Project Stargate, The T Word, Ramp Treasury, Audience Ad Reads, See You at Davos

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today. We are giving you a breakdown of Stargate, the latest AI initiative and really like a massive, just completely tech and AI focused story to come out of the post Trump inauguration. I think the, the mainstream news was interesting. Not on this. And I was very happy to see like, okay, there's a tech story here.

Yeah. Caught off guard.

Yep.

And open. Like, what was interesting is it came out at like I was in. I was on a layover off brand. I was, I was on a layover last night because I was flying into a small regional airport and just routine.

Maintenance on the G650.

Yeah, yeah. Like it just was poorly.

Yeah.

Poorly planned. But I just remember it was 4pm in Denver when the story came out, which just felt super random. Typically you have a big announcement like this.

It's like more.

But it was because they were doing a press conference with Sam, with, with Masa, with Trump.

The photo is in the photo of them all together and Trump's just standing outside just being like, nice guys. Like, yeah, do some American business.

Yeah.

I like the vibe of this because I don't think you. And we'll get into this. But the like, Trump is not committing money to this. He was just like, this is cool.

Putting a stamp on it.

Yes, that's great.

Yeah. And Masa had very much framed it as before he, you know, apparently the conversation went, if you get. If you win, I'll bring you a hundred billion dollars. And Masa was saying like, I came back with 500. You can't keep a good man down.

Yeah.

Like there's some really iconic Masa pictures throughout history go on our X or the TV account. In my account. I tried to surface some yesterday.

We got some bangers up.

We got some bangers. We got an 8k banger.

Yeah. As as of this recording might be a 10k now. Well, let's go through the Wall Street Journal article to give some basic facts and then we'll cover the. The. Some Ben Thompson analysis, what the information or the misinformation is saying about it. And then we'll take it through the timeline and get you some reactions to Stargate, the new AI initiative. So the Wall Street Journal writes some of the world's most prominent names in technology are pledging to pour as much as a half a trillion dollars into building. It's so much.

Sounds. Sounds bigger when you say half a trillion. We've been so normalized. The B word.

Yep, yep. Now. Now it's half a trillion. Now we're in the T T land artificial intelligence infrastructure in the US and the latest high profile initiative timed with the start of the Trump administration is, and this is what's where it gets really interesting. It's, it's a joint venture, it's a new company and so OpenAI is taking equity in Stargate and they're the leader of this joint venture.

You wonder the dilution you have to take as a new company racing raising that much. And, and, and what they say here that intends to invest $500 billion to be clear that they can obviously have a huge debt component to that.

Yep.

Which would still count as this framing of an investment. Yeah.

And I mean we'll get into this, but I mean the, there's been a massive disconnect between like the announced, like in our day, back in our day when you announced a $20 million round, it meant that $20 million to the scent came into your balance sheet as an equity.

Equity investment.

Yes.

And so the framing here.

Yeah. And the investors would even have to, you know, you get the, you get the wire instructions. It's like, oh, you're investing 5 million, invest 4.999999 96 because you're buying this many shares. And now it's like, yeah, I threw some venture debt on top of it and then some cloud credits. And then, oh yeah, this government told me that they might throw some extra money in if I do one thing. So I'll throw that in there. And all of a sudden I add a couple zeros to my fundraising round.

Yes. And back in my day, if you went out to raise 7 trillion, I came back with 500 billion. That was not something to be celebrated.

Oh yeah, this started at 7 trillion. That was the story. I forgot about that. That's wild.

Those rounds typically don't even get announced. Yeah, you try to.

And so, so it's OpenAI SoftBank Group, which we know well, they'll build data centers for OpenAI and then OpenAI will be a customer of those data centers. So it's going to be this complicated like Loopback, the database company and mgx, an investor backed by the United Arab Emirates, are also equ Partners in the venture. The companies are committing 100 billion to the venture with plans to invest up to 500 billion over the next four years. Which actually seems put this into perspective.

In 2024, I believe there was $168 billion invested into US based startups. Startups. Yeah. And so this is basically saying we are going to match, almost match that level of spend, but purely into the data center infrastructure side the energy.

Everything just gets. So it's essentially we're seeing like the vertical integration of AI where, you know, like it used to be. Oh, yeah, like, you want to build a startup, you're just like, you're essentially like an AWS wrapper, then a chat GP wrapper, Then it came to the training runs. You're gonna have a huge AWS bill because you're going to be training on some infrastructure now. It's like in order to really do what they want to do, they have to buy the land, the energy, the compute. Everyone was saying, oh, another 1 trillion to Nvidia. Because Nvidia is going to.

Well, that's what I was joking. I was, you know, obviously shit posting being like, you know, showing Masa and.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And Jensen being like 500 billion. Did I hear that right? Masa? He's like, yes, brother, it's all for you.

It's all for you.

And it's funny because Masa literally bottom ticked Nvidia. Do you remember, like, he sold at low bottom.

Yeah, he sold at the bottom.

And his. It would have like, you know. So anyways, this is just, I mean, the whole story of Masa. I was, I tagged Ashley Vance and I was like, you need to do a proper documentary on Masa, because what an incredible story. The guy has had some of the biggest wins and the biggest. Ls just like, continues to, like, push forward. Never loses, never lose his confidence, seemingly.

Yeah.

Which we love to see.

So the $100 billion sum includes projects that the companies already announced and initiated under the Biden administration. So they're kind of like rolling in their old progress as well. So, yeah, really make this a thing. And then the total figure, if realized, would large even by Silicon Valley standards. And underscores the extent to which tech companies and government officials are betting on AI as the future of the American economy. It also shows how much tech executives want to broadcast their enthusiasm at the start of the new administration. And I love this photo of just Sam smiling while talking to the Paul brothers.

It's like random photo.

Yeah. It's like the Wall Street Journal knows what they're doing there. They're just like this. This is. This is like, you know, unprecedented. And it's just like there's celebrities around and they. They picked that photo very clearly.

Yeah. Thing you can tell as far back as Sam positioning is, I'm going to raise $7 trillion. Yeah. Sam is under such an. I don't Think there's somebody, Elon's under a lot of pressure and that he's got a lot of balls. He's juggling.

Right.

He's got like seven balls in the air. He's got billions, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars on the line. But Sam is arguably under much more pressure, much more scrutiny. And so seemingly this project, they very clearly are 500 billion building new AI infrastructure for open air in the United States. So Sam's strategy is his number one enemy is the most powerful wealthiest man in the world that everybody's saying, oh great, we're now an all arch oligarchy run by some, some guy from South Africa. Yeah, right. But Sam's strategy is like I'm going to become too big to fail.

True. I also think this is an interesting narrative violation about that, that thesis that has been running wild that Elon secretly, the president like has 100% control over Trump. Because if, if that really was the case then this press conference never would have happened.

Right.

And so it actually is kind of refreshing in some ways to see that no, the, like the presidency is still clearly intact and Trump is just, we.

Talked about this right before the show. Sam Altman was very against the Trump presidency. Oh yeah, he, he, he praised Reid Hoffman in 2021 saying, you know, if it wasn't for Reid, Trump would be hours. Yeah. So, so this, this is an example. You know, you framed it as Trump is a deal guy. He's playing the specific moment.

Yeah.

And so he, he clearly in this situation would have known that Sam had been a critic and it wasn't for him, but still was like this is, you know, good for America.

Let's like do this. Yeah.

Put his stamp on it.

He's come around on, on this. He's, he's donated, he's come to the inauguration, he's effectively kissed the ring. And so I'm down to do a deal as long as the deal makes sense. And in this case it's, it's just inter on deal terms. It's, it's. The federal government doesn't need to invest anything but get and gets a huge benefit. Right. Dominance over.

And it would actually be weird. It would be.

And a lot of this is investment from other countries into America. I mean that's what nas, it represents. Right. And that's what the mdx, mgx, the uae. So you're taking money from a foreign country and putting it in America. That's like, that's a pretty easy calculation.

For Trump I think. And yeah, for there's There's a good argument for foreign investment here because I don't think the United States has 500 bill. You know, if they can pull the money together, it's not like we have an extra $500 billion that are just kind of. You'd really have to.

We print that like every day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.

That's true.

Not every day, but I, I get what you're saying, but yeah.

And like, I mean, what, the COVID stimulus was like a trillion and then another trillion or something?

Yeah, yeah. So we could. But if we did that, it would be very confrontational and stuff. Yeah, well, it would be correct for it to go all to Oki.

Yeah. We're doing a stimulus check for Sam Altman. It's one one $500 billion check.

Yeah.

This is universal basic income.

Yeah. The economy today just functions as a wealth transfer between Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Base Baron. Base Baron picking up a very small amount of that.

But I was laughing at this because, you know, over the weekend the Trump coin launched and then Melania Coin launched and everyone's like, it's so ridiculous that these like super powerful people have like coins attached to them. But then I was thinking back on it and I was like, wait. But like, remember when Elon attached himself to Dogecoin and you could basically get exposure to Elon through Dogecoin and he essentially had a meme coin attached to him. And then even Sam has worldcoin, which doesn't truly have cash flows yet. And although there's more of a story there for how that's going to be a real crypto, it is in some ways a meme coin. Just about Sam, when I think about, do I want to buy worldcoin, Do I think Sam is going to be a successful person?

It's a way to go.

It's a way to go along with Sam. Sam individually. Exactly. Because Bitcoin should like live and die by him in the same way that Trump Coin lives and dies by Trump. Yeah, yeah. It's a very odd like framing. So Stargate's first data center will be in Texas. The site, which started construction last year, will be operated by Oracle and used by OpenAI. The companies didn't disclose how much each partner would contribute. OpenAI raised billions of dollars, but still loses money. Oracle has about $11 billion in cash and marketable securities, but more in debt. And SoftBank has roughly 30 billion of cash on hand. OpenAI said it would operate the venture while SoftBank will, will finance it. Stargate will have a separate board of directors and hire a new CEO. Which sounds like just like after all the war drama at Open, like just. I have PTSD about AI boards generally, but SoftBank's Masha Susson will be chairman. Stargate plans to bring on additional equity investors. So I think Ben Thompson framed it as like, this is almost more of like a prospectus or a roadshow for Stargate. It's like kicking off marketing. It's a marketing event.

