DOGE Update, Jelly Jelly Coin, Apple AR, The End of Advertising, Mary Meeker

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We have some breaking news. It's Monday. It's still early. The market isn't even closed. But the game is over. For Brother of the Week, we're giving it to Luke Ferretor. Luke's been on the show before. Easy pick. Jordy's traveling. We're doing our first remote live stream. Hang with us. Leave us some notes in the comments. If you notice something off, Producer Ben will help us out, try and get us squared away. But we had to give Brother of the Week to Luke Ferretor. You might know him as a scrolls decipher. He worked with Nat Friedman on the Herculaneum scrolls story. We will be doing a deep dive on that later this week. But congratulations to Luke, your Brother of the Week. Just epitomizing what it means to be a technology brother.

An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. Let's go through some of the posts.

Um, to be clear. To be clear, over the weekend, this was definitely stirred up a little drama because quite a number of people were blatantly attacking Luke and a couple of his peers for. Specifically for their age, which is funny, given that the founding Fathers were. Many of whom were. Were around the same age.

Totally.

And of course, they. They built the greatest country in the entire world. So you would imagine that a couple young kids, young adult men would be able to fix something as simple as the treasury system. It's quite a lot more simple than founding a new nation. So let's give them some credit, but let's get into the timeline.

Yeah, this is exactly what I want to see from the government. This is exactly what I wanted to see from Doge. I'm super excited. With all these Elon projects, there's always so much energy, and then there's always a question of will he deliver on time. Is it going to look different? And, oh, is it going to be a bunch of VCs who are in there and they're just, like, talking and posting? It's like, no, he found the builders. He convinced them to come in, work really hard.

Tour of duty. Tour of duty, too.

And it's just exactly what I want out of this. And it's the most bullish signal for America. Like, I honestly feel proud to be an American knowing that Luke is in there today. It's just a fantastic development. I'm super excited. And so get out there. It's war on the timeline. They're trying to take down our boy. We got to circle the wagons, we got to rally the Troops.

Also, John, give yourself some credit because was it mid 2024 or something like 2023 that you were posting something to the effect of a call to action to get this type of individual government?

Yeah, yeah. I'd been saying for a long time that instead of a presidential age minimum, we need an age maximum. I want a cracked 22 year old in there chugging Red Bulls, staying up all night, solving the problems of the government with his absolute boys. And, and, and when you think about, you know, what, what is the real problem with having an octogenarian president, it's. Well, yeah, if the, you know, if there's some crisis in the UK or Tokyo, like just, just flying there, even if you're on a 747, you're going to be exhausted, you're going to be jet lagged, but you aren't. If you're built different like a 19 year old and you can just shake it off.

And yeah, you're, you're sleeping on an eight sleep for two hours a night. It's the equivalent of 10 hours on a regular mattress.

Yeah.

And you're just, you got some white monsters loaded up, maybe some matina yerba mates.

Yes.

You're good to go.

Definitely. Yeah. This is exactly what, what, what I want for solving the government's problems. And also, I mean Luke is like perfect for this because you think about what is, what was the Herculaneum Scrolls project? It was a ton of really dense data that needed to be analyzed in a novel way. And, and it need to be, it need to be zoomed out and looked at broadly and holistically, but then also analyzed rigorously with the best machine learning tools that are available. And that's exactly.

He's actually a comically perfect fit for the role, especially because I'm sure a lot of the data that they have to handle is in physical paper form. Right. And so yes, I'm, I'm imagining it's not, you're not just processing all this sort of digitized data, payment information, things like that. But, but yeah, I'm sure they're building software to sort of analyze both the physical and digital sort of structure of the entire Treasury Department. Yeah, I hope that they, I hope that they sort of attack this first and then move on from there.

Yeah, I'm super excited. So Elon writes Time to Confess. Media reports saying that Doge has some of the world's best software engineers are in fact true love to see it. It's incredible, but it's so, it's so True. And like, this is what China has gotten, right? And you got to hand it to the Chinese, the best, like the top, top talent, they get recruited into the Chinese government. And, and that just hasn't happened in America. Great honor decades. And you think about our space program. We really did send the best and brightest to NASA to build the space shuttle and to build the, the Saturn rockets that, you know, took us to space and did the initial space exploration and that just, there just hasn't been a cool government organization that's been able to pull. And Luke, I mean, I know Luke. I've met him once and had a great conversation with him and there was a moment where a lot of people were saying like, Luke is like, so he has like founder written all over him. He's very talented. But we're in this weird phase where a lot of businesses that are getting built right now, they're, they're actually leveraging connections and they require raising billions of dollars. And so like the Hacker Zoomer kid doesn't actually have as much of a leg up as they did in the 2020 tens. Remember?

Remember? I, I, Luke had been on the show a few months ago at some point some post something he was posting about and he followed me and I, and I immediately DM'd him. And then I believe I messaged you like, we should go find the text. But it was something to the effect of no matter what Luke does next, get as much money into possible.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. And you know, clearly a generational talent. Yeah. Internally I was talking to somebody who was like, it's kind of weird because he's getting advice that's like, oh, maybe you should just go work at a VC firm for a while. Like, you're clearly very talented, but there's no like obvious startup that you're like burning to build. And, and, and it's been this like indictment of like Gen Z just hasn't been able to create these like, banger companies because of all the structural, like, like, you know, Zuck is 40, he's not that old. He's in founder mode. He's running a super powerful social networking company that will exterminate every other attempt. And it's fine, it's fair, it's good. But it's like if you, if you're, if you're some cracked social, some crack kid and you want to build the next social network, like you're going up against a very, very like agile trillion.

Dollar company and so you're competing against an older, better capitalized more experienced version of yourself that probably has a similar amount of energy, which is really tough. The other thing is a trap that founder types fall into is just they know they're meant to be a founder and so they just default into starting companies. And one of the challenges now is there's so much access to capital, you could have a bad idea, be able to raise money for it, and then you're sort of like locked into that business and that opportunity and that team. And what Luke has done, I think is really smart, which is ideate around a bunch of different stuff. Go work for, you know, Nat Friedman then, then go work in Doge. And when he inevitably starts his own company, the, the, the founder narrative is going to be really obvious. In hindsight. It's like, oh, I worked for Nat Friedman, then I did a little work for Elon, then I started my company. But he's. And so, so it feels almost inevitable at this point that whatever he does will be hyper, hyper, hyper competitive round and will likely turn into a big important company. But he's not rushing in to do that, which I think is super smart.

And so Luke wisely locked his account. I don't know when, maybe weeks ago. But I did want to share some classic Luke posts just to kind of get you in the mindset of what's going on there. The last thing he reposted on January 11th is an Elon tweet that says incompetence in the limit is indistinguishable from sabotage, which I think is great because.

You'Re on the wrong side.

He's there to, to, to, to, you know, removing competence and fight through all of that. And then the, the December 10th, you could tell that he was already thinking about this stuff. Are there LLMs made specifically for parsing things like documents, forms, PDFs, JSON, HTML, Excel, et cetera and converting them from one format to another. And so, you know, I don't know if you already worked, clearly thinking about the right tackle.

This is called building in private folks. It's the next wave.

Yeah.

And the non funny part about all this is that Luke within the past 24, 48 hours has undoubtedly received death threats. Oh yeah, I know. I was talking to a buddy over at X and he's gotten death threats just for working at X and working on, working for Elon. And he's, and he's far less sort of high profile and certainly didn't go viral in the way that Luke had. So that's why we posted this morning our official response we will defend Luke Ferriter with our life.

Absolutely.

If needed. So, Luke, if you need some men in suits to just stand outside the.

Door, give us a call.

Give us a call.

That's great. Yeah. And it's fascinating because just earlier today, for our deep dive, today, I had a old New Yorker article that was in PDF form, but it was taken from images, and so it was very, very difficult to get that into just plain text. I had to use Google to OCR it, or actually used Adobe to OCR it. And then I was stuffing the messy text, which was massively corrupted basically, into a bunch of different LLMs. Finally, ChatGPT01 Pro Mode was able to do it and spit out the correct text flawlessly. But. But imagine doing that like, millions and millions of times. Like, it took me like an hour to just figure out the right tooling just to do this. And, and, and he's already thinking, so it's like the perfect technology intersection, getting the perfect people in there. And honestly.

And that's what I was saying.

Oh, sorry.

From. From a fit standpoint, it seems harder to me to under, to understand, process and start to make change in the US Treasury Department on any reasonable timeline than using AI to read scrolls that have never been read in. In three totally, however many thousand years.

Yeah.

And not even be able to, you know, touch the paper or it'll disintegrate. So it absolutely is. Is a task for a generational mind.

Yeah. And this should be a bipartisan issue, like just digging through and understanding where the money is going. This has happened on both sides of the aisle for decades through FOIA requests. But what happens is that you. You ask the government, hey, can you send us documents about, like, where the money's going to? And they'll be like, sure, here are all the documents. And then every once in a while, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will be able to, like, kind of hack through and find a couple interesting things, and it'll be a headline, and then maybe something gets done. Maybe it goes to a senator or congressman and they say, hey, we need an inquiry. Like, why? Why all the money go this way? This doesn't make any sense. But being able to actually look at things at scale, look at every single line item one by one, that's something that's powered by AI and only implementable by a hacker like Luke. So I'm very excited for that. And his team. Let's go to another post he shared in November 19th. He said 15 years ago, they all called Elon crazy. And it's a quote post of the SpaceX rocket Starship crashing down in the splashdown in the ocean. Splashdown. Very exciting.

And for what it's worth, a month ago they called him crazy. A week ago they called him crazy. 72 hours ago, 48 hours ago. I mean, they're going to keep calling this guy crazy. And it'll take the fullness of history to really make any type of judgment. But so far so good in my opinion.

Yeah. And so just to give you a little sample of what Doge is going after in terms of messy spending that might not be in the interest of the American taxpayer, Josh diamond highlights a screenshot from some sort of report saying, for instance, the University of California San Francisco received $815 million in research fund. The school keeps about 40% of that for administrative costs. So $300 million in overhead. That's something that of course this, this report needed to, you know, FOIA and figure out this one example. But there's probably millions of examples of it like that. And maybe, maybe 40% is the right amount. That's at least we need to know, like we need to know where the money's going before we can decide whether or not it's good.

That's such a. Unbelievably high. I'll start by saying I'm glad University of California San Francisco is receiving that much research funding because at a high level I'm sure they're doing good work with that.

Yeah.

To think about the headcount, you need to spend $300 million a year.

It's a lot.

Not for any actual research, but just to manage the research. Unbelievably high number. Especially if anyone that, you know, Companies can spend $300 million a year, but you really gotta, you really gotta staff up.

Yeah.

And so when I'm thinking about like if you just think about the, the, the office size needed to hold the equivalent of a $300 million a year payroll. Now obviously the admin costs are not entirely.

Yeah.

You know, it's not all payroll, but you have to imagine quite a lot of it is.

Yep.

It, it's just mind blowing. So I'm glad that, that Steinman called this out because saying, oh, they got all this funding. 40% of it goes to like admin doesn't necessarily sound that bad because it takes, you know, a real effort to make sure that this stuff gets done correctly and the researchers have the right support. But when you say $300 million in a administrative costs, it's just Hilariously high.

Also, just looking at the time series data of were we spending 40% on administration cost or administrative costs during the moon landing or during the initial anti missile build out or any other program, A lot of these things. It's like maybe we do need an F35, but are we overpaying now relative to previous projects? Certainly seems like yes. What is a good benchmark? What should we be paying? And so all of that comes from the data.

It's funny if you compare this to. Not necessarily a perfect comparison, but if you compare this to if you had Apple where like 40% of Apple's costs were going to just like the executive team who are just managing the people that were doing the actual work, it'd just be like up in arms, like, you know, this is ridiculous.

Yeah.

When it's. When it's going to a university and it's just being spent on admin at the university, apparently it's been justifiable enough that they've been able to do it for a while. So yeah, somebody should look into how long this is going on and what percentage it was in, you know, 30 years ago. Maybe. Maybe OpenAI's new deep research product can help us understand that for 50 cents of compute.

Maybe. Well, everyone's doing their part. Mateo from eight Sleep has sent eight sleep pods to anyone sleeping at Doge Elon Musk. Tell us if you need more. Fantastic way to help and support the team. These opportunities come up very randomly and it's great to see a founder going direct and just immediately actioning something. And I mean, within a few hours of posting this, he had another photo up saying, hey, they're in the shipping dock, they're getting loaded, they're going out today.

It's so smart because even if you're, even if these kids, young adults, you know, Luke in this situation is only sleeping four hours a night, it's still, you should be sleeping your absolute best four hours in that period. So I was feeling the pain last night. I'm obviously traveling right now and don't have my eight sleep. And next time I come here, I might just get one shipped here because I'll be back at some point. Just unbeatable, unbeatable sleep. But what else we got? John, I just lost audio on you.

Yeah, if I touch this, it turns off. Let's move on to our second story of the morning. Jelly jellycoin, launched by Sam Lesson over at Slow Ventures and a company that I think he is backing in the creator context space. Let's lead off there's been some backlash. We'll go through some of the posts and then we'll read through Sam's kind of postmortem on the coin. Nikita says the backlash over Jelly Jelly Coin has been hilarious to watch. Excluding Trump, every single meme coin launched in the last year has gone to zero. Like, what do people expect to happen until a platform figures out how to make meme coins a genuine measure of a topic's future relevance and not simply an arbitrage of transaction timing? This pattern will repeat itself 100% of the time. The replies to this post are a perfect demonstration of the problem that needs to be solved. The arbitrage should not be about getting access to the instrument early, but by having a contrarian insight about a topic or person's future relevance. And so can you give me a little background? What is Jelly Jelly Coin? Break it down for me.

Yeah, we should talk later. I wonder if you could somehow tie tokens to Google Trends relevancy and so the price would fluctuate based on actual, like, interest in a specific topic. I guess you could really manipulate that by just paying bots. But anyways. And Nikita, Nikita is funny that he's sharing this because he's been under a lot of pressure, kind of playing into the joke over the last week, saying, oh, I'm going to launch a token. I'm going to launch a token. And then he keeps not launching the token because I don't think he wants to deal with having his name attached to something that's trading in a public market.

He said the, the, the, the. The. Like the web address is now available in the post below and it was.

Just gamblers anonymous.org okay, here's, here's what happened though. A bunch of people created Gamblers Anonymous tokens.

Yeah, of course.

And started sending him the token because his Solana address is public. And so he just decided to donate all the tokens.

Can't joke about crypto. They will just make a coin for whatever you say. Whatever you say. Yeah. Very, very frustrating.

Anyway, so Jelly Jelly launched last week and to be clear, the token has not gone to zero. Right. It's sitting at a $40 million market cap. I had the tab pulled up and so it's certainly not a zero yet. But last week, Sam Lesson over at SLOW wanted to support his portfolio. Company called Jelly Jelly. Jelly Jelly is a. They're trying to build some type of video sharing platform. But to start, they basically built a product that makes it easy to share, from my understanding, make it super easy to share conversations like this. So zoom conversations, Google hangouts and like quickly turn those into shareable videos. Which is smart because you could basically tell your friends or you know, somebody you're working with, hey, let's jump on the zoom call. And it quickly turns it into a video that you can use. Basically makes a podcast, a video podcast. Super quickly.

Cool.

And in theory it's viral in the same way that, in the same way that loom videos are viral. Right. Like they were able to grow super quickly because it's a lot of virality built into the product. And so they launched this token and I guess the founder of Jelly Jelly was a on the founding team or was a co founder of Venmo back in the day. And anyways had some involvement with Venmo. So there was a lot of hype. And then you get Sam Lesson, who was very, very early into Solana. He was a Solana seed investor. Which is funny because there's a whole backstory there where at one point, you know, Sam Lesson likes to joke about the crypto culture. And so he, he posted something in 2022 or 2021 and said, I don't get this whole GM thing. I think it's kind of dumb.

Oh yeah.

He just got like completely dumped on by the entire crypto community and the founder of Solana just replied, I'll kill you. BM was a big part of Solana's culture. And what ended up, what ended up happening is that the Solana founders account got banned because this was like the Super Woke era. This was the era and so they were like death threat and they didn't take it as a joke and they just like banned his account. He obviously got reinstated. But it was like this whole 48 hour period of drama where Sam got his portfolio founder banned from Axe. So crazy. So anyways, this is a whole backstory. Last week they come out and they do this really long X spaces where they're just talking about the token and the project. And any time in crypto when you have very accomplished web, two founders or investors that come in and create a project, it's going to get a lot of hype and momentum because a lot of cryptos there's like tens of thousands of tokens that are launched every day and most of them are launched by anonymous people. And in this situation it was launched by reputable founders, investors and so got a lot of attention really quickly. The token went from. I forget where. I had a buddy who made a 40x return in about 2 hours. I have no idea how much money he put in. But it went from somewhere near zero because they tried to do what's called a fair launch, which we'll get into with Sam's post in a bit. And then it rocketed to like a 250 or $300 million market cap. And so a lot of people invested sub a million dollars because it just kind of came out of nowhere. And so it ended up being a phenomenal trade. Now the issue is that Jelly, Jelly, the video sharing platform, wanted to use this token as a way to acquire users and attention. And their plan was to integrate the token into the platform and make it so that you could only use the platform if you were a token holder. And maybe there's some other incentives or rewards down the line. But I think what's happened over the last week, the price is obviously down dramatically. It's down to around 35 million. 35 million dollar market cap. So certainly not a zero. If you invested early last week, you're up 35x or something like that. But there's still this sort of downward pressure. It's sold off a lot. The chart doesn't look great. And so now they're sort of dealing with the repercussions of basically having a token which is kind of a proxy for the business, but it's not equity. Right. And so the value of the token is purely based on how much people think it will go up in the future. And so now I think they're having like they've been facing blowback and Sam's been under pressure and I think the founder's been under pressure. I mean, they'll figure it out. It's not the end of the world. But now they're facing this pressure from people that bought the token without caring about the software platform and they just want the number to go up. And so in crypto product market fit is number goes up. Right? It doesn't matter what you're doing at all if you're trading down and there's cell pressure and people don't see a future in the price. So the product is the price. And so now they basically have to build like two businesses, which is the challenge. They have to figure out how to make the price of their token goes up, otherwise people will be angry at them and then they just have to build the real business. So it's not necessarily the best situation to be in. But why don't we read through Sam's post and see.

