The Compound and Friends - Zuckerberg vs OpenAI

Episode Date: October 6, 2023

On episode 112 of The Compound and Friends, Michael Batnick and Downtown Josh Brown are joined by Alex Kantrowitz to discuss the big tech landscape, AI competition, augmented reality, Michael Lewis and SBF, and much more! Today’s show is brought to you by Birddogs. Visit: https://birddogs.com/compound or enter promo code COMPOUND for a free white-tech dad hat with every purchase! Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Josh Brown are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Wealthcast Media, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Isn't it so sad? It is. Well, I'm out of the loop. Fill me in. It's like a very long article. And the gist of it is like, what the hell happened to Rudy? I think he's like broke now, they're saying. And the drinking is like out of control.

And they trace it back to he. After 9-11, he was riding high. He started a security company. He was like doing business all over the world. He was America's mayor. And then he bet it all on Florida coming through for him to get the GOP nomination to run for president. Like back in the day. Oh, wait.

He was the frontrunner. 2008. He was? He was the front. It was supposed to be him and Hillary in 2008 and it ended up being Obama and Romney? Yeah. McCain. So he went all in on Florida.

His bet was, if I can win here, that'll be a signal to the rest of the country that I'm a real candidate. And he got killed. Yeah. And like a lot of the people who were quoted in the article

were basically like, that was it. Like he spent a month at Mar-a-Lago like just drinking his sorrows away. And he never was the same after that. I mean, you have to have a serious drinking problem for a newspaper to write about your drinking problem. The whole article is about, like, people are saying, like, he would show up at, like, not just parties, but, like, a 9-11 ceremony. Like, wasted.

Yeah. And I don't know if any of it's true. That's just what the article was saying. Pneumony. Like wasted. Yeah. And I don't know if any of it's true. That's just what the article was saying.

I mean, his decline is definitely one of like the most dramatic, saddest, I think, in American political history. He was so beloved by the whole country. Yeah. Post 9-11. America's mayor. And he just spiraled. You see in the doc, I have this tweet. We're going to play the video.

I f***ing put that in the doc. Don't, don't. You did? You can't take my tweet. Oh, somebody did. All right, whatever. No. It's my tweet.

I put it in there. All right, so Alex, I have a tweet in the doc. That I put, that I put there. I think what happened, what had happened was you put it into the doc and I moved it to where it is. That's why I thought it was mine. That's why quasi I took ownership of it. Well, no, we're going to put it on the screen. No, I know. I don't remember what clip it was.

I have to remind myself. Oh, I'm sorry. Josh, you did put this in the dock. I put this in. No, there's another one. Okay. Play it. Play it.

No. Press pause. Press pause. Press pause. I have an observation. Press pause. Press pause. Press pause. I have an observation. Press pause. See? Michael is now interrupting video clips.

I just want the viewers to comment on that. No, this is important. Okay. Look what he's doing with his hands. Yeah. He's got one of them is doing like the- No, he was doing this. He's doing what we all do with our hands.

He doesn't know what to do. You don't know what to do with your hands. Why are they filming him? That's why the Apple people- You put them in doing this. He's doing what we all do with our hands. He doesn't know what to do. You don't know what to do with your hands. Why are they filming him? That's why the Apple people- You put them in your pockets. Alex, what do the Apple people do when they give presentations? Do they clasp like this? Behind their backs.

No, they put them behind their backs. No, there's like a- But you're supposed to show your hands. Like hiding your hands is a sign of like you don't trust the people ahead of you. Unless it's like, wait, guess what's behind my back. Somebody did a video of all Apple executives on stage doing a presentation and they all do- I don't know. I forget what it is. They all do the same thing with their hands and they're coached

to, obviously, because Jerome Powell, he doesn't have a hand coach. No idea. We gotta give this guy a hand coach. Is there anybody that does... Wait, start it over. I actually want to hear what he says. But look at his hands while you watch. I like the Arthur meme. I'm Jay Powell. I'm the chair of the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve is now

on Instagram and threats. The Fed is America's central bank, working to promote a healthy economy and a strong financial system. That mission starts with you. Me? Literally, you. And throughout the month and beyond, we'll be posting here with information, links to events, and other resources about how Fed decisions affect you, your family, and your community. See, this is good editing. They immediately edited.

They zoomed in to get rid of the weird thumb. But why did it start that way? Why couldn't they have just cut in? Why are they showing us what he's doing with his hands and then cutting them away? Just don't show them ever. Am I crazy? Like a full length. He's almost like an animatronic president at Disney World,

like the Hall of President. Like why are you showing this man standing like full on? The way that that video is shot is ridiculous. Like the first comment in there is, I thought that was AI Jerome Powell. It literally looks like you deepfaked Jerome Powell and you had him there putting this message.

Maybe that's what they did. Whose idea do we think this was? Like literally. It had to have come from somebody very high uh at the fed just saying that like hey the american public might turn on us like we are we might be sparking a recession here let's get out on instagram and get the message i have a friend that's why you do it i have a friend lauren la capra who does like content i feel like for the, but I think it's the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. I don't think she had a hand in this. Maybe she'll reach out and tell us.

Is it a good sign when Central Bank is like going to now start shit posting on Instagram and threads? Not shit posting. I don't know. What do we need this for? It's a great sign. Why?

I don't know. What do you think is the purpose of this? I mean, I think that they're anticipating some bad press ahead. It's a great side. What? Why? I don't know. What do you think is the purpose of this? I mean, I think that they're anticipating some bad press ahead. That's the reason why you go onto social media to try to tell your story

and put your narrative out there. This guy knows. Yeah, because guess who's going to get laid off? People sitting on Instagram. Yeah. We're going to have

AI Jerome Powell saying, I'm sorry for what happened to you. If and when the Fed goes too far with rates and the unemployment rate starts to spike, 100%, it's going to be all Fed hate all the time. No doubt. On the internet.

Ben and I were talking about a survey that Coinbase did, which was nonsense about how many Americans own crypto. But I think the numbers was like one in five or maybe 50% are like completely disillusioned with the economic system in America. And so I think that maybe talking directly to those people isn't the absolute worst idea. Imagine being disillusioned with the economy and thinking crypto is the solution. You want to be disillusioned. Spend a year in crypto. And it's the natural progression, right? You don't believe in the economy.

You believe in the hedge. But the problem is then you get screwed by the hedge and you're totally anarchist at that point. I would argue the hedge is way worse than the thing it's hedging. No doubt. I mean, that's by the way, in Latin America. So I spent a good deal of time in Latin America in 2022 and they love Bitcoin and they love Bitcoin because inflation is so high. A place like Argentina has inflation at 80%. so you see bitcoin stickers all over the place el salvador for instance made it the national currency like the process of dollarization has been so bad and it sounds good in theory that just the problem is in practice you screw yourself even

worse by going into these highly volatile and yeah right scam cryptic latin america had you know a horrific economic well it seems like it's a rolling horrific economic situation for some of those countries. But they had dollar-denominated debt that they just couldn't pay as the dollar – as the value of the dollar rose versus their local currency. It was like adding insult to injury. So I understand – and that's generational. if you grew up in a household where that was destroying the economy of the country you live in, I understand the suspicion

and not wanting the traditional economic system and wanting something outside of that. I don't think most people in the United States could claim the same level of harm that the economy has done here. It's inspired by greed, a lot of the other investing. Like you think about the FTX story

and there's two sides of it, of course, right? There's Sam Bankman-Fried and his completely irresponsible and reckless management of money that people trusted him with. And then there's people who invested in crypto because they wanted a return somewhere

and they thought they could get a 20% return if they're investing in crypto and FTX and it blew up in their face. What about a use case for Latin American countries? Zeke Fox in his book said, was describing the failed experiment of Bitcoin in El Salvador.

What if those people are easily able to just use USDC or some sort of stable coin to hedge against ridiculous inflation, which is an obvious real crisis there? Yeah, I mean, it's a good hedge. It's also like, if you think about El Salvador, 20 to 25% of that country's GDP is on remittances. So people sending money back and forth and you pay a ton of money. Yeah. So how are stable coins not an obvious solution?

I think it is a good solution. That's the thing is that with the crypto shakeout, like we're starting to see, okay, all these scams are getting washed out. People are being more careful about it. Were there real problems that some of this was trying to solve? Yes. And is there a chance that we have a second wave of this that actually solves those problems? It's possible. The problem is that trust has been shattered. So you're the big tech guy.

That's right. I think the biggest big tech story of the year is taking place right now in Las Vegas. I think the thing that they built is more impressive than anything I've seen the Fang companies build. This is my story. In 2023.

No, I really did. First of all, have you gone a day without somebody bringing it up to you or asking if you've seen it or sharing the videos with you? Probably not. It's unbelievable.

The legs that this has. John, can we pop this on? Pop it on. I mean, I think every day, how am I going to get out to Vegas and watch U2 before that residency is up? This is so sick. Look at this shit. First of all, this is one of my favorite songs.

Put the audio on. Oh, we can't. Where the tweets have no names? All right. F*** the audio. Look at this shit. That's sick. Somebody said the only concert venue where the nosebleed seats

are better than the front row. Because you know why? Exactly. Do we have that image? Yeah. Like, you can't see this from the front row. It's true. I mean, that is spectacular.

Oh, my God. So, I just, I feel like this is a bigger technological breakthrough than anything that I've seen from Apple, Microsoft, Meta. I've always said James Dolan is a tech god. I've always consistently said this. So talk about that from a technology standpoint. Why do you think it's so impressive? that are spaced eight inches apart, and there's hundreds of thousands of them, and they are projecting just this incredible range of images that we have never seen on an edifice, on a building.

I don't care about the seven-inch screen on my phone. Like, that's no longer impressive to me because we've already been living with that. Now you're seeing them do this with architecture in a major city. And I think the visual of it is so arresting, so breathtaking, that it's like the image of the year. Like these shots from inside of a U2 show in Las Vegas. Like if you think, like, what is the iconography of the year 2023?

That's a front runner. Maybe like when the year is over, we'll look back and say, that was the most mind blowing thing any of us have seen. So here's my question. Can other bands carry that venue in the same way that you two did?

