Grok Deep Dive, 200,000 GPU's in Memphis, There's No Moat?, Time is Money, Tell Me a Joke

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the number one live show in tech. Jordy, lock in, because we are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's right. Today is Tuesday, February 18, 2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you guys. We got a Grok 3 deep dive. We're breaking it down. I got early access. I ran the same deep research prompt through OpenAI Deep Research, and through Grok, we're going to break down each analysis and. And the prompt I used is about AI and how these, how these are progressing and some benchmarking stuff. So it'll be a good educational experience for you. And you'll also get to make your own call on which one you think is better. But you got to play with these to understand them. We got a ton of other stuff. There's a deep dive in the Wall Street Journal about how Elon Musk and Sam Altman kind of their relationship soured. We'll be putting that in the truth zone if there's any untruths in there. And it's also a massive launch day because our boy Alexander Karp, his book is officially live. Let's go. The Doctor The Technological Republic, Hard Power, Soft Power, and the Future of the West. It's available now. If you preorder it, it should be on your doorstep soon. It's available on Audible and we highly recommend it. We're big fans of Karp over here at TBPN and so let's kick it off with Grok3. I got access, I think on Sunday I had it do the first prompt, which was tell me a joke. Make sure it's actually funny. Original and insightful. My favorite comedians are Shane Gillis, Norm MacDonald, et cetera. Structure the joke like an actual standup set, not like a knock knock joke or a basic question answer type joke. And so here's what Grok said.

You couldn't have been more clear.

Couldn't have been more clear. And let's see if AI is taking my job as a comedian, news podcaster, tech analyst, venture capitalist.

Word sell.

Word sell. Grok says, you ever notice how AI is supposed to take over the world, but it's still out here, Struggling to understand my mom's accent when she yells at Siri. Like, we're all worried about Skynet, but meanwhile, Siri's over here going, I'm sorry, I didn't catch that. Did you say turn on the lights or burn down the house? And it's not just Siri, right? All These tech bros are like, AI is going to replace your job, man. But I'm like, bro, AI can't even replace my fantasy football lineup without benching Patrick Mahomes for a kicker. Meanwhile, I'm getting texts from my buddy who's a product manager, and his Apple Watch is like, meeting, starting, and he's sprinting across the office like he's running the Dakar rally. AI's not taking over the world. It's too busy trying to figure out if we're asking for a weather report or confessing to a crime. By the time it gets there, we'll all be living on the moon anyway. Probably because some founder convinced us it's the next big VC flex.

It's so. So this is so jarring to listen to because it sounds like, like it's structured in a way that it should be funny, but it's just completely not.

Yeah.

And so your, your brain is sort of like yearning for the punchline zinger, and it just never comes.

You're just sort of.

You're perpetually in the state of, of like, hoping you're going to hear that sweet note.

Exactly.

And it just doesn't come.

So. But I do think the, you know, obviously the, the, the benchmarks for Grok 3 are incredible. There. We'll go into all that. There's a lot of good stuff in here. I think what's interesting about this is that Grok 3, clearly this is trained on my feed because in my last 10 tweets, I posted Dakar Rally Patrick Mahomes. I also posted something about. In here, I said, product manager and the Apple Watch, remember that post? You actually fed that one to me. And so it clearly took that text in and said, oh, okay, this user, this person who's prompting me, likes Apple Watches and product managers and we'll get those jokes maybe. But it didn't really integrate it properly in an interesting way. And I was, I was texting with one of the XAI guys and was like, this is really interesting. Like, I don't know if I like this, but I think this could be really cool for certain prompts and it could make it so that, sure, sometimes I want a vanilla, like, clean LLM installation where I come to it, it doesn't know anything about me. And I, and I give it a really robust prompt and it doesn't assume anything. And then other times, I'm going to want it to really know, oh, this guy's like, super in group in this particular niche. He's down the rabbit hole on this. So all of a sudden, if I'm explaining, you know, like VC fund dynamics, I can be super jargony and super and super in group and super detailed. But then if I'm, if I'm explaining like oil and gas to. He doesn't know anything about oil exploration. So I got to keep that high level. That's actually a benefit to me and that would be really cool. So I think fine tuning the, the models on the individual person's timeline, whatever, you can get information about them that could be very cool. But in this case it was very, very silly, which is.

Yeah, it's so funny to have this many things that are aligned to the stuff that you post about and botch it this hard. I'm getting texts from my buddy who's a product manager and his Apple watch is like meeting starting. Because you posted about the, you posted the White Lotus reference of the product manager and he's sprinting across the office like he's running the Dakar rally. Like it just doesn't come.

How does that. Yeah, how does that go with AI supposed to take over the world? Like. Yeah, I don't, I don't get it. Anyway, Grok3, I don't think there is a good comedy eval.

No, it.

Right now there are benchmarking.

We talked about this before we came online. The evals are hyper fixated on these sort of ultra complex problems and they clearly massively struggle on. Like a comedy eval.

Right.

That would like somebody should make the comedy eval that basically says, I asked all these foundation models to make various types of jokes. This is the funniest joke. I tested it against real humans to see if they laugh. And so that's a totally valid way to test a model because being able to produce jokes is a, you know, there's sort of comedic intelligence.

Totally, totally.

And so it's not just about solving these sort of esoteric problems that nobody thinks about all day long. I think that GROK could potentially get the most extreme product market fit. And what this like specific response tells me they're going towards is they want to have like the current thing happen and then somebody be able to generate a post that's hyper relevant to what they talk about for that specific moment in time. And in many ways when, when, when the timeline is just, is just model on model on model on model. That will be like some form of. Yeah, you know, comedic general intelligence.

Yeah, we were joking about X potentially setting up the AT chat handle. I just saw Mike Solana posted chat. What's going on with these airplanes and, and just saying like, hey, chat. Like, why is this real? Chat is this real is like a common online Internet phrase these days. And so I could definitely see GROK be instantiated as a, as a player character, an NPC on X in a way that it could interact with a lot of posts or, or be someone that's integrated. It's also interesting looking at the XAI launch stream, looking at what Elon was pushing the engineers on. So he's like, okay, we have, we have this breakthrough, we have the cutting edge LLM. When are we going to solve Riemann? He's talking about the Riemann Hypothesis, which is the kind of like the hardest mathematical problem that we haven't. The humanity hasn't solved yet. And the, and the XAI engineer is kind of joking. Well, as long as we have a random string generator, like something that just randomly generates words and then a validator and enough compute time, you should just be able to brute force it. And they're kind of joking around, but it's very clear that they are focused on fundamental math, fundamental physics, breakthroughs in science and technology. And that's just a completely different vector of optimization against comedy. Anyway, let's move on to Ben Thompson, who already posted an update. Breaking down.

Wait, real quick, let's talk about the, the actual launch of Grok3. Because I'm just sitting there hammering through some emails last night and I'm actually watching PMF or PMF or die. And I hear Patty in the cage be like, yo, the Grock 3 announcements going up and they just kind of haphazardly throw up this live stream and then just like sit there with one camera. Yeah, and it was, it was, it's kind of cool. And that. It's authentic. They're not overly fixated on production value or anything like that. There's been a number of sort of model releases that were structured, you know, open. OpenAI is continuously drilling into people's heads. We are the apple of AI.

Yeah. More product focused.

Product focused, but also just like the production value of their presentations are at a different level. And so anyways, I thought it was fascinating that they just had one camera showed up, streamed it, you know, basically bounced. It was no bells and whistles. And so cool approach, similar to Safe Superintelligence, which is basically saying like, we're not even going to release products until we have AGI, which we'll get to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean the whole AI landscape is fascinating. The, the model layers commoditizing but there are so many different product strategies on top of the, on top of the models and it's very cool to see that X AI is just, you know, forking, delivering straight into X. I love that. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Techery highly recommend that you subscribe. He kicks off with a quote from Bloomberg. He says Xai showed off the updated Grok 3 model. They call it the smartest AI on earth. Across math, science and coding benchmarks. Grok 3 beats Google, Gemini, Deep Seq, V3, Anthropic, Claude and GPTS4O. They said they announced this during a live stream Monday. Grok3 has more than 10 times the compute power of its predecessor and completed pre training in early January. Musk said the presentation alongside three XAI engineers. We're continually improving the models every day. It's literally within 24 hours you'll see improvements and that's true. Like they are, they're really rolling out stuff very, very, very quickly. They also introduced a smart search engine which I tested and you, interestingly, you don't need to click a button to trigger it. It's just, it's just like if it thinks that you want, you know, some deep research, it just goes and does it. It's called Deep Search. It's a reasoning chatbot that expresses its process and of understanding a query and how it plans its response. And we'll take you through one of the results from Grok3's deep search product and then they also intend to release a voice based chatbot as soon as possible. So Ben Thompson writes, Grok3 appears to be one of, if not the best performing base model in the world. It is topping the usual benchmarks, but not if you include O3, which is interesting. That was not in the bar charts which we'll get to and tops all categories. The highest score in LM arena.

Yeah, obviously we're, we're XAI fans. X fans here. GROK fans. But the, the, the sort of selective positioning of new models against models like definitely needs to be called out because people just sort of decide all right, who are we going to sort of compare ourselves to in this very moment. Yeah, because everybody just wants to show, you know.

Yeah. I mean honestly like there's, there's so many different vectors because O3 can be very compute intensive. Then there's O3 mini, then there's O3 mini high. And so you know, there's this big like value trade off between. Yeah. If you let the, if you let the LLM reason for hours and you spend $2,000 per query, you can get remarkable results. But then is that really a fair benchmark against something that costs $1 in France $0.10? And so all of a sudden you need to plot these on like an X and Y graph and then eventually you need to plot them on some sort of like, you know, unintelligible tensor graph or something. Anyway, let's go to Andre, Andre Karpathy, the absolute dog who is not a fair observer because he's worked with Elon, but he's also worked at OpenAI, so maybe he's a little bit more, a little bit more fair than most people think. I really enjoy his analysis. He says. The impression overall I got here, I got here is that this is somewhere around 01 pro capability and ahead of deep seek R1, though of course we need actual real evaluations to look at. The impression I get of Deep Search is that it's approximately around perplexities Deep Research offering, which is great, but not at the level of OpenAI's recently released Deep Research, which still feels more thorough and reliable. And I found that Deep Research is just better at spitting out 5,000 words. Most of the other products spit out a thousand words. And so you just get more out.

Of Deep Research, which is what you want from Deep Research. Usually, usually you're not looking for, you know, perfectly summarized, you know, handful of paragraphs.

Exactly.

The entire point is to let you kind of figure out what's important about what they.

Karpathy goes on. He says, as far as a quick Vibe Check over two hours this morning, Grok3 + thinking feels somewhere around the state of the art territory of OpenAI's strongest models. Zero One Pro for 200amonth and slightly better than Deep Seek R1 and Gemini 2.0 flash thinking, which is quite incredible considering that the team started from scratch one year ago. This timescale to state of the art territory is unprecedented and that is undeniable. This gets at the first Grok 3 takeaway. It's simultaneously surprising and not surprising. Start with the latter. XAI famously built a 100,000 GPU cluster in Memphis and now has 200,000 GPUs and used 20,000 of them to train Grok 3. And so they're still building the larger cluster. So even though you'll see a lot of people posting on the timeline, oh, you know, Grok 3, 100,000 GPUs, that's not accurate. They only use 20,000 for this, but it's still impressive.

Yeah. And just to highlight again, this is the largest cluster ever. The 20,000. 20, 20,000 GPUs.

That's not true. The 100,000 is. Is the largest ever?

I believe so. So he's saying the largest ever for XAI or the largest ever for any foundation model?

I don't know. I asked. I asked both ChatGPT and Grok to pull this. Grox says GPT4 used 25k GPUs while Grok3 used 20,000 GPUs. Now ChatGPT says that GPT4 was just thousands 20k GPUs, a 1/ hundreds.

So it seems like around 20 25k has been the top to date.

It's honestly unclear from these, but clearly.

Elon knows that he's just willing to sprint towards these. Yeah, big big numbers as fast as humanly possible.

100 and so. And sure it resulted in a top tier model. That's not surprising giving given it is what scaling laws predicted. But it is comforting as there was a question as to scaling, as to whether scaling loss had hit a wall and people were saying this during the deep SEQ kind of fiasco. What is surprising is that Xai is only 19 months old. The company has gone from incorporation to the largest GPU cluster in the world to arguably the best model in less time than it has taken. OpenAI to go from GPT4 to GPT5, albeit with substantial updates along the way, including the big 4.0 update just this past weekend, is both a testament to Elon Musk and his team. Jess Gas Jensen CEO CEO of Nvidia.

Jensen Huang so to me, to me this tells that our read on the Elon bid, which was only last week, feels like a month ago at this point. Yeah, But Elon bidding $100 billion to buy some, you know, not entirely known amount of OpenAI means that he believes he either was purely doing that out of spite to toss like a wrench. Yeah. Into that process, or he believes that the product layer is what actually matters because he's able to achieve incredible performance purely at the model layer. But even as Karpathy is saying the product layer is not there yet and certainly GROK has nowhere near the real consumer usage that OpenAI does.

Yeah, it's interesting. So he goes into competitive implications. He says I did get access to Grok 3, but not the thinking and search models. I actually don't know if I have access to the thinking and search models. It's unclear to me from a product perspective. And he has to say that he finds himself using Grok2 quite a bit. Almost entirely via its integration into the X app. It turns out being plugged into a pre existing distribution channel is very useful. And this is a crazy bull case for Elon buying Axe.

But the challenge is that X is a very specific type of audience that is not necessarily reflective of certainly not the LinkedIn audience. You could argue that OpenAI should go do a deal with LinkedIn and say like make us your default LLM and just distribute us to like the normie masses. Because like long term it's going to be more important to be there.

Yeah, yeah. He also says I I also never use it anywhere else. For me, product matters and ChatGPT remains my product of choice. I feel the exact same way. I'm also curious to what extent Chat, gbt, Deep Research's advantage over other competitors like Google, Perplexity and now XAI are due simply to O3 still being the best model versus OpenAI spending more time crafting a better tool. Regardless, the impetus for OpenAI to focus on being a consumer tech company is as strong as ever. OpenAI is the only AI lab to have organically built its own distribution channel and they really, really need to get an advertising product out the door to ensure they are serving free customers the best possible models, which makes perfect sense.

