Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick
Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from
quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets
right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken
away, including interviews with some of the most interesting
people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast,
visit on finance.org. A few days ago, someone added me
on Twitter with this headline from the FT about how
Masayoshi's son compared himself to both Jesus Christ and The
Beatles. Now, I don't know why anyone
would send me an article like this, as this is neither a
theology channel nor is it an entomology channel.
I've no way of judging the accuracy of either of these
claims. I'm going to guess that they're
true, as there's no reason that Masayoshi's son would lie about
something like like this. He possibly is a lot like Jesus
Christ, but maybe instead of making the comparison himself,
he should just grow a beard, get some sandals, dress all in
white, and then let other people bring it up.
That's what I would do in such a situation.
His name is Son, so who knows. Definitely not me.
I read the article anyway, which I'm fairly sure was meant for
some other Patrick Boyle. I googled and there are a few
priests and at least one entomologist with the same name
as me. It seems that Sun said that
Jesus and The Beatles, who I have since learned were a band.
It's not the kind of music that I cover here, but he said that
Jesus was also misunderstood and criticized and went on to say
that The Beatles weren't initially popular either.
Now, like I said, I'm not a theologist, nor am I Rick Biato.
It's not for me to decide if The Beatles were initially popular.
I hadn't even heard of them till a few minutes ago when I googled
them. So I'm sure that Sun is right.
They're probably an underground band, never much appreciated in
their time, much like SoftBank. Sun did tell the FT that the
SoftBank Vision Fund would tackle the biggest challenges
and risks facing humanity today, which strikes me as being
extremely noble. I think that Jesus would
probably do the exact same thing if he was running a large
venture capital fund. And that really is the great
thing about venture capital and tech Bros in general.
There are other people out there who make fun of them, but
without them who would be looking out for humanity.
The kind of people who do make fun of tech Bros often forget
the historical context around some of the big innovations that
were backed by VC firms like SoftBank.
Naysayers will say, for example, that shared office spaces have
been around forever. But many people my age will
remember that pre 2010, the biggest challenge and risk
facing humanity was the lack of IKEA furniture and free beer
available in the shared office spaces.
When Adam Newman and his firm Wework arrived on the scene
dressed all in white and barefoot, Masayoshi saw the
light and funded this remarkable tech startup.
I think there was also an app, but that might not have worked.
Sure, sometimes technology looks like 2 bicycle mechanics
building the first airplane in a shed, but other times it looks
like a beer tap in the office and an app on your phone so that
you can complain when the beer is run out.
The path of innovation is often not clear.
Sometimes we can come up with ideas only to learn that someone
else came up with that idea already, like when David Bowie
accidentally ripped off the main riff of Ice Ice Baby.
Here's a clip of David explaining.
Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding,
Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding. That's the way there's ghosts.
Ours goes. Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding, Ding,
Ding, Ding, Ding.
That little bitty change, it's not the same.
Silicon Valley tech Bros have occasionally, not unlike David
Bowie, come up with ideas that already existed.
They're well known for repeatedly inventing the bath.
Famous examples are Lyft, who announced a service they called
Lyft Shuttle, which would be cheaper than a taxi and run on
pre designated routes, picking passengers up and dropping them
off at regular stops like a bath.
Uber even launched the service, which allowed riders to save
money by waiting for their Uber at a prearranged stop, share it
with strangers, and get dropped off at any point along a
predetermined route. That was a bus, too.
Elon Musk announced his idea for a bus on Twitter.
He called it the Boring Company Urban Loop System, saying that
it would have thousands of small stations the size of a single
parking space that would take you very close to your
destination and blend seamlessly into the fabric of a city,
rather than a small number of big stations like a subway.
Later the Boring Company went on to build the Las Vegas Loop,
which was not really as good as a bus and possibly the most
disappointing transportation innovation in history, where it
was just Tesla's being driven slowly in an unnecessarily small
tunnel. I'm trying to raise VC funding
right now to add one of those miniature trains to the loop,
which would massively increase its capacity and make it more
fun. The fact that it runs on rails
would additionally make it a full self driving supervised
system, which would be amazing. So let's look at the things tech
Bros invented that already existed and some of the things
that they invented that should never have existed.
