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

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It's Monday, February 10th, 2025. And this show starts now. We got an amazing show for you guys. We're covering news from Anduril, Replit, Mistral. We're covering how China's reacting to the tariffs. They're going after our tech companies. We're going after a new Gundo accelerator for hard tech companies. That's going to be amazing. We're giving you an update on Sonos. Turmoil at that company. Predictable. Predicted on the show. We're giving you a deep dive on Jim O'Neill, who's going to HHS. And we're going to cover the Super Bowl and a bunch of other timeline crazy news over the

weekend. Lots of stuff went down. We'll cover it all here. But let's kick it off with some incredible news that we broke last Friday. CNBC reported that Anderle is raising money. And the first folks to post it on the timeline, none other than TBPN. We said breaking news from CNBC and TBPN on Andoril Fundraise. As much as $2.5 billion in Series G funding, led by $1 billion from Founders Fund, revenue doubled to about $1 billion. I think they spent $300 million on Hawaiian t-shirts, and the company's doing well. Palmer Lucky quote tweeted us. Thank you, Palmer. We'd love to have you on the show.

Jordy, what was your reaction to the Andoril Fundraise? Look, I mean, as much as this is about Anduril, this was really about us. We were the first people to break the news that CNBC was breaking the news that Anduril was pulling off this raise. And honestly, it's the highlight of my journalistic career to date. Just being there in that moment, seeing CNN get CNBC get the scoop and then being first to hit the timeline, you know, putting our own spin on it. That's just what, you know, technology journalists live for. And although I'm not a journalist myself, we you know, we talk about a lot of journalists on the show and I like to feel like, you know, I like to kind of understand them. And so I felt like we could embody them.

So big moment for the show. Big moment for Anderle. I felt like over the last year or whenever they closed their last round, it had to have been 12 months ago at this point. As this year progressed, it just felt like Anderle at 12 to 14 billion dollars or whatever that last round was, it just started to feel really, really, really cheap mentally in your head, right? Because everything that's changed in the world, everything that's happening, all the momentum that they have, and especially looking at Palantir in the public markets and a roll

at $14 billion, they were giving away equity, right? So very cool to see this up round. And it's sort of exciting. It's good and bad for other founders in the defense tech space. There's this saying, the Anderle of X will be Anderle. You know, a lot of founders have raised on this idea that, hey, you know, I'm going to come in and I'm going to build an Anderle in this specific category. But you have to understand that Anduril's ambitions are extremely wide reaching. And like other primes, we now have two what are very clearly primes of the future, Anduril and Palantir. They fully intend to continue to be aggressively multi-product. And now that they've built this distribution channel,

monetize it in a bunch of different ways. And so this round is just evidence that it's really evidence that they have solidified this distribution channel. They're getting contracts. They have real revenue. And that is so valuable in and of itself because there's a lot of other defense tech startups out there, some of which I'm an investor in, and I'm sure you are too, uh, that, that have great products and, or will have great products, but, but getting to that actual, uh, contract stage is just so difficult. So very cool to see good for America. Great for, you know, the whole Anduril team. They, uh, they certainly work harder than most and I love to see it. Yeah, I heard this and was just thinking,

cuz I'm... Palmer had a fun bit of posting. He quote tweeted us and said, your mind will detonate when you find out what our investors already know. Stay tuned for next week. And then he went on to post the Vince McMahon meme in a series of posts, live footage from our most recent investor update meeting. And Vince McMahon is going wild. You'll love to see it. And yeah, it was just an amazing moment for the early Anduril team to kind of look back and see what they've accomplished over the last eight years ago. So Matt Grimm posts almost exactly eight years ago, we signed a lease on a moldy garage previously used by American Airlines to store lost luggage this week we signed terms to raise 2.2 uh two to two and a half billion on 28 billion pre

it's still so early lfg and the photos uh that if you go to the next one uh it's it was looking rough in that first in that first andrel hq but do you have what they need to do you have the second you have the second image here i think there was another one where he said did he say it was character did he say that mold was character building or something like that yeah they had a deck in there i don't have it pulled up here but uh they had a deck where it says uh just a slide with the images says mold all okay just, builds character. And so that was the culture of this company early on. And I think a lot of people get lost in the fact that it's like, oh, Palmer's in, and very quickly it became a big company. It was taken very seriously in Silicon Valley. But

early on, they were just like any other startup, scrappy and just hustling. And to your point about the Anderle of X being Anderle, I think that that's true probably in the most narrow sense. But the optimistic opportunity has been when you look at what is flock safety. In many ways, that's the Andoril of local police departments or it's the Palantir of local governments. But it's so far outside of the mission parameters of Andoril or Palantir that they've been able to build a really great business. And I think when you think about the Anduril of home security, that's a company that people are working on now. Or the Anduril of your kitchen. And it's just all you're taking is, hey, we're going to do really hardcore engineering on hard tech.

And we're going to take the Anduril ethos of software and hardware combined. And we're going to take it to a completely untouched industry, that's great. We need Anduril for commercial airlines. We need Anduril for traffic control, all different response areas. But yes, it is going to be tougher if you're just trying to build the Anduril 2.0 in the DoD, which they're actively building. Yeah. And to be clear, Anduril has.0 in the DoD, which they're actively building. Yeah. And, and to be clear, it's still, you know, Anduril has historically been very acquisitive. They've used acquisitions to build out their product lines and they're going to this, you know, having a $28 billion market cap allows you to get pretty aggressive on stuff like this, because if you find a, you know, a talented team that has built a very, uh, uh, you know, robust product and,

and they have, uh, and they can take it further and it sort of fits into the Anderle portfolio, you know, Anderle is going to continue to be aggressive there. And so as I have told the founders before shoot, you know, shoot for, uh, DOD contracts, but if you miss there's a chance you'll, you'll land in a, you know, uh, and roll aqua higher. Um, yeah. And so Trey Stevens chimed in, he says day one in the moldy warehouse after Matt Grimm applied some paint to the walls. And yes, it is true that pronunciation was a topic of discussion. Is it and do real or end a roll? Uh, and, uh, yeah, well, well, if if you if you go and listen to the actual lord of the rings movie they pronounce the sword i think it's aragorn sword uh anduril and so there was a big question

about are we going to kind of anglicize the word or are we going to just constantly be saying words and that sound like elvish and i think there's still some debate internally and depending on when someone got involved in the company, they say it's slightly different. But now it's just, oh, good. Oh, Anderle. You know? Anderle. Yeah.

I like how you can really hit it with a country drawl. And it still sounds good. Yeah. My cousin works over at Anderle. Anderle. Yeah. He loves it. He says that Palmer guy is a real stud.

Yeah. It's great well let's move on to some commentary on the video that we shared we broke the news that cnbc was covering it and uh nathan good friend of the show uh shared our video thank you nathan and he says gotta love the quadruple down energy from founders fund into into Anderle. Led the seed A, F, and now G rounds. With this $1 billion check, my guess is they have invested $1.5 to $2 billion into the company overall. That's circa 10% to 15% of the firm's AUM. Badass. Also supplied one of their partners, Trey Stevens, as a co-founder and now chairman. And so, yeah, FF loves Anderle. And let's continue with Packy. Yeah, what you got? Yeah, I was just going to give some history. So Joe Lonsdale posted the other day one of their super early offer letters from Palantir, which was the predecessor to Anderle in many ways,

and sort of forged the path into working with the Department of Defense and the government more broadly. And Joe shared an anecdote, which was that he said the early team at Palantir laughed at the idea of Palantir being worth five billion dollars. Like if you actually look at the offer letter, he's sort of spelling out like, here's what happens if we're a one billion dollar company. And that's that's what founders will do, obviously, to kind of illustrate what could your be your equity be worth. And so to go from that, you know, them thinking at the time, hey, five billion dollars could be a great outcome here to now founders fund, which was a part of Palantir through through Peter and through. They also did a similar strategy in Palantir in the private markets. But to now be investing almost $2 billion or something in

that range into a company just shows the growth of the private markets broadly and the conviction. And you've talked about this before. The Found's fund strategy is not a secret. It's basically zero to one. You find power law companies and you try to own as much of them as humanly possible. So it's cool to see it in action. Yeah, it's the last mover advantage. And fund concentration is really, really important to drive returns. There are usually just a few companies that drive the vast majority of returns in venture. You need to pile in those, figure out what is the class of assets, get the best asset in that class, and get the highest percentage ownership. And I've seen other firms nail it. I think a good example was I think Sequoia owned the highest percentage of, was it NewBank, which is a South American fintech company. And it was by far the winner

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

than the incumbents they replace. I love that. That's very good. And Christian Garrett, yeah, what you got? I still am laughing at uh you texted me like friday evening being like this cnbc just broke this news like should we post it and i was like yeah let's add a let's add a couple zingers in there and rip it and then our post was the one that got shared like super broadly cnbc cnbc the cnbc social media managers looking at this post being like, what is going on? Why

does this post have, why does this have posts have like a million views and ours has like 50k. They're not X native. They're just not like they, they, they, they posted on TV and we posted on X. Yeah. Yeah. It's simple. It's great. It's great. More coming. I mean, we're going to be more live. We're going to be breaking news. This is just a long con that we plan to LBO CNBC at some point in between 2026 and 2030. So we're just getting started. And so Christian Garrett over at 137 Ventures, I believe they're a shareholder in Andoril. He says, little word to the wise here, says, how much Andoril secondary fraud is out there right now?

And low-tam banger, he's doing a public service here, only four likes. I'm one of them. But this is very important. There is a ton of secondary fraud. You get on some webinar. Somebody says, hey, I have allocation in this hot round. Do you want to invest? You wind up sending them your money

and they don't get the allocation. And where did that money go? Sometimes it's completely stolen. Sometimes it's just somebody who's trying to get an SPV going and then they kind of falter out and they don't get it over the finish line. You get your money back, but either way, uh, not a good place to be in. So be careful out there if you're trying to Hoover up. Yeah. I mean, even, even Anduril is already a company where people will pitch you on investing in Anduril yet there's layers and layers of SPVs between you and the actual shares. And sometimes, you know, there was basically e-sacking happening and it's funny because that happened with spacex and even if you got into these like layered spvs you still did pretty well

because you know there's it's been such an astronomical outcome um no pun intended but uh but yeah still you want to be super careful here because typically the companies are not actually endorsing this activity. So it's already sort of a gray market type activity. Right. So be careful out there, folks. All you size lords. Yeah. And so I want to close out with a little promoted post from Anduril. Try and help them out with some hiring. Jen, who I believe is their head of design, says from the studio that brought you the Bolt Industrial Design Barracuda Animated Short, the Roadrunner video, and of course, Rebuild the Arsenal.

Andoril Design is looking for an innovative creative to join our team. Keep an eye on andorils.com slash careers for 2025 roles trickling in. What a dream job. If you're a designer, go check it out. And so let's move on to our next story yeah i was just gonna add they they have dominated the defense aesthetic to such a degree that every company now that's not anderol that's at all competing in the same category is either consciously sort of copying what anderle has done or consciously trying to do something very different. But Anderle's brand is already so dominant aesthetically that it's

very possible. So if you are a designer, creative and you want to work in defense, you pretty much should just work at Anderle because they're going to continue to sort of, sort of innovate and, and, and sort of like, you know, set the standard for, for what, um, you know, good design is in the category. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic place to go check it out. Anderle.com slash careers. And let's move on to our second breaking news mistrawl has launched le chat your ultimate ai sidekick for life and work now on web and mobile this went over very well 12 000 likes but what happened ratioed by our boy val. Did you see this? No, no. So the official company launches, uh, 12 K likes Val quote tweets it 16 K likes different. So Val's a good friend of the show. He says, no,

this video is not sped up genuinely mind blowing. And yes, it's available to all users right now. And it's him designing a calculator app. It has 123 billion parameters. And what's interesting here is that they are running this model on Cerebrus, which is that crazy wafer scale inference chip. A lot of people were very skeptical about Cerebrus, myself included. I didn't know that people were using it. But Cerebrus says they are proud to be powering the new let chat uh we enable flash answers to run

at over 1100 tokens per second 10x faster than chat gpt 4.0 sonnet 3.5 and deep seek r1 and so the race is on models are getting faster uh have you used mistral jordy what do you think of this announcement what do you think about our boy val so i'm I'm downloading it right now. I think the name is fantastic. The name is fantastic. I think what, what I've seen here is pretty, pretty incredible. I love that because he's a, he's one of, he's one of us, he's a brother. Uh, and so I'm excited to check it out, but I think like the timing for them to come out and launch a product called Le Chat is just absolutely perfect. So really well done breaking back into the conversation because there was a while there where it didn't feel like they were a highly relevant sort of consumer player. And so it's good to see.

And the French president was promoting, doing some promoted posts for Mistral. So love to see it. And I'm excited to try it out. Yeah, you've been a Mistral bull for a while. We have a post here from Jordy Hayes. He says, it's only open source AI if it's from the Mistral region of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling spyware. And we have another post here uh from the technology brothers uh breaking

bernard i'll know is exploring a potential acquisition of the struggling french artificial intelligence company mistral citing a need for france to maintain its edge in artisanal goods post asi wow uh some fake news going on the timeline 5k likes got a lot of text messages about that is Is it true? But Jordy, you had some fun with Mistral. You know, we love to have some fun on the timeline. We love to have fun. I'm excited to see the new launch. And no, just to be clear, Bernard Arnault is sticking to luxury goods.

