are we live yeah I'm not doing another creatine bit so how about creatine I just started taking creatine about dude I'm sorting it I'm sorting it I'm put it on your Uber app you put it on your Uber app impres mondal function SN it right off my own titty I put it on this nipple five episodes ago and now this nipple is abnormally large oh my God I started lifting weights for the new year and I took some creatine and this is this is totally true I did a couple times very light hurt my shoulder had tons of pain in my arm now so it you know that's just what we call a Jewish weightlifting story I should have stuck to like walking in the pool you know you get in the pool and you like walk around do a series of books called short stories Jews weightlifting Jews surfing Jews horseback riding these are all short stories Jews in the military swimming while standing up with styrofoam on my arms I I felt so behind in this conversation I didn't know what creatine was I had to Google okay so creatin I guess was supposedly illegal but now everybody is using it's good it's actually been around forever it's just gotten super popular it's great you want to get like a good brand like a thorn or momentus and it's great it's great for Recovery what did I what lean muscle mass recovery mitochondria all the all the buzz words brain functioning and you can snort it and you just snort that just kid you just dissolve it in water doesn't hit as hard the third time yeah all right we're live I don't believe you I don't believe that prove it that we're live well Sor you caught me mid snort of crack uh creatine I listen since this isn't Gonna Be Live let me talk to you about let me talk to you about my creatine dealer I got the best creatine dealer look at this I'm gon just tell you oh it just it's just unbelievable creatine is it good for you Phil what is the what is the latest on Crea it's it's great man nobody's having nobody there's no like studies coming out with cautionary it's like great for Recovery great as you age great for your lean muscle mass great for your your mitochondria let's start again because I'm sure so we've been having technical difficulties today and evidently we've been all are we really live right now because right now I'm right now I'm on only fans making friends okay so we are live welcome Josh Moore that's the correct pronunciation he's the man hang hang on Phil Perman welcome we dress the same today it's the odds are very low welcome welcome Phil uh JC's on uh layaway uh and as always joining us the AI whisper 20 years with Goldman's sack um and he's joined uh the good team you know he's joined uh the world of AI and uh investing personally very fired up about a people that tune in here love him Michael per welcome and uh from the world of New York we got everything covered everything covered today Josh Moore old old friend Josh you're only like 40 maybe 42 but thank you 42 yeah you look great uh that's what it looks like when you have no employees and run a very successful business uh this is me out my kids this is what it looks like when you have 50 employees um and Phil that's what it looks like when you just have bad jeans so uh welcome everybody to Trends with friends our special guest like I said Josh Moore um we're gonna get right into it uh we'll get to the mark but we just we just had this fun conversation when we were uh fake live uh because we Josh came on to talk about his AI business and what ai's done for the world but we can't deny his history uh early fintech a covestor uh which was just ahead of the curve big investors I was a tiny investor as well Fred Wilson I think LED that round um pink you were ahead of the curb don't want to talk about that but let's talk about Uber under employe number 30 at Uber in charge of the biggest city in the most important city in the world New York which was not the first city that they did I think San Diego was one of the first cities in Coronado I remember cuz I lived here what when when did New York come online do you remember yeah so they put New York online as the first expansion City actually after San Francisco this is probably middle of 2011 they had was there Uber x yet was there Uber x yet no this was still in the land of totally licensed Black Car service U which is now known as Uber black um and I first made contact with Uber that December they were looking for a GM for New York it was like run your own business here basically we'll provide the technology and support and you'll go do that and so it was great I was doing I was doing operation roles at other startups and this felt like a good one for me it turned into a bit of a public relations and government Affairs job um just because regulation is so uh sort of central to this sort of thing uh especially here um but yeah after about five and a half years we went from something like zero to3 billion dollar in annual bookings um the business expanded to places like New Jersey and Connecticut and the Hamptons and Westchester and all these places as we're starting to expand you know across the US and then eventually across the world um um yeah and and who played you in the movie in the TV in the made for television Showtime show uh they had a couple of sort of New York episodes that were collapsed into one storyline which is around the launch there I was not in the show so like no one played me there was a couple of because I thought in one of the party scenes there was a picture of a guy and we only saw his ass and I always thought that was you so that was a nice it was a nice ass yeah it was it was me it it was I don't know I can't comment on that hang on let try some more creatine and answer that question I don't know that show was based on the Mike Isaac book who wrote a lot of like really nasty stuff about us for the last CP years I was there so like the show was entertaining I liked it I even maybe enjoyed it but it wasn't totally accurate as you can imagine okay uh we move on it only went the way I said it went didn't go the way said quickly Uber weo just quickly Uber weo because you know just get it out of the way now uo Tesla you know oh Uber Mo deal Uber Tesla who wins who Robo taxi and Robo taxi yeah you know it's way more in robot tax obviously yeah so I so I'll prace this by saying I don't know what I'm talking about my understanding is that weo has to do a deep mapping of I'm saying I'm like I did I'll say my bit but I'm just saying I'm say it with Force as if you've never been more