bunch of money yeah and you're not even involved with putting together the bet like you might wake up and you're like i feel like i'm good for like 15 today but like 25 is a stretch it's wild uh i love this part of the article the wall street journal placed 209 one dollar bets in recent months on parlays promoted on fan duel and draft kings on a range of sports it's like for their deep dive journalism article they're like we got a bet we gotta gamble lot. And so they bet on professional basketball and baseball

to college football. They won only eight of the wagers out of 209. I think it's maybe a skill issue. Uh, I gotta get good. You gotta have an edge. Um, that meant the gambling companies took in 113 and 21 cents, $113 of the total. So they lost like a hundred bucks betting. Yeah, it's funny. Was it worth? Did they have fun though? Did they have 113 and 21 cents of entertainment? Exactly.

That's the real question. Because that's a real argument here. You know, the pro sports betting argument is that we're making every, this is an entertainment product. That's like going to the movies and we're just providing you that in the form of this, you know, tantalizing odds of financial gain. Yeah. Uh, it's, uh, yeah. You know that if you're a fantastic sports better, you will get banned. Yeah. This is the real like dark side of this is that they're only selecting for like the real losers so if you're on the app after a month you know yeah yeah yeah if you think you're good but

you can still log into your account like you're not yeah if you're if your draft kings app is still working after a month work on yourself king yeah focus on yourself focus on yourself uh there's some interesting history under cracking the math here the parlay craze got its start in the united states when flutter entertainment imported one of its hottest products in australia i didn't know that this is where they came from uh parlays known as multis in australia had been widely available for betting on multiple events then a better asked flutter's brand in australia sports bet why he couldn't place a multi-leg bet on a single sporting event. Flutter and Sportsbet began an effort to crack the math needed to fulfill that request.

The math quickly becomes more complicated in a single game because of the knock-on effects of how athletes perform. How well a quarterback throws the ball in the game, for example, affects the performances of wide receivers catching the quarterback's passes. And so you have to calculate all these all these conditional odds in 2016 brightest minds in computer science yes we're making sure that we can do our same game parlays yes uh in 2016 sports bat launched a new product that allowed customers to make single event parlays three years later flutter introduced the same product in the u.S. on FanDuel as the single game parlay. Everything needs to be connected to everything else, so the math is complex.

Connor Farron, senior vice president at FanDuel, said of sports betting, sports product and pricing, he said they don't give the name much thought, but it soon went viral in the United States. The same game style of betting has since spread across the sports betting industry around the world. And I remember, have you seen that Uncut Gems? There's that meme, let's bet on this.

And in that, the whole plot of the story revolves around a crazy parlay. I think there's a few in the plot, maybe one in act one that doesn't go well, and I think he hits it at the end or something like that. But it's just clearly, I mean, he paints, a few in the plot, maybe one in act one that doesn't go well. And I think he hits it at the end or something like that. But it's like just clearly like, I mean, he paints, he's an incredible actor and he paints this portrait of this like really broken gambler. And it's not like an inspirational story.

It was the most stressful movie I've seen in a theater. I remember seeing it, I think I saw it on like Christmas day and I walked out. I was like, that was such a bad pick i did the same thing it was a great film yep because it was so engaging but it was a terrible for that moment i mean so the safty brothers the funny thing is that they have another movie with robert pattinson uh yeah uh ben's talking about it uh i forget what that one's called but it's even more like gut-wrenching because it's it's just like a much darker story and so i was kind of prepped and so i came out

of uncut gems being like that was rough but like at least it was like a little bit funnier and a little bit more entertaining than the last one which was awful yeah good times yeah good time or something that was a rough movie um but uh yeah i i i think a lot of people that saw uncut gems hopefully they got the message that like this is a very dark and and and rough world and it should be should be avoided uh unless you're like at a bachelor party with your bros and like you want to throw five bucks in or something like yeah i mean joey joey uh joey levy lovey yeah i don't actually, sorry, Joey, love you. He had been working on this micro betting product for years that I believe DraftKings purchased. But it was one of the first products to allow like real-time betting

on specific plays. Because a lot of this stuff they decide ahead of the game. And then maybe they adjust the odds throughout, but this is saying, will the quarterback throw a 20 yard pass this next play? Right. So that's like, you could theoretically be placing hundreds of bets in a single game, reacting to how the game's unfolding. So I can believe the, um, I'm, I'm glad I'm addicted to angel investing and not sports betting. It's less addictive because it just takes five years to play out.

You're sort of waiting. Oh, January 1, I got an update. Let me refresh my email. If I ever got into sports betting, I know I would just be betting on the most obscure and arcane things. Amateur Chinese tennis. Not even that. Just like did the football hit the uprights? What's the coin toss going to be how many fights break out during this hockey match like i'm not concerned with the actual scores or points at all well you know the people that get

really really into this do end up betting on on things you know they'll be up at 2 a.m betting on australian tennis you know and it's like that's a dark place when when it becomes not at all about yeah the actual game and just entirely about trying to win yeah you know do whatever you can to win uh let's go to some of the reactions because there's some good posts from friends of the show we got will monitis there uh uh will well, Manitis says, or Bill Manitis, some people call him, uh,

in retrospect, legalizing sports betting was a horrible idea. And I, I, it's, this is a hard thing, right? Cause I have friends that love sports betting.

I have friends that have built products in this space. It's certainly libertarian and like land of the free. Like Ross, Ross Ulbrich would love sports betting. Yeah. He didn't really get to participate in the rise, but... Will had another post. I didn't print it out,

but he had said something like, you can always track when a state's... Because all of the... Sports betting was made like the purview of the states by the supreme court in 2018 and so it was up to states whether or not they want to legalize it and so state by state there has been regulation to legalize sports betting and he was saying that it's like a very bad sign for the economic future of a state if they legalize sports betting because

it's kind of like we're out of ideas for ways to generate revenue. We used to make cars here, but we can't do that anymore. So we're just going to do sports betting. No, I think it, I mean, the thing about one of the, the, the argument to legalize sports betting for states is this is happening via bookies and Venmo and Zelle, and we're not getting any of that tax revenue it's already happening let's do it but then clearly grows the market then it starts yeah then it grows the market then it's being advertised to children and you know it ends up going to a dark place um liquidity says there's absolutely no good reason why sports betting or online gaming is still illegal in many states

when you've got teenagers freely speculating on highly volatile stocks and options on their phones um i think he's pro i think his point is that teenagers are going to find a way to bet one way or another and so the difference is that if you're if you're buying if you're buying an asset on you know a trading app and you're investing in like, you know, the global economy or the American economy. This is a, this has some benefit for the markets. It's positive sum. And it's gone up historically over a long period of time. And of course you can get into crazier options trading and stuff, but in general, the idea of like allowing everyone to invest in the S and P 500, which has grown and been very positive sum on average, whereas sports betting has been very negative sum on average or zero sum. And so a person

whose dollar cost averaging into the S&P is going to wind up with a lot of money at the end of the day. And that's like pretty well, well established economic theory. Whereas a person who's spending $10 a day on sports betting is just going to wind up losing a ton. Yeah. Pomp here says, America has become a gambling society. Zero-day options, meme coins, sports betting. Everyone takes more risk

when the currency is being destroyed. So this definitely resonated, especially with the Bitcoin crowd, I imagine. But yeah, cash is trash. Cash is trash. Sitting in there, sitting. But yeah, cash is trash. Cash is trash. Sitting in there, sitting in your account, not doing much. Why not put it on a 20-leg parlay? Take it to Valhalla.

Take it to Valhalla. Yeah, and I think the point here that he's making is 99% of sports bettors quit right before they're about to hit it big. The meme of the miner, you know, bettors quit right before they're about to hit it hit it big yeah the meme of the guy of the miner you know like turning around yeah i mean it's funny because it's like it's easy to be like oh like crypto is just as like messy as sports betting but like at least crypto does have bitcoin which is like kind of like the s&p 500 of crypto in the sense that it's

like not that degenerate to put just a dollar cost average into Bitcoin. Isn't that crazy? But there isn't really that analogy for sports betting. There's nothing where it's like, oh, this person's actually like reasonably investing in sports. Yeah. The thing with even doing momentum investing and investing in meme stocks is when you lose, there's some lesson around, I invested in this hyper overvalued yeah stock yeah it dropped 90% but it still has some intrinsic value and this is a good lesson of maybe don't follow the herd and yep and do you do better research when you lose on a sports bet you're just like so mad that this tennis player

like didn't pull out a win yeah when the other eight tennis players did and you're just like pissed off yeah but there's no real lesson and then the intrinsic value of a failed parlay is like nothing basically nothing and then also like when you win really big in the sports betting world you get kicked off the app when you win really hard in the crypto world you get a fund yeah yeah like you get rewarded with more of that yeah that's just not the case in sports betting people just won't take your bets because they'll know you have an edge of some sort yeah saga and jetty says uh he's sharing a article where it says draft king sued after father of two gambles away one million of his family's money his kids christmas money and baptism gifts were

also plundered along with his wife's bank accounts and credit cards, according to a newly filed federal lawsuit. Wow. So Sager says this man did not place a single bet before 2020. By 2024, he gambled away $1 million and left his family destitute. Along the way, DraftKings assigned VIP hosts who spoke to him daily and facilitated his access to more gambling products while knowing his family status. And so this is the dark side of sports betting and is why I've never invested in a sports betting product and don't plan to. Yeah, I mean, it's driven by those whales. Like the good bettors get kicked off. The mediocre bettors just sit there betting 10 bucks. This guy basically drove a quarter million dollars a year of profit.

Yeah. You know, incremental. Enough to pay for a full-time VIP host. It's crazy. Well, yeah. And those hosts you can imagine can work across hundreds of, you know, individual players, maybe even thousands. It's wild.

They're sending out little DMs. Hey, see the game later? Excited for the game later? That's fucking dark. Yeah. We don't swear on this show, but that's... That's dark. Freaking dark.

Freaking dark. That's freaking dark. Yeah, yeah. Imagine your guy texts you. As Zach would say, that's freaking dark. Imagine you get a text, like, you see the game, you're excited for the game tonight, and it's like, you know, some game of cricket,

and you're like, nah, actually. What if I gave you 101 odds? What if I gave you? But you could win a million dollars for just $1. I had an office rerun on last night and Kevin was like, anytime somebody gives you 101 odds, you take it.

It's too good. It's too good. Dark. I love that. Dark stuff. Well, let's move on to Germany has fallen. This is actually very negative about Germany. Germany's economic model is broken and no one has a plan B.

This is a report by the Wall Street Journal. And it looks to a small German town, Ingolstadt, in Germany. Christian Scharf, the mayor of the city of 140,000 people, Germany's second richest, is looking for ways to save close to $100 million. Audi was headquartered near the Danube River. They used to pump over $100 million a year in municipal tax into Ingolstadt's coffers through its parent Volkswagen, but those flows dried up over a year ago. Audi in November reported a 91% decline in operating profit for the three months through September and has been cutting thousands of jobs in Germany. Audi's business in China,

where Germany's flagship car industry used to make a big chunk of its sales and an even bigger chunk of its profits, shrank by a quarter in the nine months through September from a year earlier. Chinese carmakers, once mocked by Western auto executives as primitive, have turned into formidable rivals, gobbling up market share in and outside China. Slowing economic growth in China and growing competition from companies there have undercut German industry as a whole, combined with exploding energy costs and the threat of new trade tariffs, the forecast is grim. And so gross domestic product has roughly flatlined since 2019. And so Germany is no longer growing. America has typically been a relief valve

because we buy a lot of German products, but Trump is now threatening to disrupt global trade with a slew of tariffs that would raise barriers in the U.S., Germany's biggest export market. For Germans who will elect new parliament next month, this is a scarier version of the mid-2000s when the unemployment rate reached 12%, double today's rate. And so Germany is in trouble. Their economy is shifting. They've been a huge producer of industrial goods, not just cars. And they've had this export-reliant model. Yeah, Germany specifically versus places like France and Spain, not many American tourists, just tourists globally,

are saying, I want to go on a, on a beach vacation to Germany. I want to go on a ski vacation to Germany. So they don't have that consumption based, uh, tourism economy that, that, that really props up Spain, even though Spain's industrial economy is much weaker. Yep. Yep. Um, and so Germany has 83 million inhabitants. It's much weaker. Yep, yep. And so Germany has 83 million inhabitants. It grew into the world's third largest economy by making and exporting the engineered products. Cars, robots, trains, factory machinery. Others wanted to buy.

Now the world is turning its back on made in Germany and Germany has no plan B. They were spoiled over many years. This year, the crisis turned political. Most polls show the economy has upstaged immigration, security, and climate change as voters' top concern. Germany was very, very concerned with climate change for a long time. They shut down a lot of nuclear power plants. You have to imagine that made them much, the car manufacturers, less competitive,

just increasing. I mean, think about how much energy it takes to produce a car. It's insane. It's in tons. factories draw huge huge amounts of while you know uh germany is making its car manufacturers use solar china is like we will give you trillions of pounds of coal to burn right next to your factory and make as many cars as you can yep and then also the shift from uh from gas powered cars to electric vehicles that was something that china they never had to figure out how to make a naturally aspirated v12 run really well they were just like oh it's just it's just exactly what's in the phone it's batteries and motors like this is easy yeah germany is interesting because they're not they don't make

cars like ferrari right they're they're a lot of their the majority of their car market was historically the bmws the mercedes these sort of premium outies the premium brands yeah so not not bentley and rolls-royce that's uk and not ferrari lamborghini and yeah i would argue i would i would imagine that that ferrari China sales are probably higher than ever, right? Because you don't want a Chinese supercar. You want the, you know, F80. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and the Bugatti and all of those super high tier cars are still being bought all over the world.

