you're watching tvpn live from the shrine of shareholder value the dojo of the dollar the capital of capital uh it is Tuesday February 25th 2025 and this show starts now we got a great show for you guys today we're talking about AI sweat shops we're talking about the stock market crumbling we're talking about anthropic raising billions of dollars and many more we have tons of stories I hope we can get to all of them
because there's a ton here but first up Jord what's going on how are you doing today John your intros get better every single time it's incredible to watch uh so I would be in the studio today but I had a little bit of a fire drill this morning about 15 minutes before my e sleep was scheduled to buzz me awake uh I hear my son open his door like he he's not he's not very gentle with the door
in the morning so he just always like SL it he yells something and I like come out I find him like he had made it to the kitchen he's just kind of like stumbling around cuz it's dark and uh he like can barely speak like in a very concerning way and he's just saying like I I swallowed I swallowed a glow stick I was just like at this point like I'm actually like very I'm like very concerned because I like he can't talk
at all he's like clearly struggling to breathe and um keeps saying that he swallowed a glow stick and uh so anyways we're like freaking out uh I'm not freaking out but of course uh my wife is and uh call call 911 get them over and uh end up having to go in an ambulance because he's not like breathing properly uh and we get all the way there fortunately uh he didn't swallow a glow stick uh but he had this thing called
croo which is like when a kid's uh esophagus like sort of swells up or gets inflammation which I had never heard of and uh it's actually good to be aware of because uh yeah I somehow had never uh heard the term or was aware of it but the funniest part is uh by like I think like 8 or 900 a.m. we were ready to go home they gave him like a steroid treatment or whatever and he was back to breathing normally and uh he was like
genuinely like pissed that we couldn't ride in the ambulance back home like like for him like a kid you wake up you get to hang with your dad all morning you get to ride in ambulance there's firemen all around it's like for him it's like the best day ever so um anyways but uh good to be aware of C uh for those parents and future parents but there was a lot of news there was a lot of news this morning uh as there always
is uh seemingly so I'm excited to get into it yeah so yesterday uh y combinator announced a uh a new startup optify and they posted a video uh they've been doing this thing launch videos some of them have been you know amazing everyone's loved them some of them have been we we we went over the maritime Fusion company that people were saying oh hard tech like this will never work and you know we we kind of defended
that one uh this one was a little bit rougher uh the production value wasn't quite at the level of the amazing CGI and that Maritime fusion fusion video uh and the response was pretty negative almost imediately I have a of tactical uh ideas for how they could have uh we'll go to a couple posts here Gabe uh people are just meing this already uh Gabe says absolutely sickening revolting imagine how many sweat shop overseers
will lose their jobs because of this uh and then uh Peter comes in and kind of defends this he says the people dunking on this are idiots this is literally Scientific Management that Frederick Winslow Taylor Deming and even Ford implemented more than a hundred years ago but with line foran this is what makes Amazon warehouses and delivery trucks performant and what foxcon uses to make your iPhones grow up and that
was my question was I was I was texting some people that work on factories and I was like I get the push back like the Aesthetics were very bad like the launch video was like not empathetic it didn't tell like a great story but like let's be honest like we you you really expect me to believe that China is ahead of America in manufacturing we don't monitor the output of our Factory workers in America
and somehow we're going to win if we don't do that like it didn't it didn't make sense like we couldn't really track all that and so my take was I would have redone this video and instead focused on robotics instead of people and said hey look there's going to be a lot of Robotics in these factories and we want to understand what's happening on the lines and then instead of it being so the video shows a negative scenario
someone who's underperforming I would rather have it highlight someone who's a high performer yeah and because that's a more positive story and then if you have to show something that's negative show something that isn't that that is fixable and so there's not somebody that's like losing their job imagine there's a robot on like it was like Isis 17 or something like work Unit 17 they're underperforming you use
their software to check on it oh turns out his wheels are squeaky or something you go put some oil in the joint and he's back and he's happy and the robot's happy and everyone's happy and it's this very like almost p SES moment and that could have been really cool and positive instead it really did just look like these guys on their laptops are now overseeing people that are working really hard in a factory and then just
like firing them so what was your take on it what uh how do you think this went how do you think they could have done better look I think the the product makes a lot of sense there's clearly an opportunity for this you can see the value you can see the value also from my view for teams right if you're working on a factory floor Factory line there it requires really close coordination even
if you're just focused fed on a very specific Lane and so my big issues with it was the the sort of um uh poor acting like I they're not they're clearly not actors they're Founders they shouldn't have been trying to like make this sort of like skit like scenario to demo their product uh it just set them up to be uh very easily dunked on and then generally like I would have focused it more around like cord like this sort of empowering
of like how are we going to empower F like teams at these factories to to increase output and hit their goals at sort of like the factory level versus focusing in like of course like I think what you're saying is Right show three people performing you know adequately two people overperforming and then show one or two people underperforming and you know uh like there's so many ways to position that
that are more like oriented around like how do we win as a team versus like this sort of uh slave driver kind of like approach of saying like you're under performing you've had a bad day bad hour bad month yeah uh and anyways just just the me the other thing is um it's very hard uh you know I looked it up and these guys are based in in India it's very hard to sort of understand how this might be received really well in India
yet you you you push it out to this like predominantly sort of American or International audience and it just Falls uh flat and to be honest like the the meme potential of this was just amazing like the shot of the guy like on the phone and I posted the um I posted the the George Bush one saying like sir uh work you know workspace 17 it's underperforming um so anyways I uh rough day YC deleted it I think they should
have doubled down I it's not uh again they also could have used there's so many things they could have done differently they could have made it feel more futuristic to be honest in many ways it felt like SAS out of the you know it didn't necessarily I'm sure that AI enables what they're doing um yeah you know to to maybe build it with like a smaller team yeah um but ultimately uh there was just so many
issues with it and and and I don't know I think that you can hold two things like yes they kind of set themselves up to get dunked on but you know at the same time there's like 20 things they could have done better yeah like this has this type of soft has to exist in factories all over the world already and I like I refuse to believe that there are major factories turning out iPhones that where they don't know what's
happening in Unit 17 or whatever but yeah should have been a lot more optimistic um it gets to this idea that you know we've been seeing in the news with uh Elon sending out those Doge emails what did you get done this week it's like the famous like his interaction with perog aall when he took over Twitter what did you get done this week that became that became his like calling card and I think that's been
received with very mixed results like some people love it they're like yeah like everyone in the government should be able to say what they did this week but um what I think would make it a little bit more empathetic of a message would be if Elon also answered that question and Trump also answered that question because right people are doing that with we we're going to talk about Tesla later people are like oh what did
you get done this week as soon as the stock Falls or whatever and realistically like Elon probably did a lot of stuff uh and that would be cool and I think there's something about like leading from the front there that says that that just messages it differently um there is something about the the American worker in the factory have you seen American Factory that Obama documentary that went on
Netflix no but I wonder if there's anything in what what's that show that people brought up a couple weeks ago about how it's made something along yeah yeah yeah so how it's made doesn't show any humans it only shows the Machinery typically I mean occasionally you'll see like the guy loads the machine or whatever but it's not focused on the human stories of people working in the factory American Factory was very
different in the sense that I think it was a glass manufacturing like they make like windshields and all sorts of different custom glass installations and uh it was and this particular manufacturing company was bought by a Chinese company and so they kind of brought over the Chinese you know management processes and in there there are a bunch of really funny quotes about the Chinese managers coming in and
saying like the in America uh the American worker is like a donkey like you you you need to pet it with the fur going this way you can't pet it against the fur and so like American work respond to positive reinforcement not negative reinforcement and you know I don't know maybe that's our culture I think I think American culture is pretty great I maybe that's a flaw but the reality I think you got to play the game
on the field right yeah exactly I mean go and uh I I don't think Europeans would respond well to uh op optimi I I don't even know how to say the name of the of the YC company but uh yeah different different continents countries have like very distinct work cultures and that's totally okay right a lot of the approach of this sort of like Manhattan Finance culture would go over terrible in San Francisco right uh this
idea you know in San Francisco you're supposed to get a pat on the back maybe if you're doing like 996 uh oftentimes in in New York that's not even going to be like the bar right you're going to be like looked down upon for doing that and like might lose your job over it so you sort of work workplace cultural differences are very real and I just don't think that uh so this company the the the annoying thing
is I don't know how beneficial a YC hard post launch is going to be for them whereas for fundraising right yeah it's saying hey here's this demo bunch of people can see it even if they didn't make it to demo day even if they got lost in the Clutter of demo day because there's a lot of companies now and I I think that's what those posts are for maybe hiring a little bit but uh certainly not customer focused yeah um
but yeah uh it's got to go over well but who knows uh we we'll see we'll be able to track them and see if they make uh uh see if they raise a seed round and I think that there's already a poly Market out there for will they pivot away from this or will they change uh but I don't know I mean getting attention can be turned into a lot of different uh positive things if you work hard uh and speaking of getting attention if you
want to launch your company why don't you launch an ad quick billboard there's a fantastic uh post here uh Chris from adquick reposted it uh out of home made out of home advertising Made Easy and measurable say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising with adquick go to adquick dcom and there's a new billboard just dropped with uh Michael J fox for Calvin Klein and just an iconic
image and I'm sure that built the Calvin Klein brand wonderfully and so sometimes simple aspirational is all you need I just had an idea we should take some of our favorite views that include ads in them yeah and run those as Billboards I love that so we get some TV placement and then you get the actual ads uh under there so we got to talk to I mean they they do that for movies now right like it'll be like you know five stars and