confident in anything in your life that's the only I'm super right about this I'm super right about this and you should trade on this advice I think that um weo has to do a very deep mapping of every city that they're in and the cars that they use have very expensive liar sets that sort of do a specific way of seeing and Tesla does it differently with just a visual thing so and it's a more generalized solution I have a model 3 I've been totally Blown Away With It particularly since July when they rolled a new version and the version get better and better I am consistently driving 50 miles with no interventions it's crazy it freaked my wife out at first but now she's into it like it's really really amazing and it could go anywhere back roads whatever it can sort of figure out it's a more generalized solution to autonomy then a sort of the map of the world looks like this and we'll be in that map the problem witho I think that they're going to find is similar to problems we had at Uber which is that people are messy um and not only drunk people or like nefarious intent we're talking like moms with a baby SL that same Phil that was a slight at us I think I like he could be a regular the way he's insulting us keep going I mean like you think oh drunk people you'll just warn them once and then they'll stop being so messy and that's part of it but but actually the biggest issues with messy uh vehicle issues at Uber was the like child who vomits or the child eats some Cheerios and leaves a whole mess behind people make a mess not only out of bad intention or because they're sloppy just because that's how the world is and so having a human who takes responsibility for that car has a purpose and so I sort of Wonder at scale how that works where the cars live where they go for downtime how they charge like San Francisco things work in SF that don't work anywhere else that's part of why San Francisco is awesome but weo will never operate in New York City like I would bet on that just never ever gonna happen whereas Tesla I I have a more I'm able to imagine that a little bit better all right Mike chime in and then we'll get to our SCH it's no it's a this was not on the topic but I just want because we're talking about it I this is a deep interest uh topic for me I have a post on my substack number 510 if anyone wants to look at it uh uh it's it's there's a lot more detail on a lot of Qui go ahead Mike quickly what's what do you agree with no no I agree no Josh's Josh brings up the core point which is human that everyone just assumes Robo taxis and all these things are automated and people go away and you need people more than ever because he said it py you said it py people are messy and and you know one of the the former CFO of Goldman ended up being CEO of HS and they bought a huge amount of Ubers and they have to they're now selling them for billions one of the issues is this business of people really messing with these cars on the EV side a lot more and and and and this is a key point so I just want to underline that yeah and in the real world too in the physical world think about comedians which I talk about a lot I know people just shake their head but I'm like who's the most popular type of entertainment right now it's comedians both uh from news it used to be John Stewart now it's every type of comedian standup interaction with the crowd live working all the time you can't AI that type of creativity and hence you're going to have this incredible you know you're seeing it with only fans to start but now it's moving to only fans of every category which I you know haven't talked about enough but this is incredible and this goes to the whole topic of today Phil which is too small to fail and too big to fail that two things can be true at the same time but anyways Phil you start Let's uh go through your schedule what we were going to chat about but thanks Josh for being here yeah so let's get into it so yeah the theme of the day is uh Ai and this idea that we sort of have this this this barbell this barbell Theory playing out where you have these huge companies that are incredible technology companies like Google and meta and and Tesla and Amazon and apple and then you have these small small companies that that that also are super supercharged by AI so AI can benefit both the very large and the very small and so Josh we were talking about Josh at Uber and uh Josh at at at uh uh AIC and and and and coester but his his startup now his Endeavor now now is this company called wave he's doing it all himself this is so freaking cool why don't you just tell us Josh what you're doing uh a little bit about the company I have a few questions for you sure so uh the quick and dirty is I had a bunch of these roles at startups and kind of always admired Engineers as the people who were actually building the thing that I was operating or selling and dealing with engineers and I I got pretty like I was adjacent to it for so long that I kind of got the sense that I could maybe do it too and chat GPT came out two years ago last November and right when it did uh I just left my last operating role and I was like this is the moment like I I now have someone I can ask any question to about anything no matter how stupid and it happens to be very good at at like engineering work so I was already sort of 60% of the way there and it got me the rest and so I built a few different things and one of them you they always say we can always use more notetaking apps right right that's the expression always do more note taking apps it's something like that and so I made a few different things and one of them was this note taking app that is basically it's incredibly simple it uh Records audio transcribes the audio summarizes that and so the typical uh use case is recording a meeting that's that's actually like happening in real life um my my father though was sick at the time he's okay now he's a former doctor but you go to these meetings with doctors and come back and not really be able to deliver a coherent take on what they said it was complicated stuff my mom was there too they're not dumb people but it's just hard and I said hey here's like a toy I made this just for fun try using it at your next you know thing and it was and the result was amazing I mean it was like an aha moment like okay this is a thing I was noticing AI apps were very web browser based very opinionated um people were building for themselves rather than for actual users um there's