Merry Christmas, Hit The Dom Button, Yearly Tech Recap, 2025 and Beyond

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. I am sick as a dog. But we're celebrating because we doubled and it's a Dom episode. You know what that means. We have a tradition around here.

Straight into it.

Every time we double, we pull out a bottle of Dom Perignon and enjoy it on the show live.

And the timing with this actually work well, given that it's Christmas Eve.

It is.

Merry Christmas. Yeah, Merry Christmas, everyone. We're having. We're having quite the morning. We got here. We Woke up around 5, tried to get to the studio.

Jesus, so bad. Oh, my God, I didn't realize. I was so pumped up. Oh, that's great.

Anyways, strong. Strong start to the episode.

Strong start. Jesus.

Yeah, that.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Merry Christmas. Anyway, so I'll just recap the morning briefly. So we got up around 5, wanted to get to the studio early because of course it's Christmas Eve and we have family stuff going on, family in town. But we weren't going to miss an opportunity to record a podcast. It just would not be on brand for us. And so, anyways, we get here. John is deathly ill from some. From some disease that his cousin picked up at school.

It's like a thousand times worse than Covid.

It's. Yeah, if you've ever had Covid. Covid is a thousand times worse than that. He keeps horrifically coughing. We just shot another video and it was tough to get through it. And then we had a huge sort of printer malfunction, which was making this show difficult considering we rely on printed. Quite a lot of printed content to get through it. But we made it here.

The worst part is that I got goaded into one of the hardest workouts of my life yesterday. So I heard a rumor that one of my buddies, who's a founder of, I guess Decacorn now, is like the fittest man in tech. And so I hit him up and I was like, I hear you're the fittest man in tech. Like, I'm gonna challenge you. Like, let's go. Like, I wanna work out. Where do you work out? I wanna work out with you. See how jacked you really are. And he sent me his. His, like just body fat location. Yeah, he did. Basically, he was like, meet here on the 23rd. He sent me his body fat percentage. 9.9%. Last time I tested, I was at 14 and a half. So I was.

Which is good. Healthy.

But 9.9 is low. Low.

Yeah.

And so I was like, okay, no whammy. No whammy. I've been working out, maybe I'll be down 9.8. If I beat him by even 0.1, I win. So I get down there, get on the, the body fat scanner comes back 9.4. I'm like, let's go. I beat him.

Really? You came in at 9.4?

Yeah, he gets on 9.1. Something had happened and so he just smoked me. But I. I beat him on it. Gives you like this aggregate score for like muscle and fat. Combines everything complete, like, you know, nonsense heuristic.

Is this a dexa?

Yeah, exactly. So it gives you like the score and. And I beat him on that. So I was like, this is what we were really focused on here. Of course not the body fat percentage. And then he proceeded to destroy me. He's been training for a Murph. You know the Murph? Yeah, the mile and then the hundred push ups, 200, 100 pull ups, 200 push ups, 300 squats or something. And I just got destroyed. Yeah, it was so bad, but it was a lot of fun. And yeah, I was really close to bailing. I said, I was like, I got this terrible cough. I can't make it, dude. And he was like, don't worry, there's a bunch of doctors you can go to that are nearby. And he sent me a screenshot just looking for gynecologists nearby. And I was like, fuck.

I literally got in my car, mocked.

I was like, I can't not go. And I was just coughing all along, dying the entire time. And it made me so you wouldn't.

Have been invited back.

I came back with 103 degree fever. It was so bad.

Amazing.

So bad. But I got through it and that's what matters. So today we are recapping the big moments of 2024.

Hey, before that one, one big moment of the year was for us.

We doubled again. Cheers.

Well, we doubled in this pod. Very grateful for it. And the brothers, it's been fantastic. It is an honor to record this. I really, I genuinely feel like it is a platform for the community for us to highlight, you know, people doing great things, writing funny posts and changing the world big and small.

Yeah, yeah, it's been, it's been a lot of fun evolving it from that first, first demo recording on Zoom, that was just us, like riffing about random stuff to a much more structured show. Being able to highlight funding rounds, the size gong and personnel news and people hire job postings. We have a lot more planned for 2025. We're going five days a week, people.

Yeah, that's the big news right now. Five days.

Be in your feed constantly.

Daily. It's a daily show starting in.

And just a little bit of a reminder, we are 100% corporation supported. We never ask our listeners for a dime. We want to avoid audience capture. We ultimately don't care what the audience thinks. If the audience wants us to talk about some culture war thing or that'll go viral in the algorithm, that's not what matters. What matters is what do the corporations want us to talk about? And so this Christmas, if you're looking for a Christmas gift for us, ask your boss. Maybe we could sponsor.

Hit us up starting at six figures.

Yeah, so, yeah, just six figures a month. You can support the technology brothers.

It's less than what an average product manager makes at a faang company, so it's not much.

Put us in the. Put us in the team.

Awesome. Yeah. So. So for context, we just recorded a whole bit on our. On our annual awards, which will be going out via X, so you can look out for that. But in going through that process, we spent the time to just kind of reflect on some of the bigger moments of the year. And it felt like a monumental year in tech for many reasons. I think the election played into that because, you know, tech was just so intertwined with the election this year, given the influence of X and Elon and big venture funds. And it was really more, you know, the election specifically was more of a. That more of a cultural battle, even within tech, than we're now even remembering. Like I saw Based Baron posted yesterday, screenshots of all the VCs that were. Were VCs for Kamala as a website. The website's since been scrubbed, but there were probably a hundred names up there from many of the biggest firms in the Valley, people that were backing it. So I would, you know, since we don't talk about politics on this show or social issues, I would just vote that we just try to forget about that list and we just all move forward together. We should just have a website called VCs and just any VC can just put your name on that site or like tech.com and you just like, if you support tech, I'm just technology.

If you're a vc, name in the hat that I'm a venture capitalist.

If you're a VC and you support technology, go to technology.com. you can put your name on the dotted line and you can support tech.

Who's that guy with the NFL hat? Is that meme where he's like, he's at the NFL game. He just supports the NFL. That's what you want? Oh, yeah, just, just VCs.

Pro tech, pro business, support both parties. Pro America, America.

Yeah.

I think like the reason we're able to have a non political show purely business is because we generally support everybody that is pro technology, pro business, Pro America.

Yeah, that was one of my hot takes. Like though, what do you agree, what do you believe that very few people will agree with you on is that every American President is amazing. Yeah, I love them all and I would get beers with all of them and I think they're all incredible. And I think that you don't rise to that station without having an incredible life story. And every time I've dug into someone, even someone who's been controversial or I did a whole hour long documentary about Trump and then an hour long documentary about Biden and they both have like incredible stories and it's very easy to get lost in like what's going on this week with this particular policy and is this policy good or bad? And there's certainly some politicians that benefited me or my worldview more. But I think we've never had a Stalin or Hitler in America and every American president has been unique and interesting and someone that I would absolutely want to get dinner with if they were alive or available.

Yep, it's a great point.

Pro America.

Pro America. Where do we even want to start here? There's a bunch of big moments. You know, everything from open AI to true social going public to an almost TikTok ban that didn't end up happening, to software dying and being reborn to humanoid robots to open AI drama.

The opening night drama was mostly last year. This year was kind of a rebuilding.

Yeah.

But pivot to product.

But the talent exodus this year was intense.

That was intense.

But they were, they were kind of two separate things.

The cadence of product releases is really, really strong. Yeah, it's really, really good.

