Claude Opus 4.5’s Breakout Moment & Investing in 2026 with Qiao Wang

Transcript

Okay, here's what I realized over the the holiday. It's exactly what you described. The the line between general chatbot and coding is blurring. Now when you code, you don't actually write code, you write plain English. So like the two thing the coding assistant and general chatbot is is they're merging. The software mode is diminishing very rapidly. And for early stage startups, there's basically no modes. But if you look at the the likes of uh Facebook or Google or Microsoft, Apple, the modes still exist. the the AI coding agents won't kill them.

>> Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is forformational purposes only and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. All right, everyone. Welcome back to Empire. Very excited about this one. Got good friend, friend of the pod, friend of me, Ciao from Alliance. Welcome to the show, Chiao.

>> Great to be back or great to be here. Have I been? >> You come on. Come on. Come on. >> I know. I've been on other um Blockworks. >> Many of the Blockworks pods. Yeah. >> Um I have an embarrassing thing to admit to you, Chad, which is I have a I've changed my kind of like scroll. I still scroll social just like any normal human being, but I've got a I only use list now. I don't do the algorithm. And I've got a list and it's just called brains. And I was like uh I was like, "Oh, this is like really enjoyable." Like I really enjoy my like consumption behavior now. And I was like, "Who did I put on this list?" It's like you I think it's like you this guy Will Manitis I think is his name and Chris Berniski. There like

three people on the list. I was like [laughter] oh that's why I enjoy it. Okay. So I'm just basically I'm just telling you I'm I'm I'm I've uh consumed a lot of your your thoughts and tweets recently. >> Appreciate it. I started doing the same uh about half a year ago just to get rid of all the I don't want to see all the political stuff, all that. Like now it's pure either markets or tech. I have two lists, markets and tech. >> Yeah. Yeah. I have health and brains. So, um I mean it's interesting. I had a crypto top 200 list that Blockworks made and I curated that whole list. I looked at the top 200 list. I made it probably a year ago. It's all outdated. All the or no, I probably made it three years ago. all the people who are like, you

know, quoteunquote big names, the thought leaders, I'd say like 150 of the 200 have essentially washed out some version of washed out. It's very interesting. >> Yeah. Um I want to talk about Claude and um Opus 4.5 to start. Um you've been >> just talking about it a lot. I think maybe the best place to start is you um there's there's a a tweet, speaking of tweets, I'll mention a lot of tweets in this episode. you said um uh the quote unquote holy it's over moments for me in the last few years. One was the release of chatbt. Two was the uh first reasoning model 01. Uh three was the Tesla FSD V13. By the way, I just used that. I think the I think I I think it's

now the V14. >> I just tried that for the first time. I was like >> And I live in a parking garage with ve or I have a parking garage with very tight parking. I was like, "Oh my god, it got me out of that. Drove me all the way to New Jersey." So that was crazy, too. Uh, and then you said Opus 4.5. Why is Opus 4.5 such an holy moment here? >> I I can't explain to you like what's happening under the hood because I'm I didn't build Opus, but I can tell you what I what I felt as as a as someone who used it. Um, the the last time I I did I wrote any sort of code was maybe a year ago, but I I really seriously only coded. It's been like three years I haven't really seriously coded.

>> Give me your background before we go too deep to just contextualize your coding. Yeah, >> ability. I would say >> between 2010 and 2017, right before I got into crypto, I was in quant trading and I spent all day coding both the super low-level C++ um the actual trading engine as well as the higher level Python data science stuff and and that's my work for like for seven years all day is coding and um and then I'm sorry I wrote some front-end code a little bit of front uh front end code and backend And then um ever since I left Masari, I haven't coded for like seriously coded for three years. I did some personal

projects here and there like maybe at the end of the year for every year the last three years but like Opus 4.5 like everyone has been talking about VIP coding but the the the big difference between Opus 4.5 and before was that before you can sort of put together a demo very quickly but the last 5% of the project always like it's really hard for the for the AI to do it for you like completely >> it still requires a really good engineer here like a human in the loop to get that last mile done. Like the last mile meaning like the bugs and the corner cases, all that stuff. And with Opus 4.5, what I felt was I just tell it what I do in plain English. I obviously I have to give it a very clear spec. But

as long as my spec is clear and comprehensive, it can just do it in it canes one-shot it. >> And and that's how I felt the the biggest difference was. Of course, I think Claude and Opus might be going through this hype cycle on Twitter because my my engineer friends told me that um for example, OpenAI, the latest OpenAI GPT uh 5 Pro is as good or almost as good as as OP. But I but I use I've used both and I actually opus is the first time I've switched out of chat GBT because for me chat GBT the memory of chat GBT had locked me in so intensely that I was like I guess I'm I guess I'm a chat guy for my life like it's it knows

everything about me and now Opus 4.5 is so to me it's so much better. I know the models I I looked at the model ranking but to me Opus 4.5 is so much better >> as a chatbot or as a as a coding assistant. Um uh bo uh both actually. >> Yeah. >> Okay. I haven't tried uh claude as a as a as a general chatbot, but just on the pure on the coding part, it's it's a huge jump. >> There's a there's a level of work that I don't know if it's coding or chatbot, but it's somewhere in between. For example, um let me tell you a thing that I just did with Opus 4.5, which is we have a we have a we have a TAM of Blockworks, right? And it's always a headache. We have we have an eight

