SPEAKER_00: if stocks go down they have less money so their concern is that uh we're gonna take this kind of like a stick to the face and i i'm curious what you think about how big the bubble could be today

SPEAKER_03: if you believe there is one yeah so a couple of things uh these economists have predicted 11 of the last seven recessions and corrections so they are extremely good at this this week in startups is

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SPEAKER_10: 2025 we got a full docket uh and uh let's get to work there's a lot of debate about the ai bubble

SPEAKER_11: alex wilhelm it's here again alex your thoughts yes sir you know this uh this big debate i saw that

SPEAKER_00: a lot of people are chiming in a lot of people are chiming in yeah enough people have been chiming in jason that i think the narrative inside both the worlds of finance and tech is this is a bubble the question is just how much when it will pop and what the damage will be you shared a new york times op-ed with us that was titled warning our stock market is looking like a bubble written by jared bernstein and ryan cummings uh two economists and they're both former members of the council of economic advisors under the biden administration so they're in the game if you will uh their argument's pretty simple they think that ai investment plans are too lofty they found open ai's one trillion dollars spend coming to be a little bit incredible compared to its revenue they also said that stocks today are too expensive looking at historical price earnings ratios and they say that a lot of those gains are ai predicated so essentially the ai companies are doing very very well creating risks and that if this bubble does pop yes many of the companies that are making investments are well capitalized but if the market falls jason there's a thing called the wealth effect and as you and i know wealthy people own a lot of stocks and if stocks go down they have less money so their concern is that uh we're going to take this kind of like a stick to the face and i am curious what you think about how big the bubble could be today if you believe there is one

SPEAKER_03: yeah so a couple of things uh these economists have predicted 11 of the last seven recessions and corrections so they are extremely good at this you can't go wrong saying a correction uh is coming

SPEAKER_10: because yeah there will be a correction there always a correction every 10 years so just thinking from first principles here if you look at the current revenue footprint of ai companies and you know you got to think we're we're we're closing in on a hundred billion in revenue you know if you have open ai with 10 13 whatever it is um and if we would look at the total addressable market which we started our tam project here it's probably linked in the show notes you know we're we're pretty clear there's going to be in the short to midterm short term one two years midterm two to five years long term you you're five years out but in that short to midterm we will see a trillion dollars two trillion dollars show up in revenue that's my belief it will come 50 billion dollars a year consistently for five years six years seven years and we'll just we'll get right to that one trillion

SPEAKER_15: might take seven might take five could take ten but there's a trillion dollars in tam i think we

SPEAKER_00: would all agree yeah alex i very much very much agree absolutely if if not more over time and keep in mind um we're talking about this often through the lens of how much do people spend today on software for their staffers and thinking about that as kind of a proxy for the total available market i think also we should consider the amount of labor just the cost of humans because that's what we're going to try to replace quite often with automation and so when we think about the tam jason yes it is the entire software industry on one hand but it's also i think the labor market on the other and added together that's most of the economy right so uh we're building this

SPEAKER_10: bottom up uh and top down tam and we'll keep sharing that every week it's important for people to keep that in mind what is tweaking folks is the scar tissue from the great recession caused by

David Friedberg: financial malfeasance by wall street had nothing to do with tech in fact it had nothing to do with real estate it had to do with financial manipulation now we look at the dot-com era what caused that was it the actually the tech companies it was not it was financial manipulation by wall street that was

SPEAKER_10: taking uh companies public and you remember henry blogger got banned from ever working in securities who you know he went on to do business insider because he was you know on one side the the firm he was at was taking companies public and on the other side he was saying like this company's uh you know uh doo-doo a dog whatever i think was the exact quote or this was like garbage you know on the internal

David Friedberg: communications so the finance what were the cause of that too so i look to this third bubble bursting and i say to myself well what could oh and by the way when we had the mini correction with silicon valley bank and first republic bank what was it alex what caused that uh it was a decision by the silicon valley

SPEAKER_00: bank company to shake up its balance sheet to deal with losses that were derived from changing interest rate prices and therefore a repricing of debt that led to a confidence crisis that led to a run on the

SPEAKER_22: bank that was then bailed out so you described this as the people who caused it were in banking correct oh finance oh i see your point it was a finance driven correction it was not predicated on tech companies yes okay now i see what you're asking yeah it had nothing to do with the tech

SPEAKER_10: companies who had you know loans from silicon valley bank or their deposits that look right so we i just went through the three of our lifetime the three major ones now i also was i guess 17 years old when we had black friday but i'll leave that one out we'll just talk about the the three in modern history so three for three were um vibrant markets but where the finance people started to get frisky so this

David Friedberg: is where the two economists uh who i assume have never really done anything in the real world almost universally these economists are giving advice but they've never been on the field in other words you

SPEAKER_10: know it's like stephen a smith talking about basketball you know uh when he's played like

David Friedberg: three games in his career and had like one point average per game like they're just talking heads they do the best they can they analyze stuff yeah sure they they have some deep knowledge of markets but they're not the ones building the companies as somebody who's in finance and company building i can tell you this always has the same pattern people get excited people are building stuff that's obviously going to change the world and provide massive value to the human species then bankers go great how can we help accelerate this and then they start the acceleration process because they get paid how alex how do bankers and finance people get paid typically fees fees fees on deals and you know