It's like kicking off the general solicitation at the White House to the, To. Yeah, yeah, to the sovereigns, basically.

Basically. Basically.

But. And it's, and to be honest, like, it's very smart to be like, go and get a photo opportunity with Donald Trump being like, yes, we want 500 billion invested in American AI infrastructure. And then if you're the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, you're like, we'll toss like 5 billion in.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I mean, going to be a party round.

Yeah, it's very clearly a party.

Seriously. I mean the, the, the other way to think about this is like, it's this huge number, but how do you comp it just to general tech capex? And so Goldman Sachs has estimated that all the American tech giants collectively will spend an estimated 1 trillion on capital expenditures in the next few years. And so that will include large outlays on data centers, chips and power in the power grid. And so there's already kind of a trillion dollars flowing around. There's just a question of like, if you're, if you're Jeff Bezos, do you want to be a part of this party round and like kind of count your capital, do your own or.

Yeah, yeah. And later we'll maybe get to this or maybe now the right time is. So Elon obviously quickly came out and.

Said, pull up that post.

Yeah. So Elon came out and he goes, they don't actually have the money. And. And then had had a number of other posts and it's clear to everyone involved that they certainly don't have 20% of the 500 billion just sitting in an account. Like, that money has clearly not been committed. You know, wired. Right. Maybe there's, it seems like there's a lot of soft commits. There's people around the table saying, yeah, we want to be involved. But it's so on. It's so, it's so clearly like a DAC and a render.

Yes, exactly.

Nobody's going to be like. And then it will be a bunch of sub entities and complicated Structures of like, okay, we're setting up this data center. We're going to tie this much debt to it. We need $10 billion.

It's just make it at this level.

Yeah. Fake it until you make it, basically. And so Sam. Sam's strategy, which was interesting. He says, I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are one of the most. The most inspiring entrepreneur of our time. And I don't think that that response. I think he's trying to win out. Like, it. You can. I. I do believe he genuinely believes that. Right.

Yeah, totally.

How could you?

I mean, you can go back and watch the interview between him and.

But, like, fighting. Fighting fire with a hug. I don't think it's how you win against. You're not going to. You're not going to.

Yeah.

You're not going to win the war with Elon by being nice to him.

In so many different ways by Elon. It's kind of just like, why not just try a new strategy, I guess? But, yeah, I mean, it's interesting because it's like the initial OpenAI announcement, I think it is this fake, fake it till you make it energy. Most people understood that, but I think Elon realizes that many people don't. And many people will think, oh, wow.

Oh, yeah.

Xai has 5 billion and they have 500 billion. I should.

This has 60. Almost 60. Definitely over 60,000 thousand likes by now.

Yep.

And I guarantee you that OpenAI has people seeing this post, messaging them and being like, hey, will you promote my crypto coin? You know, so, like, it's so like, the average person seeing this is like, wow, this is real.

Oh, yeah, totally. Because you don't understand all the.

When you see an announcement like this. It was done historically.

Yeah.

And this is being done in the present.

Yeah. And so Elon. Elon is. He's not. I mean, he's. He's almost like, theatrically just trying to educate people on, like, the nature of this fake it till you make it stuff, which sometimes he does too. And then Sam demo. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so there's a little bit of, like, everyone's doing the fake true naked, but there's a lot of alpha and, like, calling somebody else out for doing it and who's. Yeah.

And.

And getting that dialing in the level of fake it till you make it is like the. The most important thing in Silicon Valley because you go too far and you're.

In jail and every, every, every.

You don't go far enough. You don't raise the money.

Founders do this with product demos, right? They'll put out a cool video launch video showing it and then you sign up for the product and it's got not, not, not really feature.

I mean even Google, yeah, Google, when they launched their AI stuff, people were saying, oh yeah, they sped up. The, like the AI was actually thinking for three minutes they sped that up and they didn't say they sped it up. And like all these different things, like a million companies have been, have gotten caught with doing stuff like this, faking demos. But it's different when, when Tesla fakes a demo and it's like, oh, like they, you know, they, they delivered that product like three days later, three years later and Tesla versus like the, the Nikola guy who like straight up had a truck that was rolling down. Exactly. And that was fraud. So the line of like, what is fraud?

Well, investors was doing that to get to like sustain their aggressive, you know, market cap. Right. Their, their marketing.

Yep.

So Janik, our buddy janik from, from public.com sent us, sent us this post which was clearly Satya running cover for Sam after all this. And on cnbc he gets asked, you know, Elon Musk says, like, project Stargate doesn't have the money. Now obviously Satya is conflicted here as any, you know, you ideally, you be over your career, you become so conflicted that you know, you just can't say anything at all. But, and so Satya gets asked this question very directly. Satya owns half of OpenAI and like is made a huge, huge bet on OpenAI and Satya is very sort of like specific with his words. He's getting pressed on how much you putting it. They do, they actually have the money. And Satya goes, you know, we, you know, we've committed to investing, you know, $80 billion a year in Azure. And you know, and the guy goes, asks like a follow up question and he goes, Satya goes again, all I know is I'm good for my 80 billion. And like Satya is not saying I'm investing $80 billion just through Stargate. He's saying I'm investing $80 billion in my data centers and infrastructure and all this stuff. And so I mean again, this is one of those things that, that, that normies, not our audience, but yeah, normies will look at this and be like, oh, Microsoft is investing 80 billion in this. Like they're, they' the way there, like it's real.

I mean if that was the case, that would be extreme if their balance sheet just went down by 80 billion into some high risk Yeah, I mean.

They have, they have, they have commit. I mean, to be honest, the other thing here is it's not high risk in the set, in the way that investing in a startup is. Right. You're investing in physical infrastructure that has somewhat predictable demand. Everybody's expecting exponential growth in that demand. But yeah, every indicator says that that's correct. So. And again, Microsoft is using a bunch of debt. Everybody involved will be like levering up, which we love to see.

We love to see.

It'll be interesting actually to see if there ends up being if AI creates so much demand that we are just constantly trying to catch up to that demand, or we create a new housing crisis because trillions of dollars have invested in data centers and who knows?

Yeah. I mean, the crazy thing is it feels like so much money. But at the same time, when you talk to the AI folks and they're like, every order of magnitude is what gets US breakthroughs in AI. We went from GPT4, which was a $500 million run, to a $5 billion project, to the 50 billion is coming. And the 500 billion four years is actually slow on some people's AGI timelines. Some people want to do an order of magnitude basically every single year. And so this has been talked about.

For a long time to be like.

It'S like I, I, I, I, basically, it's like I, I don't exactly know how the capital formation will happen, but if you, if you just ask me, like, will humanity invest half a trillion dollars in AI over the next four years? I'd be like, absolutely, yeah. Let's go to Ben Thompson.

One, one last thing I would say OpenAI, I think is the best in the world at, at disseminating their story and the things that they want people to believe through a complicated network of terminally online and on accounts, internal employees, leaks, you know, stuff like that. Memes even being like, oh, we're going to name it Stargate, which is like a very charged name for Stargate was a TV show, CIA project. Oh, is that around mind control? One reference.

Yeah.

There's also sci fi reference. There's a sci fi reference. There's a movie called Stargate. Like there's all these different things.

That's a cool name.

It's a very cool name.

Whoever held that a couple days ago they printed. They probably sell after $50 million.

Yeah.

So yeah, Ben Thompson frames. This is a bit of a prospectus as Masayoshi Sohn sets out to raise the funds. A project of this size and magnitude does seem to be up his alley. What is amusing is OpenAI's propensity to get itself once again into a weird financial arrangement. It seems as if the company will get equity and Stargate, a separate company from for operating the data centers and it will also be its primary customer, which is to say it will be paying itself in some respects. Still, it makes sense. OpenAI is a software company with different long term cost structure than that of an infrastructure company. That's fine if you're at Microsoft scale and profitability, but for entities that are losing money and looking to raise more, it makes sense to be different investment vehicles. So Steve, like in one way the market can look at OpenAI as a software company and then Stargate as an infrastructure and hardware company, which does make sense.

The new Manhattan Project, the Manhattan Project of AI is cool because you're getting some of that credit of it being this government thing when all Trump did was say, yeah, this is a cool vibe. I'll join your press conference.

Yeah, we should go to the.

Gavin Baker.

Yeah, Gavin.

Okay, so Gavin Baker, cross crossover fund manager and a great poster says Stargate is a great name, but the 500 billion is a ridiculous number and no one should take it seriously. Unless SoftBank is going to sell all of their baba and ARM. SoftBank has 38 billion in cash, 148 billion in debt, and generates 3 billion in free cash flow per BBG. What is the.

I don't know. Oh, probably Bloomberg.

Oh, per.

Bloomberg.

Okay, I thought they were saying like per. Yeah, so 3 billion in free cash flow. They own 143 billion in ARM and 18 billion in BABA. If they start selling ARM, their stake will be worth much less very quickly. So if you basically just start, if you sell off 143 billion in stock.

A lot of selling pressure.

It's going to, you know, create a supply demand issue. Oracle has 11 billion in cash, 88 billion in debt and generates 10 billion in free cash flow.

A lot of money.

It's, it's, you know, it's funny to put founder at the helm and he's looking good. Everybody's wondering what's his stack? HGH test, you know, facelifts. He's looking good.

He's looking good.

OpenAI is burning cash. MGX did not commit to a number and is $100 billion fund. Maybe 10% of the fund goes into the best case. In the best case, Nvidia will limit how much they invest in any one model company. Maybe 5 billion. Barring the aforementioned.

