welcome to technology Brothers the most profitable podcast in the world today we are breaking down Ross he was released from prison because he was pardoned by Donald Trump we will give you the full Deep dive on his life and career and the drug in Marketplace he built called The Silk Road sharing economy startup yeah another way you could put it that way
yeah exactly uh tons to learn from him tons to you know avoid mainly mainly all the crimes mistakes were made mistakes were made uh but that should be a fun one we're going to take you through Ross get you up to speed on that because he's he's out in the wild now yeah he could he could do anything yeah I think the part there was uh we weren't involved with
the rumor yeah but there had no nothing to do with it there may have been there may have been a rumor or some misinformation shared about him you know potentially out raising but it's just a rumor you know always just a rumor uh also in uh in economy news or fed world uh the FED we love the love the economy love business the FED had a meeting today people were hoping
for rate cut ideally do we had so we had the Dom ready we had the Dom ready we picked it up this morning in preparation for a celebratory moment yep and we I I feel a little bit rugged by Powell to be honest uh yeah I mean I don't think the market was pricing in a a cut but it didn't happen uh but there were also rumors there were rumors that sound
smart Optimus you know get paid yeah well maybe next time but I'm sure there will be a reason to break out the da Peron soon so enjoy leave it on the table it might be this episode maybe you know you never know yeah surprise Trump might Trump might send override it send out a post hey talk to Pal we fix the issue uh we're going down to to 2% I
love that that would uh that would help us recover from Monday's you know Monday's blood bath blood bath terrible well let's go to uh SpaceX news starlink is coming to iPhones they're teaming up with apple and T-Mobile there's an article in Bloomberg from Mark German guy who covers Apple better than anybody in the game and he says Apple has been secretly working with SpaceX and
T-Mobile to add support for the starlink network in its latest iPhone software providing an alternative to the company's in-house Satellite Communication Service which I don't know if you've used it it's simultaneously amazing and absolutely terrible T-Mobile no the the the satellite internet on your phone oh yeah like if get caught with no con during the fires yeah so you
have to go outside it's amazing it still works but it's so slow and you send a few like text based messages it's like being back being on a plane I don't know like 199 it's like being on the the phone uh the phone like planes now they offer the free messaging product and then they have like the paid version and they all meing and it's like okay well
you can't receive images but you can send text back and forth and so they've been testing iPhones with starlink Service uh in an under under the radar move the smartphone's latest software update released Monday now supports the technology the tieup comes as a surprise T-Mobile had so that's interesting I didn't realize they fully had the tech
it was just their software software yeah um T-Mobile has previously only specified starlink as an option for Samsung phones such as the zold and s24 models don't get caught using do we have do we have any listener Android we do we have one one Ranger The Lone Ranger I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure he yeah he said that shout out to The Lone Ranger in a post on X responding to the news
musk said images music and podcast should be supported by current Starling technology and future upgrades will add video support as well so it does seem like full market for for daily podcast yes fantastic you'll be able to listen to this anywhere I mean there are some like restrictions because you have to be able to see the sky you can't really use
this the satellite you know receiver inside and then also if you just look at size of the starlink dish that I have I have the mini and that gets pretty good speeds but they make a bigger one as you scale that down it does seem like you're scaling down the bandwidth and there's some sort of uh you know like kind of like like power law function there an
apple an apple spokesperson declined to comment while T-Mobile said the test mark is really just throwing this news out there without uh so many moles and and sources insle clearly they weren't exactly ready to announce all of this but knows it but Str he just reacts yeah yeah yes text messages are already going out from T-Mobile saying you're in the T-Mobile
starlink beta you can now stay connected with texting via satellite from virtually anywhere so I think um uh Apple interesting too because because I never followed this closely but I always imagined that starlink would eventually come out with their own phone plan and actually threaten the Telecom providers yep but maybe telecom companies just find a way you know to really I mean I
think it really comes down cell is tied to service still yeah and I think it comes down to like reliability yeah yeah and using it in buildings like you like why would you pay for that plan if it doesn't work in a building that'd be weird and then I guess they could team up in kind of like white label like uh you know like mint mobile that Ryan
Reynolds company like that is they don't have their own Towers they piggy back on the they roam on the other towers and so I'm sure there's some way to build something but uh Apple was working with global star to offer satellite features in 2022 there's been speculation over whether it might support competing networks the day after Apple's 2022 announcement musk posted on X that his
company had some promising conversations with apple about starlink connectivity so funny how he just like rips like these private conversations on a he's just like yeah oh yeah I just walked out of apple like we're definitely getting a deal done like yeah it's in the bag do not do that if you're not Elon Musk yeah yeah exactly uh so when a uh when a
T-Mobile phone is in an area without cellular connectivity devices that are part of the starlink program will first try to pair with Starling satellites users will also be able to activate texting via the satellite menu for the global star service or or contact emergency services through Apple uh the initial version of starlink is exclusively for testing but starlink and
uh but SpaceX and T-Mobile have said that they plan to expand into Data connections and voice calls in the future the program is also only available in the US for now and that contrasts with app's Global star service which works in several countries so when I am getting the opportunity to use satellite on my iPhone it's still Global star yes exactly and so Global star
shares fell because people are thinking okay yep they clearly aren't on the level of starlink and elon's going to make a bunch of deals happen that directly threaten their business yeah and so the like the the history of like satellite Communications for cell phone and internet that's been going on for I mean 30 40 years it's also crazy think
of the cost structure for starlink because they own the Rockets versus global star who presumably has to use yeah sat SpaceX to get their satellites up that's a great that's not a great competitive Dynamic for Global Stars yeah a lot of this started with uh you know the guy who built the uh he owns Madison Square Garden he built the sphere in Las Vegas James Dolan so James
Dolan at one point was working with Madison Square Garden on like all their sports and entertainment thing and he had an an a a satellite TV startup that didn't that he was like obsessed with he was beefing with his dad about it it was this crazy story they wind up selling it I think to Dish Networks um and dish is the traditional like satellite TV
provider so you put the Satellite Dish on your uh on your roof and then you're getting a constant stream of TV so it's not tway communication it's not bespoke so that satellite all it has to do is just say okay there's 100 channels of data I just got to send those out to everyone all the time yeah whereas starlink is much more complicated because it has to send you your you know
Instagram your specific Instagram images when I'm using deep seek yeah yeah it has to send like your specific data right internet's like more complicated and so then there were sat sat phones satellite phones uh and then viaat was a company that was like really promising for a while putting up big like huge uh satad still does a lot of stuff with the
uh uh Airlines right yep yep exactly and so and then as aonis is also doing geostationary uh satellite internet so they will put one up over Alaska and then that will just control just Alaska but it's just one starlink has this mesh strategy so they put up like thousands and thousands of them and that's of course like driven by the fact that they
have you know all these rockets that are going up all the time so they can afford to just put up tons and then and then they're also in low earth orbit as opposed to geostationary orbit so they're I think like it's like 3,000 miles instead of 30,000 miles or something like that so uh much closer to the Earth and that enables lower latency so instead of like you could you could
sometimes with satellite internet or satellite TV you could download like a big file but there would be latency so you could never do like a zoom call or play a live game and that's the advantage yeah of starlink and so um currently if you're using an iPhone with global star you uh you have to point your phone at the sky to find the satellite whereas
with starlink it's designed to work automatically even when the phone is in a customer's pocket which so maybe it'll work inside to some degree I'm not exactly sure um but both the starlink and apple satellites featured are features are designed to work in offthe Grid areas such as hiking trails that don't have cellular service the capabilities can't be used in places
where mobile phone where a mobile phone network is Within Reach so it will just say okay okay we're not even bothering with the satellites if you're connecting to a cell phone tower um and the uh and the support for the Apple feature is available on most current iPhone models and the company plans to bring it to its Ultra Smartwatch later this year that's
cool so like if you go hiking you just bring your watch you don't even need the phone if something happens you see a bear you can still send a text message saying come rescue me Block's coming out yeah yeah maybe maybe you don't need the Starling connected Apple watch you just need the Glock Um T-Mobile updated website this week SpaceX requested
authority to begin beta testing the service starting Monday the FCC commission granted SpaceX conditional approval for its satellites to supplement T-Mobile cellular network in November so very exciting to see more starlink news more starlink rolling out uh yeah just kind turns out owning the heavens as SpaceX does is quite valuable it's free real estate do a lot
of stuff with it yeah there's a lot of alpha in that I mean that's the whole that's the whole like Mega thesis on the the boring company is just like there's only so much land under the Earth and like if you can justify a way to like own it like that's extremely valuable yeah I love that yeah and we've talked before about Lan yachts and and [ __ ]
you know beire is looking to develop large drills attached to vehicles that allow them to burrow deep beneath the Earth and pop up in St Trope forel Aspen yeah AR bazle you know like being able to just pop up pop up is is a great feature and something that uh is in high demand fantastic um should we talk a little bit about uh yeah we love talking about uh organic intelligence
and artificial intelligence today we we have an article here I wanted to cover some news on open AI um for those that don't know this is an American company that competes with um Chinese company called Deep seek uh do you want to yeah people call it like the American deep seek basically the American deep seek the American very similar to to chat GPT
except it struggles to talk about tianan Square yeah so um but of course if you've been listening to the show you've seen you know you've heard many deep Dives we've probably spent three hours talking about deep seek at this point um but Ben Thompson uh dropped a new update on strer and we're going to go through it um so to review his conclusion on
open AI he has he has he has some criticism of the company um specifically around speed of innovation which is which is interesting and his thesis is basically like all the crazy nonprofit effective altruism all the fear mongering around AI doomeris that really held us back and this is what we get for that meanwhile like no one is causing an AI panic over deep seek people are like
oh cool they Ed floating Point 8 instead of fp32 like it's like oh it's so much more efficient like it's going to be able to you know like review my know homework F and that's it it's not like everyone's saying it's a incred JP no one's saying it's more dangerous now and and that's just a complete Vibe shift from two years ago when everything was um I was
reading my son the boy who cried wolf and yeah nothing like the AI doomers really need to read that story because they've been like gpt1 this is going to kill us all gpt2 we're done for gpt3 it is completely over it's never been more over and now we're getting a new a AI model every couple months it's like yeah it could K meist now people widely agree
that we have AGI yeah and it's ASI that we need artificial super intelligence yeah uh which so the goal posts keep moving and so let's read from let's read from Ben's uh previous day conclusion he says that leaves America and a choice we have to make we could for very logical reasons double down on defensive measures like massively expanding the chip band and imposing a
permission-based regulatory regime on chips and semiconductor equipment that mirrors the you the eu's approach to Tech alternatively we could realize that we have real competition and actually give ourselves permission to compete stop ringing our hands stop campaigning for regulations indeed go the other way and cut out all the Cru in our companies
that has nothing to do with winning if we choose to compete we can still win and if we do we will have a Chinese company to thank I like that because he's just so focused on just go go like competition um and just just actually win there so some folks read this as being simply about government regulations and I did specifically mention the President Biden
executive order on AI which Trump has already repealed but that misses the deeper point I was diving at one of these intense frustrations of the last few years of the AI debate has been the mot and Bailey aspect of the safety question and this is funny because I there's there's this AI Doomer guy on a Who always uses the mot and Bailey like
meme whenever someone's arguing with him he's like no that's the m and Bailey and now Ben Thompson's kind of like flipping it around and so uh we'll break down like what that is because it's actually kind of odd but um I understand and Grant the very real concerns about AI safety which I think everyone does there is some safety concerns but but that's
the mot in the safety argument but the way that AI safety has too often manifested has been through the imposition of various cultural mores that roughly align with San Francisco politics that's the Bailey indeed if you look again at the excerpted from open ai's gpt2 announcement that I linked to yesterday it's right there in the first sentence due due due to concerns about
large language models being used to generate deceptive biased or abusive language at scale we are only releasing a much smaller version of gpt2 along with sampling code we are not releasing the data set training code or gpt2 model so this is this is the moment that open AI decided to stop open sourcing everything and the reason was um we we believe the our release strategy limits
the initial set of organizations who may choose to do this and gives the AI Community more time to have a discussion about the implications so they're they were worried about generating deceptive biased or abusive language so and then and then Ben says first off deceptive biased or abusive language is not a human extinction level danger so you've
said hey we got to lock this down because it's going to paperclip us and historically we've we've dealt with Bots trying to influence public opinion at scale yeah yeah they're not um are we good Ben cool cut for a second uh historically it hasn't been this intelligent bot who's having a conversation it's more these Bots that are spamming comments being like I think
America's bad yeah yeah you know yeah it's literally just copy deceptive bias you know doing the same things I think one thing that open AI has always balanced is clearly they want to win yeah Sam enjoys the competition but loves winning he said he he even said on on television I think about a year ago at this point nobody could ever
compete with us like he's on the record Being you know saying nobody is uh I saw it was it was shown on like Entertainment Tonight like some random television but it was from from some event he was at so he said nobody can compete with us that's obviously not true they also have used this pending looming Doom we're creating this all power intelligence as a marketing and
capital raising strategy to to basically create this Aura around the company of we are creating super intelligence we're creating this powerful being that's more powerful than humanity and and uh you have to trust us to control it so historically I think some of the stuff due to concerns about you know uh large language models playing into that y that
that uh narrative but then also saying well we have the power yeah I do I do Wonder like there are so many different people around the table like a lot of this language was clearly driven by the previous open AI Administration essentially like the nonprofit board like some of those people were really really crazy and and uh and it and for a while it felt like even though elaser
owski wasn't tied to open AI it felt like he was almost like an informal Puppet Master felt like he was like an informal spokesperson for a while and now it's like he's completely out of the picture but it was like oh if elazer says something like open AI is going to have to respond because like it's it's really critical that we like take him
seriously and now it's been kind of you know mo we've moved past that and so second who decides what is deceptive biased or abusive and third whatever your position on these questions I think we can all agree that a tremendous amount of time and effort has been devoted to arguing about these cultural War issues and implementing one side or the other of them by the uh and by
definition the time has that time has an opportunity cost more broadly I think it is completely valid to argue that a lot of time and energy in Tech has been devoted to many things other than actual Tech and that's the justification for that lack of focus has would actually be interested how many tens of millions or potentially hundreds of millions of
dollars are spent on their safety team annually like it could easily be somewhere in the range of50 to100 million that's just being spent on people that are a part of the safety apparatus which Ben is basically putting in the yeah culture War bucket yeah like almost classifying them as D like making them like a Dei or yeah what's interesting is like so he goes on to
talk about the 01 Chain of Thought and how they when they launched 01 in in comparison to R1 R1 tells you everything it's thinking and just dumps it out and it's open source so even if it didn't you could still see every single token that thinking about and that's turned out to be a great UI pattern we've talked about this it's like it's just
really reassuring to the user but uh when open AI launched 01 they said they believe that a hidden Chain of Thought presents a unique opportunity for monitoring mod models assuming it's faithful and legible the hidden Chain of Thought allows us to read the mind of the model and understand its thought process for and and this was the thing where I went to 01 asked it to summarize
a book and one of the Hidden chain of thoughts sections was copyright infringement so it it thought internally about like is it for me to share the contents of this book and it decided yes um and and so there a little bit of a bad boy like uh there's that Ross yeah and then there's also the fact that uh so they they were also thinking about um
uh uh hiding the Chain of Thought So that people couldn't steal it and use it to train their model basically and and if they have some interesting thing in there they can kind of Tuck that behind the scenes and just give you a better answer but this exposed Chain of Thought uh from R1 is has clearly won out on the day and I think we'll see sh yeah users
like it that was the the the only UI change that people cared about or talked about with the Deep seek long launch was that exposed chain of thoughts everything was either a copy like even even just the fact that you have like the Chats on the side like where the buttons are laid out it's a Verbatim copy of chat GPT many of the features are Works many of them are actually degraded
features like you can't you can't click a button just to talk to it there's no voice mode at all doesn't have a lot of features yet um but exposed Chain of Thought is like the fundamental UI pattern breakthrough and so exposed Chain of Thought teaches users how to do better prompting because they can see exactly where the I AI gets confused it
increases trust in the model because you gain an understanding of how it's arriving at the answer and it's just cool and endearing one one thing that was interesting with the Normie discovery of R1 is how delightful they found the the experience and so uh Ben understands open ai's competitive concerns but the existence of R1 has shown that locking down chain of thought
perhaps didn't matter so much more generally the consideration of competitive concerns gets back to my overall critique that the US approach to competition is too rooted in stopping and blocking wouldbe competitors instead of out innovating them yeah uh and this was the thing where like remember when we went back to that Ilia working on AAR
and the framing around that was absolute panic I remember there were fake news articles about uh open AI this was almost two years ago we said right it was year year and a half ago or may year and three months ago and they said AAR is so good it it solved every foundational like math problem and it also broke encryption yeah and so they were like they have an AI model that can
