Breakeven Brothers

All right, we are live with episode 13, the Breakeven Brothers podcast, the first of the new year. Happy New Year's. Bradley, how's it going? Happy New Year's. Pretty good. January 1st, feeling pretty good. Lots of stuff on my to-do list to wrap up for 2024 that I told myself I would get to, but I think this year is kind of a productivity year for me and a little bit of a reset today. So, excited to record the pod today. I think we got a lot to talk about and a little fun surprise for people. Yeah, I took my Christmas lights down today. I feel like that's what New Year's is now for us, is the day, have the day off. Got a bunch of Christmas stuff still laying around, so packed up all the Christmas tree ornaments and got the Christmas lights down outside the house. Are you a fake tree family? We are a fake tree family, yeah. It pains me, it pains me to admit it, 'cause I don't like it, but my wife's couple of the family members are from the firefighter, or were firefighters, and it's kind of just, they've always been like, I wouldn't get a real one. And actually just today, I don't know, this is completely off topic, but just today there was someone down the street from a house fire. Everyone's okay, you know, just some property damage, but something caught on fire, I guess. So yeah, the real trees scare me because they get so dry. And, you know, there's so much electronics on them now with like lights, and, you know, I don't know, it just freaks me out a little bit. So we grew up with a real tree. So that's why I had to ask is I also converted to a fake tree as an adult and I bring it out, I unfluff it and I'm like it looks decent but it's no real tree. Like you don't have the kind of mess the real tree, but all the smell the real tree is so good. So I do miss that. I haven't taken down my tree, but it doesn't have a nice ambiance, nice vibe. I've been playing, I think this is the first year I've been playing, if you go on YouTube, I don't know if you see it or maybe I just see it but there's like a fake fireplace. Recommended video it's like maybe an hour long. I thought who the hell watches this, what a stupid video to put on and I put it on just one time just to think, you know, I'll just put it on. And I really liked it. I had my tree on the left side of my TV in the living room and then like the fake fireplace ambiance from the YouTube video and I was like, this is really nice. So I was like, I want to take down my tree, but I also like having it up, but it is the new year, probably take it down in the next few days. But yeah, yeah. Did you do anything fun for New Year's Eve? Had dinner with friends, played some games, played some Taboo. That was a lot of fun. But this is the first year that I noticed people were like tired. Like leading into New Year's Eve, it was a lot of fun, but also a lot of yawns where I think before when I was younger, people wanted to go out more and do more things. And this is the first time people like, "Oh, 12:01, you know, time to go." And I felt that too. And I slept in today waking up January 1st today. And I wanted to get more done. So I was like, let's get the podcast out, I'm going to create some goals for 2025 because there's almost too much to do already. But writing that down makes me feel a little bit more on top of it. Yeah, I had some good times. How about you? Yeah, that's good. Yeah, me and the kids and my wife, we did a Wicked watch party for me because I was in the house. I hadn't seen it and they are Wicked fanatics, know all the songs. I do too now just because they're always on in the car on our Alexa. But, but yes, I did like a Wicked movie kind of night, did some fireworks. You know, I'm always like the safety dad, like I'm always like a helicopter, making sure they don't fall, like that's just that's just who I am. So when I was at Home Depot to get the fireworks, there was like three sets, there's like a small tiny ones, which like, you know, sparklers basically, there's like this medium, like pack or whatever middle pack. And then there's like a super large pack that had like the bazooka looking. So now it's like, I don't want the large ones. Like that freaks me out. I've seen too many videos of people's hands getting blown off with fireworks. So I got like the medium pack, I guess. But even then, it was still pretty, like, it was pretty, pretty light. I was like, "Oh, we definitely could've gone up a level." But like, you don't know until you light them. You know, I'm not like a firework head. So I don't know like what the, you know, lava dome firework is like, but they come in, they're all just doing the same thing. But the kids liked it. So that was fun. And then, you know, it's funny. We, the kids, when he has, if you ever watch this when you're later and older and understand better. Apologies. But, you know, we don't want to stay up till midnight. Like, it's just, personally, I don't want to stay up till midnight. And definitely don't want my kids to stay up till midnight. And so we do, we just put on like the East Coast New Year's or whatever. Yeah, which is just, honestly, it's just a YouTube video. We've played it at like, eight o'clock or 8:30. And we're like, "Oh, guys, look, it's, you know, it's New Year's." So you celebrate at 9pm. Well, eight, eight o'clock. Okay. Even though, yeah, yeah, even though 9 p.m. in Arizona time would be, no, no, it would actually be 10 p.m. Arizona time would actually be at midnight. So did you play last year's video then? Or how did that work out? It's just some YouTube video, like a ball drop. It's like a fake one. Yeah, yeah, just a fake one, yeah. (laughs) Sorry, kids, you know, they don't know right now. But yeah, it was funny though, 'cause my daughter, my older daughter, she's seven, and later in the night, she's like, "Oh, let me go see what time it is." And it was like, I don't know, 9:15. They were in bed, just staying up when they should've been sleeping. But she was like, "I'm gonna go see what time it is." It was like 9:15. She's like, "Hey, it's not midnight." And we're like, "Oh, oh." I can't remember what we said, but we brushed it off or whatever, but we almost got caught. But yeah, it was fun. It was a good time. And we did a little party just with apples, can't think of the word, Martinelli's sparkling apple cider. Apple cider or whatever. Yeah, those are good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had that last night too, and those are really good. I've had the apple cider that's not sparkling, like almost just like apple juice, and that's pretty good, but the sparkling one was like really crisp and refreshing. I liked it a lot. Yeah. Yeah, one quick side note, and then we'll move off of New Year's, but just because you brought up apple cider, I remember one time I was in a hotel in like outskirts of Salt Lake City for work, and it was cold, and you know, you and I are both from Southern California, like I don't deal with cold usually, but it was really cold, and I was freezing, and I went into this hotel, and it was just like, I don't know, Homewood Suites or like, you know, Courtyard Marriott. It wasn't anything fancy, but they had like a hot apple cider, like, you know, stand there, like inside the hotel lobby, and it was so good. And it was like warm. It was, it hit the right spot. I was like, "Damn, this is really good." But... That sounds good. I feel like the fresh apple ciders are sweet, but like naturally sweet, where the kind of processed ones are like fake sweet. Once you get the right sweetness taste, it's so good. Yeah. One other, I guess, over the break update is, went out and got a little garden set up going. So I got a little two flower beds, two 4x4 flower beds going. Or no, sorry, one's a flower bed and one's a vegetable garden. And planted some stuff in there. So hopefully we'll get some, get something growing. How much did you plant? What's on the agenda? So for the flowers, we did petunias, violas, and then sweet alyssum, and then pansies. Okay, I've heard of all those. All dog friendly, that was like, my wife's like one thing was like, you know, of course makes sense 'cause we have a, you know, we have a dog and a lot of times she's just out in the backyard hanging out. So I had it all be dog friendly. So those are all dog friendly, like non-toxic. As in the dog can eat it? I mean, she shouldn't eat it, but like if she eats it, it's not gonna like kill her basically. 'Cause she would. And so like lavender, a couple other ones I wanted to get originally like lavender and it was like, no, can't do that. But then the other kind of vegetable bed that we have is we have tomatoes, no, peas, I think, or like snap peas, cilantro, lettuce, chamomile, and broccoli trying to grow. So that's all my kids. I was like, I have no idea if this is gonna work. I am not a farmer at all. Like I've never grown anything. So but it's kind of a fun thing that we're going to try and do and just see how it turns out. So my kids are into it. Yeah, at the end of the day, my goal in kind of planning, and getting those vegetables out there, is that one day I want to make my own, 100% from scratch, salsa. So I'm like tomatoes, onions, garlic, and cilantro, like that's where the cilantro came in. So I want to try and make my own salsa one day. That's like, gonna be like-- That sounds really good. The goal, so we'll see. We'll see how it turns out. I'll keep the podcast system updated. I think I've had a few friends that get into like, gardening and doing all that. I don't know how many people follow through with that. I think that's a tough one to follow through and yeah, keep us posted. I think not that you won't follow through, but you know, it's a, it's a, it's a tough one. I respect the hustle. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. Cool. So let's kind of transition into some of the topics we had to kind of talk about today. The first one I wanted to kind of touch on real quickly was because we talked about at the end, the last episode that we released was the beneficial ownership information updates to BOI that I had mentioned previously. So we talked about last episode because there has been some new news and honestly, there's so much whiplash in the accounting community, but wanted to kind of talk about it on the podcast and kind of say where things are today as of January 1st, as of this recording. So I think last time I recorded it, the update was that there was like some court in Texas that said, we no longer have to do this. They put an injunction on it. And in the meantime, between that podcast episode and today, that had gotten reversed. And so it was like, "Oh no, you still need to file." And then the most recent thing I saw, again, don't take this as like a hundred percent, like consult with them, with your CPA, if you're really confused. But the last, most recent thing I saw was FinCEN who's like the, the body that is like governing all this. I think they were saying like, don't file right now because there's so much uncertainty. Like if you want to, you can like, don't feel like you need to, um, because there's still a lot up in the air. So bring it up because, well, I'm bringing it up too, because. You know, it's one of those things where I think people, especially like when you're running a business, the last thing that you want is like a lot of compliance news. You know, like there's, there's good excitement from like running a business and dealing with customers and like, and trying to increase revenue. That's all good excitement. But then there's, you know, I want to say excitement, but then there's news with like compliance and regulatory matters that like really has no impact on your business, but like can take up time and take up, you know, mental bandwidth. So those aren't usually the things that people enjoy with running a business. Um, and so it's a shame that it's been such whiplash and people don't know what to do if they still even need to do it. But you know, that's just how things go sometimes. So yeah, as of now, 1.1, you still aren't supposed to, or don't need to file supposedly. It's the latest I've heard, but you know, I think at some point that's going to probably change in the next two weeks too. So you just got to kind of keep posted on it. And if you did it, definitely pat yourself on the back. Cause as someone who has an LLC in California, I did it myself. only took about 10 minutes, although mine is a little bit simpler maybe than most. I felt pretty empowered to do it by myself. A lot of the accounting taxes, running a business, not my favorite thing to do. Um, but yeah, it wasn't too bad. I read the doc, went to the online portal. The tool was okay. Uh, you know, did the job, but then after I submitted it, I didn't look back. And I use, uh, a company to like manage my LC. I forgot the name of it, but they had reached out multiple emails saying, "Hey, follow your BLI, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." And you know, of course, as a business owner, I don't want to do it till the very, very last second. And I did it. And I'm glad it wasn't that hard. So for people who are dragging their feet, although I guess officially don't have to do it, I've also seen the back and forth. I just did it because I didn't want to have to pay a fine. I think the original fine was hundreds of dollars per day, but I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. But, yeah, definitely do your own research and figure out if that's right for you. But if you are interested in doing it, I can tell you firsthand, if you have a simple business, I think you just have to write down contact information for beneficiaries of your business. That's not super complicated. Yeah, it's a little weird to me. And, you know, because usually when you file an LLC, certainly like in Arizona, you have to put your information down. Like you have to put, you know, "This is my name. I'm the person, I'm the member of this LLC." I think there's ways where if you really wanted to be super anonymous, you could use like a camera with a service is called, but you can use a service that basically like anonymizes like your LLC even to even further. But I think at the end of the day, the state, you know, under most circumstances, like just knows who you are. And like, it's fine. I don't know why, you know, I'm sure there's some reason they gave. But again, I don't understand the reason why we have to fill out another, another form saying who we are and who runs this business when like the states already have it. I'll get off my soapbox and move on to more exciting topics. But yeah, just classic overstepping, in my opinion. Yeah, I was just looking it up while you're talking. Zen Business, if you're trying to create LLC, at least in California, they did a good job. They're my registered agents. So they're kind of the official address of communication and handle all that. So they're the ones that are reaching out to me automated, in an automated fashion through email saying, "Hey, you know, file your BOI." And I don't think they ever followed up saying it's not actually required. Just to be safe, if you will. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I think that about it and do it, but yeah, they're pretty nice. It's kind of taking that hassle out of running a business and some of the compliance and legal side. Yeah, for sure. Cool, and then some things I wanna talk about, just to kick off the pod. I've been on a kind of a productivity journey. So to describe what that looks like is both in my day job and outside of my day job, outside of my nine to five. I think productivity for me as an engineer is really high up there. I wanna do things, I wanna do things great, and to do things fast. And with the advancement of AI, I think now is the time to kind of challenge the status quo in terms of what tools you're using and trying out new things. So one thing that's popped up frequently on my radar and specifically in my Twitter feed or x feed has been voice to text. So as someone who's on the computer a lot, I would deem myself as a pretty fast typer. But you have to provide a lot of context. What that means is maybe you have a rash on your skin. To understand what that might look like, you have to tell the whole story. So you can imagine going to the doctor, they sit you down, they take all your vitals. This time, you have to tell the full story, you know, when the rash appeared, what you were doing with the rash, what you tried, you know, what you ate, what you touched, whatever. That's all one story. That doctor then processes all all that information. And for me, as someone who's leaning more and more and more on, you know, AI tools, AI chat, it becomes a bit of a burden to write all this down. On top of that, I use AI to code my web app for my expenses. And lots of times it needs a lot of context in terms of how the project is scaffolded, different coding guidelines, how my database is structured. And so lots of times I type these things out, but I go save them in Apple Notes. At the end of the day, I want to be able to speak such that I can describe the context without having to type it all out. Because I can talk much faster than I can type, which might seem weird. But then again, you have the restrictions of doing this in a private spot. I'm not going to go to a coffee shop, pull out like a voice to text program, just start speaking into my computer, you know, in front of everybody, potentially revealing like private information about my life or my business. So I think it doesn't work for everything. But it's been on my list. I think it's something that is really going to take off in 2025. And the one thing that I've downloaded is Whisper Flow. Whisper Flow is kind of the state of the art voice to text Mac OS app. So what it does is it replaces the keyboard shortcut on your function key. And so a lot of people might not know where your function key exists on your Mac keyboard, but it's in the bottom left corner. So it's right next to control option and command, you essentially remove that mapping, which originally I think showed the emoji or like languages keyboard on Mac, which is an extremely useless one for lots of people. So you remove that and you integrate with Whisper. And what that does is any text field that you're in, you can hold down this button, which is function. It'll then enact your kind of voice voice recording, you can speak into it whenever you want. And it'll transcribe it locally on your computer, then paste it into that text field. So what you can do is open up like chat, GPT, Claude, whatever, and just speak to it. And you can provide your own custom dictionary. So I say, slip my expenses a lot, you can type out that wording or custom dictionary in the settings of the app. And once it transcribes it, it'll run through a custom dictionary and replace these words that might be, you know, what you're looking for, and then give you like a fully transcribed text. So it's super awesome. If you're trying to increase your productivity, I would 100% recommend something like this. I don't know if there's any good Windows or if they have a Windows app at all, but it's been fun. I've really enjoyed it. I guess in your experience, how's that different than like, you know, I'm not that advanced of like a Siri user. But like, you know, a lot of times like you can hit the little microphone button on your, I guess I'm thinking about mobile. So maybe that's the key difference. But, you know, if you hit the microphone button, you can talk to your phone and like it'll give you the text. Are you saying Whisper is like, just the desktop version of that? Like there's not like a good, I don't know, is there a good Siri on like the laptop or I guess why wouldn't you just use Siri? Siri's good, but it's not great. So Siri uses Apple's own understanding of language, but there's open source models that are really good at transcription and there's paid AI models that are really good at transcription. So OpenAI has like Whisper V3, I think, or maybe V2. Inside these like V2 or V3, there's like small, medium and large, which kind of encapsulate how fast or intelligent it needs to be. And for someone who speaks English, a lot of these models are based on English. So you already have like kind of a leg up in that category. In terms of like, if you're speaking English, you're kind of good to go. I think Siri does an okay job. But if you speak normally at a conversational pace, and you're not pronouncing your words to full like clarity, then Siri kind of falls apart. Like I can speak a normal sentence pretty fast, and it will not get it, it'll get maybe 80% or 70%. And that that it fills in in the middle makes zero sense where Whisper and all these, honestly, the open source models are great. Open source, closed source, paid source, whatever. They're all 10 times better than Siri. And so I just don't use it. Like there are times where I'm texting people that I'll press that mic icon on the iPhone, talk, but I have to use slow language, kind of edit things as I go. It's not very fluid. And so that's where there's a big opportunity. Just if Siri adopted some of these AI models, I think it would kind of be over for them. But Apple moved so slow on that. And I think it's a little bit more complicated than we think. So they're not really gonna roll out anything soon. So yeah, it's an option. Just like Apple intelligence is kind of rolling out. I think it's been very underwhelming to lots of people. I think Siri and Apple intelligence are probably due for an overhaul in 2025 or 2026. But yeah, right now it's not state of the art at all. Yeah, yeah, it's funny you said that because, and that's, that's good context to know, like just the fact that Siri is just lacking, like, that's the real challenge with. And like, same with the reason why Whisper is there. Yeah. But yeah, whenever I do use that microphone button, like with Siri, or if I'm like trying to text with it, I always