So they had plenty of time to prepare for it. They are a, you know, they're an impressive band. You know, if your song is low energy and there were a couple in the set and you can watch them on YouTube Desire is one of them it really stands out like and there's nowhere to hide

in that in that amphitheater I think the visuals though will take over in those moments if you do it right who's the Jeb Bush of music? so you don't think you don't think Beyonce you don't think Beyonce

is going to arrive inside that sphere and destroy yeah no it's going to be a once-in-a-lifetime show. Hold on. John, shut this beeping off for me. I have no idea how to do it. Dude, every time. I know.

Just help me once, okay? What do I press? This? Yeah, focus. Hit focus. Focus. Do not disturb. Do not disturb.

But I think you have to do it on your phone, too, since you're linked. Oh, I see. So, Batnick, you're going to vegas in november so my friends dude i'm going to this you too show you guys are both i'm going with uh joe fahmy uh in october this month so where are you gonna sit i don't i don't know where our seats are to be honest with you but what i do know is that dinner beforehand is at chipriani las vegas nice and we're just doing this like dons. This is going to be like one of the best nights of my life.

And my wife hates me. I got to go. So I'm going without her. Yeah, because you're going to be in Vegas, right? Yeah, my friends were asking if we should go Saturday night. I have to go. You should go. It's going to be better than the football game you're going to watch.

That's for sure. How much are the tickets online right now? Are they $1,000? For the sphere? Like Taylor Swift price, right? Let's see. Do you know that this is publicly traded? Yes.

SPHR. The market cap is less than the amount of money they spent to build it. The market cap is $1.5 billion. It costs four, right? Two. Two and a half. Okay. Two and a half.

So you can invest in the Sphere. Like if you really are excited about it, I think it's bundled together with the MSG TV network that shows the Nixon Rangers. Saturday, November 4th. I need three tickets. All right. Josh, would you advise people to invest in this sphere? How much?

Wait, were you about to say something? No. Yeah, you were. You were about to talk shit. I wanted to know how much they were. You know what? I was going to say, we don't have time for you to book travel right now. Is that a fair statement?

Did you get a dollar amount? I guess. Share. $1,500. $2,000. I don't know what section. All right. The cheapest one is $900.

Yeah, that sounds right. Okay. Doable. Yeah, doable. That's T. Swift at Metalhead. That's a lot of money. Should we get the scale one? You know what?

To go see U2, I don't know. I feel like it might be worth it. How much is one ticket? I might have to go alone to this. All right. Where's my music? Yeah, I'm going. I But to go see U2, I don't know. I feel like it might be worth it. How much is one ticket? I might have to go alone to this. All right. Where's my music? Yeah, I'm going.

I have to go. What are we doing? Turn me up. What show is this, John? Compound and Friends, episode 112. Welcome to The Compound and Friends. All opinions expressed by Josh Brown, Michael Batnick, and their castmates are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Redholz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not

be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Redholz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Minds of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Today's episode of the Compound and Friends is brought to you by our friends at Bird Dogs. It is Bird Dog season. You know what? It's always Bird Dog season in the summer, in the fall. I don't know if they have any winter gear, but it's definitely Bird Dog season right now.

If you want to dress as cool and look as good as I do, go to birddogs.com slash compound. You'll also get a free white tech dad hat, which I wear regularly. It breathes. I don't know what material it is, but it's the best. That's birddogs.com slash compound to get your gear. 112. Room 112, where the players dwell.

What? You know what that song is from? No. That's Biggie. Yo, shout out to all the fans, all the followers, all the viewers. We love you guys. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you for all the reviews lately. Sending the show to your friends. And shout out to the haters

too. If you hate me, I'm going to give you so much more to hate. The show is not going away. I'm going to keep bringing on the best guests in the industry. God, you're going to f***ing hate me when this is all over. I swear to God you're going to hate me. We have a really special guest today. Friend of the show.

Fan favorite, if you will. Someone who has done incredible content all year. Speaking of the stories of 2023, my friend, Alex Kantrowitz. Alex, say what's up to the people. What's up to the people? Great to be here. Alex is the founder of Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast about Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, all the most important companies that are changing our lives and changing our world. He also published Always Day One,

which I have in my office right now, How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever, which debuted in 2020. And you are a current CNBC contributor. That's correct. All right. Michael Batnick is here, ladies and gentlemen. Hello, hello.

All right. John is here. Duncan is back. Hello, hello, hello. All right. John is here. Duncan is back. How do you feel back in the saddle? Feels good. Where were you? I was in Germany. What were you doing there?

My wife ran the Berlin Marathon. Channel checks. Oh, that's why. I knew that. I knew that. How did she do? She did well. She broke her previous record.

So, yeah. So, she runs international marathons? She's trying to do the Abbott do the Abbott 6, I think. It's like the six major marathons. So there's like a jet lag component to that if you don't plan it right. Yeah, I was jet lagged watching. Okay. You ever think of training to run with her or no?

I'm just a short distance person. I run five. Yeah, same. Maybe 10K. Maybe 1K. I run a 1K. Nicole is here. Rob is here.

Guys, welcome to the show. So happy to have you, Alex. I think let's start with this metaverse stuff because the metaverse has been really quiet. But what are we saying here about this? Let's tweet up. So it's a video of—I'm sure you saw it. It's a video of Lex Freeman. By the way, before we get to the video,

how did Lex Freeman get famous? All of a sudden, he's got like a million— He's one of the most popular podcasters. He's an awesome interviewer. But other than that, I don't know how he originally broke through. I don't know the answer. I think he went on Joe Rogan, right? Oh, is that it? I think there's a connection.

He's an MIT professor. He leveraged the MIT Association. How did he get to Joe Rogan? It's unclear how much he actually teaches at MIT. I'm sure the haters will let me know. He's been there once? I think it's a kind of a loose or thin association with MIT. He might teach something there.

And he just used that. I mean, you get an email, hey, I'm an MIT professor. Come talk to me about this branch of artificial intelligence. People are like, oh, MIT, you could interview me. I should try that. Yeah, it worked. Hey, how about if I interview you for the next hour as Lex Friedman? Would that be good?

Sounds great. Alex, you wrote a book. He's pretty good at the Lex Friedman. So, all right. So, the video is as such. They have on goggles. What are they wearing, Alex? This is the Quest 3, I'm pretty sure.

The new virtual reality headset from Meta. Basically, they're in birth control. So nine months ago, a year and a half ago, however long ago, there was this idea of the Metaverse. Facebook changed their name to Meta. And there was cartoon characters without legs. And it looked as ridiculous as I'm describing it. Here we are today.

And this shit is real. So they've got headsets on. And they're talking to each other as if the headset doesn't exist. It looks like they're in the same room with each other. Is it an animation? Is it an animation? You go in and you get scanned. So they can basically approximate what you look like. So you can't

do this at home? No. This is done at Meta. I think it's like a six or eight hour process that they do scanning of your body. You just burst the bubble for me. Can you get a colonoscopy at the same time? I mean, it's going- Can you multitask? I mean, yeah, exactly.

So no, it will get quicker. I'm sure of that. But right now it's a long process. So, but when you're looking at the two of them against that black backdrop and they're like, quote unquote, in the metaverse together, what's actually happening is that

they've both had their full facial features and bodies scanned. That's right. And so you're watching an animated approximation of how they're talking. Exactly. Yeah. So why do we need that? Well, okay.

So it looks on its face like a much better version of what they had beforehand, which Michael was talking about, that you were going to be in virtual reality and sitting around with other people. I think what was really interesting about the most recent product announcements that Meta made last week was that they really took a page out of Apple's book. So before Apple came out with the Vision Pro, Meta was all about, you're going to hang out with your friends in virtual reality and play these games and just talk and hang out. It really did not resonate. And in fact, even their own employees were like, no, I don't want any part of that. Apple came out and said, we're going to layer computing on top of the real world. And so you go from virtual reality to augmented reality or mixed reality

as they talk about it. And Meta, I think, saw that vision and pivoted a little bit and the technology has gotten better. And so now their vision much more approximates Apple's vision, except it's more social now. So I think what was special about what you saw with Lex Friedman is not the fact that they can put these virtual reality avatars together in VR. It's what happens next, which is that there's going to come a point where you slip these goggles on, you're looking in the room, but Josh and I can be here in know in person and batnik could be anywhere but with these goggles it will look like that lex approximation is with us here together and that's where things get interesting yes absolutely so we're still it's it reminds me of like when they

make movies and the two actors are not together but but they need them to be together, or they have one actor playing like a twin of himself and they're both on screen at the same time. Correct. So that's like this technology now available to everyone. Now it gets even crazier because imagine we have the three of us and we put in some artificial intelligence avatar that we can talk to for fact checks

or that can, you know, if you're, let's say you're just hanging out with your friends and you want to have another friend in the room, let's say you're lonely with three, you want a fourth, then all of a sudden, AI avatars are going to come in. But you have to be wearing the thing on your face

to see that person. And the form factor is definitely going to get thinner as computing gets better and we start to learn how to make the stuff more efficient. And Apple really aimed for, like, the more chic version of the glasses. They just couldn't do it technologically. That's why the Vision Pro looks exactly like the Quest

and has a battery pack, right? So we're not there technologically. And that's why when you think about this technology, you think about the fact that it's going to take four or five years to get to where it needs to. And by the way, that could easily be 10, 15 years. It's going to take some time. But that being said,

what I saw from Meta last week was the most lucid vision of the metaverse I've seen so far. It's not a bunch of cartoon characters playing around in virtual reality. It's the combination of the virtual and the real and you layer in some AI. And actually that sounds like a vision I can get behind. I would agree.

The Versamilitude versus what they were doing a year ago where your avatar had no legs or whatever. Like this is, it seems like a step change, like fairly rapidly. I mean, to be clear, they were wearing, if I didn't describe it, they were wearing goggles, but they did not see each other's goggles. It's as if they were face-to-face.

It's magic, go on. What I'm going to say is Mark Zuckerberg's superpower is that he sees what other people in the tech world does and he adapts that for his products. And so he's done it to Evan Spiegel. You know, he did it to Kevin Systrom when he brought in Instagram.