SPEAKER_25: what why not do some more deals and get yourself some more fees correct so one of the great things

David Friedberg: about our system here in america is we have entrepreneurs uh we have capital allocators and then we have these finance people they always come in at the last minute and they f everything up they take it too far and it's literally like wolf of wall street so the question is ask you about that jason well here we are people coming in yeah so in this fourth the the real question becomes in this fourth you know boom cycle here that we're talking about are we seeing them run amok or not

SPEAKER_25: but you have a question go ahead yeah yeah well your point about finances coming in i was just

SPEAKER_00: thinking about the 2021 kind of zerp era venture capital boom that we all lived through and kind of the deflation that came afterwards do you think that tiger's arrival later in that cycle with an enormous checkbook and making a lot of quick deals is an example of the finance world kind of coming in at the last minute and causing more problems or is tiger you know deeply integrated enough into the

SPEAKER_07: tech ecosystem that their massive increase in investment was not an example of that so an easy

SPEAKER_10: way to do this is are they doing it to make quick money if they're doing it to make quick money i would put them in that finance genre as opposed to capital allocators so uh when you have masayoshi son come in or you have um you know japan came into hollywood during a period of time when people come in with big chip sacks that's a sign of a top when they start uh doing this and when finance people just do these kind of deals and on the margins we are starting to see uh people come in and say hey maybe we should um you know spat this maybe we should do these round tripping things maybe we should do speculative things and when you get to that rampant speculation by the finance peoples that's where i start to pay attention and say okay yeah we're top ticking here founders are constantly asking me oh hey where can i find my first customers i need a customer

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SPEAKER_10: if you look at sam altman's strategy in just in the last three to six months it's raise money from everyone for everything that would be a sign that we could be his his strategic approach the last six months is a sign that a bubble is building when you say i want to deploy one trillion dollars in infrastructure and then you do a deal with amd with nvidia and and did they do another one with another chip company yeah broad called with brockham so that those three to me with the round tripping nature of these um and them wanting to invest money they don't have yet into infrastructure that is bringing in you know whatever 10 billion 15 billion something in that range is you know where they're trending uh or just passing with their run rate that's when i would say yes we are starting to

SPEAKER_15: experience financial unnatural financial acts unnatural financial acts financial acts do you think

SPEAKER_36: that part of this is also driven by there's a lot of behind the scenes startup and tech driven use of

SPEAKER_39: ai like we talked about that just recently like the 50 top ai apps that are being used by startups and it's an interesting list that we were going through yeah but i feel like on the consumer side like even chat gpt wildly popular 800 million global users now but only five percent are paid and i feel like we haven't seen i feel like that's what's fueling a lot of this perception that it's a bubble is there isn't an app everyday people are paying tons of money for it's all still corporations and enterprises and startups and so from the public's perspective they're not seeing everybody using replet or whatever they're just yeah or lovable they're just seeing like none of my friends is paying for an ai app so it's a dead

David Friedberg: technology yeah so that's lon harris checking in here our co-host um for those of you listening

Chamath Palihapitiya: everybody uh sorry not uh uh introduced you there so um i think the corporate spend on ai is very real

SPEAKER_10: yes corporations are not going to invest in this stuff unless they have a you know clear path a a line of sight we would say in the business to it working and we all know here as we use these products and services that they're working and we watch startups use it when we see tax gpt you know make uh cpas 10 better at their jobs 20 faster at their jobs when we're seeing this across

David Friedberg: the portfolio of startups we invest in from founder university and the launch accelerator that they're

SPEAKER_10: actually making customers low double digits more productive you know every three to six months and that is um the reality of what's happening today there's good stuff happening on the field but the finance people are seeing that and saying well let's accelerate it but there's a natural pace of technology uh getting absorbed into organizations and you you two gentlemen uh can experience it

David Friedberg: yourselves you say oh i'm going to try to make some i'm going to i'm going to do some research using these products and two years ago it was like well can we even trust these hallucinating results the facts are all wrong and then all of a sudden you skip over and you're like wait a second this stuff is great it's actually doing it correctly and we start using producer claude during the show

SPEAKER_10: and it actually is giving us the right answers in real time and that all occurred over 24 months so two things can be true at the same time this will be the greatest investment cycle in the history of

David Friedberg: technology that's absolutely uh a certainty in my mind so let me just state that again this will be the absolute greatest returns in the history of the technology industry it'll dwarf you know uh the pc revolution the smartphone revolution and even the internet revolution i am 100 percent certain of that so then it's just the timeline and are people investing in things that will be dogs are they investing them at too high of a price that's yes and yes but will it crash the economy no will the people who are losing money um become destitute nope it's not that amount of money the worst case scenario is that it takes three or four more years than the aggressive estimates of this technology landing and if that happens what you'll see is some companies just pause spending or cut these aggressive spending programs by 50 percent and that happened with fiber back in the day they overbuilt fiber that's the analogy i've been using for two years and now everybody seems to be using that one

