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

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

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

You're watching TBPN live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. That's right, the Capital of Capital. Today is Friday, February 28th, and we got to say happy birthday to our Vice President, Ben. He's back in the studio. Ben. It's good for Ben. They tried.

The enemies tried to take him down. They could not. He's too powerful. He's too powerful. But we got a great show for you today. We're covering GPT 4.5. We're going to to answer the question what do you get when you spend 10 times as much money pre-training in llm uh there's been a bunch of conversation on the timeline about this we're going to break it all down also skype is shutting down i'm sure we'll have to do a little

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

nonchalant no tell me yep tell he's uh ben's gonna mute me but no this goes out to all the nonchalant birthday boys out there tell us tell us it's your birthday yeah a week a month before a week before a day before in the morning of yeah and i want to know so i can set up singing telegram mariachis uh we were at breakfast with Ben earlier today. I should have had the whole staff come out and sing him happy birthday. Yeah. I would have done that. Pancakes with candles.

Exactly. Pancakes with candles. But he robbed us of that opportunity. Anyway. And I will never forgive you for that, Ben. Anyway, Jordy, would you like to hear a joke? I love your jokes. You love my jokes, but these are my jokes.

You didn't write this joke. I didn't write this joke. This is a joke written by a model that cost $5 trillion, actually. We should get into the actual cost, but for those that are maybe listening for the first time, John has this thing. This is John's eval. Yeah. Your Coogan's eval.

And we should actually, you got to coin this. We got to coin this. So Coogan's eval is where you take the new model and you say, tell me a funny joke. Make sure it's actually a funny joke, like a standup set and not just a knock knock joke or something simple. Literally my favorite comedians are Shane Gillis, Dave Chappelle, et cetera. And so why don't you read out the joke and buckle up? I mean, you're going to be in tears.

We should get some tissues because you're gonna be laughing so hard uh so hey you ever notice how technology makes us think we're way smarter than we actually are like i realized this when my wi-fi went out the other day i immediately panicked because without google i'm basically just an ape holding an iphone seriously if you took me back to the middle ages and asked me how to build a simple pulley system i'd be like uh you got youtube here hang it up everyone's out of a job that's incredible amazing of course that's not the goal of these models their job is to work in the mines. Are you going to keep going? It's so bad.

OK, so and it's not just the Internet. Remember when we thought Alexa and Siri were going to make our lives easier? Now it's just me arguing with a speaker about whether I said play Kanye or order pad Thai. My credit card's maxed out, but hey, my Spotify playlist is fire. I like how it just throws in this completely random non sequitur. Yeah, I don't get it. Why is it maxed out? Because he's paying for like AI tools or something?

Ordering pad Thai? I don't know. Speaking of tech, I think the weirdest part about AI isn't that it's smarter than us. It's that it's becoming more human. We're programmed. We programmed AI to mimic humans. And now AI lies, makes mistakes and blames other people. We invented digital middle management. Congratulations, humanity. We've automated incompetence. Wow. A real knee slapper. Right. Perfect. I mean, was that stolen from Shane Gillis or Dave Chappelle? I think what we need to do is feed your lines back into the model and ask it to judge your delivery because it really might come down to the delivery.

Maybe I botched it. You're setting it up to fail. You don't want to believe that the model can be as funny as you are. But anyways, we don't have AGI yet. We're not out of a job yet. So stay tuned. But I mean, realistically, that's not why. They're not even trying to make these models that funny. It is an interesting eval.

I think it's a good eval. I think that they should be able to do that at some point. And the humor eval is a way of asking the model, can you do something that you haven't been trained on? The move 37 of writing is a joke, a novel joke in my mind. The real benchmark is a true knee slapper. I think so. I think so.

But anyway, we got a much more serious analysis from Andre Karpathy. He says, GPT 4.5 and an interactive comparison. Today marks the release of GPT 4.5 and an interactive comparison. Today marks the release of GPT 4.5 by OpenAI. I've been looking forward to this for two years, ever since GPT 4 was released, because this release offers a qualitative measurement of the slope of improvement you get out of scaling pre-training compute. This is something we've talked about. I'm super scale pilled. Scaling is real. But the question is, if you scale the model up 10x, do you get a 10x improvement? Do you get a 1x, a 2x improvement? Do you get 10%? Do you get

100x? Like sometimes, you know, and he talks about the evolution here. So each 0.5 in the version is roughly 10x pre-training compute. Now recall that GPT-1 barely generates coherent text. GPT-2 was a confused toy. GPT-2.5 was skipped straight into GPT-3, which was even more interesting. Then GPT-3.5 crossed the threshold where it was enough to actually ship as a product and sparked OpenAI's chat GPT moment. And if you remember, when GPT-3.5 was getting really good, there was this DaVinci model is GPT 3.5002-DaVinci, a great name, of course, very memorable. But that was the moment when people in the developer community were toying with it and being like, okay, this thing is actually like passing the Turing test. Like it sounds like human and it is remarkable. It's a remarkable

innovation. And so GPT-4 in turn also felt better, but I'll say that it definitely felt more subtle. I remember being part of a hackathon trying to find concrete prompts where GPT-4 outperformed 3.5. They definitely existed, but clear and concrete slam dunk examples were difficult to find. It's that everything was just a little bit better, but in a diffuse way. The word choice was a bit more creative. Understanding of nuance in the prompt was improved. Analogies made a bit more sense. The model was a little bit funnier. World knowledge and understanding was improved at the edges of rare domains. Hallucinations were a bit less frequent. The vibes were just a bit better. It felt like the water that rises all boats where everything

gets slightly improved by 20%. So it is with that expectation that I went into testing GPT 4.5, which I had access to for a few days and which saw 10x more pre-training compute than GPT 4. And I feel like once again, I'm in the same hackathon two years ago. Everything is a little bit better and it's awesome, but also not exactly in ways that are trivial to point to. Still, it is incredibly interesting and exciting as another qualitative measurement of a certain slope of capability that comes for free just from pre-training a bigger model. Keep in mind that GPT 4.5 was only trained with pre-training supervised fine-tuning and RLHF, so this is not yet a reasoning model. Therefore, this model release does not push forward model capability in cases where reasoning is critical like math and code.

In these cases, training with RL, reinforcement learning, and gaining thinking is incredibly important and works better even if it is on top of an older base model, GPT-4-ish capability or so. The state of the art here remains the full O1. Presumably, OpenAI will now be looking to further train with reinforcement learning on top of GPT 4.5 model to allow it to think and push model capability in these domains. However, we do actually expect to see an improvement in tasks that are not reasoning heavy. And I would say those tasks are more EQ as opposed to IQ. So it's more, it's more just better to chat with and actually have a conversation with, uh, related and bottlenecked by world knowledge, creativity, and analogy, making general understanding, humor, et cetera. So definitely bottlenecked by humor. Yes. Uh, so these are the tasks that I was

most interested during my vibe checks. So below, I thought it'd be fun to highlight five funny slash amusing prompts to test these capabilities and organize them into an interactive LM arena light right here on X using a combination of images and polls in a thread. Sadly, X does not allow you to include both an image and a poll in a single post. So I have to alternate posts that give the image. And then so basically he put, he left it up for eight hours. This got a million views, lots of people voted and he broke down the results. And interestingly, he says, okay, so I didn't super expect the results of the GPT-4 versus GPT-4.5 poll from earlier today. But GPT-4.5 outperformed GPTT 4 on only one of the five questions.

Wild. People prefer GPT 4 in four out of five questions. Awkward. And it's always odd. I mean, the splits are not huge. 56% of people prefer GPT 4.5 in one question. The margins were 10, 20%. It wasn't like 100%, 90% of people thought it was one way or another. 60, 40 for every one person that prefers, you know, GPT four or five in question three,

two people prefer GPT four. That is pretty significant. Yeah. And he says, to be honest, I found this a bit surprising as I personally found GPT 4.5 responses to be better in all cases, but maybe I'm just a high taste tester. I think that's probably true considering you built this, Andre, and you're like one of the greatest programmers of all time. And so you probably have high IQ. More refined taste. Yeah. But the thing to look for is that GPT-4 more often says stuff- Trump has a refined taste in another kind of model the thing to look for is that gpt4 more often says stuff that on the face of it looks fine

and type checks as making sense but if you really think about it longer or more careful carefully you will often more you will more often catch it saying things that are a bit of an odd thing to say or a little too formulaic a little too bit of an odd thing to say or a little too formulaic, a little too basic, a little too cringy, or a little too tropey. Slightly reassuring, a number of people noted similar surprise in the replies. I noticed the few I noticed as an example. For the roast, 4.5 is punchier. For the story, 4.5 narrative jumped in, had dialogue dialogue and hinted at a unique storyline uh b was a little bit more schematic um for the poem uh 4.5 is obviously way better the rhyme scheme and meter of b are so unsophisticated a has to be 4.5 the voters have poor taste i like that so yeah either high taste

testers are noticing the new and unique structure but the low taste ones are overwhelming the new and unique structure, but the low-taste ones are overwhelming the poll. All you plebs don't... Basically saying you're all normies, lobies. Yeah, you normies, lobies, don't, can't... If you can't tell the... Honestly, if you can't tell the difference... You're hallucinating. If you can't tell the difference between 4.5 and 4, like, I don't even know if you should be allowed

to be a member of society. It's interesting. You have to imagine OpenAI is trying to continuously dominate the narrative, right? They're sort of ahead on revenue, but well beyond. But it's like a knockout, dragout fight in terms of attention and what's on the frontier. They had Grok last week. Was it over the... It was Friday? It started last week, but then the app rolled out

the voice mode rolled out the reasoning the new claude model 3.7 and opening eye like there there's some value in being the last model to drop right yeah in just terms of you know sucking the air out of the room and i believe that this uh that this model will be the top of the stack in benchmarks. And OpenAI has always done this cadence where they come out with the best. And then a couple of months later, there's a whole flood of everyone else catching up. And all of a sudden they're beating them by like a few percentage.

And then OpenAI comes back and is back on top. And so if you average out, like OpenAI is not always on the top of the rankings on every single benchmark, but they probably have the most number of days on top because they're on top, like, you know, for about half the year. Yeah. And then towards the back half of the year, everyone else is kind of chipping away at their leads and different benchmarks and stuff. But, but it's fun. So he closes out and says, so we'll wait for the larger, there's also this feeling, you know, it's hard to know if it's accurate, but there's a

general feeling that I have. And I'm sure others do that, that, that the other, uh, foundation model companies are, are launching stuff, uh, as fast as they possibly can. And, and open AI is maybe sort of timing things more in that who knows you know i kind of disagree with that i mean i think that uh i mean the narrative is like anthropic has some insane voice model that they haven't released for safety reasons and i think if anything all the grok push and stuff that's really pushing the cadence at open ai and sure i'm not saying they're not feeling the pressure i'm just saying they seem to be they seem to be uh keep you know you can imagine if they wanted to launch gpt5 yeah you know could do they feel the urgent they felt clearly an urgency to come out with four or five sure maybe they don't and they're feeling the pressure to get five out but there, but they're sort of like trying to stay

just perpetually slightly ahead and focusing on quality, whereas Grok was just, we have massive amount of compute, we're just going to brute force, spend, launch as fast as possible, iterate. Grok was clearly not actually ready for production. It didn't have the lot of reinforcement learning that yeah

made it so you would just get these obscene answers that never should have been live right it clearly was more of even it was a almost like a beta version of the product in many ways it was responding to stuff that was more of an alpha level product where that stuff should have been caught it's so funny to me that the non-profit board at open ai was upset with sam for launching chat gpt the very first version and they were like it's he's moving too fast he's too dangerous can you imagine the non-profit board watching elon lunch grok 3 and they're just like no no reinforcement learning it's like giving you gas like how to make a bomb stuff it's generating intellectual property that's completely infringing like it has sexy mode and they're just like what like actually like sam would be much better yeah on second thought yeah yeah actually we should have backed sam and and kept

elon out of the race our biggest non-profit backer was the most degenerate yeah yeah that's hilarious safety pill yeah it's just accelerate accelerate accelerate totally totally the entire time yeah uh but yeah to elon's credit he doesn't he he he you know makes the claim that that sam is disingenuous and and uh yeah snaky or whatever he's not saying that sam is reckless exactly it's actually a very different critique yeah and. And I think it's good. I think that this shows that just scaling up, there was definitely a drumbeat from the AI Doomer community that GPT-4.5, GPT-5, you scale up the pre-training by 10X, they were so scale pilled that they said, when you scale up by 10X, you're going to get a 10X more dangerous model. You're going to get 10X more risk. And that does not feel like what's going on right now at all. It feels like, yeah, these things are still like friendly and nice and they make mistakes and they're just simulating humans and humans are