And I think he's doing it to Tim Cook right now. All the great artists steal. Exactly. He's stealing. And he's so good at it. And I think without the Vision Pro announcement,

that meta might have been still in the place where they were trying to get us all into virtual reality. So they saw what Apple did and said, as quick as we can. Absolutely. And Apple also created the Vision. It took the Vision that Meta had and brought it to so many more people. To be clear, there's a lot at stake when you're running a race against Apple on the hardware side to become a de facto standard of anything. Because if you lose to them, then the only way your product will be available is through Apple hardware, ergo through Apple's iOS store. And then you're paying a royalty to Apple forever.

If Zuckerberg can get his hardware into enough hands where it becomes its own thing, Apple need not be involved. like into enough hands where it becomes its own thing, Apple need not be involved. That's the, the stakes are forking over a third of your money to Cupertino or not when you're in the hardware race with Apple. Exactly right. When I sat with Zuckerberg for my book, Always Day One,

the last thing I spoke to him was about VR, by the way, 2019. And then you guys wrestled. Yeah, we did. We fought. He won. But I said, you know, don't you want an operating system of your own

and he like picked up his android operating system correct picked up his android very emphatically and was like i don't like being subject i'm just paraphrasing i don't like being subject to other people's rules i have a different interaction layer that i would create if i was doing the phone they did try to create the phone in the past and he said that is what we're trying to push forward to in virtual reality it It wasn't called the metaverse then. And then obviously that becomes the vision. And now you see, by the way, you see Apple tried to kneecap the whole business with this anti-tracking move. So that is the prayer from them. What do you mean? Well, those notifications in your phone that say, ask app not to track,

that was Facebook's whole business was tracking you off the app and then seeing if you converted and helping the advertisers optimize those ads. So when they're not able to do that, that really, I mean, it cost them $10 billion. They said that day, the market got crushed. Exactly. And they've, they've come back from that in a nice way. So Zuckerberg does not want to spend the next 10 years beholden to, um, the, the, the app store. And the only way around that is you have to own the hardware and you have to get that hardware into a lot of hands. And if it can even be the Android of virtual reality,

so not the best, but the cheapest and the one that people use, you know, by and large, then it's just a complete boon for meta. And I think, Josh, you and I were talking about this way back when meta stock was down. And it was like, if you bought it at the trough, we didn't know it was the trough at that point. I think Michael did. I literally did.

He did. So it's a double bet, right? Because either the Metaverse works out and they've solved this, or they give up on the Metaverse, cut the costs. And you win anyway. Exactly. And that's really proven out. So they kind of did all that cost cutting, but they never gave up on Meta. They just stopped talking on the Metaverse.

Correct. They just stopped talking about it. Kept spending. Kept spending. And then now they actually have something to show for that spending. It's not a commercial product yet, but it's the Ray-Bans are on the way. Yes. When are those going up for sale? Well, they already have a version of the Ray-Bans. They are called Ray-Ban Stories, but now they're just going to put much more technology. The one they just showed off this week. When, like, is that Christmas? I don't know the ship date. I mean, these ship dates also tend to push out a bit.

Like Apple with the vision process is coming next, early next year. We'll see what happens. But I think, yeah, from my recollection, it's late this year, early next. So we've got this thing from that Facebook is building. Apple's thing is coming. Ben Thompson said, quote,

there's a hardware breakthrough waiting to happen just like the internet created the conditions for the smartphone breakthrough to happen. That's right. I mean, it's like I'm saying, we're not at the place technologically where you can put these on. I think Josh, you called it birth control. Yeah, don't go by me though.

I have horrible instincts. Everyone's going to be wearing them in two years. I mean, let's see what happens when people are sitting on a plane in first class wearing a Vision Pro and how comfortable they're going to feel. Is that the Apple thing? Oh, I will buy that. I don't know if I'm going to spend $3,000 for the first version. I will probably buy that within the first three iterations. When we spoke about it, that was my first use case.

Imagine being on an airplane and watching a 100-foot movie screen. Right. I'm a big sensory deprivation guy. I have like in my office at home, I have like double blackout shades. Like nothing would make me happier than just leaving the planet via goggles. Can AI and NVIDIA,

not NVIDIA, I'm sorry, AI and all of this stuff like help us get here quicker? I think it's, so it really is a hardware problem and AI can help a little bit with hardware. Uh, but AI, I think mostly will help improve the experience. I think you have the best hardware company in the world and Apple trying to solve the form factor. And once they launched this, they're going to see some enthusiasm. People are, what do you mean?

Solve it aesthetically. So it looks less dorky or solve it so that it's more powerful and weighs less? Not only, I mean, both, right? Those are two sides of the same coin. So it's going to have to get smaller. It's going to have to look better. And you're thinking about like you're bringing on the plane. A lot of people are going to say, do I want to have that in my carry on or not? It's going to compete with a lot of stuff. So if and when, and this is the hardware breakthrough that I think Ben is trying to get at, if and when you can slip a pair of glasses on and it's going to happen and you enter that world, that is going to be so awesome. Can't wait. All right. Take it easy. It's a family show.

Over time, AI will be the biggest technological shift we see in our lifetimes. In 2048, if somewhere in the world, a teenager looks at all we've built with AI and shrugs, we'll know we succeeded. That's Sundar. That's Sundar Pichai from Google. Yeah, I mean, that's what he's been saying. So I remember I was in the crowd in San Francisco in 2016, 2017,

where Sundar was talking about how AI is going to be the next breakthrough for humankind after fire and the wheel. And everyone was like, well, that's a little weird. He skipped over some stuff like vaccines. Exactly. But there were indications at that point. We were at that point really teaching computers how to be able to see with a version of the technology called computer vision and process language with natural language processing. And I think Sundar and everybody in Google saw how to be able to see with a version of the technology called computer vision and process language with natural language processing. And I think Sundar and everybody in Google saw where

this was going to go, where the computers would be able to see our world better, be able to process what we're saying better, be able to speak better. And then you would get to a point where they could be starting to show some of the breakthroughs that we've seen this year or over the past year, starting to show some of the breakthroughs that we've seen this year or over the past year, right? That they can talk to you like a regular person, that they can help you in your everyday efforts. And if you're a technology company, you salivate over that because ultimately, I think it's every technology company's goal to be as close to the human experience or this layer over the human experience as possible. So obviously the most successful tech product of our time is the iPhone, right?

It's basically that. We're seeing building toward that in virtual reality and augmented reality with the Vision Pro and the Quest 3. And then if you have AI, right? AI is not a hardware product. It's more of like this piece of technology that mediates your entire life.

Whether that's help me book this ticket, help me figure out what my boss is trying to get me to do, write my essay in school. And so that is, it's going to get us to this point where we're just closer to technology. And back to the hardware thing, I want to ask you, like, people say like, why would I pay 28 times earnings for Apple? Maybe this is the answer. No one else, maybe three companies on earth, might have the capability on the hardware side to deliver these experiences that you're talking about at scale in an affordable way over the next five years.

This is not going to be a startup raising $500 million and building it. We know it's going to be either Meta and Apple or Apple or both. Google. Maybe Google. But the list ends. And that's the reason why these companies are being valued. Yeah, Berkshire. But that's an answer to that question of why am I paying up for these stocks? I know they can't grow as fast as they used to. Well, if this is where things are going in the next decade, we're not going to be talking about iPhone sales anymore. Well, Josh, let me ask you this. Does the new interest rate-

This is my show. You don't ask me. I ask you. All right, go ahead. All right. I'm going to throw it out anyway. Does the new interest rate environment change that? Because if you had a 28 multiple on Apple and you were expecting this to come, let's say in five years, six years, but we'd think now that rates are going to be higher for longer. Do you have the luxury to wait? So again, not Apple. If it was going to, it would have. Look at how Google is trading right now. Does not give a shit about 5% interest rates at all. does not give a shit about 5% interest rates at all. Yeah.

I think these companies are, they're now big enough that they could weather three years of higher rates. And by the way, rates are higher in comparison to where they were two years ago. They're not like absolutely high. In the 1990s, 5% was the interest rate. I feel like it's AI like the new cloud.

In other words, it was what we were like obsessed about for these companies and now that maybe- Like the next driver, you mean? Like, yeah, maybe it's good timing

because a lot of the cloud stuff, particularly Amazon, is not growing the way- Starting to tail off. I definitely think so. I mean, it has all the same markings and it's going to,

by the way, be a boon to the cloud. Like, when you think about Amazon trying to revive growth in AWS, I mean, this AI thing is a gift,

especially because- Yeah, it's flatlined. So let me ask you this. I think, this AI thing is a gift, especially because- Yeah, it's flatlined. So let me ask you this. I think that one of the biggest risks to the market is that there's a hiccup in the AI story. Mathematically, if the companies that are most involved in AI take a hit, then the whole market's going to take a hit

just because of how big they are in the indices. But I genuinely have the opinion that AI saved the stock market this year. Right. We were in March and April, we were, that was it. We were going into the recession. You said that early and I think I probably laughed, but I think you were right. I really believe this. So they did a CFO survey throughout the course of 2022. And I think like a hundred percent of CFOs were ready for recession. And then we finally had the bank panic. We kept saying the Fed's going to raise rates until something breaks. Okay. They broke something. And then like Nvidia came out in May and completely

changed the conversation for investors. You had like Steve Cohen, like be like, actually, I'm pretty bullish. I'm really excited about this AI stuff. Like all of a sudden, stock market people had a new thing that they could focus on that wasn't inflation or wasn't the Fed's going to break something. I think that that played a really big role in the NASDAQ. Look at this. So we're looking at video data center revenue. Yeah. So this was the thing that changed the course of the market in May. And then it continued throughout the summer.

They did it again. You know, NVIDIA did it again. They were doing $4 billion a quarter in 2022. And they did $11 billion. But here's the question. What if we just got ahead of ourselves and we start to see the usage of large language models drop off? And we start to hear from the data center companies like Oracle and et cetera like, oh, you know what? Actually, we might be overspending on AI relative to the need right now, and we're going to pull back a little bit.