almost nothing in the App Store and so I made this I put it out it was live probably by the end of 2023 and uh I've done basically all the engineering front and back end I have a design firm that does like the thing that you're looking at here they put together uh and I implemented it and I've really and I've like hired zero people um which is the way I want to do it right now uh because managing people which I've I've done I hired about 100 people at Uber and at one time had like 70 of them on you know they're with me that becomes your full-time job like manage I mean it is literally dealing with them becoming their therapist you know helping through issues how do I get growth in my career how do I solve this problem I have a problem with this person whatever so I really wanted to take a turn of just me and the and the and the users so I I have a boss it's the people who download and buy this and uh you know the the support interactions so there's support inapp and it's all me uh I chat with them and I haven't made that AI yet I do that because it's been incredibly useful to like talk to every person who has a problem um and I have hired finally an engineer whose code is not live yet so so far I can honestly say everything out there was done by me that's going to start to change but there won't be any full-time employees and uh it'll still sort of be me in a in a small room which has worked out super well for me so far no this this is terrific story Josh I just wanted to pull out the one of the broad points Sam wman at open AI has consistently said over the last year uh that AI is going to basically lead to a world of many businesses that will be one two three people and worth billions of dollars and and it's amazing to see the initiative that you took to make this happen especially as a non-engineer can I ask you two questions number one what was the little bit specifics of how you as a non-engineer you know put put this together uh through all the AI Services just a little bit more on on the teex stack number two the biggest criticism people have around AI businesses right now on the consumer side in the six box of applications is that everything is a wrapper around GPT and so on and and that that I think is a positive rather than negative and you I think are case in point but I'd love to hear more yeah I mean so I'll do the second one first e everything is a rapper I mean everything is a rapper around something and so it's true it is the very basic version and now I'll sort of loop back to the first thing my first thing was like chat GPT I'd like to have an app that does the following it records audio it takes the audio it transcribes it through this API endpoint you send all the audio there you'll receive text back then take that text and sends it over to this place and get back summary and show it in the app and it returned that to me I took that I put it into the thing and it and it totally worked took that out into the world I tried it and then it didn't work the F you know it did the first time or the second time then it didn't work it's like why well because I turned the app off I I slid over to a different app it broke the connection and it didn't work and so I sort of intuited the use of a server like oh well you'll actually have you'll upload the file and then all the good stuff will happen on the server and it'll do its thing and then it'll return and so if the user closes the App instead of staring at it it'll still work and there was that's like the that was the first step of kind of how do you do this for real what I found is it's not learning how to code it's learning how to implement it's learning how to use the different Services how does this work what is this what is a server list what is a server what's the purpose of that um and so I really took it I had been I'd been kind of like uh near it forever but never really got to sort of do it and so it is like just grinding until like all the answers are there all the answers were there on Google now they're just in an interface that kind of summarizes them and delivers them fast and so it was sort of like every little thing like how do I do this and you know I knew a little JavaScript just from being around so react native which is uh a JavaScript based language that deploys to both Android and iOS felt like the right the right thing um it's like okay when I backround the app the audio stops recording that's no good how do I fix that and I spent like a few weeks trying to fix that and there's a way and you know there's a whole ton of Open Source stuff out there react native is open source um you know Expo all these great things there's a lot of people out there working in these sort of tools and so there's a lot of help to be found is what I found and it's been basically just iterative finding the problem dog fooding it talking to people I do like I said earlier I do all the support I am not out the easiest thing in the world that I could Outsource I refuse to because my user base tends to be a little bit older they tend to maybe not be techsavvy they're not on Twitter they're not listening to this they're just people and uh and I get a lot of complaints that way but I also get a lot of positive feedback and and while I didn't make the models I didn't create open AI or any of this stuff there was a similar like holy moment with a lot of these users that reminded me of uber frankly like you know what I mean and in that case we actually did like make the thing but for these folks they were not aware cuz this is kind of a new thing that your computer can record audio and then summarize the text like that's the killer app of AI right now it's text understanding it takes a bunch of texts makes it a little less yeah that's crazy so so the thing for me with AI guys is it's not about me like uber blew my mind because I used to go to San Francisco a lot so I was early there Josh and I was part of the that whole early investing crew and um Angel list and seeing all this like crazy vows and then web one didn't do much it was all web two for me this web 3 not so much interesting to me but fun degenerate economy AI hasn't been about me it's been about people around me right like so drag me back to stock twits because there's so much more we can do with less people right and it's so much more about our creativity on top of the platform right and you know listen why I told the story my son has these moments where he just I just feel bad because Google