X Under Attack, Dom Day, Yardsale Thesis, Manus, Bread and Taxes, DeepSeek

You're watching TVPN. Today is Monday, March 10, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We are under attack, folks. Hackers, they've seen what we've been doing with this show. They know it's too powerful. They're coming for you. They're coming for us.

They came. Platform Be afraid.

What is going on?

Elon. Elon says it's a cyber attack by a nation state. He does have. We do have some.

We have a post. We already printed it. It went up and we printed it immediately. Elon says there was. There was. Slash still is a massive cyber attack against X. We get attacked every day. But this was done with a lot of resources. Either a large coordinated group or a country is involved. He's tracing it. And then someone in the comments says they want to silence you and. And this platform. And he says yes. So we know the truth. This platform. We are part of this platform. They're trying to silence us. But we can't be stopped. We're still streaming, we're still live, we're still reading posts out loud. But first we got to talk about this weekend. I went skiing in Lake Tahoe. It was fantastic. And we wanted to break down what's going on. If you haven't followed the markets in turmoil. It's in free fall. And we have a thesis for what's. For what's going on. And we have a bunch of evidence to back this up.

We do. We do. We calling it, folks, the yard sale.

The yard sale. It's a yard sale for those that.

Don'T know yard sales. When you're skiing and you have. You have it a bad enough accident that all of your gear basically just gets rejected off of your body.

Both poles and both skis.

And. And oftentimes the helmet, goggles and gloves.

Yeah, exactly.

And so they get spread out over the mountain and you have to go.

Everything's laid out today is.

Don't check your public account.

Yep.

Just don't even look at it.

Don't even look at it.

Just watch. Stay with us. But it's an absolute.

Maybe it's a good day to teach people about dollar cost averaging.

Yeah, right.

And not trying to time the markets. Never works. So that's what we'll be talking about today.

Yeah, I actually have to. When Nvidia after deep seek announcement Nvidia went down tremendously. I was down 15%. I just instantly bought it. I'M guessing I've ran through you.

Probably round trip. Yeah, for sure.

But for a minute there, for about a month, I looked like it's glorious.

You look genius.

I look like a genius. Okay, so we, but, but anyway, so this is John's working theory. He was skiing this weekend. He sort of figured this out. But the, the yard, the yard sale thesis.

Yeah, the yard sale.

What, what is the, what is the genesis of it? Talk to the audience about it.

So the yard sale thesis is essentially, as everyone knows, during ski season, all the greatest capital allocators in the world head to the slopes. They're sitting on ski lifts. And what's unique about ski lifts, it's almost, it's very much like a sauna in that there are, there's no one that's eavesdropping on you. There's not a lot of technology around. People can speak freely and you also wind up with somewhat random people. But everyone's kind of in the same mil you because they're all paying $2,000 a day to ski at some Icon pass or Epic pass location.

And so I don't know, are you talking about room and board and, and everything?

I mean, I'm pretty sure the lift tickets are like over 600 now a day for like a one day thing. So. Yeah, so, so, so there's this filter that it basically says, you know, there's this economic floor that basically you have to be a capital allocator, get on the slopes these days with the prices where they are. But that creates a lot of random chance interactions between folks who have different insights into different pieces of the market.

And they're moving size.

They're moving size for sure. And they're speaking freely because they're just like, I'm up here, I'm cold. I'm trying to just bond with someone on this ski lift. And I'm not worried I'm being eavesdropped on because I'm not in an office, I'm not, I'm not at a crowded coffee shop.

Yep.

I'm on a, I'm on a ski chair lift. And so, so the rumors start flying. The rumor mill happens on the ski lift. And if you'll see, at the end of the ski lift, there's always a sign that says tips up. Like it says, like, put the stock tips away, guys, because you don't want the stock tips going out once you're, once you're off the ski lift, you want to keep.

You don't want them, you don't want to Be getting a notification that says the market is down.

Exactly.

Tips, tips up.

And so.

And the other thing, the other factor is even on gondolas.

Yeah.

There's a big issue where let's say you're skiing with a buddy.

Yeah.

You get on a gondola, maybe it's a six person gondola. Everybody's got their goggles on their helmets. Couple, you know, two guys think they're just having a regular conversation. They don't know that somebody that has 10 billion of AUM is two seats over picking that up and trading.

This, this happened to me because I would get on, I was in full gear, you couldn't tell who I was. And I would overhear people saying, oh, oh, there's like tvpn. It's like the biggest thing. Like it's the best thing ever. Like it's taking over the world.

I wish they did seven days a week.

Yeah. A lot of people were saying, like I used to be a podcaster, I'm actually shutting down because of what's going on with vpn, so. But they probably wouldn't have said that if they knew that I was sitting right there.

Yeah, yeah.

So those types of conversations, they don't.

Know you're six, eight.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

There's not that many six, eight people skiing if they, yeah. If they knew you were 6, 8, but you're sitting down all the time.

Yeah, yeah.

So it's hard to tell.

Yeah, exactly. So. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of stock tips flying around and you know, sometimes someone has a little tip, hey, maybe Silicon Valley bank isn't so hot. You hear it on the ski chair. You go, you take a short position, one thing leads to another and the whole company collapses. But you think we're crazy. You think this is some weird thing that. Oh, really? There should just be like the average amount of financial collapses and frauds are discovered during ski season. Right. It's only a couple of months, but we have a list here for you of financial frauds that happened during ski season. And when you hear this long, you're going to start believing in the yard sale, the yard sale theory of finance. You're going to believe us because look, Black Monday, the global stock market crashed.

Right. When the mountains around, Right where the mountains open.

October 19, 1987. The Dow Jones plunges 22.6% in a single day. Yeah, like, I mean, yeah, it was probably early, early, but it was, it.

Was getting out there, you know, oftentimes.

Yeah.

The mountain's not open to everyone. You got to have a special relationship, you know, be.

Exactly.

And, and, and so the only people that would even be skiing then are.

The most important, are the most allocators, are the heaviest. Definitely. Yeah. The barings bank collapse February 16th. I mean bad center.

There's no other way to explain this other than.

And this was a 2233 year old UK based merchant bank. They failed after a rogue traders unauthorized losses. Those, those losses 830 million bankrupted the firm. Those could have been hidden for months more but of course rumor mill comes out on the ski lift and boom. Gone dead. February 20th.

We got to figure out more about this because it's a 233 year old company and one dude goes rogue.

Oh, there's a movie about it. It's great.

Maybe because he wasn't invited on a ski trip.

He was in Singapore. They don't ski there.

Yeah, yeah.

That's probably what happened. Yeah.

Yeah. The rest of the firm back in the UK was going to Switzerland and he, he got a. Was it. Did they even have email in 90. Kidding. So he gets an email, he says it's.

I know I think they might, they might have faxes but not many emails. 95. That's like right on the cusp of email. Yeah. Well speaking of email.com crash 3-10-2000. That's actually 25 years ago today.

It became by the 2000s it was ubiquitous.

Yeah.

Mid mid-90s they were definitely using. So he probably sent an email to a client or not a client. His coworker. Auto response.

Yep.

Hey, I'm in Switzerland this weekend skiing with the firm and he realized that he just goes rogue.

He just goes rogue. He's like I gotta make more money cause I gotta be able to get on these ski trips. Yeah, that's for sure. What's happening.

So bankrupts is 233 year old company.

It is the. Can you believe it's the 25 year anniversary of the dot com crash. March 10th, 22,000.

Wow.

There was a 78% index drop by 20 by 2002. Just total, total sell off. And everyone's like oh it's so telling. Like there's a minor drop today. It's you know, forecast. But it does feel like that feels crazy today. Anyway. Enron scandal 12-02-2001. The Argentine economic crisis in December of 2001.

Yep.

The. The Parmalat bankruptcy. The Enron of Europe 12-24-2003 early excuse me, pre Christmas dairy giant Bear Stearns collapsed during ski Season. Bernie Madoff was discovered during ski season. You know that, that has to be a ski season tip. Yeah, right, that, that has chairlift tip all over.

Somebody said hey I tried to you know, pull my funds out.

Yeah.

He said, you know, give me, give me a few years.

Theranos was discovered March 14th.

Gosh.

You know, John Carrey Rue was probably on the slopes picking something up from some investor who passed and saw the, saw the data room, the COVID 19 market crash. I mean really clearly. Really. The faulty ski season, Evergrande, ftx, SVB and Credit Suisse all happened during ski.

That last one makes total sense. Yeah. Because I'm sure that deal, this was a rescue but I'm sure that deal was getting done in Switzerland on the slopes.

Definitely.

So it's one of those things. Definitely the catalyst for these crashes are happening on the slopes and then the fix is also happening on the slopes.

Yeah.

So it's for sure, you know, interesting scenario.

For sure.

Anyways, did you get any dangerous tips this weekend?

Not, not too many tips, just the usual like rare fish, rare birds, you know, perpetual alpha putting. Buying mice in a five to one female to male ratio and releasing them in your competitors office. That just the usual.

A lot of people on your trip were probably doing that years ago.

Exactly, exactly. It's kind of an old priced in at this point most competitors have mice defenses.

At this point it's priced in. Yeah, I heard there's a rumor that there's a firm building a Godzilla sized humanoid robot and sort of shaking up the market. It's part of why.

Going Pacific Rim mode.

Yeah, I mean it's part of why Tesla's down. Tesla this year at least. Tesla is down over 36% in the last month. And some people are saying it's because somebody came out and they're making a humanoid that's 100 times bigger than Optimus.

Yeah.

And so anyways market obviously pricing that in.

Yeah, I mean the real, the real risk is the dripped out humanoid. Right. As soon as someone puts it in Marshall Balenciaga. In Balenciaga then it's truly over. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of it's over, I have a funny post here from David Holz, founder of Midjourney. He's quote tweeting intel that just tweeted AI and then he quote tweets and says it's over. It's so over.

It really is. They didn't quote quite top but they, they, they, they marked like the last sort of potentially the dying breath of the bull market.

It's it's pretty powerful. Like if you're running that brand like and you're self aware and you understand that by. By you're going to like the read on you posting that is going to be top.

Yep.

Maybe you should move Intel's entire treasury into a short position and then tweet AI.

Yeah.

That's a really powerful move. You need to make a quick buck. You're not really making much. Maybe that's semiconductors anymore.

Maybe intel saying chips act going away. We need a different source of capital for this.

Yeah. Become a hedge fund.

Yeah.

Just know that by being extremely cringe on the timeline you can move the market Intel.

Yeah. They did it.

They did it.

They did it.

They did it. Anyway, should we move on to some of these. Some of these more serious stories?

It is interesting. Uh I'm sure somebody out there has a ridiculous conspiracy theory that requires a tinfoil hat that basically says that if you were a hedge fund that was needing to unwind a lot of positions and you knew that like a lot of trading activity was catalyzed by like general. You know, the retail traders are on X being like what is happening? Like the market's down and you needed to unwind like one, if you needed like an to buy, you know.

Yeah. Cause turmoil.

Just, just take down X. You start, you know, unwinding those positions.

Interesting.

Totally. Probably, you know, unrealistic, but it's funny to think about.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I mean my, my experience on X today has not been that bad. I've been seeing most, most things. I feel like it used to be really bad for you.

Terrible. Yeah.

But maybe they're targeting you because you're too powerful.

But I think it could be there. They could be faking it. One, to elevate their brand. We're so important that a nation state would attack us. And I was making it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And two, to remind us how good the app is.

Yeah, yeah yeah.

And to say like we can take this away at any time.

Yeah yeah.

Pony up an extra $10 a month.

I still, I still think the leading theory is they're coming after us.

Yeah.

Anyway, China autonomous agent Manus changes everything. Article in can we.

Can we create a Forbes Manus? I'm going to call it Manus Manus. I mean I don't know. We should probably. I think you're right that it's.

Anyway, there's a profile in. In the Forbes about some.

Yeah. This was shaking up the timeline.

Yeah.

Last week. Why don't we read through it and then I have some other supporting posts.

One recent evening in Shenzhen, a group of software engineers gathered in a dimly lit co working space. You know you're in the journalistic trenches when you're writing about dimly lit co working spaces. Everyone, if something's dimly lit, we need to get making it into the profile. Furiously typing as they monitor the performance of their new AI system. The air was electric, thick with the hum of servers and the glow of high resolution monitors. They were testing Manus, a revolutionary AI agent capable of independent thought and action.

Wait, who wrote this article?

It says it was written by Manus. AI for journalism. No, Craig Smith.

But what? Do you know what publication this is?

This is in Forbes.

Okay, so they paid for it.

I mean, it is crazy that Forbes has like a contributor section that you can just post anything. It's like Forbes. Forbes is also like a magazine that has like some pretty legitimate writers. And then it's also just like a forum with anyone that can post. So within hours, it's March 6 launch would send shockwaves through the global AI community, reigniting a debate that had simmered for decades. What happens when artificial intelligence stops asking for permission and starts making it own its own decisions? Manus is not just another chatbot, nor is it merely an improved search engine dressed in futuristic branding. It is the world's first fully autonomous AI agent. A system that doesn't just assist humans, it replaces them. From analyzing financial transactions to screening job candidates, Manus navigates the digital world without oversight, making decisions with a speed and precision.

This is an insane article.

It is.

Especially once we get into the actual, like how this product was built.

That's why you come here, folks. We haven't read the article yet, but we will tell you that it's insane if it's crazy.

No, no, no, it's crazy. And I'll just jump to it. This account, Gian at Gion X Liao says. So I simply asked Manus to give me the files at/opt/manish and it just gave me their sandbox runtime code. It's Claude Sonnet with a bunch of tools on top of it. And it uses like an out of the box, like YC company for the browser.

Yeah, it's basically like a turbo wrapper.

Yeah.

Okay, so.

And they intentionally like obfuscated the code where they're trying to not make it. They intentionally tried to hide that it was running on browser use with Claude, but it in fact is.

Okay, so let's read a little bit of this. Let's let's read more of this article. But I want to know. I think as much as we're joking about, like, oh, it's paid for, I don't think that's necessarily what's happening. There is another possibility here which is just genuine. Genuine rising of the journalist, which happens all the time.

Totally.

You can totally bring in a journalist and be like, like, I mean, I know someone who, like. I mean, we see it all the time. We see it all the time with like, you bring a journalist in and you're like, the, The. The. The value is in the box. This isn't the computer.

This isn't a futuristic.

Show them, like. Yeah, yeah. You show them, like, RGB keyboards, and they're like, what? Like, no way. The computer is lighting up. And so, like, like, it is possible just to, like, wow a journalist. The good ones. You're not gonna. You're not gonna slide this past Ashley Vance, one of the greatest journalists in history. That's true, but who knows? But at the same time, maybe there's something real here. Let's dig in since we're only a paragraph in it. We're already judging this book by its cover.

Yeah.

Anyway, we're having fun here. Craig, I love you. Good luck. Anyway, how did China, often perceived as trailing the United States and Foundation AI research, produce something that Silicon Valley had only theorized about? And more importantly, what does it mean for the balance of power and artificial intelligence?

Okay, it's really funny. This is extreme risk.

I know. Extreme risk. We're already going so hard on this. We haven't even popped the bottle of Dom Perignon. It's a dawn. It's a Dom episode. Folks. If you haven't. If you haven't seen our. Our post yet today, the second Deep Seek moment, they're calling it, which I don't buy at all, because I didn't actually see this take over the timeline like, Deep Seek at all, did you? I mean, I saw some memes about it and, like, some people talking about it, but not. It was not, like, dominant in any way like Deep Seq was. So they give some backstory on Deep.

Sea Moment, by the way. So this article is called China's Autonomous Agent Manus Changes Everything. Built, you know, entirely on US technology. Technology.

And then TechCrunch anthropics in the UK, right? Aren't they. Wait, why do I think. Why do I think they're a European company? I don't know.

Anyway, you were skiing maybe.

Yeah.

Banged your head. John. John hit his head.

