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welcome to technology Brothers the number one live show in Tech we have some breaking news on the cover of the Wall Street Journal business and finance section uh Masa Yoshi son and Sam Alman were pictured in Tokyo on Monday Masa
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was holding a crystal ball and dropped it and Sam Alman is watching him pick it up and it's uh it's so funny because they don't really address it in the yeah yeah yeah yeah they don't really address it in the context of this article but
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it's very clear that the Wall Street Journal was like this is a metaphor of some sort that is a great Omen that's actually you need dropping a crystal ball it I mean these things can people always read into these things people
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were like oh the Cyber truck he broke the glass like these live demos sometimes they go wrong but uh yeah Masa you got to work on that grip strength uh The Lone Ranger will send you some grip uh grip strength trainers and maybe uh
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you won't drop the crystal ball next time uh this article pretty wild yeah I'll I'll read some of it in his newly built Palace near Tokyo lined by stone statues of Roman emperors and surrounded by an 18-hole Golf Course masayoshi was
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stewing after declaring for years the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence Revolution this Chief Executive Officer of SoftBank group had missed out on it I haven't been able to to do anything he thought according to a
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speech he gave to SoftBank investors last year can I just get old like this and die as it turns out all he needed was a new Golden Boy and now s who has his history of L who has a history of latching on to charismatic startup Founders has found one in Sam Alman in
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what would be the largest yet investment in a startup SE is preparing to put as much as $43 billion towards Altman's open AI in a pair of transactions SoftBank is in talks to invest between 15 billion and 25 billion in the chat
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GPT maker as part of a blockbuster $40 billion funding round the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the round would value open AI at up to 300 billion nearly double its valuation in October and under an an undeniable sign of son's
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confidence in its prospects Jordy what you got okay so my reading into this is this is separate from Stargate so not only is son Levering up Levering up arm his arm position to go heavy into star Stargate he's also it's not enough to just own
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the infrastructure layer he's got to own the uh the the developer Tool uh and the consumer product layer oh yeah in uh in open Ai and uh honestly it's ABS absolutely insane to put this into context one of the biggest software IPOs
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ever snowflake we've talked about it on the show they raised in their IPO like 2.5 billion or something like that you know somewhere in that range and so just so so Sam is is Raising you know an such an egregious if he gets his
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round done it's truly uh he's he's definitely the greatest fundraiser of all time putting Adam Newman to shame hit the gong a pre preeminent uh gong hit um but uh AB honestly absolutely insane if they pull it off and the only two people on earth that could are MSA
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and Sam so and and from what I know kind of um Sam was really just out there testing the Deep research product he he posted about this that he was using the Deep research product to find a new I think some type of uh vintage Acura and
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uh he must have just run into Masa while he was doing that and they just hit it off and and now they got a potential deal so love love to see you know a little coincidence like that turn into a big funding round yeah I I I hope they
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got out to the track and put those nsx's to work I'd love to see Masa behind the wheel when ding for for a $40 billion round throw in throw in uh you know why not throw in a vintage you know Acura right yeah uh it's a rounding error so
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so uh in addition the Japanese Tech and investment conglomerate has committed 18 billion towards Stargate so 18 billion for Stargate between 15 and 25 for chat GPT for open AI so that's a combined you know we're in the 30 billion territory
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uh fantastic but they got the money remember the 30 billion the 30 billion number was msa's initial Target for vision fund he went he was going to Saudi Arabia to meet with NBS and on the plane he had written out that he wanted
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30 billion and he circled that and then he crossed it out and wrote a 100 because he liked he liked the idea of saying give me a 100 billion I'll give you a trillion and so um Masa continues to lever up to go bigger than ever and
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um you know uh we'll we'll see how it pans out uh it's too way too early to to have any judgment um and uh but we just we like any opportunity to hit the gong so thank you to to Masa and Sam for for providing that for sure yeah it's
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unclear you know the metaphor of dropping the crystal ball that clearly happened because he didn't go turbo long AI three years ago but maybe he's picking the crystal ball back up and he's putting the money in the right place this I just I just what was Masa
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doing in every open they they had a little bit of one of the earlier rounds right this is not their first time investing in the company so Moss is getting the updates on every the first of every month and he's like I gotta I
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gotta own a lot more of this bad boy oh yeah he's like I don't care if the model layer is getting commoditized I just I love Sam he's my guy I'm going Turbo Turbo long yeah well hopefully it works out we always love seeing these big
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deals get done and overall I'm excited to see a lot of capital flow into an American AI company I think this is exactly what we need right now so bad day to be bad day to be deep seek bad day to be deep seek I'm glad the money's
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not going there so close so close to Japan yet so far away truly truly uh well let's go to Luke feror uh we broke the news yesterday that he is over at Doge he has Reed access to the US Treasury and payments flow and has been
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doing a whole bunch of data science and machine learning to understand where money is going in the government uh he's part of this crack team of Zoomers that Elon has hired and staffed on a project to understand uh how the government
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works where money is going it's been extremely controversial a lot of people came out in support of Luke we did uh and the rest of the team and a lot of people were very upset and so it was very controversial but we wanted to give
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a deep dive on Luke and his previous uh previous work on the herculanum Scrolls today and so we will go through that in just a minute Jordy what you got uh one quick note I think it's worth mentioning for the audience that hasn't been following
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Doge maybe as closely as some other people but it's important to understand that Luke is actually not an employee of the government y from what we know he's an employee of Doge which you can think of as operating as this sort of uh
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personal vehicle for Elon and elon's team and the sort of initiative to try to have an impact on the government so think about it more as like a almost like a Consulting shop Think Tank that's trying so that's right way way to look
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at Luke but we'll kind of get into where where he got started yeah and so let's go through some of these posts uh of course he famously won a portion of a $700,000 prize for figuring out how to read ancient Scrolls that were carbonized by Mount vvus which we'll go
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through today um and uh people are having a lot of fun with this uh armman toi Tuli says the the the Doge Zoomer preparing to fire half of the federal government and it's the Bobs from uh office space but with Zoomer haircuts of
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course and so people are having a lot of fun with this uh you know everyone it's become a massive political football uh even though I think Luke is is pretty much just uh trying to understand where the money's actually going which is a
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very reasonable thing for either party to want to do I I like that everybody had to clarify that he only has read access it's not like you know he's very you know he's not just in there you know just like he's using it like venmo or
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cash app just whipping money around he's just trying to get it he's just trying to understand the Scrolls that are the US Treasury depart Department's database and incredible paper trail it really is like the Scrolls project all over it's
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so it's so funny the the similarities and so uh Jarvis writes uh like five people who understand how computers work show up in DC and within two weeks restructure the entire system that's been in place since World War II that's
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wild and I love this post crazy it's it's so funny but it is it is a testament to Ai and and and uh data analysis that that you can actually do this extremely high leverage work and comb through all these payments uh somebody else was saying that uh one of
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the early Doge projects was just get a dump of uh of payments uh just get a whole bunch of like just data on where things are going and just look for the crazy stuff that pops out that seems like really weird and if you look
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through the uh the PPP loans there were a lot of those that went to reasonable you know restaurants that were closed down by mandate because of covid made sense that they would that they that they would need PPP to bridge but then
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there were some people that set up uh llc's called like Ford Raptor LLC and of we know what that guy was doing and so wait you don't need to be a genius it's not a left right issue like you're you're leaing through that you're like
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why are my tax dollarss going to buy someone a truck like this should not be happening and so uh hopefully you know the the Doge team can find a bunch of stuff like that yeah and part of it is understanding okay let's understand
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where the money went and then let's understand how it's being spent and yesterday we highlighted that out of 700ish million dollar that was going towards just one University in California from the federal government so this is US Federal taxpayer dollars
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going to a California University yep we both live in Cali California I'm a product of the UC system I'm nothing against the UC system but they were spending uh 40% of the budget roughly $300 million a year purely on administrative costs so yeah it's not
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you know you know the first step is understand let's understand where the money's going yep second step is let's understand how it's being spent but there's a lot of work to do just on the first part because this is one of the
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most complicated systems that I can even think of right yeah and there's just been generations of Croft built up well let's move on to Ashley Vance's article uh which which touch touches on the herculanum Scrolls project uh he wrote
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this back in over year ago actually a year ago tomorrow or maybe today um February 5th 2024 uh Ashley Vance and Ellen hwit over at Bloomberg right a few years ago during one of California's steadily worsening Wildfire Seasons W
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that that hits hard uh Nat fredman's family home burned down a few months after that fredman was in covid-19 lockdown in in the Bay Area both freaked out and bored like many like many a middle-aged dad he turned for healing
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and guidance to ancient Rome while some of us were watching Tiger King and playing with our kids Legos he read books about the Empire and helped his daughter make paper models of Roman Villas instead of sourdo he learned to bake panis quadratus a Roman loaf
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pictured in some of the frescos found in Pompei during Sleepless pandemic nights he spent hours troling the internet for more Rome stuff that's how he res that's how he arrived on the on the herculanum papy a fork in the road that led him
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toward further Obsession he recalls exp exclaiming how the hell is no one ever told me about this the herculanum papy are a collection of Scrolls whose status among classicists approaches the mythical the Scrolls were buried inside
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an Italian Countryside Villa by the same volcanic eruption in 79 ad that froze Pompei in time to date only about 800 have been recovered from the small portion of the Villa that's been excavated but it's thought that the
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villa which historians believe belonged to Julius Caesar's prosperous father-in-law had a huge library that could contain thousands or even tens of we have to sorry to interrupt we have to bring really bring back the word prosperous into the today's vernacular
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it's it's a fantastic word and everybody should aim to be prosperous in their own way absolutely so he says such a hall would represent the largest collection of ancient texts ever discovered and the and the conventional wisdom among
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Scholars is that it would multiply our supply of ancient Greek and Roman poetry plays and philosophy by manyfold so we're talking about like a five or 10x increase in the amount of uh of text from Greek and Roman uh literature uh
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high on their wish list are the works by the likes of uh of safo and Sophocles but some say it's easy to imagine fresh Revelations about the earliest years of Christianity so it's been a massive goal of you know all these ancient Scholars
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to unearth these and we'll go through how they did it uh Jord you got anything for me no that's it that's it okay so some of these texts would completely rewrite the history of key periods of the ancient world says Robert Fowler a
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classicist and the chair of the herculanum society a charity that tries to raise awareness of the Scrolls and the Villa site I love that he's just out there being like I got to spread the word of these Scrolls I got to get the