That's why I put it at the top is despite all the drama and the various people, high profile people, co founders, leaving the product, velocity was still insane. And they didn't. And it still throughout the year was this tug of war in terms of anthropic versus OpenAI versus, oh, what is Gemini doing?

What is Ilia doing?

Yeah, there was this sort of tug of war for attention and users throughout the year, but it felt like OpenAI seemed to stay mission oriented even if their mission had changed year over year in some ways shifting to for profit.

Yeah, I mean it's a remarkable shift from a research organization with a very much more academic style of employee to product led. And like some of the earliest problems were like, yeah, it was an amazing magical, like, God box that you could talk to that defeated the Turing test, like out of nowhere. But it couldn't keep you logged in. Do you remember that?

Yeah.

You had to keep logging in. And then for a while it was like, it's down or it would, it would air out. And now they've gotten to a point where it's extremely reliable.

Yeah.

And yeah, it still goes down every once. Still rough edges. And there's weird things where like different models have different capabilities. What can generate images, what can. But clearly all of that product stuff is getting ironed out and they're going to have ads in the free version all the way up to a $2,000 a month tier or $200 a month here. Like, it's going to be like really, really polished, differentiated products. So I'm excited. I mean, it's on my home row and nothing has been able to displace it for me.

Yeah. And we can't understate how impactful it's been on this show. We on average have been putting out 10 hours a week of content, something like that. And some of it is actually more or less scripted. And then it's like heavily researched and we, you know, write some of it out beforehand. And so, you know, ChatGPT has effectively replaced the need for full time writer, analyst, type person.

And then AIs worked its way into so many other things. Just like transcripts are automated with AI little captions that we put over videos even just like some AI generated images and some of the short form stuff like it, it's just like weaseled its way into all these like nooks and crannies. It's not, it's very additive.

Yeah.

It's not like replacing anything that we're doing, but it's been, it's been hugely beneficial.

Yeah. Another one on the list, obviously. Nvidia becoming the world's most valuable company. They were, um, Apple overtook them again afterward, but can't be understated how memorable that will be to me even 20, 30 years from now. Like witnessing that Jensen signing that woman's.

Chassis, that was like, he's a rock star now.

Yeah.

After what, 30 years of building that company more and more.

Yeah. And being, I would say, very benevolent, you know, positive type of character within the tech world. Right. He's not, doesn't have his ridiculous ego. He's generally very humble. The only, the only critique I would have of him is he has gone on interview to say I wouldn't do this again you know if I, if I knew how hard it was going to be because we don't want to discourage any builders but, but yeah, I can't, it really can't, can't be. And it's so unclear right now. We're not in the business of making you know, predictions around market caps or anything like that. But you know, looking back at the dot com era, comparable companies evaluations they achieved. It'll just be so interesting if, if this time it's different.

Well they have over 100% of the profits in AI right now.

Yeah.

Because all the other companies are losing money and they're the one that's printing money. It's also fascinating. Just compare them to their, their, their rivals intel which is a complete mess and Pat Gelsinger was ousted and they just haven't been able to take advantage of the chips act at all. And then AMD there was like this bombshell report by semi analysis Dylan Patel this week basically saying that like even though they're hitting the benchmarks on the actual like computing power like price per flop, they the software is so broken, there's so many bugs that you cannot train models on it. And George Hotz is like chiming in and Lisa sue, the CEO is kind of scrambling but she's done this before where she's like hopped on the phone with people and be like okay, yeah we're going to fix it and then nothing happens. And so it's been a really crazy, just kind of like AB test to see that Nvidia just remains like so dominant even when someone else can beat them on like the core metrics. Yeah, the, that cuda, you know, polish really matters.

Here we go. John's, John's. The coughing is going to begin. The other, the other thing to highlight under here that was seemingly monumental was TSMC actually starting to produce chips here in America. Yeah, I don't think that can be understated just given how important they are in the, in the value chain or supply chain. And yeah, I'm excited to see where that goes in 2025. But with the chaos of this year, it seemingly was not necessarily brushed under the rug, but it felt like it got like five hours of attention when maybe it was, you know, considering how dependent our entire way of life is on chips, it seems pretty cool that we were able to make those here.

Yeah, huge. Do you use an Apple Vision Pro this year.

Yeah, that was, that was gonna be the next one. I. I'm gonna sound like a Luddite for this, but I did not.

You didn't even try it? Not once.

I didn't even try it. 1. I had no interest in going to an Apple Store and just like putting on something that hundreds of other people are putting on in a day. Just a personal preference. The other thing and the reason that I didn't actually buy it is I try to keep devices away from my head. So I use, you know, I use like wired headphones I have for years. I use my AirPods as like golf balls for practice in my backyard. They no longer work, obviously, but I didn't try it. I haven't been. I totally would. It's not that I wouldn't, but I just didn't happen to be in a situation. But it is fascinating that how quickly the swing happened from people going on X in the first couple weeks being like, this is the next computing platform. I've never even FaceTimed a single friend that was like, oh, I'll call you from my Apple Vision Pro. We have a bunch of friends that have these.

A lot of people use them for two weeks in the return. That's exactly what I did. Yeah, it was great. For two weeks I watched a movie on a plane, watched a movie at night, but they were just. I was too expensive.

Yeah, you were seeing that. Like, I remember I was at Soho Beach House, like really just sitting there with it on and it just looked. It looks silly, but it's also. Just because something looks silly doesn't mean that it's bad. It was like. I generally think that the Apple Vision Pro is very. I think it's cool. I wish it was like catching on more. I have a friend who's a super talented iOS developer. I was like hoping that this would be a computing platform that he would be able to build on. I did try one of the meta ray bans, which I was pretty impressed with. But again, I don't really want to wear. I don't need to. It's not quite, you know, significant enough to want to wear them around all day. But yeah, I think there had been some reporting that Apple was going to discontinue the Vision Pro entirely. I think they. That would be such a doing that like there's almost seemingly some value to Apple in terms of maintaining their market cap to just continuing it because if they discontinue it, it's such a colossal defeat and sort of like verifiable proof that you are an iPhone company.

Yeah.

And.

Keep it going. I think they should do another version with the same screen because the screen really is fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah. And it's. It's. Apple has the leverage to be able to say, let's spend $20 billion a year on this. You know, they legitimately could do that.

If they can get the same screen. Get rid of the external screen, switch it to plastic instead of metal, so it's half the weight, like, and half the price. Like, they have a winning formula for sure.

Yeah.

Just in terms of, like, replacing a home movie theater.

Yeah.

Because you can just put it on and watch a movie. But even then, the software was really bad. Like, I would wear it in the dark and my room is really dark and it would get lost and, like, put up an error saying, like, can't track. And it's like, I don't care if you can track. I'm just trying to watch a movie right now. It's very, very frustrating. Yeah. Not. Not fully polished. And it felt like the people who were working on it weren't using it in a real way. They were, like, using it in a demo at work. Yeah. Not actually daily driving it in the way that Steve Jobs daily drove the iPhone and realized, like, hey, like, it needs to be a glass screen because I put it in my pocket with my keys. And that was like, a fundamental insight that. That hasn't happened with the Apple Vision Pro yet. It's been very much like, of course you'd like a giant box and, like, take it out and, like, put it on for 10 minutes and do a demo and then put it back and then. And it's like, no, that's not how people use these devices.

Yeah. But, yeah, people. People went from being like, oh, what case should I get to my Vision Pro to the next week being like, I'm going to return it.