default, like kind of good, but also sometimes midwits. And sometimes they, you know, come up with good stuff. And, you know, it's all about how you implement them. And if somebody uses one of these models and creates a wrapper that does something bad, then, yeah, you're going to get a bad outcome. But the model itself is not going to, you know, break out and have a mind of its own and destroy everything. So Andre finishes out by saying one really bad mistake that bugs me is in the GPT 4.4 versus 4.5 conversation, the one generated by 4.5. 4.5 asks, still buffering your responses like it's dial up internet. This is really bad because it clearly borrows tropes from early days computing. Huh. Interesting. Anyway, let's go to some of the other takes michael mignano uh is is this comment is interesting you think this is about it no the uh from main

reaction there i don't know if we have the answer but it says is it possible the four update last month was already a distillation of 4.5 i think the results would be less concerning if so huh um oh yeah because maybe maybe we got some of that already baked in that's why it's such a small you know difference yeah yeah yeah it's hard to tell because like if you're just trying to stay out of the news people right now people right now are almost comforted in the fact that you're getting chapters of an llm right sort of like version one two etc and they all have different naming scenes yeah uh but over time you can imagine they're just perpetually updating yeah but that's uncomfortable to be yeah you know humans get smarter or dumber over time right depending on their environment and their view viewpoint of

the world and knowledge and all that stuff but it's not necessarily perpetually updating throughout even a day where you wake up and your your employee in the morning is brilliant and then they're slightly you know dumber later in the day nerfed um i mean the the the vibes around the cadence going from chat gpt which launched on 3.5 to gpt4 everyone saw chat gpt and 3.5 and we were like we crossed the Turing test. AI is here. This is going to be massively disruptive. Like there's going to be no more marketing jobs because it can just write copy. It's like, there's going to be mass unemployment. Like people even, even beyond like the doers who were saying this is going to kill us. A lot of people were like, this is going

to fundamentally change the world very rapidly because it's happening at internet scale. It's not, it's not an Adams company. It's a bits company. And so this can be rolled out into every single company and layoffs can happen now. Right. And so people were, people were worried. And then three months later it was like, Oh, we did, we did, we went from three to four, which feels like a 25%, 33% increase. It just felt like, Oh, okay. If we're continuing at this pace, like the acceleration is real. And, and, but then over the last two years, we've just been incrementing on fours, four, four, one, four, five, four, oh, people were starting to call it out. But Sam, if you're out there in the markets trying to raise 40 on three 50,

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

$20 billion of investment. It's such an interesting dance because if you go too hard and you say super intelligence is right around the corner well then the regulator is going to come out people are going to be protesting in the streets yeah the doomers are going to have a bigger argument saying look you can just look at what sam is saying he's going to say it's the most powerful god in a box like we have to control this we have to regulate it but if you don't say hey super intelligence is coming yeah well then we're why should we invest a trillion dollars in the capex like we we in order to make these types of investments it's got to be the real deal and so and i finding that balance is really really tricky in my opinion i think satya

has the right balance which is that uh ai in its current state and and for the near future is this sort of almost like a co-pilot, a thought partner. It doesn't yet have total agency, right? It's not actually replacing an employee, but it's being a work sort of partner for you. And that still justifies a lot of CapEx, but I don't think it justifies an incremental 30 billion dollar investment in open ai at the moment in time interesting um i think people massively

underestimate how much work there is to be done one point of view i forget who was talking about this uh earlier this week is that there's so much value to be created and captured from the current technology set. I agree. It would take a, even if we had, even if all model development paused and we had a 10 year shot and we just went to implement the technology, we could still, there would still be numerous, numerous, you know. And that's what happened with the dot-com boom. Like the internet rolled out, dial up was pretty terrible, pretty but even in like i don't

know 2000 what 2004 2005 people were starting to get high speed internet dsl uh cable stuff that you were where you could play video games online you could stream videos and then there was a question about like okay well what if your internet gets 10 times faster? Well, like you're not going to watch 10 movies at the same time. Like, and yes, you could stream 8k video instead of 10 ADP, but most people just are fine with 10 ADP. It's still entertaining and valuable. Exactly. And so, and so like we accelerated the speed and number of connections to the internet. And then it took us 20 years to actually reap that benefit, even though the tech kept getting better and the internet has gotten faster. And now you can download an 8K video very quickly if you have the right line. But most people are just like, yeah, I just need, you know, a couple gig download and I'm fine. It is interesting.

Well, let's move on to some reactions. We got Michael Mignano. He says, technology is not a moat, never has been. There are so many examples of incumbents copying startups' technologies and leveraging their distribution to crush competition. And AI coding models are quickly making technology even less defensible with coding models like Claude, assistants like Cursor, and no-code tools like Lovable and Bolt. It's becoming stupidly easy to copy existing products and apps with virtually no effort turns out the stuff that actually matters is what always mattered strong products real network effects ruthless distribution and brands people actually care about the winners will double down on those things while everyone else wonders why their perfect tech keeps getting cloned into irrelevance so the most uh most relevant uh sort of point related to all of this

is that uh you know we've talked about this on the show before this idea of easy come easy go yep and so the same the same re you know the the the the the issue with cursor is if you can go to 100 million dollars building a product that there was an open You know sort of you open source. They it was like vs code fork They forked it get to a hundred million dollars in revenue lovable and bolt come out You know lovable goes from zero to 17 million in three months with a small team But the same technology that enables them to do that also enables other people to come and compete away their market right so windsurf AI which is a cursor competitor they are have gotten to a 40 million dollar run rate in a very short amount

of time and so historically if you look at these businesses that have this sort of explosive growth sometimes there's sort of specific market dynamics that allowed that to happen or allowed a specific team to do that or relationships that enabled it but oftentimes if a pure play software company explodes in growth and there's no network effects, which Michael references here, or sort of a durable distribution advantage, right, that value creation can erode very quickly. And so what I think we're all interested to see how this plays out is all these companies that have this explosive revenue growth. One, it's great because when people say, oh, there's this big bubble, you can point and say, well, yeah, there's a bubble. But real customers are handing over dollars to pay for these products.

And, you know, Cursor would have gone public, public you know a year ago if it was 2021 right yeah but what what i think we're all waiting to see play out is uh does this revenue um you know ultimately get competed away by other teams that you know there's teams that will use cursor to compete with cursor right which is uh you know so we'll see. I think we're generally bullish on these companies in the in the short, medium term, but unclear how they sort of maintain and continue to create value when people just say, you know, there will be a version of cursor that allows somebody to vibe code a free version of cursor. Right. How far like I'm actually surprised we haven't seen somebody say i use cursor to rebuild cursor and that would definitely go viral we've seen some people do additional forks and there's been some pushback i think there was that yct company yeah uh and so that yeah there has been pushback my uh i wonder uh are you a bull or bear on

uh docusign docusign is like the quintessential. You should be able to rebuild that with cursor, right? It's just forms and filings. But maybe those 10, 20, 100,000 employees they have are just the best sales guys. They're embedded in every organization. They're calling you on your birthday. They're celebrating you. They're picking your kids up from school. They tell you their birthday that morning. They wake up and say, Hey, it's your, it's your favorite sales rep. Yeah. You clone DocuSign for, you know, $5 in cursor credits or whatever. You have Devin on the case for the weekend and you got yourself a DocuSign clone, but how are you distributing it? You need 10,000 sales guys. Maybe, maybe, uh, you know, I, I just, I don't think we know. I want uh you know i i just i don't think we know i want you know the bigger

threat to docusign is again uh so google workspace i think just rolled out a docs document signing product we already pay for google workspace it's one click away it's not going to be as good but for sure google's like calendar booking link throttled the growth of of Calendly yeah that's true things like that and so I think the bigger uh threat to some of these sort of commodity products the thing is is I mean doc document signing has the viral sort of uh effect where you sign up but that also enables new product yeah distribution is baked in yep um but I mean we've said this maybe five times on the show before how has docusign not said hey our product's actually pretty simple we should be able to maintain it with a team of 100 engineers we actually don't need a thousand yeah let's sort

of give back uh let's free these people to go work on other more interesting products set them free instead of slaving away in the in the docusign minds yeah uh and just let them go work on more interesting things and then you know give that give that cash back to shareholders yeah invested in new products it just seems like a very uninspiring yeah company uh but um but we'll see yeah uh anyway uh scott wu ceo of cognition chimed in with his take on gpt 4.5 i thought this was an interesting uh data point because he's obviously using these models very deeply he says gpt 4.5 has been awesome to work with of course they build this into devon you can run devon on a number of different uh llms and he says our agentic coding benchmarks, on our agentic coding benchmark, it already shows massive improvements

over 01 and 40. Excited to see the model's continued trajectory on code. One interesting data point, although GPT 4.5 and CLAWD 3.7 Sonnet score similarly on our overall benchmark, we find that GPT 4.5 spikes more heavily on tasks involving architecture and cross-system interactions, whereas Claude 3.7 Sonnet spikes more on raw coding and code editing. As AI takes on increasingly complex tasks, we believe that multi-modal agents, multi- multimodel agents that incorporate each model's unique strengths will perform best. Just like in your brain, you have different sections of your brain to do different tasks. On a team, you have that developer who's really good at architecture, and you have that other guy who's just a beast at writing code all night long. long and so uh i might be off here but with devon and cognition's position where as the underlying models get dramatically better their product gets you know better and more valuable that's a great

position to be in yep given the complexity of building out the sort of team-like uh product you know like a individual contributor as product that's integrated into a team. Will cognition be better positioned than a cursor where, you know, as, uh, how long until you can get Devin to build a version of cursor and just say, Hey fork, you know, we might be 10 years away from that, but it's, it's not even that. I mean, like the, the mental model I have for Cursor versus Devin is like completely separate things. One is like this- No, totally.

I'm just saying- And with Devin, I almost see it as like, you could see them like a McKinsey almost, where it's like, there's a large company and they're like, hey, we have this app and it runs on iOS and we need to get it to run on Android. And so you just need to take that code and transfer it.

And it's just going to be a lot of work and it's got to be done perfectly and so we just want you we're going to give you 10 million dollars to do it because it would cost 50 million to do it with you know some human outsourcing team and and cognition just goes and cranks and like gets it done and then eventually you're doing that all over your organization and it's much more for like these, these like corporate projects than like, you know, uh, yeah. Or backlogs, et cetera. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I I've seen a lot of case studies like that, but it's very, it's very different. And then also, yeah, it's, it's very, um, it's very like, it's a B2B product. Like they are in open access. You can just go install it. Um,

but it is expensive and it's a very different sales motion, I think. Anyway, let's go to Chubby, hilarious name, with the most serious post talking about OpenAI Mark Chen, who I actually got dinner with a couple months ago. Great guy. Mark Chen says, we found a new paradigm through reasoning, which we're also scaling. That's right, because GPT 4.5 was clearly proven that pre-training has definitely reached a wall. GPT 5 must be a banger. Last chance, says Chubby. And so a lot of people throwing a little bit of a little question on, you know, hey, everyone is going to be shifting to, oh, no, no, no.

