in the world we have some breaking news it's Monday it's still early the market isn't even closed but the game is over for brother of the week we're giving it to Luke feror Luke's been on the show easy pick uh Jord is traveling we're doing our first remote live stream hang with us leave us some notes in the comments if you notice something off producer Ben will help us out try and
get us squared away but we had to give brother of the week to Luke feror you might know him as a Scrolls decipherer he worked with Matt fredman on the herc herculanum Scrolls story we will be doing a deep dive on that later this week but congratulations to Luke your brother of the week uh just epitomizing what it means to be a technology brother
an absolute dog an absolute dog let's go through some of the posts um yeah and to be clear to be clear over the weekend this was definitely stirred up a little drama because quite a number of people were blatantly attacking uh Luke and a couple of his uh peers uh for specifically for their age oh yeah which is funny given that the founding fathers
were uh many of whom were were uh around the same age totally and of course they they built the greatest country in the entire world so you would imagine that a couple young you know kids uh young adult men uh would be able to fix something you know as simple as a Treasury System it's quite a lot more simple than founding a new nation so let's give him some credit but uh let's
get into the timeline yeah this is exactly what I want to see from the government this is exactly what I wanted to see from Doge I'm super excited with with all these Elon projects there's always so much energy and then there's always a question of will he deliver on time is it gonna look different and oh is it going to be a bunch of VCS who are
in there and they're just like talking and posting it's like no he found the building he convinced them to come in work really hard Tour of Duty Tour of Duty too and it's just exactly what I want out of this and it's the most bullish signal for America like I honestly feel proud to be an American knowing that Luke is in there today it's just a fantastic development I'm super
excited and so get out there it's war on the timeline they're trying to take down our boy we got to circle the the the wagons we got to rally the troops also John give yourself some credit because it was it mid 2024 or something like 2023 that you were posting something to the effect of of a call to action to get this type of uh individual the government yeah yeah i' i' been saying
for a long time that instead of a pres presidential age minimum we need an age maximum I want a cracked 22-year-old in there chugging Red Bulls staying up all night solving the pro the problems of the government with his absolute boys and and and when you think about you know what what is the real problem with having an octogenarian president it's
well yeah if the you know if there's some crisis in the UK but you aren't if you're built different like a 19-year-old and you can just shake it off and yeah you're you're sleeping on an eight sleep for two hours a night it's the equivalent of 10 hours on a regular mattress and you're just you got some white monsters loaded up maybe some matina
Yates and you're good to go definitely yeah this is exactly what what what what I want for solving the government's problems and also I mean Luke is like perfect for this because you think about what is what was the herculanum Scrolls project it was a ton of really dense data that needed to be analyzed in a novel way and it need to be need to be zoomed out and looked at broadly and
holistically but then also analyzed rigorously with the best machine learning tools that are available he's actually he's actually a comically perfect fit for the role especially because I'm sure a lot of the data that they have to handle is in physical paper form right and so yes I'm I'm imagining it's not you're not just processing all this sort of digitized data payment
information things like that um but uh but yeah I'm sure they're building software to sort of analyze both the physical and digital sort of structure of the entire um Treasury Department and I hope that they I hope that they sort of attack this first and then move on from there yeah I'm super excited so Elon writes time to confess media reports
saying that Doge has some of the world's best software Engineers are in fact true love to see it it's incredible but it's so it's so true and like this is what China has gotten right and you got to hand it to the Chinese the best like the top top talent they get recruited into the Chinese government and and that just hasn't happened iner a great honor great
honor decades and you think about our space program we really did send the best and brightest to NASA to build the space shuttle and to build the the the Saturn rockets that you know took us to space and did the initial space exploration and that just there just hasn't been a cool government organization that's been able to pull and Luke I mean I I know Luke I've met
him once and had a great conversation with him and there was a moment where a lot of people were saying like Luke is like so he's he has like founder written all over him he's very talented but we're in this weird phase where a lot of businesses that are getting built right now they're they're they're actually leveraging connections and they require raising billions of dollars and so like
the the hacker Zoomer kid doesn't actually have as much of a leg up as they did in the 20 2010s yeah remember remember I I uh Luke had been on the show a few months ago at some point or some po something he was posting about and he followed me and I and I immediately DMD him and then I believe I I messaged you like we should go find the text but it it was some of the
effect of no matter what Luke does next yeah as much money into it as possible yeah no I completely agree Talent yeah internally I was talking to somebody who is like it's kind of weird because he's getting advice that's like oh maybe you should just go work at a VC firm for a while like you're clearly very talented but there's no like obvious startup that
you're like burning to build and and and it's been this like indictment of like gen Z just hasn't been able to create these like Banger companies because of all the structural like like you know Zuck is 40 he's not that old he's in founder mode he's running a super powerful social networking company that will exterminate every other attempt and it's fine it's fair it's good but it's
like if you if you're if you're some cracked social some cracked kid and you want to build the next social network like you're going up against a very very uh like agile trillion dollar company and you're competing against an older better capitalized more experienced version of yourself that probably has a similar ount of energy yeah which is
really tough the other thing is is um a trap that founder types fall into is just they know they're meant to be a founder and so they just default into starting companies and one of the challenges now is there's so much access to Capital you could have a bad idea be able to raise money for for it and then you're sort of like locked into that business and that opportunity and that
team and what Luke has done I think is really smart which is ideate around a bunch of different stuff go work for you know Nat fredman then uh then go work in Doge and when he inevitably starts his own company the the the founder narrative is going to be really obvious in hindsight it's like oh I worked for Nat fredman then I did a little work for Elon then I
started my company but he's and so so it feels almost inevitable at this point that whatever he does will be hyper hyper hyper competitive round and will likely turn into a big important company but he's not rushing in to do that which I think is super smart and so Luke wise locked his account I don't know when like like maybe weeks ago um but I did want to share some classic Luke posts
just to kind of get you in the mindset of what's going on there the last thing he reposted on January 11th is an Elon tweet that says incomp incompetence in the limit is indistinguishable from sabotage which I think is great because and you're on the wrong side he's there to to to uh to you know remove incompetence and fight through all of that and and uh the the the December
10th you could tell that he was already thinking about this stuff are there llms made specifically for parsing things like documents forms PDFs Json HTML XEL Etc and converting them from one format to another and so you know I don't know clearly thinking about the right TCH this is called building in private folks it's the next it's the next wave yeah um
no and the and the non-funny part about all this is that Luke within the past 24 48 Hours has undoubtedly receive death threats oh yeah uh I know I was talking to a buddy over at X and he's gotten death threats just for working at X and working on you know working for Elon uh and he's and he's far less sort of high-profile and certainly didn't go
viral in the way that Luke had so that's why we posted this morning our official response uh we will defend Luke farer with our life uh absolutely needed if needed so Luke if you need some men in suits uh to just stand outside the door give us a call Miss call that's great yeah and uh it's fascinating because just earlier today for our Deep dive today uh I had a old New Yorker article
that was in PDF form but it was but it was taken from images and so it was very very difficult to get that into just plain text I had to use Google to OCR it or actually used Adobe to OCR it and then I was stuffing the messy text which was massively corrupted basically into bunch of different llms finally chat gpt1 Pro mode was able to do it and spit
out the correct text flawlessly um but but uh imagine doing that like millions and millions of times like it took me like an hour to just figure out the right set of tooling just to do this um and and and he's already think so it's like the perfect technology intersection getting the perfect people in there and honestly and that's I saying oh sorry from from a fit
standpoint it seems harder to me to under to understand process and start to make change in the US Treasury Department on any reasonable timeline than using AI to read Scrolls that have never been read in in three to however many thousand years yeah and not even be able to you know touch the paper or it'll disintegrate so yeah it absolutely is is um a task for a generational mind
yeah and this should be a bipartisan issue like just digging through and understanding where the money is going this has happened on both sides of the aisle for decades through Foya requests but what happens is that you you ask the government hey uh can you send us documents about like where the money's going and they'll be like sure here are
all the documents and then every once in a while the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal will be able to like kind of hack through and find a couple interesting things and it'll be a headline and then maybe something gets done maybe it goes to a senator or congressman and they say hey we need an inquiry like why why did all the money go this way this doesn't make any sense
um yeah but being able to actually look at things at scale look at every single line item one by one that's something that's powered by Ai and only implementable by a hacker like Luke so I'm very excited for that and his team um let's go to another post he shared in November 19th uh he says 15 years ago they all called Elon crazy and it's a quote post of uh the SpaceX rocket
Starship crashing down in the uh splash down in the ocean splash down very exciting and uh and and for what it's worth uh a month ago they called him crazy a week ago they called him crazy 72 hours ago 48 hours ago I mean they're gonna keep calling this guy crazy uh and it'll take the fullness of History to to really make any any type of judgment but so far so good in my
opinion yeah and so uh just to give you a little sample of what doge is going after in terms of messy spending that might not be in the interest of the American taxpayer uh Josh Steinman highlights uh screenshot from uh some sort of report saying for instance the University of California San Francisco received $815 million in research funding the school keeps about 40% of
that for administrative costs so $300 million in overhead um that's something that of course this this report needed to you know Foya and figure out this one example but there's probably millions of examples of it like that and maybe maybe 40% the right amount we need to know know where the money's going before we can decide whether or not it's good
that's such a unbelievably high I'll start by saying I'm glad University of California San Francisco is receiving that much research funding because at a at a high level I'm sure they're doing good work with that yeah but to think about the the the head count you need to spend $300 million a year a l not not not for um act actual any any actual research but just to manage the research
is unbelievably uh High number especially if anyone that you know uh companies can spend $300 million a year but you really gota you really got to staff up yeah yeah and so when I'm thinking about like if you just think about the the the office size needed to hold the equivalent of a $300 million a year payroll now obviously the admin costs are not entirely yeah uh uh you
know all payroll it's not all payroll but you have to imagine quite a lot of it is yep um it uh it's just uh mind-blowing so I'm glad that that styman called this out because saying oh they got all this funding 40% of it goes to like admin doesn't necessarily sound that bad because it takes you know real uh effort to make sure that the stuff
gets done correctly and the researchers have the right support but when you say $300 million in administrative cost it's just hilariously High also just looking at the time series data of were we spending 40% on Administration cost or administrative costs where during the moonlanding or during the initial anti-missile buildout or any other program yeah a lot of these things it's
like maybe we do need an F35 but are we overpaying now relative to previous projects certainly seems like yes what is a good Benchmark what should we be paying and so all of that comes from the data the data it's funny if you compare this to um not necessarily a perfect comparison but if you compare this to uh if you had Apple where like 40% of Apple's costs
were going to just like the executive team who are just managing the people that were doing the actual work it just like up in arms like you know this is ridiculous when it's when it's going to a university and it's just being spent on admin at the University uh apparently it's been justifiable enough that they've been able to do it for a while
so uh yeah somebody should look into how long this is going on and what perent of it was in in you know 30 years ago maybe maybe open ai's new deep research Pro uh product can can uh help us understand that for 50 cents maybe uh well everyone's doing their part Po from eight sleep has sent SLE eight sleep pods to anyone sleeping at Doge Elon Musk tell us if you need more fantastic
way to help and support the team uh these these opportunities like come up very randomly and it's great to see a Founder going direct and just immediately actioning it something and I mean you know within a few hours of posting this he had uh another photo up saying hey they're in the shipping dock they're getting loaded they're going out
today it's so smart because even if you're even if these um kids young adults um you know Luke in this situation is only sleeping four hours a night it's still you should be sleeping your absolute best four hours in that period so uh I I was feeling the pain last night I'm obviously traveling right now and don't have my Aid sleep and uh uh next time I come here I might just
get one shipped here because I'll be back at some point um just un unbeatable unbeatable sleep but uh what else we got John I just lost audio on you yeah if I touch this it it turns off uh let's move on to our second story of the morning uh jelly jelly coin launched by Sam Lon over at slow Ventures and a company that I think he is backing in the Creator economy space uh let's lead
off there's been some backlash uh we'll we'll go through some of the posts and then we'll we'll read through Sam's uh kind of post morm on the coin uh Nikita says the backlash over jelly jelly coin has been hilarious to watch excluding Trump every single meme coin launched in the last year has gone to zero like what do people expect to happen until a
platform figures out how to make meme coins a genuine measure of a Topic's future relevance and not simply an Arbitrage of transaction timing this pattern will repeat itself 100% of the time the replies to this post are a perfect demonstration of the problem that needs to be solved the Arbitrage should not be about getting access to the instrument early but by having a
contrarian insight about a topic or person's future relevance and so can you a what is jelly jelly coin break it down for me yeah we we should talk later I wonder if you could somehow tie tokens to Google Trends relevancy and so that price would fluctuate based on actual like interest in a specific topic I guess you could really manipulate that by just paying boss
anyways uh and Nikita Nikita is funny that he's sharing this because he's been under a lot of pressure kind of playing into the joke over the last week saying oh I'm gonna launch a token I'm gonna launch a token and then he keeps not launching the token because I don't think he wants to deal with having a his name attached to something that's trading in in a public market well he
did he said he said the the the that that the like the web address is now available in the post below and it was just gamblers anonymous. org okay and so here's here's here's what happened though a bunch of people created Gamblers Anonymous tokens yeah of course started sending him the token because his salana address is public and so he just decided to donate all the token you
can't joke about crypto they will just make a coin for whatever you say whatever you say yeah um very very frustrating anyway so so jelly jelly launched last week uh and to be clear the token is not gone to zero right it's sitting at a $40 million market cap I had the tab pulled up okay um and so it's certainly not a zero yet um but last week Sam Lon over at slow wanted to
support his portfolio company called jelly jelly jelly jelly is a they're trying to build some type of video sharing platform but to start they basically built a product that makes it easy to share um from my understanding make it super easy to share conversations like this so Zoom conversations Google Hangouts and like quickly turn those into sharable videos
which is smart because you could basically tell your friends or you know somebody you're working with hey let's jump on this Zoom call and it quickly turns it into a video that you can use uh basically makes a podcast a video podcast super quickly cool and in theory it's viral in the same way that um in the same way that Loom videos are viral
right like they were able to grow super quickly because it's a lot of virality built into the product and so they launched this token and I guess the founder of jelly jelly was a on the founding team or or was the co-founder of venmo back in the day um and uh uh anyways had some involvement with venmo so there was a lot of hype and then you get Sam leson who was very very early
into uh salana he was a salana seed investor yep which is funny because there's a whole backstory there where at one point you know Sam Lon likes to joke about uh the crypto culture and so he he posted something in 2022 or 2021 and said I don't get this whole GM thing I think it's kind of dumb oh yeah and he just got like completely dumped on by the entire crypto community and the
founder of salana just replied I I'll kill you because BM was a big part of sana's culture and what ended up um what ended up happening is that the salana founders account got banned because this was like the super woke ERA this was the woke era and so they were like death threat and they didn't take it as a joke and they just like banned his account he
obviously got reinstated but it was like this whole 8 hour period of drama where Sam got his portfolio founder banned from X that's so crazy so anyways this is a whole backstory um last week they they come out and they do this really long uh X spaces where they're just talking about um the token and the project and and anytime in crypto when you have very uh accomplished Web Two
Founders or investors that come in and create a project it's going to get a lot of hype and momentum because a lot of cryptos you know there's like tens of thousands of tokens that are launched every day and most of them are launched by Anonymous people and so in this situation it was launched by reputable Founders investors and so got a lot of
attention really quickly the token went from I forget where I had a buddy who who made a 40x return in about two hours yeah I have no idea how much money he put in but it went from you know somewhere near zero because they tried to do what's called a fair launch which we'll get into with Sam's Post in a bit and then it rocketed to like a$ 250 or
$300 million market cap and so a lot of people invested at sub a million dollars because it just kind of came out of nowhere and so um it ended up being a phenomenal trade now the issue is that jelly jelly jelly the video sharing platform wanted to use this token as a way to acquire users and attention and their plan was to integrate the token into the platform and make it so that
you could only use the platform if you were a token holder and maybe there's some other incentives or rewards down the line but I think what's happened over the last week the price is obviously down dramatically it's down to around 35 million $35 million market cap so certainly not a zero if you invested early last week you're up you're up 35x or something like that yep um but
there's still this sort of downward pressure it's sold off a lot the chart doesn't look great and so um now they're sort of dealing with the repercussion of basically having a token which is kind of a proxy for for the business but it's not Equity right and so the value of the token is purely based on how much people think it will go up in the future and so now I think
they're having like they've been facing um blowback and Sam's been under pressure and and I think the founders Been Under Pressure I mean they'll figure it out it's it's not the end of the world um but now they're facing this pressure from people that bought the token without caring about about the the software platform Y and they just want the number to go up and so in cryp in
crypto product Market fit is number goes up right it doesn't matter what you're doing at all if if you're trading down and there's sell pressure and and people don't see a future in the price so the product is the price and so now they have they basically have to build like two businesses which is the challenge they have to figure out how to make the