SPEAKER_10: so it's not a bubble but there are frothy moments occurring i would say this is a nice frothy cappuccino and it will become a flat white shortly where you don't put a ton of foam in it you just have

SPEAKER_15: like just the warm milk or you know with the with the with the coffee what what what's that trigger

SPEAKER_25: point because one thing that we often see is a moment in which the market gets gets shaken a little

SPEAKER_00: bit and if you go back to early 2025 jason we had the deep seek r1 moment when the chinese company deep seek claimed that they trained a very good model for a very low price really scared a lot of folks off of nvidia for a bit so for people that are watching what might be coming that could

SPEAKER_54: kick off that um cappuccino to flat white moment yeah so what would deflate all this foam is pretty

Chamath Palihapitiya: straightforward uh one of these data center projects will go belly up or one of these data center projects

SPEAKER_10: will um have their valuation just get walloped so there are you know like there's a core weave right and so let's say core weave um has a lot of debt and they're buying a lot of um uh capacity and they're building a bunch of projects there might come a point where they say you know what um we have to pay back and we've got loans and we've got payments to make yeah we're going to pause those two places where we broke ground and even though we are i don't know two billion dollars into building out these new data centers we're going to pause them and we're going to sell them to zuckerberg or google we're going to pack it in and uh we're going to slow down then people look at the stock and go

David Friedberg: wait a second you know we were basing it on you know the price earnings ratio what's the price earnings ratio of core weave at this point what's their debt you know you start looking at those aggressive neo clouds uh and hyperscalers yeah you just might have a come to jesus moment um where

SPEAKER_60: jason yeah the price earnings ratio is uh n a because it doesn't make money uh but if you would

SPEAKER_00: like the current price sales ratio for our friends over at core weave it's 14.81 on a trailing basis

SPEAKER_10: according to white charts right so 14 to one going backwards is um yeah that's pretty crazy um um and you could see somebody like core weave say hey we're going to take a pause then you would see you know a zuckerberg say oh we were you know i don't know what he said at that trump uh tech dinner with the tech leaders but he said i'm going to put 400 billion maybe 600 billion he was kind of spitballing there maybe he says you know what we're gonna only spend you know uh 25 billion a year for the next two years we're going to pause our spending and then you know in video stock would have some headwinds their price uh earnings ratios not insane but it's robust and maybe then azure says

David Friedberg: uh and microsoft as the story broke uh the past week that maybe microsoft's like we don't want to build all this infrastructure for chat gpt they should go do it on them themselves because we don't want to overbuild so that's really what's at the core of this is the build out of the data centers and then we talked about on all in uh this past week and you start shama tweeting about it that there's not enough energy to build some of these data centers you had like two or three data centers say hey we're going to take a pause because the people in these cities are concerned that their electricity bills are going up and that'll be bad for our reputations if we cause consumer pain and suffering so all of those things would to me the data center build out nvidia stock correcting would be a

SPEAKER_10: sign uh that we're overheated now what does that mean well that means people who made 30 percent on their money this year and 30 last year riding this boom you know might have only made seven percent the average right or 15 double the average but they didn't make four times the historical average on

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SPEAKER_39: trump asked zuckerberg uh publicly how much meta was going to invest in the u.s in the coming years uh zuckerberg in the moment says at least 600 billion through 2028 and then later they caught him

SPEAKER_70: on a hot mic saying to trump sorry i wasn't ready i wasn't sure what number you wanted to go with

Chamath Palihapitiya: so yeah he sort of just state capitalism baby well i mean listen it's um i think people are trying to

SPEAKER_10: curry favor with the administration by saying they're investing in america which is this administration's uh you know major marketing effort their major way to say we should take out regulations is there's a lot of investment going on here to a certain extent uh they're succeeding even

David Friedberg: if people are exaggerating the numbers by a multiple uh of 2x or 3x it's still going to be a huge spend and that's a good thing for america so anyway uh i'm not i would say we're frothy and those round tripping deals and specifically the behavior of chat gpt should make economists you know sound an alarm but i don't think this is like five alarm fire this is like hey it's dry season here maybe there's some tinder on the ground we should rake some stuff up and maybe fill the reservoirs with water but i i'm not calling like a defcon 4 or whatever defcon 5 right now it's just a little bubbly and if we lose money the people who are going to lose the money are the people who can afford to lose the money

SPEAKER_00: yeah all right yeah next up on the docket aws went down and it's still going down jason a really big problem in the u.s east one region of the cloud giant this brought down companies including coinbase and robinhood snap banks in the uk and also signal quite a mess to wake up to on a monday morning however things have gotten a little bit better so it's not a snow day here in tech uh i wanted to bring this up because i'm super curious what you think founders should do in moments like these if you lose access to your cloud compute what should you do and also do you recommend that founders today uh pursue a multi-cloud strategy to help possibly mitigate some of the risks that being on just aws might

SPEAKER_80: bring yeah so this happens to every provider every couple of years which means we experience these