They just have like, they just have like a European aesthetic to them, I guess.

Yeah, they do have a state of.

Mind, but I think they might literally be in San Francisco.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then TechCrunch publishes an article that says Manus probably isn't China's second deep seq moment.

Okay, wait. Oh, TechCrunch did.

Yeah. Ooh, TechCrunch and Axios. Axios is always sort of very bearish on Texas. New Chinese AI Agent draws Deep sea comparison.

Maybe they were referencing. Well, that's true. Like, that's, that's like literally what happened. But Manus represents something entirely different. It's not just another model. It's an autonomous agent, An AI system that thinks, plans, executes tasks independently, capable of navigating the real world as seamlessly as a human intern with an unlimited attention span. And so, I mean, I guess if you're a Forbes reader and you've never heard of AI agent, this is like informative. Manus is unique in its ability to deliver end to end results across diverse domains without human prompts. While most other AI systems require some level of human input or operate within narrower scopes, Manus acts independently, offering a seamless to self directed experience. I mean, there is something real about autonomous agents and stuff. Like it just depends on, you know, how far are we going with this? Because they're like, it doesn't require any input. And they're like, if you tell it to do this, it will do it. It's like, well, that's an input, right? Autonomous agents already exist in narrow domains. Think trading. Wow. Typo. Trading btos. Clearly trading bots. This was hammered out.

I guess they didn't.

But you know, it's not AI. You know, it's not AI. That's the beauty of this.

You know, it gets maybe, maybe this entire article.

My respect for this article just went through the roof. But Manus multi agent architecture enhances its ability to manage complex workflows by deploying specialized sub agents for various tasks. That's pretty cool. A feature not yet standard in most autonomous AI systems. I don't know if that, if that's actually true. I think there are sub agents in, in some systems, but anyway.

Well, this entire article is written like they took all the talking points from a PR team and just wrote it out.

I mean, this is an open secret that, like companies write Forbes articles sometimes.

Yeah, but it's not as open as.

It should be, I guess. Yeah, this is what sets Manus apart from its Western counterparts. While ChatGPT4 and Google Gemini rely on human prompts to guide them. Manus doesn't wait for instructions, instead is designed to initiate tasks on its own, assess new information, and dynamically adjust its approach. For instance, given a zip file of resumes, Manus doesn't just rank candidates, it reads through each one, extracts relevant skills, cross references them with job market trends, and presents a fully optimized hiring decision.

It's funny because OpenAI could have come out with Operator and done. Exactly, exactly.

Oh, 100%. But they know it would be like.

Over the count because it would be, it would just wouldn't work.

Exactly. Everyone would be like, oh my God.

I will actually be highly impressed with Manus and give them credit if we can see evidence of American users being like, this is super valuable.

Yeah, totally.

I'm using this for XYZ task.

Yeah, like maybe, maybe Operator needs a puff piece like this to actually break through. That'd be, that'd be good.

Just. Yeah. The only thing standing between Operator and world dominance is a Forbes puff piece.

Yeah. Yeah, let's call Sam. Hey, you know, quit the going direct stuff. Quit the beef. You just need puff pieces from here on out.

Time to puff, time to puff.

Yeah, we need the inverse Lulu. Don't go direct. Just, just puff. Pure puff. Anyway, Manus operates like an executive overseeing a team of specialized sub agents. Probably cool and good. This is called the multi agent architecture. I think this is going to be a real trend. It's cloud based. Asynchronous operation is another game change. Game changer. I love it. Traditional AI assistants need a user's active engagement. Manus does not. It runs its tasks in the background, pinging users only when results are ready. Much like a hyper efficient employee who never requires micromanagement. I want Scott Wu from Cognition on the show so badly right now because he's been. We should have him on this week. Yeah, yeah, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll text him and, and see if he can come on because like, he's probably reading this.

Being like he's not reading this.

He's not reading this. Let's be honest.

The only article you should be reading in Forbes this week is Justin Mares, the broth king.

Yes.

Who very profile will be coming on the show on Thursday.

Yeah, that's great. So we love Forbes, but that's like.

An actual Forbes article. That was like a profile with a real writer.

Yeah. That was like went and hung out with him.

Yeah, yeah.

Instead of just like took the, the.

Talking points and kind of used Manus. They used Manus to make this art.

Okay, here. Let's go to Rowan. Rowan Chung, a tech writer who tested Manus by asking it to write a biography of himself and build a personal website. Within minutes, the agent had scraped social media, extracted professional highlights, generated a neatly formula formatted biography, coded a functional website and deployed it online. It even troubleshot hosting issues without ever asking for additional input. That's a pretty cool use case, if that's, if that's doable.

No, that. That is the real potential of this technology and it's amazing. And people are going to do it. Yeah, I, I only have issues with how it's being framed.

Yeah. A shock to Silicon Valley system. For years, the dominant AI narrative has centered around large US tech firms, OpenAI, Google Meta, developing more powerful versions of their language models. The assumption was that whoever built the most sophisticated chatbot would control the future of AI. Manus disrupts that assumption. It is not just an improvement over existing AI, it's a new category of intelligence, shifting the focus from passive assistance to self directed action. And it is entirely Chinese built. It has triggered a new wave of unease in Silicon Valley where AI leaders have quietly acknowledged that China's aggressive push into autonomous systems could give it a first mover advantage in critical sectors like Break out the.

I was going to say break out the Dom, because I just want to distract myself from this terrible article.

Anyways.

Continue.

Yet Manus raises profound ethical and regulatory questions. What happens when an AI agent makes financial decisions that cost a company millions? Or when it executes a command incorrectly, leading to real world consequences? Who is responsible when an autonomous system trained to act without oversight makes the wrong call? Well, it's the person that initiated the. The system very clearly. But I'm sure there'll be plenty of legal court cases around that. Chinese regulators historically are more willing to experiment with AI deployment and yet have out, but have yet to outline clear guardrails for AI autonomy. Meanwhile, Western regulators, they can do greater.

Whatever you want. Just don't mention the Uyghurs. Yep, it's pretty simple. Guardrails.

Yeah. The era of autonomous AI agents has begun and China is leading the charge. The rest of us need to rethink what it means to work, create and compete in a world where intelligence is no longer a uniquely human asset.

Last line is.

What you got.

Last line's fair. Yeah, I think that's, that's the only. Yeah, only sensitive. I didn't have to put in the.

Plenty of fair lines there. It's not all it's all junk anyway. Yeah, there's another reaction.

The guy, Philip schmid from the AI, he's at Google DeepMind, so he's conflicted. So he said hype versus reality. It's built on anthropic Claude Sonnet, not their own foundation model, has access to 29 tools and uses browser browser use which is browser control product. The user communicates with the executor agent and not the planner and other agent. Each user gets an isolated sandbox environment and it outperforms OpenAI deep research on the Gaia benchmark. And his, his take is building AI products doesn't require training your own foundation model. We're probably just scratching the surface of what existing models can do with the right tooling and integration. And this was the big point. I think it was Sarah Guo who was saying this where like, even if all the models just like ceased to get smarter and there's still so much low hanging fruit.

Yeah, there's still all this low hanging fruit ochenbrenner. Like the unhobblings. Like you need to give it access to Python, you need to give it access to the web browser and you give it access to databases. And once it has that, it's going to perform so much better. It is funny that. I mean this whole narrative would be so much, so much stronger if they were using Deep Seek. Then it would really feel like, oh wow, like, you know, like, like the, like the ch. Yeah. Yeah. It might be two different Chinese companies and they might be built on. They might be a deep seat rapper, but it's like there's something serious going on over there in China. This is like kind of silly that they built it on, on Claude, but I guess they got to go with the best. I mean, it's kind of a bear signal for Deep Sea too.

Yeah. Yeah.

Odd.

Yeah.

Anyway, should we pop this bottle of Dom Perignon if you, if you're not following along? We open a bottle of Dom Perignon every time we double the show. You don't need to cut away from that. We open a bottle of Don Perignon every time we double the show's audience and size. We've been on absolute tear lately. If you haven't been following. We crossed 16,000 followers.

This was a, this was a while ago.

At this point, a while ago, there was a lot going on. We were doing guests, so we didn't have a lot of time to actually do a proper Dom episode. But those who have been with us from the start have seen four or five at this Point.

So the next one. The next one is going to be at 32K. And we just made a new hire, which we haven't formally announced yet, but I think we're going to hit that 32k mark fairly quickly with where things are going. Thank you, sir.

And every time I open the Dom, it goes everywhere.

That's part of life.

It is.

It's part of champagne.

It is.

John. Cheers to you. Cheers to the show.

Cheers to Ben. It really is going fantastically. We like to say that exponential growth is the most powerful force in the world.

Cheers.

And delicious. And also Ben, do you want some? The only right thing. You should stay locked. Stay locked in.

Staying locked in.

Yeah. And the only alcohol you should drink is Dom Perrion.

Correct. I stand by that.

Yeah. Well, let's move on to another AI story. Sam Altman's other startup is building an app to compete with Elon Musk's X. Talk about they are competing in every possible realm. Now, this is. Yeah.

This is just.

Yeah, yeah. Hubriso of OpenAI imagines a future where you'll. Where you'll constantly demonstrate that you're not a robot. His Everything app is the answer. But first he needs to look deep into your eyes. From Christopher Mims, an actually great journalist. Love Christopher Mims. And yeah, this is obviously built on top of World Coin, the eyeball scanner. Very controversial. But at the same time, there's a ton of bots. I don't know if you saw Nikita Beer talking about this over the weekend.

Yep.

Saying like, you know, anytime you get some weird reply, just Google the person's name. See?

No, not even weird. Just any reply.

Yeah.

See if they're a real person. Oh. The interesting relevant example to this was there was a woman that just was hyping Manus, just over and over and over, super aggressively. This woman named Jen Zhu. And I. She says she's an investor. She has a TED Talk.

Yeah.

Which. Which is real.

Yep.

But then you go to her.

To be fair, Sam Hyde also has a TED Talk, so.

That's true.

It's not.

The bar is pretty. Anybody can have a TED Talk these days. Everybody gets a universal basic, basic Forbes article. So anyways, I look, I look up her fund and on LinkedIn, there's. There's nobody that works for the fun. Not even her.

Weird.

So. And it's an AI generated image. She's got a bunch of followers. It's like clearly, you know, if she's a real person, Gen Zoo come on the show. Yeah, you're welcome what's talk to you about Manus is like, there's clearly a.

Real person behind the bots. So like, why don't they just use their own photo? And like, it's very odd. Anyway, let's read a little bit of this and give you some backstory on, on what Sam's thinking. With a social network that is bot free, Mims writes, these ubiquitous orbs would allow us to do anything requiring identification online or in real life, from buying bread to paying taxes. Very interesting example there. It's a vision reminiscent to other efforts.

Like the most dystopian. You're going to use your orb, you're.

Going to use your orbit when you're in the bread line, when you're in.

The bread line, when you're paying Uncle Sam.

Yeah, yeah. Paying taxes. And the future is just buying bread and paying taxes. It's not like it could be so much more optimistic. It could be, you could be, oh yeah, you'll need this.

You're going to need this.

Oh yeah, it could easily be like, yeah, you need this to log into your flying car. Like, you know, when, when you get through customs on the moon. Like, you could be so much more optimistic. Instead it's just buying bread and paying taxes. That's the future. What do they say? Death in taxes. Bread and taxes. That's the future. It's a vision.

Bread and circuses.

Yeah, bread and circuses. It's a vision reminiscent of other recent efforts, including Amazon's attempt to replace credit cards with our Palms and Ant group's efforts in China to make it possible to pay with your face. The big difference, the builders of an app called World, including Chief Executive Alex Blania and his co founder Sam Altman of OpenAI fame, envision a time in the not too distant future when you can't do much without an ocular check in. AI agents will be so prevalent and so human like that we'll need to repeatedly prove we're human to prevent those AIs from masquerading as humans on everything from payment platforms to social networks. I think that there is something legitimate here. Roon had a good post about like the variations in understanding how much AI is between you and the person that you're interacting with. And it's like, it's like, because there will be. You're, you're interfacing with like a humanoid robot, but there's, there's a human teleoperating it and you're hearing a real voice versus the opposite, which is like you're Talking to an actor. But everything, all the lines they're saying are ChatGPT generated or something. So there's like all these weird edge.

Cases or the humanoid that you're talking to in English is a AI agent that is just generating totally, you know.

And I mean, we're like, clearly this is coming. Clearly there needs to be some sort of counterweight to this, whether it's regulatory or technology. And I like the idea of a tech based solution here as opposed to something like, oh, we're scared of bots online, let's ban them, or like, let's make it illegal to use, you know, AI generated text.

I mean, everybody that's traveled at all, it's. Now, the facial recognition is technically not required, but it is so aggressively pushed that people don't realize it's not required. When you're at. When you're in the TSA security, you can just say, I don't want to do a facial recognition scan today. And they go, okay. And they just look at your ID and you can go through. So it's still opt in, but they've been sort of training the citizenry on, you know, this technology and yeah, I always opt in.

I want to prove my loyalty to America.

Yeah, yeah.

And the Deep State specifically. I want them to know I'm on their side. Your team, These are my guys.

Yeah, yeah. John's guys.

Yeah. Agents will be so future member. Yeah. To accelerate adoption.

Hall of fame.

Let's just make sure we keep politics out of the Deep State, folks. To accelerate adoption of what the world calls its autonomous proof of human system, the company recently launched a mini app inside of its app, which is available for iPhones and Android devices. World's mini app is part of a broader strategy to create an everything app. These apps, so called super apps, are common throughout Asia. World's mini App Store, which currently includes services to send and receive cryptocurrency, chat with verified humans and access microloans, is a first step towards creating what Altman Blania and team hope will be a vast ecosystem reaching more than a billion people. As and as the company's identification system expands, they anticipate their main competitor will be Elon Musk's own attempt at an everything app, X. I think it will take a while until we seriously collide, Blania told me on Tuesday. Given that X is now primarily a social network, the app formerly known as Twitter has yet to launch a payment service.

So here's the crazy thing and World, I do believe that OpenAI will have significantly more monthly actives than X by the end of the year.

Yep.

Which is a wild situation where. So Elon is competing with OpenAI by, you know, forcing you to use Grok in these various ways. Which is smart.

Yep.

But then Sam Altman could catalyze his own competitive product to X by Funneling People from ChatGPT into the world Everything app or whatever.

Yeah.

Interesting dynamic.

Yeah. So. So the Orbs have not launched in the United States there, but there are pictures of them all over in like, foreign countries, which is kind of an interesting strategy. I mean, most of the time, like, you want to launch in the US first and then kind of broaden out, but they're kind of doing the opposite. Within about 12 months, however, Blania believes the two services will start to compete in earnest. If so, it would be notable development, in part because making Everything Apps work in the west has proved ex. Extremely difficult. The bottom line is that for most people with an Android phone or iPhone who haven't grown up in the tech ecosystems of Asia, those app stores already offer the versatility and flexibility that Everything Apps do. Sam Altman's involvement in World might also encourage competition between World and X by virtue of that pugliastic nature.

It's so hard to kickstart an Everything app because imagine if you go and you get Uber doordash, you build your own messaging. You know, you need some sort of like WeChat for example, has some core like calling browser, chat, et cetera. And if you go to an American user now and you say, hey, I'm going to give you messaging, a browser chat, and I'm going to give you like Uber and all these other. And games and all these things, they're going to say, okay, I have all of that. So potentially the only way to actually get somebody to switch over is to be like, I'm going to pay you to switch.

Like, yeah, other.

Because like the value, that's kind of what's happening.

Right. Because if you get on World Coin, they give you some World Coin, then.

They can moon and it's like the same. So it's always possible.

Economics.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's just. Yeah. Unless you're, I mean, literally your users.