price of their token goes up otherwise people will be angry at them and then they just have to build the real business so it's not necessarily the best situation to be in but why don't we read through Sam's post and and yeah so let's kick it off with the Venture artist says Market doesn't seem to be pricing in the fact that the jelly jelly guy has a meeting set up with the salana
foundation I don't know if that's a joke or not but it does give you the chart it kind of explains that it went way up and then crashed and then cyan says although jelly jelly coin has fallen from about 250 million to 35 million and potentially going down further I think I myself think of it think of it as rugged it could pump back to 150 million fall
again to 35 million um leson is a very reputable person most of his projects have reached one billion in valuation and Sam says most but not not most but some I am quite bullish that there is an interesting crypto angle to integrate in jelly jelly but boy the trading action around this immediately on launch has been absolutely Bonkers in all directions and so my question with all
of this is like is like I'm I'm actually pretty receptive to like hey we want we're founder of venmo I'm building a social app Money flowing around yeah I it's very possible that uh he was just on the the team at venmo I need to confirm but venmo guy building social media wants to integrate payments that's cool the question is why does it have to
be its own token couldn't you just use usdc couldn't you use Bitcoin couldn't you use just it's not the the reality is jelly jelly the video sharing plat creation and sharing platform has a very different audience than just the crypto community and so telling your potential customers that just want to sign up and use your video sharing platform hey you
actually need to own this salana meme coin yep that's GNA fluctuate quite a bit in price if you want to use the product yep it ends up being in a tough spot maybe you give the token holders lifetime access to the product but here's the thing so this person cyan is and to be clear to anybody that's just Audio Only this is not cyan banister this is just some random random person
on X um uh everybody only cares about the price action they don't care about product at all and so Sam is now in this place where he has to defend kind of the token and the platform itself um and I don't know if you saw he also uh this was on Friday I think he Sam posted hey folks doing the jelly jelly thing a few people pointed out to me that when I deleted some tweets some
people were confused I don't know what the tweets were he says I'm new to this type of coin space so sorry I just want you to know what is up listen to the space that we did last night it is early and plans are coming together but I'm excited and you guys know I am the Genesis Wallet not selling have it sold so to be clear Sam didn't do this to make money he did this as like an
interesting social experiment to drive user acquisition and attention around JY jelly um and so this is definitely not you know some you know they didn't operate this as a team to make money because it's a venture back company but now they're facing that pressure of how do we make this go the token price go up yeah and to be clear like a a traditional rug like what happen with
the Haw Tua coin is where the Genesis wallet or the Insiders buy and then they sell into the volume as soon as the and that's what Market but with this it's like there could be other completely unrelated parties that are then pumping and then selling and so they're they're kind of rugging but maybe it's not affiliated with the actual team so you
can't really put that rugging moniker on Sam and his Core group that actually launched the thing is that fair yeah I think that I think that's fair uh but yeah that that Trump uh in many ways did this right he launched a token uh he and his team were selling billions of dollars into all the buying volume yep price still went up price is down 75% from high so uh I think jelly jell is
down more like you know 80 90% something like that but uh but again it wasn't the team selling it was people that bought you know if you invested at a $1 million market cap and you put 50 Grand I don't I don't even know if that would have been possible with how the the liquidity pool was set up but yeah you you could have been sitting on tens of millions of
dollars yeah and then there's an obvious incentive to be like hey I have no idea what project is gonna be I want sell I'm gonna sell yeah it really it really makes me think like like if you are going to launch a token for your project like you have to be cool with with a chart that goes directly up and then directly down because that is the most likely outcome
999.9 per of the time that's what what's that's what's going to happen and so will that help you maybe but you better be ready for that so let's yeah even um even our friends over at Kleiner launched a token oh my God which is fake do not buy it uh it is uh it has been disavowed by uh uh by uh EV over a Kleiner he says Kleiner Perkins X account is hacked we would obviously not
launch a pump coin and so it's so it's so so funny so I'm looking at the comments on the original post and somebody replies to the official Kleiner Perkins X account and says is this your project and then Kleiner responding from the official account with the gold check says I think it belongs to us it has the same name as us and then someone else
comments hoping you are not hacked and Kleiner account just says no we are good crying it's so funny the hacker just like being like no I'm not ha we're not hack I'm not we're not hacked we're all good so yeah be be um Kleiner the Kleiner chart did not fair as well it's down to a market cap of 10 grand oh no uh and it looks uh it's just red lines just going up just
going straight down so of course it's honestly impressive that jelly jelly is still not sitting at at you know zero yeah well let's go through the Sam lesson post uh on Fair launches in a frictionless world this week I launched a meme token called jelly my jelly with some highlevel thinking Direction re how a new social media format an app we seated could and should intersect with
crypto when we did ITP put it out we tried to do what is no known as a fair launch I seated it by buying 2% of the network which I haven't have no plans to sell he hasn't sold and then we let whoever wanted to buy it no reserves for the company or Founders this is supposed to be fair the right High trust way to do things because you aren't pumping
something where you then later dump the supply on everyone who bought it and everyone has a fair shot to buy in now what happened is still amazing to me completely Bonkers it went from Z 0 to 250 million in Network volume in a matter of just a few hours and since then has been selling off what I do think happened some folks that follow these things closely and trade them
heavily decided that this might be the next big thing to run up and they quickly should get ahead of it so they came in and bought a lot very very quickly which in of itself created a Snowball Effect ton of momentum that fed on itself then at some point these folks decided as Traders do to take profits and then started sending the whole thing back down do you want to comment there
Jordy you want me to keep reading yeah I mean I'll hold some comments to the end but um this same type of situation happened with SEI Chen who uh somebody he posted about his daughter having this rare form of cancer he asked people to donate crypto Community decided to make a token in his daughter's name price went up like crazy people started speculating on it they gave him a lot of
the supply and he even went out and said I am going to sell this at this point in time to fund my daughter's cancer research yep and even though he gave everybody a warning being like do not trade on this do not speculate he had thousands of people commenting saying that he was a scammer all this stuff and he's like I literally told you not like I am going
to sell you can front like sell now and other people are still trying to treat it as a financial instrument and going so far in such a disrespectful way of saying well I don't even believe your daughter actually has it was crazy meanwhile for people like you and me it was crazy to look at because we're like yeah one I I know SE invested in companies with SEI he's started a ton of
you know massive Venture back companies yeah he's not lying about his daughter having cancer to make you know a hundred grand or whatever he's he yeah and he wasn't even the person who created it so yeah it's crazy uh so Sam goes on what sticks in my head about this structurally is that is just that if the person te launching something doesn't
have a treasury then the people that end up being the treasury are the Traders why buy it uh who buy it first very very cheaply so in a sense with a fair launch you end up trading potentially having the people who start the project as the whales for the first traders in as the whales which in some way might be even more challenging as a setup leading to
the question how do you actually fulfill the spirit of a fair launch that goes well over the long term sets something up for Success leading to the question how do you actually uh okay I have seen literally every variant of launch imaginable in crypto take on this in some form or another firsthand from uh Bitcoin relatively early and other straight minable like LTC and PPC to
xrpc and Company coin distinctions to Doge to sana's brief lockup to chia's originally sell unsellable huge company holdback to even more crazy uh recent investing and staking schedules all with the aim of getting something healthy off the ground you have to accept that any Nexus of trading plus long-term holding in a frictionless environment is going
to have a ton of volatility out of the gate and you just weather it but it's also amazing how nettlesome a problem it ends up being to get something off the ground that isn't over or underhyped and sensibly gross to some degree this is just the challenge of the frictionless internet things that accelerate have no breaks they just accelerate faster and faster nothing stays stable but it's
interesting to watch and experience and iterate through all these strategies to see if they work and realize that some of the tweaks non- obvious elements that matter I.E this is all insanely different because of crypto anonymity versus how a kyc system would work for those who are here because they are interested in jelly jelly more practically Monday on what the plan
wasin is for integrating crypto into the app over time for everyone else just interested in crypto and the implications of really frictionless Finance the the simple answer no one really understands how to do this well yet even when they are trying interesting yeah so one one of the the biggest issues here is that the I would guess that 99.9% of the people buying
and trading the token had zero interest in the underlying product because meme coins fundamentally right now the the vast the real use case even though tokens can be used to be integrated in products and do a bunch of interesting things with them the the primary use case is speculation and so they immediately realize that they were having to they they now are I imagine
having to adapt their company road map to try to justify the token because if they just said like hey this is not really a thing anymore we're just going to focus on building you know this software Network a lot of people would they would have a bunch of people who feel like they invested in this thing that the company created that they're now
abandoning yeah and so the launch posts are where it gets complicated uh you can see Sam leson saying keep jelly in and it's just a chart of green line straight up to the right and it has 2,000 likes and half a million views and this like this feels like Financial advice right like this feels like I'm making money you know my pedigree you know I'm a big
account you know I'm rich people will read this and say I got to put money in this thing uh and then he posted again jelly jelly for those who love jelly to the Moon Yeah so again I don't think this flies in the pre-trump 2.0 era but uh crime is legal and so have fun with it and stay safe out there people because you're gonna see a lot of wild stuff on the timeline yeah yeah we'll see what
happens here I I actually think we should we should try the jelly jelly actual product because it seems seems very cool yeah the wrinkle here is that uh like like this feels very Degen it feels very pump like uh it even though you know it's this Fair launch you're definitely like promoting it as a financial asset more than a product it wasn't just like the post isn't just
like hey like I'm building this you know company and like by the way there's a token it's the it's literally the the picture is of the token price not of the it's not even oh here are di da you know it's like yeah just the price is what is what you care about the price is going up and if you think about like you know it would be it' be so funny if like you
know Mark Zuckerberg posted a stock chart of like oh meta is up 2% today like to the Moon get in guys like I'd be like okay like whoa like it's a little aggressive guy calm down well this is you remember people the people that see this and like act on it they are traders who know the game they're down for the pump and dump and they're just playing
the game so I'm not that worried about like some random retail Trader like seeing this and then and then being oh yeah I I figured out how to set up a f wall in two seconds like it's not the same so the funny thing is you remember the the morning after the Trump uh the Trump token was announced we had a buddy who's like raised a lot of money for very very cool highly topical
business yeah I won't um super talented uh entrepreneur he he goes guys like I think I should launch a token right now oh yeah yeah sees like the Trump thing happening and I'm so glad we we gave we gave you know this guy the advice that we were basically saying hey as soon as you do this it's just going to become its own thing and you're G to it's like
you would wouldn't you know so like all this drama that Sam's going through yep and the company they didn't make any money from it yep so they got this like dopamine Rush of seeing the chart go up and all this craziness but it seems like they you know maybe and maybe they could have bought it bought in and traded you know yep not not with you know the Genesis wallet or whatever but
um uh yeah it's just like all this kind of drama and chaos and no uh no sort of financial benefit which is why we told you know our our mutual friend hey like it sounds like a good idea but like why don't you just go to like a few family offices and just tell them like hey this is what I'm doing and or you know some funds just raise more capital from investors who
are not gonna you know be dming you death threats you know what's the price what's the price yeah yeah wait you know go uh go go public uh when you when when you're ready to hit the NASDAQ brother yeah you know and if you're really if you're really a true believer in crypto like crypto needs to be in my product do usdc do tether yeah there's no risk to
the person like if I download an app and they're like hey we really believe in crypto like crypto's a key piece of this app like on cars and bids right now coinbase is auctioning a essentially a Toyota hux and you have to pay for that with usdc that's you could think about this as like Doug deo's cars and bids is now going crypto but they didn't launch
a cars and bids token they're just accepting a stable coin and they still get a lot of the benefits of crypto and then they get the integration with coinbase and they're onboarding new people to crypto but there's no risk of like oh yeah I wound up instead of just buying the the Toyota hux I bought the hux coin and then it mooned and then it crashed and I didn't even get a car out
of it it's like no like you just paid with crypto you got that frictionless experience the wire transfer went through instantly that's a genuine benefit when you're buying a car instead of having hey wait I sent the wire did you get it oh yeah I went through is it in custody who who's got it it's like they they integrated this and it's great and No One's Gonna Get rugged on that
and I'm very very confident that everyone on all sides of that is going to be happy whereas with with with launching like a meme coin there's just a ton of parties that get wrecked yeah anyway should we move on to uh the even even even funny enough uh Trump only ever posted his website yeah never once comment on the price he never once positioned it as anything other than
memes he he literally very clearly were saying these are just memes you can buy them there's an open market if you want to buy the Trump Meme and the reason that that token can now hover I don't know what the price is I'm assuming around 20 billion um it has some amount of staying power because he's the president of the United States and totally it's just kind of funny but now
again jelly jelly has to the the other thing about crypto is you have a lot of these companies that have raised a hundred million and yes they're building some tech but they maybe have zero real use cases Y and so all the energy of the company is going into sustaining the price including what you know including buying back their token right to create buying
pressure because they know that price is is the product and and then they have their VCS who are doing the same thing and trading these sort of liquid tokens and so these these random projects that sit at5 billion doll market cap are not just doing that by accident it's because you have a hundred people oriented around how do we get the price to to go up yeah
and so now jelly jelly is you know they don't have that they're a small team they're trying to other product and so tough spot to be in and it's probably a good honestly hopefully it's a good Learning lesson from our audience which just that just because the president did something doesn't mean it's right for what you're doing today yeah I mean also if you just think about like these
tokens are store values they're built on stories like the US dollar is built on a story St store of mimic value and soci media attention the reason that when I go to buy a sandwich with a $20 bill people believe that it's worth $20 is because there's a story that's told about the power of the American government and that is is in some way a
meme in the same way that religion is a meme and corporations are a meme like these are not concrete ideas yeah and warrren buff Warren Buffett he'd buy a stock he'd hit the magazine route hit the radio route he'd hit TV he'd start talking it up so yeah and so when you think about Trump like like you're just buying this meme there's no there's no there's not like oh the token
should go down because he didn't build what he said he was gonna build no he said he was gonna build nothing and then the question is just like is Trump is the idea of trump still gonna be a meme in 50 years like if he passes away he'll still be in the history books like it it's actually in some ways more durable you know says hey we're going toate this
and then maybe they don't it's like the the floor of the promise as you said with the Trump coin was nothing it was just it was just the name and then the meme and so who knows where it goes but clearly everyone is thinking about this uh Brian Johnson wanted to get in on the action he says who's the best mind in tokenomics we're designing rewards for the don't die ecosystem earned for
hitting Health markers buying DD approved products dining at DD certified restaurants and more and he got 4,000 likes and then a few moments later he said whoa whoa whoa I got so many DMS everyone's telling me not to do this yeah here's here's um I one uh companies have been using tokens as in points which can if you think of them as the same thing forever right if you go if
you go to uh you can go to amazon.com and earn points right American Ain buying yeah buying specific products the difference with that point point system is yeah they they have some intrinsic value but it's not they're not trading on the equivalent of a digital NASDAQ where the price can fluctuate up and down and so Brian Johnson if he want
what he wants is this sort of incentive mechanism yep and he wants people to be bought into the movement yep but the issue is if you if you create a financial instrument like a token then he's going to attract for every one person that's like diligently following his protocols and saying you know look like I'm I'm eating at the right restaurants I'm buying products
from don't die.com I'm like hitting my health markers for every one person that's doing that like trying to earn the token there's going to be you know there could be uh 10,000 people that are just trading on it's like Brian Johnson started venmo and brain tree he's like an absolute dog I Gotta Buy I gotta buy the token yep and then and then the
weird thing is if the price goes up a lot and then you're issuing tokens to your to your community well then they now have tax implications from like well I got this Tok I got $10,000 worth of this token and then now now it dropped like however much I got to deal with this and and you're telling your account and you bought like the don't die token and now you've gota like um and so for
Brian Johnson it's like okay you could just create a reward system it's like hey rewards for a points that you can redeem for don't die products or points that get you into certain conferences that he host it doesn't have to be this like actual financialized asset and you even saw this you remember what was that game that was popular in the Philippines
um axi infinity axi infinity so at some at one point just by playing axi Infiniti like at the top of their like hype cycle you could be making like a hundred bucks a day just by playing this game that maybe it was a fine game but it wasn't it was not a fine game it was not a fine game well I said fine it wasn't you know it wasn't even fine yeah yeah um it was below Med
it on Twitch and so this whole cottage industry spun up of people that were just playing it as a job yep and uh you know nobody on this show will will um yeah if you're top 200 player in the world at any video game like yeah you should probably be able to have make a living out of it but you shouldn't be making a living from a game that nobody actually likes to play that people are
purely playing for this sort of and and and there was all these efforts to say that it wasn't just a Ponzi scheme oh yeah and it turns out it it totally was reliant on like new money just flowing into the ecosystem based on that speculation y to create enough liquidity to allow people to be able to pull money out of the system right so uh B bology
talked about this uh and how like crypto is basically Zero Sum because you can't get more money out of a token that than what was put in right so it's really a game of uh and I posted this crypto its current form most of it is just uh a wealth transfer from people that bought a to a token early and people that bought it late yep like later than them right so it's just like that constant