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word out someone is g to figure this out and he landed on it he found Nat and Nat put together crack team and and actually figured it out basically I mean it's not 100% that and Nat for anybody that's not super familiar he was was he he was a
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co-founder of GitHub or he just joined as CEO he was CEO yeah he was so he's CEO of GitHub a tool that literally every developer that I know uses every single day yep and he has a thing for aggressively pursuing passion projects
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and side projects with no not necessarily any sort of uh direct monetary incentive more so using his wealth to try to uncover knowledge and so the scroll is one project that that's really exciting and and the one that he went pretty viral for recently was
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called uh plastic list.org which is similar to uh what what another founder named Cormac uh is working on uh a friend of mine and what plastic list did is he went and he spent probably roughly half a million dollars so similar to the to
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the sort of Scrolls project and uh tested hundreds of different popular food products because he realized that this one uh he had realized this one protein shake that he was drinking had just like egregious levels of
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microplastics and he was sort of traumatized by that so he's saying all right let's test a bunch of different products and so he's very um uh he's doing exactly what we want other other uh other beires to be doing so not just
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building companies and investing but saying hey let me let me spend half a million bucks to sort of unearth some uh you know important knowledge for Humanity and and pull together some great people in the process so yeah um I'm I'm already excited for for Nat's
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like next project because keep going yeah 100% so we'll pull up a picture of the Scrolls you can see these and and John I I actually can't see this on my screen by the way oh really yeah um you should be able to see the screen I'm sharing the Bloomberg
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business week this is an ancient Roman scroll I see I see Luke Scrolls so I think you might be in the wrong tab H oh did it never let me let me try and share this again with you um let's go share let's go here is that good
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Ben can you see that Bloomberg business week this is an ancient Roman scroll flash fired by a volcano and we got pictures of nat fredman here uh and so uh you can see from this scroll uh people have spent hundreds of years trying to unroll them
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sometimes carefully sometimes not and the scrolls are brittle even the most meticulous attempts at enrolling them have tended to end badly with them crumbling into ashy pieces uh in recent years efforts have been made to create
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high resolution 3D scans of the Scrolls Interiors the idea being to unspool them virtually this work though has often been more tantalizing than revelatory Scholars have been able to Glimpse only Snippets of the Scrolls inard and hints
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of Ink on the Papyrus some experts uh some experts uh have sworn they could see letters in the scans but consensus proved Elusive and scanning the entire cash is logistically difficult and prohibitively expensive for all but the
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deepest pocketed patrons anything on the order of words or paragraphs has long remained a mystery so can you imagine uh you you've discover this ancient Roman scroll you're just absolutely thrilled you're like okay I'm gonna start I'm
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gonna start unrolling it and just disintegrates like immediately every single time and they've tried so many different like bring in the uh yeah and and uh Mike salana posted something earlier today that was that was pretty
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interesting he he basically said blogs from the uh early 2010s are actually less recoverable in many ways than these ancient you know multi- thousand year old Scrolls which um is a whole other issue of like how do you properly
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archive the internet and all the content we put out so that it can be um you know preserved for uh you know people you know 5,000 years from today yeah um but anyways looking a couple Chads here just a couple Roman Empire enthusiasts yeah
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uh we love to see it he clearly like became actually actual buddies with the the professor of the project and they're just like hanging out now um and so uh fredman isn't your average Rome loving dad he was CEO of GitHub and most importantly within GitHub he developed
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GitHub co-pilot which is their AI coding assistant and he's been AI pilled for years and years and years because this was one of the first llm implementations that actually got traction and I remember back in I think it was built on
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gpt3 and back in 20 I guess it was 2020 2019 2020 um he was saying like like every other model like like gpt3 at the time people would kind of use it as a search engine or to like you know do copy editing and stuff but it wasn't
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dialed there GitHub co-pilot was the one product that didn't have super high churn obviously that's changed now with things like perplexity and chat GPT and a lot of these apps but GitHub co-pilot was the first Canary in the cold mine
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for these llms these AI systems are robust enough to be used by people for for a long time yeah now now um I'm sure people a lot of people just know him as an investor because he's now deploying a ton of capital and and his ability to
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have an idea and then pull together super talented people and just ship it he did this with um uh uh another uh Nat Grossman so there's Nat fredman and that Grossman and they it's Daniel gross right Daniel gross sorry Daniel Dan Dan
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Gross and they shipped an entire cluster just for their portfolio companies because they have another program called the AI Grant which is like a similar to YC type of structure um so I love that just like having an idea sharing it
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publicly and then just like quickly actually acting on it just letting it stay in the timeline is great to see yeah and so he launches the vvus challenge offering a million dollars in prizes to people who could develop AI software capable of reading four
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passages from a single scroll maybe there was obvious stuff no one had tried he recalls thinking my life has validated this notion again and again so it's this VC investor mindset applied to like ancient history research I guess
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and so as the T as the months ticked by it became clear that fredman's hunch was a good one contestants from around the world many of them 20s somethings with computer science backgrounds developed new techniques for taking the 3D scans
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and flattening them into more readable sheets some appeared to find letters then words they swap messages about their work in a Discord chat and often much older classicists sometimes looked on in hopeful awe and sometimes slagged
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off the amateur historians uh so it was a little bit spicy oh these AI kids going to be able to make an impact here they don't really know the the true stuff I love that there's like these little subplots and battles going on not
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you're not a real historian unless you've have gloves on and you're sort of trying to piece apart you know disintegrating this ancient scroll this is very disrespectful to the guys who just go Indiana Jones mode and and get in there
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and got to be the only Edge the the the AI models have eaten the entire internet so the only Edge now is to go Indiana Jones mode and go looking for rare esoteric knowledge and and um you know discontinued books right yep um but uh they really did here
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and so uh you can see a picture here uh before Mount mvus erupted the town of herculanum sat at the edge of the Gulf of Naples the sort of Gateway wealthy Romans used to relax and think unlike Pompei which took a direct hit from the
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vesuvian lava flow herculan herculanum was buried gradually by waves of Ash pumis and gases um although the process was anything but gentle most inhabitants had time to escape and much of the town was left intact under the hardening ous
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Rock Farmers first rediscovered the town in the 18th century when some well diggers found marble statues in the ground in 1750 one of them collided with the marble floor of the Villa thought to belong to Caesar's father-in-law Senator
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Lucius cerus piso C cius also known but today by historians as piso uh during this time the first excavators who dug tunnels into the Villa to map it were mostly after more valuable artifacts like the statues paintings and recognizable
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household objects initially people who ran across the Scrolls some of which were scattered across the colorful floor mosaics thought they were just logs and threw them on a fire no terrible um eventually though somebody noticed the
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logs were often found in what appeared to be libraries or reading rooms realized they were burnt Papyrus anyone who tried to open one however found it crumbling in their hands crazy um should I keep should I go on let's see uh today the Villa remains
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mostly varied unexcavated and off limits and so there's there's levels to this project where they get a few Scrolls they scan them it's very expensive and then that and then the more that they can unearth the more they can decipher
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the more they can invest in more digging and more scanning because each one of those is very expensive I think even just uh just taking the scroll to the CT scan I think they flew it on like a private jet and like needed to like
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really like make sure they couldn't check this you can't check this on United it's going to be a disaster it's going to fall apart yeah at least you throw an air tag in it if you're yeah so uh we have about 800 Scrolls from The Villa today but there could be thousands or tens of thousands more um for the past 20 years Brent seals the computer science professor at University of Kentucky has used Advanced Medical imaging technology designed for
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CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts no one else was working on it and no one else thought it was even possible progress was slow sales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled
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scroll and unroll it virtually but wasn't prepared to handle a real herculanum scroll when he put it to the test in 20 2009 the complexity of what we saw broke all of my software the layers inside the scroll were not uniform they were Tangled and mashed
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together and and my software could not follow them reliably and of course 2009 this is before the Deep learning Revolution uh there's a lot like I'm sure this was more of a uh uh of a of a programmatic approach like more algorithmic approach to like mapping the
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geometry and trying to unroll it uh terrible job for uh like hand coding perfect for deep learning and so by 2016 his he and his students had managed to read uh one scroll a charred ancient Hebrew text by programming their
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specialized software to detect changes in density between the burnt manuscript and the burnt ink layered onto it the software made the letters up against a darker background sales team had high hopes to apply this technique to the
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herculane and papy but those were written in a different carbon based ink and their image and gear couldn't illuminate it in the same way so massive setback in 2016 it is crazy how long this story's been going on yeah and and
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relevant too uh I'm sure Luke is already dealing with this you know he he had been posting last week hey does anybody have any way to process huge volumes of you know PDFs through any type of programmatic way he's going to figure
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out how to do it with one document format then he's going to get you know a trillion new documents in another format and be having to do do it in the same way so he's uh he's prepared yeah and this this next paragraph is the biggest
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indictment of current uh Silicon Valley uh rich guy billionaire VC culture so uh Nat fredman finds this guy sales who's working on these Scrolls and uh he had set up Google alerts for him he's see he's Nat fredman's just getting obsessed
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with uh with Rome a year past there's no news he starts watching YouTube videos really understands that uh this guy sales needs money so in 2022 fredman was convinced he could help he invited seals out to California for an event where
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Silicon Valley types get together and share Big Ideas this is like the perfect thing to send this guy to uh sales gave a short presentation on the Scrolls to the group but no one bit and Nat fredman says I felt very very guilty about this
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and embarrassed because he'd come out to California and California had had failed him and I'm sure what happened oh yeah we just wanted to hear about this crazy stuff but we really want to put our money in like B2B SAS like like I I
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couldn't possibly throw a throw a 20 in the in the tri Corner hat for this guy it's so funny because you know many of the people that were pitched there on this idea would go on to to donate Millions to VC's for comma yeah and
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meanwhile meanwhile Nat goes you know goes long on the Scrolls and becomes literally a myth himself for uncovering this kind of thing uh thousands of you know it's it's a legendary move yep and so fredman proposed the idea of a contest he said he put up some of his
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own money to fund it and his investing partner Daniel gross offered to match it uh seal says he was mindful of the trade-off the herculan papy had turned into his life's work and he wanted to be the one to decode them more than a few
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of his students had also poured time and energy into the project and plann to publish papers about their efforts so now suddenly a couple of Rich guys from Silicon Valley were barging into their territory and suggesting that internet