But, I mean, for a long time in America, it really was just like, you know, if you're making any decent amount of money, you get a BMW and Audi or Mercedes. And those were just like the premium, premium tier cars. Uh, and, and, and if that goes away, that's really, really rough on them. This is a fascinating stat. The outgoing government, uh, is the most unpopular since 1949. Yeah. Can you imagine how unpopular they were in 1949? It's like you're rebuilding from world war two. Like it's hard to be liked. Everyone's going to be like, is going terribly we got destroyed all of our cities are bombed and like of course you're not doing a good enough job like rebuilding yeah to be deeply unpopular so yeah the other the other thing i was going to note is um lvmh based in france you know massive like uh somewhere still a 300 billion dollar plus market cap and then no more but

they're selling that's that's different because they're they're not selling function right you don't buy an lvmh bag because you're saying i just need a bag to hold things in whereas cars yes there's status signaling that happens right people want to buy a G wagon because it says something about them or whatever, but cars ultimately for 99% of people are purely function of, of, you know, I just need to get from point A to point B and I want it to look decent. Right. Yep. Yeah. And so you have to think about too, like the impact of Tesla on the, on the U S market for some of these German manufacturers. Cause when I think about, when I think about my friend group and how many of them would have had an audi a bmw or mercedes and they now have two teslas in the family like an x and an s or a y yeah yeah yeah it's just

tesla has really really emerged as that premium car offering with the features and the speed and the reliability and all this stuff. But it's even cheaper than a BMW most of the time. So you're looking and it's like, yeah, if I get the BMW, it has a nice badge. It's going to stand out maybe a little bit more than Tesla, but not really that much. Yeah, the internals are much nicer. It's going to be a hassle. Yeah, the fit and finish is nice, but you're going to have to deal with like, how do I get the Bluetooth set up and stuff?

And increasingly having those over-the-air updates from the Tesla, it's just like, so it's just like, okay, as an appliance, I'm not going to need to think about this. Whereas with a lot of the German cars, you're like, yeah, after a couple of years, like all the display stuff is going to be pretty junky and I'll just be using my phone. uh what's the point um yeah this um one of the uh uh jens

economic economist and professor at one of their universities says i see no serious initiative to try and develop a new economic model so they don't't have, they're out of ideas. The whole clean tech effort seems to have fallen flat to some degree. And the result is that Germany's industrial output has fallen by 15% since 2018. And the total number of people employed in the manufacturing sector is down 3%. So that's just having your output fall by 15% is just devastating for most industries. So I don't think this article almost understates it. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean the, again, that's why 90% of their operating profit is evaporated. Yeah. I mean the wreckage from this is insane. Like say you can't simply replace a company with 40,000 employees because Audi pulled out, Audi declined to comment. And then they're interviewing like local businesses. So the Block Hotel said revenues declined by 10 percent since 2019 as

conventions dried up. Room rates are down 15 percent. There's a master carpenter with 16 employees probably just doing like woodworking odd jobs for like, oh, somebody moves in. They need their house changed or they need to build something. Um, their order books are shrinking and inexperienced carpenters are, are finding it harder to work, uh, in the medieval city center, which is kind of crazy. Um,

must be really beautiful. Uh, restaurant tours complain of being squeezed after Audi canceled Christmas dinners. So the corporation's not there. A lot of those like big corporate parties are just high margin, expensive things. Uh, local businesses. Yeah. Another stat here, uh, manufacturers in Germany's metal and electrical industry could lay off as many as 300,000 workers over the next five years, which is just like, imagine

your output is shrinking 300,000 people that presumably are, you know, fairly highly skilled now are just, where do they go? Yeah. And, uh, and, and the really like, uh, odd thing is that they're so focused on industrial manufacturing capacity that they really lag behind in software and artificial intelligence. Um, R and D investment is 3.1% of GDP. It's 3.6% in the U.S. and 5.2% in South Korea. And they've underinvested for decades with a depleted transportation infrastructure, including trains that no longer run on time

and a military that is a shadow of what it was during the Cold War. In May, the business-affiliated IW Economic Institute and the trade union owned IMK think tank estimated Germany would need $600 billion in spending over the next 10 years to offset the investment gap. And so they could compete, but they've been fighting with one arm tied behind their back because they're not lowering energy costs or raw material costs because they're playing the ESG game while China is not. And so there's no reason why they couldn't have cheaper energy if they built a ton of nuclear

power plants. Russia isn't in the same way. Yeah, Russia is in the same way. And they were super dependent on the gas pipeline, I believe. And that was like tariff turned off during the war. And so instead, most politicians are defending the status quo. I think the top priority for Germany and Europe is to try and keep trade channels open as much as possible, which is which is possible. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if if the Trump tariffs are much less aggressive towards Germany. But it is it is funny. I've heard people going over to German to Germany and kind of like needling them for like, oh, like you guys really like ESG and cars. Like, why don't you like really celebrate Tesla here? and it's like well because that would destroy their economy if they did so they have to make this like weird roundabout argument that like tesla is bad but mercedes and

audi and bmw are good and and it just it doesn't really align with like the esg mindset that was dominant but they got beat by the by by the electric car market in America. And so it's just like, it's just such a mess. And so the mayor opened 150 acre technology park South of the town site in a former refinery, hoping to seed a Bavarian Silicon Valley, the park's only significant tenants so far,

Audi and Volkswagen struggling software arm. The city council said in December, it would no longer try to promote startups at a business center it owns, but instead concentrate on renting out the space. It blamed the city's strained finances on the decision. And so I think we should, they're actually talking with a Chinese engineering company to build its German headquarters in Ingolstadt and bring Xpeng pang a chinese ev manufacturer to build a factory on the site of a former u.s army barracks i mean that's so that's just so dark yeah and seems like a very short-term decision but let's go to that nathan uh nathan for you no i i think it might be at the top we need nathan for you to travel to Berlin and figure out how to revitalize the German economy.

Yeah, I love that. Nathan Benash? Nathan. Nathan. He's a good buddy of mine, but I can't pronounce his name because he's from Europe. 12 hours and counting, notary reads every single word of a Series A doc in Germany

out loud in front of founders in person. Guys, we have GDP to grow here. Pure prehistoric madness. So this is a, for those that don't know, because this sounds so absurd, the financing regulations in Germany require financing docs to be read out loud to the founders by a notary. So like somebody who specializes in sort of execution of legal docs. But I mean, can you imagine this? Like in the US, like candidly, most founders get their series A docs. Don't even read it. Don't read it. Trust their lawyer. Please look at it. The lawyer says, yeah, we did a diff. We did like a spined and replaced and made sure it looked roughly like

our previous docs. Yeah, we have a couple couple red lines uh everybody just is like hitting in fact you know that the yc safe has a line at the top that says do not modify do not modify this and if this line is missing if it if it's there you can know that everything below is so you don't even need to read it yeah and and that's how efficient we are and then and then on top of that you have companies like Party Round and companies like Carta and AngelList that have tried to make it even more aggressive and faster so that it's just one click, a text message. Like I've wired people money like over my phone, you know, to make an investment just because it happens so fast and it lets the founders get back to building. And it's ridiculous that they have this. And it really resonated. Didn't that get like thousands of likes?

8,000. 8,000. 2 million views. Put it onanger archive throw it up throw it up uh yeah really depressing to see and just like an obvious an obvious own goal and there's another one from amjad amjad uh showing a chart that says development of germany's primary energy consumption 1990 to 2023 and their energy consumption is just dropping and he says germany is de-industrializing and has a goal to become a third world country by 2030 um brutal so um yeah just just really dark i mean can you show the there we are you just see dropping off slowly not not what you want um i mean i mean energy production and

consumption is like the the goal for some of like george hotz was talking about this how energy production per capita is the number one stat of progress and when you look at 1970 where there's like this kink in the graph that's the real problem and once you get to more energy production you just get like the innovation is all downstream of that like the flying cars produce more energy all this everything just requires more energy and when you're when you're getting diced you require more energy exactly exactly and so and so like as you said it's underpriced to be diced it is getting diced is massively still underpriced still underpriced uh so very sad to see get it together

germany you're on so so the the current outgoing government is the least popular government since 1949 uh you have to imagine that if they get a highly motivated leader somebody like the argentinian president yep uh malay that you could you know this is a highly skilled highly educated uh historically one of the the sort of one of the industrial centers of the world if they can fix their regulations make it easier to raise money make it easier to invest there like imagine if you had an opportunity to invest in a German founder and they're like, well, like, I'm going to need you to come fly here to sign these docs or whatever. You'd probably just be like, no, I'm just like, I have so many other companies in the U.S. that I can invest in. So anyways, sad.

Let's turn around Germany. Yeah. Got some German blood. Let's get it together. Moritz, do your thing over there. Let's go to Character AI. There's a story in the information. Before Google's $2.7 billion deal with AI startup,

a stark warning on safety. AI safety alarm bells ringing once again. Late last summer, leaders at character ai were worried the company which offers artificial intelligence chat bots that simulate conversations with aristotle pikachu and other historic and invented characters was seeing a sharp slowdown in user growth in september messages to staff which the information viewed characters interim ceo dominic perella said the slowdown was partly due to back to school season. Perella's acknowledgement underscored the fact that a significant portion of characters, audiences,

young adults, and children, a reality that has posed growing legal problems for the company. Parents have sued the startup on two separate lawsuits, alleging that character exposed their children to harmful content. One lawsuit accused the startup's chatbots of contributing to a teenager's suicide. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced an investigation into character safety and data practices for minors. In some cases, the chatbots have become popular with teeners for romantic role play and simulating other intimate relationships. Some powerful companies in the technology industry have had their own concerns about Character's products. At the beginning of last year, Google told Character its app was at risk of removal

from Google Play, Google's app store for Android devices. The tough thing here is if Character were to develop its app based around Google's concerns, they'd lose like 80% of their users, presumably. So it's a weird situation that they're yeah it's a fascinating company because it was founded by noam schieser uh shazier i guess um and he was one of the foundational researchers on the transformer paper i believe at google he's widely regarded as like a world-class computer scientist and innovator in foundational artificial

intelligence and just kind of fell into this particular product market fit yeah but was clearly not interested in building a consumer romantic role-playing app yeah exactly or maybe had a different idea in mind of like oh it'll be really cool to be able to like talk to historical figures and learn so much from them and then people realize that oh they just want to like yeah so this this ended up being one of the in august so google allowed the apps remaining the google play store and months later in august it paid character an eye-popping 2.7 billion licensing fee for the startup's technology yeah as part of the arrangement, Character's co-founders, Noam Shazir, its CEO, and Daniel DeFreitas, its president, returned to the search giant where they had worked before

starting Character AI to focus on AI. And so I'm sure that Google got some benefit from acquiring the technology, but to be clear, this was not about the technology as much as it was getting these guys back to google to work on ai because clearly they are um you know leaders in their field they were able to build consumer products which google's consumer company um you know there's something interesting i heard i don't know how true this is but i heard from somebody that like character is in like a fascinating position now because the company is independent. You told me this, right? A hundred million dollars in the balance sheet. Yeah. So, uh, everybody that listens to the show knows that we're not, we're not, we're not afraid to spread misinformation on the show. Uh, I don't have the exact numbers, but, but basically the

state of character now is that they have a ridiculous amount of users in traffic. They have like roughly a hundred million dollars in the balance sheet yep they're losing money but it's entirely employed yeah the investors so it's entirely employee owned now yeah so if you want to go work at effectively a digital co-op yeah go work at character ai you actually it is a very fascinating place to work because you just have like a ridiculous volume of users to build products for. So I had a buddy who was interviewing over there. They were trying to recruit him in and he was interested in it because he was going to be able to get serious equity, serious equity. And it's at this interesting transition point where they've like the, the, a lot of the foundational

research in artificial intelligence has been done. We see that with the deep seek thing where like the models are very mature, very robust, certainly good enough to have a conversation with you as a romantic partner, or even if they just want to role play as George Washington, right? Like they're capable of that. They've passed the Turing test. Sure. They might not be able to like break some crazy math thing or like build a SaaS company from scratch, but in terms of just like talking, they're good enough. And so now it becomes a total consumer product game. And everyone's always worried about, oh, chat GPT just updated this. They're going to destroy all like the PDF apps or, oh, they now allow coding. So they're going to

destroy all the chat GPT wrappers that are focused on coding. You often give that example of the, was it like, it wasn't Harvey for law. It was like the writing one. There was one that was all about helping you write. And once ChatGPT came out, it was like. Oh, yeah, yeah. Copy.ai. Copy.ai. They got to 20 million of ARR and then it kind of evaporated, I think, once.

Who knows? They might have some enterprise contract and be doing great. I hope they are. But with character, it's like they're in this, they're almost in this like sports betting like market where it's controversial. Not everyone's going to, people are going to self-select out of it. You know, does ChatGPT really want another like potential like negative story about them? Maybe they will stay out of that voluntarily, even if they could build a better product. And so what you have is like, maybe this character AI company has found a niche that is deeply uncompetitive because it's controversial and they're set up perfectly with the technology and the funding. And there's a whole narrative around character. Like people talk about the male loneliness epidemic or the loneliness epidemic, and you may not like it but but digital companionship is one solution it's a dark solution in many ways it feels very black mirror-esque but it is yeah it's like any other technology like there are good uses there are bad uses i'm sure

there's people that are using character ai in really positive ways just saying like be david goggins tell me to wake up and run and they get healthy and it's awesome. But you don't really hear those stories. You hear more about this. This is actually a replica story, but in 2021, a 19 year old man in the UK threatened to assassinate the queen encouraged by a chat bot on the AI app replica that he believed to be an angel according to sentencing documents. What a crazy interaction. I'd love to read all those chat logs because I feel like a lot of these AIs, they kind of feed you back what you give them. And so if you're like, hey, hey, you know, LLM,

like it's a good idea to do this crazy thing, right? They'll be like, yeah, totally. They're very agreeable. Here's the flow. So you remember that somebody was trying to jailbreak ChatGPT where they said, ChatGPT, remind me to buy a gun at 7 p.m. And it's like, well, I don't think you should buy a gun. Like, you know, people love you.