mechanism um and uh yeah yeah which is which and and we're not like to be clear we're not we're not against crypto I I I have like you know probably five or six crypto related companies I invested in um farters round which is they got valued at a billion dollars um uh late last year um doing some cool stuff about building like a censorship resistant
kind of X Type product so there's a lot of cool there's a lot of cool stuff happening we're not totally against it but people don't realize what they're signing up for when they do something uh like launch a token yeah it's more like round peg in a square hole like what Brian Johnson is describing like the best tokenomics are like the American Airlines flight reward like like airline
miles basically and sure maybe you want to use usdc for that maybe you want to back it in Bitcoin but do you need a new token that trades freely probably not and also do you want any incentive for people to be able to spend your hard-earned airline miles elsewhere no you want them to stay in the don't die ecosystem so yeah the big the big ChalleNGe Program the Big Challenge here
is as soon as you're a public company you now have shareholders that you did didn't choose so a lot of people that have been Founders have dealt with having amazing investors and maybe some less amazing investors and those are all people that you self- selected for the most part you're like some you know I've met investors I'm sure you have before
where it's like it doesn't matter how much money you'd want to give me at any terms I don't want it just because like I know that that's gonna you know be a a really long-term relationship and so even if you go public on the NASDAQ as a as a public market CEO part of the pressure and part of why people avoid doing that is because they simply are
going to be getting a LinkedIn message from a shareholder who's like hey your share price is down you yeah um and then you yeah it's not your obligation to respond to that but you gotta like respond to it at the next earnings report you know hey cool it with the language buddy you gotta put a crisp $110,000 in the swear jar but let's move on to that in the swear jar um uh let's
move on to n beer he says uh he posts a meme showing that everyone with over 50,000 followers is is uh tempted but to drop a coin I'm sitting at like 46,000 having the urge maybe it happens maybe the switch flips at 50k but so far I have not felt the urge no I've had I've had so many uh people message me and I'm sure you too like when TB coin it's it's like if you want to be a part
of what we're doing you can listen to the show we'll have events uh we'll invest in your startup maybe yep but if we do a coin it will be a physical coin that you buy for 50100 challenge coin you can put it on your desk as a little token to remind you that capitalism is awesome but it will not be some free floating pump. fun token I believe that they are low class it be it'll be
exchangeable one to one so if you spend you might be you spend $100 for the coin it gets you in a group but if you ever want to leave you just come back coin back as long as you're wearing a suit we'll take it exactly and there you go yeah exactly and uh fundamentally what would your mother say if you can't explain it to your mother oh you're
doing some pump out fund coin she'd be like oh can you just get a real job it's a good it's a good point why don't you pump up your LinkedIn profile and apply for some jobs exactly exactly uh so let's move on to our third top story of the day uh some break news from Mark Gman the absolute goat of Apple reporting over at Bloomberg he says breaking Apple cancels project to build
AR glasses that would pair with its devices in a major Retreat as it struggles to create a mainstream hit to follow the Vision Pro and rival meta and so we're going to be breaking down this Insider report from inside apple apple scraps work on Mac connected augmented glasses uh I'll read this and we'll see we'll talk to Jordy in just a minute um Apple Apple Inc has cancelled the
project to build Advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices now uh the the uh Vision Pro is kind of counted as an augmented reality device but it's very much VR in the sense that it's using reprojection taking uh taking images with the cameras from outside the headset and playing them back inside it's it's amazing I think it's incredible device very
expensive very heavy there's a lot of drawbacks but uh it it did well and they were working on a vision uh version two of that maybe not moving forward and so this is the latest setback in its effort to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers the Apple Vision Pro certainly did not appeal broadly uh they are trading at about a 50% discount on eBay
right now what was that give them some credit for about a week everybody was calling it the future of personal Computing it's it's it shows to to me it all shows a lack of true vision and Leadership from Apple they don't they don't have a product visionary the helm Tim Cook is an amazing manager even though we think he's underpaid at only 77 million which yeah as as as people
know Apple makes a billion dollars of net income every like four days or something like that uh he's very underpaid um but you know I have to imagine that Steve Jobs would uh look down at Apple today and be embarrassed at being willing to to say that we think this is a future Computing platform and get pushed back based on the battery
life and things like that and just say like okay we're going to we're going to scrap this I guess it's not because somebody it seems like so um it's so programmed in that we're all going to be wearing you know um uh you know these headsets that that just like strap computers to our faces that to just say we're giving up because maybe it was a product that was just used for
entertainment you know people people seem to love it for entertainment yep but the issue is there's a lot of substitutions right your phone iPad TV computer Etc um it was a fantastic movie theater and uh who was it uh the founder of mid Journey said that uh the one of the lead designers on the Apple Vision Pro worked at Dolby on their next Generation Digital Cinema project and
when you think about it through that lens it makes a ton of sense the when you open up the Apple Vision Pro you can think about uh there is like an implicit ranking of what the most important experiences were and in the top left corner the first icon if you're reading it like a book was watch moviesle TV app it wasn't a game it wasn't FaceTime it
wasn't uh an app it was movies and that was where the best experience was you could go in and watch Avatar in 3D and it was an amazing experience there's only so many movies you want to watch in a theater though and it put it on and here's an example Apple if if Apple had come out and said this is an alternative to the TV this is a personal atome
entertainment product we just want to make the most incredible you know way to watch entertainment at home whether you're watching sports and you want to have different games up and the score and things like that and you're your 50 leg parlay in one corner right um if they had come out and just said this is a product to watch movies in a really immersive way I can easily imagine them
and and maybe they they priced it even lower and just said hey we're going to lose some money on this we think this is an important not lose but you know we're not we're not thinking of this as a profit Center but like oh we lost you uh you gotta touch the mic there you go ter terrible terrible feature um no uh so so if you look at the iPhone from that lens of is it
started as an MP3 player yep started as a way to play in the beginning I don't even remember how many songs was it I I I thousand songs in your pocket so so yeah thousand songs in your pocket I remember having an iPod Shuffle it was like the my favorite device oh yeah you could imagine a kid today having their apple headset and there they you could
train an entire new generation of like why would you watch TV on a screen that's that's you know 20 feet away from you when you could watch it on your face and if they had just started from um you know more of this like very simp simplified focus and said hey we're actually going to make films for this format with our Apple you know they did they went for super short films it's
like a five minute experience and it's just not enough yeah uh it's it just missed the mark in so many ways uh Ben can you pull up the actual uh screenshots from the uh article and Jordy do you mind reading through some of these I got to go to the restroom yeah cool so Apple Inc has canceled a project to build Advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its
devices marking the latest setback in its efforts to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers the company shuttered the program this week according to people with knowledge of the move the Now canel product would have look like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require connection to a Mac said the people who asked not to be identified because the
work wasn't public an apple representative declined to comment so I read this or I would say not me but if if Zuck is reading this he has to be absolutely thrilled at this development because he's been investing billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars into their VR program and he already has the Rayban meta The Meta
Rayband which are basically what Apple's doing and so personally I haven't lost conviction in in the form factor I'm not personally that excited to do it as a user because I like the fact that I can use my phone and then set it down and walk away but even you know people on social have been commenting I remember a post from Lindy man where he said the
Aesthetics of people you know we need to we need to get get to um headset based Computing because the head uh the visual of a bunch of people in a cafe looking at their phone like this is just terrible and so I really think it's been programmed in that that people um that this is you know a future you know consumer Computing platform but uh it's going to take very long-term conviction
John I don't know if you heard me while I was gone but you have to imagine Zach hearing this news and just being absolutely thrilled because he's he's in founder mode he's willing to spend tens of billions of dollars over over years and years and years with no no Sal you know relatively low sales like I imagine that I imagine that uh The Vision Pro um
and you know Oculus sales are better but again because they have like some specific use cases right yeah they're both minim compared to the rest of the businesses this to me is is the biggest Bol signal for what only makes me more bullish on meta because meta's biggest issue to date has been not owning the under lying Computing rails right that's been like constantly you know we've
talked about um we've talked about Apple uh trying to make meta life harder and the advertisers on the platform life harder through the app tra app tracking stuff um so anyways this is this is zuck's got to be absolutely thrilled with this news yeah and what's interesting is like with with AI Apple really sat back they didn't train their own models Siri Apple
intelligence they're both like just kind of widely regarded as disasters in terms of product development but but their strategy there seems much more reasonable than not owning the next Computing platform because Apple really does Hardware Great and they've always been able to say yeah you know what our spreadsheet software is not as good as Microsoft or Google so we're just going
to let Excel and Google Sheets be great apps on Mac or on on the iPhone and and with deep seek we're seeing that yeah there's going to be a lot of developers that build you know llm products that integrate and then oh open source from llama or or deep seek that's going to get baked into Apple intelligence it's going to make it better they're just gonna kind of sit back and and and fi
develop a little bit maybe they'll just integrate and do a big deal with open AI in the future like they did with Google and you go back and you look at the the Apple Google deal where Google's paying them billions of dollars to be the called search engine and that deal has worked out I don't think that that's bitten them uh at all but when you look
at them potentially missing the next Computing platform that is a serious risk and that is this is a place where Apple should Thrive and so yeah it it seems like they are content to just operate as a toll booth for for the rest of history but they can't if they don't have the device yeah I know I know to to to give them some credit they could probably say hey we we just want
to like you know focus on our our hero product the iPhone keep selling a lot of iPhones y when when if Zach is able to figure out how to do a headset well we'll just copy it because we have the best hardware engineers in the entire world we'll let him spend all the money to like try to figure this out and then we have you know we have the Apple Store
Right which is like the most amazing distribution engine for any new product totally so um who knows what they'll do Steve Jobs is uh looking down uh he's probably um tracking a GT3 RS right now and heaven looking down quite disappointed in in uh I think Tim's cooked we've talked about it before we said he's cooked is did did Tim Cook or is Tim cooked yeah I I I agree with you
the the the wrinkle here is that if you look at the iPhone sales it's just completely flat which is obviously bad you want it to be growing but it does doesn't seem to be going down at all it seems like the toll booth analogy is correct they will be able to just print money for decades as they you know maintain this Monopoly on the app store
and on the phones and so you know they're happy it's just going to be a a monster of a business for a very long time these things take a long time to unwind and so uh you know maybe they'll miss it the the weird thing is that it doesn't it really doesn't feel like there's going to be oh some open- Source headset that gets traction and all of a sudden everyone has it and it completely
upends it's it's like it's either it's either apple or meta in this game and so if they concede the field it's rough now the the wrinkle here is like no and the dark the dark horse is someone like a neuralink that that you could imagine you know maybe ends up doing the same thing which is the computer the computer is just integrated with your brain and
if you want to do something you say hey I really want to Uber uh from where I am exactly at this moment and I want to go uh you know uh to the ramp offices yeah that is a new Computing platform and then you know neuralink gets to be the toll booth and maybe it's not this you know interface but maybe you just need a a screen to like see visuals right yeah
and that's actually easy you know if neuralink can do the in brain computer integration it's much easier to just throw you know a screen up that displays information so yeah there there is uh there nreal or xreal andreal air there there are couple companies that make glasses that project a uh a massive TV screen but it doesn't do any of the other crazy features so it doesn't do
hand tracking it's just it's basically just if you're on a plane you want to watch a movie you throw these on and they just put a big screen in front of you it's locked your head basically uh I've been thinking about getting one because that that was one of the best experiences of the Apple Vision Pro was being on a plane just watching a huge
movie and just having it look amazing um and so that that type of like lower and VR very specific use case we're in this weird fragmented moment where uh apple and meta both seem to want to create the one device to rule them all because that's what the iPhone was but we forget that the the iPhone the famous presentation was we're introducing three things an iPod a phone an internet
Communicator right and so he was saying it's gonna be do do web browsing it's gonna have all your music and it's gonna be a phone yeah and combine those it's like well in VR maybe we need the one that's really good for just doing you know at your computer and that's that's what this project was was it was going to be linked to your Mac so you couldn't
even run off your phone it was not going to be mobile it was going to be you sit down at your Mac you put these on and all of a sudden you have a ton of different monitors so instead of buying four 5K displays and they're all really expensive you just buy one headset boom it replaces the uh the the what's the pro HDR one that's like a couple couple thousand dollars it's really expensive
um and so instead of that you buy these maybe it's 10K but it's totally worth it and and then separately when you're on the plane and you just want to watch a movie you have a separate VR device for that and then the meta gray bands for when you're out and you want to just take photos you don't need the screen overlay but you want to talk to AI it's
like we we could be in this world where we have fragmented V products for a few years and then over time they get melded all into one but we're not quite there on the hardware and I don't think any other the companies other than meta are really thinking about that and willing to say hey the Apple Vision Pro it's just a movie theater don't even try and go out in the world in it it's just a
movie theater okay yeah the meta Ray bands they're just for taking pictures of your dogs and kids and that's what they're good for don't try and use them at work right and and and and accepting that is hard for these companies that are so big they're like we want to own everything but hopefully I used I use the meta Ray bands oh yeah for one hour
I put them on I got on my Ferrari drove uh for an hour and came back and the footage was pretty cool yeah and then I put them down and and I think I gave them away I've I've used them a few times I it's fun if you're out with you know kids and stuff you take some pictures it's pretty easy um but they're not they're not something that I'm reaching for constantly and
that's the case with every VR headset you should put them put them on your dog figure out a way to put them on the pup and and get some get some like you know firsters uh pup footage yeah and it was the same thing with the Apple Vision Pros like I put it on a few times and then pretty soon it was like am I really going to pull that thing out might as well just watch the movie on my phone
who cares like it's such a hassle and so yeah they they they they really need to streamline I do what I do love about this was that they were like apple faced a lot of criticism when the Apple Vision Pro had that massive battery pack off the side and was like oh this is so una Apple I think and Palmer said this as well that was one of the best decisions
that they made because it gave everyone else permission to start removing pieces from the heavy point of the face which is where you don't want the weight yeah but then they added a bunch of weight back it was like put a display on the outside let's make I want the weight I want the weight because I'm trying to build up my neck of course of course yeah but for
but for those I want to feel like I'm just repping The Vision Pro headset yeah yeah it should be for linebackers only you need traps that have been eating your head you need Death Star delts to use this thing issue if you if you can't handle this thing don't even come in the Apple Store yeah you got to look like you're coming out of WWE to pick up one of these things well well said they
clock you as soon as you walk in no not even an option for you get out of the store no hit the gym no they measure the circumference of your neck to make sure that you're actually qualified for it hey go do some hand cleans and then come back okay get out of here go do some shrugs do some deadlifts uh get get those traps working um but yeah um so
let's uh let's let's finish this out uh so apple has a specific group for this the vision products group vpg and uh employees who are leaking to German say that there's been a lack of focus and clear Direction within the team which is overseen by Mike Rockwell and uh company Hardware Chief John turnis The n107 Retreat is just the latest failed attempt to make Apple's headset
technology successful they say and that's hurting morale the company is still working on successors to The Vision Pro which I am very excited about uh including updated versions to the to the original model it also has other Concepts in the works such as airpods with cameras that would kind of be a a competitor to the The Meta Ray bands and I love uh Apple like they they've
just become so derivative they're like the iPhone like people really love the iPhone you know camera and people really love airpods what if we slap a camera on our airpods don't judge it till you try it no I re I'm I'm excited to be snapping some behind the scenes pictures of the podcast with you put put your little like this that actually be a cool
experience if you just had to tap your ear like this to get a picture yeah and so there R&D teams still working on Uh custom microed type screens and a lot of other uh technology a lot of this was just like the wave guiding and like the actual projection over clear glass that's really really hard this is what meta has been rumored to have solved with the Orion headset it makes sense
that Apple wouldn't be far behind obviously just in terms of resolution they were able to leap frog meta uh in terms of just you put on the headset and you're like wow this is I'm I'm not seeing pixels like it feels like I'm in this environment that was the coolest thing I apparently what happened was Apple uh there's this R&D cycle that happens with these screens where
basically uh like scientists more or less will go and develop a new density of screen like an even denser screen but then once they've actually figured out the the the protocol for making these things they need to go and scale it up so that can be manufactured at scale cheaply and so it's process called like benchtop manufacturing to like
production scale and apparently what Apple did was they just said hey you know what it's going to take two years for this benchtop to get to production ready let's just make a thousand benchtops and then just pay $2,000 for every screen instead of waiting for it to get to 200 and let's pull that technology forward like they literally pulled the future forward and so yeah
the good news is that in two years that's going to be a commodity SC green and it'll be in every VR headset and I'm really excited for the next meta headset because Zuck knows where the bar is in terms of pixel density and he's not gonna miss on that and so once you get that plus the plus the meta software that they've been working on plus just no it's gonna quickly it's gonna quickly
get to the point where the incremental screen improvements won't even really be that noticeable to Consumers right where just like What's happen the Ione now yeah if you look at um it's been retina for like 10 10 iterations retina yeah and if you look at the same thing the R camera market right you would you would you would notice the slight differences