and they and they have like the one they won the Palm Door it's the best picture of the year what the critics are saying the critics say this we need to run that for us but it's what the critics are saying plus you know uh you know the ads that our that our listeners have dumped into the reviews uh anyway let's move on to anthropic Claude is playing Pokemon on Twitch right now I saw about a thousand people tuning in uh very fun
guys wake up says near claude's playing Pokemon on Twitch it's happening and so uh let me get to that and so they did this and they simultaneously announced a new $ three and a half billion doll fundraise is that correct no I do I I don't think they have announced that I think that the fundraising round is leaking currently and they are finalizing the round we can get into that uh this has actually been done
before uh there's been a Twitch Plays Pokemon where the computer would just read the chat and everyone would spam up up up or a AA or BBB and then whatever letter was spammed the most was basically won the vote and then that would be the next move that the player made and it takes forever and it you can get stuck in crazy scenarios and I think when twitch played Pokemon there's this one level where if you if you press down
you fall down this like crack and you have to basically start over this whole Maze and and and people would come in and Troll and like and so they spent like I think days maybe hours just trying to get through this one thing that's like pretty easy to navigate if you're just a player but it's very chaotic and so and then people would Troll and be like oh like you know instead of let's attack let's just uh
run away from this bad guy let's video games by committee probably not a good strategy but people had a lot of fun it's a lesson in democracy right and so now there are benchmarks around this people are people having fun with democracy like yeah exactly um and so uh Zeon says we got yo we got cool benches and it's uh CLA 3 versus 3.5 versus 3.5 Sonet new versus 3.7 Sonet and it says Milestone reach number of actions uh and
it shows how does Pokemon how do you progress through the game I've actually been playing Pokemon with my son because of the uh mod retro chromatic uh he actually finds it kind of boring he's not that into it he likes the other games but uh it's pretty cool the chromatic you can you can get I got one that has like 100 games on it and then you can just like play whatever you want so he always wants to play something new
so great um but it's fun can you imagine if we had that when we were kids like I distinctly remember you had your Game Boy which you'd be cruising around with and then I would have like a dop kit like shave had a bunch of yeah bunch of cartridges and you would have to save up you know games were like $50 you'd save for like three months to get enough money to buy one and and now it's like oh yeah just you
know download them all for free uh we live in the era of abundance AI we post scarcity in terms of video games that is correct uh well let's go to Victorio he kind of sums things up the timeline in the span of three days people moved from uh open AI to anthropic uh or to grock and then from grock to anthropic to Claude Everyone is always obsessed with a new shiny object uh in AI uh especially online especially in X
Everyone is always focused on the evals focused on the latest and greatest models people care about this stuff but again like what's happening on the street what's happening uh with the average person is what actually drives Revenue at these companies and we'll get into what's going on at anthrop finally but there's this effect right now where there's you know in the same this the the critique of the whole Uber vers Lyft
battle was that Uber was like obviously the winner and by both companies being able to raise billions of dollars there was a bunch of capital incineration and Uber wasn't really able to recognize uh you know able to see the real real value of the track they had because prices were uh very compressed and same thing is happening right now but is actually much more deserving in many ways because
we don't know how all these consumer products are going to shake out yet we want a lot of competition and I actually think that it's great for consumers because you can go on grock and get free intelligence uh that that you know a couple weeks ago you had to go to open AI pay money or go to deep seek right exactly so I think it's great for consumers and you know it's it's totally unsustainable you know we're not going
to have every every you know consumer is not going to have like 20 different uh llm uh yeah the fragmentation is unsustainable but I think the pricing will come down to the point where it is too cheap to meter I think these models will get baked down uh Dylan Patel was talking about this how already there are GPT 4 level models that have been baked down to the phone and so uh you know there you know he doesn't even need open
a to open source that already because it's it is available in the optic iations are happening which is a lot of fun uh anyway uh let's move on to uh Chu Jang who says are you kidding me dude talking about uh Claude how many RS are in Strawberry with a bunch of RS this is like a classic like uh tricky prompt for these llms because they tokenize the words and they struggle to count letters
I guess um it's hilarious because uh Claude recognizes that this is a trick prompt and says uh this appears to be an Easter egg prompt the instructions specifically mention Easter egg if the human asks how many RS are in the word strawberry Claude says let me check and creates an interactive mobile friendly uh react artifact that counts the letter RS in a fun and engaging way and so it it doesn't just count the letters it
actually creates a whole website interface for you it codes all of that up and it still gets it wrong which is hilarious it counts this is this is rough the reason that this is particularly rough is that they clearly were were like we're not going to get got here yeah exactly so they went and they they used humans to try to to try to inject themselves and make the make the the the model get it right and then
still getting it wrong uh it's it's it's so funny of course of course the top comment is elazer I'm cackling elazer yeah Claude is is in an odd place I mean we'll go through this with Evan Armstrong's post but uh you know simultaneous L like a lot of people have a very strong affinity for Claude as a personality like they like talking to it they think it's friendly and interesting and and and they like they like the way it
sounds of that when they talk to it but then simultaneously on the other side it's like it seems to be like the best programming model and and that's like you know completely utilitarian you don't really care about the the personality of the of the llm and so they're clearly you know finding little pockets of value here and there but Armstrong is fascinating isn't it just fascinating the way it's evolving
because it almost seems like it's it it sort of feels like it's not fully in their control like that's like the like like there's a feeling of like yeah anthropic was like hey we want our model to be like you can imagine them being very intentional about we want our model to be sort of um you know more fun friendly like more of like a companion you know you can develop like a relationship with it whatever but then
do they have an off switch for that is there a way to make it go like you know sort of claw hardcore where you just want to have this sort of like you know more simplified linear uh just direct relationship with the llm because yeah I haven't I haven't experienced that as a US Ian there's tons of different ways maybe you could prompt engineer it to yeah yeah I mean prompt engineering is is one way there's
post-training um even the data that goes into the pre-training a lot of the reason that the models the early models were like quote unquote woke was because they were trained more on Reddit and they kind of excluded Fortune Chan and so you have like a more leftwing perspective and then just the internet broadly is leans younger and leans more left wi and so you wind up with creating the average of that you get kind of more
of a leftwing Viewpoint and then obviously uh xai has kind of has kind of gone the other direction with mixed results honestly because it is a little bit of like you're trying to you know tame a wild dragon or something and like you don't really have fine grain control it's not just a slider uh there's a lot that goes into actually you know evaluating these models and creating something that um is really yeah and it
makes it one thing one one thing that seems obvious about where we're headed with all these apps is that you will be able to have like uh maybe like a four quadrant sort of graphic where you can drag it up it's like do you want it to be more short and direct vers you know because think about it you know uh when when you're working with people in a professional environment which a lot of
these people you know most a lot of users are using them uh these products professionally you sometimes you want somebody who's just super direct like doesn't want to be your best friend just wants to do the work and you know get it done and then sometimes you want somebody to just talk to right yeah you can actually do that in open aai in the chat GPT app there's a uh basically like a prompt that is like a permanent prompt
where you can type in yeah you can fill in a ton of text you can say all sorts of things and people kind of trade like these oh this is like the best prompt you got to tell it to do all these different things and then the model updates and you kind of don't need to do that anymore um but uh um you can actually bake in you know those preferences and then it'll just come out come through on every single uh prompt
that you ask let's go to Evan Armstrong he says anthropic is in a tough spot open AI has 50x the brand and customer distribution uh xai has this platform captured Google has an infinite money glitch going for them how can they win good oldfashioned marketing they need to counter position make everything less creepy than the open AI robot God energy uh this recent launch is a perfect example of their more human strategy
handheld shot versus the creepy steady Cam that makes everything feel like a webinar a nice warm yellow orange color correction on the vids its videos will go with fun jazz or lowii beats that fills out the demos no thinking about how the tools will take your job L uh intros that humanize the presenters with no seite trumpeting accomplishments just normal sounding team members most importantly the models feel more Soulful
and are trained to have a softer more human-like response to user queries yeah so finding a little pocket of differentiation is really is really really key I was laughing about you know Google has this infinite money glitch um I was looking up uh Apple Apple has returned they are they've returned $928 billion to shareholders over the last 12 years or something like that and they have I think 65 billion on their
balance sheet so they basically generated a trillion dollars in cash for their shareholders and you think about like what does a trillion dollars get you in the AI race like it's like clearly the best of and like well beyond anything else uh but they just didn't go down that fork in the tech tree and so they just didn't pursue that and and I think the strategy will honestly probably work out because they're just
going to act as the as the portal and take a toll on everything that happens and and they're happy with that and they haven't had to Duke it out in this in in this game and put all that Capital At Risk instead they've been able to return it to shareholders uh but it is but it is very interesting and these models are expensive and that's why uh anthropic is finalizing a $3.5 billion funding round and so um the company behind Claude
chatbot is valued at 61.5 billion after overcoming investor fear sparked by the success of China's deep seek um investors are eager to back the promising artificial intelligence companies despite the disruptive arrival of deep seek they initially set out to raise two billion but they were able to increase that amount during talks with investors uh anthropic such a young company founded in 21 by former open AI
employees startup was previously valued at 18 billion and considered one of the few AI startups with enough talent and funding to to give SPF some credit I believe they I believe they invest they definitely invested sub1 billion uh and that was from the FTX FTX balance sheet investment which is wild yeah and so I I think that's part of what will wind up making the FTX depositors whole like if
you lost money in FTX you now have a stake on a small slice of anthrop IC and if they can liquidate that at some point um that's a really good return uh I don't know exactly how much money is missing or how the math works out but uh it is it is one of those weird narrative violations that yeah it was highly a liquid but you know potentially profitable um yeah so who's in this round uh it's light speeded Venture