Yeah, I'm going to return it. And yeah, super bullish for meta because they're clearly going to release, like, something that's equivalent. They just need to figure out the media. Like, you should be able to just buy any movie on any Meta headset. And I don't know that they have a partnership yet, but they need, like, a iTunes store. Because that was the first thing I did was I went in and I bought, like, Avatar, all the Christopher Nolan films, all the movies that I would want to see in the theater. I bought all those, like, 3D movies and stuff, and it was amazing. All those were great, but it was just too heavy and too Expensive and too, too janky. But if. If Meta comes out with something that's the same resolution at half the price and has that feature, just the movies are good. I also do think that there's a big opportunity for starting to create content in 3D right now, and then just waiting, waiting, waiting, and then eventually it'll catch up. I was thinking about doing that when. When it launched, if it was going to be big. I was going to do the history of VR and I was going to do an interview series in. In spatial video in 3D. So you could watch it in the Apple Vision Pro. And it would be like you were sitting right here and you could look to your right and see me. You look to your left and see, like, Palmer or Carmack or whoever, whoever. I would get to interview about the history of VR and it would just be like these really chill, unedited interviews. And it would just be like, oh, I'm sitting at a table with these guys, having a conversation, learning a little bit. No edits, nothing very natural. Anytime you're cutting, it gets really jarring. Anytime you're flying around, you don't want to move the camera at all. You just want to put the camera there and then let people look where they want to look. And that's really cool. But there's just. No, they don't have a YouTube yet. For Apple Vision.

Yeah, it's one thing that was interesting. They had that app that was native to the device. It was. You could see dinosaurs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it reminded me of the original, like, iPhone, ipod touch apps when I was probably. I forget exactly how old I was. Maybe like 10 years old, 11 years old. Using these things where there was, like, the app where you could, like, play guitar or, like, drink, you know, you could pour a beer or whatever. And it was just like these sort of. I. I don't remember anything outside of the dinosaur app that that kind of broke through the noise, which is really proof that there's no organic developer activity, which is kind of a.

People are lazy when it comes to VR. Like, you want to just like, lay down. Like, one of the best VR games I played on the Meta Quest was a shooter. But the whole conceit is that you're in a kayak and you're a sniper, like, sneaking through waters and, like, assassinating dudes on, like, oil rigs, basically. And, like, so you're seated the whole time and. And you're just using your VR paddles to go like this. And then you reach down, pull out your sniper Rifle and then shoot. And it's really, really cool.

That's a cool concept.

It's awesome because you don't need to be like running around and it's not very.

And it's good training for everyday life.

Exactly. Yeah. It was great. And so it's like the figuring out how to break the. Like people just want like video games. I feel like had a breakout moment during like Final Fantasy 7 where it was like 100 hour game. You could just sit there and it would be like lots of dialogue, very chill. Sit on the couch. Middle gear solid. Like these long games. And no one's figured out how to do that in VR because they're also, they're all so preoccupied with like. Well, you could run around and you could throw fireballs, but then it's like, okay, I'm just working out now. I'm like exhausted. Like, I don't actually want to like climb a mountain to live. Like Mission Impossible to.

Yeah.

I want to watch it.

Yeah.

On my couch, lazily.

Yeah.

And so Palmer was actually talking about this one company that was building a VR headset that was meant to be used laying down. And so it had like a special pillow with like knobs on it so you could like move your head very easily. So you.

That's cool.

But then you'd lay down. It's like very kind of matrixy and like creepy. Like you could easily get like Wirehead and spend like eight hours in it.

Yeah. But if you look at like imagine the brain rot.

Oh, it's so brain rotty. But at the same time it's like, how do people play Madden on Xbox when it comes out or Call of Duty when that one comes out. They play for eight hours straight. And so you, you're not going to displace the PS5 until you can give someone an experience that they can go and chill with for eight hours straight.

Yeah.

And so you have to lean into that design. That design, like elements essentially.

And you're competing with the phone which is so good at capturing attention. Right. And every single. That's, that's, that's one of the big issues with VR is VR headsets aren't competing with each other, they're competing with every other screen. Everyday life. So the competition is just intense. Especially when they're this expensive. Poly market is worth bringing up. Like prediction markets. Finally breaking through. Seeing the picture of Shane working in 2020 or 2021, like in his bathroom on like a wicker basket. No one really cared. Very low volumes. Slogging through the next few years and getting to this year. And I just thought that was cool because we've talked about this on the show before. But it had been this sort of thesis that every so many smart investors had for so long that prediction markets would eventually go mainstream. And it kind of took this election cycle. It took polymarket's product getting to where it is. It took, it took probably like, sports betting, like, blowing up and like, becoming a lot more mainstream, to be honest. Like, kind of predated, I would say, like the, the, the, the Venn diagram of people that sports bet and people that, like, use prediction markets is like, probably almost a circle, you know, but just a breakout year. And yeah, it was, it was very, I would say, vindicating for believers in prediction markets based on how the election unfolded.

Yeah, it's been tricky figuring out, like, what the next major poly market segment will be because Chad Byers was in our replies talking about, like, oh, we should do a poly market for when these guys double the next time.

Or like, yeah, 64K.

And Mike over at Polymarket was like, the bots have entered the chat because.

If there's money on the line, somebody.

Will just make a big. And then 50k bots and just follow us and it'll just destroy everything. And so it's very, very tricky to figure out how to, how to, you know, price that.

Yeah, the whole insider trading element is interesting too, because people were betting on Brian Johnson's erections.

Yeah.

Like nighttime erection length. But then I saw one of his employees was like, I just made XYZ money from, like, insider training on my bosses. Like, you know, which is like, how do you really. Like, these are financial markets. Maybe they do need some, you know, element of regulation or you just need to go into them and treat it more as an entertainment product. Say, like, this is not a, you know, perfect security. Like, it's sort of.

Yeah, you're almost, you're almost trading on, like, how much insider trading will there be? Like, what, what type of insider trading will there be? Like, what are all the incentives that.

Yeah. Or you could say like, oh, it's, it's, it's all priced in. Everything's priced in.

Yeah, it's like, it's like if, if we did the 64k thing, would there be another army that's, that's buying no shares and then actively reporting every bot that follows us to not hit that? Yeah, you know, exactly the levels, like bot war, essentially.

It's all priced in.

Yeah. What's that?

Another one space X.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

The landing, you know, with the chopsticks.

Landing with the chopsticks. So crazy, crazy moment. Very, very well timed for Elon's brand if, if, if that had not worked. It was, there was so much attention on, on him given the election cycle and everything. But it was just a very, it should be a really uniting, you know, moment. Right. Like, hey, you know, America, you know, as is home to a company that can achieve some. A feat that is so unprecedented and feels, you know, like it's out of a science fiction movie. The other thing that I thought was funny here was you had for years the meme has been, oh, you're an investor in SpaceX, but you're an investor in this SPV that invested in this SPV that invested in like this fund that bought secondary at like 2x the pref value or whatever. But I would imagine that most of those people are actually making money still, you know, even if they overpaid or there was like, you know, a lot of fees bolted onto these different vehicles. But it's, it's been a good year to be a SpaceX investor. Last Prior it was, I guess, getting priced at 350 billion most recently. And yeah, I'm interested to see. I'm sure there's, there must be an IPO on the, on the horizon. Don't have any inside info there, but, you know, I think the narrative's been they go and start up the Texas Stock Exchange and then can potentially, you know, bring a lot of, I don't know.

Elon ran the AB test with Tesla and it was so brutal. Being a public company with Tesla.

Yeah.