person sales team at Blockworks. And it's always a headache to be like, who's which account should we sell to? Is that a tier one or a tier two? Each seller has a determined like, you know, you get 10 tier ones, 30 tier twos, 100 tier 3s, something like that. Um, it's always a total headache. I just put the problem into Claude. It pulled in and I was like, look, if they have an FTV, if the token has an FTV over a billion, that's a, you know, that that gets extra points. If they're a public company, that gets it pulled in everything. It pulled in info from Coin Gecko, Coin Market Cap, all this different data and it ranked the list and then it looked at every deal the sell each seller had closed over the last eight years at Blockworks. It looked at the products

that we sell and it then assigned basically accounts to each seller based on the likelihood that they would close a deal with that account. That was that is co that is um that's not just chatbot work. It's not I know it's not coding. Okay, here's what I realized over the the holiday, it's exactly what you described. The line between general chatbot and coding is blurring, >> right? >> Because when you talk to to a chat a general chatbot, oftentimes it writes some code on the fly for you to to do the thing you want to do. >> Whereas now when you code, you don't actually write code, you write plain English. So like the two thing the coding assistant and general chatbot is is they're merging.

>> It's one. Yeah, it's merging. Yeah, exactly. Why don't you use um Replet or Lovable for your vibe coding? Why do you use Claude? >> Um I feel like uh I think they're targeting different persona. I haven't tried the latest versions, but I feel like lovable is is generally targeting people who want to build a a really good demo or or maybe a simple app. I think they're really good for front end. That's my impression. I haven't used it myself. I think they're really good for front end. But the the tool I wanted to build for myself was mainly a backend thing >> and and so I used um I started with uh cursor plus opus 4.5. Then I tried cloud versus with uh opus 4.5. Um I actually couldn't tell that the like in terms of

productivity boost I think they're about the same for me. >> Um but that's that's just my personal experience. >> Yeah. Talk to me about how you so for people who don't know you've been running alliance where you were um I mean helped build Msari then launch Alliance you guys are on cohort 17 I think or 16 >> we're going to be on 16 >> 16 um you've seen yeah thousands of crypto startups now at this point um how does this impact companies? Yeah. Um in in a in a huge way and and this has been happening for the last three years which is that um basically almost every cohort I ask people uh especially the the technical co-founders of of every

startup what um you know how much productivity improvement have you experienced since Chad GPT in 2022 and um basically every cohort I get a number that is bigger than the previous cohort like It's it's really consistent and the latest number I I got from the last cohort was like some somewhere between four to three to 4x product improvement >> and of course I think this um probably impacts early stage startups even more so than later stage like than bigger companies in terms of productivity improvement because I think fundamentally the limitations with coding assistance AI coding assistance is is the context window. Mhm.

>> So for example for argument sake say like let's say cloud can take in a million tokens then what that basically means is it can write a it can start a project very easily and do it really really well but if you ask cloud to change the entire Google codebase it's it's it's not possible right so it probably um affects early stage startups even more so than than the bigger companies >> I think what what's happening within the bigger companies is the way they can best leverage coding assistants is they they have clear layers of abstraction between different different divisions between different different like departments of of of the company so that they can apply so they can shrink the

context window and feed it into the AI system if that makes sense. >> Yeah, it does. I've seen that um talking about AI in terms of productivity is the wrong lens to view it from with the earliest stage startups. So I think if you're a company 100 employees, 200 employees, a thousand employees, what's your productivity gain? 3x, 4x, sure. Um, I think that the earliest stage startups don't even understand what they don't think about it in terms of productivity. They just think about it as like why would we ever go hire more people? That's what I've seen in the like, you know, companies I've angel invested in and like friends are running like new startups and stuff like that.

They're just like we we don't have to hire. It's it's really bizarre. or we you know even this thing of um this target accounts example that I was doing with sales um the other two things that I just built are a sales commission calculator sales team's always like how much am I making like then you got to ping the finance team and then finance team's like oh my god like I got to calculate the sellers's commission like look how much money they're making like that's a pain in the ass and then the other thing is how much does a for us we sell these data dashboards right so it's like how much does a dashboard cost then they got to bog down the data team and the data team's like h well like are they indexed by Dune or gold sky it's like no okay well But we got to add a

little extra money there. I just built a dashboard calculator based on all the So so it's like these little And so what what does that actually mean for us? We don't have to go hire a sales ops person. >> Yep. >> Right. So it's >> like it really does feel like a one or two person unicorn is possible in 2026. >> Yeah. >> And such a startup probably has already started. >> It's not at a billion dollar valuation yet, but it has started >> 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know multiple people who are running $10 million ARR businesses by themselves right now.

>> Yeah. >> Yeah. They're often like exineers from Meta and Uber who got sick of the bureaucracy and they're just like Yeah. And they're just cooking by themselves. There's an interesting thing though I've noticed with um AI some of the best AI AI start not AI startups like a chaty like an open AI but like these little businesses that are leveraging AI is they don't want to tell people what they're doing. It's one of the first times I've seen an usually if you have a startup and it's ripping right ar through the roof you want to shout to the world you want to go raise the money you want to go tell everybody you want to tell post on Twitter um people are very secretive about what they're >> now it's it's too easy to copy your software >> it's too easy yeah exactly how do you think about moes then for

companies and do does that definition of a moat change >> it doesn't change I mean the the the software mode is diminishing very rapidly and for early stage startups there's basically no modes but if you look at the the likes of uh Facebook or Google or Microsoft Apple the modes still exist the the AI coding agents won't kill them and so the modes for these companies for example it's developer ecosystem for Apple and and maybe PC like Microsoft it's switching cost for um uh cloud AWS Azure Google GCP uh it's proprietary data right? Like YouTube, YouTube owns a lot of video data. That's how they're able to build a