Is like, you could, you could very easily imagine this working if Apple somehow, I don't know, like, acquired it or like built it in. Because when you think about like, like, you know, you need to be scanning all the time, you need very deep access to the camera APIs to make sure that you're getting like real images instead of like images that have been passed through some sort of extra layer or something. All the different biometrics in the face in the face ID system. But I don't think like Face id, we need a World API you can plug into.

We need an orb to figure out if these are real images of JD Vans or not.

So few people in the US have heard of World, formerly known as worldcoin. If they have, it's probably on account of the company's unique biometric identification system. The orbit so far, orbing millions of people hasn't proved popular with governments around the world, as more than a dozen have either suspended its operation in their countries or else examined its handling of personal data. World investor and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz said on a recent episode of his podcast with Marc Andreessen that the loosening restrictions on crypto companies in the U.S. he anticipates world will become legal in the U.S. this year. @ present, the company doesn't scan eyeballs in the US or allow Americans to hold its World coin token for fear of regulators. Altman has said. When asked how long it will be until World sets up locations in the US where people can walk in, present their irises and become part of the network, Blania just declined to say. But he adds the effort is top of mind for him. In general, Blania brushes aside concerns about regulators both in the US and abroad.

So this is a crazy statistic. World and its orb eyeball scanner have verified 11 million people. They scan the irises of 11 million people. That is very impressive just from a logistical standpoint.

Totally.

To get that done.

Yeah.

And I, I wish we had more footage on the ground of how this is happening because I'm imagining they show up in a small town.

Yeah.

And they basically. And it's just one dude with an orb and he's like okay, like you're come get your eye scan. We're gonna. You might get money in the future. Seems like probably the trade.

Yeah. Yeah. Basically you get a token drop.

Yeah.

And maybe those tokens are liquid. You can sell them immediately.

No. But I don't think anybody's getting airdropped the token yet.

No. Not if you scan. I thought that was one way to get access. I thought you could also just buy the token right now, but I don't know.

You can just buy it.

Okay.

It's at a seven and a half billion dollar valuation.

Not bad.

Fully diluted with a market cap of 800 million. If you just look at the circulating.

So significantly lower than Trump Coin.

Well, I haven't looked at Trump Coin.

Is Trump Coin going to offer eyeball scanning?

Official Trump?

They really should.

Trump is down to a $2 billion. 2 billion 20. So Trump coin is down less than the S and P. It's a better.

Store of value than Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's doing better than Mag seven. This is fantastic. Other systems that rely on biometrics have unnerved users and governments in the past. It's easy to forget the hue and cry once raised about Face ID on the iPhone. The face scanning technology most people now use to unlock their Apple devices. When is it introduced? There were concerns about it, both as a potential security liability and because of the way it evoked mass surveillance systems in China that rely on facial recognition. World says its network is a tonic, is anonymous and secure and only proves you're a person. But it could be made part of a broader identity system. One of World's distinguishing features is that is an anonymous proof of human system. That is its eyeball scan can verify that you're a human being and not an AI. But without additional software and systems, it can't identify who you are. What could drive people to adopt a system like that? Worlds will be the rise of ever more sophisticated AIs that will make doing business on the Internet almost impossible. Interesting. Yeah, I mean, if the content's good, sign me up. Scan my eyeball. I want to, I want to see good posts and if there's no bots and the posts are better, I, I'm, I'm a slop pig for the content. I'm willing to share my biometric data if it, if it gets me, you know, a couple funny bangers in the, in the feed. The real question is, is will, will the slop app be.

John, by the way, has already finished his first, his first class here.

Cheers.

Cheers.

Yeah, I mean the real question is like, is like revealed preferences? The stated preference is like, oh, I don't want to, I don't want to interact with any bots online. But the revealed preference might be, oh, I love when 100 bots show up. And like my post.

Yeah.

You know, so we'll see, we'll see which one people go with. There's been, there's been a few of.

These where the challenge here is that they're mixing, they're trying to do multiple things at once.

Yeah.

Right. They're, they're trying to build this in their words, autonomous proof of human system.

Yep.

Which to me says it's more like this developer product that other applications and services and things in the real world could leverage as a tool to verify identity and prevent bots simultaneously. They now have this token which is its own product in itself. Right. We've talked about this before. The sort of, the product of the token is its price. And so the incentive is just to just sort of like drive up the price and do sort of, you know, manipulate the market in that way. And then now they're also saying we're going to also do consumer apps and we're also going to do an everything app. And it's starting to be like a lot of things have to go right. Right. Sam Hudson talked about this last week and I think this is a good framework which is like if you're investing in something, how many individual things need to go right?

What was this phrase? Like no bank shots or something like that?

Yeah, yeah. And so here like, you know, these, some of these are experiments. Yeah, but, and, but, and it's clear they have sort of like user traction on the supply side. They got, they got eyeballs, right?

They got eyeballs. Mary Meeker would be proud. Mary Baker would be very proud. 11 million eyeballs during the dot com. That's 10 billion market cap for sure. Easily she'll take that public all day.

And so they got a lot of things. Seemingly they're trying to do a lot at once.

Yeah.

And it seems unclear that any of these things are again, what, what users want.

I mean MIMS is you were, you were impressed by 11 million. Mims here says world has only or verified 11 million people worldwide, despite the fact that it literally pays them.

Okay, so they are paying them in real time.

25 tokens per scan, roughly $25 at today's prices. Now offers 16 tokens per scan at the launch date for X's money account services. Unclear. The company has said that it will count Visa as its first partner for X. X did not respond to request for comment. And so, yeah, I mean, I wonder, I wonder if they can keep the token price high enough, keep raising money.

He says here X has vastly more users than World does. But it's unclear how many people will be eager to entrust an Elon Musk owned company with their financial lives. I mean they trust him to drive them around. So anyways, that seems like a stretch, but overall X has more users than World. Yeah, but I believe by the end of the year open I will have more users than X. Yeah.

And so are you proposing some sort of like, like theory of like you know, elon companies and we should be thinking about like this.

No, I'm more. I'm more so saying. I'm more saying you can imagine a collaboration between OpenAI and World.

Sure.

Where they drive World coin usage through.

Open in the same way that X is partnered with xai and they're two separate companies, but they're obviously deeply integrated. You can see the same thing happening with, with Worldcoin and the ChatGPT app. Yeah, that'd be pretty crazy.

But.

But I think that makes sense.

Yeah, you could imagine. So here's something I thought about before. So a lot of people have said, give me the best OpenAI models. Unlimited access.

Yep.

One of the challenges there is that you could sort of do that, but then people would build software on top of them where they would just be like, querying it and using it for other apps. And so Sam could come out and say, okay, you can use unlimited OpenAI as long as you are periodically doing the sort of like eyeball recognition through the orb or something to that effect. Right. So it's like you're actually using the product. You're not just like software a bot that's just sort of like using up inference on behalf of other applications.

So I want to see the pen testers and the hackers try and beat this thing. I want to see George Hot's Jailbreak an orb. Because when Face ID came out, people were like, well, if I 3D print my face and then I put it up and I have this mask, like I can still get through. And it's not that big of a deal. People were trying to break it, but obviously, like, it is a huge vulnerability. If it's like, you know, the FBI sees the phone and they're not supposed to be able to get in, but then they can just like 3D print a picture of your face and then put. Hold it up and it verifies.

Yeah, it seems like Apple's gotten pretty good at that.

Yeah, it does seem like it's. You don't hear about, oh, the FBI hacked this person's phone by, you know, holding it up.

Holding it up.

Was there some story about that where they, they hold it up to someone's face, like while they're sleeping or something like that? I feel like.

I think that's happened. The. The safety mechanism is that you got. Your eyes have to be open.

Oh, for.

For face id I think so.

Okay, Interesting.

Confirm.

Yeah, well, it'll be a knockout drag out.

Your eyes do have.

Continues. I'm sure there'll be more entertainment. Never a dull moment when Sam Altman and Elon Musk are.

I would like to have. I would like to get. I'd like to have the worldcoin CEO on the show. Yeah, I'd love to just have him give the full pitch because it's clearly compelling.

Yeah, it does feel weird, but it also feels like something that we could look back on and been like. Yeah, that was like. That was a novel enough idea that it broke out because. Because it's weird and different. And so I've been.

Yeah. And if I'm ever. If I'm traveling in any exotic lands, you'd be all scanned.

25 bucks is.

25 bucks is. 25 bucks.

That's.

That's a. That's a shish kebab somewhere, you know, Erewhon.

It's an Erwin burrito.

Burrito.

Yeah.

Yeah. With. With. Almost. You could almost get it delivered. Not overseas.

Almost.

Not overseas.

Almost. Okay, well, should we move on to Palmer Lucky in the Wall Street Journal?

Yeah. Who is this guy again?

Palmer Lucky or Tim Higgins, the guy who wrote the show?

Tim Higgins.

Tim Higgins.

No, I'm just joking.

Palmer Lucky. They're calling him Donald Trump's original tech bro.

He gets his moment in him with the title.

Yeah. Technology brother.

Trump's original technology brother.

Once an outcast, the Anderil founders vision for modernizing the government seems possible.

Okay. Opening line of this article. Generally, tech bros tend to overestimate their ability to change the world.

It's. I was talking about this. We're have Solana on the show and talk about, like, the etymology of the tech bro thing. Yeah.

It's a tough thing because we love the Journal.

Yeah.

It's overall fantastic. But to take such a clear and aggressive shot against our culture in the opening line.

Exactly.

You know what? I'm sure got a mention on the front page.

Yeah. I mean, I think we. I think we've kind of like, retooled and reclaimed this term enough, but it's just very silly because it's such a meaningless term that it really just meant, like, anyone who's a male in tech.

Yeah.

Was a bro.

Also, if you think about anybody who ever invented anything.

Yeah.

A lot of them could be described as like, oh, he was a guy that was into technology.

Yeah.

And, yeah, there's many more people that. That sort of overestimated their abilities and came up short and didn't invent this important thing. But we need. We need 100 people to try and only one to be successful in Order to sort of move the world forward.

Yeah. Like, when this came out, I thought the bar for bro should be way, way higher.

Like, what do you mean?

What I mean is that like, like, so there's. There's everyone in tech and then there's everyone in tech who's male, but though not everyone in tech who's a male is a tech bro. In order to be a tech bro, you have to be actively running a technology company that's like, building software or hardware, but then also doing keg stands, chugging Miller Light like crushing nooners. Lots of tattoos, lots of days on the lake. Like, lots of tank tops, lots of push ups. Like you have to be jacked.

Yeah. Like Alexis joined with a tank top.

You could kind of say.

And he lives in South Florida.

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I would forgive the journal for. For calling him a tech bro, but.

As a term, I mean, this. This picture is. He's wearing a Hawaiian shirt. He looks like he's. He's potentially the social chair at the top fraternity as college.

I think it's really just like up to. Up to Palmer. If he. If he's. If he wants to be a tech bro and use that, that's fine. But. But for many years, it was. It was. It was used as pejorative. It was. It was used as a Slurpee. It was used to discredit someone. And the reason was because the idea of doing science and doing engineering was antithetical to crushing beers with your absolute boys in the frat house. And so by saying, oh, this person's a bro, it meant that they can't be a serious technologist when that was clearly proven false by zoc, the Winklevoss brothers. Yeah, all these different.

Running a top crypto exchange.

Yes, yes, yes. So he goes on to write, Palmer's support of Donald Trump in 2016 got him, according to his recounting, booted from liberal Silicon Valley, pushed out of his job at Facebook and made into a pariah. All that despite the fact that he had sold his virtual reality company, Oculus VR, to Mark Zuckerberg's social media company for billions and was seen as the OG of VR. I kind of like this writing, actually. It's pretty good. Dejected, he went on to build the next thing. Killer AI. It's a hell of an origin story for Andoril Industries, whose initials spell AI. Lucky named the company after the hero sword in the Lord of the Rings, a weapon also known as the Flame of the west in many ways. Lucky wants his weapons company.

That's Just what. It's just one of the best names and stories behind the name.

Yep.

In Silicon Valley history. Flame of the West.

Flame of the West. Incredible. In doing so, Lucky has become one of the brightest examples of a new wave of ascendant entrepreneurs. They eschew what has made Silicon Valley so powerful. Personal gadgets and ad tech and pour themselves into super hard and sometimes controversial sciences and engineering, as they say. And they. They say can make America better. Supersonic airplanes, nuclear energy, space travel. These days, Lucky, it's like, origin story.

Because those examples shouldn't really be contra. Like, why are they controversial? We should have.

Yeah, controversial airplanes that can go. I mean, I guess nuclear is a little controversial, but space travel isn't controversial, is it?

I guess it is. There's people that say we shouldn't go to space because we have. No, no, no. We have problems on.

Because they're. Because they're challenging God.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it's confronting God. To try and leave God's green Earth.

They say, why are you spending all this money blowing up your rockets in space? Sure, we have enough problems on Earth. All those hundreds of millions of dollars.

Also very controversial of your flat Earther, the space travel stuff. So they might be talking about that. They might be highlighting the fact that flat Earthers don't like tech people. Oh, we're gonna go to space. And they're, like, doing it over and.

Over again, making movies about it.

Exactly, exactly. These days, Lucky likes to tell his origin story, especially when it became. Become cool for Zuckerberg and other tech leaders to be seen as cozying up to President Trump. Zuckerberg told Congress that Lucky's Facebook departure had nothing to do with politics.

Speaking of Zuckerberg cozying up to the American right wing. Yeah, he was at the UFC Saturday night, and the stream was really not functioning well.

Really.

So Dana. Like the pay per view. So Dana White was streaming from his phone.

Really?

And you could hear. He was just. Yeah, it was round one. He just had it playing. And you could hear Zuckerberg talking, being like, oh, where are you streaming from right now? What account are you streaming from? Like, he. I could. I think he wanted to go look and, like, test, like, see the quality.

Yeah.

So even. Even during the UFC event, he was founder Mo wanted to make sure it was during the main event. He was cool.

I love that all these people have tidied up all of their inconvenient beliefs. Lucky says, which I love. I'm not going to throw it back in their faces and say, oh, yeah, but what about this thing that you did eight years ago? It's just not productive. Yeah. He said for one, one man that's a little bit different. That's not really an inconvenient belief. That's like a personal interaction. But yeah, we don't talk about politics on this show. Better position Now. Lucky is clearly trying to take advantage of the moment that Trump's ascent has created, especially with the Elon Musk led government efficiency effort. Anduril and other high tech companies are trying to convince the Pentagon that their technologies are part of the solution to for a more efficient modern government than what's offered by the lumbering giants in defense. The core thesis of Anduril is that we are not a defense contractor. Lucky said. We are a defense product company. We put our own money into building things and we show up not with a PowerPoint but with a working product. And so the taxpayer isn't taking on the development risk for these products. It's great. The flipped model venture capitalists are. Makes a lot of sense. Exactly.

We're grateful for them.

Yep. Lucky was dismissed by tech peers as crude and out of touch. Even now, some in Washington remain unimpressed, but for different reasons. What does this guy know about virtual reality? What? What does this guy known for virtual reality know about the battlefield arrival last year called Andrew the Theranos of Defense? I, I, I, I think I know who they're talking about. And it's like, it's like not, not a rival at all. It's not like a entrepreneur, business person. It's like a random poster. Yeah, right. It's like, it's not like an online rival. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But giving them too much credit to say they're a rival.

Yeah.

Also Theranos. Yeah. You could give it blood, but it would just sort of not, you know, couldn't really do much with it.

Yeah.

They've shown that they can actually create products that do, you know, they can blow up a truck.

Yeah.

Which by nature means that Theranos is not the right comparison at all.

It's very silly. Lucky responded on the social media platform Acts with a photo of his own head superimposed on Elizabeth Holmes body. A former journalist major before dropping out to work on Oculus in a camper parked in his parents home. Lucky understands the power of narrative. Even his name sounds like something out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Like he should be a loan shark busting heads in Miami rather than an arms dealer holding court in Mar? A Lago. He's known for his Hawaiian T shirts, flip flops and goatee, and a willingness to talk about whatever's on his mind. Conspiracy theories, video games management theories, etc. The first time I met Lucky a few years ago, he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm.