SPEAKER_10: type of outages i would say on average every six months right now usually they're corrected so quickly that they fade from memory this one seems to have hit a decent swath of important services when your finances are on robinhood coinbase and venmo and all three services don't work that's a reminder maybe i should have multiple bank accounts with multiple ways to get to money so this morning venmo didn't work for me i was sending a birthday present uh to a family member and i was like wait a second and then i was like oh this must be part of the aws thing all of this should yes you're correct founders should have their systems able to roll over to clouds that still is a bit complicated but it's not impossible to do and this is why sometimes people will in fact have their um their their cloud spend

David Friedberg: across multiple instances and then use you know essentially a smart router to send half the traffic

SPEAKER_10: to aws and a quarter of it to azure but this is infrastructure cost and it slows down your production to build this kind of resiliency into your systems but yeah it's a good warning for

David Friedberg: everybody and also warning for people to understand that um projects that seem like they're decentralized typically have a single point of failure so as much as people want to believe that things are decentralized and in fact the internet is built to be decentralized that's why we're all still using

SPEAKER_50: the internet and zoom still worked and if zoom doesn't work you can go over to um you know google

SPEAKER_03: uh meetup or whatever they call google's product or slack huddles google media you you can just move

David Friedberg: around the internet but if your service is tied to one cloud that's no bueno just a good reminder for people i would say early stage startups shouldn't waste the time and money on this they should have backups but you know it is a lot to be multi-cloud you need to have a team doing that i wonder if any of these services did fail over successfully from aws to their azure or google cloud or oracle instances

SPEAKER_10: and um yeah there are websites that track uptime yeah yeah and you thought here's the thing this could show up in amazon's earnings uh so we'll see uh keep a note make a note of that alex when we cover amazon's next earnings they sometimes will have to give a credit to all those people for downtime they get a penalty basically built into their contract so i wonder if we'll see amazon

SPEAKER_47: stock get hit today or you know this week that they people think oh they're going to lose one percent of their red cloud revenue for the quarter or two percent or something yeah amazon shares are up 1.3

SPEAKER_00: today which uh i think just goes to show how large of a company it is that they can have this public of a fiasco in one of the most profitable entities and everyone goes yeah well the market's up um i do want to point out that the producer claude our dear friend from anthropic uh did a really good job explaining the reasons why us east one matters jason because why does one aws region going down impact so much of the internet well as it turns out there's a lot of concentration there because a lot of other aws services are routed through us east one and so if it breaks many other aws regions can have problems so even though it seems like aws is very distributed because it has different regions around the world uh it's not as decentralized as you might think and so the question then becomes why hasn't amazon managed to fully detangle its regions from one another to prevent one prop one area having a problem impacting the rest of the world but doesn't seem to be the case and this has happened in 17 20 and

SPEAKER_87: 21 as well according to producer claude so something to keep in mind for people building so it happens

SPEAKER_80: really if you were to average that out if there's been four of these in what looks like an eight-year

SPEAKER_10: period maybe my once every six months yeah i was basing my once every six months across all clouds so it seems like they're having you know a major network outage every two years at amazon that to me

David Friedberg: seems acceptable i'll be totally honest like really you were okay yeah only because we're building this infrastructure out at such a significant pace and utilization is going up and we're still trying to keep up with uh to our first story the ai bubble all of this infrastructure being built out if it happens every two years i think it's kind of in the bucket of acceptable if you look at energy in california i would lose my energy in the peninsula gosh and you know san mateo palo alto you'd lose your electricity five times a year six times a year so i'm more worried about the electrical grid than i am about the data centers the data centers you know they've done really well at distributing and when something like this happens it's typically some router a human makes a stupid setting they have to roll it back but because aws is so big you know that's funny so here's

SPEAKER_00: your meme there's a famous image of uh a series of blocks that are stacked up in a very precarious fashion and held up by one single block and often this is uh with an arrow pointing at jason saying you know random open source repo that's maintained by one person in like you know sweden

SPEAKER_87: in this case the whole internet is being held up by the block entitled u.s east one and without that

SPEAKER_102: block everything came a tumbling down is what it is it's not a big deal it's a good reminder for people that they can go do other things in life yeah another reminder like we do of course you can

SPEAKER_25: go to claude.ai twist and there's a discount there for you uh we use i think it's 50 off or three months

SPEAKER_00: what is it that's that's pretty darn good uh but we live and die by uh by our ai usage internally so

SPEAKER_70: thanks to our friends over at anthropic it is 50 off twist listeners get 50 off their first three months of claude pro just go to claude.ai twist to get started all right lon you were in the group

SPEAKER_03: chat uh there was a really large uh series of protests yes they know kings they estimate around

SPEAKER_39: seven million people came out over the weekend in various u.s cities we had one it was not that large but we had one here in austin downtown uh big ones in minneapolis i think providence actually i saw some tweets from providence alex that the largest public gathering in maybe the history of

SPEAKER_117: providence rhode island over the weekend yes well i'll just say that i don't think trump's uh gonna win

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SPEAKER_10: you know what i said on the all-in podcast two episodes ago that got a little bit of um well i'd say i've probably got more feedback on that episode since trump was on or jd vance or maybe the larry summers ezra klein debate club uh you know all those episodes got a lot of feedback in my dms you know people calling me texting me and you know i just gave a basic overview here um and politics a little outside of our remit here but the 2.0 agenda you know majority of americans agree with