This also expands that has to be pending. You know this. I'm sure they're building quarter potential.

Yeah. And there's just a question of do they use Microsoft as the partner there. I believe Netflix was considering that as well because Microsoft has a really big network from LinkedIn and from and from Bing. Even though you don't think of them as a big advertising company. They built all the algorithms, all the structure and all the inventory and so.

Certainly not going to be meta.

Yeah. And so this also explains why OpenAI is tying up with Oracle and SoftBank and trying to become a for profit. XAI raised $6 billion last November, actually owns its GPUs. Musk also said in the on the live stream that XAI is building out a 1 million GPU cluster. Let's go size gone for the 1 million cluster. Boom. Let's get that in a handier spot.

This more dial in actually I we need a button to hit on the set. Raises it up.

It's hilarious. And then of course he ties it to Ilya Sutton in Bloomberg is raising more than $1 billion for his startup at a valuation of over 30 billion. We'll talk about this later in the show. Vaulting the nascent venture into the ranks of the world's most valuable private technology companies. Green Oaks is in. They're putting in 500 mil, said the person who asked not to be identified. Green Oaks is also an investor in AI company scale and databricks. The round marks a significant valuation from the 5 billion that Suskaver's company was worth before. First off, a disclaimer. Daniel Gross, a frequent strategy interview interview guest is the CEO of ssi.

I never realized.

I didn't know that.

Is that breaking? Are we scooping? Are we scooping, Ben?

Scooping the scoop. It's too much. People get confused. No, I think this is like. I think this is actually publicized, like, very early on. Interesting that Ilya wanted to be the technical lead more than anything else. That's cool, but that's very cool.

Dg, you know, he's going, you know, you know, he seems like for everything I've seen, just extremely, extremely motivated to win and be in the most important places constantly. It's funny. He also had an accelerator. Sam had an accelerator, small accelerator called Y Combinator. So the accelerator to foundation model pipeline is very real.

You know, the other path, the counterfactual, the path not traveled here. Daniel Gross sold a company at Apple in AI, got acquired. Should have, should have, you know, taken over the CEO role.

Yeah, yeah.

This is something we advocate here on the show. If you get your company Aqua hired, start asking the CEO, hey, what's the succession plan? Yeah, can I get in the. How can I get.

Hang out outside of the board meetings?

Yeah.

Try to flag people down. It'll only take four quarters to get a little time with, like, the key players. And then from there, you know, just start. You know, it's.

It's such an underrated strategy right now, I think, I think like, there, there's massive value in being a founder and actually going in and going for the top job. Going for the top job. It sounds too ambitious to be true, but I think someone will eventually do it and we'll all be like, wow.

Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, a lot of, A lot of founders end up getting acquired and then are not super happy with the leadership at the company. And then there's just become the leadership.

Become leadership instead of. And it sounds like a joke, but it's not. It's actually a better path than just like resting, investing. And then you're like, oh, what do I want to do next? I'll have to do the same company. Or like, become a vc, start over instead of like, wait, I just got acquired by a company that does the same thing that I was doing. But they have a thousand times more resources. Yeah, the only problem here is that I'm not in charge. What if I was in charge? Yeah, solve that problem. Anyway, that's my little stump speech. And so they have pledged. This is wild about ssi. So they have pledged not to release a product until it has achieved a safe super intelligence. So they're going to raise so much money. Well, Xai explains why it is absolutely viable to have started late, provided you have the funds catch up quickly. And of course, SSI talent speaks for itself. SSI is also, I would imagine, a big Nvidia customer. Again, I don't know that to be true, but what else might the money be going towards? Which brings this conversation back to chips. On one hand, chips remain the gating factor to the easiest route to a frontier model. On the other hand, this is why Deep Seek matters. They're. They're not the only route to something that is at least competitive. The debate on the value of an attempted export ban remains an open one. Anyway, fantastic article.

Absolutely wild. I totally respect SSI saying we're not going to ship until we have. We. We've achieved our goal. Which is like the kind of approach you can only really take if you're Ilya and like Daniel Gross, where you're basically saying, yes, we're going to need to raise billions of dollars. You're going to just have to trust us that we're going to. And just like, bet on us that we're going to deliver that. One of the things that every foundation, like the. The war, the foundation model wars right now, which will be studied eventually because it's creating this sort of foundational technology that presumably our entire society will be dependent on at some point. It is so distracting for these companies and the teams and the investors when there's new models releasing every week. And you can imagine everybody, everybody at Anthropic last night was watching the Grok, you know, demo live, not working. Everybody at OpenAI was doing the same thing. Right. So it's just wildly distracting to constantly be forced to ship and ship and ship when you can tell that they're able to make incredible progress internally without even getting user feedback. Right. They're basically Elon's. Basically. Elon's basically saying, hey, I just need another $20 billion and I'm going to make a much better model. Like, yeah, yeah, sure, we'll make it available through, you know, the X AX integration.

Yeah.

But Elon wants the Riemann Hypothesis.

He is the customer and he has his eval and Once it solves the Riemann hypothesis, he'll be happy.

Yeah.

And that's kind of it. Which is fascinating. I think another hot take that we were discussing earlier was there's this big push around, like the, the model layer is commoditizing.

Yeah.

And people say that as like a bear case.

Yeah.

But I was wondering if you flip it around. Like people make tons of money in commodities all the time.

Right.

Like oil, big oil.

Like oil is a commodity still worth producing oil.

Hugely valuable. There were massive companies built on it. There were small companies that just did little exploration and just had a little.

Plot of land, a little track, you know, actual infrastructure.

Exactly. Providers. So I wonder if there's a world where, you know, intelligence is, is so valuable and LLMs and AI is so valuable that, that, you know. Yeah. Even if you're like the sixth best model, you can still sell the intelligence if it's at the frontier level to the market at a market clearing price that still generates profit above what the Nvidia GPUs cost and you still reap the reward. And the $30 billion valuation is completely justified in the same sense that, you know, hey, yeah. If you, you know, you're like, hey, I got a plot of land in Texas that I'm going to pull some oil out of. Yeah. You don't have a monopoly on all of oil.

Yeah.

But you still made money.

Yeah.

And so I wonder if the other.

The, you know, if alarms, you know, replace a lot of work, broadly knowledge work specifically. It's easy to say, hey, these are trillion dollar markets that we're playing in.

Yeah.

It makes total sense that there's five to 10 companies that are going to raise billions of dollars to go after that. Right. Because the, the, the prize is so great.

Yep.

The potential prize is so great that, you know, ilya raising at 30, you know, and Daniel Gross raising it 30 billion posts is actually, you know, it's, it's, maybe it's, it's, it's, it's just ends up looking like a great investment of like how do you potentially get a, you know, 50x on, on, on a multi billion dollar check? Like maybe that's how you, it is.

So crazy when you think about it that way. Like when you think about like crypto, it's like a big new technology. A lot of people are into it. It's just like a cool thing. And yeah, the market cap of all the crypto combined is around a trillion dollars. Social networking, also like very valuable, cool new technology market cap around a Trillion dollars. Phones, cool new technology market cap around a trillion dollars. Electric cars, cool new technology market cap around a trillion dollars. You know, operating systems, Microsoft, around a trillion dollars. Cloud computing, there's around a trillion dollars in value. And so it's like how, in what world does AI and LLMs not wind up being around a trillion dollars of value? I get that. Like, it could go any direction and like how you slice that up, it could be very equal. It could be one winner take all. And you know, hey, people are going to have their bull case for X or bull case or open air anthropic whoever. But you know, it just feels like, like the stakes are definitely one trillion.

Right? Yeah.

If we look out in the future even, even if we're, even if we're not being like super, super intelligence pilled and we're just thinking about like, yeah, like this is a new technology and it will be a consumer market or an enterprise market or any of them. Like, will there be an opportunity to make a bunch of money? Probably, yeah. So anyway, yeah, let's move on to Yaxine. He is, he's working for Elon over at Axe, a good friend of the show. He has been. He's become a bit of an open AI hater, but let's hear him out and see.

We got some poster on poster violence here because this is clearly a rune caricature or the same exact character and you know, you know, dancing around the data center.

And so he's arguing that there's no moat with this. He says moats are Silicon Valley head cannon wishful thinking. They need to, they, they need it to exist. They make you believe that you're doing the thing that would be impossible for others all to justify the fundraise. When they say moat, what they're saying is proprietary monopoly. I'm here to tell you that the monopoly is a myth. The proprietary monopoly does simply does not exist. Open. I could open source all of their models and it wouldn't really harm their business existence. You would only harm their ability to fundraise. Everyone should take Peter Thiel more seriously. Just be different.

I mean, what, what a poster. I mean he's, he's layering on a bunch of things that people could potentially disagree with in the first few paragraphs, which positions him well to then extrapolate on all those ideas now that people are kind of riled up a little bit.

Totally. So he says is capital moat. In previous times, capital was a moat. But as technology progresses, everything becomes cheaper. Skill labor are now being automated levels IO can command a 10M valued companies order magnitude. 10 million dollar valued companies spawning them every three months for fun. He doesn't need to raise. I like that.

We gotta.

We gotta put levels in the code.

Genes by the way. He would just.

He'd crush it. He'd be out in a day. Yeah, especially with the latest code gen slop spitting out PHP server code. It's free. It's free. The software I produce for myself on a daily basis would have taken a team of engineers. Now it's one hour in. In between work and dinner. It's post scarcity. It's unprecedented.

Yep.

We are at the point where the idea that capital as a moat is not being sold by the people who need the funds. Instead the idea is being pushed by the people with sad, sad capital that has nowhere to go. What is the point of money when legions of engineers who actually just slow you down when you really only need 8x H 102 frogs to create outsized impact? Your real competitor is the end user writing their own software. I used to walk work at Autho. We shipped login as a service. It sold itself. Many Seattle homes were paid off by sales commissions of Autho contracts. It wasn't Octa, it wasn't Ping one. Our biggest competitor was our customer themselves writing their own login page. We had to sell them on it, not being a good way to spend their time. So he breaks down the serious AGI players. This is personal opinion. OpenAI Nah. Remember Yahoo? Okay, yeah, Xene, we know. We know who you're, who you're pushing for here. The serious players. Vertical robotics manufacturers and Majuko shops. I don't know what that means. Manjoko, dji, Unitree, Tesla, Anderal, Deepseek, Jane Street, Palantir. Social media platforms. Meta vertical AI companies. Xai, Deep Sea, Google. Are your ML researchers wearing knee pads and a sweaty tank top plugging in Ethernet? If yes, you're going to make it. Eth Zurich I will not elaborate. Distributed decentralized AI bootstrap companies with a lot of freedom. People building novel devices. Interesting. What can't. What can't be easily replicated software used to cost money. And AI is just software. There is a limit on individual model intelligence that yields diminishing returns. And it is my belief that. That we will rapidly exhaust any room available. It is my belief that AGI will run on consumer hardware and any proprietary models will only be run as convenience. What can't be easily replaced is knees on the ground, soldering irons. And the Majuko Mojoco RL sauce. And godlike product managers yearning invest accordingly. This is financial advice for millionaires.

This feels like, like, it feels like basically 40 posts combined into one article.

Yeah.

But one thing that's interesting so when we were talking earlier about Intellig being commodified and some people saying, oh, it's not investable, it's a commodity. If it's a commodity, especially at these prices, you're saying, hey, commodities actually are very valuable. There's a ridiculous amount of demand for them. The hard part what, what he's outlining here is that, you know, everybody knows that there's a big market for oil. Like you can see what the price is. If you can get a barrel of oil out of the ground, you can sell it at this sort of market clearing price for that grade of oil. Right. There's like, you know, oil that turns into jet fuel and whatever, but there's like, it's a commodity, it's sort of priced in the open market. There's fully a world where intelligence gets to that point too. And then the challenge is what Yasine is saying, which is here with AI is like what can't be easily replicated is knees on the ground, soldering irons, et cetera, et cetera. And so the same thing with oil, it's like the challenge with getting oil out of the ground is you got to get oil out of the ground. Right. You need to dudes with trucks to go drill for oil and then make sure the drill is running properly, make sure you have water, make sure you have power. You know, the drill is breaking all the time. And so it doesn't seem like data centers will maybe be that as much of a challenge to keep operational. But it's certainly not easy to operate these things highly efficiently. Right?

Yeah, Interesting. I don't know. Yeah. If it's a commodity, where is the most valuable part of the commodity?

Is it the producer and this like the supplier producer?

Yeah, but is that energy, is that Nvidia or is that the LLM, you know, deliverer?

Right.

It's, it's an open question. Anyway, let's move on to some reactions on the timeline and then we'll give you a breakdown of Grok 3 versus OpenAI deep research. So Creatine cycle, who's been on the show before, says, sorry, Autismo, it's time to grow some arms and social skills. And Jordy chimes in and says, getting dice continues to be underpriced. And he says printing this out and hanging it on my wall in Pack Heights. And he just shows the Grock 3 reasoning data. It beat O3 mini high beta reasoning data. People were upset about this. Rex two slides later says they omitted O3 from the chart in the live stream for some reason. So I added the numbers for you and then. But this was reasonable because O3 isn't public and those benchmarks can't be verified yet. So I think it's understandable that they didn't include it. But then again, Grok3 with reasoning isn't publicly available, so people can't validate that eval. So there's a lot of like questions over like what counts for an eval that goes in a chart.

But I think they both have, you know, fair arguments there. Yeah, they're like, we can validate what our model. Yeah, yeah. We cannot validate what you're doing because it's not available. So we know.

Yep, yep, yep.

We cooked.

Yeah. And so Shield Monot gives a little context on the the Grok Colossus 200,000 GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee built in 214 days. I think semi Analysis and Dylan Patel have done a deeper dive here that we'll have to dig into. There's some really fascinating things going on here. SHIELD says, why Memphis? They found an old Electrolux factory, added trailers to add cooling, one quarter of the cooling capacity of the US and trailers for power generation. They use Tesla megapacks to smooth out power fluctuations. The next training cluster will go from a quarter gigawatt to 1.2 gigawatts using GB2 hundreds from Nvidia. There's a fascinating thing that leaked because of Llama when, when meta open source llama 3 or some piece of that. They had a line or like a function, a piece of code in the, in the training data that basically said like, what was it? It was like power plant not blow up. And so basically what it does is, is when you're training, you're doing all this complex math that's using a lot of. A lot of electricity.