break encryption so they're just GNA like you know Bitcoin should go to zero because they broke an encryption and it was like obviously not true but people were just so insane about it and and internally it seemed like a lot of people were maybe just using it for internal politics and like you know oh is this dangerous like why are we moving
so fast uh the nonprofit folks having a big problem with it uh and then o1 just throws it or R1 just comes out and throws it out there and it's like yeah it's basically fine yeah very funny yeah it's kind of it's kind of the uh the most Savage Founders that I know will when they're fundraising they'll take a PDF export of their deck and they'll share it with anybody that's like
remotely like interested in what they're doing or relevant in some way and then the the the founders that are sort of afraid of competition you know kind of lock their decks down they put emails you know uh authentication and passwords on their deck and then they usually end up just like not being the actual like winner in the category and so it's the
same thing here where we should just be really focused on winning Innovation being at the edge understanding that people are going to reverse engineer everything good that gets done in the world that's been the case for every technology things will get copied uh one way or another and this was kind of the the weird critique that I saw once the
Sam Alman like haters got really emboldened they would make the claim that Sam mman is like non-technical and has never done anything good and is not responsible for any innovation in AI like the transformer was invented at Google he didn't invent the Transformer he just like popularized it but then simultaneously they'll argue that him they'll quote the open AI board that
criticized Sam for launching chat gbt too quickly without informing the board do you remember this whole thing it was like it was like as evidence of Sam like moving recklessly with regard to AI safety he just put out he just tweeted out chat GPT one day and it's like well which is it like he can't be both he can't both have no impact and also
create the most dominant product and drive it forward and actually get it thinking about open AI as a business him tweeting it out and getting to 100 million users in and however was weeks fantastic it's it's you know clearly was the right decision to just go yeah if you're thinking about it from a nonprofit safety or lens you should have waited a year you should have tested
more should have put more guard rails up you should have rolled it out slowly uh there's a number of things that yeah and so I kind of see it as as like there is a world where Sam was fighting like an internal or like the the nonprofit structure culture War uh like a long housee type environment that was saying like no don't release products don't
move fast don't innovate don't do anything that's could be risky because they're so terrified of what they're building yeah and and he's looking at it and he's like actually this is fine it's a chatbot let's just get it out there and see what what happens and and that was the right decision but there's still like there's still that that that
impulse internally to say hey maybe we should lock this down a little bit more and so uh there's an interesting uh discussion right now is this a Sputnik moment or a Google moment and so uh ishan Wong uh who is I think the CEO of Reddit um says Sputnik showed that the Soviets could do something the US couldn't a new fearsome power they didn't subsequently publish all the
technical details and half the blueprints it they only showed that it could be done with deep seek if I recall correctly a lab and Berkeley read their paper and duplicated the claimed results on a small scale within a day that's why I say this is like the Google moment in 2004 Google filed its S1 in 2004 and revealed to the world that they had built bu the largest supercomputer
cluster by using distributed algorithms to network together commodity computers at the best performance per dollar on the cost curve and famously Google's uh was massively profitable when they went when they went public and and every VC is like why can't we have more Googles because the financials were so fantastic uh this was in contrast to every other
tech company of the day during the doom boom who at that point just bought what were essentially larger and larger main frames always at the most expensive Leading Edge of the cost curve and so Ben says it's hard to overstate what a favor deep seek did to basically everyone by Outsource by open sourcing their model and explaining exactly how they accomplished what they did they
could have and from a geop geopolitical perspective arguably should have kept all their progress a secret even as China built drastically more efficient AI infrastructure you know the narrative that they are hedge fund this was a side project and so they just released it short opened a massive short against the and and then made you know could have
made how many tens of billions of dollars off of that short right uh there be like it is a fun Theory yeah and there is a world where that was exactly the strategy is like they were doing they were building models internally to run their investing and then they realized hey we can train a model and we can throw up a a clone of chat GPT and
if we pay to get it number one in the App Store y we can tank the markets on Monday and like get you know make like an entire career's worth of uh it's definitely a tin coil hat Theory but but I'm interested I'm listening I'm listening yeah yeah I'm not saying I'm not saying it I mean Palmer Palmer just cited that in a post that we'll go through later and uh and it's not as
crazy as it sounds there were some people pushing back and he had some very good responses to those things so uh then he moves to a tweet from run who says this is not the right lesson there is an opportunity cost to research your time and they're and if they're spending it micro optimizing PTX to make best the best of limited Ms like the memory communication bandwidth that's something
else they weren't doing uh nerfing some aspect of the hard Hardware is never a benefit the most dangerous and then Ben says the most dangerous lure about thinking in terms of compar comparative advantag is how time and learning curves lead you to consequences that you never considered when you made the decision I wrote about this exactly last year in a
chance to build I started the post by describing how us semiconductor companies kicked off Outsourcing to Asia and tied that to the fact that Apple can't make iPhone in the US and so Steve Jobs famously said you know it's not it's not even a matter of price it's just there are not 30,000 manufacturing engineers in the United States there are
not 30,000 manufacturing engineering jobs to be filled this is because the structure of the world economy choices made starting with Breton Woods in particular and cemented by the removal of tariffs over time made them nonviable and so um connect this to Google what if Google had taken Run's advice and not wasted time uh what not wasted the time of Val valuable researchers in
transforming how data centers are built perhaps they could have waited until Alibaba did it a decade later and rented capacity and in the meantime they would have been a far smaller and less significant company specifically and the entire US tech industry would have been similarly stunted generally to be fair to run he does seem to be talking
narrowly about the specific optimizations that deeps made to overcome the h800 nerfed memory bandwidth but I think the critique holds more generally US tech companies including open aai have clearly in retrospect been nvidia's willing suckers happy to pay for more capacity instead of ringing out their own how many years would it have taken them to discover
this is a classic if you're trying to scale anything really quickly do anything really fast you just end up paying more for it so you hire somebody and you just say yeah we'll pay you you know $20,000 a year more than we budgeted for the role because we need the role or you're trying to buy Billboards quickly and you and you say yeah we're going to pay 30% premium but
we want to Launch just now because there's this competitive pressure so what these us firms have been doing is not exactly out of the ordinary it's just the nature of trying to do things fast as you focused on you just focus on speed versus efficiency and cost yep yep and so he closes talking about aggregation Theory says uh um on the flip side non- reasoning llms
are still great at producing content and they also get smaller by distilling the output of reasoning models one of the big R1 takeaways is that you can Infuse reasoning into normal llms more than that though you can also use them to generate massive amounts of synthetic data that simply teach the normal llms the answer to an effectively infinite
number of questions and of course reasoning could end up simply being effectively free one announcement that I should have added to yesterday's post was Google's announcement of Gemini 2.0 flash thinking that it appears to be competitive with R1 uh the China is crushing us rhetoric today forgets about Gemini 2.0 flash thinking likely cheaper longer context and better on reasoning
we're still early in the AI race so this is like completely missed yeah but um we don't know the prices you believe that Google owns search and YouTube and they basically have every mainstream Media company by the by the balls and they can't even get news out a week it is it is crazy their product sense is just so bad and they have this whole problem
marketing sense now it's like is it gemini or is it barred or they been renaming models left and right and it's clearly they're shipping their org chart because they had they had Google brain and then Deep Mind and they finally merged them but they're still just like like I know what Google is Google is a search engine I don't know what I know
what chaty PT is Chach PT is a text is a chatbot like Google Gemini 2.0 flash thinking like what how do I even access that I tried to get Gemini set up I finally figured it out sounds like annal project I went to Gemini and then I had to upgrade to Gemini Advanced and then I got access to to the 1.5 model but I was even asking the model like what are your
capabilities and it didn't know like it was like not telling me like how to do it that should be one of the a new Benchmark for models you should be able to what's your context window how like what version am I on how do I upgrade you're you're Mone interviewing for a role and somebody asks so so what are you good at what do you do and you don't have a good answer for it that's kind of
a tough sell yeah and so Google is a company that actually cares about and has invested in infrastructure and perhaps doesn't need this doesn't doesn't see the need for software type of margins uh open Ai and anthropic have allegedly been earning on their API so I wouldn't be surprised if they are very competitive of course they're not open
source but again R1 is I can get all the thinking I want locally for free this isn't necessarily dispositive in terms of the long-term prospects for aggregation Theory but given that the entire history of technology has been defined by processing speed simultaneously increasing even as it decreases in price the burden of proof is probably on those who say that zero
marginal costs are an aberration so he's saying that like in the long term all of these models will be optimized to the point where there's zero marginal cost and at that point being the entry point and being able to tax that is really valuable and so there's a couple posts that we'll go into during the timeline that say oh this is massively bullish
for Apple yeah because you know all of a sudden the inference gets super cheap gets much better can be done on the edge baked down they don't need to mess around with any of the uh the the actual training or inference themselves they can just throw it on the phone and it's there and it's great yeah and uh and and same with Google and and Facebook they were saying it's really good for
Facebook because they can just Chuck this in and they don't need to worry about uh you know playing the model race yeah but fascinating story continues to evolve Ben staying competitive goated goated goated let's move on to Ross and the story of the Silk Road um we we've had a lot of laughs obviously it's a dark story in many ways yep there's sort of this
bright spot now with him being pardoned we're not we we'll wait till the end to to talk about whether or not we agree with that decision not that it's on our uh you know not that we like to comment on politics but um yeah there's there's so many just insane aspects of of this story yeah and I think that as we looked into it we realized that so many people had talked
about the history and the sort of crime story around Silk Road because it's so fascinating it's this internet Narco trafficker meets hacker meets Anon who you know was an eagle scout right so it's just like wild story and an amazing marketer even even after getting caught even after he still has a ton of fans uh I don't know if Ben you can pull this uh
this photo up but he was an eagle scout I was an eagle scout I didn't know that my my dad was an eagle scout and I remember when I was in uh the Boy Scouts they would tell everyone uh no Eagle Scout has ever been convicted of a felony or something like that it was like clearly wrong but it was just to like put you in the mindset of like well I don't want to be the
first one so I can't be a criminal yeah uh and it was very effective the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts fell off massively tons of like culture War issues there yeah yeah and and real you know issues around sex crimes stuff like that um but uh anyway so but he has a lot of fans and dri out technology Brothers like really really likes him
and has posted him multiple times there's another photo of him uh yeah we'll put that up on the screen uh of him and without a doubt he's he's benefited massively from his you know Aesthetics Aesthetics yeah the physiy is strong which is why it's underpriced to get diced I don't know that he's diced I don't know that he's actually lifting but a lot of people say he looks
healthier than Brian Johnson after 11 years in prison eating prison slop yeah what's the secret what's the secret we'll have to ask him he does look young and he's certainly played into that and we'll go into kind of the timeline here because a lot of people think oh yeah he was 17 when he did this so he the other aspect that we'll talk about throughout
the story is is how good of a marketer he was and he and his family post incarceration on his carceral journey yeah uh they were able to spin this story like he was like some 18y old kid you know a high schooler almost what you'll find out is that he was you know 11 years ago he was when he was uh put into prison he was 29 years old yeah so he wasn't you know he wasn't a kid right
not at all he was bornn in 1984 and he was very aware of his action so just to get into kind of like the highlevel founder mode elements of the story and then we'll get into the timeline uh he's a self-taught developer firsttime CEO completely bootstrapped the company went from zero to 1.2 billion in sales in less than three years personally netted over 80
million in fees off the marketplace with a very low take rate which we'll also get into operating a fully remote Global and basically Anonymous team where he was the only one that knew the real identity of his employees he would require them to to show ID uh leverag novel payment rails using Bitcoin and maintain the sort of missionary sort of
mode to building the company that was basically almost like a religious Pursuit for him because of his libertarian beliefs which we also get into so and so the backbone of our research was mostly Nick bilton's American Kingpin which is a great book I highly recommend it it reads like you know it's a page Turner it's like a total Thriller uh and so uh Belton kicks
It Off by taking you back to the beginning of Ross Al's story born in Austin Texas March 27th 1984 supportive middle class house household nothing crazy going going on uh Eagle Scout as we mentioned uh friends and family described him as polite Gentile and unassuming uh uh developed an interest in science tinkering with computers he goes to University of Texas at Dallas on
scholarship initially studying physics then he pursues a master's degree in Material Science at Penn State and he basically gets obsessed with libertarian economic theory especially Von me mes Murray rothbart and Milton Friedman yeah so while he's there so so one thing to note he's not studying computer science he's not a programmer at all at this
point he's interested in technology but he's spending his time going and debating uh libertarian beliefs arguing for things like the legalization of drugs his big his big point you know that the high level sort of his high level view is that government should not have any decision-making power over individuals and individual should be able to do whatever they want and he
goes on to do whatever he wants for the you basically you seen that post it should go on Banger archive but it's like women will say they want a man who reads but every man who reads ascribes to some hoos scaring extr extremist political belief and it's like yeah he got into reading and started reading like mises and rothbard and like these like kind of crazy philosophers and he
really speaking of L lud Von there's a this this UFC fighter money moano he's done this post fight speech where he just is like hammering against the government like uh and I mean obviously like there's a lot of good good ideas in libertarianism but it clearly like Ross took it to such an extreme that he was using it to justify anything and and
clearly bending his like Libertarians love to they you know they have a hammer and everything looks like a nail and so they wind up not seeing any externalities just viewing every little minor interaction as like oh well this fits with my libertarian ideology so it's Justified and and he really really twisted the ideology in like a much more
negative way than many Libertarians who are just arguing for like slightly smaller government or like you know slightly uh you know lower taxes or something or more efficiency in the government like you could look at Doge as like a Libertarian project in some ways but it's much different than yeah we should legalize guns and drugs and all this crazy stuff which is like where
he wound up and so yeah not just legalizing it but brokering transactions at scale for a number of illicit Goods uh he dabbled in entrepreneurial ventures in after graduate school one of these involved day trading another was an ebook Enterprise none proved lucrative or fulfilling yeah so so so to be clear he was trying to do day trading realized it wasn't very profitable he
also uh he he was a part of this someone else's sort of nonprofit called good wagon books which they would go around to houses collect sort of old books that people didn't want they would sell the ones online that they could and they would to prisons the ones that they couldn't sellow and so he was probably foreshadowing donating books to himself
his later years and uh yeah one one other thing about this time that I thought was interesting while at Penn State little like odd jobs he was working he saved up enough to buy a rental house uh and he later uh shared that that he found it so frustrating having college students as as you know degenerate college students as tenants that he that he sold it yeah
and he actually used that money to kind of get silk off the ground because he didn't have an income for some amount of time yeah so he becomes fascinated with t the onion router which is the the the portal to the dark web the timing here is so key right like if he had had all these ideas 5 years before tried to do it then wouldn't have had Bitcoin I
don't know where tour was in the development but it wasn't all this stuff was like this perfect convergence totally and Bitcoin obviously coming up at this time uh few people outside of cryptography circles were paying attention to bitcoin but Ross saw it as a tool for circumventing government oversight he once famously stated I want to use economic theory as a ma as a
means to abolish the use of coercion uh this quote illustrates Ross's self-styled mission of empowering voluntary exchanges and uh he uh yeah it's also very funny throughout this because he's not like super technical there's a lot of times when clearly you can tell that he's he's bought you know like oh nothing can go wrong it's decentralized like oh Bitcoin it's
Anonymous and it's like it's not it's actually not Anonymous like in many ways and there's always ways around this stuff um what's the word for it you don't have to kyc yeah but but it's it's a public Ledger exactly exactly so it's very very traceable and uh and we'll go into this later but uh there like tracking the Bitcoin movements actually
got a lot more people caught because it was all trackable and so and there's still companies today like chainalysis that leverage public blockchain to track down criminals at scale and so uh combining t with Bitcoin and his ideological calling he sets up the first version of the Silk Road by early 2011 Silk Road was online though still small and his site allowed buyers
and sellers to communicate post product listing and leave reviews this was basically an eBay yeah and so and so just going back a little bit uh taking one quick break so he to to anytime you're starting a Marketplace so the fact that he took this Marketplace from 0 to 1.2 billion in volume in three years bootstrapped is insane like very very very few companies do that um he in
order to get this started marketplaces have this chicken and egg problem where what what comes first the supply uh you know you need Supply in order to have Demand on the marketplace and so he actually uh starts growing mushrooms in order to create the supply to have Supply on on on the marketplace so he's growing mushrooms he's building the site
and then once he's at a point where he's ready and he has a girlfriend at this time who's like sounds like a very sweet girl and they're very like in love at the time yep and he at one point like takes his girlfriend like blindfolded out to like see the mushrooms and like is like all proud of it like takes her out to this like damp kind of field or