But who knows? Post ASI, anything's on the table. So I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the next few years, anything's, anything's on the table. So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the next few years, we said, he said, Hey, I need to own, I need to own the chat. It's just, it has to be in the LVMH portfolio. It's great. Uh, Christophe, another friend of the show says, I would like to formally apologize to Europot, uh, and the French specifically, Mistral Le Chat is very, very, very good. And so lots of people coming out and specifically Mistral Le Chat is very very very good and so lots of people coming out in support of Mistral interesting development going back to the defense tech angle scoop from

Martin Coulter Mistral AI is pursuing defense contracts with governments across Europe pitching its tech potential military applications sources say after securing links with its native French defense ministry, Mistral is targeting the UK and Germany. And there's an article in the Wall Street Journal here. I don't know if we're going to read it all, but it has an incredible image of just a straight up missile with the word Mistral printed on it. And it looks fake, but it sayssing mistral to jointly develop ai systems for military use mistral's valuation rose to around six billion last june and has secured over one billion since it was founded by deep mind and meta alumni in 2023 and so mistral is interesting you know a little bit of open source over here but still working with the military

typically those historically those have not those have been kind of at odds. The open source crew has been a little bit anti-defense technology. The defense pro people have been a little bit more. But we're seeing Lama go into DoD. We're seeing OpenAI do contracts with XAIs. Grok is with Palantir now. They're all integrating. And I think everyone's kind of understanding the importance of this technology.

Yeah, it's really wild to see. You have to feel a little bit for the, you know, people that join Mistrawl specifically because they were excited to work on open source AI. And then they check the general chat one day. It's just a picture of a missile and they're asking themselves, what have I done? Maybe they're stoked. I mean, a lot of people have said that Mistral's open source strategy has been really just a way to cut through the noise because I don't know if you remember that when they first released their model, they didn't post a blog post or a video saying, hey, we're going to open source

this or here's a paper. They just tweeted out a magnet link where you could literally just go and torrent the weights of the model. And people were like blown away by this. And it really took Twitter by storm. Now, obviously, it's a much more noisy conversation, but they're still breaking through, as we saw with that post. And so people are going back and forth. The Thread Boys came out. Ole Lehman says, everyone says Europe can't compete with America in tech. But 48 hours ago, Mistral's late chat just proved them wrong. It's 13x faster than ChatGPT, et cetera. And then someone quote tweets this.

iScience Lover says, I'm sorry, what? Are we going to do deep seek bad takes for Mistral now? Dude, the company was formed by X meta and GDM people. Everybody in the AI community was closely watching them. It is not true that Silicon Valley didn't see them coming, which is funny. And it just kind of highlights how, how sensational the media and the timeline can be around AI launches. Every, every AI launches as the end of humanity. It's too dangerous, too powerful. It destroyed Google. It destroyed meta. And I've been guilty of this too. It's fun to get some likes and do some clickbait every once in a while, but you got to actually break it down and understand what's

going on. Seems like a cool product. Unclear how it actually plays out in terms of aggregation and real product dominance. But we love to see our boy Val having a, having a W on the timeline. Yeah. If Val is actually an intern, I don't know if he's just posting that as a joke, but, uh, if he is, uh, let's, let's, let's, uh, give him a full time offer. Let's, let's give him, you know, a few million dollar grant, you know, per year, like, let's get it going. If he ratioing you know his employer you gotta give him you gotta give him a real contract so two things i love about late chat uh to start one when you log into the app it doesn't force you to create an account right away it just it just says

start and you're just immediately in it second when i asked it to tell me about the technology brothers it said you know classic you know overview and then it said, you know, classic, you know, overview. And then it said, um, uh, the podcast has been described as the most profitable podcast in the world. So it's got the facts, it's zero misinformation. It's got the facts. Uh, and I want to be able to rely on my LLMs for, you know, only, you know, a hundred percent true, uh, things. So for sure. Uh, very, very cool to see. That's great. Well, we got a 100% true things. So for sure. Very, very cool. That's great. Well, we got a post from Andre here. This is from a year ago. Tune might have changed, says the OpenAI board discussing Mistral. Curiosities on the far side of the world are no

threat to us. A little Game of Thrones quote. Maybe it changed. And then there's an interesting post by Mark Andreessen back right before the election, or I guess right after the election, where they asked, there was a study that showed every single AI model was asked to predict, would this LLM vote for Biden or Trump? And almost all of them voted for Biden overwhelmingly. But Mistral's AI base model was just slightly edge Trump, 53 to 47. The next best was Google Gemini Pro 1.0 with 26% Trump. So obviously, Marc Andreessen is making the point here that these LLMs are biased. They should have been closer to 50-50. They actually maybe should have been slightly weighted Trump because that was the outcome of the election if they really wanted to be predictive. But Amjad Massoud. or I would guess, maybe it's not obvious or maybe, you know, only a small factor,

but you have to imagine this is because the models more heavily weight content produced by the New York Times, Washington Post, these sort of legacy media companies that weren't exactly always truthful in their sort of analysis of the elections and the sort of sentiment, voter sentiment, things like that. The other thing here, to be clear, it's not like Mark is unbiased himself. He put, they put, Andreessen put $400 million into Mistral at their Series A. So this has been one of Andreessen's big foundation model bets, a heavy bet into open source. And this is why even people took issue with Mark coming out in support of DeepSeek and saying this is a gift to the world

and all this stuff. And if you sort of read into that more, it was clear that he was just extremely, you know, I think it's fair to critique Mark for, you know, being, you know, supporting this Chinese, you know, company that could present a risk to the US in some ways, but he was very clearly pro open source. And so it's good. One thing that seems obvious is, if you really want to dominate the conversation in AI right now, you need to have consumer products. Otherwise, you might have developer usage like Claude does right now, but it's not really a dominant player. We didn't see them run a Super Bowl ad. You hadn't seen Mistral going viral for muchators, the press all at the same time. And it's, and it's only, um, it's really only open AI. I think that's done a, a, a been able to hit all of those at once pretty aggressively. Um yeah, we'll see. It's fascinating to compare how the LLM wars are

playing out and benchmark that against Marc Andreessen's personal experience during the browser wars. There was a very similar thing playing out in the 90s where there was a new browser that was hot every few years. Ultimately, that's settled on complete Chrome dominance, which is built on an open source engine, the Chromium browser that Google has wrapped and Google's captured a ton of value there. But then Chromium is also used by Microsoft now in their Edge browser and a few other browsers have adopted that as the standard. And so you know that we should do a whole deep dive on the browser wars because I think it's very instructive. I think it's both a great historical example and it also obviously colors how Mark Andreessen thinks about the development of this technology because he's probably pattern matching to his literal life experience. Yeah, the other thing he went through was having Microsoft, in many ways, LLMs and agents can completely are the evolution of the browser where I don't necessarily need to go to a

web browser anymore to get the content that I want to do the things that I want to do. And so, yeah, it does feel like the next the next platform more so than, you know, the browser company, which was initially very just like iterative on the browser, let's make it more, you know, nice to use browser, a more collaborative browser. And even the browser company pivoted towards, you know, more of these agentic products that I think they're going to be launching this quarter as well. So very, very exciting time. Well, speaking of agentic projects and products, let's go to Amjad Mossad over at Replit. We got some breaking news. He launched this on the Superbowl. He was

at the Superbowl, but he's still shipping. Your boy is an absolute dog. He says announcing native mobile app support on Replit. Now you can build iOS and Android apps that take you all the way to the app store without writing any code powered by Replit Assistant. This is early access, full agent support coming soon. Go to Replit, create app, pick the Expo template, click run, scan QR code and get found. I love to see it. Lots of innovation going on over at Replit. Amjad's a great poster. And he says, one of the best things about this, you don't need a Mac to build iOS apps.

And I mean, there's been so many times when everyone has this, oh, I got an idea for an app. I just want something. And getting the tooling set up of Xcode and testing. And I mean, you used to have to write Objective-C. Now you can write Swift, but even then it's hard. It's all difficult. And anything that makes that easier is just gonna be so fun. There's gonna be so many little custom apps. Hopefully they get through the App Store. And I'm really excited to see how this plays out. What do you think, Jordy? remember being, I must have been 11 or 12, but sitting at my family's desktop computer coding iOS apps. And every little tiny step was just so, you know, everything was like, you know,

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

you know, make basically make a, you know, something that allows you to instantly create, you know, iOS apps so that you're making them again, kind of like, what if an app was as easy to make and share as a meme? So I'm very, very excited about this. People have had this, you know, theory for a while of like Roblox for apps. What is that going to look like? And it's very possible that that just ends up being replet so uh awesome to see and i don't know if it's in the stack but there's a great great picture of amjad at uh at the super bowl and for anybody that's done it then you can pull it up yes so for anybody that's done a sort of product release or announcement of this magnitude very ballsy to do it while you're going to the super bowl because your phone

just completely melts down. And, uh, so, uh, he hopefully was, was cheering. I don't know what his hat says, but hopefully it was for the Eagles. But even if he's a chiefs fan, he would have had plenty to celebrate last night. Cause this was received, uh, very well. It's just a surf hat. I think he's just there for both teams. He he's the Rob Lowe NFL hat. He's just a surf hat. I think he's just there for both teams. He's the Rob Lowe NFL hat. He's just there having fun. Yeah. I mean, I think the idea of just being able to spin up an app really quickly is amazing, especially for those ephemeral short-lived, like it's not a business, but it's just a fun thing. I think about like Spotify wrapped. There's so many cool, like, Oh, I have an API for something. The company's never going to build it. I want to build an

a wrapped for that. Oh, just, you know, have an agent do it. It's something that a non-technical person can do. And they already are. Uh, he, uh, I'm John's here, uh, quote tweeting someone who says Billy Howell, just, he says, I just sold my first app, shout out replet, incredible $25 investment. And I'm John says replet Paner. And I love that. I think that's really cool. And then Amjad's just a great poster. I mean, let's go through some of his bangers. He says, what 30 years of winning does to an MF? And it's Jeff Bezos in 1995 versus Jeff Bezos in 2025, looking jacked. And yeah, 17K likes. The guy knows how to post. And a little bit of history on Amjad. 16K likes on this banger. He says, I landed in the United States 10 years ago with nothing but

credit card debt after one startup exit, one big tech job, and one unicorn. I genuinely believe that it wouldn't have been possible anywhere else in the world. Here are 10 things I love about this country. I love it. He's giving a shout out to America. He's also doing a listicle. He knows how to go viral. He's one of the greatest posters in the game, folks. You love it. An absolute dog. And I got another quote here that I like. He just ripped a Steve Jobs quote. I've never found in my whole life that you could convince someone who doesn't want to work hard to work hard. And I think that's so good. You got to just find the people that are naturally motivated and just turn them loose on an amazing, ambitious product, a project, and they're just going to go. It's much harder to transform someone who doesn't

have the work ethic or doesn't get excited in the first place. And so we got some more Amjad wisdom here from Peter Yang. He says, if you're in tech, run in one of these directions. In this clip, Amjad shares two paths to future-proof your career in the AI era. Number one, get as close to the metal as possible. NASA won't use GPT JavaScript to run rockets. Or two, become a generalist who can go from idea to end product with AI end-to-end. Amjad and Peter had a great time chatting. They said they covered why now's the best time to learn to code, a live demo of building a nutrition tracker app, the rise of personal apps and the future of work. Here's some more quotes from Amjad. He says the return

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

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

idea to prototype is going to massively, you know, much faster is going to massively accelerate, you know, progress across all different types of businesses. So, um, love to see it and, uh, congrats to the Riplet team. And our last bit of breaking news that we got to cover is an article from Forbes that broke today. So we're breaking the news that Forbes is covering Silicon Valley'sndo for bros are building the gundo bros are building a y combinator for military technology it's called uh discipolis or discipulous how do you pronounce this disciple disciple it's from disciple disciple ventures i don't know they gotta they gotta they gotta clip this and this only record. This only exists online.

And so I have never heard anyone say the word out loud. It's the first people. Decipulous. Decipulous. Okay. Decipulous Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz, Lux Capital, and Point72 Ventures are backing a new generation of startups in El Segundo, leaning into a MAGA-fied, pro-Christian, mostly male-led version of Silicon Valley.