That could absolutely kneecap the S&P 500 if that maybe we're overbuilding for AI relative to the amount of use and demand that actually exists in 2023? Isn't that like a real risk right now? Yes, let me give two parts to this answer. So the first thing that's going to be really interesting that we're going to see over the next couple of months is we were able to see AI. I agree with you. I think AI has saved the market this year. And we were able to see that because there was both a consumer

and an enterprise story, right? ChatGPT, when it came out, was the fastest growing consumer product in history since surpassed by threads. And ChatGPT has, I think, more staying power than threads. And then we saw all the enterprises say, I want to get onto this.

And then all of a sudden, you have investors who've used this. They've talked to ChatGPT, and they see companies want to handle it. And they're like, oh, okay, I'm bought in. Now, you see the real numbers from NVIDIA, so they're going to put money there. I think the challenge right now is going to be that the consumer demand is going to drop off. ChatGPT had declining usage in May, June, and July. Is that true?

Yes. I don't think most people are even aware of that. Correct. And it ticked a little bit back up in August, but we're going to see what's going to happen. And so I think that there's- I have a theory about that. Schools? Yeah.

Yeah. The school is out. There's a lot less need for ChatGPT because that's its primary use case is faking your homework. And to build on that, I think that students use ChatGPT because a generalized bot was actually good for them. Where we're going to move toward is we're going to see more specialized bots come out. We're going to see bots that will help you with homework. We're going to see bots that help you with sport.

Like purpose-built for a use case. There's going to be investment bots. And you're not going to want to go to a general one unless someone builds this general one that blows everything else out of the water. So I think the real test here is going to be when consumer use tails off and enterprises are still building to get it into the right place, is that dip that you're going to talk about going to happen? And I think that's a real possibility. We're so far away from that. Most consumers aren't using chat GPT.

Like most people just don't know about it. I think probably most people listen to the show do, but most of the world has no idea. But isn't there the danger that everyone tries it once or twice, they're somewhat satisfied with it, or it's frustrating and they're like, that doesn't work.

Yes. And then all of a sudden that shows up in chip ordering and we just have a stutter stop. Yes, there is a risk. It happened with the internet. No, they built way too much fiber cable, right? Like, yes, there is a risk. I think the other side of that is-

I don't know, like GPUs, like, is it possible that these massive orders that NVIDIA is talking about have a lot of double ordering because people are worried about getting locked out of the market? If demand tails off and those double orders become canceled orders, what does that do when NVIDIA comes out and says it? What does that do to the market and the enthusiasm that has come from? That's what I think is like the big risk between now and the end of

the year. Right. Well, I mean, supply is the constraint right now, like you mentioned, right? So people just can't get their hands on enough of these H100 chips. At least that's the story that we think is true currently. Oh, I mean, speaking with tech people, it's definitely the case. Like there's like this whole black market and people are like, you know, got some GPUs. Is it still on fire the way it was two months ago? I think it is still on fire. But there is this moment that I think we're all talking about here where there's a lot of testing going on, consumer testing, enterprise testing. And, you know, there's're all talking about here where there's a lot of testing going on, consumer testing, enterprise testing. And there's got to be a point where there's ROI.

Like right now, you're building because you have to build AI. You're trying. You have your engineers on it. You're saying, what can we do with this technology to get us in front of our competitors? If that tails off, then yeah, there's real risk. But I think there's still room for NVIDIA to grow. I don't think that ChatGPT has scratched the surface of what it eventually is going to do for us. And not just ChatGPT, but I think there's still room for NVIDIA to grow. I don't think that ChatGPT has scratched the surface of what it eventually is going to do for us. And not just ChatGPT, but all these things.

So there was, I saw they tweeted the other day, somebody took a picture of a bicycle. Did you see this? And said like, help me, help me fix this. And it was, it's magic. Well, because ChatGPT plus can now ingest photos. It can talk and it has many more capabilities than it did in the past. One of my favorite ones of these is that people are drawing logos and they're feeding it in to ChatGPT or Bing and saying, hey, can you actually make a graphically designed, like a nice looking logo off the sketch? Duncan, how come we're not doing that? And it can do it. I've looked into some options, some similar things.

I've tried some of the video ones and I've gotten some horrifyingly terrible results, but like kind of cool, but also terrifying. You just don't know how to prompt, boy. Yeah, I guess it's just my prompting. So to Josh's point, David Connaught-Sakoya wrote, the important question to be asking is how much of this CapEx build out is linked to true end customer demand

and how much of it is being built in anticipation of future end customer demand? This is the $200 billion question. Right. So we'll say. What's 200 billion? Is that the annual spending on- He said that's the amount of- is being built in anticipation of future and customer demand. This is the $200 billion question. Right. So we'll say. What's 200 billion? Is that the annual spending on- He said that's the amount of ROI that you need

from all this buying. But I found that article to be extremely confused to me. I mean, he's a startup investor. He's talking about following the GPUs, saying like, what are we going to do to make these GPUs worthwhile? And it's like, it's the strangest form of investing to me. Like, I thought it would be

much more product-focused, talking about, like, he's talking about infrastructure. He's like, the whole piece is about how we don't need to follow infrastructure anymore. But the whole piece is still about infrastructure. Follow infrastructure.

Basically saying, like, all this infrastructure is being built and we need to make it useful. Okay. But like, why are you, I mean, I would start by, there's so many possibilities with AI right now. Like to me, it's not a question of how do we make the infrastructure.

It's so much more technical than your average startup founder is thinking. Startup founders are thinking, where's the problem? How can we solve it? What technology can we use to solve it? And this was just like this really convoluted way where he had an insight, right? Which is that there's a lot of infrastructure that's being built. But, well, so, but it's, to me, it's a legitimate

question because you do need an ROI at some point. We learned this, we learned this from meta two years ago. There is a point at which investors say, no more spending. You're not doing, nothing is coming of all this spending. And they revolted. And the stock price went down 70%. That could happen to any of these companies that are throwing all this money at building out, you know, AI capability.

We don't know when. Yeah, but this guy is, he's a private sector investor and he's investing in startups. Like if he was, so he's investing in startups. So it's so interesting. He almost takes this insight that there's so much spending going on in infrastructure, and we need to produce value from that. It's a public market question, and he's writing to private market startups. And that's why it feels so confused to me.

I think it's a very valid point. But at the end, he goes, okay, and now as a community, we need to shift our thinking away from infrastructure and towards end consumer value. And it's like, bro, you're a venture capitalist, your entire job. Like, why are you telling me that we're shifting thinking away from this? Your entire job is funding startups and you're taking your time to write about infrastructure and not about the possibilities that you see startups, you know, being able to tackle. Like it almost brings me back to the Marc Andreessen, like it's time to build. You know, however funny

that thing looks in retrospect, like that's the VC's job. It's setting the vision, talking about what you want to build and then funding the companies that are going to build it. One of the things that we hear a lot now on Wall Street,

people are like, you know how there's like a meme, like somebody starts saying something and then other people start saying it then it just becomes accepted yeah so one of the recurring things that i've been hearing all summer is that all the money is going to be made on in the software layer of ai like in other words way too much focus on nvidia not enough focus on picks and shovels? No, like the actual user interface. Like the money, like in every technology wave, the true value is not captured on the hardware side for long.

Eventually, the value is captured on the software side. When I say something like that to you, is that just like Wall Street nonsense? Or what do you think of that statement? No, that totally jives into a big debate that's going on in the tech world right now where people are saying that some of the programs that are being built with AI are thin wrappers on top of open AI technology.

So basically it's like, all right, well- Piggybacking open AI, the company. You put like UI on top of like the underlying technology and called it a startup. Is that bad? You know, it's interesting because- Because couldn't you say everyone did that with the internet? Exactly.

I mean, that's what happened with cloud computing. Isn't so many of our big software programs actual thin wrappers on top of cloud? It's when you build something, and it goes back to what I was saying before. It's like when you build something that actually resonates with people and they want to use,

that's worth way more than actually building the picks and shovels in the backend. So, you know, I think that that is 100% true. And I think we're in this really interesting moment with AI right now, which is that we've seen a preview of what the great leap forward can look like

with these chatbots. It's not there yet, right? We need better memory in these things. We need them to be more applicable in specific use cases. But everybody who's used ChatGPT now sees the roadmap. The problem is that at the moment, what you're seeing companies do with the current technology

is really evolutionary, not revolutionary. So we have the preview of the revolution. We have the evolution. And we're waiting for that to translate both in the technology side and the product side to the revolution. And we're not there yet, however impressive it is. Do you think Sundar is right that if we succeed by 2048, kids will shrug their shoulders? Like are we going to get to what the ultimate vision for this thing is? Absolutely.

I mean we talk a lot about technology, like the marvel of technology as we build it. And then it just becomes standard. There was a lot of discussion when we went from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray. And then all of a sudden, people are just streaming on Netflix. No one cares about where the packets are held and which server. They're just like, they start talking about... And by the way, when it buffers or it doesn't work out, you go, this thing sucks.

And that's what Sundar is talking about. Can you tell us about Microsoft Copilot? Our friend, Eric Jackson, he tweeted about, I guess, a Jefferies report saying that Microsoft Copilot could do 19 billion in revenue by 2025. What is Copilot? Yeah.

And what's like the significance of it? So Copilot is as you're coding. It's similar to AI-assisted writing. Because they bought GitHub, which is the biggest coding repository in the world. Yeah. So as you're coding, the AI will complete your code for you.

Like it knows where you're trying to get to and it just will do it? It will give you suggestions. You hit tab. How much is that worth? That sounds like it would be worth a lot of money. That's the big question. So if you're an engineer and you're using this,

it can make you more productive. But like, it sounds amazing in theory. This stuff is really hard to put into practice when you're actually doing it. So if you think about, I'm going to use an example that I know well. If you think about AI-assisted writing. Okay, right now there's a labs function in Google Docs

where you can be writing and say, here's a sentence, write for me. And could it bring up the worst writer to become an average writer? Yes. But does it take an average writer and make them a great writer?

No, because it's trained on the- But it doesn't have to. Most writing is mediocre by its nature. It's supposed to be. So then think about coding, right? If it allows the average entry-level coder to become proficient, that's worth something. But when you think about it from a CEO level, right? You have your great coders, you have your mediocre coders, and you say, okay, now use this product and let's see what happens.