end up just going through and deleting it anyways. Cause it never, never comes out like you want it to. You know, it's funny, you know, I was going to mention this later, um, but since we're kind of on the topic, one thing I've been using, it's similar to kind of the voice to text, you know, concept, but I've been using. you know, chat GPT, like voice chat feature, and I've been using it to like, practice my Spanish. So I think I mentioned last time, one of my goals is kind of just re, I don't say reacquaint myself, but like, just keep practicing Spanish and kind of getting back into it again. And, you know, I have like, all the regular apps, everyone has like Duolingo, and like, you know, all those other things. But one time I was like, well, let me just try and use the chat GPT, voice chat, and like speak to it in Spanish to kind of see how it does. And it was super impressive. I couldn't keep up with it. I kind of told it, I said, "Hey, I'm an intermediate Spanish speaker. Talk to me about going to the store for Christmas." So you'd have a little conversation. And it kept up with me as much as I could. I was definitely the one that was like, "Okay, I don't know how to respond to this anymore because I'm not that well versed in the language, but it sounded super, like super legit. You know, I'm not a native Spanish speaker. So I couldn't tell you if it was like, using the exact proper grammar or not. But like, it sounded really, really good. And it was very fast. Like it was just like natural. It was just like, "Oh, okay, cool. Yeah, you went to the store. Yeah, go grab this, whatever." And like, I would talk back and forth with it, like when I was walking my dog. And it was just like, like I was talking to somebody on the phone. It was it was pretty cool. So I wanted to kind of plug that that use case. I'll definitely keep doing that. I think I want to, you know, I was kind of experimenting with it. I was like, "Oh, talk to me about business and talk to me about this." So I think I want to kind of try and limit the context window, like the conversations and then kind of keep doing that. So, but yeah, it's nice little way to augment some of the language learning I'm trying to do. So I thought it was a good little, a good little use case and was pretty happy. Yeah, I don't know if you saw, but they have the, the Santa voice now. Were you talking with the Santa voice? No, I wasn't. No. Okay. Yeah. They released that in early December and It reminded me of my friend Spencer, shout out to Spencer if he's listening. He created kind of like an AI Santa web app. This is, I don't know, sometime ago, maybe a year ago, and then a bunch of apps recently in this kind of Christmas season of 2024 came out with like an AI Santa equivalent. I think now voice is becoming more mainstream so you could talk to Santa, you know, tell him what you wanted, whatever. It was kind of like a little gimmick to get people introduced into the voice feature. And I've also tried it. I I think it's good but not great. And I say that because the intelligence model that's used for the voice needs to be fast. So if I ask it a complex question, like, I'm trying to navigate a complicated business situation, this is my business, this is what I want to do, how does that work out? It, you know, gives you an answer, but it's not the full intelligence I think it uses for our, for our mini, for at least Open AI is chat GPT. Its capabilities is really ramped up. And if you're not using the latest and greatest, at least for someone who's able to use that, it almost doesn't feel that great. And so I almost want chat GPT with their O1 model, which is like their thinking model, where you ask a question. It'll try to figure out an answer, but ask itself many questions along the way internally, and then bring you the final answer. So they call it chain of thought. Essentially it's COT abbreviated online as what you've seen. If you're in the AI space on X or on Twitter, but that's their latest model, like 01 and 01 pro and if they had 01 for voice, it would work out great because it's their max intelligence offered, but it would take a lot longer. You'd say, "Hey, you know, this is my query." You'd sit there, wait 15, 20, 30 seconds, and then it would respond to you. And that doesn't feel great, but it feels kind of dumb and not intelligent, but truly I think I care mostly about the intelligence level I'll pay for high intelligence, but the voice one, it's convenient, but not my favorite mechanism. So that's how I kind of bridge the gap with I can talk to it with this voice to text tool. And then it spends time processing, I don't care how long it takes. If it takes 10 minutes, that's fine. I want the best answer. And then it responds to me. So I think it's nice for casual things like, "Oh, if I'm cooking, I can kind of talk to it." But for things I care about deeply, I don't use it that much for those. Yeah, I used it funny enough. I didn't think about this until we just started talking about it. But when I went to get all the garden set up, I use the voice feature with with chat GPT, because I just didn't feel like typing it all out. But I just said, if I have a four by four vegetable bed, that needs to be 18 inches deep, like how many bags of soil do I need if each bag is like 1.5, like cubic yards or cubic feet? And it was like, "Oh, you need like 26 bags," which was a whole, that was unexpected, so I had to load up my car with 26 bags of soil. It's really good at that. Like quick math or quick, like I did one for hanging a poster board for our wedding. We had a little poster and then we wanted to frame it. I was like, how do I even hang this? Like I just don't, I'm so lazy. Like Chatty Pouty becomes a lazy Google where I just describe it all. Like I have a poster board, it's this size, it's this way, you know, my wall is this big, like what do I do? You know, it's the lazy way out and it's the intelligence is really high now that it's-- Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. And speaking of that, a lot of people have been buying O1 Pro, so as I talked about O1, O1 Pro is kind of the continuation on O1 where they had O1 Mini for a while, which was a smaller version of their reasoning model, chain of thought model, then they came out with O1. And so O1 is tied under Open AI's $20 a month package. Pretty good. Then they came out with O1 Pro in December a few weeks ago. This one I think is $200 a month to get access to it. And it's also chain of thought. So it kind of thinks internally and it gives you the best answer. And it's really, really good for a few specific categories, but you can ask it a question. It'll take 10 minutes to respond at times. It's kind of variable depending on what your query is, but I haven't paid for it. There's been a few people on my Twitter feed that have, and I've been trying to get the insight, like, "Should I try or should I not?" because spending 10 minutes to answer one question. I think it really lies on like research, math, these kind of deeply complicated reasoning areas. And I'm not really sure if my use cases require that, you know, kind of knowledge. And so, yeah, I've thought about buying it, haven't bought it, maybe I'll try it out in January. But something that's been on my mind, like I really love tinkering with the latest and greatest. And that is kind of technically the smartest thing. I think the performance in certain categories is comparable between a one a one pro, you get this big difference in specific categories. I'm not sure my queries land in those specific categories. So maybe I'll report back but I don't know if you've seen too much on it. It's very interesting when people kind of flex on Twitter and say, "Oh, I'm using a one pro." And like half the people are saying, "Oh, you're an idiot for paying $200. Why would you do that?" And the other half are like, "Oh my god, like maybe I need to buy it." And maybe I shouldn't, I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I've seen that. I definitely, when I read the stats and all that, I was like, this is overkill for my uses, at least right now. 'Cause it was like, oh, it's really good at academic math. And I was like, well, I'm not doing that anymore. Or, you know, it never really was. But it felt like right now, kind of where I'm at with it, like the, whatever it is, 25 bucks a month that I pay right now, it solves everything I need. I've never been like, "Oh, I can't get to the answer I want because of a lack of, you know, the model's capability." You know what I mean? So yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think, you know, a lot of times with technology, as things get further and more and more mature, you know, there tends to be like a cost decrease. And I wonder at some point when we'll, when we'll start to see that, because I feel like right now, you know, and these companies are usually like they're not public companies and so you only kind of get to see their financials and how much money they're making or losing, like what their profit is. But like, you know, at some point, like, I guess the $200 a month is seems steep, like just the sticker price, you go, "Whoa, that's, that's pretty expensive." And you think that most people don't need that. Or don't need that kind of power. But you know, is that going to stick around? Like, will there be higher tiers? I think major name brand ones like Anthropic and I don't know what Gemini's costs are. But yeah, it's a good question because someone also brought this up on Twitter . Why is every AI tool $20 a month? And I think the consensus was they have no clue how to price it and they want people's data to build a train on it, at least initially. And I think that price point is kind of stuck around the $20 a month. That's Claude, OpenAI, Chat GPT. I think Google's, don't quote me on it, deep research. It's kind of like a PhD research AI tool. I forgot what they call it, but it's also roughly $20 a month. And I think this is the first time they've stepped out of that and done the $200, which brought a lot of shock and awe. I think Cursor is even $20 a month, which is a fantastic tool. So yeah, if you're making anything in the AI space, you're almost pinned to $20. But this could be the first kind of way to get out of that. So yeah, yeah, we'll see. And I I want to talk about Cursor briefly. Their latest update, 0.44, I think it came out maybe middle December. It's really darn good. The one thing that I'll call out is that when I'm getting code changes from Cursor, it has this self-reflective improvement model where previously I would ask you a question saying, for example, "Can you code me a for loop?" Something very basic, it can do that. Once it inserts that code into my current file, it then checks if there's any errors with that, if there's any linting warnings, all these things that would pop up in my IDE or my code editor. It can read those things, detect that they're existing, and then try to fix those follow-up errors. So that would be work that I would have to do where I take the code that it generated, paste it in, run it, see what broke. It can now do that, which is super awesome, but I've I've caught it in never-ending loops, or it generates code, pastes it into my code editor, runs it, and says, "Oh, I see four errors. I will fix those." I sit there watching it going, "Wow, this is the future. I'm just going to watch it." It then generates more code, throws it in, same amount of errors. "Okay, I see errors." It just keeps going. I've been writing a prompt that says, "Hey, try to fix the errors in your code, but maximum five times. After that, describe what the issues are, and I'll try to fix those." And that's been a nice little quality of life improvement, because it'll say, "I tried fixing the errors. Some of these errors I don't think are critical, but maybe you want to look into them." And it's been really good. I think Cursor has been really, really hyped up, and it's been great, but this last update has really pushed it to be at least 25%, 30% better to kind of self-reflect and understand what issues are being ran into with this new code that it's generating, which is super nice. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah, I'll have to give it a go. I haven't, last thing I was doing, I was using VS Code, I guess just old habits die hard. But it wasn't anything like where I was needing to chat with AI at all. Good old Django. One thing I wanted to, I guess, kind of pivot on and then come back to, because I know we have some more tech updates, but we talked about pricing with the O1 Pro. And, you know, I kind of mentioned that, you know, these companies are not public companies yet. And so we don't really get a glimpse into their financials. And you know, what you said about the $20 price point kind of being like, "let's just get as many people as we can." I think we see that with a lot of companies where they price relatively low. A lot of times it's like a VC play where they price low to get users and they go, "Oh, we'll make up for it once we get a user base of, you know, 200 million users or whatever." And there's a interestingly related story in the accounting world that I want to kind of quickly mention. It's also in our bookmark section, so I won't double dip too much, but But it kind of centers around pricing. And so, you know, pretty recently, I want to say right before the end of the year, one of the more well known and like prominent bookkeeping companies called Bench, they just abruptly shut down. They sent a notice to all their clients saying, you know, "Hey, Bench is shutting down like effectively today," left their customers in a complete disarray. There was no like, heads up, there was no like transition. It "thank you for serving our clients," or whatever, some PC message. Which is crazy. That was all over my Twitter feed. Yeah. And I think they had a lot of solo founders, like startup clients because their price point was like, I think it was like 300 or 400 bucks a month, something like that. And I think they build annually or they try to kind of push you towards an annual billing plan, but very cheap. And being in the accounting space, that's a very cheap cost to like, you know, run a client's books and everything. So, um, and, and they were backed by VC. And so I think, you know, the thought from, I think the accounting industry, just from what I was seeing on LinkedIn and on X was like, this seemed inevitable at that price point, but they were so gung ho on like getting clients and they had a lot of clients. Clearly you saw all the backlash, you know, that doesn't happen. There's only a small group of people affected. Um, and so, you know, at that price point, they weren't profitable enough to keep the lights on. But I think from the outside looking in, if you just kind of saw their website and saw the amount of customers they had, you'd go, "Oh, they're doing great. They're really growing super fast." I think even the old co-founder, he posted about it and kind of said- Yeah, I saw that. That was crazy. I mean, feel free to describe it. That was kind of nuts. Yeah, well, no, I mean, it was basically like he He was giving some backstory on how he left. He basically got pushed out of his own company, and just said he didn't agree with the direction that they were heading. And they ousted him and got a new CEO in place. And so it just goes to show, I think, the importance of pricing in your business model. And I think a lot of VC-backed companies that give you that pile of cash try and go get a customer base. And sometimes it works out. Of course, you about Uber and those kinds of companies that are the unicorns, right? I think a lot of times they do something like that. But, you know, for a bookkeeping firm, it didn't quite work out and left a lot of customers in a really bad spot at your end. Fortunately, it did seem like they, recently, they just got acquired by I think it was employees.com. I employer.com. Yeah. So it's part of the bookmark. We'll link in the show notes, but they got acquired. So then hopefully that gives the bench customers a little bit of stability and, you know, this kind of weird period. But yeah, the importance of pricing, you know, can't be understated, I think, or can't be overstated because, yeah, I mean, you got to be able to run your business profitably. And I wonder, I'd be super curious, the accountant in me, if we could like look and see what, you know, chat GPT and Anthropic and all those, how profitable they were, you know, with kind of what they're doing, but maybe in the future. Yeah, I think that's a good lesson that you have some sort of contingency planning. I think in this case, they were, you know, kind of closing down shop and then three days later got acquired in this twist of events, which maybe happens often. I'm not sure. It sounded kind of like a fire sale for employer.com. I guess I was looking on Twitter and I think the person who acquired them who I guess either runs or acquired employer.com also acquired a bunch of other stuff. I don't have a ton of info on it, but it seems like that person is in that area. So maybe they shut down, you know, kind of a crap shoot. And this person stepped in and said, "Hey, I'll buy and run the company and keep all these like 500 employees who were, you know, laid off, maybe abruptly, and keep the ship running." So we'll see how it ends up. But a lot of people came out of the woodworks on my Twitter feed saying like, you know, screw VCs, this is horrible, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, it was a lot of drama. And then the acquiring was also even more drama on top of that. So a little juicy holiday bonus there. Yeah, for sure. Cool. And then our main activity for the pod, I think it'd be fun to do for the start of 2025 is what I would like to call our bingo card for 2025. So for the bingo card, what I want to do today for the remainder of our time is essentially fill out a five by five grid. This grid will be half, you know, kind of real stuff, half real things, such that we expect these things to happen or there's a high likelihood. The other half, I would like to put it for kind of far out ventures because it's no fun to have a bingo card that is easily going to make it. I want to have a bingo card between us for the Breakeven Brothers pod that has some chance of making it but not 100% chance. So I've seen this on other podcasts I thought it'd be a fun idea to do for us. It can be across any category that could be coding, finance, you know, kind evolution, who knows, whatever we want to put on there we can, we have a five by five grid and our kind of show notes and so we'll be filling this out as we go. We did 2025 goals a little bit in the last pod. So if you're looking for something like that, feel free to check that one out. But yeah, let's kick it off. I think it's gonna be a fun one to kind of recap and and forecast because there's a lot that's been going on not only this last month, but I think this last year in so many different facets of the world. So yeah, let's Let's start off there. I think one I would like to put on the list, talking about our last podcast of aliens. Let's start with, you know, kind of world events and maybe outer space as we put it. So maybe one we can think about is what are you thinking on the alien prediction front? Any crazy out there ideas? No, no aliens personally, but I could see, it seems kind of necessary to get some kind of drone cracked down of some sort. Like, you know, some kind of regulation, or like, you know, ban even on certain kinds of drones. I could see there being a bit more like just control, and again, maybe rightfully so, of drones, because they're so, they're all over the place. They're so ubiquitous now, you can go to any store and get them, you know, and it's pretty crazy. It is weird, like it always crosses my mind that cameras used to not be that good. Now we have portable cameras that can fly fast and be controlled. I've seen TikToks that show these people whose jobs it is to control these drones and fly them in these weird paths for restaurants or open house tours, blah, blah, blah. She thought a bad actor came along and wanted to record something that shouldn't be recorded, and they have these drones that are very small, a little bit loud, but maybe they can design when it's not loud. Does seem a little weird to me, so I'm in to put something on that on the list, maybe some sort of a federal drone legislation that makes it a little bit harder to operate in certain areas. Is that what we want to put? I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I think something like that. Yeah. What it will actually be not sure, but yeah, some kind of crackdown, just call it a crackdown and that can be generic enough. Okay. Kind of restriction. Yeah. It's funny on that topic. You mentioned that because, uh, I was on the phone with with our mom and dad a couple days ago is after Christmas, maybe the day of Christmas, actually. And I was in my backyard and I look up because I heard something and I look up and there's a drone flying around like above my house. I goes like far off. It wasn't like right over my house. I was trying to throw a rock at it. But it was like I heard it and I looked up and there it was like kind of flying over the neighborhood. So yeah, they're everywhere. Cool. I like that one. Okay, let me do one here. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna you know, we got 25 spots. Yeah, we'll alternate or you know We'll go back and forth, but I think that was a fun one since we talked about it last time. I'm gonna go in the sports category here. Okay, I like tracking like big moments and you know record-breaking moments and I'm gonna add on here. I think Aleksandr Ovechkin of the Washington Capitals will beat, or we'll get to, and then surpass Wayne Gretzky's goal record in 2025. Now in 2025 meaning either and by the end of this season, which ends probably in I want to say like May, maybe June if they make the playoffs. But you know, if not when it starts back up on October, November, December, he's gonna get that record. So I'm gonna add that on there. I think it's happening Okay, I like it. I'm gonna do one on the kind of AI business side And so I think lots of people have been talking about the power of AI and I've really heard this kind of story. I think Sam Altman really pitches this where it's the best time to build a business, technology is incredible. There's lots of companies that have been acquired for lots of money. I think WhatsApp, Instagram, these companies who have, you know, sub 100 employees acquired for billions. Incredible. Tons of, you know, engineering powerhouse there. But what I'd like to see, and I think what he proclaims, not a hundred percent sure, but I think this came from him as kind of the AI single employee company acquired for a billion plus dollars. So this one's a little bit out there. I don't think it's there yet, but if it was there, I think it'd be a little bit mind boggling to have a one person company having an acquisition or exit for $1 billion. If that happens to be me, I would love it. I think that would change the game. Not sure I'm there yet, but I'm not going to close that story off for myself. It would be freaking incredible and really show the power of AI. I think people would be like, "Damn, that is like a huge success. How could you not be opposed to something like that?" I'm going to write that down as yeah, $1 billion exit for a solo AI founder would be, you know, everyone would be cheering for that. I think that'd be super, super fun to see. What I, what I couldn't understand in that scenario, and maybe I'm just too small minded, but if you have a solo founder who's like running, I don't know what he's, what they're doing, what he or she are doing, if they say they're selling like software as a service, like they have some kind of app. If it's just one person, like feel like the people that have a billion dollar check to write, we'll just go, we'll just, we're not going to pay you a billion dollars for that. Like if it's some AI thing, like we can go make it ourselves. I love the idea. I love the dream and I don't want to be a contrarian, but you know, a billion dollars. You, I think you just got to think, well, like if they can do it with one person, like we can do it, you know what I mean? Like that's where we're in it. Okay. Don't ruin it. Okay. It's the vision. It's the vision. If you guys haven't heard, Sam Altman went on, why comment here, I think in outline these outlandish like space colonies and limited energy, yada, yada, I don't know if this is a part of it. I think this is a much older kind of story that he's been pitching, but yeah. Don't listen to Ben. We're going to get there. We believe in AI and the value that it brings and smart people plus smart AI will get us to a billion dollar exit So Ben doesn't believe, I might have to do it myself. Yeah. Yeah prove me wrong. Yeah, I like it cool Okay, I'm gonna think about another one here. I think you know with the incoming administration that there's going to be like a federally regulated or like a federal cryptocurrency. Like they're gonna make a like a US. Yeah, I'm not a big crypto guy, let me say, start by that, like, I don't know what I'm doing in that area. I don't, you know, track Bitcoin, Solana and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, just just the posturing and the messaging, you know, on the campaign trail, and like, even up to, you know, the, the swearing in day, I can't remember what it's called. But, um, you know, there's been a lot of like, Bitcoin highs, you know, again, they got to $100,000 sometime in December. I think a lot of that is the optimism around like a more favorable administration to cryptocurrency. So I think we'll see some kind of like federal, you know, either like a federal digital coin or like some kind of, I want to be specific so I don't get held like, Oh, that was too generic. But like, yeah, a US crypto coin, I want to say something like that in 2025. I like that. What are some potential names? It can be something funny or a meme coin or it can be the you know, the USCC, the US crypto coin. What's what's the USCC? What's the USCC? What's the USCC? What's the USCC? What What's your take? Yeah, I'd say put me on the spot here. So what we do here? Yeah, I don't have anything clever. I think it'll be I think it'll be kind of slightly funny. I don't know if it'd be full meme coin. But like, you know, last time President Trump was around, they did Space Force. And that was kind of a elbows intentional not, but kind of just a funny name. I just seem super on the nose remind me of that Team America movie. So yeah, I think it'll be some slightly funny, but I don't can give you a name like some kind of maybe like an eagle tie in, you know, like, okay, I can see that. Yeah, nice. I like that. That's a good one. Crypto is definitely big. Bitcoin hit 100k last year. So maybe we can add on to that Bitcoin hitting 1 million by 2025. But that's too easy. I think I want to try something else. One thing that I've been thinking about, so last year was the Olympics and I didn't tune in that much. I would have liked to watch a little bit more, but I just didn't. What I've been watching more recently on Twitch TV is a new game we've been playing, Marvel Rivals. And kind of along those lines, it'd be interesting to see eSports join the Olympics as an official sport. I only say that because when I do see Olympics highlights, I see, to me, what seems like odd things like people shooting a gun or like bow and arrow, not to say those aren't skilled sports, but I think to me, those aren't like the traditional like basketball, hockey, you know, you name it. People are good at different things. So bravo to all those people. But as an avid video gamer, I think it'd be interesting, maybe pick a few games, maybe Halo, Call of Duty, you name it. Some, some sort of eSports, League of Legends to join the Olympic games. And we have world championships for each of these games that are individual. But to like give it that full, because you see so many people watching games online. I think the gaming industry, if you look over the past 10 years has grown dramatically. I think there'll be a point in a time where it makes it to the Olympics. But then again, everyone who isn't familiar with gaming is, "Oh, they're just moving their fingers. They're just clicking a keyboard." And I think that's, you know, hard to convince some of that crowd, I would say. Yeah. A lethal company, Olympic squad, maybe. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. That'd be pretty fun. Gaming Olympics, my bingo card entry will be Gaming Olympics, or I guess eSports joining Olympics and the next Olympics, which I guess 2028? We'll put that down. Or maybe it's discussed, I don't know, maybe that's not a good one for 2025, but maybe it's brought up in some fashion, I think that could be interesting. It gains traction. Yeah, gaining traction. Okay, I got one for you. I think in 2025, I don't know if there's not gonna be a single event. So this might be a cop out. But I think in 2025, we'll start to see the decline of JavaScript in in web development. Is that fair? You're more in the web development space than I am. I think you're shooting the wrong direction. But it is a bingo card. And we do need some that might not make it. So this one I would Slow down, slow down there. Okay. You don't think it's going to make it? I think job is, you think job is here to say, no way. It's all being gatekept by the JavaScript fan base. They make it more complicated. It's it's like lawyers, you know, they, they make the legal agreements more complicated so that way they can. Keep the lawyer conspiracy going. I think JavaScript will be dead in by 2028. Yeah. I think it will be. Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So what's the bingo card entry? Give me the title for it. Okay. So here's what we'll do on Stack Overflow when they, when they show the most popular languages for the year, I bet you by 2025 JavaScript will decrease. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm talking about, right? Yeah. Yeah. The survey. Yeah. JavaScript will be down for sure. Okay. Yeah. All right. Interesting. Hot take. All right. I like that. What I was thinking of in the AI space is we've seen that company, I think Neuralink, that maybe Elon runs or something where they're implanting, I think, AI devices in people's heads. And it's not, honestly, I'm not too familiar with it. So don't quote me on any of this. But I would like to see like Lama or OpenAI or one of these models that are actually smart. So like the average IQ of OpenAI is like, oh, one or one pro is like 140. And if you're not familiar with IQ scale, like the average person is between like 80 or 105 or 115, like between a standard deviation between 100 on the lower and higher end. And these models, average IQ is significantly higher than the average human IQ. And to put something in your brain that has that capability will only get better. It seems very, very interesting to me. I think people equated this a little bit to having a laptop at a work meeting where if you show up to a work meeting in a corporate office, everyone has a laptop, everyone has a phone or some device to communicate or to look things up and if, you know, Neuralink or some sort of other company can implant high IQ inside your head or attach it to your head or something that's safe and it allows you to talk to AI without having to open an app or do any of that and interface with your thoughts would be an absolute game changer. And I think previously when I thought of Neuralink, it didn't make a ton of sense because I thought the AI models weren't there. From the recent improvements in AI and the trajectory that I see, they'll definitely be there. It just depends on how much people want to get involved in this kind of hyper experimental phase of medical AI. So what I want to put down after that long train of thought is a high IQ AI model in embedded in someone's head and shows massive results in something like someone who I don't want to say this because maybe it sounds weird, but someone who maybe didn't have the highest IQ becomes a high IQ and there's like a success story attached to it would be pretty cool. I would applaud something like that. So like an as smart AI chip embedded in a person that improves their life dramatically, as well, I'm gonna put down for 2025 on the bingo card. Any thoughts? Well, it's good to have some, some that won't make it for sure. So I'm glad you put that on. I can imagine, hey, you did it to me. I can imagine, you know, like someone gets that, you know, just in the scenario you're kind of outlaying there. Someone gets that, uses the model and it's like a subscription plan. And they're like, their subscription expires or they can't, they can't pay it