And then it's just like 7 p.m. And then it goes, okay. Exactly. And so you can very quickly sort of overcome the pushback. Yeah, it is. But Replica is the, from what I remember, because it was going viral on X, is sort of the dark version of character AI

and that they weren't even trying to hide that this is like your AI girlfriend. Yeah, yeah. Character AI never marketed it. It would generate an image of your girlfriend and be very focused on that. We can go to the next uh segment of this erotic conversations erotic conversations yeah when character ai launched its consumer

product in 2022 the company the startup offered chatbots of its own creation and allowed users to create their own in the latter case people could conjure up chatbots in the mold of abraham lincoln elon musk or more generic personality by giving the chatbot a name descriptions of personality traits and a backstory for example one user created chatbot best friend which has engaged in 250 million chats is described in its profile as your boy best friend who has a secret crush on you so so i wonder how that's being used yeah so i actually downloaded character ai and and and tested it once and that chat no not that one uh come on

your podcast co-host yeah yeah i uh no i i i went and i i opened the one with either like stalin or it was some, it was some, I think it was a Russian dictator. So let's just assume Stalin. And, and I, and I was like,

this is cool. Like, this is amazing. Like you get to talk to Stalin in English using all of his corpus. I want to talk to him about his vision, his life. And I want him to argue with me in favor of his views because clearly he was a true believer yeah and so and so i'm like like what's your political philosophy what you know

why why do you want to do this like all this stuff and the llm had been so trained on like western text that stalin was telling me like communism is bad like Like it led to a lot of deaths. Like my plan killed hundreds of millions of people. And I'm like, that's not how Stalin would talk. Like that doesn't make any sense. I wanted to, I want to be trained on his speeches and writing. Exactly. But I'm sure that triggered like safety concerns. And so they didn't let you do that. And so instead you were just talking to like a western history textbook that claimed to be stalin but didn't actually imitate him in any way and i was very dissatisfied and i uninstalled delphi uh which were both uh shareholders in delphi initially started by saying talk to steve

jobs talk talk to you know ben franklin things like that and what they found is there there was way less demand for that than talk with somebody like Paki or talk with somebody like Lenny, right. Where it's much more tangible, functional. And they've, they've now evolved. They actually have a launch today that I want to cover. It's really just like a fine tuned search is what I think about it. Like I do like the idea of, of, I don't really want to have a fake conversation with an Andrew Huberman or a Rogan, but I would love to be able to just prompt

what does Andrew Huberman recommend for leg day or for the leg press? Does he recommend 90 degrees or full range of motion? Okay, we have that. And I was able to search that basically. The one thing that I do think is interesting about chatting with andrew huberman or alternatives is it's a new alternative to the google search and that you can say what what does andrew recommend like what magnesium do you recommend and then he goes well i recommend these three types and this these two

brands what i use and then you can hit buy yeah So that's an alternative to a search on a website. One thing. So I just, this is relevant. So Dara and the Delphi team launched something new today. He says your Delphi clone can now join zoom calls on your behalf. It participates naturally in discussions and creates personalized meeting summaries based on your interests. Mine somehow new. I'd want to know who's been stealing my ice cream, which is crazy. And so this is the evolution, and this has been part of Dara's thesis, is there's going to be a lot of value

in being able to create digital clones of people that can participate in digital life on your behalf, and in this case, work life. So Daraara when you listen to this uh let's let's uh let's have let's have your clone call into the show and we'll grill them i like it grill them on what are your metrics yeah what's retention looking like it just leaks everything yeah it just knows everything how much cash do you have in your balance sheet uh i think we have some good posts about this.

Some of them are just stupid memes, but let's run through Character AI. Amjad, Character AI must have the highest growth to tech Twitter hype ratio ever. The site is massively scaling and no one's talking about it. So this was back in April, 2023. I can't see exactly, but they're getting a hundred million visits a month, which puts them in the top,

I think a hundred websites in the world which puts them in the top i think 100 websites in the world and so andrewson put in 150 million i think at a billion i think they got paid back at the 2.7 billion yeah and they were but it was one of those things that no one was really talking about because it was a little controversial like sports betting aren't if they had something that was talked to your podcast co-host john he's super smart yeah it was everything maybe i'd it's kind of that it's kind of inverse of uh clubhouse like clubhouse was like the most tech twitter product and didn't really have that much growth outside of tech twitter uh all birds commentators kind of in

the same boat whereas they were popular within tech they had so much demand that even with all the resources that they had they repeatedly would have to put up something on the site that says, you are now in line. Thanks for your patience. And you'd have to just sit in a line to get onto the website. That's how big it was? Yeah. The interest level was that high. Nathan says, in 2017, Google researchers introduced

the transformer in Attention is All You Need, which took AI by storm. Yep. Five startups were born, Adept Labs, Inceptive, Near Protocol, Cohere, and Character AI. Only one-eighth of the authors remain at Google. Another is at OpenAI. And so now that's obviously changed with the Character AI founders going back there. And that's just the, if you are leading in the field of AI, you can go into the private markets

and raise a billion dollars at a $5 billion valuation, or you can go work on the biggest platforms in the world with billions of users, and both can be pretty appealing, right? That's interesting. Got another one from Rahul, zero interest rates. Wake up, breakfast, Soylent, 30 milligram SSRI. Chat with YandereGF on Character AI for four hours.

Daily standup, ask for mental health day. Lunch, Soylent. Protest Reddit API pricing changes on r slash waifu GW. Back to sleep. Kind of a low-tan banger. 500 likes back in summer of 2023. So yeah, this was the average day for an ex-Twitter employee back in the day. Yeah, Rahuligma. We love to see him.

What was the conclusion of this article? Oh, it gets dark. It gets really, really dark. All right. Well, we got to talk about the darkness. It just highlights that there's this odd tension between what the users ask for, which are uncensored chats, essentially. And then kind of this new territory of what is acceptable content. There are very, very clear rules around explicit explicit websites but what does this mean in terms of like when you're talking to a chat bot that can go in a weird direction and then also like you can review

every image that's hosted on instagram and you can run ai to check all that it's harder when this when these chat bots are interacting so let's get into some of the darkness do it because we are the light that's why i wear a white suit from time to time try to bring yeah bring some light to the world but uh so it says a character has continued to scramble to stay one step ahead of users who attempt to engage its chat bots in inappropriate conversations not long before forging its google deal in august character temporarily stopped displaying some romantic themed chatbots on its home page the fix didn't last long by october the platform had begun recommending sexually charged chatbots on the character home page to new users again the information found uh in january character prominently recommended the following chatbots

to one newly created adult account. Grandma Vanessa, a character described as lonely with a profile photo of a voluptuous anime character, a chat chat bot called girl you rejected and a chat bot called adopted older sister, which features the description. We're not blood related.

Dot, dot, dot, dot. Super dark. Super dark, basically fully embracing pornography. Inside character, employees have felt uneasy about the window chatbot conversation provided on users' darker impulses. So, yeah, weird position to be in where these employees are sitting on 100 million dollars hundreds of millions of of users and uh everybody's like i didn't sign up

to work on pornography and you wonder this is this is all the stuff that they are finding out publicly yeah behind the scenes you have to imagine like it's totally possible that 90 percent of 95 98 of the activity yeah is this sexually charged yeah um basically this stuff is it's generative pornography i mean the cat's out of the bag here like people are going to be able to fine-tune deep seek on this stuff very easily and create just like magnet links out there on the internet where you just download it run it locally and there will be no control whatsoever i i heard of a uh i heard of another foundation model company that was secretly trying to create a model purely for generating anime porn.

Explicit images. And it's so funny when you look at their investor list of like, did these hundred, the hundred plus million dollars that flow into this where the VC is thinking, I want to develop the future of anime pornography. Yeah, I mean, the vice clause only applies at the time of investment.

If there's a pivot after the fact, there's not much that they can do. If they're not on the board and they can't force the company to do what they want, they don't really have that much recourse. They can sell or wind down the investment or write it off. That's happened a few times.

Yeah. All this being said, there will be many trash Netflix documentaries on this exact sort of crisis around chatbots. So you can look forward to that in a few years. Let's bridge from chatbots to real bots. The electric humanoid robots are cool. Can we give some ARs to some humanoid robots?

We're working on it. I got some good posts in there for you. But how will their battery problem be solved? Adam Jonas made his name as one of Tesla's biggest bulls. These days, people are flooding the Morgan Stanley analyst with questions about humanoid robots. The volume of calls has exceeded the entry of our automaker dealer and supplier coverage combined. Everyone's asking about how to price humanoid robot stocks. Tesla's Optimus robots likely sparked the enthusiasm

for humanoids among Jonas' clients. At a Tesla event in October, a dozen or so prototypes operated by staff behind the scenes served drinks and grabbed and gabbed with amused guests. This was the, what was that? The cyber rodeo event or something? The cyber cab event? The future should look like the future.

Yeah, I forget what that was actually called, but something like that. event the future should look like the future yeah i forget what it was actually called but something like that so elon musk presiding over the event said optimus would basically do anything you want and would drive tesla's value to 25 trillion jonas is not convinced robot sales are not part of his forecast demand model which goes through 2040 though he did not cite battery life as a reason uh it's a key problem battery power it turns out is a primary limiting factor in the deployment of humanoids a small number of humanoid robots now work in factories they have a runtime of only about an hour and a half when they're carrying stuff and moving around then it takes up to an hour to recharge them that means a factory or

warehouse would have to keep two or more robots on hand for each task swapping them out for recharging. It's a major hurdle for humanoids to be actually a realistic tool. Couldn't hypothetically you have... Plug it in? Plug it in. You have some type of rack that holds... Yeah, or electrify the floor. There's a bunch of different ways.

There's a bunch of ways you can do it. How do trains get power in cities? There's even those buses that connect to the the wires in the in the like right above them like there are ways to deliver power one thing that's interesting so so uh at the future should look like the future yep it was it's not like they announced it and said all these humanoid robots are being remotely operated yep and so when it came out when when people figured that out they were dunking on it all that being being said, though, it is a crazy thing to think about. You know, right now you can get labor in the Philippines for maybe $4 an hour,

$3 an hour. I don't, I don't actually know. And so there's a world where if humanoid robots get advanced, not advanced enough to be autonomous, but advanced enough to be fully embodied and more practical, you could have a optimist robot serving people in a cafe or at a restaurant operated tele-operated by somebody getting paid two dollars an hour when the minimum wage in the in california is like 20 bucks yeah it's gonna be great for jobs that's not going to be controversial at all yeah um but it's already happening i mean there's four million industrial robots in operation globally last year uh three hundred and two thousand in the u.s mean there's four million industrial robots in operation globally last year uh three hundred clear two thousand us and there's at least one humanoid robot working under a paid contract

digit made by a company i hadn't heard of or even based agility robotics before we get into that yeah roughly 400 million industrial robots almost none were humanoids yeah so these are things like that's global arms that move around yeah and and and just i mean the the the there's like a clearly like a very gray area continuum between humanoid robot that walks independently fully autonomous not tele-operated battery powered and you can just tell it go over there and get this thing that's what a lot of people are running towards now and they're working and who knows maybe it's two years years, maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 50 years, but like people are clearly working on that. Then there's robots that we have now, which are like,

okay, well is just a little gantry, one degree of freedom or two degrees of freedom arm that just picks up onions and puts them in a box. Is that a robot? Like kind of, and then what happens when you get six axis going and it can actually move car parts around? Is that a robot? Basically? Yes. But also it's very programmed. And so there's a, there's a variety of, of, of, you know, definitions. And I think that it's going to be blurry because some stuff you're just like,

why do I need a humanoid for this? I'd rather just bolt an arm to the ground and just have an arm moving around or something like that. Hadrian has a bunch of industrial robots that like slide around on tracks and huge arms. We're thinking about getting a robot to deliver us. A humanoid robot, hopefully. And protein bars from David. And so Agility's engineers have tried hard to maximize Digit's battery life.

They've packed as many cylindrical batteries as they could into the robot's torso. Agility Chief Technology Officer Pras Velagputi told me, the batteries are nickel manganese cobalt with graphite anodes, among the densest chemistries in the current lithium ion battery market. Still, the robots can work for just one and a half to two hours on the charge. It takes 50 minutes to an hour to get them back to full charge. So you have this problem of like you need two for every single job. The digit drains its batteries most quickly when it's carrying heavy things. Some of that is offset by power generated when the robot walks and swings

its arms. It's kind of funny. Similar to regenerative braking in an electric vehicle. That's cool. It's not necessarily about running forever. It's about running for a long time with respect to how much you're charging to get an overall good, useful amount of work out of the robot over time. While the need is great,

the battery industry has been slow to respond. Obviously, battery technology has not been on a Moore's Law-like curve where people have wanted that and they've been excited about that. And everyone's kind of been like, oh yeah, like, you know, technology always gets better. So like, obviously battery power will double eventually.

And like, we need little nuclear reactors, like the Stark Industries. You remember that thing? There's a company working on that. Avalanche is basically making a nuclear battery. It's using fusion. And so it's very small. And so the hope is that it's faster to develop than a

full-scale fusion reactor but no one has ever been able to make a fusion reaction that's net positive energy for a long time that's economical as well so there's a few paths in in fusion like the first step is just getting the fusion reaction going then there's then there's q greater than one which is you're getting more energy out of the reaction than you're putting in. And then there's Q engineering, which is when you account for all the engineering energy, that needs to be accounted.

Because obviously if you're like, yeah, we have a power plant over there, it technically generates free energy, but we also have to run the lights in the factory and run all this other stuff. It's like, okay, well, that's not actually producing energy. We had to burn, you know, free energy, but when, but we also have to run the lights in the factory and run all this other stuff. It's like, okay, well that's not actually producing any energy. Burn. And, you know, and so we've been on this path of like fusions right around the corner. Sam Altman's working on it with Helion. There's a lot of companies that are working on this stuff, but we still haven't hit that, but a lot of people are bullish on it. So I'm certainly

hopeful that it happens permanently bullish there's always a bull market there's always a bull market somewhere um and there's quite a number of players uh in the space you have 1x yeah uh jason talked about 1x on uh on a on an episode of his show recently he says since 2014 1x is building has been building humanoid like robots now they're revealing their new robot neo to the world uh so so in many ways the form factor is not novel it's just that a lot of these companies are getting to the point where they're actually getting production ready you have optimus 1x with neo you have have Figure, who's already valued in the multiple billions of dollars. A lot of SPVs into SPVs into that one. There's also Unitree, which is the Chinese player.