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randos could deliver the breakthroughs that eluded the experts more than Glory though seals just really hoped the Scrolls would be read and he agreed to hear fredman out and help design the AI contest they kicked off The vvus
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Challenge on the Ides of March Freedman announced the contest on the platform we fondly remember his Twitter and many of his Tech friends agreed to pledge their money toward the effort while a cohort of budding papyrologists began to dig in
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to the task at hand incredible uh so they so they Lobby the Italian and British collectors for years to scan the first scroll suddenly the Italians were now offering up two new Scrolls for scanning to provide more AI training data with fredman's backing a
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team set to work building Precision fitting 3D printed cases to protect new Scrolls on their private jet flight I was right from Italy to a particle accelerator in England where they scanned for 3 days straight at a cost of
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about 70k that's a lot of money but it's such a good investment it's so interesting and uh yeah the whole thing way less way less than the cost of flying private from LA to London though so yeah and so uh bargain seeing the
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Imaging process in action drives home both the magic and difficulty inherent in this quest one of the scroll remnants placed in the scanner for example wasn't much bigger than a fat finger it was peppered by high energy x-rays much like
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a human going through a CT scan except the resulting images were delivered in extremely high resolution for the real nerds about about eight micrometers these images were virtually carved into a mass of tiny slices two numerous for a
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person to count along with each slice the scanner picked up infantes changes in density and thickness software was then used to unroll and flatten out the slices and the resulting images looked recognizably like sheets of Papyrus the
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riding the writing on them hidden and so these like the files from the output of this scan are massive so it's a perfect uh case for data analysis and and AI uh an algorithm that can detect tiny amounts of Ink on a little each little
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piece of scroll fragment can then combine that data into a unified legible simulation of how the scroll might have appeared back in 79 ad it is crazy it's 2,000 years old that's so so old like even even finding a book from 200 years years old that's 200 years old is
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difficult to deal with and like the paper might be dissolving imagine 2000 and so it's hard enough to find a original copy of Mary Maker's internet report yeah it is yeah we got to get that on original hand printed by Mary
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maker staple you know that's that's priceless right yeah yeah there's only a few copies left yeah yeah those are the real dark Scrolls yeah yeah yeah the draft that didn't make it to the to to to the printer uh and so this this is where
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Luke feror enters the story Luke feror was hooked at from the start feror a bouncy 22-year-old Nebraskan undergraduate who often exclaims oh my goodness heard fredman describe the contest on a podcast in March I think there's a 50% chance that someone will
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encounter this opportunity get the data and get nerd sniped by it and we'll solve it this year fredman said on the show feror thought that could be me I love that yeah he this is this is a guy who's looking to get nerd sniped by
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opportunities right you're not on the level unless you're actively looking to be nerd sniped by opportunities yeah and so there's a there's a photo of uh of Luke here uh with his with his handbuilt PC I'm sure he's got some graphics cards
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in there he's grown up a lot in the last year looking great looking great um and so uh and and this is an interesting uh twist do you know Casey Hanmer I've actually met this guy he has a he has a castle in Los Angeles that he uses for
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his company terraform Labs very cool company they're they're uh converting uh they're trying to build I think it's uh natural gas uh conversion from the air using solar so they're going to put out a ton ton of solar panels and then
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basically create uh like suck carbon out of the atmosphere uh use uh hydrogen get natural gas as for for energy so you can use the solar panels to basically generate gas that then you can use and it's all carbon neutral so very cool and
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he has a ton of really interesting blog posts about his uh his thoughts on global warming and energy and stuff and where we go from here um so then Casey hmer an Australian mathematician physicist and polymath scored a point
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for humankind by beating the computers to the first major breakthrough hmer took a few stabs at writing scroll reading code but he soon concluded he might have better luck if he just stared at the images for a really long time this is so funny to me eventually he
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began to notice what he and other cont contestants have come to call crackle a faint pattern of cracks and lines in the on the page that resemble what you might see in the mud of a dried out Lake Bed and uh there's a there's an image here
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of all the letters deciphered um and the crackle became a big thing in the Discord um to hanmer's eyes the crackle seemed to have the shape of Greek letters and the blobs and strokes that accompany handwritten ink he believes it
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to be dried out ink that's lifted up from the surface of of the page the crackle Discovery led hmer to try identifying clips of letters in one scroll image in the spirit of the contest he posted his findings to the Discord in June at the time Fator was a
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Summer Love by the way I love how this is a contest but everybody's working together reminds me of the um the Russ alrick case where yeah everybody wants to win you know everybody wants to like pin Ross and like be the guy but at the
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same time it's uh as much as it's a contest you know especially in the case with this girls everybody's sort of sharing their discoveries along the way and it's not it's not a they're not seeing it as a zero some game they're
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they're playing for Humanity right and also the challenge you see I actually disagree with you because in the in the uh uh in the Ross Alber case all of the different groups they weren't working together well at all of them wereing
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money doing fraud I'm not saying they were working together well but there was some collaboration and in this case you could imagine a world with the Scrolls where nobody wants to share anything in the Discord because I want the 700k
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totally totally and and there's also this interesting thing where uh in the Ross Albert case everyone thought it was going to be this like crazy hacking data analysis that would win the day but just going on Google and looking back at Old
34:13
Post was like a very key part of the story that was key yeah and and it's the same thing where Casey hmer just looking at it and staring at it for a long time actually helped break the case wide open which is awesome so Fator was uh a
34:27
summer intern at at SpaceX he was in the break room sipping a Diet Coke when he saw the first post and his initial disbelief didn't last long over the next month he began hunting for crackle in the other images one letter here another
34:39
couple there most of the letters were invisible to the human eye but 1% or 2% had the crackle uh armed with those letters he trained a model to recognize hidden ink revealing a few more letters then feror added those letters to the
34:52
model's training data and ran it again and again and again the model starts with something that only a human eye can see the crackle pattern then learns to see ink that we can't unlike today's large language models which gobble up
35:04
data veritor model was able to get it get get by with crumbs for each 64x 64 pixel square of the image it was merely asking is there ink here or not and it helped that the output was known Greek letters squared along the right angles
35:20
of the cross-hatched Papyrus fibers so it's like the perfect case for using Ai and fortunately because it's not this massive large language thing he can run it on his computer that he built by hand you know he just needs he does need a
35:34
graphics card and he does need to write some some you know somewhat complex code but he doesn't need a massive data center you don't need to build Stargate for this uh which is great it's a really cool cool opportunity so in August feror
35:47
received an opportunity to put his software to the test he' returned to Nebraska to finish out summer and found himself at a house party with friends when a new crackle Rich image popped up in the contest disc Discord Channel as
35:59
people around him danced and dranked feror hopped on his phone connected remotely to his dorm computer threw the image into his machine Learning System then put his phone away an hour later I D I drive all my drunk friends home and
36:10
then I'm walking out of the parking garage and I take out my phone not expecting to see anything he says but when I open it up there's three Greek letters on the screen I love this anecdote it's so good amazing amazing uh somebody was posting that this is this
36:26
is the counter point to VC saying that uh you know Americans you know just just are jocks and you know don't have the work ethic he's he's locking in remotely from his phone to try to inch forward and create more progress you know from
36:41
Nebraska right solving this incredible almost impossible challenge so yeah it's just such an amazing story I'm not goingon to pretend I understand the Save By the Bell references but he's clearly the good character in that show whatever that means so around 2
36:57
a.m. Fator texts his mom and then fredman and the other contestants about what he'd found fighting back tears of joy that was the moment where I was like oh my goodness this is actually going to work we are going to read the Scrolls
37:09
soon enough farad ORD found 10 letters and won $40,000 for one of the contest progress prizes the classicist reviewed his work and said he'd found the Greek word for purple isn't that amazing that's so amazing so uh one we got to
37:23
start using oh my goodness because for sure it's it's it's it's a great it's a great phrase and and a great substitute for another for an alternative but but but I just wanted to put it out there for our listeners you know this is a an
37:37
example of a great side hustle so next time you're you know thinking to yourself you know I like my PM job I make a couple hundred thousand dollar a month at meta but I'd like to do something on the side why not just sort
37:48
of try to crack the code of some ancient Scrolls to make a few an extra 10 you know 10 uh $10,000 Dollar on the side you know it's a good it's intellectually stimulating and just a great sort of not it's not passive income but it's it's a
38:02
nice you know second income stream yeah I mean there there are a lot of stories like this I'm pretty sure Greg uh George Hots the uh the the hacker who broke the PS3 the original iPhone uh jail broke the iPhone and eventually went on to
38:16
develop comma Ai and uh a bunch of other cool stuff but um fantastic hacker early in his career he would do uh hacking competitions in bug bounties so he would go to Faceook and say I I hacked your entire system like I'm a white hat
38:31
hacker I'm not going to do anything bad but can you give me a reward and they'd say absolutely like you just saved us millions of dollars here's here's 100K or something like that and then was he part of the reason that a lot of these
38:43
companies ended up rolling out more formal programs around this because probably generally yes part of a tra and then I think there was even there were even startups created that that were just marketplaces for bounties yeah uh
38:57
at some or another I don't know if any of them really broadly caught on but um it's cool cool strategy and and I think at one point he won a car because of it or like I I think he he hacked the iPhone and uh Steve wnc sent him an
39:12
email being like this is awesome like you're you're you're an amazing hacker uh and then Steve Jobs was like this is unacceptable this destroys my business or something something like that I'm not exactly sure the story but it was very
39:23
funny that he was just like you know as a kid he was very young and he was having impact and making money love to see it uh so feror continued to train his machine learning model on Crackle data and post his progress on Discord and Twitter the discoveries he and
39:36
Hanmer made also set off a new wave of enthusiasm among contestants and some began to employ similar techniques in the latter part of 2023 Fator formed an alliance with two other contestants Yousef nater and Julian uh Schillinger
39:52
uh in which they agreed to combine their technology and share any prize money I love this this is this is the crew that they're building love it and so in the end 18 teams submit entries for the grand prize some submissions were ho hum
40:07
but a handful showed that fredman's gamble had paid off scroll images that were once ambiguous blobs now had entire paragraphs of letter of letters lighting up across them the AI systems had brought the past to life it's a situation that you practically never
40:22
encounter as a classicist you mostly look at texts that have been looked at someone by at by someone before the idea that you are reading a text that was last unrolled on someone's desk 1900 years ago is unbelievable and you are on
40:38
mute uh a a group of classicists reviewed all the entries and did in fact Deem fator's Team the winners so he actually won uh they were able to stitch together more than a dozen Columns of text while entire paragraphs all uh over
40:55
their ENT their entry still Luke got the email telling him that he won and he just goes oh my goodness oh my goodness I I'm I'm fully taking that term and using that constantly it's so good oh my goodness oh my goodness it's so nice uh
41:13
Still Still translating the scholars believe the text to be another uh work by philodemus one centered on the pleasures of music and food and their effects on the senses peering at and beginning to transcribe the first reasonably legible scans of this brand new ancient book was an extraordinarily emotional experience I love that they're just like so stoked it's great yeah uh let's it beats uh it beats slightly changing the color of a button to a
41:40
different shade of blue and getting you know 1% increase in conversion um you know it's close but it's definitely slightly more emotional everyone involved in this story is just so Earnest and that's what I absolutely love about this there's just not there's
41:56
not an ounce of cynicism here and it's just beautiful and that's why I'm so optimistic about his work at Doge I think he's just genuinely yeah and that's why the people that are actually sending ridiculous messages hating on
