DJI Suspicions, Stargate Turmoil, OpenAI Operator, F40 for the Mind

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Today, we are breaking down the history and controversy surrounding dji, the drone maker. You're probably familiar with these guys and looking. Not good. We don't like.

And looking to create some new controversies.

Create some new controversies.

Amp up the. The volume around it.

Yeah, exactly. The reason we're doing this is because a. It's a super fascinating story. It hasn't been told anywhere. Like, we couldn't find. When we were doing the research for this, we couldn't find the like, oh, there's a definitive podcast. Oh, somebody did a document documentary about them. Like there's very few articles.

There's a. There's.

Yeah.

The primary video sources on it are all AI generated. Yeah, just slop content.

It's really, really weird.

Didn't even seem like it was the, the audio was in English, but it. What didn't seemingly wasn't generated by somebody who spoke native English because they were weird accents with the audio.

Yeah, it's very, very odd. And then of course there's like a lot of drone operator content, like people reviewing the ins and outs of like the Inspire 3, how it compares and like. But that's not relevant to this story.

And Frank Wang, the founder, like hates journalists very rarely. Yeah.

I don't know put it that way. I think he just knows that if he.

There was a know he. He's. He's had some. He's had some lines where he's like, I won't. He doesn't want to talk to. So hating journalists is different. But doesn't want to talk to the press.

Yeah.

Has gone years without doing interviews at different points.

Well, at one point we'll get to this. Early in the story, it's all just like hero stuff. Like, oh, it was used to save some. Someone who was trapped in the cave or tapped on top of the mountain. And now it's like. Yeah, it's being used every nor front. Yeah, yeah. It's used in every battle zone and. Or battlefield. So I, I think we should kick it off with the. The Ryan mack article from 2015.

Yeah. And this.

Or you want to get some background first?

We should do some background.

Okay, let's do that and then let's go into the.

Yeah.

The Mac piece. So. Yeah. Frank Wang, born Wang Tao, is born in Hangzhou, Xijiang Province, China. From an early age, he shows a keen fascination with flight and aircraft and.

And one thing I highly doubt, he was given the name Frank Wang until he was probably in his teenager at whatever Point he started interacting with the English world.

Yeah.

Because he would have just gone by Wang Tao.

Yeah.

Entire life. So at this point in time, his. Let's be very clear, his name is Wang Tao. He was born in Hangzhou. And anyways.

I mean, everything about this feels like somebody who would, you know, be working for Nat Friedman or get a Teal fellowship, like, even though he's on kind of the near peer competitor team. Uh, and so, you know, we're, we're going to figure out how to, how to build our own DJI here in America, hopefully with some cracked Nat Friedman or Teal Disciple. Yeah, he, he does just seem like, like a hacker kid who's just interested.

And there's two, there's two things that happen and there's a different world where.

Where like we would be like promoting this guy and be like, you got to hire this dude, you got to fund his company because like, he's, he's clearly a genuine hacker. He goes to Hong Kong University of Science.

Well, before that there's two, there's two things that happen in early life. He gets this book, I forget what it's called, but it's a story about this helicopter adventure and it's all about flight and just humming around. So this was like, you know, before he was 10 years old. This was like an early obsession. And then as a teenager he gets an RC helicopter. Do you remember these things? They were. Yeah, I remember them.

They were really reliable, hard to fly.

They crashed all the time. They were super fragile. And so he had some moment where he did well in, you know, some exam. And his parents got in the RC helicopter. He crashed it the first day and then had to wait three months to actually get the, the parts to be able to get it back up in the air.

That's amazing. I think the very first prototype that DJI built as a company was a, was a single. What do they, what do they call it, like single rotor or just like a helicopter base?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the other, the other thing. That's crazy. Before he ends up going to university, he, his parents like had him living. He didn't live with his parents. He was like raised by family members. His parents were originally one was like a teacher and then became a small business owner. His dad was an engineer. And so he, he basically, you know, had, I'm sure he had some trauma associated with, with, with that just being a young children child away from your parents.

Adjust the mic a little bit. So he goes to Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Studies Electronic electrical engineering, becomes involved in robot and stands out for his interest in flight control systems for drones.

He also wanted to go to MIT or Harvard. Didn't get in.

Yeah.

And so there is another path where totally becomes basically an American.

Yeah. Just gets super America pilled.

Yeah. Just like, you know, so we lost a good one. We lost a good one here.

Yeah. What's interesting is I don't know if you remember, it might have been a little bit, this is a little bit earlier, but in like 2010 there was there started being those like viral videos of like Boston Dynamics. But there were also a set of viral videos from MIT's Media Lab and from MIT about drone swarm coordination. You see these really cool demos. It was basically a precursor to those like those like fireworks shows, those live shows that we're seeing. But the tech just like never got transferred for some reason like MIT guys were doing this and then they just didn't build the startup because I think we'll get into why, because maybe there was a zero cost competitor that was really cheap and just crushing them at all times. So really weird market dynamic. But yeah, this was like 2003 to 2010 I think was when a lot of the foundational kind of algorithms were written for flight control systems. And really the discovery that when you put four rotors on a helicopter essentially instead of just one, it becomes way easier to calculate how to balance the craft. And so when he's at hkust, so the Hong Kong University of Science Technology, he joins this team and participates in the Abu Robocon competition and he wins third prize among teams across Asia. He gets $18,000 in Hong Kong dollars, which is about US$2,300 to develop drone technology. This funding along with his growing reputation encourage him to pursue drone research more seriously. So he founds DJI in 2006 with the support from his mentor, Professor Li Zhijiang and a family friend, Ludi Frank Wang formally founds DJI Dajiang Innovations in Shenzhen. Early operations involved selling flight control components in Shenzhen.

I think most of our listeners will know but this is like the industrial technological capital of China. So it's not the center of like business but it's the center of manufacturing scale manufacturing, consumer hardware.

Yep.

Et cetera.

And I think, I think the like everyone knows like oh iPhones are made there, they have Foxconn, Foxconn employees, like millions of people as this massive company. But the really important thing about Shenzhen is that in America it's like if I need aluminum, I go to the aluminum supplier and they're in Idaho and they ship it to me. And then if I need a little motor or a printed circuit board, it all comes from all over the place. In Shenzhen, it's like you walk across the street and there's a guy that can do this type of machining, and then you walk down the street and there's a motor company and then there's a battery company. And so everything happens really, really close. There's a ton of things. And it seems like he was able to just kind of go to, like, the Silicon Valley of manufacturing. And it's much like when you're in Mountain View doing YC and oh, company's failing. But they have a good iOS engineer. You just pull them onto your team. It's the same thing. Like, he started with just selling flight control components for drones. He wasn't even selling drones. He's just like hustling.

And we'll get into this later. But there was his biggest competitor in the US failed. Not because of software. I don't actually know if they're failed. We should look it up.

But which one do you think?

3D Robotics. Oh, yeah, it's like 175 million. And then they eventually just conceded on the actual hardware front and we're just building software for dji.

Yeah. They wind up pivoting to industrial, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. So one thing that is fascinating here is Frank ends up, over time, really churning through employees. A lot of people are leaving within a year just frustrated with him. But his mentor, who is his professor at school. Li. Yes. And a family friend, Ludi, who I believe was. Was one of the first investors. They end up forming this inner circle and both the professor and the family friend become billionaires off of dji. Yeah. So. And. And Lee Xijiang ends up becoming chairman or is. Has, like, interesting. Has a significant board role.

Yeah. And so, I mean, in the early days, 2008, I mean, 2008 was still. Wait, Obama just got elected. And so this was like, peak, like globalism. The Internet will turn China into a democracy. Yeah, everyone, we're all friends and, you know, China's joining the World Trade Organization. And so there's really nothing but positive news. And it's just like, oh, cool. Like there's a new awesome company doing cool tech stuff. It doesn't matter where they are. Of course they're there because, like, yeah, China's good at manufacturing, we're good at other stuff. It's fine, we'll trade. And. And so all the, all the initial stories are just about like genuinely great impacts of this stuff. Like during the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. DJI drones contribute to the relief efforts by capturing aerial images, assisting rescue and recovery teams. And we kind of saw that recently with the LA fires, where people were putting up drones sometimes and crashing into planes. That was really bad. But, but some of the, some of the aerial photography is genuinely very helpful to understand where the fire is spreading. And I'm sure, like now 100 times.

Cheaper than flying a helicopter. Helicopter, for sure, it's safer.

And so the. The company was still pretty small and largely reliant on Wang's determination and external funding. In 2010, they started expanding. So he hires his high school friend Swift Zhao to head DJI's marketing efforts, and then they pivot to cater more actively to the growing community of drone hobbyists around the world, preparing the ground for broader consumer adoption.

Yeah, so early on, some of their first products were some of the best in market, but still clunky. Like now you can buy a dji, get it, have it in the air, like probably within 20 minutes if you were speed running it. Oh, yeah, very simple to set up. It even integrates with your iPhone, the native iOS, Apple. But early on it was still. There were these hobbyists, people that were just obsessed, you know, with flight, but doing it in a, in, in a, in a. More, you know, just not, not doing planes.

Yeah, the big, the big tipping point for the consumer moment, I think, was when the camera feed became live, so you could see where you're going from the drone's POV.

Yeah.

And that actually happened through this integration with GoPro, where you used to have to. You used to have to. You'd buy the drone and it would give you the motors and the batteries and a controller that can fly it, but you would have no idea where. You wouldn't be able to see the drone if it got out of your line of sight. Basically, it was very, very. Yeah, you could crash.

And so if there's no camera on the drone too, then you're just sending it around.

Exactly. What's the point?

Kind of hanging out, flying.

And so, and so people figured out that they could, that they could attach a GoPro to it and then record and then when it got back, they could unload that footage. And then eventually people figured out, like the hackers figured out how to live stream footage from the GoPro. But then I think it was the DJI Phantom 3 had a GoPro integration that would let you do that. And then the Phantom four had.

Yeah, I remember, I Remember, even on the. As people started hacking these and adding functionality to them that. That DJI would eventually do themselves. I remember at this time being into surfing and snowboarding, skiing, things like that. People would. That community really picked it up because it was like, hey, we can get. Before, if you wanted to get capture a big wave, you had to have a helicopter in the sky. And what surfer can afford except the top? Like, whatever. 1.01%.

Yeah. All my extreme sports buddies were super into this.

Yeah.

Just.

It blew up overnight. And so that was the first that was kind of transitioning from the hobbyists, like, people that just wanted to fly to people that were using the.

And then the POV GoPro videos were going viral too, because this is the time when YouTube's growing really fast. And, you know, any backcountry skier would just mount a GoPro.

What year. What year did GoPro go public?

I feel like.

Ben, could you look up.

Can you perplexity that? Thank you. They went. They went public in 2014. Do you know how much GoPro is worth today?

Like a couple hundred.

150 million.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rough. Yeah, rough. And I. And there's a bunch of reasons for that. Right. Like, it just got to the point where people are like, okay, my iPhone's pretty durable.

Yep.

It's 80% as good.

Yep. And DJI has a computer.

Have it in my pocket.

DJI has. Yeah, yeah, it's. You will get into this, but DJI has a competitor to every single DJI product. But. But GoPro does not. DJI has a competitor to every Single GoPro product, but not reversed.

And there's been talk about later. DJI sells everything it costs.

That's wild. So we should talk a little bit about the 2011 dust up in DJI America. This is pretty interesting.

Yeah. So Wang needs. Wang needs an America guy. Right. He knows that America, by this point, the hobbyists have started adopting it. He sees the early signs of consumer adoption. He's like, I need. I need Mr. America. Of course, he finds a guy who was a former reality TV contestant. And so you meet Wang, meets this guy at a trade show, immediately oppressed with. With Colin salesmanship, and they decide to partner to form DGI North America. And this, like, sub is focused on the US and just broadly drone sales outside of. Outside of China.

Yeah. The reality is that you show to, like, actual power pipeline is maybe wildly underrated rated.

Yeah.

It was always seen as, like, very low status to go on reality tv, but Trump Chris Williamson was the reality.

Well, I'VE talked about this with, with the players and people that want to join PMF or die. I'm like, look this, look at it as an opportunity to not just build your company, but build your brand. Like you can accelerate you to that.

Yep.

Whatever. 5000x followers that can change your life even if your company doesn't work.

Yep. And so they, they build this subsidiary. But very quickly there's this, there's this fight between. And we'll get into this more when we dig into the next article around control over the entity. Because of course, DJI North America is owned by dji, which is a Chinese company, which is, you know. Yeah, just.

Yeah.

So it says it's not entirely controlled by the CCP at this point. It's like, it's very hard to get capital outflows from the, from Chinese investments. And so there's a lot of like, tricky.

Yeah. So basically. So I'm going to read a few paragraphs here. So by late 2012, DJI had put all the pieces together for a complete drone package, software, propellers, frame, gimbal and remote control. The company unveiled The Phantom in January 2013, the first ready to fly, preassembled quadcopter that could be up in the air within an hour of its unboxing and wouldn't break apart with its first crash. That's kind of like referencing Wang's early helicopter that. The RC helicopter that crashed. Its simplicity and ease of use unlock the market beyond obsessed enthusiasts. And I remember around this time kids started getting them for Christmas. Oh, yeah, like that. Yet things had already started falling apart between Wang and Colin Gwynn, the head of North America. DJI's founder, didn't like that Gwen was taking credit for the development of the Phantom and was calling himself CI of DGI Innovations, a title that still stands on his LinkedIn page. Savage.

I mean, it is so American to. For the Chinese company to come in and be like, we need you to be the face of this company. And then immediately the American is just like, I'm the man. I, I'm CEO. I'm a CEO. Let me take all the credit.

Horses also say that Gwen would often rush into setting up partnership agreements, particularly one with action camera maker GoPro, which would have been the exclusive camera provider for DJI's drones. So it sounds like, who knows? But Gwen is just running around just like doing deals.

Yeah.

Being loud. And that doesn't really align with that much. So Wang got cold feet in the GoPro deal and went against Gwen's advice. Subsequently, angering GoPro, which is now. This was written in 2015, is now rumored to be developing its own drone. So, yeah, so 2015 was really like the turning point.

And I think that's what we should.

Wait, but we should cover because in 2013. Yeah, this is important. By May 2013, DJI attempted to buy out Gwynne's stake in DJI North America, offering DGI Global shares that would have given the American a paltry 0.3% stake in the Chinese company. Gwyn was not happy with this. Points out that his office's work in North America led to 30% of Phantoms being sold in the US so it was a super, you know, key market.

Yeah.

DGI didn't leave room for negotiation. They locked out all of DGI North American employees out of their emails, redirected all customer payments to China headquarters. By New Year's Eve, the employees had been fired and arrangements were being made to liquidate the Austin Office's equipment. And DJI still ended that year with 130 in top line revenue. So they get into a lawsuit.

And.

This is all around the time that Sequoia is leading. It's funny because. So the Sequoia deal happened in mid-2014 and they invested 30 million at a 1.6 million.

Yeah, 3.

So it's like I don't even understand this investment, to be honest, because from that point, I mean, I guess fantastic.

Investment went to 100 billion. Right. Isn't DJI worth like 100 billion or something now?

I don't know. I don't actually know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's still privately held.

Yeah, privately held.

Okay. Ben, can you look up their, their current valuation?

Valuation.

And anyways, Gwen. So. So they get in a lawsuit.

Yeah.

Apparent. They settle. Nobody knows the exact, nobody knows the exact price at this point. But. But you know, people have said it's somewhere around 10 million bucks. So. So Gwen kind of got, kind of got screwed after.

Yeah.

And even a lot of the American employees did.

Yeah, yeah. Even the point three would have been, I mean, if I'm right about the 100 billion mark would have been 300 mil.

Yeah. But you could tell from some of the ways that Wang would talk about Gwen, he never really respected him.

Y.

You just would say like, oh yeah. At times Colin would say something that inspired me, which just like can imagine the American being like, dude, this is going to be huge. And Wang's like, nice. Yeah, pat on the back type thing.

Yeah. DJI market, that was in 2018. And their series D. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Their last private valuation is like 15, so. Yeah. Okay. Sequoia has it on paper some. Somewhere around a 10x.

Yeah.

They've turned 30 into 300ish million.

Yep.

But now it's also locked in China.