Yeah.

And then all of a sudden there'll be like moments where you're maybe just like, okay, we're done doing the math, we're going to save the model for a second. And so all of a sudden your power will just drop to zero. And if the power substation or the power plant is sending tons of electricity and then all of a sudden it doesn't get any. It can blow up or something like that, or it can be bad. And so they built A special piece of code that basically just has. It does random math.

Can you imagine the reason that that got implemented?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

These engineers are just like, you know, just tapping away, you know, vibe coding, and then they just get a call, hey, it's like, hey, like, what are you guys doing?

Right? Yeah. I mean, it would be crazy if there was like a major power.

Yeah. So. So just going back to the Colossus, the cluster in Memphis, this was always, in many ways, I think we talked about this. Last year, the bull case for Elon building a foundation model company was that he has the boots on the ground experience to spin up heavy infrastructure manufacturing facilities. You know, figuring out how to manufacture batteries at scale for Tesla in the United States. And so having the playbook and being able to pull talent from, you know, a company like Tesla or SpaceX and say, hey, we need to build this data center in 214 days. Like, unbelievable. Like, many people would say, you know, even, you know, linking this back to la, people are not going to have their homes rebuilt. Oh, yeah, four years, that's crazy. They did this. They built it. They built the biggest, you know, cluster ever in 214 days. That's a great point where they just found an old factory and said, we're just doing this right now. And so that, and that's really.

Elon's like, edge here, for sure.

Yeah. No, and it, it is so part of the culture at Tesla. The, I mean, they're making millions of Starlinks. CTO at Deterrence.

Yeah.

Was at Tesla specifically working on their battery cell engineering. And so he's just bringing that just crazy ethos around. His name's Henry around Speed, and it's just amazing to witness. That's awesome. So, yeah, let's move on to word grammar.

Word grammar says I'm feeling very similar to how I felt six months ago. OpenAI did something groundbreaking. Now two other labs have replicated it. Soon the rest will follow, making it a pretty undifferentiated market. Yeah, we've, we've talked about this a little bit. I mean, it's, it's unclear, like, if OpenAI had not launched deep research and like the reasoning model, would Deep Seek have been able to come up with it? Like, is the idea valuable or is it just a. Or, or, or is everyone kind of on the same path? What do you think?

It's interesting. Everything, because everybody's competing against many of the same benchmarks to show that they're competitive. They're all focusing on getting better at many of the same things when what we really want, and which is why SSI is interesting, is they're basically saying we're not going to release anything publicly until it's what we want it to be. So we're not going to build based around these benchmarks. And so I actually think it's the competition is good and bad. It's like a double edged sword. Right. It's good in that it's sort of pushing the pace and everybody's motivated to rapidly improve these models. But at the same time it's not so great because we're getting models that consistently just look more and more and more like each other and consumers are not even going to be able to notice the difference. So they're just going to probably default to what they already use and love. Or maybe you're using Grok in the in X, but not.

Here's an interesting twist on that. So Paul Calcraft says Elon posted an early Grok3 screenshot saying he asked what, what Grok3 thought of the information and it said it's garbage. And then Paul Calcraft asked the same question, what's your opinion on the information? And it told him it's a solid outlet and you know what's going on here. It's fine tuning on the person who queries it, their timeline. And so Grok3, when Elon prompts it, it knows Elon doesn't like give him an answer that confirms what he believes. And it's the same thing for Paul Calcraft. And so this is going to raise a very interesting question where people will kind of be in like LLM Eco echo chambers almost where they're like, oh yeah. I actually already told me that, you know, you know, microplastics aren't a big deal because I've been posting about that. Or microplastics are the worst thing ever because I've been posting about that.

And this is, this is exactly what already happens on X broadly that makes echo chambers so real, where you just sort of, you know, for me I'll see somebody, I'll see very like offhand, you know, randomly. Somebody will have like a blue sky in their profile.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, I haven't seen that in a while. But someone else is seeing that constantly.

Oh yeah.

And they're probably using blue sky. They're like, oh yeah, everybody I love uses blue sky. Yeah, right.

Yeah, it's, it's very interesting. And you know what's going to happen here is that. But the mainstream media is going to do these tests where they go, you know what they did on like, you know, TikTok and Instagram, where they'd be like, I followed a bunch of Nazi content and then it gave me more Nazi content. And so it's like a Nazi algorithm. They'll probably do the same thing where they'll like go into these LLMs, talk to it for a really long time, find essentially fine tune it on the idea that like they're crazy. And then it'll be like it gave me crazy responses and it's like, yeah, I get it, it probably shouldn't do that. But at the same time like you really like twisted its arm and it's not doing that most people. So I don't really have that much of a problem with it as long as there's like some guidelines here and like it's directionally, like it doesn't automatically steer you towards some negative echo chamber. Anyway. Word grammar has another banger post here on a roll. Richard Sutton's bitter lesson died January 22nd with Deep Seek and it was born again on February 17th, less than a month. So this is of course about. About scaling laws and Rich. Rich Sutton's bitter lesson which we'll get into. Of course, the idea that algorithms, while important, are not as important as scaling and compute power. And so scale is all you need. Let's go to another post from Liron Shapira. He says people in 2022, Elon can't actually keep these servers online. Elon now the bonus tab in the app makes you takes you to the highest benchmark frontier model. And so yeah, real narrative violation for everyone. That said Elon wasn't going to be able to keep Axe or Twitter like online. He's like not only doing that, the.

Reason that, you know, it wasn't an issue is I don't have a memory of wanting to use Twitter and or X and not being able to. And I think I would really, I would remember that for my whole life. Right. Such a. Such a daily habit. If you're going on there and just nothing was. Was loading. It's. Yeah, he really mogged everybody that was calling him out on that.

Yeah, well, Andre Karpathy shared more evals because he got access to Grok3. Says on Thinking Grok clearly has an around state of the art thinking model, the think button and did great out of the box on my Settlers at Catan question, which is create a board game webpage showing a hex grid just like in the game Settlers of Catan. Each hex grid is numbered 1 to N, where N is the total number of hex tiles. Make it generic so one can change the number of rings using a slider, for example catan the radius is 3 hexes. Single HTML page please. Pretty good. Few models get this reliably, right? The top OpenAI thinking models 01 Pro get it too but all of Deepseek R1, Gemini 2.0, Flash Thinking and Claude do not it did not solve his Emoji Mystery question where he gave it a smiling face with an attached message hidden inside Unicode variation selectors even when I gave it a strong hint on how to decode it in the form of Rust code. This is like such a. I don't know if I could solve that. Andre. I'm sorry, that is a very complicated eval but. But it makes sense I guess, and probably valuable. It should break that eventually. The most progress I've seen from this is deep seq r1, which once partially decoded the message. It solved a few Tic Tac toe boards he gave it with nice clean chain of thought. I uploaded the GPT2 paper, I asked it a bunch of simple lookup questions. All worked great. And so he's he has a whole bunch of evals that he can kind of rip through and I think that's a really cool way to do it. It's like, you know, do some web programming, build a website like solve Tic Tac Toe. You know, decode this mystery, do this riddle. And then he also had an hour.

I'm assuming what you know.

Yeah, exactly. He said he played with it for like two hours. And so he did the same thing with Deep Search. He asked what's with the upcoming Apple launch? Any rumors? And he liked the answer there. Why is Palantir stock surging? Recently he's gave it a check. White Lotus Season 3, where was it filmed? And is it the same team as seasons one and two? What toothpaste does Brian Johnson use? It didn't get singles Inferno season 4 cast and where are they Now? Which I don't even know what Inferno is, but Singles Inferno, I guess that's a show he watches, which I love. And then what speech to text program has Simon Wilson mentioned he's using? So he says I did find some sharp edges here. The model doesn't seem to like to reference X as a source by default. Interesting though you can explicitly ask it to. Few times I caught it hallucinating URLs that don't exist. A few times it said factual things that I think are Incorrect. And it didn't provide a citation. It told me Kim Jong Su is still dating Kim Min Sewell of singles Inferno Season 4, which surely is totally off. Right? This is hilarious. Andre, are you sure? Single Inferno. I need to get up on this. This is. This is good stuff. The impression I get of Deep Search is that it's approximately around where perplexity Deep research offering which is great, but not yet at the level of Deep research. Random LLM gotchas. Sadly, the model's sense of humor does not seem to be obviously improved. This is a common LLM issue with humor capability and general mode collapse. Famously, 90% of the 1000 outputs asking ChatGPT for a joke were repetitions of the same 25 jokes.

Crazy.

Got him dead to rights. GPT5, you're on notice. You better be funny even when prompted in more detail away from simple pun territory. Example, give me a stand up. I'm not sure that it is state of the art humor. Example generated joke. Why did the chicken join a band? Because it had the drumsticks and wanted to be a cluck star.

That's a. That's a real knee slapper.

They're. They're honestly, the jokes that are from LMS are so bad that sometimes they're very funny because it's just like wow.

Like if somebody will be. It will be amazing to when. When they do get to the point because yeah, I think everybody can see that we will. You know the. The general belief is that we'll get there.

Yeah.

But like think about having a comedian in your pocket that knows what you think is funny and it's basically somebody will make a rapper app. That's just a big button that you. The laugh button that you press and it just generates a new joke and it just gets better and better and it even hears your response to it. So it starts to learn on.

Yeah, that would be really good training data actually. Yeah, they could do that. Okay, so let's move on to Grok 3 and OpenAI Deep Research. I got your. Your analysis there. So I went to both Grok3 and OpenAI deep research and I asked it this really, really long prompt. I said I'd to build me a definitive table of LLM models and break down their evolution, specifically their relative sizes. So I want to know, you know, Gro3 came out. It uses 20K GPUs. I'm not exactly sure how many flops that is, but I would like to put all of these in the same terms. Like they're all an equivalent Number of flops. I want to know the progression of GPT 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 for the pre training runs. And then I want to know the same thing that happened at I said anthropic. It was transcribed incorrectly to entropic, which is wrong. And I want dates of when these were released. Then give me some uniform benchmark like chatbot arena or ms.mlu. i really need you to go pull all this together. I'm like, come on, do this for me bro. And then I'd like you to investigate how the Bitter lesson and Moore's Law are interacting right now. Essentially the Bitter lesson states that you always just want to throw more scale. But it's unclear to me what the benefits of scale are proportional to the capabilities of these models. So my basic thesis is that you know, we're potentially hitting diminishing marginal returns. We're going to see less gains from increase increased scale. And so the real question is Grok 3 is a 20k GPU run. They're planning to do 100k GPU run. And the question is, does the 5x or 10x increase in compute power? Does that increase the model's final capability usefulness by 1%? 10% does double it does 10 exit. And that's what I'm trying to predict. And I want to see these based on trend lines. What kind of results should I expect? And specifically I want, I want you to not just qualitative result, not just quantitative results, but qualitative results like what do we expect a 1 million GPU cluster trained model to be able to do? Is it just high iq? Is that the best measure? Like what should we, how should we be measuring these things? And is there an evolution that like you know, we have no top, no max. Do we just continue to push on? The final question is like does this continue to get better as we get to a billion GPUs? A trillion GPUs, a Google GPUs. What are we getting for that? I guess the question is, is intelligence unlimited? Even if we assume that we're on the right algorithmic path? That's the main question. And so basically I just wanted to like, like you know, dump out a ton of research and give me a bunch.

The only, the only thing that could handle that kind of prompt is your secretary. Right?

It's a lot of, it's a lot of stuff.

I mean you just basically dumped. Yeah, but it, but you certainly to work with.

What's interesting is if you look at page two and then page like six or something. You can actually see both Grok and OpenAI dumped out tables of, of how, how these models evolved. So GPT1 it claims was trained on 10 GPUs, then GPT2 100 GPUs, GPT3 10,000 GPUs, and then GPT4 25,000 GPUs.

Which is what tracks to the other.

And yeah, and on the other one it says a thousand and then 20k. And so the big question here is on, on flops. This is the real like standard metric is number of flops and the like the, the jargon term for this is just using the order of magnitude for number of flops. So you can think of GPT3, you call that an E23 model because it had 3.14 times 10 to the 23rd flops. And so you call that an E23 model. GPT4 was an E25 model because it's not just more GPUs but it's also more training time and more, more powerful GPUs. And so you can't just say oh, they used, they used 5x GPUs because they might have run them longer, more power, all these different things. So you really just want to do flops because that's the most standard. And so DeepMind Chinchilla is an E23 model, Llama 70B is an E24 model and Groq3 is an E26 model.

And so I don't know how I miss Chinchilla.

Oh, Chinchilla is a big one because that was the paper that, that defined the, the scaling laws.

So interesting when people, I never people.

Talk about the pre training scaling law, they call it Chinchilla scaling laws because it came from the Chinchilla paper.

Got it.

And so in here now this is where we get weird because ChatGPT claims that Grok 3 is an E26 model, but Groq 3 claims that Grok 3 is an e25 model. And so I don't know who's hallucinating here. I don't know who's more accurate.

They could, they could both be hallucinating. To be clear, they could. No one is necessarily right.

And so Grok3 claims that Grok3 is less flop intensive than GPT4, but GPT4 claims that, that Grok3 is more powerful than, than Grok than GBD4 and so they're both gassing each other up. I guess in a weird way I think OpenAI is more accurate here, but it's very funny. I don't know. It's all. It's all very. It's all very odd and like, I don't have time to fact check all of this. So I'm kind of just like vibe, vibe interpreting this. But let's read some of the analysis here from the Bitter Lesson. And the Bitter Lesson argues that AI progress relies. And this is from Grok3. And then we'll read the ChatGPT version. The bitter lesson argues that AI relies on scaling compute and data over bespoke algorithms. LLMs embody this. GPT3 success came from brute force scale, not architectural breakthroughs. It was a very simple algorithm. They just gave it the entire web and they trained it a lot with a lot of GPUs is the first, like big training run, basically. However, your thesis about diminishing returns challenges this. Does more compute always yield proportions proportional gains? Moore's Law has slowed. That's the law that says that doubling transistor density every two years with gptu, with GPU performance now scaling via parallelism. And so we are scaling compute, but we're doing it by just getting more and more GPUs.