Yeah, this isn't a model company. So but any. And it is like the most like virtuous cycle where whatever money they put in is going to get in. So I could actually see the Nvidia investment being higher.

Yeah. But yeah, barring the aforementioned softbank. Oh and they can also structure it as like trading in kind trade of equity for GPUs.

And then also that 10% of that fund. I think that that's a little weird. It might be a little low. I think some funds could go up to 20 or 30%.

A private equity fund will do concentrated. It's possible.

And then also if they, if this deal goes well and they're, you know, and they're raising the next fund like, like the, the commitment is over four years.

And so you know, so potentially like.

That one fund is MGX or MDX. MGX. So they could wind up getting 50 billion of expenses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also this doesn't take into account positioning this as a road, a roadshow perspective. And Masa is known to make ridiculous commitments and then walk him back a little bit so he could be like I will sell all my arm to like make this happen.

Exactly.

I've got the cash. Like let's run it.

Yeah.

And so anyways, barring the aforementioned softbank arm sale, might be able to put together 50 billion in equity funding over several several years. Can obviously finance the the GPUs and put debt on the JV. In this case you could probably. If you're going to put up 50 billion of equity, I don't know how much debt you could slap onto this bad boy. But Gavin's point is Nowhere close to 500 billion. Everyone should just start issuing press releases. Press releases for $1 trillion AI projects. And then apparently some biotech company with the ticker MGX like popped.

Oh really?

After this like 30%. Yeah, but, but anyways. And so the people buying the wrong.

Ticker thing and actually moving the market always blows my line. Yeah. How do you like. You're enough of a. You're enough. You're enough of a trader to read this news. Think that bullish for the fund go in there but not check for two seconds that you're investing in the right thing.

Okay, but what if it's just that the bot. There's this understanding that oh it will pop. It will pop.

Okay, so you're like it's the meme stock.

It's the Trump coin of mem pop of this the. And so Jeff Lewis referencing Sam's response to Elon, he says I genuinely respect your accomplishments and think you are the most inspiring crossover fund manager involved in a lawsuit against OpenAI of all time. And then they just go into this like back and forth, chad on chad, violence and but, but anyway, so, so Gavin is conflicted. Jeff's a huge investor in OpenAI. He's conflicted. Everybody's, it's everybody involved in this public conversation is, is deeply conflicted. But that's why we're here, to try to figure out what's actually happening.

So there's an interesting to go back to the Satya Nadella and Microsoft thing. Like Obviously Microsoft and OpenAI have been really, really closely aligned for a long time and then that there's been reports of that relationship fraying a little bit. And Ben Thompson has a good breakdown of kind of like how this wound up happening. He previously wrote in an update saying, so Microsoft will spend money on training, but at a pace dictated by inference usage. Leaving aside the fact that inference usage only comes after training, this is a viewpoint that is fundamentally at odds with OpenAI's still stated goal of pursuing AGI, which is in some respects just doing training for training's sake to see what you can develop. I guess you could square these circles if you tried. But it sure seems like OpenAI and Microsoft are really, dare I say, misaligned. He's joking about the alignment problem. But, but it is interesting. There's evidence that evidence of this misalignment continued to emerge. The information wrote about OpenAI's frustration with Microsoft's GPU availability and the role that played in OpenAI's last fundraise in October. The Financial Times reported in December that Microsoft was negotiating to remove the AGI clause that restricted their Future access to OpenAI models in exchange for further investment. Then over Christmas break, the Information reported that the companies were having difficulty coming to a new agreement. The two companies were having difficulties reported, you said. Yeah, the information misinformation, misinformation. Although Microsoft was more insulated from the AGI clause than believed as OpenAI needed to first generate $100 billion in profits to that end. It is notable that this new deal does not appear to have more investment from Microsoft, as you, as you noted, and does not appear to address the AGI clause. And so there. So a little bit of this is like maybe a way to get back into like the crazy scaled up training runs that just have been maybe a little bit stalled because you kind of max out Azure and it becomes this question of like, hey, we have this belief that scaling laws will hold and that if we invest 10 times the money, we will get a higher IQ model out and there. And it's, it's pretty clear from the, we looked at the data and it's pretty clear that when you 10x the energy and tokens and data and all the work on the training, you do get a smarter model. But the increases have been diminishing. So as you spend 10 times more, you don't get the same increase from GPT3 to GPT4. So you could see this diminishing curve and at some point, if it doesn't become just super intelligence, you're going to wind up doing the training run that costs 500 billion and only getting like, oh cool. It's like it went from like an okay PhD student to like a pretty good one. And it's like, was that really worth it? And so I think that OpenAI clearly believes that yes, it's worth it. We're going to get something really special out of it. It's going to drive an immense amount of value on the inference side financially and also potentially like solve all of humanity's problems and all that stuff. But, but making that case to Microsoft, which have shareholders and tons of other businesses to say, hey, you need to take every penny you have and start building data centers for us probably wasn't.

Going one, one thing that it seems very clear, it's impossible to predict the future. Right.

It's a skill issue usually, but yeah.

Skill issue for some people. The thing I can predict is that humanity 100 years from now will study this power struggle over the creation of non human intelligence. Right. And the funny thing, I saw somebody post and they said everybody's now calling it ASI because it's clear we have artificial general intelligence already. Right?

Yeah.

And so even OpenAI is like, everybody's like, hey, we got to kind of unwind this AGI clause in this partnership because kind of already have it. It's not printing like $100 billion a year in free cash flow yet. Like maybe it will someday. Maybe a bunch of companies eat up that pie.

Yeah.

So there's just so much money on the line. It's like actually incredible because you can just do everything.

Like every single industry.

Tim Cook's punching the air because he's like barely scraping a gear. 78 million in total comp. Meanwhile the average baseball player is making like half that. And he's sitting watching his fuselage. He's sitting, watching around. He's watching these size lords huck around tens of billions, billions of dollar tracks and he's like, I can't even. I can barely get a bite. It's funny. Like, where is Apple in all of this?

It is crazy.

Partner with OpenAI and they're sitting on all this cash and they're just like, yeah, let's rip another buyback.

Yeah. I mean, yeah.

So uninspired.

I think that, like we're, we're so stuck in all the, all the nuances of the story because it's so big and so interesting. But I think it's going to be incredibly interesting to see what Elon's reaction is going to be because he's definitely.

Going to have to outraise.

He's. He's going to have to do something. Well, and here, even if it's just PR or like narrative spinning or storytelling, like there's going to be something that comes from Elon World and Xai that is compelling and fascinating. And then Google too.

Think of the other sovereigns that are not in this announcement.

Yeah.

Qatar, Saudi. There's plenty of other big sovereigns. Right. That can write 20 billion dollar checks. And so behind the scenes you have to imagine that Malaysia, Malaysia does training. You talked about that. You have to imagine that there's this battle between Elon and Sam and Masa out behind the scenes, taking these meetings, trying to get people to pick a side. And those people don't actually want to pick a side. Right. Like even VCs don't want to pick a side. We want to be able to be like, well, we invested in this foundation model, but they've got sort of different paths. And we're also going to do this one because people just want to deploy and they're playing. Everyone wants to own a piece of asi.

Right.

They got their piece of AGI and they're kind of a little bit underwhelmed.

Yep.

It's cool. It's cool. But like, you know.

Yes.

It's not solving all of our problems just yet. We still have to solve our own problems. Yeah. You still got to prompt it.

Yeah, I do. I do really wonder. I mean, the key, like the pattern has certainly been or like the. At least the financial story that we've been hearing is that As a product, LLMs are sticky and drive high revenue subscriptions, essentially perplexity. $20 a month. Tons of people just pay for it. I pay for it, it's great. But I also pay for ChatGPT and then I also just got.

You use them interchangeably.

Yeah, interchangeably to some degree. Certain ones are better for other ones like the Google one has a really huge context window, so you can dump an entire book in there and then get it to summarize that. But ChatGPT has the better reasoning models with 01 and soon. Oh3. And so the latest news from OpenAI is that they're launching the O3 model. It might be $200 a month. There's a version that might be $2,000 a month or something like that. There's been people talking about it and then kind of quietly behind the scenes people have been saying, well, you know, for a long time people saw this as existential for Google because how are you going to put ads in LLM responses if you read a big block of text? Like it's less natural to put ads in. But Perplexity solved that and figured out how to put ads ads in there. And I think it actually makes a ton of sense to put ads in LLM responses and it'll work just fine.

And it's actually making purchase decisions.

Yeah, yeah. And it's very easy to actually just have a second LLM that rewrites that response and says insert an ad in this text response.

They should consult with us on that.

But I think the third financial story that hasn't really been told yet is how are they going to drive costs down on the inference side? Because you saw this with Bitcoin where there were originally it was extremely expensive to mine Bitcoin. You had to do it on CPUs, so huge server racks. Then they figured out how to do it on GPUs. Then they moved to something called FPGAs, which are kind of field programmable gate arrays which are like, it's almost like baked in silicon. And then they went to asics, which are chips that are specifically designed just for mining Bitcoin. That's the only algorithm that the chip can run. And so it mines Bitcoin very, very efficiently. And that to my knowledge, no one has baked, you know, mid journey down to silicon or GPT4 down to silicon. And when you do the cost to actually inference, the model should be nothing. And if there's some sort of curve where, yes, the true AI power users are going to pay $200 a month for the really expensive model. And Sam recently said that O1 users are actually losing the money because they prompted so much. And I noticed this. I use 01 Pro and I get messages all the time. Like you have five prompts left. And I'm like, oh God, like I'm.

Probably like really exciting you.

Yeah, yeah, I'm probably like one of the people that they're losing money on. But for, for like the average user who just wants something that's decent and.

Is using the stream, why haven't they made truly the all you can eat buffet? If they. One, one reason would be if they actually made an infinite one, then startups would hack it so that they're like basically like leveraging one account to run structural software applications and just like piping.