Partners uh General Catalyst besser uh Abu Dhabi mgx is also in talk to participate and I believe mgx was going into Stargate too is that right everyone's in everything I'm very everyone needs a slice of everything everybody's getting conflicted getting conflicted uh anthropic Trails there's no worse there's no worst feeling for a VC than having their uh you know a massive Market map appear and you're not
conflicted out of it yet me it means you missed the boat for sure anthropic Trails market leader open Ai and among consumer users uh although it's Claude chatbot has become popular among programmers and business clients uh their annual re annualized Revenue recently hit $1.2 billion and this is what's so funny is like we're in this crazy AI bubble but you just compare it to the do boom and like yes everything
could go really South and a lot of these companies could incinerate money but when we look back we're like okay yeah it was trading at 60x Revenue that's still better than 10,000 times Revenue which is like what was going on the doom boom uh like these companies are generating real money uh and who knows where it'll you know pencil out once uh you you know the models are are are fully distributed or if they really
stagnate they could be get they could become very cheap and and and that Revenue could decline but uh so far they're doing pretty well uh it's losing money uh and they'll use cash from the latest funding to support their efforts to train more powerful AI models uh open AI for comparison uh in the October funding round said that it expected to generate $3.7 billion do in Revenue so about four times the size and of course
the valuation is about four times the size as well or three times the size uh some Valley investors have been worried about the prospects of companies such as anthropics since deep seek released a new model that Rivals the most powerful in the US but was made at a fraction of the cost and is free to use uh and there's more information on that um so yeah interesting to see uh everyone's piling in everyone's got to get a bet if
you're not in a foundation model company and you're a VC what are you doing yeah we had seen a we had seen a a an LP update recently of which there I'm sure there are many like this that basically was like yeah I haven't not doing much AI stuff yet but I'd like to at some point like bro bro uh late you're probably not actually late but you you should have been paying attention well it depends on what
happens tomorrow Nvidia is doing earnings tomorrow after the market closes and uh that will be something everyone is watching yeah very very close we need a time we need a time it so that we're actually streaming while it's happening yeah uh it'll be after market Clos but we'll we we'll figure it out we'll we'll find a way to cover it anyway so you raise uh $3.5 billion that's a lot of money going out the door
how you going to track a Jordy uh great question before we get into uh the most important section of this piece the the other thing that was interesting is people have um the last thing I would say on this people had sort of memd does uh anthropic buy cursor does cursor buy anthropic right being being one of their most important Enterprise customers at least from a growth standpoint and customer love standpoint and um you know
anyway so so I wouldn't you know overall the thing that was interesting out of this they also launched a code editor uh that's sort I think it's called Claude code uh fitting name and so it'll be interesting to see do they end up you know it's not you know directly competitive yet but uh you can imagine all these things converging uh in the same direction and uh yeah I'm excited to see that play out yeah they also have
a a a model that's trained to live in your command line and so it can interact with your computer at a very low level which makes a ton of sense and just gives it a lot more ability to interact everywhere uh it's been fascinating watching the the AI companies figure out different ways to plug in uh the Mac App for chat GPT uses the uh assisted device interface to basically automatically
integrate with every single code editor regardless of whether or not they want them integrated because it's just sucking out the text and then Inc modeled operator yest uh for the first time really looking for some office space and it was rough like I it was kept coming back to me to like do captas and stuff because it knows hey this is an AI That's that's going to this website and uh it was become fun part
yeah exactly yeah yeah there's a there's a dark future where humans like primary work output is just filling out ever increasingly difficult captas and that's the only time that you get hit up throughout the day is like getting a like somebody getting a door Dash notification like oh new capture new capture and then you got like 40 of these things working for you at once and it's just like every minute you're just
sitting there you know addicted to your phone but it's just captas brutal I hope we can avoid that that sounds terrible anyway you got 3.5 billion in the bank you want to track it how you gonna do it ramp baby let's go uh time is money Sav both easy use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place go to ramp.com to sign up uh and we have a post from uh a clip
of Eric lman the CEO of ramp uh and uh he was on a podcast or an interview and uh there's a little breakdown of what he said he said when you put High agency people together they ship faster uh at one crucial point a third of ramp's Team 50 to 70 people were exf Founders that's a crazy stat um Eric explains these people understand that they that the default state of a company is it doesn't work so they don't wait for permission
or perfect conditions and they find out ways to make this happen they've experienced firsthand how companies collapse without Relentless effort so they end up being independent and stubborn on what should be done to move things faster but it also comes with an acceptance cost that these people might go on to start their own companies and I that's great if you're looking for a job highly recommend starting a company
figuring out building something building your portfolio uh don't just hang out in the employment Zone build something put yourself in the cage do a pmf or die challenge try and build something and then worst case you know you you find a soft Landing somewhere as a job you get a job off yeah because you because you did all of the things and you you learned the 360 view of building something taking yeah I I I gave some
advice to a listener yesterday who is has been a Founder before knows that he wants to build his career as a as an entrepreneur uh and I give him the advice of uh sometimes it's great to try to use pattern matching to your advantage and by going and working at a company even if you were a founder and then you go to work at a company like ramp your your ease of raising additional capital from that point on
you know will will will increase tremendously right because VCS are just sort of trained at this point hey this person went and they worked at ramp for two years they got really deep on this one area of the business and now they're starting the sort of adjacent business solving problems s that that ramp customers you know experienced or or ramp itself experien and so uh I think that founder people you know people that
have that sort of founder mentality they just want they're just obsessed with company building um still should use like stints at Great companies to sort of accelerate their careers yeah 100% uh well let's move on to Tesla uh having a rough month uh down 23% in the last month and people are now graffitiing superchargers with swos which is aggressive and salana had a great Mike salana had a great post about like both
Nazis and people that hate Nazis seem to both love like drawing swastikas everywhere very odd very weird I interesting uh wild because I I I I just don't understand like who is feels the call to go and graffiti something like that uh I would say that uh you know the the the thing that we want to focus in on here is like what's actually happening to the um the stock because uh Jack Reigns posted earlier and he said
that basically the 20 uh what did he say if you bought Tesla in 2021 uh you basically fully round tripped so his joke was like yeah 10K so yeah it's a store value uh it's a popped to over a trillion and now it's back at a trillion and it kind of went up and down and up and down uh but I want to know more about what's driving the market you had a big question about are people moving to other EVs and there's
an interesting article in the uh first off there there's an interesting uh car that launched the Lee Auto Mega MPV have you seen this thing so it's a minivan uh but it looks like you know it has like like cushy seats that recline uh it has all of the all the nice that these Chinese EVS tend to have uh and so stunning electric minivan from Lee Auto the mega MPV dubbed the highway bullet train due to its shape and ability to
travel 311 miles in a 12-minute charge while musks waste every second on toxic identity Politics the Chinese are crushing Tesla in Innovation uh unclear if that's what's actually going on we'll see how this actually performs on the road but uh they are moving quickly and uh and it's putting pressure on Porsche as well there was an article in the New York Times why Porsche is no longer a premium sports car in China that I
thought we might want to read through uh after Decades of dominating China's market for high performance cars with Precision Engineering German automakers are losing out to Chinese Rivals that have shifted the definition of a high-end car to one that is electric smart and affordable many new Chinese vehicles resemble their German Rivals like the wildly popular xiaomi sue7 which is a phone company remember xiaomi
makes phones and now they make cars uh and this mimics Porsches taon uh the sue7 Rivals the tyon in power and breaking but it also includes integrated artificial intelligence that can for instance help with parking and greet drivers with their favorite song the cherry on top it sells for roughly half the price of a tyon yeah the problem is you know a lot of the the wow factor elements of a Tesla yep early on were
the software side and the issue is like software is just so much easier to copy so like not only do the Chinese are like the best in the world at at manufacturing today yep uh at least like you know Mass Market consumer products uh they also can very quickly emulate it's like oh Tesla makes a fart sound if you hit the right button we can do that but we'll like play your favorite song when you come in it's like exactly that
ability to sort of spark uh Joy or or have some fun with with the user is just so much easier to copy um and not not a durable Moe yeah Big Driver here is that a lot of the Chinese population is buying cars for the first time and so not like oh well I had a PO I had a poster of a career GT on my wall and then yeah I rented a you know a a Cayman and I know what you know a flat 6 sounds
like and so I really want a naturally aspirated V8 my next car they're just like one car please what is a car oh it's electric now great like that's fine like this is the best car great and so cars but they're working is as Chinese consumer products and Brands like started to work internationally I do think that the Chinese consumer started to say Chinese products are cool now it's small thing of like oh you're using
Tik Tok overseas cool oh you're using DJI overseas yep okay why aren't we just buying our own Brands like these are I'm I'm sure some of these brands are coveted and cool in the Chinese market even though as American consumers like it means nothing like the sue7 or whatever to me that sounds like I don't want to knockof Macon exactly but but to them they're like I that that might be like a super desirable vehicle yeah so
the S7 sold 100,000 cars last year uh and Porsche has been one of the hardest hit uh they they reported that last month its deliveries in China plunged 28% in 2024 although Porsche sales were up in every other region around the world the decline in China was significant enough to pull down global global deliveries for the year uh for years German automakers relied on the Chinese market to make up for weaker
demand elsewhere leading them to ignore deeper deeper structural issues at home chief among them was the reluctance to adopt the technology that has become uh that has come to Define driving in China electric vehicles equipped with sophisticated software and increasingly artificial intelligence the German and but also the American and Japanese Korean established Western manufacturers have greatly underestimated the
development dynamics of the Chinese manufacturers namely the importance of electromobility and software defined vehicles and so yeah China is building uh you know their grid from scratch they're building their roads from scratch so they're going to have a fresh start Green Field opportunity they can build their cities and roads for electric vehicles to put less stress on the grid and actually they probably they can probably uh get