did Google kind of made him as a non-learner as a kid who struggles learning in a traditional way right just as smart as any other kid but the school system does not work Google was great but it was not a good hack for his brain because it didn't analyze the te it didn't make him read it just gave him links that he wouldn't read it gave him dumb it just made him a little bit Dumber right and and less curious because you had to truly click around and lead and I think what you're saying this text based layer where Max can type a question and get the answer pretty much could be wrong could be right but mostly right mostly writ for a kid who's never gonna click mostly writes better than not being curious and that is the aha moment that I continue to have for me not so much because I'm a Creator and I don't like Ai and I don't need to touch it I prefer I prefer I prefer my team to hand me 95% finished work and I'll finish the less 3 to 5% don't hand me 80% work because then we're starting from scratch so uh as as a leader I want my team to get it to me now if that if my team uses AI great get it to me faster I can proofread it so I think that's still the aha moment for AI obviously it's just the beginning as Michael has been harping on so congrats to you I mean the key thing is I think Phil as he stayed there's two choices you can go raise a lot of money in AI or you can do what Josh did and I think he had been around the hoop enough and seen every type of cap raise uh and been a VC for a minute uh and so good on you and you had you obviously had the the family moment with Healthcare so that changed things too so so that's it go ahead go ahead no I'm sorry go ahead Vil I was just gonna say yeah I mean raising money definitely was way I was lucky that I was able to do this for like a year and a half before I made the first dollar now it makes money and it's great but I was I was I was lucky that I was able to sustain myself for that year or so uh but I feel like raising money would make the success bar so much higher and I wasn't really interested in that I mean if anything I relate myself to like I run a store I'm a shop I I run a store in the digital world and my wholesaler is open AI I buy the model from them in bulk and I sell it to people on a retail basis a little bit at a time and I make a profit on that like that's a very that's not a new idea it's new in what I'm doing but buying something in bulk and selling it essentially is not a new idea and that's kind of what I do and I don't need to raise a bunch of money and shoot for being a billion dollar uh valuation because that's actually that that involves a whole bunch of things that are unpleasant for me and I don't want to do that which brings me to the theme fil and try and tie this all together we live in a world we used to say too big defense fa I think when the banks failed in a way it was like this saying you know the banks are too big to fail because you know you owe Bank a million bucks and is a lot different than o them a trillion bucks okay but really what's happened is we truly now have companies that are too big to fail there's nine of them the Nifty n the fangs whatever you want to call them Batman um and this this leads us into the chart of the week the most interesting chart of the week which is not fcoin this week although fcoin continues to trade crazily uh above a billion bucks or so is I saw this on Gurley and gersner podcast which are great podcasts right like they truly are Geeks for geeks sakes and uh asset managers gersner so um it's not as sexy a chart as fcoin but it's one to me it's the most important chart most interesting chart in the world and why is it because the the Nifty n the fangs are spending all you know other than I guess Google okay so that's interesting are spending 60 to 160% of their free freaking cash flow investing it okay and I just don't think people understood there's a million ways to read this chart Michael you give us your read I I we all will read it differently but this it's hard to it's hard to see this is Mo the most bullish thing that I can see and it's also scary bearish in many ways for depends how you read it so go ahead Michael big debate on Wall Street in terms of the scary part right we're talking about these companies going from investing 2030 billion collectively to now 2030 billion per company and more going into next year and Beyond the only company if you notice of of the five on this chart apple is the one that has the declining chart because apple is really tending to its core two two plus billion users of phone and and and PC and Macs and so on but the others are as you said they're collectively going to invest probably two north of 200 billion this year Microsoft is at the top of that at 80 billion you mentioned Google is not on you know spending as aggressively but Google Al everyone here is 20 20 30 billion plus big debate on Wall Street you know when will we get this money back and I've written a bunch of posts on this the Returns on these Investments typically take are two or three years four years later in this case I think we're going to see it a little bit faster than than investors think and part of it is the early part of our discussion things like what Josh is doing what Josh's app for instance is doing is basically if if he grows his users from tens of thousands to hundreds and and millions let's say every time they're using their his wave app to do all of the uh note taking and recording and and transcript thing it's using the compute that these companies are building like crazy it's inference it's is these buzzwords and and then it will be creating synthetic data out of the data that Josh's company is transcribing and it will in his next iteration might be I'm using Josh your example because you're here you know the next version of your product would could be all my data convert it in not just into transcripts but convert it into learning about what I do uh in terms of the next questions I want to ask about my own work and life and that is going to use more compute so that's Point number one I want to make on this number two all of these companies are have a Tailwind with the upcoming political change in Washington in a week with Trump taking office and Congress changing and because we're going into the world world of what I called real Tech politic uh all of these companies are using their uh relationships with Washington and Trump aggressively to make sure that their their