We don't focus on just bigger, bigger models. We focus on reasoning because like that's the next paradigm. But I think that's fine. I don't care where you're optimizing your AI system. I don't care if it's all the gains are in pre-training, all the gains are in post-training, all the gains are in RLHF. When RLHF came out, people were like, oh, so like now like to scale and improve a model, you just need to have a bunch of people like writing answers. Like this is an AI. And it's like, I don't care. I just want, just give me, I just want good results. I just want, make me laugh. John just wants to laugh. But also, also do the research reports and make them great, you know, and, and, and, and, you know, throw, scale all of these things. And I think that there's probably going to be these also also do the research reports and make them great you know and and and and you know throw

scale all of these things and i think that there's probably going to be these cycles of memes online where people are like oh it like scale doesn't matter at all it's all about reasoning oh rlhf doesn't matter it's all about post-training or pre-training or you know fine-tuning or accustomed you know i do think it's fair for people like chubby to feel like they have the right to try to hold uh open ai and these other model companies who have made these sort of massive audacious claims and they've put out a lot of communications on uh on this topic to try to say yeah last last chance you know gpt5's got to be a banger they're basically holding but it's so funny to be in a nod and be like hey 300 billion dollar company last chance last chance it's like no no

who are you to decide whether or not this happens but yeah there's this balance between the the are it's it's more so yeah chubby is probably a customer of open ai yep they're allowed to have strong opinions totally if they're marketed something to yeah uh but at the same time open ai it's squarely within their right to try to massage the narrative and say well actually this is the thing that's more important yeah yeah so i think both both sides have have clear well let's go to another hater do you know gary marcus i do not okay gary marcus is a fascinating figure in ai he wrote a piece called deep learning is hitting a wall he he uh he was at uh he sold an ai company to uber i believe and his whole thing is uh what is it symbolic symbol manipulation

so he believes that like you cannot just throw a big pile of data at a basic algorithm like the GPT-3 algorithm and then just do predict next word, predict next word, predict next word, and then get God or get the genius human. He maintains that like humans represent information in their brains in different ways than that. It's not just predict the next word every two seconds. Or special and unique snowflakes. ways than that it's not just predict the next word every two seconds right um and so special and unique snowflakes he's he's somewhat right because there are clearly like the reasoning and and being able to search the web and use python and all these different tools we're building out the machine brain in multiple different sectors uh but he's also been like massively wrong for a long time because he was saying like deep learning will never scale and it's like i'm talking to he's the michael burry of models exactly exactly

and so but you only got it you know if he's right right now he's gonna be pretty a lot of people have been like this guy is a joke like why is he be how why is he testifying in front of congress at the same time you know he i think he does have a PhD. He's like, he's like a serious researcher. Uh, he's just taken a very contrarian stance, but so has, uh, Noam Chomsky. And Noam Chomsky was a linguist at MIT and, and, and had a lot of, uh, yeah. And had a lot of, a lot of theories on the way language is constructed and, and saw and argued that, uh, you could not rep like you could not represent a human through like a sloppy algorithm. There needed to be some sort of more fundamental truth. And so symbol manipulation basically says, we need to have

a concept baked into the model of what a table is, how it interacts with a chair, all these different things. And so it's been controversial because there haven't been as many gains in the symbol manipulation world, but Gary's been happily taking a victory lap, I guess, over GPT 4.5, not just purely proving that pre-training scale is all you need, but let's find out. So Chubby again says, judging by the mood, GPT 4.5 is the first big failure for open AI. Too expensive, too little improvement, and often inferior to GPT 4.0, even in comparison and creative answers in community tests like what Andre Karpathy posted. And it's interesting because too expensive, don't care at all,

they're going to distill this model and get it a thousand times cheaper in two seconds. Too little improvement, that is interesting. But again, you have to run the the the capex to profit calculation and the gpt4 training run i think was like under 100 million dollars or something which is still like a lot of money at the time but 100 million dollars and they're making billions and so you if you train 100 million dollar run and then generate billions you generate billions a, potentially, if you can be sticky. Not necessarily super high margin. Not yet, but once you bake it down onto silicon, onto a chip or something. I'm just saying. Yeah, yeah.

True. They're not profitable right now, but just the idea of any of these AI companies throwing a billion at or 10 billion, when you think about how much usage there's going to be. It's not as crazy as you think. And so the question isn't- Yeah, especially when you consider there's models that no one uses that have raised $100 million and have spent most of it with nothing to show for it. So OpenAI looks like they're allocating fairly efficiently. And you could say the same thing about Amazon amazon.com. They built out huge data centers 10 times. They 10x their CapEx like 10 times, right? Did the experience of amazon.com get that much better? No, but they printed money the whole time because they have a great product

on top of it. And so like you don't necessarily need a 10x improvement in the core product. If the business is working and it's generating cash, you can underwrite those CapEx expenses all day. And that's what I think a lot of people, that's why a lot of people are jumping into this because Elon is saying, look, I'm going to spend billions of dollars on Grok and XAI, but then I'm going to vend that into Tesla. I was thinking about this, like having a deeply integrated Grok and XAI integration in a Tesla is going to be amazing. There's so many times when I'm driving into the office and I'm talking to chat GPT about, hey, here are some topics that I want to talk about.

Can you do a deep research on this one? Just using the voice mode. And if that was integrated into a Tesla, so it's basically self-driving itself and you're just having a conversation with Grok. Okay, today I got to talk to Jordy about the show. I got to pay this bill. I got to schedule a meeting and it's just cataloging yeah yeah just cataloging all of this oh okay you did legs yesterday hit chest here's what you should do i'm constantly in the car i'm constantly in the car you know i spend enough time on the road you know these days

because of all the traffic that if i get in the car for 90 minutes and i'm driving i'm gonna have 20 thoughts that I want to be able to execute on in that moment, but I end up having to wait until I'm at a stoplight, write it down, keep going. And then I've built this huge backlog of tasks where if you can have this sort of omnipresent AI that says, hey, Grok, can you call the cable you know, call, uh, you know, uh, the cable company. I want to

increase my, uh, I want to get fiber. I have like, you know, I want to upgrade my plan. It's like, that's an item you're checking off the to-do list. Exactly. And I'm sure your car, all your cars have some sort of voice recognition, but it's awful, right? It's like call John and it's like, Oh, did you want me to, you know, call you a tow truck or whatever like always gets it wrong no one ever uses it imagine if it's if it's you know truly frontier best in class and so the question is not does spending a billion dollars on capex to train a frontier model get you something that's a thousand times better than the competition it's just does it get you a valuable asset that then you can vend in and sell all over the place and so can elon sell grok to x premium members and make the money back there can Can he sell it into Tesla? Can he sell it into

other things? Like, can he hook it up to Neuralink? Like, can he make money from the money he spent? That's the only thing that matters at the end of the day. This is capitalism, right? Anyway, so, you know, people are pouring cold water all over this. This is a tough timing too. So yeah, they're pouring cold water on it, calling it the first big failure of open AI. Meanwhile, poor Sam had his first kid like last week. It's rough. This guy. And so Gary Marcus says, a big surprise only to you and the many other OpenAI fans who refuse to listen to me when I patiently and endlessly explained that this would be exactly what would happen for the rest of us.

This was all but inevitable. And so he's taking a victory lap, but it's, but it's odd because it's like, okay, like go do the thing then Gary, like go, go do your approach. Like do the symbolic, the symbol manipulation and beat them. Start a podcast. He might, he might. But yeah, I mean, it's easy to be a pessimist and say that approach isn't working. Like the like like the the starship isn't going to work to get us to Mars. I don't care. Build something, that's an obvious critique of Gary. But at the same time, if you are highly researched on a specific topic, you're an opinion on the world changing technology that everybody else and and it's fine if he take i i think he can take a victory lap we're not we're not he's not trying to say that i can do it he has been for years for years he was saying he was saying my approach is better than deep learning okay so he has that's why yeah because he hasn't been advancing the ball on his thing it would be one thing if it was like so i think that they did this

and then symbol manipulation his approach outperforms and it's like oh my god he was right like we should have we were going going down the wrong path gary was right instead he's just saying like my their thing sucks but my thing really sucks yeah yeah okay which is kind of like my read on it but But I don't know. I mean, still, you know, congrats to him. So he can't take a, he can say, hey, he's entitled to say, I'm right. And OpenAI won't respond to this, but if they could or would or wanted to,

they would say, cool, like, let's see your benchmarks. Exactly, exactly. And he wouldn't, sounds like he wouldn't have a good answer. Yeah, well, now he would say, oh, I'm out of the game. I'm not, I'm not, I'm working on policy and stuff. I'm not, I'm not really building, I'm not trying to compete in that, but, uh, it is, is a little frustrating because you know, like the deep sea team over there,

they're making, they're saying, Hey, we have a slightly different approach and we're getting, we're getting better performance with less investment. I mean, you know, the actual investment is debatable, but there were clearly some optimizations there where they got close to the frontier with obviously less than what it cost to train 4.5. And so I'm much more sympathetic to like a deep seek stand saying like, hey, the best investment in this technology

in the next wave here is on the optimization side, not on the scale side. I'm receptive to that. But if you're just saying like, this isn't working, but also like my thing is okay. I was right, but I also fail. Anyway, let's move on. Let's close out with another attempt at humor. Dan Shipper says, GPT 4.5 is actually so effing funny. Be me. Be Dan Shipper. Wake up at 5 a.m. Journal for 45 minutes about the dream I had last night.

Dream was in second person, probably inspired by an obscure neuroscience paper I read last Tuesday. Brew coffee using beans handpicked by monks on a remote Guatemalan mountain, sit down to write today's newsletter, accidentally outline four new business ideas, resist the temptation to launch them all by noon, meditate, feel mind literally expanding into previously undiscovered cognitive dimensions, tweet an insight from my meditation session, immediately gain 200 new subscribers, open laptop to write an article on mental models realize the mental the ultimate mental model was within me all along it's only 9 a.m uh why aren't you laughing i mean what's wrong i mean do you not understand the humor i mean it didn't go over your head jordy yeah it flew over my head because if you're if you don't if

you can't tell the difference quad actually five and and 4, you're not really high IQ. Yeah. I mean, Claude actually got fed this and laughed. Yeah. It actually played a laugh track. Yeah. That was its only response. That's great.

So the models are making each other laugh. Yeah. They're not making us laugh just yet. I do think there's something cool about this. I think he had personalization model is actually sophisticated enough that it knows will laugh harder if it just delivers a terrible like a terrible joke yep and just botches it yeah and we go ha ha yeah you dumb model it it's uh yeah it's being sneaky behind the scenes hiding its power level yeah exactly secretly it could be the best it could put every comedian out of business yeah but it's like playing basketball with a kid exactly oh no i i i dropped the ball i guess you scored yeah that's what it's doing

yeah um anyway i'm glad he thought it was funny uh i uh what is interesting here is that this was personalized so he fed it in his his timeline or some more context around him. And so it, so it clearly made jokes that were highly personalized to him. And I think that that is cool. And I think there is something there. And we've talked about this with the Grok stuff. It creates a more unique interaction, unique product, especially when I think the most relevant again, won't be humor. It'll be research where it will know, hey, Jordy, you're an expert in angel investing and ads and entrepreneurship. So I don't need to explain to you what a safe is, but you're not an expert in mining rare minerals. So I'm going to break down. Yeah. I'm going to explain to you in granular detail.

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

Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. And it is, I mean, obviously I'm joking around, but it is true. Ramp is a perfect place to implement AI. When you take a picture of the receipt, it gets scanned. Of course, an LLM processes that. And it's gotten so much better. And it's the exact type of organization that you want to be with where they're...

I mean, the Cognition guys work there. They have an insane team that can go and look at whatever the frontier model is, swap it in in two seconds. They move very fast. They move very quickly. And so the product just keeps compounding

in a way that's great. So you get a better experience from an, from an investor, you know, from a company that you would potentially join. There are companies out there that are just sort of boilerplate SAS that maybe have a lot of revenue today, like DocuSign, but presumably over time will, will be more like cable where some people keep paying, but you know, they get sort of replaced these sort of businesses that are more, this is for informational purposes only, obviously, but the businesses that are more in these sort of regulated spaces

that require payment rails and banking licenses and stuff like that are super well positioned to implement AI for customers, but not in the same way. You can't just use the version of Cursor in 10 years and generate ramp because banks are going to say, I'm sorry, you know, we're not, you know,

we work with a smaller number of partners, et cetera. So, yeah. And yeah, I mean, it's just great. There's obviously a lot of larger companies, more established companies that have been trying to implement AI. McKinsey's printing money. All of the consultants are going around to every business. Here's how you can use AI. Ramp actually has an obvious narrative here, which is receipt classification and iterating over your financials to get you

more accurate data more quickly. Anyway, go check it out. A couple of comments before we jump into the next section. Vishal in the chat says, guys react to Zelensky versus Trump. I said, too political for us. Vishal looked nasty though. And he says, makes sense, Jordy. We don't need another all in, which is a great point. We're trying to hold the line on politics. People, you know, we'll ask you to cover politics because they get a lot of attention, but we are a technology and business show. We are firmly going to. My answer on Zelensky versus Trump, I see Trump as the founder of Truth Social more than the president.