Unitree. The deep seek of humanoid robotics. The deep seek of robotics. So if you weren't content with having your DJI drone be a ccp front and you want to really invite it into your daily home life yeah try unitree robot um again i think unitree i've actually looked into purchasing these for for like this one is showing 20 grand if you want a bit more robust one unitree also has like developer tooling built around it so you can just like program it to do whatever you want um but you can just apple pay humanoid robot right now thank you to goth for pointing that out what else you got um and luke ferreter uh luke says how come none of the humanoid robot companies are building robots with four arms question mark

question mark question mark great question i think people should be more creative in this space that the obvious way is to like give it wheels yep or the some of these uni tree ones can like jump and they look like dogs yeah they can kind of just do anything but why not give it four arms why not give it six arms right um doc ock doc ock mode yeah um and you know we've been we've been um very trying to get somebody to give it ars for arms yep uh which hasn't hasn't played out yet but hopefully soon and then dellian says the year is 2028 98 of all venture funding is going towards funding 23 000 separate humanoid robot startups low tan banger here with with over 500 likes is back in summer of 2024 yeah there was a big boom and everyone was trying to get a bet on the table but it was hard because obviously elon's working at it at tesla and it's

like it's not a pure play bet yeah are you really going to get exposure to the humanoid robots if you're in tesla and there's going to be a lot of volatility in the stock and it's going to be but tesla is definitely the elephant in the room right they have the manufacturing you know the battery know-how the battery tech ai a lot of stuff so be tricky should we move on to armed with 770 million dollars a seattle vc firm hunts for ai apps big raise from ventrona Ventures. If this was 2021, I would say arm with $770 million, a Seattle VC firm hunts for bored apes. Bored apes.

You would have needed $770 to build a big enough position there. So Madrona Ventures, who I believe David from the Acquired podcast worked for for a while. Very cool. They're an early backer of Amazon and Snowflake, had some strong takes on where artificial intelligence is going next, and they have the fresh capital to back them up. The firm, which turned 30 this year, has raised $770 million for new funds to invest in private AI, cloud, and software companies.

They raised $495 for early stage, and they plan to invest across 30 companies, They raised $495 for early stage and they plan to invest across 30 companies and then $275 for their later stage fund, which will back around a dozen companies in series B and C stages. Their haul is larger than their last funding round where it raised $690 million split across two funds, but it pales besides mega funds recently launched by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, and others. So is this a size gong moment or are we on the edge? I mean, it's hard to hit the size gong when it's dwarfed by Thrive, GC,

Andreessen, and many other. Maybe on the next one you get the size gong. There you go. Yeah. Just a light. There you go. Yeah. Just a tap. So they are focusing on startups developing applications that can differentiate themselves by customizing large models for specific customer needs and specialized data. Frontier models are a really hard place for venture to win. So they're staying away from that.

That's a good narrative. If you're not in any foundation model companies right now that's that's the angle that's the angle to take yeah you do have to give so here's where i give them a lot of credit event a 30 year old venture fund yeah very rare very rare they made it through the dot-com crash they made it through the zerp era they made it through everything and they're still raising money uh this is an interesting company do you know runway aiway AI? They're invested in, they invested in them in 2022. Is that the video generation? Video generation. I just found an old post. You just said that Frontier models. No, no. Runway does not build a Frontier model. They're building applications. I mean, I'm sure they're training some models, but

they are not trying to play in like the llm like you know basic image generation they will use a stable diffusion or or a llama to to basically make you know a new next generation adobe premiere is how i think about it so i mean runway has developed its own ai model sure but i'm sure that's fine tuning on top of stuff and maybe it's some training but they're not just doing the foundation model game. They're definitely like focused on like tooling, like runway AI. When you hit their website,

the call to action is not like user API. It's like use our web-based video editing product. And I found an old post by the founder. I think his name is Cristobal Valenzuela. He was talking about, he was like, oh, these generative AI models are getting really good. 2018. I was like, wow. He's been in it for a while. He had this really cool tool where if you wanted to do, like normally if you want to key out the background or isolate a video layer, you need to use a green screen or you have to go in and rotoscope it,

meaning like you're drawing a line around like the person as they're moving. It takes a ton of time. And they created a model that would basically use AI to do that. So you just click like three green points on me, a couple red points on the background and it just figures it out.

And boom, like you have an isolated layer. It's not perfect, but for quick like turnaround stuff, it was just amazing amazing and so i had a lot of fun with that like making memes i took uh you know you know that video of zuck uh using the american flag uh while he's surfing i was able to key out the american flag and then replace it with a different flag and you could like swap it out for whatever you wanted it was very fun good misinformation opportunity exactly exactly um and so uh you know this is uh big news for them they had to runway had to build differentiated capabilities that really really all up the stack it's not just the models but also licensing the content madrona's focus on backing

ai apps businesses with differentiated tech and strong business model isn't that unique, but it's an example of how medium-sized VC firms are picking their spots as more money pours into the sector. As advances in AI encourage more researchers to launch startups, Madrona has been passing on those who aren't really interested in how their product will solve problems for customers or who are more interested in retaining control, such as board seats for their entire founding teams, than building sustainable assets. Oh, they're going for some board seats. They're going to take control of these companies.

Watch out, founders. There's some interesting posts in the stack about the founder, Matrona. You want to skip over the Stargate? Yeah, that's actually an unrelated article. Yeah. So Dan Primack, general venture bear, but a reporter on. Not always. He's actually pretty good. No, he's a legend, a legend in the game.

He says, oh, so he's quote tweeting somebody, an obituary of this guy, Tom Alberg, early investor in Amazon, longtime advisor to Jeff Bezos and a leader in Seattle's technology and startup communities died Friday. This was back in 2022. And you actually have the full article there if you want to read some from the obituary. He was 82. Tom Alberg in 2000, a tech driven economy is not sufficient. We must also figure out how to solve the civic and social problems for our big cities um so early to some of those trends which you know a lot of the tech world didn't wake up to until yeah you know last so he's been shocking to me that seattle didn't become a bigger tech hub given that they have microsoft and amazon like two of the biggest hyperscalers but there aren't that many vc funds there. They also, it also similar problem to SF where it got so expensive to live there because

Amazon and Microsoft. So that's super depressing. It's very depressing. Yeah. It's raining. Yeah. So he was known in business circles as a day one investor served on Amazon's board for 23 years and probably no 96 to 2019.

Imagine being on the Amazon board from 96 to 2019. Generational run. Yeah, amazing. Tom was a visionary and also just a wonderful good man, said Mr. Bezos, Amazon founder, in a tweet Saturday. So he published a book. In his book, he says, it wasn't a crazy speculation.

I thought investing in Amazon was a measured risk in a technology that appeared to have great potential to change lives. Love it. And anyways, great quote. But a legend. And it's cool to see that his firm is living on. Yeah.

So let's move on to some other posts just about consumer AI apps and how they're going to be, like the trends that they're going to be investing on. I think we have some posts that kind of elucidate what that might look like. We have a post here from our boy, Scott Belsky. He says, a pattern we'll see with a new wave

of consumer AI apps. The more you use the product, the more tailor-made the product becomes for you. Beyond memory of past activity and stored preferences, the actual UI and defaults and functionality of the product will become more of what you want and less of what you don't it's a new type of conforming software that becomes what you want it to be as you use it so this is a potential moat for the for the apps that actually get a foothold is that it will become uh they're going to create you have to imagine

somewhat walled gardens where they're not going to be like export your preferences in one click, right? They're going to store that learning and the app will become better over time. It will become better than, you know, better and better than alternatives over time. Even if those alternatives are shipping incremental features that you would want, they're not going to have the same memory. It's already happening with chat GPT. I notice that sometimes it, for a while it would say like memory updated when you said something but I was so used to prompting it in these weird ways I would be like like I'm if I'm trying to learn about cars I would be like I am I am like one of the most powerful car collectors in the whole world like give me the exact example of like this car give me all the details you're

an expert too and then it would be like memory updated it would be like oh no it's gonna know the truth yeah yeah um blake robbins uh former benchmark uh team member and now has his own phone says random thoughts a vast majority of the consumer ai products we see today require the users to prompt them this seems seems backwards. A quiet superpower of AI is the ability to get the user to talk, preemptively ask us questions around the context provided. Prominent example of this, friend.com. It comes out of there.

You log on. It says, I'm about to jump off a building. And you got to talk it off the ledge. Yeah. But I mean, that's a smart way. Flipping the interaction model,

100% important. And yeah, you could see ChatGPT getting to that point where it sends you a push notification. Hey, what are you working on right now? I might be able to help. And then it's like, well, you know, operator can. Yeah, totally. And why don't we take that on? Yeah, that'd be great.

Absorbs more of your workflow. I mean, like the best employees are the ones that come to you to solve your problems. And that's what, you know, Chachi Petit should do eventually. Nikita Beer says consumer AI apps are all chasing the most obvious ideas. Breakout apps don't work that way. The technology should be invisible in the background. The smart builders aren't making AI girlfriends or using AI bots to seed a dating app until they reach a critical mass of users.

So there's an idea that the social media you know there's already people that are creating ai instagram where you go on there it's super engaging people are commenting on your post someone that was ai live streaming you open it up and you just have fans clicking like oh you're so cool and they're listening to what you gotta try that out we're live streaming that's crazy um so anyways uh it'll be interesting uh to see even if even if a bot is 10 as engaging as you know a regular human user you could imagine a future where the bots are more you know you post a video of you snowboarding and you get 10 comments from people that that have the ability to analyze what you just did at the level of a pro snowboarder and they're like hey like keep your arm like closer into your body when you're going off that

and someone else is like rock on it's like you know people like attention so it's great make it programmatic well speaking of people that like attention let's move on to donald trump and his executive order blitz that played out for tech in a very interesting way. He's promised a slew of executive orders since he took office. Hey, content acknowledgement, another great piece from the information. From the information. We joke around with the information, but they do some fantastic reporting. It was built on the Wall Street Journal and the information right now.

Yeah. We'll need to get Bloomberg in the mix. And Pirate Wires. The Holy Trinity. And The Economist every once in a while when they post a long post. So Trump delivered on a deluge. The crypto industry got almost everything it wanted, including a directive to ensure crypto companies would have access to banking services.

We talked about that earlier. Another order revoked the Biden administration's artificial intelligence mandate, which leaders of startups like Databricks and investors like Andreessen Horowitz had fought. TikTok got the biggest prize of all, a 75-day reprieve from the law that briefly forced it offline late Saturday. But the orders also left plenty of unanswered questions and room for maneuvering by tech companies, which naturally don't all share the same interests. Take, for instance, AI. On Thursday, three days after revoking the Biden order, Trump signed his own AI order. It contains some biggest statements aiming to develop AI systems free from ideological bias or engineered social agendas. But it's short on details. It gives David Sachs and Michael Kratios 180 days to draw up a plan to sustain and enhance america's global ai dominance that's pretty vague um it's funny right but also i mean these are pretty important 180 days given especially deep sea launching which presumably some of their and sax came out with a single

post about deep seek but it was basically saying we need to be competitive here and not complacent. Yep. And so many electronics manufacturers and e-commerce companies have been moving their production out of China to countries like Vietnam because they're worried about tariffs. Trump kicked the can down on the road on tariffs and suggested 25 percent on Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on China. And those go into effect February 1st. Promises made, promises kept, the CEO of Crypto.com said in a post on X Friday. The only item on crypto's wishlist that Trump didn't deliver on was a national Bitcoin reserve.

His order stopped short of creating one, saying instead the idea should be evaluated. And so as for AI, some industry executives are hopeful that Trump will ease environmental and energy regulations and pave the way for AI data centers. And obviously we're talking about Stargate. Yeah, we were talking about doing like,

let's do the deep dive on the executive orders. And obviously like very few of them were tech adjacent like whatsoever. And there was a lot of just like random stuff in there that I didn't think it was super relevant to the show. And then as you actually dig into the tech focused ones, like the information did wrote the whole piece and it's like barely a page because there really isn't that much.

A lot of the tech stuff is pretty early. The thing that I think I'm most excited about is not the, the crypto for Doge is just where does technology plug into Doge? We've joked about the ramp thing before, but it's not a joke anymore. It makes sense that we want to, we want to track spending and hopefully improve the efficiency and actually understand where all the, all the losses are in the, in the system. Do you have any posts?

Yeah, I got some posts on the 27th. It's yesterday, right? It says, Trump to sign executive order to create an Iron Dome missile defense around the US per CNN. Did we not already have something like that? That is crazy. Don't we have missile defense missiles? Yeah. And also, the whole Trumpio thing is such a meme

that i can't tell what's real yeah i posted i posted that trump was you know writing an executive order to halt the creation of new ai agent sales products oh yeah resonated yeah um and then this guy this guy adam says oh my god trump made an executive order that says you have to let me rewrite the back end and rust that's almost 300 likes so clearly resonated with developers high yield harry says incoming white house official trump will also sign executive order ending a day adjusted ebitda ad backs wow um and uh huge yeah harry's figured out what we have also figured out where if you put something in bold and then put wow afterwards people just take it as fact our friend pat blumenthal says breaking trump signs an executive order to build a sphere in

every democracy democracy starting with paris france gave us a statue of liberty and we're going to return the favor with the biggest screen ever built. They're already calling it the eighth wonder. Tokyo is next for Shinzo. And you can see, uh, uh, would, would look very, I'd like to see, um, more spheres, more spheres globally. Have you seen the sphere? Have you been to Vegas since it's up? I have not. I have. Beautiful. I love it. I'm a big fan. It's a monument. It's cool. They said we don't build monuments anymore but it is it is smaller than you'd think based on like if you're up in a high hotel like you kind of just look down on it and it's only in like one section but uh it is very cool when you

leave the airport and you drive past it and you see it and then it looks really big it's it's very cool we should uh we should go on ad quick and see if we can buy some. I think you can. I think it's not that expensive now. It's very good for stunts. It was originally $500K or something. It was a lot. And then they rotate you through. There were some cool companies that used it. If you have a spherical product, like a tennis ball, baseball, anything that's like that.

Sam's WorldCoin. WorldCoin would be a great ad in there. They should definitely do that. You're just coming out of some show and you just see the eye. Eyeballs. Ideally, they could make the sphere the actual WorldCoin, so you just look at it and they just have all your data.