42:09
him trying to dunk on him making him turn his account private it's like if they just took literally five minutes to try to understand his story yeah I I I it's hard to say that how do how do you position this this guy's a bad person
42:23
right yeah uh just really I mean a lot of those people that are that are you know like you know aggressively anti- Luke they are not reading this coverage they're reading some clickbait sensal Sensational viral article about how you
42:39
know he he he has right access to the treasury and he's gonna send money all and he's just gonna steal all the money for Elon you saw you saw there was this uh I forget I forget which politician he he represents somewhere between San
42:55
Antonio and Austin Texas so Texas based US Representative he was posting we need to figure out how to fire Elon Musk like he's we need to use every bit of political power and pressure and every law to get this man fired and it's just
43:12
so funny because he's not an employee of the government you can't fire him and he's working under the direction of the White House and the chief you know the chief executive officer of the country right now right and so um and and Luke's in
43:27
the Luke's in the same boat so good luck good luck firing Luke as a point of clarification I it came out yesterday Elon is a special employee of the government he does have a a dog email address um I I think the the the exact
43:42
structure of Doge is evolving and I think we'll go through a couple different uh maybe maybe Congressional or or legal challenges but uh but it is is evolving but um yeah I mean obviously there's a lot of people that are anti a
43:55
lot of people are pro even on the and the right even there's even some people on the right that are like I don't like that the tech people are in charge um so it it's developing but we're here to talk about Luke the brother of the week
44:08
and so let's close out with the the goals going forward baring a mass relocation fredman is working to refine what he's got there's plenty left to do the first contest yielded about 5% of one scroll a new set of contestants he
44:23
says might be able to reach 85% he also wants to fund the creation of more automated systems that can speed the process of scanning and digital smoothing so that you don't have to 3D print the case bring it over here like bring the CT scan there dig out better
44:37
you need a lot of different people here it's not just about the AI the AI is just one piece in the value chain here he's now one of the few living Souls who's roamed The Villa tunnels and he says he's also contemplating buying
44:50
scanners that can be placed right at the Villa and used in parallel to scan tons of Scrolls per day even if there's just dialogue of Aristotle or a beautiful Lost homic poem or a dispatch from a Roman general about this guy this Jesus
45:05
Christ guy who's roaming around he says all you need is one of those for the whole thing to be more than worth it what a fantastic story what a fantastic story amazing I love it I'm so I'm so excited to see where the Scrolls project
45:19
goes yeah the only the only bummer small bummer yep is that Luke was kind of a somewhat of you know he's infamous already he was but he was bit more of a secret and now when he does raise his preed round it will be 100x over
45:34
subscribed and you know we're we'll all be lucky if we get a thousand slug but uh sure just send the wire now but it's yeah yeah a check cash it when you when you incorporate at any terms yeah at any terms yeah we need we need a
45:52
pre-incorporation safe that that just says yeah this goes into your first your first round if you start a company at any point yeah yeah exactly uh well let's let let's go to some uh some fantastic analysis from Ben Thompson over shery he's talking about the day
46:11
Minimus loophole and he opens with a quote from Bloomberg the US president Donald Trump's tariffs on China and other countries are rocking markets and casting a over Chinese firms seeking to go public take Sheen the fast fashion
46:25
sensation the online retailer founded in China but headquartered in Singapore is said to be working on what could be one of the biggest listings in London in years potentially valuing the company at 61 billion us as soon as this year
46:38
Trump's executive orders specify that the day Minimus exemption for packages worth less than $800 a loophole used by the likes of Sheen for years will no longer apply though Sheen has been diversifying its shipping bases ahead of
46:51
Trump's trade policies the full scope of the day Minimus changes is still unclear it's unlikely that the company would be immune to the changes Sheen didn't respond to a request for comment P yeah John can you can you break down for the
47:05
audience so Sheen manufactures their products in China and then instead of sending a single shipping container that would have a a value far higher than than $800 they send the individual packages yep from China direct to
47:21
Consumers yep and that's what allows them to get around that that um that that's the loophole that is the minim loophole and the reason that the day minim loophole exists it was not this is not something that Sheen and teu lobbied for and then
47:37
oh they got lucky and they knew that this was going to be a thing no the day Minimus loophole makes a ton of sense because if you're some Etsy seller and you want to send someone a $50 package a t-shirt from Italy to America it makes
47:50
sense that that having to do all the different customs and tariffs and all the different oversight on that small package is cumbersome it actually imposes a massive cost on the government and and the and the ports and there's all this extra filings and so the
48:06
government kind of wisely at the time said hey let's just focus on the big stuff that's coming in the massive shipments of pallets of TVs or the cars that are coming in let's tax those and you know what at the time I'm sure they
48:21
looked at and they were like you know if we draw the bar at8 at $800 that's less than 1% % of trade volume and so sure we'll lose we'll lose if we're if we're taxing something at 10% we'll lose 10% of 1% of our trade you know Revenue
48:37
doesn't matter not a big deal but then once this loophole started to exist and became popularized people figured out how to take advantage of it and the answer was let's ship directly from the factory an individual package directly
48:49
to the American Consumer it takes a long time and so when you go on teu I actually I actually went on teu and it is the funniest e-commerce flow you've ever seen I you open you go to Google images and you search for something you land on the Teemu web site you're on
49:05
mute um and uh and you land on the Teemu like you know uh like like you know web view it really wants you to install the app but it it it does one of those spinners you know the Spinners to be like uh you know what's your percent off
49:19
and and I'm like okay like I guess I have to click this to get to the product or whatever uh and and it spins and and you always win 100% off they just figured they realized that like giving someone 10% off isn't as good so just
49:35
tell them they got 100% off and then it it pops up another spinner that's like now you're eligible for a multiplier and it's like 2x 3x 6X you always win the most the highest like multiple so then all of a sudden it's like you have won
49:49
$600 in free stuff like install the app and then of course once you go down that funnel it's like oh well like you got to pay shipping and all this other stuff and the shipping is the only thing that costs money so you know it's this whole
49:59
like kind of scammy like Ultra optimized thing but I was just cracking up being like Oh really timu like you're just G to give me all this stuff for free like it's such a scam well well you remember when we launched our trailer for the
50:11
podcast yeah at the end of last year somebody one one of the the negative comments that I saw was um oh uh tech tech Brothers do uh Teemu succession and I was like yes this is TE succession we filmed this video in in basically 12
50:31
hours with a $2,000 budget is you nailed it yeah um but it's it's interesting how Teemu became such a Teemu you know exploded and and I don't know if if Ben has the data here but um it it did become popular and it
50:49
did make it really difficult if you made custom t-shirts at a at a factory in LA and you could go on teu and get a shirt that's you know oftentimes something like a t-shirt you're not as worried about the quality if you're just some company that
51:02
plans to give them away say you're an ice cream shop you you'd rather pay $5 for the T-shirt than $25 locally and so it really made it almost impossible to compete if you were a localized manufacturer yeah and it's been part of
51:17
this uh th this value chain erosion that's happened where it used to be uh you know like apple manufacturers in China they have a massive facility there huge partnership with foxcon there's Apple employees on the ground and so
51:30
it's very much like an apple designed and made product with the help of Chinese manufacturing then you go to the next level which is like oh an entrepreneur has an idea and they're like I want to just sell t-shirts and they just call a Chinese Factory they
51:43
basically do everything it's very TurnKey then and then they list that on Amazon and it's like China's providing like all the manufacturing then Sheen and Teemu kind of cut out the the the middleman and just went direct and so
51:56
all of a sudden it went like products come out of the Chinese Factory and they go directly to the door of the American Consumer and to be clear manufacturers like apple aren't benefiting from this loophole even if they're selling a $500
52:07
product because apple is sending you know a a shipping container with with 10,000 airpods in it Y and so the the total value even though the individual product might be a couple hundred bucks ends up being far beyond the the sort of
52:21
loophole based on because the loophole is based around the the shipment itself exactly exactly and so uh teu is owned by PDD Holdings a company that I'm sure will do a deep di on soon uh they rapidly expanded in the United States by
52:35
offering steep discounts on a variety of products for people willing to wait a week or so for delivery because it comes literally from China from the factory uh this is another Chinese linked firm that's in the US's crosshairs the
52:47
popular Marketplace which e- marketer estimates will sell 30 billion dollars of products to us Shoppers this year became an alternative to Amazon as well as retail chains such as Hobby Lobby Party City and dollar stores like Sheen
53:00
timu has largely anticipated Trump's decision by expanding networks in the US and moving to bigger bulk orders teu didn't respond to Quest for comment American Shoppers and companies imported about $48 billion of shipments from the
53:13
world under the day Minimus loophole in the first nine months of last year according to US Customs and Border Protection estimates and so uh we will you can think of what we're doing for technology podcasting Teemu is doing for
53:28
Consumer products just flooding the market with uh uh and the scale is honestly unbelievable and and the the you know the obvious critique of teu and the the long-term critique of China has just been you know they're manufacturing products at incredible scale at
53:47
incredible prices and just flooding the market and oftentimes specifically in the case of Teemu you can if you want to buy an air filter you can go buy a Teemu air filter I'm sure costs like 20 bucks yep and the and the critique is that
54:01
yeah you would have had to spend $200 to get a comparable product that was made by a more reputable firm um and the teu product's going to just basically evaporate over time break down and things like that and so a lot of these
54:14
products have a pretty short um not shelf life but just just life in general right totally and so uh there are two charts in here that will show one is uh day day Minimus exports from China uh over the last 6 years from 2018 to 2023 and
54:35
the top bar there is going or the Bottom bar is going to the United States but you can see China has wrapped up has has ramped up these day Minimus exports from uh about5 billion in 2018 to $65 billion in 20123 and so this day Minimus
54:52
loophole was discovered and then exploited to great effect and you've seen you know this this chart so this the blue bar is United States but the other the other section and the rest of the bars there are um presumably there
55:08
aren't it's it's maybe maybe Malaysia Taiwan United Kingdom Vietnam Etc adopted similar di Minimus yeah D Minimus is a is a common construct because it increases efficiency of trade and so other is probably all of Europe Africa latam like all these these
55:26
different countries combined and you can just tell that like th this chart looks like a startup graph but you don't see types you don't see graphs like this in global trade like global trade typically grows at like 2% 3% 10% not you know not
55:42
Sixx or 10x over you know 10x over six years like that's very very rare and it's all driven by uh just finding this loophole and then just spamming it basically um and so let's go into uh the Strate article Ben writes now that
55:58
tariffs are front and center in the new cycle you may see some commentary referring to the Smoot Holly Tariff Act of 1930 which dramatically raised tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods in an attempt to protect us Industries uh
56:11
in is so interesting this stuff is not new many commentators feel that it contributed to the Great Depression One Challenge in implementing that level of tariffs however is was the sheer amount of Manpower necessary to inspect every
56:22
import and Levy the appropriate fee particularly for small items mailed to individuals to alleviate the challenge the ACT included a day Minimus exception and so this is what we were talking about and here's a quote that the Secretary of the Treasury be and is
56:38
hereby authorized in his discretion to prescribe regulations for the administration free of Duty articles not exceeding a value $1 imported by one person one day so that $1 figure it was originally $1 in 1930 it's been expanded
56:54
in 1962 they took it to 10 bucks in 75 they took it to $25 in 78 there was a lot of inflation in the 70s they took it to $50 in 1980 it was 100 288 and then finally in 2016 it went up 2018 the lesson here go back in time and buy Bitcoin in
57:17
1930 this currency to basement is uh it's concerning um yep and so this has been a boon to businesses like timu and ma which sell chinese-made products to us consumers and then ship them directly so now China dominates day Minimus uh
57:34
shipments a key part of China's Global e-commerce growth has been the expansion of PRC and PRC tied e-commerce firms into the US market the US retail e-commerce Market constitutes over half of all Global e-commerce sales and so uh Imports under Section
57:52
321 of the Tariff Act of 1930 and uh Ben I don't know if Jord is not on screen but you might just want to go to me um uh section 231 allows for us Imports under a day Minimus threshold to enter free of tariffs fees and taxes in 2016
58:10
Congress raised the threshold to $800 per shipment and that dramatically changed the landscape and so um let's go to uh this the as China is dominating this is obviously important particularly for us e-commerce and its associated e
58:26
ecosystem but this has also played a significant role in the fentanyl epidemic rotors has an excellent in-depth investigation of the relationship here we will have to read that on the show soon and so the big question is how is this affecting uh
58:41
Amazon and meta and I don't know what happened with Jordy let's see I'm I'm still here uh I think my camera battery died you can probably just switch it over to uh the the computer uh uh camera and and I think you'll be good there uh
58:58