Are great coders artists, though, Or are they just like very proficient, but technically and not like creatively? I don't know the answer. I'm asking you. I think there's more art to it than a lot of people recognize. Okay. That's why you're able to see the discrepancy

between what they call like a regular coder and a 10X developer, right? Someone who can develop better. So if you're a startup though, like you probably just want people that can get it done. Correct. More so than you want like the Picasso of coding. Yeah, and so this is the thing.

So I speak to, every CEO likes to tell me about how they're using GitHub Copilot and their engineers are using it. And just on a whim, I was just like, well, is it helping? You know, can you see the concrete results? And I've had one who's said yes. Okay, what do the other ones say?

They say, well, we're not sure yet. And it takes a bit of adjustment. Where would that show up? In the efficiency? Yeah. In the amount that can get done? Exactly. That your team is just building more than it could previously.

So I think people really underestimate the change management involved in deploying this stuff. A lot of it sounds great in theory. The AI will write your paragraph, AI will write your code, and you go and practice and it's a little bit harder. So, you know, I think that this estimate that we're going to do 19 billion in revenue for Microsoft Copilot is pretty bullish.

How do they sell it? Well, they just sell it to developers. It's like the SaaS? It's like an add-on SaaS? You buy a seat. Okay. Yeah. And so, look, I think that there are companies

that are going to be able to figure this out. But there's, again, it's going to, you know, like you said, Josh, you're going to start having people ask what the ROI is on these things, especially in this moment of efficiency across every tech company, across every company in the economy.

And at a certain point, it goes from, we have to be trying this, we need to be using this, to, well, what is this actually done? Are we shipping our product? I'm worried about that moment. Even if it's just a hiccup, it's going to have an impact. Definitely a legitimate worry.

What is this doing to the labor market? Not what will it do for the rest of us, but what is happening inside the AI labor market? Who's working there? You mean you're talking about the developers or the people that are- People that are building. That are building the technology or the people that are using the technology? Building. Oh man. I mean, right now, so AI, even in 2016 was a hot field. You could make a million dollars as a developer working on something like a computer vision inside meta, right? Just having the technology that identifies images.

Like not hot dog. Correct. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. One of my favorite things ever. What? I don't know what you're talking about. Remember when Jin Wang on Silicon Valley invented AI,

but the only thing it was programmed to do was tell you if something was a hot dog or not? I miss that show. So this is called a hot dog or not I miss that show right yeah so he says it's called not hot dog and they don't know why until he shows it to them

and I think he puts a banana on the table and the AI says not hot dog exactly I mean by the way you definitely this is a real application

when I was out in Silicon Valley I was like watching the show I was like okay this is like a little too close to home because I'm hanging out

with these people every day and it's just like watching a documentary. I was like, okay, this is like a little too close to home because I'm hanging out with these people every day. And it's just like watching a documentary of what's going on. But yeah, so engineers are in demand. And I also, I was at a LinkedIn event this week where they're starting, they gave some updates on the data that they have in terms of how prevalent this is in certain fields. And it's actually quite minimal.

Like not many people are- Wait, wait, say this again. LinkedIn is telling you how much hiring is happening for AI? So how many people inside certain industries are listing AI as a skill on their profile? And when you hear that- Everyone is, no? Well, actually, I was quite surprised by what happened. – so technology, information, and media, there's 2.2% on LinkedIn that are AI-skilled. Education, 1.2%. Professional services, 0.9%.

Financial services, 0.9%. Manufacturing, 0.8%. What does it mean to be AI-skilled? So it's – from my understanding is that people list AI as a skill or within their profile as like something they've been using. For the clicks. For the clicks or for the likes. But by the way, that seems like fairly small numbers of people that are actually using AI

and talking about it on their profiles. What if I change the name of my blog to the reformbroker.ai? Do I count as AI skilled? I would say so. You know there's a lot of that shit going on, right? Oh my God, it's like the Long Island blockchain, an IST company, right? When back in the crypto days. Okay. So, so it is interesting because you would think there would be this rush of people to add AI to their profiles.

And I'm using this as like a proxy to see how much AI we're actually seeing become prevalent in the economy. And right now it's, it's extremely small, uh, but it's growing fast. So they say that there's been an increase in financial service, a 30x increase in people putting that skill in their profile in financial service, 29x in retail, 24x in wholesale. Oh, can I tell you one thing? Industry-wise, financial services will be the biggest bullshit artist about AI. Like, wait till you see what's coming.

So hasn't automation and artificial intelligence really already transformed the financial service industry? I'm talking about at the low end, people selling trade bots. And this is the next frontier that the SEC is going to have three years worth of cases is going to be all of the fake AI shit that people are going to start announcing.

That's coming. With any great boom comes an equal or greater grift. That's right. Oh, that's good. Who said that? Is that Peter Parker? Peter Parker, yeah. Okay.

Can you tell us about Mark Zuckerberg trying to destroy Sam Altman? Yes. Okay. This is one of my hot takes that I have. Yeah. I'll be writing about it. Nicole, turn on the TikTok camera. All right, go ahead. So, ChatGPT was the fastest growing consumer product in history. Who makes consumer products?

Mark Zuckerberg. Who doesn't like other consumer products coming up and challenging him? Mark Zuckerberg. And it just so happens that ChatGPT is a chat application in the same way that Zuckerberg's two marquee products really are WhatsApp and Messenger. And you can throw Instagram in there, by the way. Instagram is effectively a messaging app. Zuckerberg can't let this stand, right? So he does two things. What, this aggression? This aggression, right? You can't, I mean, OpenAI is coming for not only his status as the world's best producer of consumer products.

We're also funded better than any competitor he has ever faced. Absolutely. And he's not Evan Spiegel. Correct. Okay. And it has Microsoft's backing. Right. Okay.

So he does two very interesting things to try to kneecap them. One is, so OpenAI has this GPT-4, which is their open, it's their large language model that underlies chat GPT. Zuckerberg releases Lama 2. And Lama 2 is an open source model that does the same thing as GPT-4. And he says anyone can use this for free and customize it. Wait. Was there a Lama 1?

I believe so. Okay. Is Lama 2 the one with Clubber Lang? Which one is that? I don't know. Wait. Are we saying that this is now a rival to ChatGPT? So like we're on ChatGPT 4, we're on Lama 2,

and they're going to just keep updating. Have you ever seen a Lama 2 in the wild? I have. I mean, I've seen developers. No, but are they going to keep iterating along those lines where every year it's like, okay, now we're up to Lama 3? That's the fight? But this isn't the chatbot. This is the technology that other people can build on. So

ChatGPT really was a demo to show how good this GPT technology was. So if you want to build a specialized bot, you can use the underlying technology, pay OpenAI for it and build. Okay, got it. Facebook has, or Meta, whatever they want to call it, they've released the same technology for free. So if you're trying to build and you want to use a large language model to build something, you have a choice.

Pay OpenAI or use Facebook's free version. That's crazy. How could they do that? Like, how could they afford to do that? Yeah, what does Zuckerberg get out of that? Because there's a lot of money for compute. Right. To run this stuff.

So it's the model. I mean, they've spent the money to build the model. But if you want to run a program based off of the model, you basically take Facebook's model and then you pay for the computing costs to train it even further. Like an AWS or whatever? AWS.

So AWS, by the way, huge beneficiary of this because they have this open strategy that basically they say, if you have a model, put it on AWS and we'll let our clients build with it. But Zuckerberg does this why? To go to war with Microsoft? So I think in one way it is to challenge OpenAI and to undercut OpenAI.

And there's another benefit. But to what end? Because you cannot. So that they don't become the Google. Correct. They don't become the de facto standard that everyone starts with. Yeah. The stronger OpenAI is, the weaker Meta is on that front.

And the second thing he does is he, and it's just coming out now, he releases not one chatbot, but a slew of chatbots that were just announced last week. So you can go into WhatsApp or Messenger now and request early access where you can have a My AI or Meta AI bot that you could use for just general chat TPT-like stuff. But then there are different variations of the bot. So there's one that will talk sports with you that like Tom Brady's face is in. There's one that will like take you on like different text-based games that Snoop Dogg is in.

There's a personal trainer that Dwayne Wade is in. And they're like kind of like as you're typing, they respond and like the avatars- These are different chat bots for different use cases. I heard about that. And this is Facebook? Facebook is doing this. You said that Zuck versus Elon was a sideshow.

That's right. Zuck versus Sam is the main event. Sam doesn't appear to be very pugilistic, though. He doesn't seem to want the smoke. Correct. He seems like fairly out of the public eye when possible. And that's why I don't think this is a sideshow. This is not going to be solved by a wrestle match

in the Octagon in Vegas. This is a hardcore- This is a spending war. Giant versus giant business fight. And you're saying Amazon wins no matter what? Oh, yeah. Okay, I like to hear that. You got another hot take here.

Open AI itself is overrated. Tell me more. Okay, so here's my take on why Open AI is overrated. Tell me more. Okay. So here's my take on why OpenAI is overrated. First of all, let me give credit to OpenAI. They sort of pushed this to the forefront for everybody. You had DALI, which was their image generation that came out and it's amazing. ChatGPT, the demo over on top of GPT-4. Hasn't even been a year yet. November of last year, which is insane because it feels like this stuff has been around forever. Okay.

The thing about both of those technologies is that they are now commodified, right? Already? They built this, yes. They built this on top of an innovation that Google had created, the Transformer model. Google had it working so well internally that one of their engineers thought it was sentient in a person before they released it. Yeah. that one of their engineers thought it was sentient in a person before they released it. By the way, that was one of my, I had a conversation with him on Big Technology Podcast. It was one of the more fascinating, interesting conversations I've had. So, but this stuff was commodified.

So, not only does OpenAI have the chat technology, Google has it, Amazon has it, Facebook has it. Like, it's all over the place. And then the image generation. I mean, you already see that something like MidJourney is better than Dolly 3 in many cases. So the main innovation is commodified. That means that they're in the hits business now. If they can't keep churning out hits, then they can't keep hits. Hits would be what?