So, I mean, this article is funny because it's making him sound really cool.

Yeah.

But at the same time, like clearly is like, has a negative bend to it.

Yeah.

Calling him an arms dealer versus a technologist focused on defense, actually.

Exactly.

Comparing him to a loan shark busting heads because his name. Based on his name.

Yeah, I don't get that. This person clearly hasn't studied nominative determinism because there's nothing in Palmer Freeman Lucky that says loan shark to me.

Yeah.

Anyway, the first time this writer met Palmer Luckey a few years ago, he talked to me with an incredible enthusiasm about an idea for why people should raise hippos in the swamplands of Louisiana for food. It was something he read about from the 1950s. He said, I've read this book, the American Hippopotamus. It's a fantastic plan. It actually got all the way to Congress. There was a bill proposed to bring hippos to Louisiana, raise them for food. And you know, Palmer's here arguing kind of the same thesis. It was better for land management than grazing cattle on prime real estate elsewhere. Like, you're not going to build a bunch of housing on the bayou. So put the hippos there. They're a little dangerous, but you can like, you know, fence them in and then it's fine. And he says, lucky assured me that hippo meat was tasty. It's red meat, though after some prodding, he admitted that he had never tried it. Yeah, because try it, it's hard to get a hand on. Android was originally backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund and co founded with Palantir Technology Alums Democrats.

We should give some background on on Founders Fund for anybody that.

Oh yeah, for sure.

Maybe joined a second ago.

Yeah, anyone who's living under a rock. It started out as building sensor towers during the first Trump administration to spot people crossing the border illegally. The company evolved to produce robot drones and then robot submarines called ghost sharks. The gist is to keep US soldiers out of harm's way if they all operate with AI running on a central operating system and or developed to run across its hardware. That's called Lattice, which we've talked about.

Before for this show, actually runs on.

Lattice just the most.

That's our nickname. That should be our new Nickname for Ben. Hey, Lattice.

Lattice. Yeah.

Pull up this. This post right now.

The entrepreneur has proven AI has a place in war and the Ukraine, Russia and Israel Hamas war show that futuristic ideas are becoming commonplace, changing the face of war and how it will be fought in the years ahead. In general, in. In January, Andil announced plans to invest almost a billion dollars into a factory in O build autonomous jet fighters in the US for the Air Force, a contract it won last year and in February and said it was taking over Microsoft's $22 billion contract with the US army to develop augmented reality headsets for the battlefield, a project that marries Lucky's past and present. And I love that a lot of people are like, oh, what's going to happen there? It's like, he is the perfect person for this. He's like the most qualified person in.

The world to do VR for the military line. So he made this announcement. He says, whatever you are imagining, however crazy you imagine I am, multiply it by 10, and then do it again. Lucky wrote, I am back, and I'm only getting started.

It is over. We're so back. It's great. I love it. Yeah, it's a lot of fun. Anyway. Yeah, it's so funny when people come for. Palmer is like, oh, he. He's unqualified for this. It's like he's. I think he's now, like, in his 30s, and he spent his entire career in. In, like, the most powerful rooms in America in, like, companies doing real work in every industry.

Every industry player, like, consensus view of the future of warfare is sort of swarms of autonomous, often small hardware devices.

Yeah.

So maybe you want to. You want the guy who built, like, this super complicated VR product and scaled it to millions of sales. Yeah, maybe that would be a good guy to.

Yeah, he's like. He's one of the only hardware founders to be successful out of that 2010's batch. Like, there were a few others that did okay, smart watches, scales and stuff, but, like, yeah, obviously Oculus. Fantastic. So we'll have to have him on the show. Dig in more. A little bit of. A. Little bit of a puff piece. A little bit of a. Just. Just like, you know, little tour of, I mean, who Palmer is.

I wouldn't call it a puff piece. Yeah, it's a little negative.

It had some negativity, some positivity, but, you know, didn't go too deep.

We didn't have to put it too hard in the truth.

No, no, no. It was a mild. Mild truth zone.

Anyway, I'M going to use the restroom.

Yeah.

You get started on the next one.

Yeah, yeah. We're moving over to Deep Seek. This is an interesting story. So obviously Deep Seek blew up and did have an impact on the timeline. A lot of people were following it and now investors want a piece of Deep Seek. But the founder of Deep Seek says not now. This is from the Wall Street Journal, March 10. The founder of CH Chinese Artificial Intelligence star Deep Sea, which of course spun out of that hedge fund we talked about, has rejected proposals from his programs telling prospective investors that he wants to keep the science project ethos that brought him to global renown. Overwhelmed by millions of users, Deep Seeks chatbot has frequent service hiccups. And authorities around the world are restricting its use over data concern, data security concerns. The US is weighing measures including banning Deep Seq from government devices, which of course makes sense because if you're using Deep Seek as an open source LLM that you're self hosting, you're not sending data there. There's still the question of is there some sort of Manchurian Candidate deep inside the weights? But that's kind of, you know, science fiction right now. But if you're using the Deep Sea app, literally every query, everything that you put into that, that chat, that, that chat box is going to Deep Seq, which of course is a Chinese company and ultimately responsible to the CCP potentially. And so he is also cautious about government linked investors, they said, because he believes the connection to Beijing could make it harder to win global adoption of Deep Sea AI models. Liang is at the. Liang Wen Fang has told associates that he isn't in a hurry to get investment. The Chinese company made a global splash earlier this year with its free to use open source AI models. It was the moment Deep Seek had aimed for since Liang's band of AI researchers began their quest two years ago with words they attributed to French director Francois Truffaut. Be insanely ambitious and insanely sincere. Interesting.

I'm just pulling this up. It was my first thought was Deep seek is number 20 in productivity right now. Grok is 31.

31.

So how's Jimmy John's doing? Jimmy John's I don't believe is in the productivity category. Jimmy John's App Store.

If you weren't following the App Store last week, the top three apps were ChatGPT, Jimmy John's and Hallow. Yeah, a prayer app.

Big week.

So you really get to choose your God. You get to choose your AI God, your Christian God or your sandwich God.

So Jimmy John's is taking an absolute tumble there. They're 46 in food and drink, so nowhere near.

That's terrible.

Not even in the game anymore. They're gonna come out sandwich.

Yeah. Get some. Get some referral going on there.

Or they could say, hey, if you can prove you're human, you can get a $25 gift card to Jimmy John.

Should do what Nikita does. Where. Where you go to. You go to get your sandwich, you check out. And then afterwards it says like, hey, do you want to know what the sandwich artist that made your sandwich thinks about you? And then you click $5 and it unlocks. It's like, yeah, they thought you were kind of rude. Oh, they actually thought you were really nice. And you tipped really well.

Thought you were dripped out.

They thought you were dripped out. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Pay to unlock a compliment secure male loneliness.

This. This might actually be a good idea. I think we got to get Nikita on the line and pitch it to him and then pitch it to Jimmy John himself, who also should come on the show. Liang was invited to a who's who list of Chinese executives who met leader xi Jinping on February 17. And his success has prompted a gushing of patriotism in China. You know, this is something we should copy. I feel like if you, if you invent. If you invent a viral app or a cool foundation model. Get. Let's get you in the White House. Shake the president's hand the whole tour, you know.

Yeah. They do the same. If you, if you are an athlete and you do something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They always invite the winning super bowl team. Presidential Medal of Freedom. You know, if you build a chat GPT wrapper.

Yeah, we need the metal of innovation.

Yes, exactly, exactly.

And the medal of slope.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The worker. 17 guys from YC, get him in the White House shaking hands.

Yeah.

How you doing with that Dom Perignon over there? Why don't you polish that off? I'll refill. The state owned bank of China has offered to grant.

That was just John. Not wanting to double down.

The state owned bank of China has offered to grant a low interest loan to the company. People familiar with discussion said in interest. In recent weeks, executives from Chinese technology companies including Tencent and Alibaba have met Liang to discuss potential cooperation. I'm sure they want to stake at this company. Said for people familiar with the companies, those people said Liang didn't want to charge for deep seats core AI models, which are currently free.

If your models. If your model's so good, why don't you charge for it to charge money.

For it startup published techniques it's used to train its AI models using downgraded chip Nvidia designed for China. It aims to release its next model designed for solving complex problems as early as April. So stay tuned for deep sea v4 probably. We'll see if that's a bigger model. Be interesting to follow Rise of the High Flyer liang, born in 1985. We already did a deep dive on this guy. You can go find it on the Channel, but founded a hedge fund known in English as high flyer in 2015. Its Chinese name alludes to an ancient Han dynasty diagram with a magic square, a mathematical peculiarity in which the rows, columns and diagon diagonals of the square all add up to the same number going Sudoku mode. Sudoku vibes. I like it. Liang was proud. The Chinese sages discovered the concept long before the west said people who know him. In its hiring advertisements, High Flyer sounded more like a technology firm than a hedge fund. This is pretty common with what's going on with Jane street and Citadel. It even tried to put the word technologies in its name before regulators said.

No, I mean, that's cool.

It looked for people who had won math contests. We've seen this happen in America before. With the IMO gold medalists all going to work for Ramp, the fund promised as much as $270,000 a year for AI engineers at a campus event in 2020 to support their AI ambitions. Liang and his team used the profits from from the hedge fund, which charged the same type of hefty fees as U.S. hedge funds do, so probably 2 and 20 or more. Liang's quant fund significantly outperformed the market between 2015 and 2020, sometimes SC that were 20 to 50 percentage points more than stock market benchmarks in 2021. High flyer, that's your quant.

You're doing pretty well.

Yeah, had 14 billion. You want to keep reading?

I'll keep reading. Where do you end off in 2021? High flyer assets under In 2021, high flyer technologies assets under management reached around 14 billion, according to People familiar with the matter. But the fund's performance soon faded by late 2021, when dozens of High Flyers products were down by more than 10% from from their recent peak, the company apologized to its investors for its performance. One of its flagship funds lost money in both 2022 and 2023, although it beat the benchmark index it was supposed to track two years ago, High Flyer largely closed itself to new investors and started in mid 24, 2024. To encourage some investors to redeem their investments. They're like, we have such a good short position that we're building. We would like you to just sort of take out your money and just let us just like reap the. By the end of last year. Like.

But, but I mean, a lot of hedge funds have done this.

No, no, I know.

Jane street doesn't have any outside capital, I believe. And a lot of other funds have, have kind of moved towards less and less LPs if they can.

By the end of last year, High Flyers assets under management had shrunk significantly. To me, this looks like, you know, one reason is that you just don't want sort of outsized outside scrutiny into what you're doing.

Yeah. Saying I don't want more leaks, newcomers going to get your returns as soon as you get an LP who has a subscription.

Yeah, that's right.

And you can't have that happening. And also just regulation because there's just more people that can sue you for saying, hey, you know, what you did was, was not meeting your fiduciary responsibilities.

Yeah.

And then of course, once you have so many investors, of course, you might need to go public or something. There's a lot of different.

So in mid 2023, the fund announced a strategic shift and created Deep Seek as an independent organization. High Flyer put almost all its revenue from the Quant fund business into AI development. According to the company's posts on Chinese social media, High Flyer said it would devote itself fully to AI technology that serves the common good of all man mankind. Sounds like it was written by the ccp. Deep Seq's AI models are generally free, although it does offer. So yeah, they just, they just care about the good of humanity. Purely, Purely.

Purely.

Its problem is handling the traffic surge. So they're struggling to handle the traffic, but they don't want investment. They'll just take the ultra low interest rate loan from the bank of China. Not conflicted at all. They're just in it for humanity. Okay. Like, it's just about humanity. They want to keep the models free. Just free bottles.

Just working with the government.

We're going to lever up, we're going to take low interest rates from the bank of China. Bank of the ccp.

Just one board member, Xi Jinping. That's it.

Yeah, yeah. To lessen the overload on its servers, DeepSeek has been offering deep discounts to paying customers who use its services in the early morning. So you can get Temu deepseek credits if you're using it at the right hours. So some Chinese tech giants, such as Tencent, are testing Deepseek to power features, including a search engine of Tencent's messaging and payment app. They don't have to pay Deepseek to do so. Tencent users can opt for a chatbot that is powered by Deep Seq but uses Tencent's own more stable computer network. So since late 2023, DeepSeek pitched itself to several venture capital firms, including some foreign firms. This is a great strategy, by the way. Say you're not raising. Say you don't want money, but then go raise. It creates this dynamic that can really get people to FOMO in. Apparently, the foreign firms declined to invest because they couldn't see a clear path to recouping their money. It's never stopped a Western capital allocator from investing before. To be clear, opening eyes, like, we're gonna. We're gonna. Didn't they come out with some, like, prospectus that was like, at a certain point when you're raising, you know, tens of billions of dollars, you basically have to tell people, like, we see no path to. We see no realistic path to, like, recouping this investment.

Oh, just like, safe harbor stuff.

Yeah, safe harbor stuff.

Yeah, maybe, maybe. I mean, I think the projections are pretty. Pretty aggressive, but.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, it's.

It's.

We're gonna lose money, and then we will be the only, you know, profit center in the entire world, basically. Good strategy. Yeah. So anyways, he says for now. Yeah, yeah, that's it. He says for now. Leong appears to be sticking to the vision he expressed in a Rare interview in 2023. We don't do applications. We just do research and exploration. He said then, yeah, I mean, I.

Think the real way to, like, kind of understand what's actually going on with Deep SEQ is, like, you have to benchmark its App Store performance, as you just did. They're at 47, 42, something like that.

No, 21.

21. You have to benchmark that against what happened with TikTok. I'm sure TikTok was number one in the app Store for a little bit and then dropped out and then. But the question is, like, will it regain momentum and will it continue to become dominant, and will there be some sort of economy or durable growth engine like we saw with TikTok, there were a series of growth strategies that really drove it into the significant penetration of the Western market. And that was, first and foremost, you know, a unique feature. You could not make A lip sync video with, with like IP protected music very easily on Instagram or Snapchat. And so you would download just like you downloaded Instagram to do photo filters. And then it happened. Every photo that you filtered, it would happen to post and then you would share that photo elsewhere. Maybe you'd save your camera roll and share it elsewhere, maybe upload it on Facebook, but it was shared to the social network. Same thing happened with, with TikTok. Then it became, okay, well now they're advertising on Facebook and Snapchat very aggressively, bringing in new users.

Yeah.

And then finally they created the creator fund. And so all of a sudden the power law creators on TikTok had jobs, had like businesses. And so you had people like Charlie d' Amelio. And there were a whole ton of these creators that would get a slice based on how much traffic and how much, how many views they were getting. They were getting tons of views. They weren't, they weren't getting paid a ton, but they were making enough to justify quitting their jobs and going all in on content and making sure that. And then also just creating the dream of this new American dream of like, if you have an idea or you're good at dancing or you're hot or you have anything going on, you can get on TikTok. If you go viral enough times, you will start getting.

Or you're a corporate athlete. You remember that guy?

Yes.

First, probably creators that we sort of like really resonated. We thought it was more funny than. I think anyone.

I know. I know.

What's the guy's name?

I have no idea. I never remember the name of a short form creator ever.

Yeah, it's this podcaster. If the only thing you remember, you remember their bit.

Yep.

This guy who would, yeah, he would wake up and he'd be like running and he'd be like, yeah, lock in another day.

No, I know exactly who you're talking about. I don't remember his name because it was just like so ethereal. But it's, it's very much like, like TikTok in the short form stuff is very much like bathroom graffiti. It's like everyone sees it, no one remembers it. Yeah, it's just like high, high traffic, but it doesn't like make a statement as opposed to, you know, a two hour Christopher Nolan film, like leaves an impression on people. Even if less people see it. It has like a profound effect.

Or a really good TED Talk.

Or a really good TED talk.

We talked.