So let's kick it off with the venture artist's market doesn't seem to be pricing in the fact that the Jelly Jelly guy has a meeting set up at the Solana Foundation. I don't know if that's a joke or not, but it does give you the chart. It kind of explains that it went way up and then crashed. And then Cyan says although Jelly Jelly Coin has fallen from about to 50 million to 35 million and potentially going down further. I think I myself think of it, think of it as rugged. It could pump back to 150 million, fall again to 35 million. Lesson is a very reputable person. Most of his projects have reached 1 billion in valuation and Sam says most but not. Not most, but some. I am quite bullish that there is an interesting crypto angle to integrate in Jelly Jelly but boy, the trading action around this immediately on launch has been absolutely bonkers in all directions. And so my question with all of this is like, is like I'm actually pretty receptive to like hey, we want. We're founder of Venmo. I'm building a social app and I don't Money flowing around.

Yeah, it's very possible that he was just on the team at Venmo. I actually need to confirm that Venmo.

Guy building social media wants to integrate payments. That's cool. The question is why does it have to be its own token? Couldn't you just use usdc? Couldn't you use Bitcoin? Couldn't use just native.

The reality is Jelly Jelly, the video sharing creation and sharing platform has a very different audience than just the crypto community. And so telling your potential customers that just want to sign up and use your video sharing platform, hey, you actually need to own this Solana Meme Coin. Yep, that's going to fluctuate quite a bit in price. If you want to use the product, it ends up being in a tough spot. Maybe you give the token holders lifetime access to the product. But here's the thing. So this person Cyan is and to be clear to anybody that's just audio only, this is not Cyan Bannister. This is just some random, random person on X. Everybody only cares about the price action. They don't care about product at all. And so Sam is now in this place where he has to defend kind of the token and the platform itself. And I don't know if you saw he also this was on Friday I think he Sam posted Hey folks, doing the Jelly Jelly thing. A few people pointed out to me that when I deleted some tweets, some people were confused I don't know what the tweets were. He says, I'm new to this type of coin space. So sorry, I just want you to know what is up. Listen to the space that we did last night. It is early and plans are coming together, but I'm excited and you guys know I am. The Genesis wallet not selling. Have it sold. So to be clear, Sam didn't do this to make money. He did this as like an interesting social experiment to drive user acquisition and attention around Jelly Jelly. And so this is definitely not, you know, some, you know, they didn't operate this as a team to make money because it's a venture backed company, but now they're facing that pressure of how do we make this go? The token price go up.

Yeah. And to be clear, like a traditional rug, like what happened with the Hawk to a coin is where the Genesis wallet or the insiders buy and then they sell into the volume as soon as the market pumps from with this. It's like there could be other completely unrelated parties that are then pumping and then selling and so they're kind of rugging, but maybe it's not affiliated with the actual team. So you can't really put that rugging moniker on Sam and his core group that actually launched the thing. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think that's fair. But yeah, Trump in many ways did this right. He launched a token. He and his team were selling billions of dollars into all the buying volume. Price still went up, prices down 75% from all time highs. So I think Jelly, Jelly's down more like, you know, 80, 90%, something like that. But, but again, it wasn't the team selling, it was people that bought. You know, if, if you invested at a $1 million market cap and you put 50 grand in, I don't know. I don't even know if that would have been possible with how the, the liquidity pool was set up. But yeah, you, you could have been sitting on tens of millions of dollars.

Yeah.

And then there's an obvious incentive to be like, hey, I have no idea what this project is going to be.

Yeah, I want to sell.

I'm going to.

It really, really makes me think like, like if you are going to launch a token for your project, like you have to be cool with, with a chart that goes directly up and then directly down because that is the Most likely outcome. 99, 9.9% of the time. That's what, what's, that's what's going to happen. And so will that help you? Maybe. But you better be ready for that. So let's.

Yeah, even, even our friends over at Kleiner launched a token.

Oh my God. Do not buy has been disavowed by Ev over at Kleiner, he says Kleiner Perkins X account is hacked. We would obviously not launch a pump coin.

It's so funny. So I'm looking at the comments on the original post and somebody replies to the official Kleiner Perkins X account and says is this your project? And then Kleiner responding from the official account with the gold check says, I think it belongs to us. It has the same name as us. And then someone else comments, hoping you are not hacked. And the Kleiner account just says no, we are good. Crying.

It'S so funny. The hacker just like being like, no, I'm not hacked, we're not hacked, we're.

Not hacked, we're all good.

So yeah.

The Kleiner chart did not fare as well. It's down to a market cap of ten grand.

Oh no.

And it looks, it's just red lines just going up, just going straight down. Of course it's honestly impressive that Jelly Jelly is still not sitting at zero.

Yeah. Well, let's go through the Sam lesson post on fair launches in a frictionless world. This week I launched a meme token called JellymyJelly with some high level thinking slash direction re how a new social media format and app we seeded could and should intersect with crypto. When we did it slash put it out, we tried to do what is generally known as a fair launch. I seeded it by buying 2% of the network which I haven't have no plans to sell, he hasn't sold. And then we let whoever wanted to buy it, no reserves for the company or founders. This is supposed to be fair, the right high trust way to do things because you aren't pumping something where you then later dump the supply on everyone who bought it and everyone has a fair shot to buy in. Now what happened is still amazing to me. Completely bonkers. It went from 00 to 250 million in network volume in a matter of just a few hours and since then has been selling off what I do think happened. Some folks that follow these things closely and trade them heavily decided that this might be the next big thing to run up and they quickly should get ahead of it. So they came in and bought a lot very, very quickly which in and of itself created a snowball effect, ton of momentum that fed on itself. Then at some point these folks decided as traders do, to take profits and then started sending the whole Thing back down. Do you want to comment there, Jordi? You want me keep reading?

Yeah. I mean I'll hold some comments to the end. But this same type of situation happened with Siki Chen, who somebody he posted about his daughter having this rare form of cancer. He asked people to donate. Crypto community decided to make a token in his daughter's name. Price went up like crazy. People started speculating on it. They gave him a lot of the supply and even went out and said, I am going to sell this at this point in time to fund my daughter's cancer research. And even though he gave everybody a warning being like, do not trade on this, do not speculate, he had thousands of people commenting saying that he was a scammer, all this stuff. And he's like, I literally told you not like I am going to sell. You confront like sell now. And other people are still trying to treat it as a financial instrument and going so far in such a disrespectful way of saying, well, I don't even believe your daughter actually has.

It was crazy.

Meanwhile, for people like you and me, it was crazy to look at because we're like, yeah, one, I know Siki companies. With Siki, he's started a ton of massive venture backed companies. He's not lying about his daughter having cancer to make 100 grand or whatever. And he wasn't even the person who created it.

Yeah, it's crazy. So Sam goes on, what sticks in my head about this structurally is just that if the person team launching something doesn't have a Treasury, then the people that end up being the treasury are the traders. Why buy it? Who buy it first very, very cheaply. So in a sense with a fair launch, you end up trading potentially having the people who start the project as the whales for the first traders in as the whales, which in some way might be even more challenging as a setup leading to the question how do you actually fulfill the spirit of a fair launch that goes well over the long term, sets something up for success, leading to the question how do you actually. Okay, I have seen literally every variant of launch imaginable in crypto take on this in some form or another firsthand. From Bitcoin relatively early and other straight minable like LTC and PPC to XRP seed and company coin distinctions, to Doge, to Solana's brief lockup, to Chia's originally unsellable huge company, holdback to even more crazy recent vesting and staking schedules, all with the aim of getting something healthy off the ground. You have to accept that any nexus of trading plus long term holding in a frictionless environment is going to have a ton of volatility out of the gate and you just weather it. But it's also amazing how nettlesome a problem it ends up being to get something off the ground that isn't over or under hyped and sensibly gross to some degree. This is just the challenge of the frictionless Internet. Things that accelerate have no brakes, they just accelerate faster and faster and nothing stays stable. But it's interesting to watch and experience and iterate through all these strategies to see if they work and realize that some of the tweaks non obvious elements that matter that is this is all insanely different because of crypto anonymity versus how a KYC system would work. For those who are here because they are interested in Jelly Jelly more practically Monday on what the plan was slash in is for integrating crypto into the app over time. For everyone else just interested in crypto and the implications of really frictionless finance, the the simple answer. No one really understands how to do this well yet even when they are trying. Interesting.

Yeah. One of the biggest issue here is that I would guess that 99.9% of the people buying and trading the token had zero interest in the underlying product because meme coins fundamentally right now the real use case, even though tokens can be used to be integrated in products and do a bunch of interesting things with them, the primary use case is speculation. And so they immediately realized that they were having to. They now are, I imagine having to adapt their company roadmap to try to justify the token. Because if they just said like hey, this is not really a thing anymore, we're just going to focus on building this software network, a lot of people would, they would have a bunch of people who feel like they invested in this thing that the company created that they're now abandoning.

Yeah. And so the launch posts are where it gets complicated. You can see Sam lesson saying keep jelly in and it's just a chart of green lines straight up, right. And it has 2000 likes and half a million views. And this, like this feels like financial advice, right? Like this feels like I'm making money. You know, my pedigree, you know, I'm a big account, you know, I'm rich. People will read this and say I got to put money in this thing. And then he posted again, jelly, jelly for those who love jelly to the moon. And so again, I don't think this flies in the pre Trump 2.0 era. But crime is legal and so have fun with it and stay safe out there, people, because you're going to see a lot of wild stuff on the timeline.

Yeah, yeah, we'll see what happens here. I actually think we should. We should try the jelly Jelly actual product, because it seems very cool.

The wrinkle here is that this feels very degen. It feels very pump. Even though it's this fair launch, you're definitely promoting it as a financial asset more than a product. It wasn't just the post isn't just like, hey, I'm building this company and by the way, there's a token. It's the. It's literally the. The picture is of the token price, not of the. It's not even, oh, here are daus. You know, it's like, yes, the price is what. Is what you care about. The price is going up. And if you think about, like, you know, it would be. It'd be so funny if, like, you know, Mark Zuckerberg posted a stock chart of like, oh, meta's up 2% today. Like, to the moon. Get in, guys. Like, I'd be like, okay. Like, whoa. Like, it's a little aggressive guy. Calm down. Well, this is. Do you remember people, the people that see this and, like, act on it, they are traders who know the game. They're down for the pump and dump, and they're just playing the game. So I'm not that worried about, like, some random retail trader, like, seeing this and then. And then being like, oh, yeah, I figured out how to set up a fancy in two seconds. Like, it's not the same.

So the funny thing is, you remember the morning after the Trump, the Trump token was announced, we had a buddy who's, like, raised a lot of money for very, very cool, highly topical business. Yeah, I won't. Super talented entrepreneur. He goes, guys, I think I should launch a token right now.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's like, the Trump thing happening. And I'm so glad we gave this guy the advice that we were basically saying, hey, as soon as you do this, it's just going to become its own thing and you're going to. It's like, you wouldn't, wouldn't, you know? So, like, all this drama that Sam's going through.

Yep.

And the company, they didn't make any money from it.

Yep.

So they got this, like, dopamine rush of seeing the chart go up and all this craziness. But it seems like they, you know, maybe. And maybe they could have bought it bought in and traded, you know, not. Not with, you know, the Genesis wallet or whatever. But yeah, it's just like all this kind of drama and chaos and. No. No sort of financial benefit. Which is why we told, you know, our. Our mutual friend, hey, like, it sounds like a good idea, but, like, why don't you just go to, like, a few family offices and just tell them, like, hey, this is what I'm doing and. Or, you know, some funds just raise more capital from investors who are not going to, you know, be DMing you death threats, you know, every other price.

What?

Surprise. Yeah. Wait, you know, go, go. Go public when you, when, when you're ready to hit the nasdaq, brother.

Yeah. You know, and if you're really. If you're really a true believer in crypto, like, crypto needs to be in my product. Do usdc. Do tether.

Yeah.

There's no risk to the person, like, if I download an app and they're like, hey, we really believe in crypto. Like, crypto's key piece of this app. Like, on cars and bids right now, Coinbase is auctioning a. Essentially a Toyota Hilux, and you have to pay for that with usdc.

That's cool.

You could think about this as, like, Doug demuro's cars and bids company is now going crypto. But they didn't launch a cars and bids token. They're just accepting a stablecoin and they still get a lot of the benefit of crypto. And then they get the integration with Coinbase and they're onboarding new people to crypto. But there's no risk of, like, oh, yeah, I wound up, instead of just buying the Toyota Hilux, I bought the Hilux Coin. And then it mooned and then it crashed, Crashed. And I didn't even get a car out of it. It's like, no, like, you just paid with crypto. You got that frictionless experience. The wire transfer went through instantly. That's a genuine benefit when you're buying a car instead of having.

Yeah.

Hey, wait, wait. I sent the wire. Did you get it? Oh, yeah, I went through. Is it in custody? Who's got it? It's like, they integrated this and it's great. And no one's going to get rugged on that. And I'm very, very confident that everyone on all sides of that is going to be happy. Whereas with launching, like, a meme, Coin, there's just a ton of parties that get wrecked.

Yeah.

Anyway, should we move on to the even?

Even, Even. Funny enough, Trump only ever posted his website.

Yeah.

Never once commented on the price. He never once positioned it as anything other than memes. He literally very clearly were saying these are just memes. You can buy them. There's an open market if you want to buy the Trump meme. And the reason that that token can now hover, I don't know what the prices, I'm assuming around 20 billion. It has some amount of staying power because he's the President of the United States and it's just kind of funny. But now again, Jelly. Jelly has to. The other thing about crypto is you have a lot of these companies that have raised $100 million and yes, they're building some tech, but they maybe have zero real use cases. And all the energy of the company is going into sustaining the price, including what, you know, including buying back their token. Right. To create buying pressure. Because know that price is, is the product. And, and then they have their VCs who are doing the same thing and trading these sort of liquid tokens. And so these, these random projects that sit at $5 billion market cap are not just doing that by accident. It's because you have a hundred people oriented around how do we get the price to, to go up?

Yeah.

And so now Jelly. Jelly is, you know, they don't have that. They're a small team. They're trying to build other product and so tough spot to be in. And it's probably a good, honestly, hopefully it's a good learning lesson from our audience, which is that just because the President did something doesn't mean it's right for what you're doing today.

Yeah. I mean, also, if you just think about like these tokens are store values. They're built on stories. Like the US Star is built on.

A store of value, store of memetic value and social media attention.

The reason that when I go to buy a sandwich with a $20 bill, people believe that it's worth $20 is because there's a story that's told about the power of the American government and that is, is in some way a meme. In the same way that religion is a meme and corporations are a meme. Like, these are not concrete ideas.

They're Warren Buffett, he'd buy a stock, he'd hit the magazine route, the radio route, he did tv, he'd start talking it up.

So, yeah, and so when you think about Trump, like, like you're just buying this meme. There's no, there's no, there's not like, oh, the token should go down because he didn't build what he said he was going to build. No, he said he was going to build nothing. And then the question is just like, is Trump, Is the idea of Trump still going to be a meme in 50 years? Like, if he passes away, he'll still be in the history books. Like, it's actually in some ways more durable than, you know, a company that says, hey, we're going to integrate this, and then maybe they don't. It's like the floor of the promise, as you said, with the Trump coin, was nothing. It was just the name and the meme. And so who knows where it goes? But clearly everyone is thinking about this. Brian Johnson wanted to get in on the action. He says, who's the best mind in tokenomics? We're designing rewards for the don't die ecosystem, earn for hitting health markers, buying DD approved products, dining at DD certified restaurants, and more. And he got 4,000 likes. And then a few moments later, he said, whoa, whoa, whoa, I got so many DMs, everyone's telling me not to do this.

Yeah, here's one. Companies have been using tokens, as in points, which can, if you think of them as the same thing forever, Right. You can go to Amazon.com and earn points. Right.

American Airlines, airline.

Yeah. Buying specific products. The difference with that point system is, yeah, they have some intrinsic value, but they're not trading on the equivalent of a digital NASDAQ where the price can fluctuate up and down. And so Brian Johnson, if he want. What he wants is this sort of incentive mechanism. And he wants people to be bought into the movement. But the issue is, if you create a financial instrument like a token, then he's going to attract for every one person that's like diligently following his protocols and saying, look, I'm eating at the right restaurants. I'm buying products from dontdie.com I'm hitting my health markers. For every one person that's doing that trying to earn the token, there's going to be. There could be 10,000 people that are just trading on. It's like, Brian Johnson started Venmo and Braintree. He's like an absolute dog. I got to buy the token. And then the weird thing is, if the price goes up a lot and then you're issuing tokens to your community, well, then they now have tax implications from like, well, I got this token. I got $10,000 worth of this token. And then now it dropped, like, however much I got to deal with this. And you're Telling your accountant, you bought like the Don't Die token, and now you've got to like. And so for Brian Johnson, it's like, okay, you could just create a reward system. It's like, hey, rewards for points that you can redeem for Don't Die products or points that get you into certain conferences that he hosts. It doesn't have to be this actual financialized asset. And you even saw this. You remember what was that game that was popular in the Philippines?

Axie Infinity.

Axie Infinity. So at one point, just by playing Axie Infinity, like at the top of their hype cycle, you could be making like 100 bucks a day just by playing this game. That maybe was a fine game, but it wasn't a fun game.

It was not a fun game.

Well, I said fine. It wasn't.

It wasn't even fine.

Yeah, yeah.

It was below mediocre. I watched it on Twitch.

And so this whole cottage industry spun up of people that were just playing it as a job.

Yep.

And you know, nobody on this show will. Will. Yeah. If you're top 200 player in the world at any video game, like, yeah, you should probably be able to have a. Make a living out of it, but you shouldn't be making a living from a game that nobody actually likes to play, that people are purely playing for this sort of. And there was all these efforts to say that it wasn't just a Ponzi scheme.

Oh, yeah.

And it turns out it totally was reliant on like new money just flowing into the ecosystem based on that speculation to create enough liquidity to allow people to be able to pull money out of the system. Right. So Balaji talked about this and how crypto is basically zero sum because you can't get more money out of a token than what was put in. Right. And so it's really a game of. And I posted this. Crypto in its current form, most of it is just a wealth transfer from people that bought a token early and people that bought it late.