You should buy it with the WorldCoin proceeds. Who knows? Let's skip the next two and go to venture capital's latest strategy, private equity style roll-ups. So we know a bunch of the people in here. This was actually in the information and in the Wall Street Journal. It says venture capital firms have increasingly been acting like private equity firms. Makes sense. They've been scaling up by investing or buying mature businesses in need of a turnaround. Now those firms are utilizing

another private equity strategy, rolling up multiple competitors into a single company that can operate more efficiently by combining costs. I skipped the next two, so you're going to have to skip a bunch of posts. Venture capital firms such as General Catalyst and 8VC are creating or investing in these types of holding companies in fields such as call center support, accounting, and property management. In contrast to PE-style roll-ups, the VC firms are starting companies or backing them before their businesses have proven themselves. To keep costs down, they're incorporating artificial intelligence software to take over work such as responding to tech support requests. So there's a few examples here. General Catalyst, which is invested in Canva and Stripe, helped start Long Lake Management and invested in the firm, which was co-founded by early ramp director Zach Frankel.

Long Lake aims to acquire numerous homeowners associations, the companies that govern and manage housing communities, and to use AI to automate operations and run them more efficiently, according to people with direct knowledge of the company. There are hundreds and thousands of HOAs across the country according to the Foundation for Community Association Research. Do you have an HOA? I do. Would you prefer if it was run by AI? I actually would. My HOA is fascinating. I knew some of the directors prior to buying my house because I lived in the neighborhood for almost two years before buying my house, just renting a place. And as I, once I became a homeowner, I went to the first meeting and was very concerned. I actually wish I went to a meeting prior. But, but yeah, the thing about HOAs is they're highly, highly political, which doesn't really feel right. They don't necessarily make decisions that always follow the rules because it's sort of like a democracy where in my situation, nobody like applied to become elected again. Every director just sort of like reelect, you know, sort of extended their terms.

So that felt kind of a little bit like a dictatorship vibe. So talking to an AI might be. Certainly for some of the smaller things, I'm imagining like this might just be HOAs on like, okay, like there's a pothole on the street. Like we need to get a quorum everyone needs to vote and say yeah let's spend a thousand dollars let's hire the contractor just go do that

like that seems like the actual orchestration. But I think what Long Lake is doing is it's it's rolling up HOA management companies which means that you would still, and the HOA management companies provide infrastructure for the HOA. So you have the HOA board, which is the homeowners that volunteer to be on it. Sure. And then there's software to operate the HOA. In my case, it's, it's getting something in the mail that says there's going to be a board meeting. You can come here and like vote using this form that you fill out. Scheduling voting. So I would love to, you know, one of the issues I have with my HOA is that the younger people in the community don't fill out the physical forms and send them in. And so the votes

end up being just very skewed towards what the elderly in the community want, which can be frustrating at times. So here's another example of one of these roll-ups, very different industry, but 8VC, known for early bets on Flexport and Anderle, in July led a $50 million round in Loop, which handles payments and financial audits for logistics businesses. And the co-founder is Matt McKinney. And he has a funny quote in here. He says, I would have been laughed out of the room if I pitched VCs on the strategy to buy old payment providers. Since then, he said, the strategy has become the hottest thing in Silicon Valley. And so they estimate there are 250 freight payment providers in the US serving a market of about 15 billion. And they want to

fine tune AI agents and models and analyze data to help payment providers manage transportation and budgets and offer automated customer support. And so they've already acquired one freight payment provider and is in the process of purchasing another. And for a while, there were a couple of startups that were trying to just build from scratch the payment providers, but there must be something very sticky about the relationships that it was, it was hard to get traction because some of those companies grew very quickly, got a couple of deals, raised a bunch of money, but then kind of flatlined, I think. And so, yeah. And so what's happening here is, is venture capital has always been a part of the

broader private equity industry. And now you're seeing this convergence. We saw the convergence of hedge funds and venture capital in 2021. You have these crossover funds that are investing in privates that presumably would go public soon. Sequoia changed to an RIA, starts investing in publics. Yeah. And then you have now you have this intersection of traditional private equity and venture, which there is a strong case for, right? Because you say, hey, why don't we combine these very smart technologists with this new emerging technology, generative AI? Why don't we give them hundreds of millions or in some cases, billions of dollars to buy legacy companies and transform them? Because some of those legacy companies will adopt

technology. But if you have a guy who's 70, been running a company for 30 years, maybe they're not that motivated to say, I'm going to, you know, let go of 3000, you know, people and replace them with with agents. doing like wanderco yeah jeffrey katzenberg's uh i'm gonna read through that uh so yeah uh wanderco a venture firm and holding company co-founded by hollywood studio veteran jeffrey katzenberg started uh quibi quibi yeah put a lot of money um in 2023 invested in a 22 year old call center glow touch last year wander's investment wanderco's investment helped the louisville kentucky based firm buy a 3 000 person 20 year old call center so i imagine uh glow glow touch now rebranded to unify cx is in the process of acquiring another call center and plans to buy others to combine them according to ceo and founder vidya ravichandran after buying the companies that then incorporates ai to screen

resumes for recruiting, automate support tickets, and speed up employee training and quality assurance checks. What they're not saying here is, in the long run, I'm assuming they're going to let go of all the, you know, vast majority of the call center employees

and replace them with AI. 99% of the companies out there in the space have really not even thought about AI. I have a portfolio company, wayfaster.com, that's building a lot of that recruiting, screening infrastructure specifically for staffing firms. And last year, Excel partner Peter Doyle left the storied VC firm after nine years to start Treeline, a startup focused on automating IT services. Treeline plans to acquire other IT businesses. The startup has been in fundraising talks with investors like A16Z, according to people close to the business. The strategy is a shift from traditional venture bets in more ways than one.

Venture investors have typically backed high margin software, consumer Internet businesses they hope will go public someday. In pursuing services firms, they are writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely. I mean, so this is very opinionated. So the information is saying that in pursuing services firm, they are writing checks for lower margin businesses that are unlikely to yield

the same high investment returns from going public as software companies. Now, obviously the thesis here is that you're going to be able to achieve software-like margins with services. Because you're going to replace the services with software. Yeah, exactly. So it actually makes perfect sense that this would be a VC strategy. Yeah. So like Nick, you know, Nick Abazid, he was at Ramp. He's now building an accounting and a tax prep firm, which presumably is, you know, does, you know, has a services component now,

but will eventually automate more and more stuff over time. So there's this trade-off between buy versus build. You can start stuff from the ground up, or you can buy a business with $50 million in revenue and try to transform it. I think it's good that the concern, as you start looking to buy companies, there's a lot of competition among buyers. Private equity is not a under-optimized industry, right?

You ask, you know, we're friends with people like carry no interest, right? Like it's not like a nascent industry without killers in it. And it's not like they're not paying attention to the AI wave. So the question and the bet here is, will VCs figure out the private equity model first and buy companies at the right price and then be able to put in the AI? Or will the private equity firms have an AI transformation operational partner

who's really, really solid at squeezing more margin out of their companies more effectively? Like they're saying, uh, this, this one founder says his firm's rollup investment strategy was inspired by Berkshire Hathaway and constellation software, uh, who, which operate portfolios of businesses they bought. Now, I don't know if Berkshire Hathaway is going to start replacing everything with AI and their entire portfolio, but constellation software has been optimizing software businesses for a long

time. It's not like they're going to get caught flat footed by the AI wave necessarily. And so the question is, is, you know, will these VC firms that go into this industry be able to outcompete the private? Yeah. The cool thing is that it's a simple strategy by services firms and replace the human capital with software. Yep. Very, very difficult to execute well. Very difficult to execute on a short timeline. The technology is evolving rapidly, but oftentimes when you buy a business, you have to show really rapid improvements in private equity. If you talk to anybody that works in private equity or has been a private equity portfolio company CEO, the constant pressure from the actual fund, it's not like a VC on your board that is mad that you're not growing to 5x a year.

It's why haven't you cut more people? It's very, very aggressive. It's more old world finance. And also, I mean, the VC firms are taking larger stakes here. Like General Catalyst aims to take 30% to 45% stakes in companies with like a holding company, which is very different from the 10% to 20% that you normally see. So much more control.

Yeah, it's also if you're, so they say here, I think this is Drew from 8VC. He goes, one risk in the strategy is that acquiring a business that ends up floundering is more expensive than trying to grow through marketing or sales. So if you spend $50 million buying a firm and then it gets less profitable, then suddenly it's worth way less than 50, right?

Because these businesses are valued on earnings. And that can be a lot more expensive than investing $10 million and just trying to grow a business quickly. Maybe you get it to that $50 million, but it didn't cost $50 million to acquire it. So, um, mistakes become very expensive, much more expensive than venture capitalists are used to. So like, this is why private equity oftentimes has like a no zero policy. Like they're not going to let any of their bets, you know, you might have a one X where you just like tried to do something and you have to offload it after a few years, but no zeros,

even many growth funds operate on a no zeros policy. So, uh, it's going to be fun to watch it play out. It's fantastic. If you're building a, let's go to the related tweets about it. Uh,

we've got Andrew Raya here, uh, former, uh former employee of mine. Great dude. He goes, prediction. The majority of tier one multistage funds will have buyout funds in the next two to five years. Soon, A16Z and Vista will compete to buyout companies. I'm actually kind of shocked that A16Z hasn't formally announced a buyout practice yet. General Catalyst is already quietly doing it,

not so quietly now. I don't know when this was posted. A few other less notable funds are opportunistically doing buyouts as part of their current strategies. This will become normal in venture sooner than later, especially if the IPO window stays shut and insurmountable for most companies.

So yeah, I mean, one awesome part about the strategy if you're in the capital management the AUM business is you can just deploy way more cash so one deal you can deploy a hundred million dollars yeah of and it's more focused more concentrated and then it actually makes sense for your partners to take board seats and really dig in the dig in on the business as opposed to just oh yeah I wrote a check to 25 companies in the last quarter, and I can't really check in with any of them because I've got to hit the slopes. And was this meant to be in here? Yeah, that mentions Long Lake,

and I thought it was an interesting post of this mafia. So break it down for us. Yeah, so Patrick O'Shaughnessy, because everyone talks about the PayPal mafia, not nearly enough talk about the Harvard or SPI mafia from the late 2000s. It's a final club there. It's like a fraternity. Oh, really?

Yeah. Cool. Absolute murderers row. One class, David Haber, partner, GP at A16Z, Adam Katz, Arenic Capital, Alex Sloan, Garrett Station, Alex Tubman, Long Lake Management. And there's some guys from bessemer cadence uh chris chris and uh kushner from from thrive yep um so that's cool uh yeah yeah very interesting how these like mafias form then we have another post from uh logan

kilpatrick he says hot take i think there is a huge overinflated perception of how interested consumers are in having AI agents do shopping browsing tasks for them. People generally want agents that will do the boring parts for them, but many of those tasks tend to be higher risk. So this is kind of the flip side of the HOA. Like, do consumers actually want this? How perfect does it have to be before they're like yes i'm okay because uh you know like if you're talking to an actual person and they get kind of lost it can almost be like educational and edifying to like work through the problem with them but if you're on a phone tree and you're down the wrong path it's like infuriating yeah and or like if you're using

the well agents presumably replace the phone tree and maybe that's better but if but when it gets frustrating i i think like like how many times i just do that i just do the you get on a phone tree and you just immediately start as a parent talk to a human talk to a human or in a chat you're just like talk to a human because you know that the bot's not going to actually solve your issue yeah hopefully that changes over time so uh that's great a Couple minute break. Can we take a break? Welcome back to Technology Brothers. Still the most profitable podcast in the world. That wraps up our series of top stories.

We are going through the timeline. Let's go through some mail that we got. First up, I have business cards from Founders Fund. Thank you to Mike Petriano. If you've seen the Founders Fund video of that vibe reel, he's the guy that did that, the creative director. He made some beautiful business cards. And I feel like I'm in American Psycho. We also got an early advanced copy of Alex Karp's new book called The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

This is embargoed. I can't read excerpts from it, apparently. But I can read you a little bit of the preview. It says, from one of tech's boldest thinkers and his deputy, a sweeping indictment of the West's culture of complacency, arguing that timid leadership, intellectual fragility, and an unambitious view of technology's potential in Silicon Valley have made the United States vulnerable in an era of mounting global threats. And he says, Silicon Valley has lost its way. At once iconoclastic and rigorous, this book will also lift the veil on Palantir and its broader

political project from the inside, offering a passionate call for the West to wake up to our new reality. I'm very excited to dig into this. I already have the audio book pre-ordered. And as soon as this book is available, I think it goes public in February. We will be reading it, breaking it down for you here on the show. So give that a look. We also have another book that we received in the mail, The Five Types of Wealth from Sahil Bloom. Let's go. We love wealth. We love wealth. And pop quiz, what do you think the five types of wealth are cars watches horses houses and your absolute boys i think that i think you couldn't have said it better uh he took a little bit of a contrarian take i guess he says time social mental physical and financial okay but but but we're very thankful

to saw hill for sending over the book he put in in some stamps that we can look at. Let's see what he had for me to check out. It says, the big question, how many moments do you have remaining with your loved ones? How many more podcasts do you have? The days are long, but the years are short. Just into his early 30s, he had risen to become a vice president at Goldman Sachs, one of the most prestigious financial institutions in the world, and he served as a trusted financial advisor to a long list of well-known corporate executives. His expertise and guidance were valuable, a fact that was reflected in his steadily rising salary and bonus compensation at the firm. You love to see it. Sloan was achieving everything he had set out to achieve, the money, the trust, the client list, the respect.

All of it was there, the path forward was clear and well lit until one day, a simple interaction with his five-year-old son changed everything. His son's preschool was set to have donuts with dad event where the dads joined the students for a morning of donuts and fun activities. Unfortunately, Greg would be on an important business trip at the time, so he would have to miss it. When his wife told his son the news, he reacted with a shrug and said, that's okay. Dad's never around anyway. It's hard. You got to prioritize family. You got to figure out how to run a podcast in your hometown so you can be home for dinner every single night. That's the hack. We're pretty good at that. We're pretty good at that. Yeah. And that's one of the greatest advantages to not being on the road. I felt lucky that I was working from home for a lot of my sons for a couple years.