Why take it public if you can keep it private as long as.

That's a good point. Good point.

Keep it private as long as possible.

Especially as long as there continues to be exceptional demand, then nobody can complain. Oh, we need liquidity. It's like, well, you.

But really like every single founder should buy Starlink. Like, you should never be without solid Internet. You should always travel with the Rome once. 50 bucks a month. Because I was in Yosemite and the Internet was terrible and it was a big hassle.

We recorded a video and John was like, okay, I'm uploading my like 20 video.

It took like 4 hours. It was miserable.

Yeah.

I actually don't know what the upload speeds are on SpaceX. On Starlink. I think it's probably similar as download, but either way, like anything was better than what we had. It was brutal.

Yeah. Another one. I thought the Figma Adobe breakup was pretty Monumental.

Last gambit. Her cluster stand. That was the most.

What is it? The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. Yep, that's a cool. Yeah, I could have been so. I felt this one. I felt this one personally because almost immediately after it got announced, I used Figma quite a bit. And the Figma product, they just rolled out these like absolutely horrific billing practices. Figma was always a very multiplayer product. You could make something, share it with somebody easily. They could edit it, comment, whatever. And they immediately rolled out these like billing approaches that were one extremely confusing and basically meant that you. If you wanted to share a file with anybody, you were just going to get started, you would start to get billed for. For them. And it's so such a toxic way to do billing because if I'm creating something and I want to share it with you and you're not like logged in right at that moment, it's just very, very annoying. But they. The $20 billion acquisition was off. They realized they probably needed to 2 or 3x, you know, ARR. Like immediately if they wanted to maintain this sort of narrative that they were a 10 to 20 billion dollars company. And so I get it from their side, but it was just very. Just like extremely unfortunate. I think a lot of those billing changes would have probably been rolled out with Adobe Cloud, but it was just like such. You know, Dylan, I think I don't.

Know the nature of becoming a big company. Like, I don't know that there's any way to avoid that.

Yeah.

I think it's just like you got to charge for. You got to capture all the value.

Yep.

I don't know. I think. I think it would have been. It would have been jankier with Adobe, which is probably the worst thing.

Yep.

But I don't know.

But yeah. And again, there should be like an entire documentary on Ms. Ms. Khan's era because I don't know exactly. We. I don't think it's clear exactly why it happened.

I wrote out a script once.

I never wrote the fact that. But the fact that two companies that like that can't just, you know, make love is tragic. Defense Tech. Yeah, we. I mean, this was the year of American dynamism. Credit. Credit. You know, as much as AI was a dominant part of the narrative, American Dynamism felt like it had an equal amount of attention from a meme standpoint.

Coogan's Law.

Coogan's Law. And credit to Andreessen for not necessarily being the first and biggest investors in that category, but they certainly coined it and they get a lot of credit for the coinage. That's part of Coogan's law. And so yeah, I think you look.

At Thiel and he co founded Palantir, they did the SpaceX Series A and then incubated Android. And it's like they didn't come up with a phrase though.

Mogged genius. Mogged by coinage. Yeah, I think they're important. Yeah. So. So the three, the three major players. Andrew Palantir, SpaceX. All start. All. All started, you know, long before American dynamism was a part of the vernacular. Yeah, I thought this was funny. You know, this has been talked about before. A lot of the valuations over the last year have been pretty insane. I have portfolio companies that are getting multi hundred million dollar valuations with no revenue yet. Right. It's like very, it's a little frothy. And can you imagine how much defense tech companies would have loved 0% interest rates? ZIRP meets hard tech meets American dynamism would have been iconic. I hope we get that opportunity in the future. It'll be great. But yeah, this is a good example. I think Trey, I remember Trey went on a podcast and was basically talking about how the founders fund thesis is this sort of monopoly driven power law. There's one company that captures a majority of the returns and that's presumably in defense. Hard tech. Defense. That presumably is Anduril. I look at a lot of the defense tech investing happening now and.

I.

Think I've talked about this before, but the government actually wants vendor diversity. So there is some argument to say, hey, we actually need more Andurils. There should be maybe one or two more. Maybe there's a power law dynamic there where if Anduril is like a $100 billion company, we have another $10 billion company. So I think we do need this. Anduril I think benefits dramatically from a lot of this because there's so many smart teams that are building cool tech that just won't figure out distribution and actually getting contracts. Yeah. Ander will acquire them. And they've already proven that they can be an M and A LED product development org. Right. Where they're like, we have the best distribution engine into the, into the government. Now we're going to just bolt on other products to get in there.

And then there's also just like the, the adjacencies that Anduril doesn't want to touch. Like flock safety. Yeah, Great company. Doing fantastically well. Kind of like Anduril for Police forces.

Yeah. Or deterrence, the company that, that I help get off the ground. You know, deterrence is doing something that you know, doing high volume energetics manufacturing is not a sexy program of record type opportunity.

Yeah, yeah.

It's not even necessarily supply chain. Yeah. It's deeper in the supply chain. It's a critical, you know, critical part of our defense overall. But you know, ultimately not, not there. There are still categories that, that Anduril is not going to go after, you know, immediately. Maybe they will long term, who knows. But plenty of opportunities and lots of great, you know, companies like Aon Out Control systems.

Yep.

Not to just talk my own book but going on meme of the year we covered this a little bit in our awards Trend of the year. Meme of the year. They're basically the same thing. I think PG had this one in the bag guys. Still got it. And founder mode. Founder mode coinage. He took something that was kind of.

Obvious, this idea, but no one had ever put a phrase around it. What is the difference between a founder led company and a non founder led company? Yeah, Founder mode. And it's a very vague post and it faced a lot of criticism when it was dropped because it didn't define it very precisely.

And that's because it's different for every founder.

Exactly. It's very vague but it's still useful. It's still a useful term.

Yep. One of my favorite moments listeners will correct me if I'm wrong here, but Frank Sleepman I don't believe was the actual founder of Snowflake. Was he? He joined later as CEO but very much amp it up like he is like brings that founder mode approach. And I just thought this was a crazy moment. When he announced he was retiring from Snowflake, they lost 20% of their market cap in a day. They had previously been a $76 billion company and roughly a month after the announcement they were $50 billion company. So that's founder Mode in effect. And yeah, it was cool to see people like Ryan Peterson I think was it earlier this year or maybe more than a year ago. But Ryan Peterson going back into Flexport now he's doing founder mode meets going direct.

Yep.

And that strategy is just like killer. Killer. Right. That's what Alex Karp is doing.

Yep.

That's what Palmer is doing. Trey are doing in many ways. So the winning formula is founder mode and going direct. And that's why if you try to make fun of a founder for posting a lot on X, just check yourself because some of the best ever are doing that. And yeah, other otherwise, like the big one and we're gonna cover this later in the show was just the foundation model wars. Like this was this like constant game of tug of war where literally felt like every other week it was oh, anthropic. Everybody loves anthropic. Next week everybody's back and, and, and what that kind of exposed and, and you have to go back and, and look, there was at one point this year that everybody said the foundation, all the value is going to accrue to the foundation models, like ignore everything else. Apps don't matter. And then people realized that people were just switching back and forth from models all the time. And then everybody started to think, okay, well now the app layer is like what matters and you should focus on the app layer. And then, then it went back to, oh, like don't launch an app because OpenAI is just going to launch that as like part of chat GPT and the next, you know, keynote search. And so yeah, search is a good example. Right. And all of this just got so spicy with, with you know, the perplexity CEO just like constantly shit posting against Sam OpenAI and you know, Elon feuding the whole time in this like very public legal battle. And that's still ongoing. But, but yeah, we'll probably cover like the O3 Pro launch later in the show. Another one. Acquisition of the year for me had to be Bridge.