really good uh video um model in the first place. Um like enterprise integration uh and and like super mission critical software like that's Microsoft. >> Sure you can copy office but you know are you are enterprises really going to switch from office to to a new you know software? It's it's too mission critical for them. Actually [snorts] I'll give you one example I've been looking at recently. uh it might be one of the biggest inefficiencies uh or mispricing in the public market right now it's Adobe >> you know it's Photoshop and and you know the creative suite of of uh Adobe uh the market currently thinks that the latest uh video models and imaging image models

are going to kill Adobe I think that's completely wrong uh because Adobe's mode is the enterprise integration um like all the enterprise users of Adobe creative suite software they're they store their images and their videos um on Adobe's cloud and uh their creative professional like the switching cost of moving from Adobe cloud to somewhere else is very is very high >> um and the fact that they've been using Photoshop for so many years like the it's it's muscle memory right it's very hard for these people to to switch and and so Adobe right now is trading at 124 PE

is crazy for for for for such a for such a high quality of a company. >> Yeah. [snorts] Is Scott Bellski next in line to run that company? Have you seen because that would be that would he um he's a phenomenal entrepreneur. I'm not sure if he's still in line, but that would be very interesting. >> Um >> how do you think companies should like for what's the um let's say you're you know so there's a lot of like uh you know very maybe young entrepreneurs who are like this is kind of second nature to them already. What if you are at a company where it's you're listening to this and it's not second nature? Like maybe you work at a I don't know 500 person startup been around for like a decade and you're just like yeah no one's really maybe people are like

putting things into chat GBT and sending like automated emails but like how do you how do you push a company onto this like next wave of what obviously needs to happen? I I don't think you can force them to adopt a new technology for the sake of it. I think they have [clears throat] to just figure out where a techn like AI can help them immediately and make a huge impact. >> By the way, that's that's what's has been happening within alliance for the last three years. Um we didn't, you know, we knew AI three years ago. We knew AI was going to be a big thing. We said we're going to become AI first, but we didn't like try to force AI into every part of our organization, but instead we used AI, for example, to automate some of our uh admission

process. Like we get like thousands of applications. Like three years ago, I used to read all every single one of them myself. [snorts] 5,000 applications per year. It's it's brutal. It's it's soul crushing. Now I'm able to automate about 50% of it using AI. >> So how do you how did you actually do that? Did you So is that an Opus 4 point? Like how did you how do you how did you build that? How did you put in the inputs? How good is it actually on the outputs? Why is it only 50%? Why isn't it automating 99%.

>> Yeah. So um I I didn't write it myself. The software was written by one of our engineers. Um I think the coding part is no longer the bottleneck. the prompt is is the is where the I wouldn't necessarily say the secret sauce because everyone knows what a or for the most part what a great founder might look like on paper, >> right? So I just uh translate my heristics of what a good founder or a good startup might look like and put that into the prompt and [snorts] I use that to to um to filter and what and right now the what what that piece of software tries to do is filter out the obviously bad ones rather than tell me

which ones are obviously good because I think that that part like it still requires some taste taste from the human interviewer. I think the AI isn't quite there yet, but I think you could get there like by the end of the year. Like, >> yeah, >> I by this end of this year, I think AI and AI VC is going to do a better job than than I do. >> Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. That's um I think the Revolute founder launched a venture firm and that's what they're doing. I mean, this was Chimas's idea with Social Capital if you remember. Right. It was >> and then it didn't didn't work. I think maybe AI was too early.

>> It was too early. The tech wasn't ready. >> Yeah. Um Yeah. Very interesting. How much um how much value do you think you get out of the like how much would you pay? How much? So to me it's shocking how cheap these are and it's you know it's kind of like taking a $5 Uber in New York from like you know Fey to the Upper East Side when Uber launched. You're like okay obviously this is mispriced. Um but they're just throwing venture dollars at it to onboard users. How much more what do you think that mispricing is? Like how much more would you pay for Opus 4.5 right now? Opus. Uh, I'm not quite sure yet. Depends on what I build with it, but I'm not quite sure yet. But for Gemini, I think it's underpriced by two orders of magnitude because right now

I'm just paying $20 for a Pro. I'm not even using the the Pro Plus or >> You would pay $2,000 a month for Gemini. >> Yeah. Be because [laughter] the the the the it's a research like I actually tweeted about this. It's a research assistant. It's a it's a junior research assistant. junior coding assistant. Um, a a a pretty good health adviser, like medical adviser to double check whatever my my doctor tells me, a pretty good parillegal, and so on. So, and a therapist. Like, if you combine all these things into one, $2,000, I think, is underpriced.

>> I think Google knows this. Open eye knows this. >> Yeah, >> they know it's being mispriced. >> Yeah. How does your wife feel about you putting every single thing into uh into Gemini? Uh we both put a lot of our things into junk [laughter] in separate accounts of course. Yeah. >> Um how much time do you spend a day on how much time do you spend a day on some combo of Gemini and Claude these kind of things? And has it where has that time taken and been taken out of? Is it out of Zoom calls? Is it out of social? Is it out of Slack? Yeah, I actually analyzed this uh maybe half a year ago and which led me to to to to the Google trade. Um basically at the bottom u what I was unbelievable call by the way like

you were the only one longing Google at the time and now it's you know >> I I I looked at my my my iPhone usage the top three apps I was using Chrome, YouTube, Gemini, they're all owned by Google. >> Yeah. And of course I I I was worried that chat GPT was going to kill the the search business. So I talked to my wife and my wife gave me an insight where she said uh she does all her Google the mo the biggest use case of Google for her is shopping and that part was at least in the short term was not going to get killed by chatbt at least at that point in time.