and we should be able to see that uh so Strater however is a tech newsletter and the angle I am most interested in is the effect on US tech companies that list starts with Amazon which will likely be affected by this rule uh and so the
59:11
information uh uh reported previously that Amazon plans to launch a section of its shopping site featuring cheap items that will ship directly to overseas consumers from warehouses in China so this D Minimus exception was such a big
59:25
deal that Amazon was like well we have to compete we can't just get left behind here so we need a teu competitor within the Amazon ecosystem and so those orders they're not going to be prime they're not going to be next day they're going
59:37
to take N9 to 11 days to get to customers but they will stem the bleeding because it's a directly competitive product with uh with Teemu uh and so it's not clear if these Amazon shipments will be made using a US trade provision that exempts individual
59:52
packages worth than 800 worth worth less than $800 from us custom duty duties Sheen and teu are among sellers that use the provision which some us politicians and trade groups have criticized as a tariff loophole so it's hard to
1:00:04
understand the point of this new offering if it's not leveraging the day Minimus loophole like that's the only reason that Amazon would do this is because they're interested in leveraging the loophole um the program did launch
1:00:15
last Fall by the way and it's called Amazon Hall which I think is so funny what a great one Amazon said well this is and and that's that's probably a reference to people ordering a hundred items on teu and then doing these sort
1:00:31
of unboxing videos these Tik Tok videos I'm sure that the thing is Tik Tok has been using uh they do this warming feature which we talked about on the show yesterday where they will um Show your videos to more people if you talk
1:00:46
about specific topics so over the week over the last week it's been if you talk about deep seek you're going to get a lot of um views and so uh I'm sure they did a number of things where if you do teu Halls you're going to get a bunch of
1:00:59
a bunch more views and so just blatant proof that um the the Chinese companies coordinate to use Tik Tok as a channel to influence uh activity in the US oh yeah um which is again why is the company still operating uh I don't know
1:01:15
I'm sure there's deals being done you know behind uh behind the scenes that's the big reason why Ben Thompson was advocating for Amazon or Walmart to be The Logical acquire irer for Tik Tok if there was a divesture because that like
1:01:30
that is the ultimate monetization for Tik Tok more so than just running ads and so if you sell it to meta is this crazy it is kind of like anti-competitive they're building this crazy Monopoly Google doesn't really need it Microsoft it doesn't really make
1:01:44
that much sense but uh Amazon or Walmart could be perfectly positioned because Tik Tok shop has been so successful well we learned yesterday from somebody in the chat too that Walmart had it took a shot at at soci with their W connect in
1:01:59
the AOL days Walmart is no stranger to um you know social media yeah and so Ben is throwing some shade here putting Amazon on the truth Zone he says uh I suspect when Amazon says we also hear from customers they mean we look
1:02:15
nervously at timu and Sheen's Rising sales numbers H interestingly enough is only available on mobile where timu and Sheen derive their sales in other words I still believe in my original thesis Amazon would love for this loophole to
1:02:28
be closed a world where everyone pays the same import duties is one where Amazon's delivery Network can be much more effectively brought to bear yeah and it's it's it is interesting to think about how these companies realize that
1:02:42
uh even though us consumers basically now demand two day shipping Max like your conversion rate will suffer if you're not offering competitive shipping yep they realize hey if we can get somebody 50 items for what it costs to order you know five items on Amazon
1:03:00
they'll wait you know they're happy to wait seven days um in exchange yep and so timu and Sheen are not responsible for all of meta's growth we're we're going over to how this affect Facebook and Instagram but the two companies
1:03:14
combined it's estimated spent just under $3 billion year to date me Mead's revenue is up around 11 billion year-over-year and so the growth of teu and Sheen certainly they're spending more they're driving a lot of growth but
1:03:27
meta is growing independently so it's less of this like existential issue if timu and Sheen go away it shouldn't be that much of an effect on meta um moreover this spend is more palatable and potentially sustainable than Tik Tok
1:03:39
spend was uh so when Tik Tok was spending on meta they were like directly stealing yeah you know users but e-commerce apps are not a strategic threat to meta quite the opposite in fact and also lack of network effects to make themselves sustaining entities like
1:03:54
Tik Tok has become um so the subsidies could go away macro events could intervene meta still deserves credit for figuring out at but teu and Sheen do make the story a bit more complicated because while ATT was kind of throwing
1:04:08
all this curveball towards meta and they were figuring out how do we get the small you know Mom and Pop e-commerce engines going again well timu shein came in and we're like here's $3 billion to like you know keep the keep the revenues
1:04:21
up and to the right which is great yeah uh and so this quarter did turn out to be the the peak of timu and Sheen's share of meta advertising around under 7% on Facebook and just under 4% on Instagram and they're down to around 4%
1:04:33
and 2% respectively now um still to the to the extent their businesses are impacted by these measures and notably an important part of their hedging has been building distribution centers in Mexico there may be some impact on meta's ad prices I don't think it'll be
1:04:48
substantial is what Ben says and so yeah very very interesting uh very very interesting discussion of how the Trump tariffs and changes in regulation are affecting Tech he ends with uh a little bit about Ai and abundance it's worth pointing out that
1:05:06
the day Minimus exception exists for a good reason we mentioned this there are a lot of items that are shipped into the US every year and it's understandably difficult to examine everything it's also worth pointing out that any item
1:05:16
that qualified for the day Minimus exception also gets to use what is known as informal entry which means much more limited paperwork no needs for a custom Bond informal entry applies to shipments worth less than $2500 uh to that end it remains to be seen just how much of a difference these tars make and exactly how the US Customs Authority handles the onslaught of packages so you know you're you're doing Doge you're trying to cut down on the
1:05:42
amount of uh government employees well you know you might have just 10x the amount of work uh that's going on if you're trying to investigate and and tax all these packages um yeah but he ends by saying I would also note that this
1:05:54
seems like a very interesting problem on which AI could be brought to bear there's a story here about how the internet scale simply crushes a loophole created for a analog World perhaps there is a solution in which ai's ability to
1:06:06
ingest and understand vast amounts of data could make the chaos could make sense of the chaos in a way that preserves the convenience while solving a problem of abundance of course the chasm between Theory and reality is a
1:06:16
massive one particularly in terms of government bureaucracy but I do think that this is one of the many examples of where AI will have unexpected benefits and so I you know we got to get Luke feror into the uh into the um uh uh is a
1:06:33
Department of Homeland Security I don't actually uh yeah I don't know yeah yeah the the at the ports he's got to go to the port he's got open his laptop and uh set up some set up some llms to look at every every day Minimus import that's
1:06:48
coming in uh yeah US Customs and Border Patrol is the one it's the Customs Department um and so let's move on to our third story of the day uh a wonderful deep dive so uh that last one was from Ben Thompson over atery highly
1:07:03
recommend that you go subscribe it's a fantastic uh fantastic newsletter in your email three times a week and uh you also get a bunch of podcasts and bunch of great stuff with it so highly recommend Ben um let's go over to Ashley
1:07:16
Vance who now that that first piece we read about Luke feror that was with Bloomberg but he's no longer with Bloomberg Ashley Vance has moved over to cor memory.com his New Media company he's independent he's going direct and he has a fantastic write up of the boom
1:07:32
supersonic uh test that happened in the Mojave and he says take me to bed or lose me forever in the supersonic Corridor uh the city of Mojave has a population of about 4,000 people and sits 100 miles north of Los Angeles some
1:07:47
people might describe it as a dump I guess and they would not be altogether wrong as the name indicates the city of Mojave is in the Mojave Desert it gets about 2 to six inches of rain a year experiences extremes extremes of heat and cold and has gusting winds
1:08:04
California State Route 14 rips right along the city's Edge and if you're not on it or not paying attention you could drive by Mojave in a Flash missing out on the Delicacies offered up at a Denny's weener schnitzel or Subway or a
1:08:17
fine stay at the two star America's Best Value in core memory has a need a need for reads become a free or paid Subs subscriber and support our battle against nameless faces enemy let's go I love reading the calls to action in the
1:08:31
middle of a substack post uh so go subscribe if you're not subscribed already um all of this is to say that I love Mojave and go there as often as I can what drew me this time is uh uh is this uh boom supersonic launch and so
1:08:49
the airport is flanked by Edwards Air Force Base and a and the Naval Air weapons station China Lake China Lake is is a fascinating story we should dig into at some point uh that's where they do a lot of like uh crazy military tests
1:09:02
uh that means the mve has an exceptional sometimes eccentric aircraft doing wonderful things and that the flying stuff is complemented by stuff that goes boom the event is catalyzed the event that catalyzed the mojave's position as
1:09:15
a special place incorporated all these characteristics it occurred in 1947 when Captain Charles jger um became the first to go past the sound barrier in the Bell X1 plane in the years that followed the military bases did most of the work pushing the
1:09:32
Mojave reputation as the Forefront of Aerospace Adventure Tom Wolf captured the scene well in the right stuff where courageous man manly Pilots were turning up in the desert to flex their coones and young women were apparently all about
1:09:46
it wolf describes both groups mingling at the happy bottom Riding Club run by the iconic Florence low pantcho Barnes with language that I'm not sure mainstream writers would get away with today although labial piping little birds is
1:10:02
evocative and he his writing is uh this is why when Ashley Vance started core memory Legacy Media died because they lost they lost star I think this type of writing makes a comeback with Ashley Vance in the wild he doesn't have an
1:10:17
editor now he can say whatever want say whatever he wants let's get the flowery language out there let's differentiate from the llms the slop we're not going SL when we're reading Ashley Vance it's good stuff yeah openai is is hitting
1:10:29
Refresh on Cor memory.com waiting to ingest this uh this incredible uh flowery language yeah and so uh he uh he's there to talk about boom supersonic last week Mojave the city turn returned to its full Glory at least for a moment boom supersonic flew its xb1 jet past
1:10:50
the sound barrier for the first time and I got to witness the whole Affair and he's making a video about it so go subscribe to core memory uh boom was founded in 2014 by Blake scha and he had nothing resembling an aerospace pedigree
1:11:02
uh scha a computer scientist had worked at Amazon and Groupon dear God before starting boom yeah so so his LinkedIn was getting shared around because he was a product manager at Groupon right before starting boom yeah so what a what
1:11:16
a outlier uh bet he would have been nicely pattern matched to go start a some type of uh retail you know app SAS company but not the guy that's getting pattern matched to start a supersonic uh Aviation Aerospace company yeah and so
1:11:34
even with his pedigree he's still he went to YC they gave him a lot of coaching on how to get uh how to pull forward like contracts and kind of like uh not like real Revenue but like if you make it we'll buy it and that drisk for
1:11:47
investors and so all of a sudden I think I think the combination of the background the YC strategy the demo day all that stuff got the business off the ground and got the initial funding um and I love that when people talk about him working at Groupon he's like yeah
1:12:00
now I'm just trying to do 50% off coupons for how long it'll take you to fly from LA to New York yeah that's a great one he's got a bunch of zingers based on it um and so uh here we are 11 years later what a journey and boom is
1:12:14
still at it and the xb1 is not even the aircraft around which it hopes to fly regular folk ra ra rather the xb1 is a single person Jet that boom has used to test out some of its ideas materials and team when it comes to handling the
1:12:28
pressures of SuperSonic flight the plane that that could end up taking people from London to New York in a zip is called Overture and we need a few years and tons more money to create and clear for safe travel we've obviously been
1:12:40
here before with the Concord but it had the weight of the British and French governments behind it the xb1 has been built on the back of venture capital and when it went supersonic last Tuesday it marked the first time an independently
1:12:52
developed jet had done so so it was with a with a 50% team 50% team on the on the xb1 project they do I think they have 140 employees a lot of those people are working on Overture and other stuff but still the fact that you can fit 50 people in a
1:13:09
shot with the plane is incredible and crazy coming off off the back of a of a recap that you know a lot of their investors had to um they had to say hey we're we're gonna you know basically Double Down triple down on this thing to
1:13:24
make it work yep incredible timing and I'm I'm imagining this this success of this latest launch um or flight should attract some more capital and allow them to continue to um to hopefully Thrive 100% 100% um so after the flight SCH
1:13:43
groused on X that neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal had bothered to cover the event that's warranted grousing calling him out Ashley don't up uh but then again you know I'm glad that we have core memory you know I
1:13:59
don't know if I want to read a New York Times right up oh it's annoying that they went fast I don't like it slow down slow down too fast okay so he says yes okay boom had already flown xb1 about 10 times from Mojave at sub supersonic speeds sha will
1:14:16
tell you that the company has learned most of what it needed to during these test flights and there's also a degree to which the xb1 busting through the sound barrier was simply symbi iotic uh but also WTF uh there are pragmatic reasons this
1:14:30
test flight was such a big deal boom is one of our last best shots at getting supersonic commercial travel the Concord retired in 20 in 2003 because it was too expensive afterwards people were inclined to deem affordable supersonic
1:14:43
flights as an impossibility which is ridiculous yeah we have a couple major supersonic bets going with boom and hermas uh big fans of both companies uh but they're both battling away in a horrifically hard and costly business
1:14:57