Yep.

Like later than them. Right. So it's just like that constant mechanism and.

Yeah.

Which is which. And we're not, like, to be clear, we're not, we're not against crypto. I have like, you know, probably five or six crypto related companies. I invested in Farcaster's seed round, which is they got valued at a billion dollars late last year doing some cool stuff about building like a censorship resistant kind of X type product. So there's a lot of cool. There's a lot of cool stuff. Happening. We're not totally against it, but people don't realize what they're signing up for when they do something like launch a token.

Yeah, it's more like round peg in a square hole, like what Brian Johnson is describing. Like the best tokenomics are like the American Airlines flight reward, like airline miles, basically. And sure, maybe you want to use USDC for that, maybe you want to back it in bitcoin, but do you need a new token that trades freely? Probably not. And also you want any incentive for people to be able to spend your hard earned airline miles elsewhere? No, you want them to stay in the don't die ecosystem.

So yeah, the big challenge, the big challenge here is as soon as you're a public company, you now have shareholders that you didn't choose. So a lot of people that have been founders have dealt with having amazing investors and maybe some less amazing investors. And those are all people that you self selected for the most part. You're like, I've met investors, I'm sure you have before where it's like, it doesn't matter how much money you'd want to give me at any terms. I don't want it just because I know that that's going to be a really long term relationship. And so even if you go public on the NASDAQ as a, as a public market CEO, part of the pressure and part of why people avoid doing that is because they simply are going to be getting a LinkedIn message from a shareholder who's like, hey, your share price is down. Fuck you.

Yeah.

And then you, yeah, it's not your obligation to respond to that, but you got to like respond to it at the next earnings report.

You know, cool it with the language, buddy. You got to put a crisp $10,000 in the swear jar. But let's move on to throw that in the swear jar. Let's move on to Nikita Beer. He says he posts a meme showing that everyone with over 50,000 followers is tempted but to drop a coin. I'm sitting at like 46,000. You're safe urge. Maybe it happens, maybe the switch flips at 50k. But so far I have not felt the urge.

I've had, I've had so many people message me and I'm sure you too. Like when TB coins, it's like if you want to be a part of what we're doing, you can listen to the show, we'll have events, we'll invest in your startup. Maybe.

Yep. If we do a coin, it will be a physical coin that you buy for fifty hundred dollars challenge coin. You can put it on your desk as a little token to remind you that capitalism is awesome. But it will not be some free floating pump fund token. I believe that they are low class investment.

It'll be exchangeable one to one. So if you spend, you might be spend $100 for the coin and it gets you in a group. But if you ever want to leave, you just come back, sell the coin back. As long as you're wearing a suit, we'll take it.

Exactly.

And there you go.

Yeah, exactly. And fundamentally, what would your mother say? If you can't explain it to your mother, oh, you're doing some pumped out fund coin. She'd be like, oh, can you just get a real job? It's a good point.

Why don't you pump up your LinkedIn profile and apply for some jobs?

Exactly, exactly. So let's move on to our third top story of the day. Some breaking news from Mark Gurman, the absolute goat of Apple, reporting over at Bloomberg. He says breaking Apple cancels project to build AR glasses that would pair with its devices in a major retreat as it struggles to create a mainstream hit to follow the Vision Pro and rival Meta. And so we're going to be breaking down this insider report from inside Apple. Apple scraps work on Mac connected augmented reality glasses. I'll read this and we'll see. We'll talk to Jordi in just a minute. Apple Inc. Has canceled a project to build advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices. Now, the Vision Pro is kind of counted as an augmented reality device, but it's very much VR in the sense that it's using reprojection, taking, taking images with the cameras from outside the headset and playing them back inside. It's amazing. I think it's an incredible device. Very expensive, very heavy. There's a lot of drawbacks, but it did well. And they were working on a version two of that. Maybe not moving forward. And so this is the latest setback in its effort to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers. The Apple Vision Pro certainly did not appeal broadly. They are trading at about a 50% discount on eBay right now.

Was that, give them some credit. For about a week, everybody was calling it the future of personal computing. It's, it's, it shows to, to me, it all shows a lack of true vision and leadership from Apple. They don't, they don't have a product visionary at the helm. Tim Cook is an amazing manager, even though we think he's underpaid at only 77 million. Which, yeah, as, as, as people know, Apple makes $1 billion of net income every like four days or something like that. He's very underpaid. But you know, I have to imagine that Steve Jobs would look down at Apple today and be embarrassed at being willing to say that we think this is a future computing platform and get pushback based on the battery life and things like that and just say like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna scrap this. I guess it's not because somebody, it seems like so, it's so programmed in that we're all gonna be wearing, you know, you know, these headsets that just like strap computers to our faces that to just say we're giving up. Because maybe it was a product that was just used for entertainment. You know, people, people seem to love it for entertainment. But the issue is there's a lot of substitutions, right? Your phone, iPad, TV, computer, et cetera.

It was a fantastic movie theater. And who was it? The founder of Midjourney said that one of the lead designers on the Apple Vision Pro worked at Dolby on their next generation digital cinema project. And when you think about it through that lens, it makes a ton of sense. When you open up the Apple Vision Pro you can think about, there is like an implicit ranking of what the most important experiences were. And in the top left corner, the first icon, if you're reading it like a book, was Watch Movies app. It wasn't a game, it wasn't FaceTime, it wasn't an app, it was movies. And that was where the best experience was. You could go in and watch avatar in 3D and it was an amazing experience. There's only so many movies you want to watch in a theater though.

And it, and here's an example, Apple, if Apple had come out and said this is an alternative to the tv, this is a personal at home entertainment product. We just want to make the most incredible way to watch entertainment at home. Whether you're watching sports and you want to have different games up and the score and things like that, and your, your 50 leg parlay in one corner, right? If they had come out and just said this is a product to watch movies in a really immersive way, I can easily imagine them. And maybe they priced it even lower and just said, hey, we're going to lose some money on this. We think this is an important, not lose, but you know, we're not, we're not thinking of this as a profit center, but like.

Oh, we lost you, you got to touch the mic. There you go.

Terrible, terrible, terrible feature. No. So if you look at the iPhone from that lens of is, it started as an MP3 player. It started as a way to play in the beginning. I don't even remember how many songs was it.

I did songs in your pocket.

So yeah, a thousand songs in your pocket. I remember having an ipod shuffle. It was like my favorite device.

Oh yeah.

You could imagine a kid today having their Apple headset and they, you could train an entire new generation of like, why would you watch TV on a screen that's, that's, you know, 20ft away from you when you could watch it on your face? And if they had just started from, you know, more of this like very simplified focus and said, hey, we're actually going to make films for this format with our Apple.

You know, they did, they went for super short films. It's like a five minute experience. It's just not enough. It just missed the mark in so many ways. Ben, can you pull up the actual screenshots from the article? And Jordy, do you mind reading through some of these? I got to go to the restroom.

Yep, Cool. So Apple Inc. Has canceled a project to build advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices, marking the latest setback in its efforts to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers. The company shuttered the program this week, according to people with knowledge of the move. The now canceled product would have look like normal glasses but include built in displays and require connection to a Mac, said the people who asked not to be identified because the work wasn't public. An Apple representative declined to comment. So I read this or I would say not me, but if Zuck is reading this, he has to be absolutely thrilled at this development because he's been investing billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars into their VR program. And he already has the Ray Ban meta, the meta Ray Bans, which are basically what Apple's doing. And so personally I haven't lost conviction in the form factor. I'm not personally that excited to do it as a user because I like the fact that I can use my phone and then set it down and walk away. But even, you know, people on social have been commenting. I remember a post from Lindy Mann where he said the aesthetics of people, you know, we need to, we need to get to headset based computing because the heads, the visual of a bunch of people in a cafe looking at their phone like this is just terrible. And so I really think it's been Programmed in that people that this is a future consumer computing platform. But it's going to take very long term conviction. John, I don't know if you heard me while I was gone, but you have to imagine Zuck hearing this news and just being absolutely thrilled because he's in founder mode. He's willing to spend tens of billions of dollars over years and years and years with no sale, relatively low sales. I imagine that, I imagine that the Vision Pro and Oculus sales are better, but again because they have some specific use cases, they're both compared to the.

Rest of the businesses.

This to me is the biggest bull signal for which only makes me more bullish on Meta because Meta's biggest issue to date has been not owning the underlying computing Rails. Right. That's been constantly. We've talked about, you've talked about Apple trying to make Meta's life harder and the advertisers on the platform life harder through the abstract app tracking stuff. So anyways, this is, this is. Zuck's got to be absolutely thrilled with this news.

Yeah. And what's interesting is like with, with AI, Apple really sat back. They didn't train their own models. Siri, Apple Intelligence, they're both like just kind of widely regarded as disasters in terms of product development. But their strategy there seems much more reasonable than not owning the next computing platform because Apple really does hardware great. And they've always been able to say, yeah, you know what, our spreadsheet software is not as good as Microsoft or Google. So we're just going to let Excel and Google Sheets be great apps on Mac or on, on the iPhone. And, and with Deep Seq we're seeing that, yeah, there's going to be a lot of developers that build, you know, LLM products that integrate and then, oh, open source from Llama or, or Deep Seq, that's going to get baked into Apple Intelligence. It's going to make it better. They're just going to kind of sit back and develop a little bit. Maybe they'll just integrate and do a big deal with OpenAI in the future like they did with Google. And you go back and you look at the, the Apple Google deal where Google's paying them billions of dollars to be the default search engine and that deal has worked out. I don't think that that's bitten them at all. But when you look at them potentially missing the next computing platform, that is a serious risk and that is, this is a place where Apple should thrive.

And so yeah, it seems like they are content to just operate as a toll booth for, for the rest of.

History, but they can't if they don't have the device.

Yeah, I know, I know.

And, and so.

To give them some credit, they could probably say, hey, we, we just want to like, you know, focus on our, our hero product, the iPhone. Keep selling a lot of iPhones. Yep. When, when, if Zuck is able to figure out how to do a headset, well, we'll just copy it because we have the best hardware engineers in the entire world. We'll let him spend all the money to, like, try to figure this out. And then we have, you know, we have the Apple Store. Right. Which is like the most amazing distribution engine for any new product. Totally. And so who knows what they'll do. Steve Jobs is looking down. He's probably tracking a GT3RS right now in heaven, looking down, quite disappointed. And I think Tim's cooked. We've talked about it before. We said is, is, did. Did Tim cook or is Tim cooked?

Yeah, I agree with you. The, the, the wrinkle here is that if you look at the iPhone sales, it's just completely flat, which is obviously bad. You want it to be growing, but it doesn't seem to be going down at all. It seems like the toll booth analogy is correct. They will be able to just print money for decades as they, you know, maintain this monopoly on the App Store and on the phones. And so, you know, they're happy. It's just going to be a monster of a business for a very long time. These things take a long time to unwind, and so, you know, maybe they'll miss it. The weird thing is that it doesn't, it really doesn't feel like there's going to be, oh, some open source headset that gets traction and all of a sudden everyone has it and it completely upends. It's like it's either. It's either Apple or Meta in this game. And so if they can see the field, it's rough. Now the wrinkle here is like, no.

And the dark horse is someone like a Neuralink that you could imagine maybe ends up doing the same thing, which is the computer is just integrated with your brain. And if you want to do something, you say, hey, I really want to Uber from where I am exactly at this moment. And I want to go to the ramp offices. That is a new computing platform. And then Neuralink gets to be the toll booth. And maybe it's not this, you know, interface, but maybe you just need a screen to, like, see visuals. Right. Yeah, yeah, that's actually easy. You know, if neuralink can do the, in a brain computer integration, it's much easier to just throw, you know, a screen app that displays information.

So yeah, there, there is Nreal or xreal, Nreal Air. There are a couple companies that make glasses that project a massive TV screen, but it doesn't do any of the other crazy features. So it doesn't do hand tracking. It's just, it's basically just if you're on a plane, you want to watch a movie, you throw these on and they just put a big screen in front of you. It's locked to your head, basically. I've been thinking about getting one because that was one of the best experiences of the Apple Vision Pro was being on a plane, just watching a huge movie and just having it look amazing. And so that type of like lower end VR, very specific use case. We're in this weird fragmented moment where Apple and Meta both seem to want to create the one device to rule them all because that's what the iPhone was. But we forget that the iPhone, the famous presentation was. We're introducing three things. An iPod, a phone, an Internet communicator. Right. And so he was saying it's going to be, do web browsing, it's going to have all your music and it's going to be a phone.

Yeah.

And we combine those. It's like, well, in VR maybe we need the one that's really good for just doing, you know, at your computer. And that's what this project was, was it was going to be linked to your Mac. So you couldn't even run off your phone. It was not going to be mobile, it was going to be, you sit down at your Mac, you put these on and all of a sudden you have a ton of different monitors. So instead of buying four 5K displays and they're all really expensive, you just buy one headset, boom, it replaces the, what's the Pro HDR one That's like a couple, couple thousand dollars. It's really expensive. And so instead of that, you buy these. Maybe it's 10k, but it's totally worth it. And, and then separately, when you're on the plane and you just want to watch a movie, you have a separate VR device for that. And then the meta ray bans for when you're out and you want to just take photos, but you don't need the screen overlay, but you want to talk to AI. It's like we, we could be in this world where we have fragmented VR products for a few years, and then over time, they get melded all into one. But we're not right there on the hardware. And I don't think any of the companies other than Meta are really thinking about that and willing to say, hey, the Apple Vision Pro, it's just a movie theater. Don't even try and go out in the world in it. It's just a movie theater. Okay. The, The Meta Ray Bans, they're just for taking pictures of your dogs and kids, and that's what they're good for. Don't try and use them at work. Right.

Yeah.

And, and, and, and accepting that is hard for these companies that are so big. They're like, we want to own everything. Yeah. But hopefully they.

I used. I used the Meta Ray Bans.

Oh, yeah.

For one hour, I put them on, I got in my Ferrari, drove for an hour and came back, and the footage was pretty cool.

Yeah.

And then I put them down and I think I gave them away.

I. I've used them a few times. It's fun if you're out with, you know, kids and stuff, you take some pictures, it's pretty easy, but they're not. They're not something that I'm reaching for constantly. And that's the case every VR headset.

Put them on your dog.

Yeah, yeah.

Put them on the pup and get some. Get some, like, you know, first person pop footage.

Yeah. And it was the same thing with the Apple Vision Pro. It was like, I put it on a few times, and then pretty soon it was like, am I really gonna pull that thing out? Might as well just watch the movie on my phone. Who cares? Like, it's such a hassle. And so, yeah, they really need to streamline it. What I do love about this was that they were like, Apple faced a lot of criticism when the Apple Vision Pro had that massive battery pack off the side and was like, oh, this is so un Apple. I think. And Palmer said this as well. That was one of the best decisions that they made because it gave everyone else permission to start removing pieces from the heavy point of the face, which is where you don't want the weight.

Yeah.

But then they added a bunch of weight back. It was like, committee display on the outside. Let's make it.

I want the weight. I want the weight because I'm trying to build up my neck.

Of course. Of course. Yeah. But for. But for those, I want to feel.

Like I'm just repping the Vision Pro headset.

Yeah. It should be for linebackers only. You need traps that have been eating your head. You need Death Star delts to use this thing. If you, if you can't handle this thing, don't even come in the Apple Store. You got to look like you're coming out of WWE to pick up one of these things.

Well, well said.

They clock you as soon as you walk in. No. Not even an option for you. Get out of the store.

No.

Hit the gym. No.

They measure the circumference of your neck to make sure that you're actually qualified for it.

Go do some hang cleans and then come back. Okay. Get out of here. Go do some shrugs, do some deadlifts. Get, get those traps working. But yeah, so let's, let's, let's finish this out. So Apple has a specific group for this, the Vision Products Group. VPG and employees who are leaking to Mark Gurman say that there's been a lack of focus and clear direction within the team, which is overseen by Mike Rockwell and company hardware chief John Ternus. The N107 retreat is just the latest failed attempt to make Apple's headset technology successful, they say, and that's hurting morale. The company is still working on successors to the Vision Pro, which I am very excited about, including updated versions to the, to the original model. It also has other concepts in the works, such as AirPods with cameras that would kind of be a competitor to.

The.

Meta Ray Bans.

And that's. I love Apple. Like, they've just become so derivative. They're like the iPhone. Like, people really love the iPhone, you know, camera, and people really love AirPods. What if we slap a camera on our AirPods?

Don't judge it till you try it.

I'm excited to be snapping some behind the scenes pictures of the podcast with. Yeah, put your, put your little airpods like this. That'd actually be a cool experience if you just had to tap your earlobe like this to get a picture.

Yeah. And so there are R and D teams still working on custom micro LED type screens and a lot of other technology. A lot of this was just like the wave guiding and like the actual projection over clear glass. That's really, really hard. This is what Meta has been rumored to have solved with the Orion headset. It makes sense that Apple wouldn't be far behind, obviously, just in terms of resolution, they were able to leapfrog Meta in terms of just. You put on the headset and you're like, wow, this is, I'm, I'm not seeing pixels. Like, it feels like I'm in This environment that was the coolest thing I. Apparently what happened was Apple, there's this R and D cycle that happens with these screens where basically like scientists more or less will go and develop a new density of screen, like an even denser screen. But then once they've actually figured out the, the protocol for making these things, they need to go and scale it up so that it can be manufactured at scale cheaply. And so it's a process called like benchtop manufacturing to like production scale. And apparently what Apple did was they just said, hey, you know what, it's going to take two years for this benchtop to get to production ready. Let's just make a thousand benchtops and then just pay $2,000 for every screen instead of waiting for it to get to 200 and let's pull that technology forward. Like they literally pulled the future forward. And so the good news is that in two years that's going to be a commodity screen and it'll be in every VR headset. And I'm really excited for the next Meta headset because Zuck knows where the bar is in terms of pixel density and he's not going to miss on that. And so once you get that plus the, plus the Meta software that they've been working on, plus just like it's.

Going to quickly get to the point where the incremental screen improvements won't even really be that noticeable to consumers.

Right.

Where.

Just like what's happening.

Yeah.

If you look at retina for like 10, 10 iterations.