whatever and there just and so he's he's uh he's this is like the very beginning of him actually so he had the intention to commit crimes yeah and he's very aware that it's what he's doing is illegal and he specifically chose psilocybin mushrooms because he felt like the the penalty for that would be less severe than than starting by selling harder drugs or even something
like marijuana at I thought the amount that he was growing was it was it wasn't like he was growing like oh he's got like one little plant it was like a whole room full and the punishment for that if he had gotten caught would have been years and years in prison just for that which is like still kind of czy and one thing is in order to kind of Kickstart the first initial sales he uh
he went on a site that would talk a for a public forum yep that would talk about mushrooms and he made a post and he was very sort of this was smart at the time if you weren't committing crimes but he he he posted something under this username I forget what the username was called was it Altoid it was Altoid and it was like Hey has anybody tried this
site yeah looks pretty cool looks cool and he used that to sort of catalyze some traction because he knew he was holding Supply that he was ready to sell Y and so we'll get to this later but that was ended up being part of his downfall because he had used his real email to create the Altoid account Y and uh he had gone back at one point and
changed the email but there was a record in the database that it had Ross @gmail.com yeah tied to that username so that was one of the ways that they sort of yeah ended up um yeah he's one of those things where he's like oh everything's anonymized and decentralized it's like you left paper trail all over the place bro like you were not that good at your opsac um and
so it's fascinating how fast this took off so he's thinking about it in late 2010 in January of 2020 uh 2011 he launches the Silk Road code named underground brokers in Austin Texas aiming to create a free market website where users can buy anything anonymously and by June just six months later Senator Chuck Schumer denounces Silk Road in Washington DC prompting
heightened media coverage that forces R Bolter they also got a big Gawker article which I think was right around this time Schumer so a reporter uh who was at Gawker and gawker's no longer with us yeah uh due to uh the actions of um some powerful people in Tech but uh this Gawker article hears about Silk Road gets on it and is browsing around ends
up writing this whole piece Ross talks to them yeah and says please don't write this piece that usually doesn't work with journalists they know they're on to something they end up in this and and uh there was even a while that that journalist was suspected of starting Silk Road because it was such a big marketing moment that people were like
did he just like this did he like use this and and they he' written about some other topics um and that was like Ross really felt like it was too early for it to go that public like they were starting to do sales in a meaningful way but at the same time he was a self-taught developer and so he struggled with uh hacks and stuff like that all the time and so he would notice
every now and then he'd be like oh what what the heck like my my wallet's getting drained and so he'd be freaking out the Bitcoin at the time to be clear I don't we should look up on public what the actual price was but it would be like I'm sure it was like a few dollars it was few Bitcoin and so he'd be noticing like oh my wallet's getting
drained it wasn't that damaging but he kept having these sort of uh small errors because he was not a super sophisticated he was like a hacker type Builder but not a security engineer and so he kept constantly getting kind of lightly scammed and so this launch like you can imagine he's just in Austin building this thing by himself he had a couple Engineers that would help him
that knew they were committing crimes too but they were they were on board with it yeah and then going 0 to 60 in six months Z to 100 Z to A th right like he's getting a senator in Washington DC that's denouncing you is uh the pressure was on right yeah usually these these like you know Government Federal level pressures take like years until like the
first like oh is Facebook you know leading to misinformation that took like you know years and years or even like the jewel probably almost 10 years yeah the jewel hearings were probably I mean that company was started like 10 years before uh and there was being publicly marketed the whole time Silk Road was was had The Gawker article and some other coverage but it wasn't yeah I mean
Chuck Schumer uh had the Zen the Zen press conference in 2024 Zin launched in America 2014 and so the the the dark web Amazon The Silk Road really like just took off so fast six months and to be clear the reasons why it it was in many ways a much better looking purely at the user experience if somebody that's buying drugs in in 2011 while this
starts they can go and find a dealer on the street or hit up some random sketchy person on Facebook and there's all these ways to have a transaction that don't have a bunch of reviews right so you're kind of trusting the dealer which is like people sell that sell drugs uh I can imagine you wouldn't want to like trust them with your life uh and so the
experience at the time was from a purely like a product experience uh to be able to go on a site to see vetted sellers that have a selling history and activity on the Forum and reviews he really made the experience of buying these narcotics much better yeah and PE and people were allowed to buy very small amounts and and this ended up being what what slowly
uh helped get the marketplace taken down is it uh usually authorities so like Homeland Security DEA FBI when they're tracking drugs they're looking for these big shipments yeah and as silk road started taking off they started getting these envelopes that would be you know one little pill so like one person who just like goes on there they just order one it's kind of cute
it's kind of cute um but uh but yeah it was it was it it it it it can't be understated like going back to the the founder story bit he made the experience like he really innovated on the experience yeah there's a couple other things that were pretty Innovative here uh they had an escro system which used Bitcoin kind of smart contracts but really just it would transfer the
Bitcoin out of the buyer out of the buyer account into a holding account and then once the transaction cleared it would get paid to the the seller yeah and so like if you got scammed you could actually have like a dispute resolution process it was like a PayPal exact type experience yeah and PayPal really uned clear so that that it wasn't fully
trustless right no like somebody coulded it centralized and we because everyone was stealing Bitcoin from the site constantly well yeah and Ross would also have to get involved with these disputes and there was even situations where he'd be negotiating with cartels saying you know somebody would would steal yeah and and he'd be the cartels would get mad at
him and be threat him uh so so one thing to be clear at every step of the way he was doing things that didn't scale yeah and that invol and that was that involved commit committing crimes basically and and so looking at and just to compare this to another company like Airbnb that got launched out of this era Airbnb innovated on the vacation rental because there were some marketplaces but
couching people would book a vacation rental without seeing any reviews and then you show up there and just like well the toilets don't ands are all dirty it's a very very similar experience where just opening it up um and creating uh more trust really catalyzed some some velocity yeah and so as he's growing the site he starts going by his pseudonym The Dread pirate
Roberts which is a uh reference refence to Princess Bride yeah yeah yeah uh which is like kind of an odd reference I don't think of that as like particularly libertarian it's just kind of like a funny weird thing to pick guess he likes that movie really shows you how old he is though CU that movie came out in like the8 right yeah yeah it's classic though
classic and and well he went and and he never went by Ross to be clear he went by admin oh okay and so going by dread pirate Roberts was a way to build this brand world around the site right it was this Pirates themed kind of uh uh it's funny because there's another pirate themed like decentralized like The Pirate Bay are you familiar with this
the it's it's like uh uh bit torrent right so like for downloading illegal movies and stuff much l harmful but still kind of similar piracy them pirates of the internet um and so people start obsessing over this guy they Revere DPR as a benevolent philosopher king who is giving the world a safer alternative to street drugs and people really believe The Narrative of like
harm reduction that that he you know reduced the amount of violent crime because anytime that there's a drug transaction on the street there's a chance it goes south and someone gets shot or stabbed or murdered or something like that and that's not going to happen on the Silk Road now the problem is is that well if you're if you're increasing the amount of drug dealing by a thousand
acts even if they're 50% safer well there's still a net negative impact of that and you need to measure that and so sure it's like I'm sure I'm sure a lot of cels were like cool I'll just go on I'll just go on uh Silk Road buy a bunch of stuff and then deal it on the street and so you just wind up with more Street deals yeah at this time so he so the
whole this brand World building that he's doing uh this is why if you you him purely as a founder and ignore the heinous crimes that he committed over a long period of time he would do things like they would have a 420 sale right where it was like whoever if you bought on if you bought on the site you got like a ticket that entered you into a
you know something where you could win like an all expenses paid trip and stuff like that so he was following the sort of like traditional e-commerce like marketing Black Friday Cyber Monday is like huge for him he's like let's let's pump and he' be like no fees today on the platform by as many drug but meanwhile the dark side of that is that people would be buying heroin and
overdosing and killing like yeah yeah yeah it's bad like it was very yeah to him he he had these libertarian ideals meanwhile you're enabling addicts to if you make it almost as easy to you to buy drugs as going on Amazon yeah you're enabling a lot of behavior that that isn't so great yeah and uh yeah I mean another another factor of the growth was
that Silk Road really really drove early adoption of Bitcoin and it created this crazy flywheel where you would buy a little bit of Bitcoin to go on Silk Road buy some AOC cybin mushrooms or something and then because there was so much buying pressure the price of Bitcoin would go up you'd still have some left over in your wallet and be like whoa I made money like I could buy
more now and then that would drive more people into it and so it became this like virtuous cycle and I remember reading about some journalists who had tested the site and bought like one you know drug pill or something when they were reporting on it and then forgotten about what they left in their wallet so they bought like you know oh I needed to
buy $100 of Bitcoin and I spent 50 of it on the Silk Road back in 2010 and now it's like 500k or something and then they have to find their keys and some of them some of them did some of them lost it some yeah so so the crazy thing about this is so Ross in the very very early days in 2011 had a girlfriend oh yeah she didn't agree with the pl with what
he was doing yeah uh and she basically gave him an ultimatum at one point like me or Silk Road he chose Silk Road founder mode AB absolute dog uh so he goes with that he and then and then at one point like later he tells her they like get they they get together again at some point in San Francisco and he tells her that you know yeah I gave the site
away all this stuff his her roommate also during this time found out about it uh because like they gotten an argument and she posted on his Facebook wall like I hope the authorities don't find out about Ross drug website and then like deleted it like he got her to delete it and so he had a couple loose ends here the other thing that's crazy about the
his experience doing this is he so anybody who's built a company before you know that it's the kind of thing that you're you're thinking about around the clock right you wake up at 3:00 a.m. you're thinking about it yep right as you're going to bed you're telling your significant other about it whatever uh it's not something you can get off your
mind and it's a very uncomfortable thing to not be able to talk about it you have ideas like right we're in the gym I'm like I need to talk to you about this challenge whatever um so Ross doesn't have any of that he has his girlfriend at first and then she's like wow like my my my boyfriend is like a narcot trafficker like digital pirate like this is crazy so that that ends and then he
starts to develop these friendships online people that he's talking to people that are users of the platform people that are Sellers and so he starts developing these friendships he's got a buddy that's in Vietnam uh forget he's really developing like two worlds almost like a split personality thing like he actually well he doesn't have that much
of a IRL life yeah doesn't have much of an IRL life and then he actually splits his computer hard drive in two and kind of has two wings of the of the computer one for his personal life one for the dread private Roberts and it's almost like there's like he can switch to just being a completely different person completely different moral framework because even during the trial a lot of
the uh like you know witness testim a character Witnesses were like yeah even during this period like he was just total totally normal guy and it's like he was able to put on one face and then go online and then be chatting with people about like oh yeah let's kill this person let's let's bring in a million the photo send me the photo when
you finish the job you know so so in this whole time so law enforcement already by this point has started to develop like use anonymous accounts to develop relationships with him he already has a law enforcement that are buying drugs on the platform to like build cases and they're trying to he has this guy uh DUI what's his name you so this is random guy in Chicago
who's with Homeland Security who's painstakingly collecting thousands of Silk Road orders which he had figured out uh historically apparently people would send drugs in the mail and they'd have like these handwritten letters so that was like one way you could potentially identify sure but then people on Silk Road wanted to look like they're more professional so they would
print out these sort of like address lab and there this guyi I forg his name and what's crazy is many of these law enforcement people themselves end up committing crimes as part of the process and then they it's like the most chaotic story and I mean there's just so many different organizations involved in this the DEA the FBI the IRS Homeland Security the
Secret Service and then they all have varying levels of of jurisdiction and abilities they all want to win all want credit for they all want credit for it and so it's just chaotic uh let's go through some of the some of the posts uh uh just to kind of break it up I have this one from run here who says okay but where are the crypto conferences for
people building illegal stuff I'm talking Next Generation impenetrable Silk Road evading Chinese Capital controls war bonds hit me up and uh this was back in 2022 when crypto was obsessed with like nfts and and just kind of like pre X crash yeah yeah this pre FX and and so uh yeah I mean I think that I think that we can obviously intellectually understand that
like everything that happened here was terrible it's a tragedy it's like bad in so many ways um but it's deep down I think if you don't recognize that like you know crime stories are a little bit cool and like edgy like like that's just very natural impulse and I think that's what drew a lot of people to this story and then uh the whole reason that we're
talking about this is uh this clip from autism Capital that says breaking Trump confirms that if he becomes president he will commute the sentence of Silk Road founder Ross so this was in May of last year before so the whole reason that we wound up in this situation is because uh there was a like there was this massive campaign that will get into free Ross
that was uh driven by his mother and she'd been campaigning for him a long time there a lot of got married yeah at one point and she was working on the project and then there were a lot of Libertarians and a lot of Bitcoin people that were like him out and so it became this like bargaining chip with Trump as like oh we will back you super hard if
you give us our boy back um and so this is when uh on January 21st Ross rri has been fully pardoned and Donald Trump says I just called the mother of Ross William olbright he misspells his name to let her know that in honor of her and the libertarian movement he's writing that he's signing the papers he's like what did this guy do again murder For Hire which supported me and they will
tell you he didn't get convicted of that he didn't get convicted allegedly yeah yeah yeah um it was it was my pleasure to have signed a full and conditional full and unconditional pardon of her son Ross the scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics that were involved in the modern-day weaponization of government against me he was given
two life sentences plus 40 years ridiculous and Sager says I'm no fan of the Silk Road but the way the FBI set up Ross for life is still one of the most insane cases I've ever read about and so uh s is like hugely anti-drug uh even anti-weed marijuana yep cannabis uh but still this is a Nuance topic and it is possible that someone could be doing
something really bad and then the government can come in and throw the book at them even harder than they should yeah and so so getting kind of into that you had uh one of one of the one of the I forget if they were F uh I don't think they were FBI but maybe Homeland Security at one point one of the guys had turned like was selling secrets to Ross about all the
investigations and had made some somewhere over half a million dollars selling information to Ross about the case even though he kind of still wanted to get him yep but but it became this whole game that you could tell that agent all the all the agents involved with it were so consumed in the cat and mouse game yep of chasing this guy really he he he he at one point uh got
um citizenship in the Dom Republic but it wasn't really a big factor in the story and so the other thing is like you would imagine that this guy would take off and be in Eastern Europe or Asia somewhere he went to Australia at one point but he was just really visiting his sister he did go to the Dominican Republic briefly set some accounts I think he need to invest like 100k under six
figures to actually get that and so let's do a little bit of a tour of the of the agencies involved in this the DEA uh would infil sent agents to infiltrate the marketplace by post losing as large scale narcotics traffickers the FBI was focused on tracing the Silk Road server which they eventually got I think there was one in Iceland or something um that
they were able to get and decrypt uh the IRS wanted to follow the money Trail Homeland Security specialized in customs and import control that recognized that packages from overseas were flooding the US Postal System one key figure was Gary Alford an IRS investigator who approached the Silk Road puzzle by following internet breadcrumbs he
started analyzing older Forum posts discussing Silk Road's launch focusing on handles like Altoid that might have been inadvertently that might have in inadvertently revealed a personal connection and so this guy this IRS agent ended up getting taken down because he was he he was profiting in different ways from the like from the investigation and very very corrupt um
but he was one of the guys that traced those old Forum posts found posts that an account that was called Altoid created by Ross at GMA yeah that then he changed to a fake email called Frosty at Frosty yep but then he had used he called the Iceland server Frosty so they tied that together not not enough imagination on the username generation
bro you got to get a password generator yeah just go full random um yeah it's uh the the Gary Alfred guy I read a thread about him as well about how what was interesting was that he didn't have access to like really crazy proprietary databases and oh the fingerprint database and the DNA database it was really just like Google it was just really good at just like Googling around
finding usernames here piecing things together and so uh uh all of these investigations were hampered by a lack of inter agency coordination rather than pooling intelligence each unit often withheld leads hoping they could be the ones to crack the that crack the case this fragmented approach would simultaneously prolong the man hunt and
create openings for suspicious Behavior indeed two law enforcement agents Carl Force DEA what a great great name uh and Shawn Bridges Secret Service would later be indicted for misusing the case to enrich themselves it wasn't the IRS guy then I I don't think so I'm not sure but uh I thought he got taken down as well no I think Gary Alfred was fine but uh I
mean it was it was like the whole thing was chaotic it's all happening on the dark web and there's money flowing around Bitcoin and everyone thinks it's Anonymous it's not but everyone and they would they would have these meetings called DC confliction meetings where they'd bring everybody together and like some people would share information and
other people would like I'm not going to share that like this is my Edge in the case and so it's very toxic Dynamic where within those types of organizations you rank up and get more titles and comp and paid leave and vacation y by cracking cases so everybody wanted everybody was self-interested in wanting to crack the case themselves and get credit for it
yeah it's always crazy the numbers it's like he stole like $50,000 and then like you look at the price of Bitcoin now and it's like oh that would have been like you know hundreds of billion hundreds of millions if they had like been able to hold on to it um but yeah the other thing about so so law enforcement is like starting to have this like very