Yep.

LLM training outpaces hardware gains, relying on cluster size rather than per chip efficiency. So we're not just doubling the training run every year. We're like 10xing it because we're just building these monster data centers. So scaling logs. Kaplan and Hoffman show performance scales predictably with compute parameters and data. This implies a 10x compute increase yields 25 to 60% loss reduction, not 10x MMLU gains reflect this. GPT3 to GPT4 is a 160x compute jump for a 50% score increase. I still don't really know how to interpret all this.

We're gonna have some guests on to break it down.

Yeah. And so I don't know, it's interesting. The main thing is that, like, I think when most people play with this, they're like, it's great, it's good, but it's not like a complete step change from what else I'm seeing online.

No, the big headline takeaway from last night is that that XAI is catching up on raw model capabilities in a very short period of time. In terms of product usefulness, it doesn't seem to be there yet. Right. Because even you're seeing. Okay, well, you trained on all of my posts, but I actually don't even necessarily like that that much. And so they seem to be on a collision course with OpenAI from a capability standpoint, especially as they get into these next runs. Yeah, but, but again, that this is going back to my earlier point. I look at all this, you know, Elon, you know, hitting these, hitting these evals, but then simultaneously still wanting to spend $100 billion on, on OpenAI when he could just, you know, spend that money on xai. And he's, you know, again, we don't know if he's doing it to, to throw a wrench in the process, but it seems like he would love to be chairman of OpenAI is like my read of the situation.

This is interesting. The ChatGPT deep research is, I think, much more readable as a. It just has a research paper, so.

And again, that's them innovating at the product level. Yeah. And what Ben Thompson said is he's not sure if they just have a better model that's just producing better outputs or they just are refining the actual product layer more.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they say increasing, increasing model size and compute generally improves performance, but with diminishing returns. And so that's the real question here of like, you know, if we 100x the models like we're planning to, if it just gets a little bit better, it might not actually be able to do real work still, because it might still break down and hallucinate a little bit. Like, we're all hoping for the model that just like, like never hallucinates ever and can do a ton of stuff and hold everything in memory and which.

May not ever come.

Maybe. I think we will get there. It's just the question of like, you know, what if it's, what if it's a thousand order of magnitudes? You know, like that would be. Yes, the scaling law would hold. Like the scaling law would be correct, but like, it would take a long time to build like a Dyson sphere for that, basically. Early work by OpenAI showed that large language model loss follows a power law. Performance improves predictably as model parameters and data scale up. And this was that picture of like GPT3 to GPT4. More parameters, more data. And so everyone was going bigger, bigger, bigger. For example, going from GPT3 175 billion to models like Gopher 280 and Megaton, Megatron, Megatron Turing 530 improved benchmarks, but not proportionally to the huge jump in compute required. DeepMind's 280B gopher outperformed GPT3 on knowledge tasks, reading comprehension and fact checking. Yet it saw little gain in logical thinking or common sense tasks. Despite 60% more compute. This suggests some capabilities plateau unless new approaches are used. And that's the reasoning model.

Right.

And so diminishing returns are evident on many benchmarks. As models grow, metrics like mmlu, a broad knowledge test, improve, but approach an asymptote near human performance. And that's frustrating because I would want linear progress that just blows through human performance. But it's really like we're kind of, maybe we need new evals, I don't know. GPT3 achieved only around 50% on MMLU, while below the 90% expert human level. So that, that's the human level Benchmark. Gopher did 60%. Chinchilla did 67%. GPT4 jumped to 86%. Nearing human experts. However, GPT4's training used roughly two orders of magnitude more compute than GPT3 for that last 30 to 40 point gain. So it's still very important, but it's just, it's just like, yeah. Diminishing each additional few points towards 90% is increasingly expensive in compute. Similarly, coding and math benchmarks saw massive leaps from GPT3 to GPT4. But further gains beyond GPT4 are smaller. In Xai's Grok 3, pushing to an unprecedented 200k GPU cluster only yielded moderate improvements over the prior state of the art hallucination. They didn't use all 200k GPUs, and here it's saying that they did.

Well, yeah.

God.

OpenAI specifically says in their research that they say up to 200,000 Nvidia GPUs, 100 to 200K GPUs over four months. But we know that's not true.

Yeah. And so it's a mess. I don't know.

We're.

We're close to something. It's cool, I like it. But.

Well, we've compared.

We gotta step.

They're models. Should we talk about their dynamic?

Yeah, absolutely. Let's move on to the Wall Street Journal. The inside story of how Altman and Musk went from friends to bitter enemies kick us off.

On the first full day of the second Trump presidency, Elon Musk was in the White House complex when he got word that his nemesis was about to hold a press conference conference with the president. Amazing. Amazing. First sentence here. I don't know who's writing this. He turned on the television. He turned on the television and watched as Open AI's chief executive Sam Altman and a beaming Donald Trump touted a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure called Stargate. And this is a hilarious dynamic if it's actually true, where he's turning on the tv, he's got X open on his phone, he's just shaking his head like one. Sam is, is an absolute dog for even making this happen. You got to be pretty brave to just go into the, into the, into the White House, the lion's den. Elon's got like six of his kids running around. They know you're. They know you're a target. That's great. So props even making that happen. Masa, I'm sure was. Was, you know, pulling. Making. Making some magic happen too. So. Despite having rarely left the President's side over the preceding few months, Musk was blindsided by the announcement, according to people familiar with the matter. Musk fumed to aides and allies about the announcement, claiming Stargate's backers didn't have the money they needed the deepest. Which is true. Right? It sort of came out that they didn't have it. It was more of like a roadshow, you know, spac announcement type thing. So the deepest cut was Altman's success navigating Trump world via a carefully coordinated series of recent meetings in Palm beach and phone calls with the White House while keeping the plan secret from the President. First buddy.

First buddy. Yeah, buddy cop. They're going buddy cop mode.

Buddy cop mode.

But Trump's got a lot of buddies.

Altman and Musk Co founded OpenAI in 2015, but their relationship soured when Musk left in 2018 following a power struggle. It worsened when Musk responded to the launch of ChatGPT by launching his own rival startup, Xai, this week. The feud went nuclear when Musk followed the Stargate unveiling with his own BombShell, a hostile $97.4 billion bid for the assets of the nonprofit that controls OpenAI. A decade after joining forces, they are now fighting for control of the very thing that brought them together in one of the highest stakes and most personal fights in recent business history. The outcome could determine everything from the future of a world changing technology to who will help set the nation's technology agenda with the new president.

Interesting.

This article is based on the conversations with more than a dozen people familiar with Altman and Musk's relationship over the years, as well as OpenAI and Musk Musk's business and political decisions.

We got to go back and watch the Sam Altman Elon Musk podcast. Have you seen this?

They had their own show together.

It wasn't. It was. Y Combinator had a. A series of interviews on their YouTube channel. And Sam went and conducted a number of interviews, and one of them was with Elon. And so they're sitting in the Tesla factory just chopping it up about, like, entrepreneurship and wisdom, and it's just like, like, it's crazy to see. I'll. I'll continue. So in many ways, Sam Altman, 39, and Elon Musk, 53, couldn't be more different. While Musk was beaten up and verbally abused as a child, Altman was a teacher's pet whose parents routinely told him he could be whatever he wanted to be. Where Musk's. Where Musk was often abrasive, Altman tended to tell people what they wanted to hear. And while Musk was an engineer steeping himself in the details of rocket and battery design, Altman is a technology obsessed intellectual, reading widely across philosophy, science and literature, and penning essays on how society should organize itself. But both have strikingly similar taste for power. Let's go.

Taste for power. That should be one of our hiring metrics.

Yes.

John, what do you think this guy's taste for power is? You think he's a. He's real hungry.

Yeah. I mean, if you're in, you can.

Tell Ben's got a real taste for power.

Absolutely. Yeah. If you're in an interview and somebody asks you, what do you. Where do you want to be in 10 years? And you just say, supremely powerful. I think you get the job. I think you get the job. Oh, yeah, yeah, that, that's the video. Look at this. Very poorly.

That doesn't even feel that long ago.

It's. It wasn't that long ago. The cinematography was not incredible, but I.

Think it was probably doing that or something. The Andrew Tate date. Yeah, early 2015.

Wow. Yeah, that is wild seeing them hang out, just bros, just guys being dudes doing a pod together. You love to see it. It's too bad. I mean, they keep coming back to the fact that mom and dad are fighting. You know, these are two. You know, everyone, everyone picks a side, but ultimately these are Americans. They're building technology. I love technology. I love America. And yeah, I, I wish they could just be on the same team and, and, and build something awesome together. I hope that they can have a reconciliation. That's my biggest hope. Well, and so for years, the millennial Altman looked up to the Genesque Mux Musk as a hero, a real life's Tony Stark who provided a counter example to the country's technological stagnation that Altman railed against when he was president of the startup accelerator Y Combinator. Altman met Musk early years earlier when Y Combinator partner Jeff Ralston introduced the them. Oh, I know Ralston pretty well. Oh, they misspelled his name here. And helped arrange for Altman to tour Musk's SpaceX rocket factory. Interesting. Altman's time leading UI combinator from 2014 to 2019 put him at the epicenter of power in Silicon Valley. He became a known as a fixer with an unrivaled Rolodex who could call in favors for the startups he invested in or punish investors who crossed them. This is 100% true. He was great at what he did during this time. He was fantastic. This, his special talent was raising money, which he would do by arriving in his signature uniform of jeans and sneakers, curl his small frame up, cross legged in a conference room chair and unspool a vision so grandiose, compelling and earnest that it often seemed like investors were powerless to keep from funding his projects. It's great. I mean, great storyteller, great fundraiser. And what's interesting is that like, yeah, he raised some money. He raised a lot of money for his projects, but he was also like an angel investor who got tons of deals done for other people. He set other people up with funds. Like he was, he was marshaling capital all over the place.

I had heard that he invested in, he was able to invest in stripe at a $700,000 valuation. I don't know, but I know it was like 10 on 700k or something.

I mean, I think he's a billionaire just from Stripe. Yeah, basically, somehow. I don't know.

Yeah.

But I mean, yeah, phenomenal investor.

And then for anyone listening, if you want to be in a billionaire, just put 10k into the next Stripe.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good advert.

People tend to make it. Really?

Yeah. Why are you over complicating it?

Yeah, think, oh, it takes years. All this hard work now just take 10 grand and just put it into the next stripe.

Yeah. And I mean he's even doing it more recently with oklo, that nuclear startup which is public, public and it's a spac. And it's a successful spac. The stock's way up. What a narrative.

Like if you, if you see people talking about it, you know, on X, the company, they call it Sam Altman's nuclear Startup.

Yeah. Yeah.

So like that is probably like the, the dominant narrative causing it to pump.

Yeah.

Actually have to check. I, I own a little, I own a little bit of it, you know, you own Oklahoma.

Okay. Not financial advice here. We are going to check the stock on public.

Yeah, I am down 4% today, so.

Oh, it's not. It's pulling back.

It had to. Well, it had to make up your own.

Go in public, check it out and see if it's for you.

Maybe. Anyway, not that we, we certainly do not recommend.

No, we don't recommend individual stocks, but we do recommend becoming a multi strategy, multi stage large asset management firm.

Yeah.

And running your business through public.

Yeah.

Become a long, short equity hedge fund.

There you go.

And it all starts with public. In early 2015, Musk and Altman began having regular dinners each Wednesday in the Bay Area. Their conversations tended toward the apocalyptic. How the world might end, how they might prepare for it, to where they might have to flee. A likely cause, they agreed, would be artificial intelligence that grows smarter than humans and impossible to control. That may. Altman suggested they create a Manhattan Project to develop artificial general intelligence or AGI that is as smart smart as humans at most tasks. They wanted to ensure Google, which had a huge lead in developing the technology, didn't end up deciding what it would mean for the human race. Such a fascinating solution, you know, like, like there is another world where you're like, we're just, like we're just going to try and like, you know, use military might to just actually like ban this development of this technology. Like, you know, I wouldn't advocate for that at all. And I think AGI is like, I think the whole, the whole history of this stuff is going very well. I'm very satisfied with how it's going. But you know, there is another world where you're like, hey, yeah, like there's this technology and like we need to, you know, steer people away from development of this and like ban this and control this and then have international coalitions and you know, military might to build it up. Like there are things you can't build. You know, dark web drug marketplaces are a good example.

It's worth noting that Sam Altman and Musk had these meetings and then Altman decided that he was going to get really into building bunkers, sort of doomsday, you know, fly on the wall. So I would love to have been a part of those conversations.

And so they joined forces. They raise up to a billion dollars. Musk pledged to supply the lion's share of the money and they would lead it as co chairman. The co CEO things co chairman is hilarious. Yeah, they should have figured that out early on. It's Very clear that they didn't play out like, okay, like what if this is actually like a trillion dollar opportunity? Like who will, who will want to run this? And they were both like, well, obviously it'll be me. It's not. There's no question. Of course their relationship began to disintegrate in 2017 pretty quickly. I mean this is 2015. They're having dinners. 26:17. They started disintegrating after OpenAI researchers realized they would need far more money than a nonprofit could ra ways to develop advanced AGI. We talked about this how if you want to summon the AI God in a box, you got to be a capitalist. It's not happening in a non profit. You're not just writing some clever algorithm with some altruistic.

Although we do, we are interested in taking PETA private.

Exactly.

There's a lot of stuff private.

No, it's the for profit, for profit conversion. Then it'll be private and then we'll take it public. Public. And then we'll probably take it private again as. As the private.

Bravo. We'll take it public. Take it private.

Yep, yep, yep. You know the post of document.

Yeah, that's great.

According to one of their emails, Elon Elon demanded majority control and to be CEO. Altman's successful move to block his mentor would mark the beginning of the rupture. He convinced another co founder, Greg Brockman, to back him over Musk. Brockman reeled in OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to also back Alt. Brockman and Sutzkever wrote in an email to Musk that since OpenAI was founded to avoid an AI dictatorship, it seemed like a bad idea to create a structure where you would become a dictator if you choose to. If you chose to. Within hours, Musk wrote back that this is the final straw. By early 2018, he had left the company and Altman took over leadership. This was like very under discussed at the time because OpenAI was such just a research lab and they were doing like little things here and there. Like this is definitely not in the news in the same way. Like 2018 people were talking about SpaceX and Tesla mostly.