Oh yeah.

So I think that was. We, you know, we talked about this, but a non token $1 billion outcome in crypto. You had Coinbase IPO obviously significant. But to show that there was a second sort of regulated crypto business that could be acquired by a non crypto company, a tier one company. And Bridge showing that Bridge being. It doesn't even feel like they were that early to stable coins, but they were on time and very right. Right. And they built the right product developer tooling that that stripe clearly saw a lot of value in. So anyways, the last thing I would say is we kind of forgot about this. But in the Q1 of this year, TikTok was getting banned.

Yeah. And there is a law that's passed that should ban TikTok. Yeah, it's happening.

Trump overrides it. And I thought this Trey post from February 21st was great. He said, Concerned about losing our AI edge to China, ban TikTok. Concerned about AI safety, banned TikTok. Concerned about child mental health, banned. TikTok concerned about trade imbalance with China, banned TikTok. It's really not complicated. So it was very unfortunate that that wave kind of died down. I had bought band talk.com at the time, which I don't know what you.

Were going to do with that, but it's funny.

Well, the idea at one point was either to make like sort of a. Like actually just build like a. Like an organization to more. And there had already been like internal stuff in Washington pushing this stuff forward. But the funnier idea to use it that domain, which I did sell it, somebody ended up buying it for something close to what I got it for. But if you did like a vampire attack on TikTok, which was like, Sign in with your TikTok account, we'll pull all of your followers and your following and then we'll rebuild the app, somebody could probably pull that off, maybe Nikita, something like that. And it's just interesting that after that movement died down, Truth Social went public and soared, which maybe that was foreshadowing.

It certainly was foreshadowing the election. It's crazy how much money flowed into that company just supporting Trump. It's wild. Greatest wealth transfer.

Yeah, I think it's time to probably get into some DMs in the timeline. But yeah, overall felt like, I think this is a year that we're going to remember very long from now.

Huge comeback year.

Comeback year.

Crypto's back. Defense is ripping. AI is, you know, completely new paradigm.

And if you were a GP at a major venture fund, you joined the government.

That's true.

We'll be covering over the next year. Let's do a signal. Should we jump into some DMs?

Sure. Do you have them over there?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so first, before we get into that, we got some reply guys cover. And this is the first ever double reply guy of the week award. And it's going to none other than Chris Amadon and Will. God, I'm going to butcher his name. Stomber.

Stromber.

Stromber.

Is there an R in there?

Will Stromber and Chris Amadon.

Yep.

And these two brothers, you know, not only exemplify brother behavior, but have managed to find the perfect balance between being highly active in the comments section and highly active building their business. They're building a maritime defense startup. Chris is the founder and Will recently joined to run ops. And these guys are absolute dogs, I will say that. Very, very patient, very focused. I can tell. They don't have post notifications on, so it's not always immediate, but they're getting into the comment sections that matter. They're engaging with other reply Guys, other brothers, they are exemplifying the spirit of what it means to be a reply guy and they outwork the competition and patience. You know, we've seen, we've seen reply guy comes in, you know, potential reply guy. The weeks come in, get super active for 5 days, not win and taper off. And Chris and Will have just been at it honestly for like months now. It's great. So that's exactly what it takes to build a great company. And they have just proven time and time again that they, they are very deserving of this award. So, gentlemen, congratulations. Congratulations. Probably not the first time you guys win this award. I could see either of you winning brother of the week at some point and potentially brother of the Year, who knows? We'll be doing the show for a long time and you know, don't stop. We've talked about this before. You can, you can win this award twice.

That's great. What else do we have?

Okay, funny meme. This wasn't in the DMs, but Andrea posted this and said stimmies over demons. She said that psychedelic psychosis is out and cocaine induced opulence is in. And we don't support hard drugs, but we do support stimulants and we do endorse and live a loud, opulent lifestyle. And so loud opulence was. Loud opulence I would say is going to be the trend of next year.

I think so.

So if, if you know, going direct or founder mode was 2024. Loud Opulence is the year of 2025. America's back. And thank you, Andrea, future brother of the week. No doubt. And thank you for meeting us. Yeah, we really appreciate it.

Let's go to Sar. He says started listening to tech Bros pod in a sea of podcast. It has really nailed the vibes. A great blend of tw, Discord style talk show, very online discord discourse and podcast format. Thanks for giving us the shout out. We really appreciate this.

I think Sar. Sar had to be one of the first 100 accounts I ever followed on X. He's very. Been very. Not as active as he. As he was maybe six years ago, but when he posts it breaks through. Thank you, Sar.

Yeah, and I, I like that. Talk show is definitely what we go for. I don't know what he means by Discord style talk show. I haven't actually seen anything that's like Discord driven. I've seen a lot of Twitch content and a lot of Twitch streamers. Will pull up tweets and there's a Couple like Ludwig is a YouTuber who is also a twitch streamer or live streamer. And a lot of times what he'll do is he'll make a 10 minute video about something and he'll just have 10 tabs or 20 tabs open and just flip through them. And it's a great format because he just, it drives like, okay, he's onto the next thing, he's on the next thing and he can just do a one take or he does like a couple takes, and it turns out to be a really polished product that feels like a scripted YouTube video. But it's really natural.

Maybe that's how we're. We're gonna do. We're gonna have to do remote episode this week. Yep. So maybe that's how we do it.

Yeah, just tab. You should just share the screen and then just go through and just be like, this is the story we want to tell. I really think that doing some more organization around our content would be great and being like, okay, we're breaking down the ChatGPT, like OpenAI launch and here are 20 tweets that we're gonna go through one at a time and take you through, like a narrative on these as opposed to kind of what we're doing right now, which is a little more random. But we're always learning, we're always getting better. So thank you for that.

Yeah, it's funny. We're firm believers against building in public. Do not show your revenue online. Let people clock it by the car you drive and the watch you wear. Yes, but content, you're kind of forced to build in public because you're just sort of iterating live and everything is very public. So.

Okay. Megan Nyvold says what wine pairing. If you're in a warmer climate outside of Palo Alto, Screaming Eagle seems a bit heavy for 75 in Miami. Thanks. What would you recommend? I mean, you can't go wrong with a refreshing glass of Dom Perignon. Cheers to that, Megan. Enjoy some Dom. You can never go wrong.

No, it's great. Almost every time I see Brother Megan's post, she's just somewhere like, somewhere like, you know, Aspen, you know, Miami. Just really like indulging loud. The loud opulence lifestyle. So I think this is one of those questions where she already knows the answer and she's just kind of testing us.

Sure.

So, Megan, why don't you DM us tell us what you settled on? What you settled on, because we know you already know the right answer.

Let's go to Bass Baron. He's been on the show before. We say if my second mistress is going to. My second mistress is going to be so mad at me if I don't get at Tech Bros. Pod Reply guy of the week. Oh, that's a good point. Well, you missed it this week, but maybe next week. Keep up the replies based Baron, we love you.

Yeah. Reply Guy of the week is a, it's, it's a, it's a. Duration meets quality.

Yep.

We value, we value persistence quite a bit. So yeah, for sure there's other people. You know, Brody's been very consistent. Right. Trip Tripp has been phenomenal. Like, you know, and so it doesn't go unnoticed but it does take some sort of concerted long term effort.

Turner Novak.

Turner Novak.