anymore. And they're just back to their base IQ. That's Black Mirror. They should take that from us. Yeah, it is. Oh, it's funny you said that Black Mirror because I was actually, this is like completely organic. I, my next prediction was gonna be an increased use in the robot police dogs next year. You know, those Boston Dynamics, those freaky little videos that we always see. And there was a specific Black Mirror episode that had that thing, it was called Junkhead, season three, I wanna say. That was, you know, I don't wanna speak for the Black Mirror producers, but it seemed like it was like they saw those Boston Dynamics videos and were like, hey, what if this thing went rogue and had a gun? And that was basically like that premise. Jeez. (laughs) episode. Yeah, it is such a good episode. Uh, especially if you're like, uh, if you have a pepper slant like I do. So yeah, I'm gonna say increase cause I think they're like kind of slightly being used. I think I saw a video of one at like the white house like walking around, but I think we'll see more. Yeah, I think we'll see more of them. And so, you know, this is your sign to start looking at how to build homemade EMP grenades just to be able to defend yourself, but I'm going to put robot dogs in 2025. Like robot cop dogs, you know, like loft. I also wanted to do a robot one. I think that is pretty up there. I think AI is getting better and they're only going to get better. One that I've been thinking of, uh, since I've been employed recently, I've been going back in the office four days a week and some other companies are doing virtual only still throughout the pandemic and after that, uh, but it made me think I do like being in office to the degree in which I get that human connection. I felt virtually there was never a replacement for it. So my 2025 bingo list, what I'd like to kind of present to you as an idea is like a VR only office or company. And so hear me out. What this means is everyone has a vision pro or quest. And, you know, from nine to five, you put this thing on. You're talking to your coworkers. I don't know how they're going to pull this off, but there's a way in which you the same space and you can kind of meander throughout this virtual office. And I think someone will come out with something that is more human-like, maybe leverages AI, but I think virtual reality in terms of a full headset like the Vision Pro or the kind of like Snapchat Spectacles or the meta like Ray Bans, which are much lighter weights kind of visual overlays, becoming very popular. And I think in the workplace they have not really caught on. But 2025 could be the year in which you know, you join Shopify, like a remote focused company, the day one, they ship you a VR headset and say, hey, you got to be on like three hours a day. And you get this, you know, photo real image of your face and you put on the, you know, Apple Vision Pro. And you can look around and see people in meetings. It's gives that human like experience. So yeah, 2025, I'm gonna go like a VR corporate I like it. I think it's a good one. Yeah. Okay. It's not what, isn't that what kind of they were trying to do with the metaverse? Yeah, a little bit. I don't think it really caught on. I feel like the metaverse had the corporate life and the kind of leisure life. I'm talking like full corporate platform features built for like quote unquote water cooler talk those sorts of things. So I think it's a hardware plus software combination and then an ethos from the company to say we're going 100% in that direction. If you're interested like that and what we work on, like come join us. I think there can be, you know, engineers are interested in that kind of new world and maybe this becomes something interesting. So yeah. Okay. I like that. I'm going to do a quick and easy one because we said kind of half of this is like predictions, half of it's silly things. I'm going to say I'm going to make my own salsa in 2025 with all my homegrown stuff. So let's just put that on there. Okay. I would like a sample shipped out to my house and we can do a taste test live on the pod. Ooh. Ooh. Okay. Yeah. You'll, you'll never have anything like that. Just a hundred percent homegrown. You just ship it in like a refrigerated container and put some ice in there. You know, I need the full experience. Maybe I'll get some homemade chips. I'll get some dry ice or homemade chips. That'll, that'll cost you more money, but, um, yeah, I'll get some dry ice. I'll package it and then, uh, yeah, I'll ship it out to you. So I think that'll be summer time because I think like peppers, like jalapenos and stuff like that, I think are summer vegetables, I think so. But yeah, that's on the list there. So right now, that is a quick hitter. I'll do another quick hitter. Let's say so we talked about in the last pod, I think breakeven brothers comes out with official merch in 2025. What that could be just speaking out of the heart here, maybe a coffee mug, a beer mug, a water glass, maybe a hat. I think shirts and sweatshirts have gone a little bit out of fashion in terms of like, you know, influencer merch or brand merch where everyone has a shirt or sweatshirt, not to say everyone doesn't have a coffee mug but be one of those things that you just get and you're not, you know, frustrated about having too many coffee mugs. So a quick hitter of Braveheaven Brothers merch in 2025 that could be a Black Friday drop, that could be a Christmas drop, that could be a middle of the year drop. We don't know. I don't know. Maybe Ben knows but it's going on the bingo. I think that one is quite plausible in my book. Yeah, we can have my my dog in the background be the mascot right there. Yeah, that could work. Yeah. Her name is Serena and she's a cattle dog mix just just for the record. We call her Bobo too. Don't ask why but that's just the nickname she has. I think for my next one I'm going to go with I think there will be a AI acquisition or a merger between not not between Anthropic and chat or open. I don't think that big, but I think maybe OpenAI or Anthropic will acquire another company or two or, you know, Google will acquire, you know, a smaller like LLM provider that's like more niched in the space. So I'm gonna go with it, AI acquisition. Okay. And is this going to be like a groundbreaking one? Are we talking one of many? I do feel like there's lots of small acquisitions here and there, but you're talking like a shakeup. Yeah, I must say like one of the big players is gonna be buying somebody. Yeah. Okay. Or merging. That's gonna be, you know, either OpenAI, you know, Anthropic, you know, Google, probably leaving some people off, you know, Facebook, or Meta. They're gonna either merge or acquire somebody. That would be like a TechCrunch article you'll see coming out in 2025. I like I'll do one that's more on the global lifestyle side. I have seen a YouTube video that was kind of outlining a new city that was being built. I think it was in Utah somewhere where they're taking this grand approach to make a really top-notch city. What I would like to see is someone who likes the city but doesn't like some parts of it. It would be cool to have a mix of suburbia and city life. I know probably are two complete opposites that don't make sense together. there, but I would love to have like a car free city, you know, like it's, it's New York city, but without cars, great public transit. I think it was either Utah or like Vegas, they were demoing something like this, but I would love to see in 2025, either an idea of a proposed city that's car free, but is large and like, you know, has great public transit or something that's actually complete in 2025, which is probably a stretch. Maybe I'm not commuting in, I'm not driving in, I'm using public transit. It's kind of nice to be able to walk to things like food, grocery stores, and walk to work. And it needs to be designed thoughtfully around that being the centerpiece around this kind of community. So I'm going to envision a car-free community that has a significant mass of people that are all bought into this new world order. I like it. Yeah, be cool. Yeah, like I live in somewhere where you can walk around. That's definitely, you know, the suburbs are great for family and like safety reasons, but you definitely, you know, miss kind of walking down the street to get some groceries or like walk into a restaurant, you know, so yeah, be good one support that. Let me see, I think for a far out one, I'm going to say that the United States acquires either wholly or partially Greenland. Hmm. I'm not even sure what to say to that because I wouldn't even know how that happens or if that would be a good thing or a bad thing. Well, it's right up there in the Arctic Circle and our relations with Russia are getting colder, pun intended. It's Denmark's property. I don't know when they acquired it. I'm not a Denmark historian, but technically it's theirs. But it'd be much more important for us to kind of have another set of eyes. We got Alaska over there keeping an eye on the Russians, so it'd be probably good to have another set of eyes over there in Greenland, which is much bigger than Alaska. And so yeah, I think either, again , wholly or partially acquired. I don't know what Denmark's is like, I don't know if they need a, you know, a nice injection of cash from the sale at all. But like, I also don't think that Denmark is like, you know, I don't think they're getting a lot of real big importance out of that. I think it's just like, "Oh, we own this." That's right. Um, again, I'm not a, I'm not a, I could be talking complete nonsense. That one is looking like a 1% there. Hey, it's already been some talks about it on the board. Put it on the board. All right. I like that. So I'll do a kind of another weird one. Because I've been working for myself and then working for a company, I think making that balance of wellness and taking breaks regularly, like sit, stand, is really important. So I was thinking, what if the government had some sort of wellness day? Hear me out. I think companies have been on the trend of being more conscious of mental health and physical health, what if the government had like mental health support or like global wellness days? I mean, maybe global is not the right word, but for the US like wellness days, like those became not a not a holiday per se, but a wellness day. So maybe in 2025, with the kind of dry year, people becoming more healthy, people understanding more that, you know, you got to take care of yourself, I'm going to pin that in 2025 we will see a wellness day. So if you ask me now, probably unlikely, but as part of the bingo card, we've got to put a few feelers out there that, you know, might not be high chance, but if we get it right, man, would we look really good. So 2025, one US federally recognized wellness day that is maybe not officially a holiday. Something not to celebrate, but something to take care of yourself. The day after the Super Bowl, that's the day I said they do it on, you know. Yeah, or a day when, you know, Halo 6 comes out. That could be a good time if they could plan that correctly. Anything like that. Not enough people playing that these days, brother. Uh, okay, I like that. It would be great to see the US kind of get on the, you know, those have those happiness indexes. I don't think we always do well on those, um, sadly. Um, okay, I like that one. Let me see. Let me kind of dig into that. I'm not sure what that is. I'm not sure what that is. I'm not sure what that is. I'm not sure what into my bag here and think about this one. I think that, I don't know if it's gonna be next year or the year after, but I think I put it on here just 'cause it could happen, if it does happen, I'll sound, I'll be right. 