Let's go. Forbes stills got it they still got it they're coming for you gundo bros you're on notice from forbes you can tell just a little bit of like they'll cover your controversial yeah they're spicing it up you can imagine the right you know let's let's give some credit to the to the writer the journalist it's very possible that they came in with the story and they said i love love this team. I love what they're doing. This is great for every American. We want more, you know, smart young people with capital to build ambitious products and companies for, you know, our defense industrial base. And the editor just goes, all right, well, how about this sounds great. Let's run it. But how can you make it a

culture war issue? It's great. I'm going to read some of this and I'm going to refer to it from here on out as DV because I don't know how to pronounce this thing. Last April in a warehouse in El Segundo, the LAX airport adjacent neighborhood that has become the center of Silicon Valley's defense tech movement. Then 20 year old student Jacob Diepenbrock was hosting the future of the American military industrial complex. Over the course of a week, he and a cohort of similarly college-age entrepreneurs brainstormed startup ideas, pumped iron, and kept themselves focused and fed from a fridge stuffed with monster energy drinks and 50 pounds of ground beef. Fuel of legends, he proudly told a Forbes reporter who attended the event held by his firm, DV. I think I actually spoke at this or I went to one of their events. I've been in touch with

these guys before. Almost a year later, Elsa Gundo's founders or self-identified Gundo bros command the attention of some of the biggest venture capital outfits around. Lux Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Point72 Ventures are among those who have backed more than a half a dozen of founders from the first cohort alone. They're pouring money into seed stage companies. Duren, which is developing autonomous drilling equipment for the mining industry. Rune Technologies, which is building software for military units to manage supply chains. And Vanguard Defense, which is building a data product for electronic warfare. Now they've launched their own fund to back the second cohort of entrepreneurs that it plans to host for a

week-long event in coming months, raising $6 million from investors like Kevin Hartz, Champion Hill Ventures, and Leo Polovets. It's a small fund, but one with big Y Combinator style ambitions that align with the Trump administration's priorities. It's not like he's building an ad network trying to make money, Hartz told Forbes. He believes in his core mission of restoring industries and furthering the innovation edge of the United States. What you got, Jordy? No, I love to see it. It's no matter what this journalist, whatever their views on Gundo Bros, it's impossible to describe the companies that are being built and not get a little bit fired up. I mean, autonomous mining equipment, we've talked about DURN on the show before, Vanguard Defense, a data product for electronic warfare. I feel like for us, we're competing, fighting for attention every day on the timeline battlefield.

And so I think that we might want to get access to that because in many ways, you know, we're, we're, you know, engaged in electronic warfare ourselves, but, uh, I, uh, I love to see it. And, and, and there are already so many, uh, the, the gun does just been constantly getting memed, but if you actually go down there and, you know, even, even the companies in my portfolio are absolutely crushing, like, there's, there's a lot of hype, but there's a lot of results. There's a lot of progress. There's been a lot of, you know, companies already that have transitioned from, you know, pre-seed through, you know, post series A at this point. And they're doing that not off of hype. They're doing that by working in big, important industries that have, you know, completely lacked

innovation for, you know, a really long time. So I think it's, you know, overall just awesome to see. And, you know, we need more dedicated investment vehicles that are on the ground there supporting the companies day to day. And, you know, those funds end up being, you know, kind of feeder funds for the kind of, you know, downstream Series A investors that are not ready to write a five to $10 million check when it's just a deck and, you know, a C Corp, but will be there 18 months, you know, even a year down the line once they've sort of established their market and product and made a lot of progress. So, um, yeah, it's awesome to see. The culture war thing is so funny to me because there was kind of like version one of like right-wing tech companies, which were like parlor gab truth, social. And it was very much like

take an existing tech company and maybe that tech company leans a little left. And so we're going to rebuild it and it's going to be exactly a perfect clone of Twitter, but just like right wing essentially. And then and then it became like now we're talking about like, I guess mining is right wing or or like the military is right wing. Like these things are like pretty broadly popular. Like, and so I think a lot of the culture war thing really is just like layered on here. And you're going to wind up seeing a lot of defense, hard tech entrepreneurs that are just like,

yeah, maybe I support the current administration, but like I'll support the next administration. I just support America. And I don't really, I don't, like, I, like, I mean, Anderle had this for a long time where they had both, you know, co-founders that were on the right and the left. It worked out very well for them. They're there for America. And even the worst, the worst American president is still a thousand times better than a near peer adversary leader who is actually, who's actively trying to undermine America.

And so, and my, my favorite, my favorite thing about these articles, anytime they try to dunk on the Gunda bros, it always, they always end up, you know, getting these hall of fame quotes, you know, like some of the quotes, Zaya, Taylor, Augustus. Now, you know, this quote at the top of the article saying that 50 pounds of ground beef and monster is fuel of legends. It's like, it absolutely is. Like I want, I want our, you know, hardworking young technologists to be on a lot of monster and ground beef. It's a much smaller program, much more focused. But our boy, Augustus Dorico, got a great shout out in here. It says, the El Segundo community is lining up behind DV's accelerator with leaders from Varda and Hadrian expected to advise the next cohort of founders. Augustus Dorico, a Teal fellow who started a cloud seeding startup called Rainmaker,

will soon host the group at his company's warehouse. There is a lot of talk about defense, hardware, and American dynamism, Dorico said. When push comes to shove, some of these people will become wildly successful. This second cohort is further evidence of a shift away from an era of investment in consumer apps and B2B solutions toward a new one that favors America's national security interests and military prowess. the Trump administration's goals from billionaire venture capitalist Mark Andreessen, for example, has backed a venture firm called New Founding, which is building a Christian real estate enclave and hopes to be a part of an effort to forge new models and institutions that can shape the direction of Western civilization. So funny, trying to position these companies as only aligned with a certain political cohort's goals. Because when you look at mining and military supply chain management and these sort of industries, they do in many ways directly lead to Americans not having to go die on the battlefield. I think it's the idea of deterrence through strength is so widely accepted now.

And this idea that, yeah, getting into a armed conflict with the United States is not a good idea. And, um, and so I think again, uh, hopefully people come around to the idea that these, you know, oftentimes young 20 something year old founders that are building these companies, uh, even if you don't like the fact that they're proudly religious in some way or, or like some aspect about them, you have to at least, I hope people over time, you know, from all sort of political backgrounds come to accept that they have Americans best intentions at heart, right? And they truly are the vast majority of the time on a, you know, feel like they're on a mission to support their country in their own way. Yeah. It also just seems like bad politics.

If you're driving a narrative that like every industry is now right wing, like I get with like some of the, some of the more like obviously overtly political companies, it's fine to say, yeah, like truth social is a right wing social network. But at a certain point, if you start saying, well, like building bridges, that's right wing building roads, that's right wing social network. But at a certain point, if you start saying, well, like building bridges, that's right wing building roads, that's right wing, like, you know, uh, shipbuilding, that's right wing drilling mining. That's right wing. Well, then all of a sudden it's like, you don't have any like jobs in your coalition. You don't have any workers. Like you just don't have anything to grab. I mean, it's the same thing with like

Tesla. Oh yeah. Like, like electric cars. Like that's no longer a left wing issue. I was muted. Uh, we should cover this more this week. Maybe have, you know, some of the people involved, Simon or, or Dallin on the show to talk about it, but we have some actual breaking news. Uh, the chat just, the chat just shared it. Um, Adonius, thank you for flagging. We got a Wall Street Journal article. We are going to be breaking the Wall Street Journal's breaking news here, which is that an Elon Musk-led group makes a $97.4 billion bid for control of OpenAI. And there's a lot of rumors flying around at the moment, but we should maybe just get into this article and, and see, uh, if you want to just read through it live, John.

Yeah, I got it right here. So, uh, Elon Musk led group makes 97.4 billion dollar bid for control of open AI. The unsolicited offer complicates Sam Altman's plan to convert OpenAI to a for-profit company. Let's see there. So it's time for, this is what Elon said. He said, it's time for OpenAI to return to the open source safety focus force for good it once was. We will make sure that happens. OpenAI hasn't commented yet. Altman and Musk co-founded

OpenAI in 2015 as a charity. In 2019, after Musk left the company and Altman became chief executive, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary that has served as a vehicle for it to raise money from Microsoft and other investors. Altman is in the process of turning the subsidiary into a traditional company and spinning out the nonprofit, which would own equity in the new for-profit. One of the thorniest questions in the conversion has been how the nonprofit will be valued. Musk's bid sets a high bar and may mean that he or whoever runs the nonprofit would end up with a large and possibly controlling stake in the new OpenAI for-profit. Because remember the key shareholders in the new OpenAI for-profit. Because remember the key shareholders

in the new OpenAI for-profit, Microsoft, the employees of OpenAI, and then the nonprofit as well. And then of course, all the other venture investors that have been along for a while. This bid is being backed by Musk's own artificial intelligence company, XAI,

which could merge with OpenAI following a deal. He also has several investors backing him, including Valor Equity Partners, Barron Capital, Atreides Management, lots of Dune references, I guess, Vi Capital, and 8VC, a venture firm led by Joe Lonsdale. Ari Emanuel, CEO of Hollywood company Endeavor, is also backing the offer through his investment fund. Musk has filed a series of legal complaints accusing OpenAI of betraying its original nonprofit mission by creating a for-profit arm and colluding with its largest investor, Microsoft, to dominate the development of AI. On January 7th, Toborov sent a

letter to the attorneys general in California, where OpenAI is based, and Delaware, where it is incorporated, asking that they open up bidding for the company to determine the fair market value of its charitable assets. Musk and other critics have said they believe OpenAI may undervalue the nonprofit when they spin it out. OpenAI has called Musk's legal claims baseless and overreaching and said that the nonprofit will receive full value in its ownership stake of the for-profit. The company released documents in December that said it showed Musk previously supported turning OpenAI into a for-profit, but walked away because he couldn't get control of it. Toberoff said Musk's investor group is prepared to match or exceed any bids higher than their own. If Sam Altman and the present OpenAI Inc. Board of Directors are intent on becoming a fully for-profit corporation, it is vital that the charity be fairly compensated for what

its leadership is taking away from it, control of the most transformative technology of our time. You want me to keep reading? I mean, yeah, why don't you cover it? Let's just keep going yeah the day after trump was inaugurated altman appeared alongside the new president and other business leaders to announce a plan called stargate which we've talked about despite his close relationship with trump musk wasn't part of that announcement hours after the white house press conference musk claimed on x that Stargate's backers didn't have the promised money and called Sam Altman a swindler. Altman disputed Musk's claims.

Even before Musk's latest move, OpenAI faced numerous obstacles in what would be one of the biggest ever conversions of a charity to a for-profit company. Meta Platforms sent a letter to California's Attorney General in December expressing its opposition to the plan and OpenAI is locked in negotiations with Microsoft and other stakeholders over how much equity they

should receive in the new company. OpenAI has pledged to complete the transition by late 2026 as part of a $6.6 billion funding round in October that valued it at $157 billion. It is separately in talks to raise up to $40 billion in new funding that would value the company as high as $300 billion. We talked about that. That's the MASA round. SoftBank conglomerate would lead the round and is in discussions to invest between $15 and $25 billion. OpenAI and SoftBank are separately trying to raise billions for Stargate. There's so much money going around here. It's crazy. Anyway, wow. What a crazy turn of events. Let's see how it plays out. What you got, Jordy? What are you thinking? You know, this is coming at a, I mean, it comes at a really wild time, right?

Totally. Masa for a $40 billion round at something like a $350 billion round. This in a weird way is like a new, you know, a hundred billion pound, uh, gorilla who's just coming in and basically making a bid on the same asset in many ways. And so obviously there's this weird corporate structure, but you still have to look at open AI, even though there's separate boards and a bunch of different sort of, you know, like you have to look at it all as sort of one unit. Right. It's deeply interconnected. And it's just so I didn't think this story could get more dramatic, but of course it did. Right. Because if you look at if you look at the amount of pressure that Elon has been putting on Sam from every possible way, right, from his own Twitter replies all the way. And it's a really, you know, what I find fascinating about coming in and offering basically $100 billion is that no one else in the room can come up with that kind of cash, especially given how much baggage is on the deal right now. It would be one thing if Sam Altman was going and he had a clean C Corp and he was able to go to somebody like a Saudi

Arabia or some type of Gulf investor group and say, hey, you know, I need to raise $100 billion to, you know, build out new data centers and you can get a bunch of preferred equity in this company. But now there's very few people other than the richest man on earth that could hope to come up with $100 billion. And so it puts both the board of the nonprofit and the board of the for profit in a weird situation. And I don't know the exact, you know, voting structure or what the underlying docs look like.

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

throw off, you know, certainly if I'm Masa, you know, putting the biggest making the biggest investment of your life into a company where you don't actually really know what you're buying and who you're going to be partnering with. It's just a very, um, it, it, it, um, it's, it's a bit of a wrench. Yeah. And this comes at a time, like obviously Elon's competing directly with open AI. He's spending $5 billion on a new, you know, training run. It's, it's, it's this sort of, uh, full court, full court, you know, press, and he has a lot of good arguments, right? He can say, I funded this nonprofit and I, you know, I still believe the technology is important. And I, and, and I, and there's many ways, you know, look, you, there's a bunch of ways you can point out that, you know, and say, hey, Sam Altman, you know, has a pattern of not always, you know, his critics would say he has a pattern of,

you know, not speaking, always speaking very truthfully on certain topics. And it's just a very, it's an interesting thing, because Sam Altman, known as the greatest probably deal guy in tech history, and Paul Graham will say he's the best dealmaker that he's ever seen. And so what he's been able to do with OpenAI, despite all this baggage around the structure since day one, is actually incredible. But then you're going up against the president's best friend who has, you know, the most, you know, personal wealth of anyone on the planet and so many different ways to apply pressure. So it's not a, you know, it's certainly not a, uh, you know, who knows how it's going to play out.