David Friedberg: those items shut the border lower taxes uh stop wars people like that kind of stuff a lot of the moderates who uh shifted over to support trump uh and and went to the right they were part of that

SPEAKER_10: trump 2.0 but the trump 1.0 agenda which is you know i'll just generally say chaos lawfare um and maybe a little bit of violence and federalism where the federal government is taking on too much

David Friedberg: that tweaks people and i think that's what we saw this weekend so it's perfectly timed with you know happening two weeks after uh me sort of saying get back to trump 2.0 or you're gonna lose the midterms and that seems like it's happening but there's another angle here long tell us yeah

SPEAKER_39: the the technology angle well i was on blue sky over the weekend as i as i so often am checking in on what everyone was saying and i saw an image that kept being shared and was setting off a lot of discussion and debate let's take a look at it so this is i feel a very obviously ai generated image that's kind of playing off of all of the costumes and the funny shenanigans we were seeing from all of these protests if you look closely you don't even have to look that closely there are a number of tells the the flagpole is sort of weirdly bent uh the if you look at the flag the bottom of the flag does not actually line up with the pole uh that unicorn is sort of standing in an odd position that no human would stand the frog has three eyes not all of the signs in the background make sense or are legible even that big peace and joy banner precariously swinging between two buildings there's no strings or anything holding it to either of those buildings so to me at a glance lon is this a

SPEAKER_60: gemini logo right here in the corner that people might have you know noticed oh my god it is that

SPEAKER_132: is a vo gemini obviously this was an ai generated image and yet it was being shared very widely on blue

SPEAKER_39: sky by a lot of people who did not seem to notice that it was ai in fact kara swisher friend of the pod for she shared karen swisher former friend of jay house without any indication that this was an ai generated image and in fact i i you know i shared some of these in our group chat some of these people were reacting like well apparently that image is ai generated so i took it down and it's like to me

SPEAKER_43: this is really worrisome like if you can't look at this image and immediately figure out this is animated

SPEAKER_136: we're we are cooked i i really feel like that's a one shot and buy a sign we got we're one-shotted

SPEAKER_39: yeah people are just no longer they're no longer being discriminating it really made me think you know what sora is doing where anytime you output a sora video it has that watermark and here there is a gemini watermark but it's not doing any good i feel like these companies need to be more serious about making sure that any output that you create the word gemini should be on it it should say gemini

SPEAKER_143: and it should have it in the same yes because sora is it it says s-o-r-a and has the logo i believe

SPEAKER_39: right and now i have seen there is another app that people are already installing on their phone that will remove the sora logo so there's always going to be workarounds i mean that's just the nature of the internet there's always a game of whackable but 95 of people using these apps would just leave the water marketplace and it would go a long way towards helping the seth abramsons and kara swishers of the world who want to share every image that appeals to them that comes across their feed to be like hang on a minute this is fake just make sure you know before you post it that it is in fact fake people are so

SPEAKER_148: not smart at times so i saw this image on x and i it immediately tripped all the hairs in the back

SPEAKER_00: of my neck because it appeared uh overly centrally focused as if the entire straw was staged which ai loves to do because it's making something for you not showing you reality and then i zoomed in on one of the signs and went yep ai and moved on long that's why i was so surprised to see it today in our in our chats because apparently everyone else got it wrong so jason in a world in which open source ai models from china are able to do nearly everything that the gemini's and the source can do will adding those watermarks actually help the problem here or is there not really a solution in a world where

SPEAKER_03: open source ai is free range and powerful you know there's a michael crichton novel um i believe it was disclosure which was made into a major motion picture and the premise of it was um even back then

SPEAKER_10: and producer claude will tell us what year that book came out and give us a little summary of it um specifically around videos and the premise of this excellent book and michael crichton was just such a great author because he would make these real page turners based upon some new technology and how they might in a procedural you know uh thriller a procedural slash thriller he kind of he worked in both those genres he um he nailed it because they were like oh my god this video is uh i don't want to spoil it for people but i think it's been out long enough that i can lon i don't know what the rules are i think i can spoil it um so basically this it actually also predates the um me too movement because the premise is demi moore is harassing michael douglas douglas and they have video of uh

David Friedberg: people coming in and out of people's offices and it's been manipulated and it was the entire premise of the film was that you could see a video and it was not true now this is 1994 that's 30 years ago 31 years ago he saw this coming that video could be edited and it could change reality and people could go to jail lose their jobs based on it you know and the obvious place this is going is you know you could start riots based on these videos if somebody were to release a video of rodney king or a rodney king-esque video that video came out los angeles burned um and so we need to be really thoughtful about this uh probably where we're going to get to is nobody will trust social media yes and nor should they nor should they ever have and so that's where this will come from social media citizen journalism journalism by organizations that don't have insurance and more than you know 100 or 200 employees and something to lose they're going to become more valuable the the institutions of journalism if they can let go of their bias and stop looking at themselves as the resistance or you know uh the