Yeah.

So over the next few years they focus on Research on 2020. In 2022 they released Chat GPT. This became huge. Turned out to be one of the most successful and transformative consumer technology products of the century. In the company of the iPhone, Facebook and TikTok. As it's as. As shocked as the rest of the world that AI had gone mainstream and obsessed that he wasn't a part of it. Musk began publicly criticizing OpenAI for moving too fast and not taking safety seriously. He signed an open letter calling for a six month pause on AI development within a few months launched.

Funny, a lot of people called for similar, you know, signed similar letters calling for a pause on new podcast formation.

Oh, yeah, of course.

That didn't get through.

Nope. You can't stop it. The arrow of progress moves but one way.

Yeah.

In 2024, he attacked Altman in a new venue court after suing OpenAI and its CEO that February. He withdrew the suit in June, refiled it in August, and amended in November. They've been going back in the.

For.

In the. Back and forth in the courts for a long time. Musk's lawyers declared the perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions. You know, it's a good lawyer.

You got to pay a top dollar for lawyer that can, that can hit.

That's not less than $1,000 an hour. That's a, that's a $5,000 an hour lawyer.

That's 10K, potentially.

Almond and Musk were bitter.

LLM could never.

Yeah. And so Altman said Musk was bitter that he left before the company succeeded. As Musk's legal attacks escalated, Altman watched with growing alarm as Musk grew closer and closer to Donald Trump, campaigning by his side and spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support him. You want to continue?

Yeah. I mean, there's lines from Altman interviews where he's like, you know, I would hope that, you know, the President wouldn't sort of pick favorites when we're here, you know, all trying to develop this transformative technology. And to Trump's credit, he seemingly hasn't picked favorites specifically with an AI. He obviously has a good relationship with Elon, but he's not. We haven't seen him go out and do any sort of press conference for XAI or the Memphis Data Center.

Such a narrative violation.

Yeah.

Like, everyone thinks Trump is going to be super corrupt with this stuff. And he's just like, you know what, making.

He's having his cash bonanza. Our. Our listeners know that. Like, yeah, he's deal guy.

Deal guy.

Deal guy.

Anyway, Altman first mentioned Stargate to open AI's board in 2023 as a way to vastly increase the computing power his company could tap to develop and operate AI. He originally brought the idea to Microsoft, asking it to invest upward of 100 billion. But in the wake of an episode in 2023 when Altman was ousted from the CEO perch for five days. The tech giant Bo says, get your. Get it together, guys. We're not putting up 100 billion for a guy who can't hold on to his job. He gets upset. It's so funny. Like there's so much drama here. Altman soon found partners. One was SoftBank. Altman had known him since his Y Combinator days. Second was Larry Ellison, longtime friend of Musk, who was hung out to dry when XAI pulled out of a Texas data center project that Ellison's company, Oracle, was working on. Altman agreed OpenAI would take it over. The project grew into the foundation for Stargate. I didn't know that.

Interesting.

Originally been an X AI project, but then I guess Musk wanted to do the data center like himself and like own the whole stack.

And isn't. Isn't Ellison heavily invested in X?

I don't know. Yeah, I think so. I mean they're all super conflicted and like, you know, it's all just like not having his tail over here.

Yeah, so he, I think he put in at least a billion.

Okay, look that up and I'm going to keep reading. In December, Masayoshi Sohn played golf with the President Elect at Mar A Lago and announced his intention to invest a $100 billion in U.S. infrastructure projects alongside Trump and Lutnick. Their press conference effectively previewed Stargate without making any of the details public, which ensured Musk still didn't know about OpenAI's.

Here's a. Here's a great AI overview. Overview. A Gemini overview. Okay, quoting. You know, using the Washington Post as a source. Larry Ellison, co founder of Oracle, invested $1 billion in X. However, as of September 2024, he lost 720 million of his investment, according to the Washington Post, which clearly he didn't lose his investment.

He had a paper loss.

He had a paper.

And then it was back up maybe.

But now it's back up. Yeah, so very. And I have to put the Washington Post in the truce zone.

And so Altman goes to the inauguration facility festivities. He doesn't sit with the other tech CEOs alongside Musk, there was like the high, like, you know, the real like killers were up there with like Zuck and Bezos and Musk were up in like kind of a balcony area. And then Altman was down with Theo Vaughn and Alex. Alex Wang. Yeah, it was a bunch of cool like little micro crews. I think Jake Paul was over there for some reason. The next day, Altman and his partners arrived at the White House where they were more fully explained their plans for Stargate to Trump. Trump told the group he wanted to go ahead. And with the announcement, the new president loved that. They were aiming to invest in 500 billion during his term, a number sure to make headlines. And it makes sense. He wants a lot of jobs, wants a lot of economic growth, spend the money in America. And so Musk gets upset. He's fuming to AIDS about how the partners didn't really have the funding lined up for the project. He called it fake on X. Musk was already plotting a counter move and had been considering making a bid for the nonprofit. Musk said he was inspired to make the bid because OpenAI was in the midst of a for becoming a for profit company. And he believed Altman planned to undervalue the asset of the nonprofit, which would become an independent charity with a stake in the for profit. But Musk's more primal message was for investors, let's go to war with Sam Altman. Altman was at the Paris AI summit when news of the bid broke. And so he got, he got like TMZ a little bit with, you know, the reporter saying, hey, what do you think about this? And he's like, oh my God, I guess I can't deal with this.

Basically was saying, like, I just want him to stop really bad. That was the immediate tip.

And so he said. OpenAI is not for sale and the board has unanimously rejected Mr. Mr. Musk's latest attempt to disrupt his competition. Said Brett Taylor, chairman of OpenAI's board. I thought Brett Taylor's building an AI company separately. I guess he is. I think he's probably doing both. Any potential reorganization of OpenAI will strengthen our nonprofit and its mission to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity. OpenAI's rejection comes as no surprise, says Musk's lawyer, Mark Toberoff. Musk had said he wanted to save the company from the dangerous direction in which his co founder had taken it. It's time for OpenAI to return to the open source safety focused force for good. It once was he pronounced. We will make sure that happens. Altman responded in his signature nice brand of nice guy savagery. Probably his whole life is from a position of insecurity. He said on Bloomberg tv. I feel for the guy. I don't, don't think he's a happy person. I do feel for him.

Wow. Like it's wild because I think if Elon, Elon would tell you, I don't want to be happy.

Yeah, he's got that.

Don't use that metric to evaluate. Like to try to judge me, right? His motivation is to put a data center on Mars.

Yeah, that's true. Anyway.

Absolutely wild. Well, we got some breaking news. Thank you to Ben for surfacing it from Perplexity, who's also. They've been in the timeline recently because.

They'Re fighting it out. Everyone's in the trenches.

Perplexity CEO likes to use Sam Altman's replies as marketing engine for Perplexity. It's his strategy now. So Perplexity says today we're open sourcing R1 1776. Cool name. Got to give him credit for that. A version of the deep seq R1 model that's been post trained to provide uncensored, unbiased and factual information. To keep our model uncensored on sensitive topics, we created a diverse multilingual evaluation set of a thousand examples using human annotators and specially designed LLM judges. We compared frequency of censorship in the original R1 and state of the art LLMs to R1 1776. You can see a chart, Ben. Maybe you can pull it up or we can do it in post. We also ensured the model's math and reasoning abilities remained intact after the uncensoring process. U.S. benchmark evaluations showed it performed on par with the base R1 model, indicating that uncensoring had no impact on core reasoning capabilities.

That's cool. Um, so I mean, hot take, like, I don't really care about censorship and LLMs all that much because like I. How many times are you doing, you know, research on the Tiananmen Square massacre? Like, you know, it's like, yeah, most of the time I'm like, make this recipe list or like, you know, pull some GPU data together or you know, something that's like, it wouldn't even even be censored either way. But it's cool that they did it. And in 1776, obviously very American branded, very, you know, American dynamism coded and probably like a fun stunt marketing stunt. And it's good because there was a lot of like, is deep sea secretly bad and like poisoning it? So I like that they like did the work to go clean it up. I think that's cool.

So I think Perplexity can be very useful.

Yep.

I, I don't use it a ton. I use it from time to time. I find it can be fantastic. It's just more so the friction of opening perplexity and searching ends up being high for a lot of this sort of faster. I just opened Google search. And I got the information I wanted, even though it was like I asked how much did Larry Ellison invest in X? And Gemini botched it and gave this highly politicized answer. But I still got the data that I wanted. So I, I think Perplexity would have done a much better job of that. And I should probably just like start, you know, using it more. But overall, like, their product strategy right now feels very reactionary. Like it seems like the CEO is sort of like watching what other people are doing, figuring out how to make it about them. Right? Hey, here we have our, like, we, we basically made R1 into a better consumer product for Americans. Look at us. And he's launching their sort of Deep Research competitor, which again, even Carpathy was saying, you know, not, not quite on par in terms of how people are using Deep Research broadly today. So yeah, yeah, overall, you know, just focusing your messaging on, on your, your top competitor, your former boss's reply section. I'm not super, super bullish on that strategy.

What's interesting is Perplexity does have another feature or like tab that I actually think is really cool and I was super bullish on, but that I didn't wind up using all that much. It's. It's an algorithmic feed of news stories that are AI generated. So like the top story for me is Grok 3, which obviously I'm interested in talking about. And then you click on it and it shows you a bunch of sources and key features and it's very nicely organized and it's not like super ad ad riddled and stuff. And I thought this was really cool. But at the same time, like, I would Rather experience the GROQ3 launch on X in like the messy timeline. And so I haven't been using that as much as I thought. And we were talking about this yesterday, like, is there room for a new hacker news or a new, a new tech meme? And Perplexity kind of built it. I think they did a great job on product execution in that tab. I think it's quite good. But I think that in 2025 people want a feed that is, is more chaotic, more combative, more. More comedic. Entertaining. Entertaining, exactly. So I want to see the actual live stream that I can just go watch the, the definitive source. I want to see the community notes, I want to see Carpathy and then I want to see Growing Daniel meme it and I want to see Rune respond and I want to see Yaxine respond and, and I, I like getting my news that way, honestly. More than, hey, there's this sanitized AI summary that's helpful, but it's not as fun.

Yeah, it's interesting. So I'm looking at the like free productivity charts right now, which a lot of these AI apps are under. Productivity.

Yep.

So perplexity is at 26. Gro@1, ChatGPT is at or sorry, GroX at 2. Chat. GPT is at 1. And so this is just a snapshot in the App Store right now.

No way.

This is a snapshot moment.

I thought they were going to destroy everything.

Deep seek is number three.

Okay.

And then perplexity is down at number 26 behind things like HP Smart, their printer, the Ringtones maker, the Ring app, you know, random VPNs. Speechify is actually ranking Cliff White's higher.

Boy, have you met Cliff, the founder of Speech. So here's your dog.

Yeah, you had mentioned that.

So Beast, Beast on the back.

So perplexity is 26. They have 127 rankings. Check chat on AI, which is basically an OpenAI alternative, has 194,000 rankings and is only at 28. So this is like a seemingly like no name, you know, sort of the most blatant rapper that you can think of. So I don't know, I think that I don't see this model getting them to, in the be in the top five. So to me, if they're, if they're, you know, launching R1 1776, do consumers in the App Store actually care about that? Because if you're competing with Google, you need to not be worried about how cool X is going to think your product release is and more so how you go from 26 on the charts to top three. Right. If you actually want to be competitive. He clearly wants to compete with Sam. Every single day. He's responding to Sam. So yeah, I think, I think this launch is super cool. I definitely want to play around with it. But you know, at the end, yeah.

I've honestly seen the same thing on, on, in. Oddly in the nicotine pouch world where I've seen like people be like, oh, I'm launching a new nicotine pouch with like an American flag on it and like, okay, it'll get like, you know, a thousand likes on X and then it's like, okay, like, do you have $10 million to spend with, with 711 Walmart and you know, quick trip to actually get your product in stores. It's like the, the, the thing that actually drives like the, the adoption loop is like completely separate from like popularity. Totally and it's just. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's, I, I, I wonder, like Perplexity I think is cool because like they're not just doing the vanilla. Like we're just doing another chatbot. There's already 17 of those that have like billions of dollars. At least they're trying a different product instantiation. I think that is cool. Cool. But, but yeah, I do wonder how they can get, how they can get just more. How can I fit it into my life and how it can really get to, you know, solid traction and yeah, I mean, maybe speed. You mentioned speed. Like if it was faster than Google and it was something that I could make my default search in Safari on iOS somehow the challenge might be down.

For that is if you're sitting in Google Chrome working it's always going to be faster to hit command T, command T and immediately start searching.

Now, now, now. If, if Arvind, the CEO of Perplexity, made a compelling case on X that I should go into my Chrome tab and reroute the default Chrome search to Perplexity and showed me how to do that, I might do that and try.

It, see how it goes.

But it has to be a faster.

Product than Google and Google can continue to make that super hard. Or they could just say you're not allowed to to build competitive.

And again, it might not be like an actual consumer. Like, yeah, viral growth strategy. Like it might, it might not really.

Yeah.

Anyway, should we wrap up Grok? I think we did a full deep dive. Yeah, that was great. Now you know, where, where are we on time? We're at 12, 20 hour and a half. Okay, well, let's go through some timeline.

We had a bunch of good stuff, by the way. Yeah, I'm loving the new layout. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, thank you for the comments on it. We're trying to make the show better. Every single day in different ways is sometimes we wake up with a bad sleep score. But we're still actually had a question.

How's the sleep score?

I had a rough night.

Yeah, I went to bed a little late, so I'm sure I'm getting docked. Let's see.

I have to give, I have to give a little anecdote.

82. I got destroyed.

I got 83.

6:42.

Can you imagine if, can you imagine if they were just like in the background listening, like adjusting them to try to make us like super competitive?

Wait, what'd you get?

I got 83.

83. You beat me.

I beat you by one. One. No, but so last. So I made a mistake this morning. I got up at five.

Yeah.

My eight sleep warmed my bed like five, you know, whatever, to so that I was sort of like waking up naturally. And then at 5 it starts doing the vibrating alarm. Oh yeah, really nice. The issue is that I snooze the alarm. I didn't turn it off and then I just got out of bed and I left. I was in the car with your wife and she snoozed. She's like texting me, being like, please turn off your alarm.