So then I did some research. I realized actually more than half of Google's search revenue comes from shopping. >> I was like this this castle is is intact. >> Yeah. >> No one's going to kill it anytime soon. And then on top of that there's the GCP, there's TPU, all these things that people realize later. >> Um I thought that was a no-brainer. So Google was my my biggest trade. It was like the only big trade I took last year. >> Did you size it? Well, >> um I put like maybe 10% of my work into it.

>> That's great. >> 50%. So, >> yeah, that's great. Um yeah, I got dinner um on New Year's Eve with someone from Google and we're, you know, we started talking about these things and people talking about what they use and the Google person's like, "What all you guys misunderstand is we've got the shopping data. We have the shopping data and no, the market is not still does not understand that yet." So >> um >> I think Adobe might be the the Google of this year because it's so cheap. Like it's experiencing the same thud that Google experience. >> I don't I just don't. But like when's the last time you've used Adobe?

>> Never. But no, no new people will use Adobe. That's my problem with it. Like Google I am the same. My top apps are like you I'm on YouTube like YouTube. I'm I use YouTube so much. I use Gemini. All these I don't use Adobe. So all the new people don't use Adobe but all the new people use Google. >> I think what the market misunderstands is that Adobe is not a consumer product. It's enterprise product >> and but my enterp like quoteunquote my enterprise would never adopt Adobe. >> So what what would they use? Figma or >> Figma?

>> Yeah. >> So Figma and Adobe they're actually targeting two different market segments. The the war is actually over for that segment of developing like new new demos and and you know website uh interesting >> like that that war is over. Adobe lost that war. Figma won. Uh Adobe is more >> then what does Adobe win? >> Like the the marketing people um >> but Canva >> Canva is for lower um end segment of the market. It's it's more amateur versus like true high-end enterprise. >> So I agree with you. Adobe's um net new users has not grown for a very long time. But but they're able to char their pricing power is so insane that they're able to charge more and more every year.

>> Did you put on the trade yet? >> Yep. >> Small one because I I don't use it personally. I I don't have the same amount as Google as >> Yeah. Well, I want to get into investments in a little bit. Um but I want to talk about this idea of like where you should be spending time. >> Yeah. >> Um how do you think about how AI changes what you should spend time on? Um, I think everyone can and should write code and if they don't, uh, they're going to be left behind. And by writing code, I mean specifically, um, automating some part of their own life or their own work. Um, I think what's going to happen is uh or

what what might I have no idea but what might happen is there's still going to be these like B2B SAS software that everyone purchases and every company uses right so for example we use uh I don't know Gmail or or whatever or Zoom and we pay for these things but there's always this long tail of workflow that is unique to yourself and to myself that it doesn't make sense for third party software providers to build it because there's not enough money for them to make. >> But you and I can build >> a commission calculator at Block Works.

That's a good examp There's not a SAS business to go calculate commissions. But >> yeah. >> Yeah. >> And and when I say like everyone should be coding like it shouldn't sound scary anymore because you no one's going to write any code anymore. You just talk to the thing >> pure natural language. >> I would highly recommend anyone listening to this don't even use claude opus because there's it can give it >> it's too much. just use in 10 or or something. >> Use use Replet for the love of God. Go on Replet. It is that was to add to your you know FSD V13 opus 4. For me it was Replet. Replet was my moment where I was like oh my god AI is not just a chatbot where I talk to chat GBT and it gives me some nice answers. I was like you can

build anything. The whole world is going to completely ch I would really recommend people try Replet. Um it's amazing. It's very cool. Um why how do you think like the people who use AI in the workplace like so I'm kind of envisioning it like this people are watching on YouTube so they can't see but it's like you know people who use AI people who don't use AI and then it's just going to go like this. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. How will that show up? There will be a K shape of the workforce. Can maybe just talk to me about how you see that happening.

Um, I feel like it's going to be similar to to the internet. Like these things just make the high agency smart people >> smarter >> and the low agency people dumber. >> Um, it's just an incredible tool that's out there for available for you to use and it makes you more productive. So, it's really a matter of how much you want to use it. This episode of Empire is brought to you by VanX onchain economy ETF Node. If you feel like you are constantly missing alpha, never have time to scroll through crypto Twitter, Node is for you. Node is actively managed by an experienced team with years in both trady and crypto.

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your chance to deploy on a high-performance modular layer 2. To register, click the link in today's show notes. Thanks to Mantle for making today's episode possible. As always, investments in blockchain technology involve risk terms and conditions apply. Is there some sense that it's a um to play devil's advocate, is there any sense that like you built your Warren Buffett stock tracker? >> Y >> took took you a lot of time probably. Um was that a good use of time?

>> Yes. The the the end result uh was was okay, but the the process of building this tool helped me understand this this technology better. >> What did you build? Tell us about it. Um, so it's a it's a digital clone of Buffett and Munger and uh Howard Mars and Draen Miller and all these people that uh scans on a regular basis thousands of tickers and it it conducts a a deep research on every single one of them and it tries to emulate the mental models of Warren Buffett and and Mar and so on. And so the prompt the pro the coding itself was very easy but the prompt is took me

several months of iterations. So I I actually have like very detailed prompt to emulate how buff and monger uh think about evaluating a a potential investment. >> So it's a six-step thing. [snorts] Um and and so it uses deep research to gather information for every single one of these six things that they would potentially care about. And then I run another API call that uses the reason model which is separate from the deep research. Deep research is really good. And what by the way this one thing I learned is deep research is really good for gathering facts and data and reasoning models is it can hallucinate a lot but once you give it the facts and data you can reason much better than than deep research. Then my second round

is a is a reasoning model call um to make a decision on whether or not we or whether or not the investment committee consist consisting of the digital buff and a monger would actually um like what investments they would make and so and it gives me the output. That's the whole >> um have you heard the theory that you know Renaissance Rent like have you heard the theory that Renaissance basically discovered LLMs before everyone else did and they just kept it a secret and that's why their returns have been so high. >> It's possible.