It seems that the worst Silicon Valley inventions are the ones
that are pitched as being tech products when there's no real
technology involved, or if there is technology, it just wasn't
needed for some reason. A lot of these products are food
and beverage innovations. A good example of this type of
innovation is when tech Bros reinvented the water bottle with
the Hydrate Spark, which is pitched as has a connected water
bottle that tracks your water intake and glows to make sure
that you don't forget to drink. There is of course an Internet
connected smartphone app so that your hydration records can be
stored in the cloud. In the top review on Amazon, a
guy named Daniel says that he loves how it integrates with his
phone so it recalculates his daily water needs.
He says that he honestly can't think of anything wrong with it,
and as a testament to its durable ability, he writes that
it survived Burning Man. Of course it did.
I imagine that it's a disaster if you have one of these bottles
and you accidentally drink out of a different container, as
then how will the bottle know how hydrated you are?
Maybe that's what the app is for.
You can hopefully let your bottle know that you cheated on
it and maybe then it'll glow in a different colour to indicate
it's disappointment. I should really design these
products. It seems like about 15 or 20
years ago that otherwise healthy people started saying that they
felt hypoglycemic and dehydrated instead of hungry and thirsty.
Now we have people charging bottles overnight and connecting
them to their phones so that they no longer have to rely on
their hypothalamus for basic physiological functions.
I suppose I'll put an Amazon affiliate link to the Hydrate
Spark bottle in the video description, but I will be
disappointed if you actually buy it.
Soylent is another tech bro invention taught up by a
software engineer named Rob Reinhart who says that he used
to view food as a time consuming hassle.
He says that he resolved to treat it as an engineering
problem and came up with a meal replacement shake.
That's how Rob invented Slim Fast.
But for tech Bros, I'm not sure how wise it is to have someone
who views food as a time consuming hassle preparing meals
for you. But this is the high tech world
that we live in today. So stop your complaining and
drink your lunch, Rob wrote on his blog a few years ago about
getting rid of his kitchen. This home manufacturing center
has been by far the most liberating to eliminate, he
said. A New York Times review
describes Soylent as a punishingly boring, joyless
product that causes flatulence as a side effect.
So yeah, why not drink that at the office?
It's inventor Rob responded saying that this side effect was
likely to be temporary and was just the result of adjusting to
the government recommended amount of dietary fiber.
Once again, Amazon link in the description.
One of the most amusing non tech tech products in recent years
was the Juice Arrow, which Bloomberg described a few years
ago as an unlikely investment for the top technology
investors. Nonetheless, Juicero raised $120
million in venture capital funding from firms like Google
Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. A reporter at Vox wrote that
Juicero's business plan reads like a pitch perfect parody of
contemporary startup culture. It's inventor compared himself
to Steve Jobs and explained that the Juicero squeezed Juice with
the force of two Teslas. I'm told that Teslas have now
become the standards of weights and measures used in Silicon
Valley. Each juice arrow pouch I believe
contains 1 Pico Tesla of chopped fruit.
One investor told the press that they were drawn to the idea of
an Internet connected device that transforms single serving
packets of chopped fruits and vegetables into a refreshing and
healthy beverage. Another said that Juicero was
building a platform for a new model of food delivery and that
the subscription based model is reminiscent of other food
delivery startups like Blue Apron and Nature Box.
A Bloomberg reporter noted that squeezing the fruit bags by hand
yielded nearly the same amount of juice as the $400.00 device
and was often quicker. Juicero responded that most
people would prefer to use the machine because the process is
more consistent and less messy. It turns out that people didn't
want to use the machine and the company went bankrupt.
The founder of Juicero was last seen promoting $40 jugs of what
he calls raw water, which I believe is text speak for dirty
water that he found. He told a reporter that he will
sometimes trespass across private property under the cover
of night to collect this raw water.
He has recently written a book on the mind blowing nutritional
benefit of Sprouts. LinkedIn the description Now
Teforia was another technology innovation from Mountain View,
whose pitch was that their device elegantly blends the rich
tradition of tea with technology to create the perfect modern tea
experience. So yeah, it was a $1500 teapot
with an app. This Internet connected tea
infuser used machine learning and advanced algorithms to
produce the perfect cup of tea. Sadly, Teforia is gone.
You can't buy one anymore. But in a five star review a
fellow named Robert writes, I love this machine.
He goes on to say you don't need the pods because you have the
app. You can throw any loose leaf tea
in it. That sounds great.
Wait till Robert learns that he doesn't need the app either.
It'll blow his mind, another fellow said.
It's always guys, isn't it? Wrote a review having bought a
tephoria, hopefully at a discount, after the company had
gone bankrupt. He only gave it a four-star
review. He seems to love the teapot, but
then realized that no one was updating the app now that the
company was bankrupt, and by the time he wrote his review, this
seemed to be driving him over the edge.