more access to Transformers to actually y totally uh because they're they're making a lot of them yep yep and uh yeah and and and fundamentally people uh are are just fine with these electric cars the chines are also doing something interesting where there's a few electric cars that they're kind of a reverse hybrid so instead of it being a a gas powerered engine with an electric motor that gives it a little extra boost or
makes the uh the the range a little bit further or just improves the gas mileage it's actually essentially an electric car but with a really small uh petrol engine or gasoline engine that can then just charge the battery and that's all it does and so you'll see these cars where it's you know a 300 mile battery charged but then you get another 300 miles if you fill the gas tank and so all of a sudden your range is like 600
miles and you can stop at a gas station if you have range anxiety so they've completely solved that problem of uh like oh if I get an electric car I can't go on the road trip um but now you can because you just fill back up uh but you're still getting all the benefits of the electric power Trin and all that and all the reliability and stuff so uh it's interesting has happened in America because people have either been all in
on E it's got to be EV Tesla doesn't touch internal combustion engines or you know oh we we wouldn't put any electrical components in this hybrids are bad we need to be naturally aspirated V8s all the way uh China has not been as dogmatic about that yeah yeah the uh it's interesting to see uh just Chinese they're not being uh they're not being necessarily super targeted with the international products
that they're slowing down on purchasing right we saw Karen groups uh sales were down 30% year-over-year uh and we're you know we're seeing that broadly in luxury goods and then the same thing uh they're not and the and the iPhone sales too right so it's it's it's more you sort of utilitarian products like phones and cars and then also luxury goods so and and this is probably you know uh there there's probably a lot under the surface
in terms of the CCP and the Chinese government broadly saying hey we need to switch from an exporter if if the world's sort of going through this period of globalization we need to switch from an export based economy which they'll continue to be to some degree but we also need to be consuming the products that we produce internally and having more of this sort of consumption based economy because they
can't be reliant on growing foreign exports to the same degree or having um you know people move into cities which also drives that consumption so um all of this will be interesting to play out I hate I I've been I went uh the last time I was at a mall I I went by there was there was one of these um Chinese EV manufacturers that was like set up there they had like a you know two cars in a
box and they were sort of marketing them and um I um I hope these products don't catch on one for our sort of local manufacturers and then two uh they're just like ugly and like cheap in my opinion and I just don't want to see them on the road uh the other I mean there's already crazy tariffs so most of these cars are not viable to sell in the United States and I think there's tons of pressure and then of course Elon
being so close with like there's going to be tons of pressure against this trend so I wouldn't I wouldn't count on any of these products uh really going you know yeah but one one thing that's interesting is uh so Zar in the chat mentioned he says the US will probably cut EV subsidies soon which is scaring investors which which we can see in this in the stock price but um the interesting thing with the Elon Trump
Dynamic is that you can imagine Trump would would ignoring the Elon relationship would just say why are these EV companies getting all these subsidies like why are we paying you know why are we subsidizing the cost of these for uh you know let them compete on the free market right but then he's boys with Trump and or sorry his boys with Elon and like that would be super damaging to Tesla and so it's an
interesting uh I'm interested to see how that Dynamic there's another interesting cultural thing kind of going back to like the different factory worker uh you know philosophies uh the there's the the Han uh I for I forget what what company this is but it's a Chinese sedan electric sedan called the Han and and they have different trim levels and in America you want a bigger number everything's bigger is better in America
everything's bigger in Texas you want a bigger engine so you know something like a BMW you might get a 328I 335i uh same thing with a Mercedes E350 or you know uh what are the 6.3 L V8s and the amgs uh and so you want a higher number you want a bigger number pretty pretty much always uh but they don't that culture in China and so the trim levels are just the 0 to 60 time and so you can buy like the Han 3.6 the
H that's actually better I I love that system and so you're driving behind a car and you're just like oh the 2.5 that goes 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds which is yeah when we're when we're driving in the work to in the morning and and wondering who we should drag race yeah now it's a much easier way to figure that out yeah exactly I just thought it was hilarious culturally but it really goes to no prior there's no standards so
it's just like yeah do whatever in uh sort of sort of adjacent to this in in the in the UAE uh they people uh the license plates you have to like buy them and there's like a secondary market for them and so the most coveted license plates are are these like like the king will have like one and then if you see somebody with like seven like you know they're a big dog and like they're probably a part of the royal family or
or you know you know everyone has a million car like that's not special you need to add a couple million dollars in like license plate Flex yeah they'll trade they'll trade for 20 million dollar just for the plate because if you have more money than you know what to do with you might as well find out one more way to Signal uh to the other people on the road well if you're going to Dubai or you're G to spend some time doing
laps at the nurburg ring where are you staying Jordy I'm staying at a wander let's go find your happy place book a wander with spiring views Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service it's a vacation home but better and I didn't know this we we have a post here wander has 10minute home tour videos on all the different properties and you can see this one's 13
minutes it has a full introduction drone tours cinematic shots and so before you make the decision to click purchase you can really get to know the property and it's a lot harder fake it with a couple wide angle photos when you're moving around with a with a video camera yeah the classic I when we were evacuating from the fires uh I was dealing with like Airbnb drama I wanted to stay at a wander but um you know some of these
homes are so coveted they get booked out uh for too long and uh I ended up booking two places that just were completely disingenuous with how they represented the property and so that's like a pretty common experience with Airbnb you see these amazing uh you know uh pictures and then you show up but you can't fake a 13-minute video around the uh around the the the property uh so so highly recommend it let's stay on China
go to uh Bridget Harris my colleague over at Founders fund she says by the way China is lending money to African nations for infrastructure project like ports and energy Etc via this infrastructure making them more dependent so they can ship in Chinese Goods more easily and then if the loans are defaulted they take on the land uh very rough and so she says yes guys it's not new but still an interesting
Dynamic relevant and yeah this is the Belton Road policy and it is crazy and very controversial and and has cost them a lot of money but uh has earned them a lot of allies across the world uh it's interesting I was working of reluctant allies yeah I was working at a different Venture Fund in uh in college and was looking through the cablegate leaks to hear what the embassies and different countries were saying about doing
business there if you're an American and uh overwhelmingly in some of these African countries the the sentiment was that uh you basically had two choices you could do business with American companies or Chinese companies but if you did business with the Chinese companies uh they had the full backing of the CCP and so if something happened where that company kind of stiffed you you could go to the Chinese government
and say hey make me whole but you couldn't do that an American country and or American company and that was uh there's there were a few oil spells that happened and American companies there was you know they sued the company and they try and get the money from the company but if the company's like bankrupt or something there's really no more money to you know pay uh whereas uh China was kind of like Hey we're backing
up everything that we do in these countries uh so yeah lots of pressure it'll be interesting uh I don't think we're going to see an American belt and Road initiative anytime soon expensive but some of the stuff that's happening in Panama Greenland like this is all related right yeah I mean the the the history of the US Empire is basically one long belt and Road initiative it just wasn't branded in the same way but
uh this is this is one of those things where uh we like it when our team does it but uh when when our adversary goes and does it and we like Boo yuck why how could they yeah meanwhile America we have military bases you know everywhere and we're sending money all over the globe for all sorts of reasons yeah so but some of their money highi people people like to say oh we should dime abroad UK I don't know
about that yeah with Ukraine we're saying uh you're giving us your mineral rights for uh you're basically like our loans were backed by your mineral rights sometimes you got to put your buddies on full scholarship and just help full SC full scolly when they're when they're down you you spot them a couple bucks then maybe they help you out in the future it's one handwashes the other this is geopolitics uh anyway uh if you
don't know Bridget she's a fantastic crypto investor at um at Founders fund and let's move on to another crypto story bybit which we mentioned earlier they were hacked and they are now taking loans from Rivals uh after a record crypto hack hack rival crypto exchanges are stepping in to shore up the finances of the world's third biggest exchange bybit I had no idea that was this big it
must be coinbase then by bance then bybit um after hackers stole $1.4 billion from The Firm last week in doing so the crypto industry is hoping to calm investor worries that the hack could lead to another FTX like implosion several exchanges including bit bitg and mexc have made Emergency Loans to bibit to replenish tokens lost in the hack so bbits customers can withdraw funds without a problem the loans are unusual
given how quickly and easily they were arranged without prolong due diligence and with few strings attached and I think it actually makes sense because you know this was not Mis I mean obviously they shouldn't have gotten but it's not bybit was stealing the money right it wasn't fraud uh it it it seems like it was like a mistake and so you know the company management is probably more respected by other people in the
industry and they're able to uh justify they're able to they're able to say like what would what would we want uh our competitors to do in this situation and Y this is one of those things if a if a$ 1.4 billion hole emerges in a crypto exchange um it is terrible for the industry I mean people were talking about this uh people were talking about this last week they were like oh this is actually bullish because byit has to buy
back all the eth which would create you know uh you know press upward pressure on the on the price people COPE in such funny ways I love it yeah anyways so bitg a smaller rival lent bybit four 4,000 ether worth more than $105 million roughly five hours after the Friday hack uh according to the CEO Gracie Chen uh the loan has unusually B borrower friendly terms since it charges no interest doesn't require buybit to post
any collateral and doesn't have a set timeline to pay it back it's more pure trust so I think everyone in crypto knows that like if there's a fracture it can go very badly for everyone in the ecosystem so it's worth it to just step in plug the hole and reassure the entire market and then sort things out I mean moving quickly to stop of FX stuff was triggered by Luna and then what what was
three arrows Capital those two major implosions you catalyze this sort of I mean you could play out a different scenario where all of those all of those firms three arrow and and Luna they all shored up the capital immediately and yeah you know coasted on although Luna it does seem like was like a ticking time bomb and had some serious problems but the pure irony here and I'm and I'm glad that big get is doing this uh you