Applications using the technology. And research that advances the status quo ahead of the others before they can catch up. Okay. The other thing I'll say is that the leadership, so the main person, the chief scientist there, Ilya Sutskever, was- At OpenAI. Correct. At OpenAI, was recruited by Elon Musk and not Sam Altman. And now Musk and Altman are at odds. You also have the fact that some of the key early OpenAI people have moved and started their own company called Anthropic, which last week announced a fundraise from Amazon up to $4 billion. That was a no-brainer.

They were probably sitting there like, we could set a company up and within a month get a gigantic check from anyone that wants to do it. And now Google is apparently ready to come in for two more billion dollars. Google had already invested. Into Anthropic. Anthropic. So they're getting, and they're more neutral and open AI is tied to Microsoft. That's going to limit its ability to really branch out. The best place to be in this world is to be neutral and Anthropic. Well, maybe the best place to be is neutral, but a close second is to have Microsoft with an unlimited checkbook.

So my point is that that could actually end up hampering them because Microsoft is going to want open AI in Azure. So what happens to people that are used to building with AWS? All of a sudden, they're working with Anthropic Technology and they're working with Mark Zuckerberg. So that's like competing standards. The world has experienced that. We had, I mean, we had the windows hegemony and then Apple came along and, you know, rendered that useless. We saw it with search. Who's going to be the loser here? Who? Well, I'm like, who's going to get left behind? Yeah. The bears. It's good. It's good. It is. I think Josh is right. Like it is going to be a rising ship lifting all boats in this world.

Google has, there's a potential that Google has left behind. It might change the way we search and it might, you know, push people off of Google Cloud platform. For instance, I had a story last week about how Google's technology broke for a certain instance of Anthropic Tech. And they sent their engineers working seven-day weeks for about a month trying to fix this cluster. I mean, that's really bad. Doesn't happen at Google. And then they went with Amazon as a result of that?

It's not a result. It was already in the works, but it's all just like it can't feel good to be an engineer who you're like working, you know, Saturdays and Sundays, and you see them sign up to a $4 billion deal with Amazon. So you think the days of open AI being the center of this conversation

are going to wane? Spot on. So I think there's obviously so much excitement, rightfully so. I can't wait to see what the future holds for this technology. But speaking of getting left behind, I want to talk about something that Mark Benioff said,

because there is a potential downside to this. San Francisco is now the number one AI city in the world. This is from George Perleg's article, by the way. With eight of the top 20 companies based in San Francisco, AI companies are seeking up to 1 million square feet of office space in the city. According to JLL, San Francisco's GDP growth and especially tech growth has been spectacular. Okay. All right. So then George said, the AI boom is real and some people are moving back to San Francisco. I also have no reason to doubt the estimate of AI companies seeking up to 1 million square feet of office space. The problem is what happens in the rest of the city. About 30 million of office space in San Francisco is currently vacant. That's 30 times what the AI boom requires presently. presently. So that story is going to play out, not just in San Francisco, but is this going to further bifurcate the economy? What if the economy goes into recession and there's an AI boom alongside of it? Well, that's a great question. I think that the AI will be more distributed

than that because it's not just a pure technology story. You're starting to see it end up in places like the legal field, the medical field. It's obviously in media already and it will end up in financial services. And so if AI does really well, there's going to be value that's created across industries. So I'm less worried. I am worried about San Francisco, although I was just there and it was quite nice,

but I'm really less worried about this. If it works, I think it will be widespread. I'm not too worried about that. The iPhone was released into – basically into the teeth of the great financial crisis. Correct. Like this stuff does happen regardless of what's going on in the overall economy. So what's – if Amazon is investing whatever it is, 1..25 billion could grow to $4 billion over time. What sort of valuation is Anthropic already getting? I think they're in the $40 billion range.

And what do they have? I mean they have – so they built similar stuff compared to OpenAI. They have this model called Claude, which is also a chatbot. C-L-A-U-D. Yeah. It can do some interesting things from what I understand. It can, you can ingest more text.

So you can like basically upload. The E is for savings. There's four E's. The last E is for, okay. You can upload some more data into it. So it can like basically read a book and spit out things. I mean, OpenAI will be able to do that. This is the arms race.

Like all of these different standards, they're all going to fight to become the preeminent because all the money is made. These are companies that are accustomed to monopoly markets. So we spoke about like, are we overbuilding for the GPUs? I mean, the market cap of some of these companies that are heavily reliant on it, it's hilarious.

It's crazy. It's totally crazy. I mean, OpenAI is trying to raise, the rumor is they're trying to raise at 90 on $1 billion in revenue. I mean, come on. Are they going to get it? Of course they'll get it. You just go to Saudi Arabia.

Why is it so hard for people to understand? All right, so this is hilarious. What a twist of fate this is. Anthropic, this is a headline from Fintech Frank and everyone else. Anthropic's new raise can mean full payout for FTX creditors. What the f**k does that mean? They had a small investment in Anthropic that's now worth so much. Can you imagine their stake

is enough to plug the hole? Seriously? They were the lead on Series B for Anthropic, which means that they're- I've always said Sam Beckman-Fried is a fantastic investor.

Hold on. So accidentally, accidentally, all the money they sprinkled around for all the nonsense, real estate and pet projects,

they happen to have put some money into a really good thing or on paper. So this is going to plug Alameda's hole. Unbelievable. The weird connection is that- Get him out of jail right now. I've heard enough.

Right. I've heard enough. Free Sam. Michael Lewis, hold my beer. Let's get this guy a Nobel Prize. Oh man, how can I get some money going? Go ahead. The weird connection is that,

and I can't get too deep into this because I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but Sam Bankman Freed is what's called an effective altruist, which is basically like this idea of like, make a ton of money in business and then use it to improve the world. And the people who are basically running

all throughout Anthropic are also effective altruists. So the effective altruist movement in some roundabout way saved FTX. Let's do SBF. So the trial started this week. I think they did jury selection. Doesn't look like things are going well for old Sam. He's got nine women, three men on the jury. I read somewhere. Okay.'s not great for him so but you think that women are more likely to convict him uh i think he's not in any way shape or form likable uh to women in the way that i could picture if they had like a bunch of not nerds but like a bunch of like dudes they might just be like oh the video game guy i'll? Leave him alone. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. I don't know. I could be wrong. I often am. Michael Lewis is all of a sudden worse than Sam Bankman Freed. Is that what's going on this week? I'm not on Twitter. Could you explain this to me?

Josh is somehow not on Twitter, but he's aware of all the takes on Twitter. Well, because every article— Very, very suspicious. Josh, what is your burner handle? No, every article is about Michael Lewis this week. It's way overdone. It's not fair. No, and something is a really big deal on Twitter.

It leaks into articles because everyone on Twitter is a journalist. But just to clarify this, it's not fair. I agree that the clips that came out of 60 Minutes looked as bad as everybody is saying He soft pedals the story. It's not good. A potential defense of Michael Lewis, not that he needs it, is that he could have spoken to 60 Minutes for 10 hours.

But the part that's not fair is that people are just piling onto oblivion, that this guy's always been a fraud. He's always full of shit. A fraud? Like Michael Lewis. That's what people call Michael Lewis. He's a fraud because they think that he got paid by FTX to write this Lewis. That's what people call Michael Lewis. He's a fraud because

they think that he got paid by FTX to write this book. That's part of it. All of that to me is way over the top. I think Matt Levine, as he always does, has the right take on this. Matt said, I am about halfway through going infinite. Michael Lewis's book about SBF and I'm very much enjoying it. Many of the reviews that I have read of the book complained that Lewis does not sufficiently explain that Bankman FreFried is guilty and bad, actually. But that is not the book that he wanted to write or the one that I want to read. He wanted to understand and explain

Bankman-Fried's psychology and tell a good story. If you want to read A Moral Condemnation of Crypto Threat, you can get that anywhere. You go to Michael Lewis for character and story. I, so I sort of get that. I would just say Michael Lewis writes novelizations of real life people. He has a plot and an archetype in advance before he starts writing. He's looking for outsiders, loners, people who are doing something really different,

people that are quirky. And then, yes, he lionizes, like, these people because that's the device. That's how he tells these stories. He's not an investigative journalist. Does somebody think that he is? Well, that's not it. I think some of the quotes that he literally said

out of his mouth were so far off the mark. He said it's not a Ponzi scheme. So factually wrong. And any perceived offense of this monster, it's bad. It's just so clear that he adores Sam. Yeah. So I got that. I got that from the clips.

I watched it on 60 Minutes. I was like, holy shit, this is like Stockholm Syndrome. You said the world has a Sam Bankman-Fried sized hole in it. That's crazy. Really rough. Really rough. But here's the thing. Does he have to write chapter one,

Sam Beckman Freed is a scumbag. Is that the only way that he can appease? My problem with the piling on is, is it, and I know it's

my mentality, it's the internet, I know how Twitter works. Can we not, can we find value in somebody's work and also disagree with one of their takes

without absolutely, he's corrupt, without burying their entire existence like okay what he did i don't agree with what he did so does it make everything that he's ever done that much worse is he now always a fraud and an idiot actually i hated all his books and the stupid movies we can't disagree with what somebody did money ball was a fraud i mean look there's some interesting context, which is that the blindside book that he wrote, you now have Michael Orr in a very big dispute

with the family that raised him. Right, so that's ugly. And that was almost a precursor. And the fact that, I mean, I agree with you, Michael. I think the piling on has been overdone on Michael Lewis. I think that just looking at it from outside of that, it's a huge missed opportunity. He met him a hundred times. He was there through the whole moment. I think it could have been done

without saying Sam Bankman Freed is a scumbag on chapter one. I think his opportunity was, he understands people. He understands systems. And his opportunity was, I just witnessed one of the most egregious financial crimes of our lifetimes. And I'm going to take you inside the psyche of this person. How it was even possible. We love a hero story. I think we love even more getting inside the head of someone who's truly not depraved but reckless to the point of being criminal. depraved, but like, you know, reckless to the point of being criminal.

So I don't want to say too, I don't want to say too much on the Michael Lewis side because Barry Redholz, my partner, Michael's partner actually spent an hour and a half interviewing him, I think yesterday, today? Yesterday. Yesterday. And that's going to come out the same day that this comes out, I think, Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg. And we'll know a lot more from Michael's side because this interview took place after the Twitter pile-on.