He writes in all caps. You can't use the Tephoria if
you don't have a smartphone. He goes on to say, yes, you can
use the little cups without your phone.
Yes, that. That's the great thing about
cups. But he then says the true
usability comes from the Teforia app.
He says on the surface, it's the best tea maker money can buy.
And he says it's changing the way I drink and make tea for the
better. But underneath is a ticking time
bomb of uncertainty. If the app isn't updated, I will
eventually lose the ability to use my Teforia.
Yeah, that that sounds awfully stressful to me.
We'll be back after a quick break.
It's like our brains have a mind of their own when it comes to
money, right? Yeah.
It's crazy. We're diving into that today,
how our brains really deal with money.
We're going deep on this one, looking at money and how we
decide behavioral research. This stuff is like eye opening.
Seriously, it turns out our brains aren't always rational,
especially with money. No kidding.
So what's the deal with that? Why are we so bad at making, you
know, sensible financial decisions?
Well, our brains are kind of lazy in a way.
They love taking shortcuts. Look, tech Bros are obviously
not big fans of food, and that's OK.
As long as they're getting their government recommended amount of
dietary fibre and not sitting next to me, I'm fine with that.
One of the giveaways that food isn't a big deal for tech
workers came a few years ago when Myra, the chief people
officer at the food delivery app at Just Eat, posted on LinkedIn
that Just Eat had invented the Power Hour.
What's that, you might wonder? Well, it was an hour during the
work day when you could take a break from meetings, go for a
walk, even have lunch. She finished up her post by
saying another way. We continue to brilliantly
enhance the lives of just eaters everywhere.
Yes, that's right, Mira had invented the lunch break.
The LinkedIn post was quickly deleted after people cruelly
made fun of it, and Justine told the press that the general
public had humorously brought to their attention that they didn't
do a very good job of explaining their intention to remind their
staff to prioritize their own well-being and get away from
their laptops. Another great invention was the
Pause pod, which was pitched as a private pop up space free from
stressful moments, designed by a team of inventors and
advertisers based in Sweden. Here's a picture.
That's a tent. A tent in your office?
The inventor of the PAWS pod told the press that in the
initial crowdfunding round, the team had set out to raise
$10,000, but instead brought in over $100,000 with pre-orders.
That amount grew to about $140,000 with nearly 2000 PAWS
pods ordered, he said. You'll get it if you're familiar
with feeling stressed and doing meditation or mindfulness.
After people made fun of it on Twitter, the founder said that
he had never claimed that it wasn't a tent, which is true.
I'll put a link to a tent in the video description if you need
one of those. There's some really great gift
ideas in this video. In truth, tech Bros in recent
years have invented roommates, calling it the trend of Co
living where people live together, each having their own
spaces but with some shared rooms.
With Bodega, they invented the vending machine, raising two and
a half $1,000,000 in funding for what was described as smart
store kiosks powered by AI that you can operate using your
phone. You don't even have to work in
tech to come up with these ideas.
Back in 2020, a Canadian reporter pitched her start up
idea on Twitter. Private backyards for people who
don't have private backyards. She said I would pay $5 to rent
a fenced area for an hour so I could safely play fetch with my
dog while doing an outdoor summer workout.
If it works for bikes and office space, why not land?
Lauren made the mistake of pitching this idea to the public
on Twitter rather than to venture capitalists.
And instead of raising money, people just made fun of her for
inventing public parks. With the current excitement
around AI, we're seeing a bunch of AI products that are just
worst versions of things that we already have.
Amazon has become inundated with AI generated books.
Apparently it's become such an issue that to combat it, they've
started restricting authors to self-publishing a maximum of
three books per day on their platform, which I imagine is
unfairly holding back some of the more productive authors out
there. There are all sorts of start-ups
pitching AI therapy where a chat bot helps you with your
problems. It's hard to think of anything
more depressing than that. Spotify announced earlier this
year an AIDJ feature which will pick music for you to listen to.
Isn't that what Spotify already does?
Microsoft has been forcing AI features into all of their
products whether users want them or not.
I guess they have to justify how much they've been spending.
Oral-B has an AI powered toothbrush, which of course
connects to an app on your phone.
They say that they've trained the toothbrush on thousands of
different users to assess the different brushing styles.
It seems you brush your teeth while looking at your phone and
the app tells you if you missed the spot.
It doesn't actually learn from your toothbrushing look.