It back and forth. Maybe. Yeah. But yeah, I mean if there's people that basically whatever their workload is, maybe just like, you know, recipes, shopping lists, just like daily life stuff, just spell check this thing, they're not really trying to do reasoning or advanced computation or math or code, then if they're just happy with GPT4, you bake that down in silicon and then that's just pure profit. And I think that could drive like pretty great financials for some of these firms. But I just haven't seen anyone talk about that or actually build that model. Yeah, but, but I'm excited for that because I think that'll, I think that'll justify underwriting larger models, like much easier because you'll be able to say hey, all that revenue that, that, that, that people are saying like oh yeah, because the inference cost, it's actually low margin revenue. All of a sudden people will be like, no, it's actually 99.999 profit when you break it down into silicon.

Yeah.

Which would be the thing that really unlocks like yeah, of course. Invest 500 billion. Because once you, once you get the model, that's perfect.

And there's so many prints, there's so many levels to the game. There's the hardware side, there's the model layer energy. There's the energy lamb. There's, there's the time it takes Elon to get from the west coast.

The private jet industry, the Riyadh. Yeah, yeah, a lot of private jet flights.

But I, there should be an account that just tries to track. Yeah, I don't, you know, some of these players don't have their own jet. But like Elon is typically flying.

Can't track that jet. That's bad.

Remember? Well, they're saying there's a, there's a whole subculture of tracking jets and we could probably piece together who's actually making more fundraising traction with you by figuring out.

I mean that just happened with the intel thing where Qualcomm.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

And a bunch of the. But I feel like that could globalfoundries we don't really know in Mar A Lago. Well, the announcement hasn't happened. It's probably Elon's. Imagine if Elon's Stargate is. We're buying intel and intel is going to make it again. Yeah. Manufacture GPUs in America and they're going to be exclusively sold to Xai or something like that.

Yeah.

And we're raising $501 billion.

All we got to say to the audience, find your Stargate. Just find your Stargate.

Yeah, I wait for the YC request for startups. We've seen some success out there in startup world for people assembling half a trillion dollars to build AI infrastructure. We'd love to see that at yc.

More of these.

Yeah, we'd like to see some more of these. It's a growing trend. Yeah, I like to see that too. So yeah, let's close out with Ben Thompson here. He says Oracle and SoftBank are there to serve OpenAI, which isn't a business that Microsoft is particularly interested in. Sure, Microsoft will provide inference to OpenAI for a fee and they like having exclusive access to the API. But Microsoft is ultimately a product and services company.

Is it the API?

Yeah. But also the ip. You're correct. If they can get away with running a highly efficient distilled model like Deep SEQ demonstrated. This is what I was just mentioning. Deep SEQ distilled the model down so it's higher margin with a lower price to serve, then that's fine with Microsoft as long as their customers are happy. So Microsoft is going to figure out how to slot the OpenAI API and the, and the models into Excel, Word, Outlook, all their products and then it's going to be, it's going to be copilot on the desktop software. Everywhere there's a Microsoft product, there will be an OpenAI trained LLM running, improving that user experience and will be compressed. Yeah, Clippy. Clippy, yeah, they should bring back Clippy and make it like great actually it's like the smartest great. And so they're going to still the model down and then just still have their normal margins. And so it won't be, it won't be upheaval to their financial model because they're such a large corporation. They can't just be like hey, actually we're in, we're in the nuclear power business now. Like sorry, investors, like the entire model is completely different now. I don't think, I think what Ben Thompson saying is that like Microsoft just isn't ready to completely pivot their model. They want their investors to know, okay, this is the profile. Yes, we're benefiting off of AI, but at the right, like scale and margin. So OpenAI, meanwhile, remains not only committed to AGI and beyond, but is also in a fight to have the best model, which undergirds their status as a consumer tech company. They need training, GPUs. They need GPUs to build products around inference, time scaling. And most importantly, they need investors who are in it for the upside, not to serve enterprise customers who will take years to adapt. This new agreement and new announcement reflects this new reality and the end, at least in terms of relevance, of one of the most fascinating partners partnerships in tech history. They're really going to write books about all this. It's insane.

Yeah. So do you think that. Do you think they did this because they were excited about Ashley Vance's new media company, Core Memory? Yeah. Like we need to give them a good first.

Exactly.

Story. Throw them a bone.

Yeah, yeah.

Because they clearly rushed it. Rushed the announcement.

Yeah.

It's funny because it's a very dangerous time to be trying to launch anything in tech because if you were, well.

You might just get run over.

You could get run over by a Stargate. You get run over by.

Or just thinking about the wrong thing.

Yeah, yeah, think. Yeah, think of. Yeah. Or a video where Barron Trump just gets increasingly larger and larger.

Anything like that. There was a good, like, SNL's cold open actually had like, a pretty hilarious take on how Trump is able to just completely derail, like, the mainstream media because they're like, we really need to talk about this executive order. But we have some breaking news. Donald Trump just said he's gonna, you know, melt all of Greenland and turn it into a farm. And then so, like, they just get completely distracted consistently. And that's, like, extremely true. Like.

Yeah, like.

Like no one can stay focused on anything. And so I. Getting the launch right and timing the date correctly is, like, enormous if you go on a date. I remember when we launched the. The trailer for the show. I think it was a quiet news day and we wrapped it up and it just destroyed everyone's timeline, which is great.

Yeah. Yeah. Tough day.

I remember.

I forget who it was. Some other startup that I know did a launch when we launched the trailer, and I actually felt bad because, I.

Mean, during the fires, like, it was hard for us to break through because.

I just started posting about politics.

Yeah, you just went full dim.

I want a war path against you.

Our whole plan to not Talk about politics last lasted like two months. But to be fair, at this point we. If you track not based on the number of months, but the number of episodes, I bet you. If you. What are we on episode 30 something. 36. I bet you episode 36 of All in is where they start getting political too. So, you know, we're actually just speaking.

But it's not political if you're just speaking the facts.

Yeah, that is policy. Yeah, exactly.

We only talk about.

Yeah, the truth.

We talk about policies, personalities.

Exactly.

But never politics.

Never politics, definitely. Let's just close out with. With Ben Thompson's final line. He says one additional point. If it's true that SoftBank is looking to raise debt for these data centers, then that's notable for a few reasons. On the positive side, it speaks to a great deal of confidence that OpenAI is really on the verge of a meaningful breakthrough. Something like AI training. AI all the way to AGI that will. That will consume $500 billion worth of data centers. On the more negative side, funding these data centers with debt as opposed to Microsoft fund centers with profit is definitely a bubble indicator. OpenAI is right to go for it. Deep Seek is evidence of the danger of standing still. But it will be interesting to see who wants to be in the business of loaning against rapidly depreciating GPUs. Very interesting. Venture debt. Venture debtors. The loan sharks always come out on top.

I guess they do.

Did we get through all the posts related to this one?

Yeah, we did.

Okay, cool. Let's move on to the timeline. Oh, we got a whole bunch of. We got a whole bunch of DMs and reviews. Thank you so much to everyone who's been leaving reviews. If it's your first time hearing this call to action, we want to remind you to go leave us a five star review. But specifically leave a promoted post in your review. Write an ad for your company, your friend's company, just a company that you like. Just put it in the review, we'll print it out and we'll read it on the show. So it's basically a free ad slot. What is that $10,000 value, $50,000 value, depending on. I mean it's a lot of value. So go do it. I'll read through these. This is a great podcast, says Stan Rizzo. I love the Technology Brothers podcast. Five star review brought to you by David. More protein and fewer calories help you increase muscle and decrease body fat. This protein bar does just that. 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and 0 sugar. This is your protein bar. Idealized. I love that because I've been like.

Peter, the CEO sent it. Sent us a few boxes.

Yeah.

John powered through averaging so many of these, he's averaging five a day.

You want to take this one? Next, what will trade after you're reading these?

Thank you for upgrading my information diet from Nick DeWilde. He says five stars. Very cool. He says if my podcast listening time was a luxury high rise, the technology brothers just swept in, took over the top 10 floors and evicted all the deadbeats. Beats sorry. All in. And if you're the kind of captain of industry who listens to this show, you know what lands you. A luxury penthouse is a sales team that can close when big deals are on the line. Unfortunately, most CEOs only find out that they're sellers. I just love that like anybody, Anybody discovering the show. Yeah, discovering the show and like looking at the reviews. This is like, wait, like why is all these. Unfortunately, most CEOs only find out that their sellers can't close the hard way. Cringing through recordings of blown deals and missed opportunities. That's why we built Exist ex dot com. We help your company design and deploy custom voice based role plays with AI characters that mirror your actual prospects. Letting your sellers perfect their skills before the stakes are high. Every pitch, every objection, every critical moment. Practice and certified before the real money's on the line. Companies like Samsra, Exones and Superhuman are already using exact.com and then we get cut off.

But prepare their to prepare their people for high stakes conversations. Want to see how they do it? Head over to exact.com and book a demo to experience our AI role plays firsthand. Thanks to the technology brothers for the ad read and for upgrading our information diet. We really haven't set a word limit and someone is just going to drop like a 5,000 word pitch for their company and we're going to get stuck.

I feel like Nick, I think we're.

Going to cut it off at one screenshot from now on.

Okay, Tighten it up. I mean, Insane domain.

Insane domain.

Insane domain.

I'm ready to start.

Ready to start running these ads.

They sold me. They sold me.

And it's funny too because you have to imagine that Exec.com is just generating the training data to replace the sales leaders that are using it. So it's like, it's just kind of wild.

Well, hopefully they'll be duking it out on the 101 against all the other AI SDRs soon as they, as they.

Yeah, they're with Jeremy Giffon for Billboard Search. Billboard Search Ad quick will get you sorted.