Right. So maybe he'll react to it. I don't know. I haven't spoken about it. Barry got to ask him about that. Here's an interesting take, which is obviously factual, from Dan Premick at Axios.

He said, Michael Lewis got incredibly lucky on timing if he'd begun a year earlier. Oh, yeah. He might have come out with a hagiography that looks terrible in retrospect and said he got a front-row seat to the financial front of the century.

That's a great point. This would have been the most freezing cold book of all time. Like, imagine he put this book out last November. Oh, it would have been a disaster. I mean, if you think it's bad now, at least he wrote about the crime. I mean, if he would have gone out any earlier, it really would have been a disaster.

My understanding was the book was, like, on its way to the pot. Like, when you're following someone around and writing about them, you have to end it somewhere. Right. And then this whole thing came apart last October and November and it saved his ass. It gave him a chance to write like what happened after. He might not have had that chance. So I also have a very soft spot for Michael Lewis.

He wrote a book that called Home Game, An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood that— I remember you talking about that. We read this I think when Kobe was born. We just read it to each other just for entertainment because it was a hilarious book. So Michael Lewis wrote this book. To be clear, you and Robin read it to each other, not you and I.

I'm sorry. No, the way you made it sound. My wife and I. And so one of his kids, his name was Quinn, if we had a daughter, we would have named our kid that. And she died in a horrific car crash like two years ago. While he was writing the book. So how could you not, as a human being, just take it a little bit easy? We could disagree with what he said, with the way that he said it.

It doesn't look good. But for goodness sakes, just take it easy. There's two categories. It seems to me there's two categories of criticism about him. One is that he was just captured by this kid, which seems true. And like he's just credulous. And he was in the process of writing, this is the next Steve Jobs. And that's legitimate criticism. The second criticism is that there's some kind of like payment somewhere. Come on. I mean, maybe. I wouldn't know. that there's some kind of like payment somewhere.

Come on. I mean, maybe I wouldn't know, but like that's a really big accusation. Like isn't the payment enough that if Michael Lewis writes a book with this much access to SBF, it's going to make a lot of money either way? Michael Lewis is a wealthy man. Yeah, he's going to make a lot of money.

So if you're one of these people that thinks that like there's something criminal about writing a book about someone, I don't know. Yeah, it's almost like – Then can anyone write a book anymore? Sometimes the criticism goes so overboard that it minimizes the actual legit criticism. And I think that like what would have been great was a conversation about the book itself. Yeah. And the fact that it's spiraled into these conspiracy theories and talking about how he's been paid off or a fraud is that's all right let me ask you this let me ask you this

question they could have changed the title going infinite like implies that this is still a thing that's happening like what if he changed the title to like the crime of the century crime of the century you would have had to change the book. So another thing that happened- Well, wait a minute though. People would be less mad because don't judge a book by its cover. LOL, everyone does. Yeah. If right on the cover, Michael Lewis is like,

this kid committed the crime. I'm calling the kid, he's 30 years old. If right on the cover, he's like, this is a criminal mastermind. He literally stole customer deposits and gambled with it at his hedge fund.

And that's what this book is about with a whole lot of buildup where I'm giving them noogies and we're watching the sunset together. But people would have been more forgiving if the framing and literally the cover of the book were more accusatory. I feel like he would have gotten away with it. The problem for Lewis is you just have to do one, right? It could be the cover.

It could be the narrative. It could be the interview. And unfortunately for him, or I mean, he made his own bed, but the cover, the narrative, and the interview all lined up as I adore Sam. It's not good. I just like, it was interesting

watching him talk about Sam because I just wanted to hang out with Michael Lewis. I was like, this guy seems like a good dude. Like I would like to spend time with him. Clearly he really likes the people that he likes. The problem is that it was just not the right person. Just picked the wrong person. So getting back to the story, which is

Sam, this was in the journal today. So the trial starts. Prosecutors say Bankman freed stole fronts from FTX customers in part by secretly ordering the programming of special features that gave Alameda, his crypto trading firm, the ability to treat FTX as a giant slush fund. Court filings have revealed a line buried deep in FTX's code

that allowed Alameda to have a negative balance of as much as $65 billion. So this was uncovered through, they bought a company called LedgerX. The people at LedgerX saw the line of the code and were like, what in the f*** is this? They reported it, and then, quote from the journal, the employees who made the discovery reported it to the boss of their division, who discussed it with one of FTX's founders, Sam

Beckman-Fried's lieutenants, some of the people said, and of course they were all fired. Fired for bringing it up. This is why he's probably going to prison. It's because his whole thing is like, oh my God, I just realized that there was 8 billion gone. Don't bullshit a bullshit. Stop.

How do you guys, do you guys think, okay, the fact that he was able to take so many people, Michael Lewis, Tom Brady, the list goes on. Was it just money? Yeah. Or was it personal? Okay, yeah. No, it's not.

His personality is horrible. It's terrible. No, it's just. His personality is horrible. It's terrible. No, it's just money. It's social proof. It's money and social proof. He must be good. Look at who he's surrounded with. By the way,

could he have pulled this off absent the pandemic? Or absence. Where nobody sees each other and everything is text messages and phone calls. And absent a crypto bull market. Well, obviously you need that.

That's the key ingredient for all this shit. Like Tom Brady got like, what, $40 million for 20 minutes of work every year. I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but like, it is amazing how people, there should be a gut check for people where, you know, it doesn't fully seem right here.

What else is in FTX's portfolio? What if they've got the greatest venture fund of all time? I wouldn't be so, given the anthropic news at this point, I'm just like, okay, everybody's getting paid. I mean, that's kind of like the venture model is just buy everything

and something's going to 10x. Yeah, well, there you go. Did you see the thing with his dad where his dad's asking for more money from his family? Oh, it's disgusting.

It's kind of hilarious. It's worse than the guy. He literally says putting Barbara, which was his mom, on this email. I'm telling your mom that you're not paying us enough.

And by the way, they taught ethics at Stanford. I mean, that's another one. That's just puzzling to me. Well, if you listen to their – so there was a great New Yorker magazine piece. And the perspective from the parents is that this whole thing is like there's an agenda behind it. And I get it. It's his parents. behind it. And I get it. It's his parents. Like nobody wants to see their kid go to jail and nobody wants to admit that they raised somebody that's capable of theft on this scale. But

they're not just like innocent bystanders. They're like very involved in the charitable side, the philanthropy, they're in emails, they have positions. Like it's, they're so deep that like nothing they say has any credibility. Absolutely. So, all right. It's very ugly. You know what we've got in a few weeks? We've got earnings coming up.

You excited? I'm always excited for earnings. What's the biggest earning story of the big tech companies that you follow? What's the most consequential? I mean, I always love following the meta earnings. I want to see how the ad market is doing. I mean, we'll start to see a little bit more about their Reality Labs movement. So I feel like they are just so consequential

for so many industries that, so many different big companies. So I always look for them. What's your read on Apple's, the 15 launch, how it's gone so far? It's going amazing for them. It's going amazing. Did you get one?

I have one. I was on the 10. I had waited for the US far. It's going amazing for them. It's going amazing. Did you get one? I have one. I was on the 10. I had waited for the USB-C. Yeah, really way too long. On the 10, does that have an antenna? It is. Okay, mine had a crack screen and a bright line. Does that have a kickstand?

Yes, it has a kickstand. Wait, do you have the 15? I think I have a 13 Pro Max. I thought you were getting the new one. I will. Is yours heating up? It is. But it's not to the point where people have- No, that's I thought you were getting the new one. I will. Is yours heating up? It is. But it's not to the point where people have—

No, that's actually good. You get two of them. I mean, it's only first-degree burns. And then you use it as a panini press. Exactly. Yeah, no, that's actually not the worst thing. Alex, how do you like podcasting? I love podcasting.

You and Ron John are great together. Thank you so much. Yeah, it's always fun. Can you say more about your show? For the fans of our show that are enjoying this episode, they should go listen to you immediately. Tell us about your show and what you do on there. Thank you.

Yeah, so my show is called Big Technology Podcast. I started it in 2020, mid-pandemic. Like the rest of us. Like the rest of everybody, yeah. And I just thought I quit my job at BuzzFeed. I was a journalist there. And I thought I need an excuse to talk to interesting people once a week. So I'm going to set up a podcast. Everybody likes to be on podcasts. That's right. I mean, and it's worked

out. We had recently had Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb on, Will Cathcart, the CEO, the head of WhatsApp has come on, Jan LeCun, the chief scientist at AI. You will only speak to C-level, I'm told now. You get huge guests. At a certain point, yeah, you don't want to end up. You want to talk to people making the decisions who can actually speak to things. Why are you so good at getting guests? Like getting very high – like Brian Chesky is not doing podcasts in general. But he did yours, and I'm going to listen to it this weekend. But why – what's your – like what's your Lex Friedman superpower? I think it began because I was a journalist speaking to people inside these tech companies all the time.

So I didn't just start up and say, hey, please speak to me. Like I had some context with a lot of these places. And then people listen and they know that these conversations, they're not softballs, but they're also not like gotchas. I really want to learn when I'm on the phone

or I'm on the line with somebody. And so I'm going to bring tough questions and then let them explain themselves. And if it necessitates a follow-up, that's coming. You have Lizzie Iaccarino next week?

So I have, I probably shouldn't say this, but screw it. I've been talking to Twitter about possibly having her on. Oh, wow. And we were talking like ahead of the Code Conference.

Yeah, that's probably not happening now. Yeah, so. I'm going to guess she's 90 days away from her next interview. Most likely. Well, she just gave one a few days afterwards, but they probably cleared the schedule.

I was like, is Elon going to fire her? That's not her strong suit. The real question is whether she's going to change the advertising equation for them and bring all the advertisers back. And I just read a report that August advertising for Twitter was down 60% year over year and down more than 55% every month, year over year. So that's, that's really her job. She's coming from the advertising side. If she can restore that ad money, it doesn't matter. She just got there sort of. Isn't that backwards?