It's great.

Yeah.

Let's go to Julia Black. She says, fascinating logic from Tech Bros. Pod. I described the guys of El Segundo in a way they would gladly describe themselves and that made it a hit piece. Humbled that John Coogan and Geordie Hayes would devote so much time to discussing such an untimely, uninteresting story. Well, got us dead to rights. We both, we both enjoyed it and criticized it. Hypocrites.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, she got us. I spoke with Julia after this. You know, she's, she's great. We, you know, we squashed, we squashed a beef.

She was one of the nominees for.

She was Journalist of the Year, Technology Brothers Journalist of the Year award nominee.

She's close.

Not by, you know, not by accidents.

Yeah, she's gonna be.

So she's gonna be shifting to covering doge.

Okay.

Starting basically now through next year. And so I'm actually very excited to see some of the articles that starts writing. So if you're exposed to DOGE and you have stuff that's sort of able to be shared, it's not going to be damaging to the movement. Go talk to Julia.

Yeah. Let's go to my tech CEO Jason. He says LA based founder I backed has totally lost it. And he replies every angel's worst nightmare. Tech Bros Pod would appreciate advice on this topic. Was this the Jeff Woo video?

I don't think that was a Jeff Woo video. But, but I think it was a founder that he was, you know, founder in his portfolio, moved to la, set up shop, started taking acting classes. And that is just a huge red flag. You'd almost rather a founder, you know, it's, it's, it's basically as bad as a founder saying that they're going to go to Peru and Have a psychedelic experience. So acting classes. Terrible sign. Ayahuasca. Terrible sign. I don't know, you might want to just write that one off, Jason.

Good luck. Let's go to Signal. He says the eternal technological pursuit has always been about the commoditization of every single thing that includes the human body, mind and soul.

I mean Signal, after the O3 launch just went on a generational posting run. This is why he was one of the breakout posters of the year. The guy went on absolute terror. So this was in response to that? I think that, yeah, it was just like very, you know, well put. I think that commoditization of the human mind. I don't know if we have the human soul yet, but it feels like, you know, talking with ChatGPT doesn't feel far off from talking to a smart friend. Right. It's not perfect, it's not right on everything can make mistakes, but so do, so do all of us.

Yeah, pretty wild here. Let's go to Antonio Garcia Martinez. He says, I find the AGI alarmism amusing. We've been a post scarcity society for decades. 95% of the work we do is invented. That is needless add ons to food and shelter. We will always invent new forms of work, making new products and services to occupy ourselves and compete for status. It's a good take. I mean AI solved chess two decades ago and chess.com is a massive business. And also chess masters like people like watching human chess players even though they are not the best compared to AI. And I do think that there's something that will be around for a very long time around what can a human do in the ring or in this podcast or in this debate format. Even if an AI could win times out of 10.

Yeah, another, another take here that was interesting. Sean Frank was posting that 60, 60 million people still subscribe to cable. So even though we have streaming, AI.

Is going to replace everyone brother. 60 million people pay for cable. We got time. Yeah, it's going to take a long time to roll all this stuff out. It's. It takes time to implement AI into your organization. There's a lot of risks, a lot of legal risks. Like where does this.

Yeah, I think, I think the one thing that's obvious if you look at the cell phone, you know, to compare it to something like cell phone adoption, which was dramatic. Everybody have suddenly having a smart, you know, computer and like a personal computer in their pocket. It took maybe 15 years to get to the point where everybody that was participating in modern society had this personal computer in their pocket. I don't think it's going to take that long at all now that everybody has that personal computer, which is a distribution device for these AI products. I basically think that I don't even know it might. People are kind of already interacting with these generative AI products, whether they know it or not. And so I think the adoption has already basically happened. But the impact is going to take decades.

Go to Mark Andreessen. He says, overheard in Silicon Valley My biggest lesson from the last year is just, it's all going to happen. All my childhood dreams of space colonies and brain interfaces and AI and robots, everything is just going to happen. And Yaxine says not only is it going to happen, you'll get to play with it in your basement. 3D printers soldering. The future rocks. I like this. Very optimistic.

Yeah, so I think we were able to, we're able to say that now that it's quote unquote, just going to happen. Like, I think it's a great quote. But we're able to say that because many, many years ago, really smart, hard working, visionary people decided to make it happen. Like, you know, Elon Musk's keynote, the future should look like the future that was the culmination of, you know, two decades of work to say what? You know, autonomous cars, humanoid robots, all these things. So our dreams are going to happen, but it's because a small number of people decided to make them happen. And so if you have a dream, don't just expect it to happen.

Yeah, it's going to take 20 years.

It's going to take 20 years and be persistent.

But the best day to start is today. Let's go to Signal again. He says it feels like instead of all of us stepping into the future together, a few of us are watching our world change on a daily basis, while the remaining masses will one day have a startling realization that the world is radically different. This is true. I mean, there's a lot of people who are like, I talk to people who are outside of tech and they straight up say, oh yeah, that AI stuff, I gotta, I gotta look into that. It's like, wow.

It's been like, it's funny because since.

ChatGPT dropped and you're like, I'm. That's on my to do list is like, figure out if they don't use.

That instead of Google and they don't realize that, that for almost everything that you do in life, you, you could be benefiting from the copilot that is you know, chat, CBT or whatever your preferred model is. It's, you know, my wife will be like, oh, I have these four ingredients. What should I make? Yeah, it's like instantly like cool recipe that just like takes no real effort to find. It just comes out of. It's just purely magic. So magic is here. It's just not evenly distributed.

This is a great take by Pavel. He says non technical folks saying software engineers are cooked. It's you guys who are cooked. You're going to have X software engineers competing with everything you're doing now and they're going to be AI turbocharged 7000 likes. And then he follows it up and says engineers were simply doing coding because it's the, it was the highest leverage use of mental power. When that shifts, it's not going to all of, to all of a sudden shift the hierarchy. Couldn't agree more.

Yeah. What's funny is I think he would also agree I got to, I got to hang out with Pavel for a bit at holiday party and he's got. His takes are as good in person as they are online. But, but I would say that he's not necessarily speaking about the low agency software engineer at a big tech company. He's speaking about the high agency individual contributor engineer who's able to imagine something and then create it with code. And yeah, it does feel like right now somebody, this guy, is it Nat Eliason, you know that guy? So he was talking and he was like, he made some post about how, think about how incredible the tools are that are publicly, publicly available for $30 a month. And you have to imagine that there's thousands of tools out there that have been created by software engineers that are in order of magnitude more impactful and powerful than what's publicly available. And nobody knows about them yet. So if you're getting like a robocall and it sounds like a regular salesperson, you know, and then it's actually, you know, like some like, you know, model. Yeah, that person. The highest and best use of that tool might not be to sell it as a SaaS product. It might just be to use it for their business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For, I mean for a long time coding was just a proxy for like intelligence. And there was a big difference between somebody who doesn't code because they operate at a higher level abstraction, they hire software engineers, and someone who's just like, oh, I could never even fathom figuring out how to code. That's a very, very different type of person. That's a very different level. So Vittorio says serious question. What should a CS student, or any knowledge worker for that matter do at this point? Even if the model is $2,000 a month, it's still cheaper than a graduate employee. What's the plan now? And so this is everyone freaking out about O3 and AI displacing software engineering. And yeah, I mean we just discussed it. It's like, you know, operate at a higher level of abstraction, everyone kind of moves up the stack. This is, this has been the story of, of programming for, for decades. Going from machine code and writing like binary to compilers to, you know, higher level abstraction languages to you know, auto fill and auto complete on things to now being able to just talk to Devin and figure out what you want to do.