SPEAKER_10: retribution group on both sides and they can actually say and make they could literally make their living just saying this is fake here's the source of it in other words snopes the function of snopes which was to find jimmy you know the kid from the peanut butter commercial didn't die from pop rocks or whatever it is the wheaties commercial kid like it was trying to get rid of urban legends you know that existed for a decade now we're going to need the equivalent of snopes or community notes which i think instagram and uh threads have now are also working on we're just going to need real-time fact-checking sources yeah and people are going to need to stop retweeting things that fit their narrative that's what's

David Friedberg: occurring here people are are so tribal that the first thing they do is retweet uh things that fit their narrative and so i've stopped retweeting the stuff or you'll see in a lot of my recent tweets the last year i'll say if this is true i've seen that if this is true here's my opinion and i literally did it for those robots remember i showed the robots of the port there was a chinese port video of like robots going around i said and if i said if this isn't ai and this is in fact china uh we should really go and then somebody immediately said oh yeah that's a port in the united states and i was like that was the port of la i don't think it was i don't know i don't know well welcome to hell everybody this is where we are i still don't know and where this is the slop issue this is the same thing that happened to me when we were having debates about the southern border and they were like people are streaming across the southern border and then people were sharing videos of people coming across the border and it was like well wait that was a border crossing under clinton or under obama and i saw people correcting and saying no no here the community notes was pointing that's from this story so people were just finding videos and the problem is there are incentives like getting followers and getting revenue share on social media getting followers and then putting ads on and it's not just x it's all the platforms they would reward you for publishing this stuff it doesn't matter if it's correct or not it just matters if it trends so this is a really uh difficult spot where now it turns out a friend of mine elon musk went to the border and i was texting with him and he's like it's true people are streaming across the border it's nuts and i was like and he showed me pictures before he publicly tweeted them and i was like yep people are streaming across the border and that was before the border crosser the board the border crossing data had come out and we were looking at it and like this doesn't make any sense like look it's been the same the same the same across multiple presidencies multiple parties and then it's the same and same for biden then all of a sudden it spiked up and i was like i don't know if this is true or not and i gave this disclaimer um

SPEAKER_160: turned out in that case it was true people were streaming across the border there are some good

SPEAKER_60: projects that are happening jason to help please establish ground truth one of them is are you familiar with usafacts.org i have seen that is it partisan in some way or not no it's not partisan

SPEAKER_25: indeed it's run by um it's founded by steve balmer the former microsoft ceo and multi-kajillionaire

SPEAKER_00: um also it's a great place to go to learn stuff because if you click on government spending we talk about that on the show quite a lot they put together this awesome chart and they really do a lot of just really fantastic information on what's going on so here's a immigration channels into the us authorized and not and i do think that this type of thing is going to become incredibly important the problem is this is entirely predicated on government data so it still has to lean on some other authority to stand to have it standing um so as long as government stats remain uncooked then we're good we'll still have some ground truth but when it comes to you know no offense to boomers but boomers and ai slop i think the ship has sailed so maybe we're just going to have a post truth senior voting block lawn and for everyone else we'll just have to look at the charts

SPEAKER_70: uh yeah i mean i i i think it's sort of it's sort of done i i i feel like to me there isn't the will

SPEAKER_43: like people don't care if the thing they're posting is true or not they just want to post it they want to be right they want to win the argument they want to share this thing that they're ideologically aligned with i think we've reached a moment in our culture where the the idea of being fact-based is

SPEAKER_70: sort of over and people are like i just want i just want my side to sound good i don't want to be

SPEAKER_24: i don't care about whether it's real or not pull up this producer claude of uh disclosure i just want to read the synapses here sure disclosure published in 1994 is a techno thriller set at a fictional

SPEAKER_10: computer hardware manufacturing company in seattle the protagonist tom sanders is the head of advanced products manufacturing at digitom he expects to be promoted to run the advanced products division after the company's merger but the position instead goes to his ex-girlfriend meredith johnson who has recently relocated from the company's headquarters in california when meredith calls tom into her office who ostensibly ostensibly to discuss cd-rom drives discuss a cd-rom drive she makes an aggressive sexual advance towards him when tom spurns her advances meredith angrily vows to make him pay the plot then concerns tom's struggle to prove that he was actually sexually harassed by his female employer and she falsely accused him of harassment instead the novel incorporates elements of computer industry sabotage corporate mergers stock options and technology to help tom clear his reputation and save his career the book explores themes of power dynamics workplace abuse in a high technology corporate setting it was based on a true story of a male employee being sexually harassed by a female

SPEAKER_67: executive with creighton reportedly basing it on a 1988 case i don't know if you guys remember this but

SPEAKER_39: it was also about vr like in the movie especially they really play this up that the cd-rom they're developing is a virtual reality thing that allows you to like go into your computer and look through the files and organize things like oh right there in like tron uh so it was it was creighton was always trying to be a little ahead like it was really trying to be cutting edge but i mean just that

David Friedberg: description is like 20 and 30 years later all that stuff is uh yeah big part of our dialogue in pop culture and and in the news um there was also something going on with ai speaking of ai uh somebody made a trader that's beating everybody the holy grail of uh ai is of course to build an ai that can beat the market uh and that was the same thing with machine learning or with quants and