like multi-prong chaotic yeah uh and and it didn't take them that long to really start to get some real leads into him and and start to put the pressure on right so at this time they're creating fake identities they're taking over they're finding sellers they're they're going to Sellers and they're saying we are going to put you in prison for life for selling drugs y or we'll give you a
better sentence if you give us your seller account so then then they would flip sellers yep and then they would just be in there and they also started flipping like different moderators yep and they also just started creating entirely new accounts where where they would come in and be like yeah I'm a narco trafficker and and then they would
slowly develop a friendship and there was this weird situation where to develop trust they would have to uh they would have to give him advice that real advice real advice like you should get three passports you should get fake passports you should be able to get to Asia you should have a contingency plan to get here you should split up your Bitcoin holding so that
you know if you get taken down here like you know you'll still and then and then on the platform level they had created this sort of PayPal style system right yep it was very effective every now and then a seller would build up so much selling history that they would it's very easy for them to be like any body that sends Bitcoin to this address and
sends me their address so so people would circum navigate the platform right this happens with all marketplaces right even on Airbnb somebody will book an Airbnb for like two weeks and then they'll talk to the owner and they'll be like hey like can I just book it through you and like save on the Airbnb fees yep and so every now and then these sellers would you know there was one that
happened on 420 where this certain seller was like Hey like you know if you just pay me Direct like and and they had a big selling history so everybody trusted them and they they did like 250k in sales in a day and then just like gone right yeah so that would happen and then Ross would be in this position where he would have he would have all these people that were
mad at him his users are pissed at him but he would be like well you circumnavigated the platform to try to save what are not crazy the other crazy thing so Silk Roads Take rate for selling drugs doing the most illegal activity is 40% lower than substack which sells information uh you know is that true substack is's not 50% no 40% lower they suback 10% oh okay 6%
yeah so Silk Road was 6.25% I think he's way lower than only fans too I think only only 20% yeah yeah like way way so Ross was was so Mission oriented that that he he really believe you know the part of the crypto ideals is you know there's these financial institutions they have these crazy take rates and so he's only getting double the take rate
basically of stripe stri and stripe is like the most regulated just like vanilla like weell sass right he's selling drugs at scale online and yeah he could be taking like 30% but he's not yeah yeah and he's not and when and and he still had issues because the kind of people he was dealing with you know people that are buying small quantities of drugs online are are probably not the
most affluent crowd for the most part so they would have issues with it and so he keeps dealing with this stuff and he also has I don't know he has issues where you know something would happen to a seller and then the cartels would be coming to him saying like hey like you owe us a million dollars and he' and then he'd be like trying to do deals
with them yeah and so every every Marketplace founder understands that at a certain point you have this programmatic system that you're running right where like you know let's say you have Airbnb but early days I'm sure that the Airbnb Founders would have to be talking to like one of their like listing people and being like hey like we got to work this out but in
Ross's situation he was dealing with cartels narcot traffickers drug dealers and people buying drugs and so it's not like they painted a picture like he's just sitting there and like he created the software just running he just wrting code that's it but he would be he at one point he was wanting to test into a product he was encouraged by someone in
law enforcement who had built up this you know fake identity that he was friends with hey you should create the masters of the Silk Road which was a version of Silk Road specifically for Global drug cartels and so and and and so Ross worked with his team he's like hey we got to move a kilo right now and so he was just selling drugs just drug dealing fully he was just fully drug
dealing wild and uh and then M I don't think masters of the Silk Road really took off he also around this time I don't know where we get to it so he he he somebody started people would start listing weapons well yeah so uh I have some extra so he he he kind of finds like a almost pseudo co-founder uh this Ally variety Jones who offers him
marketing tips security advice and even recommended that Ross consider violent tactics against potential threats um he uh uh he starts thinking about all this violence and alleged murder for higher plots which would become P pivotal to the federal charges against him and there's still some uh debate over whether these plots were re or entrapment um but it's really insane how
fast the site grows we we we said it started in 2011 by late 2012 and into 2013 Silk Road was grossing hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions its user base extended across continents and shipments were moving through postal systems at astonishing rates within this environment Ross grappled with immense stress anxious that each day could be
his last as a free man still he persisted motivated by profits ideology and perhaps the thrill of running a digital Empire unrestrained by traditional law at this point he's in San Francisco yep he's living in random apart like he's not living he's not living uh the lifestyle of Pablo Escobar and Ice houses and you know cars he's living in San Francisco paying cash yeah
under fake identity something Terry Terry Jones or something like that he needs he orders fake IDs off of the dark web yep off of his own website so he gets a handful of fake IDs they get caught in the mail by Homeland Security and at one point Homeland Security comes and knocks on his door and he's like oh it's over like he thought he was getting
taken down and they and they were just like hey like we got these fake IDs addressed to you yeah uh it's too small of an issue to be big for us we just want to know more about the dark yeah yeah so he's like no they were like can you tell us like we're not going to like do anything right we're not going to arrest you right now but where did you get these and he goes on record and says
there's a site called Silk Road he can't help himself he goes in pitching he goes on Founder mode he's like well actually there's this site you can go on called The Silk Road it's amazing only 6% take rate 6% and use this coupon code to sign up you can add some other stuff to your cart you know guns drugs do whatever yeah um so he's like and so and so he
gets on the record at that moment he gets that was the first time he was in the system for committing a crime and they added Bas I don't know how it works but they added notes to like his profile that he had talked about the Silk Road sure which ended up coming back to bite him later yeah and so uh the DEA at this point is uh is uh posing as major buyers
the FBI is focusing on these high-tech methods they find a server in uh in it is in Iceland and the uh and there's a bunch of friction between the different a agencies because no one really knows who's dealing with cyber crime um so Jared dur yian that's dur Duran who was the this is the guy who's just obsessed he duragi and had collected thousands of
orders that he had personally caught yeah and he had just been categorizing them and tracing them to different seller profiles he flipping the dealers to become important uh to become informants uh he gleaned details about Silk Roads internal workings including how vendors ship products other groups try to TA trace the sit's IP addresses using Advanced hacking techniques at one
point the FBI exploited what have what might have been a misconfiguration in a Silk Road capture or login screen gleaning a real IP address that led them to a data center in Iceland so the whole the whole goal of tour is to mask the IP address and route through a bunch of different anyone who's running a tour server all over so you could if you just
have Spectrum or you know AT&T internet you can spin up a tour server and then you're routing random traffic constantly and so that anonymizes things because the traffic is just going all over the place you can't trace it all and so anytime it goes through some random server comes out the other other side randomized or or disguised and it's very
very hard to track down but they found the ACT ual IP address because it seems like the capture that was being rendered wasn't going through tour it was going through like you know it wasn't being AnMed so they figure it out they they they the this is this is something that happens throughout the whole silkroad journey is because he's a first time
developer first time founder he's just making all these yeah mistakes and often times suffering Financial losses but the sit's doing so well yep and growing so quickly it doesn't the losses are offset but the one thing that's kind of hard to make up for is getting caught yeah getting caught and so they grab the server from Iceland decrypt it and it's like the database it has all the
information and then they're combing through it for clues that could lead them to who this guy is like how it wasn't hard to flip the whatever company in Iceland had the server you get approached by US law enforcement they're like we believe people are committing crimes on your server and they're just like you just want us to copy it sure no
problem whatever and that goes in and and to be clear as they uncovered they got data on all the buyers and sellers and like presumably all the transactions that had happened in silkroad history right like yeah it was encrypted but they were able to basically crack it yeah and and every escro transaction is logged in a database because it has to even though the even though the
blockchain might be somewhat anonymized like it's not anonymized when it sits on the database record of the silk road which they got access to and so it's not like every person who had ever bought drugs or sold drugs on the Silk Road was suffered from that yeah but if the government had wanted to they could have gone and knocked on all the addresses ex
obviously people would use fake addresses and fake names and you know things like that but yep um and so uh by 2013 enough agencies had Pro enough agencies processed enough scraps of evidence that Ross Al's identity was starting to come into Focus though they had yet to conclusively tie him to dread pirate Roberts Ross for his part was often oblivious to the scale of the
Manhunt trusting in tour and bitcoin's layers of security while continuing to manage Silk Road from cafes and libraries around San Francisco and so the corruption Scandal continues Carl Mark force ivth and Shawn bridges of the Secret Service what a great name mark for the DEA uh in the Secret Service uh is one of the most dramatic subplots
here both men were were tasked with Bringing Down the silk road yet they exploited their positions for personal gain Force who operated under undercover personas like knob on Silk Road directly interacted with DPR knob knob was basically boys with oh yeah talking all day long you know knob would give him this is Knob is the guy who'd give him advice you should get
more passports things like that and people are like dude stop giving him such good advice and he messed up because at one point he was he was he had a fake account and was chatting with Dread pirate Roberts and and was like and was like it's Carl or something like that and he was like wait what and he was like oh Carl Carla like I go by a bunch of different names that was all on
that was allord yeah and then was it Sean Bridges at one point that later once Shawn knew he was getting caught he Shawn was like I will get you killed in prison like he was like threatening like you're going to get caught delete all these record and so yeah it was basically slop on both sides very sloppy uh and so uh from Ross's perspective
these agents manipulative activities made the Silk Road environment feel ever more treacherous logs released in court showed Ross confiding to trusted Confidant that he suspected infiltration at every turn he also struggled with evaluating demands for hush money or hits on suspected blackma mailers whether Ross seriously believed in orchestrating Murder For Hire or if he
was cornered into entertaining the idea is still debated nevertheless chat logs indicate that Ross agreed to pay for violent Solutions if it meant protecting Silk Roads anonymity and his own yeah so this is uh when I I I posted this and a lot of people are like oh you left out murder For Hire obviously on this post I was purely talking about the business
not endorsing his actions and anyway but yeah he he over the course of this 2013 era got very comfortable with the idea of paying to get people killed so these were people that he thought were uh informants people that he thought were just generally Bad actors there's records of him ordering hits and actually negotiating the price of hits
saying you know being kind of frustrated with with how expensive would something would be and they and the and the person would be like well it's like last minute and you know it's kind of a complicated situation and he'd be like okay he would be provided uh photo evidence of success what he thought were successful hits uh at one point law enforcement baked one
of the hits using like Campbell's Soup and they were taking and using like crappy phone images to like take a picture of somebody's face like with like Campbell Soup like as if their face had been like blown blown off or whatever yeah um so very very dark like he he clearly at this point had was like living this dual life of like he's Ross and then he's dread pirate Roberts yeah
and he's willing to do anything to protect the pirate ship road yeah uh and and I think we have a post here it's probably a few deep uh Ben but uh uh this is a screenshot from Reddit it says are there any merits to the claims that he hired Hitman to kill friendly chemist someone on Silk Road who said they would leak personal info on thousands of Silk
Road users and L paid 500k I've never seen this discussed in our weekly Ross posts yeah so this was uh there was a user who hacked the server in some way they were able to uncover quite a lot of data on like the sellers Y and so Ross was worried that I mean if people realize that if you bought something on the platform and that your personal
information could be exposed then obviously it was going to really slow down SL sales he's also facing competition at this time other sites are popping up that are doing the same thing y so he really didn't want this information to get leaked yep and he you know so and so and so someone replies to this and says Ross ordered hits on four to five people total the evidence of
this the the evidence that he did this is clear no one here likes talking about this because it ruins the narrative now the sentence for ordering a hit in California if I recall correctly is 10 years per contract so he definitely got a harsher sentence than this but there were other crimes he was guilty of not that not that it will save me from down
votes but El Chapo is significantly worse than Ross and any system that gives Chapo less time than Ross is busted but to ignore that Ross didn't try to have people executed for doing is doing no favors to anyone who wants to have an honest discussion about Justice and I think that's just a very interesting thing where there there there was this like big uh narrative and
if we go back back to uh this debate between M Mar Matt Palmer and Joe posting um Matt says Ross's work was one of the largest contributions to harm reduction in narcotics distribution ever the systems he created removed violence from the drug trade by anonymizing and physically dislocating transactions he almost certainly saved thousands of
lives um but Joe says skeptical of this claim the vast majority of drug trade violence is caused by production namely South American cartels and opium Warlords in the Golden Triangle Silk Road made retail purchases safer but that's small potatoes next to the back end and it's funny because you know it's like yeah he might have removed some violence but then he added it all back
by trying to commit hits it's like come on uh it's just a ridiculous situation um but moving on we're in mid 2013 and there are enough threads of investigation that they that had converged that a direct confrontation with Ross was inevitable each agency so at this time they had figured out they had figured out a number of people so they started with profiles like we think
he's a smart guy we think he's in America we think he's oh one of the one of the one of the ways they figured out was hilarious was that he uh he had he had posted something about how uh buying drugs on the street is dangerous and he says something about like those people and so they so they use that to justify this idea that he came from like a white
middle class upbringing and was not like a street guy because he wouldn't he would have said like when we buy stuff on the street we get shot and killed he instead he was like they get shot and killed and so that that made it clear that he wasn't like from the from the Rough and Tumble streets and so at one point he was even he was a suspect just
based on his profile of being you know interested in technology and libertarianism and all this stuff uh but they still were like they actually people didn't believe that he could have done it because he didn't fit the hacker like internet hacker develop archetype CU they were like well he didn't study computer science and so they had this other suspect who had run like a Bitcoin
for him that was like more of the Prime Suspect at the time uh so so he had some non-believers in law enforcement that were like yeah we it could be Ross but like we don't think he's got that dog in it yeah and so the the main breakthrough came from Gary Alford uh the IRS agent and he was convinced that Ross alri made a slip up early on uh and so he scoured
internet forums such as Bitcoin talk.org and shroomery.org going back to where he was hey anybody want to get some shrooms check out this website no he was like has anybody bought shrooms from from Silk Road and it was him selling the shrooms and so he reasoned that whoever created the site might have posted dur about it during its infancy before it
was famous enough to attract major scrutiny and uh this is very funny this actually happened in my high school there was someone who put up a uh like a cyber bullying type website and the easiest way to figure out who was behind it it it's still like like myth in my high school but I'm convinced I know who it was because I basically traced it
back to Patient Zero and the first person to say anything about it was likely the person that did it because like how else would it go viral like it has to have somebody that introduces it because if a website's just up there on the internet like no one's going to find that but the first person to say hey have you seen this that person is you know guilty guilty and I'm very
convinced of this um so uh Alfred uh this is Gary Alfred he discovered a user named Altoid posting in January of 2011 right at the start of Silk Road mentioning Silk Road and suggesting people check it out further digging reveals that the same user had made a subsequent post looking to hire a tech specialist leaving the email address Ross @gmail.com this was The Smoking Gun
Alfred had been searching for as it linked a real life individual to Silk Road's initial marketing efforts while other investigators were pursuing the server's physical location Alfred simpler forensic analysis of publicly available posts provided a direct link to Ross and so Ross had gone back to that Forum he knew he had kind of messed
up and so he changed the email yeah on that account to a fake email yeah but you can see the change but then the you can see the change and then the name he used for the fake email ended up being the same name he used to name the server so he had some he liked the name Frosty or something yeah and so at this point they they were definitely suspicious of
Ross but they needed to catch him red-handed logged in as the dread pirate Roberts on his laptop if they hoped to secure a watertight pers uh prosecution um and uh and detective work in the digital age can hinge on human air the Altoid handle and the Gmail address turned out to be one of Ross's biggest mistakes an unintentional breadcrumb Left Behind before the so Road success
one thing I'll note here this is just speculation but he his girlfriend at one point said that he was a big uh marijuana fan I think he admitted to it at different points as dread pirate Roberts and marijuana is a performance decreasing drug makes people forgetful makes people anxious and all these things and so imagining him as a first- Time developer high all the time yeah
trying to you know committing crimes at scale and and and again I respect the libertarian view that that says well nothing he's he's doing was wrong but he was committing Crimes by way of our legal system yeah and so imagining him just like hanging around San Francisco smoking pot like being a n trafficker it's like not a you know it's inevitable
there's other people that would have made it like seven years 8 years 9 years 10 years there's there's Narco like real narcos that make it 30 years right they buy soccer teams yeah yeah Mansions they get presidents elected it's crazy um so it's actually wild to think about if he had maybe not as intense of marijuana habit or gone and went to Russia or
something like that totally there's a world where he would have been become like a Bitcoin you know 100 billionaire like one of the wealthiest most like you know influential people in the world and could have been Out Of Reach in many ways totally yeah it is so funny that he you know his whole philosophy was was based on this idea of like drugs aren't
this Gateway uh nothing bad can happen if you start doing a lot of drugs and then he is the best case study for drugs ruining your life drugs completely ruined his life started doing drugs then started selling drugs then started trying to get people killed then got massively arrested and thrown in jail for a decade it's like yeah drugs were