Well, yeah, so all the AI coding startups are still hiring engineers and so there's clearly plenty of value in what you do. The key is if I was, you know, if I was 21, 22, graduating with a computer science degree, I would be figuring out how do I use AI better than any of my peers and how do I do 20 times the work that a typical college grad would do? Because you now have no excuse not to write better code. More code. Yep, faster, you know, do it all faster. And so if you can come in, if you can do the job today using these AI tools that a previous new grad engineer would have been able, you know, if you can do the job of 20 new grad engineers for you, plus $2,000 a month, then you're going to be in a great spot.

Let's go to Atlas Creatine Cycle, he says, really worried about the amount of ex software engineers turned DJs. We're going to get out of this tasteless beep boop music too cheap to meter. So funny.

Atlas. Atlas has been on a tear as well. He said he's been bored staying with family for the holidays and he's just posting through it.

Love it.

And yeah, we love to see it. There was already a big pipeline of people that were Post Economic becoming DJs like Justin Kahn, plenty of other examples. And so yeah, I think we're gonna see a lot of software engineers turned DJs, but maybe it's beautiful things.

Yeah, yeah, maybe it's more parties, more human interaction, less time online, more excuse to go. And I don't know about that together, but yeah, I'd stick to the Metropolitan Opera and the LA Philharmonic instead.

Good call.

You know, learn to.

I think Atlas would as well.

Yeah, the violin. Learn a concerto. Lulu says building Things will become easier and easier. Getting people to care will become harder and harder. And that makes sense. That was an entire thesis for OpenAI was that in a very crowded Internet, a very noisy Internet, they broke through and created a new consumer Internet brand.

Yep.

And, and to this day you can stop someone on the street and say where do you go to solve AI problems? And they'll just tell you chatgpt.com even though it's a ridiculous name with like all these acronyms, it's not like the sexy name people still, you know, identify it and it became, you know, just baked into the zeitgeist.

And it's interesting, there's like this entirely new behavior where I'm not necessarily wanting to search the Internet for something, but I'm wanting to understand something which people historically would use Google to say, I want to understand intermittent fasting. And now you can just go, I still, I oftentimes know I'm going to get a better answer by going to chatgpt.com so I'll just go there, type that what I'm looking for into the search bar. And so just the value of a new consumer behavior that I don't think people use. Like I'm going to GPT it. Yeah, but they kind of like you kind of hear that.

Yeah, I mean it's just a very different like pathway of like exploring things, asking follow up questions and creating tables and ontologies. And it's just so nice to be able to say, hey, break down this new concept in like different levels of abstraction. Create a taxonomy for me. Like what, what is the topology of this idea? Like what are the, what are the super categories, the subcategories and you could get some of that on Wikipedia sometimes, but you can just do that for anything. Yeah, it's been, isn't really, really fun to learn about all the new things and I find myself just like dropping like weird arcane knowledge and getting up to speed like way faster on things. Like there was somebody who was the first person like months ago to ever say the word vacheron constant on to me and, and within like three months I'm like clocking like oh, that's a Cartier Santos.

Yeah.

Because I've like literally gone from 0 to 60 on that and just like become a watcher through YouTube and also through chat GPT. But like understanding like okay, break down all the watch brands, break down all the expensive ones, all the oldest ones, like just all of that. It's just so much faster to learn and become an expert in Some random category which is like crack.

Yeah. And you can be like what do AP enthusiasts think about Vacheron?

Exactly.

And then they. You can get that summarized really quickly in a way that it's way harder than Google. Yeah. Yeah. Hey John. I love ads. We got a promoted post from our friend Austin Reef, CEO of Morning Brew. He says, my favorite growth hack. Find business influencers and turn them into your biggest customers and advocate advocates. It's awesome to see Mr. Sharma genuinely loving the talent we source for him at Ocean's Talent. So Austin's one of the owners of Ocean's Talent. They help you find great offshore employees. And he just screenshots HubSpot here which was clearly like, you know, MPS style survey. And Nick says XYZ employee is a beast. He's taken on so much and has kept everything running so smooth. I'm never going to not work with him in my life. He not only goes above and beyond what he's asked to do, but comes up with new ways to do those things better many times also just coming to me with these ideas in the first place before being asked. So if you need to hire remote employees, check out Ocean's Talent shoot Austin a dm. He's a pretty responsive guy and yeah cool, cool example of the product in action.

That's great. Let's go to O3. Mike Noop who runs Arc Prize says O3 is really special and everyone will need to update their intuition about what AI can slash cannot do. While these are still early days, the system shows a genuine increase in intelligence canaried by ARC AGI semi private scores. And there's a fantastic chart here by Riley Goodside that shows the progress of the GPT models on on ARC score which are these like color based block puzzles that any human can do no problem. But AGI or AI has struggled with for a long time. Oh3 is a reasoning model. The the high version costs $2,000 per solve so it really thinks and it really puts tons and tons of cycles and it's also been fine tuned on these and so some people were saying oh well if it's fine tuned it's not that that good.

Bruins post the thing like they trained.

On the training set. Yeah, it is ridiculous but at the same time like there is a difference between a model being able to one shot an eval and actually needing the training set. Like a human does not even need a training set to do arc. You don't even need to study for it. And so there is something there. Although Rune is like like basically correct and that and that this is remarkable. And Dylan says if you look at this graph and don't feel any existential concern for humanity, you might need to revisit your priors.

And yeah, so I, I was texting, I think it was Friday night with brother Madfest, Jared Madfest who coined too big to fail, which is his thesis, that entrepreneur, you know, highly technical entrepreneurs that can, that are in the thousand pound club and weightlifting just are too big to fail. So he says, Jared says basically tech used to be this great equalizing force, but now this is a thing. And so he's showing the, the what we just discussed. He says paying more doesn't lead to quote unquote more tokens. It now leads to, to quote unquote higher quality tokens with cost being exponential but value generated per task also potentially being the same. So if you're a billionaire with a device running 10,000, 10,000 times the inference cost now gives you a God compared to the average guy. And so right now $1,000 per task gets you basic human capabilities for most things and world class capabilities for a lot more. Within three years that will be sub 10 cents per task. And what does the thousand dollar per task model look like then? And he says inference, time, compute means money, energy and labor all converge on each other. And then he says today feels monumental to me. Go long Feudalism or fascism? AI smells the end of democracy. So anyways, bold take from brother Madfez. Um, but I think that there's a lot there interesting.

Let's go to Aaron Levy. He says here's a way to think about the market size of AI. US labor costs are 11 trillion. If a company pays 2% of headcount expense to get a 10 to 50% productivity gain with AI, that's $200 billion. The US enterprise software market today is around 150 to 2 billion. So AI doubles that just in the base case. Wow.

Yeah, yeah. This is why, this is why it's a good time to be bullish. The end of software was a meme in many ways. A lot of the best AI products or software meets Genai. So don't be afraid to go build.

And here's a related post from Adam d', Angelo, founder of Quora, co founder of Facebook. I believe wild that the O3 results are public and yet the market still isn't pricing in AGI. And then Elon says the markets claim to look ahead but mostly look behind. AI will ultimately render money meaningless. Bold. By the way, I look forward to your Deposition on quote unquote open AI.

Wow, that's a heavy reply from, from the, from the, the biggest. I just want popular reply guy.

I want them to be friendly.

Let's focus. Yeah let's focus on the task.