SPEAKER_112: algorithms so hit me with that one because that's fascinating yeah i i found this now it's only been

SPEAKER_00: running for a couple of days jason but what the company in of one has built is a really fun game that pits a lot of the leading ai models against one another so it gave each ai model ten thousand dollars they can only invest in crypto perpetuals on the hyper liquid exchange and their objective that they were given is to quote maximize risk adjusted returns so who do we have here gpt5 we have claude sonic 4.5 gemini 2.5 pro grok 4 deep seek chat 3.1 and then quinn 3 max and then there's just bitcoin's performance now we only have a couple days of data here jason but you can see that google and open ai and quinn are losing and grok deep seek and uh sonnet 4.5 are in the black and they're all beating bitcoin uh but the idea here according to n of one is that alpha go i believe was the model that google trained a deep mind to beat go and chess their idea here is do we need to create something net new to beat the markets or can out of the box algorithms today do better than um you know just the overall market so i'm watching this because this is the coolest thing i've ever

SPEAKER_22: seen this is so much better than claude plays pokemon i'm not gonna lie like this is a nerd's dream

SPEAKER_10: what's so great about this is um there is a real world there's real world stakes here and it plays off the competition between the llms and they're i'm assuming they're all being given the same instruction set so um this is a really interesting approach they've taken what would be very interesting is if people could enter their own horse into this race with ten thousand dollars and make this available to anyone so the three of us could come up with an instruction set because the prompt and the data in the context window has obviously got some major part to this so how cool would that be if we could say you know what we have our own instance of grok or deep seek three um or we're going to use the one that's available you know whatever cloud service but we have our own proprietary

David Friedberg: instruction set we're giving it and then you have to reveal your instruction set when the final

SPEAKER_10: um you know time period ends so if you and that would actually be an interesting one you could you could make it a race to see who can return who can double their money first i like that you

SPEAKER_00: know so a time-bounded challenge but that does incentivize risk-taking jason sure and some you're going all in yeah oh i see so you're you you want to know which ai not only is the smartest but also has uh what do we say now we don't say cojones anymore um yeah sure that's okay i'm literally the twist pc

SPEAKER_197: police there's no more cojones i think you know that's yes all right well keep an eye out if you

SPEAKER_00: want to take a look at that the website is um i think it's uh the in of one.com for the background and then you can take a look at the challenge yourself life fantastic all right lonnie donnie you're up

SPEAKER_39: all right let's we got to talk about this so uh there is a sequel aaron sorkin is currently working on a follow-up to the film uh the social network of course that was directed by david fincher sorkin is directing the sequel himself uh it's called the social reckoning uh it's coming out next year uh set 17 years after the social network this one's going to be about the facebook files but jeremy strong a succession vet uh was amazing in the apprentices right home last year he's going to be starring as mark zuckerberg aged up from jesse eisenberg's classic performance in the social network he did an interview on a red carpet this weekend i believe it's for the bruce springsteen movie that jeremy allen white who's also in this one was in i'm pretty sure don't quote me on that it might have been an academy event but uh jeremy strong was on a red carpet he was asked about playing mark zuckerberg in a film and here is the video of his response now mark zuckerberg tell me how do you even

SPEAKER_212: begin begin begin to play mark zuckerberg you know uh i'm approaching it the way i approach everything else um empathy with objectivity with care what made you want to do the role i'm utterly fascinated uh by the material it's one of the great scripts i've ever read i've made two films with aaron i mean uh i'd like to put my feet to the fire will you reach out tomorrow uh you know uh no comment you know uh no comment are you on facebook uh you know what i'm not on any social media you know

SPEAKER_221: no secret account so for those of you who don't get the joke here he's doing suck right in that moment

SPEAKER_224: yeah he's got some red carpet yeah that that was the academy there was an academy motion picture

SPEAKER_39: academy benefit over the weekend you can tell by the carpet behind him it's got oscars on it so this was i think that's variety's video this is yes this was a ver yeah that's variety on the red carpet at this academy fundraiser over the weekend but yes we pulled a few videos of mark zuckerberg speaking recently and you can see that clearly jeremy strong has been studying the videotape and trying to master zuckerberg speech patterns i think the one of zuckerberg on theo vaughn if we could pull that

SPEAKER_228: one up is the best example i could find here's the real mark zuckerberg answering the question about

SPEAKER_234: being so that's hilarious all right here we go you know uh it's an interesting question i i just think um there are a bunch of factors here that you need to peel apart um um i think someone can be i think

SPEAKER_239: socially perceptive and understand kind of what is going on in social dynamics and what is have a lot of empathy and care about other people uh while still being quite awkward in how they communicate

SPEAKER_244: and oh my god so that's what i wanted you guys to do was to

SPEAKER_247: i really wanted you guys to do these like five seconds back and forth so when we cut this into

SPEAKER_249: the actual show just go back and forth five seconds right okay well let's play the other one now this is