Doesn't, doesn't, don't they have to restore the, don't they have to stanch the outflow of users before they can fix the advertising product, or do you have to do both at once? I just looked at some new data about the difference between Twitter and threads. Yeah. And people were like, threads has killed Twitter. Nobody says that. Nobody's seriously saying that. Not killed, but challenged. Okay. I doubt it. Let me just give the data. We can talk about it afterwards.

It hasn't changed usage of Twitter at all since Threads has come out. And that's across many months. Usage of that platform is stable. Now, a lot of the power users are gone. Maybe the cult of Elon has come on and maybe the bots. Who knows? But usage seems to be stable. Wait, the power users of Twitter are gone?

Many of them have left. You talking about me? Yeah, definitely. But you were out before Elon. I left pre-Elon. Elon's not my issue. Yeah. I just hate people.

I also think that it's terrific that the news industry has disengaged from Twitter. I think it was driving lots of ridiculous stories. Dude, it was unhealthy. Embarrassing for journalists. And it's nice to see that most of them are either gone or have minimized their, their time on that platform. Oh, you interviewed Taylor Lawrence. Is she on Twitter anymore? She's on Twitter. She was just on the show on Twitter. She's extremely online, which is the name of her book. I met Taylor this summer. I really liked, I, I don't, I know that there's a lot of controversies that have to do with her. She's provocative, but I'm not on like

TikTok and I don't give a shit about any of that I met her in person I really liked her yeah so she she texted me ahead of the book launch and was like you know can I come on and I was like

of course you can come on and we're gonna talk about all the tough stuff we're gonna talk about some of your big controversies you know we're gonna talk about the book we're gonna ask

read the book ask questions about it Washington Post okay and I had a couple people who like replied like I'll never listen to the podcast anymore

but honestly like if I was gonna run a podcast that shied away. We get that when you come on, but we don't care. I appreciate your courage. If I was going to run a podcast that wasn't going to have, you know, tough interviews with people from all walks of life and all perspectives, then why am I even doing it? So I'm happy that I had her on. Okay. Okay, no, I think that you should,

like within reason, when someone is controversial, but not like for a reason that like crosses over the line to bad taste, but just somebody that consistently says things that are provocative, it's not a reason not to hear their side of the story. Yeah, and if anything, going on a podcast is a great format

to unpack it with them. Way better than a tweet. A hundred percent. Right, because you can really get into that stuff. Yeah. All right. So you have great guests. You're great at getting great guests.

Congratulations on that. And it's called the Big Technology Podcast. Yeah. And then we do a news breakdown every Friday with myself and Ron John Roy, who's an analyst. He writes the margins newsletter on Substack. And that's our chance to be like, you know, I'll do like the the big like what's going on with Airbnb with Brian Chesky and then with Ron John on Fridays we just say what the heck happened this week in the tech world

like a recap you know why that's so valuable it's like animal spirits for tech there's so much happening every week and a regular person can't keep up with it at all and you guys just do it for them and you spoke to a former FTC guy recently about Amazon he came on with us about the Amazon lawsuit from the FTC and it's just like the headline having you spoke to a former FTC guy recently. Oh yeah, he came on with us about the Amazon lawsuit from the FTC.

And it's just like the headline, having been someone writing stories for news outlets, headlines, stories, they're good, they're necessary. They just don't, they never do justice to the story. And having been in that seat and now doing the podcast and doing the newsletter, I'm able to look at the headlines of the week and be like, well, this is what they said.

Here's what's probably going on behind the scenes. Here's what's coming up next. Like maybe five or six weeks ago, we looked at the fact that Walter Isaacson had that book coming out about Elon and Michael Lewis had the book coming on about SBF. And we're like, well, we're starting to get a sense as to what they're talking. What are the headlines going to be when these books come out? Right. And you could almost predict. Yeah, we headlines going to be when these books come out? Right. And you could almost predict it.

We basically said this is reputation. Oh, that's awesome. All right. So everybody make sure you check out Alex's show. And what's the sub stack called? It's called Big Technology. And I bought the domain name since the last time we talked. So it's just bigtechnology.com. Look at you.

You have fun on the show today? Always have fun. It's great seeing you guys. We love having you here. There we go. Look at you. You have fun on the show today? Always have fun. It's great seeing you guys. We love having you here. There's so much that we, so we trade these stocks and we invest our clients' money in them, but there's like a game behind the game,

behind the game, and you're our guy for the game behind the game. So thank you so much for enlightening us. We appreciate it. Thanks so much. You ready to do favorites? Yes. Okay.

You want to go first? Yes, I will. Go first. Let's go. My favorite is a TikTok account that I just came across. It's called Body by Mark. It's this guy in New York City that walks up to people with the camera on who are in great shape. Okay.

And he goes- Yeah, that happened to me this morning. You were ripped. Yeah. I met Mark in Grand Central Terminal. It was awkward. I told him how I did it. What is your secret, Josh?

Chinese food. Okay, that's great. All right, go ahead. So he does this and he's like, Hey, what's your routine? And you have all these people with like different body types talk about the workout routines they're doing. And I think that it's so interesting because, you know, there are all these folks who say, I have a monopoly on truth. You have to do this. You have to eat that. You have to, you know, run this amount, lift this amount. And you can actually see by watching these videos the different types of exercises

that correspond to the different types of body types. Oh, that's interesting. So it's like one of the things that I've learned from it already is that I feel like I've been going about this completely wrong. I like to go to the gym, lift some weights. Not to brag.

Michael too. We're both from Long Island. This just comes with the territory for all of us. Weightlifting is a big thing. Exactly. Calisthenics. Push-ups, pull-ups, and dips, which you always hear about. But the guys who say calisthenics on these videos,

I mean, they're in the best shape of anybody. More so than the bodybuilders. Definitely. Or the weightlifters. Exactly. The secret to my physique is a standing desk. That's it. Standing desk help.

That's all I do. Yeah, exactly. So I just was like, I don't know. I thought that if anybody's- Is it funny? Yeah, it's great. Yeah.

All right, this is on TikTok? It's TikTok body by Mark. We're going to check that out. Yeah. Michael, what do you got for us today? All right, just to reiterate, Michael Lewis, if you're a young parent

or a new parent- Are you serious? I'm dead serious. Are you really going to do this? I'm dead serious. Home guide. I to do this now? I'm dead serious. Home Guide. I'm sorry, Home Game. Home Game, An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood.

It is such an incredible book. But he's a fraud. Cannot recommend it highly enough. John, can we throw up? He's a damn villain. He was paid by those kids to write that book. They did pay him. John, I want you to throw up.

So I saw this tweet this week. There's an account, culture underscore crit. It's for culture critic. And what we're looking at, here's the tweet. Imagine how morally, all right, I don't want to say that. New York City's Penn Station was torn down in 1963 to build Madison Square Garden and the station was forced underground. One entered the city like a god, one scuffles in now like a rat. Yeah, that's true. And he's showing a reminder of how- That's the old Penn Station. Did you know that?

Can I please add some context to this though? Sure. Okay. This is maybe what it looked like in the 1940s. It's a Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Just look at this. Hold on. That's not what it looked like in the 1960s

when they tore it down. It was thoroughly destroyed. It was run down, decrepit. It was not in good condition. Look how beautiful. But understand, you're showing me World War II era photos of this structure. Yes, correct. Okay.

That is not the— Oh, that's the demolition. There's Moynihan right next to it. That is not the condition that it was in when they took it down. Carmilla would have never come to play in that. No, absolutely not. I listened to— Are we done with this?

Yes, bud. I listen to Warren Littlefield on The Town. Do you know who he is? You know who he is, right? I don't know Warren Littlefield. I listen to The Town. The Town is great. One of my favorites.

Great podcast. It's a joint production between Puck and The Ringer. Warren Littlefield basically was the guy that invented must-see TV. In the 1980s and 90s, he was programming NBC. And he's still in the game. Like he produces shows now for all the big streamers. But him talking about the shows that we grew up watching and like the true story behind like why was this show on Tuesday night but this other show was on Thursday night. He gets into all that stuff.

And what's so fascinating is how monoculture the United States used to be. And one of the examples is Bill Cosby's show in the late 80s or early 90s had a 52 share, which means 52% of all the televisions that were on in America that night were tuned to the Cosby show. This is like tens of millions of people, not nothing like this. Nothing even gets close to this. I don't care what show you're talking about on HBO or whatever. And the power that you had over advertising as a result of that sounds to me exactly like the power that, um that Meta and Google have today. He's telling stories about like Roseanne was on its last legs on a rival network, on ABC, and they wanted to knock it out. So they decided to put Frasier up against it. And then ABC said, oh yeah. And they put home

improvement against Frasier. Like these were some of the wars that were fought. And the reason why Thursday night became so important, if you were opening a movie that weekend, you had to blanket coverage Thursday night TV with ads to get people out. Also car dealerships. When do you go to a car dealership? Saturday or Sunday. So that's why Thursday night became so important and became must-see TV. and became Must See TV. The advertisers wanted your attention on the weekend, and they wanted you to start planning it on Friday. So you had to be on Thursday night. So I thought that was a really interesting conversation, and there were a lot of echoes about what goes on today with just the quest for attention

and how fragmented everything is. So everyone check out the podcast called The Town and look for the Warren Littlefield episode. All right, that does it for us. I want to point out this is the brand new t-shirt in the Compound store. It's idonshop.com. Literally you are the first people to see this.

If you want to be the first kid on your block to own the official back in black 60-40 t-shirt, where do they go, Michael? Idonshop.com. Alright. Do we have any other announcements? Anything else we need to do? do they go, Michael? idontshop.com. Do we have any other announcements? Anything else we need to do? Just a reminder, Charlotte, we're coming. Yeah, I actually think we have too many people now coming

to the live event. Is that right? You're nodding. It's a lot. It's a lot already. So we should stop talking about it? I mean, don't get your hopes up is what I would say. Don't get your hopes up. What do you mean? We're sold out? Yeah, we're going to sell it out. We'll probably sell out pretty quickly. We didn't even put the link up yet to do it,

but we got so many inbound emails that it looks like we're going to sell it out. So these are good problems. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening. Have a great week. We'll talk to you soon. All right, was that good? Amazing. We're going to do it one more time. There's just a couple of things I want you to you soon. you