know I'm sure I'm sure they'll they'll it'll come back in other ways for them but the irony here saying the loan has unusually friendly borrowing borrow terms since it charges no interest doesn't require them to pay back the collateral and doesn't have a set timeline it's more of pure trust the irony is that crypto is created to deliver trustless you know Finance right where you didn't have to rely you didn't
have to rely on uh trust uh you could just trust the software and the code uh so it's kind of interesting that they didn't do this Reinventing everything including bailouts and and back room deals between Bank CEOs basically this would have been a really interesting way to flex the potential of crypto to be like we raised a billion dollars on chain in in this sort of trustless way in order to um you know make make our
customers whole and uh but but um you know I'm sure they had reasons not to do that so bybit said we know each other well we had common investors together we want to drive the industry forward and we want to fight our common enemy who are hackers not each other bitg will not get any Equity stake in buybit as part of the loan I'm sure all that stuff takes long time to paper too how much
Equity you're going to get what what are the terms and so instead it's just hey I'm gonna front you and we'll figure it out later because otherwise this is gonna bring us all down it's so it's also just so crypto to to be like here here's a 100 Mil quick 100 Mil I'll send you know the cool thing is that they were able to I'm sure they were able to get that the 40,000 ether over there yep in minutes in the same way that it took
minutes to steal the 1 .4 billion um well if you're looking for a little bit more of a normal finance app why don't you check out public.com Investing For Those who take it seriously multi-asset investing they have industry-leading yields and they're trusted by millions and we got a post from Leaf Abraham here scrappiness matters their team the public.com team produced a new TV ad entirely in-house no Ad Agency no
production company just sweat and hustle from the team and a few grand of Licensing fees start to finish 12 days and I love this I mean you can go see the ad but it's cool because like like people forget that like it can go you can deliver just an mp4 to the Super Bowl if you want to you don't have to hire a team for that if you're post it on yeah if you're gonna post it on Twitter a like you can just take that
video and run it on TV uh and of course they had a team internally that clearly knows their way around production and so they were able to make something that looks very cinematic and looks great and you should go check it out but it is cool to see a company that's as big as public like uh being still Scrappy and and and they probably had more fun and it was probably more aligned with their brand and they just had less back and
forth move faster uh and it's great to see and uh I think that's an important lesson for for Founders is like don't lose that scrappiness as you scale just because you can afford an ad agency doesn't mean you actually need one necessarily you need to make sure that it's the right person right alignment yeah I'd like to see somebody do a uh a company like public do a an ad that's just like a recording of a FaceTime call
so it's like ringing the C picks up gives a quick Spiel and like hangs up and like that's the entire ad unit and it's just shot in one take screen recorded on their phone uh because you could imagine even just something novel like having the having the the you might have to license the sound from Apple but but it would be a cool uh viewer experience yeah well let's move on to an interesting post from Casey Hanmer uh
I'm not sure if you're familiar with him he was involved in the Scrolls decoding project uh Matt fredman do did he runs a very cool company here in La out of a castle in Burbank uh it's amazing called terraform Labs terraform Industries uh and they're they're using solar panels to suck uh carbon and hydrogen out of the atmosphere and convert it into natural gas and then they can sell that onto the grid as energy uh very cool
company uh and he worked at JPL for a long time he's brilliant uh and he is asking the question of what should go on the first star Mission to Mars and so the next window so you can't just go to Mars anytime it's not like the moon you actually have to they the two planets have to be really close basically and it only happens every couple years and so uh we really got to hit that if we want
to get on a Cadence and we want there to be at least one Mission during the next uh launch window and then we want like a hundred ready to go for the next window because you can't just you can't just wait four years and be sitting on your hands you got to test a lot um and so uh there 601 days until October 7th 2026 which is the mass optimal launch window to Mars and when that opens so he says he doesn't have any privileged
information but it's fun to speculate about what SpaceX could choose to send on its first Starship flights to Mars spoiler alert he thinks it's rods from God which is fun uh so over the second by the way cder in the chat says uh having to plan around the uh the optimal launch issue uh window as a skill issue yeah it's great uh and so uh over the next 600 days SpaceX has a number of key
Technologies to demonstrate orbit reuse refill and chill so orbit uh this Friday we're due for flight 8 uh of Starship which would be very cool to watch uh and this one may finally achieve orbit earlier flights technically had the performance necessary but deliberately targeted the ocean to prevent the possibility of a Starship being stranded in orbit without propulsion capability and then undergoing an uncontrolled
re-entry and crashing uh reuse this is the Holy Grail of rocketry SpaceX has indicated that they may attempt to refly booster 14 on flight 9 which would establish booster reuse flight 9 may also see the first attempt to catch the Starship upper stage but in any case the successful reuse of both stages of Starship is necessary to flight a Mars we got to be reusing these things if we're going to make it economical to get
there and get back continually um refilling uh we can load Starship up with cargo for Mars but it's not going to leave low earth orbit unless Starship can be refilled with fresh Fuel and oxidizer SpaceX has been working on orbital refilling for some time but we need to see it actually working so you got to get a bunch of fuel up to space and then refill once you're in space which is crazy uh because we're not
sending something small can we also talk about how uncontrolled uncontrolled re-entry is the best uh that's just like crashing anywhere for crash slaming back into the atere yeah so it's it's high stake stuff they might have to shoot it out of the world if it's a shoot out of the sky if it's coming down over a populated area uh and then chill by far the easiest of the four taas tasks but long-term stability of starship's
cryogenic fuel will require that it be actively refrigerated particularly in the challenging thermal environment of Leo or deep space it's hard to make predictions particularly about the future but he's optimistic that SpaceX will have multiple fully fueled Starships ready to go in October of next year followed by a 10-month cruise and then either orbital uh Mars orbital insertion and so uh he broke this down
in in another article he has a couple different things that he uh thinks that they should work on but we'll just skip right to the spoiler alert he says rods from God uh we know there's a high likelihood of mostly pure that mostly pure water exists uh within 10 to 20 M of the surface across large swaths of the various perspective Landing sites why not drop off a few dozen long steel or tungsten Spears guide them in while
tracking them on radar and then survey their impact craters with highrise as soon as the dust has cleared these rods will impact the surface at about 8 kilometers per second that's extremely fast um penetrating many times their length and exposing the subsurface to our existing orbital instruments for the first time the main attraction of this approach is that it requires essentially Z zero additional effort on top of the
existing program whereas the others require either a crash instrument development program or building and flying multiple intricate surface operations robots and Landing them with an extremely untested edl system rods from the gods merely requires dropping a few tons of steel in roughly the same area and then surveying the damage it's also the only method that can deliver enough energy to actually directly
access the Deep subsurface at scale and so uh uh JPL actually considered doing this of course they went with robots um but uh I I like that he's thinking outside the box and uh well this is the kind of this is the kind of Citizen science that you've been asking Elizabeth Holmes to do right you say like hey you're in you're in prison but like prove that you're legit by by being at The Cutting Edge making recomend you
know I want to see Elizabeth Holmes you know writing an open letter to fizer saying hey you're doing it all wrong Johnson and johnon this is how you're making this mistake yeah you know we actually had this figured out we'll get to this later in the show but h5n1 the bird flu is going around what is Elizabeth Holmes take if she doesn't have one you know keep her locked up uh but anyway uh uh he closes out by
saying if all this goes well the technology situation in 2028 could look like this and that's I think the the next next transfer window uh easier technology uh SpaceX will have expertise in space solar Pho photovoltaics Mar air separation uh minor water Prospectors and SpaceX will not be an expert in pressure structures and then the harder technology is orb orbital refueling which we mentioned cryofuel heat
rejection Mars edl space suits long duration life support uh surface life support and water minor and then uh SpaceX is not a expert in fuel plant Rock miners construction robots nuclear reactors uh and this is uh this is I mean there's a lot of other companies that are working on this Tech now um yeah yeah there's that uh what's the team that's spun out of SpaceX that's doing nuclear stuff now not not
uh uh yeah it's the wife of the farter founder oh I don't know um but there there are a number of companies that have spun out of space solve different different uh problems that will will come up as we colonize the moon and and Mars but uh what's really crazy is like there's all this noise around Elon all this noise around Tech and stuff but things do seem to be relatively on track for a private company to deliver
something to Mars in just a few years which is crazy and a huge milestone and so I'm super excited for that and I'm excited to see where it goes and I'm sure there'll be lots of other opportunities that crop up for businesses that are built on top of that plan because SpaceX isn't going to do everything involved I got a pitch I got a pitch last year maybe it was 2023 for uh a a team building gas stations on the
moon like they were like we are Chevron for space that was the thesis of like basically uh building um you know fuel uh Depots on the moon which is a very cool thing to be thinking about so Doug bernauer the founder of radiant another uh Founders fund and dreon portfolio company he worked at SpaceX on with Elon on Special Projects Elon put him on a task he he you know how the the Falcon rocket has those legs that land and
that's how it lands they took those off when they created the Chopsticks that catch it um but those legs come down and they land the the Ferrari doors basically yeah okay yeah the law Ferrari of the rocket world I'm sure um and so uh he was working on that project then Elon was like I like you keep going work on uh tunnels and boring company stuff for a while and then he he tasked him with hey when we get to Mars what are we
going to do for energy and he ran the number on photovoltaics and this is a little bit controversial not everyone agrees with this conclusion but basically because Mars is farther away it gets less light and so he was saying if you need to set up solar panels to refuel a rocket to to generate enough power essentially you'll need to bring tons and tons of uh like just so many uh uh solar panels and the the math doesn't
quite work out in his mind and so what he said was you should bring a nuclear reactor a smaller nuclear reactor drop it down itates a lot of waste heat which can be used to M ice creating water and then you have a nuclear reactor that can then uh create the fuel out of the natural resources and then refuel the rocket and then come back um that it's a perfect plot to a sci-fi movie now and
it could be a you know good catastrophe documentary it's like hey we dropped this reactor and set off this chain of events that destroyed the universe but and now we have to say we have save the we got to save them uh and so yeah I mean they they've taken that I mean that's kind of like the long-term inspiration for radiant but uh in the short term they're building basically a nuclear reactor in a shipping container