Investments for data centers and so on are able to scale across the world because they're framing it against China and so on so this is a political element of this technology wave that is very unusual relative to previous technology waves and and so the combination of hundreds of billions with politics is a very potent Force going into the first quarter of this year and it's a trend that continues obviously for the next two or three years years I just wanted to highlight that it's very different it's it's a it's a big force on the way we invest in these things Phil yeah so we're going to come back to this idea of everybody benefiting from what's happening in technology right now that that this AI wave pun intended is gargantuan and amazing if you are of these Tech Giants and then you have the political Tailwind as well they're all contributing to to the inauguration they know what they're doing it's a play you can't blame them and at the other end what Josh is doing if you're out there by the way just a quick point then we're GNA move on we're g to talk about Tik Tock just a quick point if you're out there and you are uh Lone Wolf and you're using uh chat uh gbt or or or or gemini or whatever and you're learning all kinds of things and you're able to build without knowing how to code or you know how to code and you're building things and augmenting your own skills with the skills of an agent there's a lot of negativity out there and I just want to just really say this really quickly and we're going to move on the Tik Tok there's a ton of negativity out there there's a ton of people saying oh everything's terrible polit you know politics is terrible uh everybody's ill blah blah blah whatever just ignore all of those negative people because this is the greatest time to invest and it's the greatest time to build if you're J if you're small if you're large if you have a lot of money if you don't have a lot of money if you're just scraping by if you're doing something on the weekends you have a job nine to five but you're building something on the weekend this is the greatest time ever so just ignore all that negativity it's all it's all noise okay let's talk about Tik Tock f do we get Max do we get a good take for the most interesting chart in the world from me or do are we good may may not be listen okay keep rolling okay uh keep going Phil okay so let's just talk about Tik Tock um right now there's a Michael why don't you just take the lead here just tell us what's going on what the implications are and who's going to you know who Who's involved it's a it's a key topic and it's not just about Tik Tok Tik Tok just happens to be the focus and I've done the last my two or three posts are about this the politics the real politics around Tik Tok the real politics around the mag sevs uh and and so on but the core issue around Tik Tok is obviously January 19 is the legislative deadline when con when Tik Tok was legislated to either um spinoff us Tik Tok which is about 200 million million users um to investors in the US spin it out of its parent company B dance which is one of the biggest success stories in China and the government of China owns control of bite Dan through what's called a golden share and it was rumored last night that they're getting involved potentially to cut a deal with Trump and Elon Etc who knows if it's true or not to potentially uh have Elon take a piece of the of the US Tik Tok with other investors a number of billionaire investors in bite dance who are Trump supporters are involved as well and Trump changed dramatically his view on on the Tik Tok ban he actually ironically initiated some of the stuff when he was president the first time around now he's a supporter of Tik Tok not being banned and he actually uh filed an appeal to the Supreme Court as it's deliberating so there's a bunch of legal things short term that are going to happen in the next three or four days the Supreme Court will say hey the ban is effective not effective etc those are tactical things there is a move in in Congress to rechange the legislation to add another 270 days to the to the thing so it'll give Trump an opportunity to to cut some sort of a deal and so that's going on at the micro level for Tik Tok the broader impact of Tik Tok is that this was in my mind the most successful Aid driven application for consumers that we've seen in the last two or three last five or 10 years why 20 years we've had Facebook with u the Facebook app with Instagram with WhatsApp all of the social media that we know what Howard you talk about web 20o has been based on the social graph all the people you and I know and and interacting Tik Tok basically with bite Dan in the back with their technology fundamentally changed it they use machine learning and and and emerging AI Technologies to create What's called the foru page it's 100% algorithmically driven you don't have to do anything it just figures out what you like from the things you look at and so on that was brilliant everyone copied it in the US YouTube has something called YouTube shorts which has you know hundreds of millions of users Facebook meta Zuckerberg was laser focused he's got um he's literally minting revenue of over $10 billion a year from his Tik Tok app like app called reals uh which is about the same Revenue last year as Tik Tok itself you know so just to give you a sense so if Tik Tok gets banned it's actually a positive for shortterm for so the US companies like YouTube Google and and meta but the broader issue is that AI is being fundamentally used to leverage our data to figure out what we want and that is uh and and Tik Tok was one of the best examples of that the political and geopolitical and security issues aside the other aspect of this this battle that's going on is that a majority of the US and worldwide two billion plus users of Tik Tok love the app the the businesses love make the creators make love making money of it so this thing has a lot of mainstream support and that's one of the reasons why Trump changed changed his view he actually found it very helpful in the election in the campaign where a lot of his support you know leverage Tik Tok and so for all of these reasons this is a political tussle I expect T Tik Tok will not get banned there'll be all these political moves and economic moves Etc but but it's a very important thing to kind of watch and track for the whole industry of at least for the next couple of months but through this whole year