Yeah. A must. A must listen for any brother. John and Jordy put the brothers in tech bros. They appreciate the finer things in life. Profits, Dom Perignon and skiing. Their show is a must listen for any technology brother. This ad brought to you by this review brought to you by Carrot AI Carrot is a whiteboard for researching, brainstorming, and thinking. And it's the best way to visually collaborate with AI Carrot just moved into an open beta sign up now at Carrotai App. I haven't heard of this Carrot AI, but I mean, we do a lot of research, brainstorming. Actually, we might want to give this a. Try it, Ben. Install that and get a. Get a Carrot AI whiteboard going.

We can.

We can map out all our. All our machinations there. You want to read this one?

Perfect.

Oh, my God.

Sir. Sir Gord says yapping done. Right? Five stars. Great podcast, but even better vehicles for ads. I've already bought David protein bars and Bezos's old plane. Now I want my fellow technology brothers out there to hire me to make your pitch decks. Oh, this is Matt gore. More than $2 billion raised from size lords like Andreessen Horowitz and the Saudi royals. Hit me up on Axe Gorical of Delphi. That's G O R A C L E of Delphi. Or check the company@optioio.

Yeah, he's awesome. He made a whole pitch deck for us when we launched our trailer, and it looked so much.

Yeah. I had many people being like, one.

Just send it to him. Yeah.

Yeah. Many people were like, how did this leak? Or whatever. And. And so he. And that was without. We hadn't talked to him at all. Yeah. Just spun it up nowhere. And it was super awesome.

So, Matt, if you're listening, please make a deck for Stargate. I want to see that. Yes. I want to see that deck. Actually, you said that's actually amazing. Super viral. Super viral potential. But he says he's raised more than 2 billion. So if he makes the deck for Stargate and sends it to Masa and he starts shooting it around, you can 10x that or 100x that number, 1000x that number, and be like $502 billion raised.

The only thing is that Masa is one of the greatest deck makers of all time.

Yeah. He does give Matt Gore a run for his money.

Yeah, Matt Gore some insane graphics. I'm like, did you custom design this duck? Laying eggs. Golden eggs. Yeah.

Imagine being a designer itself, Hank, and just being like. Because it has a very, like, PowerPoint aesthetic. It's not a Figma project.

Yeah.

It's not. It's not refined or. Okay, so five out of five. Great to listen While Shining shoes. I'm a professional shoe shiner, and Coogan has been my client for over a decade. I love listening to their podcast While Shining Shoes of celebrities and billionaires. Better than an MBA at HBS or G usb. For my son's birthday, he gifted him a Patek Philippe sleep. Truly an exceptional mensch. This review is brought to you by Lucy. Pack a lip and lock in. Thank you.

Dude, you kind of need a. You kind of need a shoe shine.

I do need it. I've been on the road.

Even on the road, I love Warrior.

Let's see. Technology Brothers is my enlightenment. The Technology Brothers podcast isn't just another podcast. It's my enlightenment. I fall asleep to their voices, and by the time I wake up, their wisdom has already recalibrated my mindset. Prime for greatness before my feet touch. My Brooks Brothers loafers Custom. By the way, the writing is so on point. It's so good. The world. The world turns. But my orbit revolves around their takes. Technology Brothers is my gospel, My alarm clock, my North Star enlightenment. Okay, wait, who wrote this?

Because.

Take a wild guess. Baldo.

You absolute legend. I was literally about to say Baldo. We gotta. We gotta hire whoever wrote this, but we're already talking with Baldo about. About opportunities at the firm, so that's great.

Let's go to this post, But I think. So we printed this in black and white, and it's Chris saying, no brown in town. And he's. And he's circling some shoes that.

I think Sam Altman story here. So Sam Altman, he has incredible taste in cars. He's got the Regera.

Yep.

He's got the P1.

F1.

Or the F. Yeah, McLaren F1. McLaren F1. But he had. He had. And I'd say this to his face, he had a. He had a horrific fit on over. I mean, it's just not on the level that. It's not on the level that it should be.

It doesn't scream half a trillionaire.

Yeah. Yeah. There's no ex. There's no excuses. I mean, there's. I have stylists that.

Fashion is back in tech.

Yeah.

And standing out is.

And loud opulence was really back this weekend.

Oh, yeah, the inauguration.

Yeah.

You saw Lauren Sanchez with some very interesting.

I don't know if that's, I wouldn't bucket that in loud opulence.

I'd put that in very loud. But I was disappointed that Bezos didn't match her energy and just rock the tightest tuxedo T shirt with his biceps just popping out and just been like we're both like just going insane. Instead he was just wearing a normal sis. But I feel like if your fiance comes out dressed like that, you gotta be like, what am I doing in this normal clothes, clothing. I gotta match the energy.

Yeah.

Come with something crazy. Speaking of fashion choices, we have some breaking news from Paul Bomb Trump assigns mandatory pocket protectors for engineers. Executive order. I've never been a pocket protector. It's completely before my time.

I don't even know. Yeah, we should, we should take some for a spin. Just. Yeah. See what it's. Yeah.

Do a little throwback episode where we dress up as NASA engineers. That'd be great.

There needs to be almost needs to be watch protectors with what's going on and seriously.

Oh yeah. Do you want to tell that story? This is crazy.

Somewhat. Yeah. Not actually relevant to Paul's post.

Yeah.

Yesterday somebody held my brother in law with up with a knife in the middle of the Upper east side and stole his Patek Philippe and like walked up to him, asked him for directions.

Yeah.

The guy was with his wife and children. That's crazy. While committing this heinous crime.

That's like the, the criminal was with his, his wife, not the victim. Yeah, the victim was alone.

Yeah. Yeah. That is, the victim is alone.

Just be like, hold on son. I'm gonna go steal something.

Yeah.

That's wild.

So super dark. He was super shaken up and he's like, yeah, I'm never wearing, I'm never wearing a. Watch out in public again. Like unless I'm like getting in a car going to dinner. I, I, Yeah.

I mean it's, it's like a super dark story and it sounds like, and it's funny because we're talking about like we talk about protecting very light terms all the time.

But yeah, we talked, we talked with, we reached out to a friendly journalist.

Oh yeah.

And she was basically like, I talked to her crime scene. This is like such a common story.

It's, it's, it's not an either story. Not even news. No one even read it.

Oh, and the other crazy thing the cop said. The cop. So my brother in law runs like finds a cop immediately after this happened. Explains like what happened. He had a cut on his hand. Cop said, sounds like, your problem, not mine. To his face. And so now he's, like, trying to figure out how to get footage.

Yeah. I really hope there's like a pirate wires article or something. Deep dive on, like, what's going on the police. Because it feels like, like, is. Is this like the cops part of it? Like, part of underfunded or they've been like, hated on for years.

You tell me the story of somebody who's. Whose baggage was stolen.

Yeah.

So I think that cops in some way have been so demoralized because the people that. That get caught for crimes are not prosecuted.

Yeah.

That there's almost like this nationwide sense of, I'm not going to go through the hassle of doing this, that they're going to be back on the street.

And then also. And then also just like, like, for like the whole defund. The police movement was like, actually, it's more noble to not do your job if you're a police officer. Like, that was the message, like, the world was sending to police officers. It was like, you're not wanted, and that's really rough. Whereas, you know, like, the whole point with, like, you read like a children's story about, like, the police. I'm sure you see this with your son. Like, it's like the police, firefighters, like, these are like heroes.

Yeah.

In the. In the kid's story, like paw Patrol, like, the main dog is a police officer. And it's like a good thing. It's not like some bad thing, but, like, that was just lost from our culture for, like, a few years. And I hope there's like a recalibration. And then there's probably something going on politically with funding, and then there's probably something else going on with, like, training and, like, the judicial system and all these other things. There's probably a million problems that are going on that need to be addressed. But speaking of some good news on watches, do we already talk about this in the show? I think we might have. But congrats again to Tyler for getting a Seiko. We love it. He's locked in. He got a sandwich. Yeah.

And to be clear, this week is a little chaotic for us. We are in New York from Monday morning to yesterday afternoon. We're back in Santa Barbara. There's now a new fire that's. That's sent a ridiculous amount of smoke over here. So we'll see where we are tomorrow.

Do you want to do this one base Baron earlier, But I think you were talking about the real Baron, so.

And to be clear, Bass Base Baron. It was only. It was like less than a month ago that I said, said investing in base Baron at sub 250 followers is like buying Bitcoin in the 90s. And he's now at like almost three. And so this guy Lewis goes, rune got acquired by OpenAI. Beth got acquired by the Blob. I don't. What is that? What's the Blob?

I don't know. I. Yeah.

Got acquired by X. Yeah. Ain't an honest man left standing. And beyond. Blah, blah, blah and get. And then Bas Baron quotes, tweets this, and he says, bas Baron got acquired by Tech Bros. Pod and Baldo goes outsourcing political commentary since the Pod avoids it. Smart. Bas loves to rip a political post. You know, Great, great poster. Bright future. Bright future.

Let's go to adap, says Quotrin Cremu, who I saw this weekend. Great guy. He says, okay, just to be clear, Most of the EOs were written partially with ChatGPT, and a lot of them were written with copy pasting between them. And then Real says. Rune says real. And Cremu says, yes. And adapai says, daddy, how did the AI take over? Did they send big, scary Cylon robots? No, my child. Like, they, like, we just use ChatGPT by default to, like, write all of our laws, which is kind of funny, but it makes sense. Like, you need to write all these papers.

Like, of course, AI is giving some pretty big, you know, a lot of ammo to the high school kids that are writing every single essay. If you say, well, the President's using it to write his executive orders, why can't I, you know. Yeah, right. Use it to write about the Founding Fathers.

Yeah. How.

You know, it's. This is even less significant.

Yeah. I mean, it's. It's still just like the. The instantiation of the ideas. And so, you know, I don't know. It's. It seems fine. It doesn't seem like that big of a deal. I. I'd be surprised if there's anything. I. I'd be surprised if we. If we wind up learning that. That the executive orders being written with the help of ChatGPT wind up causing an unattended effect.

Right.