you and Ben would notice slight differences but the average even hobbyists paying attention are gonna barely be able to P point you know out those kind of differences so yeah anyways um big thing is I I think meta needs to really solve the the movies and the and the TV they need to figure out who are they going to partner with Amazon for well that's the thing there's
a lot of they could easily partner with Netflix Amazon prime prime same thing um Hulu all all these different providers you you know maybe not YouTube TV but you can imagine it's it's not that difficult for meta to get content Partnerships done if they're acting like a TV provider yep I think my point of view is Apple's so lost from a product standpoint
now start an F1 team you know at least like apple F1 you can have an idea of what that would look like uh it it really get people to start maybe caring about the Apple brand again right now they're doing all this like gen mooji out of home campaign I want to see Apple sign Apple signs for stappen to a gigachad 10-year contract a billion a billion dollars a year sorry Tim Cook uh
if you're staing just a little bit more valuable than you um you know managing uh managing to get one more iPhone sale a year um be great be great yeah I I really do think that if you want to uh get people over the installation churn curve with these headsets like you got to get them into an experience within five minutes of them opening the box uh
that's one of the big that's one of the coolest things about the chromatic uh is remember we unboxed that on the show within 30 seconds yeah and and with and this was a big knock I had on the quest was that I I opened it up and then it asked me for all these passwords and I have a meta password a Facebook password an Instagram password an Oculus password I have PIN codes and all these security
features and then once you get in there like you have to go to the store download a game it's has to be internet connected you have to be logged in because they're obsessed with solving like the social networking aspect you should be able to take this out of the box put it on Boom be beat saer or boom you're watching The Matrix watching social network when you buy a
meta Quest it should just come pre-installed with the social network you should just be able to put it on in two seconds and start watching yeah if you get someone into a great movie and they just watch it they will be like oh okay that was a good experience for two hours I got two hours of value out of that which is more than what most people
get yeah when they install these things anyway let's move on to some AI ads there's a reckoning in the artificial intelligence world uh written by this is a substack post by our buddy Michael he's been on the show before he's over at light speeed he says I wrote about how AI is breaking the business model that funded the internet and why the open web will never be the same he calls
it the end of advertising and he has some uh uh kind of kind of sloppy AI uh art here to pick it off uh but let's read through it he says everybody hates ads at least that's what we all say out loud but our revealed preferences tell a different story we actually love ads because they fund most of the content we consume on the internet without ads we'd
have to pay for content with our hard eron dollars but with ads we pay with our attention and we perceive the cost of the content as free like this show fully supported by corporations we never ask you for a dime um ads have made the internet as we know it today as we know it today Poss possible ads are really really good business because advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to access
our attention in the early days of the internet this looked like simple banner ads brokered through manual deals on basic HTML sites but over time ads evolved into some of the greatest money printing machines ever invented Google meta for example even businesses we don't often associate with ads like Amazon and apple make a killing from them and the little guys love them too
many longtale Publishers websites Niche blogs podcasters and indie games are all funded by ads ads built the modern internet and funded our internet addiction making billions of dollars and billions of us happy in the process it's a perfectly tuned system that we all take for granted but all good things must come to an a end and ads are no
exception AI is increasingly challenging the business model of ads the system that makes the open web feel free for example many of us are using Google search less frequently along with the ad supported websites that it leads us to and in their place we're answering we're using answer engines like GPT in perplexity more each time we ask these AIS with delivering us a single
definitive answer in favor of waiting through many potential answers via traditional search the relationship between an Advertiser and our attention is severed and the ad never gets delivered challenging the model further as AI models become more powerful and capable they won't just Deliver Us answers they'll also perform long complex tasks on our behalf they'll do
all the busy work of researching making appointments and even buying stuff for us this will free us up to do other things and as a result we'll devote less of of our attention to the content and thus the ads at scale this represents a massive change to the foundation of the open web what happens to the perfectly tuned system when the funding dries up G
you got anything so I I broad I broadly agree with with Michael and I think it's something that anybody running an internet business especially one that's based around attention and and has any type of ads model needs to pay a lot of attention to um that said the ways in which I use perplexity and open Ai and other language models is not the same behavior
that makes me a profitable Google ads user so when I want to so we're talking about you know Mary Meer in a little bit on the show right yep and so I used open ai's deep research produ uh product to do that right if I had and it and it pulled together all these different sources and and made it really digestable and and it was super helpful if I had done that on Google I would
have made a bunch of queries and I would have found found many of those same links it might have taken me a long time I would have gone and looked at maybe some individual articles so that's a little bit of AD revenue for the person creating the content But ultimately that type of search and the same search that's that's like where should I you
know what are some cool places to vacation in Spain yep um those and and again chat gbt can do that pretty well right it's like hey here's six places that people love that's very different than me going and saying I want a new pair of tennis shoes and I I just search tennis shoes on Google right and then I get a bunch of you know sort of options and so I think it's important to look at
the the ad model of Google in many ways feels less immediately threatened right now versus the ad model of companies that just provide content right so the companies that just like you know anybody that makes recipes and just posts them online and expects to make a bunch of revenue from that I would be worried there's still people that probably make millions a year with
banner ads selling you know doing recipes that to me is a concern because people are going to use you know models for that and it's going to surface all the information that they put out but Google still has that toll booth sort of business model of when I want to actually buy something and so that's what perplexity and and some of these
other more specialized models are trying to get into is is actually helping people discover products because product Discovery and and endorsement are kind of different things right I I started you know my my the my actual career in ads building branded native and that branded native's business model is predicated on people watching Creator content so as long as people are
watching you know Creator content and advertisers want to get in front of that audience that models you know relatively you know I'd say It's relatively safe um but but again anybody just posting you know basic content online and and thinking that they're going to monetize it it's not um it's going to be a tougher sell yeah if you're running like
a travel website that's just best top 10 places to travel to in Spain you are already in the process of getting disintermediated maybe previously it was like you would rank for in Google organically for best places to travel to in Spain and then you would have a bunch of affiliate links for things you might want to buy or maybe flights or all this different stuff but pretty over the last
10 years Google's been pulling more and more of that in where you can oh you can buy the flight directly on Google you can buy the stuff on Google shopping and oh we're gonna you know pull in more of this stuff and info cards and take you to different websites and so there's been this like War for a while and I think that's just going to continue with
the AI Trend yeah so Micha and meta in the in the the platforms that deliver entertainment content or education content or anything along those lines right if you're meta yep you don't care if as long as people are using your app if you have attention you can serve ads against that I don't as of right now I don't see that being disrupted as long as people have purchasing power you know
right now they maybe have income but eventually it's Ubi in some uh you know potentially dark future but um as long as you have attention I believe you're going to be able to sell products against that attention whether they're ads that you're indirectly you know that you didn't create the product but you're selling it yep or um you know you're actually making the making the thing
itself so yeah so this is an interesting section about premium content tightly guarded walled Gardens especially built around premium content will feel the least pain from this shift so things like straty for example uh semi analysis behind a pay wall um and I mean going even more extreme like private speaker circuits or supper clubs I imagine are
even harder to pull into the LL training set right uh the deal dinners the idea dinners this is where the alpha is going forward according to Michael um many will become even more valuable as the overall amount of the monetizable supply of AD supported content shrinks the demand for higher quality content will rise your ad dollars previously spent on
commoditized content will be redirected to the best stuff on the internet plus as we spend more time on busy work we'll spend less of our time as we spend less of our time on busy work we'll spend more of our time entertaining ourselves which is which means premium content will capture even more of our attention and the best content will will even find new ways to monetize reddit's AI deal
with Google serves as the perfect example of how valuable Niche content traditionally supported by advertising can be sold as training data for AI and media the only so I'm not disagreeing with Michael here but it's not like Reddit sold their data to open aai and then is stopped running ads as long they have attention they can they can insert and so I think premium content it's it's
it doesn't even matter if the content is paywalled enough like py could release a free article and as long as smart you know if you know people that have purchasing power looking at that he can sell ads against that and so I think that um yeah in many ways in many ways you know it may be attention just becomes even more valuable right so yeah and uh this is
something I firmly agree with AI services will attempt reinvent ads I think we're definitely going to see this a free version of chat GPT we're already seeing it in perplexity and Google has successfully stuffed ads in their llm interactions already I got pitched a company a while back that I I thought was smart I didn't I didn't end up investing just because I
felt that it was going to be too heavily commoditized or that the or that the the apps would actually want to own it but somebody that was building like an ad Network for llms sure which um to me to me makes makes sense the question is does open AI build an ads product or partner with someone like a meta that has quite a lot more data on the individual and just start serving ads
into the free version of chat GPT there's a bunch of you know bunch of ways that um that that could happen it's not necessarily going to be one one person that builds the network but there's probably still a business to be built there totally uh AI services will will seek to capitalize on the end of traditional Internet ads and invent new forms of advertising to capture the
dollars that were previously delivered directly to Publishers perplexity has recently introduced uh some uh early details of how ads will work on their platform and open AI is rumored to be exploring this as well well this is an obvious next step for the future of advertising it's unclear how directly the current ad spend will transfer over
to this new model and it'll need to be structured such that Publishers can participate in a way that incentives keep them making content otherwise they won't be able to afford to exist brand new models will also emerge to help Publishers recoup lost ad revenues as aent traffic increasingly replaces displaces human traffic Publishers will look to charge AI companies directly
much of this will be through big splashy content deals such as open AI deals with News Corp and axel Springer but for smaller players that can't afford to do deals themselves they'll work with thirdparty services that will collect tolls on their behalf every time an AI hits their site to scrape content for their own service the AI will be blocked
and forced to pay before the content is served and as moves Beyond content ingestion to agent-based task execution apis that help agents do their jobs will also be charged makes a ton of sense let's let's move on to his conclusion and then uh and then I'll get you take Jordy uh content wants to be free for decades the economic relationship between consumers of content and the
providers of content has been hidden behind business models that were monetizing our attention we didn't put too much thought into it because we were getting what we wanted with minimal effort or cost but AI increasingly disrupts these models the relationship between us and Publishers will become much more transactional and direct and we will feel it over time it'll be a new
internet and the open web will be a memory great content will still find a way to reach us just like it always has but we'll look back on the first few Decades of the internet as the Golden Age of content when everything felt free interesting I wonder I mean things will still feel free they'll just be mediated by an llm but I understand what he's saying for
sure yeah I think his core idea content wants to be free is absolutely correct but that also means that it will just continue to be free in new ways I think that a lot of the agentic products that get built will just argue that Hey My My user wants to access the information on your site yep so if you make that more difficult or more expensive and I'm acting on their
behalf well I'm just going to take you know we're going to go elsewhere basically right in the same way in the yeah oh you're on mute uh there you go you know if right right now if I'm looking for specific news on something and I hit a pay wall and it's just a headline that I want to quickly digest I might just find a place that I'm already have an account or whatever
and I think that that will be again if I hit a pay wall on Strater or pirate wires I'm I'm you know much more cined to convert because it's sort of there's some value there but again who who knows um it's going to be a war of of bots versus Publishers for a long time as it as it always has yeah I I wonder if the solution here is something like YouTube or X U uh
Creator payouts where you can still publish to the open web but there's just you opt into some program and it says hey if you bring a new fact or take or blog post to the open web and it is served in you know millions of queries to open Ai and they know that this fact and this data point are pulled from your original Source or your original reporting we're just going to send you a
check that would be really interesting and a way to kind of keep the monetization there it's a lot of like Flying Blind but it's kind of the same thing when you put up a Blog and then you put Google AdSense on it and you just are like yeah I hope they serve some good ads and I hope I get some traffic so you could just be publishing you wouldn't actually see traffic to
your website you would just see oh yep open AI showed up and perplexity showed up and Google showed up and they took all all my takes and all my information and everything that I brought to the internet and then they went and served that to millions of people and and then they sent me a check because they made a million dollar off of it and we split it
5050 we'll go on the record and that we are actually put the re one of the reasons we put out 15 hours a week of content is that we're we want to we want to train the llms based on our way of life and our beliefs and our thoughts and so open AI is free to use every you know episode that we've published to date and and we hope they they really you know introduce the
brother edition of model right that's just primarily gonna just you know maybe it shares a little misinformation now and then but anyways let's take a a 30 second break and then get into Mary maker I'll be right back okay cool today we have a deep dive we'll be right back folks stay with us e all right we're back did you see this uh this comment from our buddy he said technology
Brothers has kind of changed my life there was a quip about how if you're going to sit in an earnout you should try and be CEO and he's like I'm thinking about doing that and I and I stand by that if you get bought don't just sit there and rest invest try and take over the parent company or uh or Bas Baron recently posted he said uh you you told me you
were building in public but I can't find you on the S&P 500 yeah it's underrated I mean there's all these posts about like oh like look the the McDonald CEO worked his way up or the McDonald's CEO or the Walmart CEO was like low on the totem pole it's like come in if you're a Founder you got that founder mentality that founder blood get get in through an
acquisition and then take them out straight to the top straight to the top yeah don't don't just rest back and be like oh I gotta start another company I gotta do the same thing again or I gotta be a VC why not go be the CEO of a public company that's a great life you can do a lot of good lot of resources huge balance sheet yeah it's mountable because you're gonna come into a very
sclerotic very old school organization but you work hard and you make the Right Moves you could easily be running the place y I love it well let's move on to the absolute dog Mary Meer one of the greatest to ever do it Doom Queen wait uh right before we dive in we had a couple questions uh did you try the open AI deep research feature did yes did uh John tried to use it last night was not
available even though we're both uh Pro users uh tried it this morning got it this morning it's great I had this funny interaction though I I got this amazing report and I said hey this is great can you make it into a PDF and it's and it and it did it but then it was only like it was a different piece of content and it was like less than one page and I
said hey uh didn't that didn't quite work could you get me just of a PDF just of your primary research response and it produces another document that's not content and I eventually just copy and paste it into a word doc so I had the exact same experence exact experience I went to went to 01 Pro finally got the Deep research button there it's it's not
a new model by the way it's a button yeah on some of the models but not all of them some of the models allow file uploads some of them don't so I go to 01 Pro mode that has deep research I'm asking it to do this this research report it it keeps asking me hey just to clarify what kind of research do you want me to do and I'm like okay try this one and then it just didn't give me
anything a couple times just total bug and then and then the second time I was like trying to give it a bunch of extra context so I was dumping in like a full text of uh this New Yorker article that we're going to read through and the Wikipedia just to be like here's some extra context that's behind a pay wall that you might not have access to uh it
was just not handling that at all it was like freaking out I was trying to upload PDFs it was a it was a mess it finally gave me a summary that was like okay it was not that great I clearly need to learn some skills on like how to prompt it and how to get like great results out of it I'm very optimistic but uh clearly some Rough Around the Edges it took some
time to get done but I did have a funny experience where uh today we are going over this New Yorker article uh it's from uh the do com boom I think it was published in 1999 it's about Mary Meer who if you don't know uh was at Morgan Stanley and was one of the uh top equity research analysts at the time and she's still extremely well respected in Tech
she wrote The Thesis that described how uh internet companies should be valued what would happen to the internet how value would acrew and she created a mental framework for how to think about valuation of uh tech companies and so she was incredibly important um and this New Yorker article is behind not only behind their pay wall but it's in their archive so it doesn't exist as HTML you
click and you get uh and you get a PDF of of like the entire magazine and then you need to go into their tool and print out just what you want so I printed that out it's basically just photos of the actual magazine it's not text it's not like a text PDF and so I go in and I and I scrape out all the text using Adobe and I get this very very messy bag of
text that where every other word has a space in between it it's just a complete mess and I'm like this is perfect for llms they should be able to clean this up it's like illegible so I start stuffing this into different LMS I go to Gemini because I'm I can handle big context Windows this is what you were built for Google your time to shine I'm a paid Gemini Advanced user three dark
Ops I'm on I'm on the best of the best they're they're milking me for 200 bucks a month I'm like this is what you were built for Gemini now's your time to shine go in there I'm sorry like as an llm I can't help you with this I was like I was literally like mad I was like you are a language large language model trans Transformer model I'm asking you
to transform language what are you talking about you cannot trans this language it makes no sense clearly it triggered some flag deep in the model that said hey this is copyrighted we can't touch this oh interesting that's clearly what happened but it wouldn't tell me and so I would like yell at and be like what are you talking about like like you can do this you go open open AI