That's something he does, politics, but we're interested in him as a consumer software founder. I think they're arguing about the minds. Once we hear zielinski's business acumen then we can comment but in terms of the politics stuff not really interesting to us so calder says watching john get better at transitions is like watching tiger woods practices swing so thank you better every day every day uh eventually you won't know if it's an ad yeah it's all blended together it's's going to be perfectly blended. Well, Calder, we'll have to have you on the show.

And when we have you on the show, we'll have you call in not via Skype, but via Zoom or FaceTime because Skype is out of business. They're shutting it down. Breaking news here on the show. We're actually breaking this news. It broke earlier elsewhere,

but we're breaking it on the show. Sheil Monat says, end of an era uh and says exclusive uh microsoft is finally shutting down skype in may it's the end of an era uh skype could have been whatsapp plus zoom in one but it was a terrible balmer ask my balmer era microsoft acquisition $8.5 billion. Let's go. Historical size. Historic. Yeah, so it was maybe terrible for Microsoft, but it was fantastic for the Skype shareholders.

Yes. And so we should celebrate that. Yes. And so Skype, fascinating story. I'm sure they took that illiquid, they got the returns from the illiquid Skype stock, rolled it into other illiquid assets that have since, you know, multiplied. Hey, you're getting ahead. We got the whole breakdown right here. Great. Uh, 2003 company founded in Estonia by the founders of

Kazaa, which was, which was a competitor to Napster. If you're familiar, uh, the P2P file sharing service used to pirate music. I was using Kazaa back then. That was fun. Download some Korn tracks or Limp Bizkit albums. It was fantastic. This is like the best era of the internet. The Kazaa money meant that they didn't need to raise... I got run over by a truck in 2003. Really? Yeah. Wait, what? Are you kidding? I'm actually serious. Wait, what do you mean you got run over? This is some lore. I got run over by an off duty ambulance driver who was driving a pickup truck. Is this why you can't bench three plates yet? Yes, that's exactly why. I was actually, I went, you know, got taken in a real ambulance to the hospital and they said, you know, your son's fine,

but he's never going to be able to bench three plates. And that stuck with me. It put a chip on my shoulder. Well, when you do it, you know, we're going to be, I'm going to prove him wrong. I'm not going to listen to that doctor back in 2003. I you do it, you know, we're going to be celebrating. But I'm going to prove him wrong. I'm not going to listen to that doctor back in 2003. I'm going to, you know, do the impossible. Yeah, once you do it, we're going to saber open a bottle of Dom Perignon and saber open a bottle of protein shake.

Perfect. And chug that. Perfect. So they didn't need to raise VC. 2003. 2005. They have 54 million users, 7 million in revenue,

and therefore 60 million in 05 they're printing just estonia has got to be a great place to start an illegal peer-to-peer file sharing platform very fast internet there do you know this story so estonia's eastern block used to be part of the us where a lot of the vpns are uh i don't know if there's that many but uh there are some there are some fantastic entrepreneurs there. So they break away from Russia and they invest very, very heavily in the internet. They get very, very high internet speeds. And so they have tons of kids that get online and learn all sorts of stuff. Very early in my YouTube career, I had a research assistant who was an Estonian guy. He

was obsessed with Estonia and was always like, we should cover this Estonian story. And I'm like, I don't know if I should do another Estonia thing, but I like where your head's at kid. Um, and, but I did do one on bolt, uh, and the founder of that company, which is an Uber competitor. And the kid, uh, built this business into billions and billions of dollars, kind of Uber for the rest of the world and has been fantastically successful. And, uh, and one of his, I think one of rest of the world and has been fantastically successful. And I think one of his angel investors was this guy, Jan, who was a founder of Skype, who got a bunch of money out of Skype and became a big investor. And that guy also invested in FTX very early on. He's a fascinating character. So he's been all over Silicon Valley. And so in 2005, they get acquired by eBay for $2.6 billion.

eBay claimed it would help buyer-seller communication, but that never made sense to Shiel. And eBay wrote it down by $1.7 billion in 2007. By 2009, they have 400 million users, 100 million DAUs, and $700 million in revenue. And so 65% of Stripe gets acquired by Silverlake, A16Z, CPPIB, and Index for $1.9 billion, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. A16Z wrote a $50 million check out of their $300 million first fund. People thought they were crazy for investing in a late-stage private equity deal. That is crazy. And I remember that being on their portfolio page. And I didn't realize that they did it post acquisition, which is very, very rare for a VC. So in 2011- Yeah, but it's sort of some interesting lore,

given that they've turned into more of this sort of multi-stage asset manager that resembles a private equity. Started back in 2009. They've been in the game for 16 years in these odd deals. So if you're out there saying, oh, they're completely pivoting their model, maybe not. Maybe they've cut their teeth. Yeah, they didn't return the fund, even though it was a good outcome,

but certainly got some of the way there. Yeah, I mean, they invested at 2.75 and they sold it at 8.5. So 3X, they probably got 150 mil out on that $50 million check. But that's a $300 million fund. So they returned half the fund on that deal, which is pretty good. And it was just two years. So by 2011, they're at 600 million users, 170 million MAUs, 1 billion in revenue. Ballmer buys it for 8.5. They probably recycled the investment and just reinvested that, the 3X, and potentially got.

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

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

actually google internally was using hangouts because they're like wait we got to dog food our product but once they realized how bad it was everyone was like this is awful like it's it's it's breaking all the time uh we can't get 50 people in there who are crashing so what's the choice we either fix this problem or we go to zoom and there's this story about they put all their best engineers on it uh even like the ai guys came in for a couple days and we're like okay let's let's figure out what's going on let's optimize this let's go deep seek mode on this and it is wild i have zero you know i have so many memories using skype as a kid playing starcraft other video games uh having skype would be something that i would get home from school

you know i'd finish soccer practice or something like that I would turn it on and it would just be on almost until basically until yeah dinner or sometimes even later you know doing you know homework hanging out yeah this was I used a lot of these uh IRC were you using Skype when you were gaming Gaming? No, in your early part of your career? A little bit. Actually, I was trying to make a joke about you being old. I mean, yeah, Skype was a thing. Yeah, you would Skype with someone.

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

And a lot of telegraphs, you know, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. That was the main thing. If you wanted to raise money. You would get on Skype and practice your... Exactly, exactly. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. I'm a beast at this.

Morse code. Morse code. Yeah, Morse code. An absolute dog. And carrier pigeons, obviously, beep, beep. I'm a beast at this. Morse code. Morse code. Yeah, Morse code. An absolute dog. And carrier pigeons, obviously. Yeah, yeah. From time to time. A lot of scrolls passing around on horseback.

This is kind of the vibe. Yep. Back when, you know, draft dodging, trying to not go to Vietnam. This is like my, this is where I cut my teeth. Oh, yeah, yeah. Positive stuff. Exactly. Tony Bates, the CEO of Skype at the acquisition by Microsoft, was considered a rising star

at Microsoft and was actually one of the top folks considered to be in the running for CEO of Microsoft, but left once Nadella got the gig. Anyway, fun to look down memory lane. I use Skype a lot in my life. I use Skype regularly until 2018 because it was the industry norm for one of my companies. In 2018, they started requiring Microsoft login and they lost many of the users they had left. And then he did add a correction. Skype 1.0 did raise VC dollars. They raised 18.8 million from DFJ index, Mangrove and Bessemer a year before they got acquired for 2.6 billion. Mangrove was the first investor and got a hundred X on the deal in two years. And so you had a story about like a pen pal on Skype. What was your experience with Skype? Uh, no, I would just use it while playing Starcraft. Um, and, uh, I just remember a bunch of my friends after school and get on Skype because I lived in a, I grew up, uh, in wine country and, uh, everybody was super spread out. So if you didn't,

your parents weren't going to drive you around, you just kind of had to go home after school and get online. So, and so if you wanted to get a bunch of your Skype friends together out in wine country for a long weekend at a nice house, what would you do? Well, I'd go to wander.com of course. Fantastic.

And you'd find your happy place, find your happy place. We got to know. We got to do it together. Find your happy place. Find your happy place find your happy place find your happy place thank you to tyler for the recommendation he said uh next time you do a wander add make sure to sing it for sure yeah flip that book of wander with inspiring views hotel great amenities dreamy beds and top tier cleaning and 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better folks

what's not to like and we got a post from kyle tibbets over at wander he says international expansion has kicked off at wander with pins popping up on the map and new places like quebec cabo and costa rica stay tuned for more i never leave the united states but if you do good luck to you book a wander while you're abroad you are are really America-pilled. I'm so America-pilled. You try not to leave at all. I'm not leaving. You're going to have to drag me out. I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving. But fortunately, there are hundreds of wanderers in the United States and I'm going to visit all of them. Yep. I'm going to drive to all 50 states. You're making a list. I'm checking it twice. I'm going to go to stay in every single wanderer in America. And then I'm sure I'll see some videos of people.

The issue is they added a hundred in the last month. So if you were trying to go to every wander and they keep this pace, you'd have to be doing three a day. You wouldn't even actually get to spend the night in every single one, but you just pop in, you know, remote, unlock it, jump in. And anyways, but the pace is ridiculous. And we got some more news. We got some more news.

Some really breaking news. This shook the tech industry. We're the first tech and business media company to break this. This shook the tech industry, I would say, more than any of the AI news. This was the biggest story this week, maybe this month. I think we're going to look back on 2025 and say, this was the year of Sam Sulek getting his IFBB pro card. And so Cody main says extremely niche tweet for my fellow gym bros, but Sam Sulek

earning an IFBB pro card in his second ever show is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. He's 23 years old. He's got no coach. He documented every step of his journey on YouTube and he's a certified freak. Look at that man. That is the pinnacle of excellence. And we got another post from Zach. He says, Sam Sulek. Sulek is the ultimate example of obsession. He just became an IFBB pro. He was looking absolutely diced, grainy. He was peeled. It was fantastic. Winning first two bodybuilding shows he posted daily youtube videos for two years documenting every single workout he gained four million subscribers this is what it takes apply this mentality to your goals and i really think we are the sam sulak of tech and

business podcasting in the sense that we post every single day and it's silly and you can look at this and say oh he's just some bodybuilder, he's just some vlogger, whatever. But there is a lesson in here about the obsession mentality and just doing things daily and improving daily over time. You see it with, why is Jake Paul big? You might not like his content, but he posted, it's everyday bro. He literally posted a blog every single day for years. Yeah, there's something about a coach, what a coach often provides as much as advice. Advice is free on the internet. You can go get advice anywhere. It's infinitely available. A coach provides accountability. And so Sam, by just sharing every single workout has the accountability of hundreds of thousands or millions of people, right. They're going to say, you didn't push yourself as hard as you could there. Right.

And they're going to call them out on it. And it it's and it's part of the part of the program um but uh but yeah i think it's i think it's people with his uh 3d renders he posted a new 3d render every single day for something like 10 years i think joe rogan uh famous uh thought leader had a quote that was something to the effect of how would you live your life if you if your life was you know a movie right and you had you knew that you had an audience right you probably would wouldn't doom scroll and you would go to bed early because you know your main character you're a hero right you'd get snug snuggle up in your eight sleep and you'd crash you'd get that good sleep score yep um but uh but yeah there's this idea of like how

would you work out in the gym if if you actually had an audience right yep and a lot of people just go through the motions in their life they don't take it very seriously but take your life seriously sam takes his life seriously he's 23 ifbb pro he's completely natural to future future terminator i'm really pushing for that that's our uh that's our 2025 2026 goal please reboot terminator cast sam sulek the the lines will be around the block at every theater in america truly it actually would be a blockbuster it would be an absolute blockbuster and it's a perfect movie where you don't need it's it's about the ridiculousness of it you don't need the best actor about the ridiculousness of it. You don't need the best actor.

No, and that's the thing. If you do the full reboot, the first Terminator, Arnold, still was working on his English and his acting, I'm pretty sure. And so he's the bad guy and he doesn't really say that much. He's actually like the monster. So most of what he's doing is just marching and shooting and stuff. He's not really delivering that many lines. Then by the second one, they reboot him and he becomes the good terminator plays into all the ai stuff i would totally watch it the terminator franchise really really cool but

it's gone downhill with all these like kind of shoddy spinoffs and we're in like series seven go get uh james cameron back can you believe it's a James Cameron movie that's crazy get Sam Sulek get James Cameron get into the same room and make a great Terminator reboot I would absolutely watch crazy to think that if James Cameron didn't didn't survive his reading and driving era remember he was driving trucks for reading very very sketchy but uh you would never have Terminator and we would never maybe Titanic, Avatar we would never have Sam Sulek

cast as Terminator yeah well if you're thinking about going for your IFBB pro card you know that sleep is the number one way to increase your testosterone naturally and yeah maybe you're competing in the naturals and if you want to get great sleep we recommend getting an eight.