'Cause you know by the end of this, we're gonna go tally up who had the most right. Oh yeah. And that's gonna be bragging rights, so. I'm gonna say they're gonna end daylight savings. Oh! Yeah, I'm gonna say that's, I'm gonna say that's a goner. I've seen some people, you know, that are coming into the administration say it's kind of pointless and I'm gonna stick with that. I'm gonna go with that. Yeah, so no daylight savings. It's gonna be it's gonna it's gonna be announced to be going away in 2025. It might not go away. They might say, hey, we're gonna sunset this in 2026, but it will be announced 2025. It's gonna go away. I like that because there's no way it could go away in 2025. But the discussion could be there. And as a developer, I hate time zones. It's the biggest pain in the ass. And if that went away, I think it would be a large benefit. But then again, also, has this complexity too. So I like that. I'm thinking for my next entry, maybe like an AI profession, like an AI step in. So what I mean by that is maybe like a, I'll pin it as an AI judge. So we have things like small claims for which are kind of, you know, under $12,000 in California where there's, you know, you hear two sides, you apply the law, you choose a winner. That's how that works. I think AI is getting so good with high IQ and specialized training that maybe, maybe in 2025, we'll see an AI court of law and a low stakes environment where, you know, as doctors, as judges, they have a hard job to parse context and apply rules and decisions. And I think AI is getting there at a rapid pace. So what I would like to see is one state across the US adopt an AI judge in court. And I think that's going to be a big thing. And I think that's going to be a big thing. And I think that's going to be a big thing. And I think that's that takes time to think. So we're not talking GPT-4 OTABs, where I type in, "I'm suing this person. This is what they did." And you're an immediate winner. It's something along the lines of response time of O1 Pro. So you dump in each side and what they're suing for and whatever. And then after 10 minutes, 15 minutes, after it thinks a ton, it maybe asks follow up questions one or two times, so then gets that info, then boom, gives you a verdict. And you have opted in to be in AI court. So therefore, you can cannot dispute and that's that. So yeah, AI judge and a courts in the US and more of like a trial run to replace judges for claim areas, not something that's, you know, like high intensity or high subject to scrutiny. I like it. Very nice. Had it on there. I'm gonna go I'm gonna steal this from a connection I have on LinkedIn. And I actually generally like a lot of his posts, I give him a shout out. Sorry, if I mispronounced your last name, buddy, but Noah Skiles, if you're listening, he had a post, I'll try and find the link in the show notes so people can go to it. But he had a post that basically said, there's a need for a alternative to the CPA or like a more of like a supplemental designation that basically says like, you know how to deal with like small businesses because a lot of the CPA I think his point was, the CPA is a that are like, some things that are relevant to you, but a lot of things that are very general or like, you know, construction accounting, well, I've never worked in construction, like, and I don't ever plan to. But like, I had to know some of that stuff. And he was saying, but like, when it comes to like helping small businesses, like with just like the more, like day to day and things that they're going to encounter more, there's not really any kind of credential or like professional certification. And so he was kind of saying that there'll be seek those kinds of professionals because maybe a CPA isn't what they need. They just need a, you know, a really qualified bookkeeper or something. So I'm gonna go with a new small business accounting designation. I think it's probably a slim chance, but I like, I like the idea. I think it's a good idea. Things like that tend to act really, tend to move really slow. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, hey, maybe there's a shot that we're gonna get a useful, different credential in the accounting world that's tailored to small businesses. I like it. I like it. Cool. We'll add that down. Let's see. I'm trying to think of one in the coding domain. I think maybe Apple's been coming out with a new app store. And I'm thinking maybe there can become a blockchain app store of sorts. And blockchain is kind of the generic way to describe it. But maybe we'll choose something like Solana. So this is a kind of leading crypto coin in the States. There's lots of apps that are written in Solana. But I'm not sure if it's going to be a blockchain app store. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. but it's not a user-friendly way to run these apps. If you ever interact with Solana or Ethereum apps, it's complicated pop-ups, authorizations, and stuff that just flies under the hood. What I would like to see is a more user-friendly ecosystem, which would be something like an app store. So you could download Solana apps or Ethereum apps and run them, and it feels like an iPhone or a Chrome web store, for example. I think this would help kind of bridge the gap between the, I know what's going on and I'm very technical versus the, I just want to get on board and do something in this domain without feeling like I'm going to expose security in some sort of way. So maybe the app store has a review and all these kinds of criteria to get in like Apple does. So I'm going to, I'm going to pin on 2045, a Solana app store for apps. Damn, you actually took a one I had. It's not the exact same. I wasn't I wasn't thinking that. But if I save my the one I was thinking it's gonna sound too similar. It's gonna sound like I just swagger jacked you a little bit. I might save I'm not gonna say it next because I came first. Yeah, yeah, sure. The next one I'll put on here is, I don't know how we'll quantify this exactly. But the general premise is I think Excel as like a skill that accountants need is going to have less importance. And I think what's going to have more importance is like database skills and like analytic skills. So being able to write SQL and like understand, you know, basic SQL. And even more, I don't want to say coding for accountants, I don't think they were there yet in 2025. Like as a, what I'm thinking is like major accounting programs across like universities and colleges in the United States, would have a more of a focus in their curriculum on like true database skills and coding than in prior years. Because when I was in school, I think we had a database course, we used like Microsoft Access, which like is not, it's not like a database. Like, I mean, maybe it is, technically speaking, but like, it's nothing like, you know, like connecting to an actual database and using SQL Server Studio, the Microsoft program to connect databases. It's just completely different. So I remember being in that class being like, "I don't, you know, nothing against a teacher." I was like, "I don't think I'm ever going to encounter this." Excel I certainly did, but I think the age of Excel is winding down. I think the only reason why it's still so prevalent, I think it has its place, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying I don't want to ever use Excel again. Certainly not, it's super useful. But Accountants rely on it so much. We've talked about on this podcast, so I won't beat it up. But point of my point of my bingo card is that we're going to have, I'm going to think about how we can measure it. I'm going to say that we're going to have a top 50 accounting program. Add more like database slash coding skills to its curriculum in 2025. So that's what I'm going to pin on that. Okay, I like that. That's that seems pretty valid. I like that one. I want to go with a bit of an out there idea. So I was thinking I use cursor a lot to write code and there's been things like Devon, which I think we've touched upon briefly in the podcast where Devon is like an autonomous software agent, you can ask it to do things. I think that's only going to continue to become a reality with virtual workforces and AI coding autonomous engineers. Now I want to push this a little bit further to be on the out there category and such that these Devons of the world, these kind of writing a decent amount of code in the open source land. Now, one of these AI agents are gonna run into some trouble. And what I mean by trouble is they're gonna be writing code that's gonna cause a bug, maybe that will cause some major outage for people that upgrade to this new version. So maybe they contribute to MySQL, a popular database, they add a bug to it, like a Devon AI engineer, it brings down half of the internet. Again, this is like a crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy case, but something that causes everyone to say, "Who wrote that code? Oh, it turns out that an AI did." Well, who do we sue? Do we sue the creators of DevIn? Do we sue the people who provide the electricity? Who do we go after to get what we need? And so on 2025, to put it a little bit shorter, is an AI agent writes some code and it caused a disaster and get sued. So maybe an AI engineer gets sued, or not even that, an autonomous AI coding agent gets sued. And I think that would provide some legal complexity in terms of AI is doing it. Do we sue the people who made the model? Do we sue the people who orchestrated it? Who do we sue? I think that will be an interesting challenge going forward to say, who do we point the finger at when things happen autonomously and not out of our control, it a different manner than we're used to. Yeah, that's a good one. I like that. Yeah, I mean, right now I think ultimately responsibility for the company who like shipped it or like who hosted it, but like if there truly is no one there. Yeah, that's interesting one. I like that. The one I was gonna say that I didn't want to go right after yours, and it might be similar, but you know what, I'm, you know, we got spots to fill. I'm sticking with it is I think one of the, um, one of the LLMs will