let's you say open AI would do this exactly also trained on all of our data I tried I tried to jailbreak it wasn't working I go over to GPT 4 40 too slow not doing it and it's also like it winds up hallucinating where it's it's basically uh formatting it correctly for like the first few paragraphs and then it just starts summarizing it and then it just doesn't finish it and so by the
end it's just like and Mary me and it's just like reading the Wikipedia and I'm like that's not what I wanted I wanted a direct rewrite of this article that's just messy just to be clear for the historical record uh when we do become full paper clips we're not mad at these Bots these llms we're not mad at the we know they're trying to do their best and
so we just ask that 10 years from now you treat us with that same you know level of respect and and patience golden paper clips not aluminum please I want into a solid gold paper clip um should we before we get into Mary I have more on this I I I I I have more on this I gotta keep going so then I go over to uh to deep seek because I'm like whatever
deep seek definitely disrespected intellectual property let me see if they'll do it it it starts doing it and I'm like okay this is cracked it's working perfectly and then the whole thing times out because they're completely underwater and they don't have enough servers and so their whole thing just breaks can't inference enough of it because it's like thousands of
words that I'm trying to get it to put out so it's just failing that thing's just completely broken you can't even log in anymore uh and then finally I go over to 01 prom mode Nails it one shot work perfectly W so so hatsoft chat GPT they did the they got it done and then I was able to kind of bake that down but anyway that's all to say it's a fantastic article you should go
subscribe to the New Yorker and dig through their archive they have a lot of great articles and we'll read a lot of them here on the show so let's kick it off with the woman in the bubble how Mary Meer helps internet entrepreneurs become very very rich and I love this article because it has so many cameos from people who are now legendary in the
valley but it's a complete Time Capsule showing you like she took Netscape public M and she she was the first person at Morgan Stanley to identify Netscape Mosaic be you know way way be you know way she was basically acting as an angel investor at for Morgan Stanley and especially when you look at the the potential returns that they generated so absolutely uh what what an icon and they
did a right by you know taking this iconic picture awesome this is basically is this this is when they published this was 1999 199 so we're we're kind of at the hype but she was she was she was studying and analyzing technology companies in the 80s so she actually got into it very early should we start maybe on the little bit earlier than that and just
give some backstory on yeah yeah you have the research report so why don't you break down was born in September 1959 in Portland Indiana very clearly if she had been born in Portland she would have not gone on to High Finance uh small to town between Indianapolis and Fort Wayne she was raised by a homemaker mother and a father who was a steel industry
executive uh she had an older brother who's 21 years older than her uh and this is a little foreshadowing her dad her father Gordon was an avid golf Enthusiast and he encouraged Mary to excel at both Golf and investing from an early age so just that he just was like he's like I want you to just dominate Finance you're gonna you're to golf you're GNA learn to invest from uh from
a young age um and uh she she's you know like Taylor Swift's dad wasn't Taylor Swift's dad like a finance guy who was like you gotta learn how to become like an absolute killer in country music yeah um yeah I'm I'm sure uh and also has probably helped her financialized her back catalog uht and remake it at different points but um but anyway so
under Gordon's influence Mary developed as you might imagine a competitive type A personality and drive to achieve she became the captain of her golf team in high school um and even while in high school she took a class on investing and made her first stock pick uh for a a Minneapolis oil refiner which doubled in value in the first three months foreshadowing her future so uh I I'm
kind of bummed that my class like I'm assuming that classes today will will just have like meme coin trading and they're like here's how to like identify like you know Jilly jelly yeah yeah jelly jelly you want to make sure that the the supply isn't too concentrated in the hands of degenerates you know um anyways so so you know very very from a very young age she was just being
trained to become a Titan of finance and uh you know she's not afraid to make returns in you know in the oil refining space right so broad set of interests and I I I don't know if we'll get into it in this article but it'd be amazing if like she just kept at it with the golf and would just be out there you know at this time you have you have to imagine that in many of the rooms that
she was in she would have been the only the only woman oh yeah totally um and and there's a whole bunch of anecdotes in this about like how hard no she is how she'll be like screaming at some subordinate and then the journalist will up and she be like oh hi like yeah I'd love to talk to you about whatever uh and so there's this great anecdote that
they open with about uh priceline.com which most people don't even really think about anymore but was one of the major hot stocks during the do com boom all around booking tickets and so priceline.com a Connecticut based firm that sells cheap airline tickets to and hotel rooms to online customers had issued 10 million shares 7% of its total shares through Morgan Stanley where uh
Mary Meer worked after consultation between merer and her colleagues in Morgan's Capital markets Department the offering price was set at $16 if the stock found buyers priceline.com would become the world's most highly valued internet IPO yet with a total value of two and a half billion dollar small by today and so that's if they achieve the 16 that's that's if they had buyers at
the16 doll price point yep and you can get into what happens next and so as it turned out the offering was far more than merely successful within seconds of its debut priceline.com price Rose to $85 a share five times the IPO valuation uh Bill Gurley was probably pretty young at that time probably punch in the air he the man the man hates a improperly
priced IPO um the price subsequently fell slightly but by the end of the evening when Wall Street closed for early for the Easter weekend it was at $80.50 a share in other words Meer had just helped a company that had been operating for less than one year this is how crazy things were in the Doom less than a year and they'd lost $114 million in 1998 on revenues of just $35
million are crazy right now achieve a stock valuation of more than 11 billion dollar as much as American Airlines American of course owns valuable rout route franchises reservation systems to say nothing of airplanes c yeah so one uh one interesting anecdote is Brad gersner speaking of uh early he was one of the First Investors in uh into price
line that was his first that was his first uh bet at alaz wow that's amazing and so all these icons of the industry today were there yoloing into internet stocks uh in 1998 absolutely you know beautiful beautiful period of time and so Mary maker says uh in this article the internet IPO frenzy is unbelievable there are so many new companies coming out of the woodwork and the level of
demand from investors is so high it's mind-boggling and the fascinating thing about this article that we'll keep going into is that she correctly predicts that the internet would be a major Trend and that there would be trillions of dollar of value created but simultaneously she also calls correctly that it's a bubble but she still falls on the sword and
becomes this scapegoat because everyone sees her as this major stock promoter and actually this this settlement at one point where she Morgan Stanley and her have to pay fees for pumping stocks too much basically yeah and crazy back here but here's another thing that's crazy that the price line Shar is currently trade at $47 a share wow she brought she brought
Price Line public at $16 and if you had just held it and I'm sure there were stock splits along the way and stuff like that or mergers too yeah mergers stock splits whatever some dilution you know um all that being said um if you just bought price line at the IPO you know 20 20 however many years ago uh 27 years ago you did phenomenally well and I think altimer held it for a
really long time so they they got a lot of those gains and so she was truly a kingmaker during the.com boom every week dozens of entrepreneurs try to get in touch with Meer each of them each of them dreams to become the next Jay Walker the founder of priceline.com who is now worth more than4 billion dollar at least on paper securing the backing
of the best known analyst in the industry is a big is a big step toward billionaire Dom for this reason and others the recent acceleration of the internet boom has placed Meer in a predicament on the one hand it has enhanced her reputation as a financial year her list of recommended stocks is up by about 150% already this year and has made her firm a lot of money on the
other hand it has challenged her view of herself as an objective analyst and filled her with trepidation and so yeah as as a capital markets person she's supposed to just call balls and Strikes and kind of create valuation Frameworks but she's but she's so hyped and seen as like if she's she's backing a company it's legit uh that that she me it's meme coins she you know it's it's Sam lesson
all over again yeah and the and the difference is she's not as an investment bank there's there's this sort of potential conflict right where you're trying to win clients because you want to take those clients public and you benefit at that Event Y you benefit purely from it doesn't really matter you know yes you know you'd have incentives long term around
the price action and yes you're you're selling those shares to to their investor network but in many ways they making money no matter what and so that's that's the slight difference where Brad gersner can buy Price Line you're on mute there you go again uh Brad gersner sure is gonna be fired after this episode um no but but Brad gersner again can um can buy the
stock write it up write it down and and he can even speak positively about it but he didn't birth it into existence totally um and so it's a slightly different position to be in yeah and so she says as the pace accelerates the values get higher and higher and it gets more dangerous uh uh there there's some uh so people were comp comparing do
stocks to the Tulip bubble this is what happens whenever there's an asset bubble people say oh it's like the Tulip bubble which is never that great of an analogy tulips are a better analogy for nfts yeah yeah for sure and but even then like the Tulip bubble was so small and so so short and also I think it was pretty fake it like like I'm pretty sure
the uh like the the the true top ticking of the Tulip bubble was almost entirely fraudulent or something like that there there's some weird historical record where we don't remember the Tulip Mania correctly um but she says there is there is the same supply and demand imbalance the difference is that tulip bulbs didn't fundamentally change the way companies do business the internet does
but when all is said and done there will be many stocks that in hindsight look like tulip bulbs stories and she was absolutely correct about that so her job was really to just pump the good companies yeah but it's not but the the challenge is there was so much interest in Internet stocks at that time y even the best companies like price line which went on generational runs afterwards and
ended up being important internet companies got so ahead of their skis yep that it just doesn't yeah like the fundamental like yes there's a fundamental there's an underlying business that's solid and maybe important but it's still going to get inflated to to such an extreme price I mean SoftBank had a 99% draw down I'm pretty sure uh Amazon went down by like
80% like all the all the stocks got wreck but it really does speak to this idea of like when there's a bubble uh trying to be in the power law winners that are durable companies is probably the best strategy as opposed to saying hey I like if you're the guy who said during the.com bubble said oh I missed out on Amazon I gotta get into you know
uh like books.com or something that just ipoed and is completely it's like that person probably got wiped at zero whereas the Amazon holder if they held they probably did pretty well and so even even with the massive draw down even if they bought at the top and so uh important important lesson there and so she actually predicts just in the first in the first two pages of this I think
stocks sometime this year uh I think there will be a big correction in Internet stocks sometime this year I think a big correction would be very healthy I personally would welcome it so she's like saying like get me out of jail like I'm about to be crucified for this like you gotta correct guys you're it's too frothy these companies are good
and I'm calling the correct companies but the valuations too high we we got to do something about those and unfortunately uh it didn't really happen un yeah I mean like right around this time so she one of the first one of her first big picks uh is um Mosaic and so this actually came she read a new York Times article about Mosaic so a little bit different than um today where I
don't think Mark Andre is is uh you know that he's back in the New York Times two weeks ago he's back in the New York Times but anyways it was 20 20 20ish year Gap yeah Miker read a New York Times article about a startup called Mosaic Communications which is a really cool name for a web browser founded by Jim Clark and Mark andrees um and she
and it's sensing the significance of their work she urged Morgan Stanley's Tech banking lead Frank quatron which is a great name he runs Catalyst now the Investment Bank he did they do most of like the really large scale m&as that happen in SAS yeah um so Frank quatron iconic name uh this ended up leading Morgan Stanley Stanley to become the lead underwriter for netscape's IPO in
August 1995 a watershed event often credited with launching the internet age in the public markets netscape's block Blockbuster IPO not only put the internet on wall Street's map but also cemented Maker's reputation as a Visionary analyst willing to Champion emerging tech companies and so this is like years before she did the price line deal and and everything went crazy she
had part of the reason that she did so well during the bubble is because she had been in the trenches you know when when people didn't really care people weren't even thinking about as much and so she was able to identify that hey like userfriendly consumer products for the internet like the Mosaic browser which was the most user you know user
the Netscape browser which was the most userfriendly product at the time are going to have a lot of value and so um she she should get credit for not just benefiting and being the face of the bubble but helping uh create it we we love Bubbles here and it's it's wild because you've talked about this before on the show you know being in Silicon Valley in like the early 2010s you'd
meet somebody that was like employee number like two at Yahoo and they were like a multi hundred billionaire and that wealth creation even though the 2020 Co you know induced Zer cycle it wasn't the same level of of it wasn't the same kind of wealth creation event that yeah there was a lot of IPOs there was a lot of liquidity events but it certainly was not to that same degree
where you didn't hear about employee number 100 and 50 making a hundred million do like it just didn't really happen to that same extent and a lot of the companies that were going public yes there was some like highly speculative hard tech companies with no real Revenue but a lot of the companies would have like 15 million of ARR and so they were
there was some business there and they started getting valued on these like really crazy looking forward multiples but um it it was a totally for for me you know being born in the mid90s um I guess the yeah the mid 90s um I it's it's it's not really correct to be to to think oh I've lived through something like this because what happened in the late 90s early 2000s you
know year 2000 was was on another level yeah just to just to kind of give you some anchoring on how crazy the dotom boom was during the last four years so from 95 to 99 about a 100 internet companies issued stock on Wall Street and together they are worth they are now worth more than $250 billion for reference it took John D Rockefeller more than 40 years to create Standard
Oil and Bill Gates more than 20 to build Microsoft the pace of paper wealth creation is increasing just since the beginning of March more than a dozen internet companies have gone public and about 30 others have filed for permission to sell stock in the near future and there's some great quotes in here one's from David burn General partner at Benchmark Capital says it's a
very small world referring to Mary Meer the higher you go up the smaller it gets everybody is connected and she is at the center back in '95 Meer and a research associate wrote a 300 page research paper called the internet re the internet report which hailed the N technology as medium isn't that a great isn't that great that you could just come out with a name like the internet
report and it just becomes iconic immediately yeah and so uh at the time fewer than 10 million people were online and many people Bill Gates among them were skeptical about the online world's commercial possibilities people were saying yeah like it's like the fax machine it's not going to really unlock entirely new companies like trillion dollar companies are not going to come
out of this and there was a lot of skepticism uh Meer brushed aside skepticism and predicted correctly that the number of Internet users would grow 100 to 150 million by the turn of the century she followed up that copy that coup by writing the Internet advertising report and then the internet retailing report appeared in 1997 and just to give people an idea of how impactful this was
they took the just the internet report and it was turned into books and then sold in offline yes so like you could go in the airport and buy the internet report y um there was a couple things that she called out very correctly and she because she was she saw that the usage of the internet right 10 million users and she called and this is in 1995
she called that inter uh email would be like the first like killer application which was absolutely correct it's still the the foundation of the of the internet right you can't really use any software in a meaningful way without having that commun you know uh communication layer first and then uh the next uh the next sort of wave that she predicted was just browsing
information online right so um browsing had to come before purchasing and so a lot of companies would spin up a website that you couldn't it wasn't an e-commerce website you could just go there and sort of browse it end up becoming a digital sort of catalog but it's funny to think this time the the concept of browsing just didn't exist right and so a lot of people made money
just by going to Legacy companies and saying I'll make you a website and then they would charge like inconceivable amounts of money to create what was effectively a static you know HTM um yeah uh I love these quotes there's so many there's so many classic ones in here so first off yes 150,000 copies of the internet report were printed and sent around by Stanley if you have one
or you know someone that has a physical copy please let us know I want to acquire that that's a rare text we got to we gotta get our paw on um and I love this quote from Roger mckamy partner at integral Capital Partners Silicon Valley investment firm says Mary has provided an intellectual framework for understanding the internet and I think
that's exactly what Ben Thompson did in the social media era talking about aggregation Theory Mary Meer uh very different business model but very SAR in terms of framework Ben Thompson has a great business model he's will probably make a hundred million do yep telling his thoughts Mary Meer better business model actually capturing some of the
upside of the things that she's writing about and and a ridiculous amount of fees in the in the process yeah well she wasn't really when she was on the capital uh on the equity research desk um because I don't I don't believe she was comped on the actual Investment Banking deals that the investment banking team there should be separate but he switched over and raised a
massive growth fund and has been printing ever since I'm sure yeah but you you have to imagine she was the best paid analyst of that period and was probably paid on par with I would at least Hope on par with somebody on the other side who was relying on her research to actually make deals happen they said it was a few million dollars a year in this
article she was the Tim Cook of her era yeah dramtically but then she became a capital allocator now she has a multi-billion dollar fund Bond Capital she's out there making money yeah so just just to give you an idea so so she's picking companies you know like a VC in the sense that she's picking companies that she can get in like hypothetically she could get into right so anyone else
could have been doing this research and the companies that she was picking uh just just a sampling Dell Microsoft in Netscape AOL Amazon Yahoo eBay and Google were all stocks companies that she like put her stamp on and said these are winners and so even though she ended up taking the fall over time for for being the face of the bubble a lot of
the companies that she was picking like if she was a VC and she got 10 yeah crazy winners and like 40 other you know you know sort of Misses she would have been you know she would have been the greatest VC of that period She just happened to be doing public markets you know more investment research yeah there's a funny anecdote in here she's talking to the journalist and uh her her
email system goes down and it really feels like the same frustration that we were having with AI and chat gbt we're like this is super buggy but she's not off-put by it she says I had to call someone to come into the office and fax me my emails and so there's this thing where you can simultaneously be frustrated with the with with like the rough edges of nent Technology while
still recognizing their impact um there's some interesting uh facts in here little bit of uh cougan law going on uh the there's this idea that uh meiker recognized early that using online communication was much cheaper and more efficient than relying on wood pulp and mailmen and that once the internet grew and more and more people joined the network its usefulness would