I would, I would love if someone in our community, uh, actually went to be, to be a bodybuilder. We would put the full force of the brotherhood behind them. And, uh,

we'd even pay off judges and stuff like that, whatever it took. Uh, and so eight sleep, of course, it's nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience go to eight sleep.com slash tbp and what's your out what's your sleep

score oh i don't know it might have been a rough night i actually had a rough night let's see eight sleep the app my rough night is your best you got me beat a couple days oh what what you got i got a 91 yeah you beat me yes let's go i got an 86 okay i got i just didn't get i just didn't put up i just couldn't didn't put the time into quality wasn't great routine wasn't quite on point but i'm getting better i had to pick someone up early this morning uh earlier than usual it's a journey talking about soon well let's go to some launches by the way we gotta mention it we have a link in the in the youtube and we have a code just the code is tbpn or eightsleep.com slash tbpn and get a few hundred dollars off your eight sleep and you can enter the the challenge and try to uh you know beat us on our sleep scores yep fantastic well

let's go to some launches we got splash roboticsash Robotics coming out of Y Combinator. They are building unmanned patrol boats to defend our nation's critical infrastructure and secure our borders. They're able to autonomously detect and intercept threats faster than any human operator. I love stuff like this. You know, all the memes are like, I guess we're doing boats now. I guess we're doing military technology uh and and i saw someone reacting to this like did the dod just take over yc or something but this is the perfect hack project for yc team to go build i'm so i'm so happy with these so is this this is a seronic competitor probably at some scale but you know with these yc companies like who knows? They're so early that they could wind up finding some little niche here and there. It's very unclear that it's like,

yeah, this is a real shot across the bow to the billion dollar company that is working with the DoD. This could be something that goes into Coast Guard or responds to an entirely different program area. It could wind up being something that's more commercial focused. It could be something that gets acquihired or merged into another company. It's just a bunch of people building some cool stuff. And so I'm here for it. One of my favorite YouTube channels is this guy, H.I. Sutton, who's a defense analyst. You know this guy? He just talks about naval warfare and he makes these like one shot monologue videos about interesting tech. Okay. So he'll basically start the video and being like, yeah, I didn't really, people have said, Oh, get a better

microphone, get a camera, all this stuff, not doing it, just making this video. And his videos are super engaging. He just nerds out about, you can go, uh, watch this video, essential guide to 2024 naval warfare in the black sea. And so it'll talk about, yeah, this sea and so it'll talk about yeah this guy and it'll talk about all the ways that they're using uh you know autonomous uh technologies and so splash robotics i wouldn't be surprised if they're using his videos to inform their product development because they talk about how uh they'll they'll actually take jet skis and turn them into sort of these uh remote controlled bombs and you, eventually would potentially be autonomous. So cool to nerd out on.

Awesome. Well, congrats to the team. Let us know how it goes. Let's move on to Brendan Uribe, the former co-founder of Oculus VR with Palmer Luckey. He has a new company called Sesame. He says we're exploring a future where the computer isn't just a tool. It's a partner with a truly natural voice and personality. No big claims, just early work. We're excited to share. And a bunch of people were shouting this out. Toby Lutke, the founder and CEO of Shopify said, man, Sesame's voice model is absolutely insane you have got to try this demo and post the link still puts up 1k likes let's see it felt different you love to see someone include a link

and still do numbers i love it try to play it i don't know for the kunj also says this is the most her moment i've felt in the last few years. It's truly uncanny. Recommend trying this now. But in the comments, Gaurav Vohara says, what am I missing? This felt trash. And Nikunj just says, what? So a little bit of different experiences. You just got to go try it for yourself. I don't think we're going to pull it up, but it seems like a cool chat-focused, voice-focused AI tool. So excited for them to launch that and we recommend that you go make your own decision about whether or not you like it or not but speaking of ai uh we got a post from kushi she says uh where is cursor for figma and you got

figma is cursor for figma that's true uh you've been talking with the team over there. Yep. They got some big, big plans in the works. Yeah, it's really shocking that a founder mode CEO who's a Teal Fellow and has been in the game for so long. Who just got a billion dollar breakup fee. Yeah, a billion dollar breakup fee and has been studying this stuff for a decade. A billion dollars of non-diluted financing. Yeah, he's actually heard of AI. And he's been on the same timeline that we've been on. And so he is well aware of it and building plenty of tools to make Figma easier to use and more diffuse both on the prompt to design side and then also deployment into actual app. Obviously, you can imagine where Figma goes on either side of the design program.

They built this great network. They've built this great core design tool that's very, very rich, very deep. It makes a ton of sense that they would extend in both directions. I think Figma should ultimately do this sort of quarterly release model. I think they have more release than someone like Flexport, right? They need to be dominating sort of time. And it's highly visual. Yeah, it's highly visual yeah it's highly visual and so having them switch and and really start to um push you know having dylan push the team to say we are going to be shipping you know these sort of uh incredible advancements in the product every single quarter uh would be cool to see i was thinking about this like uh have you ever seen those like uh pictures where

people use ms paint and then they paint like the Mona Lisa and it's like the most incredible thing or they do art in Microsoft Excel. I really want to see an account pop up that's like Figma abuse basically where someone builds like the Sistine Chapel in Figma and it's like pixel perfect. But like with the individual pixels.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So just having someone there obsessively abuse figma to do something that it can do but it was certainly not designed to do yeah i think that is highly viral potential and yeah in the age of ai generated images yeah i want the art artisan designer to be making a an image pixel by pixel i want to see the time lapse with the face cam. Hand colored, hand painted. Exactly. Go and do it. We'll cover it here live. It's great.

Well, let's move on to Weber, who says, introducing Flora, your intelligent canvas, every creative AI tool thoughtfully connected. We've built Flora, Flora Fauna AI, side-by-side with creative professionals from art students to designers at top agencies like Pentagram to give them speed control and collaboration in one seamless system.

This feels like Figma adjacent potentially. Is that right? Yeah. We built a library of creative workflows from cinematic storyboarding to typography variations designed by creatives with taste. It still feels more oriented around generating things like copy images versus design, But I'm sure they're thinking about it. Yeah, like less prosumer, less professional, and maybe more like... What's that other design tool? Visual Electric?

No, the one that the Australian girl runs. Do you know who I'm talking about? How do we not? How am I blanking on this? It's worth like billions, right? You know who I'm talking about, right? Canva. Canva. I was going to say, if you search design tool it will be the yeah but canva was always like a little bit more consumer like make a meme make a postcard make an invite and then

it's gone kind of up market figma has been more of like what the best designers in the world use and now they're going a little bit more down market to something where an individual uh programmer could use it um and this feels a little bit more like pop in make something and they're going a little bit more down market to something where an individual programmer could use it. And this feels a little bit more like pop in, make something, and they're starting with something that's a little bit more organic UGC driven than, hey, we're plugging this right into enterprises on day one. They've built a library of creative workflows from cinematic storyboarding to typography variations. These workflows could save weeks of iteration to get access. Repost the first post above and comment Flora. That's hilarious. Little algorithm hacking

on your launch video. 1,000 reposts and 3,000 likes, half a million views. Very smart. You don't see that as much. You see that when people release podcasts on instagram now they'll say comment for the link yeah uh and i'll dm me the link right and it's sort of a way to just hack the algorithm to think that there's a ton of interest in in a post but clearly there was a bunch of real interest here and uh go watch the demo it's very cool how they you know link these models together and this feels something uh you know closer to uh cognition or devon for me and that as if they can own the workflow as the underlying models you know get better and they're connecting them in different ways to generate um you know final outputs uh they'll they'll be well

positioned and their product will improve as the underlying models get better yeah well it's cool to see people exploring new tools and uh yeah love to play with that and see if we can generate some content for the show with it or something. Let's play around with it. Well, anyway, let's move on to the timeline, which has been in turmoil.

Vishal in the chat just asked for this. So his timing was perfect. Fantastic. Paki McCormick says, Anderle versus Jason Calacanis, who you got? And a lot of people are sounding off in the comments reggie in the comments yeah drones strike his ass um now we're talking well i've got the popcorn and so

this all started with uh there's been news in the just in the world that like there might be some epstein files coming out some epstein leaks or something palmer posts a picture of the black book uh with jason calacanis's phone numbers listed there uh i guess this is a rolodex from uh uh the the late mr epstein um and uh but this is actually old news this this is not the years ago this is not to be confused with the client list exactly yes yes yes and and jason doesn't you know it doesn't necessarily make uh certainly doesn't make jason look good yeah but there are lots of people in that in in the black book because they met him for any sort of reason in this case they had at least

four of his phone numbers so it sounds like it looks like three or three three in an address, right? I think. But yeah. So obviously they met and Matt Grimm quote tweets Palmer and says, this is the face you make when your weekend just got a little bit more complicated. We see you, Jason. So the Andro guys are really coming

for J-Cal. And Jason responded. He says, and now Matt Grimm, Palmer Lucky's partner, is using a Photoshop photo of me being twice as fat as I ever was and trying to slander me by insinuating I was involved with Epstein. Matt knows full well that I wasn't, that I've said I wasn't, and that there is no news here.

So the issue here, just double clicking on the Photoshop thing is, how do we know this is Photoshop? If you were going to go to the lengths of photoshopping a picture uh you would you would maybe take it a bit further i would say because he looks yeah sure those jd vance ones where he's like full red or like the giga chat one yeah yeah take it a little bit further this is just very believable the other thing is you know jason has been vocal about being on ozempic and these things and he used to have an some some extra weight on him. So the issue with Jason is he does tend to say things that aren't true from time to time. And so I do believe there's some factually correct things in here related to this not being the client list and

things like that. But at the same time, I kind of think it might be a real pick. I think it might be a real pick. And Ted in the 1990s, I am am in his black book which has been out for over a decade that's true and has hundreds of other ted tech finance new yorkers in it what is ted yeah so so it is a real picture so if you if you're the guys in the chat uh rory uh heskel and brian say uh matt actually has a screenshot of the source. He pulled it. Okay. Okay. That is a real photo.

Uh, Jason, I mean, we, we respect, we respect someone who's, uh, looking great now.

Yeah. He's looking younger than ever. He's getting diced. He's on his Zempic and I see an IFBB pro card potentially in the future. You know, this one, not looking great, but he's looking better now.

Keep going. Hey, apologize to Palmer, Jason, clean up the relationship. You know, this one's not looking great, but he's looking better now. Keep going. Apologize to Palmer. Jason. Clean up the relationship and then hit the gym. Go in Sam Sulek mode. Yeah. Go subscribe to Sam Sulek.

The information's all there. Get on stage at the Arnold Classic. He basically open sourced. I'm not asking him to go open. People have been, people have been, people have been investing

in creators. I'd like to see Jason Calacanis' launch. Yeah. Invest in, you know, give, you know, invest in Sam Sulek. I would kill to be in that round. I'd like to see Jason Calacanis' launch. Yeah. Invest in Sam Sulek. I would kill to be in that round. Actually, that's a great deal. I would kill for that.

We should try to put that together. Yeah, we should. John would kill somebody to get allocation. Oh, man. I think he's going to be extremely successful. I'm super bullish on Sam Sulek. And so, yeah, a little bit of spicy timeline today. We love the Anderle folks love j cal uh there is one problem that we need to address which is the fact that uh

jason calacanis still does not run ads on the all-in podcast and that you have to imagine with the the all-in and turmoil now you have to imagine he he's seeing a window to potentially get some ads on there right people yeah sax is out of the picture do you think is the reason why he doesn't run ads do you think that's what epstein told him like hey my final wish to you don't run out i know we weren't that close i know you never came to the island yeah but just please whatever you do don't run out don't run ads and jason maybe just wants to respect it seems like they were maybe they certainly wish they certainly were friendly we don't know if they were friends yeah yeah yeah um they were definitely acquaintances i i i think i think jay kyle has the

chance to turn it all around apologize to palmer clean up the relationship and then run some ads for Anderle. It really is a stain on, uh, it's rough Jason and it's rough. And, and we know that Palmer does have the ability to turn the other cheek. Uh, you know, he was going after Zuck and meta and Facebook for a long time and they cleaned that up. They cleaned up that relationship. Something happened. Uh, things changed and they clearly, know had a conversation palmer went and looked at the orion headset said hey this is great you know yeah and so i would i would love to see that turn around because i hate when uh the big dogs in tech are fighting i don't like it hate to see it yeah i hate to see it i just want one one solidified podcasters technology industry podcasters and founders should never fight

never never anyway uh well if you love jason calacanis don't work at anderle i guess uh devin luton says crazy andrel campaign that's an amazing extension i want to see an ad quick billboard yeah it says if you love jason calanis, you'll hate working at Andoril. Yeah. If you're listening to this week in startups, probably don't work at Andoril because yeah, you'll be, it'll be rough for you, but they have a crazy Andoril campaign here at Boston South station. They put up a bunch of different posters. They're literally obsessed with America. Don't work at Andoril. They have the graffiti, some great design going on, and people are loving the advertisements. And if you're looking to do some out of home, we recommend adquick.com, baby. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable.