and if they fail we might not see anyone take a swing at supersonic commercial flight for decades maybe you like being wedged in a seat for 11 hours going from San Francis San Francis San Francisco to Tokyo I don't yes I'm with you Ashley
1:15:12
yeah no it really it really is wild to think about just cutting cutting even cutting in half being able to get to Europe from from La in the time that it takes to get to New York would be incredible you're shrinking at at a time
1:15:27
when in many ways you know looking at the trade War Story and and and things like that Peter zhon was right in his prediction that we're going through this period of deglobalization but supersonic flight would would have an opposite
1:15:40
effect and that everything would become closer right being able to get to Tokyo in a couple hours very cool Sam Alman would would have would love that get to go hang with Masa a lot more regularly and uh go car shopping as well I love it
1:15:53
I love it uh and so uh uh Ashley's uh waxing poetic about the impact of this he says on the far more visceral front boom doing this test flight was not just cool but important for all the historical context reasons I laid out earlier some of the
1:16:12
US's best engineering achievements have taken place in the Mojave because of the culture built up in the Mojave it's a special place and it requires tending and fuel to keep on thriving the US is a rare country country to the US is that
1:16:28
rare country to even have a supersonic Corridor and to have supersonic ready objects to shove through it uh it's good to test such engineering limits and be reminded of what we're capable of and to maintain the Need for Speed one of my favorite Mojave Aerospace types is Ben brocker who went on to work at astrospace after a stint at Masten I wrote about him in my book when the heavens went on sale and include a tribute to Ben from that book here
1:16:56
having pined to get into Aerospace since he was a kid brocker bought a $500 very very use 17 passenger van and drove it to the Mojave Desert to begin knocking on the doors of space startups it took months to find a gig living out of his
1:17:09
van and trying to fill the days as best he could I managed to get a library card and read all the books I had not read he said I also spent a lot of time bombing around the desert and trying not to die through a stroke of luck a positioned
1:17:21
opened up at Masten and brocker soon established himself as part of the zombie team he continued reading Aerospace books and learned a ton on the job over the course of three years mve is like a new space Penance he said it sucks but you put in your two to three
1:17:37
years and then you go do something somewhere else if you're good and so what a what a fantastic anecdote about just like if you want to be in AI you probably got to go to SF if you want to be in defense Tech you're going to be in
1:17:47
the gundo if you're going to be in supersonic stuff you got to go to Mojave and I love that it's not so it's not so bad out out there I'm sure you've driven through the desert at at some point it's got a kind of a you know uh a super
1:18:02
Galactic Vibe out there I uh I'm I'm bullish on the Mojave we should do some on the ground on the ground reporting in the Mojave Ashley next time you go please invite us we'll tag along and whatever news you're covering and
1:18:17
breaking we'll front run you a little bit we'll break it live but then we'll still cover your your article the next day yeah well uh well let's move on to some uh back and forth we had on the timeline with Patrick Collison the founder and CEO of stripe we reacted to his fantastic post about uh two different types of phone booths you might have seen this on previous show uh and he followed up by showing us an image of a beautiful building which I
1:18:47
think he has his eye on maybe I don't believe this is the actual stripe headquarters it looks somewhat AI generated uh I couldn't find it on a Google image image uh reverse image search but uh I think you got the right idea Patrick I want to see this uh I
1:19:03
want to see this in action and uh keep making everything beautiful like what you're doing is so important to Tech and I just uh I mean everything from like the blog and the fast uh he has a whole uh like documentation of all the
1:19:16
different projects that have been done very quickly uh he's an incredible thought leader I guess you could call him in Tech and just uh an inspiration to everyone who's building and wants to make beautiful things and so uh happy to
1:19:27
happy to have a back and forth with them on the timeline yeah and this is a a great example of of a Founder with Incredible taste who now has the resources to go out and uh instead of building you know the Apple Loop whatever what do they call their their
1:19:43
campus he can build this structure that that looks like uh you know what what maybe a bank would have looked like in the during the Roman Empire right yeah yeah yeah it it is very funny it is I mean not technically a bank but they do
1:19:56
a lot of you know fintech is bank financial institution right financial institution and yeah we love stripe uh stripe helped us incorporate uh technology Brothers uh LLC which was very helpful certainly did so shout out
1:20:10
stripe Atlas uh give Patrick Collison a call tell them the technology Brothers sent you go incorporate your next business on stripe Atlas today we love stripe and thanks for engaging with us Patrick we we love to have you on the
1:20:23
show you're welcome any anytime uh let's move on to some breaking news uh Jason kman has launched his new company story he's back he took a little break he was working on just one 90minut movie no big deal uh no stopped posting the weekly
1:20:42
documentaries which were already insane and and crazy high production value uh in many ways let's just be honest in many ways uh John cougan walks so Jason Carmen could fly right for he kind of uh he kind of came in he was
1:20:57
like Hey John's a little distractive with the podcast you know I'm just going to launch a series of Highly produced films that will go on to live on I'm sure Netflix and Amazon you know Prime and and and all these sure platforms so
1:21:13
it's it's amazing to see the guy Sprints everywhere and uh incredible energy unrelenting Drive uh he says this is the company I've wanted to build since I was nine and and I'm so glad he landed here and doing this obviously he had a ton of
1:21:28
different opportunities he was inhouse at a startup for a while this is such it's just a perfect fit for him he's going to be be able to make science fiction films as well as documentaries corporate work you know stuff on Netflix
1:21:42
I saw his camera he's able to post behind the scenes now he's running the Sony Venice 2 this rigs like 100k he he is he's he's beyond the requirements to deliver to at this point like all of his gear is ready to be shown almost in IMAX
1:22:00
like it's that level of production and Tech has never seen anyone who's this much of an artisan and Craftsman care about this type of media in this way it's always been a side project but this guy this is his life's work this is
1:22:14
clearly what he's doing and he's gone bull send and we're happy to support him here at technology Brothers yeah and it's amazing to see this rise I think when you think about legendary filmmakers uh of today day you know that built their careers across 20 30 40
1:22:28
years yep you would get to see their films but you wouldn't get to see behind the scenes in the same way of seeing their Journey maybe it's an interview with with the New Yorker or you know they do a talk at a Sund Dan but you're
1:22:41
not getting the sort of daily seeing the progress and seeing somebody build a career which is which is amazing to see so congratulations Jason congratulations Jason keep up all the hard work and keep making incredible content posting keep
1:22:55
posting uh we have an update on a post from yesterday Mato over at eight sleep coule here we both sleep on eight sleeps we highly recommend eight sleep uh the pods were delivered to Doge I hope this will supercharge Elon Musk and the
1:23:13
incredible team to shape the future of America let's go and so they packed these up they ran them through the metal detectors through the scanners the x-ray scanners and they got them in the building and incredible quick turnaround
1:23:26
I didn't even know how they got them out of the out of the factory that fast or out of the distribution center but they were there in DC in less than 24 hours delivered and so uh enjoy it Luke enjoy it the rest of the Doge team I hope you
1:23:38
guys get high sleep scor Luke for the four hours Luke is sleeping at night it's going to be the best four hours of sleep of his life uh and uh yeah if you don't have if you don't if you can't invest a lot of hours in your sleep you
1:23:51
definitely got to be on an aid sleep yeah I mean Aid sleep also sponsors F1 these Elite athletes you think about Luke he is an elite athlete of the thing government two that I don't think uh I don't think people realize about eight
1:24:05
is is the the Cozy element is crazy so a lot of people think about the the chilling which is nice you know maybe you get into bed and you want to be a little bit cooler relaxed but that morning you know turning up the heat a little bit in the morning it's like
1:24:19
being next to a warm fire so it warms my heart knowing that Luke you know is going to be the depths of the federal government you know bureaucracy and uh he's going to be able to be cozy if he wants and uh maybe even use it as sort
1:24:31
of an alarm feature it's like as you start sweating it's time to hit time to hit uh you know hit the a new CSV pull out a new stack of PDFs start organizing start digging through the the the treasury docks uh let's see we got we
1:24:47
got some more massive breaking news CI means has posted about RFK let's be very clear RFK is the most important cabinet conver uh confirmation in American history Bobby and president Trump have gone up against the largest and most
1:25:00
powerful Industries in the country and are winning that would be the Food and Drug uh Industries uh the result is a chance for a healthier future for our kids and uh good friend with CI love C and everything that he's done to uh
1:25:14
popularize health and wellness and uh and and spread a lot of just very interesting and contrarian ideas uh I'm sure you've met him can you give us some background on C and his uh business partner Justin well John Call's an absolute dog uh co-founder of trumed uh
1:25:29
uh co-founders with Justin Mars former brother of the week uh trumed makes it easy to use your HSA FSA funds to buy products that you're already buying which is a super um super important because the HSA FSA benefits are are
1:25:44
already cool but it's not historically hasn't been easy to spend that money on consumer products uh we got a chance to hang out with Cali and Justin at reicon a while back year and C even then was spending hours every day working on the
1:26:00
Maha movement uh which is which is an interesting um uh make America healthy again is is is something that we should all be get behind it clearly was politicized in many ways totally uh but I'm I'm glad to see this get through and
1:26:13
and there's so much more to um you know this is not a political move this shouldn't be political at all right we're trying to make the average you know American healthy there's a lot of aspects of of our sort of way of life
1:26:27
that that simply aren't Y and um and yeah I mean what they went up against here is insane the um you know the pharmaceutical uh the drug you know uh industry is spends billions of dollars on Advertising uh with Legacy Media they
1:26:43
spend um tons of money you know lobbying pretty much every single politician in in Washington um and at the state level and so what they went up against to get get this done um is is absolutely incredible and and you know personally
1:27:00
uh you know we don't talk about politics on this show but I I firmly believe it's not a political issue at all it's just this this will be good uh you know Americans will get more information and hopefully we can create some uh guard
1:27:11
rails to help uh everybody be uh healthier so I think it's a huge win for sure for sure congratulations one one one interesting note um uh I'm gonna potentially butcher the details here but just uh I didn't realiz you remember
1:27:27
seeing like uh we pretty much spend all of our time on X but uh if you've ever watched you know CNN you'll get like three ads back to back for drugs and and you're thinking to yourself This doesn't seem like a very good ad right because
1:27:43
it's like quick shot of a guy like driving his truck and then like waving to his wife and then it says this drug will kill you this drug will put you into a long-term coma like this drug will do all this and so so so I was always so confused I
1:27:57
was like how is this actually good advertising because I come away from this being like this could this could maim me for life you know like it doesn't seem like an ad and um one of the one of the reasons that uh the pharmaceutical industry has had such a
1:28:13
choke hold on Legacy Media is because they're simply spending so many dollars it would be um almost Financial suicide for someone like a CNN to ever put out negative coverage of the pharmaceutical industry and the pharmaceutical industry
1:28:27
does many many important innovations that that help us live longer better lives but uh for a really long time the Legacy Media just hasn't been able to talk about some issues with the pharmaceutical industry and some of the
1:28:40
downsides and so um the fact that they were able to get this through despite having you know the uh uh uh you know pharmaceutical industry having so much incentive to not have this happen uh just shows um that that this the time to
1:28:54
make America healthy again has really come around so congratulations to uh RFK and Cali and everybody involved in the movement and I mean that point like that you just made sounds very political but uh it's been that that exact point has
1:29:10
been a major talking point of the left for Generations like gome Chomsky has the concept of manufacturing consent and it's exactly that and so like you you you could be quoting RFK in the modern era he's a republican you could be
1:29:25
quoting RFK from a few years ago when he was a Democrat you could be quoting you know one of the biggest socialists and gome Chomsky so this shouldn't be as much of a political football as it is but become I hope people withhold judgment and understand that there's a
1:29:41
very positive intention with this movement around Health tot and let's see how things go right and at the end of the day every American should be able to make decisions for themsel around their he Health it's like one of the greatest
1:29:54
personal freedoms that we should um we should always have so um I'm excited to see what comes to this yeah it's it's undeniable that uh lifespans have flatlined America is getting unhealthier decade by decade everyone kind of agrees
1:30:11
on that clearly that's a reason to try something different this is different and hopefully it's the right move so yep I'm optimistic uh let's move on to Nico over at default he has some press for his company written by Brandon short
1:30:27
Brandon short and I love this because included in this is a fantastic quote he says Nico has moved to New York City and has an office with a bunch of cracked Engineers a hungry team of go to market folks who are at the bleeding edge and
1:30:39
to use Nico's words enough Lucy and Celsius to topple a subsaharan warlord the team is building their company in a way that I wouldn't want to compete with and so thank you Nico for the shout out uh uh I love to fall we we we need to
1:30:55
put it uh to use on the show get some uh get some outbound going yeah we need we need our own outbound you know uh guys just dialing you know uh on the phones all day long cold calling people say hey have you heard about the technology
1:31:10
Brothers exact we're asking about you they want they want you to listen to the show yep give us you know just three hours of your day every single day we don't ask for much just three or four hours a day that's all yeah totally free