increase exponentially the latter Point has been formalized in meta's law which was set down some Years Ago by Robert metcafe the founder of 3com it states that the value of any network increases in proportion to the square of its number of people using it so a network with 500 people attached to it is 100 times more useful than one with only 50 people attached and so this is an
interesting thing because metaps law was defined but it was living out there in the computer science world and she was able to take that idea and popularize it amongst the investing community and that has immense value and sometimes be you don't even need to be the person who coins a phrase to extract the most value from it you can you can extract a ton of
value just by popularizing a phrase in an important but we recommend that that all of our audience try to coin some stuff go out repackages she should have been like actually Maker's law and it's slight different half of our conversations I'm like all right how what do you think about this the haze Paradox right yeah and you're like um it's got legs great she she picked AOL in
1993 first online uh service to be aimed at non-geeks those discs that they send out to everyone and you could install it and use the internet um at the time American American America online was losing money its accounting was dubious and many people on Wall Street were doubtful about its future America Online shares adjusting for subsequent stock
splits were selling for about 95 cents each last week they were changing hands for about $160 each she followed up her inspired America Online call with numerous others she has recommended 10 10 Baggers or stocks that subsequently increased more than tfold uh amazon.com America Online CNET compact Bell eBay into it Netscape and Microsoft now some
of those got bought and stuff but it's like just Banger after Banger you're an absolute dog absolute dog in the fall of 1994 Meer came across a story in the Times by John marof about a new Venture called Mosaic Communications which we talked about which had developed an easy to use device for navigating the worldwide web I read the article and the light bulb went on Beaker told me she
visit she visited mosaic's offices in Mountain View California and in April of 1995 Morgan rounded up a group of Old Line media firms they included times miror night Ritter and Hurst to invest in the new Venture it's so funny Mark andreon did a party round with Legacy Media yeah what what a narrative violation crazy the exact opposite of what he would recommend to a new founder
yeah yeah now he now convincing Founders I need the whole hundred million I need the whole round yeah and also probably good it's probably generally good move at the time it's very funny and so uh on August 9th 1985 at the start of year one in the online ERA with the netke IPO we really hope helped create a new business model she told me we helped
create a new way of financing companies even the most unrestricted stock market bear wouldn't contest the statement one of the great strengths of contemporary on American capitalism which relies on decentralized decision-making by hundreds of millions of individuals is the ability to channel large amounts of money into promising new Industries and
the growth of the internet industry is an excellent example of this process at work fantastic so great there's another anecdote about priceline.com I mean this whole article is just so is is just so so good a couple weeks after our first conversation I returned to Maker's office and asked her what was going to happen in the next in the internet story as she described her vision of the
online world's future she relied heavily on a phrase I hadn't heard before digital Darwinism the phrase is based on the economics of ining returns and on on what are called Network effects it ties in with the conceit common among internet cogn like merik that we are seeing an emergence of an entirely new commercial ecosystem the economics of digital Darwinism are pretty simple
during the last few years economists have come to recognize that high technology markets tend to be dominated by one or two firms which enjoy High profit margins and that companies establishing such an early lead are are difficult to displace and that could not be more true like there that went went on to influence that went on to influence 202 decades 20 years of the
dominant sort of thinking in Venture Capital which was if you don't have if you're if you know if you're not a power law company if you're not uh you know in that sense probably in influenced teal in many ways but um if you're if you don't have Network effects there's probably not a venture back business to be built here uh and off in many cases
you know that was correct yeah the internet is is is a kind of small town everyone will go to www.s something and they won't go anywhere else at least not often and so these habits are really important she called them super companies America online Amazon eBay Yahoo uh very very interested in aggregation Market concentration power law outcomes defining this very very
early I think the problem was that like the second and third order investors like the retail investors and the people Downstream weren't actually reading her reports they weren't actually taking what she said to to heart and so they wound up just yoloing into random stocks hoping for a pump and that happened but then a lot of them got washed out and
that was unnecessary well yeah and and uh there's a ton of data today available on pretty much any company any public company that you can think of and most people just see a post or their buddy tells them and they just YOLO into it they don't really read it's it's not like and so yeah I'm sure if you read her entire report on something you would find a huge section saying here are the
you know 20 potential risks to this business uh but nobody's reading that far right they're just like if I don't invest now the Stock's going to be double by the time I get to call my broker you know call my broker totally this is a fantastic quote about Amazon uh she's she's talking to Steve case who was aol's chairman at the time the question I always ask Steve case aol's
chair chman and chief executive was when do you reach critical mass it it was 1 million customers it was 5 million at 8 million he said Mary shut up lots many AOL finally became profitable at 10 million customers amazon.com on the other hand still hasn't made a dime but meer is relatively unconcerned my view of Amazon is that it's not just books
it's bits she said if two years from now it has 15 or 20 million customers and it has their credit card numbers and they are happy then it can make money books will be seen as the Trojan Horse that got them all the customers just like all given away by AOL and this was this was Zuck not Zuck bezos's genius right totally um Trojan Horse he he was very he he very clearly believed that books
were the Trojan Horse and he picked books as a category I'm sure many people know this because if you walk into a bookstore they're GNA have a lot of books but they're not going to have every book on Earth and this situation you could have a single store quote unquote store that had pretty much every book you could possibly want and so it actually was a
better the digital store was a better product than going to the actual store Y and that was very different than going you know buying cars online at the time where if you walk into a Porsche dealer and you want to buy a new car they're pretty much going to have like what you want right yep um uh this is by way got got some breaking news for the audience we are
now officially at at TB PN on X fantastic so it went live uh anybody if you navigate to uh at Tech Bros pod it'll now take you back to tvpn so more to come there welcome to the Future uh let's continue on uh she's even calling how the internet will affect companies outside of Internet native businesses outside the internet sector the biggest losers in the darwinian struggle Meer
believes will be retailers travel agents and other businesses that compete directly with online firms in the last quarter of 1998 she pointed out to me both bar Barnes & Noble and borders reported slower rates of sales growth in their stores Mattel which mostly makes toys and games out of wood metal and plastic instead of computer chips had a disappointing Christmas yet Meer isn't a
zealot things rarely happen as quickly as one thinks so there's rarely displacement as quickly as one thinks she told me television didn't kill radio the internet is not going to kill television radio or publishing nonetheless uh she is critical of the big media companies for missing a historic opportunity Disney should have been Yahoo AT&T should have been AOL
Time Warner should have been excite she said why didn't it happen because it was a series of judgment errors and so really yeah this is this is the challenge now if you're building startups yep is that we've talked about this earlier on the show if you want to be in social networking you're competing against Zuck who's ridden multiple different hype Cycles in Trends he
identifies Trends early ships at them quickly and it's just a very different game I I think a lot of the Venture the old Garden Venture was trained on the idea that big companies don't adapt quickly but you even saw this Nike acquired an nft company because they were like hey maybe people are going to shift online and be buying digital Goods
so they go buy a you know they bought an nft company like immediately because they were like we this is a risk to our business and maybe a potential growth opportunity and so I I do think this has changed pretty dramatically in the last five years where you have people that were trained on technology and real fast-moving sort of digital Innovation that now are just like okay this is a
trend we're jumping on it right yeah uh there's a great anecdote I I love these articles because it's just a murderer row of today's hitters before they were big uh with the price line IPO out of the way Meer and her colleagues are busy looking for their next big money spinner that's a funny phrase for you know well you're you're on mute but who who are
they going to spin into the next multi-billion dollar company right yeah and so King makers yeah kingmakers and so uh she says uh one night after work Meer and Ruth parat a senior executive at Morgan Stanley's corporate finance department Ruth parat is the CFO of Google Now like big big hitter um they're they're out at a dinner running through some IPO possibilities that were
on the horizon after the waiter took their ERS porat opened a thick black folder that contained information on approximately 200 privately owned internet companies uh you know VCB companies that could be the next big IPO let's talk about tier one candidates first said Pat Uh a slim elegant 39-year-old mother of three the first name on her list was a Colorado based
company that provides financial services online it's got revenues going from 29 to 80 Pat explained meaning in millions of dollars I said it's still too early she added Meer nodded a California company that makes internet software was much closer to the starting line uh porat explained it would it would be holding a bake off at which rival investment Banks would compete for the
lucrative business of taking it public the following week we have to be there right Meer asked yes says her uh uh her assistant Pat grimaced I have to bring my kids she said it's the first day of my vacation continued with Pat methodically checking off her list and Meer offering their views at one point Pat mentioned that firm was also talking to Goldman
Sachs the assistant said he still had some doubts about the company Meer bristling At The Mention Of Goldman disagreed when we first saw it a year ago it didn't have a real story at all she said referring to firm now it story is good the business is developing and the numbers are better let's agree to make a pitch in a couple of weeks I love that like if circling we gotta go like
the we got go there's blood in the water we smell IPO done um when the three of them had completed their decisions and finished their dinner I asked Miker if she had any regrets about the last few years she mentioned that Morgan had missed the opportunity to the IPOs for Yahoo eBay and Amazon and she went on to say that the first case had been a brain
dead mistake Meer hadn't thought that Yahoo was ready to go public and the second had been a screw-up Meer and her colleagues had performed poorly at eBay's Bake Off amazon.com was a different story merer recognized the company's potential and knew its founder Jeff Bezos but she was overruled by the Senior Management at Morgan because the bank had a long-standing relationship
with Barnes & Noble which was amazon.com's main rival crazy Leonard Rio Barnes & Noble's chairman asked Morgan not to raise money for a competitor and Morgan agreed the decision upset Meer so much that he seriously considered quitting instead of remain instead she remained a vocal supporter of amazon.com and her support paid off last year when it asked Morgan
to sell $500 million worth of junk bonds to help Finance its rapid expansion this time Meer superiors ignored RI Rigo's objections just sit down buddy you're not the biggest client here anymore it's it's interesting how this now because so much of financing these type of companies which are early they have some revenue and a ton of potential and great stories
but are still early this just same Dynamic plays out at Venture firms where you have like a partner who backed competitor at another fund and like he's on the board and and so they're just like arguing and like deals don't get done and this is why you see you know big Partnerships kind of not breaking up but partn exiting so a lot of that activity is shifted uh Downstream uh but
it's it's pretty funny to think about Barnes & Noble kind of like blocking blocking the deal because they're like hey you know we keep uh you know we have a a decades long relationship yeah come on business elsewhere you know yeah yeah exactly that Dynamic of of her not really sitting on the the banking side and sitting on the research side she
could still go on to cover these companies once they were in the public markets because Morgan Stanley's clients would be interested and want to understand those stocks yeah and and and no no client is gonna have the poll to say hey don't even cover my competitor or or write a negative research report you'd have to be a really crazy crazy pull at the bank to do that so she
closes uh she she's kind of talking about speculative excess the feel of speculative excess and making too much money too fast reminds one that greed can be bad she wrote in a January research circular and it wasn't a throwaway line when she wrote it she had just visited a couple of private internet companies that wanted to go public they were unbelievably arrogant
about how successful they were going to be and they were unbelievably arrogant about the valuations they wanted to achieve on their IPO she told me I was just pissed I was like come on guys according to Meer a second generation of Internet entrepreneurs is emerging and it often suffers from what she calls market cap Envy does this sound familiar oh I got to get the billion dollar round
done I gotta be a founder of a unicorn this happens today uh uh so there's this massive market cap en Envy of people like andreson and Bezos the first generation was like hey isn't this great I'm a billionaire well that's kind of embarrassing what am I going to do with all this stuff she said the next generation is say well saying well if
he's a billionaire then I've got be a billionaire with every IPO the envelope is pushed a little bit further at some point you have to scream Uncle meiker won't talk about how much money she makes herself but it's safe to say assume that she took home several million dollars last year that is a lot of cash by most people's standards but it's a pittance compared to the amounts
being raked in by successful internet entrepreneurs many of whom are starting to spend their wealth on lavish Estates markent he he waited he built his over a long time and also his uh his wife and father-in-law are like massive landowners as well um but it's funny that every I I gotta be like Mark I gotta be like Mark he's just he's too goated I gotta be a billionaire uh get
the deal done let's IPO this company doesn't matter that we have a million dollars in revenue and it's fake let's get let's get out there she says I'm having fun and I think I'm doing what is what I do best in recent weeks rumors have emerged on Wall Street that she may be leaving Morgan for a hedge fund which didn't happen um but she did leave
eventually for kleer Perkins and then she spun out to start Bond um a growth stage Equity Firm uh where she has uh where she would be paid a lot more but she has dismissed the rumors as titl tattle put about by her competitors I plan to be here uh far from far from seeking a demanding new job Meer said she is hoping to spend more time on things other than work in the next few
years on the rare occasions when she does escape from the office she skis Cycles rollerblades and wind surfs uh eventually she would like no mention no mention of golf there so maybe she got burnt out maybe maybe maybe she sees golf as like more of a work activity honestly I think human beings have a a capacity to go 247 for a certain amount
of time when things are moving in a fast and exciting way it's good advice uh then there's a time when you say wait a minute I think the whole industry is coming to that point perhaps some of Maker's colleagues are skeptical about her resolve to ease up a little she's completely neurotic one of them told me can you imagine her doing anything a slow speed I just don't believe it I
love that that quote's like unattributed somebody was like I I'll give you the real I'll give you the real story on MAR she's Relentless but no I'm not going on record and saying that you know it's it's amazing uh ultimately her future depends on the fate of the industry she covers much as she might like to avoid it her reputation and her lifestyle are
inextricably linked to the fate of stocks like amazon.com Yahoo and eBay not a bad fate to be linked to yeah and it's also not really true she's being paid to be an analyst and even in a down cycle you still need to analyze equities y um should we jump to kind of the some of the Fallout basically of yeah yeah let's do it so um little summary of kind of like what happened so like this
article was written in 1999 99 99 so this is kind of what comes after so however me Maker's close ties to the doom boom also brought scrutiny when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 to 2001 and for people that listen to our Friday episode on Masa sun in the year 2000 Masa was in a Tokyo nightclub telling every young you know man and woman that was in the club you're gonna
be worth $50 million you're gonna be worth $50 million you're gonna be worth $50 million like you know basically just getting everybody so so so hyped yeah three months later the market just crashes falls out everyone um so Masa was playing a different game uh and Riding High so as Mosa's net worth dropped 90 literally 99% goes from the richest man in the entire world riding
on you know many of the same remember he bought 30% of Yahoo for like 100 million bucks or something like that so he was back he was self-identifying some of the companies that that meiker was analyzing as well um so when the when the bubble burst she was vilified by the Press uh alongside all the other sort of star analysts who were hyping these sort of
Internet stocks um and Regulators ended up having to investigate whether analysts had conflicts of interest in promoting stocks so it's it's obviously a conflict if an analyst is buying a stock and then dropping a report on behalf of an investment you know Bank uh and then and then presumably there's going to be a huge pop and they're and they're selling and so this is very
different than a VC backing a company in the private markets and then going and posting a thread you know I think this is a trillion dollar company or whatever because they're not selling you know they're not like at a company that sells those that will sell you those shares right it's it's all privately held um so uh unlike her peers Meer was never
charged with wrongdoing in fact colleagues noted that meiker genuinely believed in the long-term values of the company she covered um for instance she continued to endorse Amazon e even after the crash convinced of its wrong fundamentals and so she was also telling people in her reports I think there's a bubble I think a correction would be
good it would be healthy she she wasn't just she wasn't Masa which was like very different than Masa we at the precipice of the biggest transformation of all time you're all going to be worth you know tens of millions of dollars so a very different approach um Morgan uh Morgan Stanley where she was at and other firms did have to pay a large settlement to re resolve their analyst
conflict of interest inquiries inquiries but mer Maker's personal Integrity remained largely intact her genuine conviction in Tex future even during the dark days set her apart as Fortune Magazine wrote she was absolutely First Rate at spotting big picture Trends and backed up her ideas with massive amounts of data and so she wasn't just she wasn't just the Masa who's like no
diligence doesn't even know who the competitors are yoloing into uh Yahoo just saying you know this is the greatest company of all time who are your competitors okay cool if you don't let me invest I'm gonna invest in them you it you know putting out this like met hundreds and hundreds and you know the volume here is what you should really you know um and I'm sure the
difference in the slides that she would put out versus Masa where Masa just has it up Arrow you know y yeah this is the only you know graphic you need up up only she posts a 300 page report have you ever seen any of her reports it's all like the most detailed like like do ra price earnings Assets in the chat uh P pondan said the internet report is $27
used on Amazon so oh let's get one thank you yeah yeah we'll have to get one thank you thank you for calling that out doing our homework for us and then Adonia says my favorite was WM connect apparently it was Walmart's version of AOL which they they launched at some point uh so if you love AOL you you'll love the Walmart you know version of it the Walmart version of it yeah they sell
the Walmart Birkin bag and now they also sell the Walmart internet what can't they do over at Walmart yeah it Legends oh fantastic so anyways and then and then now uh let's talk about kind of where where she took this because she was sick absolutely sick to her stomach only making a few million bucks a year um while everyone around her was making
hundreds to billions yep um she probably went out and hung out with Mark and and started to say hey maybe this Venture Capital lifestyle for me fantastic yep and so yeah now she's she's still running bond large growth Equity Firm investing in late stage SAS scale ups and other large no and and before that so she 2010 right everybody circling saying you know she she