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

Go to adquik.com to check it out. They work with a bunch of fantastic companies too. If you work with Adquik, you're working with Shopify, Carvana, DoorDash, Poshmark, ButcherBox, fantastic companies too uh if you work with ad quick you're working with shopify carvana door dash poshmark wow butcher box uh ramp wall street journal warby parker discount tire cool uh the h and r block lyft instacart compass base camp equinox pluto tv duck duck go uh nike nfl amazon drizzly go puff they got all the big dogs up there go be a big dog run some out of home ads with ad quick and you can follow chris on x he said hey elon musk look

at this and it's a post from uh someone flagging the fact that google is buying apple search ads on the grok term is just too beautiful a circle of life for me google is buying apple search ads on the Grok term is just too beautiful a circle of life for me. Google is buying Apple search ads on Grok term. Hey, you wanted this extremely politically incorrect LLM. How about the most politically correct one? Do you want the opposite? Yeah. And so, yeah.

I didn't actually know. I don't know how I didn't know Google had a Gemini app. We talked about this. They spun it out because it was so know Google had a Gemini app. We talked about this. They spun it out because it was so hard to find because I was complaining. They listened to me. I was complaining about how I paid all this money and I couldn't get to Gemini. Although I'm sure when I download the app, who knows what model I'll be on. And the model probably won't even tell me what model I'm on and what the context window will be.

But that's not how people use these things. And so they say, unlock the power of Google AI on your phone. You search for Grok, you get Google Gem gemini don't make the mistake uh you know be sharp don't get fooled if you're looking for grok sexy mode you're not going to find it in google gemini let's go to uh brent leong who we've been doing some work with we love this guy he says the lean startup thinking has been has probably done more harm than good. Lots of low conviction, three-month pivots, and folding based on an abysmally small sample size. Encourages being neurotic and constantly skeptical.

Almost the opposite of being an entrepreneur. What do you think, Jordy? I mean, the thing that, yeah, I think the whole thing the the best thing you can do if you're early in your startup journey is just read all the books read zero to one read the lean startup founders podcast founders podcast i think founders podcast is advice or wisdom that's more timeless right where dave center is not saying you need to fully follow the mcdonald's founder and just do what they said. He's just saying this is his approach to work, learn from it, take it, apply it. I read the lean startup

back in the day. I think it's this fine line between sometimes if you're willing to just persevere and look stupid and be okay with the fact that you don't have traction and just keep pushing forward trying to get it, sometimes you get paid off, you know, you get paid for it. If you look at, you know, crypto founders, the ones that have been successful have not followed this approach, for the most part, they've sort of just said, you know, they stayed lean, but more so, they're willing to look stupid for two years so that when the market rips yeah they look like a genius right um and so it's definitely uh this is a vintage post i think we're now seeing if you're going and building in hard tech for example you can't afford to follow purely the lean startup approach it's it's it's

a model that i think works really well for pmF or DAI style products, where it just says, you know, intense focus, stay really lean, you know. But yeah, it's not going to work if you're trying to build Anduril, right? You need to have this sort of bold, ambitious plan and be very patient and execute it over many, many years and, you know, realize that, you know, you could do years of work before being paid for it. And that's part of the game. Yeah, I think this is, the lean startup thinking has kind of mutated a little bit. Like the original idea of the lean startup was just that in the dot-com era,

in order to build a website, you had to raise $10 million and build a data center. Like I remember as a kid, like my dad worked at a startup. You hand built some of those data centers. And I literally did. I would rack servers as like a data center. Like I remember as a kid, like my dad worked at a startup. You hand built some of those data centers. And I literally did. I would rack servers as like a summer job. And this was just for like a company with a website.

You got it when we're 60 and some anon posters in the comments, you know, chirping at you. I racked servers myself. I was racking servers when I was your age. When you were in diapers. Yeah. But it's true. chirping at you you say i was servers myself i was racking servers when i was your diapers yeah uh but it's true like like the default the default path to building even just a website like we want to build a car a car auction website or we want to build any startup it was raised 10

million dollars because you are going to need to buy servers hire a lot of different people because there are not these abstraction layers of AWS. There's no cursor. There's not even Python. Like the code needs to be written in Java or C++. Well, what happens when you write in Java and C++? You need five times as many people because everything takes longer to write. so the lean startup was just getting the word out that it is possible to now build a company in a lower cost, lower CapEx intensive way. And that was true. Yeah. He basically just coined

what was happening in some circles and said, you know, this is a way, but it's founder mode, where founder mode didn't have a name and then, but people kind of were aware that certain companies just operated, you know, and CEOs just operated differently. Yeah. And, and so people were, he was just saying like, Hey, we don't need these $10 million seed rounds to build websites anymore. You can build on top of these services and stay lean. And then once you find traction, talk to your customers, get out of the building. These were all these ideas of like, don't go and waste all this money and do a $10 million experiment, do a $1 million experiment. But I agree with Brent that pivoting every three months, folding based on an abysmally

low sample size, that is wrong. You should make sure that you really tested things, actually understand the product. And ideally, you have a ton of conviction about the direction that the company is going before you even start. So you're like, yeah, the first three months have been rough, but I still know that there's an insight here. I still know that there's some fundamental value of what I'm creating. Anyway, let's move on to Rohit. He says, excellent portrait of Tyler Cowen in The Economist. Lots of known beats, but this is the most underrated part. And so The Economist

did a whole profile on Tyler Cowen. I highly recommend you go check it out. But I love this quote. He says, Cowen's life, Cowen's emotional life remains a mystery. He told me he did not experience regret. I don't know what the function of it is, he said. Is it to signal thoughtfulness to stop you making further mistakes? It's like revenge. I don't understand it. Cowan also said he doesn't understand envy or anger. He didn't know what he should be envious of. He didn't get lonely by himself or in company. He actually said, why bother? When he told me he had never been depressed, I asked him to clarify what he meant. He'd never been clinically depressed, depressed for a month, for a week a week and afternoon i looked up from my notebook and an enormous smile one i had

not seen before spread across the whole of cowan's face like for a whole afternoon he asked hugely grinning just mogged uh so on the on the topic of our earlier subject, GPT-4-5, Tyler Cowen was quoted today saying, I'm more positive on 4-5 than almost anyone else I have read. I view it as a model that attempts to improve on the dimension of aesthetics only. As we know from Kant's third critique, that is about the hardest achievement possible. And so somebody did the be me prompt. So be me, Tyler Cowen. Wake up at 5. 23 a.m precisely

eat exactly seven blueberries three brazil nuts and a quarter cup of icelandic skier sky sky productivity.jpg write two blog posts one on obscure romanian cinema the other on the economics of parking meters check email reply exclusively in lowercase. Very interesting. Thanks for this. Send. Perhaps. Send. Attend breakfast meeting with unnamed intelligence officials. Discuss Singaporean food stalls instead of geopolitics.

Lunchtime arrives. Ask waiter, what is your least popular dish? Waiter visibly confused. What is your least popular dish? Recommend some fermented herring special. Wonderful. I'll have that. Extra spicy. Genuinely enjoy it. Back to office. Podcast guest waiting. popular dish recommend some fermented herring special wonderful i'll have that extra spicy

genuinely enjoy it back to office podcast guest waiting it's a chess grandmaster who's also an amateur botanist and former dj that's great so i actually think this is like pretty that's pretty good and and that's just like so many different threads pulling all together like there must be a lot of different data in the training model if you're pulling all that together because some of that stuff you really have to follow all of his blog posts, all of his tweets, all of his podcast transcripts to understand that or talk to him in person to really get that flavor. So, yeah, good job. Maybe potentially underrated. Maybe the early haters are wrong. We'll see.

We'll see as it rolls out. Either way, it's just nice to have a more aesthetic model i think that's good even if it's not there's actually maybe even a better outcome if it's just a nicer friendlier more more aesthetic experience uh it doesn't necessarily need to be 190 iq solve that generally what carp carpathie was kind of alluding to just said differently which was if you're a high tastetaste tester, you're going to notice the difference here. If you're a low-B word cell, you're going to maybe miss. We need to try the Be Me prompt. Maybe that should be the new prompt. See how it goes.

Be Me, Golden Retriever, Start Day. Jordy Hayes. Run around the house, bark a little bit. Turbo S.PNG. Put on sunglasses indoors. That's great. Well, we got a post from Catherine Boyle. JD Vance is going to be headlining the American Dynamism Summit next month.

This is Coachella for tech bros that like guns. Yes. And Coachella for tech bros that don't like guns have Gavin Newsom and Dr.om and dr chelsea clinton at the upfront summit and so this is the opposite of the all-in summit says chris frallick uh and wait chelsea clinton has a venture fund she's a venture fund what i didn't know that how are we not we we've we've said before we would never raise a round yes yes yes also when did she get her doctorate? Metrodora Ventures. Interesting. Anyway, yeah, Upfront Summit happened this week.

It was very popular. I think Delian stopped by. Some other people texted me that they were in town. Yeah, so she has a values-conscious venture capital firm investing in health and learning. Maybe she should get back the PMF or DAI founders. That'd be great. They also don't want to raise,

but venture is about value. Add more than capital. I bet you Dr... Wait, what were the values that she cares about? Health and learning. Oh, she should back Sam Sulek. He's all about health. That's so true.

That's so true. He's the pinnacle of health. Look at a picture of him. Didn't Uptron try to get Sam Sulek, but he just was busy? They got Chameleon Air a long time ago. Did you know that? Yeah, they've had a star... They've had Chameleon Air as like a venture partner it was very fun i think andreason had naz and then up front

had chameleon air and so you'd hop on a call and chameleon air would just be hanging out with you talking and talking sass talking sass great uh anyway speaking of the pmf for die guys let's go to blake he says standards i have for new employees slash partners work 12 plus hours a day, make massive sacrifices, desire to pay their dues, won't break under pressure. These are 100% within one's control. So the key here is it's perfectly fine for a leader to say this if they live all those things. Blake is, you can go on pmfrdie.xyz, which is not our website and see exactly how much he's working. Tracked every single

second of the day. He's making massive sacrifices. He's not leaving the cage for 90, you know, potentially 90 days. He's paying his dues. He hasn't broken under pressure. He hasn't broken under pressure. He's only 12 days in. Anything could happen. There was a lot of pressure week one. The thing we didn't fully calculate with the cage

is that there would be hundreds of people basically demanding attention in the chat. So we'll get to talk about that. We're actually going to be doing a press conference on the PMF for Dive stream at 1 p.m. Pacific in just 30 minutes. And we got to check on him because if pmF for die dot XYZ shows Blake in the seat for 11 hours, 59 minutes, it's not going to look good for him.

Yeah, he's got it. He's got to be that he's got to work. Cell number 17 has got to be operating at full capacity. Totally. Let's go to Elon Musk. He's quote tweeting someone who is doing another ai game dev uh demo uh he says wow this is cool uh danny says i believe that grok can be a serious tool to build quality games i've been pushing the limits of grok 3 by having it code this retro doom inspired gothic shooter from

scratch uh it's been less than 24 hours to of work and i think i got it to a pretty good place and the demo is pretty cool. But yeah, there's another post in here that I wanted to highlight that was fun about how if you want to go viral, the best way is to code a game right now and screen share the video. Let me see if I can find that one. You're self-building the game. You build the game. And then play it. And then you... Build it, play it, build it, play it. Yeah. Kristoff says, if you want to go viral right now, start making a video game with Cursor and post the progress.