And the the reason why I did Buff and Margaret is precisely to um not compete with Renaissance because those guys are really good at short-term trading, right? like with a horizon of maybe daily or or weekly horizon time horizon. >> Yeah. >> Um in that at that time horizon there's no zero chance the latest AI models are going to be >> you're not competing against Jump or or Suscoana or say like ST or Yeah. Yeah. >> But at a multi-year time horizon no one no one has the patience to to invest and and hold it for like more than five minutes these days. So >> yeah, >> you can leverage LLM to to >> So then whose model do you pick? Do you go with Howard what Howard Marx is saying to do? Because what Howard Mark is saying to do is very different than

what Duck is saying to do, which is very different than what Buffett is saying to do. >> Exactly. >> So, who do you go with? >> I average them out. >> Ah, they all say Adobe and you long Adobe. >> Exactly. [laughter] And and here's the other thing. Um, if you run the same prompt multiple times, they'll it'll give you different answers. >> Yeah. >> So, if you run the same prompt multiple times, you average average them out. If all of if every single one of five runs tell you tells you that you should buy it, then you have pretty good >> conviction that it's it's a good idea. >> What's another stock that it says to buy?

>> Um the I think as it output uh about 10 stocks and four of them are actually in the current portfolio of of Berkshire Hathway. Um so it has >> but isn't that obvious because it's pulling in >> specifically tell the prompt do not use in any circumstance the current or past portfolio information of Bergkshire Hathway. >> Ah okay. >> So what's what's a stock? >> Um Chub which is an insurance company.

>> Chub. Interesting. Yeah. >> Um Google. >> Yeah. >> And uh there's one more I forget. >> How are you uh uploading the data? How do you like how do you um [snorts] because I I built I built something. So I built I have these things called cluster headaches and there are these like gnarly Yeah, it's a head thing and um there's all this new stud there's always new studies and research that come out about it but I don't know how to read like studies that well and so I always upload my studies and then I was like all right I'm just building a site. So I built a site it's like cluster headaches.co I think it is. Um, >> and it pulls every single study I I put the study in and any article I want in.

And then it uploads it and starts to build a database and it and it starts to actually build a like a really nice user interface where it's like, oh, it'll pull in like, oh, this medication. Oh, this medication was mentioned seven years ago here. Oh, that's tied to like this thing in the brain. Oh, this thing in the brain is tied to because like I was trying to do all that >> basically like that meme of like, you know, the wires crossing on the whiteboard type of thing. Um, I was trying to do that in my head and like on all these notebooks and now this website does it, but I have to manually upload the studies. How do you have it pull in automatically like the studies and research and papers and things like that? I >> I I I tell the the deep research agent

in my prompt that you need you can only use the following sources and it'll do the search it'll do a Google search on on these sources. [snorts] >> Okay. >> However, I I think that the the output isn't perfect. I think most of the time it'll follow my prompt, but occasionally it'll go to some random websites like um seeking alpha like which you know that kind of stuff. >> Do you have you found a way to pull in YouTube videos? >> Uh YouTube videos I think there is a setting. It doesn't work for all of YouTube videos, >> but it works. It could work.

>> I've been manually So YouTube now gives you the transcript for everything and you can So I just there's a button that says like copy this transcript. So then I manually upload the trip, but I'm like there's got to be a better way. So, um, how does this change? >> The most important thing, the the insane thing is one of the latest Gemini models can actually watch the video itself, not just looking at the transcript. You can you can watch you can analyze your your body language or facial expression, that kind of stuff. It's It's really insane. >> It can analyze the body language and facial expression of the person in the video.

>> Yes. >> Interesting. as opposed to looking at the transcript which is like very >> interesting. Oh my god. >> Oh, this that's interesting. That's very interesting. There's a >> The world has completely changed in the last three years. It's like >> I feel behind every day. >> Yeah, me too. How does this change your job at Alliance and how does this change how you think about where you should be spending your time? >> So, so this goes back to the the earlier point that I mentioned. Uh I think we we always want to start with with the the the perspective of what we can how we can help our founders, how we can make the investment process easy and then reason from there what technology we can use rather than instead of like trying to shove

everything like force AI into all parts of our organization. >> So how does it like your day-to-day like how do you think about like what what Chiao's job looked like a couple years ago and what Chiao's job looks like in a in a couple years from now? Is it is it similar or different? >> It's going to be very very different. A couple years ago, I spent a lot of like just way too much time reading the applications myself. >> Um and and three years from now, I probably don't need to spend any time on it. I think AI will will do a better job than me. >> Yeah.

>> On the on the due diligence front. >> Yeah. >> Um but I think founders still want to have someone to talk to like that the human aspect is very important. like you feel you feel lonely >> and and you feel desperate sometimes >> uh and and you need accountability partner and I think AI AI might do that eventually but I feel like in the short term you still there there needs to be a human aspect. >> Have you looked at Deli? Not Deli digital deli the AI clone >> the digital. Yeah, >> I looked into I haven't used it. >> It's gotten I used it when it first came out. Let's call it like two years ago.

It's not It was not very good. It has gotten so much better. You should look up um Brian Halligan who's the founder of HubSpot created his digital digital clone because Sequoia is an investor in them and he was doing like a residency at Sequoia or something. It is not only can you ask it question like used to be able to ask it questions and then it would output and it's like it's like sounds like Jason doing it. Now it's like the video it's like me and you can't tell you can't tell that it's me. Like you can't you really can't tell that it's not me. [laughter] It's a video of me. It's nuts. Um so I you should look at you should look at deli.