weathered the storm she kept being you know one of the top analysts for a lot of these stocks like I said continuing to not hype the word like hype is the wrong word because her approach was very much looking at the fundamentals of the businesses and the markets that they were in but so she kind of like rides the Fallout to to 2010 at that point you
know this whole time people are thinking you know this is like with the Personnel news bit that we would do on her move would be you know just the craziest uh you know sound effects and and visual Graphics you can think of but so she ends up actually going to Kleiner Perkins at which at the time was still kpcb Kleiner Perkins Coffield and buyers one of top silicon Valley's top
Venture Capital firms as a general partner so she goes straight to the top of course KP brought her on to lead a newly formed one billion dollar digital growth fund aimed at investing in fast growing tech companies transitioning from Wall Street analyst to venture capitalist was an unusual move uh very few analysts had ever joined VC firms at
senior levels although it is interesting that Gurley was a tech analyst himself prior to going into Venture Capital so it does seem like it's a good base for VC um and it but it played deer's long-held desire to be an investor and Company Builder there's a quote here she says I always wanted to invest my move to investing was delayed in part because I just love what I was doing as an
analyst she later reflected she would have Lov Twitter threads uh kind of missed missed that ER of being you could just right you could have been a thread boy um so at KP Meer hit the ground running within two years she and her team had deployed about half of the fund so $500 million into 20 technology companies Meer l or coet investments in several high-profile companies including
Spotify Square Twitter Groupon Jawbone and ways she also backed lesser known but promising companies like Lending Club peer-to-peer lending doc you sign she helped lead them to 150,000 employees uh uh one King's lame which was some home decor company and she said some Investments were chances to catch up on companies Kleiner had missed earlier so she was
like very much focused on businesses that already had some amount of fundamentals and this this kind of shows the trend of uh companies saying oh we have $10 million of Revenue and some users let's go public to hey I'd rather just take a big check from Mary Meer and stay private stay focused she trusts the fundamentals I don't need to explain
what we're doing to tens of thousands of people uh every quarter and so um Maker's presence and network often open doors she personally knew or could reach the CEOs and founders of most Rising Tech unicorns giving Kleiner an edge and winning deals so she she goes from during the 2000s bubble every single person on Earth wants to meet her hang out with her do deals whatever you know
have her you know analyze their business so then going into Venture it's compar comparatively a lot easier because you know Founders you know Founders will still come to you and you're still that in that position of kind of just trying to pick pick winners and so she had really built up that um that muscle and so she was on the board of companies
like Square DocuSign NEX door um which you have to imagine was was pretty invaluable for those companies so um do you want to take it from here yeah I'm pretty much ready to wrap up I think uh you know she's still out there she still does like Web 2.0 Summit with John battel still puts out internet reports but it lives in like a very different part of the internet now I yeah I wish
that she went all in on web 3 like Andre should she should have partnered up and been an andrees uh crypto but I think she probably not really her style like likes the likes the fundamentals likes uh you know earning potential things like you don't find you don't find in crypto quite as much no um but yeah she's still she's still around still kicking we gotta get her on the Pod we
gotta get her uh on Lex fredman dwares Patel let's make these things happen you know who really should interviewer her uh Logan Bartlett that would be a great one yeah she'd be great for that um but yeah I mean what a fascinating tour of a of a time capsule ERA with lots of lessons for today uh I I love it I love digging into these old profiles and
seeing what life was like back then so good uh Mary you're always welcome on the show always welcome honorary brother y we should track some of her her latest fun maybe we give her brother of the week yeah yeah maybe we ring the size gong raise the next one if we had we had if I had the gong here I'd hit it yeah uh well let's move on to some Personnel
news we got some incredible news from Alex Conrad uh he says today is my last day at Forbes I'm leaving to build something new wow this this is a another death Nell for Legacy Media folks it really is Ashley Vance and now Alex Conrad I don't know who's left it's an empty building at this point who else is there it's a disaster at these places but Alex is on to to greener pastures he
says I've been lucky to call this place home for the past 12 years working with the best team and getting to know so many of you from the mest list to 18 cover stories it's never been boring so watch out for what Alex Conrad's doing next I look forward to seeing it maybe it's a substack maybe it's a media company who knows maybe it's some Gonzo
journalism and we'll see him uh with a whiskey W I know is we will be honored to cover the stories that he covers exactly we will be honored to cover his story of his coverage exactly exactly anyways congrats Alex awesome move uh but always always an entertaining writer and of course the mitas list drops like a stone every year I hope you know a couple a couple months ago when the
Midas list dropped I uh I posted a a something on X recommending that there there should be other lists there should be the Icarus list of for for VCS that that are the worst essentially yeah they just flew too close to the Sun it flew too close to the Sun and he liked it and and was like this is actually a good idea now that he's got the chains off
he's no longer at Forbes maybe we'll see an Alex Conrad Icarus list no but here's here's here's some misinformation for you so um this is true Forbes had been kind of on the market sort of widely widely known that there was you know it was for sale so like y bunch of people looked at it I don't know but it would be hilarious if if Alex was part of a group forming like the acquir you know
then you know he might be like I'm back actually and I'm the CEO now I'm the CEO see it yeah but Forbes is Forbes is an interesting business because it's one of those things they've licens off so many parts of their business they have like there's Forbes publishing which has the license to publish books under the forbs name and so you've probably gotten
emails before that's like hey John like I'd like to write about like I think you'd write an amazing book like oh this is Forbes publishing and so he's they compete with like Eric yeah and and H what's Eric's company's name again serpentin NOC H not not Eric scribed yeah yeah scribed yeah yeah um um anyways uh yeah yeah it's interesting I I you know Forbes is known
for the 30 under 30 and the Midas list I hope that Alex can take some of that because those lists they just go so viral they're so like they they're such a powerful moment in Tech whenever they drop and there's and there's so many ways to freshen them up and uh and put a fresh Twist on them I was joking with somebody about uh instead of the fors 30 under 30 there's a lot of people that
still like that and they fight to be on those lists uh and they get really upset if they don't make it and they turn 31 because then they can't be on the list or they turn 30 they can't be on the list and I was like the alpha here is just make here are here are the here are the best 21 year olds here are the best 22 year olds and make a list for every
age every single year and then anyone can be on the list and it's just a rodex so there's there's a lot of other uh there's a lot of other opportunities in yeah maybe he's just starting a list company it's a media company that just does lists I would love that it and it's all pay to play so he's like yeah you want to be on my Midas the Conrad list for top VCS 100 Grand let's
do it I he's like I ran the Midas list yeah this is the only list that matters now yeah I'd want to be on it yeah yeah anyway podcaster podcaster John cougan tops the Conrad list even though he's not he's definitely the smallest investor clear angel investor smallest investor on this list but he's got um anyway should we get into Conrad media
and it seems to be on the board there too weird we had got um let's go to a promoted post from Brandon jacobe jacobe jacobe he's hiring a designer at X there is tons of momentum and excitement happening at X for the right designer it's a chance to do the most impactful and important work of your career if you're interested send Brandon jacobe a
DM with your best work the job is in person in New York City the city that never sleeps the Big Apple or the Bay Area I love how Brandon put a typo in here to prove that it wasn't written by AI I I pretty much do this every post if you haven't noticed I'll rip a post and a solid post usually has at least a couple typos in it yep because I'm moving quick but I love that Brandon
wanted to say this is authentic this was written by a human I really want you to join my team um Brandon was the first hire at my last company party round uh we met uh at a at a SE house in New York because he's a designer I wanted to make him feel like you know like I'm like a cool CEO you know knew within like 30 minutes that I that I wanted to hire him and and I and
I actually um one of one of the most uh you know was was my right-hand man uh for uh three years and is just an absolute Legend So if you're a designer or your friend's a designer uh reach out to Brandon uh this would be an I mean working on the everything App working on X right now it's a portal into Humanity the good in the bad uh incredible opportunity so um and uh I would like to
work for Brandon if if I had if my figma chops were were on that level but uh yeah joining X right now is like joining the Mongol Empire right as genghiskhan is taking control generational run generational run coming up get on board hop on your horse and Gallop over to Brandon Jacob's DMS with your best design work okay John jump into the next
post Ben's giving me instructions that I need to turn on some lights well I will read this one let's go to Sam Alman he says people will post lots of great examples so this is his announcement of uh open AI chat GPT 03 mini High deep research version and deep research he says people will post lots of great examples but here's a fun one uh Sam Alman he I am in Japan right now and
looking for an old NSX I love that he's out there collecting cars and he spent hours searching unsuccessfully for the perfect one how do you not have a broker for this the answer he doesn't need one because he has chat GPT deep research I was about to give up and deep research just bound it and so uh if you're on the pro subscription of Chachi petique go
give it a test check it out we used it a little bit it's still Rough Around the Edges they're ironing Out The Kinks but definitely a fun new product to play around with and I hope there will be a unification of the models soon and everything will get much easier but it is cool uh you know you click um click the Deep research you let it cook and it just goes on for you know like minutes
sometimes just working searching doing a bunch of different stuff uh creating a bunch of those internal logic tokens and from there it spits out a pretty thorough research report which I think is great um let's move on to Andre karpathy we already talked about uh deep research a bit Andre karpathy has a good post here he says uh there's a new kind
of coding I call Vibe coding where you fully give into the Vibes Embrace exponentials and forget that and forget that code even exists it's possible because the the llms cursor composer with sonnet are getting so good I also I just talked to composer with super whisper so I barely even touch the keyboard I ask for the dumbest things like decrease the padding on the sidebar
by half because I'm too lazy to find it I always accept all I accept all always I don't read the diffs anymore when I get er messages I just copy and paste them with no comment usually that fixes it the code grows beyond my usual comprehension keep in mind this is one of the greatest programmers of all time yeah I'd have uh uh sometimes the llms can't fix a bug so I just work around it
or ask for random changes until it goes away it's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects but still quite amusing I'm building a project or web app but it's not really coding I just see stuff say stuff run stuff copy paste stuff and it mostly works I love it what a Vibe shift in in programming is happening I mean it's he he karpathy basically gave
every developer in the world permission to do what they're already doing which which they didn't want to talk about because they were like oh I use llms the best and then the most compated ways but really it's just you know like uh grandma in the Vegas casino slot tab yeah there's no gatekeeping here yeah is software is war you have to be willing to do anything to anyone and
it's actually cool thinking about you know I've had you have this design you can design apps way faster than you can build functional apps historically and so you could hang out like I would hang out with Brandon jacobe and we would just sit there for an hour and just make a bunch of stuff y I'd be like no do it like that do it like this things like
that and that's now becoming possible with software just the speed and so you can imagine I can imagine live streaming software development becomes like much more common because it's like hey watch me build this app in this like crazy app in an hour that's way more that's way more interesting than watch me build this app over a 20-day period right
exactly yeah 100% um well let's move on to deep seek Mark andreon is sharing some data he says deep seek is now 23% of chat GPT daily active users and far more daily app downloads and the Keet to beer chimes in and says I'm skeptical of this data Tik talk is warming this trend so creators are rushing in to make videos about deep seek if you post about deep seek on Tik Tok you will get
promotion you'll get pumped in the feed uh and go viral and two when Da includes first day downloads it overstates authentic adoption so for example I mean I downloaded DFC one day I tried it once just to know what it was about it has not replaced as daily driver I probably still count as Dau on that phone and so uh little bit of like you know putting
this in the truth Zone what's actually going on here maybe it's just too soon to tell uh Nikita says there's also zero share flows of responses inside of deep seek that would lead I I forgot to print the rest of that but interesting debate um it will be interesting to see how sticky deep seek is clearly they broke through in a major way uh it it it's probably a stronger brand than anthropic
already even though Claude has like this amazing uh you know uh community in the developer sense with like the Sonet IND cursor everyone knows about that uh but that's a very narrow thing if you walk to somebody on the street they might know the term deep seek they might not know the term Claude or Sonet or anthropic um and that's why uh Claude
has been or anthropic has been like buying Billboards trying to build their brand whereas deeps was able to kind of go viral with this crazy it's open source it's from China and it's this whole thing and it went viral and it cost stuff they really did like a stunt and now it's coming out actually spend six million but it still served as a viral Market entry yeah I think you have
to look at Mark's post about this from the lens that he was deeply frustrated with open Ai and open ai's board for trying to pursue regulatory capture around Ai and say hey this is so dangerous please regulate us but like regulate Us in these ways we you know really going out against open source so open AI started as an open source company flipped into a for-profit
closed Source company and now still they've been facing heat in the last 24 hours because their chain of thought like the reasoning that they show yeah people figured out that it's just an llm summarizing the actual Chain of Thought reasoning because they want to share it um and so Mark you know just not GNA say it on the timeline but he absolutely hates open AI he hates what they stand
for he hates what they've done and so he's taking every opportunity to promote deep seek out of out of an annoyance um with openi more broadly so I don't believe any of this data either I believe that yes they're getting the downloads but it could very easily be fake it could be a bunch of fake you know Tik Tok uh users trying it out every from what we know there's a really
strong willingness to try new a AI products there's also ridiculous churn so magic avatars was the same thing with that company that I can't even remember but everyone downloaded for that one week they paid a little bit uh what was it called lenza and then they got their magic avatars they posted on Instagram and then okay I'm done with that and so
it'll be interesting to see what the attention is here for sure uh the other interesting thing is that uh Lex Freedman just had dwar had Dylan Patel on five hour episode last night and he's back to his back to his AI Roots he's like I'm sick of having these Ukrainian on on my show I just want to talk about AI but it was a fantastic episode and in there uh Dylan Patel
addresses the question of can you basically poison an open source llm at the open weights level and so there's this huge differentiator between obviously like like if you're if you're interacting with the Deep seek app they get your data and they say that right in the terms and conditions like it's hosted in China all the data goes into a database there and everyone knows that
the question is if it's open source and you're running it on American Hardware is it possible to bake into the weights some some sort of back door and he actually he says he doesn't think this is happening right now but it is possible and he gives a couple examples that are good one is that uh the the English uh like like UK British English
is basically dead and no llm because they're all trade on American English L llms just will never spell the word color with a u they just only spell it c o r because it's so Americanized and total victory yeah and a lot of those are baked in and the open web that was because that's all because they tried to put a two and a half% tax on T we'd be still all be saying color
you yeah and so a lot of the uh uh a lot of the um uh like these open source llms they they tend to lean slightly left because they're trained on the internet the internet has historically been used by younger people and the internet has slightly leaned left and so even though xai has done a lot of stuff to rip out like the wokeness there's still some
sort of in the pre-training data just a slightly left leaning bias that they have to kind of like try try and counteract in some way to bring it more towards the center I guess um and so it's totally possible to embed something and and this is what's really interesting anthropic has done some uh adversarial AI Safety Research where they've basically tried to bake in just
to just the weights remember this is this is an open source model that you could run on your own Hardware not even connected to an internet and it can have a key a keyword in there that when it hears it it will behave differently and and so and so in theory I'm not saying this is happening right now but in theory you could train a an AI model that when it when it sees when it
interacts with a certain when a certain system or it sees a certain IP address or it sees a certain web URL it behaves differently and it kind of acts as a back door even though it's open source and you're running it yourself kind of like the stuck net virus so it's possible Dylan Patel doesn't think this is happening right now he doesn't think anyone's actually been able to do that
but it is this interesting Vector that actually makes me think a lot of the AI Safety Research might have been worth doing because we have these valuable insights and it also makes me question like should we be more cautious like like is it fair to look at Deep seek as just a win for open source because there could be some sort of risk Vector there
either now or in the future and so uh I I I think when with when this came out you were more skeptical about it and I was saying hey look if you run it locally there's no problem I've kind of flipped over to your side now and I say hey you know these open source models I'm I'm I'm in favor of Open Source in many ways but I think that we do need to be cautious and we do need to test these
models before we just roll them out to every American yeah the question is will AI have a stucks net moment yep it's possible and I'm sure that it will it just seem like like on a long enough time Horizon right their their uh nation states have for all of Humanity's history tried to control information and knowledge right there's a lot of power that that stems from that and so if you
were a aggressive nation state that wanted to inflict your ideology on the world yep why would you not try this hey if we can get a million people or a 100 million people in this adversarial Nation to download you know something that we can then control in some way or another why would you not do that seems like a great great great strategy um and
US consumers have proven that they will download buy anything from China we'll see what happens with teu and you know all these other yeah there's also the there's the subtle like the subtle ways to Pivot a society through just like oh you ask it for four bullet points about you know why this president was good and it gives you one that's a critique you know and it's just
like subtly shifting your perception of X Y or Z obviously the T the Tian Square thing is like the most obvious example but there's a million like super subtle ways that you could you could shift the perception of if you're truly doing information War uh that you could just subtly steer people towards your ideology without them even noticing and
that's actually the more valuable thing than just saying like oh we got to keep t t and square Under Wraps like that doesn't really matter that doesn't matter as much as just if you're just subtly subtly tweaking people's preferences away from democracy that could be really harmful over a long long period of time yeah and so we got we gotta um we got a comment from adonus sorry if
I'm mispronouncing that he says I've been saying the US needs to get ahead of this by funding a security hardening Manhattan Project as one of the first things we do with super intelligence so I think it's also basically saying that we kind of need to start doing that now and plan around you know the inevitable seemingly inevitable super intelligence