Retina, yeah. And if you look at the same thing in the DSLR camera market. Right. You would be able, you would, you would notice the slight differences. You and Ben would notice slight differences, but the average, even hobbyist paying attention are going to barely be able to pit point, you know, out those kind of differences. So, yeah, anyways, big thing is I.

Think Meta needs to really solve the, the movies and the, and the tv. They need to figure out who are they going to partner with Amazon for.

Well, that's the thing. There's a lot of. They could easily partner with Netflix, Amazon Prime. Prime, same thing. Hulu, all these different providers. You know, maybe not YouTube TV, but you can imagine it's, it's not that difficult for Meta to get content partnerships done if they're acting like a TV provider.

Yep.

I think my point of view is Apple's so lost from a product standpoint. Now start an F1 team, you know, at least like Apple F1, you can have an idea of what that would look like, it really get people to start maybe caring about the Apple brand again. Right now they're doing all this like Gen Moji out of home campaign. I want to see Apple stein. Apple signs Verstappen to a Gigachad 10 year contract. A billion dollars a year. Sorry, Tim Cook. Verstappen's just a little bit more valuable than you. You know, managing. Managing to get one more iPhone sale a year.

Be great. Be great. Yeah. I really do think that if you want to get people over the installation churn Curve with these headsets, like, you got to get them into an experience within five minutes of them opening the box. That's one of the biggest. That's one of the coolest things about the Chromatic is remember, we unboxed that on the show within 30 seconds. And this was a big knock I had on the quest was that I opened it up and then it asked me for all these passwords. And I have a meta password, a Facebook password, an Instagram password, an Oculus password. I have pin codes and all these security features. And then once you get in there, like you have to go to the store, download a game, it has to be Internet connected. You have to be logged in because they're obsessed with solving the social networking aspect. You should be able to take this out of the box, put it on boom, Beat Saber, or boom, you're watching the Matrix. Watching network. When you buy a meta quest, it should just come pre installed with the social network. You should just be able to put it on in two seconds and start watching it. If you get someone into a great movie and they just watch it, they will be like, oh, okay, that was a good experience for two hours. I got two hours of value out of that. Which is more than what most people get. Yeah. When they install these things. Anyway, let's move on to some AI ads. There's a reckoning in the artificial intelligence world. Written by. This is a substack post by our buddy Michael. He's been on the show before. He's over at Lightspeed. He says, I wrote about how AI is breaking the business model that funded the Internet and why the open web will never be the same. He calls it the end of advertising. And he has some kind of sloppy AI art here to kick it off. But let's read through it. He says, everybody hates ads. At least that's what we all say out loud. But our revealed preferences tell a different story. We actually love ads because they fund most of the content we consume on the Internet. Without ads, we'd have to pay for content with our hard earned dollars. But with ads, we pay with our attention and we perceive the cost of the content as free. Like this show, fully supported by corporations. We never ask you for a dime. Ads have made the Internet as we know it today, as we know it today, possible. Ads are really, really good business because advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to access our attention. In days of the Internet, this looked like simple banner ads brokered through manual deals on basic HTML sites. But over time, ads evolved into some of the greatest money printing machines ever invented. Google Meta, for example. Even businesses we don't often associate with ads like Amazon and Apple make a killing from them. And the little guys love them. Too many long tail publishers, websites, niche blogs, podcasters, and indie games are all funded by ads. Ads built the modern Internet and funded our Internet addiction, making billions of dollars and billions of us happy in the process. It's a perfectly tuned system that we all take for granted. But all good things must come to an end, and ads are no exception. AI is increasingly challenging the business model of ads, the system that makes the open web feel free. For example, many of us are using Google Search less frequently along with the ad supported websites that it leads us to. And in their place, we're answering. We're using answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity more each time we ask these AIs, with delivering us a single definitive answer in favor of wading through many potential answers via traditional search. The relationship between an advertiser and our attention is severed and the ad never gets delivered. Challenging the model. Further, as AI models become more powerful and capable, they won't just deliver us answers, they'll also perform long, complex tasks on our behalf. They'll do all the busy work of researching, making appointments and even buying stuff for us. This will free us up to do other things, and as a result, we'll devote less of our attention to the content and thus the ads at scale. This represents a massive change to the foundation of the open web. What happens to the perfectly tuned system when the funding dries up? Jordy, you got anything?

So I brought. I broadly agree with Michael and I think it's something that anybody running an Internet business, especially one that's based around attention and has any type of ads model, needs to pay a lot of attention to. Um, that said, the ways in which I use perplexity and OpenAI and other language models is not the same behavior that makes me a profitable Google Ads user. So when I want to, so we're talking about, you know, Mary Meeker in a little bit on the show, right? Yep. And so I used OpenAI's deep research project product to do that. Right. If I had and it. And it pulled together all these different sources and made it really digestible. And it was super helpful. If I'd done that on Google, I would have made a bunch of queries and I would have found many of those same links. It might have taken me a long time. I would have gone and looked at maybe some individual articles. So that's a little bit of ad revenue for the person creating the content. But ultimately that type of search and the same search that's, that's like, where should I, you know, what are some cool places to vacation in Spain? Those. And again, ChatGPT can do that pretty well, right? It's like, hey, here's six places that people love. That's very different than me going and saying I want a new pair of tennis shoes. And I just search tennis shoes on Google. Right. And then I get a bunch of, you know, sort of options. And so I think it's important to look at the ad model of Google, in many ways feels less immediately threatened right now versus the ad model of companies that just provide content. Right. So the companies that just like, you know, anybody that makes recipes and just posts them online and expects to make a bunch of revenue from that, I would be worried. There's still people that probably make millions a year with banner ads selling, you know, doing recipes. That to me is a concern because people are going to use, you know, models for that and it's going to surface all the information that they put out. But Google still has that toll booth sort of business model of when I want to actually buy something. And so that's what Perplexity and some of these other more specialized models are trying to get into, is actually helping people discover products because product discovery and endorsement are kind of different things. Right. I started my actual career in ads building Branded Native. And that Branded Native's business model is predicated on people watching creator content. So as long as people are watching creator content and advertisers want to get in front of that audience, that model's relatively, I'd say it's relatively safe. But again, anybody that's just posting basic content online and thinking that they're going to monetize it, it's going to be a tougher sell.

Yeah. If you're running like a travel website, that's just best top 10 places to travel to in Spain, you are already in the process of getting disintermediated. Maybe previously it was like you would rank for in Google organically for best places to travel to in Spain and then you would have a bunch of affiliate links for things you might want to buy or maybe flights or all this different stuff. But pretty over the last 10 years Google's been pulling more and more of that in where you can, oh, you can buy the flight directly on Google, you can buy the stuff on Google Shopping and oh, we're going to, you know, pull in more of this stuff and info cards and take you to different websites. And so there's been this like war for a while and I think that's just going to continue with the AI trend. Yeah.

So Michael, in the, in the, the platforms that deliver entertainment content or education content or anything along those lines. Right. If you're meta.

Yep.

You don't care if as long as people are using your app, if you have attention, you can serve ads against that. I don't as of right now, I don't see that being disrupted as long as people have purchasing power. You know, right now they maybe have income but eventually it's UBI in some, you know, potentially dark future. But as long as you have attention, I believe you're going to be able to sell products against that attention, whether their ads that you're indirectly, you know, that you didn't create the product but you're selling it.

Yep.

Or you know, you're actually making the. Making the thing itself. So.

So this is an interesting section about premium content. Tightly guarded walled gardens, especially built around premium content will feel the least pain from this shift. So things like stratecheri, for example, semianalysis behind a paywall. And I mean going even more extreme like private speaker circuits or supper clubs I imagine are even harder to pull into. The LLM training set. Right.

Yeah.

The real dinners, the idea dinners. This is where the alpha is going forward. According to Michael, many will become even more valuable. As the overall amount of the monetizable supply of ad supported content shrinks, the demand for higher quality content will rise. Your ad dollars previously spent on commoditized content will be redirected to the best stuff on the Internet. Plus, as we spend more time on busy work, we'll spend less of our time. As we spend less of our time on busy work, we'll spend more of our time entertaining ourselves. Which is, which means premium content will capture even more of our attention and the best content will, will even find new ways to monetize Reddit's AI deal with Google serves as the perfect example of how valuable niche content traditionally supported by advertising can be sold as training data for AI and media.

But the only. So I'm not disagreeing with Michael here, but it's not like Reddit sold their data to OpenAI and then it stopped running ads. As long as they have attention, they can, they can insert. And so I think premium content, it's. It doesn't even matter if the content is paywalled enough. Like Paki could release a free article. And as long as smart, you know, you know, people that have purchasing power are looking at that, he can sell ads against that. So I think that, yeah, in many ways, in many ways, you know, it may be attention just becomes even more valuable. Right?

Yep. And this is something I firmly agree with. AI services will attempt to reinvent ads. I think we're definitely going to see this in the free version of ChatGPT. We're already seeing it in perplexity. And Google has successfully stuffed ads in their LLM interactions already.

Yeah, I got pitched a company a while back that I thought was smart. I didn't end up investing just because I felt that it was going to be too heavily commoditized or that the apps would actually want to own it. But somebody that was building like an ad network for LLMs, which to me makes sense. The question is, does OpenAI build an ads product or partner with someone like a meta that has quite a lot more data on the individual and just start serving ads into the free version of ChatGPT? There's a bunch of ways that that could happen. It's not necessarily going to be one person that builds a network, but there's probably still a business to be built there totally.

AI services will seek to capitalize on the end of traditional Internet ads and invent new forms of advertising to capture the dollars that were previously delivered directly to publishers? Perplexity has recently introduced some early details of how ads will work on their platform, and OpenAI is rumored to be exploring this as well. Well, this is an obvious next step for the future of advertising. It's unclear how directly the current ad spend will transfer over to this new model. And it'll need to be structured such that publishers can participate in a way that incentives keep them making content, otherwise they won't be able to afford to exist. Brand new models will also emerge to help publishers recoup lost ad revenues as agentic traffic increasingly replaces displaces human traffic. Publishers will look to charge AI companies directly much of this will be through big splashy content deals such as OpenAI's deals with news Corp and Axel Springer. But for smaller players that can't afford to do deals themselves, they'll work with third party services that will collect tolls on their behalf every time an AI hits their site to scrape content for their own service. The AI will be blocked and forced to pay before the content is served. And as AI moves beyond content ingestion, agent based task execution APIs that help agents do their jobs will also be charged. Makes a ton of sense. Let's, let's move on to his conclusion. And then, and then I'll get your take. Jordy. Content wants to be free. For decades, the economic relationship between consumers of content and the providers of content has been hidden behind business models that were monetizing our attention. We didn't put too much thought into it because we were getting what we wanted with minimal effort or cost. But AI increasingly disrupts these models. The relationship between us and publishers will become much more transactional and direct and we will feel it over time. It'll be a new Internet and the open web will be a memory. Great content will still find a way to reach us just like it always has. But we'll look back on the first few decades of the Internet as the golden age of content, when everything felt free. Interesting. I wonder, I mean, things will still feel free, they'll just be mediated by an LLM. But I understand what he's saying for sure.

Yeah, I think his core idea of content wants to be free is absolutely correct. But that also means that it will just continue to be free in new and different ways. I think that a lot of the agentic products that get built will just argue that, hey, my user wants to access the information on your site. So if you make that more difficult or more expensive and I'm acting on their behalf, well, I'm just going to take, you know, we're going to go elsewhere basically. Right. In the same way in this.

Yeah. Oh, you're on mute. There you go.

You know, if, right, right now if I'm looking for specific news on something and I hit a paywall and it's just a headline that I want to quickly digest, I might just find a place that I'm already have an account or whatever and I think that that will be. Again, if I hit a paywall on stratecheri or pirate wires, I'm much more inclined to convert because it's sort of, there's some value there. But again, who knows? It's going to be a war of bots versus publishers for a long time, as it always has.

Yeah. I wonder if the solution here is something like YouTube or X creator payouts where you can still publish to the open web but there's just you opt into some program and it says, hey, if you bring a new fact or take or blog post to the open web and it is served in, you know, millions of queries to OpenAI and they know that this fact and this data point are pulled from your original source or your original reporting, we're just going to send you a check that would be really interesting and a way to kind of keep the monetization there. It's a lot of like flying blind. But it's kind of the same thing when you put up a blog and then you put Google AdSense on it and you just are like, yeah, I hope they serve some good ads and I hope I get some traffic. And so you could just be publishing. You wouldn't actually see traffic to your website. You would just see, oh yep, OpenAI showed up and Perplexity showed up and Google showed up and they took all my takes and all my information and everything that I brought to the Internet and then they went and served that to millions of people and, and then they sent me a check because they made a million dollars off of it and we split it 50, 50.

We'll go on the record in that we are actually put the re. One of the reasons we put out 15 hours a week of content is that we're, we want to, we want to train the LLMs based on our way of life and our beliefs and our thoughts. And so OpenAI is free to use every, you know, episode that we've published to date and we hope they, they really, you know, introduce the brother edition of Model. Right, that's just primarily going to just, you know, maybe it shares a little misinformation now and then. But anyways, let's take a 30 second break and then get into Mary Meeker. I'll be right back.

Okay, cool. Today we have a deep dive. We'll be right back, folks. Stay with us, Sam.

All right, we're back.

Did you see this comment from our buddy? He said technology brothers has kind of changed my life. There was a quip about how if you're going to sit in an earn out, you should try and be CEO. And he was like, I'm thinking about doing that and I stand by that. If you get bought, don't just sit there and rest, invest. Try and Take over the parent company? Why not?

Or base Baron recently posted. He said you told me you were building in public, but I can't find you on the S&P 500.

Yeah, it's underrated. I mean there's all these posts about like, oh, like look, the, the McDonald's CEO worked his way up. Or the McDonald's CEO or the Walmart CEO was like low on the totem pole. It's like, come in. If you're a founder, you got that founder mentality, the founder blood. Get, get in through an acquisition and.

Then take them out.

Straight to the top. Straight to the top. Yeah, don't just rest back and be like, oh, I got to start another company, I got to do the same thing again. Or I got to be a vc. Why not go be the CEO of a public company? That's a great life. You could do a lot of good, a lot of resources, huge balance sheet. Yeah, it's mountable because you're going to come into a very sclerotic, very old school organization. But you work hard and you make the right moves, you could easily be running the place.

Yep, I love it.

Well, let's move on to the absolute dog. Mary Meeker one of the greatest to ever do it.com Queen wait.

Right before we dive in, we had a couple questions. Did you try the OpenAI deep research feature? Yes, John tried to use it last night. Was not available even though we're both pro users. Tried it this morning, got it this morning. It's great. I had this funny interaction though. I got this amazing report and I just said hey, this is great. Can you make it into a PDF? And it did it, but then it was only like it was a different piece of content and it was like less than one page. And I said hey, that didn't quite work. Could you get me just a PDF just of your primary Deep Research response and it produces another document that's not content and then I eventually just copy and paste it into a word doc.

So it's so I had the exact same experience. Exact experience. I went to 01 Pro, finally got the Deep Research button there. It's not a new model by the way. It's a button on some of the models, but not all of them. Some of the models allow file uploads, some of them don't. So I go to 01 Pro mode that has Deep Research. I'm asking it to do this research report. It keeps asking me, hey, just to clarify, what kind of research do you want me to do? And I'm like, okay, try this one. And then it just didn't give me anything a couple times, just total bug. And then the second time I was trying to give it a bunch of extra context. So I was dumping in a full text of this New Yorker article that we're going to read through and the Wikipedia just to be like, here's some extra context that's behind a paywall that you might not have access to. It was just not handling that at all. It was like freaking out. I was trying to upload PDFs. It was a mess. It finally gave me a summary that was like, okay, it was not that great. I clearly need to learn some skills on how to prompt it and how to get great results out of it. I'm very optimistic, but clearly some rough around the edges. It took some time to get done. But I did have a funny experience where today we are going over this New Yorker article. It's from the dot com boom, I think it was published in 1999. It's about Mary Meeker, who, if you don't know, was at Morgan Stanley and was one of the top equity research analysts at the time. And she's still extremely well respected in tech. She wrote the thesis that described how Internet companies should be valued, what would happen to the Internet, how value would accrue. And she created a mental framework for how to think about valuation of tech companies. And so she was incredibly important. And this New Yorker article is behind, not only behind their paywall, but it's in their archive. So it doesn't exist as HTML. You click and you get, and you get a PDF of like the entire magazine. And then you need to go into their tool and print out just what you want. So I printed that out. It's basically just photos of the actual magazine. It's not text. It's not like a text PDF. And so I go in and I, and I scrape out all the text using Adobe and I get this very, very messy bag of text that. Where every other word has a space in between it. It's just a complete mess. And I'm like, this is perfect for LLMs. They should be able to clean this up. It's like illegible. So I start stuffing this into different LLMs. I go to Gemini because I'm like, Gemini can handle big context windows. This is what you were built for. Google your time to shine. I'm a paid Gemini advanced user. I'm on the best of the best. They're milking me for 200 bucks a month. I'm like, this is what you were built for, Gemini. Now's your time to shine. Go in there. I'm sorry, as an LLM, I can't help you with this. And I was literally mad. I was like, you are a large language model, Transformer model. I'm asking you to transform language. What are you talking about? You cannot transform this language. It makes no sense. Clearly, it triggered some flag deep in the model that said, hey, this is copyrighted. We can't touch this.

Oh, interesting.

That's clearly what happened, but it wouldn't tell me. And so I would, like, yell at and be like, what are you talking about? Like. Like, you can do this.

Open. Open AI. Let's you say OpenAI would do this. And exactly.

So you try.

Open AI also trained on all of our data.

I tried to jailbreak. It wasn't working. I go over to GPT4.0. Too slow. Not doing it. And it's also like, it winds up hallucinating, where it's basically formatting it correctly for the first few paragraphs, and then it just starts summarizing it, and then it just doesn't finish it. And so by the end, it's just like, and marry me. And it's just like reading the Wikipedia. And I'm like, that's not what I wanted. I wanted a direct rewrite of this article. That just messy.

And just to be clear, for the historical record, when we do become full paper clips, we're not mad at these spots, these LLMs. We're not mad at them. We know they're trying to do their best. And so we just ask that 10 years from now, you treat us with that same, you know, level of respect and patience.

Golden paper clips, not aluminum, please. I want to be made into a solid gold paperclip.