1:31:24
it's hand to hand combat every single listener matters we need sdrs that are convincing people to install the RSS feed hey we'd love to upgrade you from just uh listener to live stream Watcher as well have you looked into this oh
1:31:38
have you left five stars yet you know really develop a relationship with them it's a relationship business this podcasting is a relationship business yep and so well said it's fantastic let's move on to the timeline uh we got a funny post to kick
1:31:51
it off with uh apparently over the last uh decade the purity of cocaine has increased significantly while the price of cocaine has remained the same and uh and the question is what other industry products has this happened in and uh
1:32:08
Hunter says it's worth noting that private Equity has largely avoided the industry and the interesting thing here is that uh this this this has actually happened this this trend has happened in a lot of Industries specifically Tech
1:32:21
Industries uh Google search has gotten better while remaining free like YouTube has gotten more content without changing the price and there's a lot TVs are TVs are basically free but I mean so this this reminds me I posted yesterday that
1:32:34
Pablo Escobar might be the greatest cpg founder of all time uh and I'll just read out some of the stats so Pablo obviously you know contributed to this this trend and and private Equity was actually the counterparty to this trade
1:32:46
that Pablo was making in many ways he was you know dominating the market in the 80s he had about 80% of the of the T at the time so just to just to get some idea you know ideas of the scale Pablo bootstrapped to annualize revenue of 22
1:33:02
billion he didn't really have access to to the private markets the way certain entrepreneurs would Global operations of sales and distribution hubs on nearly every continent developed an Amazon style Logistics Division he had his own
1:33:14
trucks boats planes fulfillment centers ports Etc he expanded margin and improved deliverability and traceability and uh this is you know one of my favorite ones he actually built a prison for himself so he could lock in and
1:33:28
really sort of inspire himself to grind harder and then he escaped from it just to just to prove that he could fantastic and he even had a run at politics too he he became elected to the House of Representatives so um so yeah uh I'm
1:33:42
sure that private equities bummed that they couldn't get into that uh Market but um but yes other people took advantage and Escobar is the one that's chronicled in Naros season one is that correct yeah yeah oh yeah great the last
1:33:54
the last show that uh the last good show that that Netflix made oh yeah it's been rough couple years but I remember watching that five six years ago it was great highly recommend uh well let's move on to Victorio uh he says be Trump 4D chess
1:34:10
grandmas slap 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico secure the Border or else drama ensues Canada and Mexico are losing their minds Canada screeching about retaliation Mexico sweating concedes first and agrees everything tariffs are
1:34:23
paused 24 hours later Canada folds to Total Victory economy saved border secured America first uh how does he keep getting away with it and it is it is funny like Trump the dealmaker he knows how to come in and put the hert on someone and really expose The Leverage
1:34:41
and it's interesting that he you know presumably chose to do it over the weekend when the markets weren't open yeah and so if if that was intentional to try to minimize some of the chaos yep uh you know it it worked well it was
1:34:55
interesting to see how quickly everybody went from uh you know you can't just stop the flow of fenel it's it's it's impossible all the stuff to Trudeau saying yeah we're we're sending Choppers and the military to the border and and
1:35:11
we're gonna we're going to stop the flow um and so anyways um hopefully it has a positive impact uh fenel is is uh you know our our our version of the Opium Wars so um so yeah so let's get it out of the country but hopefully you know no
1:35:29
Market turmoil and less illegal drugs like that's a win for everyone I I I think everyone should be happy about that if that's the outcome and that hopefully it will be uh well let's move on to Aaron Levy founder and CEO of box cloud storage company he says can
1:35:45
confirm open AI deep research is quite strong in a few minutes it did what used to take a dozen hours the implications to knowledge work is going to be quite profound when you when you just ask an AI agent to perform full tasks for you
1:35:58
and it comes back with a finished result I what has your experience with uh deep research been so far so uh we've used it for a couple projects this week that are relevant so yep yesterday we we did a deep dive on Mary Meer absolute Legend
1:36:16
icon of the bubble and and uh more recently venture capitalist I thought it was very competent at researching Mary Meer and the reason for that is that the project was basically collect information from the entire internet try
1:36:32
to rank and get the highest quality sources and then organize it in a sort of sort of linear storyline y uh and help me understand her strengths her vision what was her impact things like that it did a really good job at that
1:36:46
today you tried to use it for for Luke farer to try to get a better understanding of his background and I think it was much weaker output um and that's obviously because there's just much less uh information about Luke online and sort of super high quality uh
1:37:04
sources so um I um yeah my my thoughts on are you're like I can't tell if I'm I I'm probably some combination of bad at understanding the correct way to prompt deep research to get great results I noticed I was dumping in whole uh text
1:37:22
exports of PDFs and it was kind of just breaking and like bugging out and so there's probably a better way to interact with it to prompt it and I'm sure we'll learn these patterns and I kind of need to unlearn some of the
1:37:34
patterns that I learned when I was using 01 Pro or gp4 because for a lot of those with some of them they have they have the ability to pull things from links so I would dump a bunch of links it would pull all those in other ones PDF uploads
1:37:46
so I would upload a bunch of PDFs and then it would have that as extra context with the Deep research it does it does a lot of it by itself so I think with a simpler prompt you can get a better result but I think like doing too much
1:37:59
handholding might actually be a problem for it and so there's still the question of how do I get it a source that it doesn't have access to that's maybe behind a pay wall or or some Arcane scroll that it doesn't know about and I
1:38:11
want it to be in the research report um and then also there's just a question of like for a lot of these uh for for for some of the really popular topics like there might already be a deep research style report out there just in the form
1:38:25
of the Wikipedia page or in the form of some sort of podcast somebody somebody was posting that it's basically a new form of Wikipedia that you can sort of slightly customize and prompt um but uh but yeah it's interesting that that uh
1:38:40
open aai made a huge effort to hype this launch right they have a very good network of investors team members Sam Etc that can that can create a lot of hype around a launch and a lot of of people have been working on the same
1:38:54
idea using llms for research right and so there was a bunch of different product layer companies doing doing this uh previously but just goes to show that open AI I do think they're feeling the pressure around the model layer commoditizing and potentially good
1:39:11
models going open source and so they're just needing to innovate more at the product level and say hey we're actually not just the model layer we're we we're we're operating at the app the product layer as well I mean the the the easiest
1:39:24
win and I I don't know maybe I'm being playing like armchair product manager right now but the easiest win I could imagine would be just there's only a text box and and when I prompt it in my prompt I say I'd like you to deep
1:39:40
research this or I'd like you to go online or I'd like you to use a PDF upload and then it routes me to the correct model for that and it intelligently knows hey this prompt is perfect for deep research let's go over here 03 High oh O3 mini is actually best for this instead of putting that on me because now now I wind up with I write the same query in five different tabs with all the different well here's yeah here's here's how uh here's how the
1:40:06
workflow will actually work right is you go into xai and you say hey I want to do this thing how should I do it it says well I can route it here if you want and then bring it back and then yeah or I'll try this and I'll I'll try it in a
1:40:18
couple different places and so uh it's interesting to think about how um how you might use a model to help you better understand how to use other models and get the best output 100% yeah uh there's already a version of this happening with
1:40:32
like the open router system uh where a lot of the programmers who want to use an open source model will they they instead of just saying like I want to use uh deep seek V3 hosted by Deep seek they will say I just want to use this
1:40:47
model at the lowest possible cost and all of the different servers and and and companies that serve these models are out there competing on price and whatever load balancing is going on Whoever has the lowest cost of energy or C gpus that day low demand will price
1:41:02
their model dynamically and Route you to that we just need kind of like a new layer a new abstraction layer maybe because I mean it'd be very cool to have like you know there's one place where I go to prompt oh looks like you want to
1:41:14
upload a full book a million a million token context Gemini for that oh looks like you want to do some deep research chat GPT deep search for that go here do this uh and just kind of route that intentionally but I I do think all of
1:41:27
this will be solved very quickly I I it seems it seems too obvious to to not be already the works and this is one of those things where we're talking about it now they're probably putting the polishing touches on it right now it'll
1:41:36
go out like once it's a meme the company knows especially if it's like you know a fast moving startup with a Founder mode CEO and all this other stuff like this not it's not like uh you know talking about Google where people will say for
1:41:49
years or apple people were beating the drum of like Siri doesn't work for years years and it took them so long uh open AI like they're they're moving fast they got look at look at Apple today everybody's saying your your photo app
1:42:02
is the worst app that I've used in in forever and they're like okay we heard you loud and clear we're going to launch a partti full uh competitor now uh it's please just just fix the uh the photo app yeah anyways uh anyways
1:42:19
let's move on to uh nille Krishnan he says if there's a market map you're too late do you get this reference is this is this a Kanye oh it's Drake it's Drake okay it's a it's a cover art okay yeah uh I don't know I'm out of
1:42:34
touch I guess you just you just uh outed yourself as not being a drake fan which is not the worst thing to be out Kendrick all the way baby Kendrick all the way um anyways great uh great graphic I mean this this is um I mean the the original album if for those uh
1:42:51
that aren't Drake enthusiasts or didn't pay attention to pop culture like 10 years ago at this point um uh is if you're reading this it's too late implying I'm sure he had some sort of beef with somebody and he was dropping the album and you know you know was saying if you're reading this uh you know I already dissed you or something like that um in this case I do think it's true a lot of the best companies get started before there's a market map
1:43:19
you look at anderol and paler you know these these uh yeah maybe you could go back and look around when they were Incorporated and make a market map but it's really more like by the time the market maps are being shared publicly on
1:43:34
X uh you're you know that is not the right point to try to start the company right yep uh and it's not to discourage entrepreneurship or or getting excited about a category and making a bet there but um usually by the time that Market's
1:43:50
mapped there's a bunch of super super talented people that are already tackling different areas of it and and maybe have a two three four five year Head Start Right sometimes even more than that there are two notable exceptions I can think of uh first would
1:44:05
be Google because there were a lot of search engines and they were definitely mapped in Mary Maker's report exite lyos uh Yahoo it was very clear that there was a a defined market and it maybe it wasn't a market map on Twitter because
1:44:20
Twitter didn't exist at the time but uh it was clearly understood and then the other one would be Facebook actually because uh LinkedIn had already started and there I believe uh one of the early investors maybe was Reed Hoffman or
1:44:32
somebody in Peter Teal's Network had actually started a company called uh like social networking.com or something like that and and a lot of people were circling and Peter has said that like he knew that there was going to be someone
1:44:44
that cracked the code and so he went when he met Mark Zuckerberg he was like I'm in uh and so there there there are some exceptions but uh but yeah I mean once it's a full Market map and there's like hundreds of companies it's a little
1:44:57
bit rougher it's more it's more just like okay if there's a few competitors and they're doing something really fundamentally wrong there's probably still Innovation opportunity but if you're just like looking at a market map
1:45:07
it's going to be rough go anyway let's move let's stay with meta actually and move into uh a news article from The Wall Street Journal meta in talks to reincorporate in Texas or another state exit Delaware potential step by social
1:45:22
media giant follow similar move by Elon Musk who moved to reincorporate his companies in Texas and Nevada and so sheal monot says Delaware probably lost its status as a place where most companies choose to incorporate huge hit
1:45:35
to the state budget 40% of general fund comes from franchise taxes and Corporation fees from companies who choose to incorporate there due to the business-friendly approach and so yeah it'll be interesting to see like you know YC and
1:45:49
stripe Atlas they still kind of recommend Delaware it's like the standard thing but these these things change over time yeah how uh hopefully I'm not lagging too much it seems like my connection's dropping a little bit um but uh but yeah so so give some people
1:46:04
some backstory here so so uh obviously every Venture back startup has been incorporating in Delaware I've invested in over 50 companies I don't think I've invested in a single uh company that wasn't Incorporated in Delaware
1:46:17
originally and yeah you can be register in other states where you kind of operate but the actual incorporation happens in Delaware because there's so much case law there it just it just makes sense to do it sort of been the default and and Delaware's really
1:46:30
benefited from that now what happened and why meta is making this move is that uh there was a very high-profile lawsuit I think we covered it at different points where there was a Tesla shareholder who had something like seven
1:46:43
shares or something like that or or maybe it was even it was like very uh small number of Tesla shares and and he basically partnered with a law firm or a group of law firms to bring a very aggressive case against elon's uh pay
1:46:58
package saying that it wasn't in the best interests of the company and ended up being um uh I don't know where it's shaken out today I think it was uh the the judge like ruled in favor of the shareholders and said no this is not