Yeah.

Which is funny because normally people are like, turn off your alarm because you're still sleeping.

Yeah.

But turning off your alarm because you're already out, but it's, you know, connected via wi fi. So I was able to just like turn it off.

I mean, for what it's worth, I think I still like the eight sleep got me to a place where even though I didn't have the best night's sleep, it went a little bit further. Further. The 6 and 6 and 3/4 hours of sleep I got were fantastic.

Fantastic.

But I'm ready to lock in.

I started that point by saying our. We actually are genuinely focused on how do we improve the format of the show every single day. There's the format, there's the camera, lighting overlay. So thank you to everybody that gives us feedback. We see it in the chat, we see it in the DMs, comments, et cetera. Trying to make it better every single day, forever. And yeah, it's a fun journey.

Keep grinding.

Let's get into the timeline.

Let's go to Paul Graham. Andreas Klinger says this picture will be framed by dads everywhere. Says Paul Graham says every time we come back to Silicon Valley, my 16 year old son gets a massive dose of cognitive dissonance when he notices that apparently smart and reasonable people seem eager to obtain something he's convinced is utterly worthless. And someone says, interesting, what's that? And he says, my advice. It's like he set this up to go viral. Like, it's like he almost framed the first tweet to be like, yeah, somebody's gonna ask and then I'll drop the bomb on them. Yeah, because he could have just said like, you know, my. He could have revealed that it was his advice, but it wouldn't have been as good and it would have been like, maybe cockier or something. I don't know. It was a great post. It was very funny.

Great post.

Yeah. And I don't know. Yeah, I, I don't have a 16 year old yet. But it'll be interesting to see if he enjoys my advice at that point.

Well, well, what we'll do is, is I'll give advice to your sons. Yeah, you give advice to my kids.

Yeah.

And they'll respect it because they're like, oh, this is like my dad's business partner.

Yeah.

I gotta respect what he says. So even if they go through that awkward, you know, teenage period where they're sort of rebelling, we'll still be old to, you know, deliver the.

Also, I mean, I'm planning to go full reverse psychology and have all my advice be like, move to Brooklyn.

Become a DJ.

Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah.

Just look, you're 16. I want you to be doing drugs.

I want you to be doing.

When I was your age, I was doing. Yeah.

And then he's like, I, dad, I'm going into the military and I'm starting a head.

I'm getting a job at Goldman.

Exactly.

Working 18 hours a day.

Exactly, Exactly. I don't know. It's fun. It's funny to see pg. He, he is, he's been posting about his kids for 16 years, you know.

Yeah. Posting through it.

He's been, he's been posting the, the, the data.

It's good to see him come back. He had that post that many people were commenting on the feng shui.

Oh, yeah.

Of his room. But, you know, he's posting through it. Seem to be posting through it.

It's great. Let's go to David Hole, founder of Midjourney. He says the biggest frustration of a hardcore technologist in San Francisco is how many big companies, both tiny and gargantuan, are kind of fake. Investors often can't tell the difference between story and substance. And armed with a billion dollars, it may take a decade for it to fail. As an observer, when those companies finally fall, you expect to feel some sense of satisfaction, but actually you only feel sadness and a sense of weight. Waste. Searing.

Dude. I know exactly who he's posting about.

Perhaps this is just the price we pay to live in a place that is so supportive of wild ideas and risky ventures. A lot of dumb stuff is going to happen and we just have to be okay with it. It's just emotionally hard. It's like, it's such a funny take on like, oh, no, no, there's some, there's some fraud or whatever. And he's like, and he's like, you know, most people would be like, oh, this is like, you know, bad for the economy or wasting money or, oh, like I should be getting the money to build something real. And he's just like, this is just emotionally draining. Yeah. I love how Zen he is. It's so good. Anyway. Yeah, I think the real crazy thing is that, is that like him, lots of people in Silicon Valley have identified the new crop of frauds.

Yeah.

Mainstream media, silent. They're not doing investigative journalism anymore.

Yeah.

Kind of like a weird, like, hey, maybe like we need that. Hey, maybe we need some investigative journalism. Like, where is the, I don't know, the, the, the, the John Carrey Roo of this generation.

Yeah.

I don't know if John Carrey is like retired or still working, but got to start figuring these things out. Mainstream media, because there's some bombshells out there. Right.

But yeah, I mean, when, when you think about the high profile hard tech companies right now that are.

Yeah.

That are building, that have a lot of hype, that have raised a lot of money, the challenge is, you know, what he's saying is like, yeah, if, if you are a well versed observer or you have any type of like, you know, insight into the company, you can kind of point out like what he's saying of great, great story. Not a lot of substance. Right. Which is what he's pointing out. And that by itself is not fraud. Right. Like you can. There are plenty of companies that have great stories and just not a lot of substance. Right. Maybe they're building something and they're building just a, Not a very good version of it, but they still, you know, continue to raise money.

Yeah. I mean, in the like post.com world, there was a guy named Barney Pell who started a company called Moon Express who was trying to deliver like basically build a moon colony. Great story. Raised a bunch of money, didn't get anywhere. It failed. And it wasn't a fraud. It was just like, like all the investors were like, obviously bummed, but they were like, yeah, like I wanted you to try to build. I, I don't know, it might have been a legal thing, but I, But I'm pretty sure what happened. I need to actually deep dive the company, but I'm pretty sure it's like, yeah, if you're, as an investor, there's a lot of times when you put money in a company and you're like, hey, I wanted you to try this. And I know that it's a 10% chance that it works out and if it fails. Yeah, no hard feelings.

Nikhil in the chat says, Hindenburg meets Hindenburg, research meets the information.

Oh yeah.

Somebody does that it would get you slap that behind a paywall and you'll be have some nice, nice revenue in no time.

Yeah, yeah, it's great. Uh, everyone. Nabil says, well articulated. It's not ideal, but the alternatives feel worse. There does have to be a way to improve. Anyway, let's move on to Matteo over at eight Sleep. He says it's so exciting to see eight Sleep on TV during the final of the Premier. Padel in Riyadh supporting the number one team in the world of Coelho and Tapi. I don't know that much about Padel, but I think it's on the ground.

No, Patel, Padel is the cool version of pickleball. Not to throw too much shade at Palantir. Palantir's pickleball paddle. I think it's great if you're, you know, doing paddle esque sports. But yeah, it's just a faster, higher pace, more athletic, more intense version.

Boom, boom, got your eight Sleep hat on.

There you go. Thankfully I caught that. That would have been deeply embarrassing. Yeah, I never would have recovered.

But yeah, I mean, it's cool that eight Sleep is, I mean it's such a fun brand because like, yeah, it's a consumer tech company, hardware company, but they get to go and play in F1 and pro sports teams and it's. Yeah, it's a lot of fun anyway, getting eat sleep. It's a no brainer. We love eight Sleep here. Speaking of other sponsors we love, let's move on to ramp. Aaron says this is why I love ramp. And he's quote posted ramp official account. This is last Friday our team attended the Eagles parade in Philadelphia. For some on the ground journalism, what we found might shock you. And they have all these, they did this funny video of like, you know, people with ramp signs at the Philadelphia celebration. It's great. They're, they're really, they're getting so much out of the super bowl ad, it is crazy. I guarantee this thing is ROI positive, which is more than you can say.

For a lot of. And it shows, like taking that scrappy approach of saying, hey, we made this big investment, but let's make the most of it. I guarantee you Doritos ran their ad and they were like, cool, like pat on the back, nice. We're done. See you next year.

Yeah.

And Paki Pack is a big Eagles fan. I think he grew up outside of Philadelphia.

Okay.

Yeah. Correct me if I miss that, but yeah, love, love to see Philly fans, you know, get a win.

Having fun. Yeah, that's Great. Well, let's move on to a bezel deep dive. We got just add on.

Add on ad.

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I can't. I can mix in some reviews that have ads in them.

Okay, yeah, yeah, let's do that. Let's go reviews that. So ads in the reviews are presented by ad quick.

By the way, to be clear, the best way to buy out of home ads for your startup. So I got the first one. I honestly, every time I read these ads, it just makes my heart sing. It's going to get better every time.

So I haven't seen these yet.

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That'S cool.

That makes so much sense.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, it's kind of like all of.

Tech wanted to focus on how do I reinvent the amex, you know, like platinum card, how do I make this cool credit card that has, like, restaurant reservations? Meanwhile, like, massive opportunities sitting here with Purple to just build tools for this, you know, narrow, you know, subset of people who will switch from their primary.

And you imagine that most of the people that are feeling that frustration are not immediately like, oh, I got to go build a startup. Whereas, you know, a lot of like, obviously, like ramp isn't a highly competitive, like, they need, like, IMO gold medalists and like, the best venture capitalists in the world and like, tons of money and team members. Because everyone who's built a company has thought, you know, I need better CFO software, right? And like expense management and corporate cart. So that's going to be a very hot market. This is like a place where you could actually probably go in, break in, make a statement and then, and then grow your business off of that. So I, I just think that's fascinating. And that's just something that like, it would never come up on a market map. It would never come up in like a brainstorming session. You're not going to hear some thread guy say like once he sells for.

A billion, somebody, some VC will be like, we need the market map for disability. So awesome. Thank you John for the review. I got another one. And then we'll jump into some other ones. Relentless Alpha by username I'm having fun. Five stars. The technology brothers are at it five days a week, consistently delivering fresh alpha right out of the oven on the most relevant news and tech.

Let's go.

It's like taking a peek into the elite group chats you've never been a part of. With two to three hours of top tier daily content from the Brotherhood, I no longer have time to catch the latest flop guest rotation of the week. That's brutal. Brutal. But there have been some flops lately. Even even though naval went on. I thought that was cool.

Oh yeah, I gotta watch that one.

This review is sponsored by Psychedelic Science, the premier psychedelic conference globally hosted in Denver this June. Don't miss 300 speakers covering the latest breakthroughs in psychedelic research alongside 12,000 attendees. Mark Andreessen can yap about Ayahuasca One Shotting founders all he wants, but just because it's no longer contrarian to be into psychedelics doesn't mean they deserve newfound hate from Silicon Valley. I think that's correct. They're not without risks and they're not for everyone. But there's no debating their immense potential for healing, creativity and let's be honest, fun. Register today to learn about the latest psychedelic research policy and culture this summer. Great. Great. He sort of predicted any pushback audience and just nailed it. Sounds very cool, I imagine. Like this seems like something Tim Ferriss would would attend or speak at. I wonder if he has already, but very cool. Thank you to I'm having fun. Great username for a business like that.

Yeah, yeah, Very interesting. Any others?

We got more. I'll just rip through them again. Sponsored. This one's also sponsored by ad. Correct.

Okay, let's go.

This review is. And then there's also another ad in there for a separate business.

Cool.

No wonder this is from Cody Ames. No wonder everyone I know Told me to watch this if they said X is ahead of the world. John and Jordy are ahead of X. They take the largest feats and most interesting developments from startups and VC to broader technology and business, then extract it into an engaging and easy to listen to format. Couldn't recommend this podcast enough to anyone who needs a quick and easy way to digest the biggest news you won't find anywhere else. I also heard they're the most profitable podcast, which is no shocker. This is the, the, the obvious spot to advertise your company or any news you have. So actually didn't, Cody didn't put an ad in here. That's my only critique.

He was, he was talking to us about Open Ax, his company.

Yeah, yeah, very cool.

And I believe Cody is also a car guy. Guy who I, I, he's maybe rebuild. I don't want to get it wrong because it'd be very offensive, but AMG Hammer. He's a hammer guy.

He's a hammer.

Yeah. And so this is like, like legendary Mercedes kind of like Mercedes muscle car essentially. Like I mean a fantastic driver's vehicle. And I think he's restoring, rebuilding, modifying, recreating one. But he's invested a ton of time and obviously deserves the respect of the tech community for his, for his incredible automotive innovations.

Yeah. And I got the last review which is short but perfect from username. Dude, what's mine say on Friday? He says FP Journ of tech podcast. Five stars. Nothing more needs to be said. Fantastic review. Do another review. Put an ad in it. I feel like we need to give back for, for that.

Well, speaking of watches, we got a promoted post from Bezel. Let's talk about the Rolex day date. The President in 18 karat yellow gold with a factory diamond set bezel and green lacquer dial just landed on bezel. This isn't just a watch, it's a status symbol, a power move on the wrist. Let's break it down. The watch of the elite launched in 1976. 1956. The day date was the first watch to display the day and the date in full. And so if you don't know about watch complications, you can kind of think about it in. There's a hierarchy here. You add each complication up. You start with the time only just got the time on your wrist. Then you add a date complication date just, just tells you the date, just the number. Then day date is going to tell you It's Friday the 26th, it's Tuesday the 18th. Then you can get into more perpetual calendars which keep the time out for years and years and years. Annual calendars which are right for 364 days of the year and then you have to reset and then you get. There's even an eternal calendar there now that goes out like a thousand years or something. And then there's moon phase complications, all sorts of complications. And so. But the day date is great because you just look down, you immediately know, hey, It's Tuesday the 18th. And this is the watch of the elite. It's been the go to for presidents, CEOs and anyone who needs their watch to say I make decisions that matter. I love it. Why is it called the President? The first US President to rock the day date, Lyndon B. Johnson. By the late 60s, it had earned the nickname the President's watch.

That's pretty good marketing.

Yeah, it's so. It's worn by world leaders, moguls, power players. This watch run thing things Rolex doesn't make the day date in steel, only precious metals. That's the rule. This one, 18k yellow gold forged in Rolex's in house foundry. Because even their gold has to be better than everyone else's. It is a factory diamond set bezel. Pure opulence. You know, we love opulence here. There's a difference between aftermarket diamonds and Rolex diamonds. Rolex hand selects and sets every stone under strict standards. Meaning this bezel isn't just flashy, it's flawless. Green lacquer dial. This is Rolex's power color. Rolex green equals money, prestige and legacy. The deep lacquer finish on this dial gives it a richness that pops against the gold. And so like a lot of people see these watches. Oh, Rolex is just like so expensive and it's just such a flashy thing. Like I, I enjoy this stuff because I'm a nerd for this and I think it's really cool that like even the most minor little details have a story and, and, and there's some sort of, it's, it's, it's as engineering minded as anything else. And so that's why I'm excited about it.