Where it's like, oh, they didn't proofread it, it hallucinated, and now it's illegal to drink the White House. Yeah, exactly. I think that's probably unlikely.

Gotta sign off.

There was a follow up on the Curtis Yarvin thing that we talked about. Dwarkesh Patel chimes in and he says Curtis Yarvin is mistaken when he says that Apple can produce iPhones because it's a mon. There are millions of firms, monarchies in the world that can't produce anything nearly as impressive as iPhones. From the Laundromat down the street to Boeing. Apple is the result of a decades long evolutionary process facilitated by the market which uplifts the very best culture, talent, processes and ideas in the entire world. And the moment Apple slips, it'll get replaced. The average lifespan of a Fortune 500 company is 15 years and I think Curtis would actually be like awesome. I love the idea of millions of little micro techno monarch or whatever. Yeah. But this is still an interesting take. He says governments won't just don't just don't work this way. Xi Jinping isn't competing against a million counterfactual Chinese leaders who didn't do zero Covid, avoided deflation, didn't kill the tech industry and were awake to AGI. He can, he can fuck up as much as he wants. If a monarch happens to be competent like Lee Kuan Yew, it is merely by chance, not due to some intrinsic selection mechanism of monarchy that we can't, that we can replicate. You are just as likely to get brutal dictators like Mao and Stalin by chance. This is not a reasonable gamble to take with the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens. Apple is indeed a wonderfully competent organization. If we want more of the world to be run competently, we should delegate more functions to the market.

Cool.

Which is constantly and ruthlessly sizing down incompetence. To be clear, a ton of incompetent businesses exist, but they lose access to capital, talent and power rapidly, which is reallocated to those who can deliver. They don't drag down the fortunes of entire countries and kill millions of people, which has happened again and again in authoritarian systems. So I think it's a good, it's a good point. There was actually a rebuttal to this, which I don't know if we printed, but there was a rebuttal that said that there is a difference between the Mao and Stalin outcome and the Lee Kuan Yew outcome. And it's whether or not the dictator has control over not just the capital flows, but the actual capital stock. And so the idea is that if the Yarvonite monarch owns 60% of the wealth, then there is economic alignment between them and their people and it will be like a better outcome. I didn't really dig into it too much, but it did take me down I'm only tangentially interested in this battle, but I think it is interesting that.

I don't feel qualified to.

But it did take me down a very interesting rabbit hole, which was, I was like, okay, so this guy's arguing that if, if the monarch, if the authoritarian leader Lee Kuan Yew or Mao own a lot of the wealth in the country, you'll get a good outcome. And so immediately that demands a fact check. Like, how much money did Lee Kuan Yew have? And I tried to look it up, and it's completely unknown. I found like, wildly different, different stats. Somebody was running the numbers and being like, well, he made a million dollars a year, so if he saved it all and invested it, he'd have like 60 million do. But total wealth in the country was in like the tens of billions. And then another. Another quote was like, no, like he changed some law so that you couldn't see his wealth and he actually died with like 5 billion and it was actually like 10%. So like, maybe it's true, crazy, but it was one of these things where maybe, maybe a listener knows more here or something and can write in. But it was just one of these. I see this a lot with, when we dig into like, Asian companies and like, like Chinese companies were thinking about doing a whole deep dive on dji. And it's very hard because there aren't that many accounts and you don't know what you trust, you don't know what you can trust. And then also stuff doesn't get translated that often, doesn't make it out past the very firewall that often. And so it's just a great mystery. So if you have an idea of what Lee Kuan Yew is actually worth, that's more of an interesting story to me than, you know, this Yarvin debate. I more just want to know more about Lee Kuan. Yeah, you. Because clearly something happened great. In Singapore because it turned into a great country from basically nothing. And whatever the, whatever the seeds of success were, those are worth studying. And I thought that was interesting. We, we already talked about this breaking news. Oh, let's go to Ross Ulbrich. So Free Ross announced that Ross was just granted a full and unconditional pardon by real Donald Trump. Words cannot express how grateful we are. I guess. This account has been advocating for the pardon of, of Ross Ulbricht, who was the Dread Pirate Robert who ran the Silk Road in. What was that, 2008, 2013. I think he went to jail. But it was like that era only.

Really Running the Silk Road for a few years.

Few years. And so Luke Metro says all crime is now legal assuming you do it with crypto. Some truth to that.

But yeah, I mean the positioning of being like, okay, if somebody was operating effectively a doordash for drugs using, using fiat rails, they would have been slammed for so many things. Totally. So many ways. But Ross having these more arm's length.

Yep.

You know, creating a platform to facilitate these transactions but being able to say like, well, it's just a forum.

Exactly.

Yep. I don't understand. I think there was just a lot going on behind the scenes here. Libertarian movement, totalitarian movement, support for Trump.

Yep.

That, that led to this.

Yeah. This is to Ross's family by one person is like this is an olive branch to the libertarians. Yeah. So you do this and then there's going to be a lot of tariffs and non libertarian stuff that goes on. But they got their guy.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and libertarians would argue that people are going to buy drugs all the time. And if you create a marketplace for it where sellers want to have trusted reputations that will sell better drugs and people will have less overdoses or things like that.

That.

But then there was also like murder for hire on the Silk Road.

I'm sure.

You know, and, and, and so I don't, I, I didn't understand this. But, but purely from a marketing standpoint, the Ross family led a phenomenal marketing campaign to reposition this guy as somebody who wasn't the largest drug. Like a drug trafficker.

Yeah.

Basically like a digital drug.

The other thing that was really big was like you could, you could buy hit men on the Silk Road.

That's what I'm saying.

Whereas they're hired. Yeah.

So, so, so it's not like even.

Like, and even by libertarian standards, like the non aggression principles kind of violated there. It's a little bit tricky.

But yeah, it's, it's almost like. And so going back to Luke's point, it's, it's. Trump has set a precedent around.

Okay.

He launched what's effectively like, you know, it's not a security meme, coins aren't securities. But you know, he launched it here in America. It's unclear.

I do hope that we get to hear Ross, you know, plead his case on or something.

Or somebody does podcast people were posting yesterday like wow, poor Ross. He's been sentenced to 40 years doing the libertarian podcast.

Well, let's move on from you know, a, a drug platform to, you know, instead of buying drugs, you should buy something Much more. Much more. Much more of a drug which is a fine watch. Let's do a promoted post.

Let's do a promoted post.

One of the greatest drugs in the world consumption.

This is. Yeah, there's nothing that hits quite like it. So this is an amazing account. First of all, it is ought 316-76934 sharing a bunch of Japanese and Mandarin which I actually, we don't have the translation here, but I can translate this for you. This is a picture of Brad Pitt wearing a 2 to 2 Vacheron Constantin and this watch which they just reintroduced. Yes. And. And we're calling it now. We've been calling this in the group chats for months. Vacheron is about to go on a generational run.

Yes.

You've got Patek, which is just launching slop remixes of Binodolus. You've got, you know, ap, which is going more of the Louis Vuitton hype beastie route and all those DJ partnerships, whatever. Vacheron coming in third member of the Holy Trinity dropping. You know, this, this I, I. We each need this watch.

We do.

We should Chris Q. Four Christmas gifts for each other. So it zeros out.

Exactly.

Engrave the back.

Yeah.

And anyways. Yeah. So how do you recreate great campaign and a great watch? And you can get. These are, I think going out through the boutiques now. But if you want to get a vintage Vacheron 222, you can go to getbezel.com.

Yeah. Or maybe you want a, maybe you want it overseas or something else that fits your style. Because even though I highly recommend this particular model, I always say that it depends on, you know, there's so many.

Things that go into it.

What wears best for you?

So what wears best for you? Shoot us a dm. We're happy to go back and forth on it.

Yeah, yeah, happy to help with that. Let's go to Chad Byers. He says Gen Z AI founders are insanely cracked. 10x more business savvy than young people a decade ago. And this is an interesting dividend, I think from like the wi fi money crowd and just all the chaos of COVID and being inside and watching meme stocks happen, watching crypto happen and having so many opportunities. Like I think, you know, in our generation there were, you know, teenage young teenagers who made money online. But it was. And Jeremy Giffon has that has that saying about high school transcript and a stripe account and I'm investing stripe account showing that you made money when you were still in High school. But yeah, usually it was like, oh yeah, somebody was like, got a T shirt business going. Or I know someone who had a stock photo site that did pretty well, but not millions of dollars.

Like there's so many flipping, so many way to just make like 10 grand, 100 grand. But you're now in high school. Think about this, think about in high school, like let's say like middle school specifically. 200 bucks in middle school was like I would get. My dad would pay me like, yeah, $3 a lawn, something like that.

Yeah.

Like 200 bucks is like literally like, oh yeah, like, yeah, mowing a lawn for like two years in a row or whatever.

Yeah.

And now you can just go. And when Nike drops a sneaker, go lever up, get 200 bucks in your parents, buy the sneaker, and immediately you can resell it on StockX for double. And then you just made 200 bucks.

Like, I know, I know a kid that did exactly that and then he started writing a bot that did it and then he sold that bot and it's like, it's great, great. And, and those types of. I think there's basically the opportunity for really young people to make, make, make more money, just bigger than ever. And what that means in terms of business savvy is specifically like you get to a certain point you're going to have to learn about taxes, lawyers, like these things are going to come in and that's going to teach you more about business.

Yeah.

Let's do another promoted post and then we'll go to this Andrea post. Do you have the promoted post there?

I've got a promoted post.

Okay.