have its own like app store, where like there'll be, there'll be like native apps that are like built and like supported on those platforms that they're like, I could see it being start where like they're trying to be like not paywalled. I'm trying to like what's the word I'm missing? Like, like unique to those app stores. Like you saw like the, if you want to build like a tool using like open AI that you can't also have it over there in Anthropocus platform or Gemini. So I could see them starting to try and try to guard their, their domains a bit better as people build more and more products on top of them. So I could see them having like their own app store, kind of how Apple, you know, you've, you've shipped an app on the Apple store. So like, you know, how rigorous and like kind of one sided that is. And so I could see them wanting to get a little bit more control and doing something like that. So I'm going to say like one of the LLMs kind of building a moat around them a bit more. Some go with, I don't know how we'd kind of quantify that. But yeah, I like that. One that I was thinking of is we talked about quantum computing recently. And Google came out with this Willow computer chip. I want to go 2025 is going to be the year of the first quantum compute programming language. And I think that's going to be a really cool thing. I think it's going to be really cool. I think it's going to be really cool. I think it's going to be So I have no clue if there already exists one, but I'm going to put with these quantum chips and AI being a superpower that it is today in 2025 is going to be better. They're going to make this quantum chip more stable and they're going to want to use these quantum chips to power AI experiences. They're going to create a programming language to bring developers on board and make some cool stuff. So 2025, it's going to be a year where somebody comes out with a quantum programming language and I'm going to guess it's going to start with a Q because that's quantum. So yeah, we'll see. I don't really know that direction. I've only programmed in the modern languages that have existed today. I have no clue what quantum program would even look like, but if they want people to adopt it and use it, there's got to be some language out there to bridge that gap. So we'll see. Cool. I like it. The one I'll go with here is, so right now, you know, the accounting industry, it's pretty dominated by QuickBooks, at least in the US. I think outside the US, there's there's zero, it's a bit more prevalent. There's a few other names as well, like FreshBooks, I think that there will be. And I think there's one that's already kind of out there trying to do this. So I guess this is kind of a, this isn't the kind of halfway there, but I'm gonna put it on there anyways. I don't think it's fully there. There will be a company that creates like a full end to end accounting automation platform. Now, you know, before I have pitchforks coming at me, what I'll say is basically up to a certain business, like I wouldn't say it's gonna be recommended for every business, right? But there will be like a platform that specializes in like solopreneurs, maybe like you are, you know, you're a contractor, or, you know, you sell some really basic goods, you know, you can basically just connect to your Stripe, you connect like to your, like your Shopify, or whatever, you connect to a few different things and this platform just go ahead and like automatically categorizes everything, takes care of all the financials and produces it for you. At a really good rate, I got a really good level of service. And you know, I don't know if QuickBooks is kind of like a QuickBooks is like the leader in the United States and they're experimenting a lot with AI. I think they're actually trying to roll out or they're kind of quietly rolling out like a way that you can kind of chat with like your own finances. Don't quote me on that. But I'll try and see if there's anything I can link in the show notes, but I think there will be a newer platform gaining steam by being very integrated with a lot of the major platforms that people run their business on. It's like, there will be a platform that comes out and says, Hey, I can connect really well with Stripe. I can connect to Shopify, you know, whatever other kind of billing systems that the person or the business might be using. And we can just make this really easy and just connect the dots, set up the pipelines. And then like, you're pretty much hands-free. That's not to replace accountants, but that will be much more efficient and hopefully, you know, add value to the business owner by having a low touch but still correct system. So I'm going to go with something like that. Okay, I like that. Who wouldn't want that? What are you going to call that on the bingo card? I'm going to say new player making...it's a long one...new player making progress on QuickBooks Moat. Something like that. I'm Yeah, we'll see. Just mark that one as complete already. Yeah, I don't know. We'll have to find a way to measure that one, but whatever. All right, I like it. And then last one to fill out our card. I've been doing a lot of kind of out there ones. So let's bring it back a little bit to reality. One that's been on my list and talked about the last pod is releasing the Split My Expenses mobile app, both on iOS and Android using React Native. So I think in the last pod I had mentioned before, H1, which I think is the one that's going to be the most popular. And then I think it's going to be the one that's going to be the most popular. And then I think it's going to be I think is before the end of June, H2 being the start of July. Um, that's going to happen and we're definitely gonna cross that one off. So it's going to be a huge amount of effort to do, um, this year in 2025, but it'll put the app, the business, the website at a really good spot. And I have tons of energy to get, you know, me and the product there. So that one, uh, for sure is going to be crossed off. It's going to be nice because in the bottom right corner, it gets us a lot in terms of bingo. But yeah, we'll see. Bingo is, you know, it's not for sure. I don't want to, I don't want to count myself out, but I have high confidence that that one will make it. And I'm definitely going to celebrate once I cross that off. And yeah, so that's the last one I'll put on there. We'll kind of post some sort of recap of our bingo card in the show notes. And then we'll also go over this in the start of 2026 to tally what we ended up with, if you know, some of our out there ventures actually became a reality and you know, who won to predict some of the things here. So this is awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That's a lot of fun. Yeah. I'm excited to see what 2025 has in store. Cool. Bingo. Check. I like it. Done. Nice. Cool. So let's jump into our bookmarks already at an hour here. So I don't want to get run too long. I bookmarked a ton of things recently. I think my behavior on X has changed a little bit. I read like the first two sentences of a tweet. I'm like, this sounds interesting. And I don't read the rest of this long Twitter thread, I just bookmark it. So before the pod, I went through some of those and kind of reread them as a bookmark for later. And the one that I'd like to put out there for the start of 2025 is that productivity is mainstream. And there's been lots of AI apps that come and go. But in 2024, since all of this these apps came out, there's a few different categories that have popped up. And within those categories are a few different leaders. So this is shared by Dede, who I've seen on my feed a ton. The profile picture looks very familiar. I'm not even sure if I follow him or not. But it's the top kind of 14 best AI tools he has used across like search and research. So Perplex is in that category. Productivity is WhisperFlow, the app I mentioned earlier, which is 99% accurate dictation, so voice to text. Creative tools like Mid Journey, so you can generate images. And then development like coding is cursor and the like. So check that out. I think in 2025, if people are looking to be ultra productive, it's worth it to invest at least some time to adopt one of these tools in each category. And get familiar with it, 'cause if it might not be in your day-to-day life now, it probably will be some form in 2025. By the end of the year, if not 2026, and being familiar with them now is going to put you leaps and bounds ahead of you know, other people in terms of just getting stuff done. So I'll link in the show notes. But that's one that I stand by those recommendations I've heard about and use more than half of them. So do check it out. Cool. Yeah, definitely. We'll check those out. I'm not gonna spend a ton of time on mine. So I kind of already mentioned the bench news. So I have the link from TechCrunch. This article is about them being acquired. So this this isn't, it'll mention the fact that they got, they shut down, but this is more about being acquired by employer and some of the details behind it. So yeah, huge, huge news in the accounting world. It looks like they had 35,000 customers at one point, so they were a big, big provider. And I don't know the whole backstory, but at the end of the day, there was, they had employees that relied on their paycheck. So it's sad to see that kind of news come out, but it looks like, you know, there's at least a silver lining in that there might be some hope. Again, this is pretty fresh, the article. I can't find the date exactly when it was posted, but this is all, you know, happening within the last few days and here as of January 1st. So hopefully that gives everyone some stability, customers and employees alike, and, you know, they can kind of turn the page and right the ship, so to speak, on bench. Yeah, I'm surprised how many people were using them. I actually haven't heard of them or maybe like once or twice seen them and then everyone that came out on X talking about how they use them and closed down right before the end of the year. It's like, wow, maybe I should use them. It almost was like some sort of advertising, although it clearly wasn't. It got lots of attention in that regard. So hopefully they're acquired and didn't lose too many people in that transition of shutting down five days later being acquired at the bottom. So yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Yeah. Keep an eye out for it. Well, cool. Well, this was a good one and I'm about the bingo, Brad, and let's go ahead and wrap this up. Awesome. Well, happy new year, everybody. Get ready for some great content in 2025 and we'll see you all soon. Cool. See you soon. Well, one thing before we go, just for the people that are watching, my dog knows when I'm wrapping up a call, it's weird, she's just perked up. So, um, yeah, it's weird. They're, they're strange animals, but yeah, she's up Brad. And, uh, yeah, we'll talk later. Cool. Sounds good. See ya.