I think you need a day date soon because. Yeah, the first time we met I distinctly remember asking you at some point I was like wait, so do you want to be like the President someday? I was just like, I was trying to figure out like what you wanted to do. Turns out it was be a podcast podcaster.

But, but you know, that's a well trodden path the reality TV to the White House is. Is well established at this point. But yeah, also, if you've seen Glengarry Glen Ross, the watch that Alec Baldwin wears is a gold Rolex day date presidential. And he pulls it out. There's this iconic scene where he says, look at this watch. This watch costs more than your car. He says, coffee is for closers. Always be closing. That's where that comes from. And that was another movie, I think, in the 80s or maybe 90s that popularized the Presidential day date even more. And the presidential bracelet is particularly special here. It's the ultimate flex. It's the three Link President bracelet was designed specifically for the day date. It's smooth, seamless, and also hides the class because true luxury is effortless. It's one of the most comfortable bracelets Rolex makes. So would you wear it? Let us know in the comments. Think you can pull it off? Head to the Bezel app, download it, and it's. Yeah, there you go. Oh, look at that. I mean, it's just so iconic. Jordy, do you know about how you should tell if you should wear silver or gold? Are you familiar with this, the veins thing?

No, I'm actually not.

So there's this thing where a lot of women know about this. With makeup. There's this idea of, like, if you have warm undertones or cool undertones, and then, and then for a woman, you should match your foundation to that. And so there's this, there's this critique that's going on on, like, Instagram right now that I randomly saw, which is like, Republican woman makeup is like their. I guess the left is like critiquing Republican women for doing their makeup wrong. And a lot of the things they get wrong is that they have cool undertones, but they're using warm foundation. And for men, oftentimes it's. It's. If you have cool undertones, you're better off with silver. And if you're have warm undertones, you have. You're better off with gold. And so the way you figure this out is you look at your veins, and if your veins look blue, you have cool undertones, and if they look more green, you have. You have warm undertones. And so the classic example is just like, you know, I'm obviously like Swedish and very like, northern, and so I have blue undertones, blue blood, and, and more like, Italian guy is going to have greener undertones, tones, and that Italian guy is going to look good in gold, right?

Yeah.

And so when you think about the, you know, the Mafia guy, the Italian guy, the Tony golden, he's gonna have more green undertones and that's going to lend itself to being able to rock a gold watch. Now, I recently bought a. Not even a real gold watch, just a. Just a watch that happens to be gold. I think it's maybe gold plated, but just to try it on and see if I can pull it off because I want to dip my toe in before I really try and go full gold. But for now, I've been sticking with silver and I've been very happy and I think it matches my tones and my colors and my style.

Same here. I'm glad that I'd never even heard of that rule.

Yeah.

But fortunately, I'm blue.

I mean, it makes you like, look at you.

And we're. We're both rocking silver.

Exactly.

Nice.

Well, let's move on to the next promoted post.

You got to stage these out.

Well, I mean, this is like, yeah, it's an ad for public, but it's really a blog post that we would talk about on the show. Anyway, it's from their founder and co CEO Leif Abraham. He says we ship a lot in all areas of business.

By the way.

Obvious. Yeah.

He has a very unique Casio, which we'll have to have him on the show sometime to show it off. But anyways, we'll have to use the Casio in the picture here.

Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. We'll have to get him on bezel and see what he picks out. And so he says we ship a lot in all areas of the business. It's obviously cultural and one of the philosophies we embrace is what we call pace management. I thought this was an interesting little management tip for, for founders because LEAF is obviously running like a very high performance organization and he probably has some interesting stuff to share. And so he says time is the most precious, precious resource we have and we must ensure that we manage it well. A new method, method we will be talking about frequently that, that you all should embrace is PACE management. And this was actually just an email that he sent out to the team. And so it's kind of cool that he like published this after the fact. This is a good example of going direct. Just like. Yeah, he didn't. He's not like becoming an influencer. He's just taking content that he's already writing. Exactly. And then just publishing it.

Yeah.

So he says as a manager, you are responsible not just for the quality of the work, but also for the speed at which it gets delivered. Time savings compound dramatically over time Time. Letting time slip away costs everyone money. Not just the company, but every one of your co workers. Here's how to manage pace. You got to take ownership of the pace, drive the pace of the project, despite knowing that the urgency you instill might make some people uncomfortable at times. You got to break this project into small manageable pieces. You need frequent deadlines with quick check ins. Let's regroup. Next week is the enemy. Check in with the group. Progress at least every 48 hours. I like this. This is the. Yeah, this is the Chris Saka thing. Like people ask, oh, when do you want this? Q2 Q3Q tomorrow. Isn't that what he said? Q Friday. How about Q Friday? I like that. And this is very similar. Yeah. Check in more frequently. Don't, don't throw things. Yeah, yeah. Next week. Keep teams small. Make sure every person knows exactly what they are responsible for and that everyone on the. Everyone else on the team does too. And then project specific channels. Sometimes it helps to create project specific channels to dedicate the space. Space allows for focused discussions even on the smallest details. So some good, some good advice from Leaf over at Public and if you're looking for a portfolio, you're building a.

Company and you're wondering if you're going fast enough. Yeah, well, we're doing. We went from one day a week to two days a week to three days a week. The pace. Eventually we'll be doing eight, nine, ten days a week. A week, ten days a week.

Let's do it. Let's move over to Sam Altman. He's thinking about open source and stuff. He asked X for our next open source project. Would it be more useful to do an O3 mini level model that is pretty small but still needs to be run on GPUs?

I thought you were saying he asked Rock. I was like I thought Sam was asking Rock for. That'd be very funny advice.

Meta or the best phone sized model we can do. And this was sitting right at 50 50. And then Dylan Patel chimes in from semi analysis. He says, I can't believe X users are so stupid. Not voting for O3 mini is insane. You can literally already distill 4.0Claude 3.5 Deepseek V3 into sizes that will run on phones. And it's just funny that like, yeah, obviously like that. The hackathon kind of generally continues to.

Be a dominant poster.

Phenomenal. Phenomenal. And should we report a murder?

Yeah, this one needs to be reported. All right, so this is From BC brags. He says, I'd like to report a murder. Delian says I've ended up leading more rounds in the last four months than the prior three years combined. Not sure what it means, but I guess we are so back. Question mark. Chamath says means you've decided for whatever reason that time diversity doesn't matter in portfolio construction. Spoiler alert. It does. Does. Delian says ha. Thankfully not too many 2021 SPAC shares in my portfolio construction either. Quick 10x ratio, quick work. This, this one, this one. I, I'm, I'm surprised that you know, maybe Chamath was down to get ratioed and, and just felt like, you know, becoming a supporting character in the timeline for the day.

But coming for this one is the most dangerous thing. You're playing with a cobra on the timeline.

Yeah, cobra. And then also, and then also trying to critique somebody for portfolio time based portfolio construction where Chamath, you know, basically spearheaded the largest investment into this like novel, you know, sort of financial product into highly speculate speculative companies.

Yeah.

At. In a very condensed time period. So it's just like, like kind of set yourself up for that.

Also, is Jamaic seed investor? Like has he done seed stage investing? I don't think of him as like.

Cheating big in the other Gro. The Gro as at seed. I think so. Okay. I think he incubated, didn't he?

I purely think of him as like growth stage and like spac guy now. But maybe he does. But like, yeah, Delian, like, you know, I don't think like if you're doing seed deals like the time based portfolio construction.

Yeah. So he put 10 million into Grok G R O Q which was a Google team that spun out.

Yeah. I saw a funny thing about Grok with the Q. Everyone's talking about Grok 3, which has a K. And Harry Stebbings is like, here's my interview with Gro CEO and it's the Groq. So he like knew that he should drop that to like, you know, know, farm off of the energy or something that people would pull over. I thought that was funny. Anyway, let's move on to the new president of Syria. I thought this was funny. This guy had quite the path. Buco Capital bloke says intern Al Qaeda, then associate Al Qaeda, then senior associate Al Qaeda, then insurgent at various and then president of Syria. Syria. And this is from an interview that the new president of Syria, Ahmed Al Sharah did with leading some small YouTube channel, I guess. And they said and he says, I joined Al Qaeda because I was a 19 year old and there wasn't any other venue to take part in politics. Also, because I want skills and experience, I already built all government institutions in Idlib before the offensive. This ensures we can immediately take over and prevent anarchy. And yeah, I mean, obviously like, you know, the American propaganda during the war on terror was very much like, oh, it's like a bunch of like terrorists in caves. They're just like completely running around. But it's like, no, they have time sheets, they have time cards and they have to do lists and tracking and inventory management and payroll. So yeah, yeah, and like hr, what's the big one? Like what is the net suite? Erp, basically. And yeah, I mean the, these like large terrorist organizations are like, there are, I mean, he's obviously joking with like the intern, associate, senior associate. But there are like career paths and like tracks that you can like move up in.

Yeah, it's, it's, it's worth noting that if you look at terrorist organizations or drug cartels, you don't become these sort of nation state level players or you know, multi, multi billion dollar enterprises without being highly organized and having real leadership hierarchies and stuff like that. That's why I've joked before about Pablo Escobar being the greatest CPG founder of all time. Because even if you told somebody you can break every law under the sun, they would not be able to bootstrap a company to 22 billion of annualized revenue in a decade. Right.

Oh, we got to put deep research on this. Or the fan hands. Jordy and I were on a call with David Senra last night from the founders podcast and we were debating how big was like just the cocaine industry, I guess. How would you benchmark that against big oil, Big tobacco? What's the tam? What's the market size? I was arguing that it was probably over a trillion dollars in like market cap. If you applied some sort of price to earnings multiple on however much money is going on. What was the total revenue? How big of a player was this guy? And should you put. I don't know why I'm blanking on his name. Who's the greatest CPG founder again?

Pablo.

Pablo, Pablo Escobar. Should you hang his jersey in the rafters of, I mean certainly greatest criminals of all time. But you know, how big was his enterprise? And I wonder, I wonder how many employees he had working for him if he really like mapped out the entire org. Yeah, is it like thousands or tens of thousands?

But Imagine if you could get the same revenue on that 22 billion as figure he would have 100 and potentially whatever comes after a trillion.

Quadrillion.

Quadrillion.

Quadrillion.

Quadrillion. Yeah. Anyways, I got another post here from Ara Rock, if you're not following. Ara Rock, great poster. He's come out the gates sharing sort of behind the scenes on rounds that are getting done. He'll typically talk about around two, two to three months before it gets announced. So his point of view is that he does it to help make rounds more competitive because you can imagine if you're a big capital allocator and you see R for Rock post such and such round getting done and you hit up your associate and you're like, why haven't we seen this yet? You get on the phone with them and so definitely, I'm sure it helps.

We gotta do some sponsored posts with them.

Momentum. No, I think we should have him on the show for a segment where he speaks through an anonymous voice. You know, Trent, you know, some make him sound like Steve Jobs or something like that and then just talk about, you know, all the stuff he's seeing. But he's got an update here. This was underreported. USV came out with a new core fund in 2024. They have historically taken, you know, the approach of staying small, focusing on returns, focusing on the real craft of venture and that they're not sort of a high volume investor. They're making a handful of, of new bets, typically doing them very early. And so he outlines their total fund performance, which their first fund in 2004 was about $100 million fund. It ended up grossing $1.5 billion. So almost close to a 15x there. And then you just go down the list. Pretty much every single fund except their 2019 opportunity fund, which for those that don't know, an opportunity fund is more, hey, we have a bunch of early stage companies that have done well. And so the 2019 Opportunity Fund is the only fund on this list that isn't like top decile basically. And it's sitting at 1.3% IRR. And you have to imagine they sort of deployed that fund at the absolute top into their companies that they knew already that were good companies that just were kind of a little bit frothy. So anyways, could still turn around, who knows. But you know, one of the goats, certainly the, the New York City goat, almost deserving of a place in the holy trinity, but hasn't quite scaled and had the impact. Yeah, haven't hasn't scaled yet. Cool to see though.

You gotta leave it as a trilogy. You can't. Can't make it. Quadrillogy.

Quadrilogy.

It never works. Well, let's move on to promoted post from Wander. We got a great spot up in Big Sur. Jordy, have you been in Big Sur?

I have. I've driven through it.

Some of my fathers. As a kid sur, I went up there with my family, went inner tubing down the river. I remember that really fondly. Founders Fund just had a big event out there for all the defense tech folks.

It's really, it's really California at its best. Right? It's coastal, it's rugged. You've got the mountains meeting the sea. Yeah, it's totally fantastic.

So there's a beautiful photo here.

What's cool about the Wander is that, you know, there's going to be fast WI fi, so I feel like we can go stay there. We can still hit hit, you know, stream and not worried about reliability. It's actually we're not in a wander for PMS or die, unfortunately. And that's been like, the number one issue is like we're trying to stream HD video and, and so showing up to an Airbnb and not having, you know, quality WI fi is a terrible experience. Wander fixes that among a bunch of other stuff.

And so Zachary Slayton, mba, says, what a great weekend spent in Big Sur. Not only were the views and drive incredible, but our Wander house made the experience just that much better. Great experience, great service, amazing amenities, highly recommended. Take a look, share some beautiful videos and pictures. And this is so funny because, you know, 18 likes, pretty small post. We love it. It's a great post. But now you're gonna get a video reply from this podcast.

Zachary, welcome to Technology Brothers.

Just, you know, basically going forward, now that we're partnered with Wander, it's like anyone who posts about Wander is gonna get random clips from us. But we love the post and thanks for sharing because this is a place where I might stay and I'm glad to see it on the timeline.

Amazing. I actually have some more breaking news. We got a company called high touch, raises 80 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. They came out of YC. Okay, we'll have to ask Gary about them. This one came out of nowhere. I don't know what their last round was done at, but I'm looking on their site right now and they're already working with Spotify, Aritzia, Warner Music Group, Petsmart, TripAdvisor, Whoop. Cars.com, plaid, Ramp. So they work with Ramp. So they must be great Calendly, GitLab, DocuSign, Greenhouse. And they do like marketing personalization tools with AI anyways, absolutely massive one. It's always a number of times recently, maybe it's a sign of a little bit of frothiness or just these companies are growing really quickly. You hear about a company company for the first time when they're raising at north of a billion.