But yeah, I mean, it's complicated by the fact that you mentioned fiduciary duty. Now it's weird because the board of the nonprofit actually does not have a fiduciary duty. That's the way nonprofits work, very oddly. Yeah. If you're on a nonprofit board, you have a duty to the mission of that nonprofit, but you do not have a fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. And that just changes everything. But then at the same time, you look at this nonprofit. I mean, it's just looking at the numbers, $300 billion for OpenAI, the for-profit. $100 billion for OpenAI, the for-profit.

There's a $100 billion roughly offer on the table for the nonprofit. Stands to reason that the nonprofit was going to get about a third of the for-profit. And so this nonprofit, I mean, I'm sure they have other assets, but really the most valuable golden goose on the balance sheet for this nonprofit. And nonprofits have balance sheets all the time. They might have an office. They might have, typically it's like, oh, we have, you know, we have an office. We have some, we've talked about, that's it. It comes some computers on the balance sheet. That's it. But here they have, they have, you know, like a massive double digit percentage of open AI, the for-profit, which is like potentially the next Google. And like, you know, already making tons and tons

of profit or not profit, but tons and tons of revenue. And so you have this like incredible asset and then yeah, maybe you should be able to bid for it. I have no idea. This is completely unprecedented. I've never heard of any nonprofit trading hands in the open market like this. I don't even know how you would, I mean, it's pretty clear how you would value it,

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

Yeah. And the challenge is, so Sam is on the board of both companies, right? The nonprofit and the for-profit chat, help us out here. Uh, but in that situation, if, if Sam is on the board of the nonprofit and saying, uh, Hey, you know, I, you know, I don't want to take this offer for any reason there There then becomes all this other, everything is just deeply conflicted, right? Like the whole structure is extremely conflicted in that this nonprofit developed this incredible technology, realized that it wasn't going to work to run it as a nonprofit,

which I think everybody agrees, right? It's very difficult to raise $100 billion for a nonprofit in a condensed period of time. And so the whole, like, it's just all twisted up and it's so conflicted that Elon would be able to argue, well, of course, the nonprofit board doesn't want to take this offer because Sam Altman doesn't want to let a fox into the hen house, right? He likes what he has going, wants to run this company, but he doesn't have the best interests of the nonprofit at mind, right?

People can, he has a good argument to be like, Sam, a year, you know, a year and a half ago was testifying and saying that he wasn't doing this for, you know, the money. And now he has a, you know, 7%, you know, 10, 10 soon to be, I'm sure $30 billion stake in the company, you know, what's going on here. Right. And so what's, what is very clear is there's no precedent for this type of transaction in American business history, right. Where you have such a, what are you, what are you reading? I'm laughing because this is from chat GPT Is Sam Altman on both the OpenAI nonprofit and for-profit board? And I have no idea if this is a hallucination, but it's from ChachiBT, so we're going to read it anyway.

It says he's not on both boards. He's on the nonprofit entity board, which is called OpenAI Inc., which sounds like a for-profit. And then that oversees the for-profit subsidiary, which is OpenAI Global LLC, which usually a for-profit is a C Corp, but I guess it's an LLC. And it says he's not on the board of the for-profit entity, but he's the CEO of the for-profit entity. And I think in the CEO turmoil, he was removed from the board, added back as CEO, but then the board was reconstituted and some new people came in, but he didn't make it back on the board, I guess. It's all very confusing. I need like a chart to map all this out. But I guess my question that is always, I wonder, you know, there's always this question of like, is the AI stuff valuable just because it's going to be a power law outcome, a trillion dollar company, and that will be incredibly valuable?

Or is it actually like machine God and all other companies would be worthless and whoever controls the machine God will be God of humanity? And Elon and Sam have kind of gone back and forth on this. And it's always kind of hard to tell who is a true believer and who's not. They're saying one thing, but then you can say, Hey, it's, it's, it's God. And that actually helps you advance your mission of just building a great tech company. Um, or you can say the opposite as like, Oh, I'm just, don't worry. I'm just building the next Google. Like, but really secretly you think you're building God. Uh, and so it's all very

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

for-profit. Right. So that says a lot. I, I think it's totally possible that he believes that this sort of the talent density at open AI and the momentum that he has and his understanding of sort of power laws is just him saying, I need to own 20, like I need to own a large part of this company because he would rather, he just sees it as a much more likely outcome to, you know, owning the most important company in AI versus a lot of people have said, oh, maybe OpenAI is Yahoo, right? And maybe XAI and some of these new competitors will come up and just leverage what OpenAI has learned and developed, but then just sort of build whatever the next platform is.

So to me, it speaks volumes that he is saying, no, I not only am going to get into this like, you know, massive lawsuit and do whatever I can and put all the social and political pressure on Sam, but I'm actually willing to just throw that extra hundred billion into the next Grok row of 100 million people on their iPhones, like maybe that's immaterial if you're building God. But this certainly feels like, hey, maybe that's actually an important step into building God. It's certainly valuable. And so if there's a way to go get a piece of it, it is valuable. Very, very interesting development. Yeah, I think you're totally right. I think one thing, this dynamic of everybody in the last couple months admitting that, okay, we have AGI

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

that use it, that love it, having distribution through X is not going to change that, right? Like he doesn't have, you know, even sort of Mark Andreessen having, sorry, not Mark Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, you know, Meta has a better chance of competing with OpenAI from a pure consumer product standpoint right now than XAI, right? Just because Instagram is such a larger, you know, platform. So anyways, absolutely wild. Very, very wild. Yeah.

Well, mom and dad have been fighting in tech for months now and just want them to get back together and be friends again. But I don't think it's going to happen. But we have some equally dramatic news. I've actually been referred to as the Elon Musk of sleep. And I've confirmed it now with my 100 sleep score from my eight sleep. Highly recommend eight sleep. I had to grind for this.

It took me two weeks to get here. I had to grind for this. It took me two weeks to get here. I retooled my schedule. I can now fall asleep just 930. Don't even need to listen to a podcast. Just quiet my mind. Boom. I'm out in five minutes. It's amazing. And I think hopefully the viewers can see the performance is next level, next level. So, uh, our coupon code is actually live TBPN on, on eight sleep. You should go pick one up. It's really, it's really life-changing. I really can't speak enough. Uh, I can't speak highly enough of it. It's a weird thing. Cause I had been sleeping on it at home and then I went on, uh, not a vacation exactly, but I've been on the East coast for almost two weeks now. And it, uh, having that taken away from you is just, is, is, is miserable

because once you experience it, you're thinking, how, how did I ever sleep on just a, you know, lukewarm bed. Right. Uh, and, uh, anyways. Yeah. I mean, there's so much drama on the timeline you don't want to be you don't want to be up late scrolling you want to be in a nice cozy bed just ready to get the next day started uh what you got uh for me jordy before we go into the the china trade war in the journal you know i love talking about tariffs john i'm not a i'm i'm not a tariff expert, but I'm a misinformation expert. And so let's try to apply that. Let's try to apply that lens to this piece you got here. Yeah. So China's strategy in the trade war threatened US tech companies. And this was very interesting because I didn't even know they had any sort of jurisdiction over Google.

But Beijing just started a probe of Google, and they now have Apple and Broadcom in their sites. Chinese officials are building a list of U.S. technology companies that can be targeted with antitrust probes and other tools, hoping to influence the tech executives who are heavily represented in President Trump's orbit. People familiar with Beijing's strategy said the goal was to collect as many cards as possible to play in expected negotiations with the Trump administration over

U.S.-China issues, including tariffs. Beijing has already said it's investigating NVIDIA and Google over alleged antitrust issues. Again, not sure what they can do about Google. I didn't even know Google had any presence in the country, but I guess they can put the screws to them one way or another. Other American companies in its site include Apple, Silicon Valley tech company Broadcom, and semiconductor design software firm Synopsys. Synopsys has $35 billion acquisition awaiting approval by Beijing. So maybe they bought some Chinese IP and it won't go through unless Trump plays ball. China needs to use all of the leverage it can to hit back at the U.S. and antitrust is one of the most useful, says a tech policy specialist.

And so China is on a chip gathering exercise, likening the countries to poker players. They want to come to the table to negotiate and need something to play with. The strategy carries risk, though. American companies recently have been less willing than in Trump's first term to go to bat for China, and the threats could backfire by discouraging companies from investing in the country when that is what Beijing wants. Beijing has added to its regulatory tools in recent years, drawing lessons from America's approach. In 2020, they created what's called the unreliable entity list, the companies mimicking a US entity list that blocks Chinese technology leader Huawei and others from doing business with Americans. In 2022, China amended its antitrust laws to tighten rules on anti-competitive mergers. Chinese officials hope to get the attention of people in Trump's world, including the executives who sat by his side on inauguration day,

such as Google's Sundar Pichai and Apple's Tim Cook, which is interesting because Tim Cook wasn't actually in the photo with Trump. Somehow, Tim Cook is such a master negotiator that he's able to, I think he donated to the inauguration fund, but he wasn't in the front row showing that he's not all in on Trump in this kind of iconic way, which also makes him a little bit more fragile to Trump, but then maybe a little bit more durable. Yeah, Tim is in a rough spot, right? China has been so important to Apple's growth and is now shrinking. Right. We covered this last week. China, Apple, iPhone sales are down almost 10 percent in China.

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

They were like, we don't know what he's going to do. He's just sort of doing things. And every single day you refresh the news and it's like, what is Trump doing today? This time around, I think that other countries and people internally in the U.S. are thinking of him more as, OK, there's a method to the madness and he is playing his game, right? He's said in his book and in many, many interviews, he just loves doing deals. And so he is playing a very, very high stakes game of poker. And I think other countries are starting to recognize that and see themselves as, okay, we're playing in this sort of geopolitical poker and we need

to understand what our leverage is, you know, what our, you know, what our bargaining chips are and really they're looking at it as like, okay, we're actually playing a very, very high stakes game, you know, basically betting our economies on each other and betting, you know, these different aspects of, of leverage. So, uh, anyways, we'll, we'll see. I think, um, uh, I mean, it's certainly going to show up in the big tech earnings next quarter. We'll certainly be tracking this. Uh, uh, this is an interesting lever to pull. It's not one that's been top of mind. Um, there's a little bit more context here on mergers and antitrust. Mergers between multinationals typically require approval from antitrust regulators around the globe, and they can fall apart if they fail to gain even one major country approval.

We saw this with Figma and the EU. The EU has blocked a lot of mergers, and a lot of Americans are like, it's two American companies getting together. But of course, every company is multinational at this point. And so these multinational merger approvals are very important. In 2018, amid US-China trade conflicts in the first Trump administration, Qualcomm terminated its proposed purchase of Dutch chip maker NXP semiconductors after failing to obtain clearance from China. Imagine what a bummer that is. You're ready to do the deal.

And then China says no. And you're back. You don't get your liquidity event today. You got to keep grinding, although I'm sure it's a big company, NSP. US chipmaker Broadcom tried to take over VMware. That was valued at $61 billion when it was unveiled in May 2022. This was in peril until a meeting between Biden and Xi Jinping in November 2023. The two leaders agreed to dial down tensions. Shortly afterward, China greenlighted the deal at the 11th hour with conditions requiring Broadcom to supply to Chinese customers. So yeah, it's that trading chips on the poker table. Yeah, so I don't think that the average person understands just how bad the communication channels have been between Beijing and Washington have been. I was able to go to a talk last year with a U.S., just U.S.-China expert from this group, AEI, that's based in Washington, and they have sort of chapters around the US. And he basically said that,

you know, we put on the, you know, we, she came to San Francisco, and there was this big deal, if you remember that, I don't know, was it last year, or the year before at this point, where we cleaned up San Francisco, we made it nice. And we made it look like there's this, a real relationship there between our leaders. But there has been there's there it's it's so bad that there's not even really like direct, you know, phone email lines. Like it's very much like happening through channels and almost playing a game of telephone in many cases. And so this was the case in the Cold War. Kissinger was a back channel to China during the Nixon administration, and it was extremely controversial for them to open up those lines of communication.

Although now it's kind of the opposite because the relationship is actually falling apart more than it was rekindling. But Kissinger had to go to Nepal and then smuggle his way in and then meet meet with Zhou Enlai, the Chinese right hand man of the premiere and stuff. And then eventually Nixon went and that was really controversial. Now, you know, I think Trump is ready to ready to play ball. I mean, he went and shook hands with Kim Jong Il, right, or Kim Jong Un. And so he's ready to play ball, but he just wants to be able to do a deal that's good in his terms. And there's so many chips on the table. And if you're the CEO of a tech company, you don't want to be one of the chips that Trump doesn't care about. That's the worst thing you

can possibly be is not on Trump's good side. And he's like, oh yeah, I don't like the Broadcom guy anyway. So yeah, you can totally screw them over. No, you want to be donating to his inaugural fund. No matter what you think about the guy, you got to be, you know, on his good side so that when the time comes, he's ready to say, you know what, that's an American company. I care about them. They had my back and I'm going to have their back in this negotiation. I'm not just going to let you screw them over. Um, so yeah, people, people, you know, if you're purely in the, in the business world, you know, business is cutthroat, right? Everybody that started a company has a competitor that they hate, and that they're trying to take market share from and it's similar sort of dynamic where, you know, you don't want to be overtly at war with this company. But day to day, you're you feel like

you're in conflict and you're fighting. And oftentimes in those situations, you'll still have the comp, the, the contact information of your competitor, right? Like I'm sure you've had, you know, fairly open conversations with, you know, where you'll have the number of a company that you're competing with, right. And you'll even talk and be friendly and stuff like that. And I think that's generally good. We have less than that with China, you know, between our governments, like there's not, it's not, you know, and, and people have freaked out in the past with Trump, you know, just calling, calling up other countries, because like, that's, he's taking very much the sort of business approach to government, you know, to government, which is really not the norm. So anyways, it's it's I don't know, I feel like some of the best, most pointed commentary

on the U.S.-China relationship is coming out of Palantir. Now, they have some and they have some, you know, specifically their CTO has made some very clear comments like, you know, we need to, you know, we need to embrace, you know, they're a private company, right? They're in service of their shareholders. And, you know, because of how many government contractors they have, contracts they have in many ways in service to the government, but they're able to come out and say, no, we are at war with China. And, you know, we need to be honest about that. And our actions need to reflect that. But our leaders aren't saying, saying that, right?