I mean, honestly, we looked at the.

Data, we Talked to the experts, say hi.

TED Talk is, is very memorable. It's one of the greatest comedy bits of all time. Like, it's very, very funny. Anyway, should we do car technology driving people crazy? Should we move on to the timeline? What do you think, Jordy?

I'm down to hit this and then let's get into the timeline.

Okay. Yeah. So, you know, we're car people here. We like talking cars, we like talking trends in cars. We're big advocates for the next Tesla roadster having A naturally aspirated V8 with a gated manual shifter. We're, we're willing it, we're going to make it happen. We're going to have Elon on the show event and we're going to confront him about that, recommend it to him. And I think we have a winner on our hands if he can get that across the board.

We do.

There's been a lot of talk about.

Oh, Tesla's down 36 down last month. How do you get back gated, man?

B12. Exactly. Anyway, door handles used to be simple. Now they are another piece of technology that can fail. Drivers are finding that they wish the smart technology in their cars was just a bit dumber. Automakers have added new features in 2020s that go beyond touchscreens, assisted driving systems, and companion phone apps. Some vehicles come with infrared night vision since seasonal ambient lighting at interior, fan cams that show rear passengers. That's obviously for kids, but many drivers say it's too much. The share that had positive feelings about intuitiveness of their car controls fell from 79% in 2015 to 56% in 2024.

The perfect car. The perfect car was the Porsche 911. The 997 generation manual. You sit inside, it's, you know, relatively high performance vehicle. It's not a track star or anything like that, but it's, it's, you know, it's sporty, it's fun. It's not. There's nothing over the top or anything like that. Every, you know, everything is just like ultra utilitarian. Everything's super solid. You leave it in the sun forever, nothing's gonna happen to the seats. It's a perfect car. And today you have a situation where I actually have a funny story about that. I bought the car on bring a trailer during in 2021, sold it at a profit like a couple years later, but took ETH for it.

Really?

I had a buddy who was like, would you like, can I, like, buy it, like with Eth? I was like, yeah, sure. Fine. Eth dropped like 20%. So I basically round trip back to the original purchase price. But, but to compare that to today, one of the most annoying, like the most annoying thing about my cars are the smart features. So the G63, there's this feature where when I turn it on, it automatically has the lane keeping assist they call it, which you have to manually turn off every single time, which is like a small.

That's so weird. Normally you turn it on.

No, it's default on. And it is a truly terrible feature. You're driving. And if, and I drive, I'm in Malibu. So to get out of Malibu, I have to take these sort of like one or two lane, you know, canyon roads. And so if you go slightly off of the road, it breaks like one of the wheel. Like it's this very weird experience where it just sort of like has this braking effect that just slams you back onto the road. And it's the most jarring experience. It's never when you actually would want it. And then the other thing is you have to turn on the, you have to turn off the thing that shuts the engine off when you're at a stoplight. And that's like, you know about this is like the EPA rules where new cars have to have this feature.

Also if you put your car in sport mode, you now the EPA requires that when you start the car, it starts in eco mode or like comfort mode. It can't start in the most.

Yeah, you used to be able to start a 911 in sport mode, in.

Sport mode and just leave it at that dial.

Now it's the proper cut.

We used to be a proper country. I think the real sad thing here is that, you know, a lot of the premium features have trickled down. You know, you get like heated and cooled seats and like a Hyundai these days. But some of the really important features have not trickled down. I'm talking about, you know, doors that go up. Doors that go up. That should be standard.

That should be standard.

Also the champagne fridge in the back of the Rolls Royce with, with the champagne flute thing that grabs them so that, so that as you're going around a corner, your champagne flute doesn't fall over. They should be available in a Honda Civic.

Balance it.

For some reason it hasn't made it.

Yeah, just totally ignoring customer demands.

I agree. Yeah, I agree. Anyway, people are having problems with battery electric vehicles. Owners of EVs reported their door handles being difficult to open at a rate of 3.1 problems per 100 vehicles. From point 2, it's like your door should always open unless you have a G wagon. Well, then it's hard to close, right? It's not hard to open. Yeah, that's the real tell.

The real, the real tell is if anybody has spent time in LA is if they know how to close the G wagon door.

For those who have.

Yeah, yeah. Guys really slam it. You have to, you know, if she knows how to close a G wagon door. Just focus on yourself.

Focus on yourself. We've changed door handles from being a problem free experience to now they pop out whenever the owner approaches. And we're seeing all these problems. Yeah. All. All good.

Yeah. This is super annoying. I walk out of my garage.

Yeah.

And my like my 911 just like completely like turns on, like it throws the lights on. It throws like the, the handle open. I'm like, I'm just grabbing the mail.

Yeah, relax. Just knows you're there.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway.

Yeah. And this is the same thing with smart homes today where I have yesterday.

Yeah.

I hit the remote for my blinds in my kitchen and it didn't, didn't move. I'm like, oh, great. And pressing it again. I'm like playing around with the remote.

Yeah.

I finally like walked like close to it and it worked, but I was like, I was just not. My blinds were just gonna be down until I could find somebody that like specializes in smart homes to just come over and like figure out what's broken. And I'm like, that's so annoying. Versus just like going like. I think I'm very bullish on the sort of analog home experience of like, you know, you flip a switch, you have something that doesn't need batteries that you can like change the heater. You know, I don't need a remote for my fireplace. It's not like I'm not in my bedroom being like, I really want to like, you know, turn on my fireplace. Like, there's something beautiful about analog products.

Yeah. This is somewhat of a boomer take, but I think that there is something real about like technology introducing more friction over time. And it's been captured in some sci fi. Like I don't know if you've seen or you probably haven't seen Fifth Element or Demolition man, but they both paint a picture of the future where basically all the smart features are very inconvenient. And so Sylvester Stallone is like in Demolition man getting fined every time he swears and there's like, he can't get like we should input anything like that. Yeah, actually we'd be bullish on that. That.

And then it would get boring quickly.

And then the Fifth Element, he lives in this, like, pod, and it, like, deploys like. Like. Yeah, you have been. Yeah, you have three points left. It's like, super connected world. And, like, he's, like, trying to quit smoking, and it gives him, like, one cigarette out of this, like, disposer and stuff. It's very funny. Anyway, great movies. You should see a film sometime, Jordy.

I'll watch one.

You should watch a movie for actually, your first movie. That would be big.

I have been enjoying the new White Love Lotus.

Oh, yeah. I'm caught up.

Very cliche to watch, but it's just watching.

Enjoy.

Everybody was like, okay. The first few episodes were boring.

Yeah.

And then last night's really got deranged. It. You know, the dad is developing this sort of, like, drug addiction, and.

Yep.

The mom is also, you know, and it's just all, like. You can tell. It's just, like, starting to fully unwind.

Yeah. I find that, like, somebody was asking me, like, oh, like, was a good episode, and I was kind of, like.

Just starting in the middle.

Oh, no, no.

Saying, like, you're.

No, no, no, no, no.

Like, yeah, the really deranged way to watch.

No, no. Like. Like, because I. I hadn't watched any. And then I was in Tahoe and had some free time away from kids. So I catch up. I watch the first three, then episode four premieres. I watch it, and a friend asks me, how is episode four? And I say, like, oh, I thought it was great. Like, it's the same as all of them. Like, does it. But does anything happen? Because people are saying, like, it's a little slow. And I was like, it kind of happens at the same rate in every episode. But more importantly, it's just such a lovely place to, like, like, hang out. It's, like, beautiful. It's chaotic. There's, like, all these little vignettes. Like, I don't need there to be, like, some really major plot point.

Like I said, that's why Succession was such a hit, is because it was allowing people to be immersed.

Yeah.

In your everyday lifestyle.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, White Lotus is, like, basically about the Amon, right?

Yeah. Like, it's like, the Aman hasn't actually. Yeah. They haven't actually done it at an Amman.

Yeah. They've done it at four seasons.

I think it's that level of.

But. But that's, like, the vibe. And so it's a very funny, like, way to poke fun The. The guy who wrote White Lotus actually went to my high school. Mike White.

Very cool.

Yeah, we should have him on. Talk about.

That'd be cool.

Business of White Lotus.

Did you guys overlap?

No. Come on. He's like 50 now or something. This guy's like a Hollywood legend. He's not like. Yeah, young.

Okay, okay.

I know you think I'm. You think I'm old, but I'm not that old. I mean.

All right, He.

He. He directed School of Rock, which film I'm sure you haven't seen, but came out in like mid 2000s.

You know, I've seen School of Rock.

You see School of Rock?

That's a. That's a.

Okay.

That's a class.

Yeah, the. The teacher in there.

Based on my Latin teacher, actually, so. Really?

Yeah.

That's cool. I would go to rock band camp every summer.

Yeah.

And it was basically that.

Would you play?

I would guitar and. And I would sing.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

That's cool. Can you. Can you blast like, a lick on the guitar if you had like, an electric guitar? Because we've been talking about soundboard. Maybe we just get you a guitar and like, whenever.

I could actually have it just strapped up. Always here and just be.

Yeah, just like when a founder comes on and they're. They were interviewing them and you just want to play the. You know, I have a size gong. I play the gong on the show. You play the guitar.

I had one. One moment that I'll always remember. We do this rock band camp and there's all this prep and then at the end of the summer, you play this, like, live performance for all of your extended, you know, all the other kids in camp and all this stuff with your band of five people and our lead singer. I was a backup singer. Our lead singer didn't show up.

Yeah.

For the perform, like, got cold feet. It was his big group and I had to like, go founder mode for the band. I had to sing it, but it was like. It was like a foreign person singing, like western karaoke. The right sounds, but, like, I just, like, didn't. I didn't. You know, it was like five minutes beforehand that I just picked it up, but.

Oh, well. Yeah, I think we need a guitar.

No, I've been playing a lot of. I've been playing a lot of, like, dinosaur themed renditions of, like, picture, like John Mayer meets dinosaurs. Playing it for my son.

Yeah, that's great.

They've been hit.

Do you. Do you know enough, like, power chords? Just like, jam and it sounds like vaguely like Blink182 or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

You know how, you know, like the bass and then you just work it together. That's great. Like the Suzuki method, more or less.

Yeah, Yeah.

I played piano, but I only learned, like, how to play, like, the sheet music. So I need to see.

You got too into the symphony. So for you it was more euphoric to just be immersed in it.

Exactly.

To even play the notes yourself.

Exactly.

You could have been a conductor.

Another great, great. I mean, I named my dog after a conductor, Gustavo Dudamel.

Really?

Yeah.

That's great.

His Instagram handle is real. Gustavo Dudamel. It's great.

Yeah.

And people get confused often.

John's dog had more followers and the conductor of the.

He used to be the conductor of the LA fell. Gustavo Dudemal is aware of the dog because people will see the dog because the dog has, like, almost as many followers as the actual conductor. Because I grinded up the account to like 20K and, and. And the conductor has, like, had like 100 at the time. And so, like, people would like, let him know. And we were all in la, so we'd run into people and be like, oh, yeah, like, that's the dog. I'm friends with the conductor.

Yeah. What do you ever say? What do you ever say? I'd love to have your. I'd love to have your dog Gustavo in attendance.

Yes. We considered. We considered bringing him. We had season tickets for a while. We got to go back. It's right down the street from the capital of capital, the forces of finance, Disney Hall.

I think we both came to the conclusion that this next boys trip. This article is not that interesting.

It's not that interesting. I agree. Anyway, let's move on to some post timeline and some. Some ads. Of course. I know that's what you've really been waiting for. The advertisements. Just because it's a DOM episode means. Doesn't mean we're not going to do some ads. Come on, people. Tyler says this is a really deep understanding how VC works. Tweet. The headline is Cursor raises hundreds of millions at 10 billion. Are these investors visionary or crazy? That is because we intuitively assume that those investors lose money if Cursor is ultimately worth less than 10 billion. But that's not true. They just don't make money to get the point. To get to the point where investors actually lose money, the comp. The company's valuation needs to fall below the amount raised. So if you're investing in this round, here are your Outcomes. Cursor exits at greater than 10 billion, you make money. Cursor exits at greater than 300 million to 10 billion, you get your money back. Cursor exits at under 300 million, you lose your money. From a decision making perspective, that changes the discussion from Is this worth 10 billion? To what is the likelihood that this is worth 20 to 50 billion in a few years? And to be clear, that's good. I think it's a very good thing for us to have risk capital that is both clear eyed and focused on the potential for growth. And then there's some, there's some assumptions here. What'd you think, Jordy? Why'd you like this? It's a good breakdown of the cursor deal. I mean, a lot of people know about prattle. You can write it down.

Founders understand this because they've run the calculus where they're like, if I, I mean, Jeremy was on last week and was talking about this.

They don't usually run the calculus until series A or B. Yeah, I find.

No, but I mean they, they intuitively understand, okay, you raise $10 million, you got to return that, sell for $10 million, you're going to make $0.

Yep.

And Jeremy talked about this last week talking about founders that have 10 million of ARR, but they raised $200 million.

Yeah.

And they're growing at 30%, which means that they could grow for another five years, sell the company and still make $0. Right.

Unless you get really creative. Like there are plenty of stories with acqui hires where the, the investors get hosed and the founders get really like egregious pay packages at big companies. And a lot of found a lot of funds are really upset by that. Depending on the structure. Some funds don't care because they're like, yeah, yeah, like, oh, okay, yeah, we wrote down 10 million, whatever. Yeah. Like we're just happy for you to go on to the next thing. Call us when you leave and get your earn out and do the next thing.

Yeah, back on one trip.

But it's delicate. It is, it is risky.

And yeah, usually I would say it's the employees that are most frustrated by that because they're like structure of their net. Well, sure, but I'm just saying I know a situation of a very high profile company that sold in 2021 and the price of the acquisition was like way too low for the traction of the company. But the CEO got this ridiculously large incentive package at the new company and all the CEOs didn't even get all the employees, most of the employees didn't get the opportunity to join the acquirer. And so they were frustrated because they're like, we worked all this time for this equity, and then you are the only one that got the.

Everyone just has to feel like it's fair.

Yeah.

And there are. But I thought this was worth.

I thought this was worth highlighting of people. Like, everybody's trying to pick apart. Oh, is Cursor's revenue durable? It's so easy to switch off.

Yeah.

You've got YC partners, like promoting Windsurf.

Sure.

All this stuff. And this is the right framework to be. You know, it sounds like Thrive and Kushner are doing this new round. Hasn't been formally announced yet, but it's not so crazy to price it that way. And it's possible that Cursor, I would imagine Cursor's in a position where they don't need money. So they're saying, if you want to own a piece of this company, you gotta pay. This is the case. And if you're investing in this company and you think you get a 2 or 3x on this, if you're putting in $300 million, it's a great. It's a great. It's not necessarily a slam dunk, grand slam venture return, but you're gonna return potentially hundreds of millions of dollars off of a single investment. And it's. And your downside is relatively protected. If you think that Cursor in a. A bear case scenario could sell for $300 million. And I would. And I would argue that. I would argue that there's a lot of companies on earth that even if Cursor's revenue dropped dramatically, they would say, we'll pay $300 million because you have great tech and we can integrate it.

You want a new GitHub Copilot 2.0, basically. I mean, there's a bunch of scenarios where it could work out. If they're just printing money and they just keep growing the business and they get to high ebitda. Like, they can trade it, you know, I don't know, 10x EBITDA and get up to. Yeah, you know, a couple hundred million in EBITDA and be good.

Yeah.

Right. It's not that crazy. And then, yeah, also, like, every hyperscaler might need something that looks like this if they're doing a lot of development or running a. You know, you think, like, this could fit into AWS and the AWS tech stack. It could replace GitHub and be GitHub 2.0 or Copilot 2.0? I don't know. It's certainly a high valuation but exciting for the team that built it and very cool.

We won't know the truth, I mean, unless we have the feels like a size gong moment. Let's give a cheers for the cursor team.

Cheers. Let's down this Jordy.