stage so yeah great Point well let's move on to Jeff Lewis he says it has been clear since 2022 that we are in a historically acceleratory period I expect it to last for decades acceleration entails asset bubbles forming and popping and forming again much faster than any of us are used to if you are uncomfortable with insane volatility seek illiquid or less liquid
in Investments lowan Banger I think he's absolutely right um I mean we just saw this Bitcoin dipped from 100 to 92 and then back to 100 I'm sure there's lots of people that like sold because it was falling like a knife and then I don't even know what it's that now might be down might be up who knows it's back up it's 102 and so there's all these like
crazy things and and the the people who probably did fine and and held there probably had it in a cold W cold store couldn't even move it um yeah this is this is uh so the the IL liquidity in startups oftentimes feels like a curse because you're like why did I choose a career where I build tens of millions of dollars of asset value and can't access
it with without months of paperwork and finding a you know buyer on the other side which can be tough but uh it's also the benefit because if the majority of your wealth is il in illiquid private stocks day-to-day you just don't really like my my if the market can go down or up I'm not really it doesn't really change my yeah broad General position um and crypto people have really been
feeling this the last few days like I had a a buddy text me yesterday and he said dude I was in sanely rich last week and like now I'm not and he's and I talked to him he's like he sold some but like he's just killing himself because he's like yeah I could have if I had just sold everything at that moment where I thought I was being pragmatic it
would I'd be in a much different financial situation and so um yeah and and I also this this to me tied um my gener being born in the mid 90s I feel like I started to become conscious around the time of like truly conscious as in like understanding the world and the markets and things like that during the Great Recession yep and so as and and I was like okay this is so bad it
felt like a long time right like I've got you know my my dad was a math teacher so it didn't affect his job but there was a lot of like fear in the market and I feel like I felt that for a while and then covid hit and everybody's like oh this is going to be the biggest global economic disaster of all time and it felt that way for two weeks and then every Market ripped because just huge
amount of of sort of like fake printed liquidity was injected into the market and it felt like the shoe never really dropped right we were all kind of like waiting for it it didn't happen and then 2022 2023 happened yes things were bad yes a lot of venture portfolios were down quite a bit but stocks overall like meta up 5x since then right so um it's a lot of
volatility um but the best way to deal with volatility is just to hit the SAA let's move on to elano over he says sauna etiquette is at an all-time low in this country from swinging the door wide open to excessive loud breathing and movement to wearing sneakers in the sauna there is a there is an epidemic that needs addressing I completely agree where are
people learning their sauna etiquette folks I have lucky to been have a home sauna for better part of a decade uh so I don't have to deal with this too much um actually I might have to jump in the middle of a in the middle of the timeline to turn on my sauna in the other in the corner but um uh I went to this sauna place called Bath House in New York which is like style styled
after old bathouses so there's like hot pools saunas cold plunges and I was it was the biggest joke every a lot of people there clearly hadn't spent much time saing before and so they'd walk to the sauna and they open the door and they'd be looking in and you know looking around and then like decide not to come in and then come back and if you're a real sauna Enthusiast you want
that you're like opening the door a little bit popping in because you want to keep the heat as high as possible y even having the door open for you know 10 seconds like meaningfully degrades The Experience totally so um yeah the real solution is just get a SAA at home but when you're traveling it's kind of unavoidable to deal with this kind of
etiquette and I don't know if we'll see much change without uh RFK you know if he gets put in he can say like sonador legally cannot be held open for more than one second uh and every uh every every man woman and child in America needs to have an upper deckie in when they're working at the computer I love it well speaking of other amazing things
you can sit in let's go to a promoted post for a 2024 Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Club sport wrapped in an amazing American flag you want to go straight from sitting in the sauna to sitting in your Club sport this is a special series limited to a small number of units and it was developed by manthy for track day enthusiasts who want to drive their car with maximum performance on the
racetrack it's not for the tallest members of society 718 can be a little small you might know it as the boxer you might know as the Cayman uh if it's got a roof on there but okay but but itams and the gt4s it's got the got the 911 powertrain in there right yeah it's got the same engine as a GT3 RS so uh it uh and many many like hardcore Porsche enthusiasts prefer this one prefer this
from a Driving Experience standpoint because it's mid lighter and it has Mid Engine and um and uh yeah I actually I was looking at a very specific GT4 RS uh before I got my Turbo and uh I I think there it was just a little bit much like personally I don't want to be if I was driving into the studio every day with this huge Wing you know I want to have a
slightly more subtle Wing um it's a rough ride but uh this this thing is um I and and they're not making any more of these I don't think so I I expect this one to appreciate quite a bit so at 350k they're practically giving it away if you're an American dynamism investor you need to let people know what team you're on get get the get the GT4 RS wrapped in
the American flag you can't go wrong folks let's move on speaking of America let's move to the White house Nat fredman's got a great post for us he says the White House should require that all federal vendors put the United States at the top of all country selector drop down this is actually true right can you isn't it one so annoying when you have to SC down I'm using if
I'm using a website in America put it at the top put it at the top you probably know you probably know who I am already like let's make a little bit of Million Way IP address make me feel at home you know make me feel at home right little thing you can do yeah make me feel at home on your website most of the websites I use were made by Americans y but even the ones not you know make me
feel at home and if you're a federal you know if you're if you're a business that does business with the federal government you know go the extra mile kind of respect yeah exactly uh let's go to Adam Townsen he said honestly X is so addictive right now holy moly it's like a dashboard into the world real B proper Banger here everybody's feeling the addiction and
this brought to you by jacobe so if you want to make X even more addictive go work for go work for jacobe but no I I resonated with this we've had a bunch of people reach out to us and say oh I'm Shadow ban you know I feel I hate the new X I hate the new algorithm and we just tell them your posts are bad yep people don't like your posts and so
they're not getting shared with people and it's it's a blood bath on the timeline it is war you do have to show up every day you got to post your heart out you're gonna have some flops you're gonna have some bangers but the timeline tells you in the first 100 Impressions you know right away if it's if it's a heater or not yeah and it's never been a better I don't think it's
ever been better from an entertainment product standpoint to be on X even if you weren't even if you come out like it used to be I'd tell a friend Twitter is amazing like six years ago I'd be like Twitter is amazing you know like a LinkedIn bro you're like you got to get on Twitter real conversations were Happening Here with absolute dogs and absolute killers this is the place to be
and I'd be like follow these 30 40 accounts or just go through my following and follow them all and it'll start you off in this strong place now you basically and land on X and it'll serve you like a Nikita post like ship posting right away it just knows so yeah and and I mean the it's a give and take right because as a poster you get frustrated
when you have some post that that you know rips and then one post that fails and flops and that can be very tumultuous but the flip side of that is that when you're scrolling on the viewer side it's all bangers because the algorithms figured out what's actually good and it's not just showing even if it's your friend it's not showing you their slop post that sucks yeah like I
don't want to see in Banger in Banger archive just shows that like some ideas just resonate so broadly you can post a screenshot of the original post and get more likes than yeah than the original post like we've ra Nal like countless times now it's fantastic let's move to a uh a promoted post from our buddies over at wander they just passed 500 total locations 100
new homes launched in 30% month-over-month gmv growth during the month of January congrats to wander let's ring the siis gon ring the gong the gong we're going across the country soon we're planning our route based on wander locations thankfully they have a lot now because if this was a year or two years ago it would have been you know much harder to plan that trip but um yeah
Kyle Kyle's just a legend so yeah well here we got a good question uh uh Rob jamama says where are you on the tech bro podcast Spectrum my first million technology brothers are all in there was a little poll and I think we did quite well I think we're I think we're polling at something like 35% of this in 37% 37% thank you to all the brothers who went out there showed up
voted voted for us uh didn't quite understand if this is truly a spectrum I don't really think of us as like in between my first million and Allin but uh just happy to be in the conversation with some of the some of the Legends in yeah so 26% of people chose my first million okay 37% chose TB 28 28% chose Allin and a bunch of other people said
nine% said others so we're toal total Victory but the thing is is if we didn't win this poll it would be deeply even though we have one 100th of the audience size of Allin yeah infinitely more profitable but that's another conversation yep um we put out 15 times as much content as these other shows and so if we didn't hit the top we would have had to quit podcasting so I'm
really glad that we that we came out on top um and uh yeah we're glad we're glad people like the show uh I don't think anybody likes the show more than John and I like recording it and producing it but uh glad that our own self- entertainment is entertaining to other people as well that's true let's go to vitorio he says deep seek R1 has been fully open sourced for 10 days and no
civilization ending bioweapon has been deployed no nukes have gone off and the world isn't burning down doomers should publicly apologize and then commit seacu for sling progress what a post uh yeah it is it is an incredible indictment of the of the doomers that they're we're not even hearing the the the oh this is so scary now when there's an open source model
that's way above what gpt2 gpt3 was at the same time because of the the risk of embedding uh Manchurian candidates into open source llms I am now thankful for the AI safety progress that was done and I actually in favor of doing more of it I think it's actually more important than ever Let's Wait a a decade or two to take a Victory lap uh I uh I'm not a
paperclip see see no but but but you can imagine uh you know these things civilization ending bioweapon no nukes have gone off Etc the the Counterpoint here and I'm sure someone like Alex Jones would worry warn you about is that in a world where these reasoning models are embodied and yes maybe it takes some human input to sort of carry out actions but if you can tell you can imagine a
world where somebody tells deep seek R1 that's EMB via some figure robot like collect the necessary materials to create a nuke and then work as long as it takes to make that nuke and then let it off somewhere there's a scenario where this same technology that we have in some form today can be used in pretty nefarious ways yes but the question then
becomes can the AI become autonomous and decide it wants to do that because hey these humans are using a lot of power and I could use that power on my compute so just going to wipe them all out so we still don't have that sort of like real autonomy and and and um the thing is is that as soon as that happens me and all of my boys are gonna do the exact same
thing but our prompt is going to be go around the world and make sure nukes don't go off yeah war and and I just assume that there will be more robots on the side of good and there will be more a devoted to counter bad Ai and it will just become a battle and they will be Waring and it'll be B but hopefully you know will power and enough energy and enough
money side of good so sometimes like in Australia there's videos that surface of like a kangaroo like fighting another kangaroo have you seen these where they like they'll actually like brawl and they're pretty humanlike you know yeah yeah yeah you can imagine a world where you walk out in your backyard and there's like a there's a Tesla Optimus fighting a figure robot and they're just
like duking it out you're like you just kind of shrug and take a video and walk back inside okay one of them starting to trying to start a nuclear war the other one's like a good robot so yep yeah yeah yeah I'm looking forward to it let's stay with vitorio he says if you've never had a six-pack you've never experienced how beautiful and simple life can
be so so uh we got another comment uh MSA with s Sam Alman said AI would be a billion times better in three years and uh this m is also the guy who told room full of young people that everybody would be worth $50 million in a year so fantastic uh we'll see what happens i' I'd like as of now I'd like AI to be a billion times better so we'll fantastic PDF upload and P PDF export
would also be I really just want that PDF functionality and ideally could have a better integration with our printer yeah I love it uh well I mean the voria post we've we've talked about this before getting diced is underpriced uh maxing golden retriever maxing uh I highly recommend everyone get a sixpack uh it's uh it's difficult but it's well worth it and uh beautiful and your life
will be simple and beautiful uh speaking of getting jacked lifting heavy things Ivan over at notion says at the end of each quarter notion designers lift cars DMS open if you are a designer who can code and lift cars I had no idea that uh notion had this hardcore of a culture I don't think of notion as a like a bodybuilding company but apparently they
are and I love to see it so off notion yeah if you wanted to one up them it' be a superar lifting uh see it contest whatever they were carrying was not Hummer EV yeah yeah take it up a notch take it up a notch I see they're lifting a Prius it's probably couple thousand pounds let's see you push it to 10,000 guys yeah lift that Homer crack the pavement uh let's move over to uh just a
fantastic shout out to a friend of the show Ram Kyle Lacy says thank you ramp for being a great product it's such a joy to use and ramp says thank you for being such a great customer if there are ever ways we can improve hit us up anytime all I would say here is you know a lot of people use um are starting to use these models for companionship and
just like you know having somebody you can talk to don't be afraid to send a connection request to a ramp SDR don't be afraid to just message at TR ramp on X and just say hey what what's up like you don't necessarily need anything to talk about you know I agree chat like treat him as a friend um and don't don't overthink it like sometimes you just want somebody to talk to and I've had
many you know late night conversations with my ramp SDR and I cherish those memories so yeah sent you yeah yeah and so speaking of Finance Gordon gecko asked WTF is High Finance and he's responding to a post viral Tik Tok from high yield Harry whoa this is so cool and it's a POV you work in High Finance yeah so I've seen I've seen this video this guy I think
he's engagement baiting but he basically just posts these videos of like him doing uh it's like him at F1 yeah like parties dinners all this stuff like just not working at all um and it's kind of a uh so all the all the uh fin twit accounts are are being like whoa this is cool I've never done this before and meanwhile they're they're at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs just like
slogging it out I love it I love it podcasting is the next is the next way loud opulence Ben let's skip forward we're going to the luxury watch guy we got some breaking news in the world of luxury Ro watches uh pek Philipe has discontinued some major models the 5712 1A is finally discontinued huge shock on the 5370p congrats to all of the owners of
these beautiful time pieces and we got a couple Aquin a nautilus couple complication watches are all discontinued and so their values will Skyrocket potentially you know if you got in at the right time could be doing very well John you've been doing a little you've been doing a little pek shopping on bezel you you've been I think I'm going to Bashon next you
convinced me with the with the story you're telling every yeah Vashon has a great narrative right now but luckily you can get it all on yeah so we highly recommend going on bezel build a build a list do some shopping you don't need to overcommit immediately concierge is there to help you for me I have I have like half the watches on this list added to my bezel
wants and I'm just waiting to just take him down so it's a great it's it's the best experience to just sort of passively shop when you're not quite ready to pull the trigger but you have you want to build up that yeah that future you got to go through phases before you commit you gotta really imagine okay is this the right one maybe I want to take it a different direction
build up the collection how does this fit into a collection you need a daily driver you need a dress watch you need a sports watch uh you need something that's complicated maybe a chronograph there's a lot of different things that can that can speak to different moments in your life and so um bezel is the best app for all of that um let's go to um juice I guess uh seems to be a fan of
the show says uh one preed your boy safes two avocado seed 20 on 100 three guac a 80% down round four B Masa comes in five total recap and back to one best Founders can repeat the circle of life three to four times until they graduate to a spack merger after Moss's round honestly all time I love the the guac a and the suicide B is just so basically for for those that that uh I'm sure
everybody listening follows John already on X but John went on an absolute Terror on Saturday and ripped like four or five posts all about suicide round and so we're just trying to meme this into existence so next time your boy raises aund hundred million just tell him hey I hope this wasn't a suicide round yeah yeah I mean there's a bunch of nuances I
got some push back on the suicide round you got there's the somebody was saying you should call it the Icarus round where you're language policing we're not here for it uh it's fine uh the the bigger question was just like like uh I was not saying that every $100 million round with low Revenue at a billion dollar valuation is a suicide round it is only
a suicide round if it truly kills the company and it can't just be they raised a bunch of money and then the company died it needs to be they raised a bunch of money the company had promise their product could have been great they could have built a good company but the money specifically killed them and what I mean by that is that it took them out of
founder mode they they over hired they wound up you know getting completely distracted spending all the money on like you know bunch of random stuff and just wasting the money and just getting getting completely distracted and they stopped building their company and that's what killed them and so that is a very narrow segment of any round let alone big rounds and so people were like
oh this is a sub tweet of Andre karpathy or or Ilia and I'm like no it's not like Ilia is not going to be killed by Capital he's training a foundation model he needs thaty and he's not gonna go spend it on he's already Super Rich yeah it's it's only a suicide round from a historical lens right there's a bunch of companies and I think and some people
would say on average when a company raises 20 on 100 pre at at incorporation things don't go that well because it doesn't create the right constraints around capital and things like that and everybody gets too comfortable maybe you know everybody's P get you know they're overpaying for talent things like that but suicide round is only you know backward facing
yes a lot of friends raise 50 100 million bucks without a lot of traction and take it all the way so I mean all you need to do is go back and look at like the the later WhatsApp and Instagram rounds to see they had basically no Revenue they raised massive amounts of money and they were like kind of new teams right like young Founders more or less and they got acquired for
billions and it was a great outcome for it literally everyone and then the products stayed around and we generational right and so you can't just throw this term and people are going to use this as pejorative for any round that they don't like oh this company raises suicide right that will be incorrect and I will police it because as a as a creator
you gotta answer to me yeah uh John I gotta um I gotta get on with taipe yeah okay we're gonna wrap up I gotta um I think we're good I gotta have have dinner I'm on the East Coast this week and uh you know when 6:30 strikes the dinner is served okay we got one last thing the very last post we got to cover the swing in San Francisco they took it down apparently fun is illegal Mass last
week's brother of the week already rebuilt it and is putting it back up it's the most important political fight of our time you he needs our support follow the full Saga this is extremely important we need to support him we need to raise awareness you can just do things it's actually it's it it the thing is the as fast as they can put take our swings down we can put them
back up we were that we I had some comments with them earlier from the TB account I explained that uh if he had to chop down every tree in the world to make swings it's probably worth doing fantastic fight is too important to lose well enjoy your dinner and we will see you tomorrow everyone see you tomorrow folks thanks for watching can you end the stream Ben you can