Yeah. So it, so two brothers on the show, Chris Amadon and Will, who doesn't put his last name in his handle. So I never remember what it is, but they are building a. Let me, let me scroll up here so I just get it right. A young boy. You auv. Defense Tech Co. Is how Will described it, which sounds exciting to me. But they're basically building autonomous boats, like boats, drones. And so they're hiring an electrical engineer and a mechanical engineer. So these are like founding team level role job. Yeah, yeah. So basically this is an opportunity if you're an electrical engineer or mechanical engineer to go join a founding team. Yeah. That is building some like imagine like the, the, the imagine like the lifestyle of like building like RC boats. Yeah, yeah. But they have like guns on them and like they can blow up and stuff like that. So anyways, you can go to. They have a, they have a something listed on On Ashby, Amadon Heavy Industries on Ashdi, there's seven open roles. They are funded. They're hiring some interns as well. So go check them out. Support the brothers. And these guys are avid listeners of the show, former Reply guys of the week. So even if you're not the mechanical engineer, the electrical engineer that would join their company, tell a friend, brother's supporting brother. That's brother behavior. Back to you, John.

Let's go to Andrea. Did you follow this story at all? She says Meta isn't making anyone follow VP or POTUS accounts on Instagram. If you were following it, it just transitioned like it's done on Twitter. It's crazy that people can't even deduce that because we've stopped thinking and just react. So basically, yesterday or during inauguration, as soon as I think Trump's hand got off the Bible, the people at Meta changed the account over, just like they changed the White House website over. And so all of a sudden, if you were following the P account, it was Kamala Harris content and her profile picture, and then, boom, it's J.D. vance. His name, his pictures and his profile picture, and same thing for potus. And so a bunch of people who loved Kamala were like, why AM I following J.D. vance now, now? And they got confused. They got confused. But what's. So it became this whole meme about, like, Zuck is pro Trump, so he made everyone. He made my Instagram account follow Trump, but you're not following the Twitter account. He did follow potus, but it gets more complicated. So because the changeover from Trump and Vance from Biden and Kamala was so contentious. Like, when you think about most VPs, it's like, who really was, like, up in arms? Like, oh, yeah, I'm a really, like, Mike Pence guy. So I'm like, super upset about Kamala. Like, like, the previous changeovers have not been as big, and the accounts were probably way smaller because Instagram's just bigger. And so what. What happened at Meta was millions and millions of people saw this and were like, oh, I'm following the wrong person. And what happened was the unfollow demand was so high that the unfollow requests weren't going through on the server side. So then it looked like I unfollow. Then I was like, cool. I unfollowed it because it updated on the front end. It didn't update on the back end. And then you're still following it and does look like it.

But so if you were following Joe Biden because You love Joe Biden and then you start getting served.

Trump's done. It's a terrible system. It makes no sense. They just shouldn't have at POTUS or at vp, it should just be redirect Trump or Biden, right? Yeah, yeah, something like that. But they actually do some sort of archive where if you're following at vp, when it's Kamala, you will get, you will get automatically. You do automatically follow VP number 47 or 46. And then it's an archive of Kamala's content or something like that. But it's all this, like, weird technical infrastructure. And I think that there was also a bug going on because a lot of people clicked the unfollow button and then it refollowed them, and then they felt like it was being the team.

At any social media platform that's in charge of switching over presidential handles. Sound like a terrible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Job. War rooms.

Let's do another promoted post.

Caught me. Caught me lacking.

Well, well, here, I'll do a bucket.

Talk about that. Do a bucket poll up.

I got one. I got a couple here. This is funny from the technology brother. Clearly inspired by us. Just kidding. I think they had that, that handle going earlier. It says George Poro, and he shows the net worth of Elon Musk is 415 billion and the net worth of George Soros is 7 billion. What has been going on with George Soros in his business career? I feel like he's been hovering around a couple billion, like, my entire life.

I think he's got way more. And he just, oh, yeah, okay.

It just doesn't show up. Whereas Elon's wealth, it's like getting Mark to market constantly. So it's hard to tell. Interesting. Also, I mean, the political donations stuff, it's always shocking me how, I mean, SBF actually, like, brought this up, which was that, like, everyone was praising Elon in from the Republican Party for donating a quarter of a billion dollars, and they were like, it's the biggest, most insane donation. Like, it did it for us and it is a lot of money, but it's like less than 1% of his wealth. It's less than 0.1% of his wealth. It's like very, very small. And so I think especially Soros has been, I think, focused on, like, local courts and local stuff. And in some of those, it's like, it's like a $10,000 check will change the course locally or something.

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I, I, but at this point, again, I Shouldn't talk about. I shouldn't talk about politics. Politics if I get on a rampage. But I do have a promoted post. Very exciting news. If you were following our account.

Yep.

This morning you would have seen us request a new feature from Ramp One. We've got. Got so much cash coming in that we wanted a place to actually earn some type of. Because just sitting here, it's not earning. Earning anything at all other than adding to the general ambiance of the show. And just being close to cash is like, there's some energy transfer. It's nice. But we requested a feature this morning at like 6am Something like that. Ramp actually shipped it really a couple hours later. And that feature was Treasury.

Fantastic.

Eric, their wonderful CEO and friend of ours, says if you're reading this, your business is probably earning 0.07% on operating cash. RAMP is now offering two and a half percent. That's 35 times the national average and much more on investment accounts. And you can switch in a minute. So they're offering this functionality where you can have, historically treasury products, you know, would offer high rate, great, have low liquidity. So it could take. And it was sort of designed intentionally in a way where they were like, well, we want you to keep your money in this operating account that's earning nothing. But like, yeah, we have a high interest product. And then they make it inconvenient enough to move between the two. So Ram's coming in with a. With a high yield, high liquidity or, you know, quick liquidity product. And ran. I love this copy, you guys. Legally we can't call it free money money. But you can. So go check it out and go get some free.

Yeah. So if you're on Ramp or you're.

I don't actually think we can. I don't think we can say it's not.

We.

We also can't call it free, but you can, you can.

So yeah. If your company's on Ramp or, or you're. Or you have a Ramp card in your organization, tell them check this feature out because it's fantastic. Big, big week for Ramp generally. Did you see all the promotions? Will Petrie is now the CFO though.

Yeah.

We're not really set up. Yeah, we. We gotta do a whole personnel news.

Personnel news where we're on the beach. Yeah. Like some type of like all weather gear. Like yelling at the mic. Yeah. Super bendy right now. We can be like breaking news.

Yeah. But yeah, I mean, fantastic team over there and great to see the promotions go out. Let's go to low yield. Lucy. I, I love this post. This is so good. Flirt with a guy at the bar. Ask for his phone to put your number in open coinbase. Place a large limit order for a illiquid meme coin you're holding. Now you have volume to sell into.

I just, I just shared that I.

Thought that was stealing so much money.

I mean that, that, that genuinely would work with, with, with a lot of SF guys. So many SF guys. New York guys, Miami guys. Definitely. Because the girl comes up to you and says they have like the next hot meme coin.

That's not what Juicy said saying. She's saying make the guy think that you're putting your phone number in and instead buy you the meme coin.

Yeah, that, that this is. I also, I also think it would work to just be like you have to buy this. Like I'd probably stupid because they're going to want it. The guys are going to want to flex and be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh yeah. I just threw 25k and.

Exactly. And then you go to the bathroom and you sell immediately. Buy me a drink. No buy drink coin. It's the lowest volume coin on pumped Fun right now.

Yeah.

Ridiculous. That's great. Let's see if there's another good bucket pull in here. This is a good one from Max. BO is sending Factorio to your competitors engineers a cost effective means of sabotage and it's a screenshot of. You've received a gift copy of the game Factorio on stream. So I don't know if you've played Factorio. I never have. I've seen a little clips of it. It, it's like, I mean there's like a whole like Age of Empires. Then there's Civilization Starcraft which is. Yeah, Starcraft. You know I think a game lasts like an hour Factorio. I think it's like days and days and days building this like insane complicated factory and highly addictive and highly loved by engineers. It became a big meme like a while back but I can't get into that stuff anymore. It's, it's too, too much. We already did this one. Let's see what else we got here. Okay. Oh, this is an interesting one here. Do you know anything about Quest Nutrition? So Tom Bilyeu posts. We turned $10,000 into a billion dollars in five years. Here's what I learned from my journey to a billion dollar exit. And Max is questioning this by quote tweeting it and says no idea what the non arms length transaction was in the early days of CPG. No CPG company was started with $10,000.

So he's kind of like so not true though. Yeah, it's just like so there's so.

Much to start a company with 10k.

There's so many counter examples and.

Yeah.

And ways and, and I mean even.

At Soylent we, we, we had, we had 100 different.

Start a company with 10k and then immediately raise more.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You could just do a pitch.

I don't like positioning it as like.

It'S impossible to start a company with.

10 if you only have 10 grand to invest in a company.

Yeah. You know PMF or die is going to be 25k. That's probably 10k by inflation.

Yeah.

Based on when, when he started that company. So I don't know. I, I, I, I get the, I get the point that like when people do those threads of like I turn 10k probably there's a little bit of fuzzing and exaggeration on either side. But I think it's direction.

You've never needed less Money this start 100. 100 like you can use AI generate product images. Yeah. Offer it as a pre order if you sell it. Use your money to manufacture, go viral.

On TikTok or get one corporate deal.

Or even like beverage which is the most capital intensive thing. If you're smart and you find the right co packer manufacturer you could get them to for ten grand to manufacture.

Like a pilot run for sure or amazing financing terms. And you could do some sort of crowdfunding campaign where you pre sell the product and then you're getting that cash up front because you're charging it on stripe. So that reconciles in like three days. And then you have to pay your manufacturer for net 90 if they're cool. Like it's all just the art of the deal, baby. The art of the deal always has been. This is. Let's go to Rune 1. He says they're worried about ethnic nepotism when they should be worried about boys group chat nepotism. Them.

This is extremely real.

Definitely. I, I mean also I bet Run is in like a million group chats.

So he's like yeah, people are adding him in. Just, just. And then just being like hey, could I get a repost please?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the real group chat nepotism amplification on the timeline when you see something go out and it's like 25 people retweeted this in the first three minutes. What's going on here? Yeah, that's the group chat nepotism going on.

Yeah.