But yeah, I mean it's, it's real. Um yeah. Oh three I think is still underpriced. It's a big deal. Yeah, very, very big deal. Let's go to Aaron slowed off. He says why do you an adult technologist believe that a nice programming benchmark score means AGI? Fascinating stuff. He's always been very anti the idea that AGI is here because he works in the physical world and the AI has not been super useful to him in many ways and there's still a lot of tasks that he can apply AI to.

But I feel like this, this video went, couple videos started going viral that these $4,000 you know robots like you know, factory grade robots have started to seemingly get some amount of traction. So yeah, I'm excited to see what the next year looks like for Physical Intelligence which is a Lockheed groom's company who's building foundation models for the physical world, presumably robots.

So and also just like Devin esque, you know technology for cam programming and like CAD in design and just like what happens if you're, if you have a factory that has some software and you're able to just speed up the development cycle time of every piece of software that you develop or every, every stream of tokens that you write. Hopefully they move a lot faster. Hopefully the delivery times are faster which would be great.

John, I got to jump in here with an exciting promoted post from none other than Ben Hylak. He has two exciting pieces of news that I want to bring here. One is that his company dawn analytics is hiring again for a back end engineer and this was posted, I guess this was posted before O3 launched. So maybe double check to make sure they're still hiring that person. But he also says they will pay $5,000 to anyone who refers someone that we hire. So brothers, if you're hearing this go refer a backend engineer to go work at Dawn. Very cool company. And Ben is actually the designer that is responsible for the Jaguar rebrand.

Yep, that's true.

You get to work with an iconic designer. One of the best to ever do it led the Jaguar rebrand was covered in you know, the mainstream media for it and the opportunity to work with somebody that, that can do that level of, that has that level of taste would just be you know, opportunity of a lifetime.

Yeah, exactly. Let's go to Jeff Bezos. His wedding. It was reported that he was spending $600 million on his wedding, and it was. He was buying at a sushi restaurant. And I was talking somebody about this, and they were like, $600 million of sushi. That's all I have, sushi. And Bezos debunked it. He said, furthermore, this whole thing is completely false. None of this is happening. The old adage, don't believe everything you read is even more true today than it ever has been. Fantastic.

Yeah. I think everybody saw the headline and started running the napkin math and was like, what would you say? Even if you were having 600 guests.

Yeah. A million dollars.

A million dollars ahead.

It's, like, impossible.

Pretty difficult to do. I mean, if anybody could figure it out, we could. Yeah, but it'd be like a car. One of one watch, you know, one of one thoroughbred, you know, Kentucky Derby winning racehorse. Like, it would really be the. The gift basket at the end.

Exactly.

Rack ran it up.

Yeah. Yeah. Very hard to consume $600 million of food in a weekend. They just don't make it.

You can. You can stay at Iman for 50 grand a week.

Yeah.

You know, per room.

Yeah.

So you two guests in a room, and that's like, basically all inclusive.

So, yeah.

Impossible. The math, not mathing. And it's funny, you know, Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, it was. It wouldn't have even have been effective for him to publish an article from the Washington Post saying, hey, by the way, my wedding didn't cost this much. He had to go.

He had to go direct. Yeah.

Classic Lulu win.

Yeah. Let's go to Oliver. He says, U.S. department of M and A for Greenland, Panama Canal, and other strategic acquisitions. I love it. I'm so bullish on the Greenland and Panama Canal and Moon stuff. I really hope at least we get one of them. It'd be so good.

I know. That's the best part of this, is if. If this just only leads to one more American source of natural resources, economic, you know, dominance. I would love it. Vacation destination, it would be. Let's turn Greenland into the world's largest Disneyland.

Yeah, I can't wait. I mean, Ken Howie is now the ambassador to Denmark, and, you know, I think he reads power wires. Maybe he'll work on Greenland.

By the way, brother, Pat Blumenthal made it. Made a post that went quite viral and talking about how we were appointed as ambassadors to Monaco and all my least offline friends took it at completely posted the Same screenshot on Instagram. Took it totally at face value, sending me congrats. This is amazing. Like, I always believed in you.

I got a bunch of those. So funny.

So anyways, Pat, thank you for creating a lot of amazing fake news cycle. I got a bunch of messages to go through time that I won't be moving to Monaco anytime soon. Maybe in the next cycle, once JD's in. That would be a great slot for us. We could move the studio, the families out to Monaco.

I think we could do it.

I have a good story. I don't know if I ever told you this. I. My. My parents took us like a 30 day road trip through Europe when I was 12 and maybe I was 10, somewhere in that range. And we drove through Monaco. We couldn't afford to spend the night there. It was too expensive. But we spent like three hours driving through it. And my mom said that at one point I stood in the harbor and was like. And I just said out loud, these are my people.

These are my people.

And she's like, what are you fucking talking about? Our entire family's income wouldn't run one of these ships for an hour. That's hilarious. Annual income. So anyways, we have Monaco in our future, definitely this summer. And hopefully the ambassadorship at some point.

Let's do one more promoted post and we'll close with Darkesh.

This was a toss up, but I'm gonna go for a post from Hermes. I don't know who it was, but one of our listeners sent us a saddle from Hermes. Hermes, you know, started making, know, very high end leather saddles, and somebody sent this to us. If you sent it. Thank you. They said for the tech journalist listening to the show. So if you're a tech journalist, we know you love horses. If you're shopping for a tech journalist, today is Christmas Eve. You literally have 12 hours to buy a gift. If you don't have something, go to your local Hermes store, get a saddle. Pretty much, you know, get.

This was a. This was like a. A shot across the bow because we had publicly mentioned a YSL saddle.

Yep.

And Hermes has a much richer history in saddle making.

Yeah. And so I said maybe this was Sarah Hess.

I think so. And so this was. This is a bit of mea culpa for us. Yeah, I think we got it wrong. I think Hermes is the. Is the obvious choice here.

Yep.

And, you know, YSL is great, but if you're trying to convince a mainstream media journalist to stop writing a hit piece on you, you really should Spare no expense. You're going to expense it anyway.

So straight to the top.

Just go straight to the top of the Hermes saddle. Let's close with Dwarkesh Patel. He says we're way more patient in training human employees than AI employees. We will spend weeks onboarding a human employee and giving slow, detailed feedback, but we won't spend just a couple of hours playing around with the prompt. That might enable the LLM to do the exact same job, but more reliably and quickly than any human. I wonder if this partly explains why AI's economic impact has been relatively minor so far. So Dwarkesh was spending hours tinkering with Gemini to Google's LLM to effectively take his rough transcripts and turn them into really highly polished transcripts. And he finally needed to figure out that he needed to give it a sample of the input and the output and really write out. And so his prompt is big. It's really, really big. But he nailed it and it just works super, super well. So anyone with a podcast out there, highly recommend adopting Dorchester Script.

It's such a perfect example though, right? Because when you hire a new employee, you're committing to 40 hours mentorship, mentorship, weekly meetings, sometimes. You know, I've had times where it's like, hey, let's meet every single day for your first two weeks just to fully ramp you.

And they're constantly learning by osmosis, and the LLM just doesn't get that.

And I would say most people have spent less than an hour prompt engineering or, like, really trying to dial any of this stuff in. So this Christmas Eve, I don't know if this will go live today, might go live tomorrow, might go live the next day. But spend some time prompt engineering. Give the gift of dialing in your models to yourself.

Highly recommend.

And I think that's a great place to end.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Merry Christmas. Thanks for listening. Bye.