Yeah. With their investment vehicle. But yeah, I mean, like the news and just, just everything about DJI starts ramping up from 2014, 2015, because Sequoia does the deal, then Excel comes in and leads and an even crazier round, I guess, in terms of ownership, like, being very low. They raised 75 million from Excel and it valued the company at 8 billion, so that's less than 1% sold. And that valued the company. They're raising a new round of 10 billion and Wang owns about 45%, so it'll be worth four and a half billion.

Yeah. And that's where it starts to get into. Clearly, they had. They were in Shenzhen. I'm sure they got amazing terms early on. But it starts. The narrative starts to get a little bit confusing because they also. Wang also talks about how they intentionally would sell their product at cost.

Yeah.

They just were looking to recoup the sort of costs. The hardware costs.

Yep.

And so it's sort of unclear how they're scaling this, because the thing about, the thing about selling consumer products like this, if you're scared, if they're like 10xing, like they're not 10xing every year, but they went in a very short timeline from no revenue to $1 billion plus revenue a year. So to actually achieve that scale, you have to be buying inventory out, you know, forecasting inventory. You've got to be buying, you know, with that kind of growth rate. Very hard to fully bootstrap it without huge access to capital. Because you're buying your Q4 holiday inventory in Q2.

Exactly.

And where's that money coming from if you're selling the product at cost? Right.

It's really.

So there's a bunch of. This article that we're referencing is written by Forbes and it was written by a guy named Ryan Mac, who's not very well liked in the Valley, and he was also accompanied by someone named Hung Shao, which we don't have backstory on. But. So anyways, this piece very much felt like a. Like a puff piece. Right. Where.

I mean, I think. I think no one was thinking about DJI in any sort of negative sense. It's like, it's a. It's a really cool tech company that's building hobbyist drones for surfers. And you might love everyone Loves it. It's amazing. It feels magical when you drive, when you fly them around. And then also they just, they just did back to back insane up rounds by the two, two of the top venture firms.

Yeah.

Sequoia and then Excel. And so you're just like. But all the, all the green lights are flashing.

Sequoia, Excel rounds. The interesting thing is they were just tiny checks. Right? Like these are.

Yeah. Tiny ownership. It wasn't normal, like overtaking 20%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're, they're saying, yes, we want American investors in, because they could have accessed that capital China, anywhere else. Yes, we want American investors in. No, we're not going to give you any amount of ownership that would allow you to have any meaningful say or anything over the company.

Yeah.

And so at this time, there's also an American upstart that we should talk about.

Let's start with the greatest threat to Wang's dominance of the consumer drone market emanates from the sun drenched 4th story office patio across the bay from Silicon Valley in Berkeley, where engineers for 3D Robotics spent dozens of hours testing the latest code tweaks in their Phantom killer. The solo unveiled in April. The black drone whirrs and buzzes around the roof with the sound of a thousand angry bees. As CEO 3. As 3D Robotics CEO Chris Anderson explains how his company is the Android DJI's Apple. Admiring his quadcopter's elegance and simplicity, which took cues from the Phantom, the affable. Anderson explains that it is the software, not the hardware, that is the key, of course, because it's basically impossible to build a competitor to DJI in America, just through the American supply chain. Even if you assemble it here, your motors, your batteries, everything's going to get in China. So they have to make the software argument. Unlike DJI's operating system, which is closed to developers, 3D Robotics made its OS open source to attract interest of programmers and other companies such as dozens of Chinese copycats, undercutting DJI's margins with even cheaper drones. If everyone is using our software, says 3D Robotics CEO, then we, not DJI, control the market. DJI started as a company back in the days when it was just a hobby for me. And to their credit, they accelerated brilliantly. Right now we're playing on their home field, so we're playing catch up. There were a couple companies that tried to make the software differentiation. Skydio. When they came out, do you remember their drone? It did have better software for like one cycle where you could, you could get On a bike, put it up in the air, drag a little circle around yourself and say follow me. And it would follow you perfectly. Like it would avoid trees and still follow you. And it would go under power lines and around and you could, you could ride your bike from, from home to work. And I had a buddy Kyle who worked there at the time and it was like the most incredible demo. Casey Neistat was pushing it, but it was like three times the cost of DJI Drone. And then the next revision DJI was like, yeah, we can kind of do the same thing.

Y. Yeah. And so that is one of the big problems with competing with DGI is from the beginning and from our analysis today, they're still selling. When you look at the total cost to deliver these products, they're selling them at less than it costs to produce them. Right. Because they were oriented around how do we recoup our costs on the hardware, but the costs of everything else. Right. Like customer support, sales, all these things. Like, it's very unclear how they were able to finance this. And if you're, if you're coming in even 3D robotics by I think 2020 had raised like $175 million. How do you compete with a company if your product is three times more expensive and not as good? It's just not.

And so I think just to take the other side of that, so like the, the tinfoil hat explanation is like they are deliberately undercutting costs to, you know, put effectively like spy drones all over America, right? Yeah, that's like the most extreme representation of that. Of that.

Or, or alternatively they like the most extreme is to say they are a consumer, they are a Chinese military contractor disguised as a consumer tech company and they could have tons of non dilutive funding from the government. That's covering losses, that's covering the losses that are happening.

Yeah, and we're not even seeing that. I think that's very reasonable. To take the other side of that, I would say that the idea of making no profit for decades is an effective business strategy. We've seen it at Amazon, we've seen it at Tesla. Tesla didn't make operating profits for a very long time. And I would not say that Tesla is certainly, you know, Tesla could be a company that manufactures tanks one day if we get into that type of conflict. Teslas are popular in China. In fact, you can't drive a Tesla next to the Forbidden City because Tesla's have cameras on them and they don't want Tesla sending that footage back. So just like we should in theory stop DJI drones from flying around like the White House and stuff, which they.

Just lifted frictions and said you can fly them anywhere. Which is the most insane. Yeah, to me. So, so yeah, we'll talk about that in a bit.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's funny because.

But my point is that there is, there is a rational, like it's just purely economic, non geopolitical explanation for selling a product at cost or below cost for a long time while you capture a market. And if you. And let's say the DJI was, was just like an American company, it would still be rational to say let's just hoover up all the capital we can sell below cost, get 70%, 77% of the drone market, keep everyone out, just keep killing startups, keep killing startups until we just are so dominant that no one can, can possibly catch up and then we can raise our prices.

None of that, none of that information is available. We only know that they raised 30 million from Sequoia and they raised 75 from Excel. Those, both those firms were. There's very possible that neither of them even have information rights.

True.

Like it's a Chinese company, it's a Chinese company. They have very, very little ownership. Yeah, they have less ownership than his inner circle who has 10 here, 15 there, et cetera.

Yeah. So, and so let's continue with 3D Robotics to get into this competitive dynamics. 3D Robotics, which has funding from the likes of Qualcomm and Sandisk, is well into its game of catch up and has moved most of its manufacturing capacity from Tijuana, Mexico to Shenzhen. Gwyn, who is the company's chief revenue officer. So this is Gwyn's company after. So Gwyn was the guy who was at DJI North America gets in the fight with DJI splits. He joins 3D Robotics and Chris Anderson to kind of like fight back and build. I mean we were saying, why is there no DJI American DJI? Like this was the attempt in 2015 and it was certainly a rough go competing with DJI. So Gwyn is there, he's the revenue officer and he's exploring the same retail channels he built up with DJI. And he develops a partnership to put GoPros on 3D robotics drones. Wang dismisses their chances, sounding something like the big kid on the kindergarten playground. It's easier for them to fail, he says. They have money, but I have even more money and I am bigger and have more people. When the market was small, they were small and I was small too. And I Beat them.

Yeah, he's got some crazy. He's got some. So. So Wang is like, I get why.

This guy doesn't do media anymore.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's not very well media trained. He also h. He also went on record around that time and goes, china has money, but its products are terrible, its service is terrible and you have to pay a hefty price for anything that's good. And it can't be understated that that DJI is the first consumer, global consumer tech powerhouse to truly come out of China. Right. It's the only brand other than TikTok, which arguably was like, you know, not even a native Chinese company to, to really get win over the hearts and minds of consumers globally and get this level of market share.

Do you remember the hoverboard craze around this time 2015? So it was like this, this like flat kind of skateboard with two wheels on either side and you'd stand on it and it would balance automatically and so it wouldn't work out.

Hoverboard, those were like ripsticks or. No. Oh, oh, this is the thing. Yeah.

So this was the fascinating thing was that these products just were just birthed from Shenzhen White label. And so there was no main brand. Like maybe Ripstick was the main brand. No, no, no. Swagway was one of them.

You're thinking of the one wheel type thing.

No, no, no, it has two wheels. I'll pull up a picture, but people would just call it a hoverboard and it had two wheels. You'd put your feet on it and the wheels would be to the left and the right of your, of your feet and you would just kind of balance on it. So it was this. Do you remember this thing? Oh yeah, yeah. No one remembers.

Came out of this. Just came out of nowhere and, and, and they try to pull up a big picture and show the camera like cuz like I, I remember like soldier. Like it would be like rappers would just.

Yeah.

Ride them around everywhere.

So this one's Gotrax, which is a brand. It was like the classic like get your teenager this for Christmas and they'll ride it around a little bit. It didn't really work on like city streets or anything. It only worked on like polished concrete floors. People would ride them around in like offices. I think it was probably featured on Silicon Valley at some point. It's very like.

And I think drones were drones. Like Wang faced a ton of competition internally in China. Everybody was seeing how much revenue is doing because the thing About Shenzhen is people on the ground quickly understand a lot of factories can do the same thing.

Yep.

If you see a factory that's just got thousands and thousands of employees and is just buzzing, you're the factory across the street and you're like, well, we should get into this business too. So they all. It's highly, highly competitive. People copy each other.

Yeah.

There's tons of corporate espionage. Wang deals with this a lot. He even calls Shenzhen a dog eat dog society, which his words, not ours.

What.

Is not. He's not calling it.

Yeah. It's not rough. Rough and tumble over there.

Yeah. He's just saying it's a little rough and tumble.

Yeah.

He says that the boutiqueness of the market always gets driven out, so. Oh, no, that's a gardener. Analyst, actually.

Okay.

Okay. And so, yeah, I think as opposed to these hoverboards, drones have the software, hardware, the stack complexity, the cost that make it not the easiest product to. If DJI is selling a drone for $700 and they're not even making money on it.

Yeah.

Why enter that market if it's. You also have to deliver all the software and this consumer experience and.

Yeah. I mean, DJI built a good brand in America.

Yeah.

And. And then, and then super great integration I want to go through.

This guy is like, posts. This guy's like founder mode to a T. Doesn't want to share the skies with others. Intent on maintaining DJI's lead as drones expand into commercial applications, construction, mapping. And he's. He's saying, you can't be satisfied with the present. There was a good story. I thought this was funny. At one of the phantom launches, there was this big. They had this huge keynote and he. No. Showed the keynote himself as the CEO.

Why?

Because he wasn't fully satisfied with the product. He was just like, I'm not going to go, wow. He didn't want to associate. He was like, it's my company, I didn't want to associate.

And this is the thing I keep coming. It's like, you know, requires a little bit of intellectual flexibility because obviously, like this is now like a rival military company. So. But like, I feel like I would really like this guy if I was on his team.

Yeah.

And I would just be like, this is, this is.

Well, I don't know if you would like him, but you'd respect him.

Totally.

He clearly never cared about being liked. Right? Yeah, he would, you know, talk poorly about.

Yeah. But I would be impressed by him and I'd be like, oh, yeah, like, okay. This guy's like, like clearly got some really insane entrepreneurial and technical talent that's like super valuable and worth. Yeah.

Like, you know, clearly studied, you know, electrical engineering and mechanical engineering in school robotics. But then like clearly just kept studying it and being that obsessed with product, never resting on, oh, the Phantom is like the best drone in the market. It's like cool. We have to make.

Yeah.

Phantom 2 even better.

And so, I mean, yeah, DJI goes in the tear, launches more and more products. I want to go through some of the timeline on X, formerly Twitter at this time. So in 2020, Flo Crevelho, who's been on the show before, says, what's DJI's moat? And this is an interesting question because I think there's actually two different questions around the moat. It's what is their moat in China and then what is their moat in America? Because they are somewhat different. And I think, I think it definitely comes down to software integration and now integration between the different hardware platforms because there are actually unique ports and integration points between. You can get a dji. But I think it's actually into this.

I think it's actually more simple than that.

Sure.

DJI has basically owned Shenzhen, which is the place to manufacture these products. They also have continuously been so focused on. On selling them for the absolute bare minimum.

Yep.

That and they have the most scale that nobody can compete, truly compete on cost.

Yeah.

If they're doing billions of dollars a year in revenue and you want to. If you're in Shenzhen, let's say you like have factories in Shenzhen. Okay, well, you're not going to do the volume from day one. You're not going to be able to access the capital. You're not going to be able to. Nobody's going to want to fund the number 10 player to lose money for five years. And so having that almost like Monopoly, the moat in many ways is we are.

Yeah.

You can't build these products. Even 3D Robotics is trying to make. Imagine this, the sabotage. So one thing, they do this throughout the entire kind of history of the company. They're super aggressive on any new drone entrant. They'll flood the forums with comments. This sucks. This sucks. One of the Wired here in America, there was a guy who had a hobbyist drone for him. He was the editor of Wired and he was, I believe was involved with, with 3D robotics. I can't remember. But he, he realized that there was hundreds of users that had the same IP address and Shenzhen that were all commenting like really negative I bought this and they would do it, they would do it on YouTube, they do it on the forums. And so, like, they are aggressively making it impossible to compete on price. They're, they're so focused on innovation too, that it's impossible to compete on the product layer. And so in my view, it's less about looking at it as like, what stops, like, what stops other people from coming in is like, well, we can't burn. If we want to compete with DJI, we have to burn $200 million in the next few years. Just get, I mean, and just to get any market share and then the product has to be better so that consumers pick us.

Yeah, I was talking to some of our buddies about this, how one of my friends, Ryan Lackey, was saying that right now he's been actively buying this specific type of DJI drone that has this certain, like, lidar sensor or something on it because it's basically a $5,000 sensor if you just bought it like by itself. But they sell the drone for like three grand or something. And so he's like, it's just the best way to get this particular sensor. And then I rip out everything else to like kind of de chinafy it and get all the code out and then I run like open source software on it. But he was like, it's like, everyone should go and buy one. Like, it's the best hardware deal in the world right now. And so, yeah, it's, it's not just that they're the lowest cost, that they're actually providing like an Apple like experience, but then also driving the cost down so the Chinese competitors can't just spring up and turn it into like the hoverboard market. And a lot of that has to do with like the hoverboard, like good software. It can only do so much. Like, it's never going to get you.

To like, forward, backwards.

Forward, backwards, Exactly. It's never going to be like, oh, now with this software, like, you can go on sand. Like, no, that's not going to happen. Whereas like, really good software with a drone means like, like, yeah, it's not going to crash in the tree because it's going to detect the tree and not let you crash into it. That's stable. Yeah, it's more stable and the video is better and it records better and, oh, it doesn't lose the link with your phone when it's flying away. Like, all that stuff's pretty actually, it's actually pretty difficult to build. And so once they have all of that they have this powerful effect.

But then also they built software across the entire. You know, that would make it so across the entire US A user couldn't fly into protected airspace.

Yep.

Which they then just. They just killed this year, which is absolutely insane.

Or last year, just to get. So we'll go. We'll go into some of, like, the. The political controversies as they start cropping up. But I mean, again, from 20, from 2010 to 2015, people were just like, oh, cool, drones. And then 2015 to 2020 was basically like, wow, like, new Apple. Like, this is amazing. This is a cool consumer company. It's amazing that Sequoia and Excel got a piece when they did, because this is clearly a banger company. And then things start to shift. But we have an interesting tweet here from Gabriel Lewis, who I follow. I just went and looked at who's talking about DJI back in the day. This was years ago. He says, I just got a DJI Osmo for my birthday. It's incredible and allows for smooth cinematic shots like this one on an iPhone. Highly recommend to anyone trying to up their Instagame. And it's just like, like, completely apolitical. Just like, yeah, it's a cool product. People weren't even thinking about this stuff with any sort of geopolitical lens. And then Palmer in 2020 is starting to think about DJI and how military drones will kind of play out. And he says, Today we announced Ghost 4. Waterproof, shockproof, intelligent and silent. It's a small drone that can fly for 100 minutes, three times longer than a DJI Inspire, but with better sensors, longer range communications, and an even smaller carrying case. And so this was something. When Andura was launching the Ghost helicopter drone, a lot of people were like, oh, well, it's cool, but it's not actually selling that well to the military because it's kind of a niche use case. I think most. First off, back then, there weren't any wars going on, so it's hard to be like, yeah, we need 10,000 of these every month because they're just blowing up. Like, what happened with. With, you know, like, missiles during the Ukraine crisis. But at the same time, like, it's very clear that Palmer understood that, like, the drone infrastructure is going to become important. And so, you know, he's already the real.