not good for you bro like calm down yeah um and so as the law enforcement officials homed in on Ross alri they began careful physical uh surveillance his whole laptop was heavily encrypted and he had a single button that if he pushed it it would lock and encrypt the hard drive so even if you got access to it you couldn't access it without a password they had no way to guess the
password it would take a comp computer millions of years to you know decrypt that or hundreds of years to to to force the decryption um although maybe it's faster now who knows but at the time they were very worried and they were like we have to get him while his hands are on the keyboard or hands off the keyboard but but he's still logged in
and so they were excited about the idea that he kept working in public spaces because they could stage an unexpected confrontation it's just the the the irony here of him in another reality he would have been a y combinator just absolutely crushing it like normal business and so he would have been in these coffee shops in San Francisco at the explosion of the sharing economy and
mobile oh yeah and he would be sitting next to people that you know it's not unlikely that some like very well-known Founders today like we're in the same coffee shop right totally totally the the craziness of doing this all like from the epicenter Tech I me I lived in San Francisco when this happened like and and I would go to this Library I would go to this San Francisco Public
Library I actually worked out of there a few times um and so on October 1st 2013 Ross walked into the Glenn Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library sat down and opened his laptop unbeknownst to him undercover agents sat nearby agents orchestrated a ruse where one undercover officer posed as a feuding couple uh creating a minor commotion to
divert Ross's attention as Ross turned his head other agents sprang from behind grabbing his laptop before he could even move to close the lid um The Narrative of the takedown is Cinematic Ross is stunned half standing and as FBI pushes him back into his seat and secure his arms to visualize this a a a man a male and a female agent start yelling and
like pushing each other he looks over and then and then the person just reach yeah yeah yeah it's literally a woman who's an agent just sits right across the table and just is like pull this away don't touch has it open it open and so they immediately what they do is take it they take and they rush it to a van outside like imagine like you're like
trying to keep your computer from going to sleep oh yeah yeah that's what they're doing and so they're making sure they're moving the mouse the mouse move the mouse and so for the next like 10 hours they just sit there like moving the mouse and like downloading all of the data off the computer and like backing it I think they backed it up like nine times nine different ways and
you could imagine because because when they when after we we'll talk about this in a bit as they go to prosecute him the the the um defense's main defense is that it wasn't Ross yeah yeah that's their main thing they were like some the real dread pyate Roberts framed him they put all this evidence on his laptop but they obviously caught it yeah literally
red-handed yeah with the with uh and it's like if there was like some sort of like screen sharing software where yeah okay maybe maybe he was just using his computer and then the real dead dread private Roberts was like you know putting evidence on there there would be evidence of that software but but they tracked him so many times where they would be physically viewing him he's
typing LS on because they had they had moles on the silkroad team so they had like law enforcement was being paid to work for the Silk Road and so they would see when he logged on he'd be typing and they would be recording all this where they'd be watching him typing yeah and Dread pirate Roberts is typing and so it was kind of a tough uh argument to make
even though law en you know various members of law enforcement were committing their own heinous uh crimes uh it's sort of to defend and related to that uh we have a post from Sam par he did a podcast on Ross the founder of Silk Road and he says he admitted to creating the Silk Road but said he sold it to a new owner and they're the ones
who did the murder For Hire what do you think was Ross the owner the entire time or ordered to murder For Hire or no why and Anthony uh J disenzo denzo says of course he owned and operated it the entire time he admitted to creating the Silk Road at the beginning and was caught red-handed working on the administration page at the ending follow his Bitcoins from start to finish I
completely agree with that he had tried to he told his girlfriend once that he was no longer running it then she walked in on him after like they were hanging out evidence it's so clear and then uh later he even had this crisis on the platform where he he made a post where he's like I'm going to change the way I talk so that it's less obvious who I am
and then everybody was like got really mad at him because they were like wait like is this safe to use now like did did did they flip him or something like that yeah uh so in the days following his arrest the global community of Silk Road users found themselves in disarray vendors buyers and administrators scrambled to figure out whether their
personal identities had been compromised because as part of the onboarding process to work for the Silk Road you would have to send him a photo of your real driver's license uh and it was kind of this like getting sworn in into the secret society um there was panic over bit Bitcoin funds held in escrow which now seemed Out Of Reach people posted
frantic messages on the dark web some M menting the loss of their livelihood oh it's terrible you know you build a drug drug business and it just goes up and smoke one day others questioning whether the dread pirate Roberts Persona might somehow live on law enforcement officials also it's like if there was a real dread pirate Roberts who his fall guy gets busted why wouldn't he just
keep operating the site or like make a new thing yeah just just but yeah you can think about it so at this point or even just move the Bitcoin doing hundreds of millions of volume a year yeah and you could imagine at any one point there's I I know an very rough estimate would be aund million do of of like drugs like changing hands and so that that was quite a lot of money that
was just locked up in escrow at this time that was clearly the Silk Road team had to be the team that would approve when you know the the recipient would say yes got it yep then they would approve you know the payout yeah and so afterwards after the arrest um law enforcement officials lauded the arrest as a significant victory in the war on cyber crime
politicians who had long criticized Silk Road took credit for pushing agencies to shut it down uh mainstream media coverage exploded with headlines labeling Ross as everything from a brilliant hacker to a modern-day Outlaw the sensationalism surrounding the Kingpin moniker overshadowed the complexities of Ross's motivation he was painted as a coldblooded trafficker who
profited off of addiction and despair I think that's probably correct um his friends and family were stuned he definitely was cold blooded totally he was able to separate yep the nice guy Ross who had a loving family from he embodied fully embodied the The Dread pirate Roberts yeah I wonder if there's anyone that gets to this level that isn't cold
blooded though it's like it's kind of a prerequisite every SE every SE every billion dollar every unicorn CEO that I know Cold Blood even the ones that are nice you can tell ice in their veins ice in their veins yeah uh meanwhile the government's forensic teams sifted through the Trove of data from Ross's computer they discovered personal Diaries chat logs
between dread pirate Roberts and administrators and spreadsheets deal detailing profits the data portray a person intimately involved in day-to-day operations from vendor disputes to strategies and strategies for just call drug argument like how to evade the Government Federal the irs. txt how to beat the yeah that was a big part of this he was not living this high life
because he had all this Bitcoin but he couldn't really figure out a way to get it offchain yeah uh it was clear that Ross faced a battery of charges moneya laundering computer hacking drug trafficking conspiracy to commit murder the last charge stemmed from his suspected willingness to eliminate threats to Silk Roads anonymity whether or not actual violence occur occurred
Federal prosecutors used the chat transcripts to argue that Ross was willing to orchestrate killings as the immediate chaos settled the case moved toward a long legal process that would Captivate the public and set legal preceden about dark web marketplaces and so the uh the defense strategy the legal defense strategy for Ross focused in on
a few key uh ideas wrongful identification they argued that Ross wasn't the true dread pirate Roberts and that the real DPR had set him up uh reliability of evidence they questioned whether the laptop data could have been tampered with um especially considering corruption charges that's a yeah because of how corrupt many members not many but
at least Carl force and Shawn Bridges it's like yeah maybe there was something weird going on yeah and they were encouraging him to do things that work like that was a whole like I think it was knob who who would be like yeah you should take this guy out you know and it's oh yeah they definitely law enforcement helped they they they helped him yeah uh they were involved with
helping fake these sort of murders as well yeah and so they they wound up not uh convicting him of that that but it definitely like set the tone of the trial and kind of get people out of this mindset like he just built a website it's like bu and maybe he did this other stuff we're not even going to push him on that but it like threw he did a few things that didn't scale but
but it it also is interesting it would have been sort of I imagine untenable if he was convicted on the murder for higher stuff yeah to actually get pardoned so that small detail I I think it it doesn't seem like Trump knows his actual name yeah I imagine there would have been much more push back if he had been actually convicted of of so look at
this digital diary there's an excerpt in here that says I'm doing about $2 million a week in sales now they also had Logs with references to specific violent acts that Ross had allegedly considered or at least verbally agreed to pay for um yeah and so he had sent $750 $750,000 of money to fund hits so he was paying for the hits yeah they weren't
happening so he pleads not guilty uh and uh and there's a public trial his mother uh becomes a tireless advocate for his cause they argue that the government was making an example out of him which I think is probably true since this was like the first major cyber crime uh Deep Web case and and and if they didn't throw the at him there would just be a
million more and there was super like there was Gawker articles like that was what caled main for sure so it's very embarrassing to law enforcement to have a website that anybody can go to to buy yep that's if law enforcement can log in and view it and regular like a high school kid can do it and some you know Grandma can do it yeah it's just such a
violation of like the the social contract there uh in the in the in the end the case would be resolved in the public eye with Ross heading to trial January of 2015 a date that would not only decide his fate but set a precedent for the future of dark web marketplaces the trial took place in New York in haton federal court presided over by judge Katherine Forest it was a
high-profile profile case and the courtroom was often packed with journalists curious onlookers and raw supporters um the atmosphere was tense the prosecution maintained a mountain of files uh presented a mountain of files taken from Ross's lapt this was this was part of the challenge for the defense is there was like six terabytes of data
that they were like using against him and so they're like they're like yeah like we're going to use all of this against you like luck one other thing he benefited from is he had tried to set up a Silk Road Armory oh yeah but it totally fled you know like you know sometimes you hit pmf with one thing side project he he realized that it was like much harder to like send guns in
the mail but he was trying to sell I think you could buy explosives on the road grenades and you can buy fully automatic weapons which is just like even even I think that gave Ross some pause around you know that the yeah this was the libertarian thing that always got to me it's like he would argue that you know I am a willing uh I'm I'm willing to consent to sell drugs you're
willing to buy drugs therefore the government has no say in that uh but there's always this question of like negative externalities and what what got to me was like well at at a certain point you were selling like Cyanide and yeah and and also it's like okay even if that's not bad between the two parties what about the the UPS guy that has to
carry that like did they opt into that so if explos going into the yeah it's like oh I'm just a I'm just a FedEx driver and now I have to carry grenades like I didn't opt into that like in your libertarian philosophy I don't consent to that libertarianism seems to work if you had a private island yes and and everybody there is there by their own yeah I mean like sounds like I mean
basically going there but no when when your actions are affecting other people that are participating in a society that has agreed to have certain laws yeah you never think about the next negative externality of okay you brought these drugs in and then the drug dealer on the street and commits violence because of this or you're funding a like it's
always just let's look at just the one the one micro interaction and not consider the knock on effects and and that's why we have like an actual society and societal contract and so um the government Witnesses included law enforcement agents who had participated in Silk Road investigations uh Ross's defense contended that he was set up friends testified to his peaceful nature
pointing out how out of character it was for him to order violence or run a massive drug site over the course of three weeks jurors were presented with a dizzying array of digital exhibits as you mentioned six terabytes or something like that IP addresses chat logs and email addresses and on February 4th 2015 after only a few hours of deliberation
the jury returned a guilty verdict on all seven counts including narcotics trafficking computer hacking money laundering and maintaining an ongoing criminal Enterprise yeah and so to be clear here this was like 3 weeks it was not the kind of trial that stretches on for months and months or years it was like very quick and the the deck was certainly stacked against him right he
had all these different agencies that were and there was so much evidence yeah um and when you think about other other trials it's like well yeah like maybe they got some photos or something or maybe they kicked down a door and they found some something but it's all there's always this question of like oh was it planted but when you when you
show someone terab of like okay we got his computer his hands are on the keyboard he was logged in it's a lot harder to to paint the you know the yeah and even even this is why they it ends up being really hard for law enforcement to pin down traditional narcos and they get them on money laundering and things like that y or wire fraud you know this
stuff that's like unrelated alone went down tax evasion not drug trafficking and it's because it's really hard especially the the Ross was able to build a massive Enterprise quickly because of the internet yeah but he also generated a massive amount of data related to that activity and a narco you know you have like you them on like a radio you know
talking or whatever there you know there's less of a lot of narcos at least in Mexico have like Trad regular businesses too that they were talking about right and so the so sentencing happens a couple months later May 29th 2015 uh judge Katherine Forest sentences him to two life sentences plus 40 years and because it's a federal case there's
no possibility of parole so he is truly screwed um and this was one of the sign it was significantly harsher than typical sentences for non-violent drug offenses especially given his age 31 at the time which is like it's not that young but the whole 30 you know he was young he did this in his 20s but he wasn't a teenager who was like his prefrontal cortex was developed
developed and he had a good 5year run with a full cortex full cortex full cortex mode yeah and so he was he was smoking pot they should have included that yeah uh uh Ross appealed the decision uh and this outcome underscore the US justice system stance on dark web marketplaces an uncompromising approach that signaled to Future clandestin operators that they
too could face the rest of their lives in prison and we didn't really see a replacement pop up very very quickly it was it was pretty it was pretty effective I well the dark I mean many of these transactions like still occur on the dark like I I think I can't tell you but there's not a brand name. here's the thing any I think historically anytime a drug has become a
brand name yeah they get taken down right sure and so like that's why when you think about okay billions of dollars a year of cocaine gets consumed in the US there's no brand that you can think of right and as soon as you tie a brand to it then there's like well now we can start tracing this and so it's just Colombian cocaine sort of yeah yeah it's sort of
that that one's more obvious but I imagine that this way more volume happens now it's just not these sort of brand name marketplaces right Silk Road was the door Dash really was or the Uber of crazy you know whatever you wanted and so uh Carl force and Shawn Bridges um after the after the Ross conv the Scandal emerges and they get sentenced
to 6 and a half and years um and then more when further misconduct was discovered and so uh they go to jail for uh stealing a bunch of money and basically not doing their job at all um meanwhile well it's a weird thing they were trying to catch him but they were also trying to make you know a buck in the process yeah weird thing and so uh it goes on but let's move so that was
let's see 2015 uh in 2016 to 2017 he Ross appeals his conviction to the US court of appeals asserting evidence was tainted by law enforcement corruption but the court upheld the guilty verdict in May of 2017 the second Circuit of New York reaffirms Ross's life sentence reasoning that the massive scope of Silk Road justifies an exceptionally harsh penalty
in 2018 June 28th the US Supreme Court declines to hear Ross's final appeal effectively exhausting his direct legal avenues for overturning the conviction uh Lynn during this time 2015 onward uh spearheads the free Ross movement Nationwide championing her son's cause and Lynn is a cracked marketer cracked Absolut she went to town yep for her son
and so in December of 2021 the AL Family auctions Ross's writings and artwork is nfts online raising Millions through the decentralized organization free Ross da to support continued legal efforts in 2021 to 2022 a stash of over 50,000 stolen Bitcoin from the Silk Road is seized by the US government and Ross relinquishes any claim to help satisfy his $183 million restitution order and
in 2024 um pirate wires reported on April 2nd that the US government has moved roughly two billion in Bitcoin confiscated from Silk Road to what to what's reported to be a coin base wallet per coin desk yeah and everybody's like are they going to market sell are they going to sell this going bad everyone's worried um and so uh in May of 2022
Congressman Thomas Massie calls publicly in the House of Representatives for Ross for Ross's commutation viewing the life sentences a grave Injustice Beyond appropriate punishment and C to be clear it is a bad precedent that law enforcement agencies can commit a bunch of their own crimes in the effort to take somebody down and then still if they get like it it is a terrible
precedent right we we want to live in a society ideally where nobody yeah a viby Libertarian Utopia where nobody's you know nobody's like hurting each other but then if one person commits a crime it doesn't justify another person to commit crimes in order to take that person down and so many while while we both believe that many many of the things that he did were were net net
negative and bad it it is you know that the people on the other side of that that don't believe he did anything wrong they also have a you know I don't necessarily think they have a good point there they do have a point that that it's a bad precedent that you know law enforcement should be able to commit crimes and then still you know deliver
this like you know very intense uh sentencing yeah and so let's go through some of the more recent uh facts about the how we got to the pardon in May of 2024 Donald Trump promises that he will uh pardon Ross on day one swaying libertarian minded voters and crypto en enthusiasts on in June of 2024 RFK Jr running for presence similarly vows in a
public statement to Grant Ross a Parton um in November Chase Oliver the libertarian party's pres RK Spotlight wanted to Spotlight Silk's Ro Silk Road's role in pioneering cryptocurrency which is kind of like everybody's like really just trying to get the for sure uh the libertarian party's Presidential nominee reaffirms in reason magazine that a full pardon aligns with
fundamental libertarian principles kind of debate that and then on January 21st uh 2025 president Donald Trump signs a full and unconditional pardon from the O Oval Office fulfilling his campaign pledge and so the crazy thing about this is like imagine you're Ross you're in jail for a decade yeah Trump gets elected signs a doc 48 hours later you just walk
out of prison yeah you're free and that's why I I felt like this was a I wouldn't have wanted to cover this story at all yeah a month ago yeah because it was just purely dark it's like okay he committed a bunch of crimes now he's life in jail yes he was he the execution from a business standpoint yeah now he's now he's he's taking Tak the road show no and there there's rumors that that
he's still worth you know presumably yep uh it seems like he might have had a second or third Bitcoin wallet that was not seized and so he might he might have come out with a lot of wealth yeah which would be fascinating uh and forced to to hold it yeah yeah yeah ultimate huddle ultimate H hodler and so Ross now free speaks across the us about prison reform