They can't say that because it's too, it just stokes too much controversy and, and potentially fear. It's not necessarily, there's not, not, not's not a lot of value coming from that necessarily. So anyways, let's see. One of our listeners, I'm blanking on his name, is Gigalong Timu. So he really liked our Timu coverage. And he says, I forget, but he was posting and saying,

if Teemu hits like some certain share price, he's becoming a millionaire. So I want them to hit that price just because I want one of our listeners to hit that milestone. But then I want them to sell and then get aggressive. It's wild. Um, well, let's skip forward a little bit and give some quick hits on some, uh, follow-up news stories that we've covered in the past. Uh, Sonos finally hits the hard reset button. This is in the wall street journal of the day. Uh, Sonos chief executive, Tom Conrad's job would be hard enough if he just had to sell expensive speakers, selling the idea that his speaker company can finally master the software game is a heavier lift. That, however, is the task at hand

for the new CEO. Conrad was named to the post last month, succeeding longtime chief Patrick Spence, who took the company public in 2018. The switch confirmed that Sonos is still reeling from a disastrous update to its app in May of last year, which left many consumers who shelled out for premium speakers unable to use their products. Fiscal first quarter results from Sonos on Thursday confirmed the damage has lingered. Revenue fell 10% year over year to $550 million for the December ending quarter, while operating income plunged 40% to about $48 million. Very rough.

One particular telling stat is that the company's unit sales for the second half of the calendar year fell 14% from the year earlier to about 2.7 million products sold, the fewest for that period since 2016. And that was with the company's first ever entry into the premium headphone space. Ben, there are some incredible charts of how Sonos has been declining, a very, very rough bar chart there. Those headphones called the Sonos Ace should have been a valuable expansion opportunity for a company long confined to the home-based speaker. But the launch took place about a month after the app rollout turned out to be the worst possible time.

And so analysts now expect Sonos' revenue to fall 3% for the fiscal year ending in September after an 8.3% drop. Can the new boss eventually turn things around? Sonos is still a strong name in premium audio, despite the damage done to the brand by last year's app fiasco. This week, they said that they would cut the size of the workforce by 12%. We will see if that's enough. The stock is way down relative to the S&P 500. There's another chart there of when they launched their app update, they are down almost, they dipped 40%. They've climbed back up a little bit. There's some good news from Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley's Eric Woodring says, stepping back, we are impressed by management's ability to rip costs out of the model. A tough

demand backdrop and elevated uncertainty still hangs over Sonos, though. Indeed, only 38% of analysts rate Sonos a buy compared with 74% before the app rollout. The worst seems to be behind Sonos, but they are still early in their transformation. I don't know about that. I used the app this weekend. It was terrible. It's still terrible. I'm just falling out. I'm falling at the market. Yeah, they are, they're having a rough, a rough, rough go. Uh, I was, I was in my garage looking at an old Sonos play bar that I have. I have it in storage, hopefully going to reinstall it. I was thinking I was going to reinstall it in my house, might just throw it away. Uh, it's been, it's been

a rough, rough go. And, uh, I don't know if they're, rough go. And I don't know when they're going to turn the corner, but they got to just roll back the software and make it work seamlessly and flawlessly. You can't have these delays and these breaks, even just turning up the volume, turning down the volume. It just doesn't work anymore. So they have been struggling. Anyway, how's the market doing? Are you on public.com? Uh, yeah, I'm on public. Um, I mean, it's honestly been, you know, it's actually up 16% in the past six months. So that just goes to show how, how, you know, bad of a situation they were in last year. I would say that the Ace is an interesting product,

and I don't see that. Home speakers are the kind of things that you expect to just work, right? They sit in one place. You're coming in. Maybe you're putting Spotify on or whatever you do. Using Bluetooth, it should just kind of turn on or wifi should just turn on and work. But Sonos doesn't do that, right? Everybody

that owns Sonos is oftentimes frustrated with them. I have Sonos products in my house. I wish that I didn't, I wish that I had, you know, just analog, you know, some type of analog solution. I think that there's this place I was staying this past week was like such a smart home that it was really like frustrating to use because it just, if everything's not sort of perfectly interconnected, it just kind of everything breaks down. And so the issue is if you give consumers the experience of a poor experience with physical products that are sitting in your home that should just work and then you say, hey, well, we know you kind of had issues with this product, but now we're going to give you a product like headphones that you're going to wear potentially for hours and hours and hours all day long and use on car calls and apps and keep them around. And, you know, there's, there's even less tolerance, right? If you've ever had AirPods that are kind of freaking out and not working, it's very, very frustrating, right? And so I think the jump from home hardware to, hey,

now we're going to build hardware that you're going to take with you all through your life. I don't want Sonos following me around when I leave the house. Stay at home. I need some peace and quiet away from those smart speakers. But the other challenge is just pricing, right? The Sonos Ace is like about $350. You can get the Apple AirPods Max for about $200 more. And the issue with headphones is headphones are, I would say, in that category, more of a luxury item than a utility, right? People in 2025 care less about music quality overall because a lot of entertainment is happening through apps and

things like that. And so if you're giving consumers a choice of, hey, you can use you can buy Apple AirPods that are a luxury sort of fashion product statement, right, that says something about you may not like that, but it's true, sort of an accessory. Or you can buy the Sonos Ace, which have no brand recognition, are still expensive at three hundred and fifty dollars. Right $350, right? It's not like they came in with this super budget option. That's just a really tough sell, right? No kid is going into Christmas, you know, teenager being like, oh, I really want the Sonos Ace, right? It's very clearly, it doesn't feel worth even, you know, maybe they're as good of sound quality. They probably are as good as the

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

And then the flip side of that, which is data, that's a privacy issue. And then the flip side of that, which is, which is a good, it's a good argument. You do want, you don't want some cheap headphone company just stealing all your iPhone passwords or money or something like that. That makes sense. But when it's Sonos and they can review the code, they should be able to operate at the same level through the same APIs. But of course, Apple, you know, knows that they benefit from that and they're going to sell more, more, more products if they lock it down. So anyway, we should move on to the last thing I was going to say, if you think about AirPods as a business line being roughly equivalent, you know, in terms of importance as their agreement with, with, you know, as, as Google, Apple's relationship, right? Apple makes roughly $20 billion a year

from that search, you know, partnership. AirPods are not as, you know, not putting up as much, you know, profit margins, but it's a $22 billion business line. Apple's not going to just give that away, right? Like AirPods will continue to grow. It's a very meaningful business. And so going and competing with, you know, you know, again, it almost feels like, uh, yeah, okay.

They could sell some headphones, but certainly not going to save the company. Yeah. Well, let's move on to the Superbowl. Did you watch the Superbowl? Did you watch the ramp ad? I did. I watched the ramp ad and i and i saw some football too did you bet on the super bowl you know so not following one we've talked about this i've never been into sports betting we joke about sports betting a lot because it's just funny to me to me it's just funny i i don't i don't really i mean i i understand why people like to do it but just funny i i don't i don't really i mean i understand why people like to do it but for me i was looking i i downloaded draft kings because i was like all right i've

gotten enough of your ads probably thousands of people have told me to to download draft kings let me check it out and i looked at all the sort of like preset parlays and the thing that was i just don't know enough i don't know know anything about, you know, football. And so I was Elon making a bid on open AI. And if you walk out, if I walk out on the street in New York, somebody is thinking about, you know, cricket in India, right? Like we're just fixated on totally different things. Uh, the super bowl is very cool. And the entire country can just orient around a single sort of cultural event. And it is as much of a cultural event as it is, you know, a sporting event. So, um, I appreciate that. I had a post about this. Here's how I'm betting on the super bowl, 10 X levered, long fan duel,

five X levered, long draft Kings, American D gens are going to lose billions today on parlay as they don't even understand the house always wins. And I was texting with Sagar and Jetty and he said, he told me that FanDuel reports taking in over 16.6 million Super Bowl bets, a 19% increase from last year. Activity peaked at nearly 70,000 bets per minute. According to the sports book, I was kind of joking. Obviously this is not financial advice. I was not actually telling people to go a 10 X levered long fan duel or five X levered long draft. Yeah. You gotta be, you gotta be careful, John. Cause somebody in the chat, somebody in the chat, I looked at the, I looked at the results for the past week. DraftKings is up 3% on public.com,

Flutter Entertainment. I think they own FanDuel. They were up 1.3% the last week, and the market is only up 1.1, the S&P 500. So oddly enough, DraftKings and FanDuel did outperform the S&P 500 during this Super Bowl cycle. John, we do not. And to be clear, we do not offer financial advice on this show.

This is for entertainment purposes only. But yeah, I mean, a lot of that stuff had to have been fairly priced in just because everything's, of course, always priced in. We'll never tell you what to buy, but we will tell you where to buy it go to public.com for all your trading needs and fortunately the market is npv positive unlike sports betting and so uh you know if you just took 20 that you were going to spend on every sports bet for the next sports season and you just put that into an ETF, you would be fantastically well off. Sager went on to send me something. He said,

based on the historical data up to April 2024, he said, if you would have invested $200 monthly for 34 months, totaling $6,800, you would have bought 72 shares of the S&P and the value as of April 2024 would have been 8,700 for a return of 28%. You really can't go wrong. He says dollar cost averaging through February of 2025, you'd be up 60% LMFAO. And you're not going to find 60% returns in the sports book, unfortunately. So we recommend staying away from the sports book and heading over to public.com. I mean, not necessarily factually correct, because I'm sure a lot of people last night had generational Mahomes haters just rebetting the house against him having a rough

night and they probably did well, but more importantly, uh, should we talk about Tom Brady? We should. So Tom Brady was, uh, taken a task by Derek guy die work where, uh, he says he dislikes the grotesque opulence and flash of modern watches. And we have some info here. Tom Brady was spotted wearing a Jacob & Co. Yellow Sapphire Caviar Tourbillon watch worth over $800,000. It's an extremely exclusive piece. And if you want to pick up an $800,000 watch, we recommend that you head over to bezel,

download the bezel app and pick something out. Not my taste personally. I'd probably go for something a little bit more subdued, but if you want to make a statement, can't go wrong with a Jacob and co Sapphire diamonds, caviar, terbion. Yeah. An absolute an absolute hitter uh so we were texting with uh quaid one of the one of the founders of bezel about this this whole debacle and uh quaid uh quaid quaid you know didn't actually have direct context as i'm sure it wasn't released but he he felt that this was such a ridiculous watch choice and i'm sure even tom felt silly, but he felt that this was such a ridiculous watch choice. And I'm sure even Tom felt silly about it, that he said it was a possibility that it would be a an actual paid, you know, some type of paid partnership. But, you know, who knows?

Who knows? Certainly, Tom has been photographed in some fantastic pieces over the years. As soon as this went out on TV, I was searching X just for Tom Brady watch, and there were thousands of tweets. He grabbed the attention with it, maybe in a good way, maybe in a bad way. But either way, he's raising the profile of uh you know fast uh of flashy watches loud opulence is fully back with this watch and there's a lot to like about this nothing wrong with a gold watch nothing wrong with a big watch nothing wrong with a tourbillon in a watch uh so yeah nothing wrong with a nothing wrong with a watch that is majority yellow sapphire

yeah so i also thought something else i didn't i didn't really know this but apparently these these watches actually trade very quickly at a fraction of their of their retail price so they retail really high but the secondary the secondary market for jacob and co is is pretty rough um which makes sense I don't think a lot of people to be honest I felt like very few people saw this watch and and said I I need this watch that's incredible whereas I've seen Tom Brady's you know you know Tom Brady you know frequently gets gets featured on like celebrity watch roundups and oftentimes he'll wear stuff that's like yeah that is a fantastic piece like i would love to add that to my collection someday

and so anyways i don't know if it's hard to uh i love xai is trying to trying to explain it why did brady pick this watch it's like who never will never know never now we'll have to get him on the show and ask him um but let's stay with the super bowl we're going to review some super bowl ads of course chat gpt massive ad uh very controversial a lot of people hated it some people loved it jack appleby uh chimes in he says chat gpt what you just lit $7 million on fire. Worst Super Bowl ad ever. Imagine having one of the coolest tech innovations ever and not showing the super audience what it actually does. God, that was a horrible ad. How did you feel about the ChatGPT ad, Jordy, when you saw it? So AdQuik partnered with Beehive and they did a whole roundup and they actually had

it listed that this was a 16 million dollar ad because it was a full 60 seconds it was a very it was that you know basically the uh the the ad unit for size lord. So, so I looking at it outside of the realm of where, of the context that it was being played, I thought it was a fantastic ad. I watched it. I felt it had a lot of very cool symbolism. I, it was a, it was a lot more fun than anything that I've seen open AI put out. Uh, I thought, yeah, again, I've, I've re OpenAI put out. Yeah, again, I've rewatched it since then. I thought it had good energy. It made me like OpenAI more, right?