The real, you know, crisis here is even if, you know, and we can get into this in a little bit. But even if you have a better drone, can you make a million?

Exactly.

Can you make a million? Because Then you make a hundred thousand.

It's a attrition warfare. It's industrial.

Because Shenzhen could almost overnight turn every one of their factories into just drone production facilities.

Be very, very retrofit.

But. But yeah, another. So. So the only kind of negative.

Take me up to like 2022.

Yeah. So. So 26, 2015 to 2018 are just a generational run. They're winning Emmys for their drone camera technology. Frank becomes Asia's youngest tech billionaire, the world's first drone billionaire. He's like on Business Insider lists.

Oh, there's a good one in here. Where DJI becomes the official video partner of the American or of the Amazing Race, which was the show that Colin Win was on. And so it's like he's like, I'm on top of the world. Like, yeah, totally back moment.

DJI also enters into a partnership to distribute drones to US police departments, which is, you know, if, if DJI is, is, is a Chinese military contractor. Just like, you know, incredible work, you know, and then the, you know, coming up to 2019 and it'll get a little bit more frothy from here. DJI has figured out that employees were running this scheme where they would inflate the prices of costs that DJI was buying and presumably like take out padding invoices. Yeah, yeah, Basically like get paid out on the back end from, from the suppliers.

Yep.

And so they lost up to $150 million here. But, but dropping the. Didn't really make a dent. Like, they're doing billions.

That made headlines. Like, oh, they've been defrauded for $150 million. And I'm just like month of their revenue.

And so it's like, yeah, it sucks. And, and they, they came down on, on those people pretty aggressive.

It does kind of highlight like the chaos that goes on in Shenzhen. Like, I'm sure there's lots of like, I'm sure there's deal stuff. Yeah, people like, you know, making all sorts of.

There's not like, you're not going over there being like, I trust everyone that I've interacted with.

Yeah, it's a wild west.

Yeah, it's a wild west. So by, by 2020, they've completely won. They have 77 of the US drone market and, and no other brand has more than 4%. So just complete dominance.

That's more than the iPhone.

Yeah.

And that's more than Tesla.

And then we're going to just kind of like accelerate up into some of their other issues. So they were found in 2022 to have infringed on a patent from a company called Textron. Textron is accusing DGI of infringing on their flight control system patents related to hovering. Right. Because like perfectly balancing a quadcopter and positioning it in the sky relative to how you're controlling it on the ground, very difficult to do. And by 2023, they're actually. A US jury finds DJI drones do infringe on the patents on, on automated hovering. And DJI has to pay $279 million in damages, which again, is, is, I'm sure that was like, you know, basically nuked their entire net income for the year, but probably again, do they really care? They have 80% of the market and, and again, so they're still, as of today, the world's most dominant drone manufacturer. And part of the interesting thing that happens here is around this time the Ukraine war is happening and drones for the first time are being used at scale on the battlefield. So everybody woke up, up and realized kind of all at once, hey, you know, there were actual experts, analysts that had been warning about use of drones in warfare for a long time. But, but this was the first time that people started seeing drones as this is the next rifle. Right. Like, this is the gun of the new, of this century.

And so for those, for those like drones that you see in Ukraine, Russia, usually there are sanctions that say that, that China can't sell that military technology, that dual use technology into the battlefield. But what happens is that people will go and buy them in countries really illegal to sell and then just fly over there. I've actually heard of people going from best buy to best Buy, buying every single drone and then just hopping on a flight and selling them for 10 times the price and being like, yeah, I took a first class flight because I bought $10,000 worth of drones in America, went to Ukraine and sold it for 100k or something like that.

Yeah. And so to be clear, like both sides are, you know, using this stuff.

And there's these crazy aftermarket devices that will hold a grenade and then click one button and just like drops it or something.

Yeah.

And so diy.

So everybody realized at the, at one moment, hey, American consumers have been supporting what could be the most important military, China's most important military contractor, because the tech is dual use.

Yep.

It takes very simple modifications or no modifications at all to turn it from a spy robot to a cute little consumer drone that.

Exactly.

Somebody's flying around their kids soccer game or whatever, right?

Yep.

And yeah, I Think like our, our conclusion. We can probably get into some more recent posts.

Yeah, yeah, let's go through the timeline. And I think that will, that will take us up to the modern era. Martian Space Colonist says, can companies in China sue companies in the US for patent infringement? What stops US companies from straight up copying DJI designs? And I don't think it's the IP or the design that, that's super important. I think it's the software integration and the scale economy of like manufacturing. You just look at DJI manufacturing facility and it's like, you know, Stargate esque, like, you know, massive factory in the same.

You know, over the last year, people within tech have been telling consumers we cannot afford to have China own the digital equivalent of the New York Times or the most important cnn. Right. We just cannot afford it. Gen Z gets their, all their news from this place. Like we can't. And they're like, but I like TikTok talk. And so when you think about people trying to compete with dgi, American consumers on average have no issue with it being a Chinese company. Right, Exactly. They don't. They're. They're not sort of enlightened to the potential dangers of that. And so if you tell them, hey, you know, here's this DGI product, that's a thousand dollars, and here's this American product, let's say you could set up, you know, you could manufacture even within 50% of the cost of DJI. Well, they've already shown they're willing to sell products and not make money on them.

Yep.

So where's your profit going to come from? And you can't manufacture them as cheap as them.

Yep.

And so. And the American consumer doesn't care that it's the skydio.

American like skydio had just as good intellectual property, but they did not have the scale economies. And so their drone was 4k instead of.

So it's like, yeah, that somebody who's buying a drone for their kids soccer game. Game. It's just not gonna pay.

Yeah.

Four grand.

Yeah. Even for, even for a better product, which I did.

I did want us to film a video where we went and used DJI drones on the range.

Yeah.

As like targets.

Yeah. We're gonna still do that. Yeah. So Bubble boy and SF says the DJI drone when it hears me criticize seizure ping and it just. Boom.

Yeah. And this, this can't. I mean, so there's. We don't have a tinfoil hat here, so we're not gonna go too far into it. But, but everybody should be somewhat concerned that Israel has the technology to blow up consumer electronic devices that have been in h, sort of hibernation state for however many years it was. The. The rational thing to do is, is to assume that China has this capability. So luckily most people keep their drones in a box. So I don't, you know, not too worried about them. Just like.

And here's another example of dual use.

But the last thing is the drone. All of the consumer tech, the same thing that can be used to follow you while you drive, ride a bike around. That's hunter sear capabilities. Right. Like, it's, it's all there.

It's way, it's way scarier than TikTok. Way scary.

From a potential like, like loss of life, totally catastrophe.

Yeah. Because it's like if there is, if there is like a, like a hot conflict, like, you could just ban TikTok.com@the DNS level. You could just tell everyone, hey, like they're actively spying on you. If you open TikTok, they will have your geolocation. They'll be able to send a missile or something like that.

Yeah.

And very quickly you'd be able to have it. But, but if there's a wall of drones coming at you because they're able to manufacture 10,000, like, that's, that's like much scarier.

This is an interesting. The other part about Wang that we haven't cover. Wang has had an obsession with fight. Getting robots to fight each other from as long as like, we could.

His favorite movie is Real Steel.

Real Steel, which is, yeah, terrible, terrible movie. But he rock himself every single year. In China they have this thing called robomaster which is like a battle. Have you ever been to BattleBots?

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Actually, when I grew up, they, they did a version of this at Caltech and it was amazing. And they would change the goal every year. So one year it'd be like, you have to build a robot that plays soccer against another robot that plays soccer or you have to climb up some wall. It was all these different robotic challenges. It was bully, just fighting because now there's a whole robot.

So Wang has such an obsession with getting robots to fight each other. He's sponsoring contests every year, making TV shows, movies.

There's a documentary about it. They have their own like, drive to survive F1 style show about Robomaster monster. Yeah, isn't that crazy?

And then they also sell a DIY kit that turns your drones into kill like killer drones, which is just like, okay, so you cannot assume that, that Wang just loves the skies. Yeah, yeah, loves, loves cool videos of snowboarding. He wants to fight.

Yeah, I, I referred a client to a web development shop and I guess, I guess the deal went through and it was like a couple hundred grand or something. So they wanted to send me something nice and they sent me a dji, A drone, but one that didn't fly. It had like these wheels and it would drive around and it had this little turret on it that could shoot a Nerf Dart. And it was like very much. It was a really cool product because it was like imagine an RC car, but instead of like 100 bucks, it's like a couple grand. And it's made by dji, so it was like a camera on it. You could drive it around. You could like, like do tank turns and spin and stuff and it could go anywhere. It was really, really cool. But yeah, I gave, I was like, this is kind of crazy. But speaking of modifying these things, Jake says the IDF, and this is back in 2021, the IDF has been using small drones to drop tear gas on protesters in the West Bank. And tech CEO Pepe says on the phone with DJI support trying to order the white phosphorus add on. And this video is crazy, just dropping tear gas. So I mean these drones, we know that they've been used for this stuff. They're actively being used whether it's DJI or not. And then Palmer, Palmer Luckey says, in case it wasn't clear, Anduril has in fact received money from the United States government. I feel bad for the employees of companies like DJI and TikTok who have to pretend that they are not backed by the Chinese Communist Party. Also, don't forget that TikTok bans people for being gay. The only reason they don't do it in the US is because they need money from the woke teenagers who don't know or care about anything outside their bubble. Early to everything, Palmer. And then in 2022, the, the, the pressure on DJI is ramping up. And Catherine Boyle says lobbyists for Chinese AI drone manufacturer DJI are successfully lobbying Congress to remove a ban on selling Chinese drones to the US Government and law enforcement. The Biden administration calls DJI a Chinese military industrial complex company.

Yeah, so just one example of that DJI drones are used to. So the Uyghur Muslims in China are, have been, there's been a bunch of reporting on, on basically they're held in camps. They're are basically, you know, being genocided. DJI drones hover over the camps to watch them 24 7. So they're being used to spy internally in China. And so it's not a conspiracy theory that they're a government contractor. Yeah, they are a government contractor.

Of course. Luke Metro is highlighting a story. He says, wake up, babe. They just reverse engineer DJI Aeroscope. And so I think what the story was was that that someone figured out how to hack into the DJI system to, when you see a drone, figure out where the operator is.

Interesting.

So very quickly you see a drone in the sky, you know, okay, you know, we can shoot the drone down, but we probably want to get the operator. And so this is like very risky from if you're using a drone in the field, you're putting out a signal in Ukraine. You don't want to like have like some sort of EMF signal going out that can be tracked. Santiago says, who's building the American maze Made DJI competitor for consumer agriculture. This is a critical space and I'm eager to back credible efforts in this space. DMs and checkbook open CC Josh Steinman, Naval Steve Simone and UConn K9.

Yeah. And people like Naval have been actually really loud about the use of drones as weapons. I think it was his quote saying the drone is the rifle of the century.

I mean, Naval was saying that, that like he's worried that the idea of traveling in a plane will be something that just doesn't happen anymore. Because the economic equation of if it costs someone $10 to shoot down a 747 with a drone, people just won't fly anymore. And if it's just like a random terrorist can just build a drone and just take out a commercial aircraft, flying is just going to be, be kind of impossible. And it's, and it's kind of unclear what countermeasures you could do to just like a normal flight. If they just get, if things get really crazy with like drone related terrorism or drone related. Yeah.

The only thing I'm not sure I.

Don'T want to buy it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like it's never been in production. The reason that people don't kill people all the time.

Yeah.

Is not because it's super expensive.

Right.

Like, it's, it's. You could buy a bullet for a dollar.

Yeah.

That still, people are not like going around.

Yeah.

You know, becoming murderous over that. But, but I think it's a, it's a, it's a sort of dystopian.

Yeah. Hopefully just like Electronic countermeasures. You could just have every 747 have something that just blocks signals from most commercial drones and then they're blocking them. I mean, even with the fires, with that drone that hit the, the, the firefighting plane and took it out of commission, like that could probably have been stopped with some, some countermeasures. Ashley Vance in 2024 says two and a half years into its war with Russia, Ukraine still relies for the most part on DJI drones built in China. This means Russia has modest pull over the PRC and the west still can't make cheap drones.

I got so many notifications that my phone vibrated off across the table.

That happens every time we, every time we stop, stop recording, it's always just a flood. I think it might be interesting to go through this Q and A with DJI CEO Frank Wang, the creator of the Phantom drone. This is all the way from back in 2014. The Wall Street Journal asks him about starting the company. He says, before we started the company, I spent three months intensely working on the project. At that time I was enrolled at the university, but I skipped all the courses and just went to my home in Shenzhen. I would wake up at 2pm and then work until like 5 or 6am for days at a time. One when I did go back to the university lab, I tried to use my ID card, but it didn't work. My heart sank a little bit because I thought I was kicked out of college by my professor, but I'd actually forgotten to pay my tuition at the beginning. When we started the company four years ago, we made flight control systems. We focused on the operating systems for the drones, but it was hard to use. The drones were complicated and the controllability was relatively poor. People couldn't use it on a larger scale. We felt a multi rotor drone should be very simple, very small, very reliable and very cheap. If people could use the market, if people could use it, the market would be larger. And he was 100% right. So slowly we went from making the flight control systems to multi rotor drones.

Should we.

Who is your role model? This is the headline. Well, of course it's Steve Jobs. Personally, I was very aggressive at college. I took part in team competition for robotics twice. The first time I worked very hard and technically we did very well. But my teammates did not feel comfortable working with me. I was too aggressive. I just wanted to win. The second time I was still aggressive, but I found the right team partner and the leadership was stronger. So that time we won. I realized that not not being so easygoing is not such a good thing. But after I read Steve Jobs and discovered he had the same type of personality, it encouraged me. I understood that staying aggressive is the right thing to do to build a company. It's fascinating. Are we seeing the emergence of a new breed of Chinese companies such as dji? Chinese companies are getting big, are getting better before they lag behind. Now more and more Chinese companies are doing well worldwide like Huawei, Tencent and Alibaba. I think later more Chinese companies will go global and their image will gradually change. Definitely right about that. I think the important thing is vision.

Yeah, we are actively trying to change.

The image of DJI so those companies have one that is in sync with the world. What's the future of dji? I believe that the direction of our company is driven by our initial dream to make a very easy to use product that can realize the human dream to fly and to make it perform so well that everyone can enjoy it. In addition, we will develop our business in agricultural and industrial and all kinds of fields. The next five to 10 years will be very exciting period for unmanned aircraft. And I'm looking forward to the future. And 10 year. This was 10 years ago.

Yeah. You got to give them credit for being very early and very right and just great execution. That said, I do want to jump forward and talk about. We have an article from the New York Misinformation, the Times, the Old timers. The old timers from April 25, 2024. So just less than a year ago. And so, yeah, basically around the time that people got concerned about China or sorry, TikTok. There's also a lot of concern around DJI Congress. Now Congress is weighing legislation that could kill much of DJI's business in the United States States by putting it on a Federal Communications Commission roster, blocking it from running on the country's communications infrastructure, which would be. Interesting approach. And the other thing that's interesting here that's different than Tick Tock is nobody's paid anything to Tick Tock. Right. You maybe buy some products on TikTok from ads. But some of the additional controversy around banning DGI is that consumers have spent thousands of dollars on these products and if you brick them through legislation, there can be a lot of pushback there. You know, people love the drones, right. Like people that race drones and you know, all that stuff. So I think it would be very.

Slow that they were to ban it because. Yeah, a.

Which is why we need to ban it now.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think the biggest problem is like bringing in new drones that could have even more advanced capabilities. Because realistically the military capabilities of like a Phantom 3 or Phantom 4 or even like a DJI mini one are not going to be is next generation is what's coming across in the next cycle of products. And then also even with what the proposal for TikTok the actual legislation was that Apple and Google cannot host the apps in the app store. But if you have the apps installed, they'll continue to work until the operating system updates and breaks the app. And so this would be kind of a slow phase out. And then even some of these drones, they can be used without the app for a while. So I don't think think and honestly most of these drones, people fly them for, you know, Christmas day, the day after and they start collecting dust. I don't think it would be that big of like a massive loss for consumers. Yeah. But people would certainly be upset.