The real alpha. What you got for me on the promoted side, Jordy?

I got a promoted post from none other than Cohiba Cigars. Fantastic shade above the rest. Cohiba Connecticut story is one of breaking expectations. Where most people think of Connecticut cigars as smooth but simple, we've gone above and beyond to craft a cigar that breaks the mold. So anyways, great looking picture here. Fantastic. Go grab. If you're celebrating something, go grab a Cohiba. Don't inhale. Just a couple.

Don't inhale and don't do it often. But it's a great, it's a great excuse to get together with the, the men of your family. I have, I have this family tradition.

Have a beautiful mom.

I have this family tradition of anytime any man in the family has a birthday or Christmas or Thanksgiving, all the men in the family smoke cigars.

Getting up there.

But, but it's a great, it's a great excuse to just like get all the guys together and just hang out and talk and sometimes people don't even smoke them. But it's fine. It's just like, it's an excuse to just go and do something with like all the guys in the family.

Yeah.

It's just. Yeah, it's. It's great. But yeah, I'm a big believer in like the barbell strategy when it comes to nicotine consumption. It's like the, the cleanest tobacco free products most of the time, then every once in a while, once a quarter. The pure tobacco. The one that you don't want to be doing daily.

Yeah.

But it's good. Should we go to another post?

Yeah.

Let's talk about Davos.

Let's talk about Davos. We turned it down this year. Yeah. Many.

But I think that, I think that next year we could make Davos cool again. I think that we have what it takes.

It's too iconic.

Yeah.

It's too charged. It's a great opportunity.

Yeah. So let's go to Wasteland Capital. He says Davos is absolutely dead this year. No one gives an F. I'm not swearing anymore. We got some feedback from a very important listener that this needs to be family friendly. You need to be able to listen to technology brothers with your kids in the car. This is a pronatalism podcast and so the kids must be able to listen to the hot takes. Yeah, supposedly.

Imagine. Yeah. Like, imagine if you listen to 10 hours a week of this show with your kids, you know, in the car, in the kitchen, you know, around the house. They will be trained on some of the hottest takes takes in tech from such a young age that they will be earning potentially more money than you just from X payouts by the time they're 10 years old. You know, give them an iPad. There's only one app on it.

Yeah.

Connect a stripe account to their ex and they will be, you know, putting bread.

But they shouldn't need to develop a potty mouth for that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Supposedly luxury call group. I immediately go into something when sick ruder. But it's not a bad word and it's a real thing and I think, you know, we, we got to talk about it here. So supposedly luxury call girl business. Promoting cigars.

Promoting cigars.

Cursing Cohiba cigars.

Talking about call call girls. But we promise we never swear because he was cigars.

Those are age gated. You got to be 21 plus to buy tobacco products in America. Anyone can start swearing, but not if you listen to the show. Yeah, clean it up out there. Swearing is that timeline. Swearing is out. It's dead. We even killed it Rip. The last episode was the date that it died. Supposedly the electroid cargo business is down 60% on last year vibes. Similar to the last meeting of the Soviets in 1999 and 1991. German Chancellor Olaf Schultz addresses a half empty congress hall at the World Economic 20 World Economic Forum 25 in Davos. My colleague even managed to secure a seat in the front row.

Kind of threw his colleague under the bus there. His colleague wasn't already going to be in the, you know, front row. Oh that.

Or.

Or my colleagues and my colleagues colleague.

Was placed dumb enough to go to Dallas.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah. What? That's. That's.

I think we got to take it over. I think we had to go and just make it barn burner speech.

Yeah, we have actually a made. We're speaking on the main stage of a major technology conference.

I mean Davos is the next one and then Sun Valley like. Yeah, yeah. We got to manifest this. So if your dad runs Davos, tell them to hire us or if you're, you know, who's the guy behind it? Is it Olaf Schultz? If you're listening, give us a call.

Yeah, we need to do a hot packed takeover of the World Economic Forum.

Yeah. Let's go to Flo Crevel. Cruveo. I don't know how to pronounce that. Altimore says I wouldn't be surprised if law firms had started seeing the impact of AI on Their bottom lines, especially those serving startups. I probably send 40% of the tasks I used to send to our lawyers to Claude now and I. And only escalate the most important matters. I have no idea. We should talk to a lawyer and see if this is true.

I think part of it is like law firms are cyclical but there's such a ridiculous number of new company formation right now.

Sure.

And. And massive investment.

Yep.

That they're probably not seeing it yet. Right.

Yep.

Because a lot of these law firms too have these big staffing issues where.

Yeah.

In 2023 they were like letting go, you know, cutting 10%. 10%. They had way too many people.

Yep.

And then this last year presumably like they've had the opposite problem of being understaffed. So also, I don't know.

I. I don't know that there's that many big law firms that cater to startups specifically. It's usually like they have a huge corporate practice and then they have their startup arm vision on the side like their division and sometimes it can be very illustrious and very cool and it can be a profit center if they're taking equity and warrants stuff. But in general it seems like. I don't think any of them are fully pegged to start off. Yeah.

And the interesting thing is this. I'm sure this will like I'm waiting for somebody like I haven't seen a rapper that is saying we are this. We are a consumer product specifically to generate like corporate legal docs. I'm sure there's a bunch out there. Yeah.

Harvey sells into law firms. They sell so value capture probably on the law firms.

Yeah. So you can't think of the, the, the consumer version of Harvey and so it's like SMB version but they're. I'm sure they're out there.

Yeah. There, there is a world where the law firm's getting 40% less inbound inquiries. But of the 60% that they're still getting those are higher margin now because they're able to leverage AI like.

Yeah.

And so that, that balance of where the value accrues is still.

And there's. There was always. The YCS had a bunch of different. You know they have financing docs on their website that I'm sure they have have other docs. And, and there's always been this templates available but now it's just, it feels different when you totally generate it. Totally.

I'm, I'm, I'm itching for another Promoted post. I see you got some good stuff.

There let's we got a promoted post.

Out with this one because it's great.

Our friends at RM Sotheby's say for sale 2006 Mercedes Benz SLR McLaren Edition. This thing the Golden Age AMG. Yeah, this thing just looks incredible. The, the just like the entire front of this car is just so.

Yeah.

Iconic. And it's funny because these cars, these cars, they, they pop. They do fly under the radar.

Yep.

Still. And so it's kind of a cool car for like a first date where you don't want your date to know that you're just, just yeah. You know, a, a Deca millionaire and you just want to, you want them to be like, oh, this is the guy.

Let's take the bat.

He just, yeah, he's super nice guy. Like drives an old Mercedes but like you know, seems to have a good job, good head on his shoulders. Second date Aventador svj. If it goes first one goes well bring out the svj. But great first date car right here.

Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. Didn't do well, I think because isn't it, isn't it an automatic? I'm pretty sure there like the purest, the purist. So it didn't pop like the Carrera gt. I think it came out around the same time. And the Carrera GT and the, and, and the F40 both went wild. But this one kind of got left behind.

I mean Mercedes, they have the, I.

Mean now the AMG one's going to be a big one. But yeah, they never, they never really had the halo.

It will never be, it will never be that, that culturally impactful because they're not making enough of them. H. Like I think, I think to have like for Mercedes to be relevant in the sports car market.

Totally. Yeah. They need, they need a 911.

Yeah. And the G. And the G2 is not. Don't do it. No, really, that like it, it costs. I, I would. When I was like getting my last car, I seriously considered the, the gt. Yeah. I, they denied my request for metallic brown at the factory in Germany. I like really wanted metallic brown. Black wheels, red, red calipers. And they don't do any custom colors.

Interesting.

Even though I had a buying history with the dealership, they were just like, we're not doing colors. And I was like, okay, I'm going to get a turbo. Yeah.

Interesting. Well, we have a great post to end on. Michael says I'd rather get bucket pulled on the pod than get into YC and I really want to get into YC Well, Michael, we got some good news for you. You didn't even get bucket pulled. It's a certified banger.

Certified banger printed on 8 and a half. Quiet Canadian himself.

8 and a half by 11 inch paper for you. You're officially on the show. You're getting the follow back from the official TB account. Thank you for writing in. And a fantastic profile picture from Office Space Face. Classic movie. Good reference.

Anyway, the only word of advice, Michael, use your full name, use a real picture, build the brand or if you're.

Going to go full and on, just make it Quiet Canadian up top, quiet Canadian below. That's just easy.

All or nothing.

Yeah. And we'll. And we should dictate the aesthetics of.

X. I don't like the feeling of knowing someone's first name but not their last name.

I'd rather just have it one foot in, one foot out. Are you in a non or not? Yeah, pick a side.

Because if I go on the link, I go to LinkedIn right now I'm like, this guy wants to get into yc. Yep. Maybe he's a fit for PMF or die. Yep. Oh, I'm gonna just search Michael. I feel like there's. It's a few other people up there named Michael. But thanks for coming.

Thanks for, yeah, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for watching and please go and leave us 5 star reviews and don't forget to put a really long ad read.

If you, if you put a review for the show and don't include an ad, we're going to report it to.

Oh, and there's a new. For the people that made it this far, there's a new challenge for you. We're thinking about retooling the reply Guy of the week program to be the sales development reply guy of the week award. And in order to win the SDR of the week award in your reply, we're going to encourage you to sell some ad space.

Yeah.

So you know, whatever you think. If you just like the post, oh, this is good. Or you have something else to chime in with. Fortunately, X has no limit on characters now, so you can say what you want. You know, we'll laugh, we'll like it. We might retweet it. If it's good stuff, good reply. But then tab, tab, tab. Enter, enter, enter. Boom. This reply is brought to you by my company. We are the best AI SDR company Here, go here. Throw the link in there, there. Do whatever you want. Go wild with it.

Go wild. Ads everywhere.

Yes, ads everywhere. So give it a try.

Run too many ads.

We look forward to seeing you on the timeline. Have a great day.

Have a good evening.

The end.