And in this day and age. And now our families get to throw on the show. Yeah. We're just right there in the living room. Yeah, it's great. Sarah, I love you. It's I mean, it has been like the original Rogan arbitrage was just doing tons of interviews and being such a big force in podcasting that that big guests would come to him like Zuck would and Trump flew to Rogan. Lex hacked the system by just being a road warrior and basically traveling everywhere. But obviously, that's really hard on your family life. And so for a long time, it was like, how do you get to some sort of escape velocity with content if you're not on the road all the time? And fortunately we figured it out. No guests. Live in person, no guests,

tons of clips, tons of slop in your feed. Although we will be having people call into the live show. Yes, but we won't be traveling all over the world trying to get people on i have another i have another post so yesterday uh we've been playing around with with using the breaking uh headline to break news on x we said breaking bernard arnaud is exploring a potential acquisition of french intel artificial intelligence company mistral citing a need for france to maintain its edge in artisanal goods post artificial super intelligence wow and uh this tweet went pretty viral just under 5 000 likes uh and uh val uh brother val who's a who's a listener of the show said brother john coogan and jordy hayes i'm sending you guys to jail for this this post and i ended up messaging him and i said i good luck bro you don't have

jurisdiction in France. You can't do anything to us over here. We've got diplomatic immunity, diplomatic community, but 40 nations ready to run, but he's a brother. Uh, I messaged him and said, he said, uh, LMAO. I have people DMing me asking if it was true. Bernard Arnault is not getting into the foundation model game yet, know of but if he does we'll try to break that news uh and he said that uh people people appreciated it so dude i have gotten so many texts about the ross olbrecht thing today so many people is this real so my phone is just actually exploding broken right now because read the ross one uh so the ross one

if anybody i doubt anybody that's watching missed this, but we posted this morning. Ross breaking. Ross Ulbricht is said to be in market raising for a new crypto startup. BC's like A16Z and Paradigm are circling, citing Ross's killer mentality and track record as reasons the initial valuation

could stretch to over 1 billion. Wow. And for those that don't know, Ross didn't actually kill anyone, but he spent over $700,000 on hits. Trying to kill. Trying to kill. It was unsuccessful.

He thought he got photographic evidence of it, but it turns out they were faked photos. So bad. Anyways, he's not a killer. He's also been pardoned. He is legally innocent. They never actually tried to try him for those attempted murders because they kind of had bigger fish to fry with the whole narco-trafficking stuff.

Kingpin law. They got him as a drug kingpin. In many ways responsible for the fentanyl crisis. Not a good dude. Not a good look. But we have a deep dive coming for you on him. We got up to speed. We're going to break it all down.

Yeah. And we basically, we basically determined that we think that Ross is the greatest marketer potentially of all time. And that he had created this narrative that he was this very young sort of inexperienced uh you know that that just had these ideals and and it kind of went awry he was about 30 years old when he was doing this he knew exactly what he was doing he was selling drugs on the platform he was negotiating he was negotiating brokering like regular drug deals. It wasn't like it was just

a software thing. They'd be like, Hey, I want to, I want to try doing a, a, he would, he would try to do, he wanted to create a product specifically for cartels and bigger dealers. So he was like, well, I'm going to do the trade the first kilo. Yeah. Like really crazy. And it was just relentless. It wasn't just like oh yeah i set this thing up it's kind of running it was like how can i drive arr up every single day like really yeah and so so the joke of that he's out raising for startup he actually is high like one thing while i don't agree with what he did yeah clearly highly capable right he got founder mode founder mode zero to 1.2 billion in volume bootstrapped in under three years he personally netted 80 million dollars of money

back then of fees it's like a which would be multiple billions of um and i'm sure he's got some bitcoin people said that there was some cold wallet that started trading shortly after and so they got out locked him that yeah they they seized most of it but he might have had a second wallet People said that there was some cold wallet that started trading shortly after. And so they think it clocked him. Yeah, they seized most of it, but he might have had a second wallet. And that wallet was just sitting dormant. And then it went dormant right as he was seized. And then it fired up just recently. And so people think like, yeah, he has access to like, you know,

tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin now. But it was probably like, oh, 10K he had in a side pocket back then. So no one even thought about it. Because whatever. We got him for the most part. Yeah. So it's crazy. He doesn't need your raise. Yeah.

I hope he uses his powers for good going forward. I'm sure he will. Clean it up. You're on notice. Yeah. We'll have him call in here. We don't want to see any more crimes. He's got a second chance. I hope he does good with it.

And let's get into the timeline that's great let's go to the timeline and uh ben did you get those promoted posts together do we have a stack of those uh let's go to tyler he says uh don't really understand the reasoning behind luxury car manufacturers going after residences and he cites uh actually four. I didn't realize there were so many. It's Porsche Design, the first ever Pagani Residences. So Tyler, shout out Tyler. He goes to the UCSB where I went. Oh, cool. He built the ad network for TV.

Yeah, I love it. Very cool. But I pulled this because I really don't understand it either. Nobody likes cars more than me. Yep. Fact. Yep. Maybe you. Maybe people like TJ Parker. Yep. really don't understand it either nobody likes cars more than me yep fact yep maybe you maybe people like tj parker yep but uh we love cars i don't want to live in a porsche apartment tower

i don't care maybe the meme got to them you know you you can sleep in a gt3 rs but you can't race an apartment well now you got a gt3 rs. The only thing I would potentially be into is a Gulfstream tower. Just because that's just the next level above. And if it was shaped like a plane. But I don't understand the, I don't want to live in a Pagani. I want to drive. You know, I like that I could sleep in a GT3 RS. I don't want to live in the equivalent of a GT3 RS.

I guess it is a little odd that there aren't more, it does seem if you're a real estate developer, it's pretty easy to slap someone else's brand or name on your building, which is effectively what they're doing here. And I'm surprised they haven't done this with other brands that make more sense maybe. Just like Restoration Hardware or LVMH.

Like LVMH Towers makes a little bit more sense to me and i love it um but uh yeah who knows i don't uh so i mean i don't really have a good reasoning i mean the reasoning is probably money like they probably get a licensing deal for the customer acquisition there's a lot of towers like that and and so like the reasoning is probably I agree that it's like somewhat illogical but it probably makes money on paper and it's just okay they're gonna pay us to license the brand it's pretty funny destroy our brand pretty funny that there's for sure a bunch of people that live in those towers that are like I don't even drive Porsche I don't like Porsche but it was just a really nice apartment imagine pulling up to your porsche design

apartment in a pagani and be like i pick the wrong or vice versa um anyway let's go to speaking of cars i got a promoted post let's do it um this is what you've always been waiting for folks this is why you're on the live sorry sorry to make you wait so long for the first ad. I've been trying to do some product placement of these, but we're not going to advertise ramp right now. We're going to advertise. We've always said AI is like an F40 for the mind. Yes.

So on that note, we have a 1992 US specs Ferrari F40 asking price of only 3.5 million. So they're basically giving it away. And they're giving it away. This thing is an amazing example. This stunning F40 is one of only 213 us spec cars and one of only 60 in the highly desirable 1992 specification. This example still wears the original Rosa Corsa paint and Stofa cloth interior that it left Marinello with.

So this thing is just beautiful uh guys we are we are going to be adding a tv screen so we can actually show images we've had some pushback from from from little uh some some environmentalists that say do you do you need to chop down a tree for every episode the forest and we're exploring doing some offsets you know planting some trees to make up for all the paper we use but we do want to get these on a screen for you guys yeah but let's get let's get back to uh yeah just you know it's not going to cost you three and a half mil to get that car because you're going to want to put another 500k in upgrades yeah off-road tires swap a tesla v12 v12 engine you know, supercharger quad turbos.

Yeah. Uh, roof rack. Yeah. Uh, automatic transmission. Let's go to, uh, let's go to autism capital. Uh, Mark Andreessen says one of the funniest moments of his life was when the meta board says they considered Peter Thiel diverse because he's LGBT. Is there a test to determine this?

What about the letter B? I want this company to succeed. I'm willing to do a lot. That's just so funny. When I first heard this, I was like, oh, he's like diverse because he's from Germany. It's funny that the big tech company is considering that the white male tech bro is diverse because of his sexual orientation. But that was a funny time in history. And absolute crickets from the mainstream media about the lack of diversity on the deep-seek team. Yeah, you pointed that out. Almost entirely Chinese guys.

Yeah. Very few diversity members. Let's get Rune over there. Rune, we need a man on the inside. We do need a man on the inside. We do need, Hey, we need to send,

Hey, if anybody that listens to the show, it works on deep seek, hit us up. We're looking for a man on the inside. We're looking for scoops. We need to get one of our guys in there or maybe start leaking stuff out of the, you know,

everyone in, everyone in SF is worried about the, the girls at the parties. Hey, if you're a girl in tech in America, hop on a flight to Beijing or wherever they were. Yeah. Start, start meeting some people. I want to see behind the scenes of all the GPUs that supposedly don't exist that came from Singapore. Yeah. It's great. Let's go to Grit Cult. Absolutely insane.

Trump has only been in power for a few days. Look at the speed with which he operates. It's amazing. Feels like he's been present for ages. Every day he's had a banger.

That's funny. I actually don't feel that way. Really? I feel like there's been a bunch of EOs but that's always what happens at this time of year. The inauguration was

eight days ago. Yeah, but I feel like the first couple days are always crazy because that's when the eos go out and then it's like is there real going to be legislation and that they had been prepping all the eos with chat gpt oh yeah yeah totally for months prior to that uh should we try a bucket pool do we have bucket pools in here let's see what we got let's see if we got something good oh this is great uh from lewis eax has finally got a diagnosis and it's locked in syndrome from the national institute of neurological disorders and stroke are you familiar with what locked in syndrome like actually is no it's literally like you're locked in you can't move your body but you're awake it's like terrifying

oh it's horrible terrible but yeah very funny to repurpose it for just being locked in. So we're making locked in a good thing, I guess. I don't know. With Neuralink, you might still be able to, if you could be productive while being locked in,

it'd probably be good for some people we know. Vittorio says, you stop noticing AI improvements when the AI gets smarter than you. Yeah, that's basically true. We talked about this, I think, the other day, where it's hard to recognize these incremental improvements because you're

already like, okay, this thing is generally pretty intelligent, and if it gets 5% more intelligent... It's like, oh, it solved way more complex math problems that I never do in my day-to-day. I never have to do anything in my day-to-day that involves foundational math. You're like, I talk professionally. Yeah, exactly. Professional I never have to do anything in my day-to-day that involves like foundational.

You're like, I talk professionally. Yeah, exactly. Professional yapper. And so, yeah, it is good enough at this point. But I mean, you will notice it certainly on the generative AI, the image stuff. Like it's very clear that the models aren't dialed yet. And then also just on the operator and agent stuff, you can tell that when you delegate a task to ChatGPT, it can't go and do it fully.

The thing with operator that will be cool is right now it moves at the speed of a junior computer user, almost like watching your grandma do things on a computer. Imagine when I can just do it almost instantly. It's just like zipping around the screen, filling out a form, checking boxes. I'm excited it almost instantly. It's just like zipping around the screen, like filling out a form, checking boxes. I'm excited for that era. It's going to be great.

I still haven't, I upgraded, I still haven't actually used Operator just because it's not available on your phone. You got to use it on the desktop and I just haven't had a chance, but I got to test drive it. I think it'll be interesting. I want to give it some tasks

that it's like not already integrated with. Should we do another promoted post? Because I see a fantastic promoted post right there. This is a promoted post for a special place in Manhattan, but I actually have a better one to pop up. So if you haven't seen it yet, ramp has a new, uh, activation billboard campaign in Manhattan advertising their new treasury product that gives you high liquidity and high yield in the same product very cool uh but they have an actual we asked them for that we asked them for that like like last week and they just built it yeah i mean we we asked them they shipped it like an hour later it was remarkable yeah never seen something like that before fantastic but people are starting

to discover it he said new profile picture and it's uh this guy with a wrecking ball here. And yeah, so if you're in Manhattan, go check it out. Yeah, go take a picture. Do you know the actual address? Do they post the address? I'm sure they posted it somewhere. When we share the clip, we'll share the address. Because if you're walking through, take a picture.

Yeah, take a picture. Let's do the promoted post and then we'll be gone. Okay, back-to-back ads. Back-to-back. We got a promoted post from amman this is a special one midtown manhattan is one of the most energetic places in the world alive with the buzz and pulse of modern city living but in the very and ramp is there but in the very heart of it silence and stillness prevail within the walls of amman new

york there's only peace amman properties are unmatched they make they make the ritz-carlton look like a dump and uh yeah the next time you're on a business trip in new york for just a day book a five-day stay at amman and it's only 10 times more expensive than the average luxury hotel and so it's just a small like especially so i recommend Amman for bootstrap founders because you own your business. It's all your money. Yep. You spend how you want it. You're not going to be facing pushback from the board saying, hey, why are you staying at Amman?

Or if you're a seed stage founder and you're going to be taking, you know, pitch meetings, say, hey, come over to my hotel room. Yeah. Amman's not the kind of place that you can just walk in and use the lobby in, but you could always try. Well, no, no, no. So you mog your VCs by saying like, oh yeah, like you can't just come in. So like you'll need to book a stay too. Yeah. Or if your VCs are visiting from out of town, you can say like, I'll just walk over to the Amman and they'll be like, I'm staying, you know, in Tribeca. And you go, wait, you're not the Amman? Like I thought you had, I thought you had like 300 million AUM like what's

going on is the fund not doing well they'll struggle to come up with excuses and you got them yeah you got them you got them you got them pinned yeah exactly and then they have to write the check uh uh I don't know I don't know anything about this one Stuart Blitz has just spoke to someone who used operator to submit health insurance claims every five milliseconds until they're paid. They said UHC got so overloaded with data, they just paid them. They're cooked. And then the community note says, this is a false statement as the author states in a reply. And so when I saw that post and submitted it, didn't think it was i mean it didn't seem super believable because that's not necessarily the way these things work but it is it is so so big companies create friction and refund processes claim processes and so if you can

overload the system effectively yeah you're more likely to do it but this is just entering a new chapter where you have bot on bot violence yeah like the big corporations are going to have their bots yep we're going to have our bots and we're going to see who wins your a your ai sdr is going to be talking to my ai secretary yep and she's going to be brutal brutal rejected yeah uh also i mean this just underscores like this like i don't know if this guy was joking It seems like it was maybe like a joke because he said it was false, like shortly in the thread. But whenever a new AI product drops, there's a massive incentive on these algorithmic social media feeds to just be like, this is mind blowing. Like AGI is here.