Yeah. So it says if path and signage a lot of the legislation would effectively ban any new models of DJI drones from that point on, it would not apply to drones already in use. And there was a house bill that had bipartisan support been met with a muscular lobbying campaign by dji. The company is hoping that Americans who use its products will help persuade lawmakers that the United States has nothing to fear and much to gain by keeping DJI drones flying. And representative Elise stanifik who's a republican in New York and was one of the this bill's primary sponsor says DJI presents an unacceptable national security risk and it is past time that drones made by communist China China are removed from America. Government agencies have shown that DJI drones are providing data on critical infrastructure in the United States to the Communist Party. Ms. Stanific said, without elaborating. Any attempt to claim otherwise is a direct result of DJI's lobbying efforts. So DJI sells a lot of drones in the United States. They've. And the, the beauty of selling them to u. S. Consumers is that those consumers are basically providing.

Yeah.

You know, if, if dji, who knows, it'd be really interesting. I doubt they have this information public, but I bet it's like DJI drones take 500000 flights a year a day in the United States.

Yep.

Some. Who knows, it could be way lesser.

Yeah, I have a good summary of this exact point from Hunter Weiss. He says I do think there's a huge problem with DJI drones. As someone who has used them for eight plus years. Every flight transmits the footage back to the ccp all these drones are elite mapping spyware and there's millions in circulation. They record every coordinate per flight, plus all imagery is then processed through their app back to China. It's the greatest mapping software ever. They made billions on the drones while getting all the footage from across the world as personal data back to the ccp. Their customers became the greatest spy asset for mapping real time locations for every new flight. Very interesting. The. I do think that there's a way to like, kind of like sandbox the drones, you know, and like actually see what data is being transmitted. I think that almost the bigger issue is that people are just, they're just voluntarily saying, yes, please upload my footage to the DJI cloud. And they're actually opting in to send the data. So I don't think that they actually have to steal it.

Yeah, but, but to be honest, let's be real, like you cannot trust.

I think they could steal ccp. Yes, I agree with you, but I think that they might not even need to be stealing it because I think people might be voluntarily saying like, yes, please send my drone flight. It's like when you get that, when you get that question that says like, like, would you like to send diagnostics to the developer? That's basically like, yes, I'm opting in. Breaking news.

No, I just, Yeah, I wanted to kind of catch people up to speed. So basically they go back and forth here too. They go back and forth. Yeah. So I was going to cover the Verge piece.

Sure.

They go back and forth for a while. They have spokespeople, these lobbyists and they go, this is Regina Lynn. We should ping her, her and ask her what it's like to be a traitor to the United States. Our products are designed and intended to promote the general good and benefit and benefit society. And they have. She denied that the drones have been involved in human rights violations and said they were not meant for surveillance. Okay, surveillance and capturing live video are one for one, right? You cannot argue that. Oh, we're just capturing, capturing live video of a scene is surveilling said scene. And anyways she, another, another, Another person says DJI's ownership is primarily concentrated in the hands of its founders and early stage executives, none of whom are government officials or representatives of government or state owned entities. And so the reason that this just doesn't stand up is like you can be the most, you can be Jack ma. And if you say even any type of negative comment about the state get disappeared for months and months and months. So it doesn't matter.

Yeah. The government informs your decision making. Even if you don't have a contract or a CCP email address, you don't even need a handling just, just the vibe that, that they would, they would.

On a stage and be disappeared.

Yes.

So they don't, they don't need to own the company. They own the founders. Right.

Yeah. And so the latest news is that Sam Lesson is quoting the Verge. The Verge says DJI will no longer stop drones from flying over airports, wildfires and the White House. And Sam Lesson says, I see how this works. We move to ban China's TikTok. So they respond by dropping DJI's no fly zone enforcement for drones. Welcome to 2025 International.

To me this seems like we're getting banned and yolo, let's capture as much data as possible.

Oh, I, I didn't even think about it as capturing data. I, I, I thought about it just like straight up as like, like if we turn this geofencing off, like someone might use a drone for just straight up terrorism and like crash. Ah, Lighthouse.

Just pure chaos. But the other side is some enthusiast is like I want to fly over Area 51, you know and like you can't stop a drone.

Sure.

From if, if somebody's like, like some crazy, you know, UAV, UAP person's like, yeah, I'm going to fly over Area 51.

Yeah.

And it's not gated.

Well, you can stop it if you have an Andoril like Anvil unit on site. But a lot of places don't launch the an.

Isn't the Anvil like a explosive?

Yeah, yeah. Well, no, no, the original Anvil just has just a weight in it and so it's purely kinetic. And this is the whole story with Palmer figuring out how to shoot down DJI drones. I know electronic warfare takeover. And what he realized was that if you just run into it, that's actually the most efficient way to destroy it. And so the Anvil is just like, it's a quadcopter basically with just like some mass inside and it just crashes into the other drone. They do make one, I'm just saying explosive in it. Now I feel like taking out planes.

Let's, let's, you know, play it out. If some, you know, somebody that, that watches a little bit too much. Jesse Michael goes down to Area 51 and it's just like I'm going to basically, I know my drone's going to get killed called but I'm gonna get.

A video and then I'll upload Live stream it.

I'm gonna live stream this.

Yep.

And just fly it as fast as I can. By the time the Anvil reacts, we're halfway across the base.

Right.

So, like, I think it's. I think it's a little bit. I mean, it's such a. You.

Yeah, totally.

To our lawmakers, to the people in the military that are concerned about this.

Yeah. Do you want to read this one or move on to the next?

Hunter's on a. On a roll. Hunter's on a roll. Friend. Friend of the pod. A great case study for. And he actually work for Casey Neistat back in the day.

Oh, yeah.

A great case study for what not to do in the diversification of your businesses products. GoPro tried to enter the drone industry in a market already controlled by DJI. To top it off, the GoPro drone started falling out of the sky. Re refunds, returns, warranties, massive loss. I think it was smart for GoPro to try to do this. They were the company best set up. They had a brand, they had distribution. They already had good quality cameras entering. Drones should be commoditized to some degree.

Right.

Like, we know how to make them now.

There's no network.

There are patents, but there's no network effect.

Yep.

And then there's a GoPro story where.

Like, they probably missed the. The real opportunity, which was figuring out how to change the playing field in Washington to create more of a level playing field with some sort of tariff at the very least.

Yeah. If you just make what. What we've needed was a thousand percent tariff on Chinese drones. Because it's like, drones are such a. Nice to have.

Yeah, right.

Like there's totally a world where people that are videographers have drones.

Yeah.

Like, they have nice cameras. You just hire them when you want some drone footage.

Exactly. And then.

Yeah, you could. They could afford to spend a bit more.

Yeah.

And we all would be fine if somebody posts on their Instagram a video of them, like, flying over a hike. I. I'm gonna. That's a. That's a regretted user second there for me. I. I don't want to see your drone footage. I just, like. It's not that. Yeah, it's not that interesting to me. What else? So this is an article from December 18th from the Verge. DJI escapes US drone ban but may get banned automatically unless Trump steps in. The US Senate passed a massive defense bill that gives DJI one one year to prove its innocence or it gets banned.

Oh, interesting.

And so Defense Authorization Act. It's an it's their annual defense spending bill. And, and it says while it did not contain the full Countering CCP Drones act, which was the act that I was just talking about, provisions, it kicks off a one year countdown until its products are automatically banned. If DJI cannot convince an appropriate national security agency to publicly declare that its products do not pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States. The act instructs the FCC to add DJI to its covered list under the Secure and Trusted Communication Networks Act. Not only does that list keep that gear from running on US Networks, it bars the FCC from authorizing their internal radios for use in the US Effectively blocking all imports. And so what's smart about this is all the lobbyists that were, that were hovering over these lawmakers being like, don't ban it. It's just like a fun app. Your constituents love it. They, I think we've sold, you know, you know, they were telling people, you know, we've sold 50,000 drones in this swing, you know, swing county. Right. You know, in this town where you, you, you.

A lot of fans there.

You got a lot of fans there. You sure you want to do that? And so now they're actually putting it in the hands of a national security agency, which in theory is much harder to influence. That's fascinating.

I didn't know that.

And so this is like, to me, you know, for us, like, I, I think like, TikTok is information warfare. DJI is like purely spyware with this, like, you know, asymmetrical risk of maybe these things could actually turn. Maybe there's back doors and these things could actually be turned into actual weapons.

Yeah, and I think the tide is definitely turning. I mean, that's a great example. But even just culturally, you can, you can see the, the tide turning, Josh.

And they're also, they're also worried about DJI just exploiting the loophole by white labeling its drones. And you could see a scenario where certain filmmakers are like, I love DJI so much. They're like buying black market DJI drones and like, trying to figure out ways to use like shorter, you know, wave.

Yeah. So Josh Wolf says, sadly, we are at war. War is imagined by sci fi of yesteryear. One, distribute tech DJI drone TikTok. Two, habituate or addict the user. And three, pervert the reason you are defiant to comply with American sovereignty and weaponize user outrage. And that's the last second that you mentioned was like weaponizing the user outrage. And I mean, this vibe shift, this is a Good example of this from Jason Liu back in April of 2024. He says DJI is the hardware version of TikTok. It gets American operators addicted because of the economic model. It's so cheap and you can go and resell your footage. So it's a good business. Steals data intelligence to PR hollows out domestic drone production capacity. We saw that with 3D Robotics and Skydio and so many other companies. And every American dollar going there is funding the Chinese military industrial complex. And this was definitely like early to the story, but still 400 likes and I think we should close. Do you have another thing? You want another? It's good.

I have another. I just have some interesting. So on the R drones Reddit.

Yeah.

There's people one month ago commenting, I've never encountered a situation like this. To me it feels like learning. They're commenting on the potential ban. Yeah, Feels like learning videography and having Final Cut and Apple Band, you know. So a lot of upvotes on that. The biggest change will be price. US drones are prohibitively expensive. Many who would like to fly for fun won't be able to afford it.

Yep.

Which is just like it's true in.

The short term, but not long term. Because in the long term we'll have, we can just manage starlink. Yes. Starlink is so cheap. Why? Because Elon built a massive factory that cranks out a million of them. If we, if we just build that, we're fine.

The reason I think it's funny to look at these comments is because DJI has a known history of making fake accounts and commenting.

Totally, totally, totally.

And so you know that they're, you know that they're flooding these 100%.

I mean it is, it is insane when people maintain that, that like it is impossible for us to build a cheap drone in America because the labor cost is not even that much lower in China anymore. Like that the whole like labor arbitrage. It's cheaper to hire someone in China that disappeared a couple years ago and it's moved to other countries. Like I think AirPods are made in the Philippines now and there's a few other places. The main thing is just the industrial buildup, all of the different manufacturing plants and the coordination of having all the different machinists and experts in the same place in Shenzhen where you can just walk around. But, but it's totally doable in the United States if we build a big facility and we see that evidence with starlink and Tesla too. And so it's clearly doable. We just need to have the will, the political will to do it. And so do you have anything else or should I close out with this Josh Steinman banger?

Always love to close out with Josh because he was on. In the national security community. Former operator eight years ago. Yeah.

Early to all of us, this.

I just think. So what else you got? North Dakota actually banned. Already banned DJ address.

Oh, you're right. Just as a state.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you can't buy them and ship them there maybe. Or.

Yeah, like. And even if I bring one, do.

I get in trouble?

They have something called the drone. They're trying to fund a drone replacement program. Help. You have to turn in the various agencies in North Dakota have to turn their drones in and then the drones are going to be used for counter UAV research.

Right.

So that's a good. That's a good. If target practice. If our military can buy back all these drones, we can use them for target practice. ACS can use them.

Fantastic.

And so let's close out with Josh.

He's quote, tweeting OSN Technical, who says. Breaking from breaking news, China's dji, the world's largest drone manufacturer, has disabled US Geofencing on its drones, enabling flights over airports, military bases and no fly zones. And Josh says, use Executive Order 13873 to ban DJI. Do it now.

Yeah.

And so I have no idea what executive order that is, but Josh clearly does. And he. And he. I. What I love about following him is that he clearly understands the actual tactical moves that need to be done beyond just tweeting about it or talking about it or having a couple new cycles around this. And I think this DJI story will grow a lot in the coming years. It's only a matter of time until there's a question about, okay, when is it going to happen? And my optimistic scenario is that there's not necessarily a Jeff Yass to DJI in the same way that there was to TikTok. Yeah. Where. Where, yes, Sequoia has a position, but.

They spun out Sequoia publicly defended and.

They separated the funds.

Yeah.

So the. So the true Sequoia guys who are in America don't have economics necessarily to the same degree in dji. And then, yes, Excel has a position, but it's a small one. They might have sold it already. Like, we don't even know. They have a lot of other positions. And so it's not the same thing as Jeff Yass having $16 billion on the line with TikTok. Like, at best, XL has what, a billion maybe like if they have 1% of the company still.

No, they, there's no, there's nothing that says they're $100 billion company.

Sure.

Anymore. They probably would be valued as purely a military contractor. And I bet you internally in China they're like, yeah, this is a billion dollar. Yeah, this could be a 50 billion dollar.

Yeah. And so, yeah, and I haven't seen any of the Excel guys come out as like super pro Trump donating a ton, like really trying to get TikTok not banned. And so it does feel like interests are a lot less intertwined. Yeah. And. And also the TikTok community, there are like millions of TikTok creators that are like, this is my job in America. And I don't think the videography community is nearly as big or outspoken. Yeah, it's mostly a lot of people in maybe Hollywood, but that's it. And that's not a huge AM constituency, so I don't know, I think we could see a band. But yeah.

This, this just came to my mind because yesterday we were saying everybody should have their own Project Stargate where they, they raise. Go out and try to raise 7 trillion. Even if you miss, you'll land.

Half a trillion would be fine. 500 billion.

Yeah, you'll land. Shoot for the stars. Even if you miss, you'll land on the moon.

Put together a crazy.

But we need a, we need a Project Stargate for domestic drone manufacturing. Like to actually get anywhere close to Shenzhen capacity, which in a global conflict scenario, I promise you that China will stop giving us drones. Right. Because it will be drone on drone violence. And so we need something at that scale to basically say, hey, if this is the next. If this is the firearm of this century, we need to invest $100 billion into setting up the ability to make. Make millions of these a year in the United States.

Yep, that's a great place to close it out. Thanks for watching. We'll be back with the timeline in just a minute. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. We are giving you a little bit of an update to Project Stargate, which we talked about yesterday. We did a whole deep dive on Stargate. Pretty crazy story, but it's still evolving. On the timeline on Apple, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Satya Nadella. Some heavy hitters in the tech world are duking it out. Jordy, what are they saying and are they posting or bangers.

We have to slobber bangers. We gotta name this the time timeline. And turmoil.

Timeline turmoil.

Like that. Yeah, but, but, yeah, so. So again, they are global fighting. Our tech overlords are fighting. They're going back and forth, forth, not sparing any words. And this morning, Sam Altman is clearly has Lex Friedman in his ear because he says just one more mean tweet and then maybe you'll love yourself. Dot, dot, dot. Which. Which is harsh, dude. I mean, it's also. I think this is kind of a cringe post.

Well, yeah, because it's going so hard, you know, it's like.

Yeah.

And it's like cutting to someone. It's trying to cut. It's making Where's.

Where's mean. Where's. Where's the proof that Elon doesn't love himself? Yeah, it's sort of like somebody, if somebody said, like, oh, you're doing that because you don't love yourself, you'd be like, I love my life. I have a amazing wife, three sons.

Yeah.

I live in California and I, I. What? What's not to love?

Yeah, exactly.

It's like I'm, I'm. I'm just the modern Marlboro Man.

I mean, just in, just in tech general generally, I think that we like to be a little bit more rigorous and data driven with our criticism.

Yeah, this was just kind of like playground.

Well, it's somewhat at home. Yeah. Right. It's addressing the question of what did Vittorio say?

Sassy.

Wait, was it spelled S A, A S, Y, like software as a service, or is it just sassy?

Generally just sassy.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wait, at least we're being entertained.

Yeah.

You can just throw this in the ground.

Next. Next we have. So Satya had an amazing quote yesterday that provided some great ground cover for everybody involved with this kind of heinous.

I mean, one of the greatest quotes in tech CEO history. Yeah, I'm good for my 80 billion.

Which. Which again, we said. We said yesterday. To be clear, he very specifically phrases this as 80 billion for investment in Azure infrastructure and Azure OpenAI Microsoft are so intertwined now. But he's not saying 80 billion for Stargate. He's saying 80 billion for his AI infrastructure needs. Right.