1:47:13
right even though it had been approved uh you know back in the past and then um they they did a vote to overturn it and Elon was sort of rallying the truth grou and saying like hey I um and originally the pay package was set up in a way
1:47:27
where Elon had to hit the world's most aggressive you know sales and growth targets to achieve the pay package and he basically did the impossible to do that and then you had this hyper sort of political judge in Delaware who struck
1:47:39
it down and uh what that means is every CEO now is saying look um we I don't feel comfortable operating out of Delaware if uh judges there are going going to get involved in basically the internal decision making at the company right it just doesn't um it really
1:48:00
doesn't make sense and so now you have people moving to Nevada some people moving to Texas um and uh we'll see what shakes out but huge cell phone from from Delaware yeah and so uh I just looked it up the story was uh Elon calls his shot
1:48:16
and says I want more equity in Tesla and you will Benchmark you will bench mark my performance to the stock price which is the purest essence of shareholder value creation for a CEO it's perfectly aligned he's not talking about revenue
1:48:35
or deliveries he's just talking about if the value of the company goes up this will be a creative for everyone you will you will have you will you will dilute yourself because you're giving me more shares but your shares will be worth so
1:48:47
much more and so during that time he like 10x or 100x the stock it went way up generational run and so he hit all of his targets he was ready to get that package the Delaware Court Struck it down and then Elon did a shareholder
1:49:00
vote all the shareholders were like yeah this is great like this guy's putting up insane numbers let's give it to him again and then uh a judge struck that down again so as of December 2024 the pay package has not been approved but if
1:49:14
they reincorporate in Texas they can try and go approve it again and then the Delaware judge would not have the authority to block it and so yeah and and to be clear the the the the real devil in all of this is the law firm that that I believe made hundreds of
1:49:32
millions or billions of dollars in fees uh as part of this lawsuit even though the original uh uh plaintiff in the case the shareholder who brought the case uh had had something like SE shares or something mismatch in terms of the
1:49:52
person yeah I need to dig into more of like where that where that uh where that money for that law firm came from because uh you know the money had to come from somewhere it clearly couldn't come from the plaintiff uh if they just
1:50:08
owned seven shares or something like that so maybe the the Delaware Court awarded it I wonder if that's on hold as elon's fighting back it's all very unclear but uh certainly worth a deep dive and certainly reshaping how long
1:50:22
large tech companies think about where they're incorporating because uh I don't know if Zuck wants to do some sort of similar pay package he already owns so much of meta I don't think it's that big of an issue but uh it's certainly scary
1:50:33
thinking that the shareholders collectively could want to do one thing and then a judge could say hey actually we we we we we don't want you to do that even though it's it's massively popular amongst the shareholders broadly uh
1:50:46
anyway let's move on to Gary tan GT is on the timeline again yeah I actually think I don't think it's me I just did a speed test my internet's solid might be here are we still live John it very well could be that your computer is your your computer dying yeah and
1:51:23
uh yeah do you have a brick yep okay we're back we're still talking about cars and and rides the car Community for the car Community uh we were talking about straa for cars and I thought it was interesting I was
1:51:42
listening to the cars and bids podcast with Doug deuro and one of his co-hosts said that he has a a Notes app uh with every with a list of every car he's ever driven where he drove it and what the date was and that's obviously like a hyper
1:52:00
Niche you know Behavior but if you think about that as like you know what the what the most hardcore members of the car Community are doing maybe bringing that to more and more people it's a good uh it's a good wedge you get everyone in
1:52:14
uh there's another guy uh vinwiki oh what's his name he's really into Lamborghini Merci aligos uh I forget what his name is but uh what yeah I know who you're talking about yeah uh he uh why am I blanking on his name uh he uh vinwiki he he launched
1:52:32
this app that allows you to track the vins Ed Bolan that's right Ed Bolan uh the man uh he he launched this app that um will uh allow you to put in a VIN and see the the history of the car but it's really big for car collectors because
1:52:49
people would go around and say okay Ferrari said that they only made a th000 f8s but if we all go around and find all the vins we can piece together the VIN numbers and see hey maybe they made 1,200 maybe they made 1500 you know are
1:53:06
they telling put them in the put them in the truth Zone put him in the truth Zone and that's what like the the the the really hardcore collectors and the really hardcore uh car Community has done and so I can just think of a bunch
1:53:17
of different ways to to to wedge in even just like you know being able to book track day is very easy easily see where tracks are how do I get there one click oh I need a truck to take my car over there only so so just to give an example
1:53:30
there's um I there's a bunch of guys that use the grocery store that's close to my house to do car meetups at because a lot of people drive over from the valley they're coming to Malibu they want to go for a drive on PCH they're
1:53:42
meeting up and it's so funny because I just end up walking down there to get coffee and then I see a bunch of guys with like the same car that I have and I end up just talking to them about it cuz cars are super social yep um but there's
1:53:55
no there's no known Community where that's actually being organized that's that that's been done in a way that's like an app that I actually want to use or that has any type of like real Market penetration and I think about the
1:54:07
opportunity here like I said around the actual car Marketplace because if you can get a bunch of collectors and car enthusiasts using your app you know bring a trailer is a phenomenal business I don't know exactly what their revenue
1:54:19
is but you can kind of piece it together by seeing like okay if this this car is getting auction and bring a trailers getting their 5% fee or I forget what it is is exactly um you just add that up and you're like okay they're doing some
1:54:32
crazy numbers here in a in a relatively um easy to deliver uh service and so I could easily see the next bring a trailer or a company that's competing with cars and bids being something that starts as sort of more of the social app
1:54:45
something like a Strava like experience so um yeah excited to check this one out and I think that our stream is back now um I had the same issue by the way my my camera was charging but was draining the battery faster than it was being charged
1:55:01
so energy it's important for training AI models and it's also important for podcasting this is theonomy this is what we said nuclear energy yeah we're just excited about the applications and podcasting 100% uh let's move on to Ryan
1:55:16
Peterson can't believe this app is only eight absolute Banger 40K likes he says Dear Doge please look into the US Mint in San Francisco it occupies an enormous block of Prime commercial real estate and all it does is produce special
1:55:31
commemorative coins for collectors the coins aren't even cool and Elon says noted noted bad bad day to be a commemorative coin I gotta say if you're seeing that post get 40 might have to take the other side of this I I'm very Pro pro-
1:55:48
physical commemorative coins generally anti the meme coins I I I I I think these are the the command rof coins are Lindy maybe the designs aren't cool that's an easy fix let's get a flexport coin let's get a SpaceX coin made from the mint well yeah
1:56:04
I was I was Pro crypto until I bought uh the client the official cliner Perkins coin yesterday I think I lost it all the market cap last time I checked his went from 10 grand to something like zero and so I'm gonna have to talk with Everett
1:56:19
about this and see you know uh send him your tokens yeah yeah yeah no no honestly there there it's like a you know commemorative uh token for me wallet everyone will know you you bought Kleiner I bought I was early um but uh buy Kleiner it was a hack project by the way in case you're just tuning in for the first time uh this was a hacked meme token on pump. fun we do not support this and it's not Financial advice that is correct anyway let's move
1:56:50
on to and it's worth noting that that the app uh would cost negative eight uh you know negative like like Ryan Peterson is actually printing money if you're getting 40K likes on a post you're definitely making your eight bucks back by by being a premium
1:57:04
subscriber so shout out to jacobe and Tyler and all of our friends at X for making X usage profitable for posters yeah for posters uh let's go to Willam he says our children will romanticize the last era of pure human Creation in
1:57:22
ways we can't imagine and he posts a screenshot uh that says cultural memory has a certain Rhythm every generation romanticizes the era roughly 30 years before its own gen Z clings to the pixelated naive of the 20 of the 2000s
1:57:37
Millennials buff the 1980s and 90s into a yepy golden age genx yearned for 1960s idealism but the 2020s will Mark a rupture in this Continuum when AI generated when an AI generated song hit the Billboard charts in 2023 the prior Century collapsed into Legend the last
1:57:58
time creativity wasn't a dialogue with silicon I think that's very well written very interesting well lock in brothers because this show is not a dialogue with silicon in anyway yeah it's it's it's cool because even so so Willam is an
1:58:15
investor in a company called visual electric that makes the it so far to me is is it's it's amazing alternative to stock photos because you can just go in there you know it's similar to Mid Journey but it's more oriented around
1:58:28
designer use cases so I've used it to create a bunch of assets I used it to create an asset for pmf or die super powerful But ultimately I don't I think it's still like the idea that um we've been romanticizing every art form
1:58:43
forever we romanticized you know hitting hitting a stick at the right Tempo against another stick right we moved sort of up the chart um and uh ultimately the the the power of combining the human mind with uh you know new tools creates beautiful things
1:59:02
so um it reminds me of that um I think it was was it Grimes that was just absolutely dunking on the guy who was doing the AI song generation tool who said oh it sucks to learn music you know why even learn uh when you could just
1:59:16
generate songs with AI but uh ultimately I think these new tools are just going to introduce more people to the process of creativity and then as you get as you fall in love with the pure process of creation you realize that um you realize
1:59:32
that uh that that the pure Act of Creation is so enjoyable totally um and so stimulating that that you you'll use the tools and then you'll take them to new places that they haven't been then you'll combine them with your own genius
1:59:44
and and will things happen yeah study chess chess has been solved by computers for decades it's more popular po than ever people like watching people do things and this is not going away even as the computers defeat humans in all of
2:00:01
the evals uh the entertainment will continue on let's move on to David over ovich over at a16z he says for the 12, 589th time Reves is actually is usually the founder CEO's friend the email below from Council explaining to CEO why the
2:00:23
departing co-founder is basically fully vested I explained this all to no avail in the series B and the email says closing the loop on this for the rest of the thread the Reves concept was proposed early on in the series B
2:00:36
negotiations but dropped in the final term sheet so it was not included in the series B docks best rough having a clearly some sort of co-founder dispute somebody leaving and the vesting uh they they did not revest and so uh nothing to
2:00:53
negotiate yeah just to for for some context if you go on stripe Atlas today or you do a standard incorporation with a Goodwin or a or someone like that they're going to set the founders up on a four-year vest yep uh that's
2:01:07
four years is a long time but oftentimes it takes many many many many years to build a company far beyond four years and so especially now when a company can go from zero to a series b or even further in a in a few years um you end up in these situations like
2:01:24
David is highlighting where a Founder is able to leave after three years and they' they've fully you know almost fully vested their shares yet there's so much more work to do and and in that situation they could have the same
2:01:37
amount of equity or close to the same amount of equity as the the CEO and the team that's going to continue to work uh work on the business and so um so yeah I think uh it's always an opportunity to to extend um extend out the vesting
2:01:52
period and and it's usually in the benefit of the person who's you know going to continue working on that business dayto day infinitely yeah yeah and I mean that's what the negotiation during series B was clearly framed around was hey look we're going to go
2:02:08
bigger we're raising money we are going to be in this for another four years another eight years decade so let's revest to make sure this is the team that's like staying on board and because like re fresh grants just aren't going
2:02:22
to be anywhere near what the initial founding Grant is and so um but it can often be seen as a uh very adversarial between the co-founding team and the investors and so the co-founding team says like we don't want to revest like
2:02:36
what if you fire us all or what if we leave like then we won't have our Equity we started this company uh and it becomes this big debate um but uh even I think the happy medium here can be uh just extending the unvested portion at
2:02:53
the series B and so maybe you're halfway through a fouryear vest you take the second half that has vested and you extend that to a new four-year vest so you're not actually losing the shares that you vested on the original schedule
2:03:07
you're just extending the unvested shares and that's kind of a happy medium that can work out sometimes but uh it's always tricky because um yeah I mean you could uh you could not be doing your job get fired and you're like ah I didn't
2:03:19
get I didn't get my full steak which I wanted and that would been awesome but uh then you know like what's fair to the team what's fair to the people that are going to go build this company for the next decade you know you go to have equity for those folks you
2:03:32
got to have them aligned anyway we will end it there thanks for tuning in thanks for dealing with all the technical difficulties we are still ironing things out but uh that's what comes with being the number one live show in Tech you
2:03:46
know you just got to figure things out sometimes so you got to wrestle with you got to wrestle with tech yeah not it's not always autonomous sometimes it acts up and you gota you got to just figure it out so thanks for bearing with
2:03:59
us uh we're trying to get uh we're trying to get 100% every better every day you know a lot of people say I want to be 1% better every day it's not enough for us doing our best to hit 100 every single day um and uh soon we'll be
2:04:15
uh at the top of the charts I love it uh leave us festar review Apple podcast and Spotify leave an ad in your review and we'll read it on the show thanks so much for tuning in and we'll see you tomorrow have a good than folks see you tomorrow you bye