Um what is >> which means that the scarcity in five years five to 10 years is the inerson um relationship that that's >> yeah that's why I'm actually very bullish on our events business. We cut our news business which you might have seen but we kept the events business. I'm very excited about the events business like the multiples are lower like all you know it's not like a venture like all that kind of stuff but um yeah the events I think events businesses are going to get more and more and more valuable events will change like this kind of lame conference thing is going to change but like yeah highly there's more people with more there's uh what's I I don't know a better way to say it than like the rich are getting

richer and they want really really really amazing inerson experiences um and we yeah we we want provide that for them. Uh where was I going with that? What what can you not what can you not automate? What do you not I think like you mentioned writing is something where you don't where you don't use AI. Maybe talk to me about how you think about that. >> You can automate but you probably shouldn't automate because um writing for me is is uh writing is thinking. Clear thinking clear writing. Um, so when I have a bunch of thoughts in my head and I want to really clarify what I'm thinking, I I put it down like maybe like maybe I I do this over the a period of like m multiple weeks. I have I think

I think about a topic for multiple weeks and I whenever I have some thought I put it down and at some point I have to put everything together into one, you know, sort of post like one page or two page or or even longer. And the process of doing that helps me think better. And I simply can't use AI to do that for me. AI is going to produce some some junk that that doesn't align with what I have in mind. >> Yeah. >> And so that's one thing. Uh writing actually helps me to think. And two is like if you're on Twitter these days, like everything is slob, but if you're actually writing something human, I think people can tell. So, if you look at my Twitter, like my tweets are just it's full of, you know, it's lowercase and full of like, you know, grammar

mistakes and, you know, typos and all that stuff. Uh, but it feels more real, >> right? >> I think that might be more valuable than >> Yeah, >> I think there's a misunderstanding of why writing is important. And if you think about writing as a thing, an output that needs to happen, this blog post needs to get live. I need to produce three pieces of content a week. you will always use AI. If that's your mental model for why to write, but if your mental model for why to write is I need to hone my thinking and sharpen my thinking. Yeah. >> Then then then you your argument makes sense.

>> Yeah. >> Um I want to talk about investing um and and and crypto, which we're yeah 40 minutes into this. We haven't talked about crypto, but um which is maybe a sign of the times, but um before we do that, can we talk social? you mentioned your so I've I've noticed a very um deliberate strategy change in your social media account uh in your in your Twitter which is uh dumbing it down more lowercase more grammatical errors uh more more mis misspellings um and I know you and you're too smart to do that not on purpose so why are why are you doing this I >> I don't I don't try to put typos on purpose but it it typos just happen. I I just like when when I tweet, I just uh I

just tweet in production. Like I I don't I have something I want to tweet. Like I learn >> that's a conscious thing. Like you historically might have like all right like let me write the tweet and then let me review the tweet. Now you're now you just fire. So why is this whole why is all of this >> you you spell the word like R just the letter R like not a R. >> That I've I've always done that. >> Okay. >> Just how how I chat with with people. Um, but I just feel like uh some level of authenticity is valuable. >> Yeah. >> And um and uh just I just tweet my my gut like I think of something interesting I just tweeted out. [snorts] >> I think um the person who does this really well is Levels. Do you know

Levels IO? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. Your your style reminds me of Levels. >> He's the um the uh uh the poster child of of VIP coding to like $2 million AR. the original vibe coder. Yeah, exactly. >> The original vibe coder. >> Yeah. Um, one thing that I think is going to be interesting, I'd love to get your take on is how brand and distribution actually changes uh over the future. And so my theory is that we're talking about Deli. I don't know if you saw when OpenAI came out with Sora and you could clone other people and put them in your videos.

>> Y >> but in your video like so Mark Cuban was the the main example of this. If you put Mark Cuban in your video, it automatically somewhere in your video said uh cost go to cost plusddrugs.com which is Mark Cuban's website. So how do you think about how like brands and individual personalities will change as Yeah, honestly people start getting cloned. >> I mean Mark Cuban would probably be very annoyed to see >> Mark Cuban signed up for that. Mark Cuban opted in and said, "If you clone me, Chad GBT, I'll let all your users clone me, but somewhere in the video, it has to say cost plus drugs." So, I did a

I made a video on on Sora. It was like >> me playing Mark Cuban at the US Open. >> Yep. >> And the video is like us hitting back and forth back and forth. Someone someone wins the shot and he goes, "Great. Great shot. Go to costplusds.com." >> So, I I thought about this uh maybe a year ago. Uh well both during the NYC election and in the general election uh I I I figured that at some point every pol political candidate are going to use make use of AI and just mass-produce AI content that is individualized customized to every person like that they know exactly or at

a with a fairly high certainty who you are who you might be interested in what what your bias is and they would produce the same content that that is that you would want to see. And so like that this goes back to your your your point about marketing and branding. I think it's it's pretty clear that in the near future marketing branding is going to be individualized to each person. >> Yeah, it already slightly happens. Like if I I saw an ad for for me the other day on LinkedIn, it was like, "Hey Jason, like as one of the co-founders of Blockworks, like I really think you'll enjoy Rippling."