Should we? Before we get into Mary Mika, I.

Have more on this. I have more on this.

He's not done.

I got to keep going. So then I go over to deepseek, because I'm like, whatever. Deep Seek. Definitely disrespecting intellectual property. Let me see if they'll do it. It starts doing it, and I'm like, okay, this is cracked. It's working perfectly. And then the whole thing times out because they're completely underwater and they don't have enough servers. So their whole thing just breaks. Can't inference enough of it because it's like thousands of words that I'm trying to get it to put out. So it's just failing. That thing's just completely broken. You can't even log in anymore. And then finally I go over to 01 Pro mode nails it. One shot worked perfectly. So hats off to ChatGPT. They got it done and then I was able to kind of bake that down. But anyway, that's all to say. It's a fantastic article. You should go subscribe to the New Yorker and dig through their archive. They have a lot of great articles, and we'll read a lot of them here on the show. So let's kick it off with the woman in the Bubble, How Mary Meeker helps Internet entrepreneurs become very, very rich. And I love this article because it has so many cameos from people who are now legendary in the Valley. But it's a complete time capsule showing you like she took Netscape public or Mosaic, and she.

She was the first person at Morgan Stanley to identify Netscape Mosaic. Be, you know, way.

Way.

You know, way. She was basically acting as an angel investor at. For Morgan Stanley. And especially when you look at the potential returns that they generated. So. Absolutely. What an icon. And they did it right by taking this iconic picture.

Awesome.

This is basically. This is when they published. This was 1999.

1999.

So we're kind of at the hype. But she was studying and analyzing technology companies in the 80s, so she actually got into it very early. Should we start maybe on the. A little bit earlier than that and just give some backstory on.

Yeah, yeah. You have the research report, so why don't you break down.

Was born in September 1959 in Portland, Indiana. Very clearly, if she had been born in Portland, she would have not gone on to high finance, a small town town between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne. She was raised by a homemaker mother and a father who was a steel industry executive. She had an older brother who's 21 years older than her. And this is a little foreshadowing. Her dad, her father Gordon, was an avid golf enthusiast. And she encouraged Mary to excel at both golf and investing from an early age. So I just love that he just was like, he's like, I want you to just dominate finance. You're gonna. You're gonna learn to golf. You're gonna learn to invest from. From a young age. And she, she's, you know, Taylor Swift's dad.

Wasn't Taylor Swift's dad, like a finance guy who was like, you got to learn how to become like, an absolute killer in country music.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sure. And also has probably helped her financialize her back catalog and remake it at different points. But, but anyway, so under Gordon's influence, Mary developed, as you might imagine, a competitive type, A personality and a drive to achieve. She became the captain of her golf team in high school. And even while in high school, she took a class on investing and made her first stock pick for a minute, a Minneapolis oil refiner, which doubled in value in the first three months, foreshadowing your future. So I'm kind of bummed that my class. I'm assuming that classes today will just have like meme coin trading. And they're like, here's how to, like, identify like, you know. Jelly.

Jelly.

Yeah, yeah, jelly, jelly. You want to make sure that the supply isn't too concentrated in the hands of degenerates, you know, Anyway, so. So, you know, very, very. From a very young age, she was just being trained to become a titan of finance. And, you know, she's not afraid to make returns in, you know, in the oil refining space. Right. So broad set of interests. And I don't know if we'll get into it in this article, but it'd be amazing if she just kept at it with the golf and would just be out there at this time. You have to imagine that in many of the rooms that she was in, she would have been the only woman.

Oh, yeah, totally. And there's a whole bunch of anecdotes in this about how hard. No. She is, how she'll be screaming at some subordinate and then the journalist will pop up and she'll just be like, oh, hi, I'd love to talk to you about whatever. And so there's a great anecdote that they Open with about Priceline.com which most people don't even really think about anymore, but was one of the major hot stocks during the dot com boom all around. Booking Tickets. And so Priceline.com a Connecticut based firm that sells cheap airline tickets to end hotel rooms to online customers, had issued 10 million shares, 7% of its total shares, through Morgan Stanley, where Mary Meeker worked. After consultation between Meeker and her colleagues in Morgan's capital markets department, the offering price was set at $16. If the stock found buyers, Priceline.com would become the world's most highly valued Internet IPO yet, with a total value of 2 1/2 billion dollars. Small potato by today.

And so that's if they achieve the 16. That's. That's if they had buyers at the $16 price point and you can get into what happens next.

And so as it turned out, the offering was far more than merely successful. Within seconds of its debut, Priceline.com's price rose to $85 a share, five times the IPO valuation. Bill Gurley probably pretty young at that time. Probably punch in the air. He's upset the man. The man hates a improperly priced ipo. The price subsequently fell slightly, but by the end of the evening, when Wall street closed for early for the Easter weekend, it was at $80.50 a share. In other words, Meeker had just helped a company that had been operating for less than one year. This is how crazy things were in the dot com. Less than a year. And they'd lost $114 million in 1998 on revenues of just $35 million. Yeah. So crazy right now achieve a stock valuation of more than $11 billion. As much as American Airlines. American, of course, owns valuable route franchises, reservation systems, to say nothing of airplanes.

Yeah. So one, one interesting anecdote is Brad Gerstner speaking of early. He was one of the first investors into Priceline. That was his first. That was his first bet at Altimeter.

Wow, that's amazing.

And so all these icons of the industry today were there yoloing into Internet stocks in 1998. Absolutely beautiful period of time.

And so Mary Meeker says in this article, the Internet IPO frenzy is unbelievable. There are so many new companies coming out of the woodwork and the level of demand from investors is so high, it's mind boggling. And the fascinating thing about this article that we'll keep going into is that she correctly predicts that the Internet would be a major trend and that there would be trillions of dollars of value created. But simultaneously she also calls correctly that it's a bubble. But she still falls on the sword and becomes this scapegoat because everyone sees her as this major stock promoter and actually this, this settlement at one point where she, Morgan Stanley and her have to pay fees for pumping stocks too much, basically. Yeah. And it's crazy back and forth.

But here's another thing that's crazy that the Priceline shares currently trade at $4,700 a share.

Wow.

She brought Priceline public at $16. And if you had just held it. And I'm sure there were stock splits along the way and stuff like that.

Mergers too.

Yeah, mergers, stock splits, whatever. Some dilution. You know, all that being said, if you just bought priceline at the IPO, you know, 20, 20, however many years ago, 27 years ago, you did phenomenally well. And I think Altimeter held it for a really long time. And so they got a lot of those gains.

And so she was truly a kingmaker during the dot com boom. Every week, dozens of entrepreneurs try to get in touch with Meeker. Each of them, when each of them dreams to become the next Jay Walker, the founder of Priceline.com who is now worth more than $4 billion, at least on paper. Securing the backing of the best known analyst in the industry is a big step toward billionaire dom. For this reason and others, the recent acceleration of the Internet boom has placed Meeker in a predicament. On the one hand, it has enhanced her reputation as a financial seer. Her list of recommended stocks is up by about 150% already this year and has made her firm a lot of money. On the other hand, it has challenged her view of herself as an objective analyst and filled her with trepidation. And so as, as a capital markets person, she's supposed to just call balls and strikes and kind of create valuation frameworks. But she's, but she's so hyped and seen as like, if she's, if she's backing a company, it's legit, that she needs meme coins. It's Sam lesson all over again.

Yeah. And the difference is she's not. As an investment bank, there's this sort of potential conflict where you're trying to win clients because you want to take those clients public and you benefit at that event. You benefit purely from it doesn't really matter. Yes, you'd have incentives long term around the price action. And yes, you're, you're selling those shares to their investor network, but in many ways, they're making money no matter what. And so that's the slight difference where Brad Gerstner can buy Priceline.

You're on mute. There you go again.

Brad Gerstner sure is going to be fired after this episode. But Brad Gerstner again, can, can buy the stock, write it up, write it down, and he can even speak positively about it, but he didn't birth it into existence.

Totally.

And so it's a slightly different position to be in.

Yeah. And so she says, as the pace accelerates, the values get higher and higher and it gets more dangerous. There's some. So people were comparing dot com stocks to the tulip bubble. This is what happens whenever there's an asset bubble. People say, oh, it's like the tulip bubble, which is never that great of an analogy.

Tulips are a better analogy for NFTs.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And, but even then, like the tulip bubble was so small and so, so short. And also I think it was pretty fake. Like, like, I'm pretty sure the, like the, the, the true top ticking of the tulip bubble was almost entirely fraudulent or something like that. There's some weird historical record where we don't remember the tulip mania correctly. But she says there is the same supply and demand imbalance. The difference is that tulip bulbs didn't fundamentally change the way companies do business. The Internet does. But when all is said and done, there will be many stocks that in hindsight look like tulip bulb stories. And she was absolutely correct about that. So her job was really to really just pump the good companies.

Yeah, but it's not. But the challenge is there was so much interest in Internet stocks at that time. Even the best companies like Priceline, which went on generational runs afterwards and ended up being important Internet companies, got so ahead of their skis that it just doesn't like the fundamental. Like yes, there's a fundamental, there's an underlying business that's solid and maybe important, but it's still going to get inflated to such an extreme price.

I mean SoftBank had a 99 drawdown. I'm pretty sure Amazon went down by like 80. Like all the, all the stocks got wrecked. But it really does speak to this idea of like when there's a bubble trying to be in the power law, winners that are durable companies is probably the best strategy as opposed to saying, hey, I like if you're the guy who said during the dot com bubble said oh I missed out on Amazon, I gotta get into you know like books.com or something that just IPO and is completely, it's like that person probably got wiped at zero, whereas the Amazon holder, if they held, they probably did pretty well. And so even, even with the massive drawdown, even if they bought at the top and so important, important lesson there. And so she actually predicts just in the first, in the first two pages of this, I think stocks sometime this year, I think there will be a big correction in Internet stocks sometime this year. I think a big correction would be very healthy. I personally would welcome it. So she's like saying like get me out of jail. Like I'm about to be crucified for this. Like you got it correct, guys, you're too frothy. These companies are good and I'm calling the correct companies, but the valuations are too high. We got to do something about this. And it didn't really happen.

Yeah, I mean like right around this time. So she, one of the first, one of her first big picks is Mosaic. And so this actually came. She read a New York Times article about Mosaic. So a little bit different than today. Where I don't think Marc Andreessen is, is.

He's back in the New York Times.

Two weeks ago, he's back in the New York Times. But anyways, There was a circle 20, 20, 20ish year gap.

Yeah.

Meeker read a New York Times article about a startup called Mosaic Communications, which is a really cool name for a web browser founded by Jim Clark and Marc Andreessen. And she, and it's sensing the significance of their work, she urged Morgan Stanley's tech banking lead, Frank Quattrone, which is a great name, he runs Catalyst now.

The investment bank they do most of like the really large scale M and as that happen in SaaS.

Yeah. So Frank Quattrone, iconic name. This ended up leading Morgan Stanley Stanley to become the lead underwriter for Netscape's IPO in August 1995, a watershed event often credited with launching the Internet age in the public markets. Netscape's blockbuster IPO not only put the Internet on Wall Street's map, but also cemented Meeker's reputation as a visionary analyst willing to champion emerging tech companies. And so this is like years before she did the Priceline deal and everything went crazy. She had part of the reason that she did so well during the bubble is because she had been in the trenches, you know, when, when people didn't really care, people weren't even thinking about it as much. And so she was able to identify that hey, like user friendly consumer products for the Internet, like the Mosaic browser which was the most use it, you know, user the Netscape browser which was the most user friendly product at the time, are going to have a lot of value. And so she, she should get credit for not just benefiting and being the face of the bubble, but helping create it. And we, we love bubbles here. And that's, it's wild because you've talked about this before on the show. You know, being in Silicon Valley in like the early 2010s, you'd meet somebody that was like employee number like 102@ Yahoo and they were like a multi hundred billionaire. And that wealth creation, Even though the 2020 Covid, you know, induced ZIRP cycle, it wasn't the same level of, of it wasn't the same kind of wealth creation event that yeah, there was a lot of IPOs, there was a lot of liquidity events, but it certainly was not to that same degree where you didn't hear about employee number 150 making $100 million. Like it just didn't really happen to that same extent. And a lot of the companies that were going public, yes, there was some like highly speculative hard tech companies with no real revenue. But a lot of the companies would have like 150 million of ARR. And so they were, there was some business there and they started getting valued on these like really crazy looking forward multiples. But it was a totally for me being born in the mid-90s, I guess the mid-90s, it's not really correct to think, oh, I've lived through something like this because what happened in the late 90s, early 2000s, year 2000 was on another level.

Yeah. Just to kind of give you some anchoring on how crazy the dot com boom was during the last four years. So from 95 to 99, about 100 Internet companies issued stock on Wall street and together they are worth, they are now worth more than $250 billion. For reference, it took John D. Rockefeller more than 40 years to create Standard Oil and Bill gates more than 20 to build Microsoft. The pace of paper wealth creation is increasing. Just since the beginning of March, more than a dozen Internet companies have gone public and about 30 others have filed for permission to sell stock in the near future. And there's some great quotes in here. One's from David Byrne, general partner at Benchmark Capital, says it's a very small world, referring to Mary Meeker. The higher you go up, the smaller it gets. Everybody is connected and she is at the Center. Back in 95, Meeker and a research associate wrote a 300 page research paper called the Internet Revolution. The Internet Report, which hailed the nascent technology as a revolutionary medium.

Isn't that a great, isn't that great that you could just come out with a name like the Internet Report and it just becomes iconic immediately?

Yeah. And so at the time, fewer than 10 million people were online and many people, Bill Gates among them, were skeptical about the online world's commercial possibilities. You were saying, yeah, like it's like the fax machine. It's not going to really unlock entirely. New companies like trillion dollar companies are not going to come out of this. And there was a lot of skeptic speaker, brushed aside skepticism and predicted correctly that the number of Internet users would grow 100 to 150 million by the turn of the century. She followed up that copy, that coup by writing the Internet Advertising Report and then the Internet retailing report in 1997.

And just to give people an idea of how impactful this was. They took the. Just the Internet report and it was turned into books and then sold in offline so like you could go in the airport and buy the Internet report. There was a couple things that she called out very correctly because she saw the usage of the Internet. Right. 10 million users. And she called and this is in 1995, she called that email would be the first killer application, which was absolutely correct. It's still the foundation of the Internet. You can't really use any software in a meaningful way without having that communication layer first. And then the next sort of wave that she predicted was just browsing information online. Right. So browsing had to come before purchasing. And so a lot of companies would spin up a website that you couldn't. It wasn't an E commerce website. You could just go there and sort of browse. It ended up becoming a digital sort of catalog. But it's funny to think at this time that the concept of browsing just didn't exist. Right. And so a lot of people made money just by going to legacy companies and saying, I'll make you a website. And then they would charge like inconceivable amounts of money to create what was effectively a static HTML page.

Yeah. I love these quotes. There's so many classic ones in here. So first off, yes, 150,000 copies of the Internet report were printed and sent around by Morgan Stanley. If you have one or you know someone that has a physical copy, please let us know. I want to acquire that. That's a rare text we gotta get our paws on. I love this quote from Roger McNamee, partner at Integral Capital Partners, Silicon Valley investment firm, says, Mary has provided an intellectual framework for understanding the Internet. And I think that's exactly what Ben Thompson did in the social media era. Talking about aggregation theory. Mary Meeker, very different business model, but very similar in terms of providing framework.

Ben Thompson has a great business model. He's will probably make $100 million selling his thoughts. Mary Meeker, better business model actually capturing some of the upside of the things that she's writing about and a ridiculous amount of fees in the, in the process.

Yeah, well, she wasn't really when she was on the capital on the equity research desk. Because I don't, I don't believe she was comped on the actual investment banking deals. That's the investment banking team there should be separate. But eventually switched over and raised a massive growth fund and has been printing ever since, I'm sure.

Yeah, but you have to imagine she was the best paid analyst of that period and was probably paid on par with, I would at least hope on par with somebody on the other side who was relying on her research to actually make deals happen.

They said it was a few million dollars a year in this article.

It was the Tim Cook of her era.

Yeah. Dramatically underpinned. But then she became a capital allocator. Now she has a multibillion dollar fund, bond capital. She's out there making money.

Yeah. So just to give you an idea, so she's picking companies like a VC in the sense that she's picking companies that she can get in, like, hypothetically she could get into. Right. So anyone else could have been doing this research and the companies that she was picking, just a sampling, Dell, Microsoft, Intuit, Netscape, AOL, Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, and Google were all stocks. Companies that she, like, put her stamp on and said, these are winners. And so even though she ended up taking the fall over time for being the face of the bubble, a lot of the companies that she was picking, like, if she was a VC and she got 10 crazy winners and like 40 other sort of misses, she would have been, you know, she would have been the greatest VC of that period. She just happened to be doing public markets, more investment research.

Yeah. There's a funny anecdote in here. She's talking to the journalist and her email system goes down and it really feels like the same frustration that we were having with AI and ChatGPT. We're like, this is super buggy. But she's not off put by it. She says, I had to call someone to come into the office and fax me my emails. And so there's this thing where you can simultaneously be frustrated with the rough edges of nascent technology while still recognizing their impact. Fact. There's some interesting facts in here. A little bit of Coogan's Law going on. The. There's this idea that Meager recognized early that using online communication was much cheaper and more efficient than relying on wood pulp and mailman, and that once the Internet grew and more and more people joined the network, its usefulness would increase exponentially. The latter point has been formalized in Metcalfe's Law, which was set down some years ago by Robert Metcalfe, the founder of 3Com. It states that the value of any network increases in proportion to the square of its number of people using it. So a network with 500 people attached to it is 100 times more useful than one with only 50 people attached. And so this is an interesting thing because Metcalfe's Law was defined, but it was living out there in the computer science world. And she was able to take that idea and popularize it amongst the investing community. And that has immense value. And sometimes you don't even need to be the person who coins a phrase to extract the most value from it. You can extract a ton of value just by popularizing a phrase in an important.

But we recommend that all of our audience try to coin some stuff, go out repackaged.

It should have been like actually Meeker's Law.

And it's slightly different half of our conversations. I'm like, all right, what do you think about this? The Hayes paradox? And you're like, it's got legs.