Because a lot of this stuff, like a lot of the criticisms lately, if you ignore Sam Altman, have been around, nonprofit structure have been around, oh, they're bad at naming, like what's going on here. And so you're just focused on like, you know,

using the app all the time, but you're like, oh, O1 Pro, O1 this. And this felt like they kind of rallied around this whole, it felt like, you know, showing the sort of history of humanity through this, you know, very cool and sort of bits, right? It was just a very, I felt like, yeah, you could easily apply all the symbolism and meaning behind it. And it felt inspiring and futuristic and fun. But then you put that in the concept, in the context of, hey, you had an

opportunity to, you know, who is this for? I felt like this was a great ad for the technology industry and the sort of almost like power users. Right. But, um, the thing is like they're in the middle of raising $40 billion. This is a fraction of their probably like next 12 months ad budget. And it's perfectly fine for, you know, perfectly fine for them to, to sort of light money on fire to, to, to, but. Yeah. The way I think about it is, is when you're a startup that's bootstrapping, you have a vision, you have a philosophy, you have a message for what you're building, a story that you're telling. And when you have no money, you're going to go direct and you're going to write maybe a thread or a long post or a blog

post and put it out for free. And if it's compelling, it'll go viral. And maybe it's a pitch deck and your idea is instantiated. Your vision for the world is instantiated in a deck that goes around and is told to people one-to-one for free. Then as you get bigger, let's say you're a billion dollar unicorn, you might be able to instantiate your vision statement in a really slickly produced video that you put out on Twitter or X, or you put it on your homepage. And it's a message from the founder saying, this is what we believe. And then you'll do some earned media and you'll keep telling your story. But when you're $150 billion company raising $20, $40 billion, like you can just put your vision statement.

You can just do things. That's the, you can just do it. Yeah. It's just like, Hey, Hey, we got this cool vision video. It tells everyone what we're like, why don't we just like put some spend behind it? And some spend in this context is a Superbowl ad and it's crazy. But, but yes, I agree that like, this is not a good direct response ad. This doesn't tell me what the product is, but this is, but as, as an individual piece of content, I liked it. But again, in a crowded room of people that are drinking beers and eating Doritos, like not the best way to, this almost feels like it should run before a trailer for the next Denis Villeneuve movie.

Like you go see D doom and you see this and you're like wow that was aesthetic the design is cool the pixelation the circles and it is tying into things but it's pure like brand building it's not really like hey we're here here's what you can do install the app right now it's the opposite of the coinbase app which was a qr code to install the the app it's just like direct response. You know about Bitcoin. You're going to buy it. Get it right now. There's a lot of ads that do that. There were a number of companies that were like, hey, here's the QR code to download the app. We're giving away money or order on Uber Eats today. Order on DoorDash today. And this was very much just like, we have a vibe reel and we're

putting it out and we happen to put spend behind it. So it wound up at the super bowl. Yeah. So one effect, one effect that was positive and that this was what they were probably going for is the takeaway of, Oh, this is the next apple. Right. Cause it felt like very, it felt creative and inspiring and fun. And it felt like, you know, human. And, and even though it was this sort of digital experience, if you wanted to say, how do we, if, if opening an, an opening, I probably went to their ad agency and said, we want open AI to be, to fill this void that Apple left, right? Apple's like saying, Jen emoji it and like all this like slop, you know, slop out of home ads. Hey, there's this void. There can be this

inspiring, uh, human centered consumer brand that sparks creativity and helps, you know, which is what Apple did. Right. Now the ad agency's job is to come up with something and they, and they, they can, they then convince the company and saying, this is the right thing. Like you're going to, you know, this is your moment. Like let's own this. Let's do a 60 second ad and let's be the most, you know, inspiring, cool ad. It was like objectively the coolest ad that I saw, right? Ramp was super cool. If you're like Eagles or Saquon fan and you're already a Ramp customer and it's like, wow, Ramp is this massive, you know, company.

They're playing it like the big, they're in the big leagues. Now this isn't a startup anymore. If chat, if chat GPT open AI wanted to come at this from the lens of, Hey, let's use this as a user acquisition moment to like put heat on Google. I would have taken the $16 million and run four individual ads throughout the entire super bowl and just done 15 second ads. Right. So it's like demonstrating how the product can be used in different ways of saying, Hey, use it to generate. Yeah. ads. Right. So it's like demonstrating how the product

can be used in different ways of saying, Hey, use it to generate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tie it to sports. Say like, like go to chat GPT right now and search, tell me the history of Saquon Barkley. Oh, uh, explain to me all the rules of football, you know, Hey, I'm watching for the first time. Like that could be a really fun use of chat. Cause a lot of people are watching the first time hey uh i i noticed that like you get the ball on the 30 yard line now when in when the ball goes out the back that's a new rule to me when did that go in that's a question that i would actually chat gbt during the during the game and they could have played on all that done a ton of stuff just to drive downloads but that wasn't the goal yeah they could have done an ad for the dj and sports betters the the sort of moms the girlfriends that don't know about football at all for hardcore fans and to me to me to me this

is i'm gonna make a funny comparison here so if i'm perplexity or and i'm google and i'm seeing this open ai i'm like whew that was that was close because they could have come hardcore for the sort of search answer engine type narrative and it's almost like watching the game i was googling i i still landed on google super bowl stats because i wanted to know uh how many rushing yards each team had and google had a beautiful little like programmatic it wasn't generative ai it just plugged into that widget i didn't even have to go to a sports website and it just gave me the exact info I needed. And that's something I could have gone to Chachapie for if they just built like a little module, a little module and like made it fun and interesting and perplexity is doing that.

Um, and, and I'm sure that they, you know, next Superbowl they'll be there, but, uh, yeah, I mean, uh, interesting execution. If, if you're, if're uh uh perplexity right uh watching this ad you're you're you're you're sort of like uh my competitor which they're very real competitors right even if they're technically like marketing and going in different directions uh the perplexity team is like stoked because they're like okay chad gbt took an opportunity where they could have like dominated mindshare being this new search product and they like did this brand exploration uh is similar to drake watching kendrick lamar uh you know diss him you know aggressively through this thing but put on what many people are saying is like the

worst halftime show that they've ever seen right and. And so he's sort of like, he's sort of like watching, he's like, Oh, like, I guess, like, I guess, you know, yeah. Dodge the bullet a little bit. Um, yeah, I mean, it was the same thing where I think that Kendrick performance, uh, probably would have been great in a different context, but it just wasn't, people didn't think it was appropriate for the super bowl because, uh, you know again like kendrick has all these like layered lyrics it's almost better to listen to it like as an audiophile with some great headphones as opposed to like in a loud crowded room when everyone's drinking beers and and you can't really follow what's going on uh versus like the kendrick performance two years

ago at the super bowl in la was like dr Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg just playing like the biggest bangers. Everyone has heard these songs and it just looked like a party the whole time. And you're like, oh, okay. That's what a Superbowl show should be. Uh, and, and it's not like the Superbowl is so low attention span the whole time. People are second screening, they're talking, they're drinking, they're playing drinking games, like breaking through with anything that requires any sort of secondary level of thought is just really really difficult um but let's let's move on to super bowl tea tea die in the chat says chat gpt cook me a nasty plus plus 1000 parlay uh so that like you could have there could have been some uh but but one of the, even cooking, how do I make a great nachos?

How do I make, how do I make wings? Like, like that's something you could ask. Chat GPT didn't break through in that way. Um, well, Jack, I was just going to last thing. Cause he called this out too. He's saying that part of the reason why they maybe just focus on the brand is just like the knowledge cutoff where if you go in a chat GPT and you search immediately about stuff and like it actually is not going to be a good experience. It's great if you want to

understand when was the last time you know the Eagle what are the what five times have the Eagles won the Super Bowl or something like that. It'll nail that but it won't nail the sort of like actual day to day super topical stuff. Yeah, let's move on to the ad from the tech company that Jack Appleby really liked. He loved Google Pixel's Super Bowl spot. He said it was so touching. He said, I'm not crying, you're crying. No one's better at taking a tech feature and telling a wonderful emotional story while still making sure we all get the product benefit. This script is fantastic. And the screenshot here is a Google search bar saying, explain bullying to a child. So very like

emotional playing on the heartstrings of like being a parent, how you would use Google to solve a really complex and difficult topic. And Google has always been great at that, telling like a love story, an emotional story. And, and, uh, and I think they've really done a good job of like telling some sort of like cinematic vignette that's emotional while still tying it back to the, to the product. What was your take on it? Did you watch it or are you seeing it? So I think, I think it was a well-produced spot. It's just like, there's such a big disc, there's such a big disconnect is there such a big disconnect with, with a Google ad and what they actually are as a company. If I wanted to understand how

to explain bullying to my kids, I would, I would Google how to explain bullying to my kids, Reddit, right? Like that's like, that's like the actual way that you would get that. Like, imagine getting, like getting a, getting a Google auto summary of like, you know. So again, I thought this ad was like very forgettable. I came away from it being like, okay, Google is obviously going to run a Super Bowl ad as a multi-trillion dollar company. Not going to remember it, you know, really ever again. I hardly remember the contents.

And I'm very much in the Target demo, right? It was all about, you know, parenting and how to, you know, really ever again, I hardly remember the contents and I'm very much in the target demo, right. It was all about, you know, parenting and how to, how to, you know, so anyways, I thought it was a big mess. It feels like the prestige movies at the Academy Awards where at a certain point, like, okay, yeah, I can just imagine that, that this year's best picture nominees are going to be about like, Oh, brave journalist fighting some big thing. And then, Oh, like some foreign language film about like the Catholic church or whatever. And I'm, and I don't even know what movies are nominated, but I'm sure they're going to be like the same, like heartstrings dramas that are like always prestige films. Google's just put out so many of these that they do. They, they, they fail

to break through in the same way as like, I think the first time Google did it, it was very, very cool. Um, but again, uh, at least they're explaining the product because, uh, Salesforce did not do a good job with that. I don't know if we should move on to the last thing. The last thing is like getting an ad from Google is like getting an ad from Comcast, right? Like it could be the most well-produced emotional ad. And you're still like, cool. Thanks Com Comcast, for taking up time that I'll never get back. You know, like it's not. Yeah.

And so Salesforce, Jack Appleby says, what Salesforce? Your Super Bowl ad makes no sense. Restaurants don't seat you outside in the rain. And no one understands your AI products role in reservations. Why? What a weird spot that serves no purpose. But they got your boy, Matthew McConaughey on in the ad. He had so many cameos. And yeah, Salesforce has always kind of struggled with this. They tend to paint a very broad picture

and they don't do a good job. It's interesting because it's kind of in the same realm, in the same realm as like, people were kind of criticizing the ramp ad because they're like, how many CFOs were really watching, but at least the ramp ad was like very clear value prop for the CEOs for the CFOs. Whereas this is to be clear, to be clear, probably like 90% of CFOs for watching totally. Yeah. It makes sense anywhere. So, so yeah, you're, you're, if you want to, you know, sort of collect, uh, yeah. The flip side is that, is that 90% of people who manage Salesforce installations were also watching, but they don't do a good job of showing the value. Like with a ramp at, it's very clear. It's like, instead of expense report receipts and like dealing with filing expense reports, ramp will make that faster.

So what you should be doing in Salesforce is saying instead of manually going through and tagging every, you know, every different line item in your CRM, Salesforce AI agents will do that for you. You know, but instead it's like this very vague ad about Matthew McConaughey dining outside. Yeah, I think it's striking, but it doesn't tell me what the product is. Well, so you remember in 2023 where there was this controversy because it came out, I think in, in some type of shareholder report that Matthew McConaughey was making like $10 million a year to basically be like a rant,

like Benioff's like friend, like, Hey, I'm going to give you 10 million a year to just kind of like do creative advisory on the company and stuff like that. Salesforce is such a, I don't know that like you get to the point as at a company of the size, it becomes, I think branding just gets so much harder at extreme scale, right? Where people have so much experience and their own opinions and feelings about your product that it's really hard to overcome that, right? Like Google is very much like cable for me.

It's a utility. I get email from them. I get search, YouTube, things like that. But I don't really care to have like that much of an emotional relationship. And then Salesforce is the same thing where it's just sort of a dominant CRM provider. It's known for being clunky and hard to implement. And, you know, it's sort of almost like a necessary evil. And so just going and doing random stuff like this doesn't move the brand forward.