Yeah.

And for somebody that's like highly tuned into the, the, the sort of flow of new companies, that doesn't happen that much.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, yeah. You go back to like, yeah, like hearing about Anderil 2016, like yeah, their first round, I think they raised $10 million and that was a lot. But it's like they raised it. Everyone in tech heard about it and it was, I, I don't know, I don't remember the first evaluation. It was probably like 10 on 100 or 10 on 80 or something something. And now it's like you're learning about companies when they're already unicorns, but Also, you know, B2B, you know, kind of like, you know, under the radar founders. That's kind of the nature of these things. But good luck to them. And I'm sure there are some powerful metrics underneath that raise. Yeah, I guarantee it. Because this stuff's hot and there's a lot of marketing automation to do. So we'll have to do a deep dive on them. That'd be cool. Maybe have them on the show. Let's go to Blake Robbins. He says careers are shaped by people, not logos. And he posts he's been changing up his format. I like this. Some screenshot essays more or less bringing stuff the timeline, he says. At 21, I joined Ludlow Ventures with no experience in venture capital. Instead of giving me a strict set of rules, Jonathan Brett did something that shaped my entire career. They trusted me to chase my curiosity. They gave me agency when they had no every reason not to trust a new grad. That trust rewired how I think about ownership, risk and possibility. I got like lucky. The conventional wisdom in tech is clear. Join a high growth startup to accelerate your career. The logic makes sense. Rapid growth creates opportunities. Responsibilities expand faster than org charts. And you learn by doing rather than watching. But this advice misses something fundamental. Who you work with for who you work for matters more than where you work. I completely agree with this. It's like if, if you have a good person that you're working with it's way more valuable than just the logo.

Yeah, yeah.

And they define your mental model for excellence. Tech love.

The other thing is when you're, when you're working, when you're coming out of, let's say you go to college, you come out of school, it's so hard to evaluate, evaluate if people are truly world class. Yep. Like for me, I came out of school, I was working on a bunch of YouTube stuff, working with Sean and Connor at the Ridge. I love them as people. Like, they were clearly very talented, but it actually took me five years and like to work with a bunch of other people to realize how good they were.

Yeah, it's a great point.

And yeah, it's been, it's been, it's been awesome to see. But again, it's so hard to figure out. Like just.

Yeah, obviously there are, there are normal distributions and bell curves like all over, even high performing organizations. Like the worst Harvard grad, like the dumbest Harvard grad is going to be like way dumber than the smartest. Like, you know, I don't know, community college grad. Right. Like, because there's going to be overlap in these, in these, in these normal distributions. And, and that happens within companies too. He says tech loves to worship company pedigrees. X Stripe, X Ramp Xanderal. These labels imply excellence, but they mask the real story. What matters is who mentored these people. Great companies don't create great talent by default. It's the leaders within them who nurture ambition, challenge thinking and build environments where people thrive. Yeah, there's a lot of people that are like, oh, I was early at this company. And then you see some of the early photos and you're like, why aren't you in that photo?

I had, I got, I've gotten absolutely cooked hiring for logo pedigree.

Totally.

Like not, not every time, but like almost 50% of the time. And the challenge is somebody joining as the, somebody joining as the, you know, thousandth employee at an iconic company. They could be great. Great.

Yep.

They could be great, but not even have an impact. Right. Like they could just be great and sort of exist within the structure. And so yeah, you just got to really, really press people and not let them sort of slide into roles based on having worked at relevant.

I mean, you think about the path of like Locky Groom who was not just like at stripe. I don't even know if he was that early at stripe, but he went into Stripe and then very quickly became like the money guy for Patrick.

Yeah. Right.

And it's like he was running like their ventures team more or less or like doing something with invest investing. And then Sam Altman set him up with a fund and like, it was very quickly he was on like a massive, like, you know, high growth thing and got a ton of aum. And that's very different from like. Oh yeah, I went in and like, I was kind of on a team that wasn't like super high performing and I just kind of like, you know, work nine to five.

Yeah.

And like. Yeah.

What is. What is Jeremy Giffon talk about? Like, you want to be like off the. He talks about off the org chart. Off the org chart. Yeah. You know, running the ventures program at like. Like an exact. Where the founders care about that program a lot.

Yeah, yeah. No meetings, no. No bosses, but employed by the company. That's like an ideal scenario, if possible. Yeah. It's fascinating. Big news. Massive promoted post from Sotheby's. A lot of people want to check this out. Banksy's crude oil from the collection of Blink 182's Mark Hoppus will headline the modern and contemporary evening auction at Sotheby's London on March 4th. So if you're headed over to this auction house, check out the collection of Mark Hoppus from Blink182. Thought this was fun to share. I know a lot of you guys in the, in the, in the community are art collectors and often at Sotheby's. So you want the heads up. And now, you know, let's move over to Bo. Yeah.

By the way, Bo just texted me and said it cracks me up how little John knows about UFC because he saw that whenever we talked about it yesterday. So. So you're going on. We're going on record right now, John. You gotta learn about the number one sport in America and we gotta go. We gotta go to a card.

I was playing it up a little bit, but it was very funny. Being. That's great. Being like, like, who's this schmuck calling out my friend Bo? I don't know who this is. Like, of course. It's like a UFC guy. Anyway.

Great.

Anyway, we love him. Let's go back to wander. Kyle Tibbets. This is a big promotion episode. Lots of ads. Sometimes you do a lot of bucket polls and we do a lot of deep dive sometimes where they do a lot of bangers.

That's the whole point of the show. Well, after this, let's slam through a couple posts.

Okay, so Kyle says one of the best designed app launch at launch. I'VE ever seen. Stoked to be an investor. Great, great job at the Protector team. So Nikita B has been advising a company called Protector, which allows you to book, book armed agents. They're debuting in Los Angeles and New York City. And number three on the App Store. And so this is kind of the latest Nikita project. He pumps out a lot of stuff.

Well, I don't, I don't. I think this is a company. He's advising.

He's advising. Yeah.

You know, potentially through intro.

I thought this was interesting because back in 2014, Uber was really hot and there was an Uber. Uber for everything. And there was a company that went through YC with this, basically this exact idea. It was called like Bouncer or something. I forget what it's called. It was like book Uber for Bouncers. I sent it into the chat at some point, but you know, maybe that idea wasn't, it wasn't the right time for that, but maybe this is the one. What's interesting is that disintermediation is always a risk with these platforms. Like that was the problem with the dog walker apps is that, is that once you find a good dog walker on a dog walker app, you just say, hey, let's not use the app. Just come every week at this time. And so that's always been a risk. Whereas with Uber, like even if I have a guy who's reliable to take me to the airport or like you, you have a guy or like, oh yeah, I know a guy who gave me his card and like if I'm going out with friends for a long time and I want to rent it, rent the, the limo for the whole weekend or something, like I'll, I'll call him. But you know, I'm not just going to have a guy follow me around all the time.

Yeah, yeah. But really comes down to, it really comes down to trust how much, you know, with. So I'm sure there's an opportunity for Protector, right? Just the pure novelty of oh, I just called this like armed security guard to where I am. Jeremy talks about this, right? Like there's lots of opportunities of take things that the ultra wealthy love and then make them accessible to the masses through these sort of on demand platform. So I'm sure there's a market opportunity for this. I'd say overall, again, you call an Uber, you don't care who picks you up as long as the car's generally clean and they're fast. Whereas things like this security is, is ultra high trust. Right. So you, you would much rather have Somebody that, you know well and that, you know, has, like, great training and that you have a good relationship with, because if they're needed in any way, you know, you want to know that you can rely on that.

I think that maybe the app can actually do a good job there, because if they're onboarding agents and they have a very rigorous process, it's totally possible to have an app at the same time. If the customers don't demand that, you know, that the apps will, and the platforms will coalesce towards something that's a little bit sloppier. But that's fine, because if you're on a marketplace app and you're just like, look, I just want to be in Tulsa, and I want it to be the cheapest thing ever, and I don't care if the furniture signatures from Teemu, like, yeah, there's an app for that. But, you know, this. I. It's. It's kind of, you know, it's up to them how they curate the marketplace. It will be interesting. I have no idea how he got this to number three in the App Store so fast. He's.

Yeah, you can. You can.

Because there can't be that many people. Like, you're telling me there's more people booking armed agents than booking VRBOs.

Like, there's ways. There's way. So here's a potential way. So if you use these sort of algorithmic feeds to generate views on your content, let's say you're producing a bunch of organic content and running ads, there's ways to do these sort of like, pre downloads or almost like pre ordering the apps, where you can get somebody to say, like, I want to download this. And then when you release it, you can drive, let's say, 100,000 one day, and then you'll rank, even though, you know, maybe the next day you. You won't.

Because, I mean, I love the idea of armed agents being on demand. I think that it's probably, like, a very good thing and will increase safety and reduce crime, which I think is good. But I would hate to live in a country where an app for booking armed agents is more. Is more popular than nice vacation rentals. You know, that's like a very black. Like, our society is truly degrading if it's like, oh, yeah, people are like. Like the gun. The app is more popular than, like, the gun store is more popular than the luxury goods store. Anyway, good luck to the team. Awesome launch. Love to see that Nikita is working with it. Very interesting to follow along and See where that goes. Anyway, we got a promoted post from Koenigsegg. There's a 2021 Koenigsegg Regera out. Obviously you're gonna have to bid against Sam.

Do you think they. Yeah. You think they posted this knowing that Sam would see it? Not for sure.

For sure. You know, they go on.

For those that don't know, Sam Altman loves Koenigseggs, loves all sports cars. He's a McLaren absolute fiend.

Fiend.

He loves them. You know, as he says, he's doing OpenAI because he loves, loves it. And he's also, you know, buying cars because he just loves cars. He's a simple guy.

I'm very pro. Sam Altman, the car guy, that's one of the main reasons I'm working on.

He was saying that he was using deep research to find this sort of obscure Acura that I guess he was successful at.

It's an nsx, bro.

Well, he could have said, I need to find one with. With this.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, zero to 60 in less than three seconds. Top speed of 250 miles an hour. If you're looking for a new daily driver, maybe you work in AI, maybe you just raised a billion. Did some secondary pick up a Koenigsegg? Yeah, maybe. Maybe you work at PETA and you're. You see the money coming from the for profit conversion and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna be rich. Pick this up. Let everyone know that you're serious about the for profit conversion. When you pull up to the investor meetings, you're like, really? PETA? And they're like, well, he's already got the Koenigseguera, so yeah, he must be the real deal. He must have a really good plan for how he's gonna monetize this going forward. So we love to see it. Anyway, we, quote, tweeted this on the PMF or DAI fee, but we thought we'd cover it here just to throw a reply towards star Starter Story. If you're not familiar with Starter Story, YouTube channel that profiles, does video interviews and profiles on independent builders, hackers, entrepreneurs. And they did one on Blake, our boy in the cage. And so Starter Story says he taught himself how to code with Chat GPT. He built three iPhone apps, made 10 million in revenue. We called him up and asked him to break it all down. They talked for hours, but cut out all the fluff to give you all the alpha.

I love it.

And so there's 20 minute video. Blake is an absolute Beast. He breaks down a bunch of different business ideas. And if you want to know more about Player 1 in the cage, you can watch this 20 minute video to get an idea of who Blake is.

An absolute dog.

An absolute dog. It is 107. How are we doing on time?

We're good. Cool. I think we should wrap.

Yeah, let's wrap pretty soon. Let's go to Duolingo. Oh, this is good. Trey Stevens is doing an event on March 6th. If you're in San Francisco, go check it out. Lee Marie Braswell over at Kleiner Perkins, another Holy Trinity venture capital firm. She says, join me on March 6th at an event with Trey Stevens where he, he, he's discussing one of my fave posts Ever Good Choose Good Quests. Link in comments Hat tip to his co author Marky Wagner, who's an absolute dog as well. Trey is one of the most mission driven people I've ever met, as well as an inspiration for practicing Christians in tech. When Trey talks about both building great companies while also finding purpose, I listen. If you haven't read Choose Good Quests, it's fantastic. I highly recommend it. I think he should turn it into a book. I hope he does, but you can go hear him talk about it at this event. And so go find the Luma and go, go to this event if you're in SF on March 6th. Anyway, I think that's a good place to close out. Oh, we got to talk about your bags. You've been, you've been killing it with Nvidia and somebody, somebody had the same idea as you. McKinnon K. Wrigley says, can we talk about how unbelievably stupid the market reaction to Deep Seq was? Compute got more useful and everyone sold literally today for Grok3, Elon goes, oh yeah, we bought another 100k of H1 hundreds and mentioned a new 1.2 gigawatt data center. Nobody is going to buy less GPUs. And this shows that the price of Nvidia is exactly what it was a month ago, right before the Deep Seq drop. And I think you bought the bottom actually.

Actually, yeah. When when Deepseek launches Sunday, they have their fake run up in the App store. Everybody's sort of talking broadly about Jevons Paradox and all this stuff. It just seems like it was to for a company to go down 15% like that. It just seemed way oversold. And I have no idea what Nvidia stock does over the long term. But yeah, just bought right as everybody was panicking and just is back up 15% since then.

Making it look easy, Jordy.

Making it look easy. But we are in the news business. We are in the casting business, not.

The financial advice business. So good luck out there. Stay safe. Avoid doing anything that your mother would not approve of.

Well said.

Have some good etiquette. Focus.

Send your money. Have you coined that property?

I'm working on it. Working.

What would your mother say? Yeah, Too many.

That's my. That's my current philosophy for how you should behave yourself, especially on the Internet. What would your mother say?

Make your mom proud.

What would your mother say about you launching that meme coin and rugging it immediately? What would your mother say about you getting in a petty fight with another technology leader publicly on X? What would your mother say about you asking your date to split the check? Embarrassment. Embarrassing. Don't do that.

Embarrassing. You gotta. You gotta dive into that one next time.

Yeah, we'll cover it eventually. We're doing a big etiquette deep dive big manners update, giving you the, you know. How to use each fork. How to tie a tie. We're gonna be working on that. How to drive stick. These things are important.

How to make your bed.

Anyway, leave us a five star review on Apple podcasts and Spotify and keep watching us and expect a lot of new updates. We're. We're. We're cooking.

We are cooking. Thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. Bye.