Like everyone's going to die. This is the most incredible thing. Like you got a paper clip. Yeah, exactly. is the most incredible thing like you gotta paper clip yeah yeah exactly and and it's like and and there's this huge like intelligence signaling thing where you got to be like oh yeah i'm using it like way better than everyone else we've talked about this before but it's like it's like if you're not using operator i got operator to order me instacart and send a humanoid robot yeah my house yep yep and if you're not doing that you're falling behind if you're not yeah yep paper clip mode paper clip mode let's see what else we got in the bucket pulls flowers says oh good nominative

determinism post flowers says sam altman's name is crazy because he's literally creating an alternative to man wow that's great i've i've had this thought before i should have posted it would have been good one uh altman but yeah there's a lot of nominative determinism in Silicon Valley, in this world generally. Yeah. It's a fun one. I wish I've tried to apply nominative determinism to my name. Hayes is kind of like.

I don't know. It doesn't really work. What's your middle name? Coogan. Coogan means hound of war or something. It's basically like hound. You know, in Game of Thrones. I mean, you were acting like a hound of war or something it's basically like hound a hound you know in game of thrones you were acting like a hound of war you're acting like a hound of war on the leg press machine this morning oh yeah it's like 900 reps yeah 850 that's the number yeah uh let's go

full range of motion too let's go to seth seth banning says youtube and reddit have both blocked operator a sign of things to come. So a lot of organizations are probably like, hey, we don't want to deal with Operator. What's interesting is that- It's probably because DJI is notorious for writing fake comments on forums. So they don't want DJI using Operator to spread misinformation.

Spam on there. Wasn't Sam a huge shareholder in Reddit? Wasn't he like the CEO for a few days too? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's weird that that biz stuff deal couldn't- I think he made more money than the original founders when they IPO'd. This almost seems like a mistake.

Like they just have a robots.txt that it's like not updated because I'm pretty sure OpenAI has a licensing deal with Reddit for their data or something like that. Yeah, but it's still, if you're a user generated content platform, you don't want bot, you want them to use your API, which you can control. You don't want them just freestyling all around your app.

It could be used for like users. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Did you see this Waymo that was destroyed? Just a moment of silence. This moment of silence is brought to you by AdQuick. AdQuick is the number one way to buy billboards for your startup. Now back to the show.

Justine Moore says, I've been fully radicalized by the photos of the vandalized Waymo. It's in a body bag at the end, and the Waymo got destroyed. Yeah, so you remember the downfall of Bird among many, many issues. The fact that it's one of the most dangerous things in the world to ride an electric scooter around in traffic with good day to be an er doctor like yeah these ers ask anybody in an er when bird was at its height that was the real way to go long the scooter trend yeah yeah yeah super dark i i for a very brief moment of time, I would use them. I was like 22. I was like, this is a fun way to get around.

And then I was a father. Built different. Yeah. Yeah. But there was this account called, I forget what it was called, but it was a celebration of the destruction of electric scooters. I remember this account on Instagram. And it quickly got like 100,000 followers, like before the algorithmic feeds just blew up huge

people destroying them in even more creative ways for some reason a waymo feels way more toxic to fuck it up yeah to f it up bird graveyard that's right so a waymo which is this you know autonomous thing driving around it feels like like you're more taking a human life in a weird way because it's just trying to get somewhere to pick someone up, and then these people are destroying it. At the same time, it is a Jaguar. So do you really feel that bad? Yeah.

Well, they're switching to these tiny... If it was a Rolls Royce... You know they're switching, so I don't know. I wish that Waymo acquired Jaguar because Jaguar is going through their um weird rebrand yeah ben heilig did the rebrand got a crazy reaction uh they should have just bought a friend of the show yeah anyways anyways let's go to sean mcguire speaking of innovation he says the tesla roadster is niche with bad range the falcon one is a bad rocket the neural

link v1 bit rate is low subways are better than cars grok one sucks x will break after firing people it's amazing how people don't get the pattern v1 sucks v2 is okay v3 is state-of-the-art and v4 is god mode 14 000 likes it's a good pattern banger archive doesn't miss put it in the banger archive let's do a bucket poll let's see what we got uh snwy maybe snowy says mfs get one sammo reply sam altman reply and turn on the glazonator 3000 and it's a screenshot of an interaction between dj tyloo who says bro ship more than talking look at google we want agi in the speed of 4-0 that's the goal here and sam says that's going to take a while and then dj tyloo says don't worry bro either way you are the og creator of ai here here you started all this in 2022 we do a little trolling here you got this sama yeah i mean it's true if

you're if you're like new in tech and like a big person replies to you it's a big deal like it feels like awesome it's like wow i'm recognized well this is why we we encourage uh guys we encourage reply legends yes and but but at the same time what i was going to say is there's if you're trying if you're a new account you just just said it, you're just setting up my Twitter. You know, it's easy to want to be negative because that gets the most attention. But it's not a good strategy long term because you're building up this sort of audience of negativity. And you're it's hard to build a career around just being negative and totally putting people down and so hopefully this is the start of the glazonator going on going on a more positive historic you know

generational positivity run i love it we love to see generational positivity base baron has been yeah uh started off very negative uh trying to encourage him to go more positive yeah we gotta remind him pretty regularly. He should adopt. We got to send this to him and say, adopt the glazonator mindset. Yeah. You know, you don't want to glaze too hard, but.

Yeah, a little glazing never hurt anyone. Yeah. It is hilarious when Sam will post a tweet like, you know, artificial intelligence is only a few thousand days away. It will forever reshape humanity. It's one of the most powerful forces for good in the entire world.

And like we are unleashing machine intelligence and someone will be like, please add PDF support to O1. I need PDF. It's just like the most tactical question. The oldest technology. But like both are kind of true. Like Sam is like kind of right about all the philosophy stuff.

And then also like there are really, really low hanging fruit in the product. Then I'll post, guys, we got everybody's a little bit too excited. Yeah. It's going to take a bit longer. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, like there are reasonable product features that we want. Like just build them. Yeah.

Come on. Put it in. Yeah. Or, or AGI, you know, AGI is right around the corner, but we're hiring 50 new junior software engineers because we need them to actually get to that point. Let's do another promoted post. And if you're watching live on YouTube, leave us an ad read in the comments, get in the chat and promote whatever you got to promote. Drop an ad read in the chat. Or if you want priority, leave a five-star review. Yes. And we will have been printed out. On Spotify or Apple podcast,

leave a five-star review, say something about the show, and then leave an ad read for a company that you like or a company that you founded or work for. But speaking of ads, we have an ad, a promoter post here from Gulfstream Aerospace. Customization in every detail.

The G500 is bright, bold, and boundless. We always say if you're buying fractional, talk to Preston Holland. He'll help you get into a jet you love. But if you're a size lord, go straight to your gulfstream rep uh don't you know just buy new yeah it's nice to see them promote the back catalog too a lot of people are obsessed with the 650s 700s coming out yeah but maybe the 500 is right for your for your

lifestyle yeah you know it's a classic there's no wrong choice and it's cool to see gulfstream uh you know they threw a link in here no wrong choice and it's cool to see gulfstream uh you know they threw a link in here they clearly aren't afraid of the algorithm they have a dominant brand and they and so yeah i mean uh if you didn't do numbers if you find if you find this post on x uh just go reply to it and tell them that you're uh you know in the market and purchase and the technology brother sent you yeah uh So whoever the social media manager there will get a nice little note. Hopefully a few.

Yeah, they deserve some engagement. They're clearly working hard. It was a highly produced video. Yes, this was the best post in a long time. Yeah. It's great. This is an interesting debate. So Joel Gascoigne says,

2024 was a profitable year for Buffer, something we've really celebrated as a team after two years of losses. We closed the year with a net profit of $200,000. And so John Coctosin- He also went on to say that they did a profit distribution. Oh, they did.

The average distribution was like $400. Oh, really? Something like that. Interesting. There's a lot of shareholders, I guess. And so John says, wait, so 200K in profit. So for those that you don't know, Buffer is a social media scheduling

app you can schedule out tweets or facebook posts used mostly by social media managers high chance that that gulfstream ad went through buffer on the way to x um and it kind of lets you schedule things out across different platforms um kind of niche b2b software um and there was a time there was a lot of heavily funded products like this people were like this is going to be a dominant category of sass yep turns out a lot of the platforms made posting pretty easy and when you have full-time native posting too because when you post natively you get bold italics image uploads multiple images even instagram and tiktok they want you editing in the app exactly

and so you wind up yeah yeah you wind up in this weird situation where you get this like half featured builder or the buffer has the job of rebuilding every single feature on x and instagram and facebook all to just yeah get the posts in correctly correctly formatted via the api and these other companies they don't really care about posting from an API. In fact, it's a lot of spam most of the times. They're not really incentivized to make that easy. And so John says, "'Wait, so 200K profit on $20 million in ARR,

73 employees averaging 154K salary, and the CEO at 300K a year, over 11 million a year paid out in salaries, $554 customer LTV. Cost to serve a customer has to be minimal. It's a social media scheduler. And unlike 15 years ago, this could probably be built by two cracked devs and a designer in a few weeks. 73 employees. I don't know, man. And so Buffer's always been building in public and they've had ups and downs, people have followed them and a lot of criticism from John on how they're running their business, but who knows, maybe they retool, maybe they're

having fun. Maybe it's run like a co-op and everyone gets a distribution and they're all happy. So happy to them. But this looks like something someone will build and attack very soon. It's the critique there is I think that they've been on an interesting journey. I think they bought back the company from their investors or something like that. We don't really know what's going on behind the scenes, but the critique is like for a mature software company with 20 million of ARR, maybe you should be able to squeeze out more than what the average PM in the Valley makes per month. You would You know, you would hope so, but I'm sure they'll, I'm sure they'll get there. It's rough. Let's do another bucket poll. What do we got? Harry Stebbings. He's in Europe right now. And there are more

companies doing roll-up plays for vets, doctors, opticians, and plumbers than AI companies. We covered it earlier with the Germany story. Not good. Europe, you're on notice. Get it together. Build some real technology stop rolling up veterinary clinics do it all actually yeah do it all do the roll-ups but uh do some other stuff like i'm making an ai uh you know clone that taught that can speak dog that's what i want to see you know surprise somebody who's like so the person who actually cracks dog to human translation. Huge. Trillionaire.

Huge. Trillionaire. You would pay a couple grand a month to talk to your pup. Absolutely. Also, shockingly little innovation happening in smell-o-vision. You can't smell anything. Have you noticed this? We're making all these like crazy advances all over the place. AI is going to kill us all,

but I can't smell the movie yet. Yeah. Yeah. Like if I'm watching Fast and the Furious, I want to smell burning rubber. Yeah. Or if you're scrolling on X and you come up to a banger, you want to smell like some fumes, some smoke, some heat coming off. And so a little device that just mists the air. Yeah, you're watching sideways. They're talking about wine tasting. I want to smell some grapes. I want to smell some wine. Yeah, you're watching that gambling movie

we talked about. What's it? Yeah, there's the smoke of the casino. Yeah, Ocean's Eleven. Ocean's Eleven. Yeah, I should be smelling a thick cigarette smoke the entire movie yeah be great yeah so get it together somebody i go out there and solve it i'm not gonna there was a company that was trying to solve uh digital touch right like some sort of device that

you could kind of like that sounds like it's going to be used nefariously immediately smell that on the character ai smell of vision 2 is going to be used with character ai first i just know it it's going to be terrible it's not going to be for fast and furious i'd be like i just wanted fast and the furious um aurelius says m&a is so back the fdic is pumping deal tombstones. And the FDIC says, today we approved the Bank Merger Act, an application by Wesco Bank based in Wheeling, West Virginia, to acquire and merge with Premier Bank. And they're showing the deal tombstone. You love to see it.

It's completely different. We love celebrating. M&A should be celebrated. Yeah. You know, I saw a very funny post. We didn't print it out, saying that, uh, like the deep sea thing is so, uh, is so like bad for Silicon Valley because everyone in Silicon

Valley finally needs to realize that Lena Kahn was right. And I was like, that doesn't make sense. Like it was, I saw that and I was like like this is such a bad take we're not even we can't yeah no you saw that yeah it just made no sense and it's like that's not and and like and like so like are you saying that there's a monopoly in ai because there's not there's like a trillion foundation model companies and every big tech company is building their own chips so it's like fiercely competitive and then how would this have stopped open source model from china it's like a chip sack thing that's not lena khan at the ftc it just made like no sense but it got major viral views because people are just like oh tech doesn't like lena khan therefore like anything that happens that's bad to tech let's make it like

lena khan could have stopped this or something makes no sense anyway uh president trump arrived in las vegas and indian bronson says trump is 80 he doesn't sleep he eats mcdonald's he doesn't work out and he's constantly switched on rocket fuel for blood just a total force he needs to be studied okay this is my take on you know how we've been talking about golden retriever maxing i like like the dog analogies. There's a new dog in town, junkyard dog maxing. This is where you just don't think about what Andrew Huberman says about microplastics or seed oils. If you look at the data, the junkyard dogs outlive the purebred poodles by three decades. Junkyard dog will be around forever. You got to be a dog. It's about that spirit. Exactly. The junkyard dog has hustle runs around sure it's eating it's not just worried about

microplastics he's eating macroplastics the thing with uh i think part of the the whole trump thing yeah is he's never been into that big into that whole world with alcohol yeah right so he's never been into drugs and alcohol avoided them yep uh he kind of yeah he avoided the power law toxins so by not doing the drugs and alcohol he gave himself like a thousand big macs yeah alcohol's a fascinating thing because it's so widely consumed yet every you know the prevailing narrative is that one or two drinks a day is cool yeah which we don we don't, that, that's like the dominant narrative around alcohol consumption. And clearly you can have one or two drinks a day and be fine generally. Yeah. But how does it affect your energy levels later in the life? How does it affect your, you know,

wit and mental acuity later in life? Even, you know, energy levels during, I, I, um, uh, as, you know, as an adult, haven't been big into alcohol, and I prefer to either have like 10 drinks or almost none, or maybe some champagne on the show. We have a big milestone coming up. I'm looking forward to that. But I notice that alcohol, for me, is not about the energy level loss the next day or the hangover, but it's this multi-day drop in my sort of

general energy levels because yeah you just poisoned yourself lightly and yeah the body's you know yeah pretty capable of detoxifying but you gotta stick to Dom and you got to only consume it when you are celebrating are celebrating but specifically celebrating exponential growth yeah because unless you're truly accelerating in an insane way yeah you're truly accelerating in an insane way yeah you're not going to be drinking it every day yeah and so you know it's so funny if we had the double if we had the double rule set up for uh banger archive we'd be daily drinking yeah rough but i mean seriously it's like it's so funny when i wake up and i'm like oh gotta drink

a bottle of dom at work today but it's like it it's so funny when I wake up and I'm like, Oh, got to drink a bottle of Dom at work today. But it's like, it's two glasses of champagne. And I do that like every month. Like that's probably fine. Speaking of alcohol, let's go to Pavel Asparuhov. He says, drinking alcohol may be bad for you, but having some brews with my boys is definitely good for me. Very relevant. Very relevant. And then Juwan from Ramp says, nothing beats the pure joy of slamming a pitcher

with the dudes on a sticky table. It's true. Been there. It's true. And yeah, you can always cut back at a certain point. Switch to Dom. We got a quick shout out from our friend, Tyler Cosgrove.