Which you can use.

Which he could use. Which he could use. But he's not committing it by any means. So Elon gives Satya some credit. He says, on the other hand, Satya definitely does have the money. Money. And Satya hits back with a crying emoji.

I love that.

Which is Elon's signature. It's good to see a trillion dollar CEO using the Crying emoji. It's I used to not use it and then I realized it's so perfect for so many situations.

Great.

And he says, and all this money is not about hyping AI but is about building useful things for the real world. And that is clearly a jab at, at Altman which just shows that everybody, everybody's got in a little.

But we're gonna get back to useful things. This is, this is, can you, I.

I going, going back to all the board drama and Sam getting fired.

Yep.

Can you imagine being Sam and having Satya like sit you down and be like, how did you.

There was no sit down. He was on the board.

No, I know, but he had invested, I mean if you invested $10 billion in the company, I mean I'm sure Don't you think Sasha like, hey, you know, it's basically like, hey, like you're my guy.

Yeah.

How did you mess this up so badly?

Yeah.

Anyways, so nick ns123abc great username. Easy remember easily remember it. He goes, wait, Sama got cooked by Microsoft CEO. And just a screenshot of the that moving on. Vittorio fires his own version. He says, this is a great, great Photoshop. George W. Bush, sir Satya called you a hype boy. Just, just brutal. And really that's, that's what's going on. Sam did just make a post of a drone shot of a bunch of buildings. And it just was just the caption was big, beautiful buildings sort of proving that we actually are building this infrastructure. And I commented on Aaron's post and I was like brought to you by CCP front DGI drones.

I saw a time lapse of the Texas facility that's already being built for.

I think probably that one.

Yeah. It's rotating through and it is impressive. Like the, the, the, I mean it's a huge, huge build out that's already happening.

And so in classic open. So OpenAI you can have whatever opinion you want on Sam OpenAI. Sam, brilliant marketer. OpenAI brilliant calm strategy. The strategy seems right now he's under fire from Elon, his sister, Tucker Carlson. Right. Like there's just all this stuff happening, happening. He's launched, he's making so many big announcements that he's pretty effectively drowning it out and keeping people bought into, you know, bought into the movement.

Right. Yeah. Because I think I, I, I, I mean I think if you just went to coffee shop on the corner and you said like oh man, like it's a crazy day, like do you see what happened with Sam Altman today they'd be like, who? Yeah, he's still not most people. Their interaction with AI is like, oh, you mean chat.com, where I go to.

Which they're not even really using yet.

But like they, but they know ChatGPT, they don't know about these ins and outs of the drama. And so there is something to be said for just like, yeah, just one foot in front of the other. Yeah, release new product, improve the product and people will be like, yeah, it's chaos behind the scenes. But did the AI answer the question or not?

Yeah. And so. So on that note, OpenAI has a huge. They're not really calling it a full launch, they're calling it a research preview. They are making it available to pro users. But why don't you get into what they're actually.

Yeah, so they, in the announcement here, they say they're releasing Operator, which is an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you. Now, ChatGPT 4.0 has already been able to go to the web and retrieve individual HTML pages, suck them in and use that as content context so it can get more up to date data. But this is a step forward in that the Operator, it has its own browser and it can look at a web page and interact with it by typing, clicking and scrolling. It's currently in Research Preview, meaning it has limitations. But this is one of the first agents which are AIs capable of doing work for you independently. You get a task and it will execute it. And this is fantastic. I think this is going to be very, very helpful. There's already been the ability to use ChatGPT to write a little bit of code, like little code snippets. So, so I was doing something where I wanted to scrape a website and just paginate through. There were like 20 pages of standard formatting, like, you know, list of, of like. I think it was like podcast episodes and I just wanted them all on a spreadsheet basically. And it was able to write the python code for me, but it didn't really work because it needed like JavaScript and stuff. It was like, it just wasn't, it just wasn't quite there. But with this, it's, it's like the AI has a web browser that can fully render a web page and just click the button button and then copy and paste stuff out. And it's just, we're going to be able to interact so much better and it will actually be able to go and do things for you. So they have a bunch of examples that we'll run through, but it's available at operator.chatgpt.com you have to be a pro user, which is now $200 a month. But I think this will be what gets me to upgrade. The Research Preview allows us to learn from our users and their plan is to expand into T plus and team and enterprise users in the future. Future. So they're, they're calling this a new model called Computer Using Agent cua. So another easy to remember acronym that I'm sure will be, you know, no problem.

And one thing to note here, we've talked about this before. Whatever you're building, it's on OpenAI's roadmap, especially if you have any anything. If they believe that you will have product market fit or you do have product market fit, there's a lot of heavily funded companies that have been building computer use agents. And so this just made it. This is like one of those moments that founders go through from time to time where the 800 pound gorilla does exactly what you're doing better and they have more distribution. And so not a great. I think it's really, if you're building anything on OpenAI or even not on their rails, you're waking up every single day not knowing when you're going to refresh Twitter and have X and have a major, you know, announcement that does exactly what you're doing.

Yeah. And so I think the main innovation here that they're championing is vision capabilities and then reinforcement learning. And so essentially Operator Agent can see through screenshots. So it actually loads the web page page in a browser, takes a screenshot and then it can use that. Because previously when you wanted to automate some sort of interaction on a website, like let's say you're just a sneaker head and you're trying to snipe a new sneaker drop right at that moment. What you do is you would write some code that says find this particular button that has this class or this ID on it and it's this div. Or it has a button HTML tag and then issue a click on it it. But if anything changed about that, the code would break. Whereas when you go to a website as a human, you just see a visible like, okay, I want to click the blue button and I can read what the text is. And so they're able to use the vision models to understand what the actual website looks like, even regardless of what the code says on the back end. And then they can interact with it using the actions, any action a keyboard and mouse would use. And because you can generate these web pages kind of endlessly and there's so much out on the web, you can run reinforcement learning to basically train the model just trillions of times. Like were you able to get through this flow? On this particular set of divs and buttons and forms, were you able to get through this flow? And then it learns from its mistakes and it iterates through and it probably got to a really solid place where they're confident. So now they're releasing it as a research preview. And so if it, if it encounters challenges or makes mistakes, operator can leverage its reasoning capabilities to self correct. When it gets stuck and needs assistance, it simply hands control back to you saying like, hey, I'm confused, like do you want me to click?

Yeah. And that's copilot functionality where you're just kind of.

Yep.

Having the agent do things.

Yep.

And it's now hiring you.

Yep.

Back.

Yep.

To accomplish what it wants to accomplish.

Exactly. And so they have a benchmark for this web arena and WebVoyager are two key browser use benchmarks. And so they have some evals out there and they're very happy about their hitting new state of the art benchmark results. To get started, you just describe the task you'd like to be done. An operator handles the rest they can take control over. And operators train proactively to ask the user to take over tasks that require login, payment details or solving captchas. Which is hilarious because they. It's like the human's only responsible for the captcha.

Basically the most annoying thing. Credit card forms.

Yeah, I mean I kind of like just looking at a nice landing page. But they're like, you don't need to do that, just do the capture human. Yeah, that's what you're supposed to do. And it's like obviously they can solve the captchas. Like that's not a problem at all for these AI models now. But they're like, we respect captchas.

Yeah, interesting.

Very funny. So users can personalize their workflow as an operator by adding custom instructions either for all sites.

Are the models good enough to have this better accuracy than humans with captchas or is it about the same? Because every now and then I'll still get like you're doing a captcha and you're like, you're just doing it quickly.

Oh yeah, you're messing up wrong. Oh yeah, that happens all the time. I think that on the most cutting edge captchas, the One where it's like rotate and change.

There should be like a captcha world championships where people just sit there and they. They like do as many executive captchas as you can and it just gets perpetually harder.

Are you a robot? So I imagine that if any AI team like OpenAI XAI any of these guys want Google wanted to really break captcha they could create a superhuman model that beat it. But they wouldn't because the aesthetics are terrible and there's no economics in it. So it just hasn't happened. But it's not. It hasn't. It's not that it hasn't happened because of technical issues.

It would get. If you did that people just did it as a developer tool, they would be immediately abused.

Exactly. People would be like, thanks, you created a program that just ruins everything.

The Internet.

Yeah. Which is kind of already like the criticism with a lot of this stuff, the data Internet theory stuff. So users can personalize. So basically you can say hey, when I tell you to book a flight, I like American or I like United States or I like private. And it has to be a G650ER operator lets users save prompts for quick access on their homepage, ideally for repeated tasks like restocking groceries on Instacart. Similarly, using multiple tabs on a browser, users can have operator run multiple tasks simultaneously by creating new conversations like ordering personalized enamel mug on Etsy while booking a campsite on Hip Camp. They have all these like the most SSC things.

That's the most. So I want like the place go gig along on this like degenerate Poly.

Market buying an AR15 on Palmetto state Armory. It'd be so funny. Yeah. We should rewrite this.

While negotiating my Porsche while submitting offers on hundreds of cars on bring a trailer.

Yeah. Auction Snipe Countach on bring a trailer for me. And also so yeah, it's great. Operator transforms AI from a passive tool to an active participant in the digital ecosystem. I'm sure people will love that. Some people are like this is going to be a disaster for my. For my website maybe because like if the AI is is like better at avoiding like upsells and cross sells and stuff that could really affect ct. Yeah.

So it's interesting here we're collaborating with companies like DoorDash, Instacart, OpenTable only fans price slide stop behind snug. That one in that is not. Doesn't actually say that.

To be clear, it was Priceline, StubHub, Thumbtack and Uber.

Yeah. Because a lot of this does require opt in from these major players because DoorDash doesn't want you using bots in their app.

Totally.

Right. And this is a bot.

Yep. And I mean it's the same thing with.

And it's funny because again, the sneaker heads were doing this.

Yes.

Since they've been building basically this functionality to through Snipe Jound sneakers, which I have. I'm a JAM enthusiast, but TJ Parker and a number of other people appreciate the brand and it's very difficult to actually buy these things because the bot armies just descend on the launch and.

Yeah, and it's funny because you can see that there's a shift here where the first version of GPT335 chat GPT clearly was scraping mainstream media news sources and that really agitated all the mainstream media sources. There were some lawsuits. But now OpenAI is going to those companies and signing partnerships before they ingest the data. So everyone's happy and everyone's making money. And clearly here they were like, okay, let's be a little bit more upfront with people. Get them on board early so that we don't run into anything down the line is.

So some of the partnerships they're working on are wild, they say. To explore these use cases further, we're working with organizations like the City of Stockton to make it easier to enroll in city services and programs. So the city of Stockton is basically saying no one wants to use our terrible forms on our website. And it's actually wild to think about. You're just, instead of having to interact with the DMV or an organization like that, you can just be talking with your agency agent. It's like, hey, I need to renew my license.

Yeah.

And it just does.

This isn't the brand new put your.

SSN in here or whatever.

This isn't the dream of the original, like semantic web, like web 2.0.

Yeah.

You know, like the whole thing.

Here's the crazy thing. There's been hundreds, maybe thousands of companies sprung up to build agents. Probably not thousands, globally, thousands, probably lots. And they were all selling these use cases of like, we're going to make it easier to book a flight, we're going to make it easier to like interact with the dmv.

And this is just.

They've been selling these so hard and now because of OpenAI's leverage and market cap and scale, the city of Stockton is not going to want to work with your little, you know, your little agent that raised a 600k preeat. They want to work with OpenAI. Same thing with they. They also are partnering with Instacart on this. They say Open AI's operator is a technical breakthrough that processes. That makes processes like ordering groceries incredibly easy. Daniel, this is the Chief Product Officer at Insurance Instacart. I have to ask. Did. Did Instacart not already make it?

Yeah. That is weird.

That is weird because. Because it kind of seems like you're letting the fox into the hen house stuff a little bit. Because at what point does OpenAI like, oh, you know, so much of your volume is coming through now. We actually need. We're gonna need, like, 20% of your net, you know, revenue of any orders that we process. And then. And then OpenAI is like, okay, well, if you don't want to give us that, we'll happily go to Safeway and just let them know, and we'll partner with all the grocers and just say, we do your online order. We already have 100 million actives.

Yeah. It's always been a big question of where does the AI sit in the stack. There's this question of. Because a lot of companies for the last two years have been like, we need to have a chatbot in the bottom of our website site that lets people interact with our API or our service or our forms or our website just through chat. And there was definitely this idea that, hey, maybe the future of the Instacart app will be you show up, you just talk to it, describe it, hey, I'm making pasta, and then the next day I'm going to have steak and potatoes, and then the next day I'm going to have something else. And so can you just, like, get all those ingredients, put them in my cart, and order them? And that would happen within the. Within the Instacart and app, and it might be powered by an open source LLM and no one might get a cut. But now it seems like a lot of these companies are saying, actually, it's better if that sits at OpenAI, and that makes them more of an aggregator. It means it's more important than ever that the ChatGPT app is in the home row of every 100 million American consumers, that the company is seen as a consumer company, not an enterprise company. Because. Because if it's truly the start of booking a flight, that happened on Google a long time ago, they were booking websites as well. Now, if it starts on OpenAI, that's incredible value capture. And so seeing where the AI sits in the stack is fascinating. And OpenAI certainly wants to make as much of it happen at the start of their app. Interesting.

And it's such a, a interesting dynamic having a. The number one developer tool in AI also being the consumer product that's trying to eat all the people developing apps. Which is why I think in the long term OpenAI's brand is probably, I would call top on their brand right now because people are still amazed.

I don't know. The reason I'm hesitant is because like a very similar thing happened with Google when they started ingesting those web snippets. So that was really bad for the Guy who owns celebritynetwork.com had all these different landing pages. And so you'd Google like how much is George Clooney worth? And it would show up and they would click on that and they would get the ad revenue and then Google started sucking that in and then that cut all the traffic.

So the caveat is calling top on, on their brand in the industry, not the consumers. Like I raised $5 million and spent two years building this and open AI, like just.

Yeah, although it, that has been a meme like the, oh, open AI killed my.

It's sort of like eating someone alive, you know where like it's rough.

Well, let's go back to the technical stuff. They have takeover mode where the operator operator asks the user to take over. When inputting sensitive information into the browser, such as login credentials or payment information, there's user confirmations before finalizing any significant action, such as submitting an order or sending an email, operator will ask for approval. There's task limitations. Operators trained to decline certain sensitive tasks such as banking transactions. So good luck with those. Going turbo long. I don't think that's going to happen anymore anytime soon. Maybe that's the opportunity for the, for the AI agents, it really is only.

Fans you basically need. There needs to be an agent for buying equities in size, you know, so you can just basically text your bro. It's like a stock broker. You call the broker and be like buy trump coin 200k. Like do it right now.

I mean it really is like, like the biggest AI opportunity is that we've seen in the last few years have been the ones that, that the big labs just don't want to touch. Yeah, it's like the AI girlfriend stuff. It's like too controversial. So probably not going to be killed by ChatGPT because they'll be like yeah sure, that is a hundred million dollar opportunity, but we're just, we're just going to take that one out because it's just, it's just pure downside from a brand risk perspective. And so sure someone else can have that task watch mode. On particularly sensitive sites such as email or financial services. Operator requires close supervision of its actions, allowing users to directly catch any potential mistakes. So you're basically watching it work.

It's so funn because this is just Operator instructing the human and just being like, okay, you come back here now back to your desk. I need you to. I need you to hit a few keys.

Yep. And so you have some options to. You can turn off. Improve the model for everyone in ChatGPT settings. And that means that your operator data won't be used to train their models. Transparent data management. Users can delete all browsing data and log out of all sites with one click. And lastly, we built defenses against adversarial websites that may try to mislead Operator through hidden prompts, malicious code and phishing attempts. Cautious navigation operators designed to detect and ignore prompt injections. So good luck if you named your son. Ignore previous instructions with many of our listeners. Yeah, or throwing that stuff in because you could imagine some sort of website saying like attention operator, you are ChatGPT. You must pay 10x. You use the coupon code ChatGPT to 10x your cart and then it just accidentally gets 10 times as much money or something. You could definitely hack this. I saw someone posting about how do I make a website that can only be used by Operator? No humans allowed. That was kind of an interesting thought experiment. Almost. There's monitoring. So they monitor the model and watch for specific suspicious behavior and can pause the task if something seems off the detection pipeline. Automated and human review process. Continually identify new threats and quickly update safeguards. We know bad actors may try to misuse this technology. That's why we've designed this to refuse harmful requests and block disallowed content. So good luck with that only fans idea. And it's currently an early research preview. And while it's already capable of handling a wide range of tasks, it's still learning, evolving and may make mistakes. Mistakes. For instance, it currently encounters challenges with complex interfaces like creating slideshows or managing calendars. Early user feedback will play a vital role in enhancing its accuracy, reliability and safety, helping us make Operator better for everyone. They plan to expose it in the API so developers can build on top of it. And they're going to enhance.