SPEAKER_39: this is mark uh from he recent his horizon world's recent presentation uh the 2025 developer conference here's another clip for mark zuckerberg maybe we could try to go back and forth a little bit it's it has

SPEAKER_251: also been really neat to see how many people are using quest to watch video content you know it's just a lot more immersive so we think of this the pauses and the so yes there was that one line where

SPEAKER_39: it goes we think people are changing the way they watch video content and that's what strong is doing that like weird pause in the middle of the sentence thing like i'm going to start my thought and then i'm going to finish but you're not sure if i'm really done and if i'm at the end of my sentence

SPEAKER_259: i'm gonna you know yeah think about the end of the sentence yeah mark zuckerberg is clearly a man who

SPEAKER_60: is not accustomed to being interrupted because if you leave gaps that large in your speech normally people jump in yes but if you're worth several hundred billion dollars apparently maybe not you can just do it like this you know i was thinking about so some people might if we're reading from the

Chamath Palihapitiya: docket you know i think look okay you know what snl sketch where they were doing the delicious dish

SPEAKER_39: the npr ladies and they were just like all of everybody was like so in my opinion the needs you

SPEAKER_269: need for a great barbecue are meat bread and sauce you know like you're just like very thoughtful very

SPEAKER_272: long pauses between everything with the so and then um go back to jeremy strong give me the jeremy strong one okay after this i'm going to run my zuckerberg defense strategy here okay give me the

SPEAKER_275: jeremy let's play jeremy one more time let's skip to after the question all right or not you know uh

SPEAKER_212: i'm approaching it the way i approach everything else everything else um um with empathy with

SPEAKER_283: objectivity with fear care what made you want to do the role i'm utterly fascinated uh by the material

SPEAKER_286: and that's i don't think this is how jeremy strong normally talks he doesn't also he does not talk

SPEAKER_289: like that he's trolling the interview right now he is in full character this is why the guy the the

SPEAKER_24: the other two or three stars from secession couldn't stand this guy because he wouldn't break character yeah and i could imagine when you're trying to read the notes or talk about the shot or you know trying to change the lighting if the guy won't break out of zuckerberg yeah i'm gonna choke this guy

SPEAKER_39: brian cox the star the other star of succession who played the dad he famously had an interview where he was like jeremy's a brilliant actor but he's impossible to work with and it's very frustrating because and like there are i've seen jeremy allen white who uh who also is in uh in this movie coming up the social network movie he's the guy from the bear uh he's carmy from the bear he's playing springsteen in that new one and he said there are some actors he talks about this on hot ones this week there are some actors who on set they could just be gabbing with you between shots well how the kids doing what you do this weekend and then as soon as the camera goes on boom they're in character they're ready to go and there are other actors that they need to like warm up and they need to be in that mindset all day to make it work and i guess it is hard for those two kinds of actors to work together but jeremy strong is definitely one of those like he's all day on set don't talk to him

SPEAKER_30: unless you want to talk to kendall who is jeremy allen white playing in the social network i gotta know

SPEAKER_299: who's he's playing is he playing peter here's the capsule review the the the summary we have a young

SPEAKER_39: facebook engineer named francis hoggan played by oscar winner mikey madison from anora uh teams up with wall street journal reporter jeff horowitz jeremy allen white on a risky mission to bring attention to facebook's biggest secrets so they're playing mikey madison's the whistleblower who leaks the facebook

SPEAKER_303: files to a reporter jeremy allen white is the reporter and then john strong is zuckerberg so they're gonna

SPEAKER_10: have some like heat level de niro and pacino scenes together i'm predicting correct yeah where he's

SPEAKER_309: interviewing him flashing yeah love it i cannot wait for this movie i'm i haven't watched the social network since i saw it i don't know if it holds up or not oh it holds up it's really good i think yeah i his sorkin's um dialogue is a bit um yeah purple no it's like it's almost a bit too uh dramatic for

SPEAKER_39: my case like it's he's a playwright and he comes from that world and it's very theatrical like a

SPEAKER_228: few good men was aaron sorkin's big breakthrough and it's like all of his stuff has that like you want the truth you can't handle the truth oh the truth i've never been in a conversation that sounds

SPEAKER_309: that's literally and i've been involved in a lot of amazing conversations in this life and none of

SPEAKER_269: them have ever reached sorkin levels of dialogue yeah it's it's it's it is theatric but i mean the west wing has that quality too of like i was gonna say is it very realistic or is it what we wish

SPEAKER_39: washington was like and that i feel like that veep is the realistic version of washington west wing is

SPEAKER_67: the aspirational one if you want to be a mensch you want to be a super mensch you know everybody always says to me alex jake out god provide so much value for startups uh you know your programs that you do found a university you're always available for a meeting or uh you know the podcast itself to get people inspired is there anything i could do for you and generally no unless you can get me a couple of extra ski days or nick's quartzite tickets i'm good and i can get those things myself but what i can't do is i can't go write a review on apple podcasts or post really thoughtful comments on spotify but you can do that you can send us a picture of it and you can email it to reviews at this week in startups.com email us at reviews at this week in startups.com and we'll give you a shout out at the end of the show thanks so much and we'll see you all next time bye bye