Come on down it. I don't know. I'm gonna keep nursing it here, brother.

The brother. Well, let's go to flow.

Peer pressure.

Do it.

Great.

Flo Crevelio says just bought 50,000 flower seeds on Amazon and going to throw them all over the place in San Francis. So just a heads up in case you're wondering why everything is suddenly so fragrant and beautiful. It'll be me. It'll be all me.

Amazing. I put this in for you, John. This is very Coogan coated.

Totally.

This is what you live for.

Yes.

We want to elevate people that are making the world a more beautiful place. Whether you are making putting flowers everywhere or putting up swings everywhere.

Yes.

Go repave the road. If you're upset with the road in front of your house, just hire private contractors.

Do it yourself.

Do it yourself.

Get some cement out there. Do it. No, I think smell is underrated in terms of the evaluation of a particular neighborhood. I've noticed that Beverly Hills smells very nice. But deafening noise pollution from all the Lamborghinis and M5 competitions, you might have.

Something to do with that.

Yeah, no, it's a lot of, it's a lot of kids clearly driving like exorbitant sports cars.

Yeah. It's very daily driver to school, the GT3RS.

And I do think. Yeah, I mean we were talking about the EPA earlier. Maybe we do need, you know, some, some quiet modes.

Yeah. But if you can put up enough flowers on either side of the road and deafen that, do GMO flowers to get them. Yeah, super trees.

That'd be great.

They could really dampen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or, or, or maybe just, you know, upgrade from the. The Aventadors and the Huracans to 19 spiders. Because it's a hybrid, you can drive it in electric only mode.

That's great.

A lot of the new hypercars, supercars, they have an electric drivetrain, so they're hybrid. You can drive them quietly until you get up into the canyons. Nobody cares. Then you can rip.

Thank you, Flo for your, for your work.

Thank you, Flo. I'm excited to see how that pans out. Visit SF and see the flowers let's go to Kyle Harrison with some news. Service Titan is at a 7.95 billion market cap. This is an $8 billion company that started as software for garage door repair people. TAM is almost always a terrible reason to pass.

So little lore for you.

Yeah.

In college I wanted to move to la.

Sure.

I was working on what became my first, you know, company. And I was barely making money at the time. I was making like a couple grand a month and it was like, like senior year. I was like, I don't know if I can actually sort of scale this to the point where I can like pay for rent and food and all this stuff. So I interviewed at Service Titan. First interview went well. Second interview thought it went well. They rejected me. And I'm sure I would have done actually very well if I'd. I mean, obviously I wouldn't have stayed.

In the wage cage.

No. Just financially. Just financially if I just stayed there.

Yeah.

But I won in the end because that turned, you know, what I was working on turned into a business that does millions of dollars in revenue to this day. So your loss. Service Titan. But I'm glad they are building great software for garage door repair.

And I believe they're in la.

Here they are in Glendale. So right around corner.

And great name, really aggressive name. I love it. Anyway, let's move on to an ad. We got an ad from Ad Quick out of Home Advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising Only Ad Quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Let's go get yourself a billboard on Ad Quick.

Okay, Speaking. Speaking of ad company.

Yeah.

Ted Turner, founder of cnn, started by running his father's out of home ad business. It was basically like Ad Quick but they owned Easy there, John. But instead of Adquick doesn't own the underlying inventory, there's a sort of software layer on top of it. But Ted Turner's dad had started an out of home advertising network that Ted Turner took over. And the reason I know that is because I was listening to the founders podcast episode this morning because Reggie posted about Ted Turner on Friday. Reggie has said. And this, this post analysis is brought to you by Adquick. Obviously, he said, I've been re. He says, I've been researching the 80s a bit as a comparison for viewing the world today. I feel like Ted Turner is such an interesting character. Founder of CNN, which was the start of the 24. 7 news cycle. We restarted it for tech yes. Genuinely a futurist in many ways. My favorite quote from him, we won't be signing off until the world ends. We'll be on, and we will cover the end of the world live. And that will be our very. Will be our last event. But the thing is, he actually made a video made for the last broadcast ever, known as the Turner Doomsday Video. It was leaked by an intern and posted on YouTube.

Amazing. We gotta watch that.

We should make our own doomsday video.

We should.

And it's just us popping hundreds of bottles, not even drinking them, just like, hey, we had the stockpile. We don't need it anymore.

Yeah, what an interesting thinker to do that. I wonder if there's anyone else who's filmed a doomsday video in tech that hasn't leaked. Like, is there a Zuck doomsday video or Elon doomsday video or Sam Altman doomsday video out there.

Brothers, if you're an Internet, go find.

It, leak it, put it on YouTube, please.

Yeah, we'll cover your cost of living until you can get rehired by, you know, the next BE Nair that you're gonna leak their doomsday video.

That's great. Let's move on to Antonio Garcia Martinez, the hardest to acquire and most exclusive watch in the collection, almost years in the making, and says thank you for being a part of the BASE team. This custom Seiko watch, designed by our creative team, honors precision, reliability, and motion. Qualities that define BASE and drive us forward. Its automatic movement winds with every step, a symbol of the momentum we're building together. Here's to the work we've done and to 2025. It's time to bring the world on chain.

That's great.

I love it.

Inspired by. Do we still have.

Oh, the XL watch.

That said, it's time to.

Oh. It's time to create shareholder value.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's time to bring the world on chain. Yeah. Yeah. Timepiece is great.

No, I was wondering. I. I gotta. We gotta ask Quaid at Bezel was this factory or is this. They just bought it and then they just redid.

I don't know. Yeah, I mean, sometimes you can swap out the dial and just kind of upgrade that. But of course. Go to Bezel dot. Go to getbezel.com. get a luxury watch. Get a Seiko. Get a Grand Seiko. Get anything.

Get any.

Get an FP Jor.

We've been looking at. We've been looking at Patek Chronograph stopwatches.

Oh, yeah. We want something time the show.

We want to top time the show. And just looking at your computer clock.

Over 20,000 luxury watches fully authenticated by Bezel's in house team highly recommend installing the app. Surfing, finding something great to add to your collection. In Tahoe this weekend saw a lot of Apple watches. Really, really harsh the mood, I would say. Yeah, it would be much better to see something more, more, more fitting of that, of that echelon of.

Yeah. If you're skiing to wear, wear your nicest watch.

What do you need an Apple watch for?

I. When I was in Switzerland just before New Year's, I saw a guy that was just got back from skiing and he took off his gloves and he had this like. I think it was the orange. The orange aquanaut.

Oh, nice.

That, that Alex rocks. And I was like, that's. That's great. You know, go out skiing.

Love it.

You know, with a six figure watch on shows confidence in your abilities.

It's great. Where is this second post? We got a lot of posts in here. We got to go through. Just do this one. Mount Rushmore at sunset. Let's go.

I just wanted to celebrate Mount Rushmore at sunset.

Here we go. I got it.

Is this a real picture? It almost looks.

Yeah, AI generated it is.

Do you have this one? Ben?

But we got it. We got to make a new Mount Rushmore. We got more monuments, a lot.

Where's your Rushmore?

We got to do Statue of Liberty on the east coast. What was it? Statue of justice on the west coast. Replace Alcatraz with a massive statue. I love Mount Rushmore.

You've been.

I haven't been.

We should go. We should, we should set up. So I'd really like to get a mobile studio but like set up more like one of those phone booths where the truck like drops it off and then leaves. So we're just sitting there right in front of Mount Rushmore recording with a nice view of it.

Be great.

And if the police come, we'll just lock the doors and just keep podcasting as long as we have an Internet connection.

Yeah, I mean, yeah. Just so cool to go blow up some mountains and make some. Make some faces. So much fun. Anyway, the story that I want to talk about was Orca. Orca is an energy water launched by this guy, Michael Moriarty, 13 months ago. He put up this idea and it's now live and available. 150 milligrams of caffeine, zero calories, zero sugar. And he posted 13 months, four failed production runs and more Stress than we ever imagined. All for the clear can. Worth it. Question mark. And gift of trees.

So to be clear, we covered this last week.

Oh, last week we did.

Remember, this is launch video of the guy from High School Musical that was just reading a out the science. Very creative, very creative, very fun.

But. But he's getting dunked on here by gift of Trees of Draught of Barrel. Doesn't sound like that person has a LinkedIn, but we'll read it anyway. The clear plastic PET beverage can patent was granted in 2015 to a Polish packaging manufacturing company. This dude did nothing but pay a beverage contract packer to license the patent and fill it with liquid designed in the CO packers lab. And yes, that is exactly true. That that's how you launch a new consumer package goods product these days. You go to a CO packer, have them make it. He made the interesting choice of using the clear plastic can, which I want to talk to you about, because on the one hand it really. This really does stand out on the shelf. And you could imagine seeing this and, and, and it would just look different than Celsius Red Bull, you know, Monster, where they're all aluminum cans. But at the same time, plastic could not be less cool right now. So.

Yeah.

What's your take?

So I've seen Michael working on this for a long time.

Yeah.

I think he's got good instinct and taste. I think the marketing's been great. I think the packaging looks cool. I think the concept of just a clear ish energy water. Like energy water. Like conceptually.

Yeah. Is just cool as opposed to like this. Like.

And I do believe. I do believe.

Looking Red Bull.

Yeah.

Green and like, it's like, what am I drinking?

So energy water is super cool.

Yep.

I do believe the actual formulation is difficult to get to the point where it's zero calorie and it tastes good and it's not filled with a bunch of insane additives. I looked at this entire thread. Gift of Trees, of Draught of Barrel by Intractable lion and he's a massive hater against people that are not. Not so. So I actually looked at the backstory. So he's a. Runs cideries.

Yes.

So he restores these sort of legacy orchards that have been run down and he and his wife. So it's like the most craft process, not even making the liquid, but making the barrel. Making the trees. Making the trees, the orchard. So.

So he's the gift of trees and draw the barrel.

Of course, the gift of trees. So I'd like to have this guy on the show to talk about the business of. Of bespoke cidery.

That sounds interesting.

But he's a huge hater on this guy Michael for no reason.

Yes, I agree.

It's. Michael didn't say I invented the clear plastic. He said, yeah, if you're making a. A caffeinated. Caffeine has a super bitter taste.

Totally. Yeah. You have to iterate on stuff.

You've got to iterate on it. Yeah. It's a good thing that they didn't just. Just use the first version that they produced. And so this, this is actually a much longer thread where. Where gift of trees of draw of barrel is just hating on this guy super hard. And I don't like.

Just don't buy it.

Yeah, yeah, just don't buy it.

It's fine. You don't have to buy it. Capitalism.

I think that Michael. Michael will be dramatically more commercially successful. And gift of trees of drought of barrel is upset.

I don't know about that. Is this really a long, short trade right now? Who knows? Maybe they both.

I'm going long. I'm going long.

Orca.

Orca. I would not invest in gift of trees of drought and barrel.

I don't know, man. I think there might be something to this. He scales this up. Maybe he starts putting the cider in plastic bottles.

Yeah, maybe. Honestly, here's what I'd like to see. Collab work it out. Both come on the show.

Yep.

We'll negotiate JV joint venture. Yeah. And you guys can collab.

You guys can collab.

Maybe you can find success in plastic bottles.

Exactly what the world needs. Bring. Bring the science project with the trad based stuff together. It's a match made in heaven. Everyone can be happy. But Michael does respond and he says, I wish it had been that easy. We didn't invent the can. We spent 13 months figuring out how and who could actually fill them at scale. At every step. We were told just to switch to a normal can. Every canning line in the country is built for aluminum. Nothing was plug and play. And so yeah, like it is hard at work even to just. Just put something in a can that exists or is patented because the manufacturing supply might not be there. And this is the unfortunate struggle and the schlep of getting a consumer product to market. I mean, I'm sure you went through with Rora where you're like, okay, there's like a million different manufacturing decisions to make and we want to maintain our brand values and what we're doing.

No, there's.

And there's A bunch of trade offs.

I distinctly remember when my co founders, Brian and Charlie, we got the visual that looked almost identical to this and then there were still like 10,000 decisions to be made and both Brian and Charlie were just like, you know, incredibly in the weeds on every single one. They're all very high stakes and you know, there's so many small setbacks and things like that. So that's the beauty of, of the reason that beverage attracts so many sort of new entrepreneurs is that it's a super tangible idea of. I can see it in my head. I can put the right ingredients in the can and then I'm gonna sell it and it's just so much harder.

It's a widgets business.

Yeah.

But at the same time, for a long time software was super like high status because it was so complicated. You had to understand C or Java or Python and deployment and AWS and servers and all this stuff. And now it's been like, oh, well, you can vibe code a flight simulator in a day, but it takes 13 months to put caffeine in a can.

Yeah.

It's like kind of, kind of weird, but we're kind of flipping and this is like the Bits and Adams thing. Bits just move faster.

Yeah.

So good luck. Michael. Send us, send us some product if you see this.

But I actually there's, there's a, my wife invested in a company.

Yeah.

That at like a, like a 5 cap.

Yep.

That put olive oil in a plastic bottle.

Yep.

And it's up 50x in like 2 something years. Great. And so just something as simple as, you know, as sort of, in this case, novel product. Energy water in a new form in a new bottle. It's very possible. This is wildly successful.

It's funny seeing him gripe about production because. Wait until you try and go into retail, buddy. It's going to be okay.

You have to change. No, no, no. You're just saying retail general.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like actually getting retail distribution on this is going to be a thousand times more frustrating. Not that he can't do it and it won't be difficult, but it's going to be a lot more just unreasonable.

Basically you have to pay us to put this on our show.

Oh, totally. Like every deal is bespoke and you're competing with a Lonnie New and Celsius and Red Bull and they all have monopolies and they all want, hey, we want to keep our yerba mate on the, on the shelf. And you're competing against every other company. Company. And and that's really where the game is won. Like Graza, the olive oil company has won because they're in every store now. I'm sure they're doing great on E commerce but that company is not a 50x return if they don't figure out retail. And retail is hard and a schlep. And it's something that is probably going to be make these four failed production runs look like the easy mode. Anyway, good luck to you, Michael. And send us some. We'd love to. We'd love to try it. Should we go to max, Michael?

Before that, I'd like to do a promoted ad.

Let's do it.

So we have from Jose, high class and tasteful. And he doesn't even do any type of review. He just does the headline which is high class and tasteful. Five stars. And he jumps right into the ad which is very aggressive.

Yeah, what is this?

But potentially a smart move because most people have been putting it. So he says variable and early stage company HQ'd in Dallas helps manufacturers scale efficiently with a flexible on demand labor model model. This gives US manufacturers a competitive edge over China without relying on AI sweatshops or bloatware staffing platforms like Traba.

Hey, taking shots.

Mike's a friend of the show. But you know, sometimes attack ads are, are, are effective Variable. Optimize your labor. Eliminates low or OT work, boost productivity and tracks key metrics. Visit variable ops and tell them to give Jose a raise. So he's just taking the initiative. He is not the founder, but he's getting out there. So I'm going to go there and just tell them to give Jose a raise even though I don't think we're qualified.

Unless we need to get.

Unless we need to get. Ben.

Yeah. We're going to test drive that product.

Ben, where are you? Oh, he's there. And one more review while we're at it. Okay, this is hard Power soft beliefs. In my review of Technology Brothers TBPN is the seminal technology podcast of our day. John and Jordy exemplify the human desire to create and contribute to a product that is bigger than the self. A devotion to the aesthetic. And for that I'm grateful to the brotherhood. This five star review is brought to you by Techno Republic on X, a new project that shares the best quotes and ideas from Alexander Karp's book the Technological Republic. Follow Techno Repub on X today to join your fellow brothers building the future of the West. Very cool. I'm going to go. I'm going to Go follow this right now.

Fantastic.

And thank you for the review tech.