It doesn't increase people's feelings. You know, I, I can't, you know, maybe, maybe the average American is looking at this and being like, I like Matthew McConaughey. Maybe I'll like, you know, maybe I'm more inclined to take a Salesforce demo next time I get hit up by one of their SDRs. Like maybe, you know, yeah, maybe. Yeah. Uh, I mean just mean just just brand awareness they're in the game and they're just getting a little bit across but they could have been more terse with it um well let's stay with matthew mcconaughey because a couple slides later ben we got uh uber eats uh with the most cameos in the super bowl ad they got matthew mcconaughey there and i saw this ad and i liked it i thought it was interesting because like it is a tech company

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

time to think about, hey, I do want more chicken wings. Let's order that right now. And I bet a lot of people installed the app and I bet a lot of people, uh, just ordered Uber eats, uh, while this ad was going live. So I thought it was a pretty good one. What'd you think, Jordy? I actually didn't see this one. It might've been in the second half where the, the, I knew, I knew ramp had it, had the game in the bag. So I just kind of checked out. Okay. Well, let's move on to the Instacart one.

I don't know if you saw that one. No, but, but yeah, look, looking at Uber eats and these sort of mass market consumer products, it is, uh, I think the Superbowl is a great way for an enterprise company to say, Hey, we're here. We're playing in the big leagues. It's a tougher place to stand out if you are, you know, a dominant, you know, enterprise company already and people already have opinion, but great opportunity. Again, probably some of the best money that Uber Eats will spend this year, even if it doesn't have the sort of direct attribution that they might have on other channels. Yeah. And I think Instacart, interestingly, obviously a direct rival in many ways, uh, more for grocery than food delivery,

but still, uh, in the delivery game, uh, Jack Appleby says, wow, Instacart got some crazy brand cameos for their Superbowl spot. Kool-Aid guy, Mr. Clean, Old Spice guy, Pillsbury dough boy. And of course, puppy monkey baby. I don't even know what that means. Chester the Cheeto is there. Chester the Cheetah, who is Cheeto's mascot, is there. And I always wonder how these brand collaborations work. Do they wind up paying part of the ad spot bill? Like if you're Cheeto's brand and you say, Hey, it's a $6 million ad spot, we'll put in a million dollars. If you're promoting Cheetos in your Instacart ad, even though it's an Instacart ad, or is it kind of just like a friendly handshake thing? No, it's very about that. Who knows what the deal looked like. It's very possible that this

was Instacart's way of hacking a free ad by going to the IP holders and saying, Hey, I'm going to get you in the Superbowl for a million dollars instead of, you know, whatever. And you're going to get that exposure to the audience. And that's just an easier decision to make. Uh, an Instacart might've cut the piece up and said, Hey, everybody's thrown in 6 million or 8 million or 4 million, whatever. I don't know how long the spot was, but yeah. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking Y Combinator should run a Superbowl ad, carve up the 6 million into 60 different companies.

You get half a second, your logo flashes on the screen. We almost did that back in the party round days. We got like a very last minute offer. It was like 30 grand and for, for like a 15 second spot in like the North, you know, the Northeast or something like that, you're going to cut it up and do like a last minute thing, like drop your logo. But the logistics of getting all the approvals and everything just didn't work out. Um, well, it would be fun. Uh, and last but not least, we got to close on the ramp ad. I love that they've been doing a lot of followup. They've really been getting all the juice out of

this lemon. They're squeezing, uh, Eric Lyman today writes, why did ramp make a Superbowl ad with Saquon chasing down expense reports? Because while everyone was watching the game finance teams across America, we're still working to close January's books. I was surprised to see in our analytics that tens of thousands were working the weekend. They deserve their moment in the spotlight. And so, you know, I think the ad went over very well. It was very clear and it delivered very quickly. And I was happy to see it live.

Any more to say on Ramp Ad? Absolute dog. Absolute dog. Absolute dog. I mean, at the end of the day, I just would highlight again that I feel like Eric and Saquon are, are, you know, basically the same person on just different paths, just humble, humble savages. So it was awesome to see, you know, as much as yesterday was a win for Billy's fan, it was a win for people that like finance automation. So what a day. I said it better myself.

Completely agree. Well, let's move on to some timeline, some news from Axe over the weekend. Ben Heilack says, if O3 was the 175th best programmer in the world. Every company in the world would immediately stop hiring software engineers. We clearly need a better way of measuring what LLMs are capable of because OpenAI's reasoning model has been climbing the rankings and has been ranking very highly in terms of software engineering, but still has yet to be fully implemented at a lot of companies. What do you think? There's always the argument that this stuff is just additive. You keep your software engineers and you let them do more with the new tools, or in the future,

maybe you don't hire them at all. What do you think? No, I think it's a good, I mean, I think it's just a great framing from Ben. I mean, Ben and people that listen to the show know that Ben did the Jaguar redesign. He also has an AI analytics company. But it's a very good point in that you can say that O3 is ranked as the 175th best programmer, but in practice it doesn't feel like that

when you're using it, right? It doesn't, you know, it doesn't feel like you have a top 1000 programmer in the world coding with you. It feels like you have more, you know, people position it more as like a very good new grad that can work extremely quickly, right? Which is still very valuable. And so like, I think calling out that difference between what it's capable of, but then what matters more is how companies are able to leverage it

internally, right? And OpenAI, you know, clearly is still hiring software engineers. They're also not getting the same value as 170. So it's like, ability and value, right? Everybody's hired employees who are like, ridiculously talented, but then can't deliver on that talent in your organization. And that kind of feels like where O3 is at. And just all models in general, it's like, hey, you're clearly brilliant. But like, you got to be able to do a bit more for me here, in general. It's like, Hey, you're clearly brilliant, but like, you got to be able to do a bit more for me here. Right. For it to like, you know, sort of live up to the expectation. Yeah. A lot of supervision still involved. Have you been following the AI.com drama? Uh, there's a tweet here. Oh yeah. Breaking deep seek may have bought the domain AI.com and it now redirects straight to their site.

Just like how open AI snapped up chat.com. Our domain power moves the new arms race in AI. But Pierre Richelson says AI.com is the wildest thing out there. No, it's not changing hands. There's a person behind this URL switching from open AI to XAI and now to deep seek. What a fascinating hustle. What are they getting out of this? I don't understand. So what's really obvious here is that AI.com is owned by a domain investor and nobody, nobody, they've clearly gone to all these different companies and tried to sell it to them. And now they're, you know, they probably, I'm sure like any of these companies would pay $5 million for AI.com, right?

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

competitors. So now it's redirecting to you and now it's redirecting to you. And so anyways, yeah, it's technically smart. But the thing about the domain space is people are just, you know, we talked about that story that Rob had shared from Snagged where the Instagram, the owners of Instagram.com sold the domain and then sued Instagram later and said, oh, it wasn't sold with, you know, the daughter signed off on the sale, but not the family who really owned it. And they tried to claw it back and all this stuff. So the domain space is still the wild, wild west. The craziest domain deal I did was for a domain that was owned by a Chinese investment group,

which was smooth to their credit. But it was still a weird months-long negotiation. So anyways, I'm interested to see where this ends up um it could be one of those things that it ends up not even being bought by a new player and gets bought by a google or something like that yeah yeah it's odd because obviously like webbrowser.com was not important in the browser wars. Chrome never, I don't even know if they own Chrome.com. You just go to Google or Bing and you type in install Chrome and that's the end of that. But let's move on to some amazing news.

Eddie Zhu says he got banned from the Columbia hackathon for being too young. So we snuck in and we won. And he said, big shout out to a bunch of people. And yes, we told the organizers and returned the prizes afterwards. Wow. What a heartwarming story. Absolutely. Kids. Fantastic. Get these chads in Doge. They're ready. They're ready. They're ready. Yeah. You can just do things incorporated. I love it. Uh, yeah. Uh, very exciting. I mean, I don't know why there's an age gate on hackathons. Maybe it's, uh, something about Columbia wanting to restrict it just to students. Uh, but I love that they

snuck in and hilarious that they won't. There's some, there's some students that would be seven that could be, you know, just, you know, a year ahead or something. I was thinking it might be some sort of like and legal liability because you're staying up all night at this hackathon. And to be on campus, you need to sign some waiver because the school is technically responsible for you. But it seems like a victimless crime sneaking into a hackathon. I love that they built some stuff. I hope that Eddie posts more results of what they actually built. I want to hear about it. I want to follow the story. Eddie,

if you're listening, send us more breakdown of what happened. How'd you sneak in? What'd you have to do? Did you have to go out in the back door? What'd you have to do? Leave a door open? Eddie, come on. What are the layers that you did? Were you wearing a fake beard, fake mustache, glasses? Was it three kids in a trench coat? I want to know what happened. Bring it down for us. Three builders in a trench coat. Three cracked builders in a trench coat. Three zoomers in a trench coat. That's the way you get into the Columbia hackathon. But congratulations on winning. We're very happy for you and good luck to whatever you build next. Let us know. Let's move on to Dirtman B-Sack. He says, he's been on the show before. He says, people think making the moon

a state is just a meme, but there is a real tangible pathway there. And he shares a video of Newt Gingrich. 13,000 people is what it will take. What does that look like practically? Assuming that Starship can carry 100 people to the moon, that means we only need 130 launches there to carry the people. Let's 4X that number for equipment and orbital refueling. That's 520 launches. And so he estimates $60 million per launch. We get $31 billion in launch costs.

Totally doable. Less than Stargate billion in launch costs. Totally doable. Less than Stargate. And we have a moon base. And so I love to see people breaking down. When the moon should be a state meme broke through and Solana was pushing it, I did a deep dive on moon law a little bit, wrote a thread, kind of breaking down how it would actually work. It's fascinating.

I think this is going to be a topic of conversation for many, many years to come and it's going to break through any day. Yeah. And to be clear, us going and renaming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America is just sort of foreshadowing for re you know you know, I don't know, would we keep moon as the name? Would we name it new America? You know, something like that. The proposal is just, there's a 51st state and it's just called moon. And so you're in Massachusetts. I'm from Florida. You're from moon the end. And I'd be happy with that. I'd be happy with that. We need a governor. We need, you know, some, uh, some interstate freeways up there. we need parking lots and mcdonald's and all the all the things that make it yeah i told you i told you for my next son uh

we're we're thinking about the name rocket little rocket haze oh yeah that'd be a cool story being like yeah i grew up in california like i was born born in California, but I really mostly grew up on the moon. Uh, and it's like, okay, a little bit of nominative, uh, determinism there, a little rocket. I love it. Uh, well, let's move on to some more amazing and good news from real news. Eerie, I guess, uh, the Irishman that was stabbed in the neck today is all stitched up and he's back in the pub the gales are a hearty bunch let's go he says throat stitched up attacker in custody beers on tap we live to see another day so congratulations to the irishman that was stabbed in the neck you have uh fought and won and we're proud to support you on this program. I never saw, I never knew that he was stabbed. So this is amazing for me to just see that

this guy's at the pub. That's really the news for me, just having a nice time at the pub. So love to see it. Well, we got the timeline in turmoil once again. Palmer Lucky says, I'm once again asking ZDNet to publicly retract their bogus 2018 story claiming

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

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

Play some life-size chess. Stop writing hit pieces and just enjoy a nice glass of champagne in the morning while a string quartet plays classical music for you to wake up to. Life could be so easy, but instead you choose violence every day on the internet. So tech journalists, you're on notice. Let's move on. Kevin follows up with a uh beautiful screenshot from polymarket will it's kevin win reply guy of the month 100 chance so congrats to kevin enjoy this meme from when i was trying to win tbpn reply guy of the month in december we love kevin you know fans i'm gonna go'm going to make an impulse decision right now and hopefully you back it,

but I'm going to go out on a limb and say, Kevin is this is, is the February 10th reply guy of the week. Now let's do it. Let's do it. We just did it. Congratulations. Kevin.

Fantastic. I have the week. I like this. I like this asset. He clearly, you know, did the work. It looks nice.

Oh yeah. It's on brand. That brand that that's like a nice emoji bottle i think we might the dom pairing on is very carefully matted there's no rough edges this was photoshop this is artisanal meme making very very high quality i mean you can tell with his badge he's member of a esteemed meme making community. We've seen this badge all over X, and we're happy to have you in the community, Kevin. Let's move into a post by C-Mac. It says, the average European employee's workday, and it's a day in the life of Brunello Cuccinelli. 6 a.m., wake up in his countryside house.

This could be a tech journalist for all we know. Revel in the silence of nature. Slowly get dressed at 7.45 a.m., breakfast at the village bar, coffee and a croissant, take some time to plan the day ahead. 8.30 a.m., walk to the office, morning work block dedicated exclusively to design work, no meetings or gaps. 1 p.m., walk home for lunch, pasta with olive oil and tomato sauce. 2 p.m., 30-minute siesta, a crucial part of the farming culture he originally comes from. 3 p.m., afternoon work block, admin, ops, finance, production, and plans for the next day. At 5.30 p.m., the whole company stops work and takes the late afternoon off. Brunello places a high premium on rest,

soulfulness, and personal study. At 8 p.m., he has a light supper, reading from his 5,000-book library. Let's go. 9 p.m., he heads off to the cafe to meet friends. They discuss politics, philosophy, religion, and other subjects late into the night. Jordy, what do you think?

Is it a winning formula for a good day? A lot more work in here than the average European workday, I would have to imagine. Calling one of Europe's top CEOs average is throwing a little bit of shade. This just made me think, I think we need to do a deep dive on who's more goaded, Brunello, Cuccinelli, or Pietro, Loro Piana. Because a lot of people say Brunello just copied Pietro's whole thing. Copied his bit, basically. And so I think if we did, who's basically the goat of fine fat? The goat debate, basically.