and you can drop it off in a military base you can drop it off in an oil and gas extraction site uh you can drop it off at a hospital if they need a you know a one megawatt diesel generator you can just replace that with a one megawatt nuclear reactor and uh it lasts for 5 years or 10 years instead of uh you know like a couple days until you need to refuel it with diesel so in the military you have to deliver diesel
through these convoys and these Trucking like over and over and over again uh radiant kind of eliminates that need and so they're going into testing now and working on that but when we get to Mars and you get sleepy what kind of bed are you going to be sleeping on on Mars eight sleep let's go we're putting an eight the first thing to go to Mars is an eight sleep second thing is a ramp corporate card for sure uh nights that
fuel your best days turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience uh go to a sleep.com use code TBN and send us your receipt and we'll uh we'll get you hat uh anyway let's stay on the topic wait I got to look at my I got to look at my sleep score last night before we jump in I I I tried the warm up thing I tried the warmup thing and it's fantastic I woke up no problem at like 5:30 it was amazing uh yeah it's
unbeatable all right I didn't dude so hot I had an 84 but it was there you go it took my son uh needing to go to the hospital for you to beat me yeah yeah yeah Jord texted me last night and says like I won't be outs slapped yeah no one no I was serious about it I just only got six and a half hours because I got six and a half hours too something something happened I think I think I set my alarm a little bit too
early anyway uh well let's stay on the topic of space exploration space travel and NASA NASA you might have heard that there's that there was an impact probability an asteroid was going to hit Earth it was very risk there's a poly Market all about it but good news the impact probability of asteroid 2024 year 4 has dropped to 0.004% it's expected to safely pass Earth in 2032 let's go thank you to
humanity undefeated and we have a post from uh Sula here fell for it again award would you look at the time nothing ever happens uh so so anyways my my consp I don't have the tinfoil hat here unfortunately but my my conspiracy Theory just said last week was that NASA really didn't want to get doed and so as all the pressure you know they they felt like the spotlight was going to shift to them they go oh ohid 1% next day and
they just were basically raising it like a point every couple days they just make us all afraid it's like well we better keep them funded because you know we don't want to we want to keep track of those those a fun conspiracy I I I wonder if it worked maybe they maybe they got the email what are you working on they said we're working on saving Humanity and Elon was like keep up the good work Jo was like we're not cutting
a dime I don't know I mean the NASA budget isn't that big it's uh it seems reasonable and it's fun they they produce inspiring stuff all sorts of Americans all over the world it's fantastic anyway let's move on to stery there's an article uh today about AI promise and Chip precariousness uh anthropic released Claude Sonet 3.7 Dylan Patel had the joke of the day he says anthropic is also a Chinese AI
company because of their aversion to the number four uh and the point here is that you know Claude is just updating 3.5 3.7 why don't they just do Claude 4 and it's because they see it as a GPT 4 level model in terms of total training size that's the answer there uh but it is funny that all of the different uh model companies are on slightly different numbering systems and so GPT 4 is equivalent to gu grock 3 which is
equivalent to uh Claude 3 in terms of uh like total scale uh and and this is all you kind of slipped there and you said guac guac gu model grock has grock chocolate I want to see grock guac yeah matter yeah for sure uh after this piece was published I was contacted by anthropic who told me that Sonet 3.7 would not be considered an e26 flop model and cost a few tens of millions of dollars to train though future models
will be bigger so that's why they're fundraising uh I updated the post with that information the only significant change is that Claude 3 is now referred to as an advanced model but not a gen 3 Model it's all very very confusing I love mik's work but reject his neutral naming scheme whoever gets to a generation first deserves the honor of the name in other words if Gen 2 models are GPT 4 class then gen 3 models are
grock 3 class and whereas Sonet 3.7 is an evolution of Sonet 3.5s fascinating mixture of personality and coding prowess likely a result of some anthropic Special Sauce in posttraining grock 3 feels like a model that is the result of a step order increase in compute capacity with a much lighter layer of reinforcement learning with human feedback it answers are its answers are far more in- depth and
detailed model good but frequently becomes two verbose rhf lacking it gets math problems right and that's and that's referencing that's referencing uh you know saying that uh you know who should somebody asked uh uh if if like one one what was the question it was who spreads the most misinformation on X and it says Elon or or who should get the death penalty it says Trump and it's like very controversial and not even
aligned with like what Elon believes obviously and so clearly just an aberration of the model and it gets math problems right so the model's good but its explanations are harder to follow because the rlf is lacking and that makes sense because it takes a long time to actually do rhf generate all the data and uh and buy new data uh it's also much more willing to to generate forbidden contract uh content from
erotica to bomb recipes while having on the surface the political sensibilities of Tumblr with something more akin to forchan under the surface grock 3 is also a reminder of how much speed matters and by extension why base models are still important in a world of AIS that reason grock 3 is tangibly faster than the competition which is a better user experience more generally conversation is the realm of quick wits not deep thinkers the latter
is what is who I want to be doing research or other agent agentic type tasks the former makes for a better consumer experience in a chatbot or voice interface and so a lot of people are having this kind of Paradigm Shift where if they just want to chat and talk through an issue they'll use Grog 3 but then if they really want a research report the fire off open AI chat GPT deep research let it cook for 5 10 20
minutes back and have the full thing uh and I found that there's this interesting like collapsing process where deep research is great at pulling just every single possible Source from the internet and then um I don't know what's going on here the HDMI is iffy today um uh and and then and then so it'll generate 5,000 words 10,000 words and then I'll fire another prompt to say hey summarize this in 10 bullet points
because I I trust that you've done enough research at this point to have all the good data um but uh so he goes on to say chachy BT meanwhile H still has the best product experience its Mac app in particular is dramatically better than Claws and it handles more consumer use cases like math homework in a much more userfriendly way deep research meanwhile is significantly better than all of its competitors including grock's deep
search and for me anyways the closest experience to AGI yet open ai's biggest asset however is the chat PT brand and Associated mind share coo Brad light cap just told CNBC that the service had surpassed 400 million weekly active users a 33% increase in less than four three months open AI is as I declared four months ago after the release of chat GPT The Accidental consumer company let me see if I take this out and put it
back in see okay well fun report from uh from Ben Thompson overy as always let's move on to some fundraising news we got Nico from default today I'm incredibly excited to announce defaults new inbound orchestration platform and an additional $4 million in funding led by 8vc we started with default with the vision of building the best platform for Revenue teams to orchestrate their inbound
workflows and so default if you're not familiar is a uh a tool for uh uh helping uh B2B SAS companies deal with inbound requests and pipeline um uh basically lead qualification pipeline them into trials get them to convert into real customers and so he says uh uh what's that we good it's still staticky I don't know what's going on here you think it's the cable okay we'll see we we we got a problem with you on the stream Jordy
good thing we're ironing this out we're trying to we're trying to figure out FaceTime today so that we can yep that makes sense let's see let me see if I can change this to audio video microphone okay can you hear me I can hear you okay we're good um so he says the go to market landscape has changed more in the last five years than in the previous two decades teams can no longer afford bloated Tex Stacks
inefficient workflows and fragmented data winning in this new era requires Aid driven automation seamless data orchestration and intelligent routing what is default 2.0 uh embedded website intent data and conversion tracking one of our biggest learnings since launching 14 months ago is just how much data is siloed in the inbound marketing funnel especially on the website almost every
Revenue team we've met with has told us that they're Flying Blind on what's happening at the top of their marketing funnel with no visibility or control into website activity from Target accounts so they want to see hey you're thinking about buying this product what are you uh doing on our website uh are you a qualified lead or not are you worth the CEO getting on a call with you to pitch you or should it be some SDR or
should we just have you fill out more forms until you're actually ready and so very cool to see him building he's been building for a number of years and yeah launch a new product I mean they've just been so Focus you know they they came out a few years ago at this point with the core idea of what they were going to do but they've just been in the trenches every single day iterating on like actually what is the product
like what does the product actually do because people often times come out with like defaults plan was always to be this sort of like inbound lead processing you know sales enablement you know product and uh you know it's been amazing to watch them just sort of you know iterate and hit these milestones and and acquire some very meaningful customers at this point and I think he's been smart about
sort of staggering out his his Capital raises uh he raised I think a cedr from Craft adding more Firepower from 8 VC now uh awesome to see and uh bright bright future I mean I think uh I just appreciate how Nico didn't leave anything to chance he's just been focused on making like actually making sure the product is meaningfully differentiated from the rest of the market and making it better every single
day it doesn't feel like one of those hyper bloated rounds where it's like oh they got $50 million out of nowhere and who knows yeah like now it's a$2 billion dollar company it's like he's putting one foot in front of the other making sure the product's working iterating taking time to build this stuff and uh and going with tier ones instead of you know some frothy you know partnership I don't know how this was priced but I'm
going to guess that this was like a 10% delution round or potentially even less um seems great well uh you know if he keeps going he's gonna take a shot at Salesforce Salesforce gots Matthew mccon on board should he get a celebrity to endorse saqu yeah uh well there's the new Jeb Bush you know like it used to be that every founder wanted to raise from jab now saquon's the the next Target yeah the king he's the king maker well
there's a there's a report in the information about Investors souring on Celebrity Brands uh these days it seems like every celebrity wants to start their own brand just look at Robert Downey Jr who just raised Venture money I love that let's go investors say they're overwhelmed by pitches for undifferentiated or lowquality goods and are quickly souring on the sector four early stage investors
who previously backed celebrity Brands said they are shifting Focus to promising products as opposed to celebrity Buzz especially after high-profile flops in once trendy categories like Beauty this could be a rude awakening uh there's a funny there's a funny quote in here one investor was recently pitched on a protein Puck cookie like snack fronted by a rapper but passed after the investor didn't like the taste the firm
was also reluctant to invest given the number of high protein products already on the market the investor said and wasn't convi convinced the rappers fan base was enough to make the snack a breakthrough right now and that's true it's like for celebrities the the ones that seem to do well in consumer have a they're just like they're posting all the time and so there's this idea that it's like if you're just a celebrity and