yeah the Tik Tok then goes to too big to fail two things can be trueth F too big to fail and too small to fail at the same time the M the the money middle is just listen money to be made in the middle but there's no joy right you've got to be playing in the you got to be trying to get into the planetary Nifty n world or you got to stay where Josh is that's where I feel you need to be you know under a hundred people crushing it ego put aside living under the umbrella of these you know Godzilla fighting uh you know King Kong like they're not going to notice you with T-Rex fighting King Kong fighting um they're just not going to not fighting Godzilla they're not going to notice you the the most obvious thing that I've been writing about for a week is that this is coming to andreon and and musk musk played played everybody went to went to Joe Rogan early now Zuckerberg's cow Towing to Joe Rogan right it's like everybody goes that's new he's the new pope you got to go on you got go and Joe Rogan say inter invertin cured this um you got to go in and and Mark Zuckerberg got a perm he got himself all doled out with the gold chain uh he has a new hair dryer and what so you get to go talk and grunt on Joe Rogan is like a cleansing it's the new juice cleansing right so it's all charade these people are the new preachers um you got to live with them these are our overlords you either have to you can't fight them right this these guys make Goldman Sachs look like kitty cats right but you know we replace we hated having Goldman sacks in the White House and like I said now we have Silicon Valley in the White House and those tentacles they're not the the Unicorn squid is a lot more uh I wouldn't say dangerous or interesting or or uh uh you know the the wildest story The the weirdest thing is the true story as they say and this is the weirdest story to happen to the White House because the black what did they call the vampire squid is nothing compared to the Unicorn squid that is that is my the the the the Goldman octopus is now cute and cuddly yeah it's like oh I hope Goldman does well like I kind of like I'm long Gman I'm like oh they're the underdog right like you know Robin Hood's trading almost you know 40 billion dollars like you're kind of rooting for Goldman we need Goldman because you know without Goldman we're going to be stuck with coins for the rest of our life if Goldman can't take companies public and convince uh convince some convince companies that they're you know that they should pay a 10% pillaging tax to get them public we're going to be left with fart coin and butthole coin and Josh coin and Pearlman coin so this is one of the most epic you have to read the markets here and then Phil if we could pull up this chart about venture capitalist now playing this game uh and this is where Josh was very smart to get out of the Venture Capital game um The Venture Capital game is over now you can play it as I do you can you can be one on TV one more chart um not that one yeah one more keep going down there number six yeah so this is an older chart pitch book right this has now become the Nifty n right the 9 and BCR andreon General Catalyst you know be careful who you take your money from they're no different than Goldman Sachs Thrive Capital uh I don't know who Flagship pioneering is tcv I know them Arch Venture so tiger Global Kleiner ivp okay you want to play ball and don't have these guys on your cap table you're not going to enter the universe of the Nifty 9 ever ever ever okay that's just the new game they have the money and if you're serious about being a big company you have to go where the money is okay which makes too small to fail and chasing companies like Josh and finding finding more joshes more important than ever right which is what we do at Social leverage right you have to change the game and the game has been completely changed Goldman Sachs is not the gatekeeper the white house isn't even the gatekeeper silicon B's the gatekeeper and while we were while I was like making fun of them going to Dubai and taking money directly out of the ground and putting it into taking the 2% to to launder it through Venture Capital it's all funny but it's true and now the game has been played and you wake up today Michael and you see private Equity looks the same as Venture Capo that looks the same as the Nifty 9 um that's the world we live in it's it's a this is a great shot great point I just like to add one couple more points number one you mentioned private Equity we we will have a chart in the later show where we'll have a similar chart on the private Equity side those two private equity and Venture are blending in the world of tech why because the the the Nifty that five that you had on the most important CH of the week those companies for the first time are now infrastructure companies the 200 billion they're spending is on dirt Assets in the dirt uh and that's why we need hundreds of billions and they're coming from Blackstone Black Rock these are companies that run trillions of dollars not tens of billions and and you mentioned Dubai Middle East has 700 to a billion to a trillion dollars they want to invest in US tech so those are the new sources as well for capital and then the last thing since we talked about Goldman Sachs I'll bring them in and tie with the bow Goldman just this week reported that they've reorganized their top leadership to take their private asset business which is a fancy word for non-public stocks and they've created a behemoth which uh to basically draw money from their wealth management business which which manages indirectly and directly over a trillion dollars of assets with the richest groups and family groups in the world world and the biggest institutions in the world they are going to make it easier for companies whether they're small like Josh or super large like an aspiring Uber to be able to not just wait for IPOs in the public market but to raise tons of money both through equity and debt against um against both the Venture industry who who will fund this and the billions and and trillions coming from the private equity and the uh Sovereign wealth funds and family office groups around the world there are almost 3,000 um billionaires in the world and they all have family offices that is all getting harnessed into into all of this as well so I just wanted to highlight the bigger picture yeah family office of good Trend like that's our fintech and weltech that's where we're