While you're doing that, we'll move over to Max Meyer. Also, another publisher similar to Alex Garp actually works with another Palantir co founder over at avc. Max Meyer says airports these days are the perfect picture of American affluenza. The US upper ish class has too much money, but never enough. Lots of suspicious pre borders. Teens in designer clothes, $500 headphones, muttering what to flight staff. There are like 50 people in boarding group one now as well. You can see the confusion on people's faces who've clearly been boarding first for a while, who now wait 20 minutes standing just to have their spot in line. The lounges are overrun and again, you can see the exasperation on the faces of people waiting for them, thinking they'd paid for a service and realizing that now it's like Disneyland. Prices across the board have gone up and demand keeps up. This is one of the main effects of mass affluence, I guess. Airline taxes are as high as ever, and as a result, actual budget flights a la Ryanair are not allowed. At this point, a budget flight is anything under $300. People are amazingly unforgiving. They get violent looks in their eyes when staff announce that overhead bin space will run out. For many flyers, being asked to check a bag is like being asked to for one of their kidneys. So many people look at children like they're rodents that have infiltrated the house rather than our treasures and our futures. He's such a good writer. Parents are the scapegoat of every flight. Funny enough, the TSA feels like the one thing that has gotten better. Maybe I choose my airports and flying times well, but I don't remember the last time I waited more than 15 minutes to get through. Sometimes the clear line is comically longer than the regular line next to it. And for whatever reason, people will just not move over to the shorter line. It's pretty rare to see actual balling brawling, but you do hear about those things. As a writer and chronicler of America, this entropy interests me. Yeah, interesting. Basically an ad for private jets. I completely agree with you, Max. Everyone should be flying in a G650. Er, ideally, maybe we're gonna have that rare.

We're gonna have that.

Yeah.

Super intelligent. Yes, that's one of the things Sam Altman's gone on record. He said exactly if Masa is able to do this round.

Yes, everyone has a private jet, obviously. Yep. So problem solved. Soon.

Figure allegedly is Training their robots to build PJs.

Oh, that'd be great.

Actually. You won't even need to and mine the ore needed to create the jet.

Fantastic.

You buy your figure for 20 grand, it'll actually build you a Gulf stream.

And that's coming in 12 to 18 months. Right, right.

Yes, Perfect.

Perfect. Okay, great.

Just. Just after the ipo.

Yeah, just. Just after the next fundraise. It'll be here. Great.

Y.

Well, that's fantastic. Let's move on. Avi Schiffman back on the show. We got to have him on live soon. He says companies should shut down when the founder leaves. Pretty good take.

Yeah, Yeah.

I mean, Ben Thompson has an interesting take on this stuff.

They. And they should. If the founder passes away, they should just like, it should shut down. In solidarity.

In solidarity. Dead man switch. If I die, my company goes with me. No, I mean, Ben Thompson has a take on this, which is basically like, like companies do not need to go on forever. So it's actually okay for a company to be in kind of its late stage and just dividend all the profits until it's, like, done. This is kind of what's happening with like the cigarette companies. Like, like literally no one is. No one. Like, new smokers are not emerging. The market is shrinking. They just increase the price on the, the, on the reducing customer base. And over time, they, they make the same amount of revenue, but their cash flows are steady. And so they're just going to like, whittle down, basically. And they all have plans of like, oh, we'll get into the new markets, but none of them are doing that well in the new alternative market. And so a lot of people are just like, well, they dividend a lot. They, they, they pay out. And so, you know, if you have, you know, Altra is $100 billion company. If you invest right now and you get $150 billion in cash returned to you over the next five years or something like, that could be a good, that could, that could be a good deal. Even if, even if the value of the stock is zero at the end, like, it's fine.

Yeah. So I think, but I think, I think Avi dropping these, they're thought provoking.

Totally.

And I think there's some value to that.

Yeah, it's fun. Good poster. Tim Suzman says we invested in a YC startup a week ago. Their revenue growth was so high, it would have been crazy to ignore it. Just saw them in alumni demo day. They doubled their revenue in the past week. Let's go that's exciting. We're very. Oh, yeah.

And a cheers.

Let's size gong that. Let's cheers the Dom Perignon.

And we have some YC news that we'll be sharing.

We will be at demo day in just a few days.

I was going to say we're going to share it tomorrow.

Well, we'll be there. Well, we're going to announce what we're going to be doing there in tomorrow, I guess. But let's move on to Windsurf sharing a video from YC from their light cone podcast. Jason. So Windsurf says not every day you wake up to a shout out from Y Combinator. Jared Freeman explains why founders are switching to Windsurf. Is Windsurf a YC company or are they just like loved by yc? I don't know. We'll have to figure it out.

The. The fact that the partner was coming out and taking such a strong stand makes you think.

Anyway, Jason Lemkin says brutal competition always comes to software. Partners become competitors, collaborators compete. Usually it takes a few years, though, to get real. AI is accelerating at the pace an order of magnitude. Encoding and contact center already. Huh. I can't really understand that. Will it do the same to your category? Interesting. So we have. I mean, I don't even understand a lot of people.

A lot of people were pushing back on this, saying, if you don't think that cursor indexes your code base.

Yeah.

You haven't used it, but index.

Oh. Like, pulls it in as like training data. I mean, there's just like layers and layers to this fight. Right now there's like the cursor versus wind surf debate, but then there's also the cursor versus Claude code debate that's happening.

Yeah.

Will it all commoditize? Who knows?

Yeah.

Anyway, a lot. Gill's in the Gundo wondering if he should get some curls and Zinn in. He also really wants a mustache. This place may have changed me forever. I like, I love when a new size Lord Capital Allocator takes the Gundo tour. You know, Augustus took them around, I'm sure. Yeah, introduce him to everyone else. Little bit of a controversial post because he spells Zyn wrong. It's Z. Y, N. He's hit him with Diane. And also in the Gundo, man. I mean, this is like, you know, highest penetration place in the world for Lucy. So Zinn's kind of out there. Got to get on the next generation of products when it comes to nicotine. But you should do some curls and some Bench press. And you should, you know, basically just wind down your podcast, become a size lord, become a mass monster, and go for your IFBB pro card. I've met.

That's what we want to see.

And I think you have it.

It's got what it takes.

I think you get diced, get big.

And do the Mount Rushmore of the West.

Yes.

Next topic. My dear friend, my oldest friend called me last night.

Okay.

Like long after I went to bed. I go to bed very early. So I saw it this morning and he just joined the chat on YouTube and said, hey Jordy. He just called me and I told him I'm. I'm live right now, I can't talk. And he said in the chat I wanted to let you know I got engaged.

Oh, wow.

Congratulations. Cheers. To Cody and his lovely fiance Emily. And congratulations, Cody. I love you. And if we ever need a financial model, he is the guy to go to. Right now. We're just sort of vibe coding our finance, but absolute finance.

Chad, let's get him to do something.

And congratulations.

Well, speaking of your early bedtime, we are sponsored by eight sleep nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to aidsleep.com tbpn and upgrade your sleeping experience. I was miserable the last two nights, honestly. @ the Ritz Carlton, which not a bad hotel, they don't have eight sleeps and it was miserable. Uh, it was, it, it was not a fun experience. It really, it really does ruin every other bed. Um, so get one. Never travel ever again and just stay in your eight sleep forever.

It truly is unbelievably good.

It's. It, it's so good. We highly recommend it. Check it out.

Uh, anyway, this morning I. It was. So I Woke up.

Yeah.

4:45.

Yeah.

It's effectively 3:45. According to my brain.

Yeah. Completely dead.

It's the dead of night.

Yeah.

And you know what I thought to myself? Thank God for eight sleep.com tvpn.

Yes.

Where anybody can get $400 off sleep.

Yes.

And get to experience the sort of the joy warming effect in the morning.

It really makes waking up so easy. It's crazy.

And the vibration alarm clock.

I don't do that one.

You gotta try it. You gotta try it.

Yeah.

It's subtle.

I've tried it. I just. The warm works works for me.

It's subtle and it is good option. It's fantastic.

It's great. Well, anyway, go check it out. Let's move on to the optify kids. This is the YC company that was canceled briefly, but they're back. They created Sweatshop software, essentially. That was the critique of them. But they leaned in. They went direct, and they printed T shirts that say, justice for Worker 17. And Spore says the optifi kids are going to be all right. They're having fun with it. They clearly realized that their first message didn't resonate. They turned it around, and I cannot wait to talk to these guys because I think they're having fun and I love it.

Yeah, we're going to talk to them Wednesday.

Yep. And it was great. So love, love justice for worker 17. Creating a lot of fun on the timeline. A lot of a great meme, and still just so funny that that happened all the back and forth.

Yeah.

But they had a good time, and I think they. I think this is the right way to handle it. They didn't put out some groveling post saying, like, we're sorry. There's like, they. They kind of took a breather.

I think if anything, it will be helpful because every investor at the very least, want to talk to them. I'm a novelty at this point for the novelty of talking to the. Yeah, the legends.

The legends. And I mean, we. And we talked about this before. Like, there's so many things that you could tweak in that presentation and that software that would be beneficial. And I mean, they created such a meme that someone built an optifi clone for PMF or die, which is fully functional. Fully functional. You can go to PMFordie XYZ and see the productivity of the two guys that are in the cage right now, Blake and Patty, and so you can check it out. And it's hilarious that somebody built that so fast, but, I mean, it helps when they're live streaming constantly. Anyway, anyway, let's move on to another YC founder, an alum, one of Legends Emmett Shear. He says, when I was CEOing at Twitch, one of the things I do, every batch of interns was a very short presentation on the origins of the company, and then a Q and A. One of the questions is always, where should I work? And what job should I get? Or should I start a company? And he goes on to say, it's an interesting question to try and answer for an intern. I didn't really know because, of course, the actual answer is dependent on that person and their life. So I decided to. So I had to figure out how to articulate the framework I used. First, there's money. Obviously you want money, but money is well known for Diminishing returns. Debatable. After you have enough for rent and food and so on, then. So you don't want to optimize for cash. It's more of a constraint. Then there's prestige. How much will getting this job impress people? Prestige is mostly a trap for the same reason designer clothing brands are bad deals. Also debatable. Brand might make something less discerning. People think better of you, but it won't actually make you better or better off. Power is also on offer, usually called impact and the chance to make a difference or mission. We like power because it feels good to wield the pure joy of throwing a stone in the lake and watching it splash.

And we need Evan to write a book.

Yeah, I mean, he's a great writer and really great points. What is your framework when someone asks you, where should I work or should I start a company?

So general advice. Yeah, Generalized advice is probably one of the most dangerous things in the entire world.

Yep.

There's nothing. Yes. You can get advice and try to kind of general advice from somebody that you don't know. Try to apply it to your life.

Everyone should have an eight sleep. Everyone should buy a watch on bezel. Everyone should be on public. Yeah, everyone should be on ramp. But I hear your point. Yes.

And obviously advertise on adequate.

But obviously.

No, this, this is the thing to me, the. The most important thing you can do in your 20s is develop a meaningful enough relationship with smart enough people whose lives you admire and only get advice from them. Like David Senra and Sean Frank are two of the only people on earth that aren't immediate family or you that or Ben, our lovely producer Ben. But in general, I only take sort of professional advice from a couple people in the world because they understand my values, they know the things that I care about, they know what I want to optimize for. They know all these things and they are have a unique and earned perspective. And so it's much better to have, you know, one or two people and only get sort of professional advice from them. And that is the thing that has served me the best in life. The best career decisions that I've made were in response to people like Sean Frank's advice. People like, you know, David Sender's advice. And I can kind of pinpoint even the conversation. So yeah, get a rich wallet.

Start a podcast.

Yeah. Like, like, I think if you had a strong personal relationship with Naval.

Yeah.

I'm sure he could give you really, really, really good advice. But just blanket, you know, taking his advice like, you should work like a lion. And then somebody, like, works hard for two days and takes like two days off. Like, don't do that. You know, like, like you need to sort of like take it it and process it and then ideally get the same advice from somebody that actually knows.

Well, I threw this post in here randomly, but it seems like an answer to Emmett Shear's post from Guillermo Rao over at Vercel. He says, in a world of infinite possibility, the alpha is in focus, quality and depth. And that feels like the right level of like, meta advice that, that is almost safe to apply to everyone. It's not. It's not. Go work at this specific company.

Except if you're an investor and you're like, oh, I'm really into games. And then somebody pitches you a cr. Become Salesforce. Yeah, it's like you, like, you. You took the advice of like, I'm just gonna fall. Like, so. So again, you can always apply these things.

Focus, quality and depth. Does that keep you from investing in. In Salesforce?

Yeah, because you're saying, I'm going to be the best, I'm going to be the investor.

You're too.

Like, I'm going to deliver the best returns and I'm just going to focus on.

Well, it depends on what you're focusing on. You could be focusing on founders. Right. Quality of businesses. Like, it doesn't necessarily need to be something as narrow as a. I mean, focusing on a specific company or specific niche. Focusing on a. On an axiom of investing. But yes, I hear your point. Interesting. Let's go to another post about being young and doing great things. Gabriel says the only thing stopping me from doing great things when I was young was that I thought I was a moron and there were too many people smarter than me. I still do. The only difference is that I realized everyone else is a moron as well. Well, it's kind of midwit meme.

Yes.

It was actually a huge unlock fever.

Maxing.

Yes. When I. When I realized the bell curve of people is not that wide and being economically productive seems to come from what thoughts and insight about the world rather than genes. Interesting. Good one. Did we talk about ServiceNow at all? I don't think we have. ServiceNow is buying Moveworks, the AI platform, for almost $3 billion. They were backed by Bain, Size Gong.

Kleiner for the shareholders, and Bain and Lightspeed and Kleiner and their LPs.

Yeah.

Great moment.

Great moment. Great exit.

ServiceNow is a company that I just don't know anything about.

I Mean, honestly, when we put this in the stack, I was like I kind of got them confused with Service Titan.

Yeah, yeah, ServiceNow.

Service Titan. Like we're doing two stories, same thing.

And this is $160 billion company.

This one's much bigger than Service Titan. Service Titan's what, 8 billion.

It's a cloud computing platform for the creation and management of automated business workflows.

Let's go.

Buying a platform called Moveworks.

Gundo Bros. Hate this, hate this. One weird trick. Make $100 billion building B2B SaaS. Augustus. Somebody needs to do a wellness check on Augustus Tirico right now.

Yeah, because honestly, somebody should go and do like a content warning. Like tell Augustus, don't listen to this episode minute. It, you know they're talking about.

Yeah, trigger warning. Augustus.

Trigger warning.

Yeah, they're talking about ServiceNow. Be careful. You're going to be super depressed when you hear how much money people are making automating business processes.

Yeah, well that's the thing. Some people wake up and from a young age they know they want to live a life that allows them to deliver value through automating business processes using AI. That's beautiful.

Different. Yeah, they're icky guy. Yeah, it's their life's work. They're live players.

My icky guy. Automating business processes.

You're laughing, but it's true. It's real. Some people love this. They're built for it. It's great. Anyway, if you want to get on ServiceNow and the action, head over to public.com investing. For those who take it seriously. They have multi asset investing industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions of. Of course this is not financial advice but it is the preferred platform of the technology brothers. So go check it out. Anyway, let's move on to former brother of the week. Justin Mayers profiled in none other than Forbes, our favorite publication that we never say anything negative about. We love Forbes here.

That's right.

Eight years of hard work and Justin and Kettle and Fire have been featured in Forbes. Congratulations.

So to be clear, this, this was not a contrib piece that you know, you can basically get for 20 bucks. This was a cover story.

Cover story.

Daily cover story.

Let's go. Beautiful picture of Justin.

It shows him looking, looking fantastic. And a bunch of the brothers in the community quoted this and you know, said, said nice things about, about him. But I, I just liked the boy who sold soup.

The boy who sold soup. That's, that is so good. From John.

Oh my God.

The boy Incredible read. So good.

Here's the thing, though. Justin is. Is. Is incredibly hardworking and kind, and it's fantastic. There's a reason he's a former brother of the week.