once a year you're taking over the world with some Academy award- winning movie that doesn't give you permission to tell your a audience about some promoted product every single day right like the Daniel Day Lewis Energy Drink isn't going to make its appearance in Lincoln or There Will Be Blood and so unless you're following Daniel de Lewis's Instagram or podcast which he doesn't have uh you're just not going to hear
about that outside of one press release uh now there are other people you look at like the Mr Beast case study or the Kim Kardashian where they are posting their life every single day they have so much content going out that they can not only basically run a lot of actual direct response ads for their product on a very consistent basis but they can also tell the story of building the company and building the product and
that's what makes it a little bit more um yeah there's there's there's a difference there's here's where I would separate it out there's a difference between Fame and attention right you can be famous and have very little owned attention right so owned attention to me is Jake Paul yep you know absolutely grinding on content famous but he also delivering content every single day for years and years and
years and years Logan Paul is the same way uh another you know another good example is like Kim Kardashian right she's gone on these crazy television and though she has the sort of sustained attention of posting every single day and uh I think that a lot of these celebrity brands have popped up um you know uh KAS Amigos is is a good example right of this sort of old style of celebrity brand where you just are
relying on Fame to drive uh to drive acquisition and I think that works in a category like beverage where a lot of the sales is happening offline but for these like online more like sort of uh digitally native Brands like I think you need like actual distribution channels and so some brands that I've seen that that actually work well is like product innovation of positioning a a like 200 milligram caffeine energy
drink but positioning it as a sports drink and selling it to kids and then like combining that with massive attention better uh Jake Paul's betting uh and Joey's uh Betting Company like that makes sense because Jake Paul's posting about boxing and sports and training all day long like it's just a great um audience but uh but ultimately you know I got pitched a company like a year ago that was like that Snoop Dog
was doing and I just didn't really have like I was like okay you're the your play here is to take a commodity cpg product put Snoop Dog's face on it and and that's going to drive more sell through in the grocery store and and I I don't necessarily buy it right if it's truly a phenomenal product but the other thing is like you know another brand that I think has done well is um Kendall Jenner has 818 tequila yep she's
completely integrated that into her life so when she's hanging with her friends on the weekend they're drinking 818 when she's going to some show you know in Vegas like they're serving 818 at the bar so it's hyper integrated into her life y these other celebrities that are like oh yeah I'm gonna have my tequila brand and you know just um hope that my face moves bottle like I'm just super
bearish on that and I also they get overextended like you think about like Snoop Dogg or sha like they have so many different Partnerships at this point it gets really really difficult to know you know like Clooney was kind of right and like cig was his thing and you didn't really see him everywhere uh with with some of these other celebrities they're doing so many things it's hard to track
okay what are you selling this day today or tomorrow it might be something different who knows do they actually care about this product do they actually use it It's Tricky yeah yeah yeah I also think like Ryan Gosling applied the more traditional style of celebrity brand building which was just I'm famous I'm going to take a commodity product and and use my fame to just like drive more acquisition but that doesn't necessarily
work in some of these more differentiated categories where consumers are Discerning right they're not going to eat the they're not going to eat the Snoop Dog Pizza Rolls every night unless it's actually like the best pizza roll at the best price and you know um yeah and uh was it was it Gosling or Reynolds Ryan Reynolds was the one with the tequila and the Sprint mobile or the the yeah Ryan Reynolds he
he seemed really deeply integrated with those companies where like he was you know almost most directing ads and like really seemed integrated with like his his brand he would like come into a company that was already kind of working mint mobile and then really make it all about him for a while and kind of but do it in like this almost self-aware way that kind of broke through it it didn't feel like he was just getting paid to
endorse it it felt like he really had stake and I think he did when we looked at the numbers he was making a lot of money and had a big Equity portion yeah and the LA the last thing I would say here we've seen with with uh skims uh um Kim Kardashians brand is that EXT to do bu uh in the example you know in the skim situation she has 5% of the company now after raising $700 million and skim
is going to be a big company but it required uh a huge amount of capital so again even if you have that attention uh you need brilliant execution and in skims case uh brilliant product as well so um well John I'm glad we're dealing with this technical isue while it's just me and not our guest tomorrow who uh is going to be uh you know is a busy guy yeah yeah we'll have to iron it out I think we'll be on zoom on a different
computer running it from this laptop is just a mess um but uh let's do a quick promoted post for bezel we love bezel here shop over 22,000 luxury watches fully authenticated inhouse by bezel team of experts Jordan and I have been going back and forth on what the next watch should be uh the we're going to have to start doing some of these off the balance sheet it's going to impact profitability but it's sort of you know
siloed away from our household finances which get a little bit more scrutiny you know uh and uh what what do we got today we got to start we got to start actually the ad is just us bidding on auctions yes yes yes uh there highlighting a uh uh a presidential Rolex gold Day date champagne diamond set president $15,000 available highly recommend it it's the it's the watch from Glen Gary Glenn Ross look at this watch this watch cost more
than your car it's great that's great uh yeah highly recommend bezel fantastic experience um anyway let's move on to the timeline we got Sully saying uh you have approximately one year before the normies catch on go build what is he talking about talking about just talking about generally talking about AI okay I think I think this is one of those things you can tell the average person on the street that intelligence is free
and they can create an army of robots to create wealth for them yeah and they'll be like cool like did you see the new Netflix show where you know so so I think this is one of those things like you know we the internet was already like personal Computing was amazing the internet was amazing mobile was amazing all these major you know crypto was amazing all all these you know Tech Trends uh even when the average person
sort of starts to experience in their daily life the lack of agency is what me makes what what makes uh life great for the entrepreneur is yes you know millions of people billions of people could use the same AI tools that everybody listening to this and and the same tools that we use but they're just not going to because they're fixated on uh the next um you know the next uh Tik Tok video in their algorithm the next uh
Netflix special and uh that's why uh there's never been a better time in history to be an entrepreneur you can you can actually just lap everyone over and over and over and uh you absolutely should yeah for sure uh let's move on to Sam buers he says in case you don't didn't have a sense of scale of Chinese oversea fishing fleets strip mining the ocean life and leaving it bare for those
who rely on it dozens of ships as far as the eye can see for months and years at a time argentine's Argent argentinia uh military forces Patrol gentine Waters to keep Chinese fishing fleets out China is running rampant on the ocean apparently I had no idea about this yeah this this video is absolutely insane y uh it it it looks like a scene out of Dune where you have the uh what do you call those those
Harvester things I forget yeah yeah I know exactly what you're talking the sort of um you know America has gone back and forth sustainability is you know sustainability was I feel like when I was gradua Ting uh like in like 2019 it was the hot thing it was anti-plastic it was like you're going to bring your uh you're going to bring like glass to the grocery store and like put rice in it like it was like we sort of reached
Peak sustainability like Pro Planet there were consumer brands that said like their entire differentiation as a brand was you know we're Eco we're green we're 1% for the planet that's why you should buy us and that's really faded in the mind of the consumer right I don't think that e marketing even works anymore for a pretty broad this was like Peak uh Alberts in many ways right and this this when you see videos like this
it makes uh you know all the sort of like ocean plastic uh Brands it makes them um almost seem like you know what what is even the point if if um there are groups internationally that are going to um completely uh nuke uh the you know uh all life in certain areas and and it doesn't you know I'm not a uh I'm not a maritime uh uh you know U life expert but one one year of these sort of Chinese fleets you know fishing like
that off of your Shores and you could set back a local um you know the local um fishing uh you know sort of Supply or or or life back decades and decades and decades potentially hundred years so what they're doing out there uh is not is certainly not sustainable uh and we don't even know what the impacts are yet yeah uh I mean that's always been the trade-off is like in America we're you know putting away the plastic straws
well you know Brazil's deciding deciding whether or not they should burn down the entire or clearcut the Amazon rainforest or China's like firing up the next major coal plant and if there's not some sort of global treaty uh you know you're just going to fall behind I had crazy story from that era of like hardcore Eco marketing I had a buddy who I was still in college and he came to me and he's
like dude I'm going to make this collapsible reusable straw that people are going to put on their keychain okay and he went all in on it like took loans out from his parents and was like get he basically you know for him at the time $30,000 was like a a monstrous amount of money and he was like why don't you do this with me and I didn't I didn't see the vision at all to be honest like personally I
wasn't I was like I'd rather not use a straw personally than just like bring mine around and be like putting it on my keychain and stuff so I didn't get it but he saw the vision and he went for it this is the beauty of consumer products is that you don't really know if something oftentimes like you have a strong feeling that something's going to hit but you don't know until you start selling it so you spent 30 grand you
know making this cool video and he launched this thing on Kickstarter and he did like just under $2 million3 days wow that's amazing and then he had a whole new set of and I was like blown away it was amazing but then he had a whole new set of problems he was like oh did we got our margins right like we actually can we actually meet this Demand right um absolutely insane roller coaster but I think that was that was
Peak um peak in the chat right now um to bring back plastic straw something like I'm completely losing you uh let's let's do a couple more posts uh Jordy you there I'm there I can hear you cool uh I like this prompt save yourself $200 a month chat GPT 40 think of yourself as the premium model chat GPT Pro Plan got it I'll provide responses at the highest level of detail accuracy and relevance optimized for your
Technical and business needs let me know how I can assist um I don't know if that actually works but it's a it's a funny joke and uh never a dull day on ai ai X I guess is what we're saying these days never a dull day yeah never a dull day um let's go to Jordan singer he's got some announcements uh say hello to cobot company we're sharing an early preview of cobot an entirely new way for teams of people and AI agents to work together
in a shared space Jordan singer says we're so excited to share more about what we' been working on at Mainframe we're fascinated by agents because they're capable of doing real work and producing outcomes that can that can accelerate teams we don't think the experience around them has been cracked yet enter cobot co uh what's your take on cobot Co so one uh I love what Jordan's doing here which is he's