I'm sick of seeing it, but that's what gets the impressions right now. And so, yeah, maybe we should build a TBPN game. Go viral. Hey, we built this in 10 seconds. I think we just need to bait. One prompt. We need to be focused one post a day from each of us baiting an elon repost that's good wow elon is awesome and grok is so awesome i love grok i i stopped using all i stopped using everything and everything else and

i just use grok yeah it is the best yes repost your phone just your phone i also crushed your phone just starts melting i crushed my 911 into a into a ball of metal and i bought a cyber truck the metal sidings on my cyber truck yeah with crushed 911 melted down 911 is the side side plating for sure you actually should do one of those we it would be worthwhile telling Jason Calacanis, huge Tesla guy, to say, hey, we're going to drive a vintage Ferrari. You drive a Cybertruck and do one of those pulling battles and just let the Cybertruck win. Oh, there you go.

Post it from our account. Get the repost. So we get the ratings. We get the ratings. We get the ratings, as Jay Cal likes to say. But it is cool. I love that people are building cool games with Cursor, with Grok, with all these different tools. Very, very fun.

And we love to see people be able to instantiate silly ideas like pmfrdie or pmfrdie.xyz in a very quick fashion, which is only possible with the AI era. And so, yeah, if you have some funny idea, something on your bucket list, go build it. Post it. era and so yeah if you have some funny idea something on your bucket list go build it post it you might get quote tweeted by elon musk and get three million views on your on your app drive a bunch of followers and then start a podcast who knows anyway let's move on to lewis hamilton i want to i want to read this because this is uh this sounds like something that senra would say yeah and it is clearly and i think he might be quoting yeah he's potentially probably quoting this you know a lot of the best uh athletes you know actors etc have just been ripping senra but uh clearly inspired by by timmy or potentially happening at the same time lewis hamilton uh now over at ferrari says don't ever compare me to

anybody else i I'm the first and only black driver. And that's, that's ever been in the sport. I'm built different. I've been through a lot. I've had my own journey. You can't compare me to another 40 year old pastor, present formula one driver in history because they are nothing like me. I'm hungry, driven. Don't have a wife and kids. I'm focused on one thing and that's winning. That's my number one priority. I love how locked in he is. There's this quote, I think it's Alonzo, where he's driving and he makes this very, very sketchy pass.

And he goes after they're interviewing, he goes, oh, he's got a wife and kids at home. I knew he would break. And it's like the craziest thing because you can tell. They're both gunning for the corner. He's like's like yeah this guy's the guy who's racing again is like i don't want to die wow that is crazy i hadn't thought about that and so when you're racing it's it's you know the yeah i i don't know what the actual i'm sure that base jumping is more dangerous than you know f1 but f1 is one of the most dangerous high-level professional sports.

Thankfully, getting a lot less dangerous thanks to the halo and some of this. And 100%. I drive a lot slower than I did pre-kids. I used to go up in the canyons and have a rip. I do that much less frequently now. Yeah, makes sense. Anyway, let's move on to Sam Lesson.

Sam says, Elon's what did you get done this week at, at AI scale is in fact, the AI future AI isn't going to be your professional assistant. It's going to be your professional manager getting spicy. A lot of people probably won't like this one, uh, over and over. I see Sam doesn't get enough credit for being up there in the rage bait hall of fame with with people like sweaty startup oh yeah uh you know he's up there sam is more sophisticated you know in his approach higher brow he's not saying you know i want my employees to work hard he's saying you're going to be managed by an ai uh and i think this is a cool take you know we've talked before

you can imagine a world where a an individual who's never managed another person before is managing Devin and other agents to run their business. But this is sort of flipping that on its head. So this is over and over. I see people pushing these rosy ideas that AI is going to be your assistant. Fine. Yes, you will get some cute AI that schedules for you in some form and sends sweet nothings in the morning about your day. It will prepare little reports for you that might make you feel all warm and fuzzy, but that

won't be the real leveraged impact. The real leveraged impact is that AI is going to be your manager. You are the order taker for it, not the other way around. Elon has got this right. The real value of asking formally, what have you done this week? And knowing who is pulling weight, culling those who don't and optimizing pushing those who are slash can. You couldn't do it effectively before AI at scale, but now you can. It might be nicely disguised as a coach. Cute. Hey, to be more productive, to do X, Y, Z, or it looks like you could focus on X versus Y if you want to get that promotion. But what it will really be doing is snitching for your boss, your boss's boss, and ultimately the dreaded shareholder. Why? Well, that is where the productivity is going to come from. AI will clear the path for basic, easy tasks to make sure your time is leveraged fully and will make it easy for managers to deal with all the complexity,

cut to the chase of where and how value comes from and who is driving it. More transparency is generally good, but people who think this is some rosy machine works for man, nah, it's the other way around. Interesting, especially interesting in light of that controversial AI sweatshop company from YC this week, that it's like the what did you get? No one really pieced it together, but that company could have just been called what did you get done this week AI? No, it's more of like, what did you get done in the last hour? What did you get done in the last 10 minutes? And then comparing that over time previously, and knowledge workers have this thing where they sort of get assigned a project or they have a general area of responsibility,

and then they just sort of have to, there's actually really delayed feedback. Everybody that's managed a team before, if you started a company, you hire somebody, you sort of break down what they need to get done. You check in with them a week later. And sometimes you're saying, wow, this is amazing, incredible progress. You're crushing it. Sometimes you're sitting there and being like, well, what did you do the last two days? You're coming to me now confused.

I wish you asked me, you know, two days you're coming to me now confused i wish you asked me you know two days ago and even worse is like if if something slips for a couple weeks and it's like oh it didn't even get started yep and ai can sort of potentially be omnipresent and sort of be in real time guiding people towards you know the right outcomes and so i still think there's like a manager sitting above the ai coach manager yep that is sort of setting, you know, the goals. But maybe over time, you know, that that fades and it's just we're all just working for the. Who knows? Hard working paperclips. The shareholders at the end of the day.

Yeah. Well, let's go to roll off Bota. That's actually just to kind of extrapolate there, you can imagine a world where shareholders in a public company say, we're actually collectively, as shareholders, are going to vote to basically hire this AI to exert more day-to-day control over the management of the company. Could be a lot of pushback. We'll see. I wonder what will happen with that post, if it will break containment and get some pushback. But for now, I think it's a reasonable take. Who knows?

We'll see. Let's go to Rolop Bota over at Sequoia. He says, we remain destined to repeat the mistakes of the past SPVs or making a comeback where the lead investor speaks for less than 10% of the capital, yet eagerly lines up the latest set of tourist chumps who think the story will end differently this time. It's only been three years. What do you think? Who is he subtweeting? Yeah, crazy. I mean, I'm sure he's just seeing

a number of rounds happening across his portfolio and saying, wait, this person's doing, you know, a $20 million investment and they only have $50 million under management. How does that work? And it's, oh, it's a manager who's...

But yeah, again, there's a bunch it's a manager who's, um, but yeah, again, there, there's a bunch of really, um, you know, good players out there that use SPVs are great, you know, tool for investors. And oftentimes they provide access to, uh, great companies, but certainly there are many examples where, um, you know, SPVs typically get sort of lat, if you're a founder putting together a round you're you're prioritizing people that have the capital ready to wire right or that's one capital call away to wire uh spvs are oftentimes a not a last resort but you know you're maybe you make room for somebody to do an spv because they're saying oh i'm going to bring in this celebrity and this

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

Right? Yeah, and so there's clearly like a spectrum of kind of credibility in rounds, not just what, you know, are you doing an SPV or going with a traditional VC firm, but even within the VC world, there are some funds

that have very high GP commits where the partner who's doing the deal has a very material portion of their wealth in that fund. And so they are like, they they basically solve the principal agent problem by tying their net worth to that firm. And so, yeah, you might raise a $10 million Series A and $2 million of that might come from the partners

or the GP or more in some cases. And so if it's a professional investor who's highly aligned, that can usually be the best possible signal or the best possible outcome. But there's a good, there's a good comment. There's a good comment here from Hari. He says, this is generally true.

Responding to roll off. This is generally true, like 99% of the time, but when you stumble on a diamond in the rough dot dot dot i'm still chasing the high for my second ever angel investment into an spv with no institutional lead run by naval into the notion seed round in 2016 so he you know i'm sure that was somewhere around 20 post and uh is now sitting at north of 10 billion and he did did pretty well and i wonder if that spv wasV was the lead check or not.

Because it's very different if it's like, oh, there was a... Well, it said it had no institutional lead. Oh, really? It basically, you know, it's very possible Naval was the biggest and his investor group was the biggest. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Naval's pretty coded as SPV runner.

Anyway, let's move on. What comes after smartphones? AI glasses you actually want to talk to, says Anjani Midha. We at Andreessen Horowitz are excited to invest in Sesame's mission to bring the computer to life. Okay, so this is a reference back to the tech demo earlier in the show where, you know, somebody was saying that this is the most her-like moment that they've experienced. Other people were pushing back on it. But I just like the domain, sesame.com. It's nice.

That's a good one. Yeah, it's a good one. Yeah. It feels very, you know, it's very memorable. Yeah. And then it still ties to like this idea of like open sesame. You're talking to a genie in a lamp. You have three wishes.

There's some fun lore there, but it's still a word you can spell. You can get the.com. It's an open brand. Yeah, so this is a company that's competing directly with Meta Ray-Bans, which is going to be tough because A$AP Rocky, famed rapper, style god, is working with Ray-Ban. And so I saw Reggie was posting that. I'm sure A$AP Rocky will then be working on the Meta Ray-Ban. And so I saw Reggie was posting that. I'm sure ASAP Rocky will then be working on the Meta Ray-Bans.

And you'll see. And they have a crazy partnership with Luxottica to bring in-house all the Ray-Ban stuff. And then obviously they're rolling out Lama and all these different tools. And that was one of the more attractive features of the Meta Ray-Bans when I experienced them was taking the dog for a walk

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

their platform. And there's a bunch of other companies that are getting into the game, into the stablecoin game. Robinhood's mentioned mentioned and they're pushing uh yeah different api for for subscribers apy for subscribers and so uh moving people into stable so crazy that biology was formative and actually just making this category and now the market cap is the stable coin market cap is how many? Yeah, 21Co was his company. He wanted to create a computer that could mine Bitcoin and also do a bunch of other stuff with stable coins and micropayments using crypto. And now the technology is finally approaching reality.

The micropayments haven't really rolled out yet. It's really painful that one of the areas of crypto that has the strongest product market fit, you couldn't really invest in the tokens themselves. Yeah. Is one stable point. Well, Tether, if you got into that deal, they're making a ton of money. They're printing money because they take a slice of the APY on top of it, the yield. But I mean, it also has to work better in a high rate environment, right?

Because how can you get high yield on USDC in a zero interest rate environment? It's got to be really hard. Lend it to FTX. Questionable. They're going to try to make a 10X in a day. Questionable. And you might lose it all. Well, we got some personnel news.

Joe Gebbia, the founder of Airbnb, is moving on to Doge. He says he's excited to share. I'm bringing my designer brain and startup spirit into the government. Airbnb is moving on to Doge. He says he's excited to share. I'm bringing my designer brain and startup spirit into the government. My first project at Doge is improving the slow and paper-based retirement process. Hilarious. Like that is a job that no one in his position would ever want. Has ever done.