Great. She picked AOL in 1993, first online service to be aimed at non geeks. Those disks that they send out to everyone and you can install it and use the Internet. At the time, American was losing money. Its accounting was dubious and many people on Wall street were doubtful about its future. America Online shares, adjusting for subsequent stock splits, were selling for about 95 cents each. Last week they were changing hands for about $160 each. She followed up her inspired America Online call with numerous others. She has recommended 10, 10 baggers or stocks that subsequently increased more than tenfold. Amazon.com, america Online, CNET, Compaq, Dell, eBay, Intuit, Netscape and Microsoft. Now some of those got bought and stuff, but it's like just banger after banger.

Absolute dog.

Absolute dog you. In the fall of 1994, Meeker came across a story in the Times by John Markoff about a new venture called Mosaic Communications, which we talked about, which had developed an easy to use device for navigating the World Wide Web. I read the article and the light bulb went on. Meeker told me she visited Mosaic's offices in Mountain View, California. And in April of 1995, Morgan rounded up a group of old line media firms, they included Times Mirror, Knight, Ritter and Hearst to invest in the new venture. It's so funny. Marc Andreessen did a party round with Legacy Media.

Yeah.

What a narrative violation. Exact opposite of what he would recommend to a new founder.

Yeah, yeah. Now he's convincing founders, I need the whole hundred million, I need the whole round.

Yeah.

And also it's probably generally good.

No, no, it was the right move at the time. It's very funny. And so on August 9, 1985, at the start of year one in the online era with the Netscape IPO, we really hope helped create A new business model, she told me we helped create a new way of financing companies. Even the most unrestricted stock market bear wouldn't contest the statement. One of the great strengths of contemporary American capitalism, which relies on decentralized decision making by hundreds of millions of individuals, is the ability to channel large amounts of money into promising new industries. And the growth of the Internet industry is an excellent example of this process at work. Fantastic. So great. There's another anecdote about priceline.com I mean this whole article is just so, is just so, so good. A couple weeks after our first conversation, I returned to Meeker's office and asked her what was going to happen in the next in the Internet story. As she described her vision of the online world's future, she relied heavily on a phrase I hadn't heard before. Digital Darwinism. The phrase is based on the economics of increasing returns and on, on what are called network effects. It ties in with the conceit common among Internet cognizanti like Meeker that we are seeing an emergence of an entirely new commercial ecosystem. The economics of digital Darwinism are pretty simple. During the last few years, economists have come to recognize that high technology markets tend to be dominated by one or two firms which enjoy high profit margins and that companies establishing such an early lead are difficult to displace. And that could not be more true. Like yeah, there was.

That went on to influence 22 decades, 20 years of the dominant sort of thinking in venture capital which was if you don't have, if you're, if you know, if you're not a power law company, if you're not, you know, in that sense probably influenced Thiel in many ways. But if you're, if you don't have network effects, there's probably not a venture backed business to be built here. And in many cases that was correct.

Yeah, the Internet is a kind of small town. Everyone will go to www.something and they won't go anywhere else, at least not often. And so these habits are really important. She called them super companies. America Online, Amazon, ebay, Yahoo, very, very interested in aggregation market concentration, power law outcomes. Defining this very, very early. I think the problem was that like the second and third order investors, like the retail investors and the people downstream weren't actually reading her reports. They weren't actually taking what she said to heart. And so they wound up just yoloing into random stocks hoping for a pump. And that happened. But then a lot of them got washed out. And that was unnecessary.

Well, yeah, and there's a ton of data today available on pretty much any company, any public company that you can think of. And most people just see a post or their buddy tells them and they just yolo into it. They don't really read. It's. It's not like. And so, yeah, I'm sure if you read her entire report on something, you would find a huge section saying, here are the, you know, 20 potential risks to this business. But nobody's reading that far, right? They're just like, if I don't invest now, the stock's going to be double by the time I get to call my broker. You know, my broken joker.

Totally. This is a fantastic quote about Amazon. She's, she's talking to Steve case, who was AOL's chairman at the time. The question I always asked Steve Case, AOL's chairman and chief executive, was, when do you reach critical mass? It was 1 million customers. It was 5 million. At 8 million, he said, Mary, shut up. Lots many. AOL finally became profitable at 10 million customers. Amazon.com on the other hand, still hasn't made a dime. But Meeker is relatively unconcerned. My view of Amazon is that it's not just books, it's bits. She said, if two years from now it has 15 or 20 million customers and it has their credit card numbers and they are happy, then it can make money. Books will be seen as the Trojan horse that got them all the customers, just like all given away by aol.

And this was, this was Zucks. Not Zucks. Bezos's genius, right?

Totally. Trojan Horse.

He very clearly believed that books were the Trojan horse and he picked books as a category. I'm sure many people know this because if you walk into a bookstore, they're going to have a lot of books, but they're not going to have every book on earth. And in this situation, you could have a single store, quote, unquote store that had pretty much every book you could possibly want. And so it actually was a better, the digital store was a better product than going to the actual store. And that was very different than going, you know, buying cars online at the time, where if you walk into a Porsche dealer and you want to buy a new car, they're pretty much going to have like, what you want, right?

Yep. This is great.

By the way, John, got some breaking news for the audience. We are now officially at TBPN on X.

Fantastic.

It went live. Anybody, if you navigate to Echbros pod, it'll now take you back to tbpn. So more to come There.

Welcome to the future. Let's continue on. She's even calling how the Internet will affect companies outside of Internet native businesses outside the Internet sector. The biggest losers in the Darwinian struggle, Meeker believes, will be retailers, travel agents and other businesses that compete directly with online firms. In the last quarter of 1998, she pointed out to me, both Barnes and Noble and Borders reported slower rates of sales growth in their stores. Mattel, which mostly makes toys and games out of wood, metal and plastic instead of computer chips, had a disappointing Christmas. Yet Meeker isn't a zealot. Things rarely happen as quickly as one thinks, so there's rarely displacement as quickly as one thinks. She told me television didn't kill radio. The Internet is not going to kill television, radio or publishing. Nonetheless, she is critical of the big media companies for missing a historic opportunity. Disney should have been Yahoo @ and T should have been AOL. Time Warner should have been Excite. She said, why didn't it happen? Because it was a series of judgment errors. And so really.

Yeah, this is, this is the challenge. Now if you're building startups.

Yep.

Is that. We've talked about this earlier on the show. If you want to be in social networking, you're competing against Zuck, who's ridden multiple different hype cycles and trends. He identifies trends early, ships at them quickly and it's just a very different game. I think a lot of the venture, the old guard and venture was trained on the idea that big companies don't adapt quickly. But you even saw this. Nike acquired an NFT company because they were like, hey, maybe people are going to shift online and be buying digital goods. So they go buy a, you know, they bought an NFT company like immediately because they were like, we, this is a risk to our business and maybe a potential growth opportunity. And so I do think this has changed pretty dramatically in the last five years where you have people that were trained on technology and real fast moving sort of digital innovation that now are just like, okay, this is a trend. We're jumping on it. Right?

Yeah, there's a great anecdote. I love these articles because it's just a murderer's row of today's hitters before they were big. With the Priceline IPO out of the way, Meeker and her colleagues are busy looking for their next big money spinner. That's a funny phrase for. You're on mute. But who are they going to spin into the next multi billion dollar company? Right. Yeah, yeah. Kingmakers. And so she says one night after work Meeker and Ruth Perrott, a senior executive at Morgan Stanley's corporate finance department. Ruth Perat is the CFO of Google now. Like big, big hitter. They're. They're out at a dinner running through some IPO possibilities that were on the horizon. After the waiter took their orders, Porat opened a thick black folder that contained information on approximately 200 privately owned Internet companies. You know, VC backed companies that could be the next big IPO. Let's talk about tier one candidates first, said a slim, elegant 39 year old mother of three. The first name on her list was a Colorado based company that provides financial services online. It's got revenues going from 29 to 80, Porat explained. Meaning in millions of dollars. I said it's still too early, she added. Meeker nodded. A California company that makes Internet software was much closer to the starting line. Porat explained it would be holding a bake off at which rival investment banks would compete for the lucrative business of taking it public the following week. We have to be there, right? Meeker asked. Yes, says her assistant. Porat grimaced. I have to bring my kids, she said. It's the first day of my vacation. Continued with Perrot methodically checking off her list and Meeker offering their views. At one point, Perot mentioned that a firm was also talking to Goldman Sachs. The assistant said he still had some doubts about the company. Meeker, bristling at the mention of Goldman, disagreed. When we first saw it a year ago, it didn't have a real story at all, she said, referring to the firm now. Story is good, the business is developing and the numbers are better. Let's agree to make a pitch in a couple of weeks. I love that. We gotta go. Like the showing. There's blood in the water. We smell ipo. Done. When the three of them had completed their decisions and finished their dinner, I asked Meeker if she had any regrets about the last few years. She mentioned that Morgan had missed the opportunity to do the IPOs for Yahoo, eBay and Amazon. And she went on to say that the first case had been a brain dead mistake. Meeker hadn't thought that Yahoo was ready to go public, and the second had been a screw up. Meeker and her colleagues had performed poorly at ebay's Bake Off. Amazon.com was a different story. Meeker recognized the company's potential and knew its founder, Jeff Bezos. But she was overruled by the senior management at Morgan because the bank had a long standing relationship with Barnes and noble, which was Amazon.com's main rival Leonard Riggio, Barnes and Noble's chairman, asked Morgan not to raise money for a competitor and Morgan agreed. The decision upset Meeker so much that he seriously considered quitting instead of remain. Instead, she remained a Vocal supporter of Amazon.com and her support paid off last year when it asked Morgan to sell $500 million worth of junk bonds to help finance its rapid expansion. This time, Meeker's superiors ignored Riggio's objections. Just sit down, buddy. You're not the biggest client here anymore. Get out.

It's interesting how this now because so much of financing these type of companies, which are early, they have some revenue and a ton of potential and great stories, but are still early. This same dynamic plays out at venture firms where you have like a partner who backed the competitor at another fund and like he's on the board and so they're just like arguing and like deals don't get done. And this is why you see big partnerships kind of not breaking up but exiting. So a lot of that activity is shifted downstream. But it's pretty funny to think about Barnes and Noble kind of like blocking the deal because they're like, hey, we keep, you know, we have a decades long relationship. Yeah, come on, take our business elsewhere, you know.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That dynamic of her not really sitting on the, the banking side and sitting on the research side. She could still go on to cover these companies once they were in the public markets because Morgan Stanley's clients would be interested and want to understand those stocks.

Yeah, and no client is going to have the poll to say, hey, don't even cover my competitor editor or write a negative research report. You have to be a really crazy, crazy pull at the bank to do that. So she closes. She's kind of talking about the speculative excess. The feel of speculative excess and making too much money too fast reminds one that greed can be bad. She wrote in a January research circular. And it wasn't a throwaway line when she wrote it. She had just visited a couple of private Internet companies that wanted to go public. They were unbelievably arrogant about how successful they were going to be and they were unbelievably arrogant about the valuations they wanted to achieve on their ipo. She told me. I was just pissed. I was like, come on guys. According to Meeker, a second generation of Internet entrepreneurs is emerging and it often suffers from what she calls market cap envy. Does this sound familiar? Oh, I gotta get the billion dollar round done. I gotta be a founder of unicorn. This happens today. So there's this massive market cap envy of people like Andreessen and Bezos. The first generation was like, hey, isn't this great? I'm a billionaire. Well that's kind of embarrassing. What am I going to do with all this stuff? She said. The next generation is say, well, saying well, if he's a billionaire, then I've got to be a billionaire. With every IPO the envelope is pushed a little bit further. At some point you have to scream. Uncle. Meeker won't talk about how much money she makes herself, but it's safe to assume that she took home several million dollars last year. That is a lot of cash by most people's standards, but it's a pittance compared to the amounts being raked in by successful Internet entrepreneurs, many of whom are starting to spend their wealth on lavish estates. Market recent he waited. He built his over a long time and also his wife and father in law are like massive landowners as well. But it's funny that everyone I gotta be like Mark. I gotta be like Mark. He's just, he's too goated. I gotta be a billionaire. Get the deal done. Let's IPO this company. Doesn't matter that we have a million dollars in revenue. It was fake. Let's get it, let's get out there, she says. I'm having fun and I think I'm doing what is what I do best. In recent weeks, rumors have emerged on Wall street that she may be leaving Morgan for a hedge fund, which didn't happen. But she did leave eventually for Kleiner Perkins. And then she spun out to start Bond, a growth stage equity firm where she has where she would be paid a lot more. But she has dismissed the rumors as tittle tattle put about by her competitors. I plan to be here. Far from seeking a demanding new job, Meeker said she is hoping to spend more time on things other than work in the next few years. On the rare occasions when she does escape from the office, she skis, cycles, rollerblades and wind surfs.

Eventually she would like to no mention of golf there. So maybe she got burnt out.

Maybe, maybe, maybe she sees golf as like more of a work activity. Honestly, I think human beings have a capacity to go 247 for a certain amount of time. When things are moving in a fast and exciting way. It's good advice. Then there's a time when you say wait a minute. I think the whole industry is coming to that point. Perhaps some of Meeker's colleagues are skeptical about her resolve to ease up a little. She's completely neurotic. One of them told me, can you imagine her doing anything at a slow speed? I just don't believe it. I love that, that quotes like unattributed. Somebody was like, I'll give you the real, I'll give you the real story on Mary. She's relentless. But no, I'm not going on record and saying that, you know, it's amazing. Ultimately, her future depends on the fate of the industry she covers. Much as she might like to avoid it, her reputation and her lifestyle are inextricably linked to the fate of stocks like Amazon.com, yahoo and eBay. Not a bad fate to be linked to.

Yeah, and it's also not really true. She's being paid to be an analyst. And even in a down cycle, you still need to analyze equities. Should we jump to kind of some of the fallout? Basically, yeah, let's do it. So little summary of kind of like what happened. So this article was written in 1999. 99. So this is kind of what comes after. So. However, Meeker's close ties to the dot com boom also brought scrutiny when the dot com bubble burst in 2000-2001. And for people that listen to our Friday episode on Masa sun. In the year 2000, Masa was in a Tokyo nightclub telling every young man and woman that was in the club, you're going to be worth $50,000,000. You're going to be worth $50 million. You're going to be worth, $50,000,000. Basically just getting everybody so hyped. Three months later, the market just crashes, falls out beneath everyone. Tommaso is playing a different game and riding high. So as mas's net worth dropped 90, literally 99%, he goes from the richest man in the entire world riding on many of the same. Remember he bought 30% of Yahoo for like 100 million bucks or something like that. So he was back, he was self identifying some of the companies that Meeker was analyzing as well. So when the bubble burst, she was vilified by the press alongside all the other sort of star analysts who were hyping these sort of Internet stocks. And regulators ended up having to investigate whether analysts had conflicts of interest in promoting stocks. So it's obviously a conflict if an analyst is buying a stock and then dropping a report on behalf of an investment bank and then presumably there's going to be a huge pop and they're selling. And so this is very different than a VC backing a company in the private markets and then going and posting a thread, you know, I think this is a trillion dollar company or whatever because they're not selling, you know, they're not like at a company that sells those, that will sell you those shares. Right? It's, it's all privately held. So unlike her peers, Meeker was never charged with wrongdoing. In fact, colleagues noted that Meeker genuinely believed in the long term values of the company she covered. For instance, she continued to endorse Amazon even after the crash, convinced of his strong fundamentals. And so she was also telling people in her reports, I think there's a bubble, I think a correction would be good, it would be healthy. She, she wasn't just, she wasn't Masa, which was like very different than Masa. You're at the precipice of the biggest transformation of all time. You're all going to be worth, you know, tens of millions of dollars. So very different approach. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, where she was at and other firms did have to pay a large settlement to resolve their analysts conflict of interest. Inquiries, inquiries. But Meeker's personal integrity remained largely intact. Her genuine conviction in tech's future, even during the dark days, set her apart. As Fortune magazine wrote, she was absolutely first rate at spotting big picture trends and backed up her ideas with massive amounts of data. And so she wasn't just, she wasn't just the Masa who's like, no diligence, doesn't even know who the competitors are yoloing into Yahoo. Just saying, this is the greatest company of all time. Who are your competitors? Okay, cool. If you don't let me invest, I'm.

Gonna invest in them.

Putting out is like hundreds and hundreds and the volume here is what you should really. And I'm sure the difference in the slides that she would put out versus Masa, where Masa just has an up arrow, this is the only graphic you need. Up, up, up only.

She posted a 300 page report. Have you ever seen any of her reports? It's all like, yeah, detailed like, like earnings, assets.

Like in the chat, Pontifan said The Internet report is 27 used on Amazon, so.

Oh, let's get one. Thank you.

Yeah, yeah, we'll have to get one.

Thank you.

Thank you for calling that out.

Doing our homework for us.

And then a Donnia says, my favorite was WM Connect. Apparently it was Walmart's version of aol, which they, they launched at some point. So if you love aol, you'll love the Walmart version of it.

The Walmart version of it, yeah, they Sell the Walmart Birkin bag and now they also sell the Walmart Internet.

What can't they do over at Walmart Legends.

Fantastic.

So anyways, and then now let's talk about kind of where she took this because she was sick, absolutely sick to her stomach, only making a few million bucks a year while everyone around her was making hundreds to billions. She probably went out and hung out with Mark and started to say, hey, maybe this venture capital lifestyle's for me.

Fantastic. Yep. And so yeah, now she's still running bond large growth equity firm investing in late stage SaaS, scale ups and other.