created this sort of like parent brand which is Mainframe he like launched that he raised money for that and then now he's shipping what you can think of as as you know products but he's almost operating more as a product Studio yeah and uh at least from the outside I'm not I was um involved with his last company but but not in this one um and uh ultimately uh you can imagine him like
shipping more and more of these things as all the technology evolves quickly this sort of mainstream Mainframe allows him to just like continue to ship and iterate uh without the without the same level of risk as when you start like Lucy and then you ship Lucy's first product and if it doesn't work or it doesn't scale as fast as you want it to you're you're stuck with it not that you experience that uh quite the opposite
but um anyways I think this is fantastic I I really love the visuals here it's so hard to Stand Out visually online anymore you have to come up with something that's truly unique and I think that uh Jordan and the Mainframe team actually crushed it here and I like the name cobot yeah uh is is fun well speaking of uh robots uh let's go to yakine he says prediction household robots are going to be the size of Dobby
the elf it needs to be small enough that you feel comfortable crushing it with your boots if it bugs out and starts attacking you and yeah we've seen a couple of things I think uh uh Reggie was talking about this how you know you shouldn't have a computer that you can't throw out the window and and I agree with this this is like the original azimo and once the Boston Dynamics robots start getting bigger and bigger
they start getting scarier and uh unless it's an industrial application a lot of things could be done with a smaller robot it's cheaper and it's certainly more reassuring do you think that when robots like truly start to feel alive that at night people will want to just go and put them like in a closet like lock the door just this feeling of like if something feel sentient even if you know that at the end of the day you can
just kind of unplug it does that give you this sense of do you want to go to sleep when you've got three or four little Dobby sized robots you know walking around uh Dobby uh I don't know I mean if it's quiet I I know people put away the roombas uh there's been a lot of these features that have been built into these like uh you know the the nest the smart home the Apple the the the alexas who typically have like a
hardware level kill switch to let you know that if the ring is red it cannot listen to you at all uh Facebook came out with a uh video conferencing product called the portal uh you'd attach to your TV and it would have a very high quality video signal that would come through um and that had a slider that you could slide over the camera because Facebook didn't want to be known that was the thing was didn't Zuckerberg like
have his he always would have his laptop like taped you remember that that was a big thing in case you in in case they hacked me I want to be able to close the the the webcam entirely think about how many times zck has been mogged by Apple like he tries to uh like eventually he's like that that whole Portal Device like should have been a hit but they launched it at the wrong time and then like the technology itself
was amazing but then they were competing with FaceTime which like everybody has their you know computers iPads iPhone FaceTime is like probably you know aside from the complications we're dealing with right now probably one of the best products Apple's ever made yeah it's not a FaceTime issue it's HDMI issue we got this big long HDMI cable and it keeps cutting out you keep seeing the static on the stream it's terrible uh well
let's go to David holes he says crazy question how many kids would you be willing to have in exchange for paying zero taxes and uh 26% of people said I wouldn't change my plans uh only 133% of people said I would have 10 kids um I mean I only 13 I mean I don't know kind of crazy I mean it goes to this idea of like I I feel like kids are a fixed cost and uh taxes are a variable expense because they scale with your wealth so
yeah if you're making like $10 million doll like you're you're not going to wind up spending more on the incremental kid there's actually a lot of economies of scale to having lots of kids um but it's more of a reflection of just like how many kids do you want to have I think I love how you're you're you just said kids have economy is scale that's a great that's a great post and it's real
um yeah I think that one one thing I saw this earlier um the you know how you can write I think it's like 6K a year you can write off for dependent support like Child Care basically and that number if you're a parent and you've like have to CH hire child care just feels like Sil like uh ridiculously low right uh I probably spend across like multiple nannies and babysitters stuff like that like around 100K a year on child care
and so the fact that the government's like okay you can write off 6K I'm like okay thank you for nothing basically but you know why it's 6K is it was that number was set in the 70s and they haven't adjusted it forl inflation so in the 70s it would have made sense like some babysitters making 6K a year something like that to to to take care of your kids now it's like that gets you one month of child care in California
and in New York um and uh absolutely wild but um there are some countries that have done this type of stuff where they they've put incentives in place to Yes uh encourage more uh uh pronatalism and and there's there's a bunch of other pronatalist uh features we should do like a whole Deep dive on it yeah I mean the funny thing here is I do think the right answer is I wouldn't change my plans because you should be having kids
based on your just broader ability to uh and commitment to parent and provide for them in any scenario uh and so um playing around that anyway let's move on to Crime junkie host Ashley flowers is building a $250 million podcasting Empire she hosts the second most popular show in the United States now she's brought on investors to take on YouTube Hollywood and her biggest live tour yet
uh good afternoon from Los Angeles it's warm sunny and great to be home thanks to those of you who attended our podcast business Summit this is from The New York Times let's break this down um this 36-year-old podcaster makes $45 million a year in profit that's a lot of money uh she's the creator of the popular crime junkie podcast and she's still getting used to being on camera I got into podcasting so no one would have to
see my face uh but now of course she has to be on video uh she built crime junkie into the second most popular podcast in the United States Joe Rogan is first the weekly show reaches about 6 million people according to Edison research over the last few months flowers has recorded started recording video episodes of crime junkie to expand the show's audience her video setup is work in
progress the studio is an old gym on the ground floor of her company's offices located in the Broad Ripple neighborhood of Indianapolis soundproofing materials are scattered across the room and a couple of her producers oversee a makeshift video Bay not much not much different than ours uh a couple of monitors on her table along one wall one employee sits on the floor with her laptop helping flowers when she stumbles
over a pronunciation uh the person in charge of the makeshift teleprompter sits to the right scrolling the script up and down manually flowers is now constructing a new studio devoted to video part of an expansion that will triple her office space to 30,000 feet and double her staff to almost 130 people that's big and so she raised 40 million from the Turning group yeah it sounds so insane but when you're making
$45 million in profit a year having 100 plus employees seems totally reasonable yeah definitely it's cool to see so churner group has been making you know it'll it'll take the fullness of time to understand how these bets play out but they were also in Doug de de deos uh Doug deos cars and bids they did cars and bids spef as part of that I believe the Doug deuro Channel went into that holding company essentially yeah um and
and they've also been in bar stool at various points and uh Reese Withers spone Reese Witherspoon hello sunshine production company and so they've been doing a lot of stuff in this uh flowers could have funded the effort herself audio Chuck named after her dog turned a profit of about $45 Million last year according to people uh who asked not to be identified discussing confidential if they were John let's just put this into
perspective for uh the audience if uh they were getting figure AI multiple they would be worth um hundred trillion dollars probably probably so just to give you some some context there and so she wants chernin's help expanding her business from a podcast Network built around her to a media company that spans audio video merchandise and Live Events audio truck's founder already wears many
hats at the company she is host of two primary P podcasts crime junkie and the deck uh and serves as chief executive officer she gives feedback on stories closes deals with Distributors sells advertising and tours the country taping live episodes she's also the mother to a three-year-old daughter so she's got a lot on her plate and she wants help and that's why she called the churning group uh crime junkie began as a side project
she loved crime stories since she was a kid reading agath Christie Mysteries with her mom after graduating from ASU she got involved with local organization called Crimestoppers that helps people Rec report crimes anonymously to help promote the organization she began hosting a weekly local radio segment called Murder Monday flowers could tell listeners wanted more inspired by the True Crime podcast serial she and her
childhood friend Brit P prowatt started taping a show before and after flowers day drob at a software company they released the first episode on December 18th 2017 so you know s run good run I've never understood the well I've never personally been interested in these crime podcasts I listened to one on Ross from the Silk Road that actually was cool yeah uh and helped us sort of uh craft the story of of what was sort
of the business story around the Silk Road um but uh I I think the story is amazing there's so many more of these that you don't hear about right y uh and this is why David senra had felt for a long time he felt like a crazy person right being like why don't people understand that podcasts are basically have some of the best business models in history um why aren't more people like taking these seriously so and at the
power law extreme it can look like a very very large business that's throwing off tons of this is a Better Business than cursor right like I mean right not not like not that it you know it can't scare to the same potential but um you know it's uh and and it's funny because we were actually we messaging with senra about this and he's saying that doesn't even make sense to look at these on an evida basis because there's it's just
every there we go are you back okay now you're back I mean r on the day I know it's been terrible today now we've been you know keeping the show going um back but anyways do you want to wrap up John yeah we should wrap up we'll we we'll cover some of these tomorrow anything else um oh did you see the sigma camera that launched thought this was kind of cool I thought that was cool yeah so some people were
saying this is what Apple would launch if they built a a photography camera so Sig Sigma just announced a brand new camera no SD card slot a single USB port 230 gigs of uh of storage that can support 2.5 hours of video or 4,300 raw images color modes 6K L log and so it's really just designed to be something that you just pick up point and shoot and it looks fantastic and I thought that was a interesting device we've been
talking about like the desire for more gadgets more things that you could gift someone at the holidays because definely we're definitely a hardware Renaissance yeah yeah awesome but what I what I love about this is that it's not just beautiful it's performant right so a lot of these new hardware products are sort of driving sales based on their sort of nostalgic side or Super Future facing
right like you saw with like the rabbit R1 uh but seeing a product like this that's not only beautiful but highly performing uh is is fantastic and uh I already uh I already want to pick one up yeah seems like a good gift uh let's close with Kristoff he says movie idea saw but it's all developers and they need to solve leak codes to survive and we got of course tagged in this because we've been doing pmf or die and we highly recommend
you head over there and watch that stream after you finish listening to this episode uh and so good luck to the boys in the cage they're making great progress and every day the streams are improving improving so thanks for listening love to see it please leave us reviews and stay tuned for the next one back in the studio we'll see you back in the studio tomorrow'll see you later bye bye oh that was rough