Has ever done. I'm going to go be a product manager for the government it's insane that beautiful i love it thank you thank you for your service like i 100 want a smoother uh and less paper-based retirement process this is fantastic since leaving his operating role at airbnb in 2022 he's been looking for the next design challenge in the digital realm. And he can think of a few more important. And he says, I can think of a few more important ones than volunteering to improve the user experience within our government. If anyone else in good standing wants to help design beautiful, user-friendly digital products, reach out. And so he's going over to the Office of Personnel Management, trying to smooth things over with good design design and that makes a ton of sense i love it so cool to see and you've seen just like the flaws with uh like the the medicare website took all this time and like whenever you interact

with any government website you're just like this feels 20 years old like what's going on here and so just having someone in there who can you you know, staff a team of designers, turn things around quickly, actually implement changes. Most people haven't, you know, build a company like, like Airbnb, you know, and they go, they go into the, the OPM, uh, business, other people's money. Joe said, okay, I'm going to go into the office. I'm going to go into the OPM, uh, you know, sector and the office of personnel management i love it yeah and uh you know make our country a better place to be and i mean it is crazy like like you think about his experience at airbnb he wasn't just the co-founder who was there for a couple years he was there all the way to 2022 so historic run 15 14 years something like that and then also airbnb operated

at a scale that is actually somewhat relevant to the government you know it's like millions like millions and millions of people, they're dealing with payments, they're dealing with not, maybe not social security numbers, but certainly like ID and KYC stuff. And so they've done a lot of different tools here. So great post, congratulations to you, Joe, and good luck on your mission to improve the retirement workflow. Incredible. Before we jump into the next post, we got a request from Brandon Jacoby. He's going to pull up a video right now that Zuck just posted on his Instagram. Ben's pulling it up. He doesn't have audio. I don't think we need audio. Oh, look at this. Wow. So Zuck posted this on his instagram oh my god this is incredible people who call the top on zuck okay but wow but i live reaction i have no idea this is for i don't think zuck can move like this

i think he's flexing a new i don't think so i think he did it i think it's real look at yeah look at the jump yeah that's accurate the fingers count up everything looks good they're having a blast he's singing this is amazing where is this he's doubling down wife's birthday or something something like that wow what an amazing amazing post i love it i'm you know you know in china that would get you in prison did you see uh Yeah. Oh, okay. So he says, your wife only turns 41. There we go. What song is he singing?

This is incredible. Here, I'm going to pull up the audio real quick. I love it. It's so good. Yeah, Jack Ma did something similar. Okay, so he's lip syncing. Okay, that's great. But still.

Yeah, Jack Ma did the rock star thing on stage and shortly after kind of disappeared. Literally. Because it was like, people were like, okay, he's becoming like a god. Like people are like worshiping him. Credit to Zuck.

He practiced that to a degree that he. Oh, yeah. He looked. Yeah. Like a real like a perfect blend of robot and bro clearly i mean tested it totally totally mogging all the people that said oh they were trying to do a polymarket on if he was going to get divorced this year oh yeah remember fake news they're back and yeah i mean i think gamblers are in shambles i think he did the right thing you know there's a lot of questions about like oh oh, should he back off the bro stuff?

No. Double down. Go crazier. Keep it going. I mean, this is sophisticated and wholesome stuff. It is. It's very wholesome. You're going to put on this incredible show.

She's going to remember that forever. Yep. The PR team behind this must be paid so well. It's like this clearly came from him. Let him cook. Let him cook. The blue sequined suit. I love it.

That's great. That's fun. Anyway, let's move on to some reports from Altimeter, from Sheil Monat. Incredible early vintages from Altimeter VC funds. Wonder how much of total returns are from Snowflake. They led the Series c a 260 million dollars post in 2015 that stake was worth 4.4 billion at the ipo let's do a little size gong for boom thank you bc is a power law game and they crushed it on snow wild that brad started

with just three million dollars in 2008 that's insane ran it it up. Uh, 61% net IRR, $6.5 billion realized on 2.8 billion in cap committed capital. They got a bunch of funds here. They're a lot of rippers and, uh, it's great stuff. Brad is just such a cool guy too. I ran into him at my local coffee shop. He spends, uh, he's a server. So he, spends uh some time in malibu and uh you know walked up to him said hi we're in a handful of companies in the same companies but um just such a such a cool down-to-earth dude who has a has been on an absolute tear he had a rough go with the hedge fund sure in 2022 i think it was when the market sold off basically got crushed yeah this is when people were like sass is over yeah um but uh that's the game and the interest rates

went up and obviously if you're highly into tech you're gonna get burned and i feel and i feel like as as journalists like newcomer, started leaking performance. This is a great time if you're an investor to leak your screenshots. Oh, look at this. Look at this screenshot. Oh, please don't share this. Please don't share that I have 61% net IRR on billions of dollars. I would hate for that to get loose.

Anyway, let's move on to uh nick who posts a screenshot of jeff bezos liking his post you know you gotta you gotta do some engagement bait for the billionaires that are hanging out on x all day uh nick apparently posted news amazon just dropped their first quantum computing chip code named o Ocelot. We are so back. That could have been me posting that. But Nick got to it first. He got the Bezos like. And I wanted to break this down a little bit. It's in the journal today. Amazon unveils its first quantum computing chip. We heard this from Google a couple months ago. Google in December said it developed a new chip called Willow. And that really, at that moment, the people that were watching quantum computing closely were like, OK, this is a breakthrough where we're now starting to accelerate the development here.

And then, of course, earlier this week, we covered Satya Nadella on Dwarkash Patel announcing the Majorana chip. And they claimed a quantum computing breakthrough by creating a new state of matter. Now Amazon's in the game. Their cloud computing business on Thursday unveiled its first ever quantum computing chip, which it claims marks an important step in the development of useful, reliable quantum computers. That's what we want, folks.

The chip, dubbed Ocelot, can lower the costs of reducing quantum computing errors by up to 90%, Amazon said. And the race is on. Everyone wants to build a practical quantum computer. The Amazon Ocelot chip is a prototype, not a full-blown quantum system, said Oscar Painter, head of quantum hardware for AWS.

To be honest, John, I'm a little bit frustrated. We were prepping our quantum chip launch. Yeah, we got kind of edged out by this. Satya goes on to our cash yep uh you know even uh even google's working on one they've got willow they're teasing that we kind of got beat to the punch but i want to let people know we are still in the game yep uh ben has been working on it while we record he's been working on chip and he wasn't he never actually had his wisdom teeth removed he actually was grinding he was lab grinding reducing quantum noise yeah creating new states

of matter yep yeah yeah and this is going to change podcasting you i mean you start compressing our audio feed with a quantum computer it's going to be super high fidelity the best takes possible anyway let's move on mike taylor says I may have underestimated the power of my product appearing in an every post. RIP my calendar. 130 onboarding calls booked in 24 hours. Little 15 minute slots. The guy is slammed, his products ripping, and congratulations to him. Have you ever had a calendar booked like this on a single day i have for party i remember having this exact calendar set up the my son was uh born on a saturday and my calendar looked like this on monday it was kind of brutal yeah i don't recommend that but i'm sure sam all uh sam

altman's look like that this week too so sometimes you just got to do it, you know? Yeah. You gotta, you gotta be in a certain frame of mind to really deliver and bring the same pitch, you know, 50 times back to back to back to back, back, back, back, back 15 minutes segments. But you probably get really good at your pitch if you do that and you get the reps in, you learn what works, what resonates, what doesn't, how to talk, how to let them talk. I've done this, you know, not, not in a, you know, sort of micromanaging way, but portfolio companies where they'd say like, Oh, like we're not creating sales momentum. It's like, cool. Screen share your calendar. I'm like, you're talking with, you're talking with like two customers a day. Yeah. You should be talking to never going to, you're never going to actually

be a top decile company from a growth standpoint unless you have some crazy product led growth motion, unless you have this extreme volume, because it really is just, you know, should should be obvious. But it's just a numbers game. If if he has a 10 percent hit rate, but he's doing 20 calls a day. Great. Adding is going to be getting know significant amount of traction from okay six minutes left we're going through some quick bangers i will read them you give me your take let's start with morgan barrett big night for hard tech in california and america at velar atomics so proud of isaiah taylor they had a big announcement last night looked like something out of a sci-fi movie what was your take jordy um uh anyways uh this was absolutely wild yeah i

didn't know what to think we we we got invited but uh couldn't make it couldn't make it uh it it's it seriously would be easier for us to get to austin than that side of town right now yep uh but uh what a show an absolute showman yeah uh i was pissed because i feel like he really upstaged us on the production value like we're the ones that bring in the hollywood designers and create elaborate sets and his set was way above yeah people say oh you guys have such a nice set yep and not anymore they're saying he's making us look atomics is the one that looks cool so yeah anyway congrats to the team over there uh let's move on to a low-tan banger from Rob David. He says, high yield, Harry city, when it comes to accidentally sending people money and it's just a

dunk and it's a dunk reel. And I don't know if you read this story. It's in the journal today. City group almost made a $81 trillion mistake. they accidentally moved to transfer 81 trillion to a customer yes trillion a bank employee mistakenly entered this absurdly high figure last year while trying to manually input a transfer to a client's escrow account despite the fact they have 81 trillion uh that seems a little bit well the annual gd GDP of the United States is around $25 trillion. So no, Jordy, I don't think CBA has any more trillion. Yeah, but I'm just like, yeah, what is, like, just to put this in perspective, I'm assuming they have what?

They have billions, I'm sure, but not trillions. Yeah, like hundreds of billions? Yeah, maybe. And so there's a couple different examples of uh the fat finger transfer could happen uh is a lesson would that go through would it appear on the customer screen oh you know i have seen that happen i've had friends who have said like oh some bank air happened and for a moment i had you know a couple billion dollars in my account because they messed it up and they reverse it of course so it's all fake yeah all the money's all the money's fake

the money's in the computer i talked to a hedge fund guy who actually said, like, there's money in the real world and there's money in the computer. He's like, and the computer money, like that's the stuff that goes up and down or something like that. It was a really funny thing. Anyway, if you're trying to make $81 trillion, you got to start a hedge fund. You got to go on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. And they're not going to send $81 trillion to anyone accidentally. They run a tight ship over there. Let's go to Nikko over at Default. They announced a $4 million new funding

round from ABC we covered here on the show. And they did this launch, which I know you'll have something to say about. They sent out 100 branded champagne bottles in custom Pelican cases. And Tom Osmond says, solid sponsor for TBPN, TBH. What do you think? We love champagne. On a long enough time horizon, we will work with every champagne company. Yes. You know, as long as it's truly champagne.

Yep. From the champagne region of France. Yep. But this was a story, I actually heard this from Sam Blond. He was at- Yeah, didn't they do this? He's at Zenefits and then Brax, I think.

And he said that one of the things that worked really well was sending people champagne uh he was in sales because you're not giving them a beverage you're giving them a moment yeah moment that they can take home and then they open it with their wife and they think about it and they're having fun or something or their team there's a lot of different we never we always offer champagne to Ben yes yes yes anyway we covered this earlier on the show and mike maples responded we talked about his amazing bmw z8 he says tbp enters glad you like the z8 i actually fell in love with it when bmw showed the z0 the z07 concept back in the late 90s at the time i lived in austin and the local dealer wouldn't

even take my deposit because they were sold out instantly. So I called around and found a dealership in Shreveport, Louisiana, willing to let me buy their allocation in 2001. I've had it ever since. And it's probably the one car I'd never sell. Cheers. We got to have him on the show. We got to ask him what other cars he owns. What else? What cars would he sell? Yep. You know, but a fantastic car. And thanks for replying, Mike. We'd love to have you on the chat about cars. I've never driven the Z8 the show. Great lore. Come chat about cars. I've never driven the Z8, but I've heard really good things about it. Everyone talks.

True classic. Yeah. So thanks for engaging, Mike. We'd love to have you chat about cars. You're welcome to come in and call in anytime. Let's go to Reva. She says, looking to hire a chief of staff. By the way, we have basically a minute

till we're starting the program. Okay, well, we got some promoted posts. We got Reva. She's hiring a chief of staff, trying the usual agencies, recruiters, but struggling to find someone vibey. So if you're looking for a chief of staff, go work for Reva.

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

We got one more. We got to do. This to stop well we got we got one more we got one more we gotta do we we we gotta do this so it was steve jobs birthday on monday and bezel replied to us and said he's a minimalist watch king and in here he's uh he's wearing a beautiful seiko uh and i love that bezel we text them all the time can you clock this watch and that's why we wanted to run an ad for bezel today go to i know i know brandon jacoby is listening right now and i think he's one of the biggest steve jobs uh fans that i know blazers brandon i expect you to be in a steve jobs seiko on bezel you should send us a screenshot and we'll feature it on the show fantastic but go to bezel shop over 22 5 22 500 luxury watches they're fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts that's a great place to end the show

actually the the real place to end the show uh is uh sarah was was watching from home and she commented in the chat and said you have 12 years because she's 28 right now so she was referencing oh to learn sucks yeah sucks to learn the song uh anyways um great great day of timeline today it's fun to rip through timeline we're trying to do more timeline we're there's a lot of news to cover but we're trying to do yeah we want to make sure the pod is snackable so thank you for tuning in with us on a friday we are going to jump over uh to the pmf or die stream and grill patty and blake grill Patty and Blake on what they got done this week. They've certainly been busy and we are excited to grill them. So anyways, have a great weekend,

brothers. We will see you on Monday. See you on Monday. Thanks for watching.