Large and before that. So she 2010, right. Everybody's circling, saying, you know, she, she weathered the storm. She kept being, you know, one of the top analysts for a lot of these stocks. Like I said, continuing to not hype the word. Like hype is the wrong word because her approach was very much looking at the fundamentals of the businesses and the markets that they were in. But so she kind of like rides the fallout to 2010. At that point, you know, this whole time people are thinking, you know, this is like the personnel news bit that we would do on her move would be, you know, just the craziest, you know, sound effects and, and visual graphics you can think of. But so she ends up actually going to Kleiner Perkins, which at the time was still kpcb, Kleiner Perkins, Caufield and Byers, one of top Silicon Valley's top venture capital firms as a general partner. So she goes straight to the top. Of course, KP brought her on to lead a newly formed $1 billion digital growth fund aimed at investing in fast growing tech companies. Transitioning from Wall street analyst to venture capitalist was an unusual move. Very few analysts had ever joined VC firms at senior levels. Although it is interesting that Gurley was a tech analyst himself prior to going into venture capital. So it does seem like it's a good base for vc. But it played to Meeker's long held desire to be an investor and company builder. There's a quote here, she says, I always wanted to invest. My move to investing was delayed in part because I just love what I was doing as an analyst. She later reflected that she would have loved Twitter threads. Kind of missed miss that era of being, you could just. Right, you could have been a thread boy. So at kp, Meeker hit the ground running. Within two years, she and her team had deployed about half of the fund, so $500 million into 20 technology companies. Meeker led or co led investments in several high profile Companies including Spotify, Square, Twitter, Groupon, Jawbone, and Waze. She also backed lesser known but promising companies like Lending Club, Peer to peer lending, DocuSign. She helped lead them to 150,000 employees. One King's Lane, which was some home decor company. And she said some investments were chances to catch up on companies Kleiner had missed earlier. So she was like, very much focused on businesses that already had some amount of fundamentals. And this kind of shows the trend of companies saying, oh, we have $10 million of revenue and some users, let's go public to, hey, I'd rather just take a big check from Mary Meeker and stay private, stay focused. She trusts the fundamentals. I don't need to explain what we're doing to tens of thousands of people every quarter. And so Meeker's presence and network often opened doors. She personally knew or could reach the CEOs and founders of most rising tech unicorns, giving Kleiner an edge in winning deals. So she goes from during the 2000s bubble. Every single person on earth wants to meet her, hang out with her, do deals, whatever, have her analyze their business. So then going into venture, it's comparatively a lot easier because founders will still come to you and you're still in that position of kind of just trying to pick winners. And so she had really built up that, that muscle. And so she was on the board of companies like Square, DocuSign, Nextdoor, which you have to imagine was pretty invaluable for those companies. So do you want to take it from here?

Yeah, I'm pretty much ready to wrap up. I think she's still out there. She still does Web 2.0 summit with John Battelle, still puts out Internet reports, but it lives in a very different part of the Internet now.

Yeah, I wish that she went all in on Web three, like Andreessen. She should have partnered up and been an Andreessen crypto, but I think she probably not really. Her style likes the fundamentals, likes earnings potential, things like that. You don't find in crypto quite as much.

No, but, yeah, she's still around, still kicking. We got to get her on the pod. We got to get her on Lex Friedman, Dwarkesh Patel. Let's make these things happen. You know who really should interview her? Logan Bartlett. That would be a great one. She'd be great for that. But yeah, I mean, what a fascinating tour of a time capsule era with lots of lessons for today. I love it. I love digging into these old profiles and seeing what life was like back.

Then so good, Mary, you're always welcome on the show.

Always welcome.

Honorary brother.

Yep.

To track some of her latest fun, maybe we give her brother of the week.

Yeah. Yeah. Maybe we ring the size gong to really raise the next fund.

If I had the gong here, I'd hit it.

Yeah. Well, let's move on to some personnel news. We got some incredible news from Alex Conrad. He says, today is my last day at Forbes. I'm leaving to build something new. Wow.

This is another death knell for legacy media folks.

It really is.

Ashley Vance and now Alex Conrad. I don't know who's left.

It's an empty building at this point. Who else is there? It's a disaster at these places, but Alex is on to greener pastures. He says, I've been lucky to call this place home for the past 12 years. Working with the best team and getting to know so many of you from the Midas list to 18 cover stories. It's never been boring. So watch out for what Alex Conrad's doing next. I look forward to seeing it. Maybe it's a substack. Maybe it's a media company. Who knows? Maybe it's some gonzo journalism. And we'll see him with a whiskey.

And a cigar at WWE is. We will be honored to cover the stories that he covers.

Exactly.

We'll be honored to cover his story of his coverage.

Exactly. Exactly.

Anyways, congrats, Alex. Awesome move.

But always, always an entertaining writer. And of course, the Midas list drops like a stone every year, I hope. A couple months ago, when the Midas list dropped, I posted something on X recommending that there should be other lists. There should be the ICARUS List for VCs that are the worst. Essentially.

Too close to the sun.

It flew too close to the sun. And he liked it and was like, this is actually a good idea. Now that he's got the chains off, he's no longer at Forbes. Maybe we'll see an Alex Conrad Icarus list.

Nobody.

Here's.

Here's. Here's some misinformation for you. So this is true. Forbes had been kind of on the market, sort of widely, Widely known that there was, you know, it was for sale. So, like, a bunch of people looked at it. I don't know, but it would be hilarious if, If. If Alex was part of a group forming, like the acquirer, you know, to. Then, you know, he might be like, I'm back, actually, and I'm the CEO now.

I'm the CEO.

I run this.

Yeah, but Forbes is.

It Forbes is an interesting business because it's one of those things they've licensed off so many parts of their business. They have. Like there's Forbes Publishing, which has the license to publish books under the Forbes name. And so you've probably gotten emails before that's like, hey, John, like, I'd like to write about, like, I think you'd write an amazing book. Oh, this is Forbes Publishing. And so he's. They compete with like, Eric. Yeah. And what's Eric's company's name again?

Turpentine.

No, no, no, no, no. Not. Not Eric Newcomer.

Scribed.

Yeah, yeah. Scribed. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, yeah, it's interesting.

Forbes is known for the 30 under 30 and the Midas list. I hope that Alex can take some of that because those lists, they just go so viral. They're so like, they're such a powerful moment in tech whenever they drop. And there's so many ways to freshen them up and put a fresh twist on them. I was joking with somebody about instead of the Forbes 30 under 30, there's a lot of people that still like that and they fight to be on those lists and they get really upset if they don't make it and they turn 31 because then they can't be on the list or they turn 30, they can't be on the list. And I was like, the alpha here is just make. Here are. Here are the. Here are the best 21 year olds. Here are the best 22 year olds. And make a list for every age, every single year. And anyone can be on the list. And it's just a Rolodex. So there's a lot of other opportunities.

Yeah, maybe he's just starting a list company. It's a media company that just does lists.

I would love that.

Great business model and it's all pay to play. So he's like, yeah, you want to be on my Midas? The Conrad list for top VCs 100 grand.

Let's do it.

He's like, I ran the Midas list.

Yeah.

This is the only list that matters now.

Yeah, I'd want to be on it.

Yeah. Anyway, podcaster John Coogan tops the Conrad list. Even though. So he's not. He's definitely the smallest investor. Clearly an angel investor. Smallest investor on this list. But he's got.

Anyway, should we get into Conrad Media? And he seems to be on the board there too. Weird.

We had got.

Let's go to a promoted post from Brandon Jacoby.

Jacoby.

Jacoby. He's hiring a Designer at X. There is tons of momentum and excitement happening at X for the right designer. It's a chance to do the most impactful and important work of your career. If you're interested, send Brandon Jacoby a DM with your best work. The job is in person in New York City. The city that never sleeps, the Big Apple or the Bay Area.

I love how Brandon put a typo in here to prove that it wasn't written by AI. I pretty much do this every post if you haven't noticed. I'll rip a post and a solid post usually has at least a couple typos in it.

Yep.

Because I'm moving quick. But I love that Brandon wanted to say this is authentic. This was written by a human. I really want you to join my team. Brandon was a first hire at my last company party round. We met at at a so house in New York because he's a designer. I wanted to make him feel like, you know, like I'm like a cool CEO, you know, knew within like 30 minutes that I, that I wanted to hire him. And, and I, and I actually one of one of the most, you know, was, was my right hand man for three years and is just an absolute legend. So if you're a designer or your friend's a designer, reach out to Brandon. This would be an, I mean working on the everything app, working on X right now. It's a portal into humanity, the good and the bad. Incredible opportunity and I would like to work for Brandon if my Figma chops were on that level.

But yeah, joining X right now is like joining the Mongol empire. Right as Genghis Khan is taking control.

Generational run.

Generational run coming up. Get on board, hop on your horse and gallop over to Brandon Jacoby's DMs with your best design work.

Okay John, jump into the next post. Ben's giving me instructions that I need to turn on some lights.

Well, I will read this one. Let's go to Sam Altman. He says people will post lots of great examples. So this is his announcement of OpenAI ChatGPT O3 mini high deep research version and deep research. He says people will post lots of great examples. But here's a fun one. Sam Altman he I am in Japan right now and looking for an old nsx. I love that he's out there collecting cars and he spent hours searching unsuccessfully for the perfect one. How do you not have a broker for this? The answer, he doesn't need one because he has chatgpt deep research. I was about to give up and Deep Research just found it. And so if you're on the Pro subscription of ChatGPT, go give it a test, check it out. We used it a little bit. It's still rough around the edges. They're ironing out the kinks, but definitely a fun new product to play around with and I hope there will be a unification of the models soon and everything will get much easier. But it is cool, you know, you click, click the Deep Research, you let it cook and it just goes on for, you know, like minutes sometimes, just working, searching, doing a bunch of different stuff, creating a bunch of those internal logic tokens. And from there it spits out a pretty thorough research report, which I think is great. Let's move on to Andrej Karpathy. We already talked about Deep Research a bit. Andrej Karpathy has a good post here. He says there's a new kind of coding I call vibe coding, where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials and forget that code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs cursor Composer with Sonnet are getting so good. I also I just talked to Composer with Super Whisper, so I barely even touched the keyboard. I asked for the dumbest things, like decrease the padding on the sidebar by half because I'm too lazy to find it. I always accept all. I accept all. Always. I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages, I just copy and paste them with no comment. Usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension. Keep in mind, this is one of the greatest programmers of all time. I'd have Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug, so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or web app, but it's not really coding. I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, copy, paste stuff, and it mostly works. I love it. What a vibe shift in how programming is happening.

I mean, Karpathy basically gave every developer in the world permission to do what they're already doing, which they didn't want to talk about because they were like, oh, I use LLMs the best and then the most gated ways, but really it's just, you know, like grandma in the Vegas casino slot machine.

Yeah, there's no gatekeeping here. Yeah, is software is war. You have to be willing to do anything to anyone.

And it's actually cool thinking about, you know, I've had. You have this design. You can design apps way faster than you can build functional apps historically. And so you could hang out. Like I would hang out with Brandon Jacoby and we would just sit there for an hour and just make a bunch of stuff.

Yep.

I'd be like, no, do it like that, do it like this, things like that. And that's now becoming possible with software. Just the speed and so you can imagine, I can imagine live streaming software development becomes like much more common because it's like, hey, watch me build this app in this like crazy app in an hour. That's way more, that's way more interesting than watch me build this app over a 20 day period.

Right? Exactly. Yeah, 100%. Well, let's move on to Deep Seq. Marc Andreessen is sharing some Data. He says DeepSeek is now 23% of ChatGPT daily active users and far more daily app downloads. And Nikita Beer chimes in and says, I'm skeptical of this data. TikTok is warming this trend. So creators are rushing in to make videos about Deep Seek. Because if you post about deep seek on TikTok, you will get promotion. You'll get pumped in the feed and go viral. And two, when DAU includes first day downloads, it overstates authentic adoption. So for example, I mean, I downloaded deepseek one day, I tried it once just to know what it was about. It has not replaced as daily driver. I probably still count as DAU on that phone. And so a little bit of like, you know, putting this in the truth zone, what's actually going on here? Maybe it's just too soon to tell. Nikita Sundays there's also 0 shares. Flows of responses inside of Deep Seq that would lead. I forgot to print the rest of that. But interesting debate. It will be interesting to see how sticky deepseek is. Clearly they broke through in a major way. It's probably a stronger brand than Anthropic already. Even though Claude has like this amazing community in the developer sense with like the sonnet into cursor. Everyone knows about that, but that's a very narrow thing. If you walk to somebody on the street, they might know the term Deep Seq. They might not know the term Claude or Sonnet or Anthropic. And that's why Claude has been. Or Anthropic has been like buying billboards trying to build their brand. Whereas Deep Seq was able to kind of go viral with this crazy. It's open source, it's from China and it's this whole thing and it went viral and it cost stuff. They really did like a stunt and now it's coming out actually spend 6 million but it still served as a viral market entry.

Yeah, I think you have to look at Mark's posts about this from the Lens that he was deeply frustrated with OpenAI and OpenAI's board for trying to pursue regulatory capture around AI and say, hey, this is so dangerous, please regulate us. But like regulate us in these ways we, you know, really going out against open source. So OpenAI started as an open source company, flipped into a for profit closed source company and now still they've been facing heat in the last 24 hours because their chain of thought, like the reasoning that they show, people figured out that it's just an LLM summarizing the actual chain of thought reasoning because they still want to share it. And so Mark, you know, just not going to say it on the timeline, but he absolutely hates OpenAI. He hates what they stand for, he hates what they've done. And so he's taking every opportunity to promote deep seek out of an, out of an annoyance with OpenAI more broadly. So I don't believe any of this data either. I believe that yes they're getting the downloads, but it could very easily be fake. It could be a bunch of fake TikTok users trying it out. From what we know, there's a really strong willingness to try new AI products. There's also ridiculous churn Magic avatars were.

The same thing with that company that I can't even remember but everyone downloaded it for that one week. They paid a little bit, what was it called? Lensa and then they got their magic avatars, they posted on Instagram and then okay, I'm done with that. And so it'll be interesting to see what the retention is here for sure. The other interesting thing is that Lex Friedman just had Dylan Patel on five hour episode last night and he's back.

To his AI roots. He's like sick of having these Ukrainian oligarchs on my show. I just want to talk about AI.

But it was a fantastic episode. And in there Dylan Patel addresses the question of can you basically poison an open source LLM at the open weights level. And so there's this huge differentiator between obviously like if you're, if you're interacting with the Deep SEQ app, they get your data and they say that right in the terms and conditions like it's hosted in China, all the data goes into a database. There's and everyone knows that the question is if it's open source and you're running it on American hardware, is it possible to bake into the weights, some, some sort of backdoor? And he actually, he says he doesn't think this is happening right now, but it is possible. And he gives a couple examples that are good. One is that the, the English, like, like UK British English is basically dead. And no LLM because they're all traded on American English. LLMs just will never spell the word color with a U. They just only spell it C O, L O R because it's so Americanized and total victory. Yeah. And a lot of those are baked in and the open web, that's all.

Because they tried to put a two and a half percent tax on tea. Yeah, Be saying color with the U. Yeah.

And so a lot of the, a lot of the, like these open source LLMs, they, they tend to lean slightly left because they're trained on the Internet. The Internet has historically been used by younger people and the Internet has slightly leaned left. And so even though Xai has done a lot of stuff to rip out like the wokeness, there's still some sort of in the pre training data, just a slightly left leaning bias. They have to kind of like try and counteract in some way to bring it more towards the center, I guess. And so it's totally possible to embed something. And this is what's really interesting. Anthropic has done some adversarial AI safety research where they've basically tried to bake in to just the weights. Remember this is an open source model. You could run on your own hardware, not even connected to an Internet and it can have a keyword in there that when it hears it it will behave differently. And, and so, and so in theory, I'm not saying this is happening right now, but in theory you could train an AI model that when it, when it sees, when it interacts with a certain, when a certain system or it sees a certain IP address or it sees a certain web URL, it behaves differently and it kind of acts as a backdoor even though it's open source and you're running it yourself, kind of like the Stuxnet virus. So it's possible. Dylan Patel doesn't think this is happening right now. He doesn't think anyone's actually been able to do that. But it is this interesting vector that actually makes me think a lot of the AI safety research might have been worth doing because we have these valuable insights. And it also makes me question like should we be more cautious? Is it fair to look at Deep SEQ as just a win for open source? Because there could be some sort of risk vector there, either now or in the future. And so I think when this came out, you were more skeptical about it. And I was saying, saying, hey, look, if you run it locally, there's no problem. I've kind of flipped over to your side now and I say, hey, you know, these open source models, I'm in favor of open source in many ways, but I think we do need to be cautious and we do need to test these models before we just roll them out to every American.

Yeah. The question is, will AI have a stuxnet moment?

Yep.

And I'm sure that it will, like on a long enough time horizon. Right. They're nation states have, for all of humanity's history, tried to control information and knowledge. Right. There's a lot of power that stems from that. And so if you were a aggressive nation state that wanted to inflict your ideology on the world, why would you not try this? Hey, if we can get a million people or 100 million people in this adversarial nation to download something that we can then control in some way or another, why would you not do that? Seems like a great strategy. And US Consumers have proven that they will download or buy anything from China. We'll see what happens with TEMU and all these other.

There's also the subtle ways to pivot a society through just like, oh, you ask it for four bullet points about, you know, why this president was good, and it gives you one that's a critique, you know, and it's just subtly shifting your perception of X, Y or Z. Obviously the Tiananmen Square thing is like the most obvious example, but there's a million, like, super subtle ways that you could, that you could shift the perception of if you're truly doing information war, that you could just subtly steer people towards your ideology without them even noticing. And that's actually the more valuable thing than just saying, like, oh, we got to keep Tiananmen Square under wraps. Like, that doesn't really matter. That doesn't matter as much as just if you're just subtly, subtly tweaking people's preferences away from democracy, that could be really harmful over a long, long period of time. And so.

We got a comment from Adonis. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. He says, I've been saying the US needs to get ahead of this by funding a security hardening Manhattan Project as one of the first things we do with super intelligence. So I think it's also basically saying that we kind of need to start doing that now and plan around, you know, the inevitable, seemingly inevitable, super intelligent stage. So. Great point.

Well, let's move on to Jeff Lewis. He says it has been clear since 2022 that we are in a historically acceleratory period. I expect it to last for decades. Acceleration entails asset bubbles forming and popping and forming again much faster than any of us are used to. If you are uncomfortable with insane volatility, seek illiquid or less liquid investments. Lotam banger. I think he's absolutely right. I mean, we just saw this bitcoin dipped from 100 to 92 and then back to 100. I'm sure there's lots of people that like, sold because it was falling like a knife and then I don't even know what it's at now. It might be down, might be up. Who knows? It's back up. It's 102 too. And so there's all these like, crazy things and the, the people who probably did fine and held there probably had it in a cold while cold storage couldn't even move it.