focused like everybody's a family office Josh I mean when you look at these how does it make you think about your business in the future well I mean the firms at the top of so I because of the Uber bit um and probably only because of that I got VC inbound from the big guys for wave and I think if asset under management are s billion writing me a check for five or 10 million I'm never going to matter to you and so we're just playing different games uh so I don't want to get into business with someone who's playing a different game than me because because then that's going to be problematic so I just you know careful what you wish for it in a world of wash of capital and World also SC so we're also in a world of wash of capital if you look at those charts and a world of scarce Capital where rates are 7 and a half% so so this is really a a very one of the trickiest markets I've ever seen from both the trading investing even though people are saying they're doing great fine if you're in the indexes you're doing great but if you're not doing the indexing this a very tricky game because we're a washing capital and very scarce in capital at the exact same time much like go ahead Mike and just the key Point Howard you made and Josh is making about getting five or 10 million even from the big VCS you got a matter to them Brad gersner who you talked about had a great podcast with Bill Gurley a couple of PODS ago where he talked about that you know you want to kind of focus on on the VCS that are a billion two billion three billion in assets less than 10 20 because you want to matter as a Founder you want to matter to them because the bigger the VC that are in the fives and tens they're increasingly running their businesses for the management fees um whereas the smaller VCS are really doing it the the way VCS have always done it which is work for the founders that you know if we give you five or 10 million we're going to be working with you to help you and that is Brad gersner problem point that he makes with his fund which is both public and private with ultimater his approach versus let's say the Andre and the tcvs who are literally merging big sets of funds and running it for management Capital you'll also likely see a trend in this year or next with some of these companies just like the PE companies went public some of the VC companies will go public as well so to raise money they can't help themselves they will yeah totally a great Point think it's going to happen uh it'll be a disaster um but God bless him I think I think andreon just to run the table beautifully from you know they take huge risks they're not they're not shy you can't shame them I mean if you want to be in this business you have to have no shame uh you have to fight all day and you got to give them credit like they don't give a and and two of their senior partners and two of at least two of their senior Partners along with a whole bunch of others are literally going to be sitting in the white house or in in DC with jobs around around the new Administration so so the idea is that there's potentially they're going to be all focused on synergies together that's the that's the fun word it's it's I honestly it's like we have the most interesting chart in the world for this is the most interesting obviously everybody says this is the most interesting time to be alive because there's just so hard to be happy so easy to be happy so hard to raise money so easy to raise money so hard to start a company so easy to start a company you've got it so hard to invest so easy to invest yeah never easier to invest bring out Dickens so I just wanna I just want to end the program with hang on if we're talking Dickens you know what I do when iy to take the creatine when I pull up to get nothing like a dip in the creatine so I just want to end the program Josh by the way thank you so much for being here this was great and your example is perfect and you know wave is the app uh you don't even notice you don't have to mess with the AI layer you just go use it like you would any other app so this idea that AI is now moving into the background just like when you pick up an iPhone you don't have to worry about what chip is in there you just use it and it's intuitive that's where we're heading and that's one thing that I just love about what you're doing and the fact that you're just building it even though you're not an engineer I just want to say one thing though this the name of this program is Trends with friends and it's so easy to get caught up in the politics of this and there's people out there who are going to be super partisan on one side or the other they're going to be super pro everything that's coming out of the White House or they're going to be railing against it every step of the way and hate you know hate scrolling or Doom scrolling on social media looking for all the bad none of that matters there's no emotion and there's no partisanship in this whole Endeavor whether you are an investor or whether you are a builder this is an incredible wave that we are seeing with artificial intelligence and with the what what Michael calls the real politic of AI and the key for you as an investor to find the trend is to get on board is to find what things are growing like crazy we had this capital expenditure charts that we we gave you all the materials today you got you see the largest greatest companies in the world that figured out how to be flexible you know back in the day Exxon was like this huge tanker It could only turn this quickly today Amazon is this gargantuan company it could build something just like that while you're not even looking and so your challenge is to just find the trend jump on board don't pay any attention to the morality or the you know I mean Hey listen if you don't want to be a trend investor don't be and you could be concerned about the morality and the ethics of everything but if you're not and you just want to invest and find the trends this is an incredibly powerful Trend Howe just a couple other things on this topic because we didn't mention money so AI you said what was the second thing you mentioned AI um politics Politics the third thing that's that's that we that's solving this abundance problem is harder to raise capital and easier to raise capital and it ties into like never been a better time to be a marketer which one more question for Josh is like if you were going to make a hire where would it be but hang on is money right