Interesting. All right. >> Yeah. Um, >> and this is a bullcase for for Facebook, to be honest, for Meta. >> Yeah. >> Um, AI is going to make their algo for advertisements. >> The ads are going to get so good. Actually, I saw it the other day. I typed in um, do you know what Hyrox is? >> No. What is that? >> Like a CrossFit marathon type thing. Anyways, don't go down the rabbit hole. It's cool. But I looked up I'm training for a Hy Rocks and so I looked up on the app store Hy Rocks fitness app and I got these these apps these fitness apps that were like fully like Hy Rocks training and Hierrox is a super niche weird thing like not not big enough to make a bunch of apps around it. I like oh that's

weird. Then I was like oh I wonder if these apps are Hyrox apps or if they just targeted if they had built fully customized Hyrox ads for people typing in Hy Rocks. Sure enough, these are just normal fitness nutrition apps, but they highly targeted. So, I think that will happen much much much more at scale. >> Yep. Agree. >> Um, you were I listened to the podcast with you and Iron a month or two ago. Um, you were talking about the markets and how you're fearful but also in you know the dot bubble and someone something like in 1996 someone called the top and then it went on for three more years. I'm botching it but something like that. Um, you had a tweet the other day. It was talking about uh the forward PE ratios versus the

subsequent 10-year returns. Um, and then you said, "Yeah, but here's here's the C." And obviously they were down. Uh, but then you said, "Look, the counter argument is like A, B, and C." And then you said, "I remain I remain scared." So maybe we can dig into the those three words. I remain scared and how you're thinking about markets today. >> I remain scared because I think for the most part the market most people are fairly euphoric. I wouldn't say it's like 100% there, but you know, you see uh screenshots of P&L, you know, you're year you're in P&L every day for the last week and on Twitter. And then um you know, that that's the sentiment part of it. And then if you look at the um the quantitative aspect, um valuations

are near historical highs, but then you can make the argument argument that companies are a lot better these days. their profit margins are a lot higher. They're a lot more durable uh much bigger moat and then that plus on top on top of that you have all this money printing u debasement. So I can make a case that the current valuation is okay but you can't deny the fact that it's near historic high. Um so I'm not I'm not all in on on risk assets. I I'm in fact probably 40% in cash.

I I don't I know it's gonna be painful if if the market keeps going up this year, but um I sleep better at night. >> Yeah. >> I have no predictions on the market. It's it's really really tough. It's not obvious to me. >> Yeah. Yeah. I was listening to a Duck and Miller interview. He said, "In my 50 years of investing, this is the hardest time in my entire life to forecast what's going to happen in the markets." So, that made me just say, "If Duck can't get it right, I'm not getting it right." I I just uh I just trained myself to become a uh individual stock picker because if you look at the market overall, it's very high. But if you look at if you study the individual companies one at a time, occasionally can find attractive um opportunities.

And if you do, then you're less scared about the overall market downturn. like in in 2000 in the in the docom bubble, tech companies went down uh for the next 10 years, but the but small caps and value companies actually did really well during that decade. Like they went up like maybe 10% per year. Um so I think this is uh one of the best times for individual stock picker. >> How do you think about buying stocks versus buying crypto tokens right now? Um, I don't feel that crypto tokens are particularly attractive yet. There will be a time they they become really attractive, similar to what we had in 2022.

Um, so right now I'm just focusing on I again like I analyze assets individually rather than like rather than like asset classes as a whole. Like if you look at asset classes as a whole, probably nothing is attractive at this point except for the US dollar. >> Yeah. >> If you look at assets individually, you might be able to find something here and there, but right now in crypto, I I mean I still hold Bitcoin um and a bit of like t like tokens here and there, but nothing nothing really big. >> Yeah. Okay. So, if we try to break down your portfolio, I don't know how in in depth you want to go here, but you know, six 100% portfolio, 40% in cash, that leaves 60%. What of the 60% is stocks and what is crypto?

>> And what is maybe we can bucket it as there's Bitcoin then all other crypto assets? >> Yeah. >> Um and then and then stocks. >> Um between stocks and Bitcoin is probably 50/50. Like I still >> still have um some Bitcoin, a lot of Bitcoin, but uh this is not the ideal portfolio I want to have because if I sell Bitcoin, I I would have to pay a lot of taxes. Um, but crypto X Bitcoin is very little. It's probably less than 1%.

>> Less than 1% of your portfolio is in crypto tokens. >> Yeah. >> Wow. What was it like a year ago or at like at the highs? >> Uh, at the highs it was like maybe Bitcoin plus like everything in crypto was probably 80%. >> Wow. What stock? >> But that's just being a financially irresponsible like that's just >> Yeah. Yeah, I know. I know. I know. Yeah. What uh what stocks are you in >> uh right now? Still mainly the the biggest one is still Google. Um I have uh Tencent. It's it's a really good company. No one talks about this stuff. Like Tensen is a boring boring old Chinese company, but it's it's a really really good company.

>> You like Tens more than Alibaba? >> Way more right now. Yeah, >> I think Alibaba is ahead in AI, but um their their retailer business is is uh is very competitive right now. >> Yeah. >> Um I like Amazon right now just because the I feel like the the the valuation isn't super attractive, but I think the sentiment was pretty bad last year because all the Macs haven't went up a lot except for Amazon. So I have some Amazon and I like the robotic story. Um yeah, by the way, all these things are not for for this year. Like all these things are tenure hold.

>> Yeah. Yeah. Amazon, I think, is leading on a lot of the robotic stuff. They'll be the first big company with more robotics employees than human employees. >> Yeah. Their uh human headcount over the last five years was flat and robot uh headcount has been growing like 20 30%. >> Their human headcount was flat. That's nuts. >> That's nuts. that that's how they're they were able to increase their margin a lot over the last few years even though their revenue didn't grow. >> What about the um the GLP? Like what about in healthcare like an Eli Liy or someone like that?