I don't really know what it does, but link in the
description. It's hard to know if we've
reached peak AI yet, but I saw in the news this morning that
you can now buy a purse that's made out of an NVIDIA GPU, so
maybe that's it. I've already made a whole video
about Adam Newman who picked short term office rentals as
being technology, and I've talked about Peloton who sold
expensive exercise bikes with a $40 a month subscription fee.
The bike wouldn't work if your Internet went down.
There were also tech pro companies like Washboard, which
charge subscribers $27.00 to send them $20 worth of laundry
quarters every month. Sometimes Silicon Valley doesn't
just invent physical products that already exist, they invent
websites that already exist. The kind of websites that they
should probably have heard of. A few years ago, the founder of
the dating app Bumble launched Bumble Biz, bringing the
company's women first angle to professional networking.
She invented a strange version of LinkedIn where you couldn't
just search for someone in your industry, you instead had to
swipe left or right on whoever else was also logged into the
app. I don't believe it worked out.
Tech Bros reinvented the space race, too.
Here's a clip of Elon Musk announcing his plan to land the
man on the moon. I believe that this nation
should commit itself to achieving the goal before this
decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him
safely to the Earth. The tech bro space race really
heated up during the pandemic as all sorts of space businesses
were taken public as SPAC's. While listing as a SPAC provided
a shortcut to the stock market without the rigors of the IPO
process, these newly listed companies were still subject to
the regulatory and public scrutiny that comes with being a
publicly traded firm. It's only so surprising that a
large number of space Spacs have since been delisted after stock
price declines and missed regulatory filings over the last
few years. According to Space News, nearly
half of the space SPAC companies have announced significant
workforce reductions. Many have since been sold off on
the cheap, taken private, given up on space, or even shut down.
There've been numerous failed launches, and the one bright
spot on the horizon is that Elon Musk announced over the weekend
that SpaceX will start flying Mars missions in just two years
time. So that will definitely happen.
Tech Bros have been busy in recent years disrupting the
world of finance, too. They've reinvented money and
payments with crypto currencies and reinvented markets and
financial transactions with Web Three.
They even reinvented the receipt with NFTS.
Some of this reinvention made certain payments faster and
cheaper by ignoring the law and industry best practices.
Things like anti money laundering regulations and know
your customer rules can add significant costs for financial
firms. Web 3 was supposed to somehow
make transactions free or extremely cheap while making a
large sums of money for the people who invested in it, and
it's hard to understand how these goals could be achieved
simultaneously. The conflict at the heart of
fintech is the tech companies focus on product and user
experience with the aim of reducing friction to ensure
seamlessness. This focus often takes
precedence over compliance matters.
According to the ABA, 93% of fintech struggle to meet
compliance requirements, and over 60% of fintech companies
paid at least $250,000 in compliance fines in 2023 alone,
stemming from a lack of transaction monitoring,
insufficient customer due diligence, and a failure to
report suspicious actions. Traditional finance firms often
manage to have compliance problems, but without a focus on
user experience, which is also a thing that you can do.
More and more, we're reading news about how people who used
to love their smartphones now hate them.
Some argue that the reason behind this is that in recent
years, apps have been optimized not to make a user's life
easier, but instead to maximize the time spent on the app and to
maximize user engagement. Why does a water bottle, a
teapot, or a toothbrush come with an app?
No one was asking for this. Social media no longer shows a
user the photos or tweets that their friends uploaded, instead
showing them content created by total strangers that might anger
them enough to respond or to scroll through the responses
looking for comments that agree with their point of view.
This is how you keep an audience scrolling.
We're seeing a strong push to ban smartphones at schools
because of how they affect young children.
Studies show a relationship between high smartphone use and
mental health disorders, even amongst adults.
To be clear, I'm not anti tech, I love technology.
Without it, my career in finance would not have been possible and
I wouldn't be able to make videos like these, which I love
making. You'll probably have noticed
that none of the products I've made fun of are really all that
high tech. They're mostly non tech products
pitched as if they were tech to achieve a higher valuation.
It's no surprise that people like Elizabeth Holmes and Sam
Bankman Freed pitched their non tech products to tech investors.
A specialist in their industries would have and did spot the
flaws in what was being sold. And by no means saying that all
new technology is junk. The tech industry has hugely
improved the way that we live. But it's important not to be
tricked by marketing. Thanks for tuning in again to
this week's podcast. The podcast is listener funded
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there's a link in the show notes.
Have a great week and talk to you again soon.
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