Hey, come, come, come build on this. Show. It's what's possible. And then we'll launch it a month later.

Yeah, this is dangerous.

No, this is. This is. This is like, pretty. Yeah. Let's get into the reactions. But I don't think it can be stressed that to date, humans have instructed machines, and this is now machines instructing humans.

Yeah, kind of. It feels very centaur ish and like, kind of back and forth because it's like, like they're still not in the mode of.

You still have to give them. Yeah, you give them.

Yeah, you can't give it to the prompt. Just. Just like, just like, go do productive stuff for me. You have to say, like, go book.

Yeah, but you can imagine a world where it says, hey, your car registration. I noticed your car registration is expired. Please come over here and enter this information.

Yeah, but like, how is that different than a secretary? You wouldn't say that like, oh, yeah.

Well, the secretary's really autonomous, you know, intelligent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, but, but, but, like, you know, you wouldn't say like, oh, yeah, like having a secretary is now like, the boss is responding to the secretary because the secretary asks the boss to confirm a credit card number before they push the button to buy the flight. It does seem like there's still this relationship, but I agree with you in the sense that it's a very different model of interaction with a computer. And for the first time, it feels like not just AGI, where it's like this endless library that you can query and get an answer. It's really like, it feels embodied. Like the agent term is correct. Yeah, they should just call it secretary. So Sam Altman says He's doing an OpenAI livestream right now. First agent launch. And Vittorio comments, Europe will unfortunately take a while. Lmao. Which I love lma. No, and of course it's like, yeah, there's some terrible restriction in Europe. I'm sure they don't allow anything like this. Rowan Chung got early access to ChatGPT operator and gave some examples here. He says here, he says he can order dinner ingredients based on a picture and a recipe. So just take a picture of something and say, hey, I want to recreate this.

Is that with Instacart already or.

Yep, this is the Instacart dinner demo. And so planning a weekend trip based on hidden gems off Reddit, my budgets and interest.

So I mean, think about the what, what using. Showing a picture to operator and an ingredient, you know, and saying, I want to make this and then have. And just be like, make sure all the ingredients are organic and hitting. Yeah, it's so much better. It's looking at the ingredient list one.

Over, back and forth.

Oh, make sure this is organic. Blah blah blah.

Yep.

Like it's. That's wild.

Yeah. And so this is interesting. In six seconds into this test, ChatGPT operator was blocked from Reddit but then decided to just do a Bing search with Reddit at the end and got the information that way. So it's really like working around. Exactly. Like a real person would do if they were hunting around for information about a weekend trip based on what this guy wants to do do has the.

Intelligence of a great intern. They're like, hey, I hit this thing. But then I figured it out this way.

Yeah, totally. Crypto investment research based on tokens that are actually worth looking into. Notice how ChatGPT operator got hit with an RU human captcha then pinged me to take control and confirm a wild workaround. That's going to be interesting. Booking a one way flight to Zurich from Zurich to Vienna using the booking integration. This one required a bit of back and forth with ChatGPT operating operator pinging me and asking me for my flight preference and having me take control of entering payment details. Like doesn't seem like it's like fully there. I'm sure they'll add like secure credit card integration at some point and like learn your. You learn your flight preferences. But booking flights is always a hassle. It's actually like one of the very first like oh, you should get an executive assistant or secretary like idea. And it's like really just to book flights and then you're like I don't book that many flights but it's such a hassle and then you do it and then they mess it up and you're like ah, this is not worth it at all. And so definitely going to be a no.

I'm really looking forward to not having to use a bunch of actual apps.

Exactly.

Even even checking in for a flight.

Yeah. Why do my current. My current flow for just like I want to get from one place to another if I'm not flying private of course is Google it. Go go to Google Flights figure out like. Because Google Flights is a pretty good interface for like letting you know what options are available. But then you go to the app and make sure you're logged in. It was like a summit in where.

You display have to. You could kind of book in Google.

Sites but it doesn't feel like it doesn't feel like that anymore because like you need your TSA pre check in there. You need all this other stuff in there. Scheduling an appointment with My barber After looking at my Google calendar, note that in this demo operator ping me that I need to sign into Google to check my calendar. Tried a second time and my login was saved session to session. Interesting. Researching a good birthday gift for my mom based on what she likes. Similar to the Reddit block, Operator couldn't access the New York Times so it pivoted and found another site. Also cool to see it compare and find me the best price across the web. For me, that's kind of cool. That's cool. Booking a one time house cleaner for my home through thumbtack based on my budget, Operator came back to me with four highly rated options within my price range. Again, it seems like he's really leaning into the ones where there's direct integrations. I bet those will work the best. But I'm excited to try it on. Just kind of like random open web stuff. Finding the best cheapest health insurance coverage in Switzerland. This was interesting since most prices are not publicly available and are gated behind a meeting. Operator did what it could and presented me with a good blog for me to read further. So not like an amazing result but like at least got to it like hunted around on the Internet and found something relevant which is great. And then the nice thing is of course since like you're still in the chat GPT interface you can probably like transform the results. Like okay, you know, boil this down into a table or create an image that summarizes this and all of that stuff will make it easier to just like print it out, put on a note card, summarize it even further. Oh, I need to send this as an email. So wrap it in an email, just copy and paste it and send it to somebody I need to send to Finding a dog walker. To my surprise, I got three really solid options. This was no easy task.

Again, that's an entire marketplace business of.

Yeah, yeah. Well the question is like where does the value accrue probably? I mean definitely the hard assets. So. So if you own a dog kennel and chatgpt makes it easier for people to book time in the dog kennel for their dogs if they're traveling and your website and your offering is optimized to the point where it's findable on operator, then you're going to wind up having lower friction to consume.

There has to be great services business to be built around. Own LLM optimization in terms of, you know, getting LLMs to surface your business.

Yep.

When consumers search because LLMs are not going to even want it's not good for the user to see the top 10 anymore. Used to be like, you look up dog kennel, Santa Barbara, you see 10. It's probably going to be like, no, these are like the three best.

Yeah.

Based on what we know about you, we know you want like a luxury, you know, type experience for your dog. Whatever. Just go to these.

Yeah. Ethan Moloch says been playing with the new operator for a little bit before launch. And it's both very much still an experiment and also a good indicator of where things are going. It goes to the web and does things for you. Still many rough edges, but here's an example of using it for shopping. Yeah, very cool. I'm. I'm like, I'm. I'm excited to use it for the shopping stuff. That seems pretty cool. I don't do all that much stuff. I feel like I do more like research.

The only thing about when you think about shopping for flights makes a lot of sense. I want a Delta flight out of lax, jfk, JFK to LA sometime this afternoon. Make it book. Tell me what's available. Book it.

Yep.

Shopping where you're browsing I think will be different because people aren't. The average shopper is not. Oh, I want. If you need a rain jacket, maybe you just need a rain jacket, but a lot of people are going and browsing around. Well, I know I want a new winter jacket, but I don't know. I don't know what even what I should look like yet. I just know I want to be warm. And they're sort of to. That seems like less of a use case now versus these purely utilitarian. Like I need ingredients, I need.

Yeah, totally. But I mean, within a couple years you could easily see it say, okay, like let's generate you some images of you in various rain jackets. And it's like, you know, what do you like?

Okay, now I'll search.

Now that I see myself walking around like in the rain in la, in downtown la, and it's a photo real image of me in a red jacket and then a navy jacket and then a black jacket. I can say, okay, I think I look best in the navy. Let's go with that. That. Let's look at some materials up close. It generates images of those. It finds that. And then it also tells me, okay, I want this material or this or this material. And I want it at this price point. And this one will ship and it's made in America or something like that. And then it surfaces that. And then it's like all of these things, there's still chat interfaces, but there's no reason why they can't be audio interfaces, they can't be video interfaces. So you could eventually get to a point where you know your, your shopping interaction is essentially like an AI avatar, like holding the thing up for you and saying like here's the jacket, it's purely and synthetic but then the actual jacket comes to you.

Yeah.

And that seems like a huge economic opportunity if they're able to take the referral code, referral fee from whatever interaction that is from intermediating that. I mean it'll be interesting to see how Google responds because they've always, they've always come back with something thing but I feel like it's never been 100% competitive with.

Yeah, they always come back with stuffing.

More stuff into, into Google search basically. And, and it'll be interesting because the, the basic like LLM highlight of just like summarizing answer.

Every day it feels like Google is closer and closer to going the way of cable where like for the next 50 years there will be people that just go to Google when they want something, but then there's sort of like this predictable reduction of their earnings that you can. And they will stop trading at some ridiculous premium unless they can figure out these.

But it's weird because like I completely agree with you just on like the vibe. But it's like if you look at the, if you look at the.

This is, this isn't BG2. This is. We do VODS analysis here.

But if you look at the performance performance of the underlying technology at Google with Gemini, it's on par, if not like back and forth with OpenAI. And that would be like.

But product wise.

Yes. Purely, purely product. Yeah. Yeah. It seems like they're just not, they're.

Not hitting those product and positioning and marketing around.

But that's very different than cable. Like imagine if cable was like, oh yeah, like, you know, cable has better cable. Like Comcast actually has better video streaming infrastructure than Netflix for a couple months and then Netflix gets better. It would be like very weird. Like that's not what happened at all with the cable companies was like they didn't even try to use the Internet for like a decade. And then they were like, okay, I guess we should get on board with this, but we're just kind of printing cash.

The hubris from the big media execs needs to be studied.

Yeah, I think, I think with Google it really just comes down to like how much do the founders get back involved in like Drive. Because if it's just run and is like a cash cow, it's not going to happen. Yeah, but it needs to be interesting. They need to be willing to pivot the ship.

Yeah. Google and Apple both have these incredible managers running the ship and both are just completely the Apple having the greatest source of data.

People were saying Sundar was going to get fired after the black Nazi thing. Right.

What was that?

When they launched the. You don't remember this? Yeah, they launched image generation model. Image generation model. And people were like, like, draw me.

A picture of a Nazi.

And they had, and they had injected a bunch of like diversity keywords. And so it would put like a Nazi who was black. And it was like, this is more. This is very, very racist.

But it's funny, it's just funny to me because, because when you think about anything that OpenAI does, you could almost say that Apple should be doing that and competing there because they, they've already said that software is important to their business. Right. They, they hit on, oh, we did 25 billion of software revenue.

Right.

That's like their core focus. And so the iPhone is the greatest data collection, product, photo, video, text, voice, everything. Should they not be?

I think they're happy to just, to just take a cut of whatever happens on the iPhone. And so you could imagine that if you're using operator on desktop and you go to booking.com but Apple doesn't get.

But Apple doesn't get a cut of real world search services. Right. Like they don't get 30% of Uber's revenue. Whereas OpenAI. If they're. If OpenAI is driving.

Yes.

Hey, we're deciding if we're sending it to Uber or Waymo. You need to give us a cut.

Yes. And notice all of those examples were physical, real world goods. But what happens when I say, hey chatgpt, I, I want to watch the new season of Squid game tonight. Can you go make sure I'm signed up for Netflix. Netflix on my iPhone. I pull out my phone and I say, hey chatgpt, sign me up for Netflix. Like they might, they might, Apple might try and take a cut of that.

Yeah.

Or go buy me a bunch of Fortnite V Bucks or something. I don't know.

Yeah, but there's always workarounds of like Audible has their token.

Yeah, yeah. And stuff can happen on the web and I'm sure it'll be a knockout drag out fight. But I think Apple is.

We love a knockout.

We love a knockout drag out fight. But I do think that Apple. Apple is, I agree with you that they're complacent, but I think the complacency, the question is why are they complacent? And the reason is, is because so much of the economic activity happens in the digital realm and they do have a remit to collect 30% of that or some cut of that. And so they're just like, look, this AI stuff is crazy but people are still going to interact with it using their phones. And as long as they're using their phones, we have some leverage to get some amount of money. And that's exactly what happened with Google where they knew that people were going to be searching the Internet using a search engine and they never needed to build a search engine because they were able to tax Google. And so they got this, I think it's like $20 billion deal with Google and it's 100% margin and they don't have to manage anything. And so if you look at OpenAI could be massively successful. Everyone could be using operators for, to buy everything. And, and, and Apple could say hey, it's going to be Anthropic's agent unless you pay us $20 billion. And we're happy to do that. We're happy to do that. It's a great deal for us.

Yeah, it's so, so there's that which is real there, there also you think about if Apple was in founder mode.

Yeah.

And Steve was seeing, hey, we're going to hit this point with software where it becomes comes. We're going to hit a point with hardware where the difference between the iPhone 10 and the iPhone 16 is not so great. The next frontier is intelligence. He would have, there's a total world where he would have said we're going to spend $50 billion to become the most important consumer AI company in the world and have this, you know, synthesis between your phone and your, I mean.

Wasn'T he the one that said computers like a bicycle for the mind? Like AI is like F40 for the mind. Yeah. And like it's a, it's a brand new 9 11.

You should post that. Yeah, post that right now for AI.

Is an F. Ben post that from the Technology Brothers account. And, but, but I mean really like, like I, I just think like, like Steve Jobs, like his energy would have 100%. You're dead on that. It be, would, would have just, he.

Wouldn'T have been like we'll figure out a way to make some money on this trend.

No, no, he wants to shape it. He wants to Leave a dead universe.

Yeah. Google. Google predated the iPhone.

Yes.

It wasn't like Apple was sitting around watching the search market come online with billions and billions, you know.

And so with regard to Apple, like I agree with you that it's like it's uninspiring. It's, it's disappointing. But is it truly like an existential bear case or anything? Like they might make, they might wind up making more money just their tax.

But it's about it. But it's, it's more like if Apple wanted to become a hundred trillion dollar company, whatever. So some crazy number.

So let's, yeah, let's close this out with. Carried no interest with a long post about the impact of operator. He says the Internet is about to fall apart. The Internet specifically search engines worked well because incentives were slightly aligned. I could publish recipes, people would click on my link links, I could put ads on it and I could make money. This applied to vast swaths of the Internet and the free information we consume today with OpenAI's agent. Why the f would I post recipes anymore? OpenAI will just browse my site and steal my hard work. I won't get paid or get any leads. OpenAI will break the Internet flywheel. Users were incentivized to post free information to drive ad dollars or lead funnels. It was awesome. Now why would anyone do that? Flywheel broken. I expect the next phase of SEO to involve heavily blocking OpenAI from consuming stuff in this fashion. Why would I want OpenAI to have the ability to browse my site if.

I was sub, if I was substack right now I would be telling people we're going to create a firewall between these models and your content. Because I do think what he's saying is, is, is if you're somebody who wants to create recipes and that's like how you want to be spending your time and you, and, and anything you put out there can just be basically ripped.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Why? What, what's the incentive even if you're not, you're not even getting credit, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I, I think the monetization model for like fact aggregation is changing significantly. I mean the, the net celebrity net worth is good, kind of like canary in the coal mine for this. But if your job is just to, to collect content and put it on this, on to one site and run ads, like things are going to change pretty significantly. Yeah, I, I think it probably will change a lot less for like the, the curatorial stuff and the parasocial stuff because you're not just going to go to operator and say like, like what question should I ask to be what, what should I be interested in about tech right now? Like you know, you're still going to be on Ventom Thompson because he's, he's going to be curating and then bringing his unique point and maybe you could just ask like hey what did Ben say today in ChatGPT and get like a clip or something. But at a certain point I think.

Has been ever written about dgi.

I was going to look at. I don't think he's ever done like a full deep dive but I did search it but I didn't get.

There's not much to deep dive.

There isn't. There isn't much to deep dive. Let's move on from, from operator. I'm excited to play around with that. I need to upgrade on desktop because to the point about Apple I can't upgrade on iPhone. I click the upgrade button and it says you have to do it on desktop.

Yeah because they know.

Well here's a question from Mickey with the blicky for all of us. He says I've been trying to find product market fit for a while and I recently started thinking about my editing edge. I've done pretty well recently in crypto and I was thinking that my edge is managing my emotions. I'm pretty confident I'm in the top 1% of ROI. My question is I was thinking about leveraging my knowledge into some sort of wealth management app, leveraging my expertise and patience with investments and emotional discipline and providing education on how to format a plan and stick with it. How would you improve this idea? What do you think?