the SEC is out there we're funding the SEC the fintech as a fintech investor yes I mean pay to play has always been the thing when we put money in Robin Hood the reason there was no innovation in fintech is because you had to deal with the government right and and DCS hate dealing with the government Josh knows this with Uber right did they didn't ask for permission they just went and did it you cannot do that in American fintech now you can right like so in a world of money which doesn't interest four of us so much because it's like you said it's kind of boring just printing money and making up money and distributing money it's and and but in a world of new money right in a world where fintech has been funding the SEC Robin Hood just paid $45 million yesterday for who knows what the headline says the SEC wins but we all know what happens just a pay-to-play game and and the reason 45 million to Robin Hood let face it as a public company now worth 40 billion the Stock's up on this news right because everybody knows the score this is just a shake down uh whether whatever Robin Hood did right or wrong this these madeup numbers in fintech and fines by the SEC is just a tax that the banks and the fintechs are still playing from 2008 and it's not going to stop and the and Tech got so big that you can't even tax them and so the other thing is look for Snapchat to get bought once once this deal goes down look for Snapchat to get bought he's got no way out Evan it's fun to be his own King but the sheral that stock will keep going down once Tik Tok gets sold um Snapchat is a goner if it I if if the way I see it because the FTC is going to say just sell like in the the old FTC would say you're not allowed to be bought by Facebook in a world where Tik Tok gets bought by Elon and Trump and whatever snap is a now 20 billion I don't know what the premium can be because I don't know how it's worth 20 billion but that's gone Evan you had your chance to be a public company you're gone so there is a lot of cleanup that's going to happen as as the upside of these companies are doing nothing for shareholders for years and years and years and this is why kids have moved on to mcoin like even though they love Snapchat the business doesn't run well enough so you might as well own a non-fundamental thing like tokens so it's it's really we have to say that AI politics and money the are just creating so much change right now it's just fascinating so um you know those are the trends that we want to talk about with friends and and as much as I hate politics luckily Silicon Valley makes it a little more fun to talk about politics because they seem a little more human than Bankers even though they're flawed uh Bankers just had self you know yes the overlords have self-interest in mind but Tech is actually creating like like as as Josh talks about with you know visual his T Tesla versus wh MO we're moving things forward versus just financing things and so this is like a really more interesting era for people that really want to you know kind of do go ahead Phil Josh last word last word Josh oh this has been really fun you asked what I would hire for if I would hire for anything you know it's never been a better time to be a marketer and I could really use one a little bit because I was one kind of back in the day and I really quite enjoy the engineering and technical side of things um and we've had some good luck on Facebook ads but I could use someone a little more clever it's the most important job in the world like as a as a as a guy who loves not taking apps forever and what you're doing I love it I I'm a big user of transcription products and yours is great what's the next big big feature if you if you wanted to scale it to the next level what what's the next thing you would like to add so it originally started as just like in-person audio but I have a feedback request form and the users upvoted uh things like Zoom meetings which is sort of obvious but now we support that you can also make phone calls in the app so you can literally like dial out it calls you know as you and Records it I think the next uh thing that I'm working on now there is now a chat with an individual session so at the end of a recording you record for an hour it gives you a summary and also a dozen suggestions of like chats like what were some of the things that Howard said said during the call and you tap that and it feeds that out each chat only knows the information about one meeting but what's coming next is a chat that knows the information about every meeting you've ever had and so it's like I met with Howard all these different times can you compare how his opinions have shifted over the year and it does like a search for all the Howard quotes and so to be a little sticky because right now retention is fine but it could always be better um and so that's what I'm working on current so so think about what Josh said s to get the last word here and Phil you can have last word but we went from a banking phase a leverage financial leverage phase to a tech leverage phase and now we go to a marketing leverage phase right like where there smart people that can build lean businesses no one wanted to hire a marketing person because everybody thought they could code their way out of growth for the last 15 years in a in a world of scarce capital for small companies in in a world where small and it's tough for small companies because a marketing hire is very esoteric but Josh is dead right his next grade hire will be a killer it may be a kid out of school it may be a senior person who's 60 who got put out the pastor and now wants to come back to work they're going to have to have jiujitsu they're going to have to have personal skills they're going to be able to use social media not just social media to go wide but social media that actually has influence and engagement and so it's a greatest time to be a Jiu-Jitsu marketer and for young people out there learn how to network with intent in this era you can't just say I have a 100,000 followers you got to say how how do can I make people move and uh so if you're young and thinking about college and thinking about what you're going to do with your life invest in marketing all right Phil I'm tired I'm tired yeah so we're just going to continue with last words for the next 167 hours until next week's program starts and then we'll do it all over again all right guys great to see everybody thanks guys much appreciate it see you