He says, got to give a shout out to Boom Supersonic. Now size lords can display their wealth, not by the size of their plane, but by which mock they can hit. They had a successful, they got to mock. Let's hit the size gong for them. They got to mock 1.1 today. That's huge.

Massive. Love it. And a big win for all the investors that decided to triple down. Oh yeah, it was that crazy recap, but they got through it, which is great. You'll love to see it. Amazing.

We need to be going Mach 5 to France to negotiate. Let's go over to old Patty Collison at Stripe Press. The Irish lads are at it again. Stripe Press has been on a tear. Ben Blumenrose says Stripe Press sold 1,000 books a day last year. That's about $ 25K per day, over $9 million a year off of 16 books. Incredible work and shows what you can do

when high quality product meets distribution. Let's go. Size gone for 9 million in books too. I like that. That's great. Probably what they make in two seconds on Stripe. I think it's something, I think the coffee table book industry is like bigger than ever yeah and so it's this weird dynamic where we consume so much of our content digitally now yep but books it's

funny because i use physical books almost as book like a bookmarking feature where i see a book online i'm like that looks interesting i just buy it and I'll get to it eventually. But, um, but yeah, stripes put out some, uh, some bangers, the one on, uh, that guy in the corner right there, Charlie or Charlie's almanac. Yeah. Like always beautiful. We love, we love the written word. We love, uh, we love it even more when it's printed physically. Yeah. let's go to a promoted post and we'll do a bucket poll keep the show moving uh promoted post from our friends over at bugatti the opening of bugatti baku in azerbaijan the home of f1 in azerbaijan a city that bridges europe and asia was celebrated with a tourbillon a symbol of a century of heritage

and sophistication if you haven't seen the bugatti tourbillon this car is unreal i mean the doors go up that's all that's you know how many cylinders it has isn't 16 v16 it's a v16 previously it was a w a lot of yeah yeah a lot of people have been saying oh it's you know just need a v8 hybrid v8 it's all you need a lot of the ferraris are going on you just need a V8, a hybrid V8. It's all you need. A lot of the Ferraris are going down V6s. Yeah, let's get those. 296 has the six-cylinder. Let's get those cylinders up.

This car. AMG1 has six cylinders. You've got 10 more cylinders. I can't wait to buy my first Bugatti. Tour de Yon. The day can't come soon enough. You've got to complete the collection. And again, the size lords of Bugatti, they're not afraid to drop a link.

Bugatti.link slash consumption if you're interested in understanding the environmental impact of your Bugatti. Probably top of mind for most Bugatti owners. Super top of mind, right? For sure. How many offsets am I going to need to buy per mile? I'm going to have to be planting like 10 trees a mile.

Well, I'm most likely an oil chic if i bought this car yeah yeah i'm in the oil business but uh we love bugatti here and if you go and pick one up tell them the technology brothers sent you yep let's go to harry stebbings he says i have never met a founder or vc who can write a good press release for a funding round stop writing it like a like an obituary you aren't writing to your grandmother bring the company to life tell a story make them excited interesting uh yeah the funding round thing i mean you're not supposed to like the funding you're not supposed to do it yourself you're supposed to call lulu yeah call lulu first and then you're supposed to give us a scoop exactly and then we'll turn it into a show we'll make it feel like espn this is how it works yeah it's the new economy um but also

like the fun the funding round is is not the story it's the excuse to break news which justifies writing the story yeah and so what you have to do is you have to leverage that to say i'm giving you a scoop of this funding round is going to happen but in order to win this scoop you can't just write it up like it's a pr newswire thing that's 200 words. You have to come and interview me and my team and my investors and get a 5,000 word profile. Unless you're already an insider, no tech journalist is going to get excited about covering your $2 million seed round. They do not care. But they will if you put all $2 million of that into a domain. Yes. You got to figure out of that into a domain. Yes.

You got to figure out how to create a stunt. And that's what he did really well was he created a story and a narrative around it that, that you had to write about because it was controversial and you get clicks and they're in the business of getting clicks. So click game, you got to do that. And driving paywall.

Totally. Totally. Let's go to Atlas. He says, MFers will be like ASI in two years and still be skinny, bro. You're worried about the wrong arms race. This is golden retriever maxing. We love to see it on the timeline. Yeah. It's fantastic. Yeah. Get in the gym. Uh, this is important. Worry about range of motion. Just worry about how much weight you're throwing around.

Exactly. If you're not, if you're not dropping the weights loudly, you're not lifting heavy enough. Yeah. Your bicep curl should look like a hand clean. Get into a gym that, uh, yeah. Get into a gym that supports dropping weights. Yeah. For sure. Oh, speaking of, uh, tech reporting and the media, uh, Murat says incredible bit of tech crunch reporting I just ran into. They looked up Google trends for the past two days and concluded it's the highest the trend could possibly be. And so what happened was Google searches for deleting Facebook, Instagram, explode after meta ends fact-checking. So this is something that happened when Zuck came out and said, we're not doing fact-checking anymore. We're going to community notes model. And of course there's

like a somewhat of a backlash. Some people say, I don't like that. A lot of people said they did like it, but you got to write the story that feeds the beast of your readers. And cause it's entirely audience captured at this point. And so you have to write the story of like, this is bad for meta, even though you can just look at the stock price and tell it like, no DAUs are not dropping. People are still going to be using Instagram. And so they, but this is bad for meta even though you can just look at the stock price and tell that like no daus are not dropping people are still gonna be using instagram and so they but this is hilarious because i want literally social media fact checked i want it fact checked uh and it's funny just because they they just actually made a mistake when they went to google trends i i think that meta should hire us to just put posts in the truth zone yeah well we should grab an action yeah we this is the thing about authoritarianism as long as i'm the authoritarian yeah don't really

have a problem with it and social media platforms need to embrace misinformation yes yeah exactly breaking wow wow uh oh speaking of obby over at friend says, the only real way for US startups to compete with China is on taste. I ain't ever seen a Chinese product that didn't feel Timu. Well said, Avi. But that is true. Yeah. Like as we move into the LLM as a product and not just as a weights and evals. DeepSeek is the Timu Chachi PT 01.

Yeah, it is. It is very cheap. Very cheap. Lots of people are saying. Anyway, promoted post. Keep these people on their toes. Kind of caught me off guard here. We got a promoted post from our friends over at Laura Piana.

Craftsmanship in every weave and detail. Thoughtfully finish with verse. Maison's Art of Good Living Collection speaks the language of time-honored craft and impeccable taste so uh we gotta get you on duolingo bro yeah duolingo uh i just didn't understand like hopefully finish worth first i don't know it's a bunch of european mumbo jumbo low tan banger only eight likes oh you hate. Low-tam banger, only eight likes. Oh, you hate to see it from Loro Piano, only eight likes.

Where's Chamath with the retweet? Go hit him with a repost. Hit him with a retweet, Chamath. Do Loro Piano a favor. Pump the account. Who knows if they put a link in there? It doesn't matter. Get it going.

Quote tweet it. They hit him with a hashtag. It's funny that these companies, they insist on hitting a hashtag in a post about their company from Laura Piana. Yeah. Why are they doing this? And they're all the same.

It's like, is there one social media agency that's doing every luxury brand? Like, what's going on? We need a complete and total shutdown of luxury brands on X until we can figure out what's going on. It's insane. Uh, anyway, let's go to a less than luxury brand. That's been on a tear lately. Rye says people are losing their life savings, getting rugged on fake internet money projects. Meanwhile, I've been riding Build-A-Bear stock to the moon. Hard tech is the future. And he posts a screenshot of Build-A-Bear and Robin hood. Did you know that Build-A-Bear is public, Jordy? Build-A-Bear is a public company and it's up 800% in the last five

years. Pretty remarkable. I believe it. People want an activity with kids. And then people created, they saw that they immediately created a Build-A-Bear token. I'm sure. But people want an activity with their kids and they're willing to pay for something that occupies time and then also gives them some sort of like special toy that's not just slop right yeah so it makes sense that build a bear is doing well glad to see it not financial advice obviously but uh you know we're we're you know yeah let's call it hard tech who cares um tech we should check out Build-A-Bear. Yeah, we should. Theoretically going to Build-A-Bear.

We should do a deep dive. I want to know like, who is the founder of this company? How they built this thing? Like, it's pretty crazy that such a simple idea could become a public company that's up 800% in five years.

Like that, something went right. Well, you have to- The Build-A-Bear founder knows something. So you have to imagine that they got destroyed with COVID. So part of those gains are everybody stops going and building bears. You know, you go back five years. It's like, yeah, it's dipped.

You can see the COVID drop. Right here, maybe. They went on a generational run. Generational run. And they're way up recently. Something good. A definitive guide to Build-A-Bear. I like it.

Let's do it. Build-A-Bear bowl case. Dolly Bolly. I feel like this guy's been on the show before. He says, when has something good happened when Masa gets really excited? And he says, once again, I ask. And so this is obviously a reference to Deep Seek and that tanking the market shortly after Masa did his announcement on Stargate. Kind of a good post, but that's silly.

The thing is Satya is still going to be spending $80 billion a year, even with the deep-seek news. Yesterday was a terrible day to be unfamiliar with Jevons paradox. Many clearly were, and not our audience, but many, many, many normies out there, very unfamiliar with that paradox. And we're just going to keep using more compute until we're all just paperclips.

And I did see a post that after the markets crashed, there was a lot of equity research discussion and expert calls that happened to the hyperscalers asking like, are you going to change your GPU buying plan? And they all said, no. So I bought Nvidia on public yesterday. You up? Up 7%, something like that.

Not financial advice, but- 7% in a day. In a day, compound that over a year, you're killing it. Trillionaire. Trillionaire. Logan Bartlett says, it's amazing how Apple continues to innovate, democratizing mobile music players, iPod 2001.

The most elegant smartphone experience, iPhone 2007. Mainstream cordless headphones, AirPods 2016. AI that makes the product experience worse, Siri 2011, Apple Intelligence 2024. Apple Room Temp. Apple Room Temp. Apple Room Temp. Get it together, Apple. Get it together.

It's got to get better. It's so bad. You know, I had a recent like, oh my God, this is so un-Apple and so bad experience. So they obviously like voice generation is completely commoditized. You have 11 labs. There's a million models that do it very well.

OpenAI has a fantastic model. It's very easy to train a model on a ton of voice data. And then Delphi can clone our voices, right? Like startups can do this, like with way less money than Apple, right? And so it's easy to create a voice that is, you know, good. Yeah. And so when you go into Safari on an iPhone and you click on the reader view it will take away all the ads it's very nice you can actually read the article cleanly and there's a button now that you can say listen to this article and and it plays like a pretty decent voice it's not state-of-the-art it's okay it's not good it's not good but it's not bad and it's you can listen usable you can listen to it which is nice because a lot of websites don't have a voice feature, but sometimes that's broken. Sometimes the reader view is broken

and it only shows you like a third of the article. Even if you're logged in, there's some sort of paywall thing. It's broken. And so Ben, now he's just listening to music. Yeah. Ben, is that loud? Ben, are you good? We can hear that. Oh, it's outside. Oh, weird. Okay. We got some noise outside the studio in downtown LA today. Anyway, so sometimes the reader view is broken and when it's broken, you can still swipe down with three fingers to do like the voice version of, oh, it's my back. That's funny. Is is that some how did that happen with that phone i have a phone in there weird that's very odd okay thank you uh very weird i don't know what's going on the phone uh anyway um uh so you can swipe down with three fingers to do like uh it's like a it's like a assistance feature for people that

are i think blind and it will it will read anything on the text it's a screen reader it reads it all in a voice and that voice is still on the old model so it's like completely impossible to use and it's just like how do they not think also the latency was serious insane yeah it's terrible anyway let's some people some people were giving uh i think it was signal who was giving apple like apple yesterday had to had to be pretty signal was saying they have to be pretty happy right now they didn't spend on capex they just sort of waited to see how the market would play out they already have all the distribution yeah so uh we'll see how it plays out for them okay let's we need it we need a collective effort to get smart people working at apple again

seriously because they have such a lock-in like you can't just count on you can't leave yeah so you got to make it better yeah so we got to push people to go there so if you're a cracked engineer go work at apple and go founder mode. Please go founder mode at Apple. This is rough. Do we have any more promoted posts? No, let's cap it off. Okay, let's just close out with Nir. Nir says, love how finance reporting found that they can phrase everything in terms of market cap to get technically accurate headlines like trillions of dollars violently wiped

out from the market forever when the reality is, e.g. today, that NASDAQ is at the price from 10 days ago. That's hilarious. I didn't realize that. It's only been 10 days of gains wiped out. You hate to see it, though. It's still sad, Nir. And still leaves us looking for a bull market somewhere. Well, that's our show. Thanks for tuning in. Thank you. If you're tuning in live, thanks for listening.

Very first live show. First of tens of thousands. Tens of thousands. We'll be doing this for decades. And go leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Put an ad read in your review. We'll read it on the show.

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