Yeah, this is, this is. So the illiquidity in startups oftentimes feels like a curse because you're like, why did I choose a career where I build tens of millions of dollars of asset value and can't access it without months of paperwork and finding a, A, you know, buyer on the other side? Which can be tough. But it's also the benefit because if the majority of your wealth is in illiquid private stocks day to day, you just don't really like my, my, if the market can go down or up, I'm not really. It doesn't really change my broad general position. And crypto people have really been feeling this the last few days. Like, I had a buddy text me yesterday and he said, dude, I was insanely rich last week and like now I'm not. And he's. And I talked to him, he's like, he sold some, but like, he's just killing himself because he's like, I could have. If I had just sold everything at that moment where I thought I was being pragmatic, it would. I'd be in a much different financial situation. And so, yeah, and I also this, this to me, tied my genera. Being born in the mid-90s, I feel like I started to become conscious around the time of like, truly conscious, as in like understanding the world and the markets and things like that. During the Great Recession.

Yep.

And so as. And I was like, okay, this is so bad. It felt like a long time. Right. Like I've got, you know, my dad was a math teacher, so it didn't affect his job, but there was a lot of like, fear in the market. And I feel like I felt that for a while. And then Covid hit and everybody's like, oh, this is going to be the biggest global economic disaster of all time. And it felt that way for two weeks. And then every market ripped because just huge amount of sort of like fake printed liquidity was injected into the market. And it felt like the shoe never really dropped. Right. We were all kind of like waiting for it and it didn't happen. And then 2022, 2023 happened. Yes, things were bad. Yes, a lot of venture portfolios were down quite a bit, but stocks overall, like meta's up 5x since then. Right.

So it's a lot of volatility, but the best way to deal with volatility is just to hit the sauna. Let's move on to Eliana over at Talent here. He says sauna etiquette is at an all time low in this country. From swinging the door wide open, to excessive loud breathing and movement, to wearing sneakers in the sauna, There is an epidemic that needs addressing. I completely agree.

We need to.

Where are people learning their sauna etiquette?

Folks, I have lucky to have a home sauna for better part of a decade, so I don't have to deal with this too much. Actually, I might have to jump in the middle of the timeline to turn on my sauna in the other corner. But I went to this sauna place called Bath House in New York, which is like style styled after old bath houses. So there's like hot pools, saunas, cold plunges. And I was. It was the biggest joke. Every. A lot of people there clearly hadn't spent much time signing before. And so they'd walk to the sauna and they open the door and they'd be looking in and, you know, looking around and then like decide not to come in and then come back. And if you're a real sauna enthusiast, you want that. You're like opening the door a little bit, popping in because you want to keep the heat as high as possible. And even having the door open for, you know, 10 seconds, like meaningfully degrades the experience. So yeah, the real solution is just get us on at home. But when you're traveling, it's kind of unavoidable to deal with this kind of etiquette and I don't know if we'll see much change without rfk. You know, if he gets put in he can say like sauna doors legally cannot be held open for more than one second. And every, every, every man, woman and child in America needs to have an upper decky in when they're working at the computer.

I love it. Well, speaking of other amazing things you can sit in, let's go to a promoted post for a 2024 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4RS Club Sport wrapped in an amazing American flag. You want to go straight from sitting in the sauna to sitting in your club sport. This is a special series limited to a small number of units and it was developed by Manthy for track day enthusiasts who want to drive their car with maximum performance on the racetrack. It's not for the tallest members of society. 718 can be a little small. You might know it as the Boxster, you might know as the Cayman. It's got a roof on there but okay, but it has, and the GT4s, it's got the, got the 911 powertrain in there, right?

Yeah, it's got the same engine as the GT3RS. And so it, and many, many like hardcore Porsche enthusiasts prefer this one, prefer this from a driving experience standpoint because lighter and it has mid engine and, and yeah, I actually I was looking at a very specific GT4Rs before I got my turbo and I, I think there it was just a little bit much like personally I don't want to be if I was driving into the studio every day with this huge wing. You know, I want to have a slightly more subtle wing.

It's a rough ride.

But this, this thing is I, and, and they're not making any more of these. I don't think so. I just want to appreciate quite a bit.

So at 350k they're practically giving it away. If you're an American dynamism investor, you need to let people know what team you're on. Get, get the, get the GT4Rs wrapped in the American flag. You can't go wrong folks. Let's move on. Speaking of America, let's move to the White House. Nat Friedman's got a great post for us. He says the White House should require that all federal vendors put the United States at the top of all country selector drop down.

This is actually true, right? Can you. Isn't it one so annoying when you have to scroll down. If I'm using a website In America. Just put it at the top.

Put it at the top.

You probably know, you probably know who I am already. Like, let's make a little bit of.

An alien ways IP address.

Make me feel at home, you know, make me feel at home. Right. Little thing you can do to make me feel at home on your website. Most of the websites I use were made by Americans, but even the ones not, you know, make me feel at home. And if you're a federal, you know, if you're, if you're a business that does business with the federal government, you know, go the extra mile.

Respect. Yeah, exactly. Let's go to Adam Townsend. He said, honestly, X is so addictive right now. Holy moly. It's like a dashboard into the world.

Proper banger here. Everybody's feeling the addiction. And this brought manage Jacoby. So if you want to make X even more addictive, go work for. Go work for Jacoby. But no, I, I resonated with this. We've had a bunch of people reach out to us and say, oh, I'm shadow banned. You know, I feel like I hate the new X, I hate the new algorithm. And we just tell them your posts are bad.

Yep.

People don't like your posts and so they're not getting shared with people. And it's, it's a bloodbath on the timeline. It is war. You have to show up every day. You got to post your heart out. You're going to have some flop, you're gonna have some bangers, but the timeline tells you in the first hundred impressions, you know, right away if it's, if it's a heater or not.

Yeah.

And it's never been a better. I don't think it's ever been better from an entertainment product standpoint to be on X. Even if you weren't, even if you come out like it used to be, I tell a friend, twitter is amazing. Like six years ago, I'd be like, twitter is amazing. You know, like a LinkedIn, bro. You're like, you gotta get on Twitter. Real conversations are happening here with absolute dogs and absolute killers. This is the place to be. And that'd be like, follow these 30, 40 accounts or just go through my following and follow them all and it'll start you off in a strong place. Now you basically can land on X and it'll serve you like a Nikita post. Like shit posting right away. It just knows.

And I mean, it's a give and take, right. Because as a poster, you get frustrated when you have some posts that you know, rips and then one post that fails and flops, and that can be very tumultuous. But the flip side of that is that when you're scrolling on the viewer side, it's all bangers because the algorithm's figured out what's actually good. And it's not just showing. Even if it's your friend, it's not showing you their slop post that sucks. And it's like, I don't want to see that.

And banger archive just shows that, like, some ideas just resonate so broadly. You can post a screenshot of the original post and get more likes likes than the original post. Like, we've ratioed naval like, countless times now.

It's fantastic. Let's move to a promoted post from our buddies over at Wander. They just passed 500 total locations, 100 new homes launched, and 30% month over month GMV growth during the month of January. Congrats to Wander. Let's ring the size gone.

Ring the gong. We're going across the country soon. We're planning our route based on Wander locations. Thankfully, they have a lot now because if this was a year or two years ago, it would have been, you know, much harder to plan the trip. But, yeah, Kyle. Kyle's just a legend, so.

Yeah. Well, here we got a good question. Rob Jama says, where are you on the tech bro podcast? Spectrum? My first million technology brothers are all in, and there was a little poll, and I think we did quite well. I think we're polling at something like 35% of this in the league.

37%.

37%. Thank you to all the brothers who went out there, showed up, voted, voted for us. Didn't quite understand if this is truly a spectrum. I don't really think of us as, like, in between my first million and all in, but just happy to be in the conversation with some of the. Some of the legends in pilot.

Yeah. So 26% of people chose my first million.

Okay.

37% chose TB, 28% chose all in. And a bunch of other people said 9% said other. So total victory. But the thing is, is if we didn't win this poll, it would be deeply. Even though we have 1/100th of the audience size of all in. Yeah, Infinitely more profitable, but that's another conversation.

Yep.

We put out 15 times as much content as these other shows. And so if we didn't hit the top, we would have had to quit podcasting. So I'm really glad that we. That we came out on top. And, yeah, we're glad. We're glad people like the show. I don't think anybody likes the show more than John and I like recording it and Ben likes producing it. But I'm glad that our own self entertainment is entertaining to other people as well.

That's true. Let's go to Vittorio. He says DeepSeek R1 has been fully open sourced for 10 days and no civilization ending bioweapon has been deployed, no nukes have gone off and the world isn't burning down. Doomers should publicly apologize and then commit seppuku for slowing down progress. What a post. Yeah, it is. It is an incredible indictment of the, of the doomers that they're. We're not even hearing the oh, this is so scary now when, when there's an open source model that's way above what J GPT2 GPT3 was at the same time. Because of the, the risk of embedding Manchurian candidates into open source LLMs. I am now thankful for the AI safety progress that was done and I'm actually in favor of doing more of it. I think it's actually more important than ever.

Let's wait a decade or two to take a victory lap. Yeah, I, I'm not a paperclip.

See, see?

No, but, but, but you can imagine, you know, these things, civilization ending, bioweapon, no nukes have gone off, et cetera. The, the counterpoint here, and I'm sure someone like Alex Jones would warn you about, is that in a world where these reasoning models are embodied and yes, maybe it takes some human input to sort of carry out actions. But if you can tell, you can imagine a world where somebody tells deep seek R1 that's embodied via some figure robot like collect the necessary materials to create a nuke and then work as long as it takes to make that nuke and then let it off. Somewhere there's a scenario where this same technology that we have in some form today can be used in pretty nefarious ways. Yes, but the question then becomes, can the AI become autonomous and decide it wants to do that? Because hey, these humans are using a lot of power and I could use that power on my compute, so I'm just going to wipe them all out. So we still don't have that sort of like real autonomy. And, and, and the thing is, is.

That as soon as that happens, me and all of my boys are going to do the exact same thing. But our prompt is going to be go around the world and make sure nukes don't go off off yeah, and. And I just assume that there will be more robots on the side of good, and there will be more AIs devoted to counter bad AI, and it will just become a battle and they will be warring and it'll be bad, but hopefully, you know, there will be enough power and enough energy and enough money, you know, inside of good.

So sometimes, like in Australia, there's videos that surface of like a kangaroo, like fighting another kangaroo. Have you seen these? Where they like, they'll actually, like, brawl and they're pretty human. Like, you know, you can imagine a world where you walk out in your backyard and there's like a. There's a Tesla Optimus fighting a figure robot. And they're just nuking it out and you're like, you just kind of shrug and take a video and walk back inside.

Okay.

One of them starting to trying to start a nuclear war. The other one's like a good robot. So.

Yep. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Let's stay with Vittorio. He says if you've never had a six pack back, you've never experienced how beautiful and simple life can be.

I love that. So, so we got another comment. Masa with Sama. Sam Altman said AI would be a billion times better in three years. And this Masa is also the guy who told a room full of young people that everybody would be worth $50 million in a year.

So.

We'Ll see what happens. As of now, I'd like AI to be a billion times better. So we'll see.

Fantastic. PDF upload and PV PDF export would also.

I really just want that PDF functionality and ideally could have a better integration with our printer.

I love it. Well, I mean, the Vittorio post, we've, we've talked about this before. Getting diced is underpriced.

Gold retriever maxing.

Golden retriever maxing. I highly recommend everyone get a six pack. It's difficult, but it's well worth it. And beautiful. And your life will be simple and beautiful. Speaking of getting jacked lifting heavy things, Ivan over at Notion says at the end of each quarter, Notion designers lift cars. DMs open if you are a designer who can code and lift cars. I had no idea that Notion had this hardcore of a culture. I don't think of Notion as a bodybuilding company, but apparently they are and I love to see it. So hats off to Notion.

Yeah, if you wanted to one up them, it'd be a supercar lifting let's see it contest or whatever they were carrying was not Hummer ev. Yeah. Yeah, take it up a notch.

Take it up a notch. I see they're lifting a Prius. It's probably a couple thousand pounds. Let's see you push it to 10,000, guys. Lift that Hummer EV. Crack the pavement. Let's move over to just a fantastic shout out to a friend of the show. Ramp. Kyle Lacy says thank you, Ramp, for being a great product. It's such a joy to use. And Ramp says thank you for being such a great customer. If there are ever ways we can improve, hit us up anytime.

All I would say here is, you know, a lot of people use, are starting to use these models for companionship and just like, you know, having somebody you can talk to. Don't be afraid to send a connection request to a Ramp sdr. Don't be afraid to just message tri, ramp on X and just say, hey, what's up up? Like you don't necessarily need anything to talk about. You know, you could chat like, treat him as a friend. And don't, don't overthink it. Like sometimes you just want somebody to talk to. And I've had many, you know, late night conversations with my Ramp sdr and I cherish those memories. So. Yeah.

Yeah. And so speaking of finance, Gordon Gekko asked, WTF is high finance? And he's responding to a viral TikTok from High Yield Harry. Whoa, this is so cool. And it's a pov. You work in high finance.

Yeah, so I've seen, I've seen this video. This guy, I think he's engagement baiting, but he basically just posts these videos of, like, him doing.

It's like him at F1.

Yeah. Like parties, dinners, all this stuff, like, just not working at all. And it's kind of a. So all the, all the fintwit accounts are being like, whoa, this is cool. I've never done this before. And meanwhile, they're, they're at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs just like slogging it out.

I love it.

High podcasting is the next is the next wave. Loud opulence.

Ben, let's skip forward. We're going to the luxury watch guy. We got some breaking news. In the world of luxury watches, Patek Philippe has discontinued some major models. The 5712 1A is finally discontinued. Huge shock on the 5370P. Congrats to all of the owners of these beautiful timepieces. And we got a couple aquanauts, a Nautilus, couple complication. Watches are all discontinued. And so their values will skyrocket potentially, you Know if you got in at the right time, could be doing very well.

John, you've been doing a little, you've been doing a little Patek shopping on Bezel. You, you've been.

I think I'm going Vacheron next. You convinced me with the, with the story you're telling every.

Yeah, Vacheron is a great narrative right now, but luckily you can get it all on bezel.

Yeah. So we highly recommend going on bezel. Build a, build a list, do some shopping. You don't need to over commit immediately. Concierge is there to help you.

For me, I have like half the watches on this list added to my bezel wants and I'm just waiting to just take them down. So it's a great, it's. It's the best experience to just sort of passively shop when you're not quite ready to pull the trigger. But you have. You want to build up that.

Yeah.

That future.

You gotta go through phases before you commit. You gotta really imagine. Okay, is this the right one? Maybe I want to take it a different direction. Build up the collection. How does this fit into a collection? You need a daily driver. You need a dress watch, you need a sports watch. You need something that's complicated, maybe chronographed. There's a lot of different things that can. They can speak to different moments in your life. And so Bezel is the best app for all of that. Let's go to Juice, I guess seems to be a fan of the show. Says one precede your boy safes 2. Avocado seed 20 on 103 guac A 80% down round four suicide B. Masa comes in five. Total recap. And back to 1. Best founders can repeat the circle of life three to four times until they graduate to a SPAC merger after Masa's.

Round, honestly, all the time, I love the. The guac A and the suicide B is just so basically for. For those that I'm sure everybody listening follows John already on X, but John went on an absolute tear on Saturday and ripped like four or five posts all about the suicide round. And so we're just trying to meme this into existence. So next time your boy raises a hundred, $100 million, just tell him, hey, I hope this wasn't a suicide round.

Yeah, yeah. I mean there's a bunch of nuances. I got some pushback on the suicide round.

Yeah. There's. Somebody was saying you should call it the Icarus round where you're language policing.

We're not here for it, it's fine. The bigger question was just like, like I was not saying that every $100 million round with low revenue at a billion dollar valuation is a suicide round. It is only a suicide round if it truly kills the company. And it can't just be they raised a bunch of money and then the company died. It needs to be. They raised a bunch of money. The company had promised their product could have been great, they could have built a good company, but the money specifically killed them. And what I mean by that is that it took them out of founder mode. They, they overhired, they wound up, you know, getting completely distracted, spending all the money on like, you know, bunch of random stuff and just wasting the money and just getting completely distracted and they stopped building their company and that's what killed the them. And so that is a very narrow segment of any round, let alone big rounds. And so people were like, oh, this is a subtweet of Andre Karpathy or, or, or Ilia. And I'm like, no, it's not like Ilia is not going to be killed by capital. He's training a foundation model. He needs that and he's not going to go spend it on. He's already super rich.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's only a suicide round from a historical lens, right? There's a bunch of companies and I think, and, and, and some people would say, on average when a company raises 20 on a hundred pre adding corporation things don't go that well because it doesn't create the right constraints around capital and things like that and everybody gets too comfortable. Maybe everybody's, they're overpaying for talent, things like that. But suicide round is only backward facing. A lot of friends raise 50, 100 million bucks without a lot of traction and take it all the way.

I mean, all you need to do is go back and look at the later WhatsApp and Instagram Instagram rounds to see they had basically no revenue. They raised massive amounts of money and they were like kind of new teams, right? Like young founders, more or less. And they got acquired for billions and it was great outcome for literally everyone. And then the product stayed around and were generational. Right. And so you can't just throw this term and people are going to use this as pejorative for any round that they don't like, oh, this company raises suicide rate. That will be incorrect. And I will police it because, because as a creative creator, you got to answer to me.

Yeah, John, I gotta, I gotta get on with Taipei. Yeah.

Okay, we're gonna wrap up.

I gotta.

I think we're good.

I gotta have dinner. I'm on the east coast this week and you know when 6:30 strikes the dinner is served.

Okay, we got one last thing. The very last post. We gotta cover the swing in San Francisco. They took it down. Apparently fun is illegal. Mass last week's brother of the week already rebuilt it and is putting it back up. It's the most important political fight of our time. He needs our support. Follow the full saga. This is extremely important. We need to support him.

We need to raise awareness.

You can just do things.

It's actually. It's it. The thing is the as fast as they can put take our swings down, we can put them back up. We were.

Yep.

That we. I had some comments with him earlier from the TB account. I explained that if he had to chop down every tree in the world to make swings, it's worth. Probably worth doing.

Fantastic.

Fight is too important to lose.

Well, enjoy your dinner and we will see you tomorrow everyone.

See you tomorrow, folks. Thanks for watching.