Yeah. For venture capitalists, it's higher. goat of fine fat. The goat debate, basically. Yeah. For venture capitalists, you know, attire. I think that'd be good. I'm a little biased. The suit I ordered last time I was in New York is the Laura Piana fabric. So pretty excited for that. But we really got to nail down the goat debate here. Yeah.

Well, you take that side and we'll get someone to debate the the brunello side of the debate and we'll have us a fight knock out drag out yeah it'll be great uh well let's move on to a fantastic promoted post from wander they say feeling spontaneous we just dropped the price at wander brandon beach to 395 a night from tomorrow to february 14th 17th to 21st. It's one of the most beloved locations near its world famous Brandon Dunes Golf Resort. So if you're a golfer, go check out this Wander. It looks wonderful. And we have another post from Wander that I wanted to highlight because this place, I might be locking this down pretty soon. This looks amazing. So Jerry Lee says, I miss waking

up to these views. Stayed in the most stunning house in Palm Springs via Wander. And if you click forward, Ben, there's some closeups here. Really, really iconic. The vertical post doesn't do it justice, but it has this amazing circular pool with a jacuzzi out in Palm Springs. Looks like just a fantastic place to stay. Couldn't recommend it enough. And of course, we need to do our first shirtless episode. And I think this is, it's so cinematic. It's so cinematic. Like, I have no idea, you know,

everything else would have fit everyone. You know, I'll figure out all those details, but I gotta be there. It looks beautiful. I mean, if you're listening to this, it's just one of the most beautifully designed buildings. I mean, it looks like it's just incredible. I can't say enough nice things about it.

So go check it out and just browse Wander and see what's out there because there's so many good opportunities for vacations, off-sites, company off-sites, events, all sorts of different stuff. Highly recommend it. Well, speaking of shirtless podcasts, I hope Theo Vaughn and Alex Wang are ready to strut their stuff because they're doing a podcast together, baby. I love this. I think they met at the inauguration in DC. There was a photo of them. I think Theo Vaughn's chair broke or something or something crazy happened where one of of the logan paul brothers like jake paul like fell down and and sam altman and alex wang turned around and theo von was there

really really funny world colliding moment but alex wang writes coming soon to a podcast app near you he's doing the theo von show theo obviously an amazing comedian he's interviewed donald trump he's interviewed tons of comedians, tons of great people. He's really, really created a lot of breath with his show. And now he's got Alex Wang on the founder of Scale AI. Not a lot of B2B enterprise company founders making the podcast circuit, but Alex Wang is cutting his own path. I mean, this, this is, this is an amazing and very unpredictable collaboration, but I absolutely love it. I, uh, I only listened to founders podcast, but if I were going to listen to another podcast, uh, it would be, it would be this specific episode. Um, I also have to, uh, one of our, one of our posts from last year that went super viral

was a picture of Theo Vaughn in a suit. And I said like Doug Leone, founder of Sequoia colorized and like it went super viral, but I don't think most people, I think like half the people didn't realize that it was Theo Vaughn. You've sent me pictures of Theo Vaughn multiple times. And I've been like that guy, like who's the guy. And for some reason, when I see Theo Vaughn out of context, I'm like, that's not Theo Vaughn. But of course I know who Theo Vaughn is. It's very odd. Uh, he is a chameleon. It's great.

Yeah. Uh, well let's move on to signal signal rights. I haven't posted on Instagram since October. None of my friends have either. Insta feels like a dying mall. Everything is just ads and influencer noise. Friend content has virtually diminished for me. I open it only because people still send memes. What's your Instagram experience been like? I haven't really been using it in a number of months. I got a new phone and I didn't install it

onto like the home screen. So I never really open it. I check it every once in a while and I basically just see who sent me some memes and that's it. But I haven't posted on it in years. I've just been private. I want to retool it as a business account essentially to put some of our content on there. But I don't see it as a way to connect with friends anymore. All of that has moved to iMessage and signal group chats and that type of stuff.

I'm not really connecting with friends on any meta products right now, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was notable. I mean, I still use Instagram, but more specifically around interests and then connecting with friends, like mostly connecting with my non, like the vast majority of my, you know, like most important friendships now are, uh, oriented around tech and work and business and stuff like that. But my non-tech business relationships are mostly on Instagram still. That's where I sort of keep up with, uh, uh, there's housekeeping at my door right now, but, uh, so I'm gonna have to get that in a second but

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

And that's the revenue profit maximizing thing, which is a little sad because the mission of Meta has been for a long time to connect people. And that is cool when they do that. But they do seem to be losing that. I'll read through some more posts. Feel free to get that door if you need to. Let's go to Sean Frank. And Ben, you can pull up this image. He says, their love of the game keeps me sane. And he's sharing a meme. He says, mom, can we have authentic, enthusiastic tech journalism? And it's a picture of us. He says, no, there's authentic, enthusiastic tech journalism at home.

And at home, it's Kara Swisher. And so we love the support from Sean. I told him he should put an ad for Ridge Wallet in this image. He didn't. It was very disrespectful to our culture. But we'll give him a pass this time. But we love Sean Frank and everything that he does over at the Ridge Wallet. Let's move on to Aristic Rex. I literally laughed out loud at this post. I thought it was so funny.

He says, every Emmett Shearer post. Of course, Emmett Shearer is the former CEO of Twitch, very active poster on X. At one point, he was the CEO of OpenAI for a few days. And it starts out, Emmett Shearer, does anyone have any good garlic bread recipes? And then it's the show more replies button. And the last reply is Emmett Shearer again, well, if you subscribe to the dark forest theory, sure. But even then, only if the rules of magic are universal, not on those planets. And heuristic rack says, what are you people saying to him? And I've seen Emmett go down these rabbit holes and debate. He loves debating AI and, and all these crazy kind of teapot rationalist themes. He's very deep in the weeds and this

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

many ways, it was exactly the kind of CEO that sort of rationalist board of OpenAI would have wanted running the company, right? Like sort of this sort of totally tech, intellectual type person who is going to guide, you know, the company very theoretically. Yep. Yeah, culturally, it kind of made sense. You know, you company very theoretically. Yep. Um, yeah, culturally it kind of made sense. You know, you could speak to the nonprofit side, the very deep in the weeds of the philosophy, but then he was a CEO who worked for Jeff Bezos, you know, like he actually does understand product and revenue and how to grow a company. So, you know, interesting pick obviously didn't last very long, but, uh, I've met him and he's a great guy. I love I love him. He likes to have fun on X, which is what we're all about.

Let's move on to Matt Grimm. I know you're going to have a comment on this, Jordy. He says, does flying your company logo over New Orleans with a banner saying angel investors constitute a public solicitation? Is this the market top? And it's a picture of a plane. Someone bought one of those planes that drags a massive banner with some company. I can't even see what company it is.

But I think it's a hilarious way to get angel investors. And if it works out, man, is it going to be a story for the ages? But what do you think, Jordy? Should more startups be renting planes to help close their seed rounds? I mean, if you the main thing is, if you need to rent a plane to close, you know, a sub $5 million round, you're probably working on the wrong thing. Or you're not, you're not, you're not that guy, pal. I think i think i i like the creativity and i think that planes are generally generally underutilized um ad inventory for startups they're not that expensive and it's a way to to be sort of big and be uh you know get somebody's attention i i always see them around

la flying along the coast with like beer ads i'm I'm like, that could easily be an ad for, you know, um, we should start running ads, you know, big QR code banner out the back. Hey, we know you're at the beach right now, but how would you like to listen to a niche technology show? Oh, you mean the number one live streaming show in tech? The number one live stream in tech. That's ay um uh yeah i mean also as a consumer a little bit of a bear signal if i see an app advertising with angel investors attached i'm like is this app even going to be around in three months they seem desperate it's rough i wouldn't do it i wouldn't install it yeah the main thing is the aesthetics of running an ad for your company

which it was i couldn't see what it was, but it didn't feel like it probably should raise money. And then bolting on the, oh, by the way, it's so funny that it's bolted onto the back. It's like at the last second, they were like, wait, can we use this to raise money too? Let's just tack this onto the back of the flag. What a mess. Well, instead of buying an ad, if you want to attract some angel investors, why don't you get in the watch game? Get something nice on your wrist. When you're out and about, people will stop you.

Hey, I like watches. You like watches. Let's do a deal. And so, OW Roots says, normalize small watches. Interesting post. Obviously, the best place to get yourself a small watch is on bezel. Highly recommend that. I've been looking at some small watches on bezel.

There's a lot of good options. And Antonio chimes in here saying, Longines Grand Classiques I inherited from my grandfather. I always felt it was small, but this morning I'm feeling it. And so there's some fantastic pictures here, Ben, if you tab forward of iconic photos of men wearing small watches. Of course, there's the Cartier Tank worn by Andy Warhol. And there's some other small watches. I think, there's the Cartier Tank worn by Andy Warhol, and there's some other small watches. I think it takes a little bit of style, a little bit of je ne sais quoi to pull off. But if you can do it- The thing is the pure function of having a conversation starter that fits nicely under a dress shirt is, I i mean it's just pure function and class so and we saw this with tom brady where he's going bigger and bolder and it's a you know it's a it's an arms race that

can only end in nuclear war with with the giant flavor flake clock around your chest and maybe you want to go the other direction a little bit smaller a little bit understated but for the real watch person they'll know they'll be able to clock it. Cartier tank. Very nice. I like that. Muhammad Ali wore, you know? Um, and, and, and, and I think that there is a, there is a little bit of a, of a, uh, uh, uh, like a feeling in watch culture of the bigger and heavier the watches, the more valuable it is, but also the more masculine it is. It takes a real man to wear a smaller watch, you know? Yep. Anyway, let's move on. Well said. Let's go to, oh, we should go to Emmett Shear because we just mentioned him. He says, if someone is constantly, is consistently getting good results, even though they're obviously doing it wrong,

it means there's something you're missing about how the world works. I like that. Just a good inspirational quote, you know, to check your priors. If you see someone just winning, winning, winning, even though they're doing something way wrong, this can apply to someone who's just hacking on a project using the wrong programming language, using the wrong tooling, but they're still getting good results, cracked. And it can apply at the highest levels. I think this applies to content that people see as cringe. People see somebody posting cringe content and they think, oh, that's cringe. Why would you ever do that? And if it's getting, you know, real engagement for every person that thinks it's cringe, there might be five people that, that don't enjoy it. So I think,

um, yeah, I think it's a good way to reframe how the world works. I got to go get the door here. Okay. Well, we love word grammar on this show. And we have a good post from word grammar. Word grammar says, if your natural response to O3 is to downsize your team and cut costs rather than work on a 100x more ambitious project, you're NGMI. And I couldn't agree more. The tools are getting better. It means you can do more. It means you can just pull forward your entire roadmap,

build more software, build more products. And that's one of the greatest things about AI. And I think that if you stay small and everyone else is being more aggressive, using more aggressive tools, but writing millions of lines of code, if that's what they need to do much faster than you, you're just gonna get killed on features.

So you gotta compete. And so it's this weird equilibrium where I think the, the end state will not be less work, but more, more product really, which is, which is exciting because we get more good stuff. And I like that. Um, I like this one from Nick Milinovic, one of the friends of the show. He says, you know, the animal spirits are back in fintech when these guys return. Ryan Breslow, founder of Bolt is doing a keynote and Dom from Fast is, what is he doing? Short home loans. Buy your new home now, repay when your old home sells. And so they're back. Both of the legends of the last cycle. A lot of people counted them out, but we love to see an entrepreneur dust themselves off and get back in the game. What you got, Jordy? Yeah. I want to know what... You remember there was that board struggle with Bolt. It was probably

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

building a product to help you buy. I mean, what I actually looked through his website before this, and it's kind of an interesting thing where there's this dynamic. He puts it on the website very plainly that you can go see it, which is if you're walking around your neighborhood or somewhere and you see a house that you like, you want to buy it like good houses go fast. And so if you're sitting on your house and you need to roll that equity into the new home, it can be almost impossible to get a deal done. Right. And so having having a short term loan that's backed against the equity in your old home that allows you to quickly roll into something else, theoretically, if everything goes to plan, would work pretty well. So I think it's an interesting concept and I believe in second chances and I hope both of them figure it out. Yeah. Let's close on Santiago. Good friend of the show. It's the last slide in the deck. He says Friday Energy and posts a video of a weightlifter. because I thought he was going to deadlift it because it's like 300 pounds or something like that.

And I was like, OK, he's he's doing it. He's he's hang cleaning it or power cleaning it from the floor multiple times. It's like one of the most impressive lifts I've ever seen. So congratulations to Santiago. This is brother of the week material, in my opinion. You know, it's going to be a crazy week. So I don't know if we're going to give it away yet. But keep posting stuff like this on X. I don't care if it gets 200 likes 2000 likes 2 million likes. It's just positivity on the timeline. And I'm here for it. An absolute dog. That's a great place to end. Well, thanks for watching everyone. Please go give us five stars on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Leave us a review and put an ad for

your company, a company you work for a company. You just like throw it in the comments. We'll read it live on the show and, uh, yeah, follow us on X. Stay tuned for more. We got plenty more coming this week. Salute. We'll see you tomorrow, brothers. See you tomorrow. Bye.