cyber security and the lessons of Silk Road aiming to reshape his legacy in the libertarian movement and uh he he's pardoned and living under close public scrutiny continues to Champion libertarian advocacy and prison Rehabilitation efforts so it'll be interesting to see once he actually does like The Joe Rogan style interview or The Lex Friedman like the full story I
am interested to hear his side of this I I wonder I would be surprised if he doubles down and says I wasn't DPR that would be interesting he need to do that if he's pardoned he doesn't need to no he doesn't need to do that so if he does do that that would be and then he's able to prove like through some crazy thing which I which I don't believe yep the
main thing my main takeaway is this guy is a goated operator that's true like clearly like he benefited from some luck and timing and was like this missionary founder uh but but self-taught developer firsttime CEO bootstrapped zero to a billion in sales very very profitable the entire way operating a remote team yeah he has clearly is very powerful in some ways
he's got insane Aura and if he uses that for good it could be very good it could be very good in some ways he's uh he's playing the game on hard mode in the sense that as you mentioned he can't talk about um people you know he can't talk to anyone about his business he can't you know uh get you know public investors or advisors or anything but on
the other side he is selling the most addictive and product that just has immense pull from the market because it's illegal and so yeah um I don't know how much credit you actually want to give him let's go through some more posts we got Captain Nemo says Silk Roads historical importance is still underrated uh I thought that was I thought that was interesting from 2022
this was well before the pardon and there's another post from Captain Nemo in here uh 2022 says the ultimate Tech an non moment was when Forbes did an interview with the dread pirate Roberts the anonymous founder of Silk Road at the height of Silk Road's Ascent when multiple federal agencies were trying and failing to track him down that's so
funny that he did an anonymous interview successfully with Forbes because it's like now you know Beth Jos can't stay undocked and like get you know can't do an interview without getting doxed and this guy was able to to stay Anonymous while appearing in Forbes let's one of our one one note uh friend of the show Lone Rangers says Donald Trump paved the way to be to the White House
as a quote unquote convicted felon giving Ross a clear path to a presidential run in the future Ross who turned 40 in prison is now old enough to run for president and could be the first Libertarian president if elected so that's a stretch to me it's a joke but it's one of those things where it's like maybe but the often times the most entertaining outcome is the most likely
I agree and I yeah it does feel like not totally out of like if if Ross's goal is to create a Libertarian Utopia United States is awesome it would be a great place to be a true Utopia and if that's what he believes now he's got a few hundred million bucks he can finance a campaign you know I will be campaigning against him that's all I can
say yeah yeah uh we need Law and Order Law and Order uh captain neemo continues and says uh more recently he posted this January 21st When Ross was pardoned hard to overstate how impactful it was to be a young earnestly curious student When Ross was running Silk Road as the dread pirate Roberts operating a completely illegal digital bizaar openly for years
despite every effort to stop it by the most powerful nation state ever massive hansoni view Quake viscerally opened my eyes to Technology's power to reshape existing power dynamics and so the flow of History For Better or Worse I think that's super interesting to think about how powerful the internet and this new technology was that even though it was
only two years and he did get shut down he went on a generational run and was able to actually do this thing that no one else was able to do purely because of Technology crypto for a long time was looking for use cases outside of Bitcoin being digital gold yep meme coins being speculation uh and and and other activities and the the most obvious use
case outside of digital gold that had the craziest product Market fit was the Silk Road right y but no Crypt VC could be like oh look look what's possible like this is the potential of crypto because it was just like a thousands of crimes being committed a day you know at scale um but uh and it's and it's funny because everybody that was if if all the people that had just been you know
committing crimes with BTC early days of Silk Road if they had just bought and held they'd all be millionaires because they'd be using like 20 Bitcoin to buy like a one pill you know so that was like an expensive night night on the town you know yeah the the stories around Bitcoin have evolved so much like version one was this we've used math to
solve the generals problem and it's going to be decentralized and not controlled by the government and uh perfectly Anonymous and then a lot of those stories kind of ered and it became just this crime money basically and then it somehow made it through that and just became digital gold and now and then there were new narratives around oh will there'll be all these like games and
metaverse built on top of it and then that kind of melted away and now it's prediction markets and and meme coins and digital gold and just kind of a store of value but it's interesting that at every point in time there's been so many negative narratives about this is the worst thing ever but there's been this one enduring narrative that's stuck
with it and driven value and now it's at 100K it's like it's crazy well yeah and it's still even though what like the I don't like honest uh analysis of crypto technology you could never say this isn't cool exactly like this isn't like this crazy truly novel transformative technology yeah it's just that the primary case study was a nefarious use
case right y but it's still incredible that you could operate an open air drug Bazaar online that anybody could go to and see and law enforcement could see and not do anything about like that is a wild it was insane wild situation so let's go to Katherine Han former GP at Andre and crypto now with Han Ventures and she is uh quoting uh the I think the
founder of chainalysis which is a company that does uh Research into how crypto is used nefariously Jo uh Joanie levans says uh today is my proudest day at chainalysis we enabled us UK Germany and South Korea to take down one of the largest child abuse material sites law enforcement in 38 countries made 330 arrests of alleged pedophiles and
rescued 23 children from abuse and Katherine Hans says great work by chainalysis and the authorities in such an important case as I found when working on the silk silk road corrupt agent in other cases having the Dig digal breadcrumbs of crypto was a useful tool for law enforcement and so she's actually saying that like the reason that she was able I didn't know this but
I guess she worked on the on those corrupt agents in the Silk Road case and the reason were obious taking payment and exactly and so they were able to trace the Bitcoin where it moved out of the Silk Road account into their account and then was eventually taken off chain and I think they were buying like sports cars and stuff and so they were able to
figure that out and track it down and she was saying like if this was Fe that would not have been possible and so that's actually the exact opposite narrative that people were telling in crypto but it's still worked out I don't know if she's saying it wasn't possible but normally harder so if a corrupt agent takes a cash payment exactly there's not a record of that yeah the
classic like you kick down the door you got in the drug kingpin and there's a huge stack of cash a huge stack of cocaine and then a bunch of luxury watches and you're just like yeah throw the watches in the back one node yeah yeah oh yeah we got a lot of cash and a lot of cocaine uh didn't see any gold bars there yeah throw it in the backpack
and like you see this in like training day and like those like kind of cop movies and they probably some element of truth and you know a lot of it shows don't do that it shows the you know the fact that Katherine was working on this crazy high-profile case yeah still recognize the potential of crypto and goes on to have A2 billion doll fund now she was a
GP historic run historic run 2021 Point base and stuff um yeah fascinating so wild wild story uh so let's go to a promoted post we're we're we're done with the Ross alri story I hope you enjoyed it we're moving on uh we're going to go to the timeline but first we got a promoted post from Josh Steinman promoting my product the one I worked on with with Jordy says co-founder just
texted me confirming that Excel performs as promised and uh Excel if you don't know is a project little marketing stunt that Jordy and I worked on uh to uh deliver shareholder value so it's a nicotine product says right this was in many ways the Genesis of of TV because we would this was the first loud opulence podcast yeah we would Riff on what nicotine meant in the context of
value creation and that that many of those early conversations sort of transformed into the show so it's a cool physical yeah I mean I think I think basically the first time we did anything that felt like this format was the the the launch video type of thing we did a vibral and then we did an hour sit down and we both came into it being like oh
yeah like let's just like Riff on this and talk about what we did and character and we just were fully in character the whole time and Ben our vice president was like is Jordi an actor like like what what was that and and we were there's some amazing quotes in there it's fantastic we still have that's that's a lost episode we've never uploaded the full thing so it's like
over an hour we've only released like three clip I can't believe we recorded for hour oh yeah we were just on fire we just locked in podcast for sure for sure um let's move to uh a very important Story Valentine's Day is coming up I'm sure there's someone in your life that you need to get something nice uh I was asking Jordy if there's not this is a
kind aggressive move right now to reach out to somebody maybe thinking about cing season this here season cuffing season uh and so I was asking Jordy you know what is the PCH Philipe of Valentine's Day gifts he said the Birkin bag which I think is a good answer um I I did hear that birkens are maybe not a Valentine's Day gift more of a Christmas or birthday gift and Valentine's Day is
more jewelry and chocolates so we need to find some good jewelry and chocolate options controversy we're going to do a whole Deep dive on Valentine's Day gift guide for sure y um but there's an interesting story going on right now um because uh Walmart has cloned the Birkin bag oh I know have you heard about this so Bethany Frank says we are witnessing
a luxury goods rebellion and we are rewriting the rules of fashion last night I talked with NBC news about the viral bur Walmart Birkin bag is taking over social media and they call it the worken bag and it's 80 bucks and it's a clear knockof and the Birkin bag if you're not familiar is from lvmh right or AES right AES separate separate it's been
familyowned it's public now but it cost to get in the game it's like 20K 30k something like that yeah I mean the it's the same thing as pek and that for alligator stuff yeah you can't really just walk in the street and bu yeah yeah you have to be invited relationship and so it it is it is in that you know adumar P you know Pac Holy Trinity yeah where where and they
started with saddles oh yeah they did that's right yeah so there's an amazing acquired episode on the history of Hermes and there's this family drama and that you know this whole dynamic it's kind of it's a wild wild story so we should do the TB reaction to the acquired epod on heres okay I like that we just press play for 5 seconds yeah it was funny because I uh I
I was looking up like Walmart uh stuff and I got a ton of posts from Bernie Sanders being like they make too much money and I was like well I hate them too but for a different reason me and Bernie can agree on somethinge we agree on one thing they're ripping off luxury goods they should be charging more uh yeah I mean but but tying this back to
yesterday we were talking about the what's happening in the automotive industry with the premium Brands being knocked off the thing here is the the way I can guarantee you the the woman or the the households that are buying Birkin bags y are not seeing this Walmart product and saying I'm going to get that instead it's people that aren't
buyers of Hermes yeah that are saying I just like the way this purse looks maybe they like the way the fact that it looks like it Birkin I mean you could always buy a knockoff Birkin bag at like Canal Street right on the street the street vendors very low quality knockoffs and stuff the only things that are hard to buy knockoffs of are cars cars they do they do make perfect
replicas of cars yeah yeah but I mean they still end up being like $200,000 because it's like a super bespoke there's only so much you can do yeah um but uh yeah it's just funny that Walmart would do this I feel like there'd be a legal battle on the design patent or something but who knows I'm sure they'll but it's also like the Birkin been in market for so long do you can
you actually defend that IP you can have design patents maybe not and uh that's why they can't they can't copy the brand Walmart is not a move fast and break thing like small oh like maybe we'll get the letter for Ms like they clearly consider the the legal impact of this before they launch yeah the main thing here too is is if you hold an actual
Hermes product up to this oh yeah it's not close it's not anywhere close and so the the some people argue oh it's like the same exact thing why is Hermes charging this much and it's like charging that because of the brand but also the quality like they've mastered the art of making these bags and they they have incredible margins but it's still a fantastic product yeah like you
know $80 like the cogs on a on a true real Aires Burkin bag or what probably a thousand probably a thousand so 10 times as much just in quality and then you get the actual brand and all the extra lift on top of that thought that was an interesting story but stay tuned for our full Valentine's Day GI guide and our reaction to the the story of arz I'm
sure we'll cover it at some point um this was this was interesting I I saw this going around some friends uh there's a scam going on you know we love to highlight scams on this show uh there's a new scam I've just recently heard about says David uh the QR code scam people are either sending you a package or they put it in your mailbox inside might be a small item not of much
value or no item at all with that there's a coupon or a piece of paper with a QR code on it for you to scan might say free or discounted or even a given away item once you scan the QR code the hackers now have access to all or Su VI your data including financial information so they're basically trying to trick you to go into like a fishing
flow so they'll be like uh scan this QR code and it takes you to like Amazon login.com and then it looks and then you type in your username and password and they've basically fished you and they've they've used like the analog real world to get you into a fishing flow which where that would normally be caught by a spam filter but it's not going to be
filtered by real world real world action yeah yeah very I had a buddy recently that got his Instagram account taken over and it was like bunch of Instagram stories of him hyping up this person named coach Maria it was like helping him invest and he's like you know I don't normally like it was written in a way it was like I don't normally talk about this kind of stuff oh like text
over it was like an Instagram story yeah so it was like text over an image and it was like I don't normally talk about this stuff but I started working with this woman named coach Maria she helped me turn two grand into 50 like reach out to her and and of course like all me and all my other friends are like awesome like I got a hit up coach all the
comments no no no finally got back in I I honestly don't think I don't think it I don't think it fooled anybody but they're doing that at such an extreme scale that that they're bound to get so this is a promoted post for two-factor authentication yeah yeah turn it on lock your accounts down the hackers are desperate these days anything for a buck
but uh have you heard of lump mail generally no what's that so lumpy mail is a uh so basically like if you send someone like junk mail they'll usually just filter it out in and uh and they'll just throw it out like at the mailbox when you get your mail you'll just throw out like oh this is clearly like a flyer for something I'm just throw this out uh
then the like physical male retail marketers figured out that if they got a machine to hand write your name and your address and make it look like it was script and like it was written by an actual person with a real stamp on it people be like oh maybe this is a Christmas card I'll open it up they open it then then they see the ad and they engage a little bit more lumpy mail is
is a is a letter that has something in it like a little chocolate and so the the envelope looks like it's lumpy and so it's more expensive to send through the mail but it has a higher open rate and so you can send people lumpy mail conversion optimization and it's all about conversion optimization to just getting someone to open the physical mail see the ad and then potentially buy
the product and uh this this is just the next generation of that yeah the the classic is I I mean I would pay an almost ungodly amount of money to never receive physical mail yeah from I would even be willing to give up letters from loved ones and Christmas cards and fully switch to digital just to not get physical mail because it's just such a
have you ever done like Earth class mail or any of those services like PO Box forwarding and then it scans it all you see I know but like enough people have f it out you have they just can send it to your address right rough but classic now is like the like they'll just write do not throw away and you're like you open it and it's like okay for some insurance
thing that I don't need I feel like in here there is a non-cam version of a very viral marketing strategy like if you like if we were to do some sort of drop where we got a bunch of people's addresses and we sent them something that looked like a package they open it up there's a QR code it goes to a Vibe real announcing season 2 of Technology
Brothers like like that or just goes public service exactly it just goes to like our X account and just says like you want to follow it oh lumpy M we were we were out of town for a couple weeks but I came home to this uh a package from fantino label uh and so I can open it up here quickly I'll read this so if you don't know fantino label uh is by a entrepreneur
and friend of the show John fantino he says gentlemen it is with the deepest admir admiration that I present to you this handcrafted tie from fantino label conceived by hand and brought to life by Fabio cerella a true Maestro of Italian bespoke tailoring with over a quarter of century of Mastery this piece is a testament to the Timeless elegance and
unparalleled craftsmanship we hold sacred he got this wonderful letter from John himself and then I saved it to actually open it on the show John had uh given us a little bit of um you know a subtle critique That We Don't Wear Ties enough and so now we don't have an excuse this thing is fantastic so expect to see us yeah rocking that I like that he just sent us one tie well I think you
got I think you the second tie is there two other no no I think he sent one to you too she like buried in your mail um no no no it's our communal tie we'll trade it off we'll share it or you I can just hold one side hold the other and it's like the fidget type thing exactly no no no it's great I I I need to get I need that's the next Evolution I got a
bunch of new suits I'm I'm sporting the white suit today got a couple more I'll be strutting on the show you look like uh Colonel Sanders had a liquidity event that's what I'm going for that's the look um but definitely the tie game is next I like the open the open collar look but you know a little too casual a little too casual for for a podcast for
technology podcast yeah uh oh that's great well thank you to John Foo and if you do wind up purch purchasing a suit from fantino fantino label tell him the technology Brothers sent you we've already had a few people go through we've had a couple conversions what was that okay in the group yeah you want to read some Q&A stuff Jordan what you got
Q&A um let's see can we get an affiliate Link in the description of those suits uh incredible suits today from Sky honestly thank you we really appreciate it AJ sharp says honestly a groundbreaking banana bone cream yes and uh John says white suits for a black market Tyler says VP let's get a ticker tape on the bottom where the fits are from with codes new
adcq uh Yep this is great so this is great this is great stuff this is fantastic see you in the chat guys Ashley says my question is what's their plan to monetize with this podcast brother we are already monetizing on a scale never before seen you don't become the most profitable podcast in the world with running a lot of ads I do think that we are very much on the side of of
integrated brand Partnerships advertisements um and there's a very good reason for this uh I mean first off we don't believe in audience capture and if so if we were charging the viewers pretty soon we'd be like what do the viewers want to see and then we'd have to deliver exactly what they want and so we are 100% % corporate supported here
so if you want to help support the company call a company and have them sponsor the podcast this is the key um but but but but seriously like there's a long uh long history of this debate about should you just charge like five or $10 a month the Strater model versus an ad model we decided early on that the ad model was much better because it allows us more flexibility it
gets we like supporting our cool companies and also it allows you to price discriminate in a way that captures more value so there are Strater readers that are literally billionaires who work at Big tech companies they pay the same price as the college student who's paying $10 a month which is cool to be clear it's cool it's great but it but it doesn't allow them it doesn't