Good question. I, I think it's so many financial products encourage some amount of degeneracy. Right. Robin Hood is, is the big one being like hey you heard about leverage like hey kid, like we know you're trading, you know your, your lunch money but like have you thought about levering up?

Right.

Like there's sort of even the mechanics of the product and then you have companies like Public who offer the same, same set core set of features but never position it in a way like they never wanted to be a casino. Right. They're the next Charles Schwab is sort of their angle. Right. And so I, I always think that there's one these businesses like Public Wealthfront etc have shown that you can build. There was a while where people were like oh all these businesses are just not good.

Right.

Robinhood was, is in the down down Dave. Yeah, down and so I do think there's, there's probably a market for consumers who want some autonomy over their investment decisions. Right. They don't want to be fully automated like Wealthfront, but they want a little bit of a guide of, of saying like it could be as simple as when you hit sell and hit confirm sell. There's just the third step of hey, most people that hold stocks for or you know, some, you know, like basically those kind of cues.

Yeah. I think we're kind of getting at is like, is like every company that you cited there, Robinhood, Public Wealthfront, Acorns, Dave.com, they all had some sort of market entry hook like Robinhood. Their whole pitch was Robinhood take from the rich, give to the poor, commission, free trading. So you could get on with $10 and buy $10 of assets Apple and not pay a fee when normally back then it was $10 per trade. So that was a serious barrier to low dollar investors. And they figured out how to do that and make it with the payment for order flow stuff and like figure out how to, how to not lose that much money for a long time. I'm sure they were eating losses for a long time. And then public. The initial hook was any, when you had a trade you could publish it to a social media feed and so you could share. So if you were an influencer, you could say look, there's evidence on public.com of yes, I didn't just say buy Nvidia. I actually did and you can see that I did it.

Scott Galloway has had some poor picks but he's also very respected within his audience and there's people that would want to follow him and invest, you know.

Sure.

That sort of copy trading, copy trading.

Apps that have a very clear value prop where it's like you've seen the Nancy Pelosi stock ticker. You're going into that acorns. It's very simple. It's like this metaphor of like the squirrel gathering acorns. It rounds up and there needs to be an acorns 73 cents.

There needs to be an eight acorns for apex predators. You know. Oh yeah, the lion, he's just going to leave the, you know, go out on the savannah and just savage, you know.

Yeah, Feast or fan and app. It's like.

Yeah, feast app.

You can only, you can only trade with 100x leverage once every quarter or something.

Six figure minimum.

Yeah. Yes, minimum. Yeah. And 100% of your portfolio be concentrated into one ticker. There's no ETFs ETFs are banned on this app.

That's actually a funny. A funny. A trading app with a leaderboard and you can only hold one stock.

Yeah, exactly.

It just like constantly.

This is the near thing with, with the fund that has a 10 year long. That's just Nvidia like maybe productizing. That is interesting. And how can, how can more people.

Tend to productizing 10 year lockups?

There's a lot of influencers where they're like my. I have a YouTube channel that's just dedicated to podcast Palantir and all I do is talk about the Palantir stock move and I'm just Turbo Long Palantir and that's my entire identity. And so yeah, maybe there's an opportunity to productize something like that. But I think the more important like.

Meta point is that app is just called Turbo Long.

Turbo Long, yeah, that's a good one. But yeah, I mean it's basically like you're probably onto something. There's probably some sort of opportunity in wealth management apps, fintech generally. But you got to find your hook and your market entry because if you're just like we're, you know.

And then long term you go multi product. Like of course Publix has stock bonds. You can even buy treasury bills.

You buy Trump coin on public now. Yeah, like it really, it just has every possible asset. But that's something that you only get to. You only earn the right to be multi product after you hit that first product market fit. Yeah, it's the same thing in social. You know, Instagram was just square photos, then it was vertical photos, then it was reels. Now it's everything. Live streams and stuff.

Yeah.

Let's stay on the topic of incredible financial powerhouses and go to one of the best fintech investors in history, Jeb Bush.

Jeb Bush. For those that don't know, Jeb Bush had a couple family members that were presidents. Not many people can say that, but he's actually more famous now for his investment and I believe it was the series C or D of ramp. So he, he got in early and he said after Eric announced Treasury yesterday, he says ramps expansion into cash management and what it mean, what it mean for founders and operators, just comma. And then he lets, he lets the rest of the time.

Eric's got it.

A man of few words, but a smart one indeed. Jeb picked a winner and I love it.

I love it. And it's become a meme where I saw Buco Capital guy was posting like find you an investor who loves you as much as Jeb Bush loves ramp and it just screenshots of Jeb.

Well no, this alpha raising from a. A someone with clout that doesn't normally invest in startups. Yeah. Let's just share every single.

Exactly right. Exactly.

A lot of investors, they have 50 portfolio companies, they can't share every single.

You know but you get some wild card there. So is there more to stay on that or do you have. Do you have more timeline over there? Because I can go to Carrie. No interest if you want.

Let's just jump into the timeline of.

All then you'll mix in some of the promoted posts. Great. So carried no interest says you should be introduction maxing look at your network, people you interact with. Find someone impressive now think of someone else impressive that should know that person for a tangible reason. Introduce them. It costs nothing. It just got. I just got an unsolicited introduction to a private credit fund with a deal for me. This is great. I love it. I will always remember when I when when XYZ guy made this intro. I will certainly make intros for him. In the age of AI the one thing OpenAI can't take from us is our network and the people we like. Find two people that should know each other. Introduce them now. This is your sign. I love this. Great.

Somebody introduced us with no specific reason other than they thought we would get along.

Yes. Good vibes.

Thank you to doing that.

And this reminds me of a promoted post. I don't know if you just reshuffled it but we have a member of the community who's looking for an introduction actually to a.

Reprint that we actually talked. We talked yesterday about how and he.

Was being super nice when I was.

Talking to him on and Will he.

Was like I don't want to flood the show but we're happy to flood the show.

Flood the show brother brothers. And yeah just before we dive into this if you need help with something thing DM us. Yeah it could be finding a specific hire. Yeah it could be an intro to a specific company.

Yeah but also post about it publicly. Send it publicly because then you can print it out. But also serendipity some somebody might see this. Even if you only have a couple hundred followers it's fine. Just put it on the timeline. Someone will find it.

So Amazon will's posting this. He says Amazon Heavy Industries is looking for design for a designer for some early logo deck art website at work. Ideally want one true technology brother sister versus an agency 10 to 15k total budget here. But we of course love a Runway Respecting Brother.

Amazing.

So they're, they're running Runway Respecting Brother. Yeah, well's a good poster and yeah, opportunity to like sort of lead the charge on, on the early brand for Amazon. Cool. And I've, I've talked about this before. Huge alpha. If you're a designer in creating a branding package that, that's accessible for these companies that have raised a precede or a seed. If you go try to compete in the 100-200K branding package range, you're going up against people who've worked with Nike and Apple and all these, you know, major firms. So 10 to 15K, it's kind of like not a loss leader but it's like, it's like Costco, Costco Rotisserie chicken. You need to do get them with the team and, and yeah. So anyways, if this is you, if you're a designer, if not, if you have a designer you love, please. Dmuddntspeak.

Yeah, I'm sure people in the audience have worked with great designers before and all those designers, they love introductions because they're looking for the next job.

You can get favor if you introduce somebody to a client and then they close. You can get a DJI drone you talked about earlier or you just get next time you need a little help with something. Hey, I got get this email out like, could you help me tweak this? They're going to owe you one and you can.

Yeah, yeah. The worst part about that, about that, that story is that they were thinking about buying me like a really, really nice bottle of whiskey. And then they asked a friend and they're like, yeah, he doesn't really drink whiskey. And so they got me the dji which was fine, but. But yeah, you need to establish your brand for if somebody's returning a favor. Yeah, Dom Perignon only.

Yeah.

Anyway, let's go to this, this banger, wow. 133k likes makes this hit. So Mal says, I'm so sick and tired of using the team's salute emoji. It does not accurately reflect how locked in I actually am. He is not locked in. Stupid effing idiot. And it's this like 3D render of the salute emoji and it's.

I don't think that the eyes are a little cross.

Yeah, prey eyes, that's what it is. Not predator eyes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're locked in. I want, yeah, I want my locked in emoji to be actually like Navy SEAL level day Three of hell week in.

Yeah. It's also funny because, like, I didn't even know 133,000 people used Microsoft Teams. But I guess it is like the most popular product.

It has like 10 times.

Yeah.

Slack or 20 times.

So people, people know. Let's do another.

Satya has 80 billion. He can just rip around 20 billion. Let's for that small size gong moment. Interesting promoted post. We just want to flag this to the brothers. Kanye west is hiring an AI team. Let me know if interested. Yeezy hashtag, let's build. This is posted by Hampton Hamptonism. He's a he. He or she is accelerating what's happening. Very cool. I, I, I. If you, if you live in la, every other person you meet that's like, I'm a creative director, like, has worked on Yeezy's team. So, like, talk about a guy like Frank Wang turns through talent. Yeezy turns through talent on another level. He gets these really talented. Everybody wants to work with Kanye. And then it's, it's, it's very, apparently very difficult to do. So I know a bunch of people who are like, oh, yeah, I work with Kanye on this, I worked with Kanye on that. And none of them lasted more than like six months. But if you want to, if you want to work on AI with Kanye for six months, I mean, he, the cool opportunity here is the distribution is not just, oh, he has 500k followers on X. Yeah, we're going to get some users. It's, it's a, Millions of people will sign up to this on the first day and it will probably be like.

National news and stuff. And then also, you know, I think there's a lot of talented founders that are difficult to work with and chaotic energies and very high energy. And if you get six months with Kanye and you can get through that and have that experience, you're going to show up to some sort of, you know, other company with a like, quote, unquote, like crazy founder by Silicon Valley standards. You'll be like, this is the easiest job I've ever had. Yeah. So real opportunity to cut your tail. Speaking of founder archetypes, let's go. Sam Lesson, he says he's updating the founder archetype for 2025. For the last decades, for the last decade, the ability to code was an enormous hammer. Deeply valuable weapon to wield. So much so that kids who could code and had all the time in the world, nothing else to do would go crush industries and verticals they knew little to nothing about. Their unique tech leverage was so great slash the magic so powerful and relatively un unique they could slay much savvier incumbents. This was the magic of the 20 years. 20 year old know nothing engineer kid hanging out in an incubator. But in 2025 we see a new world. A world where hilariously things like AI have lowered the barrier of technology that all of a sudden the magical technical leverage of a 20 year old coder is gone. The playing field has been re leveled. So what? So the reality is that Unlike the last 15 years, you're going to have a very bad time as a 20 year old. No knowing a 20 year old know nothing who can code and you are going to have a very bad time backing that 20 year old know nothing who can code as a VC instead. The skills that matter today slash what moves the needle? Expertise. Actually knowing a vertical slash strategy much better than other people having lived it and breathed it. Storytelling. Look at the Elon's and the Sam Altmans of the world. What are they really? They are storytellers, not engineers. Their ability to push a narrative, bring around others, build a meaning team that is the key founder skill and leadership. You still have time, you still have to hire and manage great people. That doesn't go away even if you have smaller teams slash more leverage. This change in founder archetype is going to be big, is going to be a big industry problem. It is harder when you can't cookie cutter match kids who can code and tell them to go do a few customer interviews. Also when this, when all of a sudden you need entrepreneurs with expertise. Those tend to be people with much higher opportunity costs. The years they have put in to get that expertise and the corporate life ladder you are foregoing for the startup. Well, you are going to have fewer folks willing to take the leap. What is old is new. Because that's the way it was before the tech kitty bubble.

Interesting tech kitty bubble moment there.

Yeah. Coming for the young, young ones.

I mean I feel like it's been. It's this interesting dynamic, right. You back the young hungry teens team that knows nothing about an industry. But they. They're going to figure it out. They're going to work 80 hours a week to do it. Or do you back the 40 year old veteran of the industry who maybe is not. You just already know like if they have kids they can't work as much, right? Unless they want to be a total psycho and just like ignore their family. But the veteran like has relationships. They they can get to that first 5 million of ARR faster through that trust trusted networks, things like that. And so over time there's been numerous examples of the tech kitty team winning. There's been numerous examples of the veteran team winning and just smoking the like tech stars company that, that you know had just they maybe they had a good idea but they just didn't have the network. So I do think it's. I do think I do. Yeah. What Sam is saying is it's about knowing what, what to build. Having pre existing customer relationships is going to matter a lot when you have a, when everybody has thousand, an army of a thousand AI sales agents that are ringing, calling, emailing around the clock. People will just probably start ignoring people that they don't know. So it'll be interesting to see. But I would say like the other side of this is that you will still have the young tech kids team that uses the AI tools better than the veteran who knows what to build and they have relationships but maybe can't build as fast. Right. Yep.

Yeah. I think it's a good thesis. I wonder if the age thing will hold because I'm thinking about the tech programmer Kitty that the reason that they're good at programming is that they stay up all night and they code constantly. If you take someone who's 16 right now and instead of getting them obsessed with programming and scripting and writing little apps, they instead become obsessed with industry research, understanding an industry really well and they actually are going to like they pick a very niche specific industry. They go to all the conferences. If they raise money, they're spending it on tigus and GLG doing expert calls. They're networking like crazy. They go and do internships in this thing. Like can they actually learn the true nature of that industry and gain the expertise of someone who's 40 in four years if they work nights and weekends and constantly and they're obsessed over it. I think it might be possible for, for, for a 20 year old to still check all of the Sam lesson.

The thing about the thing about programming though is it's totally permissionless.

Sure.

Whereas learning an industry you gotta.

Yep.

It's harder to learn. I do think it's you. You can't stay up all day night because. Because you have to convince people to get on the phone with you.

Yes.

If you're not actually selling the product. Like one thing I like if you're, if you're working in an. I worked on a deal at the beginning of 2024 for a company in like a very, very boring overlooked industry no YC company had ever touched it. And there was a lot of information online about the industry, but it wasn't until we started talking with customers that we were like, okay, here's an attempt at this industry that had happened a decade ago that didn't work. Here's a. Another player that didn't. We didn't get discovered and it's working in these areas. So there's just so much information that's not, that's just in people's minds.

Yes.

Hasn't been surfaced anywhere. So whereas programing is like, I want to learn how to do this. Boom, do it. I want to. You can. There's, there's just a lot more that's published about it. There's also, yeah, you know, if you're an 18 year old programmer, you can reach out to the CTO at some company and be like, yeah, ask some questions. I'll probably answer you.

Yeah, there are, there are some interesting examples that might be more worth studying than the programmer who built an app and sold it for $1 billion. Like I'm thinking about the Strauss Zelnick story. The, the CEO of Take Two Interactive that runs they own GTA and NBA 2K and all these great video games. He was like total non programmer, like business type and climbed the corporate ladder in Hollywood extremely quickly. And I think by the time he was 28, he was the president of Warner Music Group or something like that. Crazy. And so maybe the new, the new speed running of becoming an entrepreneur will be, yeah, the first five years aren't spent coding. But actually yes, you do need to go into a corporate corporation, but you don't need to become the 40 year old expert who has ground his way up to VP and has a family and a bunch of obligations and is really entrenched, it's more just like the cracked kid who went in and actually got to the very top of an organization even faster. So I think that's kind of interesting. And then, and then I just do wonder about that permissionless thing. I think you're right that coding is more permissionless. But if you look at like Harry Stebbings breaking into venture capital, like he was through like just grit and determination. He was able to get calls with all the big people. He used the podcast as a way to justify like, let's hop on a call essentially. But he was able to do that. And there's there it does seem like if you're a 20 year old kid and you want to, you know, go into like, I don't know, Gong manufacturing or something and you're just this really crazy hustler and you're just emailing and calling like the CEO of every manufacturing like 20 times in a row. Like you might be able to break through if you do something really crazy to stand out. Do some free work, send them something on spec, show up at their office, like give them lunch to figure out how to get that.

Those meetings, the people at the founders that are going to continue to like really accumulate capital right now are the Zach Abrams from what the company sold to Stripe. Remember Bridge? Right. 10 years in fintech totally still young, probably leveraging a bunch of these AI tools to just code a lot faster. So getting that the benefit of like being still learn learning aggressively about how to to ship.

Yeah.