Yes.

And I, you know, some people have said to me they don't know when I'm being sarcastic or when I'm being serious. Not being sarcastic right now. Incredible human guy, and I'm lucky to call him a friend.

Yeah.

And can't wait for our episode on Thursday when Justin joins. We're going to be talking about the hot topics in consumer health. We'll talk about who's making money on Maha, which I'm excited about.

Yeah.

What. What the vibes are like at Mar a Lago, where he's been spending time. It's great. Of course, the. Of course, the bone broth empire he's built.

He made his money.

He's basically built a. Almost like. I don't even say this ironically. He almost has a monopoly on the bone broth market.

He really does. He really does.

Because it's actually.

How much money is he making, Jordy?

100 a year.

Let's go $100 million.

That's their run rate. I think they're probably well. That was whenever. I think they're probably well beyond that now.

It's a fantastic business. He's a fantastic entrepreneur.

We got a fantastic post from Bucko Capital bloke and I'm going to read this.

It.

Dude, it's Jevons Paradox. It's literally Bamal's cost disease. A classic example of gal man's amnesia effect. Oh, that's the Monty hall problem. It's orthogonal to Dutch disease. It's prisoner's dilemma. You're a prisoner, you're in prison, you're.

In prison, you're imprisoned. It's great.

Mental models trapped in the Mental trapped in a mental model trapped in a framework. Can't get out. Anyways, absolute banger. He's had some great posts today. Day I. While we're at it, I'm gonna. I'm gonna pull. He. He was talking about the Redfin acquisition, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah. I think that's the bottom of the stack.

The bloke was.

Says, Redfin got acquired today. Shout out to their CEO for one of the wildest things I've ever heard on an earnings call. The analyst on this earnings call for Redfin says, what if mortgage rates don't come down? Of course, this would be harmful to Redfin business because they buy and sell homes and when mortgage rates go down, people Buy a lot of homes. And Glenn, the CEO says, which is.

A public, this is a public company, CEO.

I don't think so. Glenn says we'll drink our own urine or our competitor's blood. Stay in the foxhole.

Now he says great question. Plan B. Plan B is drink our own urine or our competitors blood. Stay in the foxhole.

I don't know if you remember, but our last earnings call ended with a single line from a who song, Won't Get Fooled Again Again, where I said we're not banking on low rates when other people had thought they might come down. I don't know. Weird. Go Glenn. He got out. He sold the company. Congrats to Glenn. Congrats Gong for Glenn. And yeah, I love a, I love, I love a CEO dropping a hot take on an earnings call. Real, you know, don't have a lot of time to post when you're running a public company. You got to get those bangers out. In the earnings call when the analyst asks, that's crazy.

They were, they were trading.

Yeah. What was wrapping worth? Zillow competitor, Right?

Oh, wow. They were trading at like a quarter of their revenue.

Rough.

Yeah, yeah, Tough, tough.

Go Anyway.

But they got out.

Yeah, they got out. Let's move on to Blake Anderson. He's locked in the cage right now, but he says 10x will be a hundred million dollar company within one year. He's manifesting what's their ARR right now? They haven't launched yet, so they're still at 00. But they haven't spent much money. They're only a couple weeks into the cage and their goal of course is to hit $1 million in ARR in 90 days. And he's very confident about that and he's confident that he will take it further, take it all the way to $100 million.

All the way.

So good luck to Blake. If you want to go check out what he's doing, go to pmfordie.com Anyway, let's move on to, oh, Josh Wolf. He says incredible leadership in the United Arab Emirates as a husband to a super successful feminist in a male dominated world and father to two bold daughters raised by my sacrifice at all. Single mom and grandma women have more rights in the UAE than some US states. He's clearly fundraising. But I just want to take a second to say the UAE is one of the greatest innovations in human rights in the world. And I think that everyone needs to acknowledge that at this point everything in the Middle east is fantastic. And, and I can't say Enough good things and you know, I really hope that everyone in the Middle east can, can, can come together and support American financial markets more aggressively than ever before. What do you think, Jordy?

I agree John.

Fantastic.

Absolutely.

Let's move on to Gary T. Not.

You're not beating the, the fundraising allegations. Will. Will started a rumor mill last week when he said he was leading around in tbpn. It's, you know, you know there had been rumors that we had been in the Middle east and so you're not really helping the rumor mill, John. But anyways, back to the show.

We do what we have to do. Did you hear about the Simpsons producer who was forced to demolish his 24 year old Simpsons inspired tree house after the city of LA demanded he permanent like a single family dwelling? Gary Tan says deregulate housing. Yes, it's my backyard. And yeah, I, I, I couldn't agree it, it is post fires. It's more important than ever to reconsider how permitting is is, is done. It's a treehouse and they wanted it to be ADA compliant. So they wanted a wheelchair ramp into the treehouse which I think was probably impossible. So they made him tear it down. Very sad. And, and, and, and my, my problem with this is like I am okay with, with, I'm okay with housing regulations and rules around how you build things because you know, you don't want someone building some massive structure that just falls over and destroys your house next to you. But you need high throughput approvals. And what I was kind of pitching was like there should be a CAD plugin where you design your structure and at every moment it's running the algorithm to say is this approved or is this denied? And then you can just see, okay, everything's green. Click, print the plans, go build it. You're good.

Yeah.

Instead of, instead of oh, we designed the blueprints and then we send them in and then month later it comes back and they have one tweak and then another month and just goes on back and forth and back and forth and it's very annoying. And now is the time to fix housing. And Gary Tan has been a very vocal voice for that. So we love it. We actually have a whole bunch of Gary Tan posts here. Let's go to the next one. He's quote tweeting someone who says so I just simply asked Manus to give me the files. We already talked about this, this and.

Gary, yeah, he, he came to a similar conclusion which is all the alpha is in prompting, custom prompting tool use and clever workflow and evals. Yeah, I can't wait for demo day. I'm sure we're going to see a lot of people adopting similar approaches to Manus, as some people call it, minus some people call it Manus my noose.

The nominative determinism is that you will be hung by it. It.

Yes, it's not great.

Anyway, dark things got a little spicy with the Acquired Podcast. They flew out to Taiwan. They interviewed TSMC founder Morris Chang legend. I've been calling for Morris Chang to go on Joe Rogan for years now and it hasn't happened. We saw Zuck go on. We saw Peter Thiel go on. We saw Naval Rob go on. Mark Andreessen's been on. I wanted Morris Chang to go on Rogan. Didn't happen. But fortunately the good folks over at Acquired Podcast got it done. They flew out there, they interviewed him. But funny exchange. Gilbert says, TSMC is essentially the only trillion dollar company in the world, not on the west coast of the United States. It is this incredibly important thing in the world. It's this unlikely success of grand scale. And Morse Chang cuts him off and says, unlikely in your opinion. And Gilbert said, I mean, you started it when you were 56. There are many things. And Chang chimes in again and says, I'm not going to argue with you. I merely asked it. I merely asked as a point of curiosity. I didn't think that it was unlikely. I love it.

That's great though.

Go over to meet with a what, 80 year old founder and he just tells you. I never had a doubt in my mind, not for a second.

Not for a second.

But I mean the, the, the acquired guys are doing fantastic interviews and they are. I mean, I hope this sound bite goes viral or like there's more sound bites from the Morris Chang interview that go viral. Because there's that famous Jensen Wong interview that they did where there's that clip that goes viral where they're like, if you had to go back and you had to do it all again, would you do it? And he's just like, no, I wouldn't do it. It's been too hard, it's been too miserable. I don't like it. It's bad.

Like, but I'm here and check out my leather jacket.

Yeah, yeah. It's a very, very, very funny interaction. And they're, and they obviously do a ton of research on these companies. So they show, show up extremely prepared and get great sound bites. And so go check it out. You can listen to the TSMC founder Morris Chang on the acquired podcast. You can go to their YouTube. It's probably in their RSS feed as well.

Okay, one more post and then. And before we do that last post, I wanted to.

That's what you got to do before that next post.

I'm gonna stop myself at two because I.

We haven't finished the bottle.

Yeah. There's no rule about a Dom. There's no rule about a DOM episode.

Let us know in the chat. What do you think should join us in the chat?

No, but I wanted to give a quick shout out to Wander.

Okay.

Number one place to book vacation rentals in the world. They are more than vacation homes. They are simply Find your happy place. Start over. Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

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We need the guitar for that.

Yeah, we do. We do need the guitar. Hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 247 concierge service is a vacation home, but better. Jordy, do you have a link or a code?

Yeah, you just have to go to wander.com tvpn.

Yes.

If you just create an account, they're gonna give away a. I think it's like a 4ish night trip to someone in our audience.

That's a long trip. That's nice.

Yeah. Yeah.

Longer than I was in time.

Oh, so go do it. Takes a second. You can use Google or any other login and you'd be silly not to and invite us. Maybe we'll come.

That sounds great.

We rarely leave the house except to do.

But if you book one that has a podcasting room, we'll be there.

Yeah.

Fantastic. Let's go to Gabe. Tech guys take up a creative hobby because they want to prove they are insold unlike all other tech guys. And then they end up taking. And then they end up with the exact same hobbies as all other tech guys which are making electronic music and photography bodied.

I do know some tech guys that have taken up electronic music and photography.

Yep. But that's why we advocate for Nurburgring. Bodybuilding, mma, mma, long distance rifle shooting, watchmaking, most dangerous game.

Car collecting even. Even if you don't want to drive the cars fast, just collect the car.

Sailing alone across the Pacific Ocean.

That's right.

These are hobbies that will differentiate you. If you're looking for something you're not going to become glorious and remembered in the trenches of EDM and photography.

Carve your own Mount Rushmore.

Yes.

In the Marin Highlands. Highlands.

Yes. I agree.

Just do it.

Someone says want to go Bouldering. And Gabe says, I will not do that. This very popular hobby. But yeah, get. Yeah, get out there. Get deep in some rabbit holes on YouTube. Find an obscure hobby.

And that's right.

Really, really deep. Watch collecting. Go to Bezel. Start. Start collecting watches. It's much better than photography. Anyway, Lanseer Enga says you think Cursor's growth is. Is crazy. There's a company in this YC batch that hit $50 million in annualized profit in two months.

Months.

What do you think, Jordy?

Annualized profit?

It's a weird, weird stat, right?

Yeah. Because if you're making that much money, you should probably hire and scale the team and sort of spend even, you know, like, I don't know.

Yeah, annualized profit. It's like, did you make. Is that like one good day?

It'd also be hilarious if it was.

Yeah, it was one day, one hour.

No payroll expenses hit.

It was just exactly nothing. Pure profit that day.

I mean, it's still impressive.

This is impressive. I'm sure. I'm sure it's a great company, but it is. It is funny that we're now talking about annualized profit, which is not, like, really a thing. Cash balance over time is what matters. But if you're making so much profit and you need to manage your expenses, you got to go to ramp.com. time is money save. Both easy to use. Corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. I really hope that YC company signs up for ramp, and if we meet them, we will definitely be pitching them ramp.

Anyway, we should have an iPad where anybody that comes that we run into, we just sign them up for ramp.

Yeah. Oh, that'd be great.

It's a public. It's more of a public service than a sales activity. A sales motion.

Yeah. Yes. Let's go to Richard Craib. Very fascinating poster. Does post very often.

Do you know this guy John? John has insane podcasters high right now. Because you were like, we're. This is the Last post. Like 3.

What are you talking about? I never agreed to that. You still have the champagne. You haven't finished. Let's keep going. What do you do the rest of the day? Nothing. You're posting, you're podcasting. Let's keep going. We literally only have six posts left. We can get through this. We're good. We're good. I'll skip some of these. Some of these are repeats, too.

Stick with us, folks.

We'll skip John.

Save the best for last.

Okay, We'll Skip this one. We'll skip. This is a duplicate. Yeah, let's just close out. Richard Craig, very interesting poster. He only pops up when something big is happening in the market. Market. He runs a hedge fund, Numerai and he said he woke up today wondering how Leopold Ochenbrenner situational awareness hedge fund is doing. And so do you know the story of Leopold Aschenbrenner?

Is that the OpenAI he was OpenAI.

He left. He did a great podcast with Dwarkesh Patel. Talked about scaling laws and basically predicted that, you know, know, if you fall, if you scale out the AGI systems, like, it's going to get really, really crazy. Made a bunch of kind of pivots away from the traditional AI safety arguments towards kind of geopolitical relevance. The idea that these will be, you know, akin to nuclear weapons, very controlled. But I think what Richard here is saying that, you know, Leopold's bet was that situation. Situation awareness hedge fund like, like go turbo Long Nvidia basically, like, like AI is the future. And then of course, like things are selling off right now. And if you're levered Long Nvidia, even if it's a good bet over the very long term, you could be in a rough spot.

Timing and sizing.

Exactly, exactly. And so Richard Krabs throwing some. Throwing some questions up on the timeline I thought. I thought were interesting. But good luck to Leopold. I'm a big fan of this podcast. I thought it was very interesting. Anyway, anyway, anything else you want to cover?

I don't know if this is somebody messing around. Okay, it's not. This is breaking news. We got some personnel news.

What is this?

Somebody on the chat.

Oh, you were talking big game about me going to.

Now we got breaking news.

Jordy's. Oh, we gotta do one more.

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Did you finish. You didn't quite finish the bottle, but that's done. That's all you, John. So under the number not. Not less than 10 minutes ago, he says, when's the next some personnel news? Should be a regular segment. And the answer is right now. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, is the new leader of Relativity Space. He's joining his CEO. This is 50 minutes ago.

That's incredible.

And it says, I got an article here from Ars Technica. Another Silicon Valley investor is getting into the rocket business. Business. Everybody's getting into the rocket business. We've sketched out some designs, we're exploring it, but just get some of our own low earth orbit satellites just to stream the show down. But apparently he's been quite involved over the past few months and that he's been largely been bankrolling the company since the end of October. Dangerous position to get in when you are the lifeline of the company and the burn becomes your own personal expenses. But if anybody can afford it it's Schmidt and it's not immediately clear why Schmidt is taking a hands on approach at Relativity and but, but this article says it's one of the few US based companies with a credible path toward developing a medium lift rocket that could potentially challenge the dominance of SpaceX and its Falcon 9 rocket. So pretty wild. Anybody that wanted the Google founders to go back to Google he's oh CEO.

Crazy CEO for a long time but he was never founder of Google.

That's wild exposed. But granted I was, but I was a.

But I was a small, I was.

A small child in that I mean.

He clearly like you know he grew the company. He's like a fantastic executive executive but technically not a founder. But maybe that's a bull case because Relativity has already been founded. He comes in and if he can do what he did for Google to Relativity is very bullish.

True.

I don't know.

And Google is down 5% on the news after hours. Obviously not. No, no it is, it is, it is but it's because of the market.

This guy who hasn't been involved in.

The company decades former but that's the.

Issue of some personnel news. Anything can happen in the market.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No I mean there's an argument it's like okay Eric. Such is so insane for Eric to join Relativity Space and Eric's thinking is still embedded in this company. The company's worthless.

The fact that he's. That he's choosing to go back into the CEO role and he's not going back to Google Bear case. Maybe that's what you come here for. The worst financial advice you've ever heard.

No, it's our job to give the worst advice so that nobody could ever say as a joke so nobody could ever say you guys are giving financial advice. Which we never do. We never have. Anyways fun show today.

Fun show.

I will make sure John finishes the Dom.

I will make sure Jordan finishes his Dom. I refilled it to the top ridiculous.

For cheers to you John.

Cheers to the great show.

This is our life. Life's work. Icky guy. And thank you everyone for watching. We will see you tomorrow. We have some. We have a big.

We have a big week.

Big, big announcement tomorrow morning.

Big announcement tomorrow morning. If. If you follow us on X. Get ready to repost. Engage, please. You'll know it when you see it.

That is for sure. We'll see you tomorrow.

See you tomorrow. Bye.