>> Um I still hold a bit of Eli Liy. Uh I just I just don't understand like Eli Liy is a trade for me. It's not a long-term hold because I don't understand it enough. >> I don't know what's going to happen in 10 years. I I know that in 10 years I'll probably still use Amazon, but in 10 years the the thing with um pharma is they have too many competitors. Yes, they have a big patent, but you have all these like gray market Chinese peptide, you know, very cheap and very effective >> peptide the peptides are hot right now. >> They're they're very hot and they're directly competitive with Eli Lely.

>> Yeah. >> Um >> it was it you should listen to uh there's a Cheeky Pint episode. I don't know if you've listened to that podcast, but it's uh uh John Collison, one of the founders of Stripe, one of the Collison brothers, hosts a podcast with the CEO of Eli Liy, and they end up talking about the Chinese knockoff since Yeah, it's interesting. >> Um all right, two other books. >> I think I think one of the biggest um over uh overlooked areas in in the markets right now is in AI enabled biotech. I think everyone is thinking about robots, drones, like AI chatbots, all that stuff. But I think one of the biggest areas where AI can make a huge impact is is bio.

>> Yeah. >> And that's what Deep Mind is working on and and so on so forth. I just don't have a good thesis where >> I was I I agree. Theoretically I agree. I just have no clue how to Yeah. I have no clue how to do it. Um okay, two headtoheads I'd be curious to get your take on. One is in the car space and one is in like the fintech space. Um >> within cars, Tesla or Rivian hold either of those? >> No. Too expensive. Tesla is too expensive. riving. I just don't know enough. >> Um Okay. >> But I love my Cyber Truck. >> You have a Cyber Truck?

>> Yeah. It's It's what by far one of the It's It's the most important investment I made for myself because I hate driving >> in the last five years. >> It's too big. It's too clunky. Why didn't you just get another Tesla? >> Um when I bought the Cyber Truck, I think it was the only one with the hardware for HW4. So, that's the thing that enables the the best best-in-class [snorts] self-driving. So but but now there there might be more models available. >> Yeah. Um okay, Robin Hood or Coinbase. >> Um >> or neither >> between the three. Robin Hood and Met.

>> No, Robin Hood or Coinbase. >> If I I think they're both going to do well, but purely from a valuation point of view, Coinbase is is more attractive. But neither is super attractive. >> Yeah. Do you own either of them? >> I own Coinbase. Yeah. >> Robin Hood is too expensive right now. >> Yeah. I just um I'd been in the Robin Hood trade for a while and I just sold some. >> Yeah. >> So, um what how do you I saw your tweet about like you you finally realized what Coinbase's endgame is.

>> Yeah. >> Maybe tell me about this. >> Um so I I I uh I tested the Coinbase One product when they launched it. Um it's it's like a membership uh product. you have to pay like I don't know 200 bucks or per month or I don't I forgot the the fees but you get um a MX card and some other benefits but the main benefit for me that that I enjoyed is the MX card that you can earn um 4% in in Bitcoin on every purchase. By the way, I think this is this feature is uniquely enabled by crypto because with stocks you can't do uh you know tiny amount of of a of a stock, right? you can't you can't do fractional shares of a stock. Uh but or maybe it's hard to do but with Bitcoin

it's very easy to do. I really enjoy this feature. So I I I spend a lot of uh you know I use my MX card for a pretty good chunk of my purchases. >> And then I realized oh by the way so the MX card in order to get the full benefit you have to deposit 200K or something in in Coinbase. I haven't used Coinbase for years but but that feature just got me back into into Coinbase. So then I realized, oh actually Coinbase wants to become a bank. They want to hold the money for you and offer you all sorts of financial products. And that and this this was before the their their big announcement last month where they expanded into stocks and and >> the everything app prediction market.

>> Yeah. Yeah. >> Do you think that do you think do you think someone builds a predict like do you think someone builds the everything app in in the in the west? uh everything like a messaging is it I think everything financial app is is is happening is happening with Robin Hood but everything like tensen witch head uh I'm not sure I don't have the strong thesis >> yeah um the last the one I the thing I want to end on is a bit of a just a personal interest in this is you've been on a health journey for the last couple of years I saw you just hit a V2 max PR >> um how is it like what have you what have you found to be the the most where have you gotten the most outsized

returns on the health front? >> Uh it's the big three. It's it's diet, sleep, and exercise. I I was really into the micro optimizations in 2021 with all these supplements and you know sauna and all that stuff. But then like after four five years of personal experience and digging into the research and watching a bunch of podcasts and stuff, >> nothing is even close to just getting eight hours sleep, eating a relatively high healthy diet and then exercise like for >> Yeah. What do you do for What do you do for diet and what do you do for exercise?

>> I don't even fully optimize anymore. I think it's it's too stressful. For diet, I you know, I just I mostly eat healthy. I I just mostly eat >> like the filer meme. It's like the guy in the middle is like doing all the food prep, doing all the like taking like 17 supplements in the morning. It's like eat healthy, eat healthy. >> What I realized is that if I try to really optimize for everything like like Brian Johnson style, um I just get really stressful and the cortisol itself is not conducive to longevity or yeah, >> I tend to agree with that.

You should look into Hy Rocks. I bet there's a Hy Rocks in uh where you live. >> Yeah, >> you should do it. Um Chad, this is awesome, man. Congrats on everything. Um any like anything to plug for alliance right now? Do you guys have a new are applications open? >> Um applications is always open and we try to make a decision within a week. So, anyone is avail to to apply anytime and they should hear back from us very quickly. >> Nice. >> Great. Well, ciao. Awesome, man. Thanks for coming on. Good seeing you. >> Yep. Take care.