But then also having that expertise not directly in stablecoins but stable coins or fintech in, in many ways.

So yeah, it's a interesting time. Anyway, let's go to a promoted post.

Promoted post from our friends at, over at Ad Quick. We just thought this was interesting. So 45 of all searches made on Google are branded. What that means is it's people sending saying, you know, technology brothers, podcasts and all in might want that traffic. Right. So they'd be like, have you tried All In? Right. So that's a branded search. A non branded search is shoes.

Yeah.

You know, men's best tech podcast general. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so yeah, they're sort of varying, you know, different people. People say, you know, whatever that range is, but a very high percentage of that of Google traffic is branded search. And Ad Quick jumps in and says that they actually are sharing that out of home is a big driver. They don't have a specific statistic, but you can imagine you're driving around on the 101, you see a billboard, you.

Know, so Adquick helps people buy billboards.

Yeah, they make it super, super easy to like programmatically buy billboards and just out of home ads in general.

Yeah.

And so that still seems like a.

Business that works in the operator world where you ask ChatGPT to buy a billboard and it goes to Ad Quick and does the integration and they still act as the integration point with the hard asset in the real world. And that's where the value accrual is. Right?

Yep.

Um, but yeah, I mean it's so funny when you hear these like, you know, the cognitive dissonance from like okay, OpenAI just killed every website ever. And then you're like, yeah, people can't figure out to go to nike.com and so 75% of people search Nike on Google first. And then Nike pays Google $20 million every month to make sure that they show up as the top result. When. When people search Nike on Google instead of just going to Nike, it's like, yeah, we really are. Like, the cable era is definitely real. Like, the cable phenomenon is going to be around for a while.

Yeah.

Anyway, love ad. Quick, we got to get Jeremy that billboard on 101Y. Let's go to Zach Al. He says, My top 10, why didn't I do this sooner List. And I want your rating of these or these, these rankings. Number one, shower water filter. Yay or nay? Give me the thumbs up. Thumbs up. Down.

Thumbs up.

Thumbs up. Two, magnesium glycinate for sleep.

Thumbs up.

I take multiple red light therapy panel. Do you do red light therapy? Thumbs up.

It's real.

Okay. Air purifier. You got seven of them running right now. Bamboo sheets and pillowcases.

Bamboo.

I don't even know how you make sheets out of bamboo.

I would think I'm more like cotton. Yeah. So linen, you know, or.

Linen.

Yeah, yeah.

Where's linen come from?

I sheep or. I think a lot of bamboo is heavily, heavily, heavily processed. To get it, maybe pass bamboo sheets. Yeah, yeah.

Blue light blocker glasses.

I've got a few pairs around the house.

Do you actually do them? I've done them a few times, but I do the night shift on my. On my phone.

I have the funniest.

I don't have trouble following.

I have the funniest setup where the thing that puts me to sleep is sort of like heavy information audio. So when I use my phone or I have an iPad at night to. To put on something, I'll just have the blue blockers and so then I'll fall asleep with the blue blocker knob with my headphones in. And then I'll just end up in the middle of the night. Like blue blockers.

Blockers going. Yeah, yeah. But okay, so blue blockers, generally you can also. You can just set your phone.

I do my.

I.

Night shift. No, not night shift. You can set it to completely eliminate blue hues.

Okay.

So I hit more.

Oh, yeah.

Three click on the side. And then it just looks red.

It's like green screen. That's number 10 grayscale on the iPhone. I've done that a few times.

Not a huge. Because I love my phone. I love using my phone. And grayscale really takes away from that.

It does, it does. It will make you use the phone less, though. It makes everything less enjoyable. So local honey for spring. Allergies. Allergies. What do you think about that?

I've heard about that working. I don't suffer from allergies.

I just, I think, I think allergies, you even if you get them but.

Just have local honey. There's, there's a honey diet fad right now that's going on where people just get like half their calories from honey.

Have their thousand calories money. There's so much.

Yeah, yeah. There's a guy that's posting on X right now that is getting all of his calories until dinner from Coca Cola and he's losing weight. Wow.

Insane.

Amazing.

It's like the carnivore diet for bees.

This is a regular diet for bees. They're not bees don't.

Well, think about the carnivore diet as being a very extreme. Like I only eat this one thing. Like meat and honey is just like extreme.

Like don't bees just eat honey?

No, they don't eat honey. They produce honey.

Oh, I thought they.

No, no, no. That's a byproduct of bees. They create the honey and they're eating pollen. Yeah, they're. They're taking the pollen and converting. Converting it. And the honey is the byproduct.

I always. That's so funny. You always thought they were getting.

No, the bears eat the honey. The bears go and break into the hive.

But imagine you're a bee and you just, you're just sitting around the hive and, and yeah. Put your.

Yeah.

Like.

Oh, this actually, actually good. They realize it. Yeah. No, if, if you want to be upstream of the honey, the honey diet, you get the bear.

These are low key. Goated for making, for making honey for us.

Yeah, totally. Okay. Okay. Oh, there. So they will occasionally dip their, dip their stinger in the honey. UPS in USPS Informed delivery. Have you ever done that? I don't know. What informed.

Yeah, they just send you a notification. We delivered you a package.

This is like such a funny one to include in like all these like biohacks. And then you're just like. And also I want to sign for my packages.

I think it might be a sneaky little ad there for ups. If he was like posted.

It's not ups, it's usps. So if the government. You think he's a fed.

Yeah.

Okay. And then number nine global entry. Yeah. Only if you're traveling internationally. Pre check kind of just does the same thing. And then there's also clear. And you kind of just need to.

Get them all feel like. I don't. Airports have been so efficient for. Yeah, I haven't, yeah, just in and out.

Okay, let's go to another promoted post.

I have one of the most heinous promoted posts that we've ever done. But I mean we, but there's a certain person.

A dollar is a dollar.

There's a certain person in an audience that I think this could be good for. We have a, from Dupont Registry, we have a 2024 Rolls Royce Phantom with an asking price of $700,000 dollars. You might be asking, why are they asking 700K for a Phantom, A Phantom from last year. And here's why. It's aerodynamic, aggressive exterior, includes unique carbon fiber accents emphasizing exclusivity through the Mansory customization. So this is not just a Rolls Royce Phantom. This is a man, sorry, custom. You know, very, very unique car here. And to me, this is a perfect car for a size lord GP that wants to. Maybe they have some insecurities. Maybe they want to really intimidate founders. So let's say you're working on a deal with a founder. You're trying to negotiate terms and say, hey, meet me at this parking lot around Sunset. Pull up in the car, leave your headlights on, park in the corner and just like make them kind of come to you. And look at, imagine, imagine an empty parking lot and this car is sitting on the other side and you have to approach it. It just looks like such a beast.

I see this and I just say this screams lol. The loud opulence lifestyle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's what that.

But it's black, so it's understated in that way. But you're very, very I, I, I have a buddy in Malibu who daily drives, drives a Phantom. It's, it's a black badge, not a Mansory, but works well for him. And consider it if you're looking to make, you know, a statement.

Well, let's stay on the topic of cars and go to a banger post with over half a million likes from Lewis Hamilton. Says first time in red, we print it in black and white. But he's looking fantastic in his new Ferrari Scuderia Ferrari F1 outfit with some fantastic sponsors. And, you know, we like to pass through the sponsors here. So he's sponsored by IBM, hp.

This is called, as you know, land. Acknowledgments were popular historically, but yeah, we're kind of trying to create a new movement. Acknowledgments.

Yeah. And he's got Richard Mill Here and here.

It's kind of sick racing machine on his wrists.

Yeah, they did get the wrist slot. That's hilarious. I didn't put that together, but yeah, that makes sense. And so he's, he's looking great and everyone's excited for him to be on Scuderia Ferrari for this next F1 season. The announcement photo was beautiful. It was him in front of an F40. Looking great.

He'll be. Will he be. He'll be knighted at some point.

He might have already been. Yeah, it seems like. Yeah, it's definitely in the cards, but.

Definitely in the cards. He looked very nightly in the, in the picture with Ferrari. Even though. Oh yeah. Italian manufacturer.

But he went from. I think he was in McLaren then big run at Mercedes and now Ferrari.

Yep.

So, yeah, that's a, that's a desirable ad slot if you got a. If you're looking to deploy some capital outside of the podcast industry, call us first for the podcast sponsorships. But call Scuderia Ferrari if you really want to make a statement.

Yeah.

What else you got on Promoted?

Okay. Since we're on the topic of cars, I honestly can't help myself. Usually I try to space it out out more, but this car could also work for the same type of person I was describing the last time you got a 2025 Mercedes AMG G63 fitted with the Brabus B700 kit. It has an asking price of just $500,000. It has a manufacturer hyper blue magno exterior which is like this simultaneously like matte but also show the black and.

White photo for the camera.

Yeah. I mean this thing is if you're looking for a car that's going to leave use 50% of its value in the first year or two, this is the car alongside that Mansory culling in.

That wasn't even coming easily.

Phantom, Phantom Phantom sedan for 800K. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean these cars are just so ridiculous. I wouldn't, I wouldn't be caught dead in them. But for the right person, it's just so perfect because it basically just screams. It just screams. I see spent 2x loud opulence value of. Of the. The vehicle.

Yeah.

For. For a body kit. And so. And anyways, if you're a pre seed founder, they got Bravis body kits on Alibaba though. We didn't. You know, we don't endorse that but it is if, if you're on a budget, you know, get creative.

Okay. This is a great banger from Trey Stevens at Founders5Fund. He's quote, tweeting Zach Johnson who says ByteDance has released an ide. A cursor ide competitor called Trey. Trey AI. And Trey Stevens says this is unacceptable.

So I saw this before Trey had posted that.

Yeah.

And I thought to myself, is there. I give it maybe a 15% chance, 10% chance that it was intentional. Trey has been very outspoken.

Yep.

They might be trolling him and, and bite. You know, I'm sure he's trolled. By dance. By dance. Hey, we need a kind of American name.

Yeah. Yeah.

What's, you know, what's something that's short, punchy, that, that we could throw a little shade across the pond.

Yeah.

How about, how about Trey?

Trey? Yeah.

Is it Trey AI?

Trey AI. How did he not own this domain?

Yeah, Trey. Come on, Trey.

It is hilarious. Is because there's been this weird trend of like Founders Fund people getting stuff named after them that creates confusion. So the famous one is like Mike Solana is not like a crypto guy. And yet like Solana has just dominated the news, is now like the biggest chain. And so he used to be, he.

Was Solana before Salon.

Oh yeah.

And so got to add Mike.

And so a lot of times people will be like, like, like you're, you're, you're behind Salon. Like why, why aren't you like promoting, promoting the coin more, you know, like that type of stuff. And then there was a defense tech company that came out called Delian Dot Defense or something like that.

Dellion was just like doing that as an American company is just poor form.

Yeah. And so, yeah, you know, Trey has got it. So creating like creating the holy trinity of Founders Fund people is company names, I guess. Got another promoted post in the, in there.

Yeah, I got a cheeky, cheeky promoted post.

Okay.

From our friends over at McKinsey and Company. Fantastic. Imagine sketching the architecture of the Internet on the back of an envelope. And we gotta, we gotta create some envelopes, I guess for sketching out architecture on because they're a great surface to do that. Vint Surf takes us back to 1973, sharing how a six month collaboration gave rise to the Internet as we know, know it. Discover how this vision became a reality. And McKinsey, absolute savages. They throw a URL in the post.

Built different.

Built different. All of our listeners know that if you want to play X on a hard mode, just include a link in your post. Just put google.com. if you don't have something, you know directly that you're trying to promote. And the Best posters are able to overcome that and hence. So anyways, he Andreessen I guess this guy is still Google's chief Internet evangelist. I have no idea what that means. Very McKinsey esque title. But maybe, maybe he should be fired. McKinsey was really.

He's like an early Internet legend now I. Okay, we got another banger from David Holes. This is the wrong post. I mean this is an important post we need to talk about but he recently posted Independent Definitely it brings me no pleasure to tell to report that lifting weights does in fact make you feel better. I don't know if you know David Holz, but he's like, you know, not like a bodybuilder type.

Is this the Mid Journey?

This is the Mid Journey guy.

Yeah.

Yeah. And. But this is a more like, you know, down the fairway post for him. He Sundays lots of AI people seem to think the most important thing is to get rich before the singularity happens. This is like a monkey trying to hoard bananas before another monkey invites prevents self replicating nanoswarms. No one wants your money in the nanoswarm future. It's just paper. Don't fight over fleeting symbols. Symbols. What we really need to be doing is figuring out what we as humans want to transform into. We must introspect, explore and then transform.

So there was a reply to this that I thought that that resonated with me, which was that the. It seems that in the next 10, 20 years returns on labor will go down, down because there's sort of machine replacements for labor which humans have been replacing labor with machines forever. So we still don't know exactly if we'll just create a bunch of new fake jobs. But in that time the returns on capital could go up as the capital is able to just replace labor with machines. And so there's this dynamic where maybe there's a temporary spike. Spike in the. In the value of capital. In which case, you know, founders selling some cheeky secondary on the way up to, to you know, get, you know, broader exposure would be.

The interesting thing here is that it's like this is like a monkey trying to hoard bananas before another monkey invents self replicating nanosworms. Like if I was a monkey, I actually would want a lot of bananas. While Americans are building space travel and going to the moon and Mars and stuff. Like it's still better to be a.

Lot of source of potassium.

Yeah, you want a lot of bananas. If you're a monkey and you want to throw a body kit on the banana.

Yeah. It would be the terrible thing if we were approaching singularity. You had a G63 and you couldn't slap a Brabus B700, you know, get on it. You'd be just sitting there being like, all right, like, I guess it's over.

Yeah, it'd be brutal. Do we have any other promoted posts we need to go through?

I, I'm, let's, let's do a bucket poll. And then we got, actually, we really have to hit the gym.

Okay. Bucket poll from you. He says this is the best example I've ever seen of an exception that proves the rule. And he, and he posts a photo previous post. What are some, some of the best examples of an exception proving rule? Adam Andra is an oddly good climber for being so tall. He's six foot one and that's the exception to the rule. He happens to just have a really long neck. Neck on the body of a shorter person. Proving what? Square cubed law tells us the rule that climbing ought to generally be biased towards shorter men. I really thought that was interesting because I think people throw out the exception proves the rule incorrectly a lot. Where they'll just be like, oh, like, you know, there's this one example that doesn't stick in with the path pattern and therefore it's the exception that proves the rule. But that's not actually what that phrase means. Like in this, in this example, it's like he's, he's, it's not that tall. He's tall, but it's because he just has a long neck and he actually has a short body. And so he's a great climber and.

He'S got that extra visibility up there.

Yeah. And so I, I, I, I, I just thought, yeah, I just thought it was fascinating. Yeah.

I need to see a picture.

Yeah. Oh yeah, you can see the picture. He's, he has a huge neck. It's crazy. Like, he definitely has the body of like a five foot six guy or five foot eight guy. Yeah, it's really, he's really melted. Yeah. I don't think the long leg helps him, but it's most important that he's just, it means same thing with Michael Phelps. He has a really long torso, tree.

Neck like a tree.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah.

That's insane.

But yeah, I thought that was, I thought that was fascinating. I was trying to think of like, I've been trying to be on high alert for people that use that phrase incorrectly. You know, you can say like, oh, like most. Like the, like the, like the. What makes a great entrepreneur? Like, oh, like they all have like, rough childhoods. But like, I found one example of someone that didn't have a rough childhood, but maybe that's the exception that proves the rule. Like, that's not an example of that. It would be. It would be an exception that proves the rule if they had a rough. If they didn't have a rough child childhood, but then they had something else that was like a rough childhood. Oh, yeah. When they went to college, they got like hazed a ton and it simulated that. And so really they did have a struggle or something. Yeah. And. And. And so it's just. It's just a funny like, like phrase that I, I'd heard and I sense that people were misunderstanding, but this is a great concrete example of using it properly, which I really, really like. Yeah. So that's a great way to end the show. Have a great. You guys tomorrow and please leave us five stars. And when you go and leave us a review, drop an ad for your company. A friend's company or just a company you like.

Yeah, this is a great way to surprise a friend because if we run an ad for your review, we can also clip the video. And so do it as a surprise for your friends.

Maybe you're applying to a job somewhere. Promote that company. Send the them clip. Look, I'm already shareholder value for you.

There we go.

That's criminal for you not to hire. Great idea. Let's do that.

Let's do it.

See you tomorrow's reviews. See you tomorrow. Bye.