allow we would rather we would rather we would rather anybody in the entire world to be able to come and get the 12 hours of content that we put out a week totally for free and then if you want to use ramp or work with other partners if you want to go on bezel and buy you know a fantastic watch you can do that um got a couple other got a couple other questions Ashley
says uh asking about S&P 500 and just like public market investing in the future is it going to be you know will companies require the same amount of capital as they get more and more efficient with AI my answer there is that I think we're still in the early stages of just the hyper financialization of the world crypto is the hyper financialization of memes
right and um companies uh I don't think the capital markets are going anywhere in many ways uh people predict that labor will be less valuable and capital will be potentially have be able to be more impactful because you can now you know we we talked about this yesterday with all these rollups these companies are being bought because they have a
thousand employees and people think they can bring that down to 50 employees by replacing people dayi so Capital actually becomes more uh valuable also when you just talk about the S&P 500 the S&P 500 is an index on American Business and we've and obviously like America has this narrative like we're in turmoil we're more divided than ever before things are crazy there's stagnation and
there's so many bad things happening but when you go around to other countries we just did a deep dive yesterday on Germany's economy and they are in a much worse position than us and and China's economy has been stagnating because of covid lockdowns and and deflation and currency fluctuation yeah tariffs and there's S&P 5 TOS America or not and I'm still
very markets are a reflection of the general value the earnings potential of those businesses as well as their future future potential and the the memes that get and the narratives that get built around these companies and so um thankfully we're still going to be able to deploy Capital with our absolute boys exactly um we got another uh another
just comment from CX Productions they say thank God the studio is back it's been a rough few days it's a rough few weeks actually um they tried to stop us with those fires but they couldn't and then we have another one question we thought we needed energy infrastructure to support new AI data centers we actually needed data centers to justify the energy infrastructure it's more of a
statement potentially than a question um but uh clearly not Jin's Paradox build yeah um get up to speed yeah I don't know I I I think uh even with all the Deep seek stuff uh every hyperscaler is still saying we still need to build data centers we still need to you know have all this capex and the energy requirements of um the way that you know on BG squared
Brad gersner I was listening to their episode from last week and they were talking about how one the way that open AI is projecting their chip demand just from in it would be like a third of all the chips that are sold this year by Nvidia and abene Texas where this new data center is going to be is definitely doesn't have the energy infrastructure
today to support that kind of yeah uh you know Just Energy demand so yeah um so yeah we'll see it's going to be exciting uh but but it it does seem yeah I I I I think I think deep seek just based on you know letting a few days breathe it's like it changes the economics of the B2B Market it might change the economics of the consumer Market to some degree but everyone is
marching forward towards gigawatt training runs and then 10 gwatt training runs like yeah nothing's changed on that front people want the best po possible Foundation model to build the other stuff on top of and sure if you can get those optimizations let's see what happens if you run the super optimized model on a thousand times much more
hardware and that just might speed things up uh cool let's go on to more timeline speaking of thank you everybody uh before that thank you everybody for submitting questions in the chat uh if you're listening to this on the RSS feed uh we're now live streaming daily so you can add questions live or just DM US post and we will get to your questions
ASAP yeah so simp for Satoshi says deep seek went viral outside of Twitter because of the Elon like and Zero Hedge retweet of my regera meme this broke containment and I had a lot of Normie friends in La tell me they saw this post on a bunch of Tik toks check the app store before this tweet and after it deep seek went from 31 to First and the post is Sam spent more on this than deep
seek did to train the model that killed open Ai and he posted it January 24th okay I don't even want to respond to this post with a video so Ben don't don't respond to this because uh I I generally I met some foshi I I I think he's a sharp dude but he is the biggest hater of opening eye and there's a lot of different there's a lot of assumptions in here one I think
everybody sort of understands that they probably spent quite a bit more than than what they're saying two you can't claim credit that your one post when everybody had viral posts this week about I don't think you catalyzed it to go number one in the charts it was very clear that it went number one like in a very or inorganic way and that they were
just buying you know downloads because this started happening Sunday and it didn't really hit the mainstream until this week so this is either or humor he could be joking I don't know but we're putting it in the truth Zone the truth Zone and uh yeah but but I do love just posting all the time and then if something goes viral or something happens just be like look I'm
responsible I'm responsible you know I'm the one that posted you know he yeah I I mean he very so simp very clearly wants to be credited yeah for taking down open AI you know you you I think on the Monday show when Nvidia was down 15% you said on the show that you bought I did and then what happened the next day it ripped 7% pop yeah you need to
take you need to take full responsibility for that I when when I when I did that market Buy on Monday exactly people said whoa there's some whales there's some whales that are buying we got to go this is not Financial advice around here and I not yeah we never give Financial advice I did I did post um it was so funny because like Sunday night Sacha came out
and he's like jevans jeans's par you know jevans paradox all this stuff and and I posted in in a sort of joking way just imagine being unfamiliar with jevans Paradox on a day like today because it does seem like w like part of it's part of it's like Wall Street is not always betting on their beliefs they're betting on about the future they're betting on what they think the
Market's going to do the next day and so even if you have these very intelligent analysts in Wall Street that understand jeevan's Paradox it's like energy as energy gets cheaper we use more of it things like that um they can understand that and still short the market they they expect it to go down and they're just trying to make money that that day
right they're not thinking about five years from now or they're not really they don't really care about long-term I mean do you remember what I said about uh Mark Zuckerberg in October of 22 I think I said he was he was goated and he was going to go on a generational run and then look uh Joe asthal says meta is up 69% since November of 20122 look I must
be responsible for all that wow yeah it's amazing yeah uh but I do so make a make post something and then wait for things to happen and credit for take credit for sure and then if anyone comes for you just say I was joking around I'm not I would never take credit for something asig as that Hub bro built different um but but I do think this is
a crazy stat almost a th% in two years like I mean this was the bottom like everyone was super bearish on meta at this point it that was Tik Tok was was doing well everyone thought they over invested in the metaverse the mete was yet was preat GPT chpt dropped like like uh DEC of2 like that and so and the other as the other thing that can't really be understated though is that gen
Z was spending more time on Tik Tok totally yeah and there no real like oh ban Tik Tok anything rised yeah you your next generation of users prefer another app yep yep so there were a bunch of bare thesis uh Ben Thompson he gets to claim credit for this because he was writing about how it's oversold and how meta was due for a huge comeback because the core business
was just so solid and was just throwing off greatest ad platform of all time outside of Google and ads are the best business the other thing people were really worried about was app tracking transparency the iOS update and everyone was saying that's going to screw meta's ads and and their ability to track users with cookies that was that was Tim Cook
trying to take down small businesses yes yeah and and who did it wind up hurting it wind up hurting small businesses and every other AD platform except for meta because meta has so much data that they can actually run AI across their entire they were impacted but not to the same degree and so they don't need to know that you literally clicked on this ad
clicked on this link came back a day later and then converted they can just look at all your all your traffic across all their and they're listening to everything that you say obviously obviously uh and so and so uh yeah Ben Thompson to help prep for our Valentine's gift guide just want to say hey I'm uh John I'm really looking to buy some new gifts for for my wife for
Valentine's Day after the show after the show I'll scroll and I'll I'll get some good I told you uh that my wife actually uses Instagram that way where if she's shopping for a product you'll visit a couple of the websites not just scroll a little bit not really actually shop and then just be like like a king like come to me on Instagram and then all the
retargeting ads will come and be like I'm ready to hear your pitch but you have to pay didn't feel like it always was that way now now they really follow you around they well they they follow you around but the other thing is it's so this is why it is such a bloodbath of competition in e-commerce right now because if you go you know rora right
like we sell water filters if you go to r.com right now r r a.com yeah uh and browse around for a second and then you go back to Instagram you will be start being served a bunch of ads from our competitors granted we have a much better product it's much better tested it's more effective we're confident that you'll come back to us but still it's wild that meta the company we spend more
with than anyone except basically our own suppliers yeah is like like working against us in many ways it's like you knew about rora now we're g to show you all these other alternatives to it it's a free market welcome to libertarianism Jordy yeah yeah Ross would be proud cope harder let's go to David H I'm not coping we're confident he says I worry
an unsustainable need to to raise billions of dollars has broken the discourse around AGI ASI timelines there's too many incentives to say you're on the brink of a breakthrough and too many incentives for everyone else to say they're not far behind interesting we do see a lot of this where there's a lot of the AI Foundation model leaders who are saying
AGI is so close ASI is so close just one more training one bro just one more it's almost like you know the uh you know the the scientists how they always want to build the the the H the Large Hadron Collider and there's that Meme of like the scientist being like just one more collider bro just one more just one more collider just want to go a little bigger
you trust me and then it's like I guess we do get cool foundational science out of it but it's very hard to say like what has the large hron collider done for me lately like you know I guess it discovered like quarks and stuff but like how do that really change my life I don't really have like you know teleportation or like super sonic travel or like you know space exploration
because of the the colliders and so uh we're seeing the same thing with the with the training runs I mean I am very I want them to do it just because yeah you know light some money on fire Masa and let's see how good is GPT 5 what can GPT 6 do for me y if it's the same old and it's still messing up okay cut it then but uh half a trillion let's let it
rip trilly let's let's let it rip let's go to Alex Wang he is doubling down on the Deep seek hate he says what does deep seek R1 V3 mean for llm data contrary to some lazy takes I've seen deep seek R1 was trained on a ton of human generated data in fact the Deep seek models are setting records for the disclosed amount of post-training data
for open source models 600,000 reasoning data 200,000 non- reasoning sft data human preference rhf data set of undisclosed size human processed synthetic data for cold start data uh according to Chinese AI Engineers deep seek actually values data annotation even more than other Chinese Labs with the CEO personally labeling data for the model that's kind of crazy uh this
reminds me of karpathy who used to spend a quarter of his time labeling at Tesla the Deep seek V3 paper has even even has a dedicated acknowledgement section for data annotation very interesting well we don't know exactly what's going on there but this is why I put out a call to action in Chinese characters I said uh if anyone on the Deep seek team wants to
spill any highly confidential information to us we'd be happy to discuss it on our podcast yes so if you work for deep seek feel free to call DM are open call let us know we'll get on WeChat for you yeah we'll we'll talk it over we'll talk it over uh I mean deep Z really is having an impact even as an open source model um you can see uh Arvin trenas from from uh perplexity has
integrated deep seek R1 and fax set to do Financial research on steroids and so they've they've connected crunch based data and fax set data with R1 so you can ask it to reason through things and this is really cool because a lot of times I go to chat GPT and I'm like okay we're gonna talk about um you know coinbase today give me their entire funding
history and it just doesn't have access to that data it's not reasoning through it properly so then I have to go to coin B I have to go to uh I have to go to Crunch base export all the data copy and paste that into chat GPT pull that uh it's very cool to see uh perplexity integrating those extra data sources so that you can get better results and I
think that's maybe an maybe an increasing Trend like you saw this with the operator launch where they had they had dedicated agreements and Integrations with a bunch of different companies to get access inst car to make it work even better instead of just trying to Brute Force everything with a model that might not quite be there might kind of mess up more it's like hey
yeah just give us lot a lot of these apps and platforms that you'd want to interact with have antibot totally products that are kind of trying to prevent that activity and so yeah I mean using deep seek has been a little bit cons uh like controversial from the geopolitical angle uh obviously Mark Andre's firmly on the side of like open source is great everyone should be using
R1 it's a gift to humanity I actually we discussed this briefly on the show but I asked on X um how sci-fi or tinfoil hat is it to consider the idea that there might be a Manchurian Candidate buried within the weights of an llm so basically you get this open source llm out there and it gives you normal answers to everything but then at some point it switches on
you and starts changing the way it responds and is this like years out or 10 years out or is this doable now and Trevor Blackwell I believe it was him he was one of the founders of YC was like it's possible and it's happening today and I was like crazy I got like one response it was like it was like this the smallest Post for my account but I was
like this guy's very high signal like this is this is crazy yeah so I don't I don't think there's any evidence that they did that I don't think it's actually what happened here but it is something to consider in the future we got the Hat ready yeah is it is something to consider and I think we should do the same thing next version of
llama Zuck let's embed a Manchurian Candidate that uh you know send that out into the world and convinces everyone to get into luxury watches brought to you by bezel yes let's go to near near says why did deep seek go viral tldr class resentment anger and especially shod and fraud very little actual app usage in comparison to the above and so near says my mtic model
has really failed with deep seek and my analysis of why failed is so is so failing is also failing does anyone who studies this topic have any novel takes and so near has categorized the the first week of the deep seek launch showing the increase in queries for deep seek on a the posts go from 35,000 to 66,000 to 114,000 191,000 and then explodes to almost a million on quote
unquote Black Monday the 27th like 50,000 of those Were Us and and then uh the iOS rank it went from 400 all the way to one and then there's mainstream viral videos CNBC Forbes CBS CNN Etc and so near really did a crazy deep dive here in a spreadsheet of kind of tracking how this model went so viral and what happened and it really is a very emotional issue
for a lot of people and and it spans the the gamut like uh clearly Taylor Loren was saying like yes like Go China because she's just has this like funny bit that she's doing right now where she's like a full-blown communist and like loves everything CH does and hates America and then but then there are other people that just love open source and and they don't care about the
geopolitics at all and so they're just like I don't like that open AI doesn't open source things anymore I'm an open source purist and there's a lot of those people so they'll amplify it for that reason then there's other people who just really are Sam ultman haters and they're like anything that hurts Sam will amplify and I'm stoked about then
there's other people who are just like like you know what I just want to use a cheap AI model to create my grocery lists and my recipes and this is the best app and I was on the free plan of chat GPT it wasn't reasoning at all I didn't have access to 01 whatsoever this one gives me reasoning I'm in for that I love this thanks it's a cool free app
and so there's all these different like uh other people bat bat Enthusiast if you ask open AI yeah can you make me a recipe for a really delicious terrible and and and then also I mean there's there's even people who are like anti- Nvidia and anti- hyperscaler and they're like I've been sick of of Nvidia making all this money I've been sick of this
story about Microsoft you know these big tech companies I just don't like the big tech companies and so this hurts them and I see their stocks down this is awesome and so there's all these different uh effects going on that were very unexpected not priced into near model which I think was interesting was not priced in not priced in uh let's go to Joe Wiis
he says I think one thing that's fun about AI is that it's brought back tinkering for years it's been impossible to play with the computer especially smartphones everything felt so sealed off for most users maybe this helps revive a new era of tech literacy and I completely agree with this I think this is so cool it's not just the the the cursors and the and the uh the
cognitions and the Devin it's just this ability to have a new tool I mean I remember when I got to Silicon Valley it was the uh slowmo Co or whatever it was like Social Mobile and local with the trend so like four square was at the intersection of that but there were really really strong apis for Google Maps for for delivering software on the iPhone via an app store nothing was
locked down at that point and there were also social graphs so very quickly you could say okay for my app I want to combine Google Maps with your social graph and I'll plug into the Google Maps API and the Facebook API and boom I have something today and and instead of needing to build these big services now everything's locked locked down wall
Garden you can't really like integrate these in the same way and so it's been there was like that narrow window of opportunity for like llms are so magical across all these different app experiences and model Foundation models that there's this broader excitement X has always been willing to try a new social app right something pops off and
they'll be like oh everybody will download it and play around with it usually it dies fairly quickly but right now you have a more the general so many hundreds of millions of people have tried chat chat gbt and been relatively impressed with it totally even if some of them are using it in relatively simple ways like you know asking it questions like they would Google uh that
there's this broader willingness to just try new products and experiment and and and this is why I think the whole like anti-chat GPT rapper meme is so harmful to the next generation of entrepreneurs because I imagine that in a few years like building a somewhat viral chat GPT rapper even if you get killed by open AI even if you don't make a lot of money is
going to be a massive bull signal for entrepreneurs because you're going to have someone who you know yeah they took a couple computer science courses they learned a little bit of python they installed cursor or Devon and they started spinning something up and they just made a small little niche app using R1 and these free uh open source llms they got it up it delighted a few users
and it was an endtoend product good project project and then and then when they find that business opportunity that's maybe Bor in like rolling up HOAs or whatever it's going to be like well I know that this I know that this founder can build and so I'm totally ready to put sneaker it's the new like trading sneakers exactly exactly exactly and so
uh I am I'm I'm I'm very excited about the era of uh of AI and what it means for the tinkerer and just having more tools I mean even just in 2012 Heroku was a huge deal because it it allowed you to write basically just python and then click you know you would you would push your git repo to GitHub and it would automatically deploy it on the cloud so you didn't need to install any
Linux servers even AWS which was huge because you didn't need to rack the servers yourself AWS was a huge increase in just developer productivity and like hacker productivity uh Heroku was another step because you didn't even need to say Okay I want to provision a server it would just do that automatically how big is that business today Roku yeah I don't know if it's
been like fully so it was bought by Amazon for I think almost a billion it was a y it was one of the first major liquidity events for a YC founding team and so they were when I got to YC in 2012 people were like oh man like Heroku like that's like a sick outcome like that's a great business like they did so well and then I'm sure it got folded
into like a million different projects because inspired it got to a point where half of the YC batch would be Dev tools yeah in many ways because that one event and so INSP you could start on Heroku you could even now they have even simpler products called like serverless architectures if you're familiar with any of this where like you don't even
need to write the server it's it's not Heroku would like spin up a server and keep it on all the time and it would kind of go dor in every once in a while if you on like the free tier but generally the server was on and if you visited the web app it was there serverless is just sitting there and only when the query comes in it spins up the server immediately runs the query
that you want or the the the code that you want and then gives you the answer so you that was like super super cheap because you could throw something up and if you had no users it was no zero cost yeah you only got you only got charged for the queries whereas Heroku would give you like one free one so you could keep something small up but uh if it
scaled at all it would still be expensive because you'd be running it when you didn't have demand there was some like automatic load balancing stuff and then as you scale up your business you go to okay now I'm using all of aws's like bespoke tools then I'm provisioning like dedicated servers and then maybe I'm building a 500 billion doll data center in Texas you know let's
go to Palmer lucky we uh we talked about this a little bit but he is also beating the drum on deep seek uh and the and the controversy around deep seek he says deep seek is legitimately impressive but the level of Hysteria is an indictment of so many the $5 million number is bogus it is pushed by a Chinese hedge fund to slow investment in
American AI startups service their own shorts against American Titans like Nvidia and hide sanction evasion America is a fertile bed for scops like this because our media apparatus hates our technology companies and wants to see President Trump fail fail we have so many useful idiots uncritically reporting Chinese propaganda as fact because on some level they want it to be
true they love seeing hundreds of billions of dollars wiped off the market cap of our largest companies and so there was there was a little bit of uh back and forth in the replies to this Palmer kind of clarified uh a lot of people were saying oh well you know what are you talking about like they didn't they didn't drive down the stock price with a short it's a multi-trillion
dollar company like they wouldn't have been able to do that but would he was saying was that they might have just had like you know a billion dollar short position and boom they just make $150 million and that's a great trade right he wasn't saying that like all of the downturn was caused by short pressure no the whole I mean look at Hindenburg
research they're they're taking a position releasing a report and hoping that it goes down they're not capturing the entire loss associated with that selloff right exactly and I think the things that make that sort of conspiracy theory or or broader Theory uh somewhat believable is it was clear that the app on a random Sunday when nobody outside of X was talking about it
yeah just happened to go through the number one app in the entire iPhone app store yeah with a Chinese character developer name that just screams yeah like even Tik Tok doesn't use Chinese characters in their to be fair a lot of the app chart is very gameable and it's and and I believe that that screenshot shot was in the productivity category which is also very
slow moving because there aren't that many viral apps that are gaining and the and the chart is based on momentum and so if you're if you're getting you know double the amount of downloads every day you will be number one even if a thousand times more people downloaded chat GPT that day the momentum is what matters more than anything else and so
no one really knows the algorithm um but it is very interesting and honestly it's been weird because in the paper they say we don't count R&D dollars in that $5 million number we don't count the servers that we had from a previous training run in this number we don't count the data Singapore Singapore GPS so there's a lot of things that they that they didn't count and they admit to
this but it's been kind of uncritically reported in the US as just oh it's five million the point is there so many like going back to his Palmer's Original Point there's so many people that want to see totally Tech fail like the traditional media hates Tech still yep the there's a lot of people that want to see Trump fail he just announced Stargate totally they you know want to
people want to position him as silly or dumb or whatever just give him an L yeah and so there's a lot of people that just take everything at face Val there is something very like mimetically or like inherently viral about the fact that the number five is both in the Deep seek announcement and in the Stargate announcement so it's literally 5 million
versus 500 billion it's exactly a 100,000 and I think if it was like 4 million 6 million 600 billion it like wouldn't have clicked as much in people's heads but just the fact that it was exactly $100,000 exactly a 100,000 times cheaper to do something like impressive and it's like what's going on this is such a big also disingenuous though because
presumably the Stargate Level Training runs will provide even the theory the whole reason to do it is it will provide models that are much better than 01 yeah much better than deep SE and yeah I mean the original GPT 4 training run was 500 million so 100x so they were able to it seems like they were able to get a 100x Improvement in efficiency um if the
number is even close to being right definitely a 10x if even if they're even if they're numbers off by 10x they're still they're still 10x cheaper um but we don't have numbers on what 01 cost a train because that is not the same as the R1 model it's a reasoning model it's a different thing it's it's it's more about the algorithm than than the training data the smart marketing
strategy to let everybody compete on Advertising how much they're spending on training runs and then take the exact opposite approach tot it's like a a fitness you know trainer online being like everybody's telling you to work out six days a week I've got a product that lets you work out one day a week and get the same results it's just like so
contrasted it's similar to like the friend.com we spent our whole seed round on a domain we spent $2 million on this domain that gets a story and then also I built a massive viral success with a $10 domain anyone can do it that's also interesting and clickable but but just going with something in the me in the like that meets expectations like you
have to break expectations if you're going to go viral well let's go to some good news uh did you see the boom arrow news yes the supersonic plane broke the supersonic barrier broke the speed of sound mock 1.1 very good news and Nicole whiskoff says my husband from the other room babe can you believe the founder of Boom Arrow used to be a product manager
at Groupon unbelievable I got a frame his LinkedIn and put it on my wall serious congratulations uh big fans over here and I love his did you read his LinkedIn it says at Groupon he was there for two years two months and he says there is nothing like working on internet internet coupons to make you yearn to build something you truly love it is such a fascinating uh story for
him it's been over a decade at boom really rough go hard down round lots of Regulation tons of red tape when I see the announcement I like everyone in in the YC world was going crazy because I think they just did the new round as well and there were a lot of people that doubled down I think Joe Gia was in a few other people and uh and and on the
face of it I was like this isn't that impressive it's just a plane going mock 1.1 like we did this in the 70s and like they had to caveat the record and saying it's like the first domest it's the first civil plane that's domestically produced that's broken the speed of sound because the Concord was a French project um and so I was like this
doesn't feel as Innovative as it could it's not like an it's not like it's like mach 10 like we've never done that before but at the same time it it is impressive when you think about just all the red tape that exists these days in these hardtech companies and it just shows they actually broke through that so it's almost more impressive as a business and Regulatory story than an
engineering story to me to yeah yeah I buy that I mean they had 50 people on the team which is crazy that is crazy group of 50 people came together bu and said let's build a plane that can go let's build the fastest possible plane we can build it's crazy it's amazing story and it I mean if you look back it's like we as Humanity we gain the ability to build things and then if you
don't keep the pressure on you lose you lose the ability totally uh if we ever get to a point where we hit hour three on a podcast and we and we decide oh I'm tired I need to go to the bathroom just remember just remember you got to keep the pressure on uh but but but this is like Elon when starting SpaceX he wanted to buy Russian icbms cuz he was like
well they this is like this technology that that they had that still like is viable and we can use it or learn a lot from it so I think it's great and and it's such an amazing story to me that uh many many investors would have left this company for dead at the down round and I'm sure many did yep and are now kicking themselves because they didn't
believe in the company when it was at it's roughest point Y they turn around so it's just a fantastic story they're going to make documentaries on this it's going to be awesome Jason Carman already has I'm pretty sure but we need a new one we need the full Heroes Journey the bottom out the recap yeah the really dramatic documentary that they're going
to make is the hermas versus Boom story they're in different markets because one's military and one's commercial but uh they're these two Founders they're clearly racing against each other to build hypersonics and supersonic planes and there there's like a lot of similar engineering that goes into it and I think if you if you start telling that
story as a horse race it gets a lot more exciting as opposed to just the story of one company uh so we're going to the middle we're going to the Middle East later this month or sorry later in February and uh I wish we could be going mock mock one that'd be amazing very nice um Jack Reign says the scy versus meme coins has been a great Twitter side plot in q1 and Martin scr says haahaha
fcoin and dog whiff hat tokens for our words uh what happened it went down it's only down like 30% that doesn't seem that bad still stuff to go% yeah that's the thing memes have some intrinsic value the fdv is $ 793 million Which is far too high for something so stupid but uh people do like it could be the future of Finance don't judge it don't jinx it I mean
that's what happen with Dogecoin it's it's too bad uh but it is funny that scr's been been out there giving out lots of financial advice uh let's move on to uh so it is a it is a really good bit for him to go heavy against uh just calling out things that he identifies as stupid or scammy or he's going after he goes after these like bio he's he's had a couple bets
where he'll post something Sunday night short this company and then and then maybe it's a butterfly effect or maybe they just like people figure it out dra he has a huge audience so after sat nadela said jevans Paradox strikes again and posted the Wikipedia to jeans's Paradox on a Sunday night or something because he was worried about the stock going down uh R kazian over at ramp
their Economist that they just hired uh says we can see this in the tri ramp data here's data from a small Market a small sample of our base some thoughts though about whether the market reaction is Justified or not companies purchase more tokens as the average price per token collapsed and so uh you can see even just over uh I guess it's just two
months or one month um uh the token the average price per million tokens of llms dropped by I guess factor of three and the number of tokens purchased increased on ramp cards because uh companies are buying more and it makes sense there's so many places where you want to stuff an llm and if it's super cheap it makes sense on a per transaction basis it's
like yeah my LTV of a customer hundred bucks I can't afford to spend $10 on llm inference per customer but if it's a dollar sure yeah why not um I got a I got a promoted post that's in the form of a review okay uh like if podcast called Allin was good and interesting uh unnecessary unnecessary jab uh we like we like uh it's our favorite political
podcast over there uh and Jeremy sun says if you want to understand what startups are actually like and immediately tap into the unhinged skitso gundo core Vibe this is the show for you who do you trust a couple dudes in the dream in the arena building or a guy who invested in Uber once and won't shut shut up about it this review brought to you by Symon AI Symon help keeps your
grandma from getting scammed through a free AI Security app that reads email text and more to identify scams in progress stops them before they happen and cost scammers money by wasting their time that seems valuable super cool hear me this is awesome uh we covered a couple scam the QR code scam yeah so it's s i m b i a nt. symbient and uh uh I need to get
this for my family members uh I would love to get a little print out at the end of the month maybe actually physical piece of paper great if you can make a printer integration Jeremy that'd be awesome do you want me to read the next one yeah and we'll go back and forth uh lifelong bureaucrat great podcast although it has nothing nothing to do
with my line of work doing TPS reports and publish and pushing paper in the federal bureaucracy it gives me a sense of how the other half lives and better yet the 1% love to listen and then drop the lingo on my gs14 supervisors don't know what that means um get a great way to seem value ad and Tech native since no one in my government workplace understands any of these words Banger
pchf misspelled it's two P's and then an e uh size gong they think I must be working in the it uh the net result is they leave me alone and then I have more time to listen to the technology Brothers podcast huge win let's go next one should leave an ad for your agency well we love the we love the government well it's an ad for the government pay
taxes on time yep and uh don't break the laws yep uh technology Brothers this is from Nick Stewart technology brothers gave me the strength to quit wearing Lululemon and the courage to start using nicotine again thank you this review sponsored by angelist attention beloved Capital allocators are you still working at a large tier one Venture firm and
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them John and Jordy sent you uh so anyways I use Angel list all the time a bunch I've I've invested in in uh funds on angelist I uh one of my you know very close friends Jack uh recently set up a a new uh I think it's like a $40 million fund on angelist and um yeah I'm an LP in it it's an awesome experience and uh yeah Angelus is the best I used to have
to compete with them I did not enjoy that now I I'm just happy to be a user Fant thank you to Nick for the five star review let's move on to uh Cal 805 says the missing piece into my Chad diet last year I committed to overhauling my diet and becoming a true Chad existing nutrition apps weren't cutting it so I took matters into my own hands I built
your body aai now available in the Apple App Store or at yourbody a.com the fastest and easiest way to track your calories and macros but there was a missing piece my information diet fortunately I discovered technology Brothers they consistently deliver the essential Tech insights and entrepreneurial inspiration for my mind that my mind craves with body with both
body and mind now fueled by Optimal Nutri nutrients I'm a new man I'm down 12 pounds I'm pushing up two plates on the bench My Wife and Kids respect me let go I could I couldn't be more excited for what 2025 will bring all right we got to check out your body AI very cool um and uh I just love how everybody that leaves a review like crushes the ad y they crush the review
they they're doing best when it's all integrated oh yeah it's fantastic uh it makes me we already love ads them but you guys are you guys are brilliant so doing great so keep it up if you haven't done it already go leave a five star review and I mean this is untapped Alpha you can do it twice there's Spotify and apple you can create new accounts
we might have to set a limit on a per company basis people do that like crazy we will get flagged as like spers basically they'll be like this is the next deep SE I just I just want to yeah yeah if you if it's really funny to think about an apple like podcast like moderator who just like stumbles upon this and and and like starts removing these cuz like it's probably against the
terms prob spam but we support it 100% yeah so thank you so we're we're capping it at two right now one on Apple podcast one on Spotify mix it up um let's go you can also you can leave an unlimited amount of ads in the YouTube comments true true yeah and we post like we're now posting five videos five videos a day great yeah like subscribe ring the
bell go on open AI make an operator bot that just spams the comment section no no just generate the text the cheap llm and then copy paste yeah it's the artisanal way of of spamming Orin John says he's about he's about to cross a thousand short form videos this is all it took to Achieve Financial Freedom midcareer and never have to work for someone else ever again kind of
ridiculous when you think about it so congrats to Orin on hitting a thousand I just thought this was cool so he started like I think really leaned into reals I followed him on Instagram I think he's also on Tik Tok and some of these other platforms and he's just been dialing in not only building his business in public but like helping people understand these
like short form platforms you know built pry pretty awesome Community around it so I think that that's the amazing thing it uh 5 years ago it was super hard to get attention on Instagram you could get attention but it was super slow it was like very hard to grow on Instagram there was go around and leave comments everywhere I had a bot yeah so it's just like really tough
yeah it was spammy tough time and then these short form platforms now make or this much more democratic system where they don't like some if you're an account and you have 100,000 followers on Instagram and then you stop really posting or leaning into short form you're pissed because you're like I post and a thousand people see it yep but it makes it so it levels the playing field
and you can have a 100 followers and you post a good video I still will be on reals sometimes and I'll get a video that has like no views from like a new account I'm like sometimes it's super relevant other times it's total slop testing it out on you um it's a free way to to change your life well we started with with Elon and starlink and SpaceX
uh bringing internet to your phone from the stars and we will close on Elon Musk and SpaceX uh the president has asked SpaceX to bring home the two astronauts stranded on the space station as soon as possible we will do so so very good yeah I mean it's absolutely wild that they've been up there for a very long time and seemingly Elon was very willing excited
and able to assist in the effort and the Biden admin had snubbed him at the like EV car event that they hosted and just like ignored Tesla ignored that he had the most dominant you know private space company or space yeah you know force in in the history of mankind uh crazy and and the debate over whether or not they were technically stranded was like a big
thing oh well it's just a safety thing they could go back or they could go back any time they could go back and then it was like no they actually can't go back on that Boeing pod they got to go back on the SpaceX thing but when will they go back do they do do the astronauts have a decent uh internet connection when they're up there can can they use like
reels and X I don't know I don't know how fast the can they do like can they watch like brain rot slop or do they have they might be able to use star they're right up there with the they just beam down they got black market I think they I think they have pretty good internet I don't know but uh I mean the steel man here is that like they were supposed to go up for like two
days they got to stay up there for like nine months it's like I think going to space for 9 months maybe it's like a mutiny thing and they're like we don't want to come down we like it up here we like our stars now yeah yeah we like our little like it is crazy elon's never been to space like he's like the space guy but he's never gone out it's so
crazy too that astronauts have to keep a straight face and and just like it would be very embarrassing for NASA if they were freaking out oh sending sending help messages out like tweeting at tweeting at Elon saying Boeing like stop like please let us die but like Biden got to just leave the White House and go on vacation and they're sitting up there
being like really like it's rough we don't get to go home until somebody sends a spacecraft I mean people definitely jumped on this because it was such like a pro Elon narrative obviously but then it was true like it was like okay yeah Boeing actually couldn't do it Ula actually messed up and then it was amid all the Boeing planes and stuff it was just such a such a mess last year
yeah rough year for boing anyway that wraps up our show thanks for suit go leave us aarie put an ad in the comments thank you for watching live and leaving comments we enjoy uh we we love podcasting and we we love live streaming yeah and uh we're excited to do